Broil, Broil, Toil and Trouble

I've heard the term broil for a long time, but never quite knew what it was. It sounds like boil, but sound-alike isn't the same as being alike. I know there's a setting on the oven for it, but what does it mean?

And why do I care?

It turns out I have a recipe for chicken tikka masala, which, apparently, is a Westernized version of an Indian dish, something like Chicken Hunan is a representative Hunan chicken dish.

I don't mind that's it's not perfectly authentic, since I'm trying this for the first time. Here's the issue though. It requires-you guess it-broiling.

It turns out broiling is kinda like the inverse of grilling. When you grill, you are cooking meat with direct radiant heat, typically from charcoal. Ovens, on the other hand, use convection heat, i.e., heat from the air getting hot.

It's easier to understand broiling with an electric stove. At the top, there are coils. You move a broiling pan which is typically two very flat pans. The top pan has slits and lets the juices fall through to the bottom pan, which serves to catch this so it doesn't fall to the bottom of the oven.

You typically stick the pan as high as it will go, so it's near the radiant parts. The direct heat, unlike grilling, comes from above, instead of below, but otherwise behaves much the same as grilling.

Some ovens have a separate chamber below the main oven which is much smaller (so the heat is more direct) and serves the same purpose.

Here's a good article on the subject.

The key to broiling is to keep an eye on it, as you will only spend a few minutes heating it, as opposed to 20 minutes to several hours with conventional baking.

The things you learn on the Internet. It's really quite an invention.

No Country For Old Programmers

I was eating lunch today out, as I normally do, and oddly enough, the following question came up. "Why are there no old programmers?"

This was based on the following observation, which was, admittedly, rather limited. At our company, we have maybe 6-7 programmers around 30, perhaps 3-4 above 30 but within their early 40s, probably another 5-6 aged 25 or under. In any case, there aren't any programmers (well, maybe one) that are 45 or above. It's a relatively young company, and I'm on the older end.

Why is that? Why don't we find programmers above 45 or so.

It's not that they don't exist. I think one thing about "good" companies is that they do hire young, because, while older guys do have some experience, they have to continuously learn, and that's a new skill that's being expected in computing that didn't exist before.

Think about this. If you look at programming in the early 80s, it didn't require you understand databases (mostly), version control, reading incomplete APIs on the web, knowing about stuff like RSS or CSS or various protocols or learning a sophisticated IDEs, and then learning new stuff a few years later.

Indeed, many jobs require you do roughly the same thing over and over again, and use those skills over and over. For a programmer, at the time, that would mean learning a single language, learning the techniques of the day, learning to debug in a certain way. All that time spent getting good at that, and they need to learn something new again.

To give an analogy, think about MS Word. They just came out with Word 2007. This is supposed to be an overhaul of the system. All the time you spent learning how to do stuff in Word, may have to partially relearned. At the very least, you have the benefit that it's MS releasing the product, and they won't do something completely different. But it is different enough. You do need to do a fair bit of work to adapt skills you didn't think had to be adapted!

This happens all the time to programmers and worse. There are more resources to programmers, just as their are more resources to everyone--from the Web! You now have to find libraries and documentation and have to know where to find it. Scouring the Web has become a necessary skill. Before, you had a limited number of choices, if it wasn't obvious from the software you had what to do, then that was it. With the Web, there's always some search that might yield results, which is both boon and bane, good and bad.

Older programmers learned to program, but in a certain language, in a certain way. They didn't expect that they had to keep up with programming like some people keep up with Hollywood gossip.

The generation of programmers that learned during the 90s and beyond are starting to realize that the skill of continuous learning is needed. To give an example, recently, someone in our company found a nifty tool and suggested that people give it a try.

So what causes one person to think "Yeah, that's cool, I will try it out", and another to think "Well, I'm not required to use it, and I don't see a need for it, so why bother?". The modern programmer needs to look for new tools and try it out, and see if they can use it. It's like the person searching for that perfect diet, except where that search is typically futile, finding good tools is often not futile.

But why do people not learn new tools? First, they have to find it. Then, they have to install it. That may not be trivial. And imagine it takes a day of tinkering to get right. At what point is someone likely to say "Forget it. Unless I'm required to do it, I'm not going to waste my time, not even 20 minutes, trying to get this to work."

