Here is the link to my book on global warming and climate change in MS Word Format. The title is Global Wierding: From Climate Chaos to A Stable Hot Planet in A Hundred Years Or Less.
This is an EBook with hundreds of embedded weblinks and an appendix full of additional resources, also as weblinks.
Just paste this link into your web browser and you will be able to get to this book on my dropbox account where you can read it or download it.
The book is a summary of several different facets on the subject of clmate change, including a summary of the current knowledge, global climate modeling, solutions prioritized by current costs and potential for cost decreases over time, peak oil, Chinas role and future in mitigating global warming and climate change, the politics of getting legislation passed in the U.S.. and much more.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/29300285/Global%20Warming%20Trebuchet.doc
Thursday, June 9, 2011
Link To My Book On Global Warming and Climate Change
Here is the link to my book on global warming and climate change in Adobe Acrobat format. The title is Global Wierding: From Climate Chaos to A Stable Hot Planet in A Hundred Years Or Less.
This is an EBook with hundreds of embedded weblinks and an appendix full of additional resources, also as weblinks.
Just paste this link into your web browser and you will be able to get to this book on my dropbox account where you can read it or download it.
The book is a summary of several different facets on the subject of clmate change, including a summary of the current knowledge, global climate modeling, solutions prioritized by current costs and potential for cost decreases over time, peak oil, Chinas role and future in mitigating global warming and climate change, the politics of getting legislation passed in the U.S.. and much more.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/29300285/Global%20Weirding.pdf
Sunday, June 5, 2011
Comments On Metaphysics and What The Bleep Do We Know
Comments On Metaphysics and What The Bleep Do We Know
As it turns out, What the Bleep Do We Know has an extensive website with much internal knowledge as well as links to other books, seminars, community activities etc.
http://www.whatthebleep.com/index2.shtml
I have read 3 of the books on their list, and plan on reading Dean Radlins Entangled Minds, (not on their list yet) which scientifically documents and proves psychic phenomena (also done very well in the extended version of the documentary) and states how psychic phenomena (telepathy, clairvoyance, etc) can be explained by the principles of Quantum Physics. (not definitively proved to be Quantum Physics at work yet, but can be explained as such).
For example, neurologists have proved that given the speed that the human eye and brain perceives a 90 mile hour plus baseball leaving a pitchers hand, perceiving it, transferring the information to the brain, and reacting by swinging the bat, it is theoretically impossible for anybody to hit the ball with any consistency. But the mind uses quantum physics to visualize and see where the ball will be by projecting the whole event backwards in time. At the quantum level, there is no such thing as time. It moves forward or backward. Our consciousness creates the direction of time. Since consciousness is universal and we all tap into that, our personal consciousness remains congruent with universal or collective consciousness.
Another example: Dean Radlin’s group placed hundreds of computer programs that are random number generators around the United States several months prior to 9/11. These
I plan to read this, and if it is not too technical, make it one of our books for our bookclub, if everybody agrees. (My next book will still be the one on 50 ways to live longer.)
I have the Quantum version, i.e. extended 3 disk set of What the Bleep, if anybody wants to borrow it.
The overall viewpoint of this documentary is that consciousness is universal and that it transcends all religions.
How far each of us raises our consciousness depends on us, our environment, our willingness/ability to forge new relationships, overcoming our fear of losing old relationships either by maintaining them and making new ones or just moving on if need be, our willpower and social/psychological support in overcoming our personal addictions and old habits, over willingness to learn, and on and on. As a result of watching this, I am thinking of finding a TM group and joining it as well as a Reiki group. I found a Reiki group that meets once a month but have not found a local TM group yet.
I should point out that the teachings of Jesus were featured prominently in one part of the documentary by a theologian whose name escapes me right now.
I would like to also point out that if superpositioning of matter, a characteristic of quantum theory really exists and entanglement of quantum matter really exists, then the expansion and subsequent collapse of the quantum level waveform that comprises all of the information in your body and brain when you die could be seen as a scientific means for reincarnation. The dreamlike state that exists before reincarnation in which one can be with their dead friends and relatives occurs in the expansion of the information into the waveform at the quantum level. I know this makes no sense to you now, and I have used terms that have no meaning to you. But if you see the long version of the documentary, and do some reading, it may make sense.
These principles of quantum physics and the fundamental structure of consciousness at the the Planck level could also be a means for God to communicate with us and for us to communicate with God in a way that is not limited to space/time limitations. I would be interested in the similarities between prayer and meditation, since experiments have been done showing that meditation can dramatically affect the results of scientific experiments, and even cause scientific instruments to be directed by meditation. (In the documentary.) If this is being done through consciousness, and prayer is also a form of providing coherence or direction to consciousness, than it could be a way of communicating with God, it's obvious intention, but now explainable via science.
I am not a quantum physicist and don't understand this material at the mathematical level. But having read a few books written for the layman, and researched the web, I have not found any Quantum physicists saying anything radically different than what I have read so far. There appears to be consistency in the various works. In other words, I can find nothing that says its all a scam. And I know there is a lof of money being invested by banks and governments on creating cryptographic codes that will use quantum computers (none currently exist) to code and decipher such codes, because the codes are too complex for any ordinary computer to decipher in any short amount of time. And much of what we use today, computers, lasers, etc., would not be here if not for an understanding of quantum physics. These underlying principles of quantum physics, ii.e. entanglement at a distance, a single particle being in multiple places at the same time until observed, etc., have all been scientifically proven by experiments (shown in the documentary).
As it turns out, What the Bleep Do We Know has an extensive website with much internal knowledge as well as links to other books, seminars, community activities etc.
http://www.whatthebleep.com/index2.shtml
I have read 3 of the books on their list, and plan on reading Dean Radlins Entangled Minds, (not on their list yet) which scientifically documents and proves psychic phenomena (also done very well in the extended version of the documentary) and states how psychic phenomena (telepathy, clairvoyance, etc) can be explained by the principles of Quantum Physics. (not definitively proved to be Quantum Physics at work yet, but can be explained as such).
For example, neurologists have proved that given the speed that the human eye and brain perceives a 90 mile hour plus baseball leaving a pitchers hand, perceiving it, transferring the information to the brain, and reacting by swinging the bat, it is theoretically impossible for anybody to hit the ball with any consistency. But the mind uses quantum physics to visualize and see where the ball will be by projecting the whole event backwards in time. At the quantum level, there is no such thing as time. It moves forward or backward. Our consciousness creates the direction of time. Since consciousness is universal and we all tap into that, our personal consciousness remains congruent with universal or collective consciousness.
Another example: Dean Radlin’s group placed hundreds of computer programs that are random number generators around the United States several months prior to 9/11. These
I plan to read this, and if it is not too technical, make it one of our books for our bookclub, if everybody agrees. (My next book will still be the one on 50 ways to live longer.)
I have the Quantum version, i.e. extended 3 disk set of What the Bleep, if anybody wants to borrow it.
The overall viewpoint of this documentary is that consciousness is universal and that it transcends all religions.
How far each of us raises our consciousness depends on us, our environment, our willingness/ability to forge new relationships, overcoming our fear of losing old relationships either by maintaining them and making new ones or just moving on if need be, our willpower and social/psychological support in overcoming our personal addictions and old habits, over willingness to learn, and on and on. As a result of watching this, I am thinking of finding a TM group and joining it as well as a Reiki group. I found a Reiki group that meets once a month but have not found a local TM group yet.
I should point out that the teachings of Jesus were featured prominently in one part of the documentary by a theologian whose name escapes me right now.
I would like to also point out that if superpositioning of matter, a characteristic of quantum theory really exists and entanglement of quantum matter really exists, then the expansion and subsequent collapse of the quantum level waveform that comprises all of the information in your body and brain when you die could be seen as a scientific means for reincarnation. The dreamlike state that exists before reincarnation in which one can be with their dead friends and relatives occurs in the expansion of the information into the waveform at the quantum level. I know this makes no sense to you now, and I have used terms that have no meaning to you. But if you see the long version of the documentary, and do some reading, it may make sense.
These principles of quantum physics and the fundamental structure of consciousness at the the Planck level could also be a means for God to communicate with us and for us to communicate with God in a way that is not limited to space/time limitations. I would be interested in the similarities between prayer and meditation, since experiments have been done showing that meditation can dramatically affect the results of scientific experiments, and even cause scientific instruments to be directed by meditation. (In the documentary.) If this is being done through consciousness, and prayer is also a form of providing coherence or direction to consciousness, than it could be a way of communicating with God, it's obvious intention, but now explainable via science.
I am not a quantum physicist and don't understand this material at the mathematical level. But having read a few books written for the layman, and researched the web, I have not found any Quantum physicists saying anything radically different than what I have read so far. There appears to be consistency in the various works. In other words, I can find nothing that says its all a scam. And I know there is a lof of money being invested by banks and governments on creating cryptographic codes that will use quantum computers (none currently exist) to code and decipher such codes, because the codes are too complex for any ordinary computer to decipher in any short amount of time. And much of what we use today, computers, lasers, etc., would not be here if not for an understanding of quantum physics. These underlying principles of quantum physics, ii.e. entanglement at a distance, a single particle being in multiple places at the same time until observed, etc., have all been scientifically proven by experiments (shown in the documentary).
Uniquely Functional Websites
Uniquely Functional Websites
With a gazillion websites out there, I realize another list of the best websites is ridiculous. But since MySpace is a social networking site, perhaps a short list of the most unique and interesting social networking sites or just plain totally cool and functional sites might be helpful.
First, if you are looking for lists of social networking sites in a number of different categories, such as music, books, movies, cars, whatever, try the following:
Wikipedia article listing social networking websites
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websites
A list of over 350 Social networking sites in numerous categories
mashable.com/2007/10/23/social-networking-god/
Just type in “social networking sites” in Google to get all kinds of other info such as reviews of the top ten sites. Etc.
If you would rather socialize by meeting people first, try meetup.com. Here you can find a group that meets locally or regionally, or post interest in getting people to join up and form a new group. You can find groups by searching by subject or searching by city, city area, etc. This will work better if you live in a large urbanized area. These are generally not boring things like city council meetings, church groups, etc. but rather non-traditional groups. Groups are not posted here unless the group wants it posted. Meetup does not find groups and advertse them. It just serves as a central location for groups that are trying to find members or people trying to form new groups.
If you want to create a list of favorite sites that looks like Google Chrome in style and can be shared with your friends, or find friends with similar websurfing interests, try Stumbleupon.com. You create a profile. Then you check off boxes on your interests in a number of categories. Then you click on the stumbleupon icon. If you like what you see, click on thumbs up to put the site in your favorites, or click on thumbsdown or just click on stumbleupon to pop up another random site that matches your criteria. As you add sites, it gets smarter about your interests. Once you get enough favorites, you can see who has similar profiles. Then you can stumbleupon their favorites and if you like them, you can add them to your favorites.
ProjectVulcan is a site that has point source pollution data for individual factories, powerplants, roadways, and neighborhoods updated on an hourly basis. It uses a dataset updated from data obtained from the Orbiting Carbon Observatory satellite. You can download the data as well as a program that integrates this data into Google Earth, so you can look at individual pollution sources within the context of Google Earth or you can look at maps of summarized pollution levels by type of pollution and city, county, state, etc.
Pandora is a unique internet radio station in that you can type in the names of musical artists and turn each artist into a radio station. You can then create a mix of these musicians by clicking on those you want to create a mix for. You create profile and can share or view others profiles. You can also go the traditional routes of picking radio stations by genre and adding those to your favorites.
Digg is a unique website because as an aggregator of lists of various websites, it is created by the votes of users. If you see a website you like, you can vote to put it on Digg. If enough people vote for the same site, it ends up on Digg. Digg categorizes sites in a number of different ways to make it easy to find content.
Shelfari and LibraryThing are a couple of sites for cataloging, inventorying and sharing you lists of books you have read, own, or want to read. Book choices come from Amazon.com or from The Library of Congress or many other choices. You don’t have to type in anything except a partial book title and create your profile. There are also book websites that allow you to exchange books with others. See the mashable.com list of social networking sites above and go to the list of book websites to find these sites.
I Heart Movies is a site for sharing your list of movies you own, have seen, etc. on line with others and getting reviews, previews, etc. It is similar to some of the book websites discussed above in functionality.
IMDB.com is the best source for info on movies, documentaries, etc. However it is not a social networking site. You can list all of your movies on IMDB by creating a password. But to share this info. With others you would have to give people your individual password which would also allow them to edit your list, something you are not likely to want just anybody to do. So if I was doing this I would use something like I Heart Movies for my movie lists and then include a link to IMDB.com so I could get info. I can’t find on I Heart Movies on specific movies.
You can also use some of the websites that allow you to pimp out your MySpace page to create a list on your MySpace page of links to all of your movies. In other words, each title in the list is a link to that movie on IMDB.com. Your list can be in words or as thumbnail images. You can do the same thing for books and music. Books will be linked to Amazon.com. Type in myspace layouts, myspace generators, or myspace editors in Google and a huge number of sites to help you edit your myspace page will pop up.
At this point I have not included websites on Bittorrents, free on-line television, free on-line movies, DVD copy programs, free or almost free telephone services, dating sites, etc. Hopefully, I will update this blog from time to time to include info. On such sites.
With a gazillion websites out there, I realize another list of the best websites is ridiculous. But since MySpace is a social networking site, perhaps a short list of the most unique and interesting social networking sites or just plain totally cool and functional sites might be helpful.
First, if you are looking for lists of social networking sites in a number of different categories, such as music, books, movies, cars, whatever, try the following:
Wikipedia article listing social networking websites
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websites
A list of over 350 Social networking sites in numerous categories
mashable.com/2007/10/23/social-networking-god/
Just type in “social networking sites” in Google to get all kinds of other info such as reviews of the top ten sites. Etc.
If you would rather socialize by meeting people first, try meetup.com. Here you can find a group that meets locally or regionally, or post interest in getting people to join up and form a new group. You can find groups by searching by subject or searching by city, city area, etc. This will work better if you live in a large urbanized area. These are generally not boring things like city council meetings, church groups, etc. but rather non-traditional groups. Groups are not posted here unless the group wants it posted. Meetup does not find groups and advertse them. It just serves as a central location for groups that are trying to find members or people trying to form new groups.
If you want to create a list of favorite sites that looks like Google Chrome in style and can be shared with your friends, or find friends with similar websurfing interests, try Stumbleupon.com. You create a profile. Then you check off boxes on your interests in a number of categories. Then you click on the stumbleupon icon. If you like what you see, click on thumbs up to put the site in your favorites, or click on thumbsdown or just click on stumbleupon to pop up another random site that matches your criteria. As you add sites, it gets smarter about your interests. Once you get enough favorites, you can see who has similar profiles. Then you can stumbleupon their favorites and if you like them, you can add them to your favorites.
ProjectVulcan is a site that has point source pollution data for individual factories, powerplants, roadways, and neighborhoods updated on an hourly basis. It uses a dataset updated from data obtained from the Orbiting Carbon Observatory satellite. You can download the data as well as a program that integrates this data into Google Earth, so you can look at individual pollution sources within the context of Google Earth or you can look at maps of summarized pollution levels by type of pollution and city, county, state, etc.
Pandora is a unique internet radio station in that you can type in the names of musical artists and turn each artist into a radio station. You can then create a mix of these musicians by clicking on those you want to create a mix for. You create profile and can share or view others profiles. You can also go the traditional routes of picking radio stations by genre and adding those to your favorites.
Digg is a unique website because as an aggregator of lists of various websites, it is created by the votes of users. If you see a website you like, you can vote to put it on Digg. If enough people vote for the same site, it ends up on Digg. Digg categorizes sites in a number of different ways to make it easy to find content.
Shelfari and LibraryThing are a couple of sites for cataloging, inventorying and sharing you lists of books you have read, own, or want to read. Book choices come from Amazon.com or from The Library of Congress or many other choices. You don’t have to type in anything except a partial book title and create your profile. There are also book websites that allow you to exchange books with others. See the mashable.com list of social networking sites above and go to the list of book websites to find these sites.
I Heart Movies is a site for sharing your list of movies you own, have seen, etc. on line with others and getting reviews, previews, etc. It is similar to some of the book websites discussed above in functionality.
IMDB.com is the best source for info on movies, documentaries, etc. However it is not a social networking site. You can list all of your movies on IMDB by creating a password. But to share this info. With others you would have to give people your individual password which would also allow them to edit your list, something you are not likely to want just anybody to do. So if I was doing this I would use something like I Heart Movies for my movie lists and then include a link to IMDB.com so I could get info. I can’t find on I Heart Movies on specific movies.
You can also use some of the websites that allow you to pimp out your MySpace page to create a list on your MySpace page of links to all of your movies. In other words, each title in the list is a link to that movie on IMDB.com. Your list can be in words or as thumbnail images. You can do the same thing for books and music. Books will be linked to Amazon.com. Type in myspace layouts, myspace generators, or myspace editors in Google and a huge number of sites to help you edit your myspace page will pop up.
At this point I have not included websites on Bittorrents, free on-line television, free on-line movies, DVD copy programs, free or almost free telephone services, dating sites, etc. Hopefully, I will update this blog from time to time to include info. On such sites.
A Fair Proposal For Reducing The Incidence of Texting and Driving
A Just and Equitable Way to Reducing The Incidence of Texting and Driving
The problem is that if we make it a law not to text and drive as 18 states have done, including the State of Illinois, where do we stop? Should listening to the radio, CDs or audiobooks be against the law? Should talking to somebody in the front seat be against the law? Should driving without enough sleep be a crime? Anything that distracts your attention from the road can contribute to the likelihood of an accident. It all depends on the driver. Experienced drivers can prioritize and know how not to get too emotional or intellectually absorbed in other pursuits while driving.
On the other hand, texting and driving is a special case because it requires taking one hand off the steering wheel AND your eyes off the road temporarily.
So your mind, eyes, and hands are all where they should not be. Studies have shown that texting and driving ranks right behind drinking and driving as a major cause of accidents.
As in all crimes, the punishment should fit the crime. While texting and driving is dangerous, it is far more dangerous in some situations than in other situations. In this sense, it is unlike drinking and driving, where you are a danger to everybody on the road all the time you are driving, not just for a minute or two. Not wearing a seat belt could also be considered more dangerous than texting because you are certain to get injured if you do not wear a seat belt and get in an accident. Also, wearing a seat belt protects you from the other driver of the other car, not just yourself. It is not certain that you will cause an accident while texting. For example, texting in traffic is far more dangerous than texting on the open road where the nearest car is a few hundred feet away and you are in the right hand lane. Odds are if you have to stop suddenly you are going to go off the road or hit the other cars rear bumper off center, reducing the accident seriousness. Perhaps the most dangerous situation is texting while in traffic and while driving at high speeds. The only thing worse than this would be to add in rain or snow and darkness, i.e. nighttime driving.
I am not sure that the law against texting and driving is routinely enforced, even in States where it is a primary offense, such as Illinois. This means you can be stopped and arrested for texting even if you were not doing anything else wrong, like speeding. The reason is probably because of the sheer number of people who text and drive. It has been estimated that as many as 50% of people with cell phones do some amount of texting and driving. Another reason is that unless you are actually just staring at your phone, officers may be reluctant to arrest you. Finally, unless the office is immediately behind you, it is difficult to determine that you are texting and driving. You could be looking at your coffee. The officer actually has to observe you for awhile, and odds are you would figure out you are being followed and stop texting before he can stop you and arrest you. Unless the officer can produce an arrest, he is not going to get credit for an arrest.
So even though texting and driving can be dangerous, it is not always at the same level of danger. Although it is always somewhat potentially dangerous. About the only time it is not dangerous would be if you were stuck in traffic going a few miles per hour, or in a low speed zone with no other cars or pedestrians around. But then you would have to be certain of that, meaning you would have to be looking up and down from your cell phone a lot to determine that. How many people who text and drive actually look up and down frequently from the road to their phone while texting?
So here is what I suggest. I think it should remain against the law to text and drive, but I think there are some things that can be done to make the punishment fit the crime, to make sure the law is actually enforced, as well as things that can prevent accidents from happening in the first place when people are texting and driving.
First of all, to discourage the part of texting where you are actually typing, build apps into all cell phones that convert speech to text, and allow playback and editing of the message with simple steps like a verbal STOP command. ERASE WORD command. ERASE SENTENCE command. REPLAY message command, A SEND command, and so forth. These would be verbal commands that you can do using a Bluetooth device, so both hands are always on the wheel. If you are using this method to text, it should not be a crime.
