2001: A Space Odyssey

I just read 2001 by Arthur C. Clarke. I also watched the film by Kubrick.
The film feels very arty, and I remember after seeing it the first time thinking "what just happened?". The book is much better from an understanding point of view, and actually after you've read it, you can see where Kubrick is going with it.
The book is very readable and I really enjoyed it. Much of it is still in prediction territory, regardless of the name. You really have to remember that this was written in 1968 before the whole moon landing thing.
I love the coriolis tech used in the space stations and ships, although I'm pretty sure you need a radius of at least 300m to feel comfortable. The 10m radius of David Bowman's exploration ship's rotating section would drive a person insane.
The themes are all very cool, although I was disturbed by the implication that at alien race may have been needed to push apes into humanity.
The book should have ended two chapters earlier than it did as well, with the Starchild. The subsequent chapters are about a pre-Babylonian hunter/gatherer tribe meeting aliens, and an exploration group on the moon finding a different alien artifact. Irrelevant and irritating. Clarke was ahead of his time with the whole consciousness run on computers, then as pure energy. 1968. Damn.

Commercial TV

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Commercial TV seriously pisses me off. I don't watch it if I can help it. In fact, the only time I watch it is when I want to just chill out on a Friday or Saturday night with Sinéad in front of the telly, and even then I'll push to watch a download.
It isn't especially the commercials that piss me off on commercial TV. Some commercials are entertaining, and you can deal with commercials quite effectively by hitting the mute button. Try it. Seriously. No sound will probably just annoy you at first, but you'll soon come to appreciate the absence of complete shit being shouted at you.
What really pisses me off is movie truncation. OK, so you've sat down to watch a movie that perhaps you haven't seen for a long while, or maybe even its a relatively new one that somehow you just missed in the [DVD rentals/Cinemas/downloads]. You've dealt with the ads nicely with muting (v.s.) and really quite enjoyed the film right up to the point where the credits start rolling. At this point, the movie has not fucking finished and the commercial TV assholes squish the credits into a third of a screen, mute the movie and start spouting bullshit at you about moronic TV programs you aren't going to watch because they make your brain bleed out of your ears. "Hey, assholes! I was watching that!". I often want to read some of the credits to find out who some of the actors were, but more importantly, the end music is an important factor in leaving you in a particular state of mind. It can actually be a large part of the film. Directors take care with this, and artists are paid lots to have films finish with their work.
What I also hate about commercial TV is the way they move schedules about, very often without telling you anywhere in advance. Say there's a particular science fiction series you've been enjoying. One week, they might just not fricken show it all, the next week they could put it back by an hour. "Sure, we'll just show this at 12am instead of 11pm, no one will care". Assholes. Or worse, bring a show forward by an hour, so you can sit down in time to watch the credits. No wait, you never get to see credits, they're spouting bullshit at you. It's enough to drive you to downloads.
Oh, yeah, most of the programming on commercial TV is just moronic bullshit you aren't going to watch because it makes your brain bleed out of your ears. I may have mentioned it. But that's OK. I don't watch it. My favourite moronic bullshit I don't watch is "Current Affairs" shows. These sensationalist, purile, indignant "fact finding" stories make me want to puke.
OK. deep breath. I think I'm done now.

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More Cores.

You have probably heard about Moore's law driving the relentless improvement in computational power we've seen the last 40 years. Unfortunately, this "law" isn't about power or speed, but purely about the number of transistors able to be packed onto a chip. Speed has historically been a direct result of this as the clock speed was able to be driven up with the smaller device sizes.
While Moore's law is still happily churning along, and probably will for at least another decade or two, recently processor speeds haven't really been increasing very much. Instead we are now seeing multiple cores (copies of a whole processor) embedded in chips. Currently, that's mostly 2 and 4 core chips, but since this is now the easiest way to use all the extra transistors that can be packed into a chip, over the next 10 years we'll see many many cores on your desktop. Numbers like 32-128 I suggest.
Cool right? But there's a problem. Most of today's software only knows how to do one thing at a time, so if you had a 128 core machine today, it wouldn't feel any faster. We need to write more software that uses multiple cores. Its called parallel programming, and it's much harder than normal programming as it is prone to sudden and massive program failure as threads wamp each other's data. It's been suggested that 1% of programmers actually know anything about this.
At least I may be hold onto a job for the next ten years.

Dollhouse

Check this out, a new series from Joss Whedon, Dollhouse. Looks really cool. Promo videos here, here, here. Starring Eliza Dushku. Niiccce. Essentially about personality/skills/experiences programming of the "actives/dolls", hired out to clients to be whatever they need them to be. Airs in February. Can't wait. Oh, and for BSG and Terminator to start again....

First view of exoplanets!

This is a fantastic milestone in astronomy. While we have inferred the existence of planets around other stars using the gravimetric wobble effect, this is the first time we have actually "seen the light" bounced off them. Sure, that light has passed through a whole bunch of filters and other optical effects to increase the contrast against the brilliance of the host star, but it is still real.
See also here and here.

The Selfish Gene

I just finished reading the Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins.

This book makes for really interesting reading, if you are interested in evolution. Certainly, I now have a much better understanding of how natural selection works, but by far the most impactful element of the book is how it changes the way you view life in general. Dawkins proposes a view of life that is fascinating and irresistible. This view is that to better understand why we are here and even how we are here, we should focus on the viewpoint of the genes. Genes were here first, and in general we can refer to them as replicators, the things that actually copy themselves, and thus live on through geological time. Our bodies, us as entities, as creatures, are simply robots, or survival machines that the replicators use to give them the best chance for survival in their timescale. Our bodies are honed, via the process of natural selection acting on the various variations and mutations of behaviour that the genes produce.
In the process of human evolution, we have developed fantasticly complex brains capable of great self awareness and intelligence. Obviously the mutations and variations that led us down this path has been a great success story for our genes, for they now dominate the planet through us. However, this intelligence and self awareness gives us the ability to ignore many of the behaviours produced by our genes, thus taking control slowly away from them. Dakwins discusses his meme theory of evolution of cultural behaviour as part of this, separate but analagous to genetic evolution.
Everyone should read this book.

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