|
|
Sunday, September 13th, 2009
|
|
|
I tend to be skeptical of media hysteria over new diseases and epidemics. So, when I contracted the "swine flu" last week like many others who went to PAX, I got to evaluate the truthfulness of their reporting firsthand.
Here is my experience: this whole swine flu thing is way overblown. I started running a temperature Tuesday night, had a fever for all of twelve hours, woke up the next morning back at 99.1, worked from home Wednesday so as not to panic my coworkers with every cough, and felt totally back to normal by Wednesday night. I've had colds that lasted longer.
So, listen up media: chill the heck out. It's just the flu.
|
|
Comments: Read 5 or Add Your Own.
|
|
Monday, August 31st, 2009
|
|
|
Ink, an independent urban fantasy directed by Jamin Winans on a shoestring budget. It presents the story of a man broken with grief and his estranged daughter, as allegorical forces of hope and despair fight over their souls. Hope and despair here embodied in the ghostly figures who bring us dreams in the night: Storytellers who bring fantasies faced off against Incubi of nightmares.
Ink tries to be visually inventive in the spirit of Pi and other DIY sci-fi efforts. Where it succeeds most is in the sequences where it dives rapidly from one reality to another, between the real physical world in which we live and the ghost realm in the same space, inhabited by spectres who cannot be seen or touched by us, but who see and affect our lives in subtler ways. Elsewhere it falls on hoary cliches — the anonymous forest home of the Storytellers; anonymous offices for the protagonist to pace and brood and shout in; endlessly repeated anonymous overpasses for the ghoulish Ink to drag a child through. The low-rent cinematography is always evident, but in some places works to advantage: most notably in the homes of the Incubi, whose black costumes look good on video and whose flickery, TV-projected faces probably consumed half the effects budget.
The theme and plot are as hoary as can be (the professional man forced to choose between career and family, done a thousand times between It's A Wonderful Life and The Family Man, with a predictable end), and clumsy dialog and pacing don't do much to help. But there are many moments of real visual imagination metaphor props and one strikingly unusual, though tragically overacted, character. Most performances are passable, with Jessica Duffy as the good Storyteller Liev convincingly earnest, and the child actress Quinn Hunchar surprisingly good for her age — which is to say she is believably frightened or sullen at the appropriate moments. But really, someone ought to have told this director that there are other ways to emphasize lines than by shouting: scenes that should have been tense, or urgent, instead become comically shocking as the actors go from stage whisper to openmouthed screaming and back again in the space of two sentences.
Costuming was fairly good: the opposition of Storytellers and Incubi is presented as waistcoated hipsters versus leather-wrapped goths, which works well enough I suppose; and Ink's shambling ink-colored cloak makes him a ragged-edged, shadowy cipher onscreen. On the other hand, his makeup prosthetic of leathery flesh and huge, bulbous nose makes him look like a ridiculous miscegenation of Santa Claus and the Wicked Witch of the West.
I rather liked the music.
There are many fight scenes featuring some impressively fluid martial arts and gymnastics, though they're unfortunately obscured by all being shot at a stroby 12fps, which I guess was a misguided attempt at either creating tension or hiding production value.
The film derives much stylistic inspiration from Neil Gaiman (most particularly Sandman and Neverwhere), from Vanilla Sky and other nonlinear narratives, from Jim Henson, and from the aggregated cultural substrate of all the other urban fantasies that have come before it.
In all it's a flawed but sometimes interesting movie; clumsy and hamfisted in some parts, innovative and sincere in others, and with some physical action that is really much better than you'd expect from this budget. I found it worth two hours, but I'm forgiving of flawed technique in fantasies so long as they try to do something literary and fresh.
|
|
Comments: Add Your Own.
|
|
|
At a party last Friday I met a molecular biologist whose team asks 10- to 12-year-olds to play video games for an hour and then spit into a test tube for SCIENCE!