Secondly, require all cell phones sold after a certain date to have GPS in them and enabled whenever you are texting and moving at a speed over 5 miles per hour. Whenever you text, the phone would record your GPS coordinates so it would keep a log of the length of time it took to compose the text message and the distance covered. (It would not keep a log of the actual text.) Of course, this could not serve as evidence that you were texting and driving because the log of texted calls can not determine whether you were a passenger or a driver, unless you were caught in the act of texting . However, if a record is established that the text messages in the log were recorded during the period in which you usually drive to work, and the court establishes that you were at work on those days, and that you regularly drive to work, the combination of these pieces of evidence could be used to prosecute you for texting and driving. More importantly however, the phone log could be used by the judge to merit appropriate punishment. If the law is structured to give the judge a great deal of lee way in assessing the amount of the fine or punishment, such as a wide dollar range, the law could truly be made so that the punishment does meet the crime by allowing the judge to take into consideration things like how often you texted and drove, how much you texted and drove during each trip, etc. While it is not likely all of this evidence would be routinely used, it could be used in cases where there was a serious accident and people were injured or killed. And by so doing, and by knowing you can be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, and the punishment does get more serious depending on the results and the frequency of breaking the law, people would begin to get the message that they should only text and drive when it is really necessary and they should use a speech to text tool instead of hands and eyes off the wheel approach.
The problem is that if we make it a law not to text and drive as 18 states have done, including the State of Illinois, where do we stop? Should listening to the radio, CDs or audiobooks be against the law? Should talking to somebody in the front seat be against the law? Should driving without enough sleep be a crime? Anything that distracts your attention from the road can contribute to the likelihood of an accident. It all depends on the driver. Experienced drivers can prioritize and know how not to get too emotional or intellectually absorbed in other pursuits while driving.
On the other hand, texting and driving is a special case because it requires taking one hand off the steering wheel AND your eyes off the road temporarily.
So your mind, eyes, and hands are all where they should not be. Studies have shown that texting and driving ranks right behind drinking and driving as a major cause of accidents.
As in all crimes, the punishment should fit the crime. While texting and driving is dangerous, it is far more dangerous in some situations than in other situations. In this sense, it is unlike drinking and driving, where you are a danger to everybody on the road all the time you are driving, not just for a minute or two. Not wearing a seat belt could also be considered more dangerous than texting because you are certain to get injured if you do not wear a seat belt and get in an accident. Also, wearing a seat belt protects you from the other driver of the other car, not just yourself. It is not certain that you will cause an accident while texting. For example, texting in traffic is far more dangerous than texting on the open road where the nearest car is a few hundred feet away and you are in the right hand lane. Odds are if you have to stop suddenly you are going to go off the road or hit the other cars rear bumper off center, reducing the accident seriousness. Perhaps the most dangerous situation is texting while in traffic and while driving at high speeds. The only thing worse than this would be to add in rain or snow and darkness, i.e. nighttime driving.
I am not sure that the law against texting and driving is routinely enforced, even in States where it is a primary offense, such as Illinois. This means you can be stopped and arrested for texting even if you were not doing anything else wrong, like speeding. The reason is probably because of the sheer number of people who text and drive. It has been estimated that as many as 50% of people with cell phones do some amount of texting and driving. Another reason is that unless you are actually just staring at your phone, officers may be reluctant to arrest you. Finally, unless the office is immediately behind you, it is difficult to determine that you are texting and driving. You could be looking at your coffee. The officer actually has to observe you for awhile, and odds are you would figure out you are being followed and stop texting before he can stop you and arrest you. Unless the officer can produce an arrest, he is not going to get credit for an arrest.
So even though texting and driving can be dangerous, it is not always at the same level of danger. Although it is always somewhat potentially dangerous. About the only time it is not dangerous would be if you were stuck in traffic going a few miles per hour, or in a low speed zone with no other cars or pedestrians around. But then you would have to be certain of that, meaning you would have to be looking up and down from your cell phone a lot to determine that. How many people who text and drive actually look up and down frequently from the road to their phone while texting?
So here is what I suggest. I think it should remain against the law to text and drive, but I think there are some things that can be done to make the punishment fit the crime, to make sure the law is actually enforced, as well as things that can prevent accidents from happening in the first place when people are texting and driving.
First of all, to discourage the part of texting where you are actually typing, build apps into all cell phones that convert speech to text, and allow playback and editing of the message with simple steps like a verbal STOP command. ERASE WORD command. ERASE SENTENCE command. REPLAY message command, A SEND command, and so forth. These would be verbal commands that you can do using a Bluetooth device, so both hands are always on the wheel. If you are using this method to text, it should not be a crime.
Secondly, require all cell phones sold after a certain date to have GPS in them and enabled whenever you are texting and moving at a speed over 5 miles per hour. Whenever you text, the phone would record your GPS coordinates so it would keep a log of the length of time it took to compose the text message and the distance covered. (It would not keep a log of the actual text.) Of course, this could not serve as evidence that you were texting and driving because the log of texted calls can not determine whether you were a passenger or a driver, unless you were caught in the act of texting . However, if a record is established that the text messages in the log were recorded during the period in which you usually drive to work, and the court establishes that you were at work on those days, and that you regularly drive to work, the combination of these pieces of evidence could be used to prosecute you for texting and driving. More importantly however, the phone log could be used by the judge to merit appropriate punishment. If the law is structured to give the judge a great deal of lee way in assessing the amount of the fine or punishment, such as a wide dollar range, the law could truly be made so that the punishment does meet the crime by allowing the judge to take into consideration things like how often you texted and drove, how much you texted and drove during each trip, etc. While it is not likely all of this evidence would be routinely used, it could be used in cases where there was a serious accident and people were injured or killed. And by so doing, and by knowing you can be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, and the punishment does get more serious depending on the results and the frequency of breaking the law, people would begin to get the message that they should only text and drive when it is really necessary and they should use a speech to text tool instead of hands and eyes off the wheel approach.
You Can't Stop Terrorism. You Can Only Slow It Down A Little.
You Can’t Stop Terrorism
The U.S. Federal government is spending billions of dollars on two fronts to prevent terrorism. It won’t work. It will only delay when such an event occurs.
The government thinks it can prevent terrorism on airlines, and prevent terrorist weapons from getting into the country via freight barges, railroads, etc. But the number of avenues that are available to terrorists for doing terrorist acts is actually quite enormous. This is primarily due to the centralized nature of energy and transportation. For a very good accounting of this see the somewhat dated book ‘Brittle Power” by Amory B. Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins.
But you say “There hasn’t been a major terrorist attack in the U.S. since 2001.” Take a look at the rest of the world, especially London, India and Pakistan which have all had major attacks since then. So far major terrorist acts have been stopped by a combination of Intelligence, counterintelligence, advanced surveillance technology and two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan which have served to minimize the proliferation of terrorist training camps. But this is now backfiring in Afghanistan where the Taliban now have a very strong foothold and new training camps are forming in the mountainous areas that serve as the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Intelligence and surveillance techniques, along with efforts to freeze funds going to terrorist groups have worked to date because terrorism is still in its primitive organizational stage. The number of terrorists and their financial and technical resources have been limited. But as long as nations like the U.S. keep increasing the gap between the rich and poor nationwide and globally, as long as rich nations continue exploiting the non-renewable natural resources of third world and emerging nations without any consideration of the forms of government that exist in these nations, as long as global instant communications and information and technology transfer via the world wide web and via corrupt black markets gets larger and larger, the efforts of terrorists will grow until a critical mass is reached.
A recent assessment of terrorism by various U.S. intelligence resources has concluded that the probability of a major nuclear or biological strike in the U.S. will grow to exceed 50% within the next 1900 days, or 5 years.
While terrorists may claim their motives are religious, they are really the newest geopolitical force for change in the world. Their goals are geopolitical, and their alliances with governments are difficult to determine because these are very opportunistic organizations. As the world depletes its supply of non-renewable resources like fossil fuels, minerals, and fresh water, there will be national conflicts to obtain such resources at the expense of other powerful nations. Since a global nuclear war is not an alternative, much of what happens in this arena will play itself out in terrorist acts. This will happen unless a world government forms and a long term global plan emerges on how to deal with global resource depletion, and determining which advanced technologies to save resources, stop global warming, and clean up the air will be implemented and in what sequential order these things will be implemented in.
The U.S. Federal government is spending billions of dollars on two fronts to prevent terrorism. It won’t work. It will only delay when such an event occurs.
The government thinks it can prevent terrorism on airlines, and prevent terrorist weapons from getting into the country via freight barges, railroads, etc. But the number of avenues that are available to terrorists for doing terrorist acts is actually quite enormous. This is primarily due to the centralized nature of energy and transportation. For a very good accounting of this see the somewhat dated book ‘Brittle Power” by Amory B. Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins.
But you say “There hasn’t been a major terrorist attack in the U.S. since 2001.” Take a look at the rest of the world, especially London, India and Pakistan which have all had major attacks since then. So far major terrorist acts have been stopped by a combination of Intelligence, counterintelligence, advanced surveillance technology and two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan which have served to minimize the proliferation of terrorist training camps. But this is now backfiring in Afghanistan where the Taliban now have a very strong foothold and new training camps are forming in the mountainous areas that serve as the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Intelligence and surveillance techniques, along with efforts to freeze funds going to terrorist groups have worked to date because terrorism is still in its primitive organizational stage. The number of terrorists and their financial and technical resources have been limited. But as long as nations like the U.S. keep increasing the gap between the rich and poor nationwide and globally, as long as rich nations continue exploiting the non-renewable natural resources of third world and emerging nations without any consideration of the forms of government that exist in these nations, as long as global instant communications and information and technology transfer via the world wide web and via corrupt black markets gets larger and larger, the efforts of terrorists will grow until a critical mass is reached.
A recent assessment of terrorism by various U.S. intelligence resources has concluded that the probability of a major nuclear or biological strike in the U.S. will grow to exceed 50% within the next 1900 days, or 5 years.
While terrorists may claim their motives are religious, they are really the newest geopolitical force for change in the world. Their goals are geopolitical, and their alliances with governments are difficult to determine because these are very opportunistic organizations. As the world depletes its supply of non-renewable resources like fossil fuels, minerals, and fresh water, there will be national conflicts to obtain such resources at the expense of other powerful nations. Since a global nuclear war is not an alternative, much of what happens in this arena will play itself out in terrorist acts. This will happen unless a world government forms and a long term global plan emerges on how to deal with global resource depletion, and determining which advanced technologies to save resources, stop global warming, and clean up the air will be implemented and in what sequential order these things will be implemented in.
Survey Your Staff on How to Save Money, Increase Revenues (A comedy)
Survey of Selected Staff For Ideas on How We Can Save Money, Increase Revenues, and Help Stimulate Consumer Spending and the Economy
This survey is strictly voluntary and confidential. We will tabulate the results of the survey and let the group know the statistics only, not how any individual survey was done. The surveys will be destroyed and all that will remain will be the statistics.
For those of you who are more outspoken than others in our group, we encourage you to make fun of the answers as you fill out the results at the table. You are allowed to let others know how you voted, but do not have to do so.
Please mark your favorite or best answer with a plus sign (+) and your least favorite or worst answer with a negative sign (-). For each question, we will verbally let everybody know the answer that ranks highest by vote total for both positive and negative, and the number of votes.
For some questions, you will notice that there is one answer that is a potentially good or real answer, in our mind at least. That is to say it is not designed to be funny. The other answers are meant to be funny. You do not have to rank the “good” answer as the highest. You may do so if you wish.
1. Our Company should raise additional revenue by:
a. Having a bake sale.
b. Having a yard sale. Literally.
c. Selling tickets to a demolition derby.
d. Putting slot machines in the offices.
e. Making the toilets in the offices Paid, i.e you have to put a quarter in the slot for the door to open.
f. Renovating and converting the upper floors to a museum.
g. Letting street musicians play at our stores with the company taking a 30% cut of the action.
h. Extend the street musicians idea to other street people offering other types of cash only services.
2. Our comapny should start slot machines, etc. because:
a. We gotta do something about these outrageous fuel and health care costs.
b. It just might be legal.
c. Ka-ching. Ka-ching Baby.
d. I don’t think we should do this.
3. In lieu of pay raises, our company should:
a. Distribute an Anti-Depression toolkit full of wonderful ideas on how to save money like eating peanut butter instead of lobster.
b. Invite Warren Buffet to a big meeting of all our employees on how to invest in selected stocks when the market hits bottom (AGAIN), i.e. When will it hit bottom, and what stocks to invest in?
c. Enroll all employees in the Wisconsin Cheese log of the Month Club.
d. Tell everybody that it’s OK to donate less to the United Way this year.
e. Send one of those Sincere Employee letters from our CEO that says “Now Look – You still have a job, so be happy.”
4. Our Company should cut costs by:
a. Putting up signs that say :Wear boots and use snow tires this winter because we’re not gonna plow the parking lots and sidewalks.
c. Ask every restaurant in the 6 county region to donate their excess or used cooking oil so we can turn it into biodiesel fuel.
d. Put solar panels on all our buildings.
e. Farm out our health care plan to a small startup company in the Phillipines called “Psychic Health Care, Inc.”
f. Farm out all of our telephone customer care services to a startup firm in India called “Wuddadiddautay.”
5. To stimulate consumer spending, our company should:
a. Just say “What the Hell – If the Feds can spend money like a bunch of drunken sailors, so can we” and give all its employees big raises.
b. Tax the top 1% of its employees and redistribute these funds to the bottom 95% of its employees so they can buy gas and pay off some debts.
c. Tax the bottom 95% of its employees and redistribute these funds to the top 1% of its employees because we know these high income earners will wisely and prudently invest this extra income in American firms that will create American jobs for people that will spend this money in America, thus generating additional tax revenue which can be used to reduce your taxes and lower prices for you.
d. Sell lottery tickets at all of our stores because you know that whoever wins the big one is gonna spend a boatload of money here in the U.S. at American firms that employee only American workers who themselves also only spend all of their money only at American firms with American workers, who etc. etc.
e. Lobby Congress to pass a major infrastructure bill because it will create jobs and give Americans money to spend.
6. Which of the following would you most like/least like to receive from the CEO this year:
a. A one way train ticket to Detroit
b. A round trip ticket to Oak Park.
c. Five one dollar lottery tickets.
d. A pink rubber ducky.
e. A blue toy submarine.
f. Zig Zag rolling papers.
g. 3 cookies, 2 apple pies, a small diet coke and a double cheeseburger from McDonalds
h. A bottle of Redline Power Rush 7.
7. Which of the following is your favorite and least favorite holiday tradition.
a. Watching Christmas Vacation starring Chevy Chase.
b. Watching “A Christmas Story” sixteen times in a row on TBS.
c. Spending the whole day pondering why you keep making the same stupid mistake every year of letting your divorced, single and alcoholic Uncle Harry come over and spend time with the family.
d. Eating too much, drinking too much and sleeping too much so that you once again end up at the emergency room.
e. Driving around the city with your family looking for something that’s open.
f. Knowing in advance there’s nothing open, driving around the city with your family anyway just to see if there’s anybody else doing the same thing.
g. Going to the movies with your friends and family.
h. Watching Babe Lewandowski show you how to go ice fishing on TV.
i. Sitting on the recliner with the cat on your lap drinking egg nog and watching the icycles flicker from the glow of the fireplace.
j. Going to CVS or Walgreens. They’re open.
7. Please rank the following as to the importance to you as the meaning of the holiday season to you. You many rank them a to g, all of them a if you think they are of equal importance to you, or not rank some of them at all if some of them are not important to you.
a. a time for personal prayer and personal reflection.
b. a time for quality time with friends and relatives.
c. a time to spread Gods message to others.
d. A time to teach Gods message to others.
e. A time to personally help people, be they neighbors, friends, or relatives, that are less fortunate than your self or your family.
f. A time to give financially to those less fortunate than yourself or your family.
g. A time to study the Bible, Quran, Hinayana, Tripitaka, Vedas, Gitas, or other religious book used by your religion.
h. A time to celebrate your faith with others, either communally in a place of worship or privately with your family and friends.
This survey is strictly voluntary and confidential. We will tabulate the results of the survey and let the group know the statistics only, not how any individual survey was done. The surveys will be destroyed and all that will remain will be the statistics.
For those of you who are more outspoken than others in our group, we encourage you to make fun of the answers as you fill out the results at the table. You are allowed to let others know how you voted, but do not have to do so.
Please mark your favorite or best answer with a plus sign (+) and your least favorite or worst answer with a negative sign (-). For each question, we will verbally let everybody know the answer that ranks highest by vote total for both positive and negative, and the number of votes.
For some questions, you will notice that there is one answer that is a potentially good or real answer, in our mind at least. That is to say it is not designed to be funny. The other answers are meant to be funny. You do not have to rank the “good” answer as the highest. You may do so if you wish.
1. Our Company should raise additional revenue by:
a. Having a bake sale.
b. Having a yard sale. Literally.
c. Selling tickets to a demolition derby.
d. Putting slot machines in the offices.
e. Making the toilets in the offices Paid, i.e you have to put a quarter in the slot for the door to open.
f. Renovating and converting the upper floors to a museum.
g. Letting street musicians play at our stores with the company taking a 30% cut of the action.
h. Extend the street musicians idea to other street people offering other types of cash only services.
2. Our comapny should start slot machines, etc. because:
a. We gotta do something about these outrageous fuel and health care costs.
b. It just might be legal.
c. Ka-ching. Ka-ching Baby.
d. I don’t think we should do this.
3. In lieu of pay raises, our company should:
a. Distribute an Anti-Depression toolkit full of wonderful ideas on how to save money like eating peanut butter instead of lobster.
b. Invite Warren Buffet to a big meeting of all our employees on how to invest in selected stocks when the market hits bottom (AGAIN), i.e. When will it hit bottom, and what stocks to invest in?
c. Enroll all employees in the Wisconsin Cheese log of the Month Club.
d. Tell everybody that it’s OK to donate less to the United Way this year.
e. Send one of those Sincere Employee letters from our CEO that says “Now Look – You still have a job, so be happy.”
4. Our Company should cut costs by:
a. Putting up signs that say :Wear boots and use snow tires this winter because we’re not gonna plow the parking lots and sidewalks.
c. Ask every restaurant in the 6 county region to donate their excess or used cooking oil so we can turn it into biodiesel fuel.
d. Put solar panels on all our buildings.
e. Farm out our health care plan to a small startup company in the Phillipines called “Psychic Health Care, Inc.”
f. Farm out all of our telephone customer care services to a startup firm in India called “Wuddadiddautay.”
5. To stimulate consumer spending, our company should:
a. Just say “What the Hell – If the Feds can spend money like a bunch of drunken sailors, so can we” and give all its employees big raises.
b. Tax the top 1% of its employees and redistribute these funds to the bottom 95% of its employees so they can buy gas and pay off some debts.
c. Tax the bottom 95% of its employees and redistribute these funds to the top 1% of its employees because we know these high income earners will wisely and prudently invest this extra income in American firms that will create American jobs for people that will spend this money in America, thus generating additional tax revenue which can be used to reduce your taxes and lower prices for you.
d. Sell lottery tickets at all of our stores because you know that whoever wins the big one is gonna spend a boatload of money here in the U.S. at American firms that employee only American workers who themselves also only spend all of their money only at American firms with American workers, who etc. etc.
e. Lobby Congress to pass a major infrastructure bill because it will create jobs and give Americans money to spend.
6. Which of the following would you most like/least like to receive from the CEO this year:
a. A one way train ticket to Detroit
b. A round trip ticket to Oak Park.
c. Five one dollar lottery tickets.
d. A pink rubber ducky.
e. A blue toy submarine.
f. Zig Zag rolling papers.
g. 3 cookies, 2 apple pies, a small diet coke and a double cheeseburger from McDonalds
h. A bottle of Redline Power Rush 7.
7. Which of the following is your favorite and least favorite holiday tradition.
a. Watching Christmas Vacation starring Chevy Chase.
b. Watching “A Christmas Story” sixteen times in a row on TBS.
c. Spending the whole day pondering why you keep making the same stupid mistake every year of letting your divorced, single and alcoholic Uncle Harry come over and spend time with the family.
d. Eating too much, drinking too much and sleeping too much so that you once again end up at the emergency room.
e. Driving around the city with your family looking for something that’s open.
f. Knowing in advance there’s nothing open, driving around the city with your family anyway just to see if there’s anybody else doing the same thing.
g. Going to the movies with your friends and family.
h. Watching Babe Lewandowski show you how to go ice fishing on TV.
i. Sitting on the recliner with the cat on your lap drinking egg nog and watching the icycles flicker from the glow of the fireplace.
j. Going to CVS or Walgreens. They’re open.
7. Please rank the following as to the importance to you as the meaning of the holiday season to you. You many rank them a to g, all of them a if you think they are of equal importance to you, or not rank some of them at all if some of them are not important to you.
a. a time for personal prayer and personal reflection.
b. a time for quality time with friends and relatives.
c. a time to spread Gods message to others.
d. A time to teach Gods message to others.
e. A time to personally help people, be they neighbors, friends, or relatives, that are less fortunate than your self or your family.
f. A time to give financially to those less fortunate than yourself or your family.
g. A time to study the Bible, Quran, Hinayana, Tripitaka, Vedas, Gitas, or other religious book used by your religion.
h. A time to celebrate your faith with others, either communally in a place of worship or privately with your family and friends.
E Harmony Exposed - The Great Dating Crapshoot
E Harmony Exposed – The Great Dating Crapshoot
When I joined E-Harmony a couple years ago, I got conned into believing all the hype on finding that special someone, that perfect ideal mate who has the same likes and the same can’t stands as me, absolute perfection; and they indicated they could accomplish this in record time to boot. The reality is quite different.
