Category: Films and movies

Whether big-studio or independent, celluloid or digital, anything about movies

Immersed in medical drama

Recent obsessive watching of House has taught me something: while whiteboards are the new standard, in relation to blackboards, the smoked plastic board is the cool option.

Also, pharmaceutical drugs are powerful, the human body is complex, and keyhole surgery changes everything. Also, people underestimate Rabies.

[Update: 4 February 2008] One medical inaccuracy I noted in this series concerns MRI machines. At several points, there are interactions between metal and the machine. In one case, bullet fragments that House shot into a corpse; in another, metal-laden prison tattoos. In both cases, there is no effect on the metal before the scan begins. This ignores how the magnet in an MRI machine is always on. The magnetic field is always there, aligning the magnetization of hydrogen atoms. The actual scan consists of radio waves used to alter the alignment of the magnetization. As such, the metal would have been drawn into the bore of the machine as soon as it got near it, not after the scans started.

Leguminous illustration

A comic in which Emily’s artistic talents have been combined with my egregious printing is now on her beanhead site. It is also mentioned on her blog. Tristan has produced a video about the whole beanhead phenomenon, featuring exclusive footage of Emily and I walking around in Vancouver’s Chinatown and inventing silly answers to silly questions.

Rejecting Canada’s new copyright act

As a student, I was constantly being called upon to support various causes, through means ranging from making donations to attending rallies. Usually, such activities have a very indirect effect; sometimes, they cannot be reasonably expected to have any effect at all. Not so, recent protest activities around Canada’s new copyright act: a draconian piece of legislation that would have criminalized all sorts of things that people have legitimate rights to do, such as copying a CD they own onto an iPod they own.

Defending the fair use of intellectual property has become a rallying point for those who don’t want to see the best fruits of the information revolution destroyed by corporate greed or ham-fisted lawmaking in the vein of the much-derided American Digital Millennium Copyright Act. At their most controversial, such acts criminalize even talking about ways to circumvent copyright-enforcement technology, even when such technology is being mistakenly applied to non-copyrighted sources: such as those covered by the excellent Creative Commons initiative or those where fair use is permissive for consumers. Watching a DVD you own using a non-approved operating system (like Linux) could become a criminal offence.

For now, the protests seem to have been successful. Of course, the temptation for anyone trying to pass a controversial law is to hold off until attention dissipates, then pass it when relatively few people are watching. Hopefully, that will not prove the ultimate consequence of this welcome tactical victory for consumer rights.

Related prior posts:

Feel free to link other related matter in comments.

Entertaining physics demonstrations

His name is Julius Sumner Miller and physics is his business.

For those who lacked my good fortune in seeing most of these demonstrations a number of times at Vancouver’s Science World, the videos should give a sense of how physics can be made universally comprehensible and exciting. The facts that Mr. Miller looks like a mad scientist and that he has a penchant for hyperbole may well contribute to his ability to hold one’s attention.

My involvement as a camper and leader at SFU’s Science Alive daycamp also impressed upon me the effectiveness of physical demonstrations in sparking children’s interest in science. That is especially true when the demonstrations involve rapid projectile motion, strong magnets, cryogenic materials, aggressive combustion, and explosions.

Comedy cut-off

I haven’t seen The Daily Show or The Colbert Report in ages. The American Comedy Central site is blocked in Canada, and the Canadian site you get re-directed to isn’t Mac compatible. For a while, the new Daily Show website worked here. Now, it just shows a never-ending string of ads.

These shows were the only television news I had ever watched with any regularity. Until their online infrastructure changes, it seems that print and web sources will be my sole connection to the mass media.

[20 August 2008] Ashley has kindly informed me that full episodes of The Daily Show and the Colbert Report are available in Canada through CTV.ca. It looks like I won’t need to set up a special US proxy system after all, though Pandora may still tempt me to do so.

On technology and vulnerability

The first episode of James Burke’s Connections is very thought provoking. It demonstrates the inescapable downside of Adam Smith‘s pin factory: while an assembly line can produce far more pins than individual artisans, each of the assembly line workers becomes unable to produce anything without the industrial network that supports their work.

See this prior entry on Burke’s series

Children of Men

When was the idea of the post-apocalyptic future invented? I went to Blockbuster tonight in hopes of renting some clever comedy. Because of the unavailability of certain titles, recommendations from staff, delayed consequences from my trip to Morocco, and random factors, I ended up watching Children of Men instead. It makes for an uncomfortable accompaniment to my ongoing reading of The World Without Us. Then, there is Oryx and Crake and 28 Days Later. Even Half Life 2 had similar nightmare-future police-state fixations.

I wonder if it could be traced back, Oxford English Dictionary style, to the point where the first work of fiction emerged that envisioned the future as a nightmarish place. Furthermore, the first such fiction to envision human activities as the origin of the downfall. I wonder if ancient examples could be found, or whether it would all be in the last hundred years or so.

Shake Hands with the Devil

There isn’t really any appropriate way to talk about a film like Shake Hands with the Devil (2007), given the way in which it is a recasting of a historical episode such as the Rwandan genocide. I suppose one can direct blame, as a response: at the great powers, at the United Nations, at Belgium, at the belligerents, at the genocidaires. Appropriate as that may be, the sheer appalling character of what was undertaken by human beings makes me wonder whether it would have been better if nothing in the universe had ever awoken to cognition, if all the atoms in all the rocks and stars had just interacted dumbly from the unfathomable origin of space and time to the entropic silence that will be the end of it.

One thing that is demonstrated by the experience of watching is the power of film as a medium; having read Dallaire’s book and even seen him speak, the horror was never conveyed with anything approaching the same visceral quality. In response, you can’t help but wonder what we really ought to be doing in Afghanistan now, or in Darfur.

Dr. Strangelove in a nuclear bunker

Marc Gurstein rides the bomb

After today’s orientation, I went with some friends to see Dr. Strangelove in the Diefenbunker – the infamous Canadian nuclear shelter, built to protect top Canadian military and civilian leadership in the event of nuclear war. Diefenbunker is actually a general term for shelters of the type: the one near Ottawa is called CFS Carp. Apparently, there is also one in Nanaimo, B.C. One odd thing is that the shelter has a multi-room suite for the Governor General. Presumably, Canada would not have much need for a local representative of the Queen, after the actual Queen’s entire realm is reduced to a burnt, radioactive plain.

Tonight’s film was followed up by Pho with three fellow employees of the federal government. It was all a distinct social step forward, and Ashley Thorvaldson deserves credit for organizing the expedition.

You can read about the Cold War movies events on the website of the Diefenbunker Museum.