Things 17: Semiotic Blancmange, Change Blindness, Me

This week’s film – one line review
Mongol was bizarrely repetitive and dramatically failed to chart the rise of Genghis Khan as it had promised.

Next Week’s films
I’m going to see The Happening (because I like “everyone’s gone” films) and then The Incredible Hulk (because superhero movies are modern fairy tales) immediately afterwards, bringing the number of films I have seen this month to a total of 5. If interesting films continue to come out I may beat my personal best of 7 in a month, averaging £1.71 with the Cineworld Unlimited card. Woohoo!

The Happening
There are so many trailers for this that I think I’ve put together everything, but here’s a good one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxMLvh4Tb6g [gone, oh well – T.M. 7/11/14]
IMDb rating: 6.8
Rotten tomatoes rating: 11%!!

The Incredible Hulk
Trailer that seems to sum up the entire movie: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7a5LcTckfg
IMDb rating: n/a
Rotten tomatoes rating: 71%

Last Week’s Puzzle
The two main differences between memes and genes that we identified were that memes never really ‘die’ so can produce offspring indefinitely afterwards (note for example that many email scams were in existence in letter form over a century ago); but also that they actually evolve by Lamarckian evolution rather than Darwinian:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamarckian

This Week’s Puzzle
What comes next?
person, fiddle, degree, estate, column, sense, ?, …

A Quote
The descriptions in Photoshop Disasters are often very well written.

“By renormalizing the model’s waistline, Maxim Mexico takes a bold socio-political stance in the ongoing battle of the politics of representation, clearly referencing the oppressive reification of male-gaze heteronormative modes of synthesis in a semiotic blancmange of post-structural teakettle barbecue hatstand fishmonger.”

A Link
To continue the illusion theme, I encourage you to try out this excellent java application demonstrating the incredible effect of change blindness.

Two images cycle with a flash between them: the challenge is to spot what is different between the two images. When you give up, right-click on the image and set the ‘delay’ to be shorter – when you get down to ‘no gap’, the change becomes completely obvious. Then use the right click menu to reset the gap length to a challenging amount (very important – if you watch a different image with ‘no gap’ the difference will be obvious and you can never un-see it), then try a different image.

If anything, this is more incredible than the video last week.

http://www.usd.edu/psyc301/Rensink.htm
Link no longer works – try this instead: http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~rensink/flicker/download/

A video
I linked to Captain Disillusion explaining the ‘guy catches glasses on face’ video on the Living In A Digital World blog. Because I think he’s so great, here it is again:

A picture
Something a bit different this week – instead of something I found online, a picture of me and my parents.