Interstellar, Near Death Experience, and Cinematic Brilliance

I didn't think it was possible, but I now have a deeper appreciation of my favorite film - Interstellar - and a deeper respect for its director, Christopher Nolan. I've read numerous times that the ending of Interstellar is ambiguous, as the endings of his films usually are (c.f. Inception, Memento, The Dark Knight) - and before my most recent Interstellar experience, I had not understood why the ending of Interstellar might be interpreted as ambiguous. Oh boy, but it is... The "ending" of Interstellar happens when Matt Damon's character dies (I didn't spoil anything - Nolan spoiled the greatest piece of human art ever made by including Damon's scene/character). After this sequence, the spaceship in which the characters are on beautifully falls into a black hole. Humans - let alone consciousness - cannot survive back holes. Cooper dies as he goes into Gargauntua. Those are his final moments alive in the film. As reported by people who have near-death experiences, time slows down, memories flash before one's eyes, unfulfilled fantasies are experienced. The final 30 minutes of the film are just that: Cooper's death-is-nigh hallucination. The "tesseract" sequence - although beautiful and poignant - is implausible, even compared to the other sci-fi sequences in the film. Books fall off their shelf some times, and Cooper - in his dying, fantastical, hallucinatory state - reinterprets them in a way that his brain will copacetically accept his death. His life literally flashes through, and before, his eyes.

The Incredulous Elections of 2016 and the True Political Issue

I've recently caught up with the state of American politics, and have been both horrified and amused.  Yes of course, Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Hillary Clinton are all despicable, worthless frauds.  But the circus that they're circling around and the media coverage of it is far worse, as it has obscured the most important political issue.

And that is The Environment, or more specifically, our destruction of The Environment and how we might curtail its destruction so that our grandchildren may actually live on this planet.

I'm not going to debate "global warming" here. We have more evidence that "global warming" is real and that is caused by human activity than we have evidence for the fact that the Earth rotates around the Sun.  (If you reject this claim, go look for the edge on the flat earth and/or pray to your deity of choice)

I love life.  I love the cosmic miracle that our existence is a one in a billion trillion chance - that we happened to have won a cosmic lottery where we intelligent humans came about on this pale blue dot of a planet.  

And I hate the fact that we are blackening this pale blue dot we live on.  All evidence suggests that our current methods of energy consumption will not only run out, but will poison our planet to the point of extinction; microbes may not even survive.

In other words, our current state of existence will result in us drowning in our polar ice caps if we are lucky; and if we are not lucky, we will die of suffocation because our environmental air will be so polluted as to not sustain life.

This is an extremely prescient political issue.  

So, where is the candidate who advocates our survival by drastic environmental reform?

The Dumbing Down of the Population and the "No Child Left Behind" Act

One of first things that George W. Bush did when we became President in 2001 was to pass the No Child Left Behind Act.  This was generally well-received. On the surface, it makes sense: it requires that schools must have certain scores on standardized tests in order to receive federal funding.

However, it had a fairly robust effect upon the quality education in our society.

... to be continued

Why I'm voting for Bernie Sanders: II

I am utterly amazed by the level of thought that goes into our current political discourse... not because of anything amazing or discursive, but because it seems to come from apes that don't have long term memory...  

Donald Trump, a mutant Bush Brother, a foreigner (Ted Cruz), Hillary Clinton and a *socialist* are the main candidates for president?  My God! Wake up people!  

So let's be auspicious and make coarse binary assumptions about the world... On the one hand, you have American Conservatism, represented by the past, present, and future Republican candidates... And on the other, American Liberalism... 

So let's take a look at the history of our adult lives (assuming you are under the age of 50)... 

George W. Bush - a conservative/Republican - came in to power because some idiots in Florida voted for Ralph Nader... he did some shit (9/11 was a total accident... yeah right)... he did some more shit, and left the country in the Great Recession.   

