大家都是读书人
Posted: 2008-11-14 16:50
最近我看了几个娱乐电影，Traitor, Eagle eyes, Body of lies。推荐 Body of lies，如果你喜欢血钻石那种英雄美人的风格，你就会喜欢 Body of lies。Leonardo DiCaprio 和 Russell Crowe 两个人都是抛开自己的原始魅力在电影里靠演技。两个人的表演都相当自然出彩。（我不大喜欢Tom Hanks，他一表现情绪激动就狞眉皱演，无论是愤怒还是兴奋还是伤心，在多个电影里都是一个样，我看见就浑身不舒服。）另， Eagle eyes 不值得看，是个 Enemy of the State + I, Robot + 现时流行的爱国主义 的没啥创意的一个杂拌儿。
这三个电影有个共同的特点就是都把小型无人驾驶飞机在中东地区做 video 监控，并实时把码流传给当地和五角大楼的指挥台，这一技术做为吸引眼球的一个亮点来渲染。这真不是好莱坞瞎编的。我来引 Thomas L. Friedman 在他的2005年的畅销书《世界是平的》里的一段：
（Thomas L. Friedman 自911以后就开始追踪中东问题。出版了《Longitudes and Attitudes: The World in the Age of Terrorism》。）
这三个电影有个共同的特点就是都把小型无人驾驶飞机在中东地区做 video 监控，并实时把码流传给当地和五角大楼的指挥台，这一技术做为吸引眼球的一个亮点来渲染。这真不是好莱坞瞎编的。我来引 Thomas L. Friedman 在他的2005年的畅销书《世界是平的》里的一段：
In the fall of 2004, I accompanied the chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff, General richard Myers, on a tour of hot spots in Iraq. we visited Baghdad, the U.S. military headquarters in Fallujah, and the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit encampment outside Babil, in the heart of Iraq's so-called Sunni Triangle. The makeshift 24th MEU base is a sort of Fort Apache, in the middle of a pretty hostile Iraqi Sunni Muslim population. While General Myers was meeting with officers and enlisted men there, I was free to walk around the base, and eventually I wandered into the command center, where my eye was immediately caught by a large flat-screen TV. On the screen was a live TV feed the looked to be coming from some kind of overhead camera. It showed some people moving around behind a house. Also on the screen, along the right side, was an active instant-messaging chat room, which seemed to be discussing the scene on the TV.
"What is that?" I asked the soldier who was carefully monitoring all the images from a laptop. He explained that a U.S. Predator drone - a small pilotless aircraft with a high-power television camera - was flying over an Iraqi village, in the 24th MEU's area of operation, and feeding real-time intelligence images back to his laptop and this flat screen. This drone was actually being "flown" and manipulated by an expert who was sitting back at Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas, Nevada. That's right, the drone over Iraq was actually being remotely directed from Las Vegas. Meanwhile, the video images it was beaming back were being watched simultaneously by the 24th MEU, United States Central Command headquarters in Tampa, CentCom regianl headquarters in Qatar, in the Pentagon, and probably also at the CIA. The different analysts around the world were conducting an online chat about how to interpret what was going on and what to do about it. It was their conversation that was scrolling down the right side of the screen.
上面三个电影里表现的当然比他书里写得复杂高明多了。但原始的起点大概可能都在这儿。在好莱坞工作也很不容易嘛，啥流行都得了解到了。I told this story to my friend Nick Burns, the U.S. ambassador to NATO and a loyal member of the Rad Sox Nation. Nick told me he was at CentCom headquarters in Qatar in April 2004, being briefed by General John Abizaid and his staff. Abizaid's team was seated across the table from Nick with four flat-screen TVs behind them. The first three had overhead images being relayed in real time from different sectors of Iraq by Predator drones. The last one, which Nick was focused on, was showing a Yankees-Red Sox game.
（Thomas L. Friedman 自911以后就开始追踪中东问题。出版了《Longitudes and Attitudes: The World in the Age of Terrorism》。）
