Random Thoughts

In the 1980s, computer generated characters were the rage so people were always looking for a way to use them in films, regardless of whether or not it helped or hurt the story.   So it goes with 3-D in movies today. For those who don't wear glasses, it is an annoyance and for people who do wear glasses, it is twice the annoyance, but everyone is making 3-D movies because...everyone else is making 3-D movies. What 3-D technology should do, yet cannot, is make the experience more immersive.  Traditional movies, given the nature of the medium (and the expectations of the audience) don…

You may not know the name Hammer Films, but if you have watched movies at all you have probably heard of Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee.    In 1957 they appeared in a British 'horror' movie called THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN and it put both of them, and the studio, on the cultural map. The low budget Hammer studio chose 'Frankenstein' because it was in the public domain and they felt like it needed a more modern telling than the 1931 Universal Pictures version.    Christopher Lee made the monster his own in almost the same way Boris Karloff did (though Karloff, with the…

A few days back, it being the Halloween season (at least in America - do other cultures indulge in pagan madness of this sort?) I saw, on some social network or another, a neat carved pumpkin that looked like, I kid you not, R2-D2 from "Star Wars." It looked quite neat and I have never been a pumpkin carving guy, outside the stuff I do with the kids, but it seemed like a fun idea and a way to do something with the kids. However, R2-D2 was a little out of my league, having no experience in any sort of real carving, but the fellow who did it also had other projects he had done and he was quite…

So, one time for my middle school gym class I was required to write an essay about a sport. Any sport. Unfortunately, I hated all sports. Fortunately, I was blessed with a creative spirit, so I invented a new sport to write about. This is the opening paragraph of my essay: Squid racing is exhausting, often frightening, disorienting, and dangerous to participate in. It is also exhilerating, fascinating, and it cultivates a deep friendship between man and mollusk. This informational paper will cover the care and training of squid, race course descriptions, and advice to squid racers. Again…

I get quite a lot of press releases, as you can imagine.  Dozens or hundreds depending on the day.  Most are relevant, like the embargoed stuff from Cell or Nature (we don't get those from AAAS because, get this, they regard us as competitors because many of you are researchers - seriously, one of the idiot interns who run Eurekalert.org actually wrote that in an email to a journalist here, that giving the company access to Eurekalert press releases 2 days before the public would be "insider trading" - I considered writing Allan Leshner asking why he was using our membership money…

Over at 365DOA, I bring tales of early Pluto, the original controversy, and of things we can no longer discuss, for fear it will drive us mad.  Enjoy the podcast of Plutonomicon.  Pluto is no stranger to controversy. Let us ignore the current planet/no-planet nonsense and look at the heady early years of its discovery.  I found a monograph by a 1920s professor, who attempted to correlate some early ‘Planet X’ discoveries with Pluto. It being October, I thought a trip to the way-back machine would be useful in understanding just how unusual Pluto is, both now and when it was…

After the fall of the Berlin Wall and, with it, Soviet communism, one of the great joys for this former US Army Signal Corps officer was getting to talk with a former East German officer who came to work for our company a few years later. "How real was it?" I asked him one evening over dinner, referring to the Soviet threat which we basically had spent every waking moment thinking about.   In precise English, he told me, "None of it.  We were more scared than you."   The seven Spetznaz divisions had low morale and the TO&E(Table of Organization and Equipment ) we would get…

I love good comment sections in blogs: Good questions, different opinions, more examples, constructive criticisms, and so on; all this can help to get a much better picture of the issue at hand. However, having to scroll through loads of junk just to find the one or other interesting comment that may or may not hide in there, now that seriously lessens the value way too often. Therefore, I delete especially long and off topic comments if I deem them of no use to any readers. Do I lose readers with such Stalinist attitude and is it not the case that the more comments I have, the longer my…

The ChatterBox Arctic Index This index is a work in progress.  I am trying to make it easier for my readers to find articles which may be of interest to them.  Comments are disabled for index pages. This Arctic Index lists articles which are either directly focused on the Arctic or which may be of general interest to 'Arctic watchers'. ------------------------------------- Most Recent articles: Arctic Ice August 2011Arctic Ice July 2011 - UpdateArctic Ice July 2011Arctic Ice June 2011Arctic Ice May 2011 - Update #1Arctic Ice May 2011The Oldest Arctic Ice - the ice shelves of…

I saw a cool program on the Church of Scientology a few days ago, and I meant to post this review here but forgot until just now when a Google Ad unit linking to their site appeared on the sidebar.This isn't a review of the show, it's a review of the Church and a little experience I had with it around three years ago.  The next words you read will be mine, written...holy crap, three years ago to the day, how about that! My review of the Church of Scientology I was walking down Tottenham Court Road today, unsuccessfully attempting to get a job, when I walked past none other than the…