Then, you have to use it and get some value out of it. This may force you to work in a way you're not used to. Think of version control. Version control offers a ton of benefits, but there's work. You have to think about version control, what commands are available, knowing whether to branch or not, and perhaps fixing stuff up that's broken. Imagine what happens when you don't use version control. You don't have to deal with any of this.

And the downside? If you lose stuff, you lose stuff. And some people are content with that, because it means less they have to worry about right now.

And installation? Not all software installs easily. Some require hunting for libraries and such. Think about every computer science class you've taken. Most of them prepare all the software you need. That way, you don't have to deal with those headaches yourself. The good news is, over time, installation has become a lot easier. In the old days, you were left to figure out all sorts of things on your own, including, if you were on UNIX, what kind of UNIX you were on.

If you have the attitude that you want to use a new tool, even if it takes time to master, then you're likely to become better, to improve because you are willing to waste ten hours to save ten seconds. You're willing to force yourself to think in a new way because it offers benefits to you.

I'll give you another example. Since I went through academia, I became aware of TeX and LaTeX, which are the typesetting system created by Knuth and modified by Leslie Lamport (and since then, modified by a bunch of other folks). Knuth is not only a computer scientist, he's an aesthete. He cares about beauty.

He spent ten years of his life trying to preserve high quality typography. He cared that in good texts, ff, placed together, is replaced by two f's that overlap. That if you have the word Vast, the "a" sits underneath the "V", which doesn't happen with most word processors because each character is in a bounding box that doesn't overlap.

I know, for example, there is a different between left double quotes and right double quotes. Indeed, one of our data sources uses "TeX" style representation to represent left double quotes (two backticks in a row is considered a left double quote). I recognize this because I've used TeX.

But the average computer programmer graduating from college is not likely to have seen this. Indeed, they may have only learned about ASCII, heard about Unicode, and not realized that Unicode is not merely a 16 bit extension of ASCII (though at its core, that's what it is), and that this increase in characters allows a lot more punctuation.

Thus, the average computer science graduate might not have to worry about fonts, but someone out there does or they have to worry about some standard or they have to worry about Unicode. This often means spending a good deal of time learning about stuff they didn't teach you.

So this fella, who's actually pretty young, had never heard of this, didn't do that much research on the topic--didn't even know there was more to be researched (even as I pointed out an article to him), and probably finds all this rather tedious. Why study this when there's more interesting, more straightforward stuff to learn. Read about the world in a book, and it reads like a story. Let someone digest it for you so you can regurgitate it back.

To give you another analogy. At the end of every year, there's some sophisticated formula for deciding who needs to win and lose to get into the NFL (American football) playoffs. Most announcers have no idea how this is done, because they simply don't sit down and learn it. They figure they were bad at math, and so there's no reason to learn it, and they stop.

Or how the salary cap works. That's usually beyond most people, but once you study it and figure it out, it's not that hard.

So I posited that, unless there was going to be something completely different coming up, that the programmers of today might become old programmers. They're willing to spend the time figuring this out or figuring that out, even stuff that seems a complete waste of time to learn. It's this desire to figure new stuff out that will make today's programmers age gracefully.

It's not to say that every programmer will survive. After all, there's still a fair bit of programming that requires, say, debugging, and some people simply don't like debugging code, especially code they didn't write.

But these skills were skills that programmers of the past, even very bright people, those with Ph.D's didn't have. In math, you learn a notation and a system of proof, and that's it. They don't change notation on you just because it's trendy to do so. It means if you sent a mathematician through time in the future, they would have some chance of following a proof today, because the language stayed the same, but someone who wrote FORTRAN would find today's C++ code nearly indecipherable. The ideas involved, the sophistication used, and this is just day-to-day everyday programming, not genius code, would be hard to figure out.

We're still in the early stages of computer programming development, maybe comparable to Babe Ruth playing baseball. There's likely to be a lot more thought given to the craft of programming. In the meanwhile, we're still in the quagmire of today, where learning to program is still very hard, and learning to program well, requiring a philosophy, requiring us to care how the code is written.

The question is whether we want to grow old doing it.

Captcha

Luis von Ahn is one clever guy. I have no idea if he's smart in the computer science way, but he's clever.

He's a computer science professor at CMU, and his biggest idea is using humans as computers, that is, using humans to do things that computers have a hard time doing. He is most noted for captchas, which are those distorted text you enter to be sure you're a person, and not a bot.

