Hi y’all

I have just watched that new film Shutter Island starring Di Caprio. Firstly, don’t worry I’m not going to spoil the entire plot with the end you would have never expected, I mean who comes up with such a script. The guy is called Scorsese and I hope I just spelled that correctly.

Anyways, that movie is remarkable in terms of the tension that is being built throughout the whole film. I literally did not get up once for over two hours. The movie is shocking and lacks truly no thing except maybe for a better audio line, AC3 sucks.

I imagined being in such a creepy place and just couldn’t stop thinking about it. What if I were in such a place completely sane and suddenly everybody says “your nuts”, “you belong here”, “you must stay here”, “you are a danger for society”. Mental illness facilities like that one are absolutely scary and I have no intention of going in there at all. I always imagine people who were lobotomised or drugged so that they are not capable of expressing themselves anymore. Such things just scare the hell out of me. Aren’t feeling everything we got? Everything is linked to our brain and if our brain gets mashed up by hardcore drugs what is it that remains?

A lot of films have been released during the last10 years,  informing the audience that they will be replaced by machines.

Think for example of…

I Robot: Will Smith sees that we trust in something highly intelligent and do not expect anything bad, suddenly it turns against us.

Surrogates: latest film starring Bruce Willis as a  policeman in a world where we all sit at home and have our surrogates out there in the real world.

Here is the trailer of Surrogates, so you are able to see my point a bit more clearly maybe.

Where is that leading? I mean in the real world.

We already experience huge changes which originate from the internet and improvement in science. Machines take over human jobs and leave unemployment in certain niches. On the other hand it also makes companies more profitable as machines work and work and work and will not stop unless you make them to.

What else could happen?

I thought to myself, what if AI (Artificial Intelligence) was successfully implemented? Machines would be quite equal to humans wouldn’t they? What defines us? Is it our logical thinking? Is it our ethics which machines wouldn’t have possibly? Well, I guess that Stalin had no ethics as well and yet he was a human being. A rapid cycle would start and machines would improve themselves rapidly. We -- humans -- would be useless, machines could live on their own. No need for someone to program them….

Yes, I know…boring.

But I just thought about it…what if…are we that far away of such an achievement in science as AI?

However…see you next time…

Hi y’all

Some of you maybe know the rap and rock band RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE, however, they are currently rocking UK charts. This is due to an initiative that was initially started on Facebook. It all started in the year 2005, when the first winner of the UK’s version of “American Idol” or “Germany seeks the next superstar” called X-Factor won the contest and was number one during Christmas Eve. Ever since it has been that way but now, those boring pop ballads really started to suck and it is time for a proper dose of anarchy.

At the moment RATM has sold a few more singles that Joe McElderry who is the winner of this year’s X-Factor. Now RATM is enjoying a revival of their rebellious music. Their single which was released 1992 “Killing in the name of” is on the way to the top of the UK charts.

Even the BBC wanted to interview RATM and have them live on air. It turned out to be a fiasco for BBC’s censorship as they always try to avoid swear words and any other kind of offending language. Like FUCK for example. But everybody knows that RATM is not a band that will be censored easily. Despite the BBC demanding the band not to use any offending language, they did anyway. But just check out the video below!

Here is a short extract from an interview with Beatles star Paul MacCartney about what is going on in the UK music business.

“Everyone expects Joe to do it. If he goes to be Number One then good luck to him. He’s just some kid with a career ahead,” McCartney said. “I’ve got nothing against that, but it would be kind of funny if Rage Against The Machine got it because it would prove a point.”

Speaking of all the stuff we are able to download on the internet. I have another thought I would like
to share with you all.
Nowadays, we are able to download all kinds of music, movies and TV-series from the internet without
a much effort but do we have time to consume all that?
We collect and chase just like our pre-historic ancestors did. Teenies download movies even in high definition
and create a comprehensive collection of movies but most of those teenagers do not have enough time to watch it
all.
Moreover I suspect that it is not only the case with movies and so on but with books, Wikipedia, and learning material
in general as well. In today’s society we have access to almost everything we would like to know. But who is
able to apply that knowledge in practice.
I guess there are not many people who have the capability to consume all they want. There are rather people who do not have sufficient time to learn whatever they wish.

