Monthly Archives: April 2004

Butterfly Effect!

Posted on April 4, 2004 | Leave a comment

I wish I hadn’t gone to see this. I wish I had waited for the DVD. Why? buterflyeffect Because if I had waited for the DVD I could replay the few scenes I had questions about over and over again. And more importantly I could see the deleted scenes; I’m certain there are at least two and they would answer my other few questions. Why? Becuase the movie takes care of all the little details and I’m sure they didn’t forget these few, I figure they were editied out and I have to know the rest because I enjoyed this movie so much. BUT it’s not even out on DVD yet! This was a great flick.

You need to understand two things: Chaos Theory and Time Travel (both relativly simple concepts, not).

  1. Time travel – If you travel into the past don’t interfere with anything you may screw up the future. I.E. don’t go to watch your parents meet for the first time since just being there to observe you may do something to influence the outcome. (Almost a Heisenberg/Schroding dilemma which is you will influence the outcome).
  2. Chaos Theory – It is said that the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Chicago can create a hurricane in Peking. I.E. If you stop and buy gum on the way to watch your parents meet, it may be the last pack of gum that your mother-to-be can’t buy and now when she meets your dad-to-be she has bad breath and he doesn’t ask her out and you vanish in a puff of smoke.

It’s a great movie, it’s my favorite movie concept, time-travel, and as such it offers many what ifs. The only downside, it was kind of violent and I almost want to say it was in an unnecessary way, but I’m sure that without it, it might have changed how I viewed the movie.

I have to also say I laughed the absolute hardest I’ve ever laughed in a movie in my life. One scene was so ironic it hit me all the way to my funny bone. I hope I used ironic correctly (I think it’s ironic that most people use the word ironic incorrectly, I hope I used it right the third time too).

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Visual NewsMap

Posted on April 3, 2004 | Leave a comment

So you can visually see the Google! news now. You can break it down by types of news, location or even older news. It’s pretty neat (or at least neat enough to blog about).

“Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. A treemap visualization algorithm helps display the enormous amount of information gathered by the aggregator. Treemaps are traditionally space-constrained visualizations of information. Newsmap’s objective takes that goal a step further and provides a tool to divide information into quickly recognizable bands which, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe.” For more information go to http://www.marumushi.com/apps/newsmap/ and they do some other cool stuff if you go to their home page.

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Is the world a better place? 3x Thursday

Posted on April 1, 2004 | Leave a comment
  1. Is the world a better place today than it was 5 years ago? Support your answer. No. I feel the September 11 tragedy and the war and the finances of the country has really hurt us the last few years. Plus we’ve lost a shuttle our schools are suffering which means so are our children and I’m sure there are more than a few other things that I haven’t listed. I know this answer focused on the country and not the world but I don’t think they’ve been making tremendous strides the last five years in the rest of the world. Most five year blocks previously I’d say have gotten better.
  2. If you knew what the future held 25 years from now, would you want to continue life to that point even if you knew the outcome wasn’t pretty? Why/Why not? Yes! If I had the ability to see the future, I’d have the ability to change it. Heck, even without that power we have the ability to change it.
  3. Do you think our elders (we’ll put a cap on it and say 65 and older) ever thought the world would be like it is today? What will you tell your grandkids (or your friends’ grandkids) about your first 25-30 years on this planet? No, they never imagined it would be like today. It’s changed too fast for most of the masses before that time to have guessed. Many of them do not understand the world today. The futurists might have, but they’d be wrong too, we didn’t get as far as they thought we would.

    My first 25-30 years? I got to learn as much as I could, I was there when the first computers start coming into peoples homes, we didn’t blow up the world, the cold war ended, I remember when no one had cell phones, answering machines or e-mail, I was able to travel when you could show up fifteen minutes before your flight and you didn’t have to take your shoes off, I was building web sites before people Yahoo!ed and Googled, we all learned what AIDs was, what computer viruses were and how fast things could really change.

From 3x Thursday

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“Does it bring us together, or draw us apart?”

Posted on April 1, 2004 | 3 comments

A quick evaluation on whether a technology is good or not. That is a pretty short evaluation and I like it (it’s short, it’s powerful and it meets my 3 second attention span requirement). I got this from a Mike Rohde blog entry that was referring to a Howard Rheingold article quoting an Amish person as to why cell phones are okay for them. It’s got to be causing some conflict for them, remember cell phones are a lot more these days than just phones they are e-mail, web browsers, PDAs, video games, calulators, cameras, mp3 players, etc… and some of those functions are standard these days. The Amish aren’t the focus of my entry but they are the round about source of the quote.

Back to the quote: “Does it bring us together, or draw us apart?” – While it is a nice short evaluation on technology, the continuum between the two ends of the spectrum leaves a lot of grey area. But I’ve been thinking about it every since I read the entry. Computers (sans Internet) can take people away from the people they know. The Internet can bring them the world but also take them away from people they know. But for some it could be a creative outlet – photography, music, movies, art design. This could be what brings them out.

My question is what are some very clear technologies that fit at one end of our spectrum or another?
There is no research here, I’m just making it up as I go along (so don’t get upset with me).

  • Digital Photography – probably brings people together more.
  • Video games / on-line gaming – probably separates the gamer from live people (but more virtual friends).
  • Laptop Computers – possibly keeps you in touch but at the cafe and resturant and airplane you probably aren’t paying attention to the world around you (where the people are). This is probably true with handheld video games, cd/mp3 players, PDAs, text messaging, etc. also. You could probably say about regular old paper books too.
  • DVD Players / Home Theatre – this could be social or not just depends if you stay home instead of going out or if you have friends over. As the technology gets better, why leave the house?

    No big conclusion, just thoughts about the topic. If you think of any please leave me a note.

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