No wonder they hurt. Look at this one!
Kidney Stone Photos
By way of J-Walk.
Month: December 2004
Goldfish racetrack
I’ve often thought bowls are inhumane ways of keeping fish. After all, where is there to swim? So Isabelle Leijn from the Netherlands designed a figure-eight bowl that keeps the fish a’swimming, probably eternally wondering what’s around the curve. It also doubles as a planter.
So Close
Dir: Corey Yuen
2002
At heart this is a rather silly film that tries to mix melodrama with spectacular violence in the grand tradition of John Woo, but has trouble keeping the two hanging together.
Hsu Chi and Vicki Zhao (the female lead in Shaolin Soccer) play sisters whose parents were murdered years before by thugs over their father’s magical software. Now, they use the software–a program that can tap into any security camera anywhere–as assassins for hire. Lynn (Hsu) does the leg work, Sue (Zhao) stays at home behind monitors and guides her. After an opening sequence where Lynn kills off an evil CEO and jumps off a skyscraper to safety, rookie-but-brilliant cop, Hong, played by Karen Mok, is on the case and begins to track them down.
Just recounting the plot makes no sense. But for some reason it hangs together, as it’s only a backbone to have the sisters in a cat and mouse with Hong, and, like Woo, set up a series of fight scenes where adversaries slowly become partners against a larger menace (here, the same corporation as seen in the beginning). Woo’s homoerotic attraction here becomes thinly vieled (and barely explored) lesbianism between the cop (who wears slacks and smokes those silly long cigarettes) and the heavy-lidded Sue. Meanwhile, Lynn is involved with a drippy guy who may cause her to leave the business.
When the women have at it and bring the smack-down, the film comes alive. Nothing’s as brutal as the Bride/Elle Driver fight in Kill Bill 2, but the scenes are well shot and cut, and nobody stops for a witty quip. There’s also gratuitous shots of Mok’s pantie-clad booty and lots of Hsu Chi flesh. Who can complain?
But seriously, if you’re going to be an ultra-secret assassination team, why the huge summer house? Who pays for this? When Mok gets framed for murder later in the film, it makes no sense. Nor does a computer system that on one hand is so advanced it offered real time shots over the network of security cams, but on the other seems to take ten seconds to send a 1k email.
So Close is pure eye candy, and that’s great, but it’s hard to imagine the script making it out of development so quickly here. It’s truly slapdash. It’s to the credit of the actors, mostly Mok, who I find fascinating even when she’s hamming it up, that the movie isn’t a total stinker.
Forget Megapixels, try Tom Swift’s Camera
Analog jumps back into the game and kicks serious patootie.
Tom Swift’s New Camera, Ready for Space and Spies
As an adolescent, Clifford Ross was an apathetic science student but obsessed by Tom Swift. Now 52, Mr. Ross has become a character appropriate to a boys’ adventure novel. An artist and businessman, he recently became an inventor – of a camera unusual enough to capture the attention of serious scientists, including the kinds who work for the government, experimenting with nuclear fusion, space travel and spy systems. What grabbed them were photographs Mr. Ross took that allowed them to see with astonishing clarity a tiny footpath on the top of a Colorado mountain seven miles from the camera.
Yesterday and today, Mr. Ross is talking gigapixels, art and the essence of visual comprehension with a dozen scientists, at a meeting at New York University. This summit, closed to the public, was organized by Mr. Ross and his new scientific pals at the government’s Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, which specializes in matters pertaining to nuclear weapons and threats to national security.
For that last line, read, “How can we spy on our citizens better?”
Liquid Lenses For Camera Phones
Bloody hell. Who would have thought oil and water could be used to make a lens? Roland Piquepaille’s site has the scoop.
Liquid Lenses For Camera Phones
In this article, the Register writes that ‘camera phones will soon have lenses made from nothing more substantial that a couple of drops of oil and water, but will still be capable of auto focusing, and even zooming in on subjects.’ The lenses, developed by the French company Varioptic, contain drops of oil and water, acting respectively as conductor and insulator, and sandwiched between two windows. These liquid lenses could replace glass or plastic ones because of several advantages: no moving parts, leading to better reliability; a very small power consumption; very small dimensions (diameter: 8mm; thickness: 2mm); and a very fast response time of 2/100th of a second. You can expect the first camera phones using these liquid lenses as early as Christmas 2005. These lenses might also appear in medical equipment, such as endoscopes, optical networking equipment or surveillance devices. Read more…
Matchbooks
This person’s Flicker photos are all old matchbooks.
How Machines Work: Famous Keyboards
The Keyboard Museum site has plenty of cool stuff, but only today did I check out their page of Flash tutorials explaining how organs like the Hammond and the Rhodes get their particular sound. Joseph Rivers animations are something that could only exist on the web.
Threadless
Too cool. Apparently this has been going on for some time (so I suck, la la la). Best designs get printed on a limited run of t-shirts, all very affordable. This month is their Christmas blow-out sale, with shirts going for $10 each!
Ubicomp and Glue
Anti-mega Outboard Brain (a blog with a great title) has an interesting post on Ubicomp (i.e. ubiquitous computing), suggesting user desires (“I want my music collection available at all times, wherever i go”) and plotting out what exists and what doesn’t on the way to attaining that goal. AMOB does a better job at explaining than I do, so read the entire post.
Ubicomp isn’t a box you will buy from your local electronics retailer, plug in, and switch on. It’s lots of really small pieces loosely, sloppily joined – glued together.
Take the idea of “I can communicate with people wherever I am” – surely a big part of ubicomp. I know this technology isn’t everywhere (ubiquity is here, just not evenly distributed), but I think that it’s safe to say the mobile phone has pretty much made this a reality.
Infernal Affairs
Dirs: Andrew Lau and Alan Mak
2004
Infernal Affairs was the big HK blockbuster of 2002, and unsurprisingly enough, it still hasn’t opened here (except for the big cities), so when I saw it in Taiwan, I bought it, 2-DVD version too.
Andy Lau plays a cop who is secretly a Triad spy. Tony Leung plays a Triad member who is secretly a police mole (but for so long he’s perhaps crossed the line). Though we are informed they trained long ago at the academy, neither knows of each others’ existence until Lau’s character goes into the audio shop where Leung’s character works to buy some speakers. To each other they’re just regular guys. This, among other twists in this revved up genre flick, will also be the last time they meet until the end.
With such a simple premise that offers such complex conflicts (both men are suffering crises of character and identity) directors Andrew Lau and Alan Mak speed things along until it’s hard to know exactly how either character will react. On the other hand the speed also undoes the finale, which resolves itself too quickly for my tastes. (There is an alternative ending which I have yet to watch.) It’s not that I couldn’t figure it out, just that the pace feels wrong.
Andy Lau is again good in this film, two in a row. When he’s playing these sort of characters (authortarian types who may just be traitors–as in Flying Daggers) he’s fine. When it’s comedy or romance, he comes up short. Tony Leung’s world-weary character, beaten down for years on an undercover assignment that will never end, walks through the film, skulking but sympathetic. When he salutes his commanding officer’s passing funeral procession, hidden down an alley so nobody can see him, we fully understand his sad situation.
The double-DVD contains making-ofs, trailers, and other goodies, but all are in Chinese.