I'd be willing to consider watching a movie based on a reality show, but only if it was guaranteed that the movie was entirely fiction. Perhaps (though not necessarily) based on a fictional reality show. That is to say, a fictional reality show movie.
I know of a trivial variation on English called "E-Prime". Essentially it comprised English, except without the verb "to be", making it difficult to state facts as being absolutely true and usually forcing one to resort to "I believe that..." and variations. As you can imagine, such a language fails miserably in the realms of mathematics, but for political or philosophical debates, who knows? It could find itself useful.
Memorizing and regurgitating and manipulating numbers is a very different skill from mathematics. These are things which computers are very good at - things which we DESIGN computers to be good at so we waste minimal time on such trivialities and work on the stuff which a computer can't do, the stuff which maths is really about: logical reasoning with abstracts.
My point is that just because he's good with numbers doesn't mean he'd enjoy (or be any good at) mathematics. Also, mathematicians can't count.
Go and see this movie! Make everyone you know come with you! Buy the DVDs, show them to other people, make this franchise make money! And maybe, just maybe, Fox will pick it back up again.
While you are essentially correct, there's a little more to the story of HL1 than meets the eye. Spoilers ahoy for people who haven't played the original Half-Life:
At the time of the original accident that Gordon Freeman is present for, Black Mesa has had working teleporters for at least a few months and has been able to go to and from Xen for at least a week. They've captured and domesticated a good few indigenous life-forms - witness the Barnacle weapon and the ecosphere set up for some houndeyes in the Opposing Force expansion. Gradually they've captured more and more fauna until they "start getting collected themselves..." They get as far as Nihilanth's lair and manage to retrieve a mysterious orange crystal.
Yup. The crystal at the start of the game is the same as the three powering the final boss. Look and you will see a hole in the wall where the fourth crystal was stolen from. No wonder there was resonance cascade. The original accident causes a lot of random teleportations to and from Xen and brings over a whole lot of dangerous animals, but it's only about 12 hours of game time after the original experiment that stronger enemies - the green slaves, and the huge alien grunts - begin appearing spontaneously. This is no longer accidental: this is enemy action by Nihilanth, who is moving to attack Earth... which is something the Administrator, who observes pretty much the whole course of events, has been expecting, indeed, preparing for. Read Alan Shepherd's diary and you know this was actually expected to happen.
Realising what has gone wrong the grunts are sent in, find it's too difficult a task to take on, are pulled out and replaced with black ops who attempt to nuke the place as a last resort. Shepherd stops the nuke and between them, he and Gordon Freeman block the alien invasion and kill Nihilanth, thus solving the problem in a different manner from what the G-man expected, but successfully.
The bigger picture - who is the Administrator? Did the G-man trigger the cascade just so he could single out Gordon Freeman for future employment? - is still sketchy at this point, but when I figured all this out I was mightily impressed with Valve's storytelling abilities. The inattentive player would have missed a whole lot. I have high hopes for the story of HL2, which my PC is currently too underpowered to play...
Re:Better than a Volcano
on
Hacking Vodka
·
· Score: 4, Funny
This is only tangetially related but I thought I'd post it anyway. At the start of (well, a week or so into) every new academic year at my college, all of the current mathematicians (such as me) band together, spend a reasonable proportion of the mathematicians' society's annual budget on vodka and assorted other alcoholic drinks, and have an amicable get-together in somebody's room to welcome the newcomers. In 2002 I was among those newcomers. There were about fifteen of us altogether.
I had the good fortune to retire to my room relatively early that night, because some time later in the evening, I'm told, a second-year called Dom got out a fondue set. The details of what happened after that are a little confused, but basically, somebody else also got out a small lump of greenish cheese which he had bought at the dining hall some weeks previously and never mustered the courage to eat. Alcohol did its sinful work, and the idea arose to melt the cheese. Into half a bottle of vodka.
Apparently (and understandably), nobody was able to manage more than a few sips of this crime against humanity of a drink without dire ill effects. The vast majority of the cheese vodka went undrunk and the bottle sort of hung around for the rest of the term... and the next term... and the next, gradually being handed from person to person as each one tried to get rid of it without actually drinking any of it or sacreligiously throwing it away.
That was in October 2002. Towards the end of June 2003, it was decided that enough was enough. The cheese vodka had had its day. It was buried in what I'm told was a rather tearful ceremony in Botolph Court, being a rather grubby area of grass in the middle of some of our student accommodation. Apparently they emptied some tea over the grave; tea being another major interest of a significant number of mathematicians at our college.
Fast-forward to October 2003 and the next official mathmo drinks. I was now among the second-years welcoming the first-years, and obviously we told them our various anecdotes of years gone by. We got to the cheese vodka story. Alcohol once again did its sinful work, and the idea popped into the collective head to go back to Botolph Court and dig it up again.
