Packing

Got the bulk of my stuff moved into storage yesterday. Feels like a victory. I wanted to have it done by nightfall but it took - even with EK's help - till midnight. I rented a big cargo van which was sort of fun to drive since the driver's seat is quite high up, although there's no rearview mirror. My muscles are so soooooore...

I slept quite heavily after coming back here last night. No surprise, since I'd had a total of 9 hours' sleep in the last 2-3 days prior - 4 hours Monday night, 2 hours drunken nap after our lab's meeting at the Union Terrace (I had ONE bottle of hard lemonade/shandy and then fainted when I stood up), and 3 hours Tuesday night. Groan.

Tears such as men use

Then something began to hurt Mowgli inside him, as he had never been hurt in his life before, and he caught his breath and sobbed, and the tears ran down his face.

"What is it? What is it?" he said. "I do not wish to leave the jungle, and I do not know what this is. Am I dying, Bagheera?"

"No, Little Brother. That is only tears such as men use," said Bagheera. "Now I know thou art a man, and a man's cub no longer. The jungle is shut indeed to thee henceforward. Let them fall, Mowgli. They are only tears."

-Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book (click for plain text ebook on Gutenberg)

I've been feeling miserable all day, more enervated than normal for a Monday's work, because it's finally hit me that I'm leaving Madison in less than seven days. And it's terrible, because for all my shyness and eccentricity, I've been a happy person this year, and sorrow feels so strange. It feels like an extrinsic thing, like a disease, as if like Mowgli I think I might die.

I'm going to miss EK so much. We go together so well. According to common sense we ought to drive one another crazy, but somehow it's been a good nine months. I think the reason we've never had a big fight is because we just argue and whack each other all the time.

"Waking up to a cute face is great, but I wasn't expecting this one." (yes, that's my Barbapapa-shaped MOGU cushion.)

The human brain isn't made for this - not to bond with someone, not to lie together in one another's warmth, and then suddenly to be cut off with hormones still running high in the blood. He has the sweetest face when he's asleep, and I will miss that (EK's face, not Barbapapa's - the squashy cushion is coming with me). When you know you'll never see another person again, it feels like a death approaching.

Leaving work also is poorly timed because things are just getting interesting - we captured 22 ground squirrels a week and a half ago - have yet to blog the Great Squirrel Hunt, now that I've got pictures from Nicola - and Sam finally got her [pathogen name deleted for national security purposes] + lux transformants a couple of weeks ago and they put it in mice today...sigh, I'm going to miss the glow-in-the-dark mice. I'm missing all the fun stuff.

I borrowed Henry V on CD from the library (a highly recommended way to experience Shakespeare, much better than just reading the text) and was listening to that at work since I thought the rousing martial speeches might be cheerful...then it got to the St. Crispin's day speech and I nearly cried because I thought of all the people who were going to die. Crying is a bad idea when one has sixty live mice to unpack and put away, so I didn't. At least it wasn't in a "dirty" (i.e. biological agent-contaminated) room. Crying in a respirator hood can't be good at all.

This day is call'd the Feast of Crispian:
He that out-liues this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when this day is named,
And rowse him at the Name of Crispian.
He that shall see this day, and liue old age,
Will yeerely on the Vigil feast his neighbours,
And say, to morrow is Saint Crispian.
Then will he strip his sleeue, and shew his skarres:
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot:
But hee'le remember, with aduantages,
What feats he did that day. Then shall our Names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words,
Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester,
Be in their flowing Cups freshly remembred.
This story shall the good man teach his sonne:
And Crispine Crispian shall ne're goe by,
From this day to the ending of the World,
But we in it shall be remembred;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers:
For he to day that sheds his blood with me,
Shall be my brother: be he ne're so vile,
This day shall gentle his Condition.
And Gentlemen in England, now a bed,
Shall thinke themselues accurst they were not here;
And hold their Manhoods cheape, whiles any speakes,
That fought with vs vpon Saint Crispines day.

Mechanical connections

A few weeks ago we had electronic locks installed in our lab because the US government is in the middle of standardising RFID key cards for its employees. The one in our lab has a steel plate attached to the door and a wicked huge electromagnet the size of a brick on the lintel, and the door itself was clad in metal already anyway, so altogether it's solid as a rock.

The electricians who installed it were outside contractors. The guys who initially put them in made a hash of it and the supervisors had to come back later to fix things so I spent a good half a week sitting in lab being bored... But they did leave an interesting thing behind: the installation instructions.