It's part of a study they're setting up on whether different kinds of video games cause different effects on the expression of particular hormones in children. No, it's not the usual thing about violence; they're looking at cortisol and melatonin levels, and the idea is to see whether the kind of game being played makes for different results on one or the other. Basically, they're trying to figure out if it's really better to play Bejeweled before going to bed than, say, God of War.
They'd like to compare the effects of "low-vigilance" games to "high-vigilance" ones. High-vigilance games are those that require the player to pay close attention and respond quickly at all times, that take close concentration and rapid action. This would be action games and FPSes, of course, but also time-pressure puzzle games like Tetris and Dr Mario. Low-vigilance ones would be those that don't require you to pay close attention to them continuously, like, say, Peggle.
Being better scientists than gamers, they're not sure which games to use for these these tests. (Their original idea was to use a Wii game like Super Mario Galaxy for the "low-vigilance" category, until I pointed out that it does actually take a fair amount of attention and besides having a kid stand up and waving a Wiimote around the room will probably have a big effect regardless of the game.) So I offered to help them out with deciding which games to use.
So, suggestions please! They're looking for games in both the low- and high-vigilance categories. Console games are best (since it's easier to set up and reset than a PC), and I think they'd probably also like to limit the violence and gore, if not for the 10-year-olds then for their parents.
Which video games should be tested for SCIENCE? Leave your suggestions in the comments!
|
|
Comments: Read 2 or Add Your Own.
|
|
|
Recently there's been a little news about the Swedish Pirate Party winning one seat in the European Parliament; supposedly this is an indication of some kind of widespread groundswell of public interest in copyright issues.
But a bit of perspective. The pirates have one seat in Parliament. The Nazis have 15 17:
Philip Claeys, Koenraad Dillen, Frank Vanhecke, Dimitar Stoyanov, Slavcho Binev, Desislav Chukolov, Bruno Gollnisch, Carl Lang, Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine Le Pen, Fernand Le Rachinel, Jean-Claude Martinez, Lydia Schenardi, Nick Griffin, Andrew Brons, Roberto Fiore, and Luca Romagnoli.
(Okay, the last two are technically Fascists.)
|
|
Comments: Read 4 or Add Your Own.
|
|
|
Voters, moreover, have over time “self-sorted” themselves into highly partisan districts: loony left in Berkeley or Santa Monica, for instance; rabid right in Orange County or parts of the Central Valley. Politicians have done the rest by gerrymandering bizarre boundaries around their supporters. The result is that elections are won during the Republican or Democratic primaries, rather than in run-offs between the two parties. This makes for a state legislature full of mad-eyed extremists in a state that otherwise has surprising numbers of reasonable citizens.
From an Economist article that is sadly not uniformly so insightful and pithy.
|
|
Comments: Read 1 or Add Your Own.
|
|
|
I saw this in a sporting goods store today. I've heard of "shrinking and pinking" a men's product to appeal to women, but this just seems insulting.
( Picture )
|
|
Comments: Read 9 or Add Your Own.
|
|
Sunday, February 15th, 2009
|
|
|
Given my distaste for fighting crowds to get a seat at a restaurant (not to mention that my favorite special-occasion eatery, Qube, died last year), I resolved last night to procure the traditional fine meal at the best kitchen around that needs no reservation: my own.
It was just a three-course meal (four if you count the digestif) of which the most elaborate was the entree mentioned above. It was built around what looked freshest at the Pike Place Market today and based on Pappardelle's own recipe, with a couple of modifications. Here's the procedure in case you feel like replicating the results (regrettably some measurements are Imperial or approximate):
Meal component 140209.2.2( Materials and protocol )
Results and commentary
This procedure produced a colorful dish consisting of bright green vegetables mixed with jet-black pasta and stark white sauce. It was a very filling meal for two people and each of the individual ingredients could be clearly tasted without overwhelming each other. The locally available dill probably ended up working better than the original recipe's recommended parsley and thyme (and was brilliantly green as well).
