I watched live tweeting of the Apple World Wide Developer's Conference (WWDC) keynote today. They announced some stuff I'm excited about, that I've been waiting for, and some things that sound a little bit risky. Steve Jobs showed how iCloud automatically uploads a picture from your iPhone to the cloud and then pushes it to your iPad. Waaaaiiiit a minute. What if it's a private picture? What if you take a picture of your butt in a dressing room so you can judge if these jeans make your butt look funny? Cher wasn't kidding in Clueless. You can't trust mirrors. You have to take snaps. But you just want to look at it and delete it, not push it to your Macbook back home! So I was immediately filled with trepidation about this announcement. There needs to be a way to easily flag a photo as private. That's what I thought when I heard about this during the WWDC.
Then this afternoon Rep. Weiner admitted that he put that picture of his package on Twitter himself. Oh for crying out loud. He MEANT to send it to somebody else. Dang, man, we've all been there. Sorry about that! He deleted it immediately after he saw what he'd done, and then in his embarrassment lied and said he'd been hacked.
But wait a minute. The new Mac OS also has a new facial recognition feature in Photobooth. Well I'm not sure exactly what I would use that for, but it gives me a great idea. What you really need, what EVERYBODY needs, is a genital recognition feature. If there are any genitals, or nipples for that matter, in a photo then the system should ask permission before it uploads it anywhere.
It would kind of be classy if iPhoto would automatically blur out photos of this nature if it detects you aren't on your home wifi too. Coffee shop safety. I wouldn't actually mind a self-destruct button too. Like a flag where you could set a timer to delete certain photos permanently in 30 minutes. And if this flag is set your phone won't allow the photos to be uploaded to Facebook or Twitter.
They say the new Safari has features that make it very easy to send tweets. Integrate the genital recognition feature, stat. Representative Weiner would probably appear in your ads. He seems like a pretty good sport. Ask him if you can call it the Weiner Warning.
They say they only talked about 10 of some 200 new features in both iOS5 and Lion. So maybe all this stuff is in there already. Now I just have to wait until July to find out! If not, I wonder if you could TRAIN iPhoto to recognize your junk as a face? I mean don't you have to pick a face and name it then it looks for that in other pictures? This is hypothetical, not a solution to an actual problem. I'm just wondering. I don't use Faces in iPhoto because most of my photos aren't of people and it just slows everything down.
I kind of wish I actually had a TV with cable so I could watch the Daily Show tonight to see what Jon Stewart has to say about his friend Rep. Weiner. My favorite bit so far is definitely the soul singer treatment. I wonder if this is what changed his mind and made him tell the truth? It is quite compelling. And I agree totally. I'm not judging Rep. Weiner morally whatsoever. I couldn't care less if he talked about sex with six strangers online. I'm just a little disappointed in his grasp of technology. And disappointed in technology for not predicting his error and preventing it. We have to make this stuff idiot proof and they're making better idiots every day.
I just remembered a sick idea I had after the last X-Men movie I watched, the Last Stand. I made a mock-up cereal box with Ian McKellan on it. I modified it this morning with Michael Fassbinder. I didn't go all out with shadows and gradients like a real modern cereal box because it's just too twisted to warrant spending that much time on it. Plus I'm not a graphic artist. I have the ideas but I would get frustrated trying to actually make all those effects. I think I nailed the copy on the original though. I like the field strength part particularly.
So I didn't say anything in my my X-Men review about the character that's supposed to have power over metal. I had to do some research into the comic book world to see what his story is supposed to be. Is it straight up magnetism or some power over all metal?
Apparently he can't do anything with gold because he messes with a man's mouth and says something like "Guess you don't have gold fillings." Yeah, but the alternative to gold is not IRON fillings. That's crazy talk. Amalgam fillings are mostly silver, tin, copper, and zinc. None of that is paramagnetic. Aside from iron the only common elements that are paramagnetic are nickel and chromium. Dentistry does use stainless steel, but usually it's not paramagnetic even when it's a combination of iron and chromium and nickel that are. I had Nitinol wire and porcelain brackets the last time I had braces around 2004 so I was totally safe from magnet mouth. I could have had an MRI of my head and it would have been fine. We've come a long way from the days when a mutant with a grudge can pull your crowns out with his mind.
The other metallic object that figures highly in Magneto's story line is a Nazi coin. I've never heard of a magnetic coin. I had to research it. Maybe if it was pure nickel? There were some older Canadian coins that were pure nickel and would stick to a magnet. Modern Canadian coins have a steel core and will jam up American vending machines. (Steel parts become magnets just from sitting still in the earth's magnetic field.) I looked up Nazi coins and as expected they are mostly copper and aluminum and zinc. There is one example made in just one year that says it's nickel. You can buy one for $62.50, an order of magnitude more than all the other coins not made of nickel. Let's give him the benefit of the doubt and say that's the coin in question and that's why he could control it. But in the scene where his nemesis tries to make him move the coin and he can't, he crushes a bell instead. A BRASS bell. Now really, brass is not magnetic. They're just getting silly now.