I started to write a blog that would explain why E-Harmony has not, yet, worked out for me and how vain and shallow some of the people were/are. I was going to use the statistics I gathered on myself and potential mates to demonstrate this. I was going to show that E-Harmony is really no more effective than your average free dating site, and in some ways, it is worse. I am still going to do this, but now within the context of a bigger picture of on-line dating which I was able to gather from a new major article in Scientific American.
When I read the article in SA, it confirmed everything I thought, everything that was happening to me, demonstrating everything that is wrong, not only with E-Harmony but with other similarly based on-line dating services and the people who use them. As a result, I now believe that the more old fashioned dating services, as well as churches, friends, relatives, work comrades, and other social avenues are much more effective than E-Harmony and other strictly personality match and psychological criteria based on-line services.
By old fashioned dating services, I mean those that feature interactive IM, email, chat, and webcams with anyone that wants to meet you or you meet them, rather than going through a lengthy process of scientific reductionism to find the person that is most like you. As the SA article points out, the biggest problem with on-line dating is the “false-negative problem.” A test, (like the one with hundreds of “rank this from one to ten” type questions on E-Harmony) that determines in advance whom you will meet and whom you will NEVER meet necessarily fails to allow certain people to meet who would adore each other…” because they compliment each other, because they ARE different from each other. With E-Harmony, what you are guaranteed is you will get to meet and maybe date yourself (or reject yourself), but only after a long and protracted series of question and answer exchanges in which you get to decide “Do I really want to meet and date somebody like myself?”
Deceptive on-line dating borders on the horrific. It is so bad that there are actually websites like Dontdatehimgirl.com that people use to gripe, complain, blog, and even file lawsuits against on-line services that have not worked out for them or turned them into disgruntled seekers of love, lust, or both.
Survey research conducted by Jeana Frost, previously at Boston University and MIT, suggests that about 20% of online daters admit to deception. If you ask them how many other people are lying, the number jumps to 90%. Having not gone on a date yet with anybody from E-Harmony, I can’t say who’s lying, but I can tell you that the vast majority do not want you to know the truth. I deduce this from the fact that not one woman whose profile I looked at has actually made her E-Harmony personality profile available, i.e. the one created by E-Harmony from your answers to the hundreds of questions they posed about you and your likes and dislikes. Every person on E-Harmony obviously enjoys showing off what they think of themselves via the About me section, but nobody wants to reveal their personality profile.
My personality profile is and will remain available even if it inhibits some people from dating me because I am fundamentally an open and honest person, I believe E-harmony got most of it right when passing judgment on me, and as far as I am concerned, if you don’t like what you read in the personality profile, we might as well as get that out of the way now, one way or another, either through a date in which you ask me about what E-Harmony said about me, or through your rejection of me evidenced by your insecurity about dating me based on whatever you have read and didn’t like, i.e. you won’t date me and if you are too insecure to actually confront me about what you agree and disagree with, then I probably do not want to date you anyway. In this sense, I think dating is like politics, people want all of the services government has to offer but don’t want to pay anything for any of it, and want to blame the politicians who did exactly what they wanted for doing exactly what they wanted.
Continuing with the topic of deception and vanity, according to the SA article, women appear to understate their weight more and more as they get older; by five pounds when in their 20’s, 17 pounds in their 30’s, and 19 pounds in their 40s. At least 13% of online male daters are thought to be married. In one study, only 1% of online daters listed their appearance as “less than average.” One recent study showed that men claiming incomes exceeding $250,000 got 151 percent more replies than men claiming incomes less than $50,000. I wonder what the stats would be if we made that $500,000 versus $25,000?
As stated, E-Harmony relies on multiple choice or rank from 1 to 10 type tests that are supposed to determine your personality profile and how compatible (read - alike) you are to potential mates. Sounds great at first glance. But this is no Briggs Meyers test. The questions are open ended, subjective, and the multiple choice answers are subjective as well. As SA points out, these tests have never been subjected to a controlled process where a large sample of test outcomes was verified in any way, such as perhaps by a team of psychologists each independently assessing the individuals in a double blind experiment in which the survey makers know nothing of the psychologists and the psychologists know nothing of the E-Harmony tests or test outcomes.
For any personality test that is used to match people up to be claimed to be successful, it would have to be shown that a high percentage of the romantic pairings were successful. In 2004 E-harmony did present a paper at a national convention claiming that married couples who met through E-harmony were happier than other couples. But the paper was never published, possibly because the couples in the study were all newlyweds (married an average of 6 months) whereas the couples in the control group (who had met by other means) were married an average of 2.1 years. E-Harmony claims that 236 of its members marry every day, which is equal on a yearly basis to about 4 tenths of one percent of the 20 million members on E-Harmony. When E-harmony recommends someone as a match for you, there is about a 1 in 500 chance you will marry this person. Given the average of about 2 matches per month, if you went on a date with every E-Harmony match, it would take 346 dates and 19 years to reach a 50% chance of getting married. If you went on a date every week, it would take over 8 years to get to a 50% chance of getting married. And I am quite sure that there has yet to be any study of how many people who do get married on E-Harmony stay married more than the average, which is not in itself very good, in that currently half of all first marriages and two thirds of second marriages end in divorce.
Think about it. How could an on-line test possibly determine whether you should be paired with someone just like you, someone similar to you, someone somewhat different, or some magic mix of alike but also different.
While a large company like Match.com may advertise that it has 15 million paying members, less than a million are actually paying customers, and most of them are in it for only 3 months at a time, quitting and going on to the next service if no results in 3 months. This matches up perfectly with my experience with E-harmony. I can’t tell you how many women I have spent 2 months going back and forth with questions and answers, multiple times because that is the way E-Harmony has designed it, just to get to the final stage, open communications, only to find out that my match is no longer available on-line. Unfortunately, many of these dating services have raised the bar so long and so high that few people are willing to put up with even the slightest imperfection in a potential mate. After all, it is a simple matter to go back and click on the next match, or the next wink, or the next e-mail, with tens of thousands of mates ready to fill the void. Why date anybody when you can simply wait it out for the perfect match?
The biggest problem with E-Harmony is that dating is done in complete social isolation, i.e. you don’t get to ask your own questions or answer in a narrative form, and you don’t get to interact in real time with anybody. All you get to do is ask canned multiple choice questions and answer canned multiple choice questions; you have given your potential mate canned “must haves” and canned “can’t stands”, and you would be hard pressed to find anybody who would disagree with any of these likes or dislikes; this is your dating life, at least until the last step before open communications. By that time, you have already had plenty of time and opportunity to find something wrong, some reason to not date this person and go on to the next one instead. A surprisingly large percentage of women do not give you their picture even if you have started communications and requested their picture. That is social isolation.
Now from my own personal experience, the most ironic thing about this is that many of the women who have closed on me without dating me, have actually given “I don’t think the chemistry was really there” as a reason for closing. Some of these women have never even shown me their picture. What chemistry? How could there possibly have been any chemistry? I’ve never spoken to, seen a picture of, or written anything addressed to any of these women who gave this “lack of chemistry” as a reason for closing. Ironically though, this reason is an honest one. Of course there is no chemistry. The E-Harmony automaton chaperone has made sure of this. One has to wonder though. I mean – maybe they are telepathic. Maybe I am telepathic. Maybe my pheromones managed to magically find them, or there pheromones found me, though they don’t know where I live nor I them. This would explain why there could be a lack of chemistry when we tried so hard to establish chemistry in the absence of anything to base it on.
There are only four reasons a person will close on you on E-Harmony. They are the chemistry one I just mentioned, “The physical distance is too great” – actually a good reason, “There are just too many things going on in my life right now” and “Other.” OK. Too many things going on in your life right now? I guess that’s why you joined E-Harmony, right? E-Harmony gives you a multiple choice of about 30 reasons for closing on a match, and every single woman who has closed on me has chosen one of these four. Again, deception; perhaps well intentioned in that they have formed a biased opinion from my personality profile or my About me, and are afraid they are going to “hurt me” by telling me what they really think, or maybe they think if they don’t tell anybody what they really think, nobody will ever know, and nobody will ever get hurt. Deception, vanity, naivety, and all this because E-Harmony is fundamentally a game, a game of social isolation, rather than an interactive open ended game of interactive honest communications, something that I am sure all of these women really want but seem to think can wait until they are full blown deep in a relationship or married.
Fortunately, there are some big changes forthcoming in this industry, and it is an industry. Possibly due to the fact that a recent phone survey of 2,000 people found that only 25 percent were satisfied with the online dating sites they had used. Engage, for example, is allowing members to bring friends and family with them online, all of whom can prowl the profiles, checking people out and matching them up. Members can also rate the politeness of their dates, as well as the accuracy of the profiles. This is the new community approach to online dating. If you think about it, why wasn’t this always the way it worked? I mean, when you buy anything online, from EBay to Craig’s list to Amazon, you look at the ranking of the seller, what percentage were satisfied with their purchase from that seller. Yet, not one major dating site (except Engage) offers this.
The next step, virtual dating, is already under development. You interact with a virtual person, an avatar, on a virtual tour of a park, museum, or whatever venue you both feel most comfortable with. You talk; they talk, in real time. You see the image of their avatar, and they see yours in real time. It’s like a real date without the anxiety and fear of worrying whether everything hinges on how well this goes. And studies have already shown that people who had this chance to interact with each other had more successful face to face meetings with their matches later on, on a real date.
The future of dating is interactivity, instant communications, and virtual reality as a veiled chaperone. The past is an impersonal all knowing omniscient predetermined preconceived automaton that does everything for you so that all you have to do is figure out why you are going to reject your match before you date them, and in a state of ambivalent arrogance, move one step forwards and two steps backward to your next potential reject.
As a final note, and to overemphasize just how vain people really are, in the first 3 months I was on E-Harmony I posted a picture of myself with my somewhat long gray hair and my somewhat pudgy middle section showing up in the pictures. (I do work out and am very healthy as evidenced by my most recent Physical where my doctor personally told me he could count on one hand all the diabetics he has seen in his practice with blood, heart, and cholesterol test results as good as mine.) While I advanced interest in several women and attempted to establish communications with them, only 2 women initiated communications with me. Then I went to a salon, got highlights for my hair (changed its color to brownish), got my eyebrows died and trimmed, and posted this new picture in a close-up without the pudgy middle showing. Since then, about a two week period so far, I have had 7 women express interest in me. Unfortunately, 4 of them were way outside my distance boundary, something that E-Harmony continues to ignore despite that fact I keep reminding them.
Could it be that women are finally reading my personality profile and find it appealing?
When I joined E-Harmony a couple years ago, I got conned into believing all the hype on finding that special someone, that perfect ideal mate who has the same likes and the same can’t stands as me, absolute perfection; and they indicated they could accomplish this in record time to boot. The reality is quite different.
I started to write a blog that would explain why E-Harmony has not, yet, worked out for me and how vain and shallow some of the people were/are. I was going to use the statistics I gathered on myself and potential mates to demonstrate this. I was going to show that E-Harmony is really no more effective than your average free dating site, and in some ways, it is worse. I am still going to do this, but now within the context of a bigger picture of on-line dating which I was able to gather from a new major article in Scientific American.
When I read the article in SA, it confirmed everything I thought, everything that was happening to me, demonstrating everything that is wrong, not only with E-Harmony but with other similarly based on-line dating services and the people who use them. As a result, I now believe that the more old fashioned dating services, as well as churches, friends, relatives, work comrades, and other social avenues are much more effective than E-Harmony and other strictly personality match and psychological criteria based on-line services.
By old fashioned dating services, I mean those that feature interactive IM, email, chat, and webcams with anyone that wants to meet you or you meet them, rather than going through a lengthy process of scientific reductionism to find the person that is most like you. As the SA article points out, the biggest problem with on-line dating is the “false-negative problem.” A test, (like the one with hundreds of “rank this from one to ten” type questions on E-Harmony) that determines in advance whom you will meet and whom you will NEVER meet necessarily fails to allow certain people to meet who would adore each other…” because they compliment each other, because they ARE different from each other. With E-Harmony, what you are guaranteed is you will get to meet and maybe date yourself (or reject yourself), but only after a long and protracted series of question and answer exchanges in which you get to decide “Do I really want to meet and date somebody like myself?”
Deceptive on-line dating borders on the horrific. It is so bad that there are actually websites like Dontdatehimgirl.com that people use to gripe, complain, blog, and even file lawsuits against on-line services that have not worked out for them or turned them into disgruntled seekers of love, lust, or both.
Survey research conducted by Jeana Frost, previously at Boston University and MIT, suggests that about 20% of online daters admit to deception. If you ask them how many other people are lying, the number jumps to 90%. Having not gone on a date yet with anybody from E-Harmony, I can’t say who’s lying, but I can tell you that the vast majority do not want you to know the truth. I deduce this from the fact that not one woman whose profile I looked at has actually made her E-Harmony personality profile available, i.e. the one created by E-Harmony from your answers to the hundreds of questions they posed about you and your likes and dislikes. Every person on E-Harmony obviously enjoys showing off what they think of themselves via the About me section, but nobody wants to reveal their personality profile.
My personality profile is and will remain available even if it inhibits some people from dating me because I am fundamentally an open and honest person, I believe E-harmony got most of it right when passing judgment on me, and as far as I am concerned, if you don’t like what you read in the personality profile, we might as well as get that out of the way now, one way or another, either through a date in which you ask me about what E-Harmony said about me, or through your rejection of me evidenced by your insecurity about dating me based on whatever you have read and didn’t like, i.e. you won’t date me and if you are too insecure to actually confront me about what you agree and disagree with, then I probably do not want to date you anyway. In this sense, I think dating is like politics, people want all of the services government has to offer but don’t want to pay anything for any of it, and want to blame the politicians who did exactly what they wanted for doing exactly what they wanted.
Continuing with the topic of deception and vanity, according to the SA article, women appear to understate their weight more and more as they get older; by five pounds when in their 20’s, 17 pounds in their 30’s, and 19 pounds in their 40s. At least 13% of online male daters are thought to be married. In one study, only 1% of online daters listed their appearance as “less than average.” One recent study showed that men claiming incomes exceeding $250,000 got 151 percent more replies than men claiming incomes less than $50,000. I wonder what the stats would be if we made that $500,000 versus $25,000?
As stated, E-Harmony relies on multiple choice or rank from 1 to 10 type tests that are supposed to determine your personality profile and how compatible (read - alike) you are to potential mates. Sounds great at first glance. But this is no Briggs Meyers test. The questions are open ended, subjective, and the multiple choice answers are subjective as well. As SA points out, these tests have never been subjected to a controlled process where a large sample of test outcomes was verified in any way, such as perhaps by a team of psychologists each independently assessing the individuals in a double blind experiment in which the survey makers know nothing of the psychologists and the psychologists know nothing of the E-Harmony tests or test outcomes.
For any personality test that is used to match people up to be claimed to be successful, it would have to be shown that a high percentage of the romantic pairings were successful. In 2004 E-harmony did present a paper at a national convention claiming that married couples who met through E-harmony were happier than other couples. But the paper was never published, possibly because the couples in the study were all newlyweds (married an average of 6 months) whereas the couples in the control group (who had met by other means) were married an average of 2.1 years. E-Harmony claims that 236 of its members marry every day, which is equal on a yearly basis to about 4 tenths of one percent of the 20 million members on E-Harmony. When E-harmony recommends someone as a match for you, there is about a 1 in 500 chance you will marry this person. Given the average of about 2 matches per month, if you went on a date with every E-Harmony match, it would take 346 dates and 19 years to reach a 50% chance of getting married. If you went on a date every week, it would take over 8 years to get to a 50% chance of getting married. And I am quite sure that there has yet to be any study of how many people who do get married on E-Harmony stay married more than the average, which is not in itself very good, in that currently half of all first marriages and two thirds of second marriages end in divorce.
Think about it. How could an on-line test possibly determine whether you should be paired with someone just like you, someone similar to you, someone somewhat different, or some magic mix of alike but also different.
While a large company like Match.com may advertise that it has 15 million paying members, less than a million are actually paying customers, and most of them are in it for only 3 months at a time, quitting and going on to the next service if no results in 3 months. This matches up perfectly with my experience with E-harmony. I can’t tell you how many women I have spent 2 months going back and forth with questions and answers, multiple times because that is the way E-Harmony has designed it, just to get to the final stage, open communications, only to find out that my match is no longer available on-line. Unfortunately, many of these dating services have raised the bar so long and so high that few people are willing to put up with even the slightest imperfection in a potential mate. After all, it is a simple matter to go back and click on the next match, or the next wink, or the next e-mail, with tens of thousands of mates ready to fill the void. Why date anybody when you can simply wait it out for the perfect match?
The biggest problem with E-Harmony is that dating is done in complete social isolation, i.e. you don’t get to ask your own questions or answer in a narrative form, and you don’t get to interact in real time with anybody. All you get to do is ask canned multiple choice questions and answer canned multiple choice questions; you have given your potential mate canned “must haves” and canned “can’t stands”, and you would be hard pressed to find anybody who would disagree with any of these likes or dislikes; this is your dating life, at least until the last step before open communications. By that time, you have already had plenty of time and opportunity to find something wrong, some reason to not date this person and go on to the next one instead. A surprisingly large percentage of women do not give you their picture even if you have started communications and requested their picture. That is social isolation.
Now from my own personal experience, the most ironic thing about this is that many of the women who have closed on me without dating me, have actually given “I don’t think the chemistry was really there” as a reason for closing. Some of these women have never even shown me their picture. What chemistry? How could there possibly have been any chemistry? I’ve never spoken to, seen a picture of, or written anything addressed to any of these women who gave this “lack of chemistry” as a reason for closing. Ironically though, this reason is an honest one. Of course there is no chemistry. The E-Harmony automaton chaperone has made sure of this. One has to wonder though. I mean – maybe they are telepathic. Maybe I am telepathic. Maybe my pheromones managed to magically find them, or there pheromones found me, though they don’t know where I live nor I them. This would explain why there could be a lack of chemistry when we tried so hard to establish chemistry in the absence of anything to base it on.
There are only four reasons a person will close on you on E-Harmony. They are the chemistry one I just mentioned, “The physical distance is too great” – actually a good reason, “There are just too many things going on in my life right now” and “Other.” OK. Too many things going on in your life right now? I guess that’s why you joined E-Harmony, right? E-Harmony gives you a multiple choice of about 30 reasons for closing on a match, and every single woman who has closed on me has chosen one of these four. Again, deception; perhaps well intentioned in that they have formed a biased opinion from my personality profile or my About me, and are afraid they are going to “hurt me” by telling me what they really think, or maybe they think if they don’t tell anybody what they really think, nobody will ever know, and nobody will ever get hurt. Deception, vanity, naivety, and all this because E-Harmony is fundamentally a game, a game of social isolation, rather than an interactive open ended game of interactive honest communications, something that I am sure all of these women really want but seem to think can wait until they are full blown deep in a relationship or married.
Fortunately, there are some big changes forthcoming in this industry, and it is an industry. Possibly due to the fact that a recent phone survey of 2,000 people found that only 25 percent were satisfied with the online dating sites they had used. Engage, for example, is allowing members to bring friends and family with them online, all of whom can prowl the profiles, checking people out and matching them up. Members can also rate the politeness of their dates, as well as the accuracy of the profiles. This is the new community approach to online dating. If you think about it, why wasn’t this always the way it worked? I mean, when you buy anything online, from EBay to Craig’s list to Amazon, you look at the ranking of the seller, what percentage were satisfied with their purchase from that seller. Yet, not one major dating site (except Engage) offers this.
The next step, virtual dating, is already under development. You interact with a virtual person, an avatar, on a virtual tour of a park, museum, or whatever venue you both feel most comfortable with. You talk; they talk, in real time. You see the image of their avatar, and they see yours in real time. It’s like a real date without the anxiety and fear of worrying whether everything hinges on how well this goes. And studies have already shown that people who had this chance to interact with each other had more successful face to face meetings with their matches later on, on a real date.
The future of dating is interactivity, instant communications, and virtual reality as a veiled chaperone. The past is an impersonal all knowing omniscient predetermined preconceived automaton that does everything for you so that all you have to do is figure out why you are going to reject your match before you date them, and in a state of ambivalent arrogance, move one step forwards and two steps backward to your next potential reject.
As a final note, and to overemphasize just how vain people really are, in the first 3 months I was on E-Harmony I posted a picture of myself with my somewhat long gray hair and my somewhat pudgy middle section showing up in the pictures. (I do work out and am very healthy as evidenced by my most recent Physical where my doctor personally told me he could count on one hand all the diabetics he has seen in his practice with blood, heart, and cholesterol test results as good as mine.) While I advanced interest in several women and attempted to establish communications with them, only 2 women initiated communications with me. Then I went to a salon, got highlights for my hair (changed its color to brownish), got my eyebrows died and trimmed, and posted this new picture in a close-up without the pudgy middle showing. Since then, about a two week period so far, I have had 7 women express interest in me. Unfortunately, 4 of them were way outside my distance boundary, something that E-Harmony continues to ignore despite that fact I keep reminding them.
