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I won't see it. Saw this yesterday on Google Video and realized it was enough. The first reviews are being posted around the blogosphere this morning, though, and I'm going to try to round them up. If you've posted a review and want it mentioned here, trackback to this post or e-mail me at allah -at- hotair.com. And if you missed our Vent about U93 on Thursday, now's your chance.
The most comprehensive blog review thus far is Rick Moran's:
In the end, Greengrass lets the story do all his talking. A wise choice since … it would have been a relatively simple matter to have made a histrionic, flag waving spectacular instead of the intensely personal drama U-93 turned out to be. For some, that intensity will open old emotional wounds from 9/11 making it very difficult for them to see this film. I would urge them to make the effort anyway. For United 93 will not heal the hurt but rather recall in a vividly personal, emotionally charged manner who and what caused our souls to be scorched that terrible day.
Ace hasn't seen it yet but many of his commenters have, including Patterico contributor See-Dubya, who describes himself as "utterly numb." Ms. Underestimated reports feeling the same, and says it was a common reaction inside the theater. Sissy Willis notes the scene that intercuts shots of the passengers praying with similar shots of the hijackers praying and comments that it "caught her up short." Annika's not worried about the niceties of particular scenes, though; she wants blood (content warning). As does Right Wing Nation, who says he found himself reaching for his gun at certain points during the movie. He also uses the film as a jumping-off point to describe his trip to Shanksville; lots of photos at the link.
Update: A largely negative review from Jason Apuzzo at Libertas, the conservative film blog. He praises U93 as being expertly made, but finds its refusal to judge what happened on Flight 93 — its "realism" — maddening.
[W]hile we were endlessly assured by media professionals that everything had changed after 9/11, really nothing had changed. And so here, basically, is the problem with United 93, a film which is in other respects a very commendable effort … it's already old. It's a film about a period of time that no longer really exists – a period before Michael Moore, before the Patriot Act, before orange alerts, before Valerie Plame, before the French stabbed us in the back, before you could download the latest Bagdad beheading onto your iPod. Before the massive meta-debate that has emerged over the significance of 9/11 – namely, what do we do about it?… The victory conservatives seem to be celebrating with this film – that Hollywood (actually it's a group of British filmmakers) has finally made a sober film about 9/11 – strikes me as being a somewhat hollow one.
Update: Three reviews are already up at Blogcritics. The best of them is by James Frazier, who notes a scene in which a European passenger tips the hijackers to the passengers' impending revolt. Fact or fiction? Update: Debbie Schlussel e-mails to say that Frazier has it wrong:
While there is ABSOLUTELY NO such scene of [the passenger] tipping off hijackers, he repeatedly counsels against fighting the terrorists for the entire flight, claiming "they will not harm us if we do what they say, and we'll be safely returned to the airport."
Debbie wrote one of the first blog reviews of U93, calling it "Movie of the Year" in a post published on Tuesday, and followed up yesterday with a response to those who accused her of deliberately omitting Mark Bingham from her first review because of his homosexuality.
Update: Mary K caught a sneak preview a week ago and says she gained new respect for the professionalism of the air traffic controllers who had to respond that day. She also describes the killing of the first hijacker as "quite possibly the most satisfying, cinematic moment I've ever experienced." Josue Sierra wants a new 9/11 film made every year, and takes time to respond to a Kos commenter who questions the timing of the film's release.
Update: Bloggers are reviewing the reviewers, too. Moran is back for a second bite at the apple, the "apple" in this case being Slate critic Dana Stevens. Cranky Insomniac de(con)structs Paul Farhi's front-page treatment of the film at WaPo. Psychologist Robert Godwin responds to some of the choicer comments at the Huffington Post as part of his longer essay on the psychology of envy. Meanwhile, Varifrank talks about his own "survivor's guilt" and challenges conservatives who complain about Hollywood's silence on the war to put up or shut up at the box office.
