• Iron Man [My review]
• Speed Racer [My review]
• The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian [My review]
• Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull [My review]
• Kung Fu Panda [My review]
• The Incredible Hulk [My review]
• WALL-E [My review]
• Wanted [My review]
• Hellboy II: The Golden Army [My review]
• The Dark Knight
• The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor
• Star Wars: The Clone Wars


Wow.

Let me expand on that "wow." By "wow," I mean: holy freakin' crap, that was stunningly good.

You take a superhero flick like, say, Iron Man, and it's fun and fast-paced and dramatic and has a some good one-liners, and that's a good solid enjoyable movie. But a movie like this one is not only spectacular, it's an examination of what it is to be -- or not to be -- a hero. It may be a little unfair to say this because Watchmen was twenty years ago and a lot has built on it since then, but... this is what Watchmen should have been.

Also, with all due respect to Jack Nicholson, Heath Ledger's Joker mines depths of scary that the Tim Burton Batman couldn't even begin to touch, and I'm not just saying that because Heath died tragically. And that bit with the ferries? That's a psychotic villain trying to make a point.

See this movie. Seriously. See it.

P.S. Yes, I'm a bit late with the review. I was holding out to see it in IMAX, but I eventually conceded that to get into one of the IMAX showings I would have had to buy a ticket while I was still in kindergarten. So I settled for a DLP theater instead.

Tonight, Erich and I are going to test-build our space dome up at mayorjim and miriamdema's place. THIS IS VERY EXCITING.

I'm on a bit of a kick about organized use of energy. As I mentioned in another post, I'm sort of a fan of heat pumps over electric heating elements, inspired by page 120 (of the current draft) of this:

http://withouthotair.com/

Some more neat stuff on heat pumps can be found here:

http://www.eere.energy.gov/consumer/your_home/space_heating_cooling/index.cfm/mytopic=12610

http://www.eere.energy.gov/consumer/your_home/space_heating_cooling/index.cfm/mytopic=12700

That got me thinking, though, about a modular, systemic, self-adjusting home system. I'm imagining a system that's fully integrated and controlled... not off the grid, but rather leveraging the grid (and likely using "sell-back" some of the time.) I'm going to riff a bit on this topic, just for yucks, but a lot of this would involve having some central transmission buses and storage systems for heat, electricity, mechanical motion, water, and possibly other things, along with many sensors and valves... essentially, a "smart" system. Basically, thinking in terms of what types of energy you need (mechanical, electrical, heat) and what you have, and trying to do bookkeeping. I imagine things like "are the solar panels hotter than the hot water heater? If so, run the water through that. Is the windmill running? run the mechanical water pump... otherwise consider using the electric pump. Are the batteries charged? Is the local water tank full? Can we pump water up to the storage tank? Is the prius battery full? Should we sell back power? Can we run the a/c compressor off the mechanical bus from the windmill, or do we have to run it off of the electric grid?

Apparently, there are deep-ground heat sinks used for heat pumps sometimes, but combining things seems good: solar heating can be a radiator at night, having a mechanical system that can be driven by multiple sources and used by multiple sources seems to make sense.

I'm a big fan of early industrial revolution innovations that could be optimized for modern use... they used to run machines off of shafts, belts, and pulleys, so a single source of mechanical motion, like a water wheel, could power an array of machines. If a system could run the fans for heating and cooling, the compressors for air conditioners and refrigerators and heat pump heaters off of that, then having multiple mechanical sources (say, a windmill, a water turbine below your house water reservoir, an electric motor, and a diesel motor) could conceivably run a bunch of mechanical systems. Similarly, I don't see much reason why the heat pump, a/c, and fridge couldn't run on a shared coolant system, and leverage waste heat from the furnace, solar panels, stove, oven, and even fireplace. And the electricity could also extend appliances, lighting, computers, and other home electric uses to battery charging, selling back to the grid, and so forth. And excess heat needs could be provided with natural gas... I'm inclined to have separate burners at each location for that, because transporting heat that's high enough to catch things on fire seems unwise, but, e.g. if the system is smart, then the clothes drier can take input from a system pre-heated by the furnace or heat pump so it doesn't have to heat as much to get to the right temperature.

