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.

What Does Anyone Know?

Conditions Warm, Mixed.

Experts

Perhaps I'm being unfair, but I don't really trust experts. It seems to me that life throws up so many problems, events and random mutations that anyone offering themselves as an expert about something, anything, is either a fool or a rogue. I guess it's possible to be an expert on things that have a very narrow field. Tiddlywinks perhaps, or pet rock maintenance. But anything living, anything with that extra spark of chaos, forget about it. There's no such thing as an expert. Which is why I had to scoff when, after a series of shark attacks at an Egyptian resort, the experts reacted with shock that such a thing had happened.

Egyptian officials are convinced more than one shark is responsible for a series of gruesome attacks on holidaymakers in Sharm el-Sheikh that has so far left one person dead and four severely injured.

"It is clear now that we're dealing with multiple sharks, and undoubtedly at least one of them is still out there in the water," a senior government official involved with the shark hunt told the Guardian.

The statement contradicts earlier reassurances from the Egyptian authorities that a single shark behaving abnormally lay behind the past week's flurry of attacks on swimmers at the popular Red Sea resort.

The revelation comes as a group of international experts landed in Sinai to begin investigating why the normally placid waters of Sharm el-Sheikh have suddenly become host to a chilling drama that has made headlines around the world and left the town's normally packed beaches virtually deserted at the height of the holiday season.

On Sunday a 70-year-old German tourist died after a shark tore off her arm, less than 24 hours after local officials declared the sea to be safe again following the capture and killing of two sharks, one or other of which was believed to be responsible for earlier attacks on snorkellers. Criticism of the authorities' handling of the case is building, with local dive experts warning that the policy of targeting and eliminating "suspicious" sharks in the area was doomed to fail.

"I have always said that there was no way this could be the work of a single animal," said Amr Aboulfatah, former chairman of the South Sinai Association for Diving and Marine Activities and the owner of a major local dive centre. "You've got more chance of winning the jackpot in Las Vegas than you do of identifying and then capturing a single shark and thus solving the problem."

- guardian.co.uk/

Well if you'll excuse me I think that you've got more chance of capturing the moon with a lasso than ever actually solving the problem. You see, I learned something from the Discovery channel shark week. I started paying attention when an expert was talking about how none of the sharks he was standing next to would do anything, and one promptly tore his leg off. What I learned was that the sea is full of sharks. And sharks are dangerous, unpredictable killing machines. So if you want to go splashing about in the water, you simply need to accept the fact that one may very well try to eat you. Regardless of what the experts may say about water temperature, time of year, feeding patterns, shark species behavior models and odds calculations.



Film Review: Machete

Machete grew out of a fake trailer that played in the middle of the Tarantino/Rodriguez Grindhouse film from a few years ago, and got such a good reaction from the crowd that Rodriguez had to end up making it as a film in it's own right. As such, it is a film with it's tongue firmly in it's cheek from the very start. But for a film that is essentially winking at you with both eyes, it's gathered a pretty great cast. Robert Deniro as a corrupt politician, Jessica Alba as an immigration cop, Michelle Rodriguez as a revolutionary, Cheech Marin as a priest. And hey there's Don Johnson and Jeff Fahey, and cameos by Lindsay Lohan and Steven Segal! A lot of the quality of this film comes from the cast.

In the lead role is the rugged Danny Trejo, forever the tough guy finally being given the top billing. He's the monosyllabic Machete Cortez, former honest Mexican Agent turned illegal immigrant day-laborer, hired to assassinate a slimy politician but is actually being setup to take the fall. It's up to Machete to figure out who set him up and why, while staying one step ahead of the cops and the anti-immigration vigilante army. The film turns steadily into a confrontation between the armed redneck border patrol and the illegal immigrants working in today's society.

Despite the political overtones Robert Rodriguez is able to keep a light fun tone to the film, coming up with violent action sequences and fun characters to keep things ticking along. There's lots of nudity and blood, and at the end Stevel Segal shows up to get killed. I'm not entirely sure Steven is in on the joke, but the way the film has been constructed it doesn't really matter if he gets it or not. This is just a fun ride, with a few political points to make, and some cool stuff to watch. Three blood spatters out of Five.


- Peace out