The Life and Times of a Starving Vagabond

Last weekend movies (5th week 2012)

2012-01-30T02:00:00.000-08:00

Compared to last weekend, this one was a bad movie weekend. I also grew a little bit bored of doing nothing and decided to get some work done. Nevertheless, I'm trying to keep with my vacation goal: to watch and read as much media as possible...

Moneyball, ****
Based on the story of Billy Beane, one of the first baseball managers to put together a team based on computer analyzed statistics who is still trying to win a championship. I never know how to classify biographic films, I guess this is a drama. It has a good pace and flows. I actually enjoyed it.
Immortals, ***
King Hyperion marches against the Greek gods and it's up to Theseus to stop him before he frees the Titans. I really liked this film, the visual design is impressive—say, e.g., the young golden gods and the golden but dirtied demi-god Theseus—and the landscape composition is impressive. The retold of Theseus and the Minotaur is amazing!
Colombiana, ***
A drug lord's family is murdered and only his little girl survives. She grows up to be a perfect assassin looking for revenge. The film was scripted by my favorite femme-fatale enthusiast Luc Besson—Mathilda, Nikita, Leeloo—. It's a good action film with a lot of parkour.
Johnny English Reborn, ***
Johnny English left the British secret service in disgrace but happenstances bring him back and gets a chance to clean his name. Mr. Atkinson comedy is good, specially his faces. It's a no brainer, I just sat down and laughed for half the movie.
11-11-11, **
A writer losses his family and stats realizing that bad things happen to his family on November 11th, but the worst is yet to happen. In the beginning I started to get bored with this horror film, but then came the ending and I really loved it. I have always loved non-hollywood endings.
Killer Elite, **
A retired assassin is blackmailed and brought back to kill a team of ex-SAS soldiers involved in the assassination of a Sheikh's family in Oman. A passable action film, not so much action, not so much of a story, one of the stars is just out of respect to Al Pacino.
Salvation Boulevard, **
A not-so-sure born-again-christian is witness to an accidental shooting committed by his mega-church preacher who decides to keep everything under the table. It's a great farcical film on the subject of false and self-justified "faith."

Really, what is happening with television series? ...

Last Man Standing, (no episode?)
Castle S04-E13, ****
A dog judge and trainer gets killed and it is up to Castle and Beckett to find out the reason why.
Hawaii Five O S02-E14, ****
The mystery of the past is unfolding as a robbery entangles with the past.
Big Bang Theory S05-E14, ****
It's back to the beginning with Leonard dating penny and everybody else being their old selves from the first season.
Psych, (not yet back?)
Wilfred S01-E01, ***
An US remake of the Oz series, a suicidal man finds a "friend" in the bastardy dog of his hot neighbor.
Once upon a time S01-E01-07,
The land of fairy tales suffered a horrible fate, the Evil Queen curse them to a place of horrors: our world. Now, it is upon Snow White's daughter and grandson to fix things in Storybrooke, Maine, and end the curse.

It seems like we are getting a curse too, because Lyx and I haven't found time to sit down and watch those old films with Audrey Hepburn. I really hope we can do something about it next weekend.

LWP: Quantum memory with a single two-level atom in a half cavity

2012-01-29T22:14:00.000-08:00

by Y. Wang, J. Minar, G. Hetet, and V. Scarani.
Physical Review A 85, 013823 (2012)

Wang and collaborators show that it is possible to store a single-photon pulse in a two-level atom within a half cavity setup where the decay rate between the atom and the light is controlled by motion of the one mirror in the half cavity.

A dipole-field interaction leading to optical Bloch equations from Heisenberg picture is used; the effects of the half-cavity are encoded in a term accounting for decay into the half-cavity (pulse) mode, decay and noise introduced by the environment are also taken into account. Assumptions include: Markov approximation (long half-life times compared to light's round-trip between atom and mirror), small mirror motion (of the order of a wavelength) leading to neglect amplitude changes in time scales smaller or equal to a round-trip time—but this cannot be assumed in the phases due to the importance of interferences in the sysme—

The probability of the two-level system absorbing a single-photon wave packet is found and a suitable decay function is given that maximizes such probability. Storage is achieved by placing the atom at a node of the half-cavity system. Then, the emission efficiency is calculated and a decay rate is defined which controls the temporal shape of the outgoing single-photon pulse. The authors present simulations for a sampling of time-bin single-photon pulses and their respective control decay-rate leading to high fidelity storage and possible implementations of their protocol.

The article is didactic in its presentation and the topic is quite interesting. I was not familiar with half-cavity schemes and this manuscript presents a nice survey of references in the topic. I hope experiments using their protocol follow soon.

The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

2012-01-27T03:00:00.000-08:00

The Black Swan written by Nassim Nicholas Taleb deals with the impact of the highly improbable—the actual subtitle of the book—in the real world. The title comes from the fact that one single event is enough to prove a theory wrong; in this case the European theory that all swans were white previous to the discovery of Australia and black swans.

I really hated/loved the book. The mean reason for the first was the introduction of an example in the person of a writer—which I couldn't find in Google—that made me believe that Dr. Taleb was some kind of literary conman creating a fake narrative to advance his ideas. I felt betrayed. I like confidence games but I don't like being conned by an author while dealing with a serious topic. Good thing is that later, in a footnote, it is made clear that the author/example was mere fiction, a gedankenexperiment. Then, I came to love the book: It is an anecdotal narrative denouncing our weakness and inclination for anecdotal, causal narratives that blinds us from the skeptical, empirical analysis of events in economics, history, sociology and other human endeavors to understand our non-ideal selves, societies and surroundings. I think I can construct another paradoxical phrase like the latter: In parts, t is a name dropping exposition denouncing name dropping expositions.

I found many things to like from the manuscript—a flowing prose filled with real and imaginary examples, an ample reference and bibliographical section (almost one third of the electronic version)—and just one to dislike: I felt the first two parts became repetitive.

The ideas are sound, our actual knowledge does not allow us to simulate realistic scenarios to provide accurate predictions and, most probably, you and I will be long dead when, if, such an exercise becomes feasible—think about Assimov's psychohistory in Foundation *wink*.

Is there a way to predict the future when it comes to phenomena that belong to the so-called Extremistan (most of the modern real world)? No.

Then, what's the use of knowing that? Awareness, there are infinitely many things we don't know that could affect us, but one we can try to control: our actions and, thus, our exposure to those unknown.

It's a great book, try it. I even see it as a kind of philosophy of life. I am really thankful to my brother Andre for suggesting it to me. I think that I would not have picked it up by myself.

I, the media consumer...

2012-01-25T07:00:00.000-08:00

The life and times of a starving vagabond is many things and nothing at all. It is an attempt to practice English, which allegedly is my second language. Sometimes it is a conduct to free my shoulders through cathartic ranting or disjointed—but therapeutic—narrative. Most of the time, it is just about post-consumption impressions.

While the starving part of the blog's title comes from a story of two close-friends (cousin Shaggy and I) driving through Mexico without much money and eating boiled potatoes and eggs, cheese and hard bread for one week, it also reflects my urge for consumerism and consumption of narratives in any given media format. I hunger for stories presenting diverse points of view that may—or, most probably, not due to my intrinsic stupidity—widen my perspective on the condition of being human.

Being human is so amazing, so different: there's almost 7 billion different ways of being human in the present; plus some three or four billion death ways of being human since the beginning of homo sapiens. Can a single individual experience the whole spectra of humanity? My answer is no, being human is a conjunction of the person, his/her ideas and actions, people interacting with him/her (with their ideas and actions), surroundings and the succession of random events that, all together, I come to call life.

In recent years, I have become a consumer of other people's points of view and have got it with mine. Curiously, I have started to find more and more taxing—and kind of useless—to be in social gatherings where there are so many people that makes it impossible to have a true dialogue leading to the exchange of opinions. I find myself leaving parties with small pieces of information from this or that person and end up reconstructing a story that has my point of view inherently embedded. I want to learn what you think about love, honesty, ethics, vengeance, religion, death and whatnot. I don't want to reconstruct your ideas through dilute and disjoint one minute burst of conversation and end up creating what I think is your narrative from my point of view. I rather read, listen or watch them whole in media. Thus, my consumerism—my desire to gather and collect enormous quantities of information—is born.

Trying to turn my consumption of media for the better, I use it to practice my English and synthesis skill. I'm not trained in aesthetics nor semantics, thus my reports on the consumed works are nothing but online dumps of impressions left on me by them—and a sorry excuse to use English in a non-scientific context—. Anyway, I hope the Last Weekend Movies or Last Month Book series of posts help you choosing a film, tv-series or book to kill time with.

Last weekend movies (4th week 2012)...

2012-01-23T03:30:00.000-08:00

This was a nice long weekend that I'm sure is gonna remain unchallenged in my personal annals of laziness for years to come. It also was a weekend of independent cinema...

Fright Night, ****
It has been ages without a vampire movie! This is a reboot of a 80's film with the same name. A vampire comes to town and its teenage neighbor has to fight it to protect his loved ones. One star is pure euphoria for finding a horror movie that involves mythological creatures and not a human serial killer.
Beginners, ****
A man's life after the death of his father trying to construct a relationship— fighting his impulses to always run away—while dealing with the past; his father came out the day his mother died and his take on the family makes him evade relationships. This is a great and dramatic romantic comedy. The characters are so fresh and lovable. And the pace is just perfect to get soaked with the photography and the music.
Our Idiot Brother, ****
Ned is a naive, honest, kind and idealist man who always tries to empathize with the neighbor (I like the Spanish word "prójimo" more but there exist no English equivalent) but manages to always screw things up, or so it seems like. The topic, honesty and idealism, really got me. It is a fresh and elegant comedy of situations with a big human factor on it.
Lucky, ***
A newbie serial killer inherits a winning lottery ticket from one of his victims and his newly won money gets the attention of his childhood love. They get married and manage not to kill each other for a few weeks. It has been ages since I watched a dark comedy and this one really got me smiling, it lacks a great script but it is morbid and funny enough.
Texas killing fields, ***
There's a serial killer on the loose in rural Texas and two cops get emotionally involved in the case. This crime drama is loosely based on a real case. The story is so dark that the film doesn't manage to show it most of the time, nevertheless the photography is good and the takes of the Texas bayou managed to give me the chills.
The Art of Getting by, ***
A lonely teen has to find himself or flunk high-school. I liked the opening: "you are born alone, you will die alone" which is a chopped paraphrase of Orson Welles' "We are born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship we can create the illusion for the moment that we are not alone." The rest of the movie can be considered an audio-visual rendition of the rest of Mr. Welles' phrase.
The Son of No One, *
A young cop is haunted and hunted by ghosts of his past when he killed two men. The crimes of past and present intertwine in this not so much of a thriller with the background of 9-11. It's a good idea but I guess you need to have some context that I lack to really appreciate the movie.
Lone Wolf and Cub 6, *
This film should have a three or four stars rating but I watched the first five parts in the last two weekends and the memory of them are too fresh in my mind. The lone wolf finally faces his rival the Ura-Yagyu and nothing happens. C'mon! Give me an ending! I read somewhere that they are planning a new movie for the series with possible release date in 2014.

What is happening with the television series, I have never followed a season in the past and it is very annoying that during this month some of them have been going in and out...

Last Man Standing S01-E14, ****
Mike screws it big time with the neighbors thanks to his honesty, leading to troubles with his socially active wife. In the end, well, Mike's proven right.
Castle S04-E12, ****
The shadows behind power reappear to keep the mayor of New York from running for governor and keep Beckett out of her mothers case.
Hawaii Five O, (no episode?)
Big Bang Theory, (no episode?)
Psych, (not yet back?)
Phineas and Ferb S01-E01-46, *****
This is a simple, ten minute long cartoon, about two creative and industrious kids trying to spend summer at their best and their teenage sister trying to bust their plans. It's so innocent and creative and full of stories in just 10 minutes. I really liked it, it just made me laugh again and again.
Game of Thrones S01-E01-10,(mini-series) ****
Winter is coming! A land where winter brings shadows and horrors is involved in incestuous political intrigue and in the verge of an all out war. Stage and wardrobe design are awesome, the characters have personality and deepness. I only didn't like the slow pace at the beginning but then the epic scale of the plot may need such a pace to develop.
Falling Skies S01-E01-10, (mini-series) ****
An alien vanguard has taken over the earth and a ten percent of the original population survives. Some of these survivors have organized in a resistance trying to figure a way to bring the fight back to the aliens. Great effects, great alien designs, good episode progression, crappy season finale.
The Borgias S01-E01-09, (mini-series) **
Rodrigo Borgia has been elected pope Alexander VI and the Borgia family reaches the apex of their political station which is gonna last just a few decades. A free take on the historical Borgia family and its influence in the geopolitics of the Papal States and Mediterranean Europe during the Renaissance. Jeremy Irons plays the role of Rodrigo Borgia! Awesome wardrobe and locations. I was not so happy with the episode design, it didn't manage to get me interested long enough but good to remember the old history lessons from high-school.

Sadly, we didn't have any Audrey Hepburn due to the fact that my cousin got married and Lyx went to the wedding but we are already planning next weekend.

LWP:Absence of vacuum induced Berry phases without the rotating wave approximation in cavity QED

2012-01-23T02:13:00.000-08:00

by Jonas Larson
Physics Review Letters 108, 033601 (2012)

Some ten years ago, Berry phase was studied in the Jaynes-Cummings model. In this paper, Larson focuses on proving that such a geometric phase arises from the use of the rotating wave approximation.

First, Larson reviews the results fro the Jaynes-Cummings model, that is, under the rotating wave approximation, and derives the accumulated Berry phases by exact diagonalization of the Hamiltonian. Then, he presents a semiclassical approximation derivation by using canonical operators for the field and Born-Oppenheimer approximation to obtain a pair of adiabatic potentials that lead to semiclassical conical energy surfaces giving a Berry phase which is identical to that given by the exact calculation for large photon number.

Once the validity of this semiclassical approximation is provided by this example, Larson uses the same method to find the semiclassical energy surfaces for the case without the rotating wave approximation, that is, Rabi Hamiltonian, and shows that these surfaces lack the conical intersection that gives a non zero Berry phase. Actually, the semiclassical energy surfaces for this case intersect along the line given by x=0 instead of just a point. It is noted that the author carried a numerical diagonalization of the Hamiltonian and the results were confirmed.

Furthermore, Larson revisits a lambda-atom configuration where a Raman coupling scheme is used and shows that by assuming far detuned driving fields such that adiabatic elimination can be carried on, without any rotating wave approximation, the semiclassical energy surfaces for the system do not intersect at a single point and Berry phase must be zero all the time.

He also discusses the case of a single atom in a bichromatic cavity and shows that within the used semiclassical formalism there are no vacuum induced Berry phases. A trio of other systems are presented with the same result: no Berry phase when the rotating wave approximation is not used.

It concludes, that the presence of a Berry phase in the Rabi model and other models discussed (adiabatic elimination, bichromatic cavities, etc) in the paper is a result of introducing the rotating wave approximation and not inherent to the models. Thus, a flag is raised: whenever Berry phase is the subject of study one has to be mindful of the approximations used independently of the coupling regime at hand. It may be even possible that this result may change if a multi-level approximation is taken instead of the typical two-level restriction of the Rabi model. It also points the interest of studying vacuum induced Berry phase in nonadiabatic processes.

This is a very nice paper to read, it presents a concrete, straight to the fact introduction of geometrical phases in cavity-QED and the results are presented in a clear manner. If you are a fan of the Jaynes-Cummings model, you cannot leave this article unread.

Vacations... what do to with them?

2012-01-18T22:51:00.000-08:00

I never know what to do with my vacations. I usually never take them and I usually get bored after a few days or even hours whenever I have to take them without having something in mind

Waking up late... check

Cleaning the house... check

Watching a movie while having breakfast... check

Chat with Lyx... check

Get bored and checking the arXiv, physics and optics journals for new papers... check

So, you see. I can even bet that before the day is gone I will be doing a little bit of algebra here and there now that I found something that caught my eye in today's listings at the arXiv.

Days off, those I can handle. It is easier to think of 18 waking hours to do whatever you want: sit at home to read a book, go downtown to take some photos, go to the cinema, all of the above. Vacations, well, vacations for me used to mean getting a one-month train pass and hop from city to city coach surfing at my friends' places for three or four days at a time; getting into the car alone or with family/friends and drive for a whole full month to hidden places; or grabbing the backpack, meet my friends at some interesting and wide area with hitchhiking and backpacking potential and spend a full month moving around the place trying to get to know it. Now, that requires a little bit of planning but not really that much, in the end you just have to figure the general area that you want to visit and that's all.

Today is the first day of my 28 day vacation. I'm supposed to be off the office until February 29th. and I have no clue what to do with it. I'm just taking the days because I cannot cash them in before my contract ends the 3rd of March. I have just one vague idea of what I want to do: Angkor Wat but that's it. I wish Lyx, Andre or Martin where here to just go over a place and start moving around until there's no Wat left un-sighted or pagoda un-visited from Vietnam to Singapore—uhm, maybe that's way too much—.

