Although I’m not especially worried by higher fuel prices—in my opinion, they’ll help accelerate a much-needed movement to electric vehicles, which in turn will force us to use more nuclear and solar power—one of the things I’ve routinely wondered is how planes will deal with the problem. To me, the only solution seemed to be to use hydrogen (rather explosive) or increasingly expensive gas propellants. It turns out, though, that small planes can be powered by batteries—and someone has already made a battery-powered propeller plane. It’s quiet, clean, and can fly for 90 to 120 minutes—enough for a pleasure cruise. And the best part? It costs a mere 60¢ to refuel the craft.

Count me in.

I’ve never been an especially big fan of Python—faster but less powerful than Ruby, slower and less powerful than Smalltalk and Common Lisp, and not as usefully grungy as Perl—but I’ve become a rather strong pragmatist vis-à-vis programming languages, and realize that Python probably isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, so I’ve been trying to improve my proficiency through activities such as Django Dash (which Tyler and I won) and small coding projects, such as the one-off tasks I have to do at work. It’s a technique that’s served me very well in the past to learn new languages and frameworks.

One of the reasons I’m not a particularly big fan of Python is the pervasive use of underscore methods—methods named __like_this__—to accomplish things that Python’s bondage-friendly design wouldn’t otherwise let you do (e.g., operator overloading, destructors, and functors). To that end, I was happy to discover a concise list of Python’s underscore methods and what they do. If you want a quick overview of what can be accomplished through underscore magic, that page should serve you very well.

Given I know a few people myself who don’t own cellphones, I found defective yeti’s list of how people’s reaction to the discovery he does not have a cell phone has changed over the course of the last decade spot-on and hilarious.

In my earlier review, I compared WALL•E—at least the first half—to a silent film. (True, the sentences, “Directive?”, “WALL•E,” “EVE,” and “Classified!” are indeed spoken, but since that’s it, I’m willing to fudge a little.) Silent films were, of course, not actually silent; a pianist—or, for larger locales, an organist, or even an entire orchestra—provided music to accompany the visuals. I had hoped that WALL•E would honor that tradition by having an outstanding soundtrack. I was not disappointed.

The WALL•E soundtrack, though certainly not the most technically complicated score I’ve heard in recent years, does stand singularly one of very few scores where I can re-experience the movie simply by listening to the music. Specifically because WALL•E and EVE have so few words to speak, my aural memories of them are through their orchestral backing. I can still see the dreary desolation of Earth in 2815 A.D., laugh at WALL•E’s inquisitiveness in Wall-E, feel WALL•E’s horror at EVE’s comatose state in Worry Wait, and feel their carefree love for each other in Define Dancing. That’s something I can say about depressingly few soundtracks these days. I’m very happy that WALL•E’s did not disappoint.

And it turns out that the Toyota Prius isn’t necessarily that great for the environment after all. (This should not come as a surprise if you’ve been keeping up on the research into renewable energy.) Listen closely to the end of the segment, though—the point isn’t that the Prius cannot be more efficient than the M3, but rather that the driver has to do his part to drive more conservatively, too—something that I’ve argued, and been keenly aware of, since I started driving.

I was more excited about the arrival of WALL•E than I have been about any movie in a very long time. WALL•E would be one of the last Pixar films with minimal Disney influence, promised to make us fall in love with a pair of robots, and, I hoped, would give the Pixar a chance to redeem itself from Cars (also known as “Doc Hollywood with less nudity and more automobiles”). Besides, the trailer for this post-apocalyptic G-rated adventure used part of the soundtrack from Brazil. What wasn’t there to love?

Unfortunately, last week, seeing WALL•E on opening day looked problematic. The annual Fog Creek summer party was on that Friday, plus most of the people I wanted to see the movie with were busy Friday night and gone for the weekend.

So I did what any sane person would do: I dragged my roommate and an unsuspecting intern to the 12:01 AM showing on what was, technically, Friday morning. After a few quick naps and a few quick Redbulls, we wobbled our way into Times Square, bought our tickets, and headed into the theater.