From a systems point of view, there are some concerns, since with this much stuff tied together, there is more coupling for failures... if the compressor system breaks down, you could lose refrigeration and a/c and heating and so forth... and it's possible that there are big efficiency hits for using refrigerator coolant in an air conditioner or vice-versa, or for having a variable speed shaft system in the mechanical core of the house, which would need a lossy governor to keep it at the optimal main shaft speed to be geared to all the mechanical pumps, generators, and fans.

It seems, though, that these are largely things that have been solved in the past in specialized systems, and the major thing that prevents this sort of thing is that we're trained to think of systems as single appliances, rather than as modules in an integrated system. And because of that, interoperability is not something that's generally designed into these systems, so it really, at this point, would involve a lot of "homebrew" design. I've tried to look at more mundane home automation systems to control relatively obvious stuff... I'd like to use one of the home automation systems to integrate with a central computer, and it seems like it'd be a no-brainer to use the weather station thingie we have to make smart decisions about things like the sprinklers and the thermostat controls... and I'd like to be able to use the web browser on my phone to tell the house I'll be home in 30 minutes, so change the a/c to comfort level rather than baseline. One would think there would be sprinkler controllers, thermostats, and such (as well as TiVo type thingies and lighting control) that would be easy to integrate, but there seems to be a lot of complexity and non-standard crap that's an impediment, as well as a large added cost for stuff that's intended to be this versatile, when it's available at all.

This is symptomatic of another pet peeve: producers of goods don't like interoperability, either because they just don't care or think about it most of the time, or because they actively prefer to have a proprietary system that doesn't integrate so they can get market lock-in or force people to buy compatible stuff from them. The idea of standard, interchangeable parts is no longer very popular, so while old-school things like screws, light bulbs, lumber, and plumbing fixtures have some standard rules, many new things have weird plugs, attachments, interfaces, and so forth. There is a sad lack of standardization in terms of everything from GPS communication protocols to interconnect cables to data formats to DC adapters for electronics. If I wanted to have a home DC power bus that would charge my cell phone, laptop, and such, and run various other electronics, I can't do it: even if they all run on DC, or even all on 12volt DC, there are a zillion different plugs and connectors and weird "smart" systems in chargers that aren't well documented, leading to one or two stages of inefficient transformers and rectifiers in each electronic item. And many electronics manufacturers not only adopt the "why would anyone want to do that" attitude preventing unanticipated but legitimate uses, they even seem to buckle under to pressure from media companies to actively block things: I found the other day that, even when playing a HOMEMADE DVD, apples disable the "take a screen shot" feature while a DVD is playing, so if you want to take a still frame from YOUR OWN CONTENT you're blocked. Because of delusions that only pirates would ever want to do that, and they, apparently, aren't expected to be able to work around that... a typical case of lack of interoperability hurting the typical user by putting up impediments that someone with a profit motivation could get around.

We now have digital control systems at our fingertips that are fantastically better than what the integration engineers of the 19th and early 20th century had to work with, and yet we've abandoned the desire to leverage those for integrated systems in many cases. Maybe I'm being naive about the costs of coupled systems (as I mentioned earlier) but I think it's time for the pendulum to swing back toward integration... in addition to the HVAC and energy in the home, my computer should automatically talk to my laptop, cell phone, land-line handset, prius phonebook, TiVo, and so forth every time they are collectively in bluetooth/ wifi/ whatever range, and do the intelligent syncing of calendars, backing up home directories, and so forth. When I look things up on google maps, it should upload the waypoints into the Prius nav system, and into my garmin hand GPS and the GPS bluetooth thingie that I use with my phone. And I should be able to ssh into this from my laptop, my phone, or any other internet-equipped device. And when I have, I should be able to check or change lights/ sprinklers/ HVAC system controls, and schedule TV recordings, and start downloads, and check or modify the grocery lists, and leave reminders for myself or others, and so forth and so on. And while we're at it, anyone anywhere should be able to pick up any telephone, push a "get your attention" button, and say "I want to talk to Mark Montague in Altadena" and get connected to me, maybe with "Is that the one on Alegre Lane?" first to disambiguate. And there should be a cryptographically secure system where if I don't want my phone number to be available, there can be a key-exchange where they can send a message asking me to give them a one-time or permanent invitation to contact me without them ever knowing my actual phone number and address, yet being assured that they're interacting with me because of some public-key confirmation.

