My rating of Discovery Channel’s Smash Lab: 9.9 / 10 (The only reason it isn’t getting a 10 / 10 is because THAT is reserved for the old seasons of Junkyard Wars.)

The Discovery Channel has been showing this new series (’new’ at least in India, I reckon that it’s already in its second season in the US) called Smash Lab for the past few weeks - and it’s really fun! The basic premise of the show is to take some accident scenario - a bomb exploding in front of a building, a car breaking through traffic dividers on a highway, a speedboat on collision course, a lifeboat being ejected at breakneck speeds - or a hurricane hitting a mobile trailer. What amazes me is how over-the-top this series is, and how much money they burn up each episode. Sure, they product placements, but the episode today - the hurricane one - really dazzled.

What they did is to take a mobile trailer home, and then cover it with carbon fibre to see if it could stand hurricane-force winds. And guess what they did to generate that? Since Hollywood-level wind machines weren’t enough to produce that strong winds, they hired a friggin’ Boeing 737 and used it’s jet exhaust to try and blow apart their reinforced home! And astonishingly, the carbon fibre worked - the whole home turned turtle but it stayed in one single unit. Plus, along the episode, they also trashed 3-4 more trailers, just to make a point.

If bringing in a jet plane wasn’t enough, consider this - in one episode they constructed a whole building, and then coated it with a special kind of polymer paint which has very high tensile properties. Then, they loaded up a car with dynamite, parked it right in front of the house - and blew it up. Oh, and BTW, before that? They also blew up 2-3 pickup trucks before they did this, just to ‘analyse the forces involved in impact’.

I’m pretty sure their budget would rival that of at least some mid-level Hollywood movies. It’s not just the over-the-top approach - what makes the show exciting is their totally crazy ideas which they work on and actually make to work, in most cases. Like another episode, in which they made a sand pit which could be turned into a fluid mass at the flick of a button - as a security measure to stop a, say, bank robbers’ getaway vehicle at a bank. As far as the coolness factor goes, Smash Lab is right up there with other Discovery Channel classics like Junkyard Wars and Future Weapons. You can read about their episodes on the Smash Lab blog too.

I noticed one more thing. Discovery Channel had an India-specific site earlier at discoverychannel.co.in; but if you visit it these days, it simply redirects you to the International page of Discovery Channel UK! Talk about cost-cutting measures!

Now I let another person who is a master at this take it from here;

The (Other) Secret
The inverse square law trumps the law of attraction
By Michael Shermer

An old yarn about a classic marketing con game on the secret of wealth instructs you to write a book about how to make a lot of money and sell it through the mail. When your marks receive the book, they discover the secret–write a book about how to make a lot of money and sell it through the mail.

A confidence scheme similar to this can be found in The Secret (Simon & Schuster, 2006), a book and DVD by Rhonda Byrne and a cadre of self-help gurus that, thanks to Oprah Winfrey’s endorsement, have now sold more than three million copies combined. The secret is the so-called law of attraction. Like attracts like. Positive thoughts sally forth from your body as magnetic energy, then return in the form of whatever it was you were thinking about. Such as money. “The only reason any person does not have enough money is because they are blocking money from coming to them with their thoughts,” we are told. Damn those poor Kenyans. If only they weren’t such pessimistic sourpusses. The film’s promotional trailer is filled with such vainglorious money mantras as “Everything I touch turns to gold,” “I am a money magnet,” and, my favorite, “There is more money being printed for me right now.” Where? Kinko’s?

A pantheon of shiny, happy people assures viewers that The Secret is grounded in science: “It has been proven scientifically that a positive thought is hundreds of times more powerful than a negative thought.” No, it hasn’t. “Our physiology creates disease to give us feedback, to let us know we have an imbalanced perspective, and we’re not loving and we’re not grateful.” Those ungrateful cancer patients. “You’ve got enough power in your body to illuminate a whole city for nearly a week.” Sure, if you convert your body’s hydrogen into energy through nuclear fusion. “Thoughts are sending out that magnetic signal that is drawing the parallel back to you.” But in magnets, opposites attract–positive is attracted to negative. “Every thought has a frequency…. If you are thinking that thought over and over again you are emitting that frequency.”

The brain does produce electrical activity from the ion currents flowing among neurons during synaptic transmission, and in accordance with Maxwell’s equations any electric current produces a magnetic field. But as neuroscientist Russell A. Poldrack of the University of California, Los Angeles, explained to me, these fields are minuscule and can be measured only by using an extremely sensitive superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) in a room heavily shielded against outside magnetic sources. Plus, remember the inverse square law: the intensity of an energy wave radiating from a source is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from that source. An object twice as far away from the source of energy as another object of the same size receives only one-fourth the energy that the closer object receives. The brain’s magnetic field of 10¹⁵ tesla quickly dissipates from the skull and is promptly swamped by other magnetic sources, not to mention the earth’s magnetic field of 10⁵ tesla, which overpowers it by 10 orders of magnitude!

