Movie Review: It Chapter 2

Speaking of Stephen King, I recently went to see It Chapter 2 with a friend. Here's what I thought (while I try to keep spoilers to a minimum).

The story starts off in Derry, Maine, present day, when Pennywise the Clown is seen again. Mike Hanlon finds a message at the site of a murder that says, "Come home." He proceeds to call his fellow members of the Losers' Club, telling them it's time to keep the promise they made 27 years before: to come back and kill Pennywise if he ever returns. Unfortunately, the remaining "losers" don't remember their time in Derry, and have to be reminded of many of the events from the first movie in order to effectively fight Pennywise.

First, what I liked about the movie. While most of the movie takes place in the present day, there are a few scenes that go back to the losers as they were 27 years before. The clubhouse they built, which was very important in the book, finally makes an appearance. We also get to meet Bill's bike, Silver, at last. The movie, while scary, is also incredibly funny. The characters impart their dark, dry humor with each other often, even during tense scenes, which feels completely real and believable. And my favorite part was a great reference to this scene in my all-time favorite horror movie, John Carpenter's The Thing:

Oh yeah, and in addition to The Thing reference, the movie features some fun fan service for people who love horror movies, and great Easter eggs for anyone who loves horror movie trivia.

I also liked seeing Mike get a much more important role in this movie, since he was relegated to the sidelines in the first one and much of his contribution to that story was given instead to Ben. And some of the subplots from the book, while interesting, were cut from the movie, making it a much more straightforward story.

At the same time, the things I didn't like as much about the movie were also related to departures from the book. The clubhouse, while finally appearing, was given little to no importance in terms of the ritual to fight Pennywise. I also didn't like some of the changes they made to Mike. In the book, Mike often didn't tell the others things he remembered but they didn't because they needed to find them out in their own time. But movie Mike also lied to his friends and purposefully put them in danger, not something book Mike would have done. In the book, the danger was always Pennywise. Really, my biggest complaint about both movies has to do with their changes to Mike's character.

The Ritual to kill Pennywise was also much more interesting in the book, though I suppose it would have been difficult to film coherently, because the book version was much more about emotions and thoughts, as opposed to clear actions. Honestly, I didn't really like the way they defeated Pennywise in the movie, but I still enjoyed the rest of the movie, so I'll let it go.

Overall, It Chapter 2 was a fun, entertaining movie that neatly wrapped up the Pennywise and Losers' Club storylines. While I'm a little sad about some of the elements from the book that were cut or changed, I'm glad that they did this as a single film instead of a two-parter, as they would have had to in order to include some of the scenes Stephen King requested they keep in the movie. The tone of this movie is certainly different than the first, but it works. As I said, you could see these characters growing up into the sarcastic, wry, somewhat dark humor they impart throughout their scenes, based on what they went through in the first movie. Despite fighting a shape-shifting, pan-dimensional fear and flesh devourer, the characters felt real.

A Rough Night

I had an incredibly rough night last night. In the early morning, I woke up and had the terrible feeling that I wasn't alone. I felt someone or something was in the room with me, even in the bed with me, though I knew I was the only one there. Over the excruciating moments, I began to feel I was being haunted or even possessed by something. I woke up this morning unbelievably anxious and feeling sore in every muscle in my body. It seems last night I was the victim... of sleep paralysis.

Sleep paralysis is an interesting, and quite terrifying, phenomenon. What happens is that you wake up while still in REM sleep. Dreams intertwine with reality and can cause such experiences as hallucinations (auditory, visual, even olfactory), emotions (such as fear and dread), inability to move (because your body paralyzes you during REM to keep you from acting out your dreams, that carries over into this semi-wakeful state), and muscle soreness. Though sleep paralysis is more common among people who already have some form of sleep disturbance, such as insomnia, it can happen to anyone. It's been theorized that many so-called experiences of the paranormal are actually cases of sleep paralysis.

There's a great documentary on sleep paralysis I highly recommend if you'd like to learn more:

Has anything like this ever happened to you? Feel free to share in the comments!

I've Got a Bad Feeling About This

In the 1993 film Jurassic Park, scientist Ian Malcolm expressed serious concern about John Hammond's decision to breed hybrid dinosaurs for his theme park. As Malcolm says in the movie, "No, hold on. This isn't some species that was obliterated by deforestation, or the building of a dam. Dinosaurs had their shot, and nature selected them for extinction."

This movie was, and still is (so far), science fiction. But a team of Russian scientists are working to make something similar into scientific fact:

Long extinct cave lions may be about to rise from their icy graves and prowl once more alongside woolly mammoths and ancient horses in a real life Jurassic Park.