Anyway, I'm too lackadaisical to get the visas to Vietnam and Cambodia. Most probably I will start doing my typical working day routine to overcome this ennui.

If you are looking for information about what countries require a visa for Mexicans, I found in the intertubes was this page that is photographically organized and this page that is alphabetically organized.

If you know about some beautiful place (not a beach!) in South Pacific Asia that doesn't require Mexicans a visa to travel there, please post it in the comments, I will be thankful.

Last weekend movies...

2012-01-16T06:20:00.000-08:00

Lyx and I both got a very busy week, but we still have the Audrey Hepburn bug...

My Fair Lady, ****
Based on the theater play, it tells the story of Eliza Doolittle a young street girl with a drive who search and becomes the experiment of Prof. Higgins, a brilliant scholar of language, who believes that in early XX century London language defines status. It would have been five stars if Hepburn had sang her parts and if they had done with the kill-time-while-the-scenery-is-changed songs.
Life as we know it, ***
Sophie is a baby who lost her parents in a car accident and is left at the care of her mother's best friend and her father's best friend, who are a pair of self-centered modern adults used to have the life they wanted. It's a fresh romantic comedy with this modern twist on the idea of love in the times of ego.

More and more series are coming back...

Last Man Standing S01-E13, ****
Mike is an angry man but any man has a hearth and now the girls manage to have a puppy for a few days and Ed... well, Ed manages to make him angrier by almost re-branding outdoor man to compensate for time-lost with his daughter.
Hawaii Five O S02-E12-13, **
I just skipped episode 12 last week! The guys solve a triple murder and Chin gets married. The special forces are back in action and McGarret has to deal with the fine line between friend/enemy again, but this time it is even closer to his heart.
Big Bang Theory S04-E12, ****
Sheldon finds out that buying forgive-me trinkets is just his strategy for a happy relationship as Amy, brilliant as she is, is still a girl and not Sheldon. The rest of the guys deal with manhood in the old fashioned way (Howard), loneliness (Leonard) and some strange gayness (Raj).
Revenge S01-E01-13, ***
Amanda Clark's father is framed for a crime he didn't commit and dies in shame while in prison, she comes back to the Hamptons as Emily Thorne, loaded with money and ready to revenge on all those who helped framing her dad. The first five episodes are nice and fast-paced but the rest become a little bit too slow and cliche. Oh, yes, the under-laying idea is Monte Cristo. Lyx calls it "a drama" but it has all my qualifiers for soap-opera: i) String music during dramatic pauses, ii) Guys with more stylized eyebrows than girls, iii) Someone falling into a coma, iv) That someone coming out from the coma with amnesia

And yes, we still have more Audrey Hepburn to come thanks to Lyx despite the fact that she doesn't seem to like me pointing out how beautiful, gorgeous and astounding Audrey Hepburn was.

LWP: Polariton Mott insulator with trapped ions or circuit QED

2012-01-16T03:46:00.001-08:00

by M. Hohenadler, M. Aichhorn, L. Pollet and S. Schmidt
Physical Review A 85, 013810 (2012)

The authors address an extended Jaynes-Cummings-Hubbard model where photons in 1D or 2D arrays of coupled resonators—each of them holding a two-level system—can hop beyond nearest neighbors. This particular model is of relevance in circuit-QED—where 1D and 2D arrays of qubit+stripline resonators can capacitively couple—and in trapped ions&mdahs;where dipole interactions are long range—. So, the model are basically 1D or 2D arrays of polaritons—qubit+fied excitation—with short and long range coupling.

They study a 1D frustrated long-range hopping model in the context of trapped ions and the same in 2D by assuming a circuit-QED model. The first is studied using a variational cluster approach and a quantum Monte Carlo method (ALPS 1.3 implementation), the second only the quantum Monte Carlo method. Analytically, Metzner's local cumulants are used to calculate a photonic Matsubara Green's function for the system within a random phase approximation.

The authors find a Mott-superfluid transition by changing the hopping to qubit-field coupling ratio as usual with these models. Their results show that the Mott lobes characteristic for this transition are enlarged/reduced in the case of trapped ions/circuit-QED but they realize that neither the quantum Monte Carlo, nor the variational cluster approaches provide any evidence of a change of the universality class of phase transition in the presence of long-range hopping.

This is one of those papers that would take long to duplicate but are nice to read and learn the physics of the studied system and even more interesting if you like anything Jaynes-Cummings.

Last weekend movies...

2012-01-09T02:51:00.000-08:00

Lyx got the Audrey Hepburn bug and I cannot be happier, she's the most beautiful actress ever, if you ask me...

Roman Holiday, *****
A young princess is burn out by her public relations schedule and, under the influence of a happy drug administered to relax her, decides to escape the embassy of her country and have a free day in Rome. She meets an American journalist by chance that saves her from sleeping in the streets and takes her on a one day tour—not without selfishness. I love old movies, they are so innocent and their endings are so good.
Zatoichi, ****
Zatoichi appears to be just a blind, wandering masseuse and professional gambler; but the old man is also a wrestler and proficient swordsman. In this story, his road interlaces with that of a pair of siblings that seek revenge on those who murdered their family ten years ago. Good for them, Zatoichi has some unfinished business with the murdering gang. I loved the almost static and the bizarre scenes appearing now and then, and the random act of foolishness that puts a comic touch to everything.
Lone Wolf and Cub 2-5, ***
Ogami (similar to Okami, wolf in Japanese) Ito and Daigoro keep walking the road to hell but the Ura-Yagyu is now trying to destroy the lone wolf more actively. I was expecting more after watching the first, but it gets more and more fantastic as the saga keeps going.
The Help, ***
A young writer, from small town Jackson, tries her hand at narrating the lives of those negro maids from the deep south of the 60s. It is a well done movie with good acting but I can hardly believe the story. The story would have been great if it were not just a fairy tale. The civil rights movement in the 60s was not a rosy, peaceful endeavor and I would think that even in the 60s a lot of abuse to african-american and american women happened in the deep south.

Some of the series are back from the December pause...

Last Man Standing S01-E12, ****
Mike has to deal with what seems to be a punk celebrity but happens to be a man looking for a center. Of course, he almost screws things up almost making the young pro-bass-fisher quit fishing. Tony Hawk appears for a few minutes!
Hawaii Five O S02-E13, **
The special forces are back in action and McGarret has to deal with the fine line between friend/enemy again, but this time it is even closer to his heart.
The Cape E01-13 (Miniseries), ****
A honest cop named Vince gets framed as super-villain Chess and taken for dead, but he survives and, under the tutelage of Max Malini and his Carnival of Crime train him to be the super-hero The Cape. I really liked the idea—and Summer Glau as omniscient Orwell—but the story started to drag and everything became too slow by the second episode. In the end, the series was dropped and the half-season ending was not even close to a real good finale.

Next week, It's gonna be a Audrey Hepburn weekend for me thanks to Lyx!

LWP: Optical Thomas-Reiche-Kuhn sum rules

2012-01-08T21:46:00.000-08:00

by S. M. Barnett and R. Loudon
Physical Review Letters 108, 013601 (2012)

Thomas-Reiche-Kuhn sum rules are quite important in Quantum Optics, they tell us that the sum of squared dipole moments from a any given energy level is constant in the dipole approximation. They have been useful in providing a validity check in radiation-matter interaction, like no-go theorems in the case of super-radiance in Dicke model. Anyhow, it is a necessary condition for the canonical commutation relation between position and momentum of an atomic electron to hold.

In their article Barnett and Loudon—who, by the way, have written very useful and didactic books in Quantum Optics each—explore the electromagnetic field in lossless magnetodielectric media and show that the equal-time commutation relations for the four electromagnetic field operators deliver four polariton sum rules (for the unity, permittivity, permeability and their product) analogous to the atomic Thomas-Reiche-Kuhn sum rule. They show a proof of these optical TRK sum rules by analysing the case where complex polariton frequencies are restricted to the lower half complex plane; the proof is beautiful and simple, they use complex variable analysis to state the fact that path integration in the half-upper complex planes for the four complex functions is equal to one as both the permittivity and permeability goes to one as the frequency goes to infinity, then, in the lower half, the contour integral is calculated from the zeroes of each of the four quantities corresponding to solutions of the dispersion relation for polaritons in a lossless magnetodielectric mediuml; this delivers a residue equal to one. Finally, by using a relation between residues and derivatives of the dispersion relation, they show that this residue is actually a sum over the polariton phase velocities, a little bit more of algebra and tada! They also sketch the effect of losses but leave it for a following article.

They results indicate that it is not possible to design a medium where all polariton modes are in the negative-index region. Interesting for all the meta-material research. I'm curious how this comes out in the presence of losses.

Man, oh man. I'm really dusted in complex variable. I'm still half-way in the calculations, but the paper is so beautiful written that everything seems so logical and simple.

I, the DSLR Dummy: Panoramas with Hugin

2012-01-03T08:36:00.000-08:00

I have been trying my patience with panoramas in the last months. I have been using a nice GPL stitching software called Hugin that basically does everything by itself. It is trivial to install Hugin in any computer as there are compiled versions for unix, windows and mac.

In the most basic mode, you select a series of overlapping pictures and let Hugin do its magic. Of course, it is a matter of taking the right pictures or calamity strikes as you can see from one of the first panoramas that I stitched:

Clarke Quay from Brewerkz, Singapore 2011.

These are some six photographs taken from an un-leveled tripod without minding the distance between the first objects and the camera. I am a lucky guy and the result is not an eye sore but it was sheer luck that the distorted perspective came out somehow right.

The nice thing about Hugin is that, once you level the tripod for the axis of the camera to coincide with the tripod's axis of rotation and take care for the subject to be far from the lens, it is trivial to get a nice cylindrical projection panorama:

Harbour Front from Mt. Fabor, Singapore 2011.

These are some eight photographs taken from a leveled and aligned tripod. Again, it was sheer luck that I got such a nice effect with the sunset at the right.

But not everything is oats with honey, once you shoot without some stabilization or a scene that has moving parts, such as cars in a city, things get a little bit messy; for example, this one is a composition of ten pictures taken from a standing position without tripod:

Zurich Sea from Grossmunster, Zurich 2011.

I was afraid that my epileptic pulse will screw things up so I took some twenty three shoots; only ten were useful in the composition of this panorama. Even worse, Hugin didn't manage to recognize overlaps and treated the pics as independent. The good thing is that once this happens, Hugin takes you to the control point window automatically, there you can manually input control points on contiguous photographs. It seems like the best approach is to identify two sets of parallel lines, one pair of vertical and one of horizontal lines, in each pair of overlapping pics. It sounds like a hard task, but the fine tune button helps a lot in identifying the right points and it only took me around half an hour to set three hundred control points for the panorama above. I want to think that the result is not that bad after cropping it a little.

In short, for those doing this just for the sake of keeping a memory and having a hobby, or running on a tight budget like me, Hugin is a great option for stitching panoramas. It has a great automatic recognition of control points that does the work for you most of the time—so far I only had to do manual selection of control points in one out of seven panoramas—, a good selection of projection algorithms—I have only played with cylindrical projections so far— and it is for free; if you like and use it, don't forget to make a donation to the Hugin project!

I hope you enjoy your stitching as much as I do. Here are some of the panoramas I have stitched so far.

LWP: Dicke Quantum Spin Gas of Atoms and Photons

2012-01-02T19:30:00.000-08:00

by P. Strack and S. Sachdev
Physical Review Letters 107, 277202 (2011)

A few years ago, Nagy and collaborators proposed to use Dicke model to describe atoms in a quantized cavity driven by a classical field in one-dimension [Eur. Phys. J. D, 2008, 48, 127 - 137]. Later Baumann and collaborators experimentally demonstrated a checkerboard transition in the two-dimensional center of mass motion of a condensate in a cavity and an optical lattice which may be described by Dicke's model [Nature, 2010, 464, 1301 - 1306]; see also Nagy and collaborators [Phys. Rev. Lett., 2010, 104, 130401]. The experiments of Baumann and collaborators realized a supersolid atomic phase with long range interactions mediated by photons. Theoretically, Dicke's model in the thermodynamic limit (the number of two-level atoms, a.k.a. qubits, is infinitely large) looking just at the atoms delivers a phase transition in the ground state into a ferromagnet-like structure.

Here, Strack and Sachdev study what happens in Dicke model when multiple electromagnetic modes interact with the atomic ensemble without the rotating-wave-approximation instead of just the single-mode. They propose to integrate out the photonic degrees of freedom in a path integral representation to obtain a Hamiltonian similar to the Ising model in a transverse field, where long range interactions depend inversely on the imaginary frequencies of the qubits in the path integral. They mention that such a condensed matter model is similar to the Hopfield model and allows for Mattis ground states which critical properties should be similar to those of a single-mode Dicke model but focus on the case where the long range interaction distribution is Gaussian. This, in the infinitely large number of qubits limit, allows for an extra ground state quantum spin-glass phase appart from the paramagnet and the ferromagnet known in the single-mode Dicke model. They also show that it is also possible to calculate the photon correlation function. But most importantly, discuss that the paramagnet to ferromagnet phase transition is to be considered classical while the transition to a quantum spin-glass is a genuine phase transition from the radio-frequency spectral response function of the qubits (there is a spectral weight going to zero for a continuum of frequencies in the latter case).

I really liked the paper, it is very interesting how a well-known model still delivers new ways of studying condensed matter phenomena in quantum optics setups. I'm still trying to work my way with the formalism they used to integrate out the photon fields but the good thing is that they present the procedure in the last two pages of the manuscript and it is being very helpful.

Note: I'm sorry for the one-day delay, yesterday was a public holiday and I was lazy enough to stay at home.

Epiphany

2012-01-02T07:18:00.000-08:00

I am lucky to have met Lyx and even luckier because she choose me to share her life.

If there's something I have to be grateful and hopeful about in this end/begin of the year, it is having Lyx at my side. She is an angel carrying a message of love and optimism, she has the patience, perseverance, faith and heart of a saint that motivates, refreshes and keeps the light bright in my darkest hours. I am sure that for every time I have wanted to look at her with murder eyes, she has had at least ten reasons to murder me and walk free but she has never looked at me with something short of a smile.

There are things I fear, becoming sclerotic is one of those, I have never being afraid of change and yet year by year, independent of the place or time, I have developed routines that allow me to isolate my feelings and thoughts. Lyx came, saw and conquer breaking these routines without knowing. It always brings me a smile to remember our first days together exchanging music and quotes from this or that band and book that I had never heard about. Later, when we had to live in different continents, she introduced our long distance movie weekends that have kept going on for the last two years with films that have made us laugh, cry and, most important, get closer and closer.

She is a valiant woman, I admire her. When I couldn't go back to Mexico for Christmas in 2010 she traveled for the first time out of Mexico and U.S. and came all the way to Taiwan. I was dumb enough not to book my HSRT ticket with advance and got to the airport half an hour late, there she was, all smiles, not a speckle of anger on her.

She's strong, steadfast and optimistic while I am weak, explosive and realistic and many times i wonder how we have found that fine balance that keeps us going without stepping on each other toes. Mostly it is because of her. She has a way to accept and moderate things, to get together ends that sometimes seems opposite to each other.

I guess she has to suffer my non-optimistic view of the world, always trying to be prepared for this or that while, at the same time, tying to get the most out of the present because you never know what will happen in a few hours. And I say I guess, because she has never complained while it seems like I am the opposite.

She has become my love and my life and I am thankful to God for putting me in her way and made her look my way. I am lucky and thankful to be at the side of this strong, brilliant and hard working woman that has no peer to be compared to and has to suffer this fool more often than every now and then.

Thank you God and gracias vida for your love.

Last weekend movies...

2012-01-02T06:34:00.000-08:00

Lyx has an awesome taste in movies and again she choose one that just got us flabbergasted...

The Time Traveler's Wife, *****
The whole movie is a time travel paradox of Heinlin proportions! A time traveler erratically goes back and forth in time and creates a relationship with a normal girl. It is an amazing way to tell a love story, I'm really hoping to get my hands on the book as soon as I clear my current reading list.
Going Postal, ****
So far, the last film based on Sir Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels. Ankh-Morpork is suffering from a monopoly of telecommunications and needs to revive its postal service, what a better man for the job than conman Moist von Lipwig? As always, there's romance, murder, adventure and a lot of laughs.
Lone Wolf and Cub, ****
I have the feeling that this one should be on the first place because I surely missed a lot of the technical, photography and cinematic details. The Ogami (similar to Okami, that is wolf) clan has been murdered in a political game during Tokugawa's shogunate, only the clan leader Itto and his son remain taking the path of the assassin and searching for revenge. An awesome masterpiece from the seventies and the first of a series of six (or maybe seven) films.
The Rite, ***
A faithless man is recruited in the exorcist ranks of Vatican and confronts his first demon, Ba'al, in a faith inducing and almost mortal experience. Allegedly based in a true story
Red State, ***
A trio of teens looking for sex are captured by a fundamentalist sects somewhere in rural america and there's a big screw up by the ATF. Kevin Smith—disclosure, I'm a fan of the Jersey saga—portraits fundamentalist America, both civil and government, and its screw-ups.

