Hard Knock Lives.


Following on the heels of Jim Kirk and Jay Gatsby, there’s plenty more action in the trailer bin this week. First up, Hugh Jackman’s Logan heads off to Japan in the James Mangold’s The Wolverine, with Brian Tee, Will Yun Lee, Svetlana Khodchenkova, Hiroyuki Sanada, Tao Okamoto, Rila Fukushima, and Famke Janssen.

I’ve seen about half of the first Wolverine movie twice now on two different plane trips, and wasn’t impressed. Still, Marvel’s been on a roll lately, and with Mangold in the director’s chair and a shift in scenery, this could potentially make for some quality summer air-conditioning.


Elsewhere in the comic book world, Hit-Girl et al face some Freaks & Geeks-style dilemmas in the first trailer for Kick-Ass 2. (Note: This is a red-band trailer, so NSFW — mainly because Hit-Girl still swears like a sailor.)

The first outing was a great time at the movies, so this one has my ticket even if Matthew Vaughn and Nicolas Cage have left the premises. I have high hopes for Jim Carrey, reportedly the best thing about The Incredible Burt Wonderstone, as Colonel Stars and Stripes.


And while we’re watching people play super-hero dress-up on the red band frequency, roid-raging bodybuilders Mark Wahlberg, Dwayne Johnson, and Anthony Mackie try to make crime pay in the red-band trailer for Michael Bay’s Pain & Gain, i.e. Michael Bay’s apparent stab at a Coen-brother crime noir. (This one’s more NSFW, for all the Bayhem reasons you’d expect.)

There’s very little chance I pay money to see this film, partly because the only Michael Bay movie I’ve ever been entertained by was The Island, and mainly because I’m getting a little sick of films trying to mainstream torture of late. Still, this is a highly likable cast, and dubious credit where due: As with Bad Boys 2, nobody brings cartoonish Grand Theft Auto: Vice City-style debauchery to life quite like Mr. Bay.


Update: I meant to post this yesterday with the others, but forgot — and that’s how much of an impression this trailer made on me. Nonetheless, Brad Pitt and Mireille Enos struggle to balance family life and the zombie apocalypse in the trailer for Marc Forster’s loose adaptation of Max Brooks’ World War Z, also with Bryan Cranston, David Morse, James Badge Dale, and Matthew Fox. Eh, maybe.

The Doctors Get Paid.

“This is basically never mentioned in the US health care policy debate but the reason why foreign prices are lower is not mysterious — they have laws forcing the prices down. The fact that we allow such high prices is why health care in America is hard to afford. The high prices make private health care extraordinarily expensive to patients and employers, and the same high prices make it difficult for the government to cover everything through public sector insurance. Canada, where the prices are lower, manages to have a more robust welfare state without higher taxes for precisely this reason.”

As Matt Yglesias points out, one of the many reasons health care is so expensive in the United States: doctors are paid way too much. See also: 21 graphs that show America’s health-care prices are ludicrous. And after that: The Serpent on the Staff.

Along with pretty much always being on the wrong side of reform, the American Medical Association has contributed heavily to this problem. First, by working to artificially limit the supply of doctors for decades, and thus helping to ensure the doctors we do have are burdened with crushing amounts of debt. Second, by pushing for a cap on Medicare-supported residencies in 1997, further decreasing the US supply of doctors — They’ve since reversed course on that. And third, by continually skewing Medicare payment models and reimbursement rates. Don’t expect this issue to be resolved anytime soon.

Do Green Lights Cause Lens Flare?


“My life, Old Sport, has got to be like this.” Two new TV spots hit for Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, now only a little over a month away. As I’ve said before, this looks like it’s either going to be amazing or a total train wreck.

Also in the bin of late, Kirk steps up after a few anti-Federation terrorist attacks in the newest trailer for J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek: Into Darkness. Man, Benny Cumberbatch talks a lot of smack, doesn’t he? Well, if that’s what it takes to get into Smaug shape, so be it.

A Better Cloaking Device.

“Whilst previous cloaking studies have used metamaterials to divert, or bend, the incoming waves around an object, this new method, which the researchers dub ‘mantle cloaking’, uses an ultrathin metallic metascreen to cancel out the waves as they are scattered off the cloaked object.”

Physicists get ever closer to a Harry Potter-style invisibility cloak with a new, less-bulky metascreen that scatters nano-particles. “Moving forward, one of the key challenges for the researchers will be to use ‘mantle cloaking’ to hide an object from visible light.”

The Future is Off-World.

“In the next generation or two—say the next 30 to 60 years—there will be an irreversible human migration to a permanent space colony. Some people will tell you that this new colony will be on the moon, or an asteroid—in my opinion asteroids are a great place to go, but mostly for mining. I think the location is likely to be Mars.”