Update: Vanderleun's also reviewing the reviewers, and pans NYT critic Manohla Dargis. The Ugly American echoes Mary Katherine Ham's reaction to the scenes inside the control room, while Right Truth asks himself the inevitable question, "What would I have done?" Brainster, who offers another rave, includes this interesting tidbit:
Oddly, they don't specifically indentify anybody other than the hijackers, although there are clues throughout for those in the know–Jeremy Glick is the one who wants to talk to Liz, Todd Beamer is the one who asks the operator to call his family. Mark Bingham is the guy with the rugby shirt who's the last to board the plane.
Update: Dave from Garfield Ridge: "I won't lie to you– United 93 is the toughest film I've ever sat through, tougher than anything. But it was worth it." Deep Keel says it's too late for "never forget"; we've already forgotten. Like Varifrank, Fake Turkey has his eye on the box office. And here's an interesting post at TheRealUglyAmerican.com responding to MyDD's complaint about U93 initially being marketed only on conservative blogs.
Update: Twenty-four hours since the last update. Today's reviews are more reflective, using the film as a starting point for grander themes. Start with this moving treatment by my pal Vanderleun, who plays Cassandra in concluding, "On one of our days to come, there will be another test. You'd best have an answer prepared." Pieter Dorsman of Peaktalk watches himself watching the film and catches himself misremembering details as a way of making sense of the day's events. Barb at Righty in a Lefty State reports some memory side effects as well.
See-Dubya is guest-blogging at Junkyard Blog for whoever the slacker is who runs that joint. See-Dub notes yet another memory effect: so intense is the film that he honestly can't remember details well enough to resolve the dispute between Debbie Schlussel and James Frazier about the foreign passenger. Laura Lee Donoho says she does remember, and that the passenger does indeed try to warn the hijackers. Laura calls it dhimmitude in microcosm.
Publius Rendezvous and TechnoChitlins note a common reaction: absolute silence in the theater at the film's end. WC at the Gathering Storm says there was no silence in his theater. There was something else.
Finally, Craig Henry at Lead and Gold imagines what the reviews for U93 would look like if applied to films about other American traumas — and re-writes them accordingly.
Update: Captain Ed is back from the theater, and pronounces the filmmakers' decision to intercut scenes in the control room inspired:
I think that the wider focus on the frustration, anger, and anxiety in the control centers helps the movie in two distinct ways. First, it allows the audience to remember the context of United 93 in the course of 9/11, making the timing easier to understand. More importantly, when the passengers finally rally and start to plan the attack, the amount of time left in which to do something comes as a shock to everyone. Rasche, who plays civilian pilot and passenger Donald Greene, tells the group that the plane is flying too low to allow the hijackers much more time, and that the counterattack had to separate them from the controls immediately. Any attempt to dive would not allow enough time to pull up.
That time frame could not be overcome, although the movie shows the passengers reaching the cockpit and engaging the terrorists on the flight deck. The last images of United 93 come from the cockpit window, where the Pennsylvania countryside spins ever close to the plane, until the screen suddenly goes black.
Other blog duties are calling, so here's the Technorati link for those who want to stay on the trail.


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Pick Up the Pieces
This story appears in the November 1998 issue of . Subscribe »
While watching a rerun of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" the other night, I was reminded of an important business lesson. In this episode, the android officer Data suffers a loss of confidence after losing a game of Strategema (a fictional strategy game) which he believes he played perfectly, without mistakes. To get Data back on the bridge of the starship Enterprise, Captain Picard tells him, "Data, it is possible to make no mistakes and still lose."
If you've ever placed your own advertising, you know it's a lot like high-stakes Strategema. When a perfectly good ad fails, it's hard to know what went wrong. Let's assume you've produced a terrific print ad: A benefit-oriented headline draws the reader in; you've used an intriguing visual and motivational copy; your ad is readable, clear and has an effective call to action (a reason and means for readers to respond). But you run your perfectly good ad and absolutely nothing happens, or perhaps just a few responses trickle in.