TEMPLATE FOR 32 SERIES MAGNALOCK (STANDARD MOUNT)

1. See installation instructions for full information and troubleshooting.
2. blah blah
3. blah blah
4. blah blah
5. blah blah
6. blah blah
7. blah blah
8. When inserting the sex bolt from the outside of the door, do not inset it fully until you have started the mating screw from the other side. This insures that the sex bolt will go in straight.
9. Do not over tighten the strike mounting screw into the sex bolt.

Jokes of a certain nature come easily with hardware - "male" and "female" connectors, for instance. But "sex bolt"? Was the person who wrote these instructions really frus or something?

Not being a bitch

Ran into an interesting interview in the New York Times' Tuesdaily "Science Times" section. After all the furore last year about women's brains not being science-oriented, and the old-boys'-club phenomenon, and whatnot, the NY Times interviewed a neurobiologist called Ben A. Barres...who used to be Barbara until 10 years ago. The part of the interview that jumped out at me, however, was this:

Q. Why didn’t you see these episodes as sexism?

A. Women who are really highly successful, they are just as bad as the men. They think if they can do it, anyone can do it.

Learning that that's not true makes all the difference between being an intelligent person liked for their helpfulness and being an arrogant ass whom everyone wishes would go away and stop flaunting her/his brains. It took me forever to learn that. I didn't realize it for all of primary and most of secondary school.

It took me so bloody long to learn not to be a bitch.

Another interesting bit:

And it may be that some women — and African-Americans, too — identify less strongly with their particular group. From the time I was a child, from the littlest, littlest age, I did not identify as a girl. It never occurred to me that I could not be a scientist because I was a woman. It just rolled off my back.

What's funny is that although I'm quite comfortable with my gender, I generally can't stand other women. They drive me crazy. An acquaintance through Phases was recently freaking out because some of her stupid friends were threatening to sue each other because of a flamewar about someone's hair rebonding.The girls that I'm friendly with themselves tend to be toward the tomboy end of the spectrum.

I like wearing pretty dresses but somehow it never occurs to me to. I just spent an afternoon prancing around in my never-worn finery, preparatory to packing it away for five months. But I hate clothes shopping.

[brag]One of my proudest moments in college was unexpectedly winning the Sophomore Prize in Computer Science - as the only girl in a class of 8. I think one of the things that might have done it was using a very short and unusual solution to a problem on the final. We had to write a program that would convert decimal to octal. You're "supposed" to do this by diving the input by powers of 8, but I remembered from secondary school maths that if you have a number in binary, you can convert it to octal by grouping the digits in threes, e.g. 110,001,000,110 = 6106 in octal or 3142 in decimal. So instead of dividing by 8, I used bitstream operators to push off three-digit chunks. The prof called me in to his office to ask me to explain what the toot I was doing; apparently he'd never seen that solution before. Funny thing is, I was taking the class for fun but everyone thought I was a CS major after that. [/brag]

Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time

Posted to the Phases Yahoogroup just now.

Yo...so...haven't posted to Phases in ages and ages. Recently,
however, I've encountered an old friend that I really think needs to
be shared, just because it's both very good and very unusual.

I first ran across Josephine Tey's "The Daughter of Time" in the
school library of MGSS Melaka and read it in Form 4 or 5 or so. More
recently, I was at the public library here (Madison, Wisconsin, USA)
frantically searching for audiobooks to take with me on a long car
trip when I found it on CD. Audiobooks are the best thing to accompany
tasks that occupy one's hands and eyes, but not the mind. In
retrospect, it's pretty amazing that I didn't earn any speeding
tickets (aka summonses), bash up the car, or for that matter, DIE on a
9-hour drive that was essentially the first time I'd driven solo, but
that's another story.

Tey is known as a mystery writer whose stock detective is Alan Grant
of Scotland Yard. This novel, however, begins with Grant flat on his
back in traction in the hospital, having broken his legs, and he stays
in bed right up till the end of it. The story revolves around his
investigating the widely accepted historical "fact" that Richard III
murdered his nephews, the child king Edward V and his brother Richard,
who were known as the princes in the tower.

(I know some of you with itchy fingers are going to Wikipedia right
now to look up Tey, Richard III, and the Princes in the Tower...)

I was reminded how good the book in itself is, but it's even better as
an audiobook because it's mostly dialogue-driven. There are some
quotations from history books and primary sources, some of Grant's
internal ruminations as he lies in bed at night, but the meat of the
book is discussions between Grant and his various visitors. So hearing
it read aloud gives the reader (or in this case, listener) a much
greater sense of the characters' presence.

