What I’ve Been Watching
Latest batch of movies I’ve seen:
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) – Not my usual type of movie, but it was pretty good. A pretty typical Mundane detective thriller – and I admit I didn’t anticipate who turned out to be the bad guy. The only part that was worth seeing on the big screen was the (awesome) opening credits – the rest, while competently filmed, didn’t have any eye candy.
The Adventures of Tintin – I wrote a separate post about this one here.
Cry Baby Lane – This one attracted my attention because I heard it was made by Nickelodeon (unusual for them to make a thriller) and was not aired because it was deemed to scary for the intended audience at the time. I’m not sure I agree – it’s pretty tame by today’s standards.
Battle Los Angeles – I swear I’ve seen this movie before. A bunch of alien retards with superior tech launch a freaking ground war against Earth to steal resources they could much more easily obtain out in space. Humans lose ground until a small group of jarheads get unreasonably lucky and find the invaders’ critical weakness (in this case, a stupidly centralized resource again). The only thing this movie has going for it is the animation on the alien aircraft – I love their hover mode propulsion method.
Darkness (2002) – Surprisingly one of the better horror movies made in the last couple of decades, in my opinion. Unpredictable. Fairly standard genre story, but well executed. I especially liked the ending.
One Week (2008a) – Recommended to me in a conversation about my recent cross-Canada road trip, and very appropriate. Lots of scenery and stretches of road I’ve seen in this film – the story perhaps didn’t have the intended impact on me because I was too busy letting it lead my reflection on my own journey to concentrate on the character’s journey.
Sharktopus – Poster child for the current trend of the B-monster-movie genre self-parodying. It’s the usual thing: Misguided scienticians create a monster that runs amok for a while until they kill it. Only this one is tongue-in-cheek.
Stonehenge Apocalypse – Contains everything bad about prophesy-driven disaster movies, though it does go further with the actual disasters than most. Very skippable.
The Thing (2011) – I dunno. It didn’t have anywhere near the impact on me that the Kurt Russell one did. Maybe I’m just too desensitized now. This one is a prequel and does seem to fit well in that role, though it’s been too long since I saw the two originals that I can’t be sure it meshes cleanly.
The Tunnel (2011) – Above average as modern monster/suspense movies go, though still not great. This one did appeal to the urban exploration nerd in me.
The Hole (2009) – I really liked the concept of this one. The execution was competent but unremarkable.
Killer Tomatoes Strike Back and Killer Tomatoes Eat France – I’ve long been a fan of the original Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, and was somewhat disappointed with the sequel, Return of the Killer Tomatoes. The first movie didn’t really need a sequel. I only recently discovered these two additional sequels, and they’re not needed either. The three sequels (plus TV series!) smell like a poorly executed attempt to build the original film’s cult following into something with enough inertia to become a money-making merchandising property. Each sequel is even more self-conscious and over the top, with the final one making extensive use of the fourth wall. The only saving grace the sequels have is the villain, Dr. Gangreen, and his henchman Igor – they’re actually somewhat amusing, and Gangreen is a respectable evil mad scientist – too bad he’s trapped in these turkeys.
Tetsuo the Bullet Man – OMG this was dumb. The usual Guyver genre crap, plus weird-ass ideas about genetics, largely incomprehensible characters and really bad cinematography, and a climax that felt like a bad ripoff of Tetsuo’s situation from Akira. Waste of time.
Psycho (1960), Psycho II, Psycho III, Psycho IV and Psycho (1998) – The first movie has been on my to-watch list for ages, and upon discovery of the sequels and the remake I finally got around to it. Watched them all in the space of a week. Despite its firmly entrenched place in pop culture, the first one surprised me with how much I didn’t know about it – for example I thought the famous shower scene was near the end, but it’s actually at the halfway point. I quite enjoyed it.
The three sequels actually do a pretty decent job of maintaining continuity with the first movie, though they unavoidably get increasingly contrived. Psycho II in particular was a pretty well done sequel that actually made sense relative to the events of the first movie. Psycho IV is missing half its ending in my opinion – given the way the story is structured, it needs two resolutions for the two sets of principal characters, but it only has one – leaving the first group of characters we met hanging in a suspenseful limbo.
The 1998 remake was a bit of a train wreck. It’s a scene-for-scene, word-for-word remake of the original movie, with just a couple of (completely unnecessary) embellishments. That by itself wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing. The problem is that it’s full of anachronisms. The scene-setting text at the opening says the story is set in 1998, but using the dialogue from the original script makes the characters act like 1960s throwbacks. Most of the cars are modern, but the clothing is 1960s style. In the scene where the Sheriff’s wife phones the hotel, she still asks the switchboard operator, by name, to connect her – in 1998! Very confusing. This would have been better if they had either preserved the 1960 setting with all its trappings, or fully updated it to the 1990s, including rewriting the dialogue appropriately.
