Mood:  happy

My personal verdict's in: 3.5 out of 4-stars.

The science is close enough (minus the obvious error in stellar physics), and we'd be pretty close to 4-stars if not for the last third (a slasher fest). The scene where the crew boards the 'abandoned' sister-ship ranks as one of the creepier movie moments I've ever seen... 

They needed bigger Ray-bans, though...

Posted by shanekentknolltrey at 10:03 PM ADT

Updated: Wednesday, 1 August 2007 8:34 PM ADT

Share This Post

Permalink

Mood:  not sure

This weekend I think I'll be investing my entertainment dollar in some Sunshine in lieu of Simpsons (or both, maybe...)

I just heard about this little sci-fi venture the other day, and it's to be release in America today! (figures: that's actually a little more press than your average firm-to-hard sci-fi movie ever garners...)

It's a gamble: most complaints about the flick criticize the science as getting progressively paltry, and then the film devolves into a slasher flick (not necessarily a bad thing, but...)

Part of the problem with the premise- as I see it- is the fact that somehow, in only FIFTY YEARS' time, humans will have the explosive power at hand to statistically affect a small portion of the sun itself...

riiiiight.... lemme throw some sunshine on the perspective (image courtesy of Apple's Science Website):

The sun is NOT massive. The sun is not 'big': it is gigantic on a scale of near imcomprehensibility.

 Even with a weapon capable of vaporizing Earth ten-times over, the effect we'd have on Mr. Sun would be infenitesimal to the point of pointlessness. Apparently the gist of the film is that we've gotta 'explode' a 'Q-ball' pocket inside the corona...

...okay.

 To be most scientifically sound, the movie's premise should be about some kind of rogue asteroid with wierd-ass particles coming near the sun and threatening to cause some strange interactions. Unlike the Sun, humans of 50 years from now COULD concieveably affect an asteroid...

But the result of that scenario would probably be a both boring and very bad movie... 

Gonna get me a ticket, anyway: I can forgive a story's lack of scientific rigor (lord knows my own spiel has enough of that to go around). Good story trumps bad science... as long as the science isn't THAT BAD...

Posted by shanekentknolltrey at 11:54 AM ADT

Updated: Friday, 27 July 2007 11:58 AM ADT

Share This Post

Permalink

Mood:  mischievious

Anyone who needs proof on the power of infant neural plasticity,  one should check this guy out.

To be clear: HIS BRAIN MASS IS STATISTICALLY NOTHING: the central ventrical has expanded to SUBSUME the guy's whole god-damned noggin, 'xept for the very edges...

More proof that nature provides: this man's neurons literally made something out of NOTHING: all basic functions, respiration, temp reg, heartbeat, in addition to a smattering of intellect (he's Forest Gump, by all reports, but LOOK AT THAT PICTURE AGAIN: he has almost NO brain).

This goes to proves what the most amazing piece of biological tecnology ever invented by natural selection really is...

We shouldn't discriminate; after all, some people here in America without a detectable brain in their head do very well for themselves... 

I need to stop now. 

Posted by shanekentknolltrey at 3:49 AM ADT

Updated: Friday, 27 July 2007 12:18 AM ADT

Share This Post

Permalink

Mood:  cheeky

After nearly a month of toil, I've churned out another chapter in Typers...

If Emily Bronte worked as fast as I did, we'd never have the second-half of Wuthering Heights... 

Posted by shanekentknolltrey at 3:22 PM ADT

Share This Post

Permalink

Mood:  quizzical

We could be flying to Jupiter, curing cancer or unlocking the mysteries of life right now...

Eh, this'll do, I suppose... 

What they aren't telling you is that 'Chinook', like its faulty helicopter namesake, had a few bugs in its program, initially:

Scientific progress goes 'hop, hop, hop'... 

Posted by shanekentknolltrey at 12:21 AM ADT

Share This Post

Permalink

Mood:  chatty

Introducing TYPER'S 'unholy trinity'...