Grant's sidekick for solving this particular crime isn't another cop,
but a young American at the British museum named Brent Carradine.
Carradine has fled the family business in furniture to follow his
girlfriend (an actress in the same play with Marta) to the UK. Grant's
actress friend Marta describes the young man in his big spectacles and
oversized coat as a "wooly lamb". It's a phrase I've used on my friend
[name removed for privacy] in real life - he's a geeky and remarkably innocent engineering
student. Although when I try to think of applying it to Phases people,
the one who springs to mind immediately is John Yen...

I just wanted to share that. Cos, you know, Christians should share
good things. And if anyone wants the mp3s of the audiobook, you can
get them from me when I'm back in Malaysia in two weeks.

Oh, deer

The Center is in a big compound that's mostly full of prairie grasses. It's surrounded by a chain link fence with an enormous metal gate that's closed after office hours (EK: "A compound? What is this, a cult?"). On Monday, 3 July, as I was leaving work, I saw this little family:

I'm rather tickled by how bold Wisconsin wildlife is. Deer and squirrels and Malaysia tend to hide in the jungle all the time so that even the brush of a squirrel spied outside a classroom window is occasion for "Eh tengok! Tupai! Tupai!". Although, who knows, if the trend in keeping chipmunks as exotic pets continues, they're probably going to escape eventually and set up shop as an invasive species... International students from Asia and Africa also tend to be distracted easily by bunnies on the lawn at campus.

Saw them again this morning and got some good shots of the fawns. Mum bounded across the driveway in front of my bike, fawns followed after I stopped and spent some time lurching back and forth to see if it was okay to cross while the scary human was there. They look like they've done some serious growing in the last two weeks - unfortunately there's not much in the picture to provide a sense of scale. Last time they were about the size of an Alsatian/German Shepherd dog. This time they were about the size of my bike.

Viva Italia!

The new "visiting scientist" in our lab is a vet from Italy. I feel bad because he's basically taking over my role of lab coolie and I have to show him how to do things even though he's a 29-year-old veterinarian who's worked extensively with wildlife and I'm an idiot barely out of uni. (Clinical skills != lab research skills) Anyway, we've had a couple of interesting conversations due to language barriers.

On Monday as I was leaving work:

me: So, we'll be going to catch the squirrels on Thursday. Bye!
Nicola: Er...Shi-Hsia, what day is Thursday?
me: [wtf is he asking me a stupid question like that? oh. days of week named different in Italian.]
me: It's the 13th. Thursday is the fourth day of the week. In English the days are Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday.
Nicola: Ah, thank you.
me: What are the days in Italian?
Nicola: Lunedì, Martedì, Mercoledì, Giovedì, Venerdì, Sabato, Domenica.
me: Okay, so Giovedi we're going to catch squirrels.

Jupiter day? Oh well. In charge of thunder too. Suppose that fits.

Yesterday in the office:

Nicola: Shi-Hsia, do you have a rubber?
me: I don't have a rubber, but you can use this one on the pencil. [hands him a new pencil with eraser] Oh, and something you should know - in America, it's called an eraser. Don't call it a rubber. Because in America, rubber means a condom.
Nicola: Oh. Thank you.

Good thing he asked me instead of someone else...

Squirrel-hunting was quite successful - thanks to Mike from the UW's Carey Lab who kindly drove us out to the golf course and showed us how to catch them. I'll write up and post the story when Nicola sends me the pictures.

Spooky...kepala otak kau

I got this link in an email from my boss with the subject line: "Fw: This is spooky!!!" There was a string of about a dozen forwarded email headers with comments like "Crazy! I tried it twice and both times it was right on. Weird……": Wizardry

Cookies for the first person who can figure out how it works. (Post your answer in comments.) Extra chocolate chips for anyone who can figure out why (mathematically) it works. Took me about five minutes to articulate my answer. Hint: it has a lot in common with similar "think of a random colour" or "write down your name and add up the ordinal values of all the letters" mind-reading tricks, but this has a bit of a twist.

Scroll down for answer:
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How it works:

Every ninth symbol is the same - that is, the symbols do change each time the game is run, but in each run, all multiples of nine have the same symbol. This means that the function given in the instructions must always give a multiple of nine, giving gullible players (i.e. 99.9% of Internet users) the impression that a Flash game is somehow reading their minds.

