I just had to blog about this, Night of the Living Dead, the original movie from 1968 and the only one worth anything, is now in the public domain! You can watch it for free! Online! Where? On Siderite's blog!!

This is a documentary about Daniel Tammet, a guy that is a savant, but without the loss of social skills. He can make incredible complex calculations in his mind, has a fantastic memory, learned Icelandic in seven days then conversed in it on live TV.

The most incredible stuff is when he does math, though. He "sees" numbers as colored shapes and the operations he does in his brain are plastic, rather than numeric. He just sees some shapes that then reveal digits. As a guy in the film said "he does math without even knowing".

As a film it is not terribly elaborated, but you don't need it to be. It just shows the facts and lets you be amazed. I am getting annoyed with IMdb for not having a lot of the documentary films I am watching these days, so I had to blog about them. Bottom line, this doesn't really help anyone do anything, but it does display a normal looking person seeing the world in a completely different way than most of us and being capable of "superhuman" feats. These guys are the real superheroes, even if in comic books they would have probably been the bad guys. You know, no muscles, not really handsome, lots of brain.

The best part of it is that you can watch it all, right here, on my blog, thanks to google videoYouTube. Isn't the Internet fab?

I usually comment on films on the IMdb site, but there was no mention of this program episode there. Watching it was much like reading "I am a Mathematician", immersed in a fascinating, yet inaccessible world, the one of professional mathematicians.

I often wonder where do they get the money to sit years on end at their desk to prove a theorem, without telling anyone they intend to. Anyway, the story is about this guy, Andrew Wiles, who had the dream of solving Fermat's last unsolved puzzle and one that Fermat himself wrote he had a beautiful solution to. You see, Fermat wrote some conjectures, some ideas he had, and did not write the solutions, thus failing to turn them into theorems.

A lot of mathematicians struggled to prove them and they succeeded, all but one, a problem so simple to define and yet very difficult to solve: show that there are no natural non zero values that satisfy the following equation for any N larger than 2 : x^N+y^N=z^N.

It is amazing the math that this guy has to explore to solve it. Of course, I understand nothing of it, and the show doesn't try to make anyone understand the math, but the feeling and effort are truly remarkable. A must see for anyone needing motivation to better himself.

You want to watch the film, here it is:

Without further ado, The Sounds! with their song "Seven Days a Week". Of course I chose this one because the blond looks cute :)



Links: Official site, MySpace site, Wikipedia entry, YouTube search.

No, I am not talking about Dark Water, either. I am talking about water. Penn and Teller went to a rally of some sort and asked people to ban dihydrogen monoxide; water, that is...



So, if you are reading this, dear environmentalists and conspiracy theorists... don't listen to everything that sounds good, because most of it is not, even if it seems to enter the same agenda as yours...

At first I thought it wasn't Linkin Park singing. The sound is a bit different, at least in this song. But I like it. I hope this new album of theirs, Minutes to Midnight, will be as good as their first.

I just remembered this song and, since I haven't been posting music lately on the blog, I put it on. The clip is made by fans of both Lou Reed's song and of the movie Trainspotting, also a favourite of mine, which featured A Perfect Day in the soundtrack. Enjoy!

 Now, you might ask yourself what has the girl in the image with making your own girlfriend. Look closer, it's not a girl (and not a nigth elf either) it's a computer generated image, made from scratch.

While listening to my favourite songs on Pandora, I heard a song that I really enjoyed. The band was The Provenance, from Gothenburg, Sweden. and I immediately started looking for more on the Internet. Here is one of the best songs I've heard in a while, with a video that could have been way better. The music, though, is worth it.

Catching Scarlet in the Sun - The Provenance

They have a site, but not very updated and, since they just released their fourth album but only joined YouTube in October 2006, I guess they are not really Internet people. So let's us lend them a little hand, shall we?
Official Web Site - Actually, their site is dead, their domain for sale.
MySpace site - ugh, it seems that the band has been... well... disbanded. Their last blog entry says as much: "bye".
YouTube user site

Of course, sooner or later YouTube blocked this video. Let's try something else:



It seems there is a fashion of combining English and Japanese in popular music in Japan, but this is really ridiculous. Just check out the lyrics: "Not a Chinaman 'cause I ain't from China, man... I am Japan, man.". Damn that's funny :))

Here are the complete lyrics, translation included

I found this article on BBC News that told of a series of new algorithms for 3D image rendering using the tracing of light rays rather than polygonal rendering. They also use less resources than traditional algorithms. Interesting enough, so I searched the Internet. I think this will usher a new era of computer games, not to mention a boom of cheap 3D movies. See how the reflections generate secondary and tertiary reflections in the image?

Check out the site of the OpenRT project for videos on how this works.

Update 2011: Apparently the site is pretty much dead except the front page. It's an old post anyway.

Other Links:
Ray Tracing basics at Wikipedia
A free open source (GPL) OpenRT implementation

Unfortunately, the lead singer is now in prison after accidentally killing Marie Trintignant, his girlfriend and the daughter of famous actor Jean-Louis Trintignant. This clip is manga-style, but that's not why I put it here, it's because I really like the song.




Links:
Noir Desir at Wikipedia
the Noir Desir site

Ok, let me feed my weird side. This is the soundtrack of a very nice anime series, itself spun from an anime movie called Ghost in the Shell. The series was called GITS - Stand Alone Complex and this was the opening song. This is not the official video for this song, especially since it depicts images from the movie, not the series, but I liked it better. Enjoy!

The original video was removed from YouTube, this is another, same song.

[youtube:h71xGNXpRVo]

Inner Universe - GITS SAC OST
Composed by Yoko Kanno
Performed by Origa
Click here for lyrics and details.
You can also download the manga for Ghost in the Shell and its sequel (GITS 2 :) ) at narutocommunity.net, after a very annoying registration and a lot of popups (or javascript errors).
Try these direct download links, although they might not work:
Ghost in the Shell
Ghost in the Shell 2
Warning: don't use multiple connections or download accelerators. This site only allows one connection from one IP, apparently.

And here is Making of a Cyborg, by Kenji Kawai, the original soundtrack for the movie.

[youtube:-u77XdL8_B4]

I don't usually enjoy live performances better than the studio sound. I am sorry, I know that there is a completely different atmosphere, that the true quality of the artist is revealed in live concerts and that the creativity and spontaneity of the band or singer can only be seen face to face, but the sound is usually worse and the way it comes out not usually exactly what the artist wanted or expected.
But this particular performance from American band Evanescence was very emotional and it moved me, even from a recording on YouTube. Enjoy!

Evanescence - Taking Over Me - live at Rock am Park

theSTART are a Rock / New Wave / Electronica band from Sudden Valley, California, as it writes on their mySpace web site. They also have an official website. I've discovered them quite a long while ago, but back then I didn't use to put images and video to the blog. Anyway, without further ado here is the videoclip to the song Gorgeous, by theSTARt. I hope you enjoy it.


Yesterday, the video worked, today it's stuck on "Loading". Just in case you experience the same problem, here are the available videos with theStart.