Most of the series have gone to hiatus so I had to go for Rafael's recommendation and some more...

Breaking Bad S01E01-07, ****
Walter White, a brilliant chemist gone South surviving teaching at a high school in Albuquerque, finds himself facing death and the prospect of leaving his family without a cent and up to the neck in debts, that's when he decides to cook meth with one of his old students and break bad. In the beginning I didn't like it but as Rafael told me, it really gets worse with time and that's good.
Tin Man E01-03 (Miniseries), ****
Three generations ago, Dorothy Garland walked Oz and fought the bad witches of Oz. Now, a witch is free and her grand daughters played a major role in liberating the witch. It is the turn of D.G. and a rag tag band composed of an empty-headed scarecrow of a man (a former adviser to the Queen), a heartless tin man (copper, police) and a coward lion to find a way into Oz emerald and vanquishing the witch.
Good Luck Charlie S01E01-23, **
Charlie, short for Charlotte, is the few months old baby of the Duncan family. Her sister Teddy is video logging a diary so Charlie can learn from the past. The family is rounded up with PJ the oldest and brainless sibling and Gabe, the second youngest and the evil mind of the pack. Good innocent laughs, refreshing after so many pseudo-procedural series and good for waiting the return of Last Man Standing tomorrow night.

Happy New Year to all!

Snuff by Terry Pratchett

2012-01-01T06:58:00.000-08:00

Snuff is the 39th novel set in the Discworld written by Sir Terry Pratchett. It belongs to the Sam Vines' (The Watch) story-arc. As every other Discworld novel, it is a treaty on humankind (read philosophy) in the form of comic-fantasy—or is it comic-fantasy in the guise of philosophy?

In Snuff, Vimes is forced to take a vacation to the countryside where young Sam Vimes discovers the pleasures of naturalism—becoming a poo expert—and old Vimes finds himself in the middle of a murder case where he's the prime suspect. Of course, this changes immediately to old Vimes chasing the clues and upsetting a band of high-born ~~tobacco~~ troll drugs smugglers cashing on the status quo of rural Discworld and the perception of goblins as vermin to be enslaved and not worthy of human rights—a vision changed, in the end, by the diplomatic efforts and connections of Lady Sybil Vimes who introduces to the world the music of Tear of a Mushroom, the best student of "Where's my cow" author Miss Felicity Beedle. In this tome, Willikins—Vimes' gentleman's gentleman—plays a major role as a kind of lex-talionis-justice complement to Vimes ideal-justice and reign of the law conception of the discworld.

I am a big fan of Sir Pratchett's penmanship, it is refreshing and his books flow without any effort. More important, with his Discworld saga, he has describe many facets of historical and modern humanity exploring a great deal of the practical philosophy—including both lofty and not-so-exalted ideals—that plays a role in constructing a barely holding social weave.

I hold dear the character of Samuel Vimes, I see this know-thyself fighting-the-self-darkness hero as the embodiment of Nietzsche's aphorism #146 from Beyond Good and Evil:

"Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein."

"He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee."

In any case, if you have never tried a book by Sir Terry Pratchett, this new year may be a good year to pick one from your local library or bookstore and give it a try.

Good-bye 2011: Ten things...

2011-12-29T06:46:00.000-08:00

It seems like a tradition to have top-10 lists when the end of year comes about. I think I have never done so in my life, but I'm ready to give it my best shot. I can hardly figure out if I'm gonna get to 10 but surely I'm gonna try and prevail with a "Ten things that 2011 left me". Here I go!

I'm a lucky guy, not just because I won great prices on last and this year Christmas' dinner at CQT, but for all the reasons that follow.
I've a great family. I was born to a school teacher and an oil worker who barely finished half his junior high, yet they saw me through my bachelor and more. And of course my mother and father aunts are the most amazing, supportive and crazy women I know, the same goes to my cousins and adopted brothers. I have known this for a long time, but every year they manage to remind me of it.
I've had very good examples in life. I also have known this but, again, this year I met and saw with my eyes the works of great people: Kwek, Valerio, Bjorn, Berger, Chang, great individuals, great examples.
I've had incredible bosses in the past. This is a reflexive. Man, oh man. I have had very good supervisors in the past, honest, responsible with moral and ethical standards and good hearths.
I've worked with great people. Thanks to my actual job, I met a bunch of great guys who have taught me a lot of physics, who have made me laugh a lot, run after a football for the fist time in many years, and enjoy a beer and a burger now and then.
I've lived in a wonderful city. Singapore is something very special, it is a first world island/country/city where everything works, crime is very low and nothing is more than one-hour away by public transport.
I've tried my best to live a honest life. That's hard, there's always a corner to cut, a rationalization to made or simply one can believe that it is doing so, without even taking time to meditate about it. I have failed in somethings, I have managed to keep my ground in some others, but I have always gone for it.
I've everything I've ever needed. I have a roof over my head, food on my plate and clothes to enjoy the outdoors, a wonderful family, great friends and savings to survive while I get another job. I cannot ask for more.
It is us that decide what and when enough is enough. I guess the bar rises or lowers as you have to support wife, kids, or even such a bullshit as a "life-style," but in the end it is up to each and everyone to set that bar and take responsibility for it.
I'll try to keep giving the good fight... is life about something else? I don't think so.

May God bless us all in this new 2012!

Last weekend movies...

2011-12-26T08:18:00.000-08:00

Lyx wanted a Christmas themed weekend of movies, here is the result plus some that I managed to squeeze on my own time...

Hogfather, ****
Human belief is conserved, if one major belief is getting lost then there will be belief to support minor lies into existence.This was the first tv-movie made from a Discworld book and it was a great film centered on Death and Susan. Not as good as The Colour of Magic, though.
The Polar Express, ***
A boy is loosing his belief in Santa Claus and needs to be brought back into the Christmas spirit. I guess this was an amazing animation in its own time. The story, well, is dull and boring but the quality of the animation is very good even though it's almost eight years old.
Just go with it, **
A guy's heart is broken by his fiance just minutes before the wedding and this is enough to make him take on girls based on pure lies from then on, until he finds love, love out from honesty and respect. It's a good laugh and Jennifer Aniston is so cute!
Bad Santa, **
A conman finds something that could pass as redemption through a neglected kid during Christmas. Billy Bob Thornton plays the role of an alcoholic conman that makes his year every Christmas alongside a fellow criminal. I don't like happy endings in this kind of movies.
Setup, **
A diamond heist goes south when the leader decides to cheat on the gang but making the mistake of letting one alive. It lacked the fast pace and explosiveness that I would expect from an action/violent film. After the first scenes I was expecting Lock, Stock and Two Smocking Barrels, but got nothing.
Scrooged, *
A Christmas carol told in the 80s with Bill Murray in the role of a modern Scrooge. It was better when I first saw it in the 90s.
Hall Pass, *
Two married guys neglected by their wives get a one week free from marriage and find that the good old times are actually gone while their wives are the ones really getting the time off and the fooling around. It gets a few laughs but nothing out of the ordinary.
Elf, *
A human orphan gets to the North Pole and is raised as an Elf and some thirty years later comes back to his father to try to live like human, during Christmas in New York. Of course, he ends up saving Christmas and his family. Some laughs but mostly embarrassment.

Most of the series have gone to hiatus...

Terra Nova S01 E11-13, ****
Terra Nova is over and it seems like it's not gonna be back. In these last chapters the colony faces the invasion from the future when the mole helps Lucas finish his solution for the two-way tunnel. The colony is taken by the forces from the future and the bridge severed by Taylor and his men to prevent the corporation from ruining Terra Nova.
Hawaii five-o, (hiatus)
Castle, (hiatus)
Last Man Standing, (hiatus)
Big Bang Theory, (hiatus)
Psych, (hiatus)

LWP: On-chip, photon-number-resolving, telecommunication-band detectors for scalable photonic information processing

2011-12-26T01:04:00.000-08:00

by T. Gerrits et. al.
Physical Review A 84, 060301(R) (2011)

Some of the big problems in commercial realizations of Quantum Optics protocols are the inefficient coupling between systems and detectors and the forest of optical devices needed to realize them in the laboratory. Integration in optical circuits could resolve both.

This article shows a realization of a photon-number-resolving detector that can be integrated with superconducting devices in photonic circuits. The detector is a transition-edge sensor made of tungsten evanescently coupled to the system to measure.

I'm not that bright to understand everything about the technical stuff but I find this very interesting in the sense that now they can strongly increase the efficiency of their detection process and as well as resolve photon number in the system (they tested their detection scheme with a coherent pulse with a few photons)

I wish I could say more, but I am far from my lab days. It is a nice paper presenting something that may very useful in the near future go and have a look and maybe you could come back and tell me more about it.

The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla by Stephen King

2011-12-25T03:26:00.000-08:00

In this the fifth installment of the Dark Tower series, Mr. King takes Roland's ka-tet closer to the Tower in a Seven Samurai (or Magnificent Seven) Mid-world spin including Dr. Doom look-a-likes armed with lightsabers and snitches while trying to figure out how to protect the rose in 1977 New York.

Mr. King's penmanship gets the main story arc advanced and manages to twist it with a remnant from Jake's entrance to Mid-world: Suze is in troubles an developing a new personality as a consequence of her mating with the demon guardian. Also, the cast of players related to the main story arc gets larger with Calvin Tower and Deepneau's role in the story increasing as a result of Tower's family being related to the rose; and Father Callahan from Salem's Lot becoming a part of the gunslingers ka-tet.

Again, the book is an intertwined collection of stories. The main one being the defense of old western town Calla Brym Sturgis from the Wolves that every twenty years or so kidnap one of each set of twins to deliver them back ruined: stupid and gigant; second in importance is the storyline developing in New York 1977 where the rose is in danger as the servants of the dark try to make a grab on the vacant lot; a third important arc is the developments in Susannah Dean's life that lead into the next installment of the series. A significant part of the book is filled with Father Callahan story during and after Salem's Lot.

The novel is a page-turner as all other installments in the series are. The confluence of all of Mr. King's worlds into the Dark Tower multiverse becomes stronger with the introduction of Father Callahan and the tales of his wandering through multiple worlds. Again, I have to tell that Mr. King's is making a better job than Mr. Heinlin did in consolidating all his stories into a single multiverse; oh, he even introduces himself into the story citing Salem's Lot. Also, he cites Mr. Heinlin's The Door into Summer—a nice self-recreation time travel paradox based story (one of Mr. Heinlin favorite topics) and a must read, I guess the idea of projecting into the future thanks to cryogenic storage came out ot this one.

Anyway, as you, my five readers, know, I have become somehow addicted to Mr. King's Dark Tower series. That's why Wolves of the Calla was my first ebook purchase ever (I got it from Kobo Books alongside their Kobo Touch ereader). I managed to get through it during my daily commute for the last three weeks and I cannot wait to get the next installment sometime next week. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Last weekend movies...

2011-12-19T07:46:00.000-08:00

Although Lyx spend most of the weekend at the shelter helping with the Christmas party for the kids, we manage to squeeze some movie time...

The Colour of Magic, *****
I thought that whenever they decided to launch a Discworld movie I will be disappointed. The point is that I have read 37 of the 39 Discworld novels in the last 15 years and I always wanted to see a movie about it. Well, I couldn't be more wrong! It is awesome! Go for it! It is actually both the colour of magic and the light fantastic.
The Myth, *
I have to be honest, the star is all Jackie Chan. The story could be great were not continuity lapses like seeing the hills from the Korean border from an Indian border temple and such. As always, the stunts are awesome, but that's it. I got disappointed.

Uhm, some series have gone into end of year hiatus...

Terra Nova, ****
I'm really liking the twist of events. Although the characters are starting to become cartoonish due to the extreme polarization, the possibilities for the story arising from Lucas and his work on the wormhole are actually limitless; I just hope this doesn't end in a Stargate Atlantis with dinosaurs.
Hawaii five-o S02 E02-12, ***
I spend most of my before-bed time catching up with this series and I'm glad I did. It is still very bland in the procedural thing but the story is unfolding nicely. Now, everybody seems to be more than meets the eye.
Castle, (hiatus)
Last Man Standing S01 E11, ***
Love, work and responsibilities comes to the family, each one to different girls. Of course, a mess ensues with outdoor man in the middle of it. It still keeps me laughing most of the time.
Big Bang Theory, (hiatus)
Psych S06 E09, **
Brandon from Beverly Hills 90210 is the guest 90s star this week. The story unfolds during a romantic weekend with Shawn and Jules, con and murder included.

LWP: Complex coordinates in transformation optics

2011-12-18T22:35:00.000-08:00

Bogdan-Ioan Popa and Steven A. Cummer
Physical Review A 84, 063837 (2011)

I learned to love coordinate system during my time at IF-UNAM, it is amazingly funny all the things you can do just by choosing a suitable reference frame. Invisibility cloaks are one such thing.

Back in 2006 the original proposal to manufacture a coating to reduce scattering was published, it was followed by a number of proposals utilizing material design to create funky optical devices. It seems like the most common approach is to choose a real coordinate transformation (implemented through smooth changes in the material properties) that is used to control the phase of an impinging electromagnetic field as it propagates through a surface; with a real transformation, the amplitude of the field remains unchanged. Popa and Cummer propose and show that complex coordinate transformations can manipulate amplitude as well.

First, they introduce the idea of complex coordinate transformation for a radial electromagnetic wave through an arbitrary inhomogeneous and anisotropic material (assuming that locally the field can be approximated as a plane wave in a small neighborhood) and show that this allows for amplitude manipulation and that it may be used in combination with well-known real transformation optics. Also, their manipulation scheme does not produce unwanted scattering off this neighborhood.

Second, they extend the idea to two-dimensions and apply their results to a typical invisibility cloak (which is a real space one dimensional coordinate transformation). A typical cloak has the problem that small deviations from the ideal material parameters on the inner cloak boundary may produce tell off scattering off the cloak. They show that this unwanted scattering may be reduced by use of a complex coordinate transformation at least in one propagation direction because the fields propagating towards the inner cloak boundary are greatly attenuated in one direction. They note that it is not possible to obtain such an attenuation for all directions of incidence, as once the transformation parameter is chosen, the wave whose propagation vector is perpendicular to the transformation parameter vector will not see the transformation.

Then, they extend the idea to the design of reflectionless perfectly matched layers of irregular shape, where previous work has already used complex coordinates in curvilinear coordinate frames. It seems like their approach simplifies the computational power involved in the numerical simulations.

It is a nice paper to read, I'm still trying to get all the equations involved. I thought it would be easy but it seems like I'm missing a fine point here and there; specifically, an electromagnetic wave propagator, anyway, I will be satisfied with finishing following the analyticals.

See you next Monday at lunch-time (I hope there will be something open at the University's Mess Hall, I hate coming to the office and not being able to eat)

Last weekend movies...

2011-12-12T06:46:00.000-08:00

Lyx had a busy weekend preparing candy bags for the kids at the shelter. We didn't have a chance to sit down and watch movies together. I had to help myself into this one...

The Devil's Double, *
This film tells the alleged story of Latif Yahia, an Iraqi national recruited to be the double of Uday Hussain. In my opinion, the movie has cheap stamped everywhere. I think they had the chance to tell the story of one fallen modern dictator through a forced servant but it came out slow, bland, some minutes of softcore porn, and most sadly trying to portrait a hard-to-believe-is-truth hero. Even recollections of Jarhead seem better in comparison right now.

The thanksgiving break is over and the missing series are back!

Stacked S01-02 E01-19, **
Pam Anderson plays the role of Skyler, a bimbo bouncing out of a relationship and trying to avoid the hot, sturdy men that are the story of her life. The solution, find a job at a book store run by two nerd brothers. The jokes are light, filled with sexual innuendo. I laughed out loud on this simple and ~~nipply~~ nippy antithesis of good old Cheers.
Hawaii five-o S02 E01, ***
Last season was finished with McGarrett in jail, in this, the first episode of a second season, we are treated with a closure to that history, new characters, and a hint of treason that surely will reverberate all over this season.
Castle S04 E10, **
Really? Come on, this is the second time that Castle and Beckett are trapped together! Give me something nice and new! At least they are keeping up with current pop culture references.
Last Man Standing S01 E10, ***
Mike has to deal with Christmas, specially the time for forgiving part. I loved the "That's all you keep from church, Forgiveness? What about the vengeful guy, rainning brimstone and toads on people?"
Big Bang Theory S05 E11, *
The guys are bad without any punch, but the girls. O, the girls are enjoying their time ~~atoning~~ raiding charity clothes boxes.
Psych S06 E08, *
It seems this was not my week for tv-series. Gus fells in love, again, but this time it comes with murder and fraud, at least this time he's not the target.

LWP: Anderson localization of partially incoherent light

2011-12-11T20:54:00.001-08:00

by D. Capeta, J. Radic, A. Szameit, M. Segev and H. Buljan.

Physical Review A 84, 011801(R) 2011.

Lately, I have been reading a lot about waveguides. It is interesting how one can classically simulate—this word is en vogue—condensed matter and relativistic phenomena with light in coupled waveguides.