Could it be that women are finally reading my personality profile and find it appealing?
Conversation With A Bad Autobot
From Psychsim.com
Hello.
It's nice to see you again.
Please make yourself comfortable.
Tell me what's on your mind.
I think I am going to spontaneously combust
Did you come to me because you are going to spontaneously combust?
yes
I understand. Please continue.
How can I stop this from happening?
What do you think?
I don't know. That's why I am asking you.
Do you think it's normal to be asking you?
Can you stop me from spontaneously combusting?
Why do you want to?*
Because I will die if I spontaneously combust.
Don't any other reasons come to mind?
NOT REALLY!!
Hmm. . . Go on.
How much are you charging me for this crappy therapy?
What answer would please you the most?
You are an idiot.
Do you enjoy being?*
Hello.
It's nice to see you again.
Please make yourself comfortable.
Tell me what's on your mind.
I think I am going to spontaneously combust
Did you come to me because you are going to spontaneously combust?
yes
I understand. Please continue.
How can I stop this from happening?
What do you think?
I don't know. That's why I am asking you.
Do you think it's normal to be asking you?
Can you stop me from spontaneously combusting?
Why do you want to?*
Because I will die if I spontaneously combust.
Don't any other reasons come to mind?
NOT REALLY!!
Hmm. . . Go on.
How much are you charging me for this crappy therapy?
What answer would please you the most?
You are an idiot.
Do you enjoy being?*
Brain Food - Best Websites on This
Blast – powder brain food, mix in with a fruit juice.
http://myhealthonline.com/Products/multi-nutrients/Blast-600-grams-of-powder.htm
An article on brain boosters
http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/21776/
A short 7 question multiple choice quiz on best brain foods
http://www.webmd.com/balance/brain-food-quiz
Wholegrains, nuts, berries, seeds, raw vegetables, fish, eggs – 20 foods for brain in article below
http://leftofzen.com/brain-food/2008/01/04/
A good article
http://www.increasebrainpower.com/brainfoods.html
This looks like a good site for purchasing herbs and other supplements, but on-line ordering does not appear to work. But the articles are good.
http://www.memory-loss.com/herbal-remedies/memory-loss/memory-loss-supplements
http://myhealthonline.com/Products/multi-nutrients/Blast-600-grams-of-powder.htm
An article on brain boosters
http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/21776/
A short 7 question multiple choice quiz on best brain foods
http://www.webmd.com/balance/brain-food-quiz
Wholegrains, nuts, berries, seeds, raw vegetables, fish, eggs – 20 foods for brain in article below
http://leftofzen.com/brain-food/2008/01/04/
A good article
http://www.increasebrainpower.com/brainfoods.html
This looks like a good site for purchasing herbs and other supplements, but on-line ordering does not appear to work. But the articles are good.
http://www.memory-loss.com/herbal-remedies/memory-loss/memory-loss-supplements
Some of The Best Bigger Production Horror Films
Some of The BEST Horror Movies Of All Time
(Not including Indie films in this listing)
For a complete history of the Horror genre in films, go to the AMC filmsite.
I have some excluded some of the very early films that are classics of the genre. Sorry, they are great but dated.
There are two links for each film. The first one is the film review from AMC. The second is the TV listing from TV Guide, if it is scheduled to be on TV in the next couple of weeks. If it is scheduled for a premium channel or about to end a TV run, there is no link, just a listed date and time.)
Many if not all of these films are available on Netflix as well.
The Best Horror Movies
Carrie
Alien
Poltergeist
The Birds
Psycho
Silent Hill
Halloween
Videodrome (1982 and 2010)
Dead Ringers
Scanners (1981 and 2011)
Bram Stoker’s Dracula
28 Days Later
The Haunting (1963 and 1999)
The Shining
Interview With The Vampire
The Dead Zone
The Exorcist
Rosemarys Baby
The Amityville Horror (1979 and 2005)
The Fly TV Listing
The Silence of the Lambs
Jacobs Ladder
The Thing
Let the Right One In
An American Werewolf in London
Darkness Falls
Salems Lot
The Omen
Re-Animator
Misery
Rose Red
The Serpent and the Rainbow
Cube
Prince of Darkness
The Changeling
The Island of Dr. Moreau (Marlon Brando version)
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
The Fall of The House of Usher
The Pit and the Pendulum
Sleepy Hollow
Wolf
The Wolfman (2010)
Wolfen
The Hunger
Vampires Kiss
Twilight
The Witches of Eastwick
The Sixth Sense
Feardotcom
Paranormal Activity
Village of the Damned
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane
Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte
The Cell
And two very dark comedys on the Horror Genre
Scream
I Know What You Did Last Summer
(Not including Indie films in this listing)
For a complete history of the Horror genre in films, go to the AMC filmsite.
I have some excluded some of the very early films that are classics of the genre. Sorry, they are great but dated.
There are two links for each film. The first one is the film review from AMC. The second is the TV listing from TV Guide, if it is scheduled to be on TV in the next couple of weeks. If it is scheduled for a premium channel or about to end a TV run, there is no link, just a listed date and time.)
Many if not all of these films are available on Netflix as well.
The Best Horror Movies
Carrie
Alien
Poltergeist
The Birds
Psycho
Silent Hill
Halloween
Videodrome (1982 and 2010)
Dead Ringers
Scanners (1981 and 2011)
Bram Stoker’s Dracula
28 Days Later
The Haunting (1963 and 1999)
The Shining
Interview With The Vampire
The Dead Zone
The Exorcist
Rosemarys Baby
The Amityville Horror (1979 and 2005)
The Fly TV Listing
The Silence of the Lambs
Jacobs Ladder
The Thing
Let the Right One In
An American Werewolf in London
Darkness Falls
Salems Lot
The Omen
Re-Animator
Misery
Rose Red
The Serpent and the Rainbow
Cube
Prince of Darkness
The Changeling
The Island of Dr. Moreau (Marlon Brando version)
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
The Fall of The House of Usher
The Pit and the Pendulum
Sleepy Hollow
Wolf
The Wolfman (2010)
Wolfen
The Hunger
Vampires Kiss
Twilight
The Witches of Eastwick
The Sixth Sense
Feardotcom
Paranormal Activity
Village of the Damned
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane
Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte
The Cell
And two very dark comedys on the Horror Genre
Scream
I Know What You Did Last Summer
My Personal List of The Best of Everything: Film, Books, Websites, Etc.
Best of Almost But Not Quite Everything
Best Films, Documentaries, Books, Social Networking, and Websites and A whole Bunch of Other Best Stuff on The Web
The films were chosen due to there ability to prophesize what has already happened or may yet happen, films that are profound or true or real, films that are unique or ironic. These are essentially important films in one way or another, with an important statement on the current state of humankind, human psychology or the potential future for humankind or the psychology of the human animal. Some of these films are about the psychology of people and others are about the combined psychologies of people living together in a family or a city or a nation, hence they are about sociology and politics.
The Books are books I have in my library and have read or partially read, and have placed on my Shelfari website and Library Thing website.
The websites were culled from my favorites, my Stumbleupon page, and various best of website lists. I have viewed and used, even if only momentarily, all of these sites.
Best Film Books
TimeOut Film Guide (Year)
This book has reviews of 18,000 films and includes a list of the top 100 film websites at the front of the book. Website is: http://www.timeout.com/film/
Videohounds Golden Movie Retriever (Year)
What Videohound is categorize films by a large number of categories that you won’t find elsewhere, such as zombies, teen love, etc. They also list by cast, director, and several different type of awards. But they don’t have a website. The amazon book address is: http://www.amazon.com/Videohounds-Golden-Movie-Retriever-2010/dp/1414422180
For a list of the top 100 filmsites on line go to: http://www.100topkid.com/?cat=Movies
This site has top 100 sites in several categories.
Another good list of the top 100 coolest film sites is: http://www.fadeinonline.com/cage/topfilmsites.html
Roger Eberts Movie Yearbook (Year)
Roger Eberts Four Star Movie Reviews of the 2000’s website: http://www.listsofbests.com/list/13860 There are 266 films on this list.
This site has lists of the best in several categories other than film.
Roger Eberts Four Star Reviews 1967 – 2007. It appears on Google Books at:
http://books.google.com/books
and type in Roger Eberts four star reviews in the search box..
Of course, Roger has his own site: http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/
Best Movie Review Websites
http://Aintitcool.com
Harry Knowles site is about a lot more than movie reviews. Contains chat lines, forums, discussions, Harry’s reviews, upcoming movies not out yet, where to get novelties, graphic novels, merchandise, etc. Harry is not your traditional reviewer. Written in a cool style for a younger audience. Harry does not condescend. He speaks cool.
http://Rottentomatoes.com
This site does not give out very many good reviews. Looks for the worst it can find in a movie. And reviews many bad movies that you won’t find reviewed elsewhere.
http://MRQE.com
This is not really a movie review site. It is a portal to find movie reviews. Type in a movie title and you will get a list of movie reviews. Click on one to get that particular review. Also has several articles on movies.
http://Metacritic.com
This site only reviews new movies and dvds, and does not give complete reviews, but is good for seeing the average review (in terms of a number) from all of the critics who reviewed the movie and it gives brief synopsis reviews from each critic. Metareviews are good if you are looking only for the very best movies or very worst, i.e. where there was a concensus, but do not help for movies in between. Movie critics do not universally agree, and in fact, very often disagree.
http://IMDB.com
The premier movie site. Not only leads you to movie reviews, but tells you everything you want to know about the movie such as cast, director, sound, editing, awards, etc. Almost every movie will have pictures and most will have some trailers. You can put your favorites in your own personal database so you can go back to them later.
http://Rogerebert.com
Perhaps the slickest design. Dedicated to Roger Eberts reviews of movies. Contains his annual contest to win a trip for two to some famous place.
http://Indiewire.com
http://Defamer.com
http://Independentfilmreviews.com
http://Cinematical.com
http://Indiefilmspot.com
Video Streaming
http://Atomfilms.com
http://Netflix.com
http://Wonderland.com
http://Buttermouth.com
http://Graboidvideo.com
http://Hulu.com
http://Veoh.com
Movie critics
http://Metacritic.com
Online film magazines
http://Cinemascope.com
http://Villagevoice.com
Online Sales and Trading of DVDs
Ebay
Buy.com
Half.com
Amazon.com
DVD Empire
DVD Planet
eCampus
Title Trader
Zunafish
Deep Discount
Criterion.com
Dvdbeaver.com
Mastersofcinema.org
Film Festivals
http://www.filmfestivals.com/index.shtml
Websites With Lists of The Best Films – From 100 to 1,000
http://www.nytimes.com/ref/movies/1000best.html
http://www.afi.com/tvevents/100years/movies.aspx
http://www.filmsite.org/
http://www.imdb.com/chart/top
Best Science Fiction Films
Sphere
Existenz
Dark City
The 13th Floor
The Matrix
2001: A Space Odyssey
Dr. Strangelove
The Ghost in the Shell
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within
Avatar (to be released in December 2009)
The Abyss
Terminator 2
Dune (The TV Series not the movie)
Contact
Blade Runner
Gattaca
The Truman Show
Alien
A Clockwork Orange
WALL-E
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
The Andromeda Strain (both the original and the remake)
The Man From Earth
Documentaries
Websites on Documentaries:
Nfb.com
Documentaryfilms.net
Freedocumentaries.net
Netflix.com
Freeonlinedocumentary.com
Actual Documentaries
Corn
The Fog of War
Super Size Me
Sicko
Capitalism: A Love Story
Lake of Fire
Uncounted
Recount
The 11th Hour
Ecopolis (a series)
Planet Earth (a series)
Future Visions (a series)
Crude Impact
Food, Inc.
Enron: The Smartest Guys in The Room
Born Into Brothels
Hearts and Minds
The Thin Blue Line
An Inconvenient Truth
Fahrenheit 9/11
Woodstock
The Times of Harvey Milk
March of the Penguins (Think about their commitment to community)
Crumb
American Movie
Streetwise
Outfoxed: Rupert Murdochs War on Journalism
The War At Home
Harlan County, USA
The Alzheimers Project
Outrage
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
Something the Lord Made
Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer
Celibacy
Death on a Factory Farm
Hard Times at Douglass High: A No Child Left Behind Report Card
Little Rock Central: 50 Years Later
Middle Sexes: Redefining He and She
Murder On a Sunday Morning
Pandemic: Facing Aids
Shock Video
Too Hot Not Too Handle
Wide Awake
The Yes Men Fix The World
Youth Knows No Pain
Films Based On A True Story/Biography
Platoon
JFK
Nixon
The Wolf of Wall Street (due out in 2010)
The Informant
Amelia
Boys Don’t Cry
Far Away Home
Shattered Glass
Milk
Into the Wild
Ali
Ray
Raging Bull
The Hurricane
Goodfellas
Catch Me If You Can
Casino
Schindlers List
All The Presidents Men
Dog Day Afternoon
Donnie Brasco
American Gangster
Monster
Fargo
A Rivers Edge
Frida
Ghosts of Mississippi
Murder In The First
The Doors
Gandhi
Erin Brochovich
Seabisquit
E-Books and Readers
There are basically three E book readers that are the most popular
The Sony E-Book Reader
The Amazon Kindle (a couple of versions)
The Barnes and Nobles Nook
Amazon and B&N sell E-books for up to $10 each online through their websites. Bargains can be found for $1 to $5. Barnes and Nobles has a format that allows you to read their E books on any computer or on their reader, the Nook. To read on a computer, you download their free software.
E-Books in standard adobe pdf format are also available from many public libraries as well as some websites. Some of the websites are:
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/the-best-6-sites-to-get-free-ebooks/
http://free-ebook-download.org//
http://www.free-ebooks.net/
Best Websites
There are 100 million unique websites out there. I have attempted to find the best ones in a huge range of categories. While I give tags for each site, I can not evaluate or critique all of these in a short amount of time. But stay tuned. I will try to provide more info. on each site in a future update.
Overall Best Places To Look
http://www.worldbestwebsites.com/
This above site is organized into several categories with lists of the best websites in each category. One category worth mentioning is Best Search Engines. Google is not the only one, and there are unique search engines to help you accomplish what you want in academic situations as well as search engines that poll multiple search engines to get what you are looking for.
For now, we can start with the best lists of websites or the best search engines.
Stumbleupon – This site allows you to pick and choose your own list of categories and subcategories of websites. It is a well organized hierarchy, which allows you to really refine your interests. Then you click on the search button. But instead of evaluating the entire web, this site looks at the network of other stumbleupon users and what they have rated to decide what you see. When viewing sites, you can pick a single category or all categories in your list. Once you have enough favorite sites, which you assemble by giving a thumbs up or down to each site, Stumbleupon will recommend other members and if you like a stumblers list of sites you can subscribe to them, meaning you now have access to their entire list and their reviews of each site. After awhile, Stumbleupon will show you what percent of each stumblers list that you both have in common so you can further refine who you think best matches up with your interests. Each member has a profile. So if you subscribe to a persons favorites and they also subscribe to yours, you become friends. You will find the most unique and amazing sites by using Stumbleupon.
Springo.com - This site categorizes websites in a hierarchical manner and provides a visually appealing interface to help you pick sites to look at. You are just going to have to try this to understand it. There goal is to find the top 100 sites in each category.
Tbwe.com This stands for the best website ever. You vote online for your best website in any number of categories and the results are used to create a database of user submitted/voted on websites organized in a hierarchical manner by category and subcategory.
Mashable.com has an article entitled 5,000 resources to do just about anything online. Embedded in it are lists of websites for each of several categories, such as blogs, bloggers, website hosting, etc.
http://mashable.com/2007/09/08/5000-resources-to-do-just-about-anything-online/
Some search engines actually scan multiple search engines for you and then put together a list for you from all of these search engines. For example, you look for cats. It scans google, yahoo, digg, whatever and puts all of the results together into one reponse. A couple of these meta search sites are search.com and alexa.com.
There are several others.
Each year, Time Magazine published its list of the top 50 websites of the year. They have been doing this for about 5 years now. When you go to their site for this, you can see details on each site and a link to bring you to the site.
There are hundreds of social networking sites out there. The top two are Facebook and MySpace. But there are hundreds more in several specialized categories. Recently, Mashable published on their site a list of the top 350 social networking sites by category, such as general, pet lovers, you name it. Here is the link to that article.
http://mashable.com/2007/10/23/social-networking-god/
100 Best Online Tools To Feed Your Creativity
Sometimes getting good ideas is just a matter of finding them lurking just beyond your current thoughts. Use these tools to seek out ideas and get them organized so they are working for you. Brainstorming, mindmapping, organizing on-line tools.
http://onlinecollegedegree.org/2009/04/28/100-excellent-online-tools-to-feed-your-creativity//
Without further interruption, here is my list of the best websites on the web.
You will need to enter http://
Coolonlinetools.com
Truthorfiction.com
Politifact.com
Snopes.com
Lies.com
Reuters.com
Vote7.com
Beelinetv.com
Cartype.com
Soundike.com
Scirus.com
Sciencedaily.com
Springwise.com
Nationmaster.com
Makeuseof.com
Livingroutes.com
Worldprocessor.com
Englishscholar.com
Medicalstudent.com
Humanmetrics.com
Awea.com
Flickr.com
Friedbeef.com
Worklessparty.com
Soundsleeping.com
Vegan.org
Addictinggames.com
Onlinecollegedegree.com
Musicovery.com
Veoh.com
Techradar.com
Thememoryhole.org
Theonion.com
Fossilfreedom.com
Asifproductions.com
Pelfusion.com
Systems-thinking.org
Nejm.org
Factcheck.org
Placesforwriters.com
Polldaddy.com
Contexts.org
Scienceblogs.com
Huffingtonpost.com
Tantricplanet.com
Disinfo.com
Livejournal.com
Socialistworker.org
Revisemri.com
Dailygalaxy.com
Current.com
Commondreams.org
Tumblr.com
Thecolorawards.com
Deviantart.com
Filmsite.org
Livescience.com
Wired.com
Lavendarliberal.com
Mashable.com
Digg.com
Alternet.org
Photoshoparchive.com
Imgfavae.com
Urbandictionary.com
IMDB.com
IMSDB.com
Shelfari.com
Librarything.com
Stumbleupon.com
Myspace.com
Dailycensored.com
Projectcensored.com
Infowars.com
Mediafreedominternational.com
Psychcentral
TripKick
WikiTravel
Zeer
Afrigadget
AskMen
WebMD
Health
RateMyProfessors
SeriousEats
MapJack
SearchMe
TinyURL
Mobaganda
UrbanDictionary
Hulu
Imeem
GaiaOnline
Kiva
WikiSky
CaliforniaCoastline
ProjectVulcan
Delicious
Metafilter
Skype
AcademicEarth
Wolfram/Alpha
Vimeo
ForaTV
Amazon
Netflix
Wikipedia
Metacritic
Pollster
Pandora
Yelp
Snopes
Couchsurfing
Photosynth
OMGPOP
WorldWideTelescope
Fonolo
Search.com
Alexa.com
Earthcam.com
About.com
Reference.com
Beliefnet.com
Mayoclinic.com
Altmedicine.com
Citysearch.com
Sciam.com
Nature.com
Allposters.com
Mapquest.com
Rottentomatoes.com
Guttenberg.net
Bestofbloggers.com
Intuit.com
Problogger.net
Democraticunderground.com
Prospect.org
Docudhama.com
Krugman.blogs.nytimes.com
Progressiveblue.com
Listography.com
43things.com
Ask500people.com
Liberaloasis.com blogs
Liberaloasis.com is an extensive list of political socioeconomic blogs and satirical humor blogs embedded in the site. Plus a full list of liberal internet radio stations.
Jooce.com
Mox.com
Criminalsearches.com
Damninteresting.com
Viewzi.com
Searchme.com
Imeem.com
Kongregate.com
Fffound.com
Songaza.com
Thesmokinggun.com
Taggalaxy.de
Wolfgangsvault.com
Dating Sites
OKCupid.com free
Plentyoffish.com free
Datingabout.com
Freedatingsites.com
Allsinglesnet.com free
Singlesnet.com free
Directoryofdating.com
Truebeginnings.com
EHarmony.com
Match.com
Chemistry.com
Clubplanet.com
Myspace.com
Loveplanet.com
Friendsover50.com
Babyboomerspeoplemeet.com
Meetin.org
Meetup.com
Freedatingusa.com free
Seniorfriend.com
Datehookup.com free
Jumpdates.com free
Mingle2.com free
Datingsitewiz.com free
BEWARE: When using dating sites, beware of spam. It varies from site to site but there is no site totally free of spam. Spam means people who don’t really exist or are trying to get money from you.