Posted by shanekentknolltrey at 12:01 AM ADT

Updated: Thursday, 2 August 2007 3:29 AM ADT

Share This Post

Permalink

Mood:  bright

Tsk, tsk. Somebody at a Scholastic subsidiary has "some 'splaining to do"!

Now, this is a problem, ain't it? But the reaction from fans has been kinda strange. Several people have gone on record as saying that there would be "no point whatsoever" in reading this last Potter book if they knew the  identities of the two characters that get offed, and how the book ends.

...riiiiiight...

I'm all for this whole 'turning a generation of kids onto reading' business that Rowling's managed, and the lady has one hell of an imagination (her overreliance on getting out of jams by having a 'Wizard do it' does kinda speak to a weakness in creating coherent plots, though....) but the fact that a large number of Harry Potter fans share this 'no point in reading if I know' sentiment is troubling (you can be justifiably pissed, but don't tell me you won't read something you keep yammering non-stop about...)

Two years ago I read the Count of Monte Christo- which is a kinda large book- even though I had knowledge of the whole plot and knew how it was likely to end for most of the cast.

Good literature can be read no matter one's knowledge of the plot. A friend of mine watched the Sixth Sense knowing that Dr. Crowe was a ghost, but he still says that its one of the best films he's ever seen.

 Seems to me that most of the Potter fans would be appeased by the movies, alone. The books, I guess, are merely so many scripts churned out for their benefit.

Posted by shanekentknolltrey at 1:06 AM ADT

Updated: Thursday, 19 July 2007 1:14 AM ADT

Share This Post

Permalink

Mood:  blue

In the aftermath of their little earthquake it seems that Japan is suffering from some nuclear woes. Seems a bit of radioactive water escaped in the quake, and the people weren't informed properly...

Hopefully this won't be a death-knell against nuclear power in Japan. Japanese are pretty sharp people, and I can't see them going all anti-nuclear apeshit like we idiot Americans did after Three Mile Island.

Nuclear power possesses the highest efficiency-to-cost ratio and efficiency-to-accident ratio of any power system (go over that again and you'll get it...) until we see some more success in our ability to confine fusile material, nuclear is as good as it gets.

It's funny that TMI killed nuclear power in the US even though it was actually a success story: there was a reactor problem, it was contained, evacuations worked, and the clean-up was successful. I'm shocked whenever I talk about this incident to people who rant about the 'meltdown' at TMI. No, no, no: what happened there was the compotent, successful prevention of a meltdown.

You only run into problems with nuclear power when an incompotent nation-state is running the show...

I'll admit: those results can be spectacular...

But TMI? Nah: it's a non-issue taken up by demagogues to make us live the 'green' dream: with a wind turbine in every yard, and a yard for every turbine... 

Let's hope that, in Japan, scientific progress doesn't get boinked...

Posted by shanekentknolltrey at 2:09 PM ADT

Share This Post

Permalink

Mood:  happy

A Garland, Texas woman really took a  'chunk' out of crime, if not a bite.

My only criticism of her actions is that she stuck him on his posterior instead of in his 'amorous' region: it would save the state the cost of incarcerating him for 20 years if she'd have castrated the gentleman in question.

I'm not sadistic, mind you. At least I don't think so. However, one of the very few perks of military law that I like is the ability to sentence a rapist to death, if a jury so chooses. Personally, I think such a punishment is fairly equitable in the case of 'aggrivated sexual assault', as some 'lawmakers' demand this act be called... 

MY 'Allied Miliary' meets out such a punishment against offenders, and while I don't condone a worldwide totalitarian military empire (we can agree that this is a bad thing... despite what the geniuses currently editing the Wikipedia page for my genre in question have to say, people like me don't exactly envy the distopias we create...) I do enjoy the thought of putting 'caps' in the 'asses' of scum like these.

Posted by shanekentknolltrey at 1:43 PM ADT

Updated: Tuesday, 17 July 2007 1:46 PM ADT

Share This Post

Permalink