This reminds me of the time Ari Fleischer insisted at a press conference that "Nobody, but nobody, is more reluctant to go to war than President Bush." (source, emphasis mine)
Apparently, people think that saying something enough makes other people believe it, even if it's 180 degrees from the evidence.
Yes, this is true, though I think directors today have to intend for both framings.
If you compare a widescreen DVD with the same movie on TV, you'll find that pan-and-scan doesn't just chop of the sides. They are forced to chop off less of the sides if they also reveal more of the top and bottom, since both changes make the frame closer to the 1.33:1 of TV.
Directors know this is going to happen, and they have to account for it. They can't let a microphone or a dolly track appear right above or below the frame, though sometimes (as the parent indicated) one slips by. The viewfinders that they use don't have just one rectangle, but several: one for theatrical release, one for TV, and now ones for HDTV and other "future" scenarios, all superimposed.
This is a little sad because it means directors can't explore the edges of their frames any more. They're forced to compose every shot so that the characters appear in the intersection of all the rectanges -- in trying to please every distribution scenario, everything has to be in the boring center of the frame.
I'm glad the general public is starting to come around to letterboxing, so maybe we can eliminate pan-and-scan once and for all.
A side note too: the prints that are shipped to theaters aren't matted; it's up to the projectionist to use the correct lens (anamorphic or no) and the right set of physical mattes. Whenever you see a boom lower into the frame it's almost always the projectionist's fault. I actually went to complain to the usher at a neighborhood theater that the movie wasn't matted right, but she looked at me like I had two heads.
You make it sound like directors don't have much leverage at all in TV, but I can definitely see a difference in the product.
The two Les episodes I mentioned, "Chain of Command II" and "Family," have some the best guest acting of the series (along with "The Game" and "Journey's End," naturally). David Warner vs. Patrick Stewart always gets me. There must have been some extra rehearsal there (or maybe it was just the Shakespearean training).
Somtimes a single composition -- circling around Picard at the end of "The Inner Light," the tear in "Sarek" -- make the show feel richer and more genuine. The way Bole lit, composed, coached and shot the Riker-Troi scene in 10-Forward gave that scene so much more weight than any other scene played on that set.
Certain episodes can have tones that are totally unique. The loneliness and depravation of "Tin Man." The playful naivete of "Data's Day." The cold militarism of "Yesterday's Enterprise."
I'll tell you, though, that I think a lot of the credit for that has to go to the music. Almost ALL the music in Voyager sounds the same -- a routine soundtrack of brass and recycled rhythms makes a lot of episodes feel like technical exercises. All the TNG episodes I just mentioned have unique music that fits the tone of each show and makes them interesting in the way that they differ.
But it sounds like a TV director has no power to dictate which episodes can afford their own music, which can take the time to redo the lighting, and which can rehearse for an extra day. In that way, the good ones impress me more than film directors do, because of what they can accomplish with such economy. I wonder if they're sticking to TV by choice.
I don't think a lot of people take an auteuristic view of Star Trek, but I used to follow which directors were which on TNG and follow their styles.
My favorite directors have to be veteran Cliff Bole ("Best of Both Worlds", "Silicon Avatar", Voyager's "Dark Frontier") and Les Landau ("Chain of Command II", "Family", "Night Terrors").
Did you have any favorite directors, or did they all seem interchangeable like the old days of movies? Since "Best of Both Worlds" is better than some of the Trek movies, I'd really like to see Bole helm a feature. No such luck. Is there any particular reason? Can I get in touch with him?:)
I knew I should have gotten in on the ground level. Tomorrow my Excellent is going to be Can't Buy A Stick of Gum No More (mostly affected by moderation done to your comments)
IIAS (screenwriter). If I worked in Hollywood, I might naturally conclude that De Niro wants to reproduce the success of all three said films. I might therefore graft them together in the most commerical way possible. Let me know what you think, Nov. 1 is not too far off.
----
Will's Beautiful Memento by Kappelmeister
INT - CLASSROOM - DAY
LEONARD One more step, I'll dethink ya, buddy.
WILLOW Come on Lenny, let's go home.
