Pixar is now, what, 11 for 11?
As a sequel, TS3 does suffer from replaying various bits of shtik that you've seen before. But the whole framing story works well, and the last scene is a bit of a tear jerker. There are also several laugh out loud moments in which I think the whole audience was laughing at once. No mean feat, that.
I saw the film in 3D. I can honestly say that I did not see one case where 3D was used obtrusively, as a gimmick, an effect you were supposed to notice. Neither was the film flat. I think the filmmakers hit an effective balance. (The same cannot be said for Avatar, for example.)
Pros:
Spanish Buzz
Ken
Totoro as Miyazaki homage
Cons:
"Night and Day", the short before the main film, was not as strong as previous films. I know, I'm reaching.
Monday, June 21, 2010
Review: Legion
I saw this on the small screen of an airplane. That is about what it deserved.
The story is a combination of Terminator (imminent end of the world, the baby must die, pursued by unstoppable big guy) and "X of the Dead" (small group of strangers trapped in the house by zombies) movie.
It doesn't really work, since running away from the Terminator was the only effective strategy.
Pros:
None
Cons:
laughable CGI
you can tell an angel by their British accent
The story is a combination of Terminator (imminent end of the world, the baby must die, pursued by unstoppable big guy) and "X of the Dead" (small group of strangers trapped in the house by zombies) movie.
It doesn't really work, since running away from the Terminator was the only effective strategy.
Pros:
None
Cons:
laughable CGI
you can tell an angel by their British accent
What was the early earth really like?
I've been trying to collect some facts/factoids about what the environment of the Archaean Earth might have been like, in order to organize some of my thinking about origin-of-life scenarios.
Sun:
Earth:
Moon:
Put some of these together, and you get a recipe for incredible weather. We often think of the ancient Earth as tropical volcanic islands being lapped gently by tides that swish warm and shallow waters of a lagoon containing a dilute organic soup.
Think again. Think howling winds blowing endlessly around the world, as they do between Antarctica and the southern continents. Think waves pushed by that wind and tides the size of the World Trade Center towers, rushing over flat landscapes to crash like tsunamis and run inland for miles, or entirely across the landscape to the next shoreline. Every 3 hours.
Think of the hurricanes. Clouds and rain nucleate around dust and organic chemicals floating in the sky. Not much of either would be available, so those heaving oceans just evaporate, and the amount of water in the atmosphere just keeps building up. And up. And up until it supersaturates. And then finally the rain starts to fall in huge fat drops. The storm grows, the quickly whirling planet triggers a spiral, an eye.
But there is no landfall to dissipate this hurricane. There is just the wind howling around the planet, and isolated islands being drowned by the tides. The hurricane could spin like Jupiter's Great Red Spot, around the world and then back over the same ocean that spawned it.
What are some of the Origin Of Life (OOL) implications?
High UV levels striking the ocean surface, where water and CO2 are present, can rapidly build many organic molecules. Some people fear that the UV would break big molecules apart faster than they could form. Luckily, that is not true. Long chain molecules, such as RNA, can 'quench' the high energy photon before it heats up the entire molecule, or breaks a single bond. The heat drains away into the ocean. So the high UV works in life's favor to build up lots of the chemicals of life.
Those winds? It turns out that the top layer of the ocean, a skin only a few millimeters thick, has its own dynamics. Evaporation raises the concentration of other chemicals just below the surface. And the wind whips the surface into masses of bubbles - spindrift. These bubbles trap chemicals together for long periods.
The tides? The endless pounding that landforms received was insurance that all kinds of useful chemicals were ground up and dissolved in the ocean, as rapidly as the volcanoes brought them to the surface.
It is also true that the endless cycling of tides and drying out is a natural form of what we call PCR - a way to duplicate organic molecules
No continents also meant that there was a much larger network of undersea cracks in the crust, where seawater and lava could meet. Today these conditions exist in fewer places, creating the 'black smokers' and 'lost cities' that support life without light. They would have been far more common in the ancient past.
Bottom line - as truly alien as our planet must have been three and a half billion years ago, it was still a setting in which life blossomed almost as soon as it was able. Some of the most important reasons are all based in the existence of the Moon as the large close companion of the Earth. Life may come up out of the depths, or at the surface, but the Moon donated the rocks and created the stirring motion of our oceans.
Sun:
- 70% weaker in total(?) radiation - weaker at least in the visible by that much.
- higher activity in UV range
- spinning faster - like the Earth and the Moon, before they all traded rotation for distance.