I thought to look for this pattern because multiple of nine have funny properties due to us having ten fingers - for example, some of the "pick a random number" children's tricks mentioned above depend on the fact that if you add the digits of a multiple of 9, the result will equal 9. (An extension of the trick depends on the tendency of people to think of "elephant" when asked for a gray animal, and "Denmark" when asked for a country that begins with D, but that's the vagaries of the English language, not the vertebrate skeleton.)

Why it works:

The most straightforward way I can think of to explain is like this: If you take a multiple of 10 (e.g. 40) and subtract the first digit, then the number you get is a multiple of 9:
10x - x = 9x (e.g. 40 - (4+0) = 36, 70 - (7+0) = 63).

So any other two digit number is just incrementing that by whatever additional amount:
(10x + y) - (x + y) = 9x (e.g. for 43, (40+3) - (4+3) = 36).

What really baffled me was one of the forwarded comments, "I've tried it about 20 times and it was right every single time."
Like, hello, woman, if you've tried it twenty times you should have noticed SOME kind of pattern. Alamak, oi.

Big shot journalist

I don't want to make a habit of just re-posting stuff I see on other blogs, but I'm reading Gizmodo, and this awesome kid wrote to them. Do have a look at the article.

Ooh, and here's his whiny little blog entry about how one of the Gizmodo staffers scolded him for being an lazy bum and rude to boot.

To give you an idea of what kind of "journalist" he is, here's an excerpt from a previous entry:

Work is good, if I'm allowed to call it work, since I show up at 1 or 2 everyday, have lunch, linger around then leave. But everybody's really cool, actually they're crazy. And oh yeah, Hala (Rambling Hal, I have no idea what happened to the link option stranded over the post pad) is really crazy, but I think she has every right to be so, since I've witnessed a specific person driving her to the cucku nest. Anyway, back to me, being the spring chicken here doesn't really help, you might think it would, but it doesn't; I have to actually restrict myself to simply laughing and silently enjoying the fun or else I'll be accused of being the child that I am.

Ok, boy, so you're not even a journalist. Just a 20-year-old wanker with a part-time job that you're not even doing properly.

He is so going to get clobbered. Actually, he got clobbered already with flaming comments on his blog.

Ink on paper

Trying to get myself to draw freehand with ink more.

(click images for large versions)

This isn't so much a statement about men as a statement of my inability to know what to do with other people. I can deal with my own pain; but I don't know how to soothe the pain of others, and there's a grief and a diffuse guilt about that. The closer the relationship, the greater the sense of helplessness. Obviously romantic/sexual relationship fall toward the higher end of that scale.

The sentiment "boys are fragile" isn't some radical feminist men-are-weaklings bullshit; I've heard similar from my father, and from friends. And the only two boyfriends I've ever had have, in the past, hit patches of massive post-college depression/disorientation.

Well...that and I've been listening to a lot of Barenaked Ladies and Radiohead.

This is YH. We were in a park and drawing some duckies but there were too many people around so we moved and drew each other instead. She's prettier than that; I just hate drawing faces.

Ribbit!

[20:41] me: sweet i just won an argument with my roommate
[20:42] EK: over what?
[20:42] me: there's this thing making noise in the bushes outside our front window. she said it was a bird and i kept saying it was a frog
[20:42] me: she was poking around trying to catch the culprit...and did.
SCORE!
[20:53] me: ok we've got it ID'd. it's a gray treefrog.

[20:53] me: poor little sex-crazed guy...
[20:53] EK: are you insinuating something?
[20:53] me: *looks innocent*
[20:54] EK: [whack]

When I took Terrestrial Field Ecology one of the "labs" involved doing an auditory census of frogs in a local nature preserve. The prof had some frog call sound files on her computer where a male voice would read the species and common names, then the call would play. For some reason the way it said "Gray treefrog; Hyla versicolor" invariably made everyone burst into laughter.

Google Image Search for "gray treefrog amplexus" (yes, I'm dirty-minded) yielded the following: gettin' it on, froggy style

Stargazing

Update on David Brin fangirlage: last week when I finished reading Brightness Reef, I'd thought I had one more book to go to finish the Uplift series. I got The Uplift War from the library two days ago and as it turns out, I have read that - or rather listened to it, in audiobook form, and not all that long ago (not over two years, since that was when I started listening to audiobooks). This supports my theory that my memory is strongly geared toward text. I retain spoken words rather badly, and my memory for music is limited to songs with lyrics.