The next new clever idea based on captchas is to digitize text from books that have been scanned in. Facebook has used this, where you type in two words. One word, they already know what it says. The other, they aren't so sure. The word they know is used to make sure that you, the person, is real, and if you enter that word correctly, it's felt that the other word should also be entered correctly too.

In addition to captchas, people can tag photos with relevant words. So the idea is that object recognition is hard in photos, but people can handle it easily. But you don't completely trust the people tagging, so you find a way to prevent the occasionally person who is trying to use bad tags.

Next time you enter a captcha, you may be helping a digitizing effort.

Full House

Columbo was a detective series from the 70s, and had the same basic premise, week after week. Within five minutes, you, the audience, were told who the guilty party was. Columbo wasn't so lucky. He'd spend the rest of the show trying to figure out who did it. What mattered was how he found out. As the devoted viewer, you'd see if Columbo looked like he was going off track.

Perhaps in the end, the reason the show survived is that people liked Peter Falk.

House is a series that has the same basic plot week after week. Patient comes down with a mysterious ailment. House and his assistants must try to figure out what's going on. Usually, their first or second attempt is wrong, and nearly kills the patient. Eventually, they figure out what's going on, and the patient is saved.

But why does it work beyond that? Is it possible that you, gasp, like the guy, or his assistants? I mean, you only learn a little bit each time, but maybe as time goes by, you like the characters. Of course, cast members are typically chosen because they are good looking, and sure, it helps if they can act some so you can feel good that you like the person for who they are, rather than because they happen to be hot.

Anyway, they were showing an episode where House is picking new assistants out of a cast of many, and he imagines he sees his former assistants, making you think he cares, underneath that irascible personality is someone that cares. Maybe it's that brief shining moment that people look for, that this impatient, smug, gruff individual who doesn't care, does indeed care.

Ikon Blend

A while back, I complained that pretty much every blender looked the same, and most were incapable of preventing an air pocket when enough ice was thrown in. I wanted to make a smoothie, and it should be done with the minimum amount of fuss. I shouldn't have to add a cube at a time or some mundane process like that. Smoothie King doesn't have to do that. Why should I?

I had noticed most blenders look the same, but there is an exception. Ikon Breville, a newcomer in the kitchen appliance space (one must use "space" to refer to the consumer electronics niche to be cool). And they have additional blades, including one that appears to sweep across the bottom.

The catch? The Ikon Breville blender is 200 to 300 dollars, or nearly triple of what my current (inadequate) blender costs. And I don't even know if that extra blade helps! But it appears like it would, and at least, they are coming up with some kind of novel design. I have to give them credit for that.

Blender companies have to realize people want to make smoothies, and their invention should make this as easy as possible, which means redesigning the blade mechanism to make it easy to make smoothies.

Way to go guys!

Authoritative Advice

Here I go again.

There are plenty of articles that assert advice on the authority of some expert, and yet the research that backs up the research is missing. For example, I just read an article about correct posture in front of a computer. But how much of this is real, and how much of this is "Well, this must be how it is". That is, the obviousness of why this is the correct way to sit makes it so. If your neck hurts, well, clearly you have the monitor too high, or off to an angle.

I agree some of it appears to be common sense, but then, there used to be tons of other remedies that really don't make sense except someone just felt the need to assert it.

Still, so many of us want to hear the ring of authority, so we listen, without questioning why. The funny thing is that when there is some scientific basis, then if someone argues against it (say, global warming), we feel there must be a debate, and thus we are willing to say there's not strong evidence, even when we don't explore the issues in depth.

If education teaches us anything, it should teach us how to assess "expert advice".

Monday Night Tony

Tony Kornheiser picked up what had to be a dream gig. Cohost of Monday Night Football. OK, so it's not the original MNF. That disappeared when ABC, which had hosted MNF since its inception, decided Sunday night was better, and swapped it with ESPN, which had been doing Sunday Night Football (To be fair, ABC owns ESPN).

Tony even survived the purge. Joe Theismann (who I can't stand as an announcer) was his co-host and had been doing football for ESPN for quite a while. But most people observed that Theismann and Kornheiser didn't get along. Tony would say, graciously, on his show that the two got along just fine. But Kornheiser felt constrained. In order to be nice to his buddy, he held back on critical words.

They eventually replaced Theismann with Ron Jaworski. Former Philadelphia Eagles QB, Jaworski (called "Jaws") is gregarious, gets along well with Tony, and studies the game fastidiously. He used to cohost a show where they went over game tape and break stuff down like coaches do. The kind of stuff that fanboys love. Jaws is not only a geek ( of a sports variety), he positively effervesces. And Tony is suitably deferential when it comes to Jaws's expertise. And Jaws is so active and non-egotistical, that Tony feels relaxed enough to be himself.