- larger magnetic field - from the faster spin.
- bigger solar gamma and x-ray bursts - from the larger magnetic field.
Earth:
- 6-12 hour rotation period - if you back up from current conditions of the Earth-Moon system, this is what you get for the time right after the Moon reformed after the impact of some Mars-size planetoid with the proto-Earth.
- 3x current heat flux from the interior due to more radioactives.
- thick atmosphere of CO2 (like Venus today) - there is a huge amount of CO2 buried today as rock formed by life.
- no oxygen, so no ozone to stop UV from reaching the surface - an incredible 10^30 more! That is a mind boggling amount of radiation, which the ozone layer currently keeps at bay.
- tides are 1000 times higher! (if moon is 10x closer)
- winds are very strong, east-west bands - due to rapid rotation.
- no large continents
- low levels of cloud cover -no nucleating particles.
- high level of infall of cometary organic material - inner solar system still full of debris
Moon:
- much closer (10x closer?) - that is inside Earth's geosynchronous orbit. We have satellites that would have been further away!
- spinning itself - not yet tidally locked
- covering a huge piece of the sky - because of being so close
- collisions that make moons such as ours are rare but not completely unlikely - they might happen in 5-10% of solar systems with rocky planets
- 30 (out of 300) gas giant exoplanets discovered so far orbit in their star's 'habzone' - even if the planet is too big for life as we know it, it could have life bearing moons
Put some of these together, and you get a recipe for incredible weather. We often think of the ancient Earth as tropical volcanic islands being lapped gently by tides that swish warm and shallow waters of a lagoon containing a dilute organic soup.
Think again. Think howling winds blowing endlessly around the world, as they do between Antarctica and the southern continents. Think waves pushed by that wind and tides the size of the World Trade Center towers, rushing over flat landscapes to crash like tsunamis and run inland for miles, or entirely across the landscape to the next shoreline. Every 3 hours.
Think of the hurricanes. Clouds and rain nucleate around dust and organic chemicals floating in the sky. Not much of either would be available, so those heaving oceans just evaporate, and the amount of water in the atmosphere just keeps building up. And up. And up until it supersaturates. And then finally the rain starts to fall in huge fat drops. The storm grows, the quickly whirling planet triggers a spiral, an eye.
But there is no landfall to dissipate this hurricane. There is just the wind howling around the planet, and isolated islands being drowned by the tides. The hurricane could spin like Jupiter's Great Red Spot, around the world and then back over the same ocean that spawned it.
What are some of the Origin Of Life (OOL) implications?
High UV levels striking the ocean surface, where water and CO2 are present, can rapidly build many organic molecules. Some people fear that the UV would break big molecules apart faster than they could form. Luckily, that is not true. Long chain molecules, such as RNA, can 'quench' the high energy photon before it heats up the entire molecule, or breaks a single bond. The heat drains away into the ocean. So the high UV works in life's favor to build up lots of the chemicals of life.
Those winds? It turns out that the top layer of the ocean, a skin only a few millimeters thick, has its own dynamics. Evaporation raises the concentration of other chemicals just below the surface. And the wind whips the surface into masses of bubbles - spindrift. These bubbles trap chemicals together for long periods.
The tides? The endless pounding that landforms received was insurance that all kinds of useful chemicals were ground up and dissolved in the ocean, as rapidly as the volcanoes brought them to the surface.
It is also true that the endless cycling of tides and drying out is a natural form of what we call PCR - a way to duplicate organic molecules
No continents also meant that there was a much larger network of undersea cracks in the crust, where seawater and lava could meet. Today these conditions exist in fewer places, creating the 'black smokers' and 'lost cities' that support life without light. They would have been far more common in the ancient past.
Bottom line - as truly alien as our planet must have been three and a half billion years ago, it was still a setting in which life blossomed almost as soon as it was able. Some of the most important reasons are all based in the existence of the Moon as the large close companion of the Earth. Life may come up out of the depths, or at the surface, but the Moon donated the rocks and created the stirring motion of our oceans.
Saturday, January 9, 2010
Review: The Digital Plague, by Jeff Somers
I bought this book to read on the plane. It was a good value for the price.
The cover advertises it as 'nano-noir', a term I would agree with. It is science fiction with a hard boiled detective edge, and a good dose of humor.
The lead character and narrator, Avery Cates, is a successful assassin. Cates and his world were introduced in Somer's previous novel, The Electric Church. I have not read that book, but as in all sequels much of the plot and characters in that book are quickly sketched in this one.