I may be sad that the 21st century doesn't have the lunar vacations and flying cars, but I'm even more sad that the sorts of ways we could easily be leveraging interoperability and modern computer systems are blocked by short-sightedness, greed, apathy, and stupidity (and maybe a few technical issues, but not ones I consider show-stoppers-- cars, for example, run the alternator, power steering, a/c, water pump, smog pump, and fan off of one mechanical bus...)

Tonight the Royal Opera started their production of Monkey six minutes late, which meant that I got to see it after a frenetic dash, waving my ticket at at least seven different ushers and doing elegant things like shrieking, "But I don't know where the lift IIIIIS!"  I hadn't been there before, but don't ask me what the building is like; I couldn't possibly tell you.

Monkey is an operatic adaptation of the Chinese classic 西遊記, usually called Journey to the West in English versions.  This is a classic of Chinese literature, several hundred years old.  The original was written in Classical Chinese, which I can't read, but while I was in Taipei a few years ago I picked up a set of volumes of rewrites of the classics in modern Mandarin (though an archaic-sounding Mandarin, as I discovered from the squacks of laughter from my then-teacher when I picked up some vocabulary from my reading).  I estimated that the rewrites were for children about nine years old, but a Chinese-American friend of mine who had been to school in Taiwan said no, it's more like for twelve-year-olds.  I have read about a sixth of the book, and I find the main character, 孫悟空, the Monkey King, hilarious.  He is the most audacious, id-driven, appallingly-behaved character I have ever encountered in literature, and it's a great thing to be him vicariously through reading the book.  Not to mention that he is impossibly strong and fast and good at martial arts while being utterly unencumbered with impulse control.  I had tears of laughter reading about him using his cloud somersault technique or whatever you call it in English.

And as soon as I saw the actor playing the Monkey King move, surrounded by his Monkey Subject chorus, I knew we were in for a treat.  I wouldn't call the production an opera as such.  The show was a multimedia movement extravaganza, closer to ballet than opera, and much closer to Cirque du Soleil than to either.   The singing was not one of the most interesting things about it, or even in the top five.   So I suppose I should name the top five:

  1.  Movement.  The movement was the star of the show; most of the people onstage were acrobats, and the chorus scenes were accordingly stunning. 

  2. Sets and lighting.  The sets were imaginative and colourful and the lighting functioned as part of the sets.  The very best part was that the "sets" were three-dimensional, especially as many scenes included actors flying on wires.  This was most effective in the scene where the Monkey King goes to the underwater kingdom of the Dragon King to demand weapons and armour.  The chorus members playing the sea court were bobbing at just the right rhythm at a variety of heights, giving the clear impression of floating.

  3.  Music.  The orchestra was large, actually larger than I thought it needed to be given the relatively sparse texture of much of the music.  The music used a lot of repetition to build scenes and provide structure.  At times it evoked Phillip Glass, at times electronica, but never either of them too strongly.  I wasn't sure I liked the music, and yet almost every time I turned my focus to it I heard something I found interesting, and was that a theremin I heard at one point, or an unfamiliar Chinese instrument?  Buddhism themes were expressed through vocal parts that sounded like Buddhist chant, along with not one but two presentations of the Heart Sutra, a simple one near the beginning when the Monkey King seeks training in immortality, and a reprise of that with additional melodic layers toward the end when the group is successful in their mission to retrieve lost sutras.
 
  4. Costumes.  Colourful, beautiful, and imaginative, even including the Monkey King's yellow tracksuit.  In the undersea court, one person was a floating bright red starfish, and another was an octopus.  Guanyin looked like a goddess, as she should.  I can't think of a bad costume in the show.

  5. The production used projected animations (like in Avenue Q, or Candide at the ENO, or the projected films in a production I saw of The History Boys -- this seems to be a pretty standard thing these days).  I had mixed feelings about the animations.   Some of them were boring scene transitions, or cliched ways of showing, say, the Monkey King travelling around the world.  At one point a projected animation combined with live-action acting depicted the Monkey King turning himself into a bee to defeat Princess Iron Fan from inside her own body, which would have been hard to show otherwise, but I still wasn't sure if I liked it.  However, once more to the undersea scene: the underwater effect was partially brought about by the projection of animations that were like the way light appears to move and undulate when one is underwater.  Very effective.

