Caraccioli

Huh. According to IMDB, Peter Falk's daughter Catherine is actually a detective.

Well, all of the stuff coming from the rovers comes out of one camera and that's sitting a few feet off the ground. So you can't get a lot of expansive scenery shots. I may be confusing it with the images from the Galileo mission to Jupiter, but I think the images coming back are black and white and they computer colorize them using various reference material. So that might further limit the effectiveness of the images. They do indulge in a lot of really well-rendered computer images of the Martian surface including some cool shots of the airbag padded landing. But it doesn't capture that sinking stomach feel you get from watching some of those almost pointless (storywise) flying and roller coaster IMAX movies.

A friend came across some research on consciousness that she thought I would find interesting. It's a pair of papers by an anesthesioligist with Baylor University in Dallas. Basically, Doctor Walling cites research by Walter Freeman of University of California Berkley. He believes that by plotting EEG scans of various animal's brains, he can prove that consiousness in humans follows non-linear dynamic equations (which are at the core of chaos theory). Plotting non-linear dynamic equations in chaos mathematics is sort of funky. I won't go into a lot of details because it gets confusing, but you basically plot intevals of current data against the last data (integration) and look for something called attractors. Normal systems settle into a regular pattern that sort of revolve around or devolve into a geometric pattern. The shape of this pattern is the attractor. The movement of a non-chaotic system will generally be attracted to points, curves or manifolds (Oyyyy, topology. Maybe Blackjohn can explain that to us.) Non-linear systems don't follow such neat patterns and tend to create all kinds of weird system attractors - so weird that they've been named "strange attractors". Fractal structures are an example of a strange attractor at work. In a normal system if you upset the movement, the system will wobble and eventually return back to moving along the path of the attractor. (A clock pendulum is often used as an example. It typically swings back and forth. If you upset it, it will wobble in a "non-normal" way until it eventually settles back into its regular motion - swinging back and forth.) However, some systems are chaotic and when you upset their movement, they move wildly, never returning to a "normal" pattern of motion. (This is why a faucet may drip in an inconsistent manner - drip...drip drip...drip.drip and so forth.) Blah, blah, blah. Point being, you find chaotic systems by their "motion" which is distinctly different than non-chaotic systems. Ok, so Walter Freeman has been plotting data from the EEGs of various animals including humans. What he's discovered is that the "higher" up you go in the animal kingdom, the more the plotted EEG data follows fractal attractors. Some animals show regular, linear patterns - these include anemones, starfish, moth larva and earthworms. However, Freeman found in his data that the EEG data starts to exhibit chaotic behavior in Crayfish and continues to become more chaotic as we move through Perch, Catfish, Minnow, Bullfrogs and Dogs. The highest fractal dimension appears in humans. Walling says that "the fractal attractor we observe could be evidence of a repository for the information required for higher-dimensional brain activity." He therefore believes that consciousness may be described by a 4 dinmensional phase space (a mathematical space where all of the dimensions of a system can be accurately respresented) which means that consciousness is outside of a "normal" 3D anatomical space. Basically, consiousness exists outside of your body, based on chaotic mathematical representations of the EEG data. It all seems a bit tenuous to me. You have to buy into the idea that the EEG data accurately represents consciousness. I wonder a great deal about the whole concept of consciousness in the first place. For example, if you (whoever actually has read this far) and I watch a car crash, we will almost certainly give different descriptions of what happened. This makes me wonder - is your version of consciousness the same as mine? If they're different, then is any data set truly valid? If we're all unique, we may each have higher or lower order representations of the EEG data. What if some people actually do function in 3d phase space? Still, it was interesting to find scientific data relating chaos theory to the functioning of the brain. Y'know. (Follow all that? :angry: )

When I was married my ex- was going down the hallway to get ready for work where she found one of the cats sitting in the middle of the hallway holding a mouse between its paws. She vividly recounted for me the sound made when the cat looked down from her and abruptly bit the mouse's head off. I understand it was sort of a loud crunch. My ex- is usually pretty sharp and cool-headed, but that seemed to really unnerve her. (I inherted the other cat - the useless one who actually ran away from a mouse once. ) (Although I am not kidding.) Hey, since this is random topics... I saw Roving Mars at the local IMAX theatre this weekend. It's not what you'd call the most exciting movie, nor do I really understand why this was made as an IMAX movie...but it's really nice to see NASA succeeding at space exploration. Those two rovers have outlasted their expected lives several times over through good design, some clever manuvering by the JPL folks here on Earth and more than a little bit of luck. They continue to roam the surface of Mars. Kudos to Disney for making a nice little upbeat film about the plucky little robots wandering around our sister planet.