The book is fun and fast-paced. Its problems are relatively minor, but the editor was asleep at the wheel a few times.
My big issue with the book is that it tries to put too many ideas forward at the same time, instead of limiting itself to the exploration of one idea fully. One key idea in particular is terribly motivated, and even the characters agree is inexplicable. It appears to exist only to punch up flagging adrenaline levels and created scenes that might be more cinematic if filmed.
Good entertainment value at the paperback price. I will go back and buy the first book, and the next in the series as well.
The cover advertises it as 'nano-noir', a term I would agree with. It is science fiction with a hard boiled detective edge, and a good dose of humor.
The lead character and narrator, Avery Cates, is a successful assassin. Cates and his world were introduced in Somer's previous novel, The Electric Church. I have not read that book, but as in all sequels much of the plot and characters in that book are quickly sketched in this one.
The book is fun and fast-paced. Its problems are relatively minor, but the editor was asleep at the wheel a few times.
My big issue with the book is that it tries to put too many ideas forward at the same time, instead of limiting itself to the exploration of one idea fully. One key idea in particular is terribly motivated, and even the characters agree is inexplicable. It appears to exist only to punch up flagging adrenaline levels and created scenes that might be more cinematic if filmed.
Good entertainment value at the paperback price. I will go back and buy the first book, and the next in the series as well.
Review: Daybreakers
Daybreakers is an Australian-made vampire film that explores some traditional vampire tropes in unconventional ways by taking them to their logical limits. Set in the near future, it has science fiction and horror elements skillfully mixed. Except for Willem Dafoe, I did not recognize the cast.
The premise is ecological. In a predator prey-relationship, if the population of predators goes above the level that the prey population can support, it will crash. Not enough antelope = starving lions. The mathematics (called Lotka-Volterra dynamics) are very beautiful.
Many vampire stories assume that vampires will carefully cultivate the human population they feed on. Not Daybreakers. This movie introduces a destabilizing idea - that vampires will 'promote' many humans instead of feeding on them, for essentially loving reasons. Done with the best intentions, but in the future of Daybreakers, ten years after a vampire plague of unspoken origin, most of humanity are now the immortal undead, kings and queens of the night.
For the sake of argument, if a vampire needs 60 humans as a stable blood farm to provide a renewable resource of one pint a day, you can see how converting 90 percent of the humans to vampires is going to lead to 'instabilities'. There is just not enough blood to go around. Blood is both food and currency in this future.
The premise is inventive. The details are worked out nicely. The film is a good blend of horror and s-f. Those who are fans of traditional effects, as opposed to CGI, will be happy. My main quibble is that it solves the main problem twice, apparently for cinematic rather than in-story reasons. I enjoyed the music quite a bit.
Recommended.
The premise is ecological. In a predator prey-relationship, if the population of predators goes above the level that the prey population can support, it will crash. Not enough antelope = starving lions. The mathematics (called Lotka-Volterra dynamics) are very beautiful.
Many vampire stories assume that vampires will carefully cultivate the human population they feed on. Not Daybreakers. This movie introduces a destabilizing idea - that vampires will 'promote' many humans instead of feeding on them, for essentially loving reasons. Done with the best intentions, but in the future of Daybreakers, ten years after a vampire plague of unspoken origin, most of humanity are now the immortal undead, kings and queens of the night.
For the sake of argument, if a vampire needs 60 humans as a stable blood farm to provide a renewable resource of one pint a day, you can see how converting 90 percent of the humans to vampires is going to lead to 'instabilities'. There is just not enough blood to go around. Blood is both food and currency in this future.
The premise is inventive. The details are worked out nicely. The film is a good blend of horror and s-f. Those who are fans of traditional effects, as opposed to CGI, will be happy. My main quibble is that it solves the main problem twice, apparently for cinematic rather than in-story reasons. I enjoyed the music quite a bit.
Recommended.
Review: Sherlock Holmes
I saw Sherlock Holmes last night with my son.
Likes:
Title design
Set dressing
Irene Adler
Humor
Dislikes:
That same washed out color palette you've seen in other recent films.
For those who enjoyed Robert Downey Jr. in Ironman, Sherlock Holmes (the film) has a bit of steampunk Tony Stark to the character Sherlock Holmes. Jude Law plays Dr Watson very well in my view. Rachel McAdams plays Irene Adler, the moral, comic, romantic, and intellectual foil (and equal) to Downey's Holmes.