Why couldn't a PA on the movie set just go around with a little magnet and find stuff that the magnet would stick to for this scene? How hard is that? It would have eased my mind A LOT. I just went around my house with a magnet and found out some cool stuff. If I was riding my old Schwinn and Magneto wanted to throw me in a ditch I'd be toast. But on my mountain bike there are just a few screws on there that a magnet will stick to. I would just ride away. My polyethylene kayaks are totally safe. The few screws in them are non-magnetic stainless steel.
So how does Magneto stop bullets? Most bullets are lead or copper and not iron. Or missiles and mortars which are probably made for reduced weight so are likely mostly aluminum.
I read some supposition that his power is really ELECTROmagnetism, like he makes lightning in some of the comics. It's proposed that he can induce a current in any conductor. So even if it's not a magnetic metal he can make a current carrying loop in it and make it SUSCEPTIBLE to magnetism. He makes speaker motors out of solid objects.
The way loudspeakers work -- fine copper wire is coiled around a paper cone nestled in a gap in a solid ceramic magnet. The amplifier makes current flow through the wire. The magnetic field induced by current going in a circle like that makes the copper/paper part jump up out of the magnetic field, pushing air in front of it. That's what you hear, pressure waves in the air. The amplifier is an alternating current source, so the current is going back and forth in the wire, so it alternately pushes and sucks the air in and out as it jumps up and down in the magnetic field.
Those RFID tags race organizers use now work on this same bit of physics, only in reverse. You run or ride your bike through a magnetic field and it induces a current in a coil of wire inside the device they give you. That makes it transmit your identification number to a receiver that logs the time in a computer. Magneto could totally sabotage a triathlon if he wanted to.
So basically Magneto has to take whatever metal object he wants to control and set up a circulating current in it that he can then control with his magnet mind. Well if I can imagine a circulating current in just one part of a solid metal conductor and then imagine a magnet around then why can't a mutant? No wonder he had to work on this power of concentration for almost 30 years before he could go after his nemesis. Still, considering the modest amount of thought it took me to get there I wonder why they never had him rocking out in the warehouse district, playing metal buildings like subwoofers? Too bad he's all hung up on his personal issues of persecution and not a performance artist.
This doesn't explain why he can't control gold though. Maybe he just chooses not to.
Yeah, I see why they named it that. It seemed like it was written for a ninth grade English assignment. The Rotten Tomato meter is pretty high on this one. Yet I remain ambivalent.
The special effects in movies at this point are so high quality there's no point in griping about them. If you love you some CG, go have a good time. If you are bothered by random remarks that seem out of place in the context, consider seeing something else. These random remarks are what makes me think it was written by a group of ninth graders. One of them insisted they cut to the black guy when they say the word slavery. And that was probably the same one that thought it was a good idea to say women don't belong in the CIA. Probably heard that's what people were like in the '60s and thought that would make it seem AUTHENTIC. Well it was so far from being authentic for the time they should have avoided to the urge to do those things. It just pointed out how bad they did at capturing the feel of those days.
Maybe that weird split screen editing in the part of a movie where they have a montage was supposed to seem period appropriate, too, but it was just corny. Not good. If the editor didn't know better than that I'm inclined to blame him for many other complaints. Why would they stick in an infantile explanation for the name X-Men yet not bother to explain how a blue girl about age 8 ended up in the kitchen of an English mansion raiding the refrigerator? I can't see the ninth graders leaving that out of their screenplay. It must have gotten cut along with their parents. Apparently the only one with parents is the one we already knew about from the other movies, Magneto from Poland.
January Jones as Emma Frost was poorly used in the movie. Her character would hint at having some, I don't know, character, then she would turn into a chandelier with tits (coined by @JhonenV) and that would be it until the next scene featuring her milky white cleavage and blank facial expression and the turning into a chandelier again. I guess all the time she was off screen she was shopping for those amazing outfits. I came along at the end of that decade and all I remember was double knit. Did they really have slub silk coats and fox fur bikini cover ups and goat skin boots in 1962? Neat!
They liked having people change into something else. Emma Frost did it and the blue one, Rascal? Rodent? Raven! They were fond of an effect that looks like those old clocks with the numbers that flip. So it was like she would just change time all over and look like somebody else. Yeah whatever, it got old. Especially when the clothes would flip too then be clothes again right where they were already.
Some of the acting was not bad, but the directing was. Kevin Bacon got really excited when he first got Erik to show his power. It was one of only two times somebody got excited in the whole movie. The other time was when Oliver Platt got to act for a few seconds in a CIA meeting. Then he got edited out I guess.