Here are five reasons good ads sometimes fail, and some solid advice on how to avoid future losses:
1. The ad is placed in the wrong media. Before placing your ad in any publication, examine the readership information in its media kit to determine whether it reaches your target audience with a reasonably small amount of waste. For example, if you want to reach teachers via a magazine that targets teachers, school administrators and librarians, check the readership numbers carefully to be sure that teachers, not the other two groups, make up the bulk of the publication's readership.
It's also important to select publications that are looked to as sources of information on your type of product or service. If you're choosing between advertising in your city-wide newspaper or in a neighborhood paper, for example, choose the one your target audience turns to when they're looking for information on what you're marketing.
2. The ad is run on the wrong day. Search corridor media are those people reach for when they've made a decision to buy. You've probably noticed how, on any given day, your favorite section of the daily newspaper becomes a search corridor for a particular type of product. All the local banks may run ads on Mondays in the Business section, for example, or all the ads for audio equipment may run on Fridays in the Weekend section.
If you place an ad for audio equipment on Thursday in Main News instead of on Friday in the Weekend section with the other stereo advertisers, you've removed your ad from the search corridor. Prospects looking for audio equipment simply will not be looking for your ad in Main News on Thursday.
3. There are barriers to sales. If it's too hard for prospects to get information or make a purchase, then no ad, no matter how well-produced, can work for you. When people respond to your ad, do they get stuck in voice-mail jail? Can they speak with a real person who is knowledgeable about the offer in the ad? Do they get a busy signal? If so, many prospects will give up and buy from someone else.
Often, an otherwise excellent ad will fail solely because the advertiser didn't provide a toll-free number. If you ask prospects to spend their own money to find out about your product or service, you're placing a significant barrier to sales in their way.
4. The offer is too weak or just plain wrong. Before placing an offer in your ad, it's important to determine how it stacks up next to competitors' offers. To find out, clip their ads regularly. And consider this: It's not always important to beat the competition on price. Instead, find a way to add value with additional services or products.
Once you've hit on what you believe is your best offer, you may have to test it to see if you're offering something your prospects want to buy. When a good ad with what you think is a top-flight offer fails to pull, strengthen the offer. Once you find an offer that improves your ad-response rates, stick with it until it stops working for you.
5. You aren't advertising frequently enough. Companies that advertise consistently, such as regional banks, build up "awareness" among their target audiences. So if your local bank offers in its weekly ad a new service, such as one-hour approval on auto loans, it will probably reap a significant response, even though it's the first time that particular ad has appeared.
If you're a new advertiser, however, you haven't yet built up awareness among your target audience, so you'll have to run your ad with some frequency before it begins to garner responses. The frequency required depends on what you're marketing, the complexity of your message, and how well your target audience understands your type of product or service. (There are exceptions: Ads placed in directories and some search corridor media, like classifieds, may require only one insertion to get results.)
You Must Remember This
Contact management software is a vital tool for millions of businesspeople whose work involves building relationships with customers and prospects. Just ask freelance sportscaster Eric Tracy of Woodland Hills, California: "I used to be the kind of person who wrote things down on the back of a business card," he says. "Now I'm an information machine." A good contact manager lets you:
- record complete contact information in a customizable database
- log calls, meetings, to-dos, letters, faxes and e-mail messages
- view your calendar by day, week or month
- quickly produce letters, memos and proposals
- perform mail merges to easily communicate with groups of contacts
- extend your customer information using direct links to the Internet
- share your calendar and contact information with co-workers
Two of the most popular programs on the market are GoldMine (GoldMine Software Corp., $295.95, www.goldminesw.com, 800-654-3526) and ACT! (Symantec Corp., $199.95, www.symantec.com, 800-441-7234). Their newest versions, 4.0, provide all these features as well as telephone integration, so when a customer calls, you have instant access to his or her information based on caller ID. Look for these benefits when shopping for contact management software:
1. Ease of use. If a program takes too long to learn, you may be too frustrated to use it.
2. Integration with other applications. Both ACT! Version 4.0 and GoldMine 4.0 give you access to many applications, including word processing and e-mail, from within their programs so you don't have to launch other programs separately while they're running.