Barack Hussein Osama - or as the media like to call him, "Barack Obama" -  a liberal/Democrat - took over and now we're in an economic boom.

And yet people are still considering the conservative/Republican perspective?  People are throwing their support behind Donald Trump??

There are only three possible hypotheses that explain the phenomena described above...

1) We Humans are utterly stupid.

2) We Humans have been made stupid; we've been repressed of our greater intellectual capacity - accidentally or purposefully - by a force that requires we be stupid.

2a) The force that requires we be stupid are the economic elite. 

3) I live in an utter dream world, and Donald Trump is logical.  

...

Much of *my discourse* above is tongue-in-cheek - but all of its message is genuine.  

I am very stupid, however I think that (2a) is the root of it all...

And therefore I am voting for Bernie Sanders for President.  

Why I'm voting for Bernie Sanders

I'm voting for Bernie Sanders because his agenda is for true democracy, and against the faux democracy of our current political situation:

Hypothesis: People who are very rich (and powerful) want to continue being very rich (and powerful).

This isn't a radical claim; it seems natural to me. Regardless, let's entertain the possible validity of this hypothesis...

Money is required for political power in our current system of government/organization. To be democratically elected into office, elaborate marketing/advertising campaigns must be executed. Elaborate marketing/advertising campaigns are most easily executed with money; it's not an accident that almost every single President of our nation (USA) has come from wealth, and the two or three who didn't were heavily funded by wealthy people.

How do very rich (and powerful) people ensure that they will continue being rich (and powerful)? They advocate public policy (via laws and government actions) that ensure the continuance and growth of their wealth and power.

Consider what you know about human nature. What is the average human being like? If we assume that the group of very rich people who are in political power are like everyone else, then it's safe to assume that they're not magically selfless or altruistic. It's safe to assume that they're not the benevolent provider of our rights - that they don't act in order to ensure that we ordinary people have life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, due process, and other apparent benefits of democracy. Why would they care about that when they're too busy enacting public policy to ensure and enhance their wealth and power? (I won't even go into Bush/Cheney at this point... connect the dots...)

For all intents and purposes, a relatively small group of powerful people (who are powerful for no other reason that they're wealthy) are "pulling the strings" of government, thereby compromising our democracy.

Bernie Sander is not one of these elite, rich and powerful people who have been writing our laws.

Therefore, I support his candidacy for President of the United States of America, fully and unequivocally.

Why is no one bothered that Ted Cruz was born in Canada?

Ted Cruz was born in December of 1970 in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. The country of one's birth was an important and contentious topic a few years ago. President Obama faced ferocious claims and opposition over the supposition that he was born in Kenya. There was a mad debate about his legitimacy over a birth certificate. People espoused the rationale that a foreign national was unfit to be President. Ted Cruz is a foreign national, yet this hypothesis goes untested against him. The question I therefore ask is how do we respond to this hypocrisy in a creative way that condemns no one and benefits everyone?

Hunter S. Thompson and the "American Dream" in the Early 21st Century

Summer 2015 was a tumultuous time. Whereas most of the nation had embraced the previously radical notion of "gay marriage," there were still parts of the American psyche - and political body - that were re-thinking the notion of the Confederate Flag, finally accepting the absurdity of flying the symbol of viciously racist men who have been dead for a century - as a symbol of government.

For it was here in the American psyche that the people of America realized that the "American Dream" was literally just that - a dream. An illusion, a mental construct, a fantasy on par with other fantasies, including but not limited to the unicorn.

And it was here (in time) that the (American) people realized that the linguistic/mental/sociocultural paradigm was false to begin with. That to speak about (and think of the world in terms of) the "American" Dream was fundamentally unsubstantiated, no more arbitrary, and no less meaningful, than drawing boundaries based on rivers or mountain ridges and pursuing unicorns defined by those boundaries.

It was at this point in which such nonsense was abandoned and we sought “to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world," as Robert Kennedy put it.

