The Hobbit

"Good whimsy to orc ratio." said Celeste.

It's true. The movie was a lot of fun. I actually found their to be a lot of battling, but that could be because it was 2am and I was tired. The movie is really pretty and we have all our favorite cast members. You even get to see Frodo at the very beginning. It's awesome.

I loved the opening with the dwarves showing up. We also recognized the vampire guy from the English version of Being Human and that was fun.

If you liked the treatment that Peter Jackson gave the Lord of the Rings movies, you'll dig the Hobbit.

Really my favorite thing was going to the opening and seeing all the geeks dressed in their best finery. Hobbits costumes of course, but also dwarves and, my favorite, a dragon with little red wings.

What I did not realize is that this is a story in two parts. That made me sad (also apparently not paying attention).

I think we'll go to the opening of the next one. But who wants to wait - not me!

Guns, gun violence, correlations and... solutions?

I have mixed emotions about guns, but a lot of clarity about gun violence. I live in a city with a lot of it and often think about violence including my own safety and that of my son. And I'm really angry and exhausted by the rhetoric people are shouting at each other the last couple of days. So I've been doing some research about the connections between guns and homicide.

There are more gun owners and gun homicide in the US than anywhere else in the world by the numbers (which are all over FB right now). Comparing total deaths of the US and the UK or Finland or Switzerland or even Isreal is crap - they all have tiny populations compared to the US so that numbers don't mean anything - and the certainly don't inherently mean that the US is the most violent country in the world. Or do they? We don't know by those numbers.

So I started looking at things like gun ownership per capita and other ways of equalizing the statistics. Some one else thought of the same thing....

"Poverty and failing institutions appear to be much better predictors of homicide than gun ownership. Murder rates are higher in neighborhoods of America that are poorer and less educated, regardless of gun culture..." does a lot of looking at the kinds of statistics I was looking for.

There is also the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC) statistics that is sited in the List of Countries by Intentional Homicide Rate List which shows just that a list of countries by intentional homicide rates per 100,000. But it coems with a disclaimer...

"The reliability of underlying national murder rate data may vary.[1] The legal definition of "intentional homicide" differs among countries. Intentional homicide may or may not include infanticide, assisted suicide or euthanasia. Intentional homicide demographics are affected by changes in trauma care, leading to changed lethality of violent assaults, so the intentional homicide rate may not necessarily indicate the overall level of societal violence.[2] They may also be underreported for political reasons.[3][4] Another problem for the comparability of the following figures is that some data may include attempts. In general the values in these lists should not include attempts except when mentioned otherwise."

In other words they don't really know. In fact that's what I came up against a lot in this research. Most suggestions were to narrow the data to first world countries so that the reproting could be more accurate and maybe I will at some stage look for more. But I just wanted to say that the causes or correlations are not as clear as many make them seem, especially in places like FaceBok where you get a picture or a short blurb in which to commnicate something complex.