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With elections coming up in just a couple of weeks the local paper is full of letters endorsing or attacking candidates, and we decided to join the fray with an endorsement of David LaGrand for the State Senate. For those who don’t know David, he’s probably best known around Grand Rapids for his role in the founding of Four Friends Coffee Shop and more recently Wealthy Street Bakery. There’s a tight word limit on letters to the paper and so there’s not much detail, but if you’re interested you can find out more on his website. ...

A few people emailed me over the past few weeks to say that comments weren’t working on this site. To be honest I’ve been enjoying the absence of spam that that brought, but the time came and the comments should now be fixed. So feel free to post away, or not, as you see fit. I’ve also moved my news feeds to a new (to me) service called feedburner that lets me keep better track of how many people are reading them, and possibly add other services in time. If you currently subscribe your newsreader _should_ pick up the change, but if not, or if you want to subscribe for the first time the URL you want is http://www.feedburner.com/jystewart/anthropic ...

It’s been a slow few months for films at UICA, but the schedule seems to be picking up and we made our first visit in a while to see Half Nelson, a film I’d been looking forward to since reading about it in Andrew O’Hehir’s compelling but all too often frustrating (given how few of the films he mentions make it here) column for Salon, Beyond The Multiplex. As O’Hehir makes clear, this is most definitely not another “inspirational-teacher flick” in the vein of To Sir With Love. As befits a film with quite this much indie-cred, its tale is far more ambiguous. Ryan Gosling’s teacher certainly has his moments of inspirational teaching (and his decision to teach history to these disenfranchised minority kids through Marxist influenced dialectics is a daring decision in an America that has yet to get past the Red Scare) but his life is anything but inspiring. ...

Having very much enjoyed The Virgin Suicides and loved Lost In Translation, I tried to ignore the negative buzz around Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette. It may have been booed in Cannes, but it wasn’t too hard to believe that those reports were overplayed and that some of the response had come from French critics who shared their nation’s resentment towards that most controversial of queens. The film’s scenes are as luscious as was to be expected, the choice and use of music impeccable, the performances are strong, and the timing gives a good sense of the emotional ups and downs we are led to believe Marie Antoinette was experiencing as she negotiated life in the last days of the French court. But overall, it felt like a film of ‘moments’. There are many good pieces but they didn’t come together to form a compelling movie. ...

Today we got our first political phone call of this election cycle. It was a pre-recorded message from some fear-mongering group posing as some sort of ‘family defense’ group (I didn’t catch their actual name) complaining about Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm’s policies on policing. Apparently she’s not strong enough to defend the poor scared suburban middle classes. Or something like that. But politics I vehemently disagree with aside, I was struck by the didactic tone of the message. I’m used to the pre-recorded messages at least making some attempt to engage the listener, usually by starting with a greeting. This one launched into a tirade without any introduction whatsoever. I couldn’t help but feel like the person scripting it wasn’t used to real human interaction. ...

jQuery keeps picking up speed. The lightweight (but with its plugins, apparently not feature light) javascript library is to be included in the next version of drupal and there appears to be some effort to provide rails helpers that will use jQuery rather than prototype. That project will probably need to provide a drop-in replacement to convert me. Rails makes prototype use so very easy. But if it does, I’m sure I’ll be making use of my friend Karl’s recently announced Learning jQuery blog, which seems a great source of tutorials. ...

There’s always some trepidation when a favourite artist moves into a new medium. Just as many great music video directors have made dreadful movies and songwriters aren’t necessarily the best poets, not all novelists do a great job of writing for the big screen. But I have such faith in Douglas Coupland, that there’s nothing but enthusiasm in my response to the news that he’s shopping a TV series, Extinction Event: ...

Last time we saw Wilco play—two years ago on the A Ghost Is Born tour—it wasn’t until the third encore that they seemed ready to relax. Having performed a remarkable, polished set and two exceedingly strong follow ups, they were called out by the fans one last time and loosened up for a rendition of The Late Greats. Friday night’s set in Lansing was an altogether different affair. This time around it seemed that the band had hit the road not to showcase a new album but to have some fun. Their entrance and the first two songs was almost jaunty, and they played around with some arrangements including a guitar solo early on that could have become painfully self-indulgent in the hands of a lesser player than Nels Cline. Jeff Tweedy was unusually quiet on stage, a fact that he acknowledged during one of his rare comments, but he assured us that he was having a great time. ...

The New York Times today ran a piece talking about organizations and businesses developing strong local neighbourhoods and green buildings. Their lead profile is of Guy Bazzani, President of Bazzani Associates. Working with The Image Shoppe I’ve worked on Bazzani Associates’ website over the past eighteen months. We’re currently testing a few new features showcasing the company’s work in the local community, and it’s a shame they weren’t ready to launch before the article went to press. But Bazzani Associates are doing good work, and it’s good to see them getting deserved attention. ...

The news of the potential closure of my old department has led me to wondering what the future is for a subject like physics, which in turn had me thinking about its past. While many have been worrying lately about declining interest in a number of ‘core’ academic subjects, such as physics, it is easy to forget that the subject only came into existence as a distinct discipline within the past two centuries. Many of the great heroes of physics–people like Kepler, Galileo, and Newton–would never have considered themselves physicists, probably leaning toward the term ’natural philosophers.’ Maxwell’s contributions to the discipline were immense, but he’s also notable for being one of the earlier practitioners to go by the name ‘physicist’. ...