Disney is not preparing number 4. The script is not being written per Ted Elliot and Terry Russio. Any speculations that are surfacing on the internet are rumors and cannot be used in any future POTC scripts,that being a legal issue with Disney and the writers, again per Ted and Terry. Hm. Iron Bess hints that something may (or may not) be in the works. I know for a fact that she works for Disney in the back office. What's the lineage of your absolute knowledge?

Whoa! Ragetti and The Shark - seperated at birth?

That drives me crazy because most forum software cannot scale the pic, so it stretches the screen out beyond the edges of a normal browser window. Here, it only stretches it out for one post. Some other forums, it stretched everything in a thread out and all the rest of the post text ran off the screen! You were constantly pushing the slider bar back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, just to read posts because someone didn't know how to scale pictures. Irritating.

I saw the first one six times in the theatre. I waited with trepidation for the second one... resurrecting Barbossa...pah. (I'm still bitter. <-so's my dog Phydeux) Plus it's hard for studios not to go the "They loved it the first time, so let's give them more and exaggerate it to the point of caricature!" route. Well....I don't know if I'd go that far. There were a couple of problems with Jack's role and some of them were just inevitable. First, he wasn't fresh. Point of fact, he can never be fresh again - we know him. That may be as responsible as anything for your perception that he lost his edge. Second, he was a supporting character in the first movie - the main story was about Elizabeth and Will with the Barbossa/Black Pearl/Captain Jack story being the backdrop against which Will and Liz play out their drama. So Depp could just sort of mince through scenes, mugging and stealing them at will (or at least, from Will). But they practically had to bring him to the fore in this movie. Depp did too good a job and now his character is a victim of Depp's success. While his characterization was really interesting in the first movie, he was still sort of a one note Johnny. (Heh.) So it's tough for him to carry the second movie without adding dimension to him - which waters the character down some. Third (building upon the above), the main character has to give the audience something to latch on to. If you ever watch director VOs in these kinds of movies, they always talk about how some character in the movie gives the audience a reference point. In the first movie it was Will. He was thrust into the world of piracy and had to "discover" many things - allowing us to discover them with him. In this movie, I think Sparrow is more the central character. In order for us to identify with him, he can't be all sass and duplicity. They have to flesh him out more - make him a bit more human so we can identify with him. Now you have a conflict - he's not the character he was in the first movie, he's a bit softer. Norrington is a company man. He always was. As for the guy he gave the heart to...he's the new villain of the piece. You can't have a movie without creating discomfort for the audience. That means creating someone we can all universally hate who gets the upper hand. Watch any TV drama that lasts and what do you find? Just such a character. Davy Jones will be redeemed somehow, his crew released or satiated or some such and the EITC company "geek" will get his due as the villain. Bet on it. (Note: I have no knowledge of the 3rd movie and studiously avoid the information on the web regarding it. This is just speculation based on Hollywood sequel SOP and musical cues (believe it or not.)) I'd have to agree that Sparrow was what drew the crowds to the first movie. Everything else had been done before. Of course, it was all done here in excellent fashion which helped. One of the things I really missed in the second movie was the excellent background character portrayals, as I mentioned in my first post to this topic. In the previous movie we had Murtogg and Mulroy, Gillette, Twigg, Koehler , the prisoners in the cell next to Jack's, the Harbormaster and so on. In this movie, we had Jones' crew, but they were so covered in makeup that you couldn't tell them apart. Even the scenes in Tortuga were less interesting as I recall them because the action focused too closely on Depp's doings.