In less than 10 years it is hoped the fearsome big cats will be released from an underground lab as part of a remarkable plan to populate a remote spot in Russia with Ice Age animals cloned from preserved DNA.

Experiments are already underway to create the lions and also extinct ancient horses found in Yakutia, Siberia, seen as a prelude to restoring the mammoth.

Regional leader Aisen Nikolaev forecast that co-operation between Russian, South Korean and Japanese scientists will see the “miracle” return of woolly mammoths inside ten years.

Jurassic Park is certainly not the only example of fiction exploring the implications of man "playing god." Many works of literature, like Frankenstein, The Island of Doctor Moreau, and more recent examples like Lullaby (one of my favorites), have examined this very topic. It never ends well.

By Mauricio Antón - from Caitlin Sedwick (1 April 2008). "What Killed the Woolly Mammoth?". PLoS Biology 6 (4): e99. DOI:10.1371/journal.pbio.0060099., CC BY 2.5, Link

Cowboy Bebop 20 Years Later

I've been asked before what made me fall in love with corgis. Did I idolize British royalty? Did I have one or know someone who had one as a child? Did I just think their stumpy legs and enormous ears were adorable? (Well, yeah.)

But the real reason? I started watching Cowboy Bebop in college and fell in love with Ein, the adorable corgi on the show. Yes, I love corgis because I loved this anime.

For anyone who has seen this anime, all I have to do is say I love Cowboy Bebop and they furiously nod in agreement, perhaps singing some of their favorite songs from the show or doing their best Spike Spiegel impression. For anyone who hasn't seen it, it's difficult to describe the show because it defies categorization. But this article does a wonderful job of summing it up:

Cowboy Bebop is its own thing. You could call it a space western. That’s, however, like saying Beyoncé is a good dancer. It’s true. But it’s not the whole picture. Not even close. Cowboy Bebop is a mashup of noir films, spaghetti westerns, urban thrillers, Kurosawa samurai films, classic westerns and sci-fi space adventures.

Again, though, all that genre bending is just part of the equation. The show resonates so deeply because it’s a mirror in which you can see yourself, and how we all wrestle with life. This is what makes Cowboy Bebop great art. It’s a beautifully complex, aesthetically striking meditation on how we deal with love, loss, luck and that inescapable question: Why should I give a fuck?

It's been 20 years since Cowboy Bebop premiered, and those 26 episodes and 1 movie remain relevant and influential today. Time to rewatch the show, I think.

The Importance of Training Data

In the movie Arrival, 12 alien ships visit Earth, landing at various locations around the world. Dr. Louise Banks, a linguist, is brought in to help make contact with the aliens who have landed in Montana.

With no experience with their language, Louise instead teaches the aliens, which they call heptapods, English while they teach her their own language. Other countries around the world follow suit. But China seems to view the heptapods with suspicion that turns into outright hostility later on.

Dr. Banks learns that China was using Mahjong to teach/communicate with the heptapods. She points out that using a game in this way changes the nature of the communication - everything becomes a competition with winners and loser. As they said in the movie, paraphrasing something said by Abraham Maslow, "If all I ever gave you was a hammer, everything is a nail."

Training material matters and can drastically affect the outcome. Just look at Norman, the psychopathic AI developed at MIT. As described in an article from BBC:

The psychopathic algorithm was created by a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as part of an experiment to see what training AI on data from "the dark corners of the net" would do to its world view.

The software was shown images of people dying in gruesome circumstances, culled from a group on the website Reddit.

Then the AI, which can interpret pictures and describe what it sees in text form, was shown inkblot drawings and asked what it saw in them.

Norman's view was unremittingly bleak - it saw dead bodies, blood and destruction in every image.

Alongside Norman, another AI was trained on more normal images of cats, birds and people.

It saw far more cheerful images in the same abstract blots.

The fact that Norman's responses were so much darker illustrates a harsh reality in the new world of machine learning, said Prof Iyad Rahwan, part of the three-person team from MIT's Media Lab which developed Norman.

"Data matters more than the algorithm."

This finding is especially important when you consider how AI has and can be used - for instance, in assessing risk of reoffending among parolees or determining which credit card applications to approve. If the training data is flawed, the outcome will be too. In fact, a book I read last year, Weapons of Math Destruction, discusses how decisions made by AI can reflect the biases of their creators. I highly recommend reading it!

