Brain Drippings

Google mail has introduced a new feature in Google Labs, the ability to undo the sending of an email.

I used to like April Fools’ Day when I was a kid. Sure, it was a silly day, and most of the ‘jokes’ were not that funny, but occasionally there was some classic prank that was just awesome and that I still remember 30+ years later.
 
Now I really hate April Fools’ day, and the reason is the Internet. It’s not that the ‘jokes’ on the Internet are not sometimes funny and amusing, it is that the jokes live on long after April, much less April Fools’ Day, has come and gone.
 
Last summer I was involved in an argument on a newsgroup with someone who, it turned out, had read some April Fools’ news story and not realized it was an April Fools’ story. Hah hah, very funny. Except this was June.
 
At one time the top hit on google when searching for “OS X” “Word 5″ was a fake TidBITS story about Microsoft porting the old (last good version) of Word to OS X. Or maybe it was someone else doing a word-alike, I forget. The point is, you could find that story quite easily even when it was no long April 1.
 
And of course, sometimes people only are looking at the short summary on the google page, and not even seeing a date.
 
April Fools’ would be fine were it confined to in-person pranks and transient ‘news’ like newspapers; but when it finds a home on the Internet, it becomes permanent, and that is a problem.
 
Even without the Internet there have been many times were April Fools’ actually led to very real problems. The most famous example might be the “April Fools’ Tsunami” in 1946 in which numerous people died because they thought the warnings were April Fools’ Day pranks.
 
In 2003 a prank story about the death of Bill Gates caused a marked drop in at least one Pacific Rim stock exchange.
 
The 1984 death of Marvin Gaye, who was shot by his father, was widely assumed to be a April Fools’ Day prank.
 
Besides, I’m still waiting for my case of Sugar-Free Radical Google Gulp to show up from 2005!

Posted via email

This is the BEST THING EVER.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMTY8AmIGjQ[/youtube]

A friend of mine recently posted a link to an aid for visualizing just how large a number a trillion is.
 
http://www.pagetutor.com/trillion/index.html
 
And while that is useful, I have a couple of other methods I’d like to throw at you.
 
First, is the stack of $1 bills.
 
A million $1 bills is a lot of bills, and stacked one on top of the other, would reach over 300 feet. A billion $1 bills would reach higher than any aircraft has ever flown to over 300,000 feet.
 
OK?
 
A Trillion $1 bills would stack up over 55,000 *MILES*, or a fifth of the way to the moon.
 
The stack would weigh about million metric tons. The USS Nimitz, an aircraft carrier with a crew of about 6,000 people, weighs in at a shade under 100 metric tons. So a trillion dollars would weigh more than 10,000 USS Nimitzs. That’s hard to imagine.
 
If you took 1,000,000 $1 bills and laid them out on a standard NFL field they would cover the space from one goal line to the nearest 35 yard line. If you took a billion of them, you could easily cover 250 acres.
 
A trillion? A trillion dollar would cover a third of Rhode Island. Still hard to imagine, isn’t it.
 
OK, imagine the Empire State Building. Built in the 1930s it is made of steel and stone and is over 1200 feet high. It’s an icon of not just New York, but of America and of the 1930′s. It was the tallest man-made structure in the world for nearly 50 years. Got it in your mind?
 
One trillion $1 bills weighs more than the Empire State Building.
 
One trillion $1 bills weighs more than TWO Empire State Buildings.
 
One trillion $1 bills weighs about the same as THREE Empire State Buildings.
 
Now try this. Open up a web browser and type in:
 
1 million seconds in days
 
now try
 
1 billion seconds in years
 
and finally
 
1 trillion seconds in years

Posted via email

WATCHMEN (2009)

Capsule: A worthy adaptation of a seminal graphic novel,  Watchmen manages to find a balance that should please both fans of the comic and people who are new to the story.  Only the most die hards will be disappointed at the story changes to fit the movie into 2h40.  High +2 (-4 to +4) or 8.5/10.

WATCHMEN manages to stride a fine line with grace, balancing the needs of a movie against a seminal graphic novel that spans several hundred pages. I know Alan Moore is upset by this adaptation (not the movie specifically, but the simple FACT of the movie), and though he may demand I turn in my Alan Fan Club card, I have to say I found some of the changes in the movie were an improvement. In particular, the whole resolution seemed like a much better idea than the original, strategically. More than this, I cannot say.

On the other hand, there were some changes that didn’t quite manage to make a lot of sense.  In the graphic novel, the world of 1985 is running on electric cars and airships and clean cheap energy.  The movie 1985 has no such changes, and yet we still have Hollis’s sign “Specializing in Obsolete Cars.” Obsolete is a strange choice of words  in a world where petrol is still king. Towards the end there is a death of one of the characters that, with the changes in the movie’s plot, makes absolutely no sense. Minor quibbles.

Visually the movie is pretty close to perfection, evoking both the grimy apocalyptic feeling of the graphic novel and the spandex-tights of Silver age comics. The action sequences are very well done, without all the over-cutting and super-fast “hey, we might have seen something if you’d stop cutting” editing that is so common to action movies. In several places there are top-notch fight scenes that look more like something out of a 1970′s Bruce Lee movie in that the camera simply sits back and lets the action happen, full-frame. The judicious use of slow-motion, again not over done for every punch like some new SFX toy the FX guys got this week, but instead inserted where it will do the most good, is extremely good.

The violence is unlike anything most people will be expecting in a ‘heroes in tights’ sort of film.  This was a grimy, violent, and bloody graphic novel, and the movie does not shy away from that at all. We do not have long intense fight sequences and nary a drop of blood. At times the film is quite gruesome in a way that the graphic novel, with its still images, could never be. This is, somehow, even more effective in this film than in many others. I don’t shy away from violent films, but I found myself cringing in my seat several times during WATCHMEN and I think the reason is that you do not expect the superhero movie to be truly violent. And even when it is, over and over, each time it’s a bit if a shock.

The soundtrack, particularly through the first half of the movie, is absolutely wonderful, with songs chosen that immediately bring you full circle to the time period. Nena’s “99 Luftballons” intros a discussion on the impending nuclear holocaust; Wagner’s Flight of the Valkyrie, a la Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, over a battlefield in Viet Nam (the failure of the Tet Offensive); Tears for Fears’ “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” softly underplayed during a conversation between some of the world’s top CEOs, including Lee Iacocca; these are but a few examples.

And finally, the place where WATCHMEN really shines is in the casting. Every single actor is spot-on for the role. I admit that I was not so sure about Malin Akerman, Matthew Goode, Jackie Earle Haley, Jeffery Dean Morgan, or Patrick Wilson. And I thought Billy Crudup looked more like Dan than Jon.  OK, so I was wrong.  They were all convincing, and all drew you in to their characters. If I have any complaint here, and it is a minor one, it is that sometimes Jackie Earle Haley’s Kovacs sounded a little too much like “Dirty” Harry Calahan.