A thing I have finished
I’ve been craving a feeling of accomplishment for a long time, and I promise myself that over the Christmas holidays I would make an effort to finish at least one of my personal projects. And I did! And it feels good.
For a while I’ve been needing some bright lights for my macro photography, and also wanting some bright color accent lights. I bought this from ThinkGeek. It has the advantage of simply plugging into a standard light socket, and has sixteen different color settings. I found it still a bit too dim, and some of the colors were off – blue especially looked too purple for me.
So I decided to make my own – a larger one using multiple super-bright LEDs of four colors (red, green, blue and white) arranged in a mosaic with a diffusing filter in front to mix the colors. With this arrangement I should be able to get a much better variety of colors, and using multiple LEDs would give me more brightness.
I based the physical design around available enclosures, protoboards and power supplies. I don’t like working with high voltages (they tend to be a bit killey) so I’ll always use an off-the-shelf power supply if I can. I decided on a 12V, 1A supply I had on hand because using a higher voltage would let me place the LEDs more in series, thus reducing the current requirements and the number of current limiting resistors I would need. Most super-bright LEDs have voltage drops between 3V and 4V, so that let me put them in series of three.
Here’s the schematic (click to embiggen):
I decided to socket the LEDs in female header strips instead of soldering them to the protoboard, in case I burnt some of them out and needed to replace them. In practice this perhaps wasn’t such a good idea; it complicated the physical layout of the circuit on the protoboard, and generated problems with loose connections between the LED leads and the sockets. I could probably solve the latter problem well enough by bending the ends of the leads slightly, but it seems to work well enough if I don’t shake it too much, and it’s easy to fix if a connection fails.
Here’s a picture of the finished board, populated with LEDs, installed in the enclosure I picked for it.
You can see the four brightness control potentiometers installed on the sides. At the bottom is a cheap tripod mount I made with a quarter-inch bolt and bolt joiner.
The next picture shows the reflective, scattering backdrop I put the LEDs through to help blend the colors. Since I was planning to put a diffuser in front of the LEDs, I figured there would be a lot of light back-scattered and so I should put a reflector at the back to stop some of the light from being wasted.
I also added the color-coded knob handles to the controls in this shot.
And finally, here it is with the diffuser on the front:
I made the diffuser myself by cutting a thin sheet of clear Perspex to size, then grinding both sides with coarse and then smooth sandpaper. It worked out well.
Although I had intended the light to be mounted vertically on top of a tripod or light stand, someone pointed out to me at this point that it could also be used horizontally as a small light table. It kind of looks like a disco floor when used this way:
And now, the results! To see if my project achieved its goals of brighter light and better color than the light I bought from ThinkGeek, I shot the following series of images (click to enlarge please). All images were shot using the same exposure and a fixed color temperature of 5400K. The upper row shows the primary colors of the ThinkGeek light, and the lower row is mine. Mine has an extra photo for white – the dim one is just the white LEDs, and the bright one is with all LEDs on at full intensity.
Conclusions:
- Mine is not as much brighter as I had hoped (perhaps half a stop for individual colors) but it is still brighter. The full-on white is considerably brighter.
- Mine has a slightly more bluish blue.
- The diffuser/reflector arrangement worked out well; when used as subject lighting rather than as a light table, the color mixture is very smooth. I could get more brightness by using a clear front panel instead of a diffuser, but then the colors would be less evenly mixed.
- Mine consumes slightly more power (9W versus their 7W) but that’s not a huge difference.
- Mine can produce a much wider variety of colors by virtue of having separate analog brightness controls for each of the four color components.
- Mine produces softer shadows on small objects because the light-emitting surface is relatively large; the ThinkGeek light is almost a point source so gives hard shadows.
Tintin not in need of rescue after all
Just back from seeing the Tintin movie, and I have to say I liked it. That deserves comment because I’ve been looking forward to this movie for a long time and living in fear that they would ruin the property, just like almost every other movie made in the last 15 years has been a disaster. I’m delighted that I was not let down tonight, because that’s such a novelty.
Now, Tintin purists must be warned: It’s not a direct adaptation of any single Tintin story. It’s a mashup consisting primarily of The Secret of the Unicorn with significant chunks of The Crab with the Golden Claws, and a handful of characters from other stories make brief appearances too. But that’s OK. It works, and canon or not it most certainly is a Tintin adventure.