Which we did.
It was crawling up the side of the bottle to get out.
It comes pretty close to the all-time Worst Idea In Alcoholic History. Not quite up there with "let's drink Lenin's embalming fluid", but pretty darned close. I think *name removed*, one of the first-years, was the only person who tried any of the one-year-old matured cheese vodka. She managed a record-breaking whole capful. She was alternately paralytic and unpleasantly violent for the rest of the evening. Eventually I was one of the ones who helped carry her back to her room, by which time she was already being seriously considered for that year's Most Drunken Mathmo award, usually given in summer.
The cheese vodka is now missing, presumed poured down a sink somewhere, but I suspect that in the fullness of time it will resurface like an old supervillain.
Re:Speaking of filters...
on
Hacking Vodka
·
· Score: 1
Pornography triggers myriad kinds of internal, natural drugs that mimic the "high" from a street drug. Addiction to pornography is addiction to what I dub erototoxins -- mind-altering drugs produced by the viewer's own brain.
How does this 'brain sabotage' occur? Brain scientists tell us that "in 3/10 of a second a visual image passes from the eye through the brain, and whether or not one wants to, the brain is structurally changed and memories are created - we literally 'grow new brain' with each visual experience."
[...] Any highly excitatory stimuli (whether sexually explicit sex education or X-Rated films) say neurologists, "which lasts half a second within five to ten minutes has produced a structural change that is in some ways as profound as the structural changes one sees in [brain] damage...[and] can...leave a trace that will last for years."
Pornography psychopharmacologically imprints young brains...
Let me see if I'm reading this right... is she saying that people can remember things that they have seen? And that our brain changes to incorporate those memories? Great Scott! Get me the President!
Even at minimum wage the wages for the amount of time spent downloading a stupid DivX is more than the price of a pristine DVD of the same title.
Not true at all. One can search for movies with Kazaa or load a torrent from a web site in the morning, and by the time one returns from work, the download is finsihed, happily awaiting my watchful eyes. Total time invested: 5 minutes. Sure the computer downloaded for hours, but the user can be away doing his own thing.
Even better: I can set a download running, go into town in order to buy the DVD legitimately, come back, and the download will have finished first. Time expended is a complete non-issue here.
More importantly, Pixar has some of the best writers. IMO the writing in any movie is far more important than the visuals. If one were to take the CGI out of - for example - Finding Nemo, you'd still have a fantastic movie because it can stand on story and dialogue alone.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd be willing to consider watching a movie based on a reality show, but only if it was guaranteed that the movie was entirely fiction. Perhaps (though not necessarily) based on a fictional reality show. That is to say, a fictional reality show movie.
What do you call a printer?
This isn't news! It's anti-news!
I guess you're waiting for Salad Fingers: The Motion Picture?
Perhaps they feel the whole "demons from Hell" angle is overused also.
My question is, does the newcomer stand a chance of breaking Ken's record, or is it back to the regular routine on the show now?
You could probably use it to good effect in stand-up comedy. You've got an entire tense devoted to expressing the words "But seriously though..."
I know of a trivial variation on English called "E-Prime". Essentially it comprised English, except without the verb "to be", making it difficult to state facts as being absolutely true and usually forcing one to resort to "I believe that..." and variations. As you can imagine, such a language fails miserably in the realms of mathematics, but for political or philosophical debates, who knows? It could find itself useful.
...17 doesn't divide 321
I'm amazed at the number of people who point to battery-changing as a drawback of wireless mice. You can get them with chargers now.
It really was a pity that the anime got dropped after only two episodes. It'll be nice to see the rest of the story on screen.
Memorizing and regurgitating and manipulating numbers is a very different skill from mathematics. These are things which computers are very good at - things which we DESIGN computers to be good at so we waste minimal time on such trivialities and work on the stuff which a computer can't do, the stuff which maths is really about: logical reasoning with abstracts.
My point is that just because he's good with numbers doesn't mean he'd enjoy (or be any good at) mathematics. Also, mathematicians can't count.
Go and see this movie! Make everyone you know come with you! Buy the DVDs, show them to other people, make this franchise make money! And maybe, just maybe, Fox will pick it back up again.
How good would your movie have to be not to be scared of the next Star Wars?
Though I hope Greengrass has the sense to keep it unchanged, I don't think the masses are going to like the ending. It's not standard Hollywood fare.
XMMS stocking?