Of course they had to leave vast amounts out.  A Chinese audience wouldn't have needed much of that explained, being familiar with the world and the story, but a Western audience lost a lot.  However, the original is vastly too big to compress into a couple of hours.  Another problem with the production was the lack of flow from scene to scene, which felt clunky. And the singing was mostly unimpressive, and the music was overamplified, and not in a subtle way, which meant there were no directional cues to tell where on the stage (or in the orchestra pit) the singer was.  One of my favourite things about actual singing on actual stages is getting that coherence between what I hear and what I see.

It wasn't an opera.  It was flawed.  But I'm delighted I got to see this show.

My pants are starting to get uncomfortably tight, and my weight has been creeping upwards, more noticeably lately -- I had had "between 200 - and 210" in mind for a while, but I'm now solidly on the path to 220. That's no good.

I recently discovered the no S diet: No snacks, sweets, or seconds, except on days that start with S. That's it.

It feels an awful lot like an implementation of the more general Don't Eat Like An Idiot Diet (which I think a friend coined), which I would summarize for myself as "Don't overeat, don't eat stupid things, don't eat when you're not hungry". The No S rules are easier to remember, though.

For me personally, no seconds is pretty easy. I don't habitually eat seconds, nor feel the urge to, except at social events where we order a bunch of food and there's some left over. Especially pizza, but also things like Thai and Indian, I'll often go back for a second plate after everyone's had some. Those sorts of things most often happen on weekends, though, so I may still get to indulge that vice a little.

No snacks is harder, but doable. I eat when I'm not hungry because it feels good, and when I'm stressed, doing something that feels good helps a little, or at least is very tempting. Especially at work, where I have food in my desk; so the key to this will probably be taking all of the food out of my desk that isn't clearly a meal. (I keep some food on hand for lunches when I don't bring leftovers, when I want to have dinner before volleyball, etc.)

No sweets is gonna be killer, though -- I often have a square of chocolate after a meal, and, well, just, dang.

The guy's web site is written a common-sense straightforward style that really speaks to me. His arguments about how we're naturally suited via evolution to be non-snackers seem a little thin, but the general philosophy, and his thoughts about habits and how to form them and what makes things Easy and Hard, resonate with my own experience. So, we'll see.

I found the diet through his shovelglove page, and I might give that a try too. (Or maybe I just want to own a sledgehammer. :^) His urban ranger page is entertaining too, but not very appealing to me personally; for starters, most of the places I drive to (work, Trader Joe's, volleyball in Bunker Hill) are not in fact within an hour walk. But I may keep it in mind.

http://www.reuters.com/article/scienceNews/idUSN2433580320080724?sp=true

continuing in my theme of whining about Reuters' science writing, while I love the idea of scavenging waste heat, something that never seems to make it in these sorts of articles is that efficiency doesn't just depend on a temperature, it usually depends on a temperature gradient between a hot thing and a cool thing. So the engine block, or exhaust, or whatever is hot, and this stuff will extract electricity from it somehow causing it to be cooler, but it presumably needs to still radiate heat in order to keep the "cool side cool," and that heat is paid as an entropy tax. I'm also annoyed that they say the old material has a "rating" of .71 and the new one has a "rating" of 1.5 without giving units or saying what the heck an "rating" is. I would expect an efficiency rating to be between 0 and 1, so 1.5 seems not bloody likely. It must be something like watts or watt-seconds generated per (minute? gallon of gas? temperature difference?)

Anyway, whining notwithstanding, things that can efficiently scavenge waste heat are good. And I love the concept of looking at the organization in energy as well as its energy content: heat is disorganized, and electricity is organized, so using organized energy for heat pumps is a lot more efficient than using a big resistor to just make heat. And, in another sense, you can use a heat difference to create a pressure difference, and use that to drive a turbine or something, but because you're not going to completely cool down the exhaust gas, there's inherently a lot of waste heat that's just never used... in a system that has "organized" energy like electricity, mechanical motion, spring energy, and so forth, the losses are from imperfect transmission more than inefficient extraction, and tend to be much lower... unless what you're after is heat anyway: if you only need heat, it's better (CO2 emissions aside) to burn gas at the source (or use solar heating without any pointless electricity stage.)