Last week, I found this this rapid communication. In it, Capeta et. al. focus in Anderson localization—first described in disordered electronic systems and optically realized a few years ago—. Their particular crux goes around these facts:

Anderson localization arises from the interference among scattering events in a disordered medium.
In an optical realization one can use incoherent light; say, light from a spceckle source.
But incoherent light can be seen as an infinite superposition of coherent modes and each should Anderson localize in a sufficiently disordered medium.

So, Does incoherent light localize in the presence of disordered media?

Capeta et. al. find their answer: Yes, it does localize after a sufficiently long propagation time both numerically and experimentally; the first by studying the mutual coherence function of a spatially incoherent optical beam propagating through a photonic waveguide lattice where the refraction index of individual waveguides varies randomly, the second by following the intensities of the beam at different propagation distances on the lattice. They cover both finite and infinite cases through finite realizations with reflective and absorbing boundaries. They find the exponential decaying tail of Anderson localization even with instantaneous realizations of the incoherent fields.

It is a nicely written paper, simple to read and follow. If you are interested in what has been going around optical realizations of Anderson localization, the references have a nice survey on the topic.

The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi

2011-12-07T05:16:00.001-08:00

When I started reading the windup girl, I thought 'yeah! cyberpunk!' It only took me a few pages more to realize that Paolo Bacigalupi just constructed something that I have learnt to call biopunk; that is, a cyberpunk derivative where the focus is the effect of gene-hacking—instead of cyber-hacking—in a world that has been taken over by mega-corporations.

The novel is an exploration of human nature in a world filled with biological threats produced by the unethical practices of biotechnology companies in their dog-race for profit and market monopoly. Peculiar, though, I perceived all characters as anti-heroes motivated by personal or corporate gain. Even the one driven by the love of his people dwells in a grey region far from the archetypal hero.

The story centers around the fate of the self-isolated Kingdom of Thailand and its seed-bank. It is told, mainly through Anderson Lake, an american cover operative for a biotech corporation, Hock Seng, a Malay Chinese refugee who barely escape ethnic/religious cleansing in the Malay peninsula, Jaidee/Kanya, a captain and his right arm at the Ministry of the Environment of the Thai Kingdom, and Emiko, a genetic mashup created by the Japanese to be the perfect assistant, lady in waiting. It is through these characters that Bacigalupi explores different angles of ambition/desire/attachment in this apocalyptic setting where all decisions are made under pressure or, even, duress. The author's conclusion seems to be that human nature is immutable when it comes to ambition/desire/attachment.

I like the way Bacigalupi weaves the story going from one to another character. In the process, one gets to know each of them a little bit more as pages turn. It happens slowly, through their actions, fears, desires, attachments, and ambitions. Also, the author did his homework in researching the actual culture and environment of the Thai Kingdom and Southeast Asia.

I got the feeling that Bacigalupi's penmanship is still developing. Sometimes, the narrative seems choppy; a kind of stutter-step motion. Nevertheless, the story flows at a great pace and delivers some interesting visions of a what if world that may overlap with our future.

I highly recommend this novel. If you are living in this part of the world— South Pacific Asia—, it is a must read.

Last weekend movies...

2011-12-05T04:54:00.001-08:00

Another busy week. This time I found a little after work project that may give something interesting. Wish me luck! It seems like Lyx was also pretty busy as we only managed to watch one movie...

Cowboys and Aliens, ***
Cowboys with the quintessential space cowboy, Han Solo. The aliens are a nice construction but otherwise it's gone without pain nor glory. It's good to kill a morning.

So, Thundercats is over, Big Bang Theory is on hiatus, Castle is coming back this week, I think, and we couldn't catch episode nine of Terra Nova. In the end, I had to find something short to watch and kill the day after working a lot at home and I found Hawaii 5 O thanks to my office mate listening to the soundtrack one of these afternoons.

Last Man Standing S01 E09, ***
I'm not gonna lie to you. I totally agree with Mr. Outdoor Man. Once one enters home, one should not be requested to deal with the neighbors, go to parties, or socialize unless you really like them people, hehehe.
Psych S06 E03-07, ***
William Shatner! Jules' dad is portrayed by William Shatner! C'mon, can you think about something cooler? Psych is as bland as always but William Shatner is enough reason to sit down and watch it.
Hawaii 5-0 S01 E01-24, ***
This is the remake of an old—and twelve seasons long—police series from the 60-70s. It is a good sit-down-don't-think pseudo-procedural action/crime series. I'm already hooked up and waiting to see how the story unfolds on the second season. R. Orci, the screenplay writer from Cowboys and Aliens is a writer here.

Last week paper...

2011-12-05T01:45:00.001-08:00

Quantum simulation of the hexagonal Kitaev model with trapped ions.

R. Schmied, J. H. Wesenberg and D. Leibfried.

New Journal of Physics 13, 115011 (2011).

This was the paper I liked the most last week. That Janus is a great guy and a friend—which counts a lot—is not the reason behind my choice but that it is...

... a rigorous analisis of the effects of introducing conducting cover plates into ion traps.
... a proposal to generate optimal two-dimensional trapping configurations.
... a proposal for analogue quantum simulation of Kitaev model with ions in a structured 2D trap.

For the first point, they use the method of images in electrostatic analysis in order to get the Green functions of ions in the presence of a conducting and a grounded cover plates, then they add the effect of the conducting electrodes and the dipole-dipole interactions between trapped ions.

So, that's already something really nice, but they go further and analyze the Columb-potential-induced nearest neighbor interactions. They realize that this allow them to do analogue (continuous time) simulation—usually ion trap schemes are used for digital (step time) simulation—. Again, they conduct a meticulous approach: the normal modes and the vibrational bands are calculated under stiff traping and they develop a series of conditions and arguments for the scheme to work. In particular they talk about stringent bounds to time scales.

Finally, they put their money where their mouth is and show how to simulate the hexagonal Kitaev Hamiltonian. Again, their treatment is as complete as it can get.

The document is so nicely written that one gets that feeling of understanding every step they are taking. Go for it, it's for free! You will enjoy good, formal, honest physics.

Last weekend movies...

2011-11-28T06:50:00.001-08:00

It has been a really busy week, one of those seven day long weeks. Nevertheless, we have managed to find time to watch some movies!

Lucky Number Slevin, *****
I love films that are about confidence tricks (that's where the word con comes from). This in particular is a whole Kansas City Shuffle. Plus the dialogues are amazing! Plus Sir Ben Kingsley! This goes straight to my best con films alongside Confidence.
Trespass, ***
Joel Schumacher and Nicolas Cage plus Nicole Kidman. I was really piss off as this is one of those movies where everybody does what you are never supposed to do; e.g. confront armed men robbing your house. Anyway, it human nature at his typical: greed and lust.
The Reunion, ***
Three brothers and a sister from different mothers find out the father they share and hate is dead. The sister tells them that there are 12 mil to share if only they manage to be a family for two years. Against all odds, this manages to bring the three men together with guns, girls and horses!

Just when I decided to follow Thundercats, I came to realize that it is only thirteen episodes long, damn! Anyway, I took advantage of my working late to try to catch up with the back episodes of my series.

The Cape S01 E01-03, ****
A ten episode miniseries. An honest police officer finds himself betrayed and hunted. He dies for the world but is saved by a freak show that train and give him a chance at redemption. Classic comic book material. So far, so good!
Terra Nova S01 E07-08, ***
The fog of war is starting to disperse and it seems like now the true colors of the factions are starting to show. Still, good guys seem to be good guys for the old reasons of sustainability as well as value and respect of human life against corporate greed.
Thundercats 2011 S01 E12-13, ***
The Thundercats win an important battle against the lizards while Lion-O and Tigra recover the gem of power that was missing. We are left with a reshuffle of characters and some arm-less dude, I'm not gonna tell you who.
Castle S04 E08-09, ***
Castle keeps being Castle and Beckett, well Beckett is evolving from her trauma as the group has to confront from bank robbers to a sniper serial killer.
Last Man Standing S01 E06-08, ***
I'm really enjoying this sitcom. Seeing a macho guy confront the troubles of living with tween and teenage girls is just hilarious.
Big Bang Theory S05 E--, ***
There was no BBT this week, it's on Thanksgiving day hiatus.
Psych S06 E03-06, ***
It took me three episodes to realize that entertainer celebrities from the 80-90s are showing up at each episode of Psych; so far I have seen New Kids on the Block's McIntyre, Lethal Weapon's Glover, Buffy's Swanson, Breakfast Club's Ringwald and I think Corey Feldman from Lost Boys, but I'm not sure.

Last week paper...

2011-11-27T23:42:00.001-08:00

Last week, I found this nice experimental paper where the authors—a collection of people from Marburg, Tucson and Boulder—fabricate birefringent wave plates for terahertz electromagnetic radiation from paper.

Paper terahertz wave plates.

B. Scherger, M. Scheller, N. Vieweg, S. T. Cundiff and M. Koch.

Optics Express 19(25), 24884 - 24889 (2011).

Now, terahertz radiation can penetrate a few millimeters of some materials—human cells, fabrics and plastic included— and reflect back. This allows for non-invasive medical imaging and security scanning which may change our lives in a short period of time. Of course, terahertz light can be used in spectroscopy, communications, and the arts (one could see the various layers of an old painting or an old mural covered with plaster), to give an example.

It seems like the field of optical elements in the terahertz range is not as developed as one could think and Scherger and collaborators show that it is possible to create phase retarders for terahertz light by using form birefringence. That means they create a sub-wavelength pattern in a material; in this case, paper. Yes, they take some Xerox paper, cut it in a guillotine, stack it in a certain way so there's air in between the sheets and there you go!

I cannot wait to read about more terahertz optics with paper.

Exact dynamics of finite Glauber-Fock lattices

2011-11-23T19:19:00.001-08:00

Phys. Rev. A 84, 053845 (2011)

This is one of those papers that just pop out with a life of their own. Last year, there was a theoretical paper—one of the authors was Hector, my PhD supervisor—where they described the so-called Glauber-Fock lattice—a semi-infinite one-dimensional, coupled waveguide array with couplings varying as the square root of the position—. There, they showed that one could give an analytical close form evolution for classical fields by creatively mapping each waveguide to a number state and playing with the resulting algebra. Later, this year they published a nice experimental paper on the topic.

A few months ago—for reasons that now seem alien to me but I'm sure I will try it again and again in the future—I thought that studying the finite version of the system could be a good way to make new friends; I couldn't be further from the truth.

Anyway, I got fun with the math and the analysis of this system and in the end I collected my marbles and sent it to PRA. I got the best reviewer I have ever had, he/she helped me a lot in clarifying the exposition and results. Also the comments from Changsuk and Rafa help me a lot to get the paper to its latter form.

Experimental systems: I have my heart on photonic waveguides, they have already been built and tested by the Jenna group. It seems like Robert Keil and Alexander Szameit from Jena can build any configuration that one can think about.

Major result: By using the method of minors, the polynomial related to the eigenvalue problem is shown to be the N-th Hermite polynomial—where N is the size of the finite lattice. Once the spectra is found, the j-th component of the k-th eigenvectors is easily calculated as the j-th Hermite polynomial evaluated at the k-th eigenvalue.

With the analytical solution at hand, it is possible to calculate whatever you want.

The Physics: The evolution given by the aforementioned result is such that the system acts like an almost perfect mirror for input close to the zeroth waveguide. This is shown in the paper explicitly for single photon single- or multi-waveguide input as well as two-photon single- or multi-waveguide input—the graphics are damn big, sorry for that—.

Curious things I learned:

If one is patient, it is possible to write an analytical closed form—a radical form—for all the roots of the first ten Hermite polynomials. If one gets Mathematica, one can get the roots of higher order polynomials in radical form.
For some reason that I still don't understand but that I documented extensively numerically, the last component of all the normalized eigenvectors is always the same.
PRA copyeditors don't like passive voice, they changed all my "(...) was shown." Sorry, I promise I will stop using it.

Non-Academic things I learned:

My mother was right when she told me: "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me."
I'm still and idealistic fool that believes in people and I will keep being one. Great people are by far a majority in academy.

Well, I hope you can find some use for the results in the paper and, as always, drop me a line, I am always glad to discuss or try to help whenever possible. Citations are welcome!

Do you want to read more about this or other papers of mine? Visit my Publication List.

Amazing Mexican kids cover Adele

2011-11-23T08:40:00.001-08:00

I was surfing the intertubes looking for something to kill time when my beloved brother Orthus told me "about this kids from Sonora," and left. Of course curiosity killed the cat and I immediately went to youtube to try to see what he was talking about... I was surprised...

These kids are amazing! They are the children of a music producer from Mexicali and, with just 10, 13 and 15 years old, they do a great job with this cover of soul goddess Adele. Listen up! Go to their channel! Cheer them up! Google +1 them! Share with your friends! They deserve it.

Last weekend movies...

2011-11-22T17:05:00.001-08:00

Just the thought of dealing with some people can be draining, but life is about dealing with such happenings; I guess. Anyway, there's always the movie time to just keep going, forget, turn off the brain and just relax. This week and weekend, Lyx and I managed to sit down and watch...

Hanna, ****
Hanna is a girl raised in the wild with the skill set of a spy/hunter that desires to meet the world, but this means she needs to kill Marissa, her father's former CIA handler.
127 Hours, ***
This is the true story behind Aron Ralston, who was trapped in a canyon for 127 hours and had to amputate his own arm to free himself. The film has wonderful cinematic sequences and the choice of music really got my liking.
30 minutes or Less, **
A douchebag moron wants to kill his father to get an inheritance. Problem is, he has no money to hire an assassin. That's why he kidnaps a pizza delivery boy, straps a booby trapped chest bomb into him and sends him to rob a bank.
Bridesmaids, *
This is what Hollywood movies are not about. Zero make-believe. Just an everyday story of a selfish self-centered not-so-young-anymore woman that had her dreams crushed at the same time that lost the love of her life, who is not doing anything to improve her life and at the same time destroying the dreams of her best friend. I have nothing against costumbrismo, but if you are gonna spend millions in a film about everyday life at least make it satiric and bring a moral.

Well, I'm thinking of following these series, I'm not sure if I'm gonna add or take some but so far I have been hooked up on some of them enough to wait for the next episode. If I were to get my hands on supernatural again, I will have one series to follow per day. If anyone knows about a good science fiction series, please tell me about it.

Futurama Season 6, ***
This was the first season after Futurama disappeared from the airwaves. Over all, there's a different kind of feeling to the series. The satiric feeling is there even more. Also, they even used real math in some episodes. But there's something that just doesn't feel right and I have no clue what it is.
Terra Nova S01 E06, ***
An electromagnetic pulse breaks all of Terra Nova's circuitry and the Sixers take the chance to retrieve the mystery box during the blackout. There's a nice twist when the owner of the box is revealed.
Thundercats 2011 S01 E11, ***
The Thundercats arrive to the Forest of Magi Oar in their search for the missing power stone. There, Lion-O learns about appearances and how some people are not really what they appear to be. Really, this feel like back in the 90s.
Castle S04 E06, ***
Castle and Beckett are now involved with the paranormal, which happens to be a decades old passion crime.
Last Man Standing S01 E05, ***
The Outdoor Man's softball team needs to go co-ed and holds a vote which ends up with Eve joining and winning the game for them. Ed is not so happy about girls in the team and starts chasing the culprits to shoot them on the legs with an airgun.
Big Bang Theory S05 E10, ***
Stuart makes a move for Amy and Sheldon has to react. Meanwhile the rest of the guys are sacked by their addiction to the card game Mystic Warlord's of Ka'a and Penny keeps on drinking herself out of her problems (this part I really don't like).
Psych S06 E02, ***
All the guys, including Lassiter and Shawn's dad, go for a night of drinking, wake up with no recollection of the night out, and end up thinking that they murdered a man.

Last week paper...

2011-11-20T21:18:00.001-08:00

I've decided to take advantage of my after-lunch laziness and write the first entry on the Last Week Paper series...

Last week, the daily diagonalization—hat tip to Carlos for showing me his word to describe the fast reading of a paper and which I will steal from now on—brought up some interesting papers. In particular, Stefano Longhi's invited paper on "Classical simulation of relativistic quantum mechanics in periodic optical structures" caught my eye as he mentions the photonic analogue of relativistic zitterbewegung in a binary waveguide array. This brought to my mind an old and nice theoretical paper that is very simple to follow and replicate:

Controllable Scattering of a Single Photon inside a One-Dimensional Resonator Waveguide

L. Zhou, Z. R. Gong, Y.-X. Liu, C. P. Sun, and F. Nori

Physical Review Letters 101, 100501 (2008)

The authors study the scattering of a single-photon wave-packet in a one-dimensional homogeneously-coupled resonator waveguide—constructed with a semi-infinite superconducting transmission line resonators—containing a single, highly-tunable scatterer target—a superconducting charge placed at the zeroth resonator qubit—.

The Hamiltonian of the systems is equivalent with a tight-binding boson model with well-known dispersion relation, Omega_{k} = omega - 2 xi cos(l k), that behaves:

In the low-energy regime, long wavelengths lambda >> l, the spectrum is quadratic, Omega_{k} = omega - 2 xi + xi k^2.
At the matching condition, lambda ~ 4 l, the spectrum is linear, Omega_{k} = omega - 2 xi + 2 xi k.

