Looking Out To Sea

We got to see James Cameron’s new epic on Tuesday night, Avatar in 3D.

The three-dimensional aspect was very well done — much better than Beowulf in 3D which was hampered by terrible graphics. It looked fabulous and, who knows, maybe the added depth helped to make the action clearer.

Unfortunately the plot was fairly boring and the characters were about as shallow as it’s possible to get. In fact, it was largely the characters from Aliens — including Sigourney Weaver herself — fighting the Corporation and their unethical ways. They had a knuckle-head military guy, who appears to be a subtle blend of Duke Nukem and Kilgore from Apocalypse Now. No, I tell lie, there was nothing subtle there at all. They had a sleazy company guy and they had a mining operation set up to gather Unobtainium. I couldn’t help but snigger that they actually called their precious metal unobtainium. I wonder if they use it to make MacGuffins?

The clock applet in GNOME is surprisingly useful to keep track of friends and family in foreign places, and considerably less naff than having real clocks on the wall labelled “New York”, “Paris”.

This is a screenshot from my desktop at work, showing locations of company offices, my brother and the launch site for the NASA test rocket last month. (Don’t judge me!)

I really like being able to see whether someone is likely to be up just by looking at the map. It also makes it very clear in winter which countries get more sunlight than others (hint: it’s the ones having their summer time!). And those poor countries across the top which hardly see a ray of sunshine all winter. :-( I shall have to check in six months time how the coverage of light/dark across the globe has changed.

Anyone else got a similar gizmo which is apparently useless but that gives a great deal of excitement?

Last week we pulled out the Mathematics Notes book from secondary school¹. This was the book in which we had to write all the definitions and meanings for what we learned; and it had to be written in ink, for some reason that escapes me now.

Can you remember the formula for the volume of a sphere? Could you derive it if you had to? I’m happy to say I remembered it but I haven’t had a go at pulling it together from first principles. It’s all that integration, innit?

If you had kids in ten or twenty years’ time that were learning this stuff do you think you could help them with their homework?