So, what shall we do?

I must say, I do not know. But if you have ever wondered, where it all comes from, check the video below.

Hello my dear reader

I’ve been thinking about quite a lot of things recently. My thoughts were especially cruising around that whole debate about internet downloads and so on and so forth. It seems to be a never-ending discussion. The thing is, people download all kinds of content from the internet and do not feel obliged in any way. We do not care about an artist nor a film director or an actor.

You maybe think: “Why should we?” Celebrities wear bling and drive Bentleys; we should not give a single penny of our little money. Though, there are perhaps cool bands making cool music in a garage in Melbourne or there may be a rapper rhyming like the next 2Pac in a New Yorker underground club.  These artists need to be supported, why wouldn’t you buy their CD?

Let’s say you live somewhere in the middle of Europa, how on earth could you possibly know a band in Melbourne or a rap artist in NY? The answer is simple: Internet. Most musicians I listen to are not superstars and I only came across them while I surfing the net looking for artists making similar kind of music I already listen to. Then I download it.

Two things happen then. Firstly, I decide whether I like the music or not. Secondly, I have the music I want. There is no reason to spend more time looking for an internet shop which sells that CD. Furthermore, there is no need to wait for delivery of that CD. CDs are inconvenient anyways.

A lot of people may not like this attitude but it is what happens on uncountable computers around the world. Bosses of major music labels in particular do not like people like me, who download music freely. They are afraid to lose their job because they realise that their job is useless.

Nowadays, an artist can put his music on his webpage and offer his work as a free download. This has a bunch of effects. On one hand his music will be distributed freely across the internet and on the other hand the artist has taken care of his marketing. No need for the middle-man at the major label company. Exactly, that is why MGM and Universal want to get rid of Rapidshare.com and ThePirateBay because they are platforms which act as a new middle-man with the little difference that they do not take the most part of the artist’s sales.

Then, you probably think, how an artist could earn money by offering his work freely on the internet. That is the point, where all his fans he has on Facebook, Twitter and MySpace come in. If that artist is good and a talent, making good music or whatever, people will come to his concerts, they will buy his t-shirts and other merchandising stuff. That is what fans do; they want to express their admiration for someone. That is exactly the way how artists should earn their salary. Eliminating the unnecessary middle-man and promoting themselves free of charge on the internet.

There is so much more I could say but I’ll save that for another post.

Almost forgot a video. Here we go, with an introduction to fines given in different countries if you download music from the web.

A friend has reminded me to write another blog entry and I am glad that he did so. Because I was so busy lately that I couldn’t catch a break and write something.

But here we are now…and I would very much like to ask something.

Have you ever tried to think about something and could just not come up with it? I do think so. It is just that we do not remember things very well sometimes. Like names of people we only met once or when if we forget to buy milk on the way home.

But then, after a few minutes of thinking what else to write in my post I thought of something completely different. I asked myself, what the difference may be between the words remind, remember, recall and came to the following conclusion.

To remind means that someone or something is bringing something to your mind that you maybe would forget without it.

Example: I’m so glad that my mother reminded to ask my teacher for a reschedule of my math exam.

To remember means that a have to remember something on your own and not by any outside circumstance. Or if you maybe are not able to remember something then you cannot recall it. We maybe remember a lot of things but we by far cannot recall all of them at command.

Example: I just remembered that I haven’t locked the car this morning.

To recall means that you remember of something and tell other about it.

Example: As far as I can recall he was not very polite the last time you have seen him.

Finally, as always a little Youtube related to my post. It’s a song by Jack Johnson in which he sings about a girl and his love.

“Do you remember when we first moved in together…”, so he askes her if she is able to recall her memory.

Or in this video you will hear Audioslave singer Chris Cornell singing that things around him don’t remind him of anything.