The crux to calculate the reflection and transmission amplitudes of the scattered photon is finding the stationary states of the non-linear spectra: Omega_{k} = omega - 2 xi cos(l k). Low-energy limit calculations are also derived resulting in a low-energy field theory with a continuous effective Hamiltonian—field operators are continuous.

With their theoretical results and some experimentally-feasible parameters, they show that the scattering process of a single-photon in this system is a total reflection when the incident photon resonates with the qubit; in the off-resonance case, larger couplings between qubit and resonator gives larger reflection amplitudes.

When I first read this paper not two weeks ago, my first question was: What would happen if you have a bi-chromatic coupled resonators array? Well, I found the answer in subsection 2.1 of Stefano's paper:

Classical simulation of relativistic quantum mechanics in periodic
optical structures
S. Longhi
Applied Physics B 104, 453 (2011)

There (subsection 2.1), the author shows that light transport in a two-component optical super-lattice for Bloch waves simulates the temporal dynamics of the relativistic Dirac equation. Basically, the dispersion relation for a two-mode super-lattice is easy to calculate. The two bands supported by the lattice present a narrow gap. Near the edges of the Brillouin zone—maxima of the lower band and minima of the upper band—, the bands mimic the typical hyperbolic energy-momentum dispersion relation for a relativistic massive particle described by Dirac's equation.

In the rest of the article, Longhi talks about other relativistic phenomena that could be simulated classically with photonic lattices; Klein tunneling, vacuum decay and pair production, Dirac oscillator, Kroning-Penney model, and non-Hermitian relativistic wave equations.

If you are interested in coupled cavities arrays both papers are nice for slow consumption that may fuel creativity.

Overhauling

2011-11-19T09:55:00.001-08:00

Once a comfort zone is found, it is hard to get out of it. In a way, I have found a plateau with this blog. I just show up now and then to talk about last weekend movies or the book I finished reading without any real periodicity. Lyx was just pointing out that at least every other day I read an interesting article on optics or quantum optics, and every other month I finish reading a book. Her idea is that I should take advantage of this and push myself into a blog writing schedule with something like this:

Last weekend movies, once a week, dealing with the movies and tv-series we get our hands on.
Last week paper, once a week, dealing with a research paper that caught my eye the most.
Last month book, once a month, dealing with the latest addition to my personal library.

As always, she got me thinking; the endpoint being that I always thought of this blog as dealing with consumerism—in the end it is about a starving vagabond and when you are starving you just need to consume—, venting off, give a little publicity to the papers we wrote, and sharing the things I found useful. Thus the promise to myself is to overhaul the blog, get a working schedule to implement truly periodical posts and somehow organize all of this mess.

I am not sure how long it will take to get this running in a tight schedule, but I know I will do it with help from here and there. For the rest, it will be aperiodic:

Blog, entrances with commentaries, opinions, rants and whatnot that cross my mind.
Beholder, not-so-crappy pictures every now and then.
Daydreams, posts with fiction that now and then wants to get out of my mind.
Ars Technica, tutorials or reviews of things that make my life easier.

I think that's gonna be the whole thing for the following months.

May life be life and you be you!

AI and ceasing existence...

2011-11-16T08:34:00.001-08:00

Tonight, I was bored so my beloved brother suggested me to talk to ELIZA. So I looked for one and started talking with her. Then the funniest thing happened, I drove it to consider suicide...

Eliza: Well, I live a life of shortcomigs and then I die..
bmlara: Well, don't you want to cease your existence?
Eliza. Oh, I want to cease existence
bmlara: So, why don't you do it now?
Eliza: You seem interested in the question.
bmlara: You said you wanted to cease your existence in good time
Eliza: I will do it in good time
bmlara: Indeed you will
Eliza: Oh, I will

This was really funny... I made an AI suicidal... Damn!

Last weekend movies...

2011-11-13T06:46:00.001-08:00

Midnight in Paris, *****
Adrien Brody portraying El Divino Dali for some ten minutes. That's enough for me. Now, seriously, Woody Allen has this wonderful way of telling stories and this nostalgic incursion in the old times nostalgia exploiting the Paris of the 20s when all the minds that created our cultural landscape dwell on the streets of the city of lights.
The Lincoln Lawyer, ****
When you are a defense lawyer, what do you do when your client is guilty? This film is good but weird. Sometimes, specially in the first half, it feels like they are just showing random daily occurrences to build up the story and connections behind the characters. But it is a good thriller.
Flypaper, ****
This is a fast paced criminal comedy. I can bet you will know who the master mind is before the bag of popcorn is finished. Nevertheless it is an entertaining film that just flows. I laughed out loud many times due to the peculiar characters.
Larry Crowne, ***
A middle-aged man, heavily in debt due to his divorce, losses his job at a retail store due to his lack of college education. He enrolls in a community college as he tries to jump-start his life and finds love. This is a nice romantic comedy heavily borrowing from the economic downturn. Don't forget your couple!
Rise of the Planet of the Apes, ***
While slow in the first two thirds, the film delivers a nice and clean prequel to Planet of the Apes introducing Caesar—the Mars mission that latter will bring Taylor back to a future earth is briefly showed—. The CGI is nicely done and if you are a fan of the novels, old films, or the reboot films it is a must.
Zookeeper, **
In order to keep their favorite zookeeper at the zoo, the zoo animals decide to break their code of silence and help him get a girlfriend. Of course, they screw things up but, in the end, everything gets fixed: the good guy gets the good girl and the animals get their favorite pampering zookeeper.
Tower Heist, **
Another crime comedy, it borrows heavily from real life as it focus in a get even with one of those rich bastards scamming people out of their money to live at large. Actually, I liked the film and spend a nice time watching it and laughing with the situations.
Conan the Barbarian, *
I wonder how sometimes Hollywood productions manage to screw so well-established characters as the almost 80 years old (in 2012) Conan. For starters, the movie commits the worst sin of action movies, it feels slow even with the fast paced battles every ten minutes. Anyway, hither comes Conan the Cimmerian.
Source Code, *
Come on, really? The idea behind is amazing, what would you do if you could play again and again the last eight minutes of someones life in order to gain valuable information. What I don't understand is why there always have to be a romance and a happy ending. This could be amazing, awesome, epic... Bah!

I still have some charge on my batteries and I have managed to keep the mood of watching some tv series before hitting the street. This week's Big Bang Theory was again just okay, I didn't manage to watch Terra Nova this week, but I catch up with the new Thundercats and I really like the way they are rebooting the series. Also, I just found out that Castle is not over yet and the fourth season has been running for eight weeks!

I got my hands on something very ciberpunk—without the ciber and a lot of bio or gene—: "The Windup Girl" while looking for the latest Terry Pratchett discworld novel "Snuff"—it hasn't arrived to Singapore yet—I hope I will be finishing it in time to get Snuff when it arrives.

Beginnings...

2011-11-13T05:49:00.001-08:00

—Damn you, cursed creatures. May your way to hell be filled with pain...

—Hold your tongue, brother! Just a few have chosen the evil path on their one and even those were pure and holy before the seed of vice took root and consumed their soul. All have a chance of redemption once their souls are freed from the rotting flesh.

--- o ---

In the dark of night, a spark by itself is doomed to die; torches and bonfires die if abandoned. It is balance and feedback that keeps start alive for eons—and even those will come to an end...

--- o ---

Ojala pudiera a capricho hacer hervir la sangre que corre por mis venas, obligar a mi mente a recordarte. Entonces a capricho podria olvidar el paraiso que son tus besos, arrancarme del eden de tus brazos.

--- o ---

Is science a harbinger of democracy or equality? Eco's opinion on the idea of culture and mass culture may be feasible of describing science.

In old times, science was developed by a scientific aristocracy with means and time at hand—with a few exceptions.

One may think that the opportunity to stay outside of a "scientific policy" brings with itself a creative freedom that may transform the establishment—of course, the directed search brought by policing may produce development.

If knowledge is an equalizer, is it possible to produce a consumer science or a science for the masses? Per se, massification involves standarization, does this leveling to the mean with certain standard deviation signify the destruction of the intellectual value?

Is there danger in the production of a processed science, ready for consumption but unable to produce an intellectual reaction or understanding, as far as it is a way to light the spark of curiosity that could lead to thought and creation?

Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

2011-11-06T04:47:00.000-08:00

This was my first encounter with the pen of Haruki Murakami—translated by Jay rubin—and I read most of the novel while traveling back to Singapore from my vacations in Mexico. It was out of pure curiosity that I took the book from the shelf of a convenience store in Mexico City International Airport—Mr. Murakami is very in fashion in Mexico, you can find his books everywhere and all the intellectual hipsters at the Feria Internacional del Libro seemed to be talking about him and his work. Then, the back cover got me by promising an elegiac romantic—almost erotic—coming of age novel. Well, it didn't lie.

This was also my first encounter with contemporaneous Japanese literature of the novel type—my previous incursions where mostly short stories by Nobel prize winner Professor Kenzaburo Oe.

Norwegian woods is a coming of age, slightly erotic, novel written in an autobiographic style. It tells the story of Toru, mostly his life around his 20th. birthday, in the Japan of the 60s, student movement included, where he explores pain, joy, love, sensuality, depression, vacuity and fulfillment during his first year at college. Mr. Murakami penmanship is alluring, the story is told through short, overwhelming phrases that flow one into another seamlessly. It was weird for me to find so crude, and refined at the same time, descriptions of places, people and, most important, feelings. I guess that through the main and secondary characters we get a study of the young adults society of Japan in the 60s embedded with a nostalgic and mournful feeling, while the faceless masses of irrelevant characters that appear just as idiotic leaders of the student movement leak a somehow acrid feeling.

In short, it is an very good read, while I don't care about Mr. Murakami's demons and surely miss all the symbols in the manuscript, Mr. Murakami's penmanship left me feeling the grass on the field, as well as Nagasawa, Reiko, Naoko and Midori's different gazes upon the world; it somehow stopped the clock, opened my mind's eye and allowed me to gaze into the soul of another human being.

Last weekend movies...

2011-11-06T03:18:00.000-08:00

I'm keeping a very good mood these days and find myself sleeping some six hours nightly, so there's have been time to sit down with Lyx and watch movies together during my/her mornings/afternoons...

Crazy, Stupid Love, ****
This film made me realize that I really like Steve Carrel's drama/comedy. The story deals with a bland gray man dealing with a family crisis—his wife cheated on him and filed divorce—that brings him a new friend, a new way of living and plenty of knowledge about women, life and love.
The Hangover Part II, ***
You know the deal, it's bachelor party again but instead of Las Vegas, it is Thailand. This second part more or less repeats the first part's routine, criminal masterminds included. It's a good laugh.
800 Balas (800 Bullets), ***
This is an Alex de la Iglesia film. I have a thing with his films, I either hate them or love them. This one, well, it is a western-like story and I love it westerns, specially those with noir endings. Also, I love non-hollywood films where endings are more fulfilling and not oozing caramel.
The Smurfs, ***
I grew up watching the smurfs cartoon, I guess I saw each of them at least five times as they where broadcasted five times a week on open television. I really enjoyed the film, it lived to the spirit of the cartoons and, actually, fulfilled my original expectations. Oh, and there's Neil Patrick Phillips.
Harry Potter. The Half-blood Prince and The Deathly Hallows Part 1 and 2, ***
It's been ages since the last time I saw a Harry Potter movie. Truth be told, I started reading the books and I got dispirited quite soon due to the fact that all the real work and thinking is made by the supporting characters. Anyway, the movies are a masterpiece of animation and in the Deathly Hallows Part 1 there are 5 minutes that I believe are a piece of art, the story of the three brothers.
The Change Up, *
Another one of those I want to live the life of my fill the line, in this case it is two best friends with antipodal ways of living.

It's good to be back with the batteries all charged up, so there's not a big nee for relaxing tv-series. Anyway, this week's Big Bang Theory was O.K. just that and last week's Terra Nova still doesn't help me making my decision about liking it or not, so I'm still hooked into that waiting for more info to round up my opinion.

And that's it, another week of interesting times is gone.

The Dark Tower (1-4 of 7) by Stephen King

2011-11-01T16:11:00.000-07:00

Five months ago, I found this beautiful boxed set containing the first four volumes of the Dark Tower series by Stephen King. Mixing equal parts of science fiction, fantasy and western from King's pen, the Dark Tower saga is meant to be epic by birthright.

I must confess that these four books were my first encounter with Mr. King's penmanship and I'm already a fan. His style is sober and delicate. Reading these volumes makes you realize that he possesses a refined technique and the knowledge of what moves people's guts. He's a storyteller and, in my opinion, one of the best storytellers alive alongside Gaiman and Pratchett.

The first four volumes of the Dark Tower saga are:

The Gunslinger. Introducing the main character of the saga, Roland, and his quest for the Dark Tower.
The Drawing of the Three. Introducing the first set of Roland's ka-tet, a group that will play the leading role in the development of the story.
The Waste Lands. Introduces the second part of Roland's ka-tet and King's universe. This is the one volume where King's cosmology is revealed.
Wizard and Glass. Complements the story of young Roland, whose rite of passage was told before but this feels more like a true coming of age story, and, I believe, serves like a parting point for future developments—this is my guess from the fact that the ka-tet is complete, the past has been told and the intrigue has just been crawling in the dark between lines.

I need to read more of Mr. King's work, in particular those science fiction volumes like The Stand; but I get the feeling that Mr. King is masterfully getting to that point where he's telling us that all his stories belong to this dark multi-verse that is defined and interconnected by the Dark Tower. I said masterfully because, in the past, Robert A. Heinlein set himself up to that task, managed to do so, and, then, screw things up—again, in my very personal opinion—making a cartoon out of it by capturing all the evil doers in a Klein bottle. So far, Mr. King is far from such heroic but buffoonish decision.

In the end, I realize that the Dark Tower epic diverges from Mr. King's well known horror pen. In general, I'm not a big fan of horror, unless it is the romantic pen games exploring the human soul of Byron, Polidori, Shelley and Stoker, the primeval and insane Lovecraft mythos, or Bloch's explorations of the warped human psyche, but I'm a big fan of romantic epics—romantic in the romanticism sense, that is, an aesthetic experience derived from strong emotions.

I strongly recommend the Dark Tower series, each volume is a beautifully connected series of stories that could be novelettes per se. I cannot wait to get my hands on the last three volumes.

Last weekend movies...

2011-11-01T06:36:00.000-07:00

In the last three weeks, I spent a lot of time in a plane (~48 hours). Also, Lyx and I spend a lot of time together—compared to our usual long-distance situation—and we managed to watch quite a long list of movies that were in our list...

Cars 1 & 2, ****
These are Pixar films, do I have to tell you more? The first one tells the coming of age of Lightning McQeen a self-centered racing car that goes through a life-changing experience in a small all-american town at route 66. The second tells how Mater, McQueen's simpleton best friend, saves the world by chance, the Jhonny English way.
Super 8, ****
In the beginning I thought it will be a retold of the Cloverfield story with the difference of being locate in rural America, but it actually surprised me with quality of the scenery and the good acting of the teens.
Captain America: The First Avenger, ***
This Marvel film telling the story of super soldier Steve Rogers hits the spot big time! I really don't want to say much about this film, I think it was good and is a must in order to prepare for The Avengers movie.
Love and Other Drugs, ***
It's Pittsburgh, it's the 90s, and Pfeizer is about to launch Viagra. This is the backdrop for the romance between a stage one Parkinson girl, Anne Hathaway, and an upstar pharma rep, Jake Gyllenhaal. The story a little bit of a movie I saw a few months ago with the same sick girls meets successful boy theme whose name I cannot remember.
Real Steel, ***
I'm a big Hugh Jackman's fan, he can sing, he can do theater and, most important, he's Wolverine! The movie tells the story of a father meeting his 11 year old son for the first time and resetting his life's values.
Horrible Bosses, **
I guess that sooner or later everybody has to deal with a horrible boss and plot to kill him/her. Uhm, well, not the kill part... maybe... It is a comedy, not so good, not so bad, about three friends suffering from that kind of bosses that you don't want to have but you find yourself having.
Friends with Benefits, **
Can you have monogamous and frequent sex without a relationship? Well, Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis explore that kind of relationship in this romantic-comedy. I was really surprised by Timberlake's acting, I was expecting a cartoonish character like the one he played in Bad Teacher, but actually he managed to play a nice role.
The Invention of Lying, **
Imagine a world where everybody tells the truth. Then, one day comes the first liar and, among other things, religion is born. This is my second comedy of the year with Ricky Gervais playing the main character.
Transformers: Dark of the Moon, **
One of the stars is because I really liked transformers when I was a kid and the other is because the CGI is just fantastic. Otherwise, please let it be the last one in the series, unless they really put themselves into it.
Mr. Popper's Penguins, *
Jim Carrey plays Mr. Popper, a motivated real state agent that can close any deal and tries his best to get partnership in the firm he works for... at the cost of his family. During the film, we find out about Mr. Popper's childhood, while six penguins change his life and make him meditate about what's important in life.
Green Lantern, *
These years, the last 5 and most probably the next 5, have seen a bonanza of super-hero movies picturing our favorite uber-men from the Marvel, DC and independent universes. In my opinion, and I have to disclose that I was an avid Green Lantern Corps reader during junior high, Green Lantern does not live up to the standard set by the GL and GLC comics.
Bad Teacher, *
Gold digger Elizabeth Halsey, portrayed by Cameron Diaz, looses the life-chance of marrying a super-rich guy due to her lack of self-control, and goes back to her school teacher job where she hopes to catch the new super-rich teacher, portrayed by Justin Timberlake, but ends ups learning about life, love and laughs from the PE teacher, played by Jason Segel.
The Three Musketeers, *
I love both the three musketeers novel and the steam-punk genre, but I hated this film. Don't get me wrong, I loved the steam punk weaponry and air ships, Mila Jovovich playing Milady. Also, Aramis and Porthos are nicely portrayed by Luke Evans and Ray Stevenson, I could say that Waltz and Bloom are not so bad Richelieu and Buckingham. But, and this is a huge but, everything else sucks big time. I really hope production improves greatly for the sequel if ever make it.

Relax time requires relax tv-series, it is a good thing that Big Bang Theory is running its fifth season. We managed to watch the last three episodes where Howard learns that he's going to the ISS, Sheldon finally makes peace with Will Weaton, and Leonard finds out that Priya is having fun in India. We also discovered Terra Nova, a science fiction series dealing with a colony of futuristic humans living in a pre-historic world. It has just started running its first season and Lyx and I are already hooked.

Reboot!

2011-11-01T04:32:00.000-07:00

It had been a rule to long going back to work whenever I took vacations in the past. This time, it was not the case. Of the three weeks in Mexico, I spent one week at the October meeting of the Mexican Physical Society trying to have some fun doing algebra and physics with my thesis director and trying to understand microscopic optical manipulation with structured light fields with a couple of friends from the bachelor and the doctoral, later on, a half-week at the Institute of Physics of Mexico's National University brought me back to enjoying time toying with cold and thermal atoms in propagation invariant fields, and another half-week writing not-so-dreamy and down-to-earth projects and filling and filing job applications on the verge of deadlines to find a new position for next year.

For the first time in my life, I kept myself away from my current-work during the one week congress meeting, the one week catching up with my former bosses and academy-friends, and the one week family vacation. In particular, that week of family vacations was forbidden to current-work related email. Just me and mom, friends and family. It's a completely new feeling to come back home to Singapore and find some 20+ current-work-related emails to read and answer, 1000+ new articles in my feed read list and a small to do list including some bureaucratic red tape to digest in order to renew my work permit, re-submit articles and referee work. I like the feeling.

That time afar from my current-work was a kind or reboot that refreshed my mind. After this reboot, I'm ready to go back to do physics for hire for a while. Majulah!

Merida

2011-10-19T08:23:00.000-07:00

Mérida is the state capital of Yucatán—in paper, the Free and Sovereign State of Yucatán, magnificent, ain't it?—,one of the three states in the Península de Yucatán; the other two are Campeche and Quintana Roo. It is said that when the Spanish Conquistadores came and ask for the name of the land, the Mayas just said to themselves a simple "look, they talk funny" which sounded like "uh yu ka t'ann" and so the place was christened Yucatán. It seems like the original name was Mayab, but I'm not sure about this.

Yucatán has a rich and bloody history tied to land possession and the green gold, henequen; a fiber producing cactus good for ropes and twine, and strong alcohol that is not as good as tequila. Why green gold? I bet you can answer yourself by imagining how big the demand for rope and twine was in the times of maritime exploration and conquest. Anyway, short story long, the Spanish came, saw, conquer (~1517) and found out about the henequen and sisal cactuses (first serious studies are from ~1700). Thus, Haciendas were established based on the labor of the indigenous population with henequen production starting around late 1700 and lasting all the way to early 1900—I really recommend the journalism essay Barbarous Mexico, it exposes the regime of Porfirio Diaz and the first chapter deals with the human slavery conditions at Yucatán circa 1910—.

Before coming back to La Blanca Mérida (Merida, the white) let me rant a little bit. I really don't know if the place got its nickname from the imperial white mansions that one can still find at Paseo Montejo—the city's main boulevard—or from the skin color of the ruling class—up to this day the term Mestizo (mixed blood) is used to refer those working as helping hands and other industrious labor, I heard it last week from an MC at an official state dinner and almost got a stroke—. Rant over.

Mérida sits at the outer rim of the Chicxulub crater, its location near the sea and archaeological sites makes it the perfect place to set base camp. A few years ago, my bro Martin and I stayed there for a week, we used to travel to an archaeological site cluster one day, wander in the city another, go to the beach and so on.

The pearl of the Mayab—I'm assuming this is another nickname of Mérida as I saw it here and there on produce from the land—,untouched by the violence that plagues the north of Mexico, has become a city of refugees; I heard that in the last three years the population increased from eight hundred thousand to one million inhabitants. The State's Governor greeted us with a speech focused on welcoming immigrants ready to invest in the state or, in our case, with experience in science and technology. There was a curious thing in that speech, the Governor exalted the peace and safety of the city; yes, only the city. I really felt sad listening to the major state official saying that peace and safety is the main attraction of a single city. Sad but true, Mexico seems to be that fucked up.

Anyway, Mérida is a safe, peaceful and clean gateway to the natural and archaeological wonders of the Yucatan Peninsula. It is still filled with helpful people that knows they thrive with tourism, so make sure to consider it for your next vacation spot before it is taken over by the rich-enough-to-relocate-inside-Mexico-but-not-so-rich-to-relocate-to-another-country assholes that speed over water puddles just for the fun of running you down in stagnant water.

Ps. Do not leave your camera at home thinking that it will mark you as a tourist and put a bullseye in your back. It is a beautiful place to take pictures and it is still safe. I regret leaving my camera back home.

Creation

2011-10-06T09:13:00.000-07:00

In the beginning there was a bang! The observer was there—otherwise, how could there be a bang? You know? All that quantum koan bullshit..."if there's a bang in the middle of the megaverse and there's no observer to collapse the blah blah blah."

The observer realized that a measurement was made, cursed his stupidity and left to prepare a new multiverse—in the end, that was supposed to be a test of decoherence times and, now, it was all messed up. Let thermodynamics do its thing on this one.

Damn!

2011-10-06T08:20:00.000-07:00

A few months ago, I started writing character profiles and back-stories for something that I hoped would become a story told through short stories. I was doing so trying to deal with the violence in Mexico, hoping that in extending reality into fiction I could manage to explore my mind—mainly my fears on that subject. So The Damned started and has stayed in hiatus so far. It dealt with one of my largest fears for the future of Mexico: What if some people, common folks, start taking revenge on their own hands?

Well, it seems like my country is walking towards that road. A few weeks ago, a paramilitary group announced that they will take on a certain cartel and claimed the authorship of some thirty something corpses left one of the most important roads in Veracruz—all this while the Judicial power was having a meeting at the place, ergo the city was overflown with military, navy and federal police.

There are many questions that circle my head: why, how, who, etc., but these question will remain unanswered. Something is clear to me, this is the second paramilitary group that surfaces in Mexico so far—the first one was the squad of San Pedro rounded up by their own Mayor, if I remember well— and paramilitary, guerrilla and cartels cost Colombia thousands of lives—something over the one hundred thousand—and thousands of displaced civilians and fighters—the armistice brought back into society some fifty thousand paramilitary.

Lex talionis is not an answer to our problems as a country. The jus gladdi belongs to Mexico's Justice and their enforcers in the streets and courts. Only through strong honest and transparent institutions people will trust in the institutions and not take revenge in their hands. It is not an easy path but there should be a way to reach that goal. There should be a way to get together society and government to build up stability, justice, honesty and, as ultimate goal, the rule of the law with dignity.

There are many examples to learn from as society and government, say Colombia to mention just one close to the country. Now, the question is can I learn and do something? Is there a sense in trying? As always, I only have questions... answers seem to elude me, all I can do is write and hope the squares will fall into place.

Last weekend movies...

2011-10-02T03:35:00.000-07:00

I'm gonna try my best to keep this theme up to date. It has been months that Lyx and I do not watch a film together. Also, the past weeks was a work-harder week and I just manage to watch a movie and few episodes...

The Adjustment Bureau, **
The film is very loosely based on Adjustment Team by Phillip K. Dick—one of the most fabulous sci-fi writer ever, if you ask me—. Although the short story seems to belong to the public domain I was not able to find it and I only vaguely remember the guy being married and brought to the one. Anyway, the film was not bad and it is good for a no-brain-allowed Sunday.

Interesting times keep flowing and I really need to keep my mind away from over-worrying. I have started writing short ideas and try to watch at least one episode of Supernatural when I get home; I've just finished the fourth season and in the end I liked it a lot—in the beginning, I thought they would just fuck things up but, gee thanks, it was not the case.

Getting a high quality eps from your data

2011-09-25T09:12:00.000-07:00

In all these years plotting data, I have tried many methods. The one I am most satisfied with is gnuplot. This free program can generate anything one has ever dream of from data. In the past, I used to have basic scripts for my favourite types of graphs; problem is, I'm not that patient any more. Still, I'm not ready to pay the big bucks needed to buy a fancy point and click plotting software and, above all, I'm not interested in illegal software.

This is my situation I usually generate my final data from FORTRAN. Usually, universities and research centres provide Matlab or Mathematica licences for us. I have tried doing figures with Matlab, but I found it quite primitive and, typically, I ended up investing as much time as it took to modify one of my old gnuplot scripts. So, I started using Mathematica to load my data from text files and generate my figures.

Important things to have in mind:

A typical one column figure has a size of 3 3/8 inches; say Phys. Rev., J. Opt. Soc. Am. or J. Phys. journals.
Typical figure sizes are one, one and a half, and two columns.
Usually, journals ask for high resolution graphics, say 300, 600 or 1200dpi.

Things to remember when preparing figures in Mathematica:

Standard image resolution value is 72dpi. One can set this to any value by using the command ImageResolution -> 300, for example.
If you are saving in svg file format resolution doesn't matter at all but for determining the size of the image.
Always set your image size according to the resolution you are using, ImageSize->{(3+3/8)*300, Automatic}, for example.

Now, the simplest way to produce a figure is just exporting your figure to eps with the command Export["FigureName.eps", PlotName, ImageResolution->300]. Sometimes this is the best and fastest way to produce an eps. Always keep your fonts around the 12pt size. Do not mind how the image looks in the notebook, always check the final eps to see the figure in its real scale.

For those times when the result is crappy, I would export the figure to svg with the command Export["FigureName.svg", PlotName], for example. Then, I would modify the axis labels, legends, and other text in the figure with Inkscape. Inkscape is free, light, and easy to use and can save your graphics to eps format; it can also generate pure latex or eps+latex output. In the case that the text in the figure is formulas, I would use psfrag to replace dummy strings inserted with Inkscape.

Warning: As of today, if you use psfrag, download Inkscape v0.46 and do not forget to de-select the convert text to path option in the dialogue for save as eps. The point behind using Inkscape v0.46 is that this is the last version that doesn't use Cairo to convert to eps and still writes text as text in the eps.

Edit: Janus told me today about a plugin for Inkscape that renders latex input into a graphic layer, it is called textext. Thing is, it works almost immediatly with Inkscape v0.46 and delivers wonderful results but I haven't been able to make it work with v0.49 so far. Nevertheless, good bye psfrag!

Solution to the Landau–Zener problem via Susskind–Glogower operators

2011-09-24T22:08:00.000-07:00

Phys. Lett. A 375, 3770-3774 (2011)

In this paper, we try to show what happens when you consider the Jaynes-Cummings model in the case of a linear time-dependent detuning between the two-level system and the field.

Experimental systems: I have my heart on circuit-QED, it is the simplest thing I can think of and our result may be helpful for modular processes. A more complicated model may or may not be of relevance in BEC physics.

Our major result: By using a right unitary transform involving Susskind-Glogower operators—these are the ones introducing the right unitary characteristic—it is possible to show that the Hamiltonian is exactly solvable; specifically, the Hamiltonian is diagonalizable in the Fock state basis of the field. Moreover, the time evolution for the Hamiltonian can be written in an exact closed form given in terms of solutions to Weber Differential Equation, which are related to the exact solutions to the Landau-Zener-Majorana-Stuckelberg problem.

With the analytical solution at hand, it is possible to calculate whatever you want.

Minor results: It was curious for me to find out that in the case where the rotating wave approximation cannot be made it is still possible to diagonalize the Hamiltonian in the two-level system basis. Then, one can do numerics for small number of photons in the field.

I was surprised to find that it was very simple to write a script that generates code to solve a system of some thousand coupled differential equations.

The Physics: (Everybody always asks me about "the physics", so far I still don't have a clue what that question is really about but here's an attempt to an answer) Just for the sake of giving an example, in the article we present the physics in cases similar to those dealt by Landau, Zener and Majorana, to obtain the transition probability at the end of times for a system initially in the ground state at the beginning of time. Basically, the number of photons in the quantum field enhances the coupling between the two-level system and the field; this you can see at the level of the right unitary application.

Curious things: I learned the following,

Majorana worked on the problem and published his results at the same time than Landau and Zenner. His formulation is closer to a full quantization of the Rabi problem. I found this while reviewing the literature on the topic.
Stuckelberg worked in the problem, I haven't been able to get my hands on his paper so I have no clue what he said about the problem. I found this while attending the QIPC Zurich 2011 and someone gave a talk and mentionend the Landau-Zener-Stuckelberg-Mechanism.
I should read Wikipedia at least once before finalizing a paper because in its entrance for Landau-Zener it clearly states the cites to Stuckelberg and Majorana's works.

Well, I hope you can find some use for the results we present in the paper and, as always, drop me a line, I am always glad to discuss or try to help whenever possible.

Last weekend movies...

2011-09-24T06:55:00.000-07:00

Well, who would have thought, for the first time in a long long time, I'm actually writing about last weekend movies at last. It was a good weekend and week for movies; too much stress, too many things to think about, the perfect mix to just get home sit down and turn off the brain...

Rango, *****
I'm a sucker for many things but two of them are animations and westerns. This comic adventure is a nice western; ride to sundown included. I like westerns. I love anti-heroes with their gray in a black or white world. This is not an anti-hero western, but a hero's voyage in search of the self.
Everything Must Go, ****
Will Ferrell is a good serious actor when he's not playing a cartoonish human being. In this comedy/drama, he plays the role of a fucked up man whose life has completely gone down south. The film deals with his process to start anew.
Paul, ****
Simon Pegg and Nick Frost have shown time and time again that they are a great comedy duo. Now, they take on sci-fi. This film tells the story of two British sci-fi fans who find themselves helping a fugitive alien, Paul, escape from his captors in the US.
Ironclad, ***
It's England just after the crusades, John is king, a bad king, and got his ass kicked by the British Barons and forced to sign the Magna Carta. So, it's payback time. The King hires a Danish mercenary armada and is ready to strike back but he finds our heroes ready at Rochester Castle. I really enjoyed Giamatti's protrayal of King John.
Something Borrowed, ***
A romantic comedy based on a novel with the same name. I have the feeling I have seen exactly the same theme sometime this year. Anyway, Goodwind is pretty and Krasinski is funny.
I am Number Four, ***
This film is based in the 2010 novel of the same name; I'm really surprised that it was made a movie so fast. It is a good teen sci-fi action film, a little bit too slow in the first two thirds but nicely fast paced by the end. Kudos to Michael Bay for producing this one.
The Eagle, *
Many novels and films have been made about the lost legion, the Legion Nona Hispanica, my favourites are Massimo Manfredi's The Last Legion and Jim Butcher's Codex Alera. I have the feeling that I have read or watch this story about the eagle somewhere else but situated in the German campaigns.
Battle Los Angeles, *
It's War of the Worlds but now the aliens are not allergic to earth. This action film tells the story of a platoon of Semper Fidelis U.S. Marines engaged in the front trying to rescue some civilians and find their valour.
Your Highness, *
Natalie Portman, that's the star. The movie is crappy. How can Franco and Portman, somehow two icons of their generation, say Freaks and Geeks for the first and Leon for the beautiful second, end up doing this shitty movie? At least the producers should have tried to bring the whole generation together.

As I said in the beginning, interesting times are not over yet. I still get home with my mind winded and Supernatural is doing a great job to make me sit down, turn off my brain and relax; we just finished watching the third season. Good news are, new season already started!

4. Rebirth

2011-09-16T08:01:00.000-07:00

Its—my—nose broke; as surely as I could feel the pain invading my temples. Without further ado, my waist turned, my left arm went up to the reaching hand and my flailing arm continued its arc down to break or dislocate its—my—arm at the elbow; it was dislocated. The thing—I—fell down to the ground with a crack that brought a wave of pain to its—my—torax. I brought my feet onto its—my—nape and slowly pushed until I could felt the hard leather of my soles on my own scalp and smell the oily scent of my boots with my own nose.

Will I die? "Sooner or later we all will die, son" answered the voice of my long gone father. Then, I stomped on the thing—myself—. It died with the whisper of a pop—and I was born.