Bend and Snap

This is quite possibly the cutest thing ever:

The moment I handed @RWitherspoon my 15,000 dissertation/love letter to Legally Blonde - and yes, it was scented. I blacked out somewhere between her taking it and Oprah saying 'wow' #WrinkleInTime pic.twitter.com/56XV8FElqV

— Lucy Jayne F🌸rd (@lucyj_ford) March 13, 2018

That's right - reporter Lucy Jayne Ford wrote a dissertation on Legally Blonde and was able to give star Reese Witherspoon a copy of it:

Lucy Jayne Ford, a reporter for Bauer Media in London, was at a press junket to interview Witherspoon and her Wrinkle in Time co-stars Oprah Winfrey and Mindy Kaling, but couldn’t resist the opportunity to show her admiration for Witherspoon.

“I want to start by saying I’m obviously a gigantic fan of all of you; Reese, I actually wrote 15,000 words on you once,” Ford said before handing Reese a copy of her lengthy dissertation and explaining that she had watched the film 800 times to write it.

While Ford conducted her interview after giving Witherspoon the dissertation, Witherspoon made sure to ask her one burning question that Elle Woods most definitely would have approved of before their time ended.

“I have just one question,” Witherspoon said. “Is it scented?”

“I actually put perfume on it before this,” Ford confided.

Statistical Sins: Gender and Movie Ratings

Though I try to feature my only content/analysis/thoughts in my statistics posts, occasionally, I encounter a really well-done analysis that I'd rather feature instead. So today, for my statistical sins post, I encourage you to check out this excellent analysis from FiveThirtyEight that uncovers what would qualify as a statistical sin. You see, when conducting opinion polling, it's important to correct for discrepancies between the characteristics of a sample versus population, characteristics like gender. But apparently, IMDb ratings also show discrepancies, where men often outnumber women in rating different movies, sometimes as much as 10-to-1. And if you want to put together definitive lists of best movies, you either need to caveat the drastic differences between population and raters, or make it clear that the results are heavily skewed by one gender.

The Academy Awards rightly get criticized for reflecting the preferences of a small, unrepresentative sample of the population, but online ratings have the same problem. Even the vaunted IMDb Top 250 — nominally the best-liked films ever — is worth taking with 250 grains of salt. Women accounted for 52 percent of moviegoers in the U.S. and Canada in 2016, according to the most recent annual study by the Motion Picture Association of America. But on the internet, and on ratings sites, they’re a much smaller percentage.

We’ll start with every film that’s eligible for IMDb’s Top 250 list. A film needs 25,000 ratings from regular IMDb voters to qualify for the list. As of Feb. 14, that was 4,377 titles. Of those movies, only 97 had more ratings from women than men. The other 4,280 films were mostly rated by men, and it wasn’t even close for all but a few films. In 3,942 cases (90 percent of all eligible films), the men outnumbered the women by at least 2-to-1. In 2,212 cases (51 percent), men outnumbered women more than 5-to-1. And in 513 cases (12 percent), the men outnumbered the women by at least 10-to-1.

Looking strictly at IMDb’s weighted average — IMDb adjusts the raw ratings it gets “in order to eliminate and reduce attempts at vote stuffing,” but it does not disclose how — the male skew of raters has a pretty significant effect. In 17 percent of cases, the weighted average of the male and female voters was equal, and in another 26 percent of cases, the votes of the men and women were within 0.1 points of one another. But when there was bigger disagreement — i.e. men and women rated a movie differently by 0.2 points or more, on average — the overall score overwhelmingly broke closer to the men’s rating than the women’s rating. The score was closer to the men’s rating more than 48 percent of the time and closer to the women’s rating less than 9 percent of the time, meaning that when there was disagreement, the male preference won out about 85 percent of the time.

In the article, a table of the top 500 movies (based on weighted data) demonstrates how gender information impacts these rankings - for each movie, the following are provided: what the movie is currently rated, how it would be rated based on women or men only, and how it would be rated when data are weighted to reflect discrepancies in the proportion of men and women. Movies like The Shawshank Redemption (#1) and The Silence of the Lambs (#23) would generally remain mostly unchanged. Movies like Django Unchained (#60) and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (#218) would move up to #34 and #50, respectively, while Seven Samurai (#19) and Braveheart (#75) would move down to #59 and #112, respectively. And finally, movies that never made it on to the top 250 list, like Slumdog Millionaire and The Nightmare Before Christmas, would have rankings of #186 and #199, respectively.

Things I'm Loving Today

What am I loving today? Well..