3. Security. Look for a program with integrated zipped backup. ACT! 4.0 offers a special reminder when it's time to back up your data.
4. Expandability. Good contact managers can grow with your company, so you don't have to learn a new system when you add employees.

subset: commoncrawl


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A pair of reports in the last couple of weeks has delivered bad news for future ice loss in Antarctica. One described the possibility of committing ourselves to several meters of sea level rise if ice in the Wilkes Basin were to become destabilized. The other concluded that we likely have already committed ourselves to over a meter of long-term sea level rise from a portion of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. In both cases, the ice loss tipping points are a result of the shape of the valleys in which the glaciers sit, which deepen as you move inland, reaching below sea level.
That configuration has long been known to exist below the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, but it wasn't thought of as a factor in Greenland. Now, a new study from some of those same researchers has revealed that Greenland, too, has a number of deep valleys that dip below sea level. That means Greenland is susceptible to larger, more rapid losses of ice than previously thought.
The topography of the land beneath an ice sheet exerts a large amount of control over the flow of the ice, yet it's largely hidden from view. Glaciologists have long been using airborne radar surveys to determine ice depth in much the same way that sonar can measure water depth below a ship.
While that has revealed quite a bit about Greenland's interior (which is depressed into a bowl shape by the weight of the ice sheet), the complicated topography of the coastal valleys has resisted exploration. This is partly because the conditions are lousy for the radar technology, and partly because you need such high resolution to resolve all the valleys and ridges. Yet the shape of those outlet valleys, which are roughly analogous to rivers draining an inland sea of ice, will have a lot to do with how Greenland responds to our warming climate.
While Greenland's topography has remained a stubborn problem, satellite measurements have provided fantastically high-resolution maps of ice flow velocity. These satellites bounce radar off the surface of the ice, and they use the subtle variations in the surface to track motion between satellite passes.
This provides researchers with a clever way to work out the depth of the ice in the places where we haven't made measurements. Where we do have depth measurements, flow velocity lets us calculate the volume of ice flowing by over time. Because the amount of ice flowing out of an area has to equal the amount of ice flowing into an area (provided it's not melting), a change in velocity downstream can indicate a change in depth.
Imagine a river flowing into a narrow chute. In order for the volume of flow (say, per second) to be the same in the river and at the end of the chute, the velocity of flow in the chute will have to be much higher.
Taking advantage of this fact, the researchers ran a sort of simulation using the satellite-measured ice flow velocities and all the depth measurements that have been made. The simulation worked out topography that was consistent with all the measurements, as well as the flow of ice.
The result is a much higher-resolution look at the valleys through which Greenland's outlet glaciers flow, with depths calculated every 150 meters. Many are much deeper than we thought—mainly the valleys through which ice flows the fastest. That's no coincidence, as they've been deepened by glacial erosion. While the deepest valleys account for only eight percent of the total length of the mapped valleys, about 88 percent of the ice flowing toward the sea passes through them.
Critically, many sit below sea level for significant distances inland. (See the blue areas in the image below.)
The deep nature of these valleys is important because many of the outlet glaciers currently retreating are being melted by warmer ocean water. Using our previous best guesses at Greenland's topography, ice sheet models simulate a slowing of that retreat as the glaciers pull back to higher ground, decreasing contact with this warm water. That limits the amount of simulated ice loss. The new map, however, shows that many of these major outlet glaciers will have to retreat much farther inland to escape the ocean's influence.
This doesn't necessarily imply that these glaciers will cross a massive tipping point—like the Antarctic glaciers in recent news—because that runaway retreat depends on valleys that deepen as you move inland. That may be true for segments of these valleys, but not for the entire length—they eventually do trend upward. The depth of these valleys does imply, the researchers write, that the glaciers within them "are more vulnerable to ocean [warming] than previously thought and will retreat faster and farther inland than anticipated."