I'm having visions of some sort of integrated home system that tracks and integrates heat, electricity, and mechanical supply and demand: is the windmill turning? is the solar/thermal system hot?

I think this calls for a separate brainstorming post.

So tonight at 18:50 my phone rang.  I wondered who it could be as I ambled over to pick it up.  It was my friend Sam. 

He said, "Jill, what are you doing at home?"

"Hmm?" I said, "Should I be somewhere else?"

"Er.....tonight is the night we are going to the opera."

I fell into a state of shock.  "Is it Thursday?"

"Um, yes."

"What time does the opera start?"

"Half seven."

"If I can find the tickets I can get a cab and I might make it."

"Why don't you look for the tickets and call me back?"

"Have you and Z eaten?"

I have no idea what he answered, actually, as I was no longer listening.  I mumbled something about calling him back, hung up, and started to pull clothes on and look for the tickets.  I am normally very organised, but the past few weeks of working on the dissertation have left me in an unbelievably absent-minded state, and I searched for an unfathomable nine minutes before I found them.  By then I had also pulled on some shoes, turned off the cooking that was in progress, and phoned for a cab.

In the cab, I phoned Sam back and told him where I was and said that if we had no traffic at all, it was possible for me to arrive barely on time.  I ended up texting him the seat numbers, and they were able to prove to the people at the box office that these were their tickets -- not only did they know my name and postcode, but the seats were not together, so having them be able to tell the seat numbers was actually really solid evidence that the tickets were theirs. 

"Sam, I'm on Gower Street.  I'm likely not going to make it.  Are they going to let you in?"

"Oh, yes, we're having our bags checked now."

I relaxed.  Worst comes to worst, I can enjoy a couple of hours in Central London and then meet up with them afterward.  I haven't ruined anyone's opera experience but my own with this phenomenal cock up.  Wheeeeeeeee.

Woman shreds mortgage past due notices for 42 months, then shoots herself rather than tell her husband she hasn't been making payments:
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/custom/fringe/sns-ap-foreclosure-suicide,0,428261.story?track=rss

Super sad part: she says in her suicide note that her family should pay for the house with the life insurance money. Most life insurances have a suicide exception.

(link from ouraboros)

There's a scientific finding published in the news over the past few days, about the coupling between solar wind, the Earth's magnetosphere, and the aurora borealis.

What strikes me, though, is that the Reuters article on it has "summarized" it for the common audience to the point where, as a moderately educated person, I found that the summary impeded my knowledge of what the result was. Essentially, in an effort to explain this in terms that anyone could understand, they obfuscated it and removed information.

I found a Canadian Broadcasting article that shows that you can accomplish the same task without such critical failures.

There's nothing factually wrong in the Reuters version, but they just rattle off factoids about "energy" and "magnetic field lines" and "reconnection" without explaining the terms; it's like "scientists discovered new ways to string smart words together," as if the public only should care about the mystical force lines imbued with energy... essentially, only caring about the aesthetic of the description while entirely missing the causality of it... the CBC article does a far better job at describing what's really going on: the fluctuations in the solar wind distort the "bubble" and "teardrop tail" of the magnetosphere, and under some circumstances the deformation is such that it's unstable, and collapses back, releasing energy. The idea of something deforming and snapping back is something people can easily understand, and it's kind of neat, and the sort of thing that will appeal to science fans.

The press seems to think that non-experts are only interested in hearing the fancy words and some trivia (magnetic energy explosion a third of the way to the moon) without caring about why scientists might care about this stuff. I have no idea if such people exist; I'd expect there to be a very small window between complete apathy and caring about a rough but accurate explanation of the actually relevant part. If they do exist, though, I don't have much respect for them, and I don't think the reporters and educators should declare them to be the "target audience."

