College FUN'd

A recent Macleans article stated 32 per cent of Canadians said their retirement would be partially funded by a lottery win. I, of course, put that Macleans magazine in a vacuum sealed bag, where I will store it for 30 years until it becomes valuable. When I finally do remove it from storage, I'll chuckle at all those dummies waiting for their LottoMax win.

Here is a list of other items which will pay for my retirement:
- Dungeons & Dragons action figures, including a Shambling Mound(TM),
- a box of comics, including the complete run of Power Pack,
- one silver suit, one purple shiny shirt, and one purple sock tie, worn to a Grade 9 dance.

Wait. What was that? Okay, my wife has just informed me that the silver suit has been donated to Goodwill. Good job, honey! Some hobo is cruising in the Mediterranean right now!

To be perfectly frank, I'm still mad at my parents for allowing me to open my toys. I would not have to work right now if I had all my Micronauts in their original cases. Which brings me to the point of this post: my son's college fund. We keep it in a plastic container in the basement marked "Broken Glass and Poison" (to deter and confuse any would-be robbers).

The college fund contains: Two mint condition Darth Maul figures (with a commtech(TM) chip so Darth Maul can yell at you if you tease him about his tribal tattoos!); One slightly melted bar of Fight Club soap, obtained from a screening of said movie; One sealed Pokeball from a McDonald's happy meal (I hope its you, Charizard!!!); One wind-up elephant from the Disney movie Tarzan, again, from a McDonald's happy meal.

I know what you are thinking and I totally agree. I'm too heavily invested in McDonald's products. I had a Burger King cardboard crown in the collection, but it was damaged when the Fight Club soap melted. Note to investors: do not put your investments near a heating vent!

Oh, and I think I put $30 in RRSPs this year too. See you on the beach!

Diet and exercise ... and diet

Just in case you weren't convinced that About.com  is full of idiots, along comes Jennifer R. Scott with this "nugget" of wisdom:

Experts agree that it's easier to exercise than to cut the same number of calories that exercise shaves off. In other words, it's just plain easier for us to be a little more active than to do without more food to achieve the same calorie reduction.

I'm sorry, but W.T.F.A.Y.T.A? Not one sentence above, we get this:

For example, a 180-pound person who walks at a brisk 3 mph will burn just over 250 calories in 45 minutes.

Guess what else is 250 calories? A chocolate bar. How long does it take to eat? A few minutes. So what is more effective for losing weight? Jennifer, put your hand down. Let the adults answer.

Why is exercise associated with weight loss? The two have very little to do with one another. For example, whenever they show ads for The Biggest Loser, they show an obese person jogging on the beach and then chowing down on a sub. The only thing that jogging will do for an obese person is destroy their knees. The only reason the two are linked, that I can think of, is very active people tend to be skinny. But correlation does not equal causation.

If common sense wasn't enough, how about some studies. After a brief 24.8 second search on the Internet, I found this link which outlines several studies, all of which show that exercise "is not a major factor" in weight loss. I would look further, but I'm losing Rant Energy.

So next time you see an ad or a news story on weight loss and they show people exercising, do what I do, shake you fist at the TV. And think about how dumb Jennifer is.

P.S. I don't know Jennifer and the quality of her other post. She may or may not be an idiot*.

*Note: she is an idiot.

Monkey and who, now with more cats!

Guess who's back for another year of misadventures. That's right, it is the calendar that makes every dumber, "Monkey" & me.
I had a big list of things to blog about, and I even wrote them down. I can't find the list, so I'll have to wing it.

"You stole my idea!"
I watched The Social Network. I thought it was pretty good, but, like Monkey and Me, in contains a line that will infect peoples' brains for years to come.

"You stole my idea!" has its history in grade school. Being a "copycat" is bad. What the teacher wasn't telling the hundreds of snot-nosed kids coloring pictures of horses and spaceships, doing reports on the solar system and natives, etc. is she's seen it all before. Hundreds of times.