Alternative Truths or Realitys, Myth Exposing
Truthorfiction.com
Politifact.com
Snopes.com
Lies.com
National Health Care Sites
Rrcentral.com/careplans/100_best_health_care_policy_blogs
Thehealthcareblog.com
Pnhp.com
Nchc.com
Best Transportation, Public Transit, and Railroad Sites
And Climate Change and Renewable Energy Sites
The Five Best Mass Transit Cities in the World
http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/green-living/free-ride-the-five-best-mass-transit-systems-worldwide/1095
The Top 100 Transportation Websites
http://www.world.org/weo/transportation
The Top 100 Climate Change Websites
http://www.world.org/weo/climate
The Top 100 Renewable Energy Websites
http://www.world.org/weo/energy
Links to over 5,000 Railroad Websites
http://www.railroaddata.com/
Rail Links – The Definitive Directory of Rail Websites
http://www.raillinks.com/
About Project Vulcan
The Vulcan Project is a NASA/DOE funded effort under the North American Carbon Program (NACP) to quantify North American fossil fuel carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions at space and time scales much finer than has been achieved in the past. The purpose is to aid in quantification of the North American carbon budget, to support inverse estimation of carbon sources and sinks, and to support the demands posed by higher resolution CO2 observations (in situ and remotely sensed). The detail and scope of the Vulcan CO2 inventory has also made it a valuable tool for policymakers, demographers, social scientists and the public at large (now on Google Earth!). Here is a narrated flyover.
The Vulcan project has achieved the quantification of the 2002 U.S. fossil fuel CO2 emissions at the scale of individual factories, powerplants, roadways and neighborhoods on an hourly basis. We have built the entire inventory on a common 10 km x 10 km grid to facilitate atmospheric modeling. In addition to improvement in space and time resolution, Vulcan is quantified at the level of fuel type, economic sub-sector, and county/state identification.
Here is the Link to the Project Vulcan website:
http://www.purdue.edu/eas/carbon/vulcan/index.php
Wikipedia article on Public Transport
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_transport
The CTAs Website for Passengers
http://www.transitchicago.com/
Free mass transit software games and train simulators
http://www.fileguru.com/downloads/transit
http://www.mstrain.org/
http://www.railserve.com/Computers/
Online Directory of Public Transportations in the U.S. State by State
http://www.publictransportation.org/systems/
The Google Transit Trip Planner
http://www.google.com/intl/en/landing/transit/#mdy
Blogs on Public Transport
http://frepubtra.blogspot.com/
http://www.blogtoplist.com/rss/public-transportation.html
http://transportation.nationaljournal.com/
http://www.loadedweb.com/search/?q=public+transportation
http://www.loadedweb.com/search/?q=mass+transit
Public Transport Publications and Magazines
http://masstransitmag.com/
Books On Public Transportation
http://www.librarything.com/tag/public+transportation
Journals on Public Transportation
http://www.nctr.usf.edu/jpt/journalfulltext.htm
http://www.dot.wisconsin.gov/library/services/cat/journals.htm
http://www.bts.gov/publications/journal_of_transportation_and_statistics/
Statistics on Public Transportation
http://www.bts.gov/publications/journal_of_transportation_and_statistics/
Transit Facts, Systems, Reports, and Resources
http://www.publictransportation.org/
Best Films, Documentaries, Books, Social Networking, and Websites and A whole Bunch of Other Best Stuff on The Web
The films were chosen due to there ability to prophesize what has already happened or may yet happen, films that are profound or true or real, films that are unique or ironic. These are essentially important films in one way or another, with an important statement on the current state of humankind, human psychology or the potential future for humankind or the psychology of the human animal. Some of these films are about the psychology of people and others are about the combined psychologies of people living together in a family or a city or a nation, hence they are about sociology and politics.
The Books are books I have in my library and have read or partially read, and have placed on my Shelfari website and Library Thing website.
The websites were culled from my favorites, my Stumbleupon page, and various best of website lists. I have viewed and used, even if only momentarily, all of these sites.
Best Film Books
TimeOut Film Guide (Year)
This book has reviews of 18,000 films and includes a list of the top 100 film websites at the front of the book. Website is: http://www.timeout.com/film/
Videohounds Golden Movie Retriever (Year)
What Videohound is categorize films by a large number of categories that you won’t find elsewhere, such as zombies, teen love, etc. They also list by cast, director, and several different type of awards. But they don’t have a website. The amazon book address is: http://www.amazon.com/Videohounds-Golden-Movie-Retriever-2010/dp/1414422180
For a list of the top 100 filmsites on line go to: http://www.100topkid.com/?cat=Movies
This site has top 100 sites in several categories.
Another good list of the top 100 coolest film sites is: http://www.fadeinonline.com/cage/topfilmsites.html
Roger Eberts Movie Yearbook (Year)
Roger Eberts Four Star Movie Reviews of the 2000’s website: http://www.listsofbests.com/list/13860 There are 266 films on this list.
This site has lists of the best in several categories other than film.
Roger Eberts Four Star Reviews 1967 – 2007. It appears on Google Books at:
http://books.google.com/books
and type in Roger Eberts four star reviews in the search box..
Of course, Roger has his own site: http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/
Best Movie Review Websites
http://Aintitcool.com
Harry Knowles site is about a lot more than movie reviews. Contains chat lines, forums, discussions, Harry’s reviews, upcoming movies not out yet, where to get novelties, graphic novels, merchandise, etc. Harry is not your traditional reviewer. Written in a cool style for a younger audience. Harry does not condescend. He speaks cool.
http://Rottentomatoes.com
This site does not give out very many good reviews. Looks for the worst it can find in a movie. And reviews many bad movies that you won’t find reviewed elsewhere.
http://MRQE.com
This is not really a movie review site. It is a portal to find movie reviews. Type in a movie title and you will get a list of movie reviews. Click on one to get that particular review. Also has several articles on movies.
http://Metacritic.com
This site only reviews new movies and dvds, and does not give complete reviews, but is good for seeing the average review (in terms of a number) from all of the critics who reviewed the movie and it gives brief synopsis reviews from each critic. Metareviews are good if you are looking only for the very best movies or very worst, i.e. where there was a concensus, but do not help for movies in between. Movie critics do not universally agree, and in fact, very often disagree.
http://IMDB.com
The premier movie site. Not only leads you to movie reviews, but tells you everything you want to know about the movie such as cast, director, sound, editing, awards, etc. Almost every movie will have pictures and most will have some trailers. You can put your favorites in your own personal database so you can go back to them later.
http://Rogerebert.com
Perhaps the slickest design. Dedicated to Roger Eberts reviews of movies. Contains his annual contest to win a trip for two to some famous place.
http://Indiewire.com
http://Defamer.com
http://Independentfilmreviews.com
http://Cinematical.com
http://Indiefilmspot.com
Video Streaming
http://Atomfilms.com
http://Netflix.com
http://Wonderland.com
http://Buttermouth.com
http://Graboidvideo.com
http://Hulu.com
http://Veoh.com
Movie critics
http://Metacritic.com
Online film magazines
http://Cinemascope.com
http://Villagevoice.com
Online Sales and Trading of DVDs
Ebay
Buy.com
Half.com
Amazon.com
DVD Empire
DVD Planet
eCampus
Title Trader
Zunafish
Deep Discount
Criterion.com
Dvdbeaver.com
Mastersofcinema.org
Film Festivals
http://www.filmfestivals.com/index.shtml
Websites With Lists of The Best Films – From 100 to 1,000
http://www.nytimes.com/ref/movies/1000best.html
http://www.afi.com/tvevents/100years/movies.aspx
http://www.filmsite.org/
http://www.imdb.com/chart/top
Best Science Fiction Films
Sphere
Existenz
Dark City
The 13th Floor
The Matrix
2001: A Space Odyssey
Dr. Strangelove
The Ghost in the Shell
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within
Avatar (to be released in December 2009)
The Abyss
Terminator 2
Dune (The TV Series not the movie)
Contact
Blade Runner
Gattaca
The Truman Show
Alien
A Clockwork Orange
WALL-E
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
The Andromeda Strain (both the original and the remake)
The Man From Earth
Documentaries
Websites on Documentaries:
Nfb.com
Documentaryfilms.net
Freedocumentaries.net
Netflix.com
Freeonlinedocumentary.com
Actual Documentaries
Corn
The Fog of War
Super Size Me
Sicko
Capitalism: A Love Story
Lake of Fire
Uncounted
Recount
The 11th Hour
Ecopolis (a series)
Planet Earth (a series)
Future Visions (a series)
Crude Impact
Food, Inc.
Enron: The Smartest Guys in The Room
Born Into Brothels
Hearts and Minds
The Thin Blue Line
An Inconvenient Truth
Fahrenheit 9/11
Woodstock
The Times of Harvey Milk
March of the Penguins (Think about their commitment to community)
Crumb
American Movie
Streetwise
Outfoxed: Rupert Murdochs War on Journalism
The War At Home
Harlan County, USA
The Alzheimers Project
Outrage
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
Something the Lord Made
Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer
Celibacy
Death on a Factory Farm
Hard Times at Douglass High: A No Child Left Behind Report Card
Little Rock Central: 50 Years Later
Middle Sexes: Redefining He and She
Murder On a Sunday Morning
Pandemic: Facing Aids
Shock Video
Too Hot Not Too Handle
Wide Awake
The Yes Men Fix The World
Youth Knows No Pain
Films Based On A True Story/Biography
Platoon
JFK
Nixon
The Wolf of Wall Street (due out in 2010)
The Informant
Amelia
Boys Don’t Cry
Far Away Home
Shattered Glass
Milk
Into the Wild
Ali
Ray
Raging Bull
The Hurricane
Goodfellas
Catch Me If You Can
Casino
Schindlers List
All The Presidents Men
Dog Day Afternoon
Donnie Brasco
American Gangster
Monster
Fargo
A Rivers Edge
Frida
Ghosts of Mississippi
Murder In The First
The Doors
Gandhi
Erin Brochovich
Seabisquit
E-Books and Readers
There are basically three E book readers that are the most popular
The Sony E-Book Reader
The Amazon Kindle (a couple of versions)
The Barnes and Nobles Nook
Amazon and B&N sell E-books for up to $10 each online through their websites. Bargains can be found for $1 to $5. Barnes and Nobles has a format that allows you to read their E books on any computer or on their reader, the Nook. To read on a computer, you download their free software.
E-Books in standard adobe pdf format are also available from many public libraries as well as some websites. Some of the websites are:
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/the-best-6-sites-to-get-free-ebooks/
http://free-ebook-download.org//
http://www.free-ebooks.net/
Best Websites
There are 100 million unique websites out there. I have attempted to find the best ones in a huge range of categories. While I give tags for each site, I can not evaluate or critique all of these in a short amount of time. But stay tuned. I will try to provide more info. on each site in a future update.
Overall Best Places To Look
http://www.worldbestwebsites.com/
This above site is organized into several categories with lists of the best websites in each category. One category worth mentioning is Best Search Engines. Google is not the only one, and there are unique search engines to help you accomplish what you want in academic situations as well as search engines that poll multiple search engines to get what you are looking for.
For now, we can start with the best lists of websites or the best search engines.
Stumbleupon – This site allows you to pick and choose your own list of categories and subcategories of websites. It is a well organized hierarchy, which allows you to really refine your interests. Then you click on the search button. But instead of evaluating the entire web, this site looks at the network of other stumbleupon users and what they have rated to decide what you see. When viewing sites, you can pick a single category or all categories in your list. Once you have enough favorite sites, which you assemble by giving a thumbs up or down to each site, Stumbleupon will recommend other members and if you like a stumblers list of sites you can subscribe to them, meaning you now have access to their entire list and their reviews of each site. After awhile, Stumbleupon will show you what percent of each stumblers list that you both have in common so you can further refine who you think best matches up with your interests. Each member has a profile. So if you subscribe to a persons favorites and they also subscribe to yours, you become friends. You will find the most unique and amazing sites by using Stumbleupon.
Springo.com - This site categorizes websites in a hierarchical manner and provides a visually appealing interface to help you pick sites to look at. You are just going to have to try this to understand it. There goal is to find the top 100 sites in each category.
Tbwe.com This stands for the best website ever. You vote online for your best website in any number of categories and the results are used to create a database of user submitted/voted on websites organized in a hierarchical manner by category and subcategory.
Mashable.com has an article entitled 5,000 resources to do just about anything online. Embedded in it are lists of websites for each of several categories, such as blogs, bloggers, website hosting, etc.
http://mashable.com/2007/09/08/5000-resources-to-do-just-about-anything-online/
Some search engines actually scan multiple search engines for you and then put together a list for you from all of these search engines. For example, you look for cats. It scans google, yahoo, digg, whatever and puts all of the results together into one reponse. A couple of these meta search sites are search.com and alexa.com.
There are several others.
Each year, Time Magazine published its list of the top 50 websites of the year. They have been doing this for about 5 years now. When you go to their site for this, you can see details on each site and a link to bring you to the site.
There are hundreds of social networking sites out there. The top two are Facebook and MySpace. But there are hundreds more in several specialized categories. Recently, Mashable published on their site a list of the top 350 social networking sites by category, such as general, pet lovers, you name it. Here is the link to that article.
http://mashable.com/2007/10/23/social-networking-god/
100 Best Online Tools To Feed Your Creativity
Sometimes getting good ideas is just a matter of finding them lurking just beyond your current thoughts. Use these tools to seek out ideas and get them organized so they are working for you. Brainstorming, mindmapping, organizing on-line tools.
http://onlinecollegedegree.org/2009/04/28/100-excellent-online-tools-to-feed-your-creativity//
Without further interruption, here is my list of the best websites on the web.
You will need to enter http://
Coolonlinetools.com
Truthorfiction.com
Politifact.com
Snopes.com
Lies.com
Reuters.com
Vote7.com
Beelinetv.com
Cartype.com
Soundike.com
Scirus.com
Sciencedaily.com
Springwise.com
Nationmaster.com
Makeuseof.com
Livingroutes.com
Worldprocessor.com
Englishscholar.com
Medicalstudent.com
Humanmetrics.com
Awea.com
Flickr.com
Friedbeef.com
Worklessparty.com
Soundsleeping.com
Vegan.org
Addictinggames.com
Onlinecollegedegree.com
Musicovery.com
Veoh.com
Techradar.com
Thememoryhole.org
Theonion.com
Fossilfreedom.com
Asifproductions.com
Pelfusion.com
Systems-thinking.org
Nejm.org
Factcheck.org
Placesforwriters.com
Polldaddy.com
Contexts.org
Scienceblogs.com
Huffingtonpost.com
Tantricplanet.com
Disinfo.com
Livejournal.com
Socialistworker.org
Revisemri.com
Dailygalaxy.com
Current.com
Commondreams.org
Tumblr.com
Thecolorawards.com
Deviantart.com
Filmsite.org
Livescience.com
Wired.com
Lavendarliberal.com
Mashable.com
Digg.com
Alternet.org
Photoshoparchive.com
Imgfavae.com
Urbandictionary.com
IMDB.com
IMSDB.com
Shelfari.com
Librarything.com
Stumbleupon.com
Myspace.com
Dailycensored.com
Projectcensored.com
Infowars.com
Mediafreedominternational.com
Psychcentral
TripKick
WikiTravel
Zeer
Afrigadget
AskMen
WebMD
Health
RateMyProfessors
SeriousEats
MapJack
SearchMe
TinyURL
Mobaganda
UrbanDictionary
Hulu
Imeem
GaiaOnline
Kiva
WikiSky
CaliforniaCoastline
ProjectVulcan
Delicious
Metafilter
Skype
AcademicEarth
Wolfram/Alpha
Vimeo
ForaTV
Amazon
Netflix
Wikipedia
Metacritic
Pollster
Pandora
Yelp
Snopes
Couchsurfing
Photosynth
OMGPOP
WorldWideTelescope
Fonolo
Search.com
Alexa.com
Earthcam.com
About.com
Reference.com
Beliefnet.com
Mayoclinic.com
Altmedicine.com
Citysearch.com
Sciam.com
Nature.com
Allposters.com
Mapquest.com
Rottentomatoes.com
Guttenberg.net
Bestofbloggers.com
Intuit.com
Problogger.net
Democraticunderground.com
Prospect.org
Docudhama.com
Krugman.blogs.nytimes.com
Progressiveblue.com
Listography.com
43things.com
Ask500people.com
Liberaloasis.com blogs
Liberaloasis.com is an extensive list of political socioeconomic blogs and satirical humor blogs embedded in the site. Plus a full list of liberal internet radio stations.
Jooce.com
Mox.com
Criminalsearches.com
Damninteresting.com
Viewzi.com
Searchme.com
Imeem.com
Kongregate.com
Fffound.com
Songaza.com
Thesmokinggun.com
Taggalaxy.de
Wolfgangsvault.com
Dating Sites
OKCupid.com free
Plentyoffish.com free
Datingabout.com
Freedatingsites.com
Allsinglesnet.com free
Singlesnet.com free
Directoryofdating.com
Truebeginnings.com
EHarmony.com
Match.com
Chemistry.com
Clubplanet.com
Myspace.com
Loveplanet.com
Friendsover50.com
Babyboomerspeoplemeet.com
Meetin.org
Meetup.com
Freedatingusa.com free
Seniorfriend.com
Datehookup.com free
Jumpdates.com free
Mingle2.com free
Datingsitewiz.com free
BEWARE: When using dating sites, beware of spam. It varies from site to site but there is no site totally free of spam. Spam means people who don’t really exist or are trying to get money from you.
Alternative Truths or Realitys, Myth Exposing
Truthorfiction.com
Politifact.com
Snopes.com
Lies.com
National Health Care Sites
Rrcentral.com/careplans/100_best_health_care_policy_blogs
Thehealthcareblog.com
Pnhp.com
Nchc.com
Best Transportation, Public Transit, and Railroad Sites
And Climate Change and Renewable Energy Sites
The Five Best Mass Transit Cities in the World
http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/green-living/free-ride-the-five-best-mass-transit-systems-worldwide/1095
The Top 100 Transportation Websites
http://www.world.org/weo/transportation
The Top 100 Climate Change Websites
http://www.world.org/weo/climate
The Top 100 Renewable Energy Websites
http://www.world.org/weo/energy
Links to over 5,000 Railroad Websites
http://www.railroaddata.com/
Rail Links – The Definitive Directory of Rail Websites
http://www.raillinks.com/
About Project Vulcan
The Vulcan Project is a NASA/DOE funded effort under the North American Carbon Program (NACP) to quantify North American fossil fuel carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions at space and time scales much finer than has been achieved in the past. The purpose is to aid in quantification of the North American carbon budget, to support inverse estimation of carbon sources and sinks, and to support the demands posed by higher resolution CO2 observations (in situ and remotely sensed). The detail and scope of the Vulcan CO2 inventory has also made it a valuable tool for policymakers, demographers, social scientists and the public at large (now on Google Earth!). Here is a narrated flyover.
The Vulcan project has achieved the quantification of the 2002 U.S. fossil fuel CO2 emissions at the scale of individual factories, powerplants, roadways and neighborhoods on an hourly basis. We have built the entire inventory on a common 10 km x 10 km grid to facilitate atmospheric modeling. In addition to improvement in space and time resolution, Vulcan is quantified at the level of fuel type, economic sub-sector, and county/state identification.