Wanton destruction was wanton. The effects were so good I actually felt myself worrying about the damage to the beach and the trees in this one Caribbean scene then I remembered the reason those trees were arranged in a perfect Gaussian distribution was because it was all rendered, not real. If you like watching things get torn all to hell, this is a good one for you.
I would be remiss if I didn't mention the 30 meter satellite dish in the yard of Professor Xavier's house. He leased some land to the long distance company for a repeater? I've seen antennas like that in those places. I have no idea what they meant for it to be. Back in the cold war they did have a lot of fast moving smaller dish antennas to follow the spy satellites as the went by overhead. They were low satellites so they zipped by. That dish in Xavier's yard was not that kind. They have seen some similar to that at the cold war satellite linkup installation in North Carolina (Pisgah Astronomical Research Association) that I've been to, so I'll buy that it existed.
They tried to have an authentic looking radome back at the CIA facility over the thing that amplifies Professor Xavier's telepathic abilities too. The radome at PARI is similar to that but it had pseudo-random shaped panels to reduce natural frequency interference. But in the middle there's a 12m dish. Not one of those things beauty queens lean against on a float and a 1950's permanent wave apparatus. That's what they had in their radome in X-Men. Whatever. At least it was more believable for the era than the thing in the later movies.
I found the mutant abilities silly and the fact they even talked about evolution was preposterous. That's not evolution. That's just ridiculous. Have a ridiculous explanation. Like they went forward in time, evolved over thousands of years to some specific natural circumstance, then got sent back to freak out the humans as a prank or punishment or something. Maybe to even stop nuclear war. I don't know. Just not evolution. Never getting wisdom teeth is evolution, not being born blue with flip-clock skin that can mimic clothes and hair bone structure and everything. Even the chandelier with tits was more believable than the blue flip-clock.
I did like the Cadillac the CIA agent had. I liked that it had no pillar between the front and back doors. A death trap in a roll over, but that's what made it seem good for this film. I did not, however, appreciate that they wet down the floor in the parking garage so it was all shiny. Maybe it was CG shiny. Either way, it completely threw me off. Why? What? How? Just no! That's like a trick real estate agents do to take a picture of a house and make it look better, wet down the driveway. I've done it. But in a parking deck it's just gratuitous and distracting. Stuff like that just ruin it for me worse than a kid who can fly by yelling at the ground. One is suspending disbelief and the other is trying to ignore bad taste. Can't do that.
RT @Interior: Want to design @Interior's new logo? We're #crowdsourcing the design and want your ideas. http://on.doi.gov/mmBjBw
I clicked the link. What the hell, US Government?! They're offering $1000 for a spec logo design that will go on the clothing of over 70,000 employees. Are you SHITTING ME?! That's just highly unprofessional.
The other day I was saying "What the hell is WRONG with people?" when I read on Trey Ratcliff's website that the Austin airport had taken a photographer's work off Flickr, cropped out the best part and printed it and just put it up in the airport. Do companies just think creative people are all independently wealthy and make this stuff just for fun? We are happy for other people to use it for commercial purposes? They think that at A FEDERAL AGENCY?! I scared up some kind of budget document that tells me the Secretary of the Department of Interior has over $100 million to spend on salaries and expenses out of a $20 billion overall budget. And he thinks $1000 is a good price for their logo design? On spec? I think I can legitimately say "What the hell is WRONG with this COUNTRY?!"
So you say you want my idea? My idea is, "Fuck You, Department of the Interior." First congress insults the engineering profession with those NASA cuts and now you go and put down professional graphic designers? This country is going to hell in a cheap knockoff handbasket carried by the Department of the Interior.
I was going to use Comic Sans but then I saw Plantagenet Cherokee....
I'm reminded of an episode of Community where they have a contest to design a new school flag and the winner is an image of a sphincter ringed with the words E PLURIBUS ANUS.
To see all the entries so far click the Gallery tab at the top of the Crowdspring page.
In 2012 I did a Small Year. My intention was to spend as little money as possible and stay home all the time. In January 2012 I bought two Spartan Aircraft aluminum caravans, 31 feet long, 8 feet wide, manufactured in 1949 and 1951.
In the spring of 2013 I completed the conversion of the 1951 Spartan into a permanent lab and laundry room. It is now my knitting and sewing lab.
2016 was my smallest year yet.
2017 was on the medium size of small. I started working on 20 versions of the Royal Game of UR in 2017.
2018 was not as small as 2016 but smaller than 2017. I kept working on Royal Game of UR.
2019 was been slightly less small than 2018 so far. I went to the coast so that expanded my range by two counties. I've got 20 versions of the game of 20 squares ready for 2020. They're all 20% off on my Etsy shop all year.
In 2020 I am launching a video series for the Buck Rivet Report and restarting that blog.
