Meaningless Musings

Justin Bieber Slowed Down 800%

jayfi — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 00:17:01 +0000

Satoshi Kon Has Died

jayfi — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 23:12:35 +0000

Director Satoshi Kon has passed away at the age of 47. He created one of my favourite films, Millennium Actress, and it is a shocking feeling to know that I won’t be seeing anything more from him. It seems that he may have been living in poverty towards the end of his life. I don’t know if I should be shocked or not that such a brilliant person would be struggling financially after producing so many amazing works.

Up in the Air review

jayfi — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 07:05:47 +0000

It’s a good movie. I didn’t think it was “oh-so-poignant” like some of the gushing reviewers out there….nor did I walk out of the theatre thinking about the themes from the movie. But that’s okay – it’s my own fault for reading reviews and expecting something really memorable. Taken objectively, it’s one of the better films of recent times, sure. It has some good characterizations (though Clooney’s tag-along assistant was rather predictable) and a realistic, unsentimental closing arc (I was five seconds away from rolling my eyes during one particular sequence near the end, but the film saved itself well). However, let’s be honest: the message behind this movie isn’t particularly revolutionary, and there are several movies which tackle it better.

Proof of P=/=NP?

jayfi — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 16:02:31 +0000

A proof by an Indian-American computer scientist named Vinay Deolalikar on P=/=NP has been circulated on the internet. For those of you who don’t know, this is a famous computer science issue that has been under question for decades, and no one has come up with a proper proof. There have been a lot of incorrect proofs and a lot of hoaxes of course. However, Mr. Deolalikar doesn’t look like a scam artist: he’s the head researched at HP Labs, has many previous papers to his credit, and the paper itself looks serious.

As I understand it, the P=?NP question basically asks whether problems to which a given answer can be easily checked can also be easily solved. The example is factoring. If you are given some numbers, it’s easy to check if they are factors of some bigger number. But finding the solution from the big number to begin with is much more time consuming. Or at least, we assume it is. If it was proved that P=NP, it would mean that the search would be just as easy as the check. Of course, this paper is trying to prove that P isn’t equal to NP, which is what most computer scientists believe (but had no proof for).

I tried glancing through the proof but this is waaaay too high-level for a 3rd year Engineering student. It will probably take months before this paper can be verified as being true or false, but if it’s true, it will quite a breakthrough.

Google allows signing into multiple accounts at once.

jayfi — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 22:20:21 +0000

I wonder what made them do it. No, it could not have been the millions of people asking them for years.

Inception

jayfi — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 06:20:58 +0000

Just got back from a late screening. I’m going to have to go with the “overrated” camp on this one. It uses a fairly basic sci-fi concept (with some rather clumsy exposition in the early half) stretched out with a lot of action and special effects to a 2 and a 1/2 hour length that wore itself out quickly. The attempt at an emotional subplot was pretty Hollywood-generic with close-ups, whispered dialogues, sad music, and no sign of subtlety – although the big “reveal” at the climax was moderately effective. Apart from DiCaprio, we don’t learn anything remotely interesting about any of the other poorly-defined characters, and when we start the mindless gunfights in arctic-flavored dreams, boredom seeped in. All in all, this is more of a special effects showcase than an attempt at an interesting science fiction story (or even a competent heist film).

Triceratops was a lie

jayfi — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 17:38:03 +0000

Science is slowly destroying our childhood memory of Land Before Time. The name “Brontosaurus” already bit the dust, and now it’s been discovered that Triceratops actually wasn’t its own species – just a juvenile form of Torasaurus. Well, that’s how journalists are reporting it, anyways, since it makes a good headline (“TRICERATOPS NEVER EXISTED”). In reality, since Triceratops was named first, that name will have priority, and Torasaurus will be the one reassigned to that genus.

If you want to see how else science has destroyed many fantasies about dinosaurs, this is what Deinonychus used to look like, and this is how they now think it looked like.

The Loss of Culture

jayfi — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 21:35:09 +0000

I’ve been watching some old movies from across the seas. Banshun and Tokyo Story out of early Japan are especially good. But more interesting is the way they are saturated in the culture they take place in. The social relationships, the way characters communicate – these could never be copied over to a Western film without significant changes because they are just too…Japanese. You notice this in some early Indian films too (well, the ones from the southern part of the country, which tend to be subtler than their more internationally-popular northern counterparts). Give a society a camera, and they will start by making films based on their own stories and culture, obviously.

But that cultural saturation seems to slowly disappear. Modern filmmakers from these countries start incorporating more “Western” elements into their story because they think Hollywood is the only model to follow. They do it in their particular way, sure, and produce good results (take Lily Chou-Chou, for example), but where is the uniqueness? Some people seem to think it’s a case of “modernizing” cinema. But it’s really more like adapting to Western conventions of “modern filmmaking” which is seen as the default. One example I’ve notice is the extreme chasteness of some early films from Japan or south Asia that has pretty much disappeared in Japan and is started to wither away in India too.

Ah, that’s globalization for you.

Leaving

jayfi — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 01:23:08 +0000

Heading back to Toronto soon. Thanks to everyone who came out for the show (most of whom don’t read this blog anyways). While there was a ton of amateurs joining us afterwards (more than I expected), I have to give the most credit to the dude with the harmonic (completely forgot his name). You don’t hear the words “harmonica virtuoso” that often, but hell, that guy was one. Oh, and we only pulled in $635 donations for Doctors Without Borders, but it’s is decent for a small concert.

Update on Comic-con

jayfi — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 22:39:27 +0000

Seats for the session I mentioned last post are all taken now (it’s not a huge room). You could show up if you’d like, as I’m sure a there will people who won’t come at the last minute, but no guarantees. We have the hall reserved for about an hour after our planned tunes for the impromptu session. No vuvuzelas, please.

If you can’t make it to the show, I wouldn’t mind meeting with any readers on the convention floor if we happen to pass. Just look for an extremely refined and handsome young man of unidentifiable ethnicity wearing a Studio Ghibli cap. I promise I will not try to mug you (at least initially).