I finally saw District 9 and was quite impressed. It’s the best Science Fiction movie I’ve seen since I can’t remember when. There haven’t been many good SF films recently: the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still was terrible (and I’m quite a fan of the original), and most other apparently Sci-Fi films out recently (even Star Trek) barely even qualify as hard Sci-Fi. Hollywood seems to have stolen our Science Fiction and replaced it with something called “Techno-Action” instead.

But then along came District 9. The premise is that an alien spaceship breaks down in the skies over Johannesburg South Africa, stranding a million or so insectiod aliens (”Prawns”) on Earth. The aliens are housed in a sprawling, fenced-in slums, fed cat food, and generally mistreated and reviled by the surrounding human community. “At least the government keeps them away from us,” says a woman early in the film. As the movie opens, the Prawns are about to be relocated from the slums to a nice new modern internment camp, and an ineffectual bureaucrat named Wikus Van De Merwe is put in charge of going door-to-alien-door serving eviction notices. Of course, for Wikus, things don’t quite go according to plan.

The thing that makes this movie great is the lack of conventional heroes. Wikus is kind of a drip and is never exactly brilliant, even in the course of his eventual heroics. More interestingly, the Prawns are not particularly exceptional either. They aren’t highly-evolved celestial travelers so much hapless passengers on a giant interstellar greyhound bus that had the misfortunate to break down in some out-of-the-way spot. The movie has a lot to say about racism, both overt and institutional, and what allows it to raise these issues so deftly is precisely that the Prawns aren’t particularly noble in the face of oppression. Rather than asking us to feel for them, we are instead encouraged to think about what our responsibilities towards our fellow beings are, even when those beings are ordinary flawed and brutish folk who we happen to not like very much. In other words, the Prawns are just like any real-life tread-upon group. Even better is that the movie manages to avoid delivering a heavy-handed moral pronouncement on the situation (that I really liked the ending is all I’ll say about that).

Definitely worth checking out.

I just finished reading Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us, and I recommend it highly. The book imagines that all humans vanish from this planet overnight (aliens, killer virus, the rapture, etc) and then investigates what would happen to the planet after we’ve gone. It makes for a good framework within which examine all the terrible things we’re doing to our little blue marble home and what it would take to clean up our mess.

To me, the scariest chapter is the one called “Polymers are Forever.”

“Except for a small amount that’s been incinerated,” says [research scientist] Tony Andrady […], “every bit of plastic manufactured in the world for the last 50 years or still remains. It’s somewhere in the environment.”

Most of it is in the ocean. The large pieces are clumped up in what is called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an area of the middle of the Pacific Ocean absolutely covered in garbage. Which is bad enough, but that’s only the big pieces. The really terrifying part is what happens to the small pieces. Plastic pieces don’t biodegrade, they just break down into smaller pieces of plastic.

The book quotes marine biologist Richard Thompson, who studies the accumulation of plastic in the world’s oceans. Thompson has discovered that most sea creatures happily eat “bite-sized” pieces of plastic, and then die if the pieces are too big to pass through their digestive systems. As the plastic bits get smaller, smaller animals start eating them and dying.

At what point would [plastic debris in the ocean] star to naturally break down—and when they did, would they release some fearful chemicals that would endanger organisms sometime far in the future?

Richard Thompson didn’t know. Nobody did, because plastics haven’t been around long enough for us to know how long they’ll last or what happens to them. His team had identified nine different kinds in the sea so far, varieties of acrylic, nylon, polyester, polyethylene, and polyvinyl chloride. All he knew was that soon everything alive would be eating them.

“When they get as small as powder, even the zooplankton will swallow them.”

We’re wildly irresponsible in our use of plastic. It’s one of the most indestructible materials we’ve invented, and we use it primarily to make disposable goods like packaging and grocery bags. It’s insane. As a species, we’re terrible at long-term thinking. We’re merrily destroying our home and poisoning ourselves, but it’s happening slowly enough that we can turn a blind eye to it in the name of short-term profit.

We ought to factor the costs of safe disposal (and by disposal I mean breaking down to base elements) of our materials into their cost. It’d drive the price of plastic through the roof and probably ruin the holy economy in the short term, but it might keep the plastic wrapper containing today’s breakfast from being part of breakfast tomorrow.

After the ballgame in Toronto last Friday (and as of writing, the trade deadline has come and gone and Roy Halladay is still a Bluejay! Hooray! At least until the off season…), Shengrong and I spent the rest of the weekend in Niagara Falls. She’d always wanted to go ever since Dashan (possibly the best known Canadian in the world) took her on a “tour” of the falls in one of his TV programs. The falls are very well-known in China: westerners who go to China want to see the Great Wall, Chinese who come to Canada want to see Niagara Falls.