Apparently this woman who handled the family finances didn't pay the mortgage for *42* months, and shredded the notices from the bank indicating non-payment rather than say, confide in her husband the truth of their situation. Plus the day of the foreclosure sale, shot herself. Now he's out not only the money and the house, but no more wife!

Y'know, I'm all for efficiencies in specialization. It does take my husband a lot less time than it does for me to back up the photos, or change the oil. But I certainly know how to check the Five Precious Humours under the hood of a vehicle (oil, transmission, radiator, brake and steering), and he knows how to mend a hole in his pants, even if those are not our preferred tasks.

I am utterly baffled as to how people can leave something as huge as their financial future in so completely to someone else's judgment. Yes, that includes using a full-service broker -- they resemble overpriced bookies to me ("I got this great tip on a horse, I mean, stock"). The spouse may not have to know the gory day-to-day details, but at least a regular check in! I guess I am really lucky that mostly my financial expectations are in line with the people I spend my time with.

http://www.yarnharlot.ca/blog/archives/2008/07/24/not_my_best_colour.html

It turns out that earlier, when I was quipping about all this spinning for the Tour de Fleece giving me a limp, I wasn't really fooling. What was a vague ache turned into a bona fide inability to lift...

Toys galore
Scattered on the floor
There's no room for more
And it's all because of... Koterie?!

Yep! This Saturday, Koterie is bringing Furrymas to Rocket City, because everyone knows Christmas is just as fun in July as December!

Romp through Koterie's Christmas Trivia and go home happy -- all manner of prizes have been donated by our vendors!

We'll see you at 7 PM PDT this Saturday!

I found this sort of interesting, in that this flagship of inequity seems to have taken hold as a meme despite evidence that it's no longer (per factcheck, anyway) much of an issue in reality:

http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/mccains_viagra_moment.html

This reminds me a bit of the disproven vaccine-autism association that never seems to go away.

I wonder if the imagery that ties the inequity directly not just to gender but to sexuality (via the also-loaded enabling of freedom for sexual expression) is part of the reason for this being a very tenacious notion.

p.s. why do all spellcheckers and dictionaries I've checked say "disproven" is wrong and should be "disproved"? I have an aesthetic preference for using "disproven" or "proven" as an adjective while leaving disproved as a transitive verb, e.g. "the claim is (dis)proven" vs "I (dis)proved the claim." Does this make me a bad English-speaker? I have no idea where I picked up this habit...

I read three comics over the last day or so. Two were by Warren Ellis; the first was Black Summer #7, which appears to be the last of the series, which talks about superheroes and vigilante-ism (interesting view), and the second of which was Gravel #3, which carries forward the story in a different, less bloody way, which I have to admit was something of a relief. Finally, there was DMZ, which seems to discuss power politics in a graphic way.

All pretty good.

Kittens are now underfoot, must remember to always step carefully, or, better yet, shuffle.

Has anyone else been ripped off by Home Finders run by Kian Boucher?

Home Finders was there yesterday and this morning. Tonight, it's gone. Turned out they weren't actually ADVERTISING their services (I wondered why I hadn't had many links lately from there to my land!).

Tonight, it's gone and the owner's profile is blank, except for:

"my time here is complete... much love and much success to all! :)"

ok, so, i haven't dropped off the face of the planet. i'm in maine right now. well, maybe that's off the face of the planet. but it sure is nice out here!

we got on a plane last thursday night and arrived friday morning. since then it's been pretty amazing and relaxing. we've done a lot of cooking, baking, and eating. we made blueberry jam! and have been picking a lot of blueberries. we've played a LOT of whist (which is truly the best card game in the world). we've gone on several nice walks, and i even got in a row boat (and rowed it!) for the first time. there have been trips to town to cute stores and the like, and i bought some amazing fabric with squirrels printed on it. also there have been squirrels! and deer! and it's just so lush and beautiful and nice here. there has been much reading, and we hit a library's paperback sale so we could buy more cheap books. and there have been thunderstorms! actual weather! it's crazy.

so we're here for another week, and i expect it to continue to be the best vacation ever. i don't even have cell reception, and that's awesome! i do have email and internets, and that is also awesome. :)

oliver_j_taco needs this!

Two cats try out the treadmill- a video.

I wonder how soon it will take this to appear on Cute Overload