James Fallows speaks with Space Adventures co-founder Eric Anderson on the coming age of space colonization. “One key to making all this happen is that we need to use the resources of space to help us colonize space…The near-Earth asteroids, which are very, very close to the Earth, are filled with resources that would be useful for people wanting to go to Mars, or anywhere else in the solar system. They contain precious resources like water, rocket fuel, strategic metals.”

Along the same lines, and from last June, a Dutch company called Mars One has a very specific timetable in place for Mars colonization. “Lansdorp plans to send another couple of adventurous astronauts to join the colony every two years, but the idea is that no one gets a return journey. This is a permanent base, a Plymouth Rock in an entirely new world that will begin the long, slow and painstaking process of terraforming it.” The first four colonists, set to leave Earth in 2023, will be chosen this year.

Update: So far, it seems, the Mars One project has received 40,000 applications.

Five Men of Harvard…

…gained victory today. (Sung to the tune of this.) Per tradition, I was out in Seattle over the past weekend for my college group of friends’ annual March Madness festivities. And, for the first time since…well, ever, Harvard actually won a game. This more than makes up for an otherwise sleepy set of second/third round match-ups — the most exciting by far was Butler v. Marquette — as well as my already busted bracket. I inexcusably bought the Gonzaga hype.

A Song of Ice and Flynn.


Less than a fortnight before the first half of A Storm of Swords gets its close-up, HBO releases an extended trailer for Game of Thrones Season 3. Looks solid as usual, although biting Daft Punk from the very memorable Tron: Legacy teaser is an odd choice.

Of course, if this TRON-Tyrion mash-up whetted your appetite for GRRM retro-style — Thatcher! Jazzercise! Lipgloss! — look no further than Game of Thrones‘s mid-90’s-style credits, not unlike the Firefly one making the rounds awhile back.

Across the Gulf of Space.

“On August 25, 2012, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft measured drastic changes in radiation levels, more than 11 billion miles from the Sun. Anomalous cosmic rays, which are cosmic rays trapped in the outer heliosphere, all but vanished, dropping to less than 1 percent of previous amounts. At the same time, galactic cosmic rays – cosmic radiation from outside of the solar system – spiked to levels not seen since Voyager’s launch, with intensities as much as twice previous levels.”

It’s been out in the fringe territories for a few years, but apparently now it’s official: Voyager I has left the Solar System. “We’re in a new region. And everything we’re measuring is different and exciting.”

Update: Belay that- NASA’s Voyager team says hold the champagne: “In December 2012, the Voyager science team reported that Voyager 1 is within a new region called ‘the magnetic highway’ where energetic particles changed dramatically. A change in the direction of the magnetic field is the last critical indicator of reaching interstellar space and that change of direction has not yet been observed.”

At Least Homer Read It.

Social Media friends and Flickr followers have probably already noticed that my actual doctoral diploma arrived in the mail last week. (Speaking of which, there’s a good economics dissertation to be written on the bizarrely high cost of professional framing.) On the same day, I also received this sweet congratulations gift from my girlfriend Amy: A print of the estimable Professor Frink examining Homer J. Simpson’s (lack of) brainwaves as he peruses the old dissertation, while Berk and I look on.

FWIW, this particular piece of awesome was drawn on commission by former Simpsons illustrator Gary Yap, who can be found on Etsy for custom works. He also apparently perused my Flickr feed and/or GitM for our look and general inspiration (Note the back of the book and Berk eyeing the Roomba.) I wonder if he made it as far as the shelves of old Simpsons toys, currently collecting dust and resale value in a Chesapeake, VA attic. In any case, very cool.

Things I’ve Learned from the Archives, 2002-03.

So, after more hours than I’d like to admit, I’ve made it through the first Movable Type year (2002-2003) of recategorizing and retagging the GitM archives. Among the things I’ve learned so far:

  • Paul Rudd will be playing Batman or Superman, against Christian Bale, in Wolfgang Petersen’s World’s Finest. Unless it’s Jude Law.

  • “Blue laser DVDs” are expected in the market by 2005…all models will be retro-compatible with red-laser DVD’s.

  • I had forgotten how this “pick-a-card” website could read my mind and had to figure it out all over again.

  • Lifetime’s Cinema Sequence is still quite a fun web game.

  • Over the past decade, GitM has gone from being worth nothing to $43,000 on the now-defunct Blogshares. Woot.

  • The Washington Post and Boston Globe have changed their link structures, so many old posts referencing their content are now dead ends.

  • I used to care more about deficits than I do now. (And, conversely, Republicans used to care much less.) In the parlance of the Beltway, “my views have evolved” on this subject.

    Part of the reason for the shift is the good versus bad spending dichotomy I talked about in 2010. But, more to the point, I’ve since read up on Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). (See also: Warren Mosler’s Seven Deadly Innocent Frauds of Economic Policy.)

    Basically, I was parroting the conventional wisdom on “fiscal responsibility” back then, and didn’t know what I was talking about.