The Grove

The Grove is my favorite shopping place is LA so far. Nicely located close to our place, they have awesome enviroment, lots of shops, lots of food, lots of girls, lots of movie theaters. Plus an awesome day and night view from the roof of one of the best engineered parking lots in the world:




We watched SinCity in DLP. That is the recenlty favored digital projection system that theaters are starting to use. It is the same technique that our projector uses, just better quality and size. Only 92 theaters have DLP systems as we speak (21 in CA), but eventually all will switch since it makes distribution so much easier. The quality did not impress me, since the screen was so huge that I could see individual pixels in straight lines (same with our projector).

The Stang

Never had a picture of me and my car here before. Here it is then:

Sheeps

A mathematician, a physicist, and an engineer are riding a train through Scotland.

The engineer looks out the window, sees a black sheep, and exclaims, "Hey! They've got black sheeps in Scotland!"

The physicist looks out the window and corrects the engineer, "Strictly speaking, all we know is that there's at least one black sheep in Scotland."

The mathematician looks out the window and corrects the physicist, "Strictly speaking, all we know is that at least one side of one sheep is black in Scotland.

Primer

Or why you shouldn't read other people's blogs (Ορέστη εσύ φταις!).

I mean, what the fuck? I really tried to put 100% of my consciousness to understand this movie while watching for the first time and knowing nothing about it, and I failed miserably. It left me with a very fuzzy feeling of what happened at the end. For a 78min $7K budget film with terrible acting, it was impressive. Having seen Memento, Donny Darko and Mulholland Drive, I thought it couldn't get worse. At least in Memento it was clear from the beginning what was the "key", so it only takes a couple of views to sort the movie out. In Mulholland Drive there is nothing special really, it's just that the various parts of the movie play in some order other than their natural one, plus it has to do with dreams so some things are symbolic and not everything is explained. A second watch with repeated pause/play is enough. Donny Darko was cool and it kept you wondering but again at the end it made some sense.

For Primer I will need to put a lot of effort to figure everything out. Not only they talk hardcore tech stuff, but the transitions at first glance aren't smooth and you are not sure whether something they just said is important or not. If you have an idea what's going on, let me know.

Numb3rs 1x08

Really good stuff in this episode. At last a question I had in my mind for years was resolved:

- How do we know that everyone has their own unique fingerprint?
- Because no 2 people have ever been found to have the same prints. It's an assumption we make based on 100 years of empirical evidence.
- How often does one part of someone's print resembles someone else's?
- We've never done this type of population surveys.
- Isn't random match propability the only way you have of knowing the likelihood of two prints matching?
- Random match is used in DNA analysis.
- Exactly. That's why when experts make a DNA match they don't say it's a sure thing. They say it is 1 in 4 billion chance that the DNA comes from the same person. But fingerprints don't have odds. They just match or they don't match...


Plus a small dose of Quantum Mechanics:

- It's like the evidence proves him rigth and wrong at the same time.
- Oh, yeah, the old paradox oh Schrodinger's cat. There is a cat in a box, 50-50 chance it's been poisoned. But now here's the paradox: until such time as we can open the box and observe the cat, for that time, that cat is both alive and dead.
- I fail to see the analogy though. In reality he can't be both right and wrong at the same time.
- No no no... The truth with Schrodinger's cat is that the question itself is meaningless until we look inside the box.