• This comic from XKCD:

• Chris Stuckman's hilarious review of Fifty Shades Freed:

• And while we're at it, his spot on review of The Cloverfield Paradox (go watch on Netflix first if you want to see it):

• For comparison, you can also check out the review of The Cloverfield Paradox from my friend over at Is It Any Good?
• David Robinson of Variance Explained tells us how to win your office Super Bowl square.
• And finally, this sign I saw on my walk to work this morning:

Releasing an Oscar-Worthy Movie

Apparently, having an Oscar-worthy movie isn't just about the script, the cast, or the director - it's also about how the movie is released. Market Match published this great story last week, that describes the two approaches to releasing movies:

A wide release is usually pursued when a distributor believes a movie will be an immediate hit, on the basis of its existing fandom or a major marketing campaign.

The platform release, on the other hand, can be used to gauge a film’s appeal. “A platform release takes a lot of planning. The strategy usually changes on the fly through the response of public and critics,” said Paul Dergarabedian, a senior media analyst with comScore.

This year, only three of the Best Picture nominees used a wide release approach: Dunkirk, Get Out, and The Post. The rest (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, Darkest Hour, Lady Bird, The Shape of Water, Call Me By Your Name, and Phantom Thread), used the platform release approach.

And in a fantastic visual display that you really need to see for yourself (scroll partway down), the authors demonstrate that, over the last 8 years, 7 of the Best Picture winners used the platform release approach.

Psychology for Writers: On Fight, Flight, and Fear Responses

This will be a new series on my blog, coming out on Fridays. (I may not post one every single week, but they'll always come out on a Friday.) My goal is to impart some wisdom from my discipline - psychology - to help writers, in part because I see a lot of tropes over and over that are not really in line with what we know about human behavior. (And I have so many writer friends with their own expertise - I'd love to see others share some domain knowledge like this to help us write more accurately!)

One of the big tropes I see is how people respond to extreme fear, usually by soiling themselves in some way. George R.R. Martin just loves to have his characters pee and crap themselves, but he's certainly not the only offender. In fact, I just finished Sleeping Beauties by Stephen King (one of my favorite authors) and Owen King, and was really frustrated when once again, the peeing-oneself-in-fear trope reared its ugly head.

Do people pee themselves in fear? Yes they do. It probably doesn't happen anywhere near as often as it does in books, but then we don't usually encounter some of literature's most fear-inducing creatures in real life. So we'll say for the moment that the frequency with which people pee themselves is fine. In fact, that's not even the issue I have.

The issue I have is when this response occurs. In the books (and movies & TV series too), something scary shows up and the character immediately wets him or herself. Nope. That's not when it happens. It would happen after the fear moment has passed - after the creature has been beaten or moved onto another target, just as the character is beginning to breath a sigh of relief. That's right - you pee after you've been afraid, not during.

How could that be? Let me talk to you for a moment about the fight vs. flight response, for which I've created this visual aid:

Regardless of whether you're going into battle or running way, your body response is the same: in response to some stressor, your body is raring up to go. Specifically, the sympathetic nervous system is getting you ready to expend energy, because fighting or flighting, you're going to be expending energy. Your body releases chemicals, like epinephrine (adrenaline), norepinephrine, and cortisol. Your heart rate and blood pressure increase. Your pupils dilate. Your muscles get ready for action.

But as these systems are charging up, other systems are slowing or shutting down completely. Your immune response is suppressed. Sexual arousal is suppressed. Digestion slows or may even stop. And your body stops producing waste materials, like urine. It's not very helpful if, just as you're getting ready to fight for your life, you realize you're hungry or need to pee, or if your allergies act up and you've suddenly got itchy eyes, sneezes, and a runny nose. Those feelings go away, temporarily, so you can focus your energy on the surviving.

But after the stressful period ends, your parasympathetic nervous system takes over. Unlike the sympathetic nervous system's "fight or flight" response, the parasympathetic nervous system's response is "rest and digest." (I've also heard "feed and breed," because of the aforementioned impact on sexual arousal.) Those processes that were slowed or stopped start up again. Your muscles relax. You can imagine where this is going.

The best portrayal of this concept I've ever seen was in The Green Mile: the scene where Wild Bill, one of the inmates on death row, grabs Percy, one of the guards, and threatens him. The other guards get Wild Bill to release Percy, who rushes to the other side of the corridor and collapses on the floor. Wild Bill says with a smirk that he wouldn't have hurt Percy. And that's when Del, a fellow inmate, points out that Percy has just wet himself.

Percy is away from Wild Bill and safe. While the emotions he was experiencing when Wild Bill grabs him are still present (he's still upset), his body is returning to its previous physiological state. And that's when his bladder lets go.

So there you have it - if you really want your character to wet him- or herself, it should happen after the character begins "coming down."