But here's the rub.

Tony's a guy made for radio. Every time Tony is on camera, he looks constipated. He's uncomfortable. OK, he's not exactly like Mary Carillo who automatically smiles when she's listening, almost cloyingly sweet (almost, but not quite).

Which is too bad because Tony can be brilliant on radio.

But anytime Tony has to sit down and wait for other people to speak, he looks like deer in headlight. Good thing this doesn't happen too much.

In Your Facebook

Facebook was originally aimed at college students. Indeed, you couldn't get an account if you didn't have a school account. Then, they let the floodgates open, and anyone could get an account. People began to see Facebook as a more mature MySpace.

I had vaguely entertained the idea of getting an account despite being out of the typical demographic. To be fair, ever since Facebook let anyone join, the average age has probably jumped 10 years, so the typical user is more likely to be 30 than 20 (as with many blogs, I assert this with only a scarce recollection as my only evidence).

But nothing much was pushing me to get the account until a former student signed up for one, and apparently used one of his IM clients and spammed everyone on the list, which included me. I hadn't spoken to him in a bit. I knew he moved and had gotten married, but since his IM was beckoning me to try it out, I set one up.

Of course, once you add one person, then you want to add another, and then somehow, it networks, and people you knew, find you, and they want to add you. It's worse than LinkedIn.

Indeed, one tends to spend time doing little things, trying to join networks to join a group, and so forth. There's still a little bit of elitism (meant to protect folks I suppose) and some hoops one must jump through to get access to certain groups.

I suppose the novelty will wear off, except, of course, your "friends" can ping you and then send messages and you can see them update their page, and so forth.

Makes you wonder how this generation of kids, the one that sits past Generation X (I probably fit in that generation, though I'm sure few of the adjectives that applied to that generation apply to me, which in fact, was probably a smaller generation than one might imagine, concocted by the media desperate to try to understand the most vocal segment of the youth population).

It's the Internet generation, and they've learned you don't need to be a programmer to use the Internet. And the desire to be popular has extended far beyond the confines of Ivy League campuses and far beyond the sea of lockers that line hallways of high schools throughout the country. You call people your friends that hardly know you. Oh you were the guy that was at this party that was with this girl who had the accident. You know.

Still, with those AJAX forms fading in and out, the Web 2.0 goodness that says not only are we cool among kids but we're cool among geeks too.

Will being a member of Facebook tell me what's going on in the world of college kids. Will new trends come out that the media once defined, and now might self-organize? We're connected in more ways than ever before, and yet, we may know each other less well than before.

Thus, social networking may be increasing asocial, as the average contact per "friend" decreases until this commodity we call "friend" is something like tag, a label we place on others, so we can have the most toys.

Pop 'Em

I made a trip to Virginia to visit Linens N Things. I had been down on them for a while, but I think they are competitive with Bed, Bath, and Beyond. However, the local Rockville site didn't have an Oxo Pop Container.

Oxo makes tons of products. They now make stuff to compete against themselves. Multiple can openers, for example.

The popup container competes against stuff like Click-Clack containers. You can put rice, flour, sugar in these acrylic containers. The key for the Oxo is that there's a button on top. Press it, and it creates a vacuum seal. Press it again, and it pops out, and serves as a handle. It's pretty darn cool.

Except it was a pain to find.

Google Maps failed me again. It took me to the wrong address for Linens N Things. It pointed me further up the road, and I was wandering wondering how any store could be buried far off the main road and not be visible. It didn't make sense.

I decided to go the other direction a bit, which took nearly half an hour, because I kept wandering around, and found it, by a place called World Market. It's hard to say what kind of store this is. It has furniture, kitchen stuff, mostly containers, and such, but also spices, coffee, tea, etc. I can't quite say what the store reminds me of. Pier One?

Anyway, I ended up getting a bunch of spices there for a dollar each. Then, they suggested I get spice jars, of which they had like 5 different kinds.

Then, I went to Linens N Things to find the Pop container. I didn't see it, at first, then finally realized it was on the shelf on the other side. The person who helped, despite being friendly, didn't realize it was sitting on the other side.

Then, I headed to look at Williams and Sonoma, which is generally overpriced, but tries to keep this air of sophistication.

