OT Start the week topic! ;-)

[guest24]

I always have this number of books on the go and it never seems to spoil the reading process. Anyone else do this?

I tend to read lots of books at once. Still ploughing through the Illustrated History of the Third Reich, making inroads into Ray Mears' Northern Wilderness book, just finished Ken Follet's The Man from St Petersburg, trying to chew my way into Vince Cable's The Storm, I dip into Schott's Miscellany when bored, and read the odd magazine here and there.

To cap it all there was a book I started in 1976 that I never finished because it went back to the library. Anyone seen a copy of The Thursday Adventure? I'm about half-way through but feel I may need to restart as its been a while...if I ever find it again.

[mini-thumper]

To cap it all there was a book I started in 1976 that I never finished because it went back to the library. Anyone seen a copy of The Thursday Adventure? I'm about half-way through but feel I may need to restart as its been a while...if I ever find it again.

I need to get another copy of 'The Man in the High Castle' by Philip K.Dick, as I too was halfway through it when I left it on a plane back from Iceland (the country not the shop) a few years ago. It was a hardback as well!

Boyd

[guest27]

So I was awake the other morning at a bout 3 and could not get back to sleep.  The webbook was laying, blinking, on the flor next to the bed, so inspired I spent a little time fiddling with some data from the Internet Movie Database.

They have a top 250 rating system which requires a large  number of people to rate a movie before it makes the list, then they use some Boolian magic to come up with a sound set of answers.  Bec ause of the nature of the site it is biased to Holywood films, but plenty of non-english language films make it in there.

If we ignore the 2000 to 2009 data, I am not sure where the cut off is for the rating to be about the last film I watched and when it becames the best film I watched - I remember a few ears back teh BBC held a vote for the best single ever and most of the top 10 were from the previous 5 years with the Spicegirls, or some boy band being No1 single of all time - better even that such things as White Christmas, Bohemian Rhapsody etc.  So it is reasonable to exclude the last 10 years from consideration.

We get from the top 250

1920's 7 films 2.8%
1930's 14 films 5.6%
1940's 26 films 10.4%
1950's 36 films 14.4%
1960's 23 films 9.2%
1970's 25 films 10.0%
1980's 26 films 10.4%
1990's 36 films 14.4%
2000's 57 films 22.8%

So It is reasonable to factor down the 2000 films because of their newness but a pretty stable mix from 1940's to date

In the top ten there are

1950's 1
1960's 1
1970's 3
1980's 1
1990's 3
2000's 1

Playing by the (arbitrary) rule of ignoring the 2000's we can add

1940's 1

So out of the 50,000plus films made since the 1920's seems every era produces a similar number of gems.

R