Or else, we continued to crumble until the last creature capable of thought in this fraction of the universe was drowned in what is now our polar ice caps.

The full Carl Sagan "Pale Blue Dot" quote.

I should have posted this image of the Carl Sagan quote in my previous blog.

This is the full "pale blue dot" quote.  It's a beautiful, hopeful quote - the last part is crucial:

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

A fraction of a pale blue dot

Many years ago, Carl Sagan provided a remarkable commentary on an image of our planet taken from a distance by a probe we sent out.

We now have an even clearer image of our planet

What this image depicts is the scale of the universe in which we live.

We live on a gigantic planet, which we can cross in about twelve hours, given our best technology.

This gigantic planet is a fraction of our local cosmological system; this cosmological system is a fraction of the Milky Way galaxy.  The Milky Way galaxy is a fraction of a larger area that contains millions of galaxies - which is a fraction of an even larger area - which is a fraction of a fraction of our universe.

To describe our place in the universe as a "pale blue dot" is erroneous and anthropocentric.  On a human scale, to describe our place as a "sub-atomic particle within quark within an electron within an atom" would be generous.  Our language provides us with a means to communicate the concept of many "withins" - but our minds lack the capacity to truly comprehend the physical scale of what we describe.

We are an infinitesimally small fraction of a fraction of a pale blue dot.

Assuming there is a personal god that is overseeing this great system - we are a digit far to the right of the period in its calculations.

And this is not bleak, nor fatalistic, nor damning, nor depressing.  It means that upon this fraction of a fraction of a pale blue dot, it is we who define our fate.





 

New Hypotheses

It's a funny thing how writing is congruous with life; as my life was put on hold for the last several months, so was this blog.

About a year ago, I (finally) finished my education at the University of Southern California.  I moved back to Seattle (err… a suburb of Seattle) to sort out the subsequent chapters of my life.  

After several months of a trying and arduous endeavor which required an injection of serendipity, a new volume has been forged.  I am back in Los Angeles with steady employment, once again able to be creative - to breathe, to live, to love, to write, and to hypothesize.

There's much I could write about in detail.  But for now, I shall offer a rather terse top-ten list (order only partially meaningful) 

The top-ten things I have learned in the past year

1) Perspective - and Perspectivism - are profound.

2) Contrary to what our society tells us, education can seriously be detrimental for employability.

3) "Interstellar" is one of the greatest films ever made.

4) There is a paradox in our socioeconomic system, which as far as I am aware, has not yet been described.  I call it "the unurgent urgency of the job market."

5) The beer of the Pacific Northwest is perhaps the best in the US; it makes Los Angeles beer taste like Hop Hell, i.e. the place where hops who didn't believe in the Hop God go to be punished for eternity.  

6) The phrase "Dear Hiring Manager" can quickly become one of the most exhausted and disgusting phrases of the English language. 

7) Still, virtually no one understands/accepts my arguments for why belief in Mormonism is problematic.  But now, I give zero fucks.

8) A fresh start in life in life can be wonderful.  But unfortunately, it can be accompanied by a fresh start in self-confidence level. 

9) Santa Monica, California is an amazing city, in many different ways.  Higher levels of our government should adopt its philosophy and practice.

10) I need to start writing again.

If Peyton Manning threw as much as Russell Wilson...

Peyton Manning is undoubtedly one of the greatest quarterbacks ever; he thus gets to throw the ball a lot.  In the 2012 and 2013 regular season, Manning had 1,242 pass attempts.

Russell Wilson is a top quarterback as well.  However, he plays for a run-dominant offense, and throws the ball far less often, having only 800 regular season pass attempts the past two years.

What if Peyton Manning only were only allowed to throw the ball 800 times in the last two years?

I scaled Peyton Manning's passing statistics to 800 attempts, so that Manning's and Wilson's passing statistics can be directly compared.  The results are very similar...

And keep in mind, Russell Wilson is only two years into his career...