While you are essentially correct, there's a little more to the story of HL1 than meets the eye. Spoilers ahoy for people who haven't played the original Half-Life:
At the time of the original accident that Gordon Freeman is present for, Black Mesa has had working teleporters for at least a few months and has been able to go to and from Xen for at least a week. They've captured and domesticated a good few indigenous life-forms - witness the Barnacle weapon and the ecosphere set up for some houndeyes in the Opposing Force expansion. Gradually they've captured more and more fauna until they "start getting collected themselves..." They get as far as Nihilanth's lair and manage to retrieve a mysterious orange crystal.
Yup. The crystal at the start of the game is the same as the three powering the final boss. Look and you will see a hole in the wall where the fourth crystal was stolen from. No wonder there was resonance cascade. The original accident causes a lot of random teleportations to and from Xen and brings over a whole lot of dangerous animals, but it's only about 12 hours of game time after the original experiment that stronger enemies - the green slaves, and the huge alien grunts - begin appearing spontaneously. This is no longer accidental: this is enemy action by Nihilanth, who is moving to attack Earth... which is something the Administrator, who observes pretty much the whole course of events, has been expecting, indeed, preparing for. Read Alan Shepherd's diary and you know this was actually expected to happen.
Realising what has gone wrong the grunts are sent in, find it's too difficult a task to take on, are pulled out and replaced with black ops who attempt to nuke the place as a last resort. Shepherd stops the nuke and between them, he and Gordon Freeman block the alien invasion and kill Nihilanth, thus solving the problem in a different manner from what the G-man expected, but successfully.
The bigger picture - who is the Administrator? Did the G-man trigger the cascade just so he could single out Gordon Freeman for future employment? - is still sketchy at this point, but when I figured all this out I was mightily impressed with Valve's storytelling abilities. The inattentive player would have missed a whole lot. I have high hopes for the story of HL2, which my PC is currently too underpowered to play...
This is only tangetially related but I thought I'd post it anyway. At the start of (well, a week or so into) every new academic year at my college, all of the current mathematicians (such as me) band together, spend a reasonable proportion of the mathematicians' society's annual budget on vodka and assorted other alcoholic drinks, and have an amicable get-together in somebody's room to welcome the newcomers. In 2002 I was among those newcomers. There were about fifteen of us altogether.
I had the good fortune to retire to my room relatively early that night, because some time later in the evening, I'm told, a second-year called Dom got out a fondue set. The details of what happened after that are a little confused, but basically, somebody else also got out a small lump of greenish cheese which he had bought at the dining hall some weeks previously and never mustered the courage to eat. Alcohol did its sinful work, and the idea arose to melt the cheese. Into half a bottle of vodka.
Apparently (and understandably), nobody was able to manage more than a few sips of this crime against humanity of a drink without dire ill effects. The vast majority of the cheese vodka went undrunk and the bottle sort of hung around for the rest of the term... and the next term... and the next, gradually being handed from person to person as each one tried to get rid of it without actually drinking any of it or sacreligiously throwing it away.
That was in October 2002. Towards the end of June 2003, it was decided that enough was enough. The cheese vodka had had its day. It was buried in what I'm told was a rather tearful ceremony in Botolph Court, being a rather grubby area of grass in the middle of some of our student accommodation. Apparently they emptied some tea over the grave; tea being another major interest of a significant number of mathematicians at our college.
Fast-forward to October 2003 and the next official mathmo drinks. I was now among the second-years welcoming the first-years, and obviously we told them our various anecdotes of years gone by. We got to the cheese vodka story. Alcohol once again did its sinful work, and the idea popped into the collective head to go back to Botolph Court and dig it up again.
Which we did.
It was crawling up the side of the bottle to get out.
It comes pretty close to the all-time Worst Idea In Alcoholic History. Not quite up there with "let's drink Lenin's embalming fluid", but pretty darned close. I think *name removed*, one of the first-years, was the only person who tried any of the one-year-old matured cheese vodka. She managed a record-breaking whole capful. She was alternately paralytic and unpleasantly violent for the rest of the evening. Eventually I was one of the ones who helped carry her back to her room, by which time she was already being seriously considered for that year's Most Drunken Mathmo award, usually given in summer.
The cheese vodka is now missing, presumed poured down a sink somewhere, but I suspect that in the fullness of time it will resurface like an old supervillain.
INFORMATIVE?!
Let me see if I'm reading this right... is she saying that people can remember things that they have seen? And that our brain changes to incorporate those memories? Great Scott! Get me the President!
More to the point, where would you like to see gaming go in the next five years? What empty spaces have you that need filling?
I'd say somewhere between two and three days, on average
More importantly, Pixar has some of the best writers. IMO the writing in any movie is far more important than the visuals. If one were to take the CGI out of - for example - Finding Nemo, you'd still have a fantastic movie because it can stand on story and dialogue alone.