One of the joys of detective fiction for a reader is to see if they can solve the mystery before the main character. This is difficult in film detective stories, but this film does honor the trope by at least letting you see the clues, even if they whiz by too fast to process until the requisite flashback at the end.
Holmes and Watson as the bickering odd couple got old fast, though it was better than the fawning hero worship versions of Watson in other films.
The least likable parts of the film are the fight scenes. Holmes does have a reputation 'in canon' as a boxer and martial artist, so I am not objecting that they are out of character. Rather, they are filmed in gratuitous slo-mo intercut with sped up footage on some very cluttered sets. The result is some very muddy views of the action - who is hitting whom how.
Recommended - a well made 'reboot' (though not 'origins') genre film. Strong detective, minor steampunk notes, and no bitter aftertaste.
Likes:
Title design
Set dressing
Irene Adler
Humor
Dislikes:
That same washed out color palette you've seen in other recent films.
For those who enjoyed Robert Downey Jr. in Ironman, Sherlock Holmes (the film) has a bit of steampunk Tony Stark to the character Sherlock Holmes. Jude Law plays Dr Watson very well in my view. Rachel McAdams plays Irene Adler, the moral, comic, romantic, and intellectual foil (and equal) to Downey's Holmes.
One of the joys of detective fiction for a reader is to see if they can solve the mystery before the main character. This is difficult in film detective stories, but this film does honor the trope by at least letting you see the clues, even if they whiz by too fast to process until the requisite flashback at the end.
Holmes and Watson as the bickering odd couple got old fast, though it was better than the fawning hero worship versions of Watson in other films.
The least likable parts of the film are the fight scenes. Holmes does have a reputation 'in canon' as a boxer and martial artist, so I am not objecting that they are out of character. Rather, they are filmed in gratuitous slo-mo intercut with sped up footage on some very cluttered sets. The result is some very muddy views of the action - who is hitting whom how.
Recommended - a well made 'reboot' (though not 'origins') genre film. Strong detective, minor steampunk notes, and no bitter aftertaste.
Friday, September 18, 2009
Jump the Hybrid!
Actually, jump from the hybrid. Nathan left the lights on in the old Altima, and the battery (a brand new battery) couldn't start the car, plus the alarm was tripped. (This is the second time that running down the battery has tripped the alarm.)
Because of the alarm issue, Nathan couldn't get a jump from helpful strangers. They tried, but the engine wouldn't start, just beep, beep, beep. Dad to the rescue.
I had researched the alarm system of the 98 Altima on the web, and tried the secret handshake with the key in the driver's door, two lefts, then two rights. That seemed to have cleared the alarm issue.
Now for jumping - the new Altima is a hybrid. We looked in the owners manual and you can indeed jump start a hybrid from another 12 volt battery. The manual said nothing about jumping another car from the Altima, but we decided to give it a shot.
Open the hood. Under the hood are some large boxes. I'm stumped. Henry Ford would be stumped. Saved by the owner's manual. It has an illustration of where to attach the cables. Negative to ground, positive to a bolt exposed in what otherwise looks like the fuse box.
The moment of truth. I push the button to start the hybrid - which starts in all electric mode. No sparks, flames, or explosions. I take this as a positive sign. Finally the gas engine starts, and I rev the engine like normal and tell my son to try to start the other car.
It works!
OK, maybe a blog entry about jumpstarting a car is thin gruel for you. But at the time, it felt pretty cool.
Because of the alarm issue, Nathan couldn't get a jump from helpful strangers. They tried, but the engine wouldn't start, just beep, beep, beep. Dad to the rescue.
I had researched the alarm system of the 98 Altima on the web, and tried the secret handshake with the key in the driver's door, two lefts, then two rights. That seemed to have cleared the alarm issue.
Now for jumping - the new Altima is a hybrid. We looked in the owners manual and you can indeed jump start a hybrid from another 12 volt battery. The manual said nothing about jumping another car from the Altima, but we decided to give it a shot.
Open the hood. Under the hood are some large boxes. I'm stumped. Henry Ford would be stumped. Saved by the owner's manual. It has an illustration of where to attach the cables. Negative to ground, positive to a bolt exposed in what otherwise looks like the fuse box.
The moment of truth. I push the button to start the hybrid - which starts in all electric mode. No sparks, flames, or explosions. I take this as a positive sign. Finally the gas engine starts, and I rev the engine like normal and tell my son to try to start the other car.
It works!
OK, maybe a blog entry about jumpstarting a car is thin gruel for you. But at the time, it felt pretty cool.
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