I think that one of the best ways for a fan to express themselves is through a personal license plate. I have an Isaac Asimov themed plate, and my wife has one dedicated to The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan. Yesterday my mother-in-law was riding in her car when her husband spotted one of the coolest license plates ever with a decal above it to match. AT-AT is the perfect license plate befitting a true Star Wars fan. She promptly posted it on her blog, which was forwarded to me by my wife via StumbleUpon. I had to get the full story from the source, and when I did she said she’d send me all 3 pictures. Here they are…
I wasn’t really planning on watching Avatar in the theater until I heard a raving review of the 3D version from my brother-in-law. He told me he immediately knew he wanted to watch it again. I have never seen a 3D movie before, so I was pretty pumped to go see it. I had heard some reports of people getting sick from watching the movie, so I admit I was a bit apprehensive during the first few minutes. The 3D didn’t really bother me initially, but after about 30 minutes I found myself getting a bit of a headache. I think it was from me trying to look around the screen checking out the different levels of depth during each scene. I decided to just relax and look where I normally would and I started to feel better.
As for the movie itself, it wasn’t an amazing, earth-shattering experience for me like many people have said it was for them. The whole idea of controlling another body remotely was rather interesting. This concept has been around a long time, but I don’t think until now controlling another biological being built with parts of your own DNA has been described. The movie was fun to watch and is most definitely a milestone in cinematography. I haven’t really gone to movies in the theater in the past few years because it has started to become so expensive, but Avatar is worth the money. If you can see it in 3D without getting sick, I’d recommend that as well. (more…)
In a completely off topic transition from Sci-Fi, I felt compelled to share this following telephone answering machine message. My wife sent me a quick IM telling me I needed to call this # (I don’t list it here) and “just listen to it.” Apparently this lady is quite eccentric, which I can’t do any justice by trying to describe her. She starts off by reading off a menu with food on it then digresses into song, then wishes everyone safe travels. That sounds normal enough, right?
Tonight with my wife, I watched an interesting episode of Nova titled “The World’s Smartest Machine.” Romantic, right? You can tell we are a couple of geeks at heart. Being a huge fan of Asimov and his robot creations, I am continually amazed at the progress of robotics and artificial intelligence. As a kid I was playing chess as early as the 3rd grade. I’ve always thought of myself as a pretty good chess player. When I heard about a computer that supposedly could beat a world champion chess player, I was intrigued. Garry Kasparov battled IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer in 1996 and won, however he eventually lost a rematch in 1997. Well, IBM is back at it, this time taking on Jeopardy. Nova takes us behind the scenes with the developers of “Watson,” the next step in AI. I was disappointed when the episode ended and it didn’t say who won. I didn’t realize until logging on PBS.org that the contest actually was taking place while I was watching Nova (on my media center PC). After some frantic Google searches, I eventually came across a Twitter feed with a link to a Youtube posting of the episode. This was not quite 2 hours after the episode aired! Isn’t technology great? I expect the Youtube post to be served a DMCA take down, so watch it soon if you plan on it. In addition to the episode at the end of this post, I’ve embedded the Nova preview and an humorous parody of the challenges Watson overcame during his development. I suggest watching the Nova episode first. If you are at all interested in AI, you must check these out!
There are two more nights to the match, airing Tuesday February 15th, and Wednesday the 16th. Be sure to check them out, along with some live blogging on PBS.org. I find myself rooting for Watson, not because I want to see humans defeated, but because I want to see humans capable of making something smart enough to do it. Who do you think will win? Who do you want to win?