Christmas in March

Tonight I was in a grocery store.

Christmas music was playing in the background: instrumental renditions of "Rudolph," "Oh, Holy Night," and other mundane songs that we have to put up with for several months during the dark days of Winter.  

Hearing about the Great Hallmark Holiday and mommy kissing Santa Claus on the Ides of March was a very, very disturbing experience for me. 

I'm one of those terribly polite people who virtually never complain to managers or any staff about the quality of their business.  I've been served cold meals, wrong meals, over-charged, under-charged, and many glasses of expired beer;   I keep my mouth shut, for I forgive human beings for making honest mistakes.  

But tonight I was so disturbed by hearing Christmas music in March that I complained to the manager of the grocery store, and to two other employees.  The manager knew something was wrong.  The two regular employees didn't even realize that Christmas music was playing in the background. 

Perhaps I was so disturbed because hearing the music confirmed my scornful hypothesis that Christmas is starting earlier and earlier every year, so that profit-driven people make more money off of our dumb-asses that buy into Hallmark Holidays.   

When I was a child, you couldn't really do Christmas until Thanksgiving was over.  And now, the trivial sales and the 4/4 key-of-C songs start virtually in October.   I've been saying for years, (partially tongue-in-cheek) that Christmas will soon start even sooner, and in a couple of decades, it will be year-round.  My experience tonight in the grocery store confirmed my idea that some would call a paranoid delusion.  It was like an experience similar to what George Orwell must have felt had he been magically supplanted into 1984.

As always, this blog post is not *really* about hearing Christmas music in March.  It's about a deeper sociocultural problem.  Shall we discuss this further below?  :)

The New Pope and Feminism

I've known a number of Catholics in my life.  

It always astonishes me to meet Catholics who are intelligent, educated, and modern, especially those of the female variety.

I pose to them a simple question:  Do you think men are superior to women?

I do not think this to be true, and usually they don't either.  We are all equal creatures under the eyes of God.

But wait… why can't women be priests?  Are they not prepared to receive God's holy knowledge?  

Why are testicles and a penis a prerequisite for knowing The Divine, and spreading The Divine to our human species? 

Among other things, The Catholic Church is completely sexist.  It is a relic of an old way of thinking and living, where women stayed home and made babies while men did more noble things.  

The media coverage of the newly "elected" Pope upsets me.  The day that a female Pope is elected is the day that Catholicism deserves to make the newspapers in a positive way.  

But that will never happen…

Is it not the time we take a strong stance against archaic, sexist, racist, and classist thinking in our culture?  Is it not the time we acknowledge how marvelous, miraculous, and special human life is, and abandon systems of thought, like Catholicism (and religion), that run contrary to this?   

Call me a liberal, a polemic, a hippy, an atheist, a Marxist, a feminist… for I embrace one label, and that is, a Humanist.  And I see the sexism, pedophilia, ethnocentrism, and corruption of the Catholic Church to be anti-humanist.  And I plead to you, my brothers and sisters, to stand up against such things.

   

Apple Introduces iPhone 6: The first phone-gun hybrid

Apple introduces iPhone 6:  The first phone-gun hybrid. 

January 24^th, 2015

Cupertino, CA

Today, representatives from Apple unveiled the much anticipated re-thinking of their revolutionary smartphone.  A new generation is born: iPhone 6.  Some may actually call it the iPhone 6-Shooter.

In addition to the new and intuitive design and interface, this phone comes with a controversial new app called iGun.  iGun allows the user to fire real bullets, much similar to a real gun.  Six rounds can be loaded into the phone at once, and fired at the speed and frequency of a semi-automatic handgun.  Apple claims that the app is for self-defense purposes only. Apple likewise claims no malicious intent:  “… the iGun upgrade is simply a result of the market:  likely consumers want both a smart phone and a tool for self-defense,” said Alex Jones of the Apple Press Ministry. 