Nothing is new. I think it was in college that I realized how dumb I really was. Nothing can be done if you are trying to reinvent the wheel, so the only way to do anything productive is to stand on the shoulders of giants. (I promise not to combine two lame cliches in one sentence again.) You must copy. You must steal. Everything is synthesis. In Engineering, we add things called "References" at the back of technical papers. In art, we call it homage or inspiration. But any creative person knows that they never really create anything new.

I'm interested in screen (and normal) writing. Beginning writers are nervous about discussing story ideas with others. They are worried people will "steal their idea". They soon learn no one cares about ideas. They care about the concrete expression of those ideas. The actual lines of dialog, the descriptions of scenes. That is where the difficulty is. Google and Lycos are both "search engines".

Copyright law recognizes this, therefore only actual expressions are subject to copyright, not ideas. More than that, if ideas were subject to copyright, it could infringe on free speech. Copyright is a government granted monopoly given to creators to make "copies" of their work. Its purpose to encourage creators to make more work and therefore enrich society. The ultimate measure is society's benefit, not whether a given creator is making a living.

Copyright is not a property right. If I make a mix tape and give it to a friend, I'm not stealing anything. I am "infringing" on the creators right to make copies. Some people like to stretch definitions and say I'm stealing some of the creators potential revenue, because the friend may have bought the original CD.

A friend tells you a joke while at coffee. That night, you tell the same joke to a group of acquaintances. Your friend overhears and is upset with you. "That was my joke!" My reaction is to tell him to buzz off. If he didn't want people to hear the joke he should have kept it a secret.

Culture is a conversation. Copyright law must be a balance between encouraging people to speak in the conversation and allowing people to respond.

Poor impulse control

I just recently bought a new high definition TV (HDTV). TV buying can be daunting and complicated, so I thought I'd go through the things I learned in my hunt.

Only a year ago, I bought a 46" LCD Toshiba TV for $1600 at Visions. One of the main reasons we got it was it had an "upscaler", which allegedly made standard definition (SD) inputs (like from a DVD player) look high definition (HD). It worked okay, but we started watching more movies on our Blu-ray player and HD cable, so it because less and less useful.

It was fine, but the feature that I really coveted was called Smoothing. Sony calls it "Motion Flow" and Samsung calls it "Auto Motion Plus". Before I explain what Smoothing is, I have to explain how TV signals work.

Motion pictures are filmed at a rate of 24 frames per second (fps). Every second, 24 unique frames flash before your eyes. Television is broadcast at 60 fps. Since 60 is not divisible by 24, when movies are shown on TV they have to do something called 3:2 pulldown. What it means is the first frame is shown twice, the second frame is shown three-times, the third frame is shown twice, etc. See below for an example:

[A] [A] [B] [B] [B] [C] [C] [D] [D] [D] ...

3:2 pulldown can result in a flickery and blurry effect which is typically called judder. TV manufacturers have tried to combat this by increasing the frame rate of HDTVs to 120 fps (more commonly called 120 Hz). 120 is dividable by 24, so each movie frame is shown 5 times.

This can only fix the picture so much. Just flashing the same picture 5 times may make it slightly clearer, but it doesn't change the fact that it is the same picture. This is where Smoothing comes in.

Smoothing software in the TV tries to predict what the image would look like between two frames. So if a golf ball is on one side of the screen in one frame, and then on the other in the next, the Smoothing software tries to create a new frame with the ball in the middle. Smoothing tends to make film look more like video. It is very visible when the camera pans slowly across a scene. It also makes computer-animated movies look hyper-real.

Smoothing tends to only be available on higher end TVs. Sony and Samsung (the top two LCD TV manufacturers) each had TVs with the feature that I was looking at but they were about $2400. If I had better impulse control, I'd wait until September or January, which are the best times to buy TVs. But I walked into a Walmart last week. Right in the middle of a bank of TVs I saw the beautiful glassy image of a TV with Smoothing enabled. They were showing Avatar and even though I don't really like that movie, I stood there for 20 minutes, totally ignoring the three phone calls Karen made to my cell phone. (I swear, honey, I did not hear my phone ringing.) I couldn't believe the incredible smooth image on a 47" TV that was only $1000. I did a little bit of research on the brand (no-name Vizio) to make sure it wasn't a total dog, and then picked it up on the weekend.

