lundi 1 mars 2004

Personal search I'm happy with the search engines I use, especially DEVONAgent (Mac OS X), but the San Jose Mercury News reports a bid to get personal: "Modern search engines do a lot of things well, but they can't read minds. When someone types in the keyword 'jaguar,' most search tools can't tell whether the user wants information about the animal or the British sports car. That may be about to change." Via Lasica's 'New Media Musings'. While the notion of personalising your searches by monitoring where you browse may have a certain appeal, I'd hate to think where that could lead. Targetted advertising might be the least of it... 10:44:38 PM  link   your views? [] 'I wonder if on Mars it can rain upwards' Scientists are excited by reports from the Red Planet, it seems: "Evidence that suggests Mars was once a water-rich world is mounting as scientists scrutinize data from the Mars Exploration rover, Opportunity, busily at work in a small crater at Meridiani Planum. That information may well be leading to a biological bombshell of a finding that the red planet has been, and could well be now, an extraterrestrial home for life." ('Space') Especially chuffed is "former Viking Mars lander investigator" Gilbert Levin, now 79 and the chairman and executive science officer of a multi-million-dollar biotech and IT company, Spherix ('Mission to Mars', Business Gazette).. "Levin points to Opportunity imagery that offers conclusive proof of standing liquid water and running water on a cold Mars. Other images show the rover tracks clearly are being made in 'mud', with water being pressed out of that material, Levin said [to 'Space']. 'That water promptly freezes and you can see reflecting ice. That's clearly ice. It could be nothing else,' he said, 'and the source is the water that came out of the mud'." 10:10:05 PM  link   your views? [] Burying Oscar "...[Robert] McNamara survived the 1960s, when he contributed more than most to the slaughter of 3.4 million Vietnamese (his own estimate). He went on to run the World Bank, where he presided over the impoverishment, eviction from their lands and death of many millions more round the world. And now here he is, the star of Errol Morris's much-praised, in my view wildly over-praised, documentary The Fog of War, talking comfortably about the millions of people he's helped to kill." "Oscar Winning Director Thanks War Criminal Before Audience of Billions" was how Alexander Cockburn at 'Counterpunch' saw the show that I, devoid of a television, didn't last night (via the perspective of ex-taxi driver and former professor of film history Richard Oxman, who wrote "Oscar's Obituary" for 'Press Action'). 9:13:52 PM  link   your views? [] 'Paycheck': a fortune thrown out of the window Let's look on the bright side. "The good news is that there are some decent action scenes that save 'Paycheck' from the garbage can. There is a good motorcycle chase scene (where did [Ben] Affleck learn to drive like a Hollywood stunt driver ... ahh who cares?) and a good final showdown back at the lab. But the movie is just too ridiculous. 4/10." That was Dr. Gore's comment at the IMDb. The trouble with those routinely explosive scenes is that while they were noisy enough to stop me falling asleep, my brain had switched off completely by then. Not even Uma Thurman, of whom I had high hopes after 'Kill Bill vol. 1', could redeem this film, which was the first serious failure of a bid to bring a story by Philip K. Dick (official site) to the screen I've seen. For once, I was disappointed by 'Les Inrocks' (Fr), which ran an interview in the current issue with director John Woo, as the film was released in France, that had me thinking 'Paycheck' could be worth queuing to see. Unfortunately, any hopes of intelligent life in this film had gone out of the window long before the first sheet of plate glass got spectacularly broken. Plenty of things get smashed, sometimes in de rigueur slow motion. In the interview, Woo failed to say that his visual metaphors are laid on with a trowel, while if the deliberately repetitive passages had a point to make, I'm blowed if I got it. The best thing I got out of this film was subsequently finding "the inside-out story of how a hyper-paranoid, pulp-fiction hack conquered the movie world 20 years after his death," an article Frank Rose wrote for 'Wired' shortly before 'Paycheck' was unleashed. 8:35:21 PM  link   your views? []

nick b. 2007 do share, don't steal, please credit under artistic licence terms; contributing friends (pix, other work) retain their rights.