A Town Called Panic

The Physics of Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus

A friend of mine sent me a link to the most amazing chart today:

I wasn't really a big A-Team fan.

My brother was a big A-Team fan. He used to watch it all the time. I think he even had all the episodes on DVD.

Thoughts on Avatar

I'll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you're using here: it didn't require any discipline to attain it.

You read what others had done and you took the next step.











You didn't earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don't take any responsibility... for it.

You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could and before you even knew what you had you patented it and packaged it and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now you're selling it, you want to sell it!

Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.






Here's the thing, Avatar is one hell of a tech demo. James Cameron has definitely built one hell of a world for this movie. The problem is that it's a world full of cliches. It's very pretty to look at, it's engaging, but it's lacking a soul.

Scarface has never actually held any appeal for me

Once again, the book proves to be better.

A few weeks ago, I was in a hotel room in Stamford, Connecticut. I was getting ready to get on a plane to come home. The tv was on and I was flipping through the channels and The Golden Compass was on. It was about halfway in, but I stopped and watched it. I decided that I liked it enough that I wanted to see how it began, so I queued it up on Netflix.

Last week, I was at the used bookstore and they had a copy of  The Golden Compass. I was getting ready to head out to Rhode Island for a week and figured I'd give it a read while I was traveling. I like to read on planes more than anything else. I put my headphones on and just read. There are no distractions and I can focus on my book. I always read on flights. It's just what I like to do.

I got home on Saturday and Netflix had sent me the movie, which I was even more interested in watching now that I'd read the book. So, I watched it. And all I could come away with was what a jumbled mess it was.

The movie was too short. There are just too many things going on to try to condense it as much as they did. I think that it's a fairly enjoyable movie without having read the book, but having read it, the differences and short comings are just too apparent.

Here's the thing

When I was a kid, I was fascinated by a few of things. Astronomy was a big one. I would go to the school library and just go through every book I could to look at pictures of galaxies and stars and planets and moons and...well, anything else that there might be pictures of. It was the same with the oceans. Whales, sharks, fish, dolphins, coral, it all amazed me. My grandma had a view master with a couple of Jacques Cousteau disks. I just loved looking at them. The other one was mythology. The Greek and Roman stories especially, and as I got older, Native American and Norse myths as well. It was the old Greek myths though that sparked my interest.

The fun thing is, I'm still as in awe of space, the oceans and mythology as my 8-year old self. So, it's probably a foregone conclusion that I will see the new Clash of the Titans.