Anti-gun groups have already released statements, and plan to use their recently abridged constitutional rights to take the issue to court. Many consumers are hesitant.  Some iPhone 5s users and Apple devotees have vowed to not purchase the upgrade, and even to boycott Apple.

In November of 2013, The National Rifle Association acquired 34% of Apple’s stock.  Left Wing blogs and Anti-Gun groups claim that the iGun is a direct result of this so-called “take-over.”  Apple’s CEO and Chairmen did not respond to requests for comment on this matter.  NRA Executive Vice President Paul Ryan could likewise not be reached for comment as he is currently on a campaign tour in Ohio. 

The iPhone 6 is scheduled to be released next month.  Demonstrations against the device are being planned; use the internet to find a grass roots organization or protest near you. 

The Westboro Baptist Church

I've recently been investigating the Westboro Baptist Church, a fascinating yet horrendous group of human beings, displaying the worst non-violent perversion of religion.  They're a Calvinist Clan who are obsessed with death and sex; they marvel in the death of human beings, believing that God brings on death in order to punish the world for homosexual behavior.  Not only do they think such irrational things, they are impenetrable to reason.  And most of them are well educated, and the wickedest of lawyers.

How can this be?

This church consists almost entirely of members of the same family.  The patriarch of the family is a sick man, transparently mad.  He must have some unfortunate genetic mutation that inhibits large parts of his brain.  He passed this gene on to 9 of his 13 children.  And the gene was then passed to tens of his grandchildren. 

The Westboro Baptist "Church" is not a church.  It's a clan of partially-inbred cousins containing a poisonous genetic mutation.  May they not breed further.  And certainly, may their tax-exempt "church" status be revoked. 

Backstage with Radiohead

On Thursday, April 12th, 2012, I saw Radiohead perform live at the Santa Barbara Bowl. The concert in and of itself was great, but the story surrounding the event is even greater. Below is my account of the experience.

First, let me begin by saying that I am a huge Radiohead fan. Without any reservation, I will make and defend the claim that they are the greatest band since The Beatles; one hundred years from now, music critics will be citing their work and influence. They are by far my favorite musical artist, and I follow their work very closely. I’ve become quite the historian and connoisseur of Radiohead, to an extent that somewhat resembles an obsession, knowing far more about the music, history, and current news of Radiohead than the average casual fan.

So naturally, I wanted to see them in their only performance in all of Southern California (outside of Coachella). However, attempts to buy tickets for the show were fruitless, as tickets sold out within seconds, both on Radiohead’s webpage and ticketmaster. Literally - seconds. And because the tickets were paperless/electronic, scalping was not possible, and so purchasing tickets at an exorbitant markup on ebay (as I have done in the past) was not an option. I conceded defeat and bitterly accepted the conclusion that I was to miss Radiohead’s first tour since I became a fan of them.

However, a glimmer of hope came a few months ago.

Sometime late in 2011 I met a man who is a pilot for Virgin Atlantic Airlines. He resides in England and occasionally flies from London to LA and back, staying at a hotel near where I live during his layover. My Pasadena friends and I came to know this man during his brief and irregular visits. One night, while we were takin’ a piss at the pub (to phrase it in the pilot’s charmingly British vernacular), it was revealed that he lives in Oxford, the city where Radiohead are from, and where four out of the five band members still reside. As I do when I meet anyone who has lived in Oxford, I asked him if he knows Radiohead.

It is indeed a small world, after all.

Not only does he know Phil Selway, the drummer of Radiohead, he’s good friends with him, grew up with him, went to school with him, and they continue to socialize today. After expressing my disappointment over not being able to see them play on their current tour, the pilot coolly assured me that he would talk to his friend Phil Selway about the matter, and would see what he could do.

Several months passed where I dubiously held on to the idea that a miracle was possible and that I would get into the show. I held on to a modicum of hope that it was possible that some guy I hardly knew who claimed to know Phil Selway, could possibly be able to convince Phil Selway to somehow spend the time and energy to get a ticket for an unknown third party who is neither famous nor important (that being me).