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Went to the Hyde Observatory in the park in Lincoln with YH. We actually ended up spending quite a long time there. Its's a very nice park, reminiscent of the "lake gardens/taman tasik" type that ends up getting created around the artificial lakes left by tin dredges in former mining towns back home.

There was a short and quite bad homemade documentary on the Sun, although it did contain some useful tips (if you buy a small telescope, use a proper filter over the objective, DON'T trust the eyepiece filters because they "have a nasty tendency to shatter" when the hot sunlight is concentrated upon them). They handed out some free July star charts.

This reminded me of the star charts that came with the Quest fortnightly my dad used to buy (it was one of those things where you buy a binder and the issues come in loose-leaf pages that you tear apart and place in the appropriate sections). They had a cardboard cut-and-paste model with each issue. One time they had star charts, and for whatever weird reason the UK and Australian editions were both released in Malaysia, and we bought two copies without realizing they were different. Obviously since Malaysia's near the equator they both proved useful.

YH got trapped by this old guy who turned out to be a retired optometrist. He treated us to a lecture on how you should use your glasses as little as possible because they're designed for when you're focusing about 16 feet ahead, therefore using them for closer work such as reading causes eyestrain. I just tried typing without glasses; doesn't work terribly well though. He also suggested making a pinhole in a piece of paper and using that, since pinholes give you infinite depth of field. Nice old guy, a bit cheong hei as old people tend to be. Reminded me of my Ah Gong's lectures about health food and acupressure.

The cool stuff we got to see:

• Jupiter and the Galilean moons. I've always wanted to see those, since the first SF novel I read as a small kid was Asimov's Lucky Starr and the Moons of Jupiter. I think Asimov wrote the Lucky Starr novels early in his career, but you can definitely see some of the same themes pop up in later novels. They're a good intro to Asimov for kids.
• Albireo: a double star. We could actually see one was yellow and one was blue - pretty cool.
• M13, the Great Globular Cluster in Hercules (wahlau long name): a blobby...cluster of white stuff with more clearly visible stars scattered over it.
• M57, the Ring Nebula. It doesn't look as nice as the picture on the NASA site when you're not using Hubble though. Just like a small white ring.

Two of the volunteers who were operating the telescopes were chatting about some sort of contest that involved spotting "objects in Andromeda". Astronomy, the sport of geeks. Wonder why I haven't gotten into it before.

Where are we going and what's with this handbasket?

I'm either stupidly awesome or awesomely stupid. Yesterday I drove 9 hours from Madison, Wisconsin, to Lincoln, Nebraska. To put this in perspective, the longest time I'd ever operated a car solo before was about three minutes (taking my dad to the bus station and bringing the car back).

Didn't die, nobody honked at me, hopefully haven't gotten any speeding tickets. My excuse for coming here is that my friend YH is bored staying in her cousin's apartment all summer, but I think I had something to prove to myself.

When you drive for 9 hours in one day, your skills improve perforce. The only major mistake I made was that there was one part on the route where I-151 and I-61 overlap. I was following the Yahoo Maps instructions (17 steps) instead of Google Maps (33 steps) and so missed the part where I-151 split off again. I stopped for lunch in Davenport, Iowa and then realized Davenport was nowhere near my route. Fortunately it was in right direction and it's on I-80, which I had to get on later anyway. I-80 is the most boring highway ever and it runs all the way across Iowa, which is the second most boring of the United States that I've been to (sorry, David!).

Casualties: left and right buttocks. I didn't realize driving could be so painful.

Rental car (from Avis) is a Pontiac G6. Sweeeeeet.

Live and exposed?!?

The Miss Malaysia/World pageant organizers must be a bunch of super humsup old men.

KUALA LUMPUR: The Miss Malaysia/World 2006 is back, only this time it is “live and exposed” and more exciting, with a brand new concept.

Nineteen beautiful women are poised to take centre stage at this year's pageant themed “Live & Exposed”, which will be held at the Sime Darby Convention Centre, Mon't Kiara, here on July 28.

rotflol...well, I guess this will be fodder for those people who say the swimsuit trials show too much skin.

Prelude to watching An Inconvenient Truth

Conversation with a friend last week:

[21:48] Johndoe: my mom can't get to http://www.climatecrisis.net/ but i can
[21:48] me: what's that?
[21:48] Johndoe: the website for An Inconvient Truth
[21:48] me: that's weird, how come she can't?
[21:48] Johndoe: dunno
[21:49] me: maybe your dad's set up a republican firewall on your family's machine.
[21:49] Johndoe: rofl
[21:50] Johndoe: ya, he would do that.