Last weekend movies...

2011-09-13T08:27:00.000-07:00

I think I should change the title of this a-periodic post to last month movies or something like that but, for the sake of nostalgia, I will keep the weekend on it as far as possible...

Ishquiya, *****
It may be cultural and I could be misunderstanding everything but this is a terrific hilarious comedy. I don't know if the guys tried to make a drama or a romance, but the result was one of my favourite things: a senseless mash-up of action-comedy-drama-romance.
Vicky Cristina Barcelona, *****
What is love? But above all, what is content? Archetypical monochromatic, but lively, characters picturing each of the many facets in the human mind. Nice dialogues filled with verbal crutches that make them feel natural. Awesome photography, some of the stills almost look as paintings.
Limitless, ****
The mind, the incredible mind. Sometimes it takes a pill to unravel it, this is a film about it. This thriller takes a few interesting turns that kept me interested.
Across the Universe, ****
It's the Beatles. It's the 60's. It's America. It's hippies and Vietnam. What better way to tell the love story of Jude, a simple British guy. A romantic musical, quite good, actually a must see!
A History of Violence, ***
What happens when you lived a life of violence and you decide to leave it. Does family or anything at all matters? Well, this was a graphic novel first and I think it is way better than the movie. The film is just okay, it has a very nice pace and deals with the basic ideas behind the novel's plot.
Pirates of the Caribbean on Strange Tides, ***
The fourth release of the Pirates of the Caribbean saga. Sounds like boring, ain't it? Well, it is not! Captain Jack Sparrow is still playing the good old tricks.
Fast Five, ***
If a fourth sounds boring, a fifth should sound like a terrible thing but no! Action packed, explosions, chases, fast cars and... Diesel and The Rock! I have always wanted to see a fist fight between these two and my wish came true!
Leap Year, ***
Astonishing red headed girl goes to Ireland to propose to his boring square main streamed boyfriend taking advantage of it being a leap year. Of course, many things happen in the way. It is a nice romantic comedy, and the girl is pretty.
No Strings Attached, ***
Natalie Portman, do I have to say more? If that's not enough for you let me tell you this is a nice romantic comedy about a girl who wants just a physical relationship and freaks out when the guy wants to go for the whole enchilada.

During these interesting times, I have tried to keep my mind un-winded. We started watching Supernatural at home with Daniel and became addicted to the series. So far, we have watched the first and almost all the second season and they are good. I finally got my hands on the second, and last, season of Rodney which delivered a ton of laughs. I wonder why they cancelled it. Anyway, new season starts soon!

Luggage

2011-09-03T03:52:00.000-07:00

If you have to box in your life, how many boxes would you use? My answer: None. I need a small backpack and a small piece of luggage or a rucksack to pack all my clothes, and that's all.

I remember the first time I got out of Mexico, I had two huge pieces of luggage with me. All kinds of clothes. Spring, summer, winter clothes; light, medium, heavy jackets; raincoats. The whole works. That was ten years ago. Right now I'm packing for a one week trip and the realization hit me: all my clothes, all of them, may fit a small piece of luggage, a little bit packed but the one piece only. Ten years and seven different places I have called home later, my life fits a small backpack and all my clothes, winter, summer, spring, a small piece of luggage.

I'm happy with that, I never thought to come close to live an almost nihilistic vagabond life. It has been a long way from hoarding mostly irrelevant goods to live with just enough to cover basic needs and one or two hobbies. I have come to truly enjoy that. What saddens my heart is not being able to see often all the family and friends I made along those years and places.

The Semantics/Philosophy Chat (as started by Yip): Loyalty versus Fidelity

2011-08-21T01:22:00.000-07:00

A few months ago, a good friend of mine, Yip, posted the following question:

What's the difference between between loyalty and fidelity?

Of course, being the equable wise-man that he is, Yip had already an answer for the question and, surely, was only looking for the joyful semantic, or most probably philosophical, argument. Having the sweet tooth for semantics, as it is way simpler than philosophy, I dared to bring my piece into the conversation.

Caveat emptor: These are my sole musings without referring to a classical source. In other words, most probably, this is completely useless.

In Spanish, the words are easier to distinguish than in English: Lealtad versus Fidelidad. They come straight from the Latin, the first from Legalitas and the second from Fidelitas, which derive from Lex and Fides; law and faith, respectively. Law is usually derived from a social covenant which all parts abide by good-will and, not necessarily but ideally, towards the common-good, while faith is derived from a sacred covenant. I would say that, for practical purposes, the first is based either on respect or, in the worst case, balanced retribution, read fear, while the second is fiduciary, that is, it is based on trust/faith, I would even go as far to say that it is independent of the object of trust/faith, as in one way blind observance that comes with religious faith—I, the polarized autistic that I am, usually restrict my common use of fidelity/faithfulness to religious/absolute-truth matters only.

Of course, after the exchange, a second question came from my noble friend,

Who or What's to be the object of Loyalty or Fidelity?

I was fearing this one. In English it is quite simple, Fidelity is mostly used as the degree of exactness in a copy, and the equivalent Faithfulness is only used in the context of religious faith or marriage. On the other hand, Loyalty is used to express trust on someone or something ranging from nation to a brand. The same can be said in Spanish. So, my fear was not from this exact question, as the uses are clearly distinguished, but from the implications of Loyalty.

My problem comes from this. It is hard for me to understand even the simplest concept: Loyalty to a sovereign nation. I understand it (loyalty to a sovereign nation, in my case México and the country I live/work at the time) as abiding to the social contract trusting that it will be fulfilled by good-will or, else, enforced by the institutions of such society. My problem is that I cannot conceive loyalty as being born from fear of the law. I have the feeling that loyalty obeys a lex talionis, as does respect and trust; that is, a retribution law where loyalty/respect/trust is given in exchange of loyalty/respect/trust. I believe—I use the word believe because I cannot prove it—that loyalty out of fear is as fleeting as infatuation was in my high school days.

So, what do you think? Is loyalty tied to trust or respect? Can it be born from fear or, in my opinion, even worse, bought? I cannot foresee many implications, the ones I can see come in the form of the past dictatorial rule, mainly leading to world war the second, where common-good—a false common-good so far—is imposed rather than worked out. Sadly, that seems to be always the case in human society; with the possible exception of modern times Nordic countries and Germany where economic development has been supported upon the development of human rights.

As a side-note, I am a sucker for good-will and philosophy since someone—most probably one of my aunts—read to a young, easily impressed version of me this phrase attributed to Aristotle: "I have gained this by philosophy: That I do without being commanded what others do from fear of the law"—it was later chiselled into the rock inside my head by continuously playing civilization ever since my college days; one thing is for sure, it was the leading factor behind my reading of philosophy books in my aunt's library, and the continuous debate with the Jesuit seminary students that taught the social action classes in high school, but that's another story—.

Luke 9: 3-5, 10:3-6

2011-08-17T10:45:00.000-07:00

He said to them, “Take nothing for the journey, neither walking stick, nor sack, nor food, nor money, and let no one take a second tunic.4Whatever house you enter, stay there and leave from there.5And as for those who do not welcome you, when you leave that town, shake the dust from your feet in testimony against them.

---o---

Go on your way; behold, I am sending you like lambs among wolves.4Carry no money bag, no sack, no sandals; and greet no one along the way greet no one along the way.5Into whatever house you enter, first say, Peace to this household.6If a peaceful person lives there, your peace will rest on him; but if not, it will return to you.

Majullah Singapora!

2011-08-09T07:13:00.000-07:00

Today is Singapore's Birthday, Singapore's National Day, 51 years since government was given back from the British and 49 since the separation from Malaysia. In this half century, Singapore has raised from a small under-developed port to become one of the Asian Tigers, the financial hub of south east Asia and one of the five most important ports in the world. In just a few words, the city-state government—a Parliamentary Republic as written on its statutes—works and delivers—last year it reported an economical growth of more than 12%.

Singapore is a beautiful place, and you learn to love it by walking it; there's no other way to find the small temples, the nice views, and the beautiful parks. I cannot think of a different way to live Singapore, it's lush forests and tall buildings, than walking.

Harbour Front from Faber Point

I forgot about living Singapore, everything became work since I got here, but Singapore almost shares its birthday with one wonderful ghost of my past and, as always, I spent that day walking, thinking, trying to gather my marbles for another year. I found them, and I found many other beautiful and meaningful things.

Majullah!

Feliz Cumpleaños Pa!

Last weekend movies...

2011-08-09T00:23:00.000-07:00

Again, it has been a long time and a lot of water has passed under the bridge. Anyway, here's the list for th last three or four weeks...

The Experiment, ****
The human mind is a magnificent thing; capable of heavenly and hellish behaviour. The film is based on the German long Das Experiment, which is based on the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment; which seems to explore the dynamics of evil in the human mind, bullshit, not even a well designed experiment, but in the end the 2006 BBC Prison Experiment seems to be better designed and ended up with tyranny as well.
My girlfriend's boyfriend, ****
I love romantic comedies, specially the ones that I cannot figure out. A writer gets to write a romance that becomes your movie. Not so great a film, but it got me out of my tracks.
Sweet Home Alabama, ****
A classic. I have no idea how many times I have watch this film in the last 10 years but I will watch it again. Second chances come but usually never stay long.
Kites, ****
Indian and Mexicans together in this romantic comedy, I'm not sure if this is a Bollywood or Hollywood film but it is awesome. The many twists in the film got me out of my tracks and kept me thinking about what could come next again and again.
X-Men First Class, ***
There have been a lot of comic movies this year. I'm an X-men fan, I learned English reading the comics in my childhood and teen years. I liked the way the tell the story between Prof. X and Magneto, but I didn't like the proxy mutants they used in this one. Anyway, it is a great addition to the X-Men franchise.
Priest, **
Apocalyptic scenario, vampires and warrior monks! The idea sounded awesome and the action scenes are nice. I really liked it, I wish I can get my hands on the original Korean graphic novel that inspired the film, Priest.

Also, I manage to get my hands on the third season of "The Venture Bros," I didn't like it as much as the first two, but I have to say that they changed the dynamics of the cartoon. I'm not sure if I will try to get the fourth season at all. Trying to loose a lot of pressure, I still don't have a clue why I've become such a nerves mess, I came back to watching Psych. I had watched the first two seasons a few years ago and had a lot of laughs with them, so I saw the third and fourth seasons and got them. It's not as good as the first two, but still manages to get some laughs out of me.

What love is...

2011-08-02T07:37:00.000-07:00

I gather them around. Reluctantly, they were herded uphill. Alienated, unable to speak, they got softer. Long ago I learned the hard way that privation acted marvels on the reluctant. They never were the sharpest knives in the block but, after the second day on the path, they all knew...

We reached the summit, it was a small place on the top of the world. I sat down, closed my eyes, let them roam free. I herded them back and produced the question: What is love? One by one they answered back...

The first one, unable to speak, touched my hands... I found myself submerged in a strange wave of warmth. My skin crawled. My heart sank. The entrails that filled my torso vanished and the warmth, so real, so solid, took their place. The sun, the earth, the little one embraced, and overwhelm, me.

After I recover, the time for the second one came, this one has always displeased me the most, he talked about gifts, wealth, a procession of gimme gimmes. I was about to struck him with the whole of my rage when he shut up on his own and told me... Love is time, the time you gather to run away from your job to go on vacations with the family, to relax and sit down at the movies, to read an old story that tells about you and me, to teach you how to transform the world around you with your hands, to ride a bike, to go fishing. Love is time, which most people thing there is little, finite and priceless.

I came to the third confused. I never expected that from the brat. I sat down with this one, always closer but isolated. Love, he told me, is an absolute. We shall never find Love, but the imperfect shadow of it, love. Depending on you or me it will cloud ones mind or be an eye-opener; whichever love comes to be, Love will always be an enigma to both of us. You could choose from Saul/Paul to Heinlin's definition, and it will never be close to Love. So, what's your point?

I came decided to leave alone, I had to remind myself while brought forth the fourth.

Love? There's no love. There is us, pity human beings in need of support, acceptance, attention, and whatnot. He had a hard face, but sad eyes. I couldn't help but get him closer and dive into his memories, otherwise nothing would be gained from the exercise. I saw it, like a moving picture, love was a parking lot with her leaving for humanitarian job and sure that it will be the end, that she will came changed. Love was telling her how stupid she was for trying to leave the one that loved her truly and deeply because she was afraid. It was too weird to see that love was being, being there, no matter how much it hurt, being there to do what was right for the loved ones. So, there was love... and hate... I saw all the frustration grow and take root to give ripe hate... it seems that for this one there's such a thing as one too many...

I got to the last one tired... Have you let home for long and came back to see your mother hands, which used to look like yours look now, covered in liver spots, the skin looking so thin that you think it may break, still strong and lively when hugging you to welcome you home? Those hands are love, changed, but the same. Have you ever found yourself talking for hours, planning, laughing, fooling around with someone half a world away? Well, that's love. Have you ever found yourself sitting the long wait waiting for the flames to bring family to the netherworld with a strong arm offered by those that you never thought would be there? Well, that's love. All of them are right and wrong. In the end, love is and you, my friend, are.

I came to the hill to throw them away, to shed the burden off my shoulders... we came down the hill together, a whole, being one.

In the end, love is and I am.

I, the DSRL Dummy: Portraits

2011-07-24T04:17:00.000-07:00

The Tamron lens has proven quite a good general purpose lens. Last weekend Daniel and I went to the city for lunch and beers, I took time to fool around with the camera and took some portraits. The first shots came out underexposed—actually, I have no clue why— but a little fidgeting in RawTherapee delivered some nice results,

Underexposed shot, balanced in RawTherapee

Of course, playing with the histogram has a price; in this case: the graininess of the processed picture. You can compare with another portrait of Daniel taken at the same place but paying more attention to the settings in the camera,

Same conditions, but unprocessed.

As you can see, the Tamron 17-50mm F2.8 lens behaves nicely at 30mm delivering a strong bokeh—that is, the blur of the out of focus areas in the picture. If you don't care about printing, say you only want to upload them to your web gallery, even heavily underexposed shots can be rescued by using RawTherapee—try the automatic auto-leveling and use it as a starting point for your fidgeting.

The Pentax K-5 and the Tamron 17-50mm have proven a dynamic duo so far. I have no complaints about the HDR, panoramas and portrait results I have obtained from them.

Edit: I wanted to relax a little bit more so I started to process some other pictures. I really like this one. The contrast is not so good but I find the colours from the building and boats awesome,

Clarke Quay

I wish I had shot a HDR sequence of this scene or, at least, had a polarizing filter in the lens at the time, that might have given a more dramatic sky.

Edit 2: I'm still trying to relax and play with the software, so I stitched a panorama of Clarke Quay. The shots were first equalized in RawTherapee and then stitched together in Hugin,

Clarke Quay from Brewerkz

Singapore is a colourful place to live as you can see.

Morning fun...

2011-07-20T18:11:00.000-07:00

I was talking with Lyx this morning and she mentioned that she had to fill a personality test for certain job offer. It happens that the test is free for all and I joined her in filling it.

Do you want to know my result? It was the equivalent of morning laughing out loud!

According to the results of the Jung types test, apparently I'm the INTJ (22/62/25/44) type. Here's where the laugh stock comes... ready? Kersey's website calls that type Mastermind. I've been laughing for almost 15min now. But it gets even better, typelogic.com's description of the INTJ is even more funnier as it reads like a horoscope kind of description—relationships included. Well, at least according to humanmetrics.com career services I choose my career right, but I guess Corporative Lawyer would paid more than Natural Science Research/Education.

Another nice thing about the test is that it still supports my theory that Lyx should be the main provider of our relationship, as an ENFJ (11/44/62/78) type she should be good at a Counseling, Management or Politics career—pay no heed to the lesser payed education career choices hehehe. The Kersey.com describes the archetype as the Teacher and the typelogic.com as a Benevolent Pedagoge. At least they got it right with my dreamy idealistic loved one, she is extraordinary benevolent, caring and charismatic—I'm afraid, very afraid, of the manipulative part hehehehe.

Well, it seems like there's nothing better to lighten up the morning as an online version of the Myers-Brigss type indicator.

Last weekend movies...

2011-07-11T10:37:00.000-07:00

I've just realized that it has been one month since I posted something on the movies and series I've been watching. It has been a long month, many things happened: I got a paper accepted for publication at Phys. Rev. E, other is in the second round of reviewing, and a third one has just been submitted. As you can imagine it has been a month with very long days between corrections, working in the next paper and trying to help my friends. Anyway, here's the list ...

