The Duchess True-story period drama that actually managed to change my level of appreciation of Keira Knightley from white-hot hatred to tolerance bordering on admiration.
Eagle Eye Brain-turned-off action flick where poor bastard Shia Labeouf has to follow instructions from mysterious female voice on phone or everyone dies. Great bullshit computer interfaces throughout. Very stupid, but does the job it sets out to do. I still white-hot hate Shia Labeouf.
Body of Lies A surprisingly weak and unsatisfying Ridley Scott Iraq-war thing starring Leo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe. Starts off good enough but gratuitous romance sub-plot totally fucks up the pacing.
Nights in Rodanthe End-of-flight bottom-of-the-barrel scrape where Diane Lane and Richard Gere play damaged middle-agers who find a second chance at life through their sickly-sweet romance. An assault on intelligence, and even more on consciousness.

I’ve blinded myself with science.

Every time I read about physics, I get stuck at the whole Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle thing. I actually remember straining to understand it one night as a (very nerdy) teenager, and later on in science college, I would spew back the theory without ever really understanding it. Now I’ve finally picked up A Brief History of Time, and sure enough, nothing is more certain than my getting blocked at the Uncertainty Principle.

Here’s my problem:

Some believe that because everything in the universe is governed by a set of rules, if you know the state and velocity of everything in the universe at a given point, you could infer, by applying the rules of the universe, the state of everything at every other time. Hence everything can be said to be predictable. Let’s call this Determinism, which was at a time accepted by the scientific community. That makes sense to me.

But Heisenberg says that you can never measure the position of a particle perfectly, without changing its velocity (this is because you’d have to shed light on the particle to measure its position, and the light would alter the particle’s velocity). So, you can’t ever perfectly know the position AND velocity of a particle. Either you’re uncertain about its position, or about its velocity. Fair enough.

What’s always bugged me about this is that it seems to rest on nothing but an experimental limitation. Just because an experimental limitation introduces uncertainty, it doesn’t follow that uncertainty is a fundamental property of the universe. Yet Hawking explicity says it is; that this is the case no matter what experimental method you use to measure velocity or position. Why?

Hawking even says that some supernatural being could know all (ie. not be limited by experimental limitations), but “such models of the universe are not of much interest to us ordinary mortals”. Well, why wasn’t it a problem to accept Determinism, when there are also obvious experimental limitations to knowing the state and velocity of every particle in the universe?

More importantly, why must the very way the universe works be affected by our ability to measure it? It seems ballsy to suggest that the universe itself operates uncertainly, simply because we ordinary mortals can never know it perfectly. Sure, science must measure and predict, and the introduction of this principle increases the accuracy of our predictions. But why not say that’s the best science can do to be predictive? Why does it follow that this uncertainty is a property of the universe itself?

In other words, why assert that God plays dice with the universe? Why not say, “God doesn’t play dice, it just seems to our imperfect observational abilities that he does”?

I absolutely adore this birthday card I received from a colleague yesterday. In case you’re wondering about the pegleg, Comet’s leg got hurt last week (but she’s ok). Merci JF!

Someone took exception to the fact that my BAFTA picks reflected only the small variety of games I played last year. True, but the nuance is I don’t play games I don’t like; I don’t feel bound to play unenjoyable games out of professional duty. I only feel duty-bound to try to play them. As entertainment, they shouldn’t be work to consume.

This reminds me of something a friend once quipped to me: men will watch any sci-fi, good or bad, whilst women will only watch good sci-fi. Translation: depending on how you feel about a form of entertainment, you’ll have different thresholds of tolerance for them.

In film school, I prided myself on seeing every film that came out. This eventually broke down when I found myself obliged to consume upsetting or violent movies I really didn’t want to see. By then my career had veered away from film, professional duty no longer applied so I gave myself permission to avoid them. As a result, some notable greats are still in the limbo of the unseen, for various reasons: The Pianist, There Will Be Blood, American Gangster, 28 Days Later, Boys Don’t Cry.

I’m way more willing to see movies of questionable quality because I like them better than games, but also because they are much less of an investment. I haven’t lost as much time and money if I see an entire bad movie as I have if I play a bad game halfway through.

Still, even with respect to movies, my limbo of “ought to see movies” is uncomfortably crowded, and since I’m now trying to reorient my career towards film, those lost souls are coming back to haunt me. I’ll probably bite the bullet and consume all those depressing and unsettling greats in a fell swoop, perhaps interspersed with all the insubstantial Princess Diaries I’ve also (but rightly) skipped.

I’m curious: what do you do when you need to consume something you dislike because it’s required for your professional culture?

ACTION & ADVENTURE
Call of Duty 4, which I finished in two sittings last week; it was overall one of the best put-together games I’ve ever experienced, complete with a couple of moments of genius and unfortunately a few of intense frustration. As a game I’d probably give it a 95%, which means it ranks about the same as a movie I’d give a 60% rating to.

Other nominees include Fable II and Grand Theft Auto IV, both of which I found too abysmal to play more than an hour.

ARTISTIC ACHIEVEMENT
Assassin’s Creed

BEST GAME
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

I’m tempted to say Rock Band, though I’ve never played it. I just love the idea of Rock Band.

CASUAL
Wii Fit narrowly steals this one from the excellent Boom Blox, due to its superior replayability (not to mention a theme dear to my heart).

GAMEPLAY
Mario Kart Wii was my game addiction of 2008, with Call of Duty 4 in close second.