Here is the Link to the Project Vulcan website:
http://www.purdue.edu/eas/carbon/vulcan/index.php
Wikipedia article on Public Transport
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_transport
The CTAs Website for Passengers
http://www.transitchicago.com/
Free mass transit software games and train simulators
http://www.fileguru.com/downloads/transit
http://www.mstrain.org/
http://www.railserve.com/Computers/
Online Directory of Public Transportations in the U.S. State by State
http://www.publictransportation.org/systems/
The Google Transit Trip Planner
http://www.google.com/intl/en/landing/transit/#mdy
Blogs on Public Transport
http://frepubtra.blogspot.com/
http://www.blogtoplist.com/rss/public-transportation.html
http://transportation.nationaljournal.com/
http://www.loadedweb.com/search/?q=public+transportation
http://www.loadedweb.com/search/?q=mass+transit
Public Transport Publications and Magazines
http://masstransitmag.com/
Books On Public Transportation
http://www.librarything.com/tag/public+transportation
Journals on Public Transportation
http://www.nctr.usf.edu/jpt/journalfulltext.htm
http://www.dot.wisconsin.gov/library/services/cat/journals.htm
http://www.bts.gov/publications/journal_of_transportation_and_statistics/
Statistics on Public Transportation
http://www.bts.gov/publications/journal_of_transportation_and_statistics/
Transit Facts, Systems, Reports, and Resources
http://www.publictransportation.org/
A List of Some of My Favorite Books
Fuller, Synergetics
Galbreath, The Age of Uncertainty
Engler and Coleman, The Consumers Guide to Psychotherapy
Shankle and Amen, Preventing Alzheimers
Moore, The Official Fahrenheit 9/11 Reader
Shanor, The Emerging Mind
Frank, Bush On the Couch
Beare, 50 Secrets of the World’s Longest Living People
Huffman, Wolff, A Practical Handbook For the Boyfriend
Capra, The Tao of Physics
Teeley & Bashe, The Complete Cancer Survival Guide
Rinpuche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying
Ayres, Super Crunchers
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Diamond, The Third Chimpanzee
Lefts, Where the Heart Is
Videohound’s Epics
Dawkins, The God Delusion
The Science of the X Files
Edward, Afterlife
Filkin, Stephen Hawkings Universe
Sheff, The Medical Mentor
Lovins, Brittle Power
Sherill, The Oil Follies of 1970-1980
Dean, Broken Government
Zellicott, Microbe
Foods That Heal
Bursteir, Secrets of the Code
Wilson, Still Weird
The Men’s Health Guide to Peak Conditioning
Steger, Saving the Earth
Freeman, The Photographers Manual
Bradford, Alternative Health
The Millenium Whole Earth Catalog
Learn to Play Winning Chess
Guiness World Records 2007
Savart, Medicine For Healthier Living
The Spacemaker Book
New Living Spaces
Workout For a Balanced Brain
Power Sleep
A Different Universe
Power To The Patient
Klare, Blood and Oil
Allen, Improve Your Memory
Soleri, Arcology – The City in The Image of Man
Mysteries Through the Ages
The Society of Mind
The Peoples Medical Society Health Desk Reference
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Presents America
Mega Sudoku
Understanding Children
Alien Art
Crime Investigation
Under The Influence
The Onion: Dispatches From the Tenth Circle
NOVA Adventures in Science
Undoing Perpetual Stress
High School Confidential
An Inconvenient Truth
Roger Ebert’s Movie Yearbook
Franken, The Truth
The Complete Guide to Symptoms & Surgery
Smoke Signals
The Coming Global Superstorm
Einstein, Relativity
The Planiverse
Aint It Cool
The DHEA Breakthrough
Protein Power
Information Warfare
Herbal Bible
James & Thorpe, Ancient Mysteries
Peoples Pharmancy Guide to Home & Herbal Remedies
Banish Your Belly
The Complete Guide to Alternative & Conventional Medications
Ellsberg, Secrets
Klein, Intuition at Work
A Golden Thread
Charles Simone, Breast Health
The Sphinx and the Megaliths
The Coming Plague
The Macmillan Visual Almanac
New Passages
Fingerprints of the Gods
Crichton, Next
Bodystat
NRA Money – Firepower – Fear
The World Treasury of Physics, Astronomy and Mathematics
The DaVinci Code
Girls Night Out
Personality – Strategies and Issues
Zen and the Art of Gardening
Cyclopedia – The Portable Visual
Bhagavad Gita As It Is
The Complete Book of Natural and Medicinal Cures
The Merck Manual of Medical Information – Home Edition
The Pentagon Papers
100 Things You’re Not Supposed to Know
New Choices in Natural Healing
Taliban- Militant Islam, Oil
Contract on America
Spontaneous Healing
Streiber, Natures End
Entangled Minds
A Dog Year
How To Buy Stocks
The Arthritis Cure
The Doctors Book of Home Remedies
The Arms Bazaar
Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain
Genesis – Projekt Saucer, Book Two
Interstellar Travel
Nuclear Power: The Unviable Option
The Green Pharmacy
The Fix: Inside the World of Drug Trade
The High Frontier
Double Cross
The Triumph of Politics
Dune
Dune Messiah
Children of Dune
The Secret Life of Plants
Broken Silence
The Pill Guide to Natural Medicines
Dreamcatcher
Three Mile Island
Sphere
Interview With the Vampire
The Vampire Lestat
Shudder Again
Dr. Atkins New Diet Revolution
The Complete Book of Walking
The Healing Foods
Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess
Silent Coup
Einsten The Life and Times
Fear and Loathing On The Campaign Trail
Complications
The Working Poor
Endangered Minds
Remembering & Understanding Your Dreams
Surviving Schizophrenia
The Pill Book, 6th Edition
The New York Public Library Science Desk Reference
The Consumer Bible
The Domestic Violence Sourcebook
The Dream Encyclopedia
The 60 Greatest Conspiracies
The Price of Loyalty
QPB Guide to the Search for Extraterrestial Intelligence
The Cambridge Factfinder
Spite, Malace, and Revenge
Three Levels of Time
No Nukes
The Case for Legalizing Drugs
Toxic Psychiatry
The Chinese
What the IRS Doesn’t Want You To Know
Isaac Asimovs Book of Facts
Gods Politics
Gallileo and the Dolphin
On the Trail of the Assassins
Sex, Lies and Politics
Eat the Rich
What Are the Odds
1000 Cures for 200 Ailments
Balance Nutrition
Familes That Play Together Stay Together
The Inner Parent
Oil From Rockefeller to Iraq and Beyond
Bloodthirsty Bitches and Pious Pimps of Power
The Wolf of Wall Street
Emotional Intelligence
Listening to Prozac
The Whole Shebang
Thieves in High Places
Science and Human Behavior
Complexity – The Emerging Science of
The Physics of Immortality
Charlie Wilson’s War
Jarhead
Nukespeak
American Dynasty
Phantom Illness – Shattering the Myth
Thriving on Chaos
Spook – Science Tackles the Afterlife
You’re Only As Good as Your Next One
Getting Yours
The Fabric of Reality
Reviving Ophelia
The Breast Cancer Prevention Diet
Energy For Survival
The Politics of Rich and Poor
What Your Mother Couldn’t Tell You and Your Father Didn’t Know
Age Power
Einsteins Universe
Brainmaker – How Scientists Are
Stephen Hawkings Universe
Red Giants and White Dwarfs
Teenage Wasteland
3X George Carlin, An Orgy of George
Society of the Mind
When Rabbit Howls
The Medical Detectives
Hackers
White Oleander
The Lord of The Rings
Dude, Where’s My Country
Essential Buddhism
The Death and Life Afterbook
Too Good to Be True
Transformation
Communion
Breakthrough
Confirmation
Fire on Earth
Open Skies, Closed Minds
The Gulf Breeze Sightings
The Dancing WuLi Masters
The Brain Chemistry Plan
Betrayal of Trust – The Collapse of---
The New Male Sexuality
Natural Detoxification
What’s the Matter with Kansas
The Brain Chemistry Diet
Asimov on Numbers
Earth in the Balance
Natures Cancer Fighting Foods
The New Glucose Revolution for Diabetes
The Saudis
Buying Organic
Futureshock
War and Antiwar
Take It Back
The Beatles
Photoshop 5.5 Visually
120 Diseases, The Essential Guide to….
The Complete Guide to Diabetes
Secrets of the Code
Survival of the Sickest
Saving Planet Earth
Mensa – The Book of Total Genius
The PRD Pocket Guide to Prescription Drugs
Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff
Ripley’s Believe It or Not Curriodities
Death Be Not Proud
Manchild in the Promised Land
1001 Places To See Before You Die
The Canon
Galbreath, The Age of Uncertainty
Engler and Coleman, The Consumers Guide to Psychotherapy
Shankle and Amen, Preventing Alzheimers
Moore, The Official Fahrenheit 9/11 Reader
Shanor, The Emerging Mind
Frank, Bush On the Couch
Beare, 50 Secrets of the World’s Longest Living People
Huffman, Wolff, A Practical Handbook For the Boyfriend
Capra, The Tao of Physics
Teeley & Bashe, The Complete Cancer Survival Guide
Rinpuche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying
Ayres, Super Crunchers
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Diamond, The Third Chimpanzee
Lefts, Where the Heart Is
Videohound’s Epics
Dawkins, The God Delusion
The Science of the X Files
Edward, Afterlife
Filkin, Stephen Hawkings Universe
Sheff, The Medical Mentor
Lovins, Brittle Power
Sherill, The Oil Follies of 1970-1980
Dean, Broken Government
Zellicott, Microbe
Foods That Heal
Bursteir, Secrets of the Code
Wilson, Still Weird
The Men’s Health Guide to Peak Conditioning
Steger, Saving the Earth
Freeman, The Photographers Manual
Bradford, Alternative Health
The Millenium Whole Earth Catalog
Learn to Play Winning Chess
Guiness World Records 2007
Savart, Medicine For Healthier Living
The Spacemaker Book
New Living Spaces
Workout For a Balanced Brain
Power Sleep
A Different Universe
Power To The Patient
Klare, Blood and Oil
Allen, Improve Your Memory
Soleri, Arcology – The City in The Image of Man
Mysteries Through the Ages
The Society of Mind
The Peoples Medical Society Health Desk Reference
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Presents America
Mega Sudoku
Understanding Children
Alien Art
Crime Investigation
Under The Influence
The Onion: Dispatches From the Tenth Circle
NOVA Adventures in Science
Undoing Perpetual Stress
High School Confidential
An Inconvenient Truth
Roger Ebert’s Movie Yearbook
Franken, The Truth
The Complete Guide to Symptoms & Surgery
Smoke Signals
The Coming Global Superstorm
Einstein, Relativity
The Planiverse
Aint It Cool
The DHEA Breakthrough
Protein Power
Information Warfare
Herbal Bible
James & Thorpe, Ancient Mysteries
Peoples Pharmancy Guide to Home & Herbal Remedies
Banish Your Belly
The Complete Guide to Alternative & Conventional Medications
Ellsberg, Secrets
Klein, Intuition at Work
A Golden Thread
Charles Simone, Breast Health
The Sphinx and the Megaliths
The Coming Plague
The Macmillan Visual Almanac
New Passages
Fingerprints of the Gods
Crichton, Next
Bodystat
NRA Money – Firepower – Fear
The World Treasury of Physics, Astronomy and Mathematics
The DaVinci Code
Girls Night Out
Personality – Strategies and Issues
Zen and the Art of Gardening
Cyclopedia – The Portable Visual
Bhagavad Gita As It Is
The Complete Book of Natural and Medicinal Cures
The Merck Manual of Medical Information – Home Edition
The Pentagon Papers
100 Things You’re Not Supposed to Know
New Choices in Natural Healing
Taliban- Militant Islam, Oil
Contract on America
Spontaneous Healing
Streiber, Natures End
Entangled Minds
A Dog Year
How To Buy Stocks
The Arthritis Cure
The Doctors Book of Home Remedies
The Arms Bazaar
Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain
Genesis – Projekt Saucer, Book Two
Interstellar Travel
Nuclear Power: The Unviable Option
The Green Pharmacy
The Fix: Inside the World of Drug Trade
The High Frontier
Double Cross
The Triumph of Politics
Dune
Dune Messiah
Children of Dune
The Secret Life of Plants
Broken Silence
The Pill Guide to Natural Medicines
Dreamcatcher
Three Mile Island
Sphere
Interview With the Vampire
The Vampire Lestat
Shudder Again
Dr. Atkins New Diet Revolution
The Complete Book of Walking
The Healing Foods
Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess
Silent Coup
Einsten The Life and Times
Fear and Loathing On The Campaign Trail
Complications
The Working Poor
Endangered Minds
Remembering & Understanding Your Dreams
Surviving Schizophrenia
The Pill Book, 6th Edition
The New York Public Library Science Desk Reference
The Consumer Bible
The Domestic Violence Sourcebook
The Dream Encyclopedia
The 60 Greatest Conspiracies
The Price of Loyalty
QPB Guide to the Search for Extraterrestial Intelligence
The Cambridge Factfinder
Spite, Malace, and Revenge
Three Levels of Time
No Nukes
The Case for Legalizing Drugs
Toxic Psychiatry
The Chinese
What the IRS Doesn’t Want You To Know
Isaac Asimovs Book of Facts
Gods Politics
Gallileo and the Dolphin
On the Trail of the Assassins
Sex, Lies and Politics
Eat the Rich
What Are the Odds
1000 Cures for 200 Ailments
Balance Nutrition
Familes That Play Together Stay Together
The Inner Parent
Oil From Rockefeller to Iraq and Beyond
Bloodthirsty Bitches and Pious Pimps of Power
The Wolf of Wall Street
Emotional Intelligence
Listening to Prozac
The Whole Shebang
Thieves in High Places
Science and Human Behavior
Complexity – The Emerging Science of
The Physics of Immortality
Charlie Wilson’s War
Jarhead
Nukespeak
American Dynasty
Phantom Illness – Shattering the Myth
Thriving on Chaos
Spook – Science Tackles the Afterlife
You’re Only As Good as Your Next One
Getting Yours
The Fabric of Reality
Reviving Ophelia
The Breast Cancer Prevention Diet
Energy For Survival
The Politics of Rich and Poor
What Your Mother Couldn’t Tell You and Your Father Didn’t Know
Age Power
Einsteins Universe
Brainmaker – How Scientists Are
Stephen Hawkings Universe
Red Giants and White Dwarfs
Teenage Wasteland
3X George Carlin, An Orgy of George
Society of the Mind
When Rabbit Howls
The Medical Detectives
Hackers
White Oleander
The Lord of The Rings
Dude, Where’s My Country
Essential Buddhism
The Death and Life Afterbook
Too Good to Be True
Transformation
Communion
Breakthrough
Confirmation
Fire on Earth
Open Skies, Closed Minds
The Gulf Breeze Sightings
The Dancing WuLi Masters
The Brain Chemistry Plan
Betrayal of Trust – The Collapse of---
The New Male Sexuality
Natural Detoxification
What’s the Matter with Kansas
The Brain Chemistry Diet
Asimov on Numbers
Earth in the Balance
Natures Cancer Fighting Foods
The New Glucose Revolution for Diabetes
The Saudis
Buying Organic
Futureshock
War and Antiwar
Take It Back
The Beatles
Photoshop 5.5 Visually
120 Diseases, The Essential Guide to….
The Complete Guide to Diabetes
Secrets of the Code
Survival of the Sickest
Saving Planet Earth
Mensa – The Book of Total Genius
The PRD Pocket Guide to Prescription Drugs
Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff
Ripley’s Believe It or Not Curriodities
Death Be Not Proud
Manchild in the Promised Land
1001 Places To See Before You Die
The Canon
Intentional Communities are Expanding Via Senior Citizens
New Concept in Senior Living Creates Rapid Expansion of Intentional Communities Key West, FL Sunday, January 24, 2010
Before 2001, few people were familiar with the concept of "intentional communities" until the first one was formed in Boston. Beacon Hill Village was the first intentional community and there are now communities in California, Colorado, Connecticut, District of Columbia, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin and the first International Community in Australia.
For the next 20 years, an average 10,000 baby boomers are retiring daily and many people in their 50s, 60s and 70s are asking the question, "Where will I be living?" In the past, this question is often addressed once something has happened unexpectedly and decisions are made under duress, often without the input of the person involved. The decisions, while often necessary, are also often traumatic for everyone involved. Moving back with children, considering in-home care and assisted living facilities or nursing homes have been the usual options in the past but intentional communities have begun to create an answer to aging in place, in your own home.
The flagship community and model for others was the one formed by a group of Beacon Hll residents in 2001 as an alternative to moving from their houses. And while these communities might imply a physical neighborhood, they are not. Beacon Hill Village is a concept, not a location, and includes members from many Boston areas.
Intentional communities are membership organizations in which dues are paid for services, services that allow people to continue to live in their neighborhood close to friends and in their home. As members in intentional communities age, the community organizes and develops programs and services that allow them to lead safe, healthy and productive lives in their own home.
Ages range from 50 and older and members are both single and married. While services vary according to the needs and interests of each individual community, BHV says, "From groceries to Tai Chi to cultural and social activities to home care, Beacon Hill Village members get what they need to enjoy their lives…and peace of mind. "
Membership costs vary from village to village but at BHV, an annual membership is $600 for an individual and $860 for a couple. A membership can be purchased for someone else, for example, a parent.
HouseWorks, founded in 1998 by Andrea Cohen in Boston, was intended to be a different kind of private-pay home care company, more responsive or reliable than any of its predecessors. Cohen's vision has been to help seniors live at home, no matter how challenging their situation. A fundamental innovation has been the entrepreneurial approach to service delivery, a customer driven approach that returns a sense of control to adult children and their elderly parents. Rather than telling customers what they can or should have, HouseWorks listens to what they want and attempts to meet their needs.
Because of their unique philosophy, it was only fitting for HouseWorks to become affiliated with BHV when it was formed and Cohen has been a fervent advocate of the concept of intentional communities.
As the leader in intentional communities, the website for BHV (www.beaconhllvillage.org) contains a page of all the other villages with contact information. There are additional pages for those interested in forming an organization in their community and a link to www.vtv.org ,a village- to-village website of resources.
In nine years, intentional communities have spread from the vision of a few Boston colleagues to a concept which allows members in a growing number of states and countries to get what they need to enjoy their lives…and peace of mind.
Phyllis May, Ph.D.
Key West, FL
305-295-7501
Before 2001, few people were familiar with the concept of "intentional communities" until the first one was formed in Boston. Beacon Hill Village was the first intentional community and there are now communities in California, Colorado, Connecticut, District of Columbia, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin and the first International Community in Australia.
For the next 20 years, an average 10,000 baby boomers are retiring daily and many people in their 50s, 60s and 70s are asking the question, "Where will I be living?" In the past, this question is often addressed once something has happened unexpectedly and decisions are made under duress, often without the input of the person involved. The decisions, while often necessary, are also often traumatic for everyone involved. Moving back with children, considering in-home care and assisted living facilities or nursing homes have been the usual options in the past but intentional communities have begun to create an answer to aging in place, in your own home.
The flagship community and model for others was the one formed by a group of Beacon Hll residents in 2001 as an alternative to moving from their houses. And while these communities might imply a physical neighborhood, they are not. Beacon Hill Village is a concept, not a location, and includes members from many Boston areas.
Intentional communities are membership organizations in which dues are paid for services, services that allow people to continue to live in their neighborhood close to friends and in their home. As members in intentional communities age, the community organizes and develops programs and services that allow them to lead safe, healthy and productive lives in their own home.
Ages range from 50 and older and members are both single and married. While services vary according to the needs and interests of each individual community, BHV says, "From groceries to Tai Chi to cultural and social activities to home care, Beacon Hill Village members get what they need to enjoy their lives…and peace of mind. "
Membership costs vary from village to village but at BHV, an annual membership is $600 for an individual and $860 for a couple. A membership can be purchased for someone else, for example, a parent.
HouseWorks, founded in 1998 by Andrea Cohen in Boston, was intended to be a different kind of private-pay home care company, more responsive or reliable than any of its predecessors. Cohen's vision has been to help seniors live at home, no matter how challenging their situation. A fundamental innovation has been the entrepreneurial approach to service delivery, a customer driven approach that returns a sense of control to adult children and their elderly parents. Rather than telling customers what they can or should have, HouseWorks listens to what they want and attempts to meet their needs.
Because of their unique philosophy, it was only fitting for HouseWorks to become affiliated with BHV when it was formed and Cohen has been a fervent advocate of the concept of intentional communities.
As the leader in intentional communities, the website for BHV (www.beaconhllvillage.org) contains a page of all the other villages with contact information. There are additional pages for those interested in forming an organization in their community and a link to www.vtv.org ,a village- to-village website of resources.
In nine years, intentional communities have spread from the vision of a few Boston colleagues to a concept which allows members in a growing number of states and countries to get what they need to enjoy their lives…and peace of mind.
Phyllis May, Ph.D.
Key West, FL
305-295-7501
Saturday, January 8, 2011
All About Movies and Best Movie Review Websites
About Movies
Before delving into lists of the best movie websites, movie review sites, best movies, etc., I would like to celebrate the social significance, and the impressionistic power of this medium. If you are any kind of artist, be it an illustrator, animator, painter, sculptor, photographer, designer, interior decorator, writer, actor, or musician, your kind is used in the production of movies. Movies and TV (excluding reality TV and talking heads) are responsible for the most controversial, the most spiritual, the most historical, the most compassionate, the most inspirational and motivational, the most provocative, the most enlightening and endearing, the most powerful, and the most visually pleasing pieces of art that the world has ever known.
Movies and TV use all of the arts in unison and/or in contrasting juxtapositions to create works of art that do not exist anywhere else. Movies can displace us in time and space, compress both or expand both by integrating various arts with good screen writing. Movies can transport our minds and our emotions to a totally different place, a totally different time, and a totally different emotion than any we have experienced before. And movies do not require any great effort from the viewer to accomplish this, for once we are absorbed into the zeitgeist of arts that compose a movie, we understand it intuitively, emotionally, and intellectually simultaneously.
When well crafted, they absorb us so intimately and with such simplicity in doing so that we are literally hypnotized by their magic as we are thrown into another world alien yet recognizable and believable at the same time.
Sometimes movies just entertain us, and allow us to escape from our mundane existence at a price much cheaper than an airline ticket and a hotel. Sometimes movies overwhelm us with an experience that transforms our emotions and raises our consciousness. Sometimes movies provide us with a catharsis by making us laugh or cry or both. Sometimes movies literally show us the evil and the goodness that exist within us. And sometimes movies confront us by challenging our values and morals, and by exposing us, our society, and our culture. Sometimes movies transport us out of our bodies and into that of the character on the screen and do this so powerfully that we are momentarily changed as we empathize with the character.
