(Originally sent February 2009)
I managed to catch a showing of The Good, The Bad, The Weird yesterday:
I’m very glad I did. It was a bit unexpectedly violent, but had an incredible amount of innovative action visualisation on the screen for a lot of the time.
(Imdb 7.5, RT 88%)
On a similar note, I’m looking forward to seeing Push which looks very silly with people deflecting bullets with the power of their mind:
(Imdb 7.0, RT 26%)
A video
Last year I realised entering text was becoming one of the most important things we do, and the current ways of doing it on mobile devices are actually pretty rubbish. Here’s one vision of how that could change, being presented to a great audience that knows which questions to ask (long video but you get the idea pretty quickly):
http://www.techcrunch50.com/2008/conference/presenter.php?presenter=76
Link is dead, here’s a short bit that somebody else shot:
Here’s a more straightforward demo:
A link
Although I don’t subscribe to the idea that “if science can’t explain it then it can’t be real”, Homeopathy does not seem to hold up to rigorous examination, but on the other hand it does offer an excellent method of obtaining a placebo effect. This risks being dishonest, but here’s what an honest approach would look like:
http://www.fdhom.co.uk/index.asp
A quote
People almost always mean “I don’t consider <x> a high priority” when they say “I don’t have time for <x>”. This was made transparent earlier this week when I heard someone say:
“I don’t watch TV, I don’t have time for it. Except for sports.”
Puzzles
Way back when I last sent Things I set the Atheist Paradox. My view is that it cleverly exploits the fact that DNA really is the only known example of a ‘naturally’ emerging code in combination with a flawed comparison between “things we know require intelligent design” and “things we see emerge ‘naturally'”, while completely ignoring the hierarchical nature of Intelligent Design. But I won’t go into that any more here.
Anyway, this week, an open ended question. Cinema screens are becoming digital. This means they can also become interactive – before the film, adverts or who knows what can be showing, and the audience can interact with it via their mobile phones. Given that possibility, what could be done? What should be done? What will be done?
A picture
InventNow.org is a site for kids to submit their inventions and discuss them. They mainly seem to be board games, spaceships, and self-heating clothing. But I particularly liked “cung fu kittens plus”:
