Fighting

At the risk of confessing something of my violent side, I do have a bit of an obsession with the mechanics of fighting (much much more the theory side than the practic-al/e side). I want to do a kind of party video (humour me) of the best movie fight scenes - you know one of these random video monitors of some random out of context action that just makes the party/bar scene more complete than if it were absent (it could also be great sporting moments or the high-speed cinematography of billiard ball interactions, but for the moment I am thinking fight scenes - actually car chases would also be a good theme).

So, to that end, what are the great fight scenes ? The opening fight scene in Reloaded is definitely going to be in - that is a really nicely choreographed scene (my preference is definitely for techniques in the trapping range). The stilted (perhaps punctuated is a better term) style of the Thai boxer in Mach (Ong-bak?) and Tom yum goong (sorry, I am not sure what the English titles are) is quite appealing for its screen effect. Bruce and Jackie would obviously feature. Who else ? The close-in fight at the end of Equilibrium with the hand guns is also very well done.

To what degree would this fall under fair-use ? Can I post it to YouTube without fear of repercussions ?

10 years to the day!

Today marks my tenth anniversary outside the country I was born in and in the country I moved to! So that is two anniversaries to celebrate! :-) [Is my world-view too positive?]

How have I spent my day you might ask ? Well:

• I started with getting up late (7.30am)
• Read some RSS feeds (anybody interested in my OPML file?)
• Returned some DVD's to the shop
• Went to starbucks and 'wrote' a small app in a MDA development environment
• Was happy to see it build and run on the mobile device emulator on my 5 year old laptop running on batteries (stamina mode) in a semi-reasonable amount of time (the sweet thing about developing in meta-data is that subsequent deployment to different platforms (with different form-factors!) is trivial).
• Made some notes from a book I recently read (Purple Cow - Seth Godin)
  
• Had an organic hamburger lunch - unfortunately what on the menu said "red hot chili" came across as "someone waived a chili over the top of it".
• Went to the supermarket and looked at some bags (!) and bought some supplies for the week ahead.
• Returned home, opened a nice bottle of red wine, sat on the balcony (the weather is perfect (really perfect! :-)) and read a magazine/did some email/wrote this entry.
• It's now 3.36pm and I am wondering what to do next.....

So, here's today's question with regard to this blog. Should I....

1. Start another blog under my real name (optional exercise: define real) - note that this does not imply that I want my identity linked to this blog (though I will consider a migration path for existing readers).
2. Start another blog under my real name talking about my company.
3. Come up with a more definite theme for this blog (suggestions welcome).
   
4. Continue with this blog as is (=ad hoc updates about random topics).

Your vote counts!

(In some sense :-) )

Funny who you see...

...at the traffic lights at the end of Jardine's Bazaar in Causeway Bay, Hong Kong. I thought I recognised a Mancunian accent (though it took an embarrassingly long time to do so despite standing right behind him). I have to further confess that it wasn't until I was looking through a magazine later that I saw his picture and subsequently deduced who he was (and still is as far as I am aware).

[For those that can't be bothered to follow the link, he was/is Ian Brown, former lead singer of the Stone Roses.]

Vista Vociferocity

This is a bit of old news now (I found it lying around in a draft post that I forgot about) but interesting to see the potential for increased productivity (entertainment ?) that Vista promises to bring....

nonsensical fashions ?

For those who have read "Fashionable Nonsense" in which a couple of physicists managed to get essentially meaningless text accepted to a peer-reviewed social sciences journal, a social scientist has got his own back (albeit to a smaller degree) 10 years later.

Cognitive illusions

I just finished reading "Inevitable Illusions" (one of the books on the several that I got a while back) and I was going to write up the cognitive illusions (as the book is a bit waffly) but I just found a blog entry that does that job. The book also claims that several of these cognitive illusions come from people's lack of intuition concering conditional probabilities - so perhaps I will write up Bayes' rule to see if we can't sort everyone out on that front :-).

Before this book I read the "The Eudaemonic Pie" which was fascinating - I like these long term amateur yet serious project books. It's about a group of people who set out to beat roulette with a computer in a shoe (no small feat given that this was done around 1977). The experiments they did to gather the raw data, the subsequent analysis and modelling, the prototyping, the miniturisation, the problems in the field, etc......all great stuff!

Chat

So, you probably noticed the new chat window at the side there (unless you a new visitor, in which case "Welcome!") - now you can chat with me (oh joy!) even if you aren't on any of the IM networks I use, or don't know who I am... :-) .

[I also added my delicious bookmark link below the chat for easy access - I know everyone is keen to follow the hop-points of my herd of electronic sheep.]

A glazed torus...

I had wondered what was behind all that...

...makes you think...

This and this.

Comments ?