There is no other medium that teaches us the social etiquette, manners, mannerisms, and behavior that ends up becoming a part of our culture or already is a part of our culture. Movies force us to look closely at ourselves and our values by making us experience things and emotions that we probably would not experience without them, and by providing us with vicarious experiences that we might never experience otherwise. Other than school, church, family, and relatives, no other medium provides us with a sense of right and wrong, morals and values like movies. It does this by showing us intellectually the contrast between goodness and the darkness and evil that exist here, there or everywhere, or by making us vicariously experience the goodness and/or darkness and evil that exist here, there, or everywhere, and it makes its point sometimes powerfully, sometimes subtlety, sometimes with humor and grace, often with a combination of all of these elements.
And in the process it changes us. Since it is a temporary vicarious experience it does not change us permanently, but over time, it does change society. Our social norms, mannerisms, and values are formed to a great extent by movies and TV. Movies and documentaries have the power to change us, to make us better people or to make us worse, depending on our current values and our frame of mind. For most of us, movies probably don’t change our fundamental values (although they can), but they powerfully reinforce our ethics and values when we ourselves have our doubts, brought about by a combination of our own weaknesses and vulnerabilities, our social status, and the chaotic random things that happen to all of us on a daily basis.
Movies give us the cultural tools we need to survive and socialize in the world we know and the world we don’t know. You may not walk out of a movie and directly use the words or phrases or behavior you witnessed, but in combination, over time, movies do make us all communicate more intuitively using more varieties of verbal and non verbal behavior than we would otherwise. This process of socializing us to culture makes us more empathetic and more intuitive and ensures that we communicate instead of dominate.
The Myth That Books Are Always Better Than the Movie
Make no mistake about it. Usually, the book is better than the movie. But only if you can imagine the book, kind of like making your own personal movie.
Most books are not read at one session. In our busy lives, a lot can happen between readings, and this makes it difficult to pick a book back up and pick up exactly where we left off. You can see a lot more movies than you can read books solely because it takes more time to read a book than see a movie. Nevertheless, if you have the time and the imagination, (not all of us have even one of these let alone the other one), books are usually better (mainly because you control the imagination). However, there are plenty of examples of movies that were better than the book.
Some books are just horribly written. Full of exposition and description but lacking character, or the opposite, full of plot and dialogue but devoid of any emotion or meaning. But often a good screen writer and director can understand the intent and can visualize and make visual in mere moments what it took the writer hundreds or thousand of words to do. It is not because we lack imagination that we go to the movies instead of reading. It is because we can not envision something we have never experienced and we can not experience something we can not envision. Movies merge the experience and the vision by uniting our emotions with our senses and our intellect.
A good example of a badly written book that was transformed into a great set of movies is the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. The author, J.R. Tolkien, tried to make a reference book on the geography and history of Middle Earth into three novels, where the plot and characters are subservient to the descriptions of Middle Earth and its history. The movies were able to juxtapose these elements in real time with the narrative appearing simultaneously on the screen with the visual geography and history.
A second example is Twilight. I know I am going to be on a lot of peoples hit list for these remarks, but here goes. The book has dialogue that is juvenile and pretentious and just goes on and on about one trivial behavioral detail after another with regard to the looks and actions of its two main characters. As is true of many books, the middle part of it is not part of the storyline, and contains details that do not tell us what is important about the characters motivations or feelings. Most of the characters other than Bella and Edward are mere props in the book, stilted. There is no third character to make transitions or give us the tension that exists in a trilogy. The movie cuts out all of this redundant dialogue not only because it has to in order to make the movie 2 hours long instead of 20, but because it simply is not necessary. We are more interested in why Bella wants to become a vampire and throw her life away to a man/vampire she is in love with than we are with the details of what she is thinking from moment to moment on and on for what seems like decades. Through the non-verbal power of music and imagery, the movie intuitively tells us why and expresses the emotions in a minute that the book takes forever to do so.
These two examples were picked because they are kind of polar opposites. Tolkien – too much description and exposition and history with a lack of character development. Twilight with too much emphasis on the characters details but not enough context to see why the characters behave the way they do. The shallowness of the dialogue is another matter.
Below you will find some WEB articles comparing film to books.
Comparison of Lord of the Rings Books to the Movies
28 Reasons Why Twilight the movie Is Better Than Twilight the book DON’T MISS THE LAST FEW IN THIS SLIDESHOW. HILARIOUS.
Books Versus Movies – Time Magazine Movie Critic
Essays: Reading a Book Versus Watching a Movie
Upton Sinclairs Oil Versus Movie There Will Be Blood VERY ACADEMIC.
Revelations: Books Vs. Movies by Clive Barker VERY TRUTHFUL
Great Geek Debates: Books Vs. Movies Wired Magazine TRUE TO ITS TITLE
463 Movies Better Than the Book – From Book Readers
The Greatest 9,331 Movies Of All Time As Compiled By Brad Bourland
The movie websites below contain various lists of the best movies out today, on DVD, and best movies of all time, along with reviews and details on each of these movies. At the end of this article there is a list of lists, a list of 3,600 lists of movies. But perhaps the lengthiest and most sincere quest to catalog the best movies of all time has to go to Brad Bourland, a simple grocery clerk from Austin, Texas, who has spent many years of his life reviewing all of the movie review websites in an attempt to conduct a meta review, a review of all of the reviewers, of the top 9,331 movies of all time.
Brad’s project began back in 2001, when he started with the reasonable goal of rating 200-300 films. Nine years later, after spending more than 1,600 hours in seven libraries in three states, logging more than 4,000 hours on dozens of computers, and rummaging through 110 books, his project was ready for the masses.
This link is to an article in Salon on this mans single minded quest. Brads website, which contains the full list in MS Word format, is contained as a link within the Salon article.
Best Movie Websites
IMDB.com
IMBD is the standard against which all other movie/tv websites are compared. It has more movies listed and has a professional version which can be used if you are in the industry and searching for talent, looking for films in production, shopping your resume, etc. It has a large number of ways to search for films and a huge database. And you can create you own personal list of films with links to the movies in the IMDB database. It ranks all movies by critics and users, so you can get a list of the best 250 movies as reviewed by users of IMDB, or the worst 100 movies of all time as determined by users... You can look up virtually anything about a movie: cast, director, editing, art direction, awards, costumes, photography, plot, and much much more. You can also view many movies and tv shows online.
While IMDB has more films and more info. on each film, including more reviews, than any other website, it can be overwhelming at times, and it does not have a real clean interface. For example, the listing of movies to watch online is not organized and finding movie reviews involves more than a couple mouse clicks. But if you want to know exactly how each audience voted for a film, from age group to gender, etc., this site has a vast amount of info. It can take some getting used to. However, once you learn it, this site will be your favorite.
VideoHound’s Golden Movie Retriever
For many years VideoHound published a giant quality paperback book in 8 by 10 inch newspaper thin pages titled the Golden Movie Retriever. The book is over 2,000 pages long and all good independent video rental stores had a copy. That book had a gazillion movie reviews, along with several hundred lists of movies in categories you could not find anyplace else, like slasher films, hipster films, cult classic, etc. Now finally, it also has a website. The website has films listed in 26 different genres, including ones you won’t find elsewhere, like Film Noir, Art and Cult Films, Religion and Spirituality, Social Issues, and True Stories. It also has the lists. 24 pages of list names, for a total of several hundred different lists, such as for example a list of 3-D Flicks, a list of movies about Alien Babes, a list of movies about amnesia, a list of movies about Meteors and Asteroids, etc.
Videohound is also the one of a few sites to realize that Film Awards deserves it’s own menu tab. There simply are so many different organizations awarding films in so many different categories for so many decades that Awards deserves its own menu tab.
In addition to all the genres and categories which you can use to find films, this site also lets you browse films functionally by Actors, Directors, Cinematographers, Composers, and Writers.
VideoHound also has a tab for blogs such as reviews of current films and a store where you can purchase books or DVDs. The one thing you can’t do is directly go to Amazon as Videohound has its own growing store of books and DVDs, usually at significantly less than retail prices, but also usually not as low as used items on Amazon.
Finally, this site allows you to create your own profile. There is a menu tab for creating and accessing your profile. From here you can create your own list of movies you have seen or want to see and rate them and review them. This is a very easy to use system. You can add movies to your personal list and rate them from within almost any menu. For example, using a search for a movie. For example, by finding the movie by browsing movies in a genre. You can share the entire list or a customized subset from your list with others via an email system. You can also share by sending to facebook, etc, as well as follow on Facebook, Twitter, etc.. And you can immediately share your thoughts via Twitter, Delicious, Digg, etc. The only downside is that you can not see or edit your lists in a spreadsheet like format and you can not download your lists to Excel. See They Shoot Pictures Don’t They link below for an Excel spreadsheet of 8,800 best films that you can edit in Excel.
About the only criticism of this site besides the inability to get your custom lists you made and your favorite movies as a spreadsheet file is that this site is a little slow from time to time.
Films101.com
The great thing about this site is that you can get lists of the top 200 or so films in each genre with links to the info. on each film in imdb.com, and mrqe.com. More on the latter in a moment. This site is linked to several other sites including amazon.com so you can buy a new or used DVD. However, I could not find a link to netflix.com on this site.
AllMovie.com
This site lists thousands of movies by type/category. The menu allows you to list all films in each category or search for a specific film. There are 12 categories. The top few to several hundred films (depending on category) are listed for each category, sorted by the films overall rating on a 5 star system. The short description in the listing has title, year, and director, with links to a full description of the film that includes awards, cast, etc. The full description of the film includes a list of similar works and related works, which is very helpful if you like the film and want to find other related or similar works. What makes this site unique is that there is a link to info. on the DVD of the movie. And this link has a huge amount of info. on the DVD such as a listing of all extra features on the DVD, the number of DVDs in the set, the total length, menu options, aspect ratio, etc. This site has two companion sites called AllMusic and Allgame which you can get to from the AllMovie website. The AllMusic site is very good.
MRQE.com
This stands for Movie Review Query Engine. When you search for a film in this database or find it on a list, you then get a web linked list of all of the reviews that were ever done on the movie, with web links to each review. You also get a meta-review, a statistical analysis of what all of the critics together thought of the movie on a scale of 1 to 5 as a bar chart. You can even rank the list of reviews from good to bad, so the best reviews are at the top and the worst at the bottom. All movies on this database/website are also linked to Netflix, Amazon, Blockbuster, etc. so you can automatically go to the movie on that particular site that you choose and either order it, rent it, or watch it immediately, or put in you queue of movies to be watched.
Metacritic.com
Similar to MRQE, but instead of looking at what lots of different critics each thought of a movie or music, this site compiles scores from all the critics and gives a composite result. While MRQE does a little of this, this site does it better and rates new movies, movies on DVD, new TV, older TV, and music. It does this by genre and alphabetically. It provides lists of the composite scores in a number of different categories. And it even lets you see how each critic compares to other critics on average. For example: Roger Ebert ranks all movies an average of 9 points higher than the average, or Village Voice ranks all movies an average of 5 points lower.
Theyshootpictures.com
This is an extremely extensive list of films. The top 400 films have built in mini-descriptions so you don’t have to flip to another website. The top 1000 reviews can be sorted. And if you want to edit the list for your own personal list, you can download the top 8,800 films of all time as an Excel file and then play around with this all you want. (You must have Excel or this link will not work.) The excel file has two hyperlink fields. One field for Amazon and the other for IMDB.com. So you can do an incredible amount offline with this excel file. The excel table has an extensive list of fields/columns, and you can obviously add columns to it once you download it. This site also has a very long list of weblinks to hundreds of other film websites. This is a well organized site that allows you to look at lists of movies and their weblinks in many many different ways.
EmpireOnline.com
If you are only interested in new movies, upcoming movies, and what’s out and coming out on DVD, this is the best site there is. Extensive coverage of new films with a month by month release date catalog that looks forward over a year and a half. This is the same company that makes the British magazine Empire, the slickest and best movie magazine on the market.
Rogerebert.com
While Empire may be the slickest and largest site for examining new movies, Roger Ebert’s site is the best way to very quickly review all of the current releases at theatres now. His one minute review section has very concise reviews of most if not all of the currently released movies in theatres now. If you are planning on seeing a movie tonight and have lots of choices but little time to make a decision, you can get the quickest and probably the best and most reliable reviews from this site. Of course, Roger also has his reviews of older movies here as well, and the latest news from Hollywood.
“Best of Lists” List of Movie Lists
About 3,600 different lists of movies, such as cult films, chick flicks, Bond movies, top spiritual films, MTV Movie Awards, AFI’s 100 Years 100 Movies, Independent Spirit Awards, etc. If you don’t know exactly what you want to watch but have and idea, use one of these lists to help you.
Best movies so far in 2010
(If not available on DVD or Netflix now, will be by end of year)
Toy Story 3
Inception
Shutter Island
Joan Rivers – A Piece of Work
The Runaways
Alice in Wonderland
The Wolfman
The Book of Eli
Splice
Scott Pilgrim Versus The World
The Lovely Bones
Diary of A Wimpy Kid
Get Him To The Greek
Creation
The Town
The Kids Are All Right
The Eclipse
Brooklyn’s Finest
A Million In The Morning
Best TV Shows so Far in 2010
Mad Men
Fringe
Boston MED
Boardwalk Empire
House, M.D.
The Big Bang Theory (a sitcom)
Chelsea Handler Late Night
Haven – New
The United States of Tara
The Office
Glee
Weeds
The Secret Life of the American Teenager
Dexter
30 Rock
Best TV Shows Of All Time
The Simpsons
30 Days
Weeds
The Closer
Intervention
Secret Life of An American Teenager
Star Trek – The Next Generation
120 Minutes
MTV Unplugged
Project Runway
Friends
Seinfeld
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
The Cosby Show
Mork and Mindy
30 Rock
House
Greys Anatomy
Heroes
The Gilmore Girls
True Blood
The X Files
ER
The Sopranos
WKRP in Cincinnatti
The Wire
Twin Peaks
Six Feet Under
Hill Street Blues
Saturday Night Live
Cheers
All in The Family
The Daily Show
Freaks and Geeks
Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman
Taxi
Get Smart
The Jeffersons
Ren and Stimpy
Farscape
Battlestar Galactica
South Park
Mad Men
M.A.S.H.
The Andy Griffith Show
The Dick Van Dyke Show
Best News, Political, and Talk Shows of All Time
Nightline
60 Minutes
PBS Frontline
The Rachel Maddow Show
The Daily Show
Oprah Winfrey
Tyra AKA The Tyra Show
Good to Great Movies and Documentaries and TV Out on DVD or Netflix Now
Madmen – Season 3
The Blues – A Documentary on Seven DVDs
30 Days – Season 1 (Morgon Spurlock who did Super Size Me created this)
Blue State
Speak
Precious: Based on the novel by Sapphire
The Cove – Best documentary of 2009
Food Inc. Best documentary of 2009
Crazy Heart
Diary of A Wimpy Kid
Bad Lieutenant
Inglorius Basterds
A Serious Man
Up In The Air
Up
Drag Me To Hell
Public Enemies
Avatar
The Hangover
Nine
Where The Wild Things Are
It’s Complicated
Sherlock Holmes
The Informant
Whip It
Moon
The Blind Side
Invictus
500 Days of Summer
Coraline
Star Trek
The Heart is A Drum Machine
The Beautiful Truth
King Corn
A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash
In the Realms of the Unreal
Hounddog
No Impact Man
Inked: The Best of Season One
The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc
The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill
Girls Rock
The Botany of Desire
The Future We Will Create
Mad Hot Ballroom
Rivers and Tides
12
Fuel
Quills
Brief Interviews With Hideous Men
Best Documentaries of All Time
Before perusing my list of best documentaries of all time, please take a look at the following website called Box Office Mojo. It includes a list of all documentaries that were introduced into theatres from 1982 to present, including their ranking in box office receipts, their life gross ticket revenues, number of theatres they were shown in, the date they were released to theatres, and weblinks to each of the documentaries with additional information
BTW Boxofficemojo is a great site if you are looking for statistical info on box office results. It has some amazing info. For example, did you know that ET the Extraterrestial was number one at the box office more weeks in a row than any other film, including Titanic?
BoxOfficeMojo.com.
Harlan County. U.S.A.
Hoop Dreams
The Thin Blue Line
The 11th Hour
A Crude Awakening
Who Killed The Electric Car
Home
Blue Water
Planet Earth
Life
Bowling For Columbine
The Fog of War
Supersize Me
Born Into Brothels
Food, Inc.
The Cove
Fahrenheit 911
Winged Migration
March of the Penguins
Enron: The Smartest Guys in The Room
A Brief History of Time
The U.S. Versus John Lennon
More Than A Game
The Most Dangerous Man in America….
This Film Is Not Yet Rated
Bushs Brain
Howard Zinn: You Can’t Be Neutral On A Moving Train
Jimmy Carter, Main From Plains
King Corn
Can Mr. Smith Get to Washington Anymore?
Woodstock
Sicko
Hearts and Minds
Triumph Of The Will
No End In Sight
The Ascent of Man
The Corporation
Night and Fog
The Times of Harvey Milk
Berkley in the 1960s
The War Room
Dark Days
The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill
The War At Home
Streetwize
Outfoxed: Rupert Murdochs War on Journalism
The Slow Poisoning of India
A War On Science
Darwins Nightmare
Cosmos
Jonestown
Aileen Wournos: The Selling of A Serial Killer
Jesus Heart
Young@Heart
Movies To Come To Theatres Soon – Remainder of 2010
** Means will probably also be a hit at the box office
** The Town
Legend of The Guardians (3D)
The Virginity Hit
A Mothers Courage: Talking Back to Autism
Buried
Collapse
Ghetto Physics: Will The Real Pimps and Hos Please Stand Up
Megamind
Sin City 2
When Worlds Collide
The Other Side
The Next 3 Days
True Grit – Remake by the Coen Brothers
Conviction
The Tourist – teams up Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp
Hereafter – Directed by Clint Eastwood
** The Social Network – About the beginnings of Facebook
How Do You Know
I’m Still Here – documentary on Joaquin Phoenix
Never Let Me Go
Catfish
** Wall Street – Money Never Sleeps – Oliver Stone has been slipping lately but this might be his comeback
The Tempest – Julie Taymors remake of Shakespeare from a feminist viewpoint. She did Across the Universe and Frida
** Little Fockers - just for the fun of it. Probably wont be as good as first two.
Black Swan – Natalie Portman. Directed by Aron Darunovsky - I know I spelled his name wrong.
** Freakonomics – series of 5 short documentaries taken from the book – each by different director
Nowhere Boy – early years of John Lennon
Fair Game
The Next Three Days
** Burlesque – Christina Aguilera and Kristen Bell
Love and Other Drugs
Somewhere
Blue Valentine
The Tree of Life
Due Date
Movies That May Be Good but Will be Very Violent and Possibly Gruesome
127 Hours
Buried
Devil – by M. Night Shyalaman. This film is not terribly violent. But its emphasis on religious beliefs and meanings may be a little controversial. Can M. Night return to the success he had with The Sixth Sense and Signs?
Best Film Directors of All Time
Woody Allen
Robert Altman
Paul Thomas Anderson
Judd Apatow
Darren Aronofsky
Caroll Ballard
Warren Beatty
Ingmar Bergman
Bernardo Bertolucci
Kathryn Bigelow
Albert Brooks
James Cameron
John Cassavettes
Ethan and Joel Coen
Francis Ford Coppola
David Cronenberg
Brian De Palma
Guillermo del Toro
Jonathan Demme
Clint Eastwood
David Fincher
Milos Forman
William Friedkin
Terry Gilliam
Alfred Hitchcock
Peter Jackson
Lawrence Kasdan
Elia Kazan
Stanley Kubrick
David Lean
Spike Lee
Sidney Lumet
David Lynch
Terrence Malick
David Mamet
Michael Mann
Sam Mendes
Mike Nichols
Alan Parker
Arthur Penn
Sean Penn
Roman Polanski
Sydney Pollack
Otto Preminger
Sam Raimi
Ken Russell
John Sayles
Martin Scorsese
Ridley Scott
Steven Soderbergh
Steven Spielberg
Oliver Stone
Quentin Tarantino
Francois Truffaut
John Waters
Orson Welles
Frederick Wiseman
Before delving into lists of the best movie websites, movie review sites, best movies, etc., I would like to celebrate the social significance, and the impressionistic power of this medium. If you are any kind of artist, be it an illustrator, animator, painter, sculptor, photographer, designer, interior decorator, writer, actor, or musician, your kind is used in the production of movies. Movies and TV (excluding reality TV and talking heads) are responsible for the most controversial, the most spiritual, the most historical, the most compassionate, the most inspirational and motivational, the most provocative, the most enlightening and endearing, the most powerful, and the most visually pleasing pieces of art that the world has ever known.
Movies and TV use all of the arts in unison and/or in contrasting juxtapositions to create works of art that do not exist anywhere else. Movies can displace us in time and space, compress both or expand both by integrating various arts with good screen writing. Movies can transport our minds and our emotions to a totally different place, a totally different time, and a totally different emotion than any we have experienced before. And movies do not require any great effort from the viewer to accomplish this, for once we are absorbed into the zeitgeist of arts that compose a movie, we understand it intuitively, emotionally, and intellectually simultaneously.
