Reverse typecasting

In movies and television, typecasting is the phenomenon that sometimes happens that a certain actor is strongly identified with a certain kind of role, and gets typically hired for such roles. And, in fact, most often the public outright expects them to be in that kind of role.

Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger are typical examples, where they have been frequently typecasted as the tough protagonist of an action movie. Many comedians get often typecasted in comedies, and can have a hard time breaking through other, more serious roles. Actors like Morgan Freeman often get cast in authority figure roles (such as the President of the United States).

I have noticed, however, that there exists another, much less talked about phenomenon, which is pretty much the polar opposite of typecasting. I don't think this even has a name. I'm calling it "reverse typecasting".

This is when an actor is so famous for a certain role that it becomes almost unthinkable to hire him or her in another similar role, because of the strong association with that one particular character.

For example, David Caruso is the lead actor in CSI: Miami, as Horatio Caine. He is best known for this role.

This, in my opinion, pretty much excludes him from being cast in another police procedural. Just imagine the confusion of the audience if he were to be cast in another such TV show. "Hey, that's the guy from CSI Miami! Is he supposed to be the same character?" It would be highly distracting because of this. It would be hard to not think about him as Horatio Caine, no matter how much the other show tries to portray him, and the show, as completely unrelated.

Average vs. median

Most people are familiar with the concept of average (or, in more technical terms, arithmetic mean) when talking about numbers. The average of a group of numbers is their sum divided by their amount. This concept crops up all the time in all kinds of things, like average salaries, average prices, average viewership... Statistics just love averaging things.

As an example, the average of the numbers 1, 3, 4, 10 and 25 is 8.6.

A lesser-known related concept is the median. Many people don't even know what it means, and others might have heard or read the name but not really know it either. When they hear what it is, it might seem like such an arbitrary, even useless, thing.

The median of a group of numbers is simply the middle one, when the numbers are sorted in increasing order. (If there's an even amount of numbers, then it's the average of the two middle numbers.)

In the above example, the median of 1, 3, 4, 10 and 25 is 4, as that's the third number in the ordered list of five numbers.

But what use is the median for anything? As said, it may feel like such an arbitrary and even useless thing to calculate. However, there are many situations where the median is actually more useful and informative than the average.

The good thing about the median is that it kind of automatically discards extreme outliers from the equation.

For example, suppose that there's a market for a product, like an individual card from a trading card game. There may be hundreds and hundreds of sellers for that particular card. In order to get a picture of how valuable that particular card is (eg. compared to other cards from the game), you may want to know a number that reflects the overall pricing.

The average of all the prices might sound like a good idea at first, but its problem lies in what I mentioned earlier: Extreme outliers may distort the figure, making it less informative and useful.

For example, maybe 30 sellers are selling the card with prices ranging from 50 cents to 1 dollar. But there's one seller that, for whatever reason, is selling it for 1000 dollars. If there's eg. an automatic server-side program that collects all these selling prices and averages them, that one outlier would skew the result drastically, making it almost useless. It would make the card much more valuable than it really is.

The median of the prices, however, can be much more useful. In this example, the average may be something like 32 dollars (which would mean, if taken at face value, that this is a really expensive card), while the median could be something like 74 cents (which would mean this is a moderately priced card).

In this case the 74 cents is much closer to the truth than the 32 dollars. The latter number is heavily skewed by that one outlier. The median automatically discards such outliers, making the resulting number much more useful.

"Downloading" and "uploading" in movies

Hollywood movies dealing with computers often love to use fancy terms (well, fancy to the layman's ears) like "downloading" and "uploading", but don't seem to care much about which one of those terms is accurate and proper for the situation, and will freely use whichever term randomly. Thus you get dialogue like "I'm going to download this file to the bad guy's computer", which may sound cringey to the more technically adept viewer.

On the other hand, the two terms are not actually absolutely unambiguously defined, even in technical parlance. There are two main schools of thought on this:

The first one considers the relationship between which computer is being used by the person, and which one is at a remote location. If the person is physically using computer A, and a file is being transferred between it and some remote computer B, the proper term depends on the direction of transfer: If the file is being transferred from the remote computer B to the local computer A (ie. the computer that's directly being used by the person), it's "downloading". The other direction is "uploading".

The other school of thought considers the role of the computers themselves: If one computer is the "server" and the other is the "client", then "downloading" means transferring a file from the server to the client computer, while the other direction is "uploading". This even though the person might be directly using the server computer rather than the client one. (This kind of thinking considers the "server" to be "higher" on a hierarchy than the "client", and thus the term is defined by whether the file is going "up" or "down" in the hierarchy. The same principle holds if the server is being itself a "client" of another, bigger server, which is thus "up" in the hierarchy.)

Of course the situation could be more complex than that. For example, the person, using computer A, might be transferring a file from remote computer B to another remote computer C. Is that "downloading" or "uploading"?

In the end, it's actually not as clear-cut than it might seem at first.

Inspired video game cover art?

Just something funny I stumbled across while browsing games on Origin:

Is it just me, or are there striking similarities between the two? (And I didn't even edit them to be together. This is a direct unmodified snapshot.)

At least they are both from Ubisoft, so I suppose there isn't any plagiarism going on.

The origins of Chuck Berry's famous guitar riff

Take a listen to the 1964 song Fun Fun Fun by The Beach Boys. One immediately notices when the song starts that that guitar intro sounds awfully familiar. Well, yes indeed, it sounds virtually identical to the guitar intro of Johnny B. Goode by Chuck Berry, made in 1958.

Is this an instance of blatant plagiarism? Not really. It's not that simple.

Chuck Berry himself was certainly fond of that particular guitar intro, as he used it in very similar forms in a multitude of his songs, including Roll Over Beethoven, Let It Rock, Carol, Little Queenie, and Back In the U. S. A.

But the thing is, that intro wasn't actually composed by Chuck Berry. It was originally composed by Louis Jordan in 1946 for his song Ain't That Just Like a Woman.

If there is any plagiarization going on, it's by Chuck Berry (even though I have no idea if he had permission to do so.)