Ankur’s note: I’ve already made a long review of the movie Transformers, but Anuj had something extra to add.

Transfomers movie poster (small)

If you haven’t seen this movie then I am advising you to drop any plans you have to do so, don’t waste your time. To tell you the truth all I could think of while watching this movie is you gotta be kidding me. Seriously the actors were rolling out jargon like the US mint, they had runaway intellectual deflation over there (seeing this movie can make your brain go into a recession).I didn’t know before watching this movie that DNA computers can perform quantum computation and why the heck will giant robots be bipeds at all and why walk at all? Bipedal movement is so imprecise and difficult to implement and why are they humanoids in the first place? Seriously the way they transform into small objects is totally ridiculous, I would like to know what happens to all that matter? Do they perform matter-energy conversions on the fly? I mean the only thing worth seeing in this movie are the special effects otherwise there is no depth in the plot which is virtually non existent.

I think that they should have seriously hired a technical consultant before writing the script or they could have checked it up Wikipedia. Maybe then they would have ALSO realized that the Beagle 2 was NOT a rover in the first place and that it was made by the British!

So this is a movie worth missing and the idea that modern technology came from alien technology is so 2001…

Amul Star Voice of India logo

I happened to be channel surfing today, and accidentally ended up at (horror of horrors) Star Plus. They had another of those idiotic song reality shows going on, called Voice of India or something. I watched it for a while, and although I’ve never seen it earlier, I could tell that their anchor guy doesn’t seem to be enjoying the show. He constantly has a facial expression which seems to have been brought about by the fact that someone forced him to drink a whole bottle of Pudin Hara, mixed with a generous dosage of castor oil. Or maybe it’s just his paycheck. Anyway, I didn’t watch this travesty of a show for long, but during the few minutes that I *did* watch, it was quite evident that quite a few of the folk participating were nothing better than bathroom singers - and terrible ones at that. It didn’t stop the judges judges from swaying around as if a K L Saigal LP record was being played in the studio, but I’ll gloss over that fact. In fact, the judges seemed to have nothing more to mutter than sweet nothings after a contestant had their go. I guess a desi Simon Cowell won’t work with Indian audiences. The footage of the show also appears to be VERY jerky, almost as if it has been shot at a frame rate of 15 FPS. I just don’t get why people watch this kind of stuff. 20 minutes of THIS had me puking.

Now please don’t misunderstand me, I worship Scientific American, this mighty institution has uplifted me from the drudging confines of reality, time and time again. However, today I opened an article in the Scientific American to find

Nuclear Weapons in a New World; Countries are altering their nuclear arsenals, prompting the U.S. to refurbish its own warheads.

Now that’s rich, somebody has to remind them that currently the United States has more nuclear warheads than all the so called ‘aggressor’ nations that inhabit the world today. The United States along with the Soviet Union had ‘pioneered’ the global balance of terror, which successfully booby trapped each and every citizen of this planet for much of the late twentieth century. The United States and the Soviet Union were the first nations who started to collect nuclear weapons and thanks to them it nearly became a home handicraft industry. However, thanks to the revulsion felt by citizens of the world a mutual compromise was reached, now the USSR is out of the game and they are doing it, again, on a much larger scale. Who exactly is the genius behind this brilliant maneuver? Do they realize that if they do anything like this, they will finally succeed in destroying the global civilization and perhaps humanity itself by triggering another arms race? I guess they never do learn their lessons; Vietnam…Iraq, history it seems is bound to repeat itself with such idiots in power…