Ceteris paribus, it is undoubtedly better to think positive thoughts than negative ones. But in the real world, all other things are never equal, no matter how sanguine your outlook. Just ask the survivors of Auschwitz. If the law of attraction is true, then the Jews–along with the butchered Turkish-Armenians, the raped Nanking Chinese, the massacred Native Americans and the enslaved African-Americans–had it coming. The latter exemplar is especially poignant given Oprah’s backing of The Secret on her Web site: “The energy you put into the world–both good and bad–is exactly what comes back to you. This means you create the circumstances of your life with the choices you make every day.” Africans created the circumstances for Europeans to enslave them?

Oprah, please, withdraw your support of this risible twaddle–as you did when you discovered that James Frey’s memoir was a million little lies–and tell your vast following that prosperity comes from a good dollop of hard work and creative thinking, the way you did it.

I was just reading some old computer magazine archives that I have, and I couldn’t help but wonder about the need for social media like blogs. Now many people dismiss blogs as trash where people get to rant, but I disagree. Take tech magazines and blogs for example. I was reading the PC World (India) website award stories online, and the one thing which really struck me was that none of the jury members seemed to be actual site members, who have a FEEL for what their service actually IS. It’s all OK to talk of which site looks good compared to some other site, but it doesn’t tell you a wetslap about ground realities. So for example, they can go on and on about how nice XYZ education site is, but they’re not the friggin’ students, are they? Nor could they ever match, say, Ankit Sud’s review of photo printing sites in India; simply because they never ORDERED prints from ANY of the sites in the first place! Only an actual user of the service who puts up his review can tell you how good it is in real life - that’s something any tech mag CAN’T do.

photo credit: MexicanwaveIt’s not just that - when considering tech product reviews, you’ll notice that that the quality of customer is never factored in, and yet it’s a very pertinent question. Only Apoorv Khatreja could tell you about current issues with Altec Lansing’s customer support, while the tech mags only comment on the copy they get to test on which. Which brings the other point - since most of the products they get for reviewing are not bought but given to them specifically for the purpose of reviewing, they are not necessarily impartial. You’ll notice that Indian magazines like Digit and Chip never have the gall to give a REALLY bad review about any product. Ones from foreign shores like PC World DO have a set of balls and occasionally tear a product apart, but still, the majority of their review end up giving 75-85% approval ratings - weird for real-world products. I’m not advocating magazines here, but just pointing out that tech magazines - or even blogs like Gizomodo or Engadget - may not like to bite the hand that feeds them (rather, gives them products to review). I’m not saying that they blatantly write advertisements, but that when they’re getting the products as a ‘favor’ rather than BUYING it, you tend to be sub-consciously partial towards the product. Something that a blogger review doesn’t have to face with.

That, and the fact that they use the product for a lesser period of time than someone who publishes to his blog. Only I could tell you that I dropped my LG phone from my first floor balcony, without any harm coming to the phone; or the fact that it’s predictive text input sucks. Not some tech reviewer who may have a few hours - or a day at max - to review a product which he hasn’t bought, but received as a ‘gift’. They simply don’t get enough time to tell about the lifetime of use a product undergoes!

That’s the power of Web 2.0. Getting to know stuff first-hand from people, people who are passionate about spreading their bit of knowledge to others.

Jarhead (2005) movie poster - small

Jarhead (Yahoo! movies page)
My rating: D+ (Poor effort)
Directed by: Sam Mendes
Cast: Jamie Foxx, Jake Gyllenhaal, Peter Sarsgaard
Released by: Universal Pictures

I rarely give movies a rating below C and its derivates. Jarhead deserves special mention, because it takes an interesting thing and turns it boring. It’s based on a book by a real-life US Army Marine Corps soldier, on his experiences during Operation Desert Storm in the first Gulf War. I haven’t read the book, but it seems from the movie that the book’s content - i.e., a personal diary of a Marine in Eye-raq - just isn’t suited for the big screen. It’s gritty, and it’s boring. An almost 2-hour long video diary, except that it has been shot on Hollywood movie quality footage. I’d have been more interested if it was actually shot by some Marine during the war. There’s no philosophical angle either - just the usual sanctimonius holier-than-thou crap of we’re-better-than-Eye-raqis. Uninspired performances, unrealistic performances. Except maybe Peter Sarsgaard, because he can keeps quiet and shoots nasty looks, which is a good thing when there’s no script; Peter Sarsgaard being highly talented in the shooting-nasty-looks business. The funny thing is, major American critics (even Ebert) ALWAYS fall for this sanctimonius patriotism. That’s OK, when a movie is GOOD, like Black Hawk Down, but not this…this abomination.

Jarhead trailer