LEONARD It's a code. There's something else here, I can sense it.
WILLOW What do you mean?
LEONARD Look at that Bernoulli hack. Now I know for a fact, no self-respecting professor would write that if he knew his students could get it.
WILLOW Sorry, sir.
LEONARD Did I say "Dear Lord" or "Dear Willow," ya four-fingered, two-bit phantom?
WILLOW You talkin' to me, Lenny?
LEONARD Dear lord.
Leonard stares intently at the blackboard, his cold grey eyes madly internalizing the complicated equations.
LEONARD Let me see.
WILLOW Look, Lenny. The astrophysics professor left this on the board.
LEONARD MATHMAN, an 50-year old janitor, cleans near a college blackboard with his imaginary friend, WILLOW.
"Literally" is a word that you use when you want to cut through layers upon layers of misued metaphors, ambiguous sarcasm, and other kinds misdirection,
It's like a reserved word. Or, better yet, it's like an escape character. Whatever follows it should not be interpreted by some high rhetorical parser; instead, it means what it says it means.
Somewhere along the line, though, people misinterpreted "literally" as just another word for emphasis, so now everyone is talking about how they are "literally dying of thirst" and so on.
Go ahead and redefine the rest of the language to mean new, exciting things, but take your hands off of "literally" -- it's sacred.
This will probably get modded down as Offtopic, but whenever someone says they'll probably get modded down as Offtopic, they end up with 5.
Why, I do believe that this is the first time I have ever been published. Thanks, guys!
Blockquoth PhysicsWeb:
My original article was also mentioned on Slashdot.org, an extremely active website. Although Slashdot bills itself as "news for nerds", its audience evidently includes a large number of science-history aficionados. A discussion with more than 500 comments ensued, many dissecting the merits of particular experiments. Here too the double-slit electron-interference experiment topped the list. One participant remarked that this and other experiments illustrating quantum-mechanical principles "even seem to reveal something about ourselves", noting that "philosophers and cranks are attracted to the results like moths".
Other Slashdot participants proposed many of the same experiments as Physics World readers - and often for similar reasons. However, they also came up with an imaginative variety of examples of deep play. These included fun things like putting discarded CDs into microwave ovens, firing potatoes using lengths of pipe and cans of hairspray, and synchronizing coloured lasers to the music of Pink Floyd.
One of the contributors described watching small plastic bags circulating in wind pockets, commenting that "sometimes there's so much beauty in the world, I just can't take it". Another mentioned the fact that a hunter firing at a falling monkey always hits the monkey no matter how far away it is, even though it drops just as the hunter fires. One person even cited sitting outside a hospital to hear the Doppler effect, with the comment: "Anytime an ambulance passes me, I'm amazed."
One Slashdot participant described a method of producing a fractal using a coin, marker and tape measure, claiming to have nearly cried the first time they saw it. Another described an impromptu game that he and classmates had invented at the end of a lab class, in which a liquid-nitrogen-filled styrofoam cup with holes in the bottom can be made to glide pleasingly around the floor when kicked about as the gas leaks out.
"There are certain skills necessary to accomplish the shooting, making and coming out on the other end with a motion picture," Poster says. "One is cinematography. We say, if you know how to light it doesn't matter what medium you're shooting on. Likewise, if you don't know how to light it doesn't matter which medium you're shooting in."
I just graduated from college with a stack of short films behind me, and I'm gearing up for my first feature. From a technical standpoint, yes, film is still much better than digital -- I'm sure people on this thread will mention the absurdly low resolution of today's HD video. But to go to film means tripling the budget, raising tens of thousands of more dollars. And that's for 16mm, not even the 35 that we know and love in the theater.
One of my friends says, "Don't bother with video, it looks like crap. Spend the money instead to make a 35mm short that will look really professional and then people will invest in a 35mm movie." And another one of my friends actually went and did it, getting into some pretty big film fests.
But I agree with the quote -- it's not how good the format is, it's how you use it. Take two recent digital movies, Tadpole and The Fast Runner. The first is lit like the filmmakers know it's a cheap format, and treat it like a cheap format -- everything is hastily lit and handheld. Certain passages look like a home movie my dad could have shot. In the latter, the format was treated with respect and carefully lit, getting as much out of the format as possible. And it looks fantastic -- I would have no complaints is my film looked like that.