I know one question I've gotten when discussing this in the past is, why do animals pee on someone/something in fear? Remember, animals don't have the same highly evolved nervous system that we have. Their systems are not going to shut down in the same way a human's does. Also, their reaction is not directly to fear, but is (arguably) an evolved response that is pretty effective in getting predators to let them go. Sure, an animal could bite instead, but that's aggressive and likely to earn an aggressive response. These animals are generally built for flight, not fight, and peeing is a submissive response. But for humans and other creatures higher on the food chain, being an apex predator means we'll have much different responses than animals that are not apex predators.

Bonus: you could use this information to portray the opposite. Sometimes authors want to show how badass their character is by having them be completely unfazed by something another character finds terrifying. You could have your character walking into battle commenting that he/she is starving and hopes to get something to eat after finishing with this nonsense, or something along those lines.

I know I blog about statistics a lot on this blog, but I'm always thrilled to talk about my discipline too! Any psychology topics you'd like to see addressed here? (Or any tropes you're tired to seeing?)

Reading and Viewing List

Two meetings this morning, so I haven't had a chance to read or watch some open tabs. Today's reading:

• Fallows writes about how actual smart people talk about themselves (and in my favorite response thus far to "stable genius," a friend shared a picture of a stable genius on Facebook - her daughter's horse)
• The Tribune gives us Impossible Tacos - I'll bite
• Also from the Tribune, Medieval Times finally has a queen

And on my watch list:

What the Wrath of Khan's trailer would look like today

Also on the subject of trailers, a recut that makes The Room look like a good movie:

Cracked discusses how 9/11 changed 90s sitcoms:

And Lessons from the Screenplay examines The Fault in our Star Wars:

Year in Review: 2017

I'm looking back over 2017, and pulling together some metrics to answer the question posed by Rent: How do you measure a year? Here are a few ways:

Books read: 52 (for a total of 16,906 pages)
Blog posts written: 365 (counting this one)
Jobs: 2, and fortunately, less than 2 months of unemployment
Concerts Performed: 7, plus a very successful benefit for my choir
Movies Seen in Theatre: 14
Plus another NaNoWriMo win!

I also decided to check out my 5 most popular blog posts from the year, based on page views, and all of them are about statistics (go figure):

1. Statistical Sins: Stepwise Regression
2. Statistics Sunday: What Are Degrees of Freedom? (Part 1)
3. Statistics Sunday: Free Data Science and Statistics Resources
4. Statistics Sunday: What is Bootstrapping?
5. Statistical Sins: Know Your Variables (A Confession)

I've already shared some of my writing goals for 2018. I'm putting together some additional goals and resolutions for 2018, and I'll share those soon!

Sound off, readers - how do you measure your year? And what are your goals for 2018? Feel free to describe in the comments or share a link to your own blog posts on the subject.

By the way, you might also enjoy Google's Year in Search 2017, which gives some of the highlights for the year:

Movie Review: Pitch Perfect 3

Tonight I went to see the movie that made Pitch Perfect a trilogy. I'll be honest: I loved the first one, and I was very disappointed with the second. So I didn't have high expectations for the third - and that's probably why I liked it. With some caveats, of course.

If you're not familiar, Pitch Perfect was the story of a scrappy group of college a cappella singers who prove to the world that all-woman groups can do good a cappella music. Pitch Perfect 2 was the story of a disgraced group of college a cappella singers who prove that a cappella groups can perform original music. Pitch Perfect 3 is the story of down-on-their-luck college graduates, who prove that great a cappella singers sometimes perform with instruments.

The movie opens with an awesome arrangement of Britney Spears's "Toxic." I'll be honest, this just made me happy, because I love that song.

It's interrupted by Fat Amy busting through the ceiling with a fire extinguisher, dousing their captors as the others escape. Then Fat Amy and Beca jump off the boat as it explodes.

I literally said, "What?" at this point in the movie.

A subtitle tells us we're now going back 3 weeks to show what led to these insane events. Beca hates her job as a music producer, trying to make crappy music sound good only to be thrown under the bus, so she quits. Fat Amy and Chloe are Beca's roommates, and after Beca shares her news of being unemployed, the three meet up with their fellow singers for a Barton Bella reunion... only to discover, to their disappointment, that they won't be singing, just watching the current Barton Bellas.

It's here that we learn the girls are going through what these days is called (sadly, without a hint of irony) a quarter-life crisis. So they jump at a chance to perform together as a group again, on a USO tour, while competing for a spot as the opening act for DJ Khaled.

