Sad

I guess it's old news, but I just learned that Andreas Katsulas died on 2/13/06. He played G'Kar on Babylon 5. Only sighs and mutters from me; he was great. official site

MDT in 12 Monkeys

Here are some thoughts of mine on the nature of time in Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys. It can be argued that the film presents an example of "one-dimensional time" since there are no blatant contradictions in the plot, but this analysis presents an interpretation of the film that is consistent with "multidimensional time".

http://www4.ncsu.edu/~swatkins/12monkeys.htm

Beach trip

Last weekend I took a trip to the beach in part to celebrate the big 3-6. Pics are here.

RIP Peter Tomarken

I suspect you might have already heard, but Peter Tomarken (once the host of Press Your Luck) has died in a plane crash. In honor of Mr. Tomarken, here is a special bonus link: the sound effect from the big board (which I believe also inspired the sound of the "God Machine" on the Daily Show). Maybe I watch too much TV.

Type 7 Phase Discriminators

In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Timescape", some of the Enterprise-D crew are discussing how to deal with some mysterious temporal anomalies and the following dialogue takes place:

PICARD: Mr. La Forge, what about a subspace force field like the one we used on Devidia Two? Could something like that protect us from the effects of the temporal fragment?

GEORDI: Possibly. But we'd need an awfully sensitive phase discriminator in order to moderate that kind of field.

DATA: The emergency transporter armbands contain a type-seven phase discriminator. It should be possible to reconfigure their subspace emitters.

They all seem familiar with the concept of the phase discriminator. So not only are these people accustomed to the task of phase discriminating, but they have a specific device that discriminates phases. Phases of what? Seems like it discriminates between phases of energy, perhaps, but it's hard to be certain.

And don't forget that they've got at least seven different types of the device. I wonder why they couldn't just build all the functionality of all the types into a single device, like maybe a phase discriminator with a knob on it that allowed you to turn it from a type-seven to, say, a type-eight.

Slackers.

RFID=666?

Some Christians believe that RFID chips, which may replace UPC bar codes, are the "mark of the Beast" described in the book of Revelation.

Of course, many of these same Christians believed that the UPC bar codes were the same mark of the Beast ... just as some Christians long ago believed that the Gutenberg printing press (look it up, jeez) was similarly a harbinger of the end of the world.

I wonder if we'll ever really figure out What God Wants.

By the way, I hate the idea of RFID chips. I wonder if I can microwave them.

Who died?

Aw, man, I forgot the Oscars were on tonight. I don't really care much about the Oscars in general, but I love that bit where they recap all the movie celebrities that died in the past year. I'm sad that I missed it.

The Real Natalie

So SNL aired another in their "SNL Digital Short" series on Saturday, and I thought I should do my part to spread the meme. If you liked "Lazy Sunday" and you don't mind a little profanity, then you might like "The Real Natalie," in which Natalie Portman proves that she's more hardcore than most people realize.

See it while you can - NBC will probably force YouTube to remove the video at some point.

Update: It's been removed already. I found it at NBC.com, but there are a bunch of flashing ads to deal with, and it may be IE-only. So I'm not gonna link to it.