Year: 2006

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Virtual Appearance != An Actual Appearance

Ray Harryhausen and his Armatures

For the last couple weeks I have been looking forward to hearing legendary visual effects artist Ray Harryhausen speak tonight at the University. I was hoping to take my camera and get a few shots of his stop motion armatures. I even picked up a couple of extra tickets for my parents, whom are going to be in town tonight—this was going to be a source of some much needed excitement. The only catch is, Mr. Harryhausen isn’t actually going to be here.

I first thought something was odd last week when I read on the tickets, “A VIRTUAL APPEARANCE BY RAY HARRYHAUSEN”, but I figured it had something to do with the title of the lecture, Grand Illusions. Upon re-reading the lecture description it hit me like a ton of bricks that the real grand illusion was the fact that Ray Harryhausen would only be making a virtual appearance, as in live via satellite from Los Angeles.

Skeleton Armatures

I hate to be a stick-in-the-mud and I’ll see what my folks think but I’m probably not even going to go. Frankly, I wouldn’t be much more disappointed if I’d just discovered they were merely showing a DVD interview with Mr. Harryhausen. Why would they bother paying him to speak, if they couldn’t afford to actually bring him here.

I’ve been to virtual lectures before, and they really leave a lot to be desired.

Now I know why there were so many tickets left over; I now also know why they are free. You get what you pay for I guess.

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Gladwell Offers an Anatomy of Explanations

Reading Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker review on Charles Tilly’s new book “Why”, I had one of those eureka moments in tracing back and understanding the deterioration of an old relationship. I hope you’ll glean some insight as well.

Though I haven’t read it, Gladwell summarizes the book’s breakdown of the types of reason-giving we give into four categories: conventions (social formulae), stories (common sense narratives), codes (legal formulae) and technical accounts (specialized stories). Depending upon the type of reason we give, we run into trouble because of the unspoken message that is sent by our choice.

Imagine, he says, the following possible responses to one person’s knocking some books off the desk of another:

  1. Sorry, buddy. I’m just plain awkward.
  2. I’m sorry. I didn’t see your book.
  3. Nuts! I did it again.
  4. Why did you put that book there?
  5. I told you to stack up your books neatly.

The lesson is not that the kind of person who uses reason No. 1 or No. 2 is polite and the kind of person who uses reason No. 4 or No. 5 is a jerk. The point is that any of us might use any of those five reasons depending on our relation to the person whose books we knocked over. Reason-giving, Tilly says, reflects, establishes, repairs, and negotiates relationships. The husband who uses a story to explain his unhappiness to his wife—”Ever since I got my new job, I feel like I’ve just been so busy that I haven’t had time for us”—is attempting to salvage the relationship. But when he wants out of the marriage, he’ll say, “It’s not you—it’s me.” He switches to a convention. As his wife realizes, it’s not the content of what he has said that matters. It’s his shift from the kind of reason-giving that signals commitment to the kind that signals disengagement. Marriages thrive on stories. They die on conventions.

As I usually do with Gladwell’s writing, I highly recommend you check out this article, “HERE’S WHY“.

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Suspended Spherical Tree Houses

When I was a kid, one of the things I really wanted was a tree house. I seem to recall my dad insisting that the tree in the back-yard wasn’t big enough yet—I’ll remember that excuse for when I have my own kids—but now I that I have a real house, one in a tree doesn’t seem to have the same draw it used to, at least that was until I saw the beautiful tree spheres created by Canadian craftsman Tom Chudleigh.

Suspended Spherical Tree House

Tom’s “Free Spirit Spheres” evolved when his original plan to build a boat didn’t pan out, and instead he put what was effectively the cabin up in a tree in his native British Columbia. Since completing the first prototype called Eve, which was made out of yellow cedar wood, Tom has perfected his techniques. Now, he also constructs the spheres out of fiberglass, fitting them with plumbing, wiring and the all-important windows. Folks with more money than I can buy their own, prices start at around US$45,000.

See freespiritspheres.com for more photos and information.

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US thinking about Nuking Iran

I’ve been reading about the sabre rattling the US has been engaging in with Iran and frankly I’m in disbelief. Yesterday’s New Yorker article makes me sick. Snip:

The Bush Administration, while publicly advocating diplomacy in order to stop Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapon, has increased clandestine activities inside Iran and intensified planning for a possible major air attack(… )

The lack of reliable intelligence leaves military planners, given the goal of totally destroying the sites, little choice but to consider the use of tactical nuclear weapons. “Every other option, in the view of the nuclear weaponeers, would leave a gap,” the former senior intelligence official said. ” ‘Decisive’ is the key word of the Air Force’s planning. It’s a tough decision. But we made it in Japan.”