A couple of weeks before the date of the show, my communications with the pilot about this possibility went from nebulous promises to claims that getting tickets was likely. And then from there to concrete promises and enthusiastic certainty. On April 2nd, ten days before the concert, I met with the pilot in person the night he arrived from London, and was told that without doubt, I would be getting into the show on Phil Selway’s guest list.

Being a skeptic to the extent that I appear to be bitterly pessimistic to others, I tend to use probability and Occam’s Razor to interpret everything, including events in my life. At that point, I knew that the pilot was sincere, but I didn’t know if he was genuine, which are two different things. Most importantly, I had no way of empirically verifying the truth of what he was saying.

The idea of me getting into a sold out Radiohead show, in LA, and on the band’s guest list seemed absurdly improbable and implausible. And so both Occam’s Razor and my probability calculation led me to doubt. I refused to make any concrete plans, as it would have been an embarrassment and a complete waste of time and money to go all the way out to Santa Barbara, just to show up and find out that I’m not on the guest list.

However, after several discussions with friends and several email exchanges with the pilot (who was back in Oxford), I slowly became convinced enough to take a leap of faith and go out to Santa Barbara. One friend of mine poignantly pointed out that a cost-benefit-risk analysis should be compelling enough for me to go: after all, it would be worse to be on the guest list and not go, than to go and not be on the guest list.

So I found someone to go to the show with. We left Thursday afternoon with neither tickets nor any sort of confirmation. We had nothing but our ID’s and the hope that that was sufficient to get us in. We anxiously drove up the Santa Barbara with Radiohead blaring on the stereo.

We arrived at the Santa Barbara Bowl around 5pm, just about the time that thousands of people had started filtering in to the amphitheater. We spotted the window at the box office that had the phrase “Band Guest List” above it. We swallowed any fear of rejection, and without missing a stride, walked up to the box office, and handed the woman working there our ID’s. She looked in a tray on her desk, and pulled out two envelopes, giving them to my friend and me. Mine contained the following ticket:


Apprehension and doubt immediately turned into relief and excitement… I was going to see Radiohead.

Oh but wait… there’s something else in my envelope…

I had the idea in the back of my mind that this was possible, but, although being a skeptic, I still did not want to “jinx” it, and so I kept such an idea in the back of my mind, doing my best to refrain from discussing it with my friends.

But the quixotic daydream had become a reality. Not only was I getting into the show and had great seats, I was going to the after show party.

With unrelenting marvel from that point on, I saw the show. It was amazing. It was bitterly cold and it rained heavily through the concert, but that bothered me not. The show lasted for over two hours, with twenty-three songs and two encores. The first highlight of the show was the performance of “Pyramid Song” with Jonny Greenway playing the electric guitar with a bow, so beautiful that it nearly brought me to tears. The second highlight for me was the performance of the brand new song “Identikit," which was breathtaking. Videos and pictures I took of the concert can be found on my youtube and Flickr, including this video of the full performance of "Nude."

After the show was over, my friend and I waited for the masses to file out. Thousands exited in awe from what they had just experienced. It stopped raining, and after about thirty minutes, when the crowd was a bit thinner, and we were informed by security that the aftershow was starting. We were told to proceed (with our aftershow wristbands) to the terrace just by the entrance to the bowl. A bit dazed by excitement and high from the second hand cannabis smoke that mixed with the fog and permeated the air, we made out way up to the terrace.

The terrace was this lounge sort of area, surrounded by a deck on all sides, with one side overlooking the entrance to the bowl, the other side overlooking the stage, and a third side hovering above a canyon, overlooking the city of Santa Barbara (this picture doesn’t do it justice).



The party contained about 40-50 important-looking people, about half of which were inside the lounge escaping the cold, and other half were spread out on the deck, smoking, chatting, and visiting the open bar. There were a couple of “B-List” celebrities there, actors and what not I recognized.

