Dave Kellam

I just finished watching Adaptation (IMDb, official, weblog) and had to jump onto the internet to see what was going on. I started reading this thread and felt it summed up the movie pretty well. Some people love it, some people hate it; it’s brilliant and it’s crap. Everything all rolled into one and each to his own getting what they can out of it. I was laughing throughout the last half of the film, laughing at him doing everything that he said he wasn’t going to do. I thought it was brilliant writing, but I’m a sucker for multilayered self-indulgent stories about people trying to write a story. And it was entirely self-indulgent which is where a lot of the humour lies. It’s worth checking out, deffinitely one of the better movies that I’ve seen recently.

I was really impressed by the use of flash for this site detailing a voyage through the western US. It’s just a cool way to do a travel log.

The Recording Industry Association of America already has a target on its back because of its take-no-prisoners stance on file sharing and piracy. That explains why its site gets hacked so much. But why does it continue to be so easy? By Michelle Delio. [Wired News]

This is me taking a stab at using NetNewsWire to update the site. The point of the article is sound: the trumpeters of digital security and the evils of the internet are obviously clueless about the way it works and how to provide basic security for their site.

Hey Bob, I’ve got an idea: if we invent a new type of illness, we could push a whole bunch of new drugs on the people we say have it. Alright, so you’ll work on ‘female sexual dysfunction’ and I’ll start my work on the ‘writing with your right hand disease’.

Personally, I think it’s about time we ushered in an era of censorship over science. God knows this democracy thing isn’t working. God forbid that a structural engineer may know the weaknesses of a particular type of bridge. Go back to your wartorn countries and build your faulty bridges that will kill dozens and inflame the hatred for the western devil.

Headline: New Years Celebration’s Free of Terrorism. Tomorrow: January 2nd free of terrorism; September 10th: Free of Terrorism. I don’t think terrorists seem particularly tied to any given day on the western calendar, but that may just be me. New Years parties do result in a large gathering of people which provies a potential target, but what about all the other large gatherings of people throughout the year?

I had to go to Ottawa last night to see Star Trek: Nemesis due to the complete lack of theatres in Brockville right now. The movie was alright, some good parts, some bad parts. I thought it was better than the last Star Trek movie, although maybe not as good as First Contact. Shinzon was a solid villian, probably the best since Khan.

Gallup released its poll indicating the most admired men and women in America. George W. Bush is leading the pack and Rev. Billy Graham is at number six, pffering a glimpse at the intelligence levels and priorities of the American people. Clinton is a smart man, Bush is a puppet.

I was checking out the Top 10 Space Mysteries for 2003 at space and came across an article outlining the Ekpyrotic Universe as an alternative to our current model of creation. Chiefly the idea that there are no parallel universes or alternate worlds, rather just one universe with multiple dimensions. Their model has essentially five spatial dimensons (the fourth being time) with the ‘big bang’ occuring as a result of four dimensional membranes colliding in five dimensional space. Three cheers for theoretical physics.

Five dimensions is a bit of a mindfuck, so I embarked on a small internet quest to find out more about the concept. This article explains the Kaluza Klien Theory that postulates a fifth dimension in an attempt to unify electromagnetism and general relativity, I don’t really understand it. This description is a little bit easier to wrap the head around, less mathy more normal english. This article’s a little bit heady but it outlines trying to grasp the ideas of hyper and ultracubes. And another article outlining the ideas behind multidimensional space (probably the easiest to conceptualize out of all of them). Many of the multispatial concepts and ideas seem to be connected with superstring theory, which just leads to the opening of another can of worms. I’ll finish this off with some diagrams that offer an attempt at visualizing 4D space.

The Boahen Lab at the University of Pennsylvania has an overview of the problems faced in creating computers that rival/emulate the human brain.