This publicity stunt for the movie Chronicle is nicely done, I think.
More info here
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Category Archives: General
Aerial Anthony Gormley?
British Pathé
Have just discovered that British Pathé have a splendid archive of “90,000 Historic Clips”.
Here’s a pleasing little example. (I remember meeting George Cansdale a couple of times in my childhood – he was a minor hero of mine.)
If you like these, you can also find a good selection of historic videos on the Internet Archive.
Beyond Reasonable Doubt?
We all know the courtroom drama, where the suspense is tangible as we wait for the jury’s verdict. But should such things actually happen, asks Richard Dawkins in a New Statesman article?
Extract:
You cannot have it both ways. Either the verdict is beyond reasonable doubt, in which case there should be no suspense while the jury is out. Or there is real, nail-biting suspense, in which case you cannot claim that the case has been proved “beyond reasonable doubt”.
Smart Energy – now it’s personal
My pal Pilgrim Beart gave a splendid talk at the IET last week, about smart energy monitoring.
Click here to watch the webcast.
45 mins of talk, 45 mins of questions. Well worth the time.
Humour for Geeks
If you’re an elderly Computer Scientist (i.e. older than about 35), you’ll enjoy James Iry’s post, A Brief, Incomplete and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages. Extract:
1957 – John Backus and IBM create FORTRAN. There’s nothing funny about IBM or FORTRAN. It is a syntax error to write FORTRAN while not wearing a blue tie.
1958 – John McCarthy and Paul Graham invent LISP. Due to high costs caused by a post-war depletion of the strategic parentheses reserve LISP never becomes popular. In spite of its lack of popularity, LISP (now “Lisp” or sometimes “Arc”) remains an influential language in “key algorithmic techniques such as recursion and condescension”.
Splendid stuff! – Many thanks to Dave Clarke for the link.
Les Gets from above
OK, I’ll stop posting skiing pictures now. Probably.
Sliding-Q
Geoff took some nice photos of me on the slopes today. I’ve edited out the ones that made me look less cool.
If you read my earlier post, you may be amused to notice that the poles are not the same colour in all of these pictures!
Keeping up with the Geoff Joneses
Only people who are better skiers than me should really try shooting video while in motion, but it was a nice gentle slope!
However, I did have an interesting and rather embarrassing experience today. We stopped off for lunch at a favourite spot, after which Geoff , the star of the movie, picked up his board, and I my skis, and we set off for another happy afternoon on the slopes.
At the end of the day, Geoff wanted to get his board rewaxed, so we headed down to the rental shop. There was a man waiting outside, who pointed at me.
“Ah! You!”‘, he said. Confused, I tried to work out whether I knew him, or why he might otherwise be accosting me. He soon explained. “You have my skis!”
And I looked at the poles and skis he was holding, and sure enough, they were mine. At lunchtime, he must have placed them on the rack next to Geoff’s board, and yours truly had walked up and pinched both them and his poles (which were, I’m embarrassed to say, completely different from mine), clamped the skis onto my boots (which fit perfectly) and skied for the whole afternoon without noticing. I’m not sure whether the fact that I was so oblivious to my equipment means I’m a good or bad skier…
Anyway, the poor chap, a very nice Dutchman, had waited for about an hour for me to come back and then, having called ahead, had availed himself of my equipment to ski over to the rental shop marked on the skis, which was where we found him waiting. I wonder how long it would have taken us to notice if we hadn’t decided to drop in on the way back…
The moral of this story is probably that ski-hire places should always get the mobile number of the people who rent their equipment. Or that they shouldn’t lend them to people as foolish as me.
And so the silly season starts…
I can’t really believe that the American public would be seriously concerned that Mitt Romney can speak French. If Newt Gingrich really picked this as a reason to lambast him, it should presumably disqualify Gingrich, not Romney, from office.
Now, I know little of either of them, but if you want to pick on Romney, I would have thought that his belief in – nay, his missionary zeal for – a man who gained inspiration from magic stones in the bottom of his hat at the start of the 19th century, would be a better target. Surely that’s even more worrying than being friendly with Frenchies?
But, of course, that’s religion, so it’s taboo…
A portrait of The Artist
Well, my faith in cinema is gradually being restored. About three weeks ago we saw Hugo, one of the few 3D movies worth watching, and one of the even fewer that would still be a splendid film in 2D. Then last week we saw Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows; not quite in the same league but still jolly good fun. And tonight it was The Artist, which is quite fabulous.
For those who’ve missed the publicity and the reports of the plentiful standing ovations at Cannes, The Artist is a story set around the time when silent movies are being replaced by talkies. That’s hardly novel: so was Singing in the Rain. But what makes this different is that it is itself a silent movie. It looks at the transition from the ‘before’ side rather than from the ‘after’, as it were. And when was the last time you went to the release of a new silent movie?
So the sheer novelty value is a large part of what gets the bums on the seats. But very few of those bums’ owners will be disappointed once they get there, I think. I was delighted even before the film began: as the adverts drew to a close, the curtains on either side of the screen moved inwards, because this is shot in traditional 4:3 ratio, not widescreen.
The genius of The Actor is partly down to the bravery of those who had the nerve to try such a thing, and partly down to the skill of the execution. But what struck me as we walked home is that it’s unique. Nobody will be able to do this again. So I think it has found a place in the cinematic history books from which it is unlikely ever to be displaced.
And it’s also a great night out.
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