I’ve been complaining for a while because no one in the news seems to ever discuss what’s contained in this new health care. They just talk about whether it’ll pass and who’s getting more support for it – not the actual content of it.
So, at last, I have found a good summary of what is actually contained in the bill. So, here it is (from Reuters).
James Cameron blew through the box office records with Titanic. And now it looks like he’s going to do it again with Avatar. Using data from here and here, I’ve compiled a graph of the total gross earnings of the two films. I’ll wager it’s a valid comparison, given that the two films were released on practically the same day of the year, 12 years apart (Titanic on December 19, 1997 and Avatar on December 18, 2009) so they should both be subject the same seasonal fluctuations in movie attendance.
Titanic vs. Avatar in terms of Total Gross Earnings
The ‘Avatar Adjusted Gross’ numbers are adjusted based on the difference in average ticket price between those two years. To get them, I multiplied Avatar’s Total Gross by 4.59/7.35. These numbers are based on the fact that 4.59 was the average movie ticket price in 1997 and 7.35 was the average for 2009 (based on these and these statistics). Therefore, multiplying Avatar’s gross income by this ratio should get us Avatar’s gross income, adjusted to 1997 movie ticket prices.
My prediction? Avatar is going to blow through Cameron’s own previous box office record for the highest grossing film of all time.
Update (01/27/2010): Here is the latest version of the graph with the latest data available (ending with 1/25). This graph doesn’t QUITE show Avatar passing Titanic, but it’s close.
Updated Avatar vs. Titanic Graph (Data through 1/25)
Update (02/10/2011): Here is the latest version of the graph with all the data from Avatar’s box office run. By now, everyone knows Avatar passed Titanic. But, it’s interesting to note that the adjusted gross did not.
Updated Avatar vs. Titanic Graph (Data through 1/25)
I have created the first iteration of a SVG to dojox.gfx converter. This will enable easier transition from designing an SVG document in a program like Inkscape and actually using that SVG with Dojo’s experimental SVG tools. As I said, this is the first iteration, so if it doesn’t seem to be working correctly, let me know. I hope this helps some people who ran into the same frustration that I did. Here’s the link.
I got some more of my work on the IBM website! Now, MMMS is hosted on alphaWorks at IBM. Here’s the link to the MMMS page on alphaWorks. It’s always exciting to see your work go up in prominent places in a big company (I even got a bio on the MMMS page!).
I finally got iCalendar Recurrence implemented (as per RFC 2445 for those of you who know what those are). I am very excited indeed, because just implementing the recurring events took me quite a while and quite a few lines of code.