This story borrows pretty heavily from the previous two movies, with other groups throwing all kinds of shade at the Bellas, including a chick group called (I kid you not) Ever Moist - who are just Ever Salty. Fat Amy has moved on from her constant ginger jokes of the first movie to constant dumb Emily jokes. They're not as funny, but I'm thrilled they moved away from the Fat Amy schtick of Pitch Perfect 2, which consisted of, "Hey, Fat Amy is so fat. Just look at how fat she is. Isn't that funny? Oh by the way, she's really large." Even better, they dropped the unbelievably stereotypical jokes from (about) Florencia, their Guatemalan classmate.

Plus, Fat Amy redeems herself by showing she's pretty bad ass, as the B story deals with her reunion/conflict with her father (played by John Lithgow), a smuggler. Elizabeth Banks and John Michael Higgins return in their roles as a cappella commentators. Ruby Rose is quite good as the lead singer of Ever Moist, and I was thrilled to see Andy Allo as a member of Ever Moist - I saw her perform at City Winery recently, and was really impressed with her. And I was almost super-excited when I saw music producer Theo, mainly because when he first appeared on screen, I thought it was Adam Scott. I was sad when I got another look and realized, alas, it was not. But the actual actor had a cute accent, so there's that.

So the movie was over-the-top and much-recycled. But it was cute, it had good vocal arrangements, it had some really funny moments but didn't seem to take itself too seriously. Overall, if you loved Pitch Perfect, you'll probably want to see this movie. It's not profound, it's not even terribly clever, but it's fun.

Travel Day Links

I finally saw The Last Jedi last night and loved it. I'll try to have more reactions soon. For now, I'll say I loved and I'm so happy to no longer have to dodge spoilers.

I'm heading out of town for the holidays later on this morning/afternoon. I have a few articles up to read:

• An incredibly depressing letter from Hogwarts, telling a young witch she's being waitlisted, part of a campaign to raise awareness of the importance of educating women
• Short filmmakers can license a Stephen King story for $1, as long as you follow his rules
• An older article that someone shared, and the least surprising news ever: peer review might be keeping breakthrough results from being published
• And lastly, these Ohio parents who gave their son's teachers bottles of wine with his picture on the label, and a caption:

Happy holidays, everyone! I'm driving into cold temperatures and lots of snow, so I'm packing a ton of books and my laptop (and lots of sweaters and yoga pants), and planning to spend much of my time reading and writing. 

True Colors

Two graphs are currently open in my browser today, both of which deal with color - one deals with political affiliations (red Republicans and blue Democrats) while the other deals with lightsabers.

First, the graph of political affiliation, shared via Andrew Gelman:

Specifically, this chart displays results from two datasets: one from the National Provider Index, which lists physicians in the United States; and state voter files, which provide voter registration data including political affiliation. They were able to match these two files to create one dataset of political affilitation for 55,000 physicians residing in 29 states. As you can see in the graph above, there appears to be differences in political affiliation by physician specialty, hence the title of the original article: Your Surgeon Is Probably a Republican, Your Psychiatrist Probably a Democrat.

The second graph just brings me joy, because I'm super-excited to see The Last Jedi Thursday (also: tired of dodging spoilers). In honor of the new Star Wars movie, FiveThirtyEight gives us this graph of number of lightsabers by color in both canon and extended universe:

Movie Review: The Disaster Artist

It's been a while since I've done a movie review and I just saw The Disaster Artist last night - so here we are! A movie review, and not even a superfluous one at that.

The Disaster Artist tells the story of Tommy Wiseau (played by James Franco) and his best friend/fellow actor Greg Sestero (Dave Franco), as they try to make it in the crazy world of show business. Tommy has a mysterious past: no one knows how old he is, where he's from (he claims to be from New Orleans despite an unidentified/unidentifiable Eastern European accent), or where his vast wealth comes from.

Tommy and Greg meet in Jean Shelton's acting class, where Jean (in a great cameo from Melanie Griffith) offers both actors feedback after poorly executed scenes. Despite the fact that Tommy's rendition of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire was simply him shouting, "Stella!" over and over again while climbing the walls and writhing on the floor, Greg is impressed with Tommy's fearlessness. He asks Tommy to do a scene with him. Tommy encourages Greg to overcome his stage fright, and their friendship is born.

Together they move to L.A., staying in an apartment Tommy owns but rarely visits. They go through the various steps of becoming professional actors: taking headshots, going to auditions, and (at least in Greg's case) finding an agent - the great Iris Burton (another great cameo, this one by Sharon Stone), who is famous for representing child actors like River Phoenix, Kirsten Dunst, Drew Barrymore, and Fred Savage.