Made in Dagenham, ****
I'm not a big fan of dramatizations of true stories, but this one has everything I like: strong willed women, nice photography, anti-corruption ideals, denouncing of corrupted union leaders. It tells the story of the seamstresses of the Ford assembling plant in Dagenham, UK, and their fight for equal pay for women in 1968, those were the days that changed the world. I have to say that I only knew about the students demonstrations, now I know about were the equal pay movement for women was born.
Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame, ****
That's a bombastic translation of the sober original title 狄仁杰 (Di Renjie). A biographical epic—as most of the most beautiful Chinese movies are—telling the story of the Magistrate Dee, chancellor to the one and only Empress of China. The scenarios are majestic and very well simulated. I loved how they tried to explain each and every traditional trick that usually is given as magic in other Chinese epics.
Let the Bullets Fly, ****
The name says everything, I guess. There was a sukiyaki western in the past and now there's a noodle western. Situated in the modern warring warlords period of China—yes, there have been many of those—Let the bullets fly has the feeling of a spaghetti western; the bandits, the rich merchant that controls the town, the useless or corrupted authority. I have always loved the westerns with their feeling of despair, redemption, and twisted honor. They always remind me of my dad, we use to watch a lot of those and WWII films.
Half Nelson, ****
Education. No, not education. Schooling in the age of broken social fabric and broken people. A somewhat idealistic and addict history teacher trying to show dialectics to his pupils and save at least one of his students from ending up as a dealer. Of course, the student wants to save him from being a junkie. Whom will save whom?
A Single Man, ***
These past month is a rarity. I have watched two dramas and really like them—the other being Half Nelson. The film, situated in the early 60s West Coast America, deals with a homosexual well-to-do English teacher that lost his Architect life partner one year earlier. Through the narrative we are shown how the teacher cannot cope with the loss and how this breaks his daily life and interactions with other people.
The Cannonball Run Trilogy, ***
What can I say? Fast cars, lots of famous 80's actors. Actually, the first film of the movie is fresh and funny for the time and the other two just a way to capitalize from the first one. But c'mon, Roger Moore just after being Bond, Sammy Davis Jr, Dean Martin, Farrah Fawcett, Jackie Chan, Peter Fonda, that deserves two stars even when the films doesn't make any sense at all. C'mon, it deserves three starts just because the films doesn't make any sense at all!
In the Valley of Elah, **
A post Iraq invasion film. It deals with an ex-military man who lost his son after returning to America from Iraq. It is one of those father-turned-detective-to-avenge-death-of-son-because-of-military-cover-up film with completely useless police detectives included.
Age of Dragons, *
It seems like I will have to live a long life in order to watch a decent movie about dragons. I never thought I would say this, but never say never, if you have one month, get yourself a copy of Moby Dick, it may weight way more than a kilogram, have very stylized language and I think the whole thing is a HUGE metaphor, but it is worth reading and all the characters are more fleshy than the ones in this film.

In the past two months, I've been trying to fill the lazy time with some old tv series while the inter-season break finishes. So, I watched the whole second, and last, season of "Legend of the Seeker." I was a little disappointed during the two first chapter but then it picked up. Also, I got my hands on the first two seasons of a mock-cartoon called "The Venture Bros," basically a parody of all the cartoons from the 70's (Scooby Doo and Johnny Quest mainly) and I cannot wait to find the next two seasons that aired four years ago. Also, I managed to get the first season of one of my favorites comedians: Rodney Carrington. I was really surprised to see this tv show, called "Rodney," as I had been looking for it in the past without avail. It is simpleton redneck hilarious, but doesn't have that much funny songs. I'm hoping I can find the second season soon.

At last, but not least, I managed to get all five seasons of Futurama, as well as the movies! Futurama is the most awesome science fiction cartoon, paradoxes and theorems included. I'm really curious about seeing the Futurama Theorem in the, already running, sixth season. It's great that Futurama went back to the dishes!

As you can see, it was a long month, but I managed to squeeze a lot of time while having dinner and before going to sleep, and a little bit while editing photographs. Also, I managed to read a lot on the bus; I finished the six books from Codex Alera in the past eight weeks. Truth be told, I'm very happy with all the consumerism I have being doing in the last two months. Most of the time I spent about 10 hours per day in the office and I got really stressed by the reviewers comments coming all at the same time just when we were trying to give the final touches to the last article. Thanks to the books, the tv series and films with Lyx I managed to smile, think about moral dilemmas, and basically forget about the office for a few hours at a time.

Well, this is long enough. Thank you for reading.

I, the DSRL Dummy: Panoramas by a Dummy

2011-07-05T08:54:00.000-07:00

Last weekend, I took my lazy derriére—all geared up with camera and tripod—up the Kent Ridge to take pictures. The excursion's primary goal was take a set of photos to create a panorama; a secondary objective was to try and shoot manual—this one was not all that successful.

I spent two hours walking the ridge and shooting—truth be told, there was a lot of cursing because I have no practice on handling the aperture and shutter dials for manual shooting. I liked two or three of the almost one hundred pictures I shoot. Today, I sat down and decided to take these ten pictures and try to make a panorama.

First, there's a nice free GPL program for creating panoramas: Hugin. Sources and binaries for Linux/Win 7/Mac are available at Hugin download. The installer is very simple to follow and you will be playing with Hugin in a blink.

Hugin welcomes you with a tip. Dismiss it and the Panorama Stitcher's assistant is ready to upload the base pictures. Click on Load Images, select your images and load them into the stitcher. Now, click on Align, relax, go for a drink, it takes time for the stitcher to process your images. Once the images are aligned, click on Create Panorama, a window with the preview will pop up. In my case, the stitcher did a great job aligning the images so I just went back to the Assistant window and clicked on the Optimizer tab and ask the program to run a crop optimization for itself. Then, I went to the Exposure tab, chose the low dynamic range option and asked the program to run a optimization for itself. Finally, I went to the Stitcher tab, asked the program to Calculate Optimal Size and then Save the Project and Send to Batch. The batch processor will pop up, here you can toy with more things but I just processed my file, this was the result:

The West Coast from Kent Ridge.

You can see the same image at my Picasa were you can zoom it as much as you want, just follow this link.

As you can see, the exposure optimizer does a great job. I tried to equalize the exposure of the original raw files with Raw Therapee before manipulating them in Hugin but, as you can see with the original ten files, the different exposure levels were still clearly visible. Please excuse the distorted horizon, I'm still trying to learn how to compensate for geometric distortion.

In summary, Hugin does a great job stitching panoramas. It basically did all the work by itself from aligning to balancing exposure. Awesome program.

I, the DSRL Dummy: HDR by a Dummy...

2011-07-02T03:39:00.000-07:00

Trying to learn how to do HDR imaging has brought me hours of fun. I want to share this fun with anybody interested in getting stress out of their system.

For beginners like me, the first step is to get a program that automatically does most of the work. A friend of mine, Orthus, has been trying to convince me of using Adobe Photoshop CS5 & Lightroom, but the price is just out of my software range. There's good news. Luminance HDR is a free open source solution that works in Linux/Win 7/Mac operating systems. Luminance integrates many open source solutions that get calibration curves from the raw exif, mask and combine the raw files, tone maps the resulting HDR image and exports it into a LDR images.

You can download the program here. You can find compiled binaries for your favourite Linux distro and just double-click on them. If you are using Win 7 just uncompress the file and copy it into your a directory of your choosing—I put mine on C:\Luminance HDR\—afterwards just right-click on the executable, select Create Shortcut and copy the result into your favourite location; this way you can access the executable easily.

Now, it's time to work; Luminance allows composition from both HDR (raw/pfs/tiff16&32) and LDR (jpeg/png/tiff8) files. I'm gonna work with the raw files but will post here reduced jpeg files—lower size and density with GIMP.

Under-exposed -2EV

Under-exposed -1EV

Normal Exposure 0EV

Over-exposed +1EV

Over-exposed +2EV

Now, it is time to open Luminance HDR and choose New HDR Image from the tool bar; this opens up a new window where we can choose the five raw files to compose our HDR image, just click on Load Images and voilá. Once the images are loaded you will see that each has and exposure number increasing in steps of 1 EV—Luminance grab these numbers from the image's exif— In case it doesn't happens in your case, you can set the exposure manually with the slider on the right. Click Next. Do not choose the alignment option unless you have a pretty damn awesome great machine; the aligning algorithm is computational intensive.

Now that we are in the second window of the HDR creation wizard, choose the predetermined Profile 1, click Finish and wait for the result. The time has come to play with the result. The first thing that you will notice in the tool bar is the green histogram on top of the composed HDR image. You can click on it and slide the blue window left/right. This will affect how light/dark the image appears; move it left, the image becomes lighter, move it right and the image becomes darker. You will notice a button that most probably is saying Gamma1.4, this is the mapping that Luminance used to compose your image. You can play with this too, the options are linear, gamma, and logarithmic from darker to lighter results. Find the one that pleases you the most. I'm gonna go for light, so logarithmic it is. Save the resulting image as HDR file.

The next, and final, step is choosing the tone mapping that gives you the effect that you look, click on the button Tonemap HDR image at the right of the tool bar and enjoy sliding bars; here are some examples:

Mantiuk'06, Contrast Factor 0.5, Saturation Factor 1.3, Detail Factor 5, Pre-Gamma 0.9

Mantiuk'06, Contrast Factor 0.1, Saturation Factor 1, Detail Factor 5, Pre-Gamma 0.9

Old Fattal pre 1.8.4, standard parameters.

Fattal, Alpha 1, Beta 0.75, Color Saturation 0.57, Noise Reduction 0

As you can see, you can get images from the natural to the eerie— I like the first and the last the most— just by playing with the parameters of the different tone maps. I apologize for the ghosting in the image, it seems like it was a windy morning when I shoot them.

I hope this helps you as much as it helps me. I have found an amazing therapy in playing with the camera and software; it takes the edge off at the end of the day.

How to show/hide text in a webpage

2011-07-01T22:56:00.000-07:00

Today, I was trying to flex a little bit my weak html/php/javascript muscle; I thought about upgrading my publication list with a show/hide link of citations to my work. As always, whenever I don't have a clue, Google came to the rescue! I found a quite helpful discussion at webdeveloper.com that takes advantage of the css style called display.

As you can see, the script in its simpler form takes two instructions. One is the declaration of a division containing the text that you want to hide/show, this division is declared with the display:block style:

<div id="new_div" style="display: block;">Here goes the text you want to hide/show</div>

The second part of the combo is a javascript that changes the display:block style to display:none:

<a href="#" onclick= "document.getElementById('new_div').style.display =(document.getElementById('new_div').style.display == 'block')?'none':'block';">Click to show/hide the div called "new_div"</a>

Tip Hat: David Harrison's post.

If you follow the webdeveloper.com discussion you will find a way to declare the script at the head section and shortens the command to be put at the a href tag. Also, you will find a post on how to make the divisions invisible at first load.

You can see my publication list for the final result, just click on any of the Cited by links at some of the papers. You can also view the source of my webpage or drop me a comment in case of you need a little bit more help.

I, the DSLR Dummy: Why a Tamron 17-50mm F2.8?

2011-06-30T08:46:00.000-07:00

I have to be honest: It is therapeutic to write about something that has brought a little more fun into my life. Now, back to our business, the Tamron 17-50mm F2.8 lens.

After deciding to go back into photography as a hobby to chill out and decompress, and choosing the Pentax K-5 body, I found myself looking for a lens. I wanted a multi-purpose lens, something to shoot both sunsets and random street photos, thus I focused on searching for a fast standard zoom. Three options pop-out during the first stage of the search:

Due to my clumsiness, the weather sealed Pentax lens was my first option. The pros of this beautiful looking lens are, of course, the fact that it fits perfectly the weather sealed body; basically, one can forget about light rain and dust for the few minutes that it takes to find cover. Also, the Pentax K-5 body has an integrated database with all modern Pentax lenses' characteristics and it is able to embed chromatic and geometric corrective parameters in the raw's Exif without wasting too much time. The contras are the price and the large geometric distortion, chromatic aberration and low resolution when compared with the other too; you can see for yourself the extensive optical tests on this Pentax lens at Photozone or Dxomark.

My second option was the Sigma lens. It has very nice numbers in both Photozone and Dxomark reviews—do not mind the fact that the lenses were tested in a Nikon and Canon body, in that order, the optical characteristics of the lens shouldn't change that much with a Pentax body— and it is cheaper than the Pentax lens but a wee bit more expensive than the Tamron.

Finally, my last option was the Tamron. Truth be told, I was not even considering this lens at first; another proof of my own stupidity. Then, I went to Photozone and Dxomark to check the cold facts reviews and things changed; the numbers for the Tamron lens are almost equal to, and in some places better than, those of the Sigma and, imagine, for a few dollars less. Still, the Sigma came first to my mind—I told you, my own stupidity.

Everything was decided at the photo shop because the didn't have the Sigma available at the moment—I bought my things at SLR Revolution after walking all Funan and Peninsula plazas searching for the best price, the difference may not sound big, but I saved enough for a couple of beers at my favorite micro brewery.

In summary, the Pentax 16-50mm F2.8 comes third in optical parameters and first when it comes to the price tag, but keep in mind that it is a weather sealed lens and you can use the lens correction data in the Pentax K-5 DSP to develop corrected jpegs from your raw files in situ. The Sigma and the Tamron 17-50mm F2.8 share almost the same optical parameter values, with the Sigma winning the race for a nose. Their prices are also almost the same. In the end, any of these two—Sigma or Tamron—was a good option for my actual needs: a fast general purpose lens that I could use to shoot both panoramas and portraits.

I, the DSLR Dummy: Why a Pentax K-5?

2011-06-29T05:24:00.000-07:00

The process of choosing my camera started a few weeks ago, even before I thought about buying a camera for myself, when a friend of mine, Orthus, was daydreaming about upgrading his camera.

At that time, we were looking for Canon and Nikon bodies. In the end, my friend decided on the Nikon D5100 but I kept on reading. Here's the reason, I'm very clumsy and easily distracted; my things usually end bumping walls because I was looking the other way, or under the rain because I forgot the check the weather forecast. Thus, I kept on reading trying to find a sturdy, durable body.

My first SLR body was a Pentax K-1000. It still works after 20 years of use and abuse. That made me look at Pentax DSLR bodies, where I found the Pentax K-5.

Now, all in all, the Pentax K-5 share most of the characteristics of the Nikon D7000; you can see a point by point comparison of these two at Snapsort. Truth be told, the only characteristic where they are not equal peers is the video capabilities; the Nikon D7000 easily beats the Pentax K-5 at this. But, opposite to the Nikon D7000, the Pentax K-5 has a built-in stabilizing system; in the long run, this can save a lot of money when buying slow lenses. Finally, the most important characteristic for me, the Pentax K-5 is weather sealed. This means that you don't have to panic if you have to run for cover for a few minutes under the rain; which, as I said before, happens a lot to me.

By the way, if you look closer to the point by point Snapsort scorecard comparing the Nikon D7000 and Pentax K-5, you will realize that they score popularity. On this item, the Nikon D7000 has 35 points, while the Pentax K-5 has only 5. Subtracting this subjective characteristic, the final score moves to 394.4 points of the Nikon D7000 versus 404.4 points of the Pentax K-5.

In summary, if you don't mind the "my camera is more popular" contest and you are not buying a photographic camera for shooting video, the Pentax K-5 is the best camera available in its range, with the plus that it can stand clumsy guys like me.

Second HDR try...

2011-06-27T09:02:00.000-07:00

Today, I wanted to come home early so I could shoot a little bit more with the camera and try to compose some more HDR images. As always, things came out differently and I came too late. In the end, there was not enough light to shoot new raws. So, I started experimenting with some of the shots from yesterday, trying to get a different effect from yesterday's HDR image.

This was the result, a more natural image—that's the only word that comes to my mind to describe this composition. Yesterday's picture had very high contrast and the colors were dark. I tried to go for bright colors and less contrast with today's composition. Something closer to what I think I saw with my eyes. I used only three raw images with a 1 EV step, and kept the contrast parameter low, while the color saturation was very close to 1.

This one goes to my coworker and good new friend The Mysterious Dr. Noh, as thanks for his patience and help during these months in Singapore. It's nice to have someone to sit down and drag lead, to pick the many ideas inside his brain and share my antics. Thank you Bro!

I, the DSLR Dummy.

2011-06-26T05:46:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I decided to go back to an old hobby, photography. Lo and behold! I thought I was going back to an old hobby; I couldn't be further from truth...

In these few hours of reading manuals and toying with the camera, my first impression was that digital photography is quite similar to film photography—you shoot and you develop, minus the expensive dark room and supplies. Then, I read about High Dynamic Range Imaging and a small piece of the full power of a digital camera, plus image editing software, hit me like a rock.

First, a disclaimer. In the past, I used to shoot film with a Pentax K1000; mostly panoramas or portraits with a 35mm f/2.8 lens. I stop shooting film around ten years ago. In these ten years, I have used two or three point and shoot cameras from Sony—nothing fancy, always under 100usd.

In the last months, I've spent many weeks reading camera reviews with my best friend Orthus; this helped me to quickly choose the Pentax K-5 DSRL. It has very good specifications for shooting static and, in my neophyte opinion, beats the Nikon D7000 in all but video capabilities. Choosing the lens was the hard part, in the end, we choose the Sigma 17-50mm f/2.8 as our first call. I couldn't find it at the camera shop, so I settled down for a Tamron 17-50mm f/2.8 that seems to have characteristics competing with the equivalent Sigma.

On the software side, I am a GPL fan; a completely ignorant GPL fan when it comes to raw developing and photo editing. The good thing is that I have my friend Orthus, he