What grinds my gears

A trope sometimes seen in movies and TV series (especially in the 80's, somewhat less nowadays) is that aliens come from another star system here in order to harvest resources that they don't have. Often this is water, sometimes something else. There are lots of problems with that premise (one of them being that it assumes that the Earth is somehow special, that it's one of the extremely rare planets in the galaxy that contains those precious resources in abundance. This couldn't be farther from the truth. For example, and unlike most people seem to think, water is one of the most common compound elements in the universe, and can be easily found in things like comets, moons and planets. The same goes for most other elements. An alien race sufficiently advanced to travel interstellar distances could certainly harvest those resources from almost anywhere.) However, the one thing that most people never think of is the way in which the aliens are supposed to lift eg. mill...

For several years after Star Wars The Phantom Menace was released, I just couldn't see what was so horribly wrong about it, and why people hated it. The subsequent two movies were quite ok as well. Now, don't get me wrong. Back then I thought that the vast majority of people hated it simply because the vast majority of other people hated it, and it was just a hip and cool to hate it (a phenomenon I have complained about several times,) and I still think that's mostly the case. However , I have later come to realize that some of the criticism of the prequel trilogy is, indeed, valid. I have come to realize that my own appreciation of the trilogy has dropped significantly since those times. What changed my opinion the most was the great review series done by The Distressed Watcher (who I think made a terrific job at analyzing it, and sadly has gone mostly unnoticed by the vast majority of people, who only know the review by Red Letter Media which, while funny, I don...

There's a rather curious misconception, or intuition, that many people have related to gravity, and this is sometimes seen in movies and TV. This misconception is that if there's a very large object orbiting a planet (eg. Earth) and it's broken up to small pieces, all of the pieces will fall down. (A related concept is that if small pieces get loose from the large object, eg. garbage or such, they will likewise fall down to the planet.) I find this misconception rather curious. It's the exact reverse of Aristotelian gravity. You see, in antiquity there was among some philosophers the concept that heavier objects fall faster than lighter objects. In this case it's the exact reverse: The intuition seems to be that lighter objects fall faster (ie. are pulled more strongly by the planet's gravity) than heavier objects. If the orbiting heavy object gets broken to smaller pieces, or it lets small pieces loose, those pieces will now be pulled by the planet's gr...

Homeopathy is most certainly not the only snake oil salesmanship out there that's a pure sham, but it's probably the one that makes the most money worldwide. (There are other shams that may make more money than homeopathy, but they are usually not related to selling supposedly medicinal products.) Homeopathic products are 100% placebos, pure and simple, yet it's taken really seriously among many people, and many claims of successful clinical studies and efficacy abound. There are published papers and lots of positive experiments that claim that homeopathy fares much better than placebos in properly-conducted double-blind trials. But how can there be, given that homeopathic products are just placebos? It's not hard to get such results. There are some simple tricks that can be used for this. For example: When conducting an experimental trial, minimize the amount of test subjects. For example, rather than testing on 500 people, test on 20. Engage in confirmation bi...

One common sentiment that many people express goes something like this: " Your freedom of expression ends immediately when you hurt someone. " It's sometimes described with an analogy: " You are free to wave your arms around, but that freedom ends immediately when you hit someone with them. " This is a rather deceptive sentiment because it's so easy to agree with, when you don't think about it too much, yet it's quite hideous. There's a big difference between hurting someone physically and hurting someone's feelings. The former is an objective and universal thing. Hitting someone on the face will hurt every single person in existence, and it's not a question of opinion, education, culture or personal preference. It's quite an objective thing. Hurting someone's feelings, however, is completely subjective. It depends completely on one's personality, background and a ton of other things. What hurts someone may well not hurt...

I have commented in previous posts, how among "armchair movie critics" and internet reviewers it seems to be an unwritten rule that if the majority of other people detest a particular movie (or franchise) then everyone must detest it, lest their credibility be tarnished. There are many, many examples of this. For instance, you absolutely must detest the Star Wars prequel trilogy (especially the first film), the second and third Matrix movies and, as a more minor example, the Battleship movie. If you don't, then you are strange and without any credibility. Personally I would add the Twilight saga to this list. Especially the first movie. It's, once again, one of those movie franchises that everybody must hate, because everybody else also hates them. It's not even allowed to say "it was ok." Even that's too much. I'm not saying that the Twilight movies are the best masterpieces ever made (after all, only an extremely small minority of all mov...

It seems to have been a trend during the last decade or so that every time they make a movie that's a remake or adaptation of a story, they always modernize it to happen in the modern world, even if the original story is set to happen many decades ago. It doesn't really matter if the original story is set to happen in the 1980's or the 1920's, the trend seems to be to always adapt it to happen in the 2000's. Sometimes this has no big impact in the story, so no bad consequences follow this modernization. However, oftentimes they have to bend over backwards in order to make the adaptation work. A very typical example is that 20+ years ago almost nobody had a cellphone, while nowadays it's rare for somebody to not have one. Thus if the story relies on people being stranded or otherwise cut from civilization or the authorities, the adaptation needs to go to extra lengths to try to explain why the cellphones aren't working or why they don't have them. And...