And even beyond that, what good is a great-looking format if the story isn't worth the film stock it's shot on? (I won't name any titles here.) So no, I'm going to do a feature-length movie on video before I do a short in 35 (unless, of course, I can raise the money to do a feature on 35:). It's going to be a great looking video, with a compelling story that takes advantage of the unique qualities of the medium.
When it comes to SFX, "digital" does not necessarily mean "better." The models of Star Trek: TNG, with light passing over the textured, solid models in unsimulatable ways, are much more realistic to me than a Voyager frame filled with two dozen wire meshes. (I'm using TV shows for examples because the budget constraints are tighter.) My eyes have started glazing over all fake looking FX, especially digital stuntmen in features. They pull me out of the story immediately. I stop seeing them as people, and I didn't pay $10 to care about someone's digital models. I want to be like Zemeckis -- do FX that you can do well, and make sure they they serve the STORY instead of being their own attractions.
This is just another issue of people thinking that co-occurance implies causality -- just like the recent discussion about the huge public uproar about less sleep making you live longer.
There's no getting around the fact that people get fat on low fat diets. The reason for that has been ascribed in the literature to the problem of using observational data to draw interventional conclusions.
Some years ago, probably about 10 years or more, there were studies published looking at the diet habits of obese versus normal weight person. No intervention;they just gave out diet diaries to a bunch of people of different weights and compared the rusults after dividing them into different weight categories. They found that the total calories eaten by people of different weights were not significantly different; the main difference was in the diet composition. Overweight people tended to get a larger proportion of their calories from fat; normal weight people tended to get a larger proportion from carbohydrates. (Protein, I believe, was not significantly different.) This gave rise to the hypothesis that "calories didn't count", and that the way to lose weight was to eat less fat and more carbs...an "interventional" conclusion from "observational" data. In practice, as it as become amply clear, it didn't work out as expected. When an obese person omits fat from his diet and substitutes carbs, his total caloric intake doesn't stay the same...it rises, presumably because he has lost the "satiety" signal. I believe the article mentioned an excess 400 calores. This has to go somewhere...even assuming a thermogenic effect, it's got to result in significant weight gain.
On top of this pure caloric effect, there is the question of the insulin effect; that is, the stimulation of insulin by carbs that is at the heart of the Atkins hypothesis. It's become clear that in at least some people, that's important. I became convinced that there is some truth to that when, last year, I gained a couple of pounds in France, and it didn't disappear despite going back to my usual diet/activity. I love bread, and was eating a lot. I decided to stop buying those big loaves of delicious old style bread every day, and going without bread for a while. No other changes. I lost about 7 or 8 pounds in a month. There really is an issue with carbs!
You know, I used to get all worked up about entertainment I didn't like. I could go on for hours about why Voyager wasn't as good as Next Generation, and sometimes did. The plots, the sets, the tones, the target audiences, and so on. I could nail down each episode of Voyager for why it didn't impress me, and put them in context of how the Star Trek franchise as a whole went downhill since Gene Roddenberry died.
But then I realized something. Ranting and venting about entertainment you don't like is just a tremendous waste of energy.
The few episodes of Enterprise I watched didn't impress me, but instead of watching and then complaining about them, I decided to just not watch them. I got hours and hours of my life back by realizing that bad episodes of Star Trek are not worth the time of watching and critizing them. I just stopped stressing about the whole thing and done more productive things with my life.
If you enjoyed writing thousands of words about how U-571 sucked, all the more power to you. But let me humbly suggest that not every movie is supposed to be liked by every person. Let me suggest that if you're not the kind of person who likes tight reaction shots, big "esplosions," and the sacrifice of historical accuracy for drama, you might want to avoid such movies in the future, and save the aggravation of ranting and venting over a piece of entertainment. There were people who liked the movie because they didn't mind the dramatic exaggerations you mock.
