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Nuremberg (movie review)

The ball got rolling, for me to see this one, at Mercado Group, my name for our bevy of professional librarians, now retired, who (a) devour media (b) have opinions about what’s worthwhile and (c) are Russell Crowe fans. And Nuremberg was just opening in theaters they told me, Russell Crowe a star therein.

I’d been casting about for a next film, ready to break the streak of rented noirs, and putting off Wicked 2 in case I could coordinate with another movie buff. So the fact it was pouring rain was no deterrent. The HotSpot Trip Planner (same as TriMet’s) advised an FX2 would get me to Fox Tower with time to spare that very afternoon (earlier today).

Having gotten there early (to the theater lobby) and with no one else around, I started doing voice to text into my phone, as I’m wont to do. This time my words were bound for Lithuania, which my longer term readers may recognize as part of my far-flung network. That’s apropos as the Baltic states are where a lot of this particular war happened, and is happening still depending on how you look at it. Lots of German armor has been heading towards Russia again.

Yes, I’m finally getting to the movie, which I thought sturdy, robust, well-made. It had all the elements. We’ve already had decades of WW2 movies haven’t we? Part of the challenge is cutting through that blanket of make-believe atop reality. Documentary footage helped.

Believe it or not, I’ve become a tad forgetful and even though I well-know Gladiator and should easily recognize the Beautiful Mind guy, I actually wondered for far too long, which one was Russ. Obviously he’s the fat German. Most people know that going in.

How could I be that confused? Maybe I’ve been indulging in too much Oregon cannabis? At least I’m not into salvia, also legal, and thanks to Paul, I own a specimen which, being a tropical plant, may not make it through the winter even indoors. That one gets lots of negative trip reports.

Anyway, back to the movie, we were 98% to the end I’m pretty sure. Our psychiatrist was back on the train, after the verdicts were in. We had taken in some gallows action, when all of a sudden a movie theater employee broke into the 1940s to bring us back to the 2020s: we needed to leave the theater now, as Fox Tower was on fire. The five or six of us left in an orderly fashion (this was a matinee on a Monday and most people are at work).

I came outside to an eerily calm scene, with fire trucks and firefighters everywhere, in full battle gear, but no one was running or shouting or seemed very flustered. Had the fire been put out already? 

I scanned the building but didn’t see anything. This was no towering inferno spectacle. I decided my dog probably needed out, so I didn’t stick around long. I was on the FX2 heading home pretty quickly, snapping a few pictures as I exited the scene.

I haven’t read any reviews yet. I expect a lot of them will be positive. I thought the performances were all stellar. 

The topic is very serious: man’s inhumanity. As a species, we fall short of what we think humanity should be. Do we have any institutions that might address these shortcomings? A lot of hope gets put into being law abiding, but as this movie points out, there’s not been much law in this area of altercation between nations, let alone enforcement thereof. We witness a similar situation some hundred years later (counting WW1 and 2 as a single war with an interregnum).

Incyder Talk

TG 2025

Synergetic Geometry: Volumes Table

As rendered by pandas in a Jupyter Notebook

TG in CrowTown

TG is an accepted moniker (token) for Thanksgiving in these parts. Xmas is likewise not controversial in my circles, not a sign of disrespect or other baggage. 

“CrowTown” as a moniker for Portland, on the other hand, might be met with objections, perhaps more for the CamelCase than the confession (that we’re overrun with crows, a welcome phenom). 

Would crow_town be better? Lowercase and snake_case might indeed be closer to the metal.

My TG scenario starts with wardrobe and accessories for a change, as opposed to always thinking about the food. My new Men’s Wearhouse suit is suitable, shall we say. I’m not trying to flaunt wealth with G7-G8 level skins, just blend in as another KFC Colonel in Japan. 

Hah hah, that’s with reference to Japanese pop culture in 1985 Japan. 

Let me quote my account from Facebook this morning:

Language Project Poster

Hoopla Two

Learn the Ropes Village

In a generic sense, we've seen "learn the ropes" villages a million times, again and again. Every Christian camp or the like, if we're talking evangelicals, but speaking from my background as Unprogrammed Friend (that's a thing), we had them also. 

Rainbow Gathering? I missed out on going, but a lot of my friends went. My influences are varied. I also lived in a trailer park, I mean mobile homes estate, in Gulf Coast Florida.

Inevitably, these camps will have a ropes course, and I'm not saying mine wouldn't necessarily (nor would), just what I mean by "ropes" is not that literal, but from the English idiom, meaning "developing the skill sets necessary" for whatever specific kinds of work.

For example, when you learn the ropes on a farm, that may involve keeping to a calendar, following workflows involving heavy equipment. If you're an airplane pilot, you might get time in a flight simulator. In geek speak, one could liken "learning the ropes" to becoming the master of some API.

Speaking of geeks, I'd liken my projected School of Tomorrow camps to computer camps in that, although outdoors, we'll have indoor experiences, including perhaps in a portable planetarium, even if the stars are clearly visible. It's not either/or when it comes to map vs territory.

I'm recycling the above 4D Solutions channel vid because of the showcase prototype villages already in operation in the eastern hemisphere. I'd be looking to assemble something similar, with a cast of prototypers willing to test out "pod life" while "learning the ropes", in the Rogue Valley area, for example.

Naturally anything so cinematically interesting would be captured to video and shared with patrons, other viewers, would-be joiners, those looking back. Self chronicling is built into the workflows, as is product placement in some cases, meaning vendor donors get critical feedback on their artifacts in action, ala the Project Renaissance model, wherein nonprofit biofirms, such as Project Earthala, have front line test piloting responsibilities.

Sometimes we're not just learning the ropes as apprentice newbies, but experimenting with developing the initial rope system, establishing templates, such as were developed at New Alchemy Institute and by John Todd and other bioengineers. Before we're ready to pass on working systems to apprentices, we need those working systems to pass on.

So will the various religious denominations be involved?  Of course. Some camps will be the result of collaborations, suggesting a sophisticated secular infrastructure that keeps the various religions in productive configurations, versus butting heads.

I've always seen Quakerism as connecting with meticulous recordkeeping, including bookkeeping, whereas I associate Mormonism with a focus on mapping ancestry. 

These are stereotypes to some degree, yet help predict the flavor of the apprenticeships on offer. Quaker campers might study SQL / NoSQL, while being encouraged to get into blogging (journaling already being an encouraged practice). 

Some Quaker camps might feature beer making, and all the farming that goes into that.

Calculus with Python

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I'm on academia dot edu. Even though many don't consider that to be a meaningful institution, I have to congratulate them on snagging that domain. For that alone, they deserve some applause.

Anyway, of the papers I share through that venue (channel), probably the one getting the most attention is Calculus with Python, which is short and pithy.

In that paper, I account as a shortcoming (to overcome) in most calculus intros that they eschew the Bell Curve, the Gaussian, the Normal Curve, because it's not easily integrable, no matter that the area under that curve is the bread and butter of a whole branch of maths: data science.

Since that paper has been in circulation, we've seen some advances in some curricula, where tackling the integration of the Bell Curve, in a relatively simple manner, is accomplished. I've seen the calculations popularized on the Numberphile channel. Textbook authors have more to go on in popular culture now.

In other words, everything I write about tends to be a moving target.  However, from that it doesn't follow that I need to remove my record of "aimed and fired" i.e. the debugging I was proposing may have happened since then, so let's applaud those improvements and move on.

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