Anyway, Oxo is generally hit or miss. Not all their products are that good. I just bought ice trays with the tops (they slide over the ice). The tops suck, but the ice tray is reasonably OK.

I could be buying stuff for a while for the kitchen, so I'm running into issues finding places to put everything. The usual kitchen dilemma.

I'm a Fanboy

Ever watch GalaxyQuest? It's a bit of a parody of Star Trek, with Tim Allen taking the role of the William Shatner. The basic idea is that the crew of GalaxyQuest, a Star Trek like show, a show which has been canceled, while the members of the show mostly make a living attending SF fan conferences, when they encounter real aliens who have modeled their existence on the television show (by intercepting TV signals).

In the film, there's a teen fanboy who eventually helps out.

You know who that fanboy is?

Justin Long.

You know. Justin Long?

He's the "Mac" guy in "I'm a PC, I'm a Mac" commercial.

Yeah, that Justin Long.

Lesson in Love

I haven't taken tennis lessons since I first began playing.

Which isn't entirely true. I did take a tennis class a few years back. At the time, I could only sign up for a beginner's class, and the teacher didn't really know tennis all that well. It was as if she had "trained" to be a phys. ed. teacher and took tennis as part of that, but never cared that much about tennis. I'm sure I knew more about tennis than her and played better.

I decided to sign up for some lessons when a coworker did the same. It was at Rock Creek Tennis Center, and even though it's a bit of a hike from here, the nice thing is that they have a tournament held there, and so if I have to drive to there, I know how to get there.

The first lesson was a bit unusual. When I arrived, there were already three other people there and the instructor, an older gentleman who seemed pretty eager. The other three seemed to already know each other. That made four, even though the group should have been six.

It turns out the guys had been taking lessons earlier and they signed up for more. One guy in particular seemed to have signed up for lessons perpetually, having played their for years.

The instructor mainly spent time running through drills.

One thing about drills, and the thing I don't particularly like about it is that it's both speedy and slow. When you're hitting, the guy feeds you balls faster than you'd probably get them in a game. But once you're done, you wait.

That in itself is really not so bad because I was running around quite a bit and needed the time to rest.

I did notice that some of the other players lacked some footspeed, so I was able to move a little quicker in that respect.

Later on, I went to hit with Ravi, whose going to take some beginner's lessons with his wife, and this allowed me to both hit and think about hitting.

One thought that occurred to me was that I needed to think about my shoulders, in particular, my upper torso. I tend to arm the ball a fair bit, and that makes my shot weaker and harder to control. I also find the ball flies up on my, partly because the face of the racquet is a bit open.

Anyway, things to think about until the next lesson.

Unsmooth Smoothie

I want to make smoothies, and you do so with a blender. But here's the issue, and you'd think someone would have figured it out. The blades are meant to chop the ice up, but this creates an air pocket, and then it's useless. You would think that there would be some mechanism, like the fins of a washer, that would stick up and draw the stuff downward. Nope. You would think this would solve the problem. And yet, you don't see it. Why not? I don't know. The blade design for blenders seem unchanged.

Yet, it would solve so many problems, and yet, surprisingly, the design remains virtually unchanged.

Put a little brainpower into it guys. Maybe you'll inadvertently solve the problem.

Learning Cricket

I can't say I'm much of a fan of baseball. I find it too slow to watch. On occasion, say, when the Red Sox face the Yankees and they are playing a tight game, then I might enjoy it some. Otherwise, I don't care for it.

So it would make sense that I don't care much about cricket, which, outside of Indian grad students, isn't played that much in the US. But I figured I knew a little about baseball, so I should read up on the rules of cricket.

I'll explain it in terms of baseball figuring you will know baseball. I'm sure I'll have it partly wrong, but that's fine. This is why I write it.

In baseball, there are nine innings. Each team comes up to bat once per inning. For sake of example, the Red Sox bat, then the Yankees bat.

When the Red Sox are batting, a pitcher will pitch a ball (called bowling in cricket). If the batter does not swing, then the ball either falls within a range called the strike zone and thus is a considered a strike, or the ball misses this zone and it is called a ball.

If the batter swings, several things can happen. If the batter misses completely, it's called a strike. If the batter hits the ball and it falls outside the legal range, then it is called a foul. A foul is counted as a strike, except you can not foul out. I'll explain striking out in a moment.