[21:51] Johndoe: if someone is going to convince me that global warming requires action on my part, Al Gore is NOT the one i would take any suggestions from
[21:52] me: hehe
[21:52] me: i'll find someone else you'll listen to
[21:52] Johndoe: i'd listen to you.
[21:52] Johndoe: or pastor chris
[21:52] Johndoe: or any uw prof. in a non liberal-arts field
[21:53] me: er...remember the sermon at Blackhawk about "The Future" [Apr 30] a couple months ago?
[21:53] Johndoe: yep
[21:53] me: that was chris dolson AND a UW environmental studies prof
[21:53] me: 3 for 3
[21:53] Johndoe: but al gore said something, so that negates 1.
[21:54] me: rofl

Phases review: An Inconvenient Truth

My roommate got a postcard for 2 free tickets to An Inconvenient Truth in the mail today.

We saw it yesterday for $5.75 each.

I'm like "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaah shit bastards."

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Why should a Malaysian watch a movie by Al Gore? To most of us, he’s probably the stupid cowboy who visited and made some ill-informed remarks about reformasi back in the 1990s, and then lost the American presidency to another stupid cowboy. Now, however, he’s given up politics for the agenda of saving the world.

This movie is based on Gore’s book of the same title and the lectures he has been giving on climate change, a.k.a. global warming. It’s not a feature film so much as a sermon. It’s not even an ordinary documentary, since those generally have a lot of footage of nature plus a few diagrams. This has some footage of nature, some diagrams, and a lot of one guy talking. Gore is a good narrator, however, and the nature shots are spectacular.

To convince a lay audience that something radical is happening in a scientific field, they have to be shown what’s normal for comparison – if a space alien visited Earth in December 2004, how would it know that tsunamis weren’t seasonal occurrences? The movie does this quite effectively. He calls up a graph tracking atmospheric carbon dioxide levels from 300,000 years back (from air bubbles preserved in polar ice). The graph traces zigzags several millennia wide and less than a metre deep. When it reaches the 20th century, however, the trace goes up and up and up to the ceiling about five metres high.

The Antarctic section is another memorable demonstration of the strangeness of the changes our planet is undergoing. It starts with a flyover of one of the ice shelves hanging off the southern continent, the narrator telling us that it’s seven hundred feet high. It’s bigger than Malaysia. And yet, only a few years ago, scientists were stunned to find it honeycombed by pools of melted water. The pools absorbed the sun’s heat much more than the ice, and so kept expanding until the whole thing broke apart into the ocean. He also shows ‘before’ and ‘after’ photos of glaciers all over the world, vanishing. “Soon there will be no more snows of Kilimanjaro.”

To further push the point that this is a global issue, the movie spends some time on Gore’s visits to China, lecturing in packed halls. He’s shown meeting with PRC scientists and government officials, asking them about pollution controls and the state of the environment. To anyone who’s been there, as I have, the gray smog-filled skies in the background are painfully reminiscent.

My point here is that we should watch this movie and should care about climate change, even though we’re not a big industrial nation. For developing countries there are two choices. As we build new factories and power plants, we can either do it with newer, cleaner, technology, or repeat the mistakes of the giants and get caught in the same traps – and with less money and resources to pull ourselves out of them.

One of the movie’s pitfalls is the overuse of Gore. (Yes, that was meant as a pun.) A good portion of the movie is taken up by shots of his face. He spends several minutes talking about his son’s near-fatal accident at age six, and another several minutes reminiscing about how he lost the 2000 election to George W. Bush. There are also promiscuous shots of his Apple laptop, since he’s on that company’s board of directors.

A personal story that did resonate with the message of the movie was that of his sister’s death. His father, who was also a senator, also farmed beef cattle and tobacco. His sister, who started smoking as a teenager, died of lung cancer. He alludes to tobacco and cancer several other times as an example of another cause-and-effect relationship that was long hidden from the public because a powerful industry didn’t want it known.

The end credits are worth staying to watch because they include practical advice for those who felt that the message was worth hearing.
(paraphrased from memory):

“Walk, ride a bicycle, or take public transportation instead of driving.”
“Buy energy-efficient applicances.”
“Write to your political representatives and ask them to do something about climate change.”
“If they don’t listen, run for office.”
“If you believe in prayer, pray that people can find the strength to change.”

Amen, friend.