MULTIPLAYER
Of the nominees, I’ve only played Left 4 Dead and Mario Kart Wii in multiplayer mode so I won’t choose, but I’m surprised EA Montreal’s Army of Two didn’t make the cut. It was one of the best co-op experiences I’ve had in the past year. Most frustrating co-op game: Fable II. Just lots of broken gameplay overall IMO.

ORIGINAL SCORE
This isn’t really “original score”, but I have to give Fallout 3 a big shout-out for its awesome 1940s soundtrack.

STORY AND CHARACTER
I’ve played several of the nominees, including the story-driven Mass Effect, but I wouldn’t really vote for any of them as having an “awardably” compelling story or profound character development.

TECHNICAL ACHIEVEMENT
Assassin’s Creed. Although it wasn’t a great success in terms of gameplay, Assassins brought the medium some breakthroughs in terms of animation and artificial intelligence.

USE OF AUDIO
Call of Duty 4: the one game where I actually noticed the quality and immersiveness of the audio.

GAME Award of 2008
Call of Duty 4

My honourable mentions: Mario Kart Wii, Boom Blox, Army of Two

When I was a kid, my grandmother Laurette and my grandfather Yvon lived in the apartment above ours. Every day I came home from school and went right upstairs to play cards with him as she made me a grilled cheese sandwich. Although the whole family is made up of rather direct, no-nonsense people, my grandmother was by far the most direct person I’ve ever met.

She wasn’t a sentimental woman either. When I got hurt she didn’t take me in her arms; she would swiftly disinfect the wound and put a band-aid on it, later admonishing my father for moving into a place with stairs. At Bingo, when she got close to winning but lost, she’d never fail to colorfully rip into the person who had won, even if the winner was our priest. Still, because she wanted to be polite, she’d say “Allez donc pisser, vous”. When my cousin, aged only 4, loudly complained on a bus that the lady sitting next to her didn’t smell good, and my aunt tried unsuccessfully to keep her quiet, Laurette said “Ben c’est vrai qu’à pue!”

Yet for all her down-to-earth realism, every Christmas she built a virtual Disneyland in her living room for me and my cousin, filling us with wonder like a pragmatic fairy. When I last saw her in the hospital over the holidays, she didn’t recognize me but kept talking about Andy’s daughter’s recent achievements. She told me about my new job. My new house.

Laurette would have been 93 on Sunday, but she passed away last weekend, after a few months of illness.

Since then, I’ve received a lot of messages from surprising places, and I’ve learned that Laurette was neighborhood grandmother to many who weren’t related to her. Although I never heard her spontaneously tell anyone that she loved them, this week I’m happy to know that many hearts were touched by her uncompromising tough love.

Bye Mémé, tu vas me manquer.

On October 1st, I started an experiment in which I would be a vegetarian for 100 days. I wanted to do it long enough that it would be a challenge and also long enough to see the effects. With the 100 days now over, I’m ready to share some mostly anecdotal, completely unreplicated personal findings.

- Physiological: I lost 7 pounds (about 5% of my weight) and feel generally awesome, but I don’t credit vegetarianism for this. The veggie diet coincided with a training program which I think is responsible for these positive changes. However, the experiment did show that one can easily engage in rigorous strength-training whilst avoiding meat, a concern that had previous kept me from adopting vegetarianism. Energy levels remained high, and got my 65g daily protein by including lots of legumes.

- Gastronomical : Armed with a few recipe books and some online research I found it easy to make vegetarian meals that both Jonathan and I enjoyed, and I made many new discoveries along the way. I’m now a bulgur master. At no time did I feel any general meat cravings, but did feel one specific craving early on when a crispy slice of bacon was staring up at me. Otherwise even when wonderful dishes were served (Blork’s turkey at thanksgiving, Mom’s tourtière at Xmas), I found honest satisfaction in the vegetarian side dishes. I was also able to take in a bit more of the yummy, healthy fats (from nuts and olive oil) because I was ingesting no unhealthy fats from meat. Oh, and Indian vegetarian takeout rawks.

- Financial: This was surprisingly the area of biggest impact. Every week I went to the checkout counter thinking, “okay, this one’s going to be costly” having bought so much, and every week I was stunned by the bill. Weekly groceries for two people, including Jonathan’s meat (exclusively smoked or canned fish), ran us 45-50$ for the duration. The previous typical bill was about 125-150$.

- Social: This is definitely the area where I felt the sacrifice most dearly. Being a vegetarian is most inconvenient when dining out or at other people’s houses. Even when you bring a veggie dish to someone’s dinner party, it feels like an imposition. Additionally, the special diet creates one more constraint when choosing restaurants, or the necessity to negociate with chefs who aren’t always pleased to alter the delicate balance of their dishes. That having been said, there is less social pressure to bend the rules when you’re a strict vegetarian than with anything that seems negociable such as being on a diet or being a loose vegetarian. People don’t question you on it. Except your dad, of course.

Conclusion

Overall, one of the most surprising things is how little difference being a vegetarian makes in one’s life. It was generally an extremely easy and positive transition for me to make. As a result, I have decided to remain vegetarian, but only at home. The only difficulty arose when dining out or at people’s houses, so when I’m out I’ll eat what’s there. Since about 80% of what I ingest is food I make, with this easy guideline I should remain mostly vegetarian.

This page on how to make a good powerpoint presentation is presented in a way that makes me think I shouldn’t trust it.

I honestly thought for a second it was a clever way to make its point.

The people of Greenland pass a referendum regarding greater autonomy from Denmark.

Here’s a crappy picture I took of Greenland on the way back from Scotland last September.

There’s people there?