But despite all that, Tommy and Greg both struggle to get cast. Greg laments that maybe they should just make their own movie. Tommy, with his "bottomless" bank account, thinks that's a great idea, and writes a screenplay for The Room. When Tommy makes the unbelievable decision to purchase, rather than rent, cameras and equipment, he is given access to a studio and some of the best technicians in show business to help him make his movie. And, as history has shown us, that awful, incoherent movie went on to become a cult film, playing to sold out crowds.

The Disaster Artist does for The Room what Ed Wood did for Plan 9 From Outer Space - the "so bad it's good" movie that was already loved by many gets elevated and understood at a new level. The story behind the movie helps you to appreciate, even admire, the movie, regardless of its inept writing and poor execution. In fact, I'm a fan in general of "making of" movies, like Shadow of a Vampire (portraying the making of Nosferatu) and RKO 281 (portraying the making of Citizen Kane); regardless of whether the movie they portray is a masterpiece (as Nosferatu and Kane are considered to be) or garbage (like The Room and Plan 9) these making-of films are like love letters to the original movies and to cinema in general.

I'm about halfway through the book on which The Disaster Artist is based, written by Greg Sestero and author Tom Bissell, both of whom have cameos in this movie. (Also, be sure to hang around after the credits for a great scene with the real Tommy Wiseau.) So it's difficult for me not to compare the book and the movie, and - as is so often the case - feel bummed that they cut out some great parts from the book. For the most part, I felt this was a good adaptation of the source material, and fit a lot of Greg's and Tom's insights into The Room and Tommy himself into the movie. The beginning, though, felt a bit rushed - I didn't feel like it established why Greg and Tommy became friends, and why Greg was willing to do and give up so much to make Tommy happy. But the actors in the film all did an excellent job at bringing the material to life. James Franco was incredible as Tommy, and Dave Franco perfectly captured Greg's sweet, naïve charm.

Probably the part I'm most bummed they cut out was Greg's story about the movie Home Alone. In the film version, Greg shares that he became interested in acting because Home Alone changed his life. It's a throwaway line that makes Greg look like a lovable idiot. But in the book, he explains what he means by that, and it's actually a really sweet story. After Greg saw Home Alone, he went home and wrote a screenplay for Home Alone 2. Greg, being a child at the time (he's about my age), probably didn't write a professional-quality screenplay, but nonetheless, he found the address for John Hughes's production company, and sent his screenplay in. Not long after, he got his screenplay back in the mail, along with a note from John Hughes, telling him: "Believe in yourself, have patience, and always follow your heart." He says after reading that note, he found his calling.

Having seen The Room helps to understand many of the funny moments in The Disaster Artist. I'm fairly certain the others in theatre with me had never seen The Room because I was often the only laughing. But regardless of whether you've seen The Room, I highly recommend checking The Disaster Artist out. And if you're a fan of The Room or just bad movies in general, I also highly recommend reading the book.

Statistics Sunday: Bayesian Inference in a Galaxy Far Far Away

I was recently rewatching Rogue One with a friend the other day. Since this is part of the Star Wars universe, it of course had to have some of the usual Star Wars elements: strange-looking aliens, someone uttering the line "I've got a bad feeling about this," and droids rambling off odds of different outcomes. Always bad outcomes - seriously, why don't the droids ever feel the need to say, "The odds are 50 to 1 that everything is going to turn out okay," or "There are puppies ahead; 200 to 1 odds of many puppy snuggles"?

But I digress. Because what I really want to talk about are those odds, and why they tell us something about the droids. True, they're sprinkled into the movies mainly as jokes. We don't really need to pay attention to the odds, other than to be impressed when the bad thing the droid was calculating on about doesn't end up happening. For instance, from The Empire Strikes Back:

Or this one, from Rogue One:

The information from the droid isn't actually that important. The point is that the line should make you laugh. But I was thinking about how this information is used in the Star Wars universe, and more importantly, where it could be derived from. And I came to an important realization:

These droids must be using Bayesian inference.

It's incredibly unlikely that these probabilities are empirically derived (BTW, this approach of using completely empirical data to derive probabilities is called Frequentism). C-3PO, for instance, says the odds of successfully navigating an asteroid field are 3,720 to 1. What that means is he has to have data on at least 3,721 attempts at navigating an asteroid field. And of course, you'd want more data than that. Just because 1 attempt out of the 3,721 was successful doesn't mean those are the true odds. It's possible the odds are actually 10,000 to 1. You need a lot of data to empirically derive the probability of something.

