Just wanted to point out that Meet the Fockers has now outgrossed The Incredibles.

Wow. Just… wow. Really? Wow.

Did you buy any MGM DVDs between 1998 and 2003? If so, you can probably score a free DVD due to a class action lawsuit.

I’ve been aware of the Folding @ Home distributed computing project for years. But, I was never that interested in helping out because I didn’t understand what my spare CPU cycles were being used for. Now, thanks to Bill Bryson’s A History of Nearly Everything, protein folding not only makes sense, it’s exciting!

In 2003, the Human Genome Project was completed, which basically made an inventory of all human genes. But as MIT’s Eric Linder put it, the genome is like a list of body parts, but it says nothing of how they work. Before we make designer babies or wipe out Alzheimers and AIDS, we need an operating manual for how to use all those parts. This operating manual is the human proteome, which would describe how our proteins actually work when DNA tells them to.

Unfortunately, proteins are even more complicated than DNA. As Bryson puts it, “…as many as a hundred million of them may be busy in any cell at any moment. That’s a lot of activity to try to figure out. Worse, proteins’ behavior and functions are not based simply on their chemistry, as with genes, but also on their shapes. To function, a protein must not only have the necessary chemical components, properly assembled, but they must also be folded into an extremely specific shape.”

So, that’s the bad news. The good news is that protein folding is mathematical enough to simulated by a computer. Figuring out how proteins fold is still an insanely complicated one, but with enough time and power, it can be done - and you and I can help! All we have to do to help cure Alzheimers and countless other diseases is let our computers make use of their idle time by downloading this program.

Pretty spiffy, eh?

But that’s not all. Proteins & DNA are, we’re discovering, the ultimate nanomachines - complex, tiny robots capable of quickly building and repairing damn near anything. If we can figure out how they work, we may eventually be able to use them ourselves to build and repair, um… yeah, damn near anything. To some, this is a scary thought. To sci-fi fans, it’s an irresistibly attractive notion. Of course, we’re still centuries away, but the early steps are happening right now, and you can participate! I know I’m going to.

I can’t describe Lisa Debenedictis’s music without using the word ’shimmering.’ Think ‘Subterranean Homesick Alien’ by Radiohead. Anyway, it’s… pretty. You can downlload her entire first album from her website.

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The Wisdom of Crowds has a fascinating bit on movie theater prices on page 98 that I’ll quote:

One of the more perplexing examples of the triumph of convention over rationality is movie theaters, where it costs you as much to see a total dog that’s limping its way through its last week of release as it does to see a hugely popular film on opening night. Most of us can’t remember when it was done differently, so the practice seems only natural. But from an economic perspective, it makes little sense. In any given week, some movies will be playing to packed houses, while others will be playing to vacant theaters. Typically, when demand is high and supply is low, companies should raise prices, and when demand is low and supply is high, they should lower prices. But movie theaters just keep charging the same price for all their products, no matter how popular or unpopular.

[snip] “…if theaters make most of their money on concessions [they do], and their real imperative is to get people into the theater, then there’s no logic to charging someone $10 to see Cuba Gooding Jr. in Snow Dogs in its fifth week of release. Just as retail stores mark down inventory to move it, theaters could mark down movies to lure more customers.

So why don’t they? Theaters off a host of excuses. First, they insist (as the music industry once did) that moviegoers don’t care about price, so that slashing prices on less popular films won’t bring in any more business. This is something you hear about cultural products in general but that is, on its face, untrue. It’s an especially strange argument to make about movies, when we know that millions of Americans who won’t shell out $8 to see a not-so-great flick in the theater will happily spend $ or $4 to watch the same movie on their twenty-seven-inch TV. In 2002, Americans spent $1 billion more on video rentals than on movies in theaters. That year, the most popular video rental in the country was Don’t Say a Word, a Michael Douglas thriller that earned a mediocre $55 million at the box office. Clearly, there were lots of people who thought Don’t Say a Word wasn’t worth $9 but was worth $4, which suggests that there is a lot of cash being spent at Blockbuster that theater owners could be claiming instead.

Really, the theater’s blind economic ignorance is mindboggling. How many times have you heard someone say (or said so yourself), “I dunno, I’ll wait until it comes out on DVD.” And how many people have you heard complain about the prices of movie tickets these days? All of the above points make a ridiculously strong argument for lower ticket prices, especially for films that are playing to empty showing rooms, week after week.

Behold, the power of convention! Behold, the stupidity of movie industry!

This is a hook-filled piece of indie rock doesn’t break ground, but it does entertain and perhaps, move. Two more songs are available for download via the website.

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