Viraj's Weblog

Just got my own Jotspot wiki. All I put up there so far are some pictures, but it's very cool!

I saw Flags of our Fathers reluctantly, but thought it was a good movie about that famous flag-raising picture. I had no idea how much controversy was behind that picture. Letters got great reviews, so I decided to check it out.

The movie harks back to the great war movies like Patton. It's told from the side of the Japanese, and after seeing Flags, the scenes are shown in such a way where you say, "Oh, I remember that scene from the other side!" The combination of these 2 movies is just a great pair and an amazing achievement in filmmaking. Of course the movie is very sympathetic to the Japanese, but I love movies that tell stories from the other side, instead of the one-sided "bad guy" "cowboys and indians" cliche. Eastwood succeeds in making you care about these different people, even when the whole movie is subtitled and in Japanese.

The battle scenes are incredible. They convey a true nature of war where there is no setup or preparation before an attack, or an attack happens while preparations are being done. The far-away shots of the pock-marked mountain with tiny explosions are almost peaceful from a distance. As if when seen from far, it just looks like a bunch of tiny animals fighting. The onslaught on the island was an amazing amount of firepower.

The goal of military training is to make you consider your enemies subhuman, on the level of rats. It's only when you are empathetic towards the enemy do you realize how wrong war is. The trouble these days is that empathy is missing. That's how tribal battles were fought. We haven't come much far from throwing spears.

Absolutely appalling new math teaching "methods".

Here is an interesting sex test that tries to predict what type of brain you have. I found out about it via a very interesting BBC show called Secrets of the Sexes.

Probably the most amazing thing on the show was a professor being able to predict the outcome of a runner's race of 6 athletes just by having photocopies of their hands. It turns out, the ratio of the sizes of your ring finger to your index finger determines how much testosterone you received while in the womb. The bigger the ring finger compared to the index finger, the more 'male' you are. The professor was able to predict the outcome of the race with only 2 errors, swapping the 3rd with the 4rd. But he got 4 correct (including 1st place and last), all without ANY other information on the runners. Pretty amazing.

Woman who have a high ratio tend to be better in visual-spacial abilities. It's interesting that a simple thing such as finger length can tell so much.

There's a really interesting interview with Francis Collins in the February 2007 issue of Discover. I wrote about his book earlier. Here's a quote:

Before we start trashing religion, we should recognize that religion down through history has been misused by lots of people in terrible ways. But it's also done some profoundly good things. What has atheism done to help people? The worst examples of human carnage in the 20th century came from the atheist regimes of Stalin and Mao. The principles of faith are generally altruistic, gentle, and loving. The problem is when someone takes those principles and twists them to suit their own purposes - that was the Inquisition, and that is suicide bombers.

So what would you say to the scientists who are fervently opposed to religious thought and practice?

Is there any dogma more unsupported by the facts than from the scientist who stands up and says, "I know there is no God"? Science is woefully unsuited to ask the question of God in the first place. So give the religious folks a break. They are seeking the kind of spiritual truths that have always interested humankind but that science cannot really address.

I am not a big fan of the Lord of the Rings-type of movies. They just seem to me too much fantasy. So I had some doubts about Pan's Labyrinth, but with the tremendous reviews it has been getting, I just had to check it out.

This movie was incredible. It is truly a fantasy film for adults. In fact I thought some scenes were actually too violent. There was one scene in particular that had an army captain bashing in someone's nose with a bottle until his nose virtually disappeared in a blob of blood. The torture scenes were also bad. At some point I said to myself, "WTF, does it really need to be this violent?"

But the movie is beautiful. It reminded me of another movie I saw recently called Addison's Wall, which describes how a child copes with trauma by fabricating his own fantasyland. Generally, the fantasy in Pan's Labyrinth parallels events happening in the real world. The real-world events are so grotesque that the fantasy is actually believable. All of the strange characters in the fantasy have their counterpart in reality, and the story is reminiscent of a much darker Alice in Wonderland.

It's said the movie is the director's labor of love, and it really shows. Every scene is crafted beautifully and the camera transitions between fantasy and reality flawlessly. The film is about growing up, and how we deal with life's obstacles. Ebert's review describes it wonderfully:

Ofelia's challenges do not arise like arbitrary plot obstacles; they are organic to her (and the movie's) development. The girl learns not only to follow instructions, and that there are heavy prices to pay for failing to abide by them, but also to trust her own instincts about right and wrong. In order to find her true self, she must also find the strength to break the rules imposed by authority.

Notes from director Christopher Smith:

I think the reason why many people lose their love of the [horror] genre when they become adults is that this illicitness disappears, but why then has horror had such a recent revival? I think the answer lies in the fact that the films are becoming that much more demented and sadistic. Films like Hostel, Saw, and the Asian films Audition and Oldboy make adult audiences squirm all over again and have them talking about scenes afterwards, just like they did when they were at school.

I carried this sense over into my new film Severance. Comedy horrors usually fall into one of two camps: comedies with a splash of horror like Shaun of the Dead or Scary Movie, or horror movies with a splash of comedy like Scream. With Severance I wanted to walk straight down the middle of the line so that the film would be equally scary and laugh out loud funny. There's a scene in the film where a character gets his leg caught in a bear trap. As his friend tries to help free him, they keep slipping and letting the jaws of the trap snap back onto his leg. this goes on and on and on and with each snap back the audience gets a new emotion, ranging from horror to comedy to comedy to horror, because for me the two are always intrinsically linked. You laugh because you shouldn't, and because you shouldn't, you laugh more.

There's a scene in the movie where a character accidentally shoots a passenger plane out of the sky with a ground-to-air missile; it gets one the biggest laughs. I remember the financiers in England tried to cut the scene on the basis that an American audience would find it offensive and in bad taste. I fought and won the battle and then screened it at American film festivals. What happened? It got one the biggest laughs. Why? Because it's wrong. It pushes the boundaries of what's considered good taste. You can actually feel the audience saying to themselves as the missile goes up, "Oh no, I can't believe he's going to do that -- he did do that -- I can't believe it -- that's funny!" And it's funny because it goes against what is deemed acceptable and it therefore becomes an illicit pleasure.

Go see it!

Here is the clip that did Idiocracy in.

Democracy Now has an interesting interview by Jon Alpert with Saddam after the Gulf War that was never aired in the US.

Well it's been a year since I've been in Mountain View and at Google. I can hardly believe it. I have been renting an apartment, and occasionally did some real estate hunting. The prices here are absolutely ridiculous, but I gave in and bought a small condo in Mountain View. The price is correct on that page: 279k. I could've probably got a 3 BR townhouse in FL for that much. Zillow seems to think it's worth 352k, so I think I got a good deal. Honestly, it was the cheapest condo for sale in Mountain View , so I couldn't have done too bad.

I ended up getting an 80/10/10 mortgage. This is basically 10% down, 80% on a 1st mortgage, and 10% on a 2nd mortgage. What's the point of 2 mortgages? Well here in CA if your loan is 80% or less than the home price, you don't have to pay Private Mortgage Insurance (PMI). Many buyers do 80/10/10 here because everything is so damn expensive. I have a 5.8% fixed 30-year on the 80, and like a 9% on the 10. The latter I plan to pay off pretty quickly, so I'm not too concerned about the high rate.

I'm moving this week, which is always fun. As if this weren't enough, I've enrolled in a Compilers course at Stanford through their SCPD program. The plan is to get a Software Systems certificate, and if things go well, maybe transfer to a Masters program. I just have to maintain a B or higher. It will probably be hectic the first few weeks with my move, work, and school, but I think it's a good opportunity.