The characterizations are all bang on, the choice of voice talent is good, and they did a really good job on the face modelling too. (Although a live-action Tintin movie wouldn’t hurt either.)
I think I spotted a few easter eggs. At the start of the desert sequence there was something in the background that made me think of the latest Uncharted video game – and now that I think of it, the Uncharted series could be said to have taken some adventuring lessons from Tintin. Also in the train station scene in the intro sequence there is a sign listing some of the places Tintin has been – perhaps hints about upcoming movies?
Speaking of what’s next – we were originally promised three Tintin movies. I’m going to guess the next one will likely be based on Red Rackham’s Treasure with perhaps bits of The Black Island or Flight 714 thrown in, and the third will have to be Destination Moon plus Explorers on the Moon. But I’d also like it if they did The Seven Crystal Balls and Prisoners of the Sun.
Now, I feel it is my duty as a nerd to find something to nitpick, so here goes. None of this is in any way irritating enough to color my enjoyment of the movie, but if you haven’t seen it yet I would suggest you stop reading now, go watch the film and then come back and compare notes.
- It’s being pushed as a 3D movie. I didn’t have the option to see it in 2D, which annoyed me. That said, the 3D isn’t bad – most of the time I didn’t even notice it, which means it was done reasonably well.
- As some reviewers have noted, they did go a bit overboard on over-the-top action sequences. Tintin always did have a bit of over-the-top action, but not to this extreme. I’m told, however, that making it a 3D movie was necessary to get the studio to greenlight production, so obviously they needed some place to showcase the 3D gimmick, and action sequences are tailor-made for that. I can live with the 3D and the extra action if it was a necessary price to make this film for me.
- Captain Haddock’s eyes were a little too close together, the twins a little too chubby, and Nestor’s head too thin depth-wise. Also the Sultan seemed a bit stiff – I don’t think his animation was mocapped.
- I don’t recall Haddock having any specific nationality in the books. In the film they gave him a Scots accent. It works for me, but YMMV.
What I’ve been reading
The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil – Wherein the author argues from 60 years of historical data about increases in computing power that commodity computers will exceed not only the processing power of the human brain but that of all living humans by the end of the 21st century.
Coupled with advances in sensing technologies such as MRI, we should soon be able to (either destructively or not) transfer human minds into computer simulations of working brains. Eventually the majority of human civilization will be in digital form and a staggering array of new kinds of interaction will become possible.
Naturally I hope he’s right, but I think his predictions are a little too optimistic in terms of timing.
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S. Andrew Swann: The Hostile Takeover trilogy (Profiteer, Partisan and Revolutionary) – Pretty good as political science fiction goes. An eclectic cast of non-stereotypical characters, set in an interesting universe that makes me want to check out some of his other books in the same setting. There are a couple of places between the halfway point and the end where things get a little too deus ex for my taste, but thankfully all that gets out of the way in time for the more conventional resolution.
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The Grand Design by Leonard Mlodinow (with Stephen Hawking’s name on the cover to boost sales). Basically it’s a science popularization book specifically about quantum theory, what it does and doesn’t do, and what we’ve learned from it. Short and easy to understand.
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The Complete Maus – My long relationship with this book has finally come to a close. I first noticed the series in the the college library when I was in my mid-teens. Leafing through it, I could tell that it contained good storytelling and told an important tale, but at the time I had little interest in history, so I shelved it with a note to read it through later. More than 20 years later, that “later” has finally arrived thanks to someone at work selling the compilation at a good price. Well, having read it, I have to say it was rewarding. It’s riveting in the way all tales told by survivors of major events are riveting. Not much more to say than that; go read it.
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Trouble with Lichen, by John Wyndham – How rare, a pro-immortalism story with a happy ending. It’s a short and easy read, and well done. It mostly concerns means of manipulating the masses into accepting longevity advances, something individuals are strangely resistant to and institutions actively resistant to. Recommended.
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Fleet of Worlds by Edward M. Lerner and Larry Niven – a very enjoyable Known Space story that reads like a classic Niven. There are a couple of flaws with the setup and teardown; the ending, first off, seems to conflict timing-wise with established canon about the fleet in other Known Space stories. Secondly, I have trouble reconciling the setting for the story (a human colony on the fleet) with known behavior of the Puppeteers – it’d be a real stretch for them to do what the backstory claims they did.