I, for one, have become happier since treating entertainment like entertainment, and not like politics or other life-impacting issues. Of course, I'm going into entertainment for a career, so my attitude is something more like "since I don't like the way Star Trek is now, it's my responsibility to go out there myself and show them how it should be done.":)
People who work for telemarketers work on commission. When you stall, "parrot," or anything else, you're not wasting the company's time, but the person's time -- and, consequently, their paychecks. The longer you keep them on the line, the less opportunity they have to close a sale with someone else.
Look, I'm not trying to elicit sympathy for the telemarketing companies. I hate the intrusions as much as you do. But the callers themselves are not evil people; they are simply looking for a regular job like the rest of us. When you stall the call to "get them," you're not getting the right people.
Heh. I'm at Columbia now and taking a class in NLP taught by one of the people behind Newsblaster. We had a lecture about summarization (yes, it is just careful selection of source sentences) and got a tour of Newsblaster as a case study. Now it's on Slashdot. oily_ants, what did you think of yesterday's midterm? Happy spring break!
This is doubly funny because last spring I took a class in computer graphics by the man behind augmented reality, which is again on the front page today because of the street sign article.
This means:
A lot of my classmates read Slashdot,
Sooner of later the whole university will be too slashdotted for me to be able to finish my classes and graduate, and
I've got to start submitting all of my professors' projects, no matter how obscure. I hear my Databases professor got X working under Linux.
$8,000 for a movie prop is impossible to comprehend.
Really? For you, maybe, but people have different value systems. This prop was used in 1980 -- surely there are a few middle-aged rich guys and film buffs who would pay much more to touch and own a piece of their childhood happiness.
Slashdot Mirror
This reminds me of the time Ari Fleischer insisted at a press conference that "Nobody, but nobody, is more reluctant to go to war than President Bush." (source, emphasis mine)
Apparently, people think that saying something enough makes other people believe it, even if it's 180 degrees from the evidence.
Slashdot's February 2002 story about the technical challenges in starting a MMORPG.
that they're just trying to find some way to make it look like typing "ls" on a Linux shell gives you a BSOD.
Yes, I agree. Berman fell victim to one of the classic blunders.
The most famous, of course, is never get involved in a bidding war with Dreamworks.
But only SLIGHTLY less well known is this:
Never go in 5 days ahead of LORD OF THE RINGS when the franchise is on the line!
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!
Ha ha ha ha --
Yes, this is true, though I think directors today have to intend for both framings.
If you compare a widescreen DVD with the same movie on TV, you'll find that pan-and-scan doesn't just chop of the sides. They are forced to chop off less of the sides if they also reveal more of the top and bottom, since both changes make the frame closer to the 1.33:1 of TV.
Directors know this is going to happen, and they have to account for it. They can't let a microphone or a dolly track appear right above or below the frame, though sometimes (as the parent indicated) one slips by. The viewfinders that they use don't have just one rectangle, but several: one for theatrical release, one for TV, and now ones for HDTV and other "future" scenarios, all superimposed.
This is a little sad because it means directors can't explore the edges of their frames any more. They're forced to compose every shot so that the characters appear in the intersection of all the rectanges -- in trying to please every distribution scenario, everything has to be in the boring center of the frame.
I'm glad the general public is starting to come around to letterboxing, so maybe we can eliminate pan-and-scan once and for all.
A side note too: the prints that are shipped to theaters aren't matted; it's up to the projectionist to use the correct lens (anamorphic or no) and the right set of physical mattes. Whenever you see a boom lower into the frame it's almost always the projectionist's fault. I actually went to complain to the usher at a neighborhood theater that the movie wasn't matted right, but she looked at me like I had two heads.
Thanks for the great answer.
You make it sound like directors don't have much leverage at all in TV, but I can definitely see a difference in the product.
The two Les episodes I mentioned, "Chain of Command II" and "Family," have some the best guest acting of the series (along with "The Game" and "Journey's End," naturally). David Warner vs. Patrick Stewart always gets me. There must have been some extra rehearsal there (or maybe it was just the Shakespearean training).
Somtimes a single composition -- circling around Picard at the end of "The Inner Light," the tear in "Sarek" -- make the show feel richer and more genuine. The way Bole lit, composed, coached and shot the Riker-Troi scene in 10-Forward gave that scene so much more weight than any other scene played on that set.