When well crafted, they absorb us so intimately and with such simplicity in doing so that we are literally hypnotized by their magic as we are thrown into another world alien yet recognizable and believable at the same time.
Sometimes movies just entertain us, and allow us to escape from our mundane existence at a price much cheaper than an airline ticket and a hotel. Sometimes movies overwhelm us with an experience that transforms our emotions and raises our consciousness. Sometimes movies provide us with a catharsis by making us laugh or cry or both. Sometimes movies literally show us the evil and the goodness that exist within us. And sometimes movies confront us by challenging our values and morals, and by exposing us, our society, and our culture. Sometimes movies transport us out of our bodies and into that of the character on the screen and do this so powerfully that we are momentarily changed as we empathize with the character.
There is no other medium that teaches us the social etiquette, manners, mannerisms, and behavior that ends up becoming a part of our culture or already is a part of our culture. Movies force us to look closely at ourselves and our values by making us experience things and emotions that we probably would not experience without them, and by providing us with vicarious experiences that we might never experience otherwise. Other than school, church, family, and relatives, no other medium provides us with a sense of right and wrong, morals and values like movies. It does this by showing us intellectually the contrast between goodness and the darkness and evil that exist here, there or everywhere, or by making us vicariously experience the goodness and/or darkness and evil that exist here, there, or everywhere, and it makes its point sometimes powerfully, sometimes subtlety, sometimes with humor and grace, often with a combination of all of these elements.
And in the process it changes us. Since it is a temporary vicarious experience it does not change us permanently, but over time, it does change society. Our social norms, mannerisms, and values are formed to a great extent by movies and TV. Movies and documentaries have the power to change us, to make us better people or to make us worse, depending on our current values and our frame of mind. For most of us, movies probably don’t change our fundamental values (although they can), but they powerfully reinforce our ethics and values when we ourselves have our doubts, brought about by a combination of our own weaknesses and vulnerabilities, our social status, and the chaotic random things that happen to all of us on a daily basis.
Movies give us the cultural tools we need to survive and socialize in the world we know and the world we don’t know. You may not walk out of a movie and directly use the words or phrases or behavior you witnessed, but in combination, over time, movies do make us all communicate more intuitively using more varieties of verbal and non verbal behavior than we would otherwise. This process of socializing us to culture makes us more empathetic and more intuitive and ensures that we communicate instead of dominate.
The Myth That Books Are Always Better Than the Movie
Make no mistake about it. Usually, the book is better than the movie. But only if you can imagine the book, kind of like making your own personal movie.
Most books are not read at one session. In our busy lives, a lot can happen between readings, and this makes it difficult to pick a book back up and pick up exactly where we left off. You can see a lot more movies than you can read books solely because it takes more time to read a book than see a movie. Nevertheless, if you have the time and the imagination, (not all of us have even one of these let alone the other one), books are usually better (mainly because you control the imagination). However, there are plenty of examples of movies that were better than the book.
Some books are just horribly written. Full of exposition and description but lacking character, or the opposite, full of plot and dialogue but devoid of any emotion or meaning. But often a good screen writer and director can understand the intent and can visualize and make visual in mere moments what it took the writer hundreds or thousand of words to do. It is not because we lack imagination that we go to the movies instead of reading. It is because we can not envision something we have never experienced and we can not experience something we can not envision. Movies merge the experience and the vision by uniting our emotions with our senses and our intellect.
A good example of a badly written book that was transformed into a great set of movies is the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. The author, J.R. Tolkien, tried to make a reference book on the geography and history of Middle Earth into three novels, where the plot and characters are subservient to the descriptions of Middle Earth and its history. The movies were able to juxtapose these elements in real time with the narrative appearing simultaneously on the screen with the visual geography and history.
A second example is Twilight. I know I am going to be on a lot of peoples hit list for these remarks, but here goes. The book has dialogue that is juvenile and pretentious and just goes on and on about one trivial behavioral detail after another with regard to the looks and actions of its two main characters. As is true of many books, the middle part of it is not part of the storyline, and contains details that do not tell us what is important about the characters motivations or feelings. Most of the characters other than Bella and Edward are mere props in the book, stilted. There is no third character to make transitions or give us the tension that exists in a trilogy. The movie cuts out all of this redundant dialogue not only because it has to in order to make the movie 2 hours long instead of 20, but because it simply is not necessary. We are more interested in why Bella wants to become a vampire and throw her life away to a man/vampire she is in love with than we are with the details of what she is thinking from moment to moment on and on for what seems like decades. Through the non-verbal power of music and imagery, the movie intuitively tells us why and expresses the emotions in a minute that the book takes forever to do so.
These two examples were picked because they are kind of polar opposites. Tolkien – too much description and exposition and history with a lack of character development. Twilight with too much emphasis on the characters details but not enough context to see why the characters behave the way they do. The shallowness of the dialogue is another matter.
Below you will find some WEB articles comparing film to books.
Comparison of Lord of the Rings Books to the Movies
28 Reasons Why Twilight the movie Is Better Than Twilight the book DON’T MISS THE LAST FEW IN THIS SLIDESHOW. HILARIOUS.
Books Versus Movies – Time Magazine Movie Critic
Essays: Reading a Book Versus Watching a Movie
Upton Sinclairs Oil Versus Movie There Will Be Blood VERY ACADEMIC.
Revelations: Books Vs. Movies by Clive Barker VERY TRUTHFUL
Great Geek Debates: Books Vs. Movies Wired Magazine TRUE TO ITS TITLE
463 Movies Better Than the Book – From Book Readers
The Greatest 9,331 Movies Of All Time As Compiled By Brad Bourland
The movie websites below contain various lists of the best movies out today, on DVD, and best movies of all time, along with reviews and details on each of these movies. At the end of this article there is a list of lists, a list of 3,600 lists of movies. But perhaps the lengthiest and most sincere quest to catalog the best movies of all time has to go to Brad Bourland, a simple grocery clerk from Austin, Texas, who has spent many years of his life reviewing all of the movie review websites in an attempt to conduct a meta review, a review of all of the reviewers, of the top 9,331 movies of all time.
Brad’s project began back in 2001, when he started with the reasonable goal of rating 200-300 films. Nine years later, after spending more than 1,600 hours in seven libraries in three states, logging more than 4,000 hours on dozens of computers, and rummaging through 110 books, his project was ready for the masses.
This link is to an article in Salon on this mans single minded quest. Brads website, which contains the full list in MS Word format, is contained as a link within the Salon article.
Best Movie Websites
IMDB.com
IMBD is the standard against which all other movie/tv websites are compared. It has more movies listed and has a professional version which can be used if you are in the industry and searching for talent, looking for films in production, shopping your resume, etc. It has a large number of ways to search for films and a huge database. And you can create you own personal list of films with links to the movies in the IMDB database. It ranks all movies by critics and users, so you can get a list of the best 250 movies as reviewed by users of IMDB, or the worst 100 movies of all time as determined by users... You can look up virtually anything about a movie: cast, director, editing, art direction, awards, costumes, photography, plot, and much much more. You can also view many movies and tv shows online.
While IMDB has more films and more info. on each film, including more reviews, than any other website, it can be overwhelming at times, and it does not have a real clean interface. For example, the listing of movies to watch online is not organized and finding movie reviews involves more than a couple mouse clicks. But if you want to know exactly how each audience voted for a film, from age group to gender, etc., this site has a vast amount of info. It can take some getting used to. However, once you learn it, this site will be your favorite.
VideoHound’s Golden Movie Retriever
For many years VideoHound published a giant quality paperback book in 8 by 10 inch newspaper thin pages titled the Golden Movie Retriever. The book is over 2,000 pages long and all good independent video rental stores had a copy. That book had a gazillion movie reviews, along with several hundred lists of movies in categories you could not find anyplace else, like slasher films, hipster films, cult classic, etc. Now finally, it also has a website. The website has films listed in 26 different genres, including ones you won’t find elsewhere, like Film Noir, Art and Cult Films, Religion and Spirituality, Social Issues, and True Stories. It also has the lists. 24 pages of list names, for a total of several hundred different lists, such as for example a list of 3-D Flicks, a list of movies about Alien Babes, a list of movies about amnesia, a list of movies about Meteors and Asteroids, etc.
Videohound is also the one of a few sites to realize that Film Awards deserves it’s own menu tab. There simply are so many different organizations awarding films in so many different categories for so many decades that Awards deserves its own menu tab.
In addition to all the genres and categories which you can use to find films, this site also lets you browse films functionally by Actors, Directors, Cinematographers, Composers, and Writers.
VideoHound also has a tab for blogs such as reviews of current films and a store where you can purchase books or DVDs. The one thing you can’t do is directly go to Amazon as Videohound has its own growing store of books and DVDs, usually at significantly less than retail prices, but also usually not as low as used items on Amazon.
Finally, this site allows you to create your own profile. There is a menu tab for creating and accessing your profile. From here you can create your own list of movies you have seen or want to see and rate them and review them. This is a very easy to use system. You can add movies to your personal list and rate them from within almost any menu. For example, using a search for a movie. For example, by finding the movie by browsing movies in a genre. You can share the entire list or a customized subset from your list with others via an email system. You can also share by sending to facebook, etc, as well as follow on Facebook, Twitter, etc.. And you can immediately share your thoughts via Twitter, Delicious, Digg, etc. The only downside is that you can not see or edit your lists in a spreadsheet like format and you can not download your lists to Excel. See They Shoot Pictures Don’t They link below for an Excel spreadsheet of 8,800 best films that you can edit in Excel.
About the only criticism of this site besides the inability to get your custom lists you made and your favorite movies as a spreadsheet file is that this site is a little slow from time to time.
Films101.com
The great thing about this site is that you can get lists of the top 200 or so films in each genre with links to the info. on each film in imdb.com, and mrqe.com. More on the latter in a moment. This site is linked to several other sites including amazon.com so you can buy a new or used DVD. However, I could not find a link to netflix.com on this site.
AllMovie.com
This site lists thousands of movies by type/category. The menu allows you to list all films in each category or search for a specific film. There are 12 categories. The top few to several hundred films (depending on category) are listed for each category, sorted by the films overall rating on a 5 star system. The short description in the listing has title, year, and director, with links to a full description of the film that includes awards, cast, etc. The full description of the film includes a list of similar works and related works, which is very helpful if you like the film and want to find other related or similar works. What makes this site unique is that there is a link to info. on the DVD of the movie. And this link has a huge amount of info. on the DVD such as a listing of all extra features on the DVD, the number of DVDs in the set, the total length, menu options, aspect ratio, etc. This site has two companion sites called AllMusic and Allgame which you can get to from the AllMovie website. The AllMusic site is very good.
MRQE.com
This stands for Movie Review Query Engine. When you search for a film in this database or find it on a list, you then get a web linked list of all of the reviews that were ever done on the movie, with web links to each review. You also get a meta-review, a statistical analysis of what all of the critics together thought of the movie on a scale of 1 to 5 as a bar chart. You can even rank the list of reviews from good to bad, so the best reviews are at the top and the worst at the bottom. All movies on this database/website are also linked to Netflix, Amazon, Blockbuster, etc. so you can automatically go to the movie on that particular site that you choose and either order it, rent it, or watch it immediately, or put in you queue of movies to be watched.
Metacritic.com
Similar to MRQE, but instead of looking at what lots of different critics each thought of a movie or music, this site compiles scores from all the critics and gives a composite result. While MRQE does a little of this, this site does it better and rates new movies, movies on DVD, new TV, older TV, and music. It does this by genre and alphabetically. It provides lists of the composite scores in a number of different categories. And it even lets you see how each critic compares to other critics on average. For example: Roger Ebert ranks all movies an average of 9 points higher than the average, or Village Voice ranks all movies an average of 5 points lower.
Theyshootpictures.com
This is an extremely extensive list of films. The top 400 films have built in mini-descriptions so you don’t have to flip to another website. The top 1000 reviews can be sorted. And if you want to edit the list for your own personal list, you can download the top 8,800 films of all time as an Excel file and then play around with this all you want. (You must have Excel or this link will not work.) The excel file has two hyperlink fields. One field for Amazon and the other for IMDB.com. So you can do an incredible amount offline with this excel file. The excel table has an extensive list of fields/columns, and you can obviously add columns to it once you download it. This site also has a very long list of weblinks to hundreds of other film websites. This is a well organized site that allows you to look at lists of movies and their weblinks in many many different ways.
EmpireOnline.com
If you are only interested in new movies, upcoming movies, and what’s out and coming out on DVD, this is the best site there is. Extensive coverage of new films with a month by month release date catalog that looks forward over a year and a half. This is the same company that makes the British magazine Empire, the slickest and best movie magazine on the market.
Rogerebert.com
While Empire may be the slickest and largest site for examining new movies, Roger Ebert’s site is the best way to very quickly review all of the current releases at theatres now. His one minute review section has very concise reviews of most if not all of the currently released movies in theatres now. If you are planning on seeing a movie tonight and have lots of choices but little time to make a decision, you can get the quickest and probably the best and most reliable reviews from this site. Of course, Roger also has his reviews of older movies here as well, and the latest news from Hollywood.
“Best of Lists” List of Movie Lists
About 3,600 different lists of movies, such as cult films, chick flicks, Bond movies, top spiritual films, MTV Movie Awards, AFI’s 100 Years 100 Movies, Independent Spirit Awards, etc. If you don’t know exactly what you want to watch but have and idea, use one of these lists to help you.
Best movies so far in 2010
(If not available on DVD or Netflix now, will be by end of year)
Toy Story 3
Inception
Shutter Island
Joan Rivers – A Piece of Work
The Runaways
Alice in Wonderland
The Wolfman
The Book of Eli
Splice
Scott Pilgrim Versus The World
The Lovely Bones
Diary of A Wimpy Kid
Get Him To The Greek
Creation
The Town
The Kids Are All Right
The Eclipse
Brooklyn’s Finest
A Million In The Morning
Best TV Shows so Far in 2010
Mad Men
Fringe
Boston MED
Boardwalk Empire
House, M.D.
The Big Bang Theory (a sitcom)
Chelsea Handler Late Night
Haven – New
The United States of Tara
The Office
Glee
Weeds
The Secret Life of the American Teenager
Dexter
30 Rock
Best TV Shows Of All Time
The Simpsons
30 Days
Weeds
The Closer
Intervention
Secret Life of An American Teenager
Star Trek – The Next Generation
120 Minutes
MTV Unplugged
Project Runway
Friends
Seinfeld
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
The Cosby Show
Mork and Mindy
30 Rock
House
Greys Anatomy
Heroes
The Gilmore Girls
True Blood
The X Files
ER
The Sopranos
WKRP in Cincinnatti
The Wire
Twin Peaks
Six Feet Under
Hill Street Blues
Saturday Night Live
Cheers
All in The Family
The Daily Show
Freaks and Geeks
Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman
Taxi
Get Smart
The Jeffersons
Ren and Stimpy
Farscape
Battlestar Galactica
South Park
Mad Men
M.A.S.H.
The Andy Griffith Show
The Dick Van Dyke Show
Best News, Political, and Talk Shows of All Time
Nightline
60 Minutes
PBS Frontline
The Rachel Maddow Show
The Daily Show
Oprah Winfrey
Tyra AKA The Tyra Show
Good to Great Movies and Documentaries and TV Out on DVD or Netflix Now
Madmen – Season 3
The Blues – A Documentary on Seven DVDs
30 Days – Season 1 (Morgon Spurlock who did Super Size Me created this)
Blue State
Speak
Precious: Based on the novel by Sapphire
The Cove – Best documentary of 2009
Food Inc. Best documentary of 2009
Crazy Heart
Diary of A Wimpy Kid
Bad Lieutenant
Inglorius Basterds
A Serious Man
Up In The Air
Up
Drag Me To Hell
Public Enemies
Avatar
The Hangover
Nine
Where The Wild Things Are
It’s Complicated
Sherlock Holmes
The Informant
Whip It
Moon
The Blind Side
Invictus
500 Days of Summer
Coraline
Star Trek
The Heart is A Drum Machine
The Beautiful Truth
King Corn
A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash
In the Realms of the Unreal
Hounddog
No Impact Man
Inked: The Best of Season One
The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc
The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill
Girls Rock
The Botany of Desire
The Future We Will Create
Mad Hot Ballroom
Rivers and Tides
12
Fuel
Quills
Brief Interviews With Hideous Men
Best Documentaries of All Time
Before perusing my list of best documentaries of all time, please take a look at the following website called Box Office Mojo. It includes a list of all documentaries that were introduced into theatres from 1982 to present, including their ranking in box office receipts, their life gross ticket revenues, number of theatres they were shown in, the date they were released to theatres, and weblinks to each of the documentaries with additional information
BTW Boxofficemojo is a great site if you are looking for statistical info on box office results. It has some amazing info. For example, did you know that ET the Extraterrestial was number one at the box office more weeks in a row than any other film, including Titanic?
BoxOfficeMojo.com.
Harlan County. U.S.A.
Hoop Dreams
The Thin Blue Line
The 11th Hour
A Crude Awakening
Who Killed The Electric Car
Home
Blue Water
Planet Earth
Life
Bowling For Columbine
The Fog of War
Supersize Me
Born Into Brothels
Food, Inc.
The Cove
Fahrenheit 911
Winged Migration
March of the Penguins
Enron: The Smartest Guys in The Room
A Brief History of Time
The U.S. Versus John Lennon
More Than A Game
The Most Dangerous Man in America….
This Film Is Not Yet Rated
Bushs Brain
Howard Zinn: You Can’t Be Neutral On A Moving Train
Jimmy Carter, Main From Plains
King Corn
Can Mr. Smith Get to Washington Anymore?
Woodstock
Sicko
Hearts and Minds
Triumph Of The Will
No End In Sight
The Ascent of Man
The Corporation
Night and Fog
The Times of Harvey Milk
Berkley in the 1960s
The War Room
Dark Days
The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill
The War At Home
Streetwize
Outfoxed: Rupert Murdochs War on Journalism
The Slow Poisoning of India
A War On Science
Darwins Nightmare
Cosmos
Jonestown
Aileen Wournos: The Selling of A Serial Killer
Jesus Heart
Young@Heart
Movies To Come To Theatres Soon – Remainder of 2010
** Means will probably also be a hit at the box office
** The Town
Legend of The Guardians (3D)
The Virginity Hit
A Mothers Courage: Talking Back to Autism
Buried
Collapse
Ghetto Physics: Will The Real Pimps and Hos Please Stand Up
Megamind
Sin City 2
When Worlds Collide
The Other Side
The Next 3 Days
True Grit – Remake by the Coen Brothers
Conviction
The Tourist – teams up Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp
Hereafter – Directed by Clint Eastwood
** The Social Network – About the beginnings of Facebook
How Do You Know
I’m Still Here – documentary on Joaquin Phoenix
Never Let Me Go
Catfish
** Wall Street – Money Never Sleeps – Oliver Stone has been slipping lately but this might be his comeback
The Tempest – Julie Taymors remake of Shakespeare from a feminist viewpoint. She did Across the Universe and Frida
** Little Fockers - just for the fun of it. Probably wont be as good as first two.
Black Swan – Natalie Portman. Directed by Aron Darunovsky - I know I spelled his name wrong.
** Freakonomics – series of 5 short documentaries taken from the book – each by different director
Nowhere Boy – early years of John Lennon
Fair Game
The Next Three Days
** Burlesque – Christina Aguilera and Kristen Bell
Love and Other Drugs
Somewhere
Blue Valentine
The Tree of Life
Due Date
Movies That May Be Good but Will be Very Violent and Possibly Gruesome
127 Hours
Buried
Devil – by M. Night Shyalaman. This film is not terribly violent. But its emphasis on religious beliefs and meanings may be a little controversial. Can M. Night return to the success he had with The Sixth Sense and Signs?
Best Film Directors of All Time
Woody Allen
Robert Altman
Paul Thomas Anderson
Judd Apatow
Darren Aronofsky
Caroll Ballard
Warren Beatty
Ingmar Bergman
Bernardo Bertolucci
Kathryn Bigelow
Albert Brooks
James Cameron
John Cassavettes
Ethan and Joel Coen
Francis Ford Coppola
David Cronenberg
Brian De Palma
Guillermo del Toro
Jonathan Demme
Clint Eastwood
David Fincher
Milos Forman
William Friedkin
Terry Gilliam
Alfred Hitchcock
Peter Jackson
Lawrence Kasdan
Elia Kazan
Stanley Kubrick
David Lean
Spike Lee
Sidney Lumet
David Lynch
Terrence Malick
David Mamet
Michael Mann
Sam Mendes
Mike Nichols
Alan Parker
Arthur Penn
Sean Penn
Roman Polanski
Sydney Pollack
Otto Preminger
Sam Raimi
Ken Russell
John Sayles
Martin Scorsese
Ridley Scott
Steven Soderbergh
Steven Spielberg
Oliver Stone
Quentin Tarantino
Francois Truffaut
John Waters
Orson Welles
Frederick Wiseman
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