He went on, “Nuclear planners go through extensive training and learn the technical details of damage and fallout—we’re talking about mushroom clouds, radiation, mass casualties, and contamination over years. This is not an underground nuclear test, where all you see is the earth raised a little bit. These politicians don’t have a clue, and whenever anybody tries to get it out”—remove the nuclear option—”they’re shouted down.”

After everything that’s happened in the last 5 years, I wish I was the one to have written the following quotation on the subject. From a comment posted at the site TPMCafe on January 14, 2006: “Speaking as a Canadian who is fond of judicious language, I feel that this situation deserves careful and measured thought. So let me just open with: Is your entire &#@%ing country on crack?“

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Avian Flu Pandemic Simulation

Using supercomputers to respond to a potential American health emergency, scientists from Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, the University of Washington and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle have developed a simulation model that makes stark predictions about the possible future course of an avian influenza pandemic.

Flu Pandemic Simulation

Based on today’s environment of world-wide connectivity, beginning with 10 infected people arriving in Los Angeles, the simulation predicts that the pandemic will spread quickly throughout the continental United States, peaking about 90 days after the initial introduction.

The computer simulation models a synthetic population that matches U.S. census demographics and worker mobility data by randomly assigning the simulated individuals to households, workplaces, schools, and the like. Department of Transportation travel data is used to model long-distance trips during the course of the simulation, realistically capturing the spread of the pandemic virus by airplane and other passenger travel across the United States.

“In the highly mobile U.S. population, travel restrictions alone will not be enough to stop the spread; a mixture of many mitigation strategies is more likely to be effective than a few strictly enforced ones,” said Kadau, also of Los Alamos’ Theoretical Division.

The number of symptomatic cases at any point in time is shown on a logarithmic color scale, with 1 or fewer cases per 1000 in green, 50 per 1000 in yellow, and 100 or more per 1000 in red.

Simulation of a pandemic flu outbreak. (4mb Quicktime)

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South Park on Family Guy

I’m not sure why, since there are so many of them, but I’m always surprised when I run into die-hard fans of the Family Guy. On at least three occasions I have made the off-handed comment that it seems like the show has been specifically made for someone with attention deficit disorder—to which each of the people I was talking to said, actually I used to have ADHD.

I guess that explains a lot.

Given the enormous fan base, I decided that maybe I was just happening to catch “off” episodes that weren’t as funny as the truly great stuff that they must be putting out in order to create so many fanatics. So I pulled out my roommate’s “Best of Family Guy” DVDs and, as painful as it was, watched them straight through.

Ho-hum… and these were supposed to be funnier than all other episodes? Give me a break.

I’m glad to see I’m not the only one that feels the show is highly over-rated. Jaime Weinman’s blog post “Why I Hate FAMILY GUY” nicely sums up my feelings.

I found a link today over at Cartoon Brew that let me know about Wednesday night’s episode of South Park in which they make fun of the Family Guy. Although South Park has offended me on numerous occasions (to the point that I no longer watch the show), I still think it has a collection of very intelligent writers and is very capable of creating memorable and often insightful commentary on the world around us. For your viewing enjoyment, here is a clip from Wednesday’s show:

Update: I guess the video no longer works because YouTube is cracking down on playing clips of tv shows.

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Fishapod Fossil: Another Missing Link

Darwinist’s rejoice and creationists look the other way after the discovery of “a prehistoric critter that represents a missing link in the evolutionary chain”. Paleontologists from the University of Chicago and several other institutions dug the fossils out of rock formations discovered on Ellesmere Island, in the Canadian Arctic.
Fishpod

Fishapod dates from about 383 million years ago. It had the scales, teeth and gills of a fish, but also a big, curved rib cage that suggests the creature had lungs as well. The ribs interlock, moreover, unlike a fish’s, implying they were able to bear fishapod’s weight—an unnecessary trait in a fish. It had a neck—most unfishlike. And, most surprising of all, its pectoral fins included bones that look like nothing less than a primitive wrist and fingers.

Boingboing has the fishpod details.

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Google Current

google current

There’s a new show online called Google Current, which dishes out the scoop on Google’s top search terms.

Google Current airs every half hour on Current TV and provides a look at what the world is searching for on Google. From hybrid cars to human-animal hybrids, from Paris riots to Paris Hilton photos, your searches guide our stories. There’s nothing like it on television.

Google Current can be found at http://current.tv/google/.

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