The falls themselves are as spectacular as you would expect. If you’ve never been there, there are two waterfalls, one much larger than the other. There’s a boat called the “Maid of the Mist” that’ll take you up close, which is a pretty intense experience, and made more so for us because it absolutely poured rain for the 30 minutes we were on the boat, and then the sun came out. They give you a stylish blue slicker to keep you from getting soaked by the spray, so we came out of the experience relatively dry.

The town of Niagara Falls is a little surreal. It’d pass as a fairly ordinary small town, except for the giant tourist area grafted on to the side nearest the waterfalls. There are plenty of hotels and restaurants, which is to be expected, but also a large number of “attractions” like the one pictured above that don’t really fit. Apparently, everyone is trying to offer an answer to the question of “we’ve seen the waterfall, what now?”, and answer it louder than his neighbour. I suspect there’s a positive feedback loop in action: each outlandish attraction pushes the next to be even crazier.

The waterfalls, at least, are beautiful. We mostly stayed away from the surrounding madness, but I couldn’t resist snapping the photo above of Frankenstein’s castle-and-burger-king, which is across the street from the toppled over Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum and just up the hill from the pro-wrestling themed “pile driver” amusement ride, and the wax museum where teenage girls busily snapped pictures of a wax statue of Heath Ledger as The Joker in the window.

I found myself trying to imagine what the Falls would have been like before the town. What must the first people to see it have thought, coming upon this roaring display of nature surrounded by the quiet woods? It would have been like finding the hand of god reaching down to the earth in the middle of the wilderness.

Roy “Doc” Halladay, the best pitcher the Toronto Bluejays ever had, is very probably going to be traded before the end of the week. I’d never seen him pitch except on TV, and, with a little bit of panic, realized that his Friday night start in Toronto might be my last chance. So I did what any die-hard Jays fan would do in my position: took the day off work and booked a flight. Shengrong said I was “feng feng dian dian de” for my impulsiveness, but gamely came along.

Halladay is incredible. Because he plays in Canada, and not say New York, he isn’t as widely known as he could be, and he seems to like it that way. Whenever he talks to the media he’s thoughtful and well-spoken, even a little shy. One the field, he’s incredibly intense. He rarely smiles or even looks up at the crowd. He glowers down at every batter like an ace pitcher should. Occasionally, steam comes out of his ears.

And what a pitcher he is: “dominant” is a word often used to describe him. He’s an incredible athlete: all of his pitches from the 94 mph fastball with deadly movement, to his pinpoint curveball, to his devastating 92 mph cut-fastball (Marino Rivera, the Yankee’s legendary closer, throws only cutters), to the sinker and the change-up, are “plus” pitches, meaning better than the average for the league. He has great command of all of them: he can throw any pitch for a strike on the corner of the plate when he wants to, and the hitters can never guess what might be coming next.

But there are many pitches with great “stuff”, as the pitch-arsenal is called. Great pitches alone don’t make a great pitcher, and his “stuff” is just the beginning of greatness of Roy Halladay. Some pitchers with wicked pitches try to strike everyone out. They spend five or six pitches per batter and are worn out after five or six innings. They’re happy when they manage to finish the seventh. Halladay can “pitch to contact”, he throws pitches that look appetizing enough for the batters to swing at, but they don’t connect solidly with the bat, and turn into easy outs. He saves the strikeout for when he really needs it, and thus saves his arm. He usually leads the league in innings pitched and throws more complete games in a season than most other teams. He once threw a 10-inning complete game and won it 1 to 0. Incredible.

And then there’s his work-ethic. Starting pitchers throw every 5th game, and Halladay is known to make the most of the time in between, both in terms of physical conditioning and in his analysis of the opposing hitters, learning their weaknesses, formulating a plan. I don’t know if Malcolm Gladwell mentioned Halladay in his book on how “genius” is often a product of a huge amount of work, but if he didn’t, he should have. When Halladay first arrived in the major leagues, he dazzled everyone by nearly throwing a no-hitter in his second big-league game. Then he ran intro difficulties and seemed to fizzle out. He was sent down all the way to A-ball and most people thought that was the last they’d hear of him; he’d be the baseball equivalent of a one-hit-wonder. But Doc worked is butt off in the minors, retooled the mechanics of how he throws the ball, and came back. He’s been to six all-star games, he’s thrown 44 complete games, he’s won the Cy Young award for best pitcher in the league.

