Why did the chicken cross the road? To get a ticket of course. story here Some people, including me, have no life i guess.

The phrase wooden means (to me) anything a character does that comes accross as flat, two-dimensional. If that's so then the main protagonist, Atikin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen), is a redwood. Dear god, someone find him a non-acting job so I don't have to see his whining any more. Ewin McGregor (Obi-Won) continued to be great. Yoda was the main star, and the official star wars site confirms this with a huge pict of Yoda (Frank Oz). Natalie Portman (Padme), forget two-dimensional, she was one-dimensional.

Here's the thing though; the story was excellent. The special effects, nothing better. But basically the film tried too hard, did too much. It tried to tie in the first and last trilogy, and mostly succeeded. But by doing so anyone who's seen the last five can almost mouth along the incredibly bad dialog. Lucas is a genius story writer and special effects guy. Why he thinks he can write scripts I have no idea. Episodes 5-6 (Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi) were not scripted by him as I recall, yet they were his story.

The 'Force-ful' persona of the main characters and story end up saving the movie, which degraded to a bunch of special effects fighting scenes featuring one big character. The end result is a film that was badly fragmented and lacking cohesion. I hoped for more. Disappointed I was by the second trilogy; the only real star was Yoda. And the outcome, all but inevidible, for one strong with the Force can see through time.

Hopefully there will be more Star Wars movies; it's a very rich environment. Already a fan movie (SW:Revelations) has cropped up and isn't that bad; it was a huge and heroic undertaking by some huge, dedicated fans.

Links:

IMDB review

Official Star Wars site

SW: Revelations site

E3, entertainment something expo, basically the video game conference every year, invitation only. It's to see what's great and coming out. A few people in the blogsophere are talking about it. One person (Bill Harris at Dubious QUality) observed two very interesting macrotrends of game producers. 1) Women are now more into games than they were in 1999. My wife certainly seems to like them somewhat, which is shocking. The game design people need to realize that, though. The fact that it has cross-gender appeal is what makes The Sims and other design type games (ie Rollercoaster tycoon) huge.
2) The PC is dying as a gaming machine. Basically the consoles have similiar horsepower as a PC, and everyone can stick in a disk and have the console game working. NO compatibility issues. THe Xbox, which we have, is an Intel machine running Linux. I think it's a pentium 2? Anyway, it runs pretty much fine. Although while playing Knights of the old Republic recently the game went slightly wacky. The problem with consoles will always be their lack of sophistication. No matter how much graphical horsepower they have, many genres are just not possible on consoles. Real-time strategy, anything mouse based, anything with more than a dozen controls (flight sims, for ex). Anything remotely complex to play (because of the user stupidity issue, not becaues of the platform.

Anyway E3 time is always fun since you can see whats coming down the pipe. More and more I'm not very enthusiastic, mostly because I can't see myself actually enjoying these as I once did. Well, everyone grows up. And i'll still play the odd very interesting game every once in a while.

Okay, seriously lefties, WTF (what the f***). So 5 cases of Koran 'mishandling' were discussed today at a press conference. We don't know what kind of 'mishandling' these were. 3 were not accidental, 2 were. Does anyone realize that most of these prisoners are from countries where Christianity is illegal, and people caught handling a bible are put in jail? (Saudi Arabia has that practice). (Discussed here)

Amnesty International also released a scathing report of US prison practices, specifically about Gitmo. (report here)
Specifically the directer-general Irene Khan said:

"The USA, as the unrivalled political, military and economic hyper-power, sets the tone for governmental behaviour worldwide. When the most powerful country in the world thumbs its nose at the rule of law and human rights, it grants a licence to others to commit abuse with impunity," said Irene Khan.

I agree in certain respects, but since when did the worst regimes in the world listen to the U.S. and how we treat prisoners? So because of us imprisoning alleged terrorists and people who tried to kill our forces, we are suddently the next Stalin? I think there needs to be some reality checks. Let's see.

Darfur, massive genocide.
Iraq, massive Genocide.
former Yugoslavia, massive genocide.
U.S. Imprisoning several thousand people who have tried to kill our forces, and touching their Koran without latex gloves.

Yes, the great Satan lives and reigns in the U.S. When these other huge, massive problems of hundreds of thousands people dying have cleared up, then AI can talk about our prisoners. Until then...be quiet, liberal swines. We are not in charge of the world, we are not the world's moral police.