I didn’t dare take any more pictures of the party so as to not look like some googly-eyed fan or another sort of impostor. And as it turned out, I learned that photography was prohibited by security anyway.

After enjoying a drink or two and a few conversations with people who work with in the music industry, I reconnected with my concert companion on the edge of one of the decks. As we were sharing our mutual hypnosis over the incredulity of the situation, a group of people passed us. One of which was Thom Yorke, the singer of Radiohead.

We briefly stalked him in a very gentle and inconspicuous manner. He stopped at the side of the bar, grabbed a drink and started talking with his entourage. My friend and I went up to the bar, got a drink, and subtly toasted Thom.

We then faded into the corner of the main deck to again marvel in what we were experiencing. Perhaps due to our somewhat star-struck state, we failed to pay any attention to the people standing directly to the side of us, smoking cigarettes. But I soon realized that one of them was Colin Greenwood, the bassist for the band.

Recall that we had gotten into the show and the after party because the drummer of Radiohead, Phil Selway, was kind enough to put two strangers on his guest list. I felt that I should at the very least introduce myself and thank the guy. And so my friend and I went looking for him in the crowd of party-goers. We soon found him. He was talking with Clive Deamer, the other (temporary?) drummer for the band, and some other people I didn’t recognize. I had no intention of being rude or disrespectful, so butting in was not considered. My friend roamed around the party some more, (I of course) having another adult beverage, keeping an eye on Phil every once in a while.

The group of people Phil was talking to disbanded, and my friend and I realized it was now-or-never, and we made our move. We shook hands as I introduced myself, telling him that I was the one he put on the guest list, via our mutual friend, the Pilot. We had a good laugh at the situation, and my friend and I expressed our extreme gratitude for both the concert and the invitation to the after party. We chatted for a little bit more, mostly small talk. I told him how much I had loved the band’s performance of “Identikit,” that it was the highlight of the show, and I told him that I think the band should continue in that artistic direction. Being quite shy but gracious, Phil Selway nodded and smiled and continued to converse with us until he was drawn away by someone he knew. At that point my friend and I realized that we had taken enough of his time. We shook hands goodbye and again thanked him for everything.

Realizing that we might have exposed ourselves as outsiders at that point, we quickly grabbed one last drink and said goodbye to the other people we had met. We then galloped away into the fog of the night, a thick layer of ocean water reminiscent of something in a 19th century British detective novel, aptly emulating and slightly enhancing the mystique of the night.

It was one of the greatest experiences I have had in my nearly 30 years of existence.

Word Lens can read translate written text too!

See post below for more about the app.

Word Lens iPhone App

I've just discovered what could possibly be the greatest smartphone app of all time. It's called World Lens, and among what it does is translate text from one language to another in real time (it also does frivolous things like invert English words).

It's currently available in French-to-English, Spanish-to-English, and vice versa for both.

For example, this is a paragraph in Spanish in the University of Chicago Spanish Dictionary.


Word Lens uses the iPhone's camera to detect text and translate it in real time.


This text is translated in real time as...


You can stop the real time algorithm and it will give you a "final draft" of the translation


If you click on a translated word, such as "LENGUA"...



It will give you a screen with alternative meanings of the translated word, and other words the original word might have been, in cases where the algorithm fails to properly read a word...



Pretty cool, huh?

It's made by Word Visual. It's sold as a travel aid, but could be used for so much more.


**For Linguists and/or Programmers**

Word Lens ostensibly uses only very limited top-down processing, if at all. Both its word recognition and translation capabilities could greatly improve the accuracy of the translation if top-down information were used. For example, top-down processing would have selected "language" instead of "tongue" as the translation for "lengua" (see pics above).

So... Does anyone want to make a better, rival app and try and sell it?

Comments and Emails welcome.
daylen (dot) riggs (at) gmail.com