Certain episodes can have tones that are totally unique. The loneliness and depravation of "Tin Man." The playful naivete of "Data's Day." The cold militarism of "Yesterday's Enterprise."
I'll tell you, though, that I think a lot of the credit for that has to go to the music. Almost ALL the music in Voyager sounds the same -- a routine soundtrack of brass and recycled rhythms makes a lot of episodes feel like technical exercises. All the TNG episodes I just mentioned have unique music that fits the tone of each show and makes them interesting in the way that they differ.
But it sounds like a TV director has no power to dictate which episodes can afford their own music, which can take the time to redo the lighting, and which can rehearse for an extra day. In that way, the good ones impress me more than film directors do, because of what they can accomplish with such economy. I wonder if they're sticking to TV by choice.
I don't think a lot of people take an auteuristic view of Star Trek, but I used to follow which directors were which on TNG and follow their styles.
:)
My favorite directors have to be veteran Cliff Bole ("Best of Both Worlds", "Silicon Avatar", Voyager's "Dark Frontier") and Les Landau ("Chain of Command II", "Family", "Night Terrors").
Did you have any favorite directors, or did they all seem interchangeable like the old days of movies? Since "Best of Both Worlds" is better than some of the Trek movies, I'd really like to see Bole helm a feature. No such luck. Is there any particular reason? Can I get in touch with him?
About a zillion readers wrote in to tell us
Whoa! Karma inflation!
I knew I should have gotten in on the ground level. Tomorrow my Excellent is going to be Can't Buy A Stick of Gum No More (mostly affected by moderation done to your comments)
Also check out Brick Tales, which has a lot of the trilogy storyboarded in Legos -- more than just locations.
IIAS (screenwriter). If I worked in Hollywood, I might naturally conclude that De Niro wants to reproduce the success of all three said films. I might therefore graft them together in the most commerical way possible. Let me know what you think, Nov. 1 is not too far off.
----
Will's Beautiful Memento
by Kappelmeister
INT - CLASSROOM - DAY
LEONARD
One more step, I'll dethink ya, buddy.
WILLOW
Come on Lenny, let's go home.
LEONARD
It's a code. There's something else here, I can sense it.
WILLOW
What do you mean?
LEONARD
Look at that Bernoulli hack. Now I know for a fact, no self-respecting professor would write that if he knew his students could get it.
WILLOW
Sorry, sir.
LEONARD
Did I say "Dear Lord" or "Dear Willow," ya four-fingered, two-bit phantom?
WILLOW
You talkin' to me, Lenny?
LEONARD
Dear lord.
Leonard stares intently at the blackboard, his cold grey eyes madly internalizing the complicated equations.
LEONARD
Let me see.
WILLOW
Look, Lenny. The astrophysics professor left this on the board.
LEONARD MATHMAN, an 50-year old janitor, cleans near a college blackboard with his imaginary friend, WILLOW.
If humans had evolved with six digits on each hand, this would be a major, major milestone release.
I can't agree with your second point more.
"Literally" is a word that you use when you want to cut through layers upon layers of misued metaphors, ambiguous sarcasm, and other kinds misdirection,
It's like a reserved word. Or, better yet, it's like an escape character. Whatever follows it should not be interpreted by some high rhetorical parser; instead, it means what it says it means.
Somewhere along the line, though, people misinterpreted "literally" as just another word for emphasis, so now everyone is talking about how they are "literally dying of thirst" and so on.
Go ahead and redefine the rest of the language to mean new, exciting things, but take your hands off of "literally" -- it's sacred.
This will probably get modded down as Offtopic, but whenever someone says they'll probably get modded down as Offtopic, they end up with 5.
My comment on the Slashdot thread made it into the article!
Why, I do believe that this is the first time I have ever been published. Thanks, guys!
