Trapped in a Box

Conditions: Warm, Jittery.

Juggling Bombs

Christmas tends to bring out the best and worst in people, nicely encapsulated in the following story from Time magazine, where a bunch of Nanotechnologists decided to build a Christmas card that's smaller than a human hair.

So, why did they do this? The researchers say the technology they used to make the Season's Greetings card could be used in products like TVs and cameras. Says Professor David Cumming: "The process to manufacture the card only took 30 minutes. It was very straightforward to produce as the process is highly repeatable. The design of the card took far longer than the production."

The card is invisible to the naked eye, which will make it even more difficult for your grandmother to put a check into.

- newsfeed.time.com

Yeah, well the jokes may write themselves, but frankly I'm thinking that the power of nanotechnology may not be in the safest of hands here. This is literally a technology that could rewrite our civilisation, and these propeller heads are wielding it like it's a sparkler on Guy Fawkes day. This is not something to be joking around with, and I fervently hope most of the scientists involved bloody well sober up and realise the responsibility they've taken on with this science. Hey guys, how about a cure for cancer? You can make it smaller than a pin head if it makes you more motivated.



Film Review: Tron Legacy.

Off the bat I should admit I've never seen the first Tron movie. However since hardly anyone else has seen the first film either, it actually puts me in the majority. The first Tron film was a flop, albeit an odd one. While the ideas of Tron would percolate away in society, the actual movie itself was regarded as an oddity. So it's weird that Disney have decided to make a sequel. Not a remake, not even a re-imagining, but a straight-up sequel, to a film hardly anyone has seen.

Anyway, the gist is that in the first film Jeff Bridges created a couple of programs to build a perfectly ordered world in a computer, and got sucked into said computer and trapped once the programs turned on him. Twenty odd years have now passed, and his son figures out how to enter the Tron world. He gets captured, gets in a fight, rides some light cycles, then meets up with his father, and the two of them have to figure out how to get away, along with a new character Quorra who is some kind of new AI life form. But ultimately plot is not this films strong point. And frankly, the characters are total cyphers as well. The rogue programs, Tron and Clue, are simple villains. Jeff Bridges's character is seems more along for the ride than being essentially the wizard of this particular Oz. It's up to the son and Quorra to blandly bland their way through the middle of the film, being totally upstaged by a wildly hamming it up Michael Sheen as a bartender(?) who is trying to be on everybody's side.

I guess the talking point of this film is the 3D, which I avoided, and the computer-generated character Clue, who is a 20 year younger version of Jeff Bridges. He looks a little wooden, but not too bad Unfortunately the rules still holds that the more human a digital character look, the less realistic it looks. The music is very 80's arcade influenced. The visual effects are also quite 80's arcade - ish. I don't know if it's retro stylish, or just out of date. The world of this movie makes no sense. The rules seem to be made up on the spot. The characters are all wierd and shallow. The plot is nonsensical, where the bad guy plots to trap Bridges's son, only to then try and kill him instead of use him to trap Bridges himself. I just can't really see the point of it all, and frankly found myself a bit bored in a coupe of places. It's a digital film badly in need of some analogue soul. Two discs out of five.


- Peace out.