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Year Million edited by Damien Broderick. It’s a collection of essays by a variety of authors, most of them scientists, ostensibly about what they think our destiny over the next million years is likely to be like. Many of them go straight for the big picture though and talk about all of the future.
My favorite part is this quote by Steven B. Harris, who articulates something I sort of unconsciously knew all along but am excited to see revealed clearly: “Homo Sapiens Sapiens is now largely a software species, perhaps the first, governed mainly by epigenic factors (outside the genome), some of which are extrasomatic (outside the body). Much of what makes us special as a species is stored not in genes or brains, but in libraries, laws, traditions, and songs.”
This is so true. Obviously our genes are somewhat important because they give us the hardware capable of running the minds we’re so proud of, but the hardware by itself is useless; a child by itself does not grow into a human being, nor can it be made into one after it has grown on its own past a certain point (as I believe is demonstrated by studies of feral children). Everything we consider important about ourselves as individuals and as a species is programmed into us after we’re born by those who teach us. And the continual improvement of that programming is what has enabled us to improve our lot at an exponential rate.
The rest of the book I found rather depressing though, for two reasons.
First, many of the authors keep coming back to Matrioshka Brains, and collectively they make the case that building such devices is the logical way to squeeze the most living out of the universe in its present form (ie while there are still stars), and that the drive to maximize life will ultimately compel all sentients to build such things. I can’t disagree, but I don’t like it either – it’ll make the universe a boring place. Suppose we were to build an M-Brain for ourselves. We could have trillions and trillions of humans living it in happily for billions of years or more, but to build it we’d have to disassemble the rest of the solar system – there’d be no other places to live or to explore. We would basically turn inward, living in simulated universes of our own devising instead. That’s not for me – I want to explore the real universe. So we’d probably end up with an expanding shell of people like me, moving outward to explore real places while they still exist, and behind us the stars would be going dark as more and more of them are wrapped in minds or their energy redirected to power minds elsewhere.
But then again, stars (and matter itself) won’t last for ever, which brings me to the second depressing part. Recent discoveries suggest that not only is the universe expanding, not only is it not likely to contract again, but the rate of expansion is actually accelerating. These measurements still need to be confirmed, and the baffling question of how this can be happening could use a good answer, but for now let’s assume it’s true.
One consequence of this is that the observable universe will shrink over time – the furthest galaxies will fade away as they accelerate to the point where even the light they shine directly at us isn’t fast enough to outrace the expansion of the space in between. Superclusters of galaxies may stick together, but the gulfs between them will get larger, and that means the limit of the amount of interesting places we can explore gets smaller with time, even though the universe itself is getting larger.
Another is that the majority of time in this universe – basically all of it – will be spent in an uninsteresting state where there is no matter and almost no energy, and less energy all the time. We’re living on the slope of an exponential downward curve in the abundance of energy gradients (which are necessary for any kind of thought). Eventually the stars will go out and stop being born. Then the black holes will evaporate. Then, assuming we’re correct in our belief that protons can decay, all matter will evaporate into subatomic particles and the universe will contain only energy, radiating out in all directions and thus becoming more diffuse. The temperature of the universe will become more and more uniform and will continue to drop towards absolute zero – but will never actually get there. It’s impossible. So there will always be some energy gradient around – always less and less, but some. And this process will continue for ever.
Imagine then that we can devise some way to survive the death of matter – say we can create a cloud of particles that can compute thought and do so using any available energy gradient (though of course it’ll have to compute more slowly as less energy becomes available). Now we could live forever, but it would be, to me, a very claustrophobic existence because there would be nothing to do but live in simulations – navel-gazing in our memories, or trying out randomized simulations for all eternity. (Perhaps we’re actually living in one of these right now and have deliberately forgotten, to make it interesting). Because this environment would have to compute more slowly as the available energy dissipated, the ratio of real time to simulation time would increase. At first perhaps we might think faster than real time, but after a time it would get to the point where the components of our immaterial computer might only exchange a photon of information every trillion years, because there isn’t that much to go around. A hypothetical person inside the simulation watching a clock count off the real-time years would see the number rising faster and faster all the time, then the number of digits in the year would start rising faster and faster, and so on. But other than that one indication, the rest of us would never know.
I find this depressing and really hope we can engineer a better solution for our long-term destiny, though in a way this is still better than a Big Crunch because it means an infinite existence of a sort is possible.
But, all of this is still a ways off. We’ve got half a billion years or more to enjoy Earth, then perhaps five billion years with the solar system in its current form, and hundreds of billions until the stars in general start to fade. I hope that’s enough time to come up with some answers to these pressing problems.