But Roy Halladay, the arch-competitor, has never been to the post-season. He’s on a team that hasn’t made the playoffs since 1993, and that’s not good enough for the Doc. He’s current contract ends after 2010, and he’s said that, while he’d prefer to win in Toronto, time is running out for him (he’s 32) and he might look to other teams where he’d have a better shot. Right now, his trade value is as high as it has ever been, and so the Jays, fearing that he’d leave in 2010 and they’d get nothing back, have put him on the market. It’s unclear whether the Jays will get the kind of deal they want for him, but there’s a very real chance he could be going.

Whether he’s traded or not, I’m glad I got to see him on Friday. If it was his last game in Toronto, it was in some ways a fitting conclusion to his Bluejays tenure. He was brilliant, throwing 9 innings, giving up only 2 runs (1 earned) (giving up fewer than 4 earned runs in 9 innings is considered “good”), allowing only 4 hits, walking only 3, and striking out 10. The crowd, although not as big as it ought to have been for Doc’s final game, was certainly aware of what they might be about to lose. They gave him a standing ovation when he walked off the field after his warmup, they gave him a standing ovation after almost every inning, they stood and cheered whenever he got two strikes on a batter.

But for all of Doc’s superman effort, his team couldn’t get him the win. His opposing starter, Tampa Bay’s Matt Garza, kept right up with him, allowing only two runs to the Jays and baffling their hitters over nine innings. In the tenth inning, the Jay’s bullpen coughed up two more runs, and then the Jay’s hitters went quietly. As much as he tries to carry the team, Halladay couldn’t carry them enough to win the game.

Flow, the software I’ve been working on for the last 18 months, has shipped!

There are videos of it in action and a trial version to download, if you follow the link. After all the hard work it’s gratifying to see it available to the world!

Almost. I saw Transformers 1, and there’s no way I’m falling for that again.

This review of the new giant robot cgi-fest is brilliant:

So LaBoeuf, who’s actually a fine actor, is the stand-in for the male viewers’ greatest fears about themselves. No matter how great a loser they might be, they can’t be as losery a loser as Sam Witwicky. And yet, Sam has awesome giant robots stomping around telling him he’s the most important awesome person ever. And he has the hottest girlfriend in the universe, Megan Fox, for whom banality is a huge aphrodisiac. The more pathetic Sam gets, the more Fox’s lips pout and her nipples point, like little Irish setters.

Michael Bay Finally Made An Art Movie

At the Dragon Boat Festival this weekend there were three or four crocodiles like this fellow on display in cages. Each croc seemed oblivious to the attention of the passing crowds, content to lie in the shady grass in one corner or another of his cage. While I was snapping pictures I saw a man walk up to one of the cages to see what the fuss was about. He read the sign posted on the side, which said something along the lines of “Man-eating nile crocodile” and then peered in. The crocodile was lying against the wall nearest him, and he couldn’t really see it from the angle he was looking down into the cage. His eyes went wide when realization dawned that he was looking at an empty crocodile cage… uh oh!

Then he found the little fellow hiding in the shade and looked relieved.

The humble sign is not a new piece of technology, dating back to sometime just after the invention of writing in Mesopotamia, circa 3500 B.C. The sign is a clever concept: take an idea you want to communicate, write it down, and situate it prominently. When people see it, they’ll read the words and know what you wanted to tell them. Sounds good in theory, but do signs actually work?

After 5500 years of wondering, I’m glad we can finally put the question to rest.

Crossing the theatre parking lot on our way to see Star Trek, we passed a van with a license plate reading “REDSHIRT”. I think I know what those people were there to see.

So, what did I think? I don’t mind “re-imaginings”, I’m a big BSG fan after all, and, with a new cast portraying the original Star Trek characters, this movie leans in that direction. However, I don’t think they quite pulled it off. It didn’t really feel like Star Trek, and didn’t manage to redefine Star Trek into anything new and compelling either. It was generic space-ships-and-explosions sci-fi.

Still, it could have been a disaster, and it wasn’t. I’m sure sequels are in the works, and I’m cautiously optimistic.

I’ve blogged about Philip Glass’s Metamorphosis before (back when I was young and naive and just learning about Glenn Gould), but it’s music that I keep coming back to. I really, really like it, but don’t fully understand why. It seems to have been calculated to stimulate my very own brain in just the right way to make me both calm and creative.

I lately found this on Youtube. Branka Parlić playing Metamorphosis One:

You can find parts two through five on le ‘tube as well (or on Parlić’s own website under “videos”).