Inception

I read a review of this movie that made it sound really great, so I looked forward to seeing it. Turns out it was okay. There was some interesting stuff in it about ideas being able to tell reality from imaginary, but there was a whole lot of your generic action movie stuff in it: car chases, gun fights and fist fights. A little too much of that for my taste. They did have some weightless scenes, and they were very well done. I've seen stuff where the actors are hanging from wires, and I've seen videos of astronauts in the space shuttle. Weightless is hard to fake. Maybe they used the vomit comet (that jet airliner they use for training astronauts) to film these scenes. Maybe they used wires. I don't know. It's science fiction and they use a box with wires to share dreams. Each participant has a wire clipped to their wrist that connects them to the box. Problem with this is that it was too much like virtual reality and not enough like dreaming. It simply looked like somebody gave the action department the go ahead to pull out all the stops. There were a couple of ideas that were interesting. One was that dreaming happens ten times faster that real life. That is, your time sense is distorted. You can have a dream that seems to last for hours and in reality it may only last for minutes. Of course, they have to expand on this and have you go to sleep in your dream and enter another level of dreaming, so now your time sense is expanded by another factor of ten. You go down one more level and now things are happening a thousand times faster in your dream than they are in real life. The second idea is how you get out of your dream. Well, you could just wake up, but they are messing with drugs and multiple dream levels, so we have to have a trick. One is the famous feeling of falling. The other is you die in your dream. That should wake you up. Unfortunately, if you are several layers deep in your dream, you may have to die several times to wake up. And what if you can't tell when you are finally, really, truly awake, and think you need to wake up one more time? That could be a problem. This whole business of having multiple levels or dreams that look like virtual reality reminds me on another movie I saw a few years ago called eXistenZ. The third idea was that an idea could be the most contagious disease. Once you have told someone, and the idea starts to spread, there is no way to stop it. I think I've heard that one somewhere else before. The best part was Leonardo's wife, who she was, or wasn't, and the effect she had on him.

Minor Observation

I walked barefoot to the mailbox this afternoon. It is three houses down. After the first house I noticed the texture of the sidewalk changed, much sharper, like walking on fine gravel or coarse sandpaper. Then I noticed the color was different, much whiter that the usual gray. Someone got out their pressure washer and washed away all the mold and lichen. You can see the difference between the white sidewalk in the foreground and the gray sidewalk on the other side of the mailbox. On the way back I noticed that the driveways (that had not been pressure washed) were not as dark as the sidewalks, but they were not perceptibly coarser. The automobile tires must be scrubbing the mold and lichen off the concrete. Actually, probably just the mold. I don't think the lichen gets a chance to get started on the driveways.

So the question is, did the power washing just remove the lichen and mold, or did it also remove a thin layer of concrete, which left the points of gravel sticking up? As sharp as it was, I am thinking the later.

Update February 2017 replaced missing picture.

Not Bees, Part 3

John Read from Advanced Green Pest Solutions (that's Advanced Pest, much more obnoxious than your regular pest) came out this morning to look at our bee infestation. Not bees, yellow jackets. Bees have four wings, yellow jackets only have two. Well, that simplifies matters considerably. If it had been bees, I might have been tempted to try and physically remove the hive and relocate it. I mean, bees are our friends, and they are having lots of problems these days, so it would have been good to avoid destroying them. Besides, if it was a bee hive, there would have been honey, and somehow I don't think it would have been a good idea to leave a cache of honey inside the wall. Anyway, they weren't bees, so he just fogged them with some kind of nasty and that was that. $120. Well worth it considering

• I didn't have to mess with the poison.
• I didn't have to rip a hole in the wall and then have to repair it.
• I don't have to store the left over poison.
• I thought they were bees.

I think one of the reasons I thought they were bees is the ones in the house were so docile. But I think that was because they were half dead already from "breathing" fireplace exhaust. I mean they were dead (ha, ha) quiet, no buzzing at all.

Update February 2017 replaced missing picture.

Eat Me

My daughter made some "scuffins" yesterday to take with her on her trip to San Francisco. Scuffins are a cross between a scone and a muffin. She labeled a big box of them "DON'T EAT" and then left a few out to satisfy the scavengers. Some wag took a pen to her note and changed it to read "DONuTs for dad to EAT". I confess, I know who the funny guy is.

License Numbers

On the way back from Portland this morning I noticed a Cadillac with an Oregon license plate with only the number 8 on it. No other letters or numbers. Who is this guy? Do you suppose there are other single digit plates? I wonder who has number one. This reminds me of the red Cadillac convertible I saw a few years ago with a license number of "DEA 1". Wonder who that was.

When is a million a billion?

Answer: only in spam. I got a link the other day which pointed to a page of synopses of stories about airplanes. One of these synopses claimed that EasyJet PLC . . . [is] spending approximately 1.52 billion dollars to make it work. That's a lot of money, but if you follow the link, you find that the number is only 1.5 million dollars, which is a minor engineering project, especially minor since it relates to airplanes.

But this reminded me that names for numbers over a million mean something else in Europe than they do here, so maybe we just have a communication problem. I found an article on Wikipedia that explains the difference between the so-called Long and Short Scales. A million is a million where ever you go, but a European billion is a thousand times bigger than an American billion.

If you want to prevent misunderstandings, you can try writing the number out in digits, or use scientific notation. If you are simply trying to stir the pot, well, go ahead and inflate your values by a factor of a thousand. It's doubtful anyone is paying attention.

Super Drawer Closing Action

Went to Ikea with my daughter the other day to pick up some stuff for her new living quarters in Eugene. They have an endless supply of stuff, some utilitarian, some fancy. There were two items that caught my eye. One is the tiny apartment models. I only saw one this time: 385 square feet. Very cool. How practical it would be is another matter. Most of my life, I've been looking for more space, but for the last few years I've come to realize we only use about half of the space we have. The living room is moth balled except for Christmas. The rec room just accumulates stuff, and the dining room table is used for folding laundry.

I didn't find anything about the model apartments on the web, but I did find this, which is a little scary.

The other thing was this:

The action is subtle, and hard to see in this video. Maybe a closeup, or a high speed video would show it better. What happens is that when you give the drawer a shove to close it, once it gets close enough, a mechanism slows it down until it's only open about a half an inch, and then it sucks it closed, silently. Pretty spiffy.

The drawers in our kitchen have rollers, so they go in and out easily, and there is a little ramp near the closed position that will pull the drawers closed, and hold them closed. However the only thing keeping them from making a big bang when they get shoved too hard are the little rubber bumpers stuck to the inside corners, and the glue that holds them is place is weak. They shift around, fall off, get lost. Anyway, even if the bumpers are there, you still get a thump if someone slams a drawer. Not possible with these new fangled ones.

And that's what you get for taking to me Ikea.