This news sucks. The Feds raided a popular bittorrent site in response to release of Star wars 3 through this peer-to-peer file transfer technology. In December the most popular site, suprnova.org was closed in response to a MPAA lawsuit. For a while (a year or so), it was easy to find movies, tv shows, or software via bit-torrent, but now that has dried up mostly, as most sites are pushed further underground. I wonder if all this has really affected piracy numbers. I'm guessing no.

Fidler on the roof, the blogger is a woman who's christian and recently married; she now has a book about her marriage's first four years and it's ups and downs. Good to see someone writing about reality. Also good to see 'out of the closet' christians; people who are not afraid to be called christain. I'm christain but not practicing. Anyway it's important to recognize that marriage is a process and there are lots of newly-wed people like myself trying to make it work.

Gibbie (my ferret) passed away this weekend while at the vet. The vet said she had very high blood glucose level, and a high fever. I think she went into a diabetic induced coma, from which she didnt' recover. She was very old and her passing was expected. I am relieved that she didn't suffer that much.

Koreans were able to make patient specific stem cells in 11 patients, from 2 to 65, male and female. Story here. This is huge, and shows how far behind the US will be if the federal ban on cloning is not reversed. Patient specific stem cells make it possible to cure or treat disease by reversing genetic defects; anything from Alzteimers to cancer to SCIDS; really anything that has a genetic component. We may be as little as 5-10 years before genetic treatment becomes a reality.

Next step: patient specific organs.

Next step: immortality. If all of your cells can be regenerated, without genetic alteration, such as mutations or telomere shortening, then aging would not occur.

Update: Bush reaffirms the federal ban on theraputic cloning. Asshat. (story here)

here

This is a cool blog about a cool area; antartica. They have a gallery of shots showing the aurora australis, which is like the aurora borialis but on the opposite pole. Hard to believe these shots are real; they look right out of a video game or something. Way cool.

So NewsWeek published a blurb about Gito people flushing Qurans down the toilet. So the muslim world goes ballestic. So the whole thing is absurd. Here is a great quote from a commenter on Austin Bay's site.

Austin has a ton of stuff on the whole incident.

Drop a crucifix in a glass of urine, and its art.
Complain about it, and the left tells you that you are a phillistine.

Drop a Koran in a urinal, its desecration and cause for bloodshed. Point out that many Muslims are overreacting, and the left tells you that you are a culturally insensitive bigot.

Comment by Scott Free — 5/15/2005 @ 11:07 pm

This looks promising: Merck announced results from a new drug (Revlimid) targeted for MDS, a bone marrow neoplasia syndrome which strikes mostly older patients. It's somewhat like leukemia apparently (MDS reviewed here) . Basically it's a group of syndromes in which there are not enough normal healthy bone marrow cells to repopulate the blood system. Cells in the bone marrow are stem cells that regenerate differentiated blood cells; these differentiated blood cells only last a few months in teh blood stream.

Anyway, what is remarkable to me is that a huge number of patients had 'deep remission' of the disease (60-70%) from a drug that was only expected to treat symptoms. I haven't looked into the study design or marker enough to understand it much, but it seems like the genetic marker for the disease was significantly afffected in remitant patients; in other words it seems like the drug specifically killed the unhealthy stem cells, which could give rise to full-blown leukemia. (AML). Anyway, good news and we need more of the sort.

It's funny how only a small fraction of big pharma's income is from cancer drugs (10%?), but so much research and so many drugs are available.

I'm noticing alot of 'good news' stories for big pharma lately, which is good because I want a job in the industry when i graduate soon.

Very interesting article here. What is it? It's a sleep disorder, where one can suddenly fall asleep with little warning. The author got into two serious accidents because of it, and the NTSA estimates 100,000 accidents/year is caused by narcolespy (or falling asleep at the wheel, i'm not sure which). Anyway, its serious and surprising that so little is known about it. When patients are on medication that costs $20/day, and there is only one drug known, i'd say it's a serious problem.

Here

Star Wars 3 is supposed to be pretty good. We'll see. I remain skeptical of the second and last trilogy.

There is no update. WOrking like crazy, doing alot of experiments, getting alot of results; unfortunately all negative. Something like 10 experiments in a row have worked (the controls worked), but the results were negative. I am doing an experiment in mammallian tissue culture which I hope works (should, according to the literature), and then I can try the definative experiment of the dissertation. We have identified one phosphorylation site via mass spectrometry, but are unable to show functional consequences of it. Which I think there is. I think the story is potentially very interesting, but i can't get the results to back that up.

It's worse than we thought (HT: Dave Barry)

Death to the bunny!