If the ball is hit in the legal area, then the batter must run to first base. If the ball is caught before it hits the ground, the player is considered out. If the ball bounces, and an outfielder throws the ball to another player in the outfield, and they tag the player (touch the player) before they reach the base, they are also out. If the players hits beyond a certain distance (a wall defines this distance) in a valid zone, then the player has hit a home run. All players including the batter have each earned a run.

Three strikes and a player is out. Four balls and a player is automatically allowed to go to first base (if a player is already on first, he moves to second). Players are moved a base forward if there's no choice (two players are not allowed to be on the same base).

Three outs, and the batting team goes to the outfield, and the outfield becomes the batting team. When they finish three outs, it's considered an inning.

If players can continue to reach base, a pitcher may pitch many times. A pitcher continues pitching until there are three outs, or until they decide to replace a pitcher with another. If a pitcher is replaced, they can not return to the game.

In cricket, rather than have 9 innings, there is essentially one inning. One side bats completely, then the other.

Instead of four bases, there are two (it isn't exactly a base). A bowler in cricket bowls 6 times. After six times, the bowler has completed an "over". Someone else must then bowl.

During the bowl, the batter must protect the wickets, which are three sticks. There's no such thing as a foul, a ball, or a strike. The cricket player need not even swing at the ball, though if they fail to protect the wickets, they may become out. Even if they swing and hit the ball, they don't have to run.

If they choose to run, they have another person situated at the other "base", and they run back and forth alternating places. Each time they reach the other "base", a run is scored.

In cricket, it's quite difficult to get someone "out". In baseball, if a player is out, it is temporary. They can come back when it's their turn to bat again (9 players play, from 1 to 9, and when the ninth is done, the first one bats again). In cricket, if a player is out, they are out. They don't come back to bat again.

Since you need two players to run back and forth, when there is only one player left, the team is done, and the other team bats. However, that's rare. Usually, 50 overs are completed first (six pitches to the over).

There is an equivalent of a home-run (worth 6 points), but since cricket is very high scoring (100 runs is not uncommon), and since it's hard to hit, few people try to hit them. Unlike home runs in baseball, where players must run the bases, the 6 points are automatically awarded without any running required of the batters.

A baseball pitcher likely throws about 90-100 pitches a game. In cricket, the maximum number of throws is 300 (50 overs, at 6 pitches each). However, there are multiple bowlers, and no one would ever bowl all 50 overs.

Hopefully, I have that right so far. I'm sure someone will correct me if I've made a mistake.

Nom nom nom

Silicon Implants

In the last, oh, say two or three years, you can't avoid silicon. This ain't silicon chips that made Silicon Valley famous (well, I suppose it is). Silicon's first appearance in kitchen items occurred in silicon oven mitts. They looked like rubber, but apparently could prevent heat from getting through.

Once you saw them in mitts, they've shown up everywhere. Knife handles and pots and pan handles in particular. But I see them for collapsible colanders (a recent innovation) and even a drain cover for the sink (I bought one).

Most of these companies tout how comfortable these silicon handles are. But I find them slightly creepy feeling, like some kind of odd latex. I kinda like the feel of metal. I think I saw one for an ice cube tray which looks all rubbery and I wonder how easy it is to pry out.

Look for it the next time you explore the kitchen section of a store.

Speed of Internet

"Don't tase me bro"

On Monday, September 17, John Kerry was giving a speech at the University of Florida. A student, one Andrew Meyer, was heckling Kerry, when police started dragging him away. Meyer asked, rather loudly, why he was being taken away, that he had done nothing wrong, all the while his friend was videotaping the scene.

At one key moment, prior to the police attempting to subdue him (he was already on the ground), he yells out, rather infamously:

"Don't tase me bro"

After which, they proceed to tase him.

Any regular reader of Reddit will know that police like to tase rowdy people, even as some have complained they enjoy it too much, that the amount of pain inflicted doesn't justify the frequency that it's used. Indeed, sometimes police, with little provocation, certainly none like Andrew's heckling, still insist on using a taser. It's been suggested that each time the police use the taser, a device meant to send high currents of electricity to incapacitate an alleged perpetrator, they should have it used on themselves, so as better to understand what they are doing to others.

But the key is this. In a time before the Internet, before YouTube, this incident would have had little ripple in the news. Now, you can buy t-shirts and other memorabilia less than a week after it happened.

Literally, this phrase was popular days afterwards, with people seeking to cash in literally Wednesday, two days after the speech. Columns have already sprouted about how to handle the police if caught in a similar situation (advice: don't say "Don't tase me bro").