The most interesting pet I ever kept was an opossum. His mother was killed by a car and he was sitting in the middle of the road crying. So I did what any kid does...took him home to mom and insisted we save him. We raised him for about six months, but he died of pneumonia. He was surprisingly good natured for a wild animal. Nasty, wiry hair though. (We named him Armpit because that's where he liked to go when you held him. I guess it's like a marsupial pouch...)

I don't own any re-enacting gear (except that shirt that appears in my user photo). So I make undead pirates instead... ...and monkeys. (From my pirate-themed haunted house room this year. Gratuitous link: Pirate Haunt)

Jenny Depp?

Looks like she's thinking... "Where the *&%$ is he now?" Cheers to your supportive, patient, and incredibly tolerant wife, Jack!

Oooooh, this was a really good one! It appeals to every pirate's most cherished urging: greed. All in nice Paypal formatting with a handy link. The URL on the link almost looks right if you don't study it too closely. This $100 prize will cost you if you follow that link, so keep an eye out for an email like this: Matthew Eldridge just sent you money with PayPal. Matthew Eldridge is a Verified buyer. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Payment Details Amount: $93.50 USD Transaction ID: 9FW55189WD400453J View the details of this transaction online -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Shipping Information Address: Matthew Eldridge 1936 68th Street Windsor Heights, IA 50322 United States Address Status: Confirmed -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Thank you for using PayPal! The PayPal Team PayPal Email ID PP274

Yep, that's what Ein is all right. (Ein is my current avatar. JohnnyTarr was asking about it.)

I was chatting with someone offline about pets and I told him that I would resurrect the Pets thread around here and...well. It appears ol' Caraccioli has been made a fool of (yes again). The pets thread was deleted when they decided to clean up this one horse forum. So I thought I'd restart the stupid thing. (Not that I am bitter.) So here is a picture of my miserable, sullen, misogynistic housemate Pinky. She is named for the rat in Pinky and the Brain. (Note the surly, patronizing look.)

Well, thanks everyone for you comments. I finally finished the whole page. You can see the whole haunt (as best I could photograph it) and the other two props in there here.

So, I decided to do a POTC-inspired haunt for the Jaycee's Haunted House this year. (I've been doing at least one room a year for the last 15 years.) I don't have photos of the whole room on the web yet, but the centerpiece was a prop of Jack the Monkey. The whole thing was inspired by a conversation I had with Iron Bess asking her about getting Disney to make a life-sized, undead Jack the Monkey prop. Then it occurred to me..."You know how to do this. Make your own freakin' monkey!" So I did. You can see him here.

I may change my screen background...

Bringing this back up.

People are strange when you're a stranger Faces look ugly when you're alone Women seem wicked when you're unwanted Streets are uneven when you're down When you're strange Faces come out of the rain When you're strange No one remembers your name When you're strange When you're strange When you're strange

Is this like that episode of Laverne and Shirley where you win a supermarket shopping spree but only manage to get a scooter pie across the line in time? (Why do I remember that?) Sayyyy...real pirates don't count posts, they count pieces of eight. Or victims.

So if you had to pick only one career that you would pursue for the rest of your life, what would you do?

Minion-like subservience to your boss, grueling, repetitive offscreen training routines, power over weak minds, access to some wicked-cool technology, instant engendering of fear in the general populace and an almost guaranteed shortened life-span - usually ended by some form of cleaving. Actually, except for that last one, the benefits are similar to those you get working for the DMV or IRS.

I've decided to switch careers. I'm going to be an incompetent sith lord. "Hi, I'm Darth Caraccioli. How may I serve you?"

After seeing the new James Bond naked in Tomb Raider, I'd walk over hot coals to see Casino Royal. A curious standard by which to plan your movie viewing opportunities... Say, in the trailer the girl says something about "keeping my eyes off your perfectly formed..." something. What? It sounds like "owls" to me. Well, I found out that the trailer music was arranged and written by Jeff and Rob Pfeifer (not David Arnold who is the usual Bond composer. He's scoring this movie). So it will probably never appear on any CD.