Blockquoth PhysicsWeb:
My original article was also mentioned on Slashdot.org, an extremely active website. Although Slashdot bills itself as "news for nerds", its audience evidently includes a large number of science-history aficionados. A discussion with more than 500 comments ensued, many dissecting the merits of particular experiments. Here too the double-slit electron-interference experiment topped the list. One participant remarked that this and other experiments illustrating quantum-mechanical principles "even seem to reveal something about ourselves", noting that "philosophers and cranks are attracted to the results like moths".
Other Slashdot participants proposed many of the same experiments as Physics World readers - and often for similar reasons. However, they also came up with an imaginative variety of examples of deep play. These included fun things like putting discarded CDs into microwave ovens, firing potatoes using lengths of pipe and cans of hairspray, and synchronizing coloured lasers to the music of Pink Floyd.
One of the contributors described watching small plastic bags circulating in wind pockets, commenting that "sometimes there's so much beauty in the world, I just can't take it". Another mentioned the fact that a hunter firing at a falling monkey always hits the monkey no matter how far away it is, even though it drops just as the hunter fires. One person even cited sitting outside a hospital to hear the Doppler effect, with the comment: "Anytime an ambulance passes me, I'm amazed."
One Slashdot participant described a method of producing a fractal using a coin, marker and tape measure, claiming to have nearly cried the first time they saw it. Another described an impromptu game that he and classmates had invented at the end of a lab class, in which a liquid-nitrogen-filled styrofoam cup with holes in the bottom can be made to glide pleasingly around the floor when kicked about as the gas leaks out.
Scientific American had a feature article a while back that explained the superparamagnetic effect, as well as the holographic storage technology that the story poster referred to.
The article was also featured on Slashdot.
This was the most relevant quote for me:
:). It's going to be a great looking video, with a compelling story that takes advantage of the unique qualities of the medium.
"There are certain skills necessary to accomplish the shooting, making and coming out on the other end with a motion picture," Poster says. "One is cinematography. We say, if you know how to light it doesn't matter what medium you're shooting on. Likewise, if you don't know how to light it doesn't matter which medium you're shooting in."
I just graduated from college with a stack of short films behind me, and I'm gearing up for my first feature. From a technical standpoint, yes, film is still much better than digital -- I'm sure people on this thread will mention the absurdly low resolution of today's HD video. But to go to film means tripling the budget, raising tens of thousands of more dollars. And that's for 16mm, not even the 35 that we know and love in the theater.
One of my friends says, "Don't bother with video, it looks like crap. Spend the money instead to make a 35mm short that will look really professional and then people will invest in a 35mm movie." And another one of my friends actually went and did it, getting into some pretty big film fests.
But I agree with the quote -- it's not how good the format is, it's how you use it. Take two recent digital movies, Tadpole and The Fast Runner. The first is lit like the filmmakers know it's a cheap format, and treat it like a cheap format -- everything is hastily lit and handheld. Certain passages look like a home movie my dad could have shot. In the latter, the format was treated with respect and carefully lit, getting as much out of the format as possible. And it looks fantastic -- I would have no complaints is my film looked like that.
And even beyond that, what good is a great-looking format if the story isn't worth the film stock it's shot on? (I won't name any titles here.) So no, I'm going to do a feature-length movie on video before I do a short in 35 (unless, of course, I can raise the money to do a feature on 35
When it comes to SFX, "digital" does not necessarily mean "better." The models of Star Trek: TNG, with light passing over the textured, solid models in unsimulatable ways, are much more realistic to me than a Voyager frame filled with two dozen wire meshes. (I'm using TV shows for examples because the budget constraints are tighter.) My eyes have started glazing over all fake looking FX, especially digital stuntmen in features. They pull me out of the story immediately. I stop seeing them as people, and I didn't pay $10 to care about someone's digital models. I want to be like Zemeckis -- do FX that you can do well, and make sure they they serve the STORY instead of being their own attractions.
This is just another issue of people thinking that co-occurance implies causality -- just like the recent discussion about the huge public uproar about less sleep making you live longer.
There's no getting around the fact that people get fat on low fat diets. The reason for that has been ascribed in the literature to the problem of using observational data to draw interventional conclusions.
