The Percy Jackson series

My daughter loves to read. She's eight years old and has really started to be able to plough through a good novel in a reasonable amount of time. Having finished the Harry Potter series last year and going through a variety of shorter youth books since, I noticed the Lightning Thief book at Chapters and let her have a look at the first chapter before deciding she liked it.

I have a basic theory that any book that gets turned into a movie is probably interesting enough in story to be readable. Having seen the trailers but not the movie, I bought her the book and hoped she'd enjoy it. After finishing it and begging for the next books, she let my wife borrow it and then me. Turns out, aside from some very silly plot elements making it very clear this is not a thought provoking book for adults, its a pretty fun story. Saturday morning cartoon fun, not Lord of the Rings.

Purchasing and borrowing our way through the next three books, my daughter wanted to see the movie. After giving my usual warnings that movies are never as good as the books on which they're based, we rented it just the other night. I must say, my warning wasn't stern enough even for myself. Had it not been for my daughter wanting to finish the movie, I might've returned it to the movie store as defective -- in content.

I'm not just saying its a rendition of the story, since that's pretty common with such book-turned-movie attempts, its also a pretty bad movie. We're not talking plot compression, but something more akin to stealing character names and places and then writing a whole new story set in a similar universe. I would go well over my word count if I were to list the things I disliked in the movie, so I won't bother.

With the movie now firmly brushed aside, we're all looking forward to reading The Last Olympian, but also sad another good series comes to an end and we must again do the hunt for good reading material for a young reader who enjoys books.

Racial profiling, literally

Christian Rudder from OkCupid/OkTrends has posted an aggregation of some of their data on personal preferences from their over half million users (minor language warning due). The data is divided mostly along racial lines, although there's also some equally politically incorrect data divided along religious boundaries. I'll allow you to go read it for yourself though.

There are some entertaining tidbits, like "if a Latin dude tells you a joke, you should laugh" and how little in common white men and women have in common. That said, one of my first thoughts as I looked at the white male interests lists was "now I know why you're single" because, after all, this is a dating site's data. These are probably not, by and large, your happily-in-a-relationship people.

Despite not representing the population at large to any degree of error, it is still an interesting data set to have a look at. Before you read it though, can you guess what any of the top three words/phrases are for each race by gender? I didn't.

Twitter and toilet paper

I came across an interesting piece about Twitter today on CNET about Washington Post reporter Mike Wise. Aparently Mike Wise wanted to demonstrate how unreliable Twitter is as a news source by posting fake information using his real name and that of the newspaper he works for. Long story short: he's sorry now.

I'm reminded of people who continually post about how unreliable the now ubiquitous Wikipedia is. Whenever studied, whenever tested, it proved itself reliable and as worthy of being referenced as other major publications. Somehow the "many eyes" concept still hasn't gotten past some of our society's belief in the constant need for experts.

In response to one such person's comment on the above CNET story in fact, I posted the following:

Twitter delivers reliable news in the same way as paper does. Its a medium, and that is all. Some paper has doodles on it, some paper is used on rolls and deposited in toilets, and some has newsprint all over it. There is nothing special about paper that makes it more newsworthy than any other medium, and nothing nefarious about Twitter that makes it less deserving to be used for the same purpose.

People fail to comprehend sometimes that many mediums can be used for both good and silliness without any conflict. Facebook has silly farm games, and people posting their weekends of binge drinking but also companies who want to share their product information, and groups of individuals organizing events in their communities.

Of course, many people also fail to understand Facebook.