Due to a structural hazard in my kitchen I was unable to poach the salmon in parallel with boiling the sauce and the pasta, so it ended up sitting in 70°C water off the heat for twelve minutes while I worked on everything else. This resulted in a slightly overcooked salmon though thankfully poaching is a very forgiving technique.
The sauce, though flavorful, seemed loose in this application. I suspect it may have to do with procedure: I chose to place the whole salmon filet pieces on top of the pasta to showcase the high-quality seasonal salmon, whereas I suspect the original recipe implies that it is meant to be shredded and tossed together with the pasta and sauce so that everything is coated with a thin layer. In future iterations I may thicken the sauce with cornstarch or xanthan gum to get something with a more gel-like texture that will sharply contrast the black pasta rather than thinly whitewash it. I might also use a better white wine since cooking didn't seem to mask the nearly undrinkable Beringer much(*).
(*edit: However, mulling the wine for half an hour with cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, orange peel, and an egregious amount of brown sugar did seem to drag it a ways to palatability.)
|
|
Comments: Read 3 or Add Your Own.
|
|
Wednesday, February 11th, 2009
|
|
Sunday, February 8th, 2009
|
|
|
I just got this refreshingly honest fake-Rolex spam:
Get the Finest Watch Replica!
We only sell premium watches. There's no battery in these replicas just like the real ones since they charge themselves as you move. The second hand moves JUST like the real ones, too. These original watches sell in stores for thousands of dollars. We sell them for much less.
[etc. etc - url stripped to avoid linking to malware]
Visit us: http://REDACTED
Christmas discount this week only! Make your order before the prices go up.
This spam was sent using an innocent third party as the fake sender address who will pick up bounces and misdirected spam complaints. It went out via a third party host (broadband host in the USA), i.e. stealing someone else's service. It was sent to addresses harvested off websites at random to people who have no interest whatsoever in fake watches, stealing their time.
Whoever is sending this spam has no regard for other people whatsoever.
Not only does 唐怀情 fess up to what they're doing, it sounds like they're proud of it.
|
|
Comments: Read 1 or Add Your Own.
|
|
Sunday, January 18th, 2009
|
|
|
I finally broke down and bought an iPhone today, and after exactly six hours of ownership I've already found an issue so annoying that I may well return it to the store on Monday.
You can't turn off the dial tones.
Seriously. When you go to dial a phone number, each button you press beeps the DTMF touch-tone, really loudly — can-be-heard-across-a-crowded-room loudly. And you can't turn this off. The settings menu has options to turn off the clicky-clicky sounds the keyboard makes when you type into it, and the "beep! you've got mail!" sounds, but no way to turn off the dialpad sounds. The only way to make it not beep when you're trying to call someone is to silence the phone altogether, which disables ringtones for incoming calls as well. That's idiotic: usually I do want the phone to ring when someone calls me because that is what phones do, I just don't want it to beep when I'm calling someone else!
Googling around iPhone forums reveals that yes, really, you can't disable these sounds without jailbreaking the phone, SSHing in, and deleting them off the firmware. That is completely absurd. I shouldn't have to void my warranty and risk bricking my phone just to turn off a sound.
If Apple dropped the ball so completely on this feature, what other annoyances have they hidden around the OS?
|
|
Comments: Read 5 or Add Your Own.
|
|
Saturday, January 17th, 2009
|
|
Thursday, January 1st, 2009
|
|
Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008
|
|
|
What is it good for? I mean, why is it worth using?
So far as I can tell it's just the world's most elaborate mechanism for diffusing attention and wasting time.
|
|
Comments: Read 9 or Add Your Own.
|
|
Tuesday, November 18th, 2008
|
|
Tuesday, November 4th, 2008
|
|
|
Current results show one candidate with a lead in the Electoral College and the other leading the popular vote.
Part of me wants to see the election end like this — Obama winning the EC but losing the pop — just to see what all the Democrats who called for the abolition of the Electoral College eight years ago have to say this time.
|
|
Comments: Read 2 or Add Your Own.
|
|
|
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.1){kind=small}
crashworks's journal