"We anticipate," they continue, "that these results will have a profound and transforming impact on model simulations of ice-sheet evolution in Greenland." Those models haven't matched the retreat observed over the past couple decades. After incorporating the new topography data, they might. It's unclear at this point how much more sea level rise that might translate into for the end of this century, but it definitely won't be less.
Nature Geoscience, 2014. DOI: 10.1038/NGEO2167 (About DOIs).


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Let $f:[n]\times [n] \rightarrow [0,1]$ be a function from pair of integers to the real interval [0.1]. I would like to find sets of complex vectors $X= \{x_i\}$ and $Y=\{y_j\}$ satisfying $x_i\cdot y_j=f(i,j)$, in such a way that the vectors in $X$ and in $Y$ are as small as possible. More precisely, set $m= max_{i,j} f(i,j)$ and $N=max_{i,j}[\|x_i\|,\|y_j\|]$.
1) What is the minimal $N$ such that $x_i\cdot y_j = f(i,j)$ for all $i,j\in [n]$?
2) Is there an upper bound on $N$ purely in function of $m$, i.e., with no depenence on $n$?
3) If the answer to question two is no, what is the best upper bound that we can give for $N$ in function of $n$ and $m$? A trivial upper bound is $$N \leq \max_i{\sum_{j} f(i,j) } \leq mn.$$
but I believe that the dependence on $n$ might be lowered.


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|Butterfly Conservation
|saving butterflies, moths and our environment
|Glasgow and South West Scotland Branch
|Copyright Butterfly Conservation © 2015 Glasgow and South West Scotland Branch
|Privacy and Copyright Statement
|Butterfly Conservation. Company limited by guarantee.
Registered in England (2206468). Registered Office: Manor Yard, East Lulworth, Wareham, Dorset, BH20 5QP.
Charity registered in England and Wales (254937) and in Scotland (SCO39268)


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If you are already a customer, you may login to retrieve your shopping cart.
Barbecue is an art, not a science. D.W. Mikesell, understood that world-class barbecue is spicy and sweet, not too hot, just enough to wake up your tongue to say hello. It's the taste of a summer evening on the back porch, of friends coming over, of good food straight from the kitchen. So come on over. There's plenty for everyone.


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It allows you to switch on/off the speaker; and choose between different sources of the audio signal.
- Switch to OFF position when you want to switch off the speaker.
- Switch to AUX position when you use the speaker with a player connected via a audio cable.
- Switch to position when you want to use Bluetooth connection.
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The above two tree ornaments come to you courtesy of The Boy. He designed and made them on Friday, and I just had to include them in the ornament series! I'm big-time in love with them. They're so simple, beautiful, innocent. It's the kid thing. Those little fingers do magic, I tell you.
He made them from a cereal box, paint, pistachio nutshells, junkmail confetti, string, scissors and glue.
The pistachio shells, I'd painted a while back, so when it came time to decorate his trees, the shells were there for the taking. In fact, if you plan to do a collage craft like this with your kids, it's a very good idea to prepare all the decorative bits ahead of time. That way, there's no waiting and they can dig right in!
The shells need a generous amount of glue if they are to stay put. He applied a goodly blob to each before attaching them to the trees. Those little guys are there for the duration, methinks.
The confetti was punched from Christmas-flavoured junkmail, a favourite in these parts.
But who am I kidding? There was no way I was going to let him have all the fun. Nuh-huh, I just could not do it. I had to make one of my own too, right? Here's mine below.
And here's the tree-some...
I'm thinking of asking The Boy to make me a whole grove of them. Wouldn't that be great? I wonder if he'd go for it... Do you think?


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Real Or Fake? This Sneaker Sh*t Is Getting Crazy: People In Los Angeles Already Lining Up For The Air Yeezy 2s That Don't Drop For Another Month!
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