Ongoing Process

Just wondering if anyone else Googled the mailing list. 

There’s much buzz around Avatar becoming the highest grossing film of all time in only a few weeks.  This buzz is well earned in many ways because it’s a landmark movie, but the more astute among you may say “Ah, but adjusted for inflation, it’s nowhere near the top!”.  This is true, it comes in 26th when looked at that way (still a remarkable feat given how briefly it’s been out).  But when you really think about it, money doesn’t directly measure the popularity of a movie: the number of tickets sold does.  But just as the dollars need to be adjusted for inflation for a more accurate measurement, the ticket sales must be adjusted to reflect changes in population (selling 100 million tickets in a population of 150 million is a very different thing than in a population of 300 million!).  So, based on estimated domestic ticket sales from Box Office Mojo and estimated population from the US Census Bureau, I present to you the actual most popular movies of all time.

Gone with the Wind still holds a record that is hard to imagine being broken.  At almost twice the popularity of its nearest competitor, every single citizen in the entire nation saw this movie an astonishing one and a half times!

Even with this more realistic picture of popularity, Avatar is still doing incredibly well at 68th place.  And it’s still steadily cranking out the sales, so I don’t doubt that its rank will climb much higher than that before it finishes its run.

It’s interesting to note that there hasn’t been a new top-10 movie in 28 years.  That means that most people currently alive in the country have never personally experienced a genuine cinematic phenomenon (especially not also being old enough to really appreciate it).  And in the last decade, Avatar aside, the best we’ve managed to do is 72nd.  Let’s hope that Avatar is a sign of better things to come!

Note that ticket sales were taken from a list ultimately based on money made, so an unusual ratio of tickets to money could have resulted in some movies being excluded from this list, especially near the bottom. Also, any movie re-released in a year with a substantially different population will have a skewed result (I’m looking at you, Star Wars).

I’ve been shopping for a new phone for a while now.  My old one died prematurely and the first replacement is junk (Nokia both, no more for me!), so I’m trying to be more choosy about the next one.  So I’m reading through piles of phone reviews and I find a most curiously consistent absence: call quality.  They go on for pages and pages about this bell and that whistle, but they don’t actually say anything about how well it receives a signal or how good the person on the other end sounds.  I think we have collectively rather missed the point of a phone…

Love this. 

Ok, this is for all the Linux geeks of the world: get the hell out of my use of root.

Argument #1: This is my computer, not yours.  I don’t have the slightest interest in your opinion of how I use my own computer.

Argument #2: I’ve been using Windows with “root” auto-login for fifteen years.  Number of virus infections: 0  Number of spyware infections: 0  Number of hacker breakins: 0  Number of accidental catastrophic modifications: 0  Why?  Because I know what I’m doing, that’s why.

If you don’t know what you’re doing and need someone else to hold your hand to keep you from breaking your own computer, that’s fine.  But keep your ineptitudes out of my computer.  Kindly desist all restrictions for the use of root.  If you must throw in warnings for the newbies, fine.  If you absolutely have to, even keep root usage out of the GUI dialogs and make me edit the config files manually.  But for the love of God, don’t hard-code restrictions into the system itself.

Linux is about freedom, right?  Then get your kiddy leashes the hell out of my computer and let me use it the way I want to.

Thank you.