Mining novels

This is a great story by John Markoff in the NY Times. I'm not a lawyer though, or I'm sure I'd see it differently. Legal discovery has been automated, and the sophistication of the software is mind-boggling. The sweetest part is the Enron Corpus, a public database of Enron email and documents seized by the government during the criminal proceedings, which has proven invaluable to researchers trying to understand corporate language and social networks. Future Enrons will be plagued and prosecuted, not by lawyers, because there won't be any, but by software developed with the Enron Corpus.

A novel could be written with this data-mining software. There must be a million stories in the Enron Corpus. Obviously plenty of slimy, criminal tales, but also romance, misunderstandings, jokes, lies. Happy families, miserable ones, duck hunting, moving children to college, crazy drives across country to look up people who died years ago. No more writing novels - we'd just start our software and make coffee. It's 100% accurate, while humans are barely more accurate than flipping a coin.

The Illusionist

We watched Silvain Chomet's The Illusionist this weekend. It was full of beautiful, precise pictures. The landscapes of Edinburgh and the hinterlands up the loch were gorgeous, with the detail and precision of scientific illustrations. They made me think of the Colorado landscape drawings of William Henry Holmes.

I don't know what the end of the movie means, but I love not having everything spelled out. It takes a lot of guts to leave key parts of the story up to your viewers or readers. Try to imagine a mainstream Hollywood movie showing a character looking at a snapshot, but not showing us the snapshot. They would never trust us to come to our own conclusions.

Eagles

It's been eagley this last week. We saw a juvenile bald eagle in the trees by the apartment ponds. It was being shouted at by a hundred crows, who were careful to keep their distance. Crows will dive at an owl, but apparently not at an eagle. It may not even have been aware of them. I thought it was looking very closely at the mallard and ring-neck ducks below. Its head and tail weren't white, but there seemed to be white below the brown feathers on its head. When it turned its head, white showed through. Later it flew over us, making for the river. Then yesterday we saw a pair, very high up, turning closely together. At intervals, one would plunge at the other feet first. The other would elegantly curve away. There was some uncertainty about identification, but not with the final bird we saw, at the wetlands, with a very bright white head and tail.