Some years ago, probably about 10 years or more, there were studies published looking at the diet habits of obese versus normal weight person. No intervention;they just gave out diet diaries to a bunch of people of different weights and compared the rusults after dividing them into different weight categories. They found that the total calories eaten by people of different weights were not significantly different; the main difference was in the diet composition. Overweight people tended to get a larger proportion of their calories from fat; normal weight people tended to get a larger proportion from carbohydrates. (Protein, I believe, was not significantly different.) This gave rise to the hypothesis that "calories didn't count", and that the way to lose weight was to eat less fat and more carbs...an "interventional" conclusion from "observational" data. In practice, as it as become amply clear, it didn't work out as expected. When an obese person omits fat from his diet and substitutes carbs, his total caloric intake doesn't stay the same...it rises, presumably because he has lost the "satiety" signal. I believe the article mentioned an excess 400 calores. This has to go somewhere...even assuming a thermogenic effect, it's got to result in significant weight gain.
On top of this pure caloric effect, there is the question of the insulin effect; that is, the stimulation of insulin by carbs that is at the heart of the Atkins hypothesis. It's become clear that in at least some people, that's important. I became convinced that there is some truth to that when, last year, I gained a couple of pounds in France, and it didn't disappear despite going back to my usual diet/activity. I love bread, and was eating a lot. I decided to stop buying those big loaves of delicious old style bread every day, and going without bread for a while. No other changes. I lost about 7 or 8 pounds in a month. There really is an issue with carbs!
I wonder if it uses "time until Slashdotted" as the base unit.
Intel dispatched a suit and an engineer right away
Huh? Do Intel engineers usually go to work naked?
:)
You know, I used to get all worked up about entertainment I didn't like. I could go on for hours about why Voyager wasn't as good as Next Generation, and sometimes did. The plots, the sets, the tones, the target audiences, and so on. I could nail down each episode of Voyager for why it didn't impress me, and put them in context of how the Star Trek franchise as a whole went downhill since Gene Roddenberry died.
:)
But then I realized something. Ranting and venting about entertainment you don't like is just a tremendous waste of energy.
The few episodes of Enterprise I watched didn't impress me, but instead of watching and then complaining about them, I decided to just not watch them. I got hours and hours of my life back by realizing that bad episodes of Star Trek are not worth the time of watching and critizing them. I just stopped stressing about the whole thing and done more productive things with my life.
If you enjoyed writing thousands of words about how U-571 sucked, all the more power to you. But let me humbly suggest that not every movie is supposed to be liked by every person. Let me suggest that if you're not the kind of person who likes tight reaction shots, big "esplosions," and the sacrifice of historical accuracy for drama, you might want to avoid such movies in the future, and save the aggravation of ranting and venting over a piece of entertainment. There were people who liked the movie because they didn't mind the dramatic exaggerations you mock.
I, for one, have become happier since treating entertainment like entertainment, and not like politics or other life-impacting issues. Of course, I'm going into entertainment for a career, so my attitude is something more like "since I don't like the way Star Trek is now, it's my responsibility to go out there myself and show them how it should be done."
Any more suggestions?
Yes. Say "I'm not interested" and hang up.
People who work for telemarketers work on commission. When you stall, "parrot," or anything else, you're not wasting the company's time, but the person's time -- and, consequently, their paychecks. The longer you keep them on the line, the less opportunity they have to close a sale with someone else.
Look, I'm not trying to elicit sympathy for the telemarketing companies. I hate the intrusions as much as you do. But the callers themselves are not evil people; they are simply looking for a regular job like the rest of us. When you stall the call to "get them," you're not getting the right people.
I once saw an experiment where a small bag made out of thin plastic was subject to the forces of a small pocket of circular wind currents.
Sometimes there's so much beauty in the world, I just can't take it.
This is doubly funny because last spring I took a class in computer graphics by the man behind augmented reality, which is again on the front page today because of the street sign article.
This means:
Congratulations!
So easy to use, no wonder it has a negligible desktop market share!
$8,000 for a movie prop is impossible to comprehend.
Really? For you, maybe, but people have different value systems. This prop was used in 1980 -- surely there are a few middle-aged rich guys and film buffs who would pay much more to touch and own a piece of their childhood happiness.