Charlie Wilson's War (2007)

It's good as a sort of primer into political logrolling while describing how one liberal Texas representative got America to fund a successful war by Afghans against the Soviets for only about $1 billion. Interesting oblique criticism of the war in Iraq is slipped into the dialogue in places. The film also highlights the opportunity lost -- this successful war was not supported in the end with economic aid in a way that could have led Afghanistan to liberal or western leaning democracy.

Why beautiful people have more daughters by Alan Miller and Satoshi Kanazawa

For me this book was fascinating from beginning to end. Written by evolutionary psychologists, its focus is mostly on sex differences and genetics. It begins by positing that humans genetics developed on the savanna and that genetically influenced behavior hasn't changed significantly since we were 'civilized'. There are quite a number of -- for me -- unexpected predictions or explanations from this direction of reasoning. For example, a man gets the (perhaps subconscious) urge to buy a sports car in a mid-life crisis because his wife is going through menopause and no longer able to bear children. The car advertises his fitness and wealth to younger women. Men take on more risks to acquire wealth and status because not to do so could mean not attracting a female mate and not passing on genes. Women does not have to (or want to) take risks because she has something rare and desirable, the egg. Also, once a male scientist (artist or businessman) is married and has a child, his output drops considerably. Single scientists (and engineers?) continue to produce results until much older. (Read the book to understand why.)

About the title, beauty is apparently wasted on males from a reproductive standpoint. Generally, women don't weigh male beauty heavily in their partner search. (However, if they are at the fertile part of the hormone cycle, they do search for a particular kind of testosterone heavy look, of solid jaws, extra height, and muscles.) Thus, nature has it rigged so that the prettier folks turn out more girls to whom beauty is more useful.

Interestingly, with all their work, they were still unable to explain genetic survival value of homosexuality or the reason for its development.

Ratatouille (2007)

Amazingly drawn/rendered, this film about a rat chef is incredibly well done. It's light years better than the other animated rat movie.

News Hour with Jim Lehrer in HD

Wow, Jim's tie is shown with such incredible detail. One of the first national newscasts in HD. That's pretty neat.

Spiderman 3 (2007)

This was an okay movie. I liked it considering my expectations. It goes over conventional, but perhaps timely parables about revenge and forgiveness. And the action sequences are reasonably good. The villians are a bit confused, and there are surely too many of them. For example, the black sticky blob of meteorite thing is a villian too. But having the thing landing exactly in the right place and coincidentally infect Spiderman seems so impossible that one has to completely suspend disbelief about it.

The shade of poison trees: Dashboard Confessional

Seems to fit my horrible mood right now. Early tracks seem a little mellower perhaps than previous albums. The title track is actually my current favorite of the disc. Lyrics