Heck, I'm writing a blog entry about this.

But mostly to remind myself about the incident.

And who uses bro anyway?

So seventies.

Bro.

Stuff

George Carlin, the comedian, had a routine where he'd talk about people and stuff. We have stuff. We have stuff to store our stuff. We have stuff to carry stuff.

I recently read about an interesting exercise, except, of course, it's not an exercise. This guy moved from one apartment that was plenty spacious to one about two thirds the size. The exercise, such as it is, is to get rid of 1/3 of your possession.

Now imagine you are asked to do this. Get rid of 1/3 of what you have. Could you do it? Could you part with 1/3? Would you have made the decision this guy made? Or would you have insisted there's no way you can live with less than what you have. This furniture means too much. It belonged to a beloved relative. How much does your stuff define you?

George Lucas Meets Star Trek

I was watching an episode of Star Trek (the original) that I hadn't seen in years. I've seen every episode of the original Star Trek (from the late 60s) several times over.

So imagine, to my surprise, watching something that I didn't recognize. In particular, additional CG effects of the shuttlecraft. For those whose memories are a bit rusty, the shuttlecraft Galileo has crash-landed on a planet. The Enterprise is called away for a rescue mission.

On the planet, there are oversize ape-like creatures bent on, well, harassing the crew. One of the character dies, and they must try to escape the planet or be killed by these creatures. As they use the boosters to escape, they realize they will burn up on re-entry. They realize they can only go one orbit before the ship goes back down and burns up.

Spock decides to jettison and ignite the fuel, to use that as a distress signal.

It's here where you see the shuttle from the back, as it burns fuel up, and where I was thinking "um, that wasn't in the original".

I checked out the SciFi channel. They've digitally redone some of the episodes, and this is the first weekend they are televising it, though I see it on DC20 which is not the SF channel.

So apparently, there's some effort to modernize the effects. The odd part of the effects is that they don't look that realistic. Indeed, it kinda looks like the illustrations that you might see in an SF book. It makes it look even more 60s, which I suppose, is not such an awful artistic direction to take.

I don't know what I think of the effect, but it is a bit different. I suppose it's not as awful as it could be. I wonder if Adam's more of a purist when it comes to these changes.

Lethal Weapon

Here's a film that had one good idea. The crazy white guy paired with the sane black guy. After a bunch of films where Eddie Murphy played the street smart cop, here was one that flipped the conventions.

But, honestly, how can you watch this film? It's so painful how much underlining this film does. Basically, the first hour or so of the film is basically showing how nuts Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson) is. I mean, scene after scene after scene, is devoted to telling. How. Crazy. Martin. Riggs. Is!

He's crazy! He wants to kill himself. He's willing to grab a guy who's about to commit suicide and jump down with him. The resident doctor says he's crazy (but he's a good cop, so who needs to listen to what she says?).

In that respect, Die Hard is (sadly) far more intelligent.

Navel Gazing

Sex is Comedy is a film by Catherine Breillat, which is a somewhat fictionalized account of her making a previous film.

In this film, the female director wants to film a crucial sex scene, that's particularly difficult. She sleeps with the male lead. The female lead isn't getting the scene right.

Next time you watch a film that has nudity, watch when it happens. Almost always, it's in the middle, or possibly early on. Rarely does it happen in the last 10-20 minutes of the film. Boogie Nights was famous for a scene where fallen porn star, Dirk Diggler, shows off the reason he had a career in porn movies. It's considered a pathetic display of a guy who used to have it all.

Sex is Comedy which is hardly a comedy breaks many of the conventions of films, placing a nude scene at the last parts of the film. It, like Boogie Nights, features a guy with a prosthetic, though in this case, the purpose is for him to maintain an erection.

Yeah, that's right. Indeed, perhaps the only way to have something resembling an "R" rated move with a guy that has an erection is for it to be a prosthetic and the guy to joke around about his prosthetic, er, penis.

But as silly as that is, this film, which had mixed reviews, really seems to expect a lot from its actors. What's harder to film? A sex scene? Or acting in a scene that's about acting in a sex scene?

All I can say is that the twenty or so minutes I watched the film, I thought that it was incredibly difficult to achieve this scene about a film scene, and how the actors really had to do a lot of work to pull off the scene. That, and how such a scene is rarely the climax (pardon the pun) of the film.