And what about K-2SO simply saying the probability that Jyn will use the weapon against Cassian is "very high"? It doesn't actually matter what the probability is, but where does that value come from? Sure, it's possible that K-2SO is simply using the probability that an escaped convict would use a weapon on another person, but still, it doesn't seem like there would be a lot of data just laying around. And if K-2SO prefers to use data specific to the situation, he'd need data on the outcome of a very specific situation, one that has likely never happened.

But it isn't unusual for people/droids/whatever to want to know the odds of something that might never have happened before - an event so rare it's impossible to observe it naturally but that you need to be prepared for in the unlikely event that it happens. Insurance companies need to know the potential risks of taking on a new account. Governments need to prepare for potential wars. And scientists need to be able to make causal inferences from their data, sometimes data not collected in such a way to infer cause. To a classical statistician, those puzzles would be difficult, maybe impossible. But to a Bayesian, it is completely possible to generate odds on a thing that has never happened before.

(If you need to refresh your memory on Bayes' Theorem, check out posts here, here, here, and here. And as soon as I learn how to invent more free time, I'm going to sit down and learn Bayesian statistics so I can stop Dunning-Kruger-ing my way through it.)

What K-2SO and C-3PO are generating are conditional probabilities - the probability of something happening given known probabilities about the present situation. These known probabilities are called "priors," and the droid could draw on whatever priors make sense. So C-3PO might be drawing on data about the maneuverability of the Millennium Falcon, the probability of crashes while being pursued, size and motion of the asteroids, and even observations about Hahn Solo himself. Using those conditions, C-3PO can calculate the probability that they'll make it out of the asteroid field alive.

(Side note: Successfully navigating an asteroid field actually wouldn't be that difficult. Check out this post from The Math Dude at Quick and Dirty Tips.)

And just as with the asteroids, K-2SO doesn't need to have the empirical odds that Jyn will use her "found" blaster on Cassian. Instead, he could use known information on Jyn's proclivity toward violence, rates at which convicted criminals use guns, and even probability of a weapon being fired in emotional situations or probability that Cassian will piss Jyn off somehow. K-2SO could use whatever priors make sense, and use that information to derive this "very high" probability.

Hopefully you're as excited as I am about seeing The Last Jedi!

May the Force be with you.

Videos to Help You Get Through Your Friday

It's been a long week. So I've got some videos lined up to help me get through the day. First up, Postmodern Jukebox brings us this awesome Motown-style cover of "Tomorrow" from Annie; the amazingly talented Shosanna Bean sings lead, and Toni Scruggs and Tiffany Smith provide backup (plus a short interjection of "Hard Knock Life"):

The Room gets songifyed:

Two members of my choir talk about singing Messiah (our first concert is a week from tomorrow!):

Jenny Nicholson talks about playing The Last Jedi Bingo:

Link Round-Up

Happy Friday, everyone! Here are the tabs I have open, that I've either read or will be reading soon:

• The closest The Room will ever get to winning an Oscar - the "making of" comedy, The Disaster Artist starring James Franco is getting some Oscar buzz
• Matt Lauer has commented on the sexual harassment allegations - my favorite part is where he says, "Repairing the damage will take a lot of time and soul searching and I'm committed to beginning that effort. It is now my full time job." Translation: Look how hard I'm working to make it right. And, oh yeah, I'm reminding you that I no longer have a full-time job. Pardon me while I make the "nobody cares" motion. You guys know the one I'm talking about.
• Speaking of men behaving badly, a friend shared this older article that details the history of Chevy Chase pissing people off, and apparently being racist and sexist. He's Chevy Chase, and I'm not. And for that, I'm thankful.
• Finally, the APS Observer publishes an article about the hidden costs of sleep deprivation

Also: If you've never experienced The Room and don't really want to watch the entire horrible movie, you can check out Chris Stuckmann's detailed review to get pretty much everything you need to appreciate The Disaster Artist:

Statistics Sunday: Data Discovery

For today's (late) Statistics Sunday post, I was going to dig into FiveThirtyEight's Thanksgiving data, to find the real reason people in the West eat so much salad at Thanksgiving. As I was inspecting the data and readme file, I clicked back in the directory and found that FiveThirtyEight has shared a ton of data on GitHub. So instead of analyzing Thanksgiving data, I clicked through readme files of other data they had available.

Yes, I became distracted by new data.

Some favorites among the list:

• Marvel Comics characters who have been part of the Avengers
• Halloween Candy Power Ranking
• Every guest Jon Stewart had on the Daily Show
• An analysis of characters and their intersections in Love Actually
• Marriage (and divorce) trends in the US
• A huge multi-file set of media coverage of the Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, Jose, and Maria
• Scrabble tournament data