By the time we arrived—still a good twenty minutes before the show started—the theater was packed, and the audience already on the edge of their seats. Unsurprisingly, I saw very few children; the audience was composed almost entirely of twenty-somethings and a few thirty-somethings, many of whom were clearly diehard Pixar fans. That made me happy: seeing a movie with an enthusiastic crowd can add a tremendous amount to a movie.

(And a dead crowd can subtract. I saw the movie for a second time Sunday afternoon, and was…well, saddened by the audience’s reactions. WALL•E’s start-up sound—the same as the Apple IIGS—spawned laughter and applause at the initial screening. The reaction from the audience the second time I saw it? Nothing. There were a half-dozen other jokes that the Sunday matinée’s audience simply failed to grok or find funny, leaving me the only one laughing in the theater.)

Finally, the movie began.

First, I have no idea how Pixar managed to slide the opening short—entitled Presto—past the Disney censors. The cartoon, though hilarious, steals liberally from the best of the maniacally violent Warner-Bros. cartoons of yesteryear. Although not worth the price of admission by itself (movie tickets in New York are up to $12), I definitely look forward to being able to add it to my DVD collection.

Finally, the main feature began. Would WALL•E live up to my overhyped expectations?

In my opinion, WALL•E is two movies. One of them truly is the best movie I’ve ever seen. The other is solid. Combined, it’s still an amazing piece, but I find myself wanting for what WALL•E could have been.

The first movie, which lasts for roughly forty minutes WALL•E, has virtually no dialog. One of the characters is a cockroach with no facial expressions. Another is a trash compactor with binoculars for a head. The third has no mechanism whatsoever for expressing emotions other than two pupil-less eyeballs that are always the same shade of blue. Yet, I was almost moved to tears. The emotions expressed were so beautiful, so pure, and so dire, that I can’t think of any way to describe it except as visual poetry. It is emotionally and visually exquisite, and devastating.

The second movie, which roughly corresponds with the latter half, has substantially more dialog, shallower emotions, and more plot. The haunting poetry of the first section devolves into more typical Disney fare. I still thought that this movie was enjoyable to watch and significantly higher-calibre than most movies I see, but it lacks the artistry and panache of the first half. To be honest, I felt cheated. WALL•E’s opening promised so much more. That the second half was merely above-average left me oddly disappointed.

For this reason, I find rating WALL•E painfully difficult. WALL•E could have been the last great silent film—and, for awhile, it was. I want this WALL•E to be divorced from any emotions I may I have about the work as a whole; I want to be able to point to it and say, “This is what movies should be.” But the actual movie simply does not maintain that bold vision throughout, and, unless you have a brutal taste for tragedy, the movie-within cannot stand by itself.

I did love the movie enough to see it again two days later—something I don’t think I’ve done since Aladdin—and I’ve recommended it heartily to family and friends. I just wish Pixar had had the courage to finish the movie with the same bold vision that they had for the first half.

Bell Canada is currently engaged in a lovely kerfuffle with the CRTC (Canada’s rough equivalent of the FTC) for throttling BitTorrent traffic. The CRTC recently ordered Bell Canada to release its bandwidth numbers, and Bell Canada, after some protestations, complied. The little teensy problem with their data, as Ars Technica points out, is that the numbers indicate that any problems Bell Canada is experiencing have nothing whatsoever to do with BitTorrent, and can be trivially and cheaply fixed.

I am shocked—shocked!—to find that gambling is going on in here!

This has got to be one of the dumbest concepts for a cell phone I’ve seen in my life. I’m kind of amazed it wasn’t killed in preproduction.

It may not enable time travel, but the flux capacitor, in a literal sense, is here. Called a memristor, the device provides similar functionality to a transistor, but at vastly higher efficiencies, an should allow for much smaller, more efficient computers in the future.

The Freakonomics Blog has a fasciating report on the horrible accuracy of TV weather stations. Although I don’t find the results remotely surprising, the data reflect such a profound lack of insight that I’m forced to reevaluate whether watching the weather is worth my time at all. For most people, going outside, looking at the sky, and paying attention to changes in humidity seems as if it would yield more accurate results.