Christopher Nolan's Memento

That was a fascinating film. Leonard is an insurance agent whose wife was killed and he was coshed in a burglary, giving him anterograde amnesia. He retains his memory from before the accident, but afterwards cannot lay down new memory. He is trying to track down his wife's killer. He manages his life with notes, important information tattooed on his body, and a series of Polaroids of people he knows, his motel, his car, etc, and trained himself to check them (he can form habits by repetition, which are in a different part of the brain).

( Spoilers? )

Funnily enough, the idea of living moment to moment fascinates me, and I'm impressed at the way he deals with it. However, the idea of letting himself forget or invent things, changing who he is, makes me shiver, and in examining the back-story I always find myself praying his story is essentially true. I think I have a disproportionate obsession with always *knowing*, and of being myself.

I think the idea of different sorts of consciousness fascinates me. I like this film for the same reason I like The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, and Greg Egan books, and books about aliens with radically different intelligence.

Memento

There are some thoughts about the meaning of the film, though I doubt they will make any sense if you haven't seen it.

( Spoilers )

Adams Family Values

That is still a marvellous film. It's not quite as good when you know what's coming, but it's still lovely.

Five by five

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_by_five

In voice procedure (the techniques used to facilitate spoken communication over two-way radios) a station may request a report on the quality and strength of signal they are broadcasting. In the military of the NATO countries, and other organizations, the signal quality is reported on two scales; ... for signal strength, and ... signal clarity. Both these scales range from one to five, ... The listening station reports these numbers separated with the word "by".

Five by five therefore means a signal that has excellent strength and perfect clarity — the most understandable signal possible. Five by five by extension has come to mean "I understand you perfectly" ...

The term "five by five" was popularized by the character Faith in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Faith Lehane used it frequently ... meaning that things were good.

(Someone was asking me what this means. Here, suckle at the informational teat :) There isn't a citation, so I don't know for sure this is completely correct, but I'm sure it's why she says it.)

Quotes

Is P=NP? In a 2002 poll of 100 researchers, 61 believed the answer is no, 9 believed the answer is yes, 22 were unsure, and 8 believed the question may be independent of the currently accepted axioms, and so impossible to prove or disprove. --Wikipedia

John Wilkes Booth (May 10, 1838 – April 26, 1865) was an American stage actor. He is best known today as the assassin of President Abraham Lincoln. -- Wikipedia

"The next morning I remembered nothing but that I had had a "clever" inspiration while guzzling whisky from the bottle. "Oh, no," I muttered, "What did I do?" And I went to the computer to see what damage I had wrought. I called up the problematic part of the program, and regarded my alcohol-inspired solution. There was a clear and detailed comment explaining the solution, and as I read the code, my surprise grew. "Hey," I said, astonished, "it really was clever."

And then I saw the comment at the very end of the clever section: "Told you so."

I don't know what to conclude from this, except perhaps that I should have spent more of my life drinking whiskey. I did try bringing a flask with me to work every day for a while, about fifteen years ago, but I don't remember any noteworthy outcome. But it certainly wasn't a disaster. Still, a lot of people report major problems with this strategy, so it's hard to know what to make of my experience."

-- www.plover.com/blog/

For every Halo, there are a dozen Universal Studios Theme Park Adventure. No offense to the people who wrote that game, I came upon it with a search for "worst video game") -- www.plover.com/blog/

And in fact such a definition is satisfactory when we are concerned with defining a time exclusively for the place where the watch is located; but it is no longer satisfactory when we have to connect in time series of events occurring at different places  -- Einstein

I am now going to do something I’m not sure I’ve ever done before. I am going to praise something Robert Jordan wrote. -- limyaael

Arrow Key--Move.
Z'key -- Blow up self. --Complete controls for a videogame

Lord, do I hate repeating unattributed quotes, because they usually turn out to have been coined by Hitler, or Orson Scott Card, or both -- terrifel, boards.straightdope.com

Hey! eBay! You're not microsoft! Stop fucking with my HTML! --boards.straightdope.com?

Integrating Sqrt(tan). This one's easy. Use the method of guess-and-check. Guess a function, differentiate it, and see if you get the original function back. If you do, you're done. If not, guess again. The key to the method of guess and check is to make good guesses. Here, I would recommend guessing 1/2*tan(x)^(1/2)*cos(x)*2^(1/2)*arccos(cos(x)-sin(x))/(cos(x)*sin(x))^(1/2)-1/2*2^(1/2)*ln(cos(x)+2^(1/2)*tan(x)^(1/2)*cos(x)+sin(x)) . Sure enough, when we check d/dx [1/2*tan(x)^(1/2)*cos(x)*2^(1/2)*arccos(cos(x)-sin(x))/(cos(x)*sin(x))^(1/2)-1/2*2^(1/2)*ln(cos(x)+2^(1/2)*tan(x)^(1/2)*cos(x)+sin(x))] , we get sqrt(tan(x)). It's simple!" -- boards.straightdope.com

Jack's Happy Post

Yesterday and today I've had a productive and relaxing day at work. It's good. Let's hope it keeps up for 200 more :)