This short scene is a very well-known one from the cult film PULP FICTION. Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta want the suitcase of their boss back from those guys. But as it’s a Quentin Tarantino movie it’s very special one and the dialogues are just really crazy sometimes.

“Hamburgers, the cornerstone of any nutritious breakfast”

The mention what a quarter-pounder cheese is called in France and he says it’s called a Royal with cheese. The reason is the metric system which has not quarters or inches or anything like that everything is decimalised.

In the U.S. there are pounds as a measure for weight or inch for 2.54 centimetres of the metric system. Today we still use inches to describe the size of screens for example. A 42 inch LCD.

By the way, the word “fuck” is used 271 times in that movie.

Vocabulary:
smart = intelligent
beverage = something to drink

Hello, hello my dear reader….

Science is an amazing thing, isn’t it? Ancient cultures have discovered and worked out the basics of what we call today science. It is amazing what discoveries the old Greeks made for instance Aristotle thought of the world as a spherical globe. And since then it was a known fact that our earth is a globe and not flat. Some people think that during the dark ages the earth was considered to be flat but this mistake origins from Washington Irving’s fictional tale A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus.

Later however people like Galilei had to justify for their non-sense in front of the inquisition court. Science was not popular in the church. Therefore a lot of scientists couldn’t work freely in public and publish their discoveries. If there wouldn’t have been the dark ages I could tell that a lot of scientific achievements would have been made much earlier.

Let’s get a little bit further and to a specific subject: chemistry. What wonderful subject it is. Began as alchemy when people first tried to make Gold. During 250 years people found ways to create almost anything but Gold, what they were originally looking for.

This brings us right to the present and again a very entertaining and gripping show. It’s called Breaking Bad which means that you for one or more times just won’t do what law tells you. And this is indeed a good title for this TV production. A high school teacher starts cooking Meth to earn money.

Meth is one of the most dangerous and damaging drugs in the world. It damages your organs and makes you look much older than you are because of a ingredient (I just can’t come up with the name but it doesn’t really matter) which interferes with your skin regeneration and that could make a 23 years old addict look like a 40 years old wasted man.

Vocabulary:
spherical = like a ball
dark ages = time between the end of the roman empire and start of the renaissance also middle age

Hello…

Let me show you a fantastically, gripping and humorous TV series. The series is called Chuck and he’s the main character of the series. Its plot is set in California where Zachary Levi is starring Chuck, a guy kicked from Stanford and currently working in the Buy More. One day he receives an e-mail from his old friend which contents highly confidential data. When he opens it Chuck loads a whole bunch of government secrets in his brain and needs by then protection and supervision by the CIA and NSA. The reason is that he is now a kind of computer that keeps secrets and flashes on things he sees. This might be a terrorist or something related to a secret of the government.

Variety describes it as:
Chuck possesses modest charm, impressive stunt work and another mildly appealing reluctant hero.

I love the series, it’s so entertaining and funny but see for yourself. Here’s the promo.

Vocabulary:
gripping = very interesting
confidential = secret
a whole bunch = a lot
supervision = to be observed, to be watched, to be looked after
reluctant = not voluntarily, not like to be but has to

Today, we’ll watch a excerpt of the David Letterman Show. The show is a typical late night show, late night shows are quite popular in the U.S.. David Letterman is just one of those guys who invite stars to their show and talk with them about recent films, books or anything else that interests the audience in the states.

So, here we go with tonight’s guest whose name is Sacha Baron Cohen. A well-educated Cambridge graduate of history and entertainer best known as Ali G. and Borat. He’s introducing his movie Brüno which is coming into cinemas.

Reviews of Brüno idicate that the movie is a has-to-be-seen one for people who can neglect the immorality and disgust of the film itself and see its message behind showing that a lot of people are just pretending to treat all others equal.

USA Today wrote:
Brüno offers more shock value for your moviegoing dollar than any other movie this year.

LA Time wrote:
Brüno is an idiot savant of penetration — breaking through borders, boundaries and anything that resembles good taste on his way to whipping up as much cultural anarchy as he can[...]

Vocabulary:
excerpt = one part of the whole
recent = quite now, not long ago