It was the wife and my 11th anniversary, so it is really a gift to us. Your welcome, Karen.

Monkey & who?

Take a look at the picture to your left. You just got 10% dumber.

This calendar, whimsically named "Monkey & Me" has one problem. There is not a damn monkey to be seen. The animals on the cover are CHIMPANZEES. Let's list the differences between monkeys and chimps.

Monkeys have tails.
Chimps have human-like ears.
Monkeys throw feces.
Chimps can use tools.

It is really difficult to mix them up. Chimps sometimes EAT monkeys! Come on!

For the longest time, I thought that bears and gorillas were related. Not first cousins or anything, but when you put them on the animal tree, they were close. People like my wife have teased me about this. I had no idea where I got this stupid idea until I was watching an old episode of The Little Rascals. In it, they capture a "bear" in the woods, and the "bear" is being played by a guy in a gorilla suit. They say "bear", I see gorilla, and I'm 1% mentally handicapped for 20 years. This is serious business. Calendars like the one above can cause real mental harm.

Goodbye Noughties

It is 2010, and I thought it would be fun to look back at what blighted the Noughties.

CINEMATOGRAPHY

The highest grossing movie of all time, Transformers II, is practically unwatchable due to what I like to call, "Visual Tourettes". This decade saw one of the worst gimicks in movies catch on: the shaky cam.

Shaky cam has been used sparingly in the past for two reasons:
1. To give a amateur documentary feel (e.g., Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield). Note the "amateur". No good documentarian would have that much trouble holding the camera steady. Its not like the camera is balanced on their head.
2. To shoot fight scenes in movies where the director was too lazy to actually train his actors. Shaking the camera hides the fact that punches are landing 3 feet from the other guys face. A perfect example is Bourne Identity vs. Bourne Ultimatum and Bourne Supremacy. The former has good fight scenes where you know what is going on. The latter would be better viewed while riding the Tilt-a-Whirl.

Two ridiculous things that must be mentioned:
A) Shaky cam in CG shots. The robots fighting in Transformers look like a bike and a garbage can rolling down a hill.
B) Shaky cam in scenes when nothing is happening. The hero may be faxing a letter and for no apparent reason, the camera is bobbing and weaving like a drunk got ahold of it.
C) Shaky cam to simulate POV shots of people running. Next time you go for a run, see if everything looks shaky. People's eyes naturally focus on a point, and will adjust as you run. Things might look shaky if you're running down the street with your hair on fire.

I hope this "technique" dies off because many many good movies have been destroyed due to these ADD cameramen.

SHOES

Three shoe styles have come out this decade which need to be called out.

Uggs - Never has a shoe had a more appropriate name. To be fair, these shoes don't look terrible when new. After a while, these things slouch and begin to look like kid's nasty winter boots. And women will wear this things with tucked in sweat pants, rolled up jeans, or with mini-skirts. I know, I know, they are comfortable, but you look like you robbed a hobo.

Crocs - Better living through chemistry! Crocs, plastic bags, and water bottles are not biodegradable. They also share something else in common: they shouldn't be worn on your feet.

Fitness Shoes (eg., MBT anti-shoe, Sketchers Shape-ups) - These shoes are so mind-bogglingly ugly that I thought I'd make them the symbol of the year. These are like wearing a pair of rocking chairs on your feet. I had some weird shoes growing up (Reebok Pumps that actually pumped up, shoes with springs in them to make you jump higher) but the only fitness you'll get wearing these Frankenstein shoes is running away from people with pitchforks chasing you.


Okay, that's it. Those are my two nitpicks for an otherwise good decade. Of course, if you wear or like any of the things I talked about, I wasn't talking about you.