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Andrew spied one of the Pandamania Pandas a few months ago in the lobby of a nearby office building. We were finally able to take a picture of it today on our way home from the movies.
This is the “Clean Panda” that was outside RFK Stadium and that we saw on our 9th panda-hunting trip.
The Cinema Arts Theatre near us started showing the Oscar Nominated short movies yesterday, so we decided to check them out instead of trekking downtown for more of the DC Independent Film Festival.
The animated shorts were varied, running from silly to powerful to just plain weird.
The theme for three of the four live-action shorts seemed to be kids in bad situations.
3/5 stars
We mainly added this to the queue because it was directed by Jonathan Frakes. It’s a cute movie with not-so-great science and a few cheesy what-would-you-do-if-you-were-a-teenager-who-could-stop-time kind of scenes.
2.5/5 stars
This seems to be my theme lately — not bad, not great, mostly eye candy. Owen Wilson plays a Navy navigator who’s plane is downed behind enemy lines. This is not a war-time film, but present-day-ish.
We had the focus group meeting all day today. I didn’t give my presentations until this afternoon, though I think they went fairly well. The one on dark energy really sparked a lot of conversation. My presentation on Constellation-X wasn’t as good, but that’s because it was far more technical than the dark energy presentation. That, and dark energy is intrinsically more interesting.
Jim is still digesting the discussions that we had with the teachers, but overall I think the day was a success. Even if we don’t directly use the suggestions that we got, we have some starting points to jump off from.
Jim and I drove up to Penn State today — we’re holding that focus group for the Beyond Einstein education materials tomorrow with a group of PA high school teachers tomorrow.
Jim spied this banner in the Engineering and Earth Sciences Building, where we met with some of the organizers of the focus group. He called it a monument to geek-dom:
After dinner, we walked back to the Nittany Lion Inn, where we were staying, and I spotted the famous nittany lion statue on the way. I snuck back out later, and got this picture:
Also tried my hand at an “arty” picture of the sundial outside the Inn — I wanted to go back during daylight and snap a picture, but forgot.
After the DCIFF sessions, Andrew and I stopped at the Shops at 2000 Penn to browse at Tower and grab dinner. While there, Andrew spied this Mickey statue:
Turns out 75 Mickey statues were made for Mickey Mouse’s 75th anniversary. Those Mickeys are going to be in DC from March 19-April 30. Yay! The statue we spied is a 76th Mickey that will be on display with the others.
The Shops also had on display some cool kites for the Smithsonian Kite Festival, coming up on April 2.
The DC Independent Film Festival kicked off last week, so Andrew and I decided to catch a couple sessions today. We caught two shorts fests: “Politics, Conflict, and Controversy” and “Cinematic Love & Death”.
I suppose I should have been prepared, during the first session (politics, conflict and controversy), for films with a message. I wasn’t. I’ve been a writer for a long time (not paid, not published, but a writer, none-the-less), and I know that a good story comes from, well, a good story. It needs strong characters with real problems and conflicts. If there’s a “message” to the story, it will come through the problems and conflicts that the characters encounter. There’s no need to hit the reader over the head with the message. Most of these filmmakers have not learned this lesson yet. Nearly all of them had a message and felt that they needed to shout their message at us stupid viewers.
Having said that, there were a couple noteworthy pieces during the first session:
In some ways I felt that the actually content of the protest was missing — I got a general idea of what they were protesting (the School of the Americas), but there wasn’t enough “evidence” to make me support the protestors. On the other hand, the documentary was really about the protestors, not the subject of their protests, at least that’s what I gathered. In that sense, it was well-done with an underlying arch that brought the film from beginning to end and told the story of the protestors without shoving anything down our throats.
This one was also more powerful than the “fiction” shorts that had a message to convey. Here, there was a message of sorts, but the filmmaker did not take sides. Rather we got to see both girls’ parents talking about their girls. We get the sense that the parents of the bomber, while sad that they lost their daughter, were supportive (not necessarily proud) of their daughter and her convictions. On the other side, we see the grieving parents and classmates of the victim.
This one was not as well crafted as Convictions: Prisoners of Conscience, because at times it seemed that some material was just thrown between scenes of the parents without a real plan for connecting events.
The second session was much more enjoyable than the first, though two of the pieces were almost indecipherable. Particularly enjoyable:
All in all, a fun afternoon. We’ll probably be back for another session or two next weekend.
Here are the rules:
Here’s the same thing from home:
“What’s a Pervect doing traveling with a Klahd, anyway?”
“Who’s a clod,” I bristled.
“Easy, kid,” Aahz said soothingly.
From Another Fine Myth by Robert Asprin. Certainly less intelligent that my “Work version”…more fun, too.
Here are the rules:
Here’s mine:
The transformation of components of the second rank ημν transform by
η’αβ = Λαν Λβμ ημν
by comparison with Eq. (4.26), η’αβ = ηαβ. Thus ηαβ has the same components in all frames, as we have assumed.
From Radiative Processes in Astrophysics by George B. Rybicki and Alan P. Lightman. No lie — that’s the book I have out on my desk at work. Maybe I’ll try at home tonight, and see what’s lying around there.
[Link from Mr. Hassle’s Long Underpants]
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