akrish

So I just wrote this really long, hopefully thoughtful post, but it didn’t turn out as I wanted so this is much lighter. This article wound up in my RSS reader and it got me thinking about comics. I used to read tons of comics when I was a kid and nowadays when I look at the newspaper, most of the comics pretty much suck. Here are some of my favorites (in some loose ordering):

1. First of all, Calvin and Hobbes is one of the greatest comics of all time, and that article attests to that. If you can get your hands on Calvin and Hobbes books, I highly recommend them. Bill Watterson treated his comics as artwork and he really does so much more with the inches of space than many other cartoonists. Also, his material is often deep and philosophical, and I think a lot of kids can relate to Calvin in more profound ways that other cartoons. Calvin is one of my favorite childhood characters because of his imagination and his cynicism.
2. Tintin isn’t a newspaper comic, but more of a comic book. It’s originally a French comic book but it should not be hard to find English translations. The comic is quite popular and when I last went to Europe (years ago), I saw the comic book everywhere. Anyway, it’s a very good comic. It’s not like other comics in that it’s purpose is not comedy. They are about the adventures of this journalist (Tintin), who ends up travelling all over the place. And of course there is subtle humor scattered throughout, making these comics quite entertaining.
3. Asterix again is like Tintin in that it is a French comic book. However, this one is more explicitly humorous. The humor is very unlike American humor, differentiating this comic from other popular ones. For one, the names of all the characters are puns, like “Asterix”, “Obelix”, and “Chief Vitalstatistics”. Read the comics for more of these puns, unfortunately I’m not if you’re still able to get them or where you can do so. There are tons of other humorous elements, in fact, there’s a wikipedia article about them.
4. Foxtrot is another really funny comic that was in syndication until pretty recently. If you haven’t read it, you should read some on the website. It’s about your average American Family, and mostly about the three kids, a high school jock, a stereotypical freshman girl, and a super-nerdy fifth grader. I guess, the humor is pretty standard for American cartoons, but I related to a lot of the subject matter, more so than many other comics.
5. Beetle Bailey. For some good old-fashioned laughs, check out this comic. My dad had a bunch of the comic books so I ended up reading them as a kid. Beetle Bailey is a lazy soldier and it’s about his the escapades of him and his camp.
6. Dilbert. I started reading Dilbert as a teenager (much later than the rest), but I guess as a programmer, I can kind of relate to Dilbert’s life (though fortunately I’m stuck in a corporate hell-of-a-job). I didn’t enjoy this one as much as the others, but Scott Adams is still a really funny writer. I recently came across this, which definitely made me laugh.

And of course now there are web comics. I periodically read xkcd and phdcomics. So yeah, enjoy!

So a couple of my roommates and I have recently (re)-discovered Sesame Street on YouTube. It’s been quite entertaining seeing clips of videos that I remember distinctly from my childhood. Also some of the clips are really funny to college students. Here are some of my favorites:

 LL Cool J goes on an Addition Expedition. -  best line ever: “One Elmo monster and one Mr. LL Cool J makes one, two friends!”

Cookie Monster’s Rap. - I totally remember this song from when I was like five. Brings back good memories.

Hoots vs. Yo Yo Ma - Hoots is hilarious. Also Yo Yo Ma is awesome.

Cookie Monster’s Letter of the Day - Cookie Monster’s eyes are so funny.

Gangster’s - exactly like real mobsters…

As you can probably tell, I’m totally procrastinating during finals week. I thought I wrote about this before but I couldn’t find the post. Briefly, I hate finals. Not because of the exams, but because if I do any work that isn’t explicitly studying for your exams, I feel really guilty about not prioritizing exams. What this means is that my productivity goes down the drain. I do spend a decent amount of time preparing for my exams, but I definitely have more time to exercise, and work on other projects. So for the past couple of years, finals time for me has been a decent amount of studying mixed with a lot of wasting time, watching tv and playing guitar, but with an overall drop in productivity.

So that’s how we found the Sesame Street videos. I hope you enjoy them!

I don’t watch that many movies, but this weekend my parents and I went to watch Disney’s (actually Disneynature’s) Earth. All three of us really enjoyed the movie so here I am writing a short review.

First of all, you should watch the trailer, you get a feeling for the ridiculous footage that the directors managed to take.  The movie is basically a documentary about the Earth (duh) and a lot of the creatures that coexist with us. The “story” focuses on three families (polar bears, whales, elephants), but also spends some time on tons of other animals: monkeys, birds of paradise, wolves, penguins, you name it.

Naturally, the theme of how humans are making it difficult for animals to survive is present, but it’s quite subtle. The movie wasn’t designed to reprimand humans (like I believe An Inconvenient Truth was); instead it showed specific examples of how global warming was making it difficult for animals to survive. The narrator would say things like “as our world warms, it’s becoming harder for …,” without directly blaming humans (though we all know who’s fault it is). I really liked how they didn’t get distracted with this theme, as I could vision the movie being completely different if they had emphasized this point further. Not that I don’t think the whole environmentalism issue isn’t important, I think that the movie still made it’s point without becoming too intrusive and forceful.

I was also really impressed with the footage the directors captured. Even in the trailer, there are some amazing shots. I can’t say much about this without giving away anything really cool about the movie, but they use some pretty cool techniques. Most noticeable (and cool) is the time-lapse photography that they use to show change. They use it tastefully to show growth of organisms, seasons changing, etc. Then, there is a lot of aerial footage, in places like the Arctic Circle, Niagara Falls, the African Savannah, and the Rain Forest. A lot of this footage is also really cool (though some of it seems like pretty standard stuff).

The crazy thing is how they managed to get so much footage of animals. For one of the first scenes, the crew waited with cameras trained for two weeks to film polar bears emerging from their winter den after winter. There’s tons of this stuff and I haven’t really seen that much of it (though I confess I’m not much of a nature buff).

What really caught my attention was the soundtrack. It’s not often that I notice the soundtrack of a movie, but there were several times that I found myself thinking “this music is really fitting and also standalone awesome.” The soundtrack was recorded by the Berlin Philharmonic, and they’re an internationally known orchestra. I’m really excited for the soundtrack to come out so I can listen to it while studying.

Overall, I definitely recommend Disneynature’s Earth. Again, I don’t watch a lot of nature documentaries, but I really liked this one. I don’t think it’ll win many awards, but it’s a good movie. Also, you should watch it in theaters to really appreciate the cinematography.

Yup it’s almost finals time and you know what that means… productivity is going to plummet and I’m going to start blogging again.Maybe a few of you noticed but my blog has been down for quite some time. I was originally hosting on a free 1-year facebook accelerator from joyent, but the problem was, naturally, that I only get it for a year. Anyway, my contract expired, and I’ve been super busy with school and stuff to re-set my blog on my older hosting service. This last week, I’ve somehow had a bunch of free time (or I’ve been really good at not working on important things) so I decided to set things up again. So yup we’re back. I think I will probably be blogging a lot over the summer (as I did last summer), mostly because I hope to have a bit more free time. I should also start posting lots of pictures.I guess I’ll start things off with an interesting article I found a couple of days ago. These researchers at Yale came up with a new way to analyze the running time of algorithms. The technique is called Smoothed Analysis and the article is here. The actual paper is ridiculously long and I don’t have enough statistics background (or patience) to read the whole thing, but the basic idea was really cool. Also, we just learned about the Simplex method in my algorithms class, and we talked about how in the worst case the algorithm is exponential, but in practice it’s quite efficient. Smoothed analysis is the explanation!

This article by George Orwell is really interesting and pretty funny.

Orwell talks about how the english language has been polluted through evolution, and how writers tend to be verbose and ambiguous rather than trying to get their point across. He cites a lot of examples which I’ve seen and heard frequently in writing, speeches, and even common language, showing that even though the article is like 50 years old, it’s still very relevant.

One of the funniest parts is when he translates a line from Ecclesiastes into modern English.

Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Here it is in modern English:

Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

Seriously… look at that second sentence. First of all it’s really hard to read quickly. Secondly, it doesn’t really say anything. And thirdly, the first sentence provides wonderful imagery while the second sentence is completely abstract. And I’m not kidding, I’ve seen a lot of writing like that (and I’ve even written like that a lot).

One of the problems is that society encourages us to write like that (at least to some extent). I remember that college applications like to see that you have a strong vocabulary, so we include “big” words into our essays when smaller words suffice or are better. Same with the writing I’ve done in college, people don’t seem to argue with you’re writing if it looks like you know what you’re talking about and to do that, you use this cryptic constructs and ambiguous vocabulary.

Orwell continues to talk about politics, and how political writing (including speeches) is complete garbage in terms of language. Since politics is so much about pleasing your audience, phrases that present catastrophes in a “not-so-bad” light are often used. As an example, Orwell writes, “Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification.” And with the Iraq war, how often have events that would surely be met with public disapproval been covered up with vagaries and euphemisms?

And I hear it a lot in campaign rhetoric, that I don’t even follow that much. Plans and promises on both sides are kept intentionally vague for obvious reasons, but this usage of language promotes itself as politicians are seen as role models. I don’t really know too much about politics so please correct me if I’m wrong. I prefer to stick to my programs, where language is rigid and being ambiguous means being incorrect.

Orwell then suggests how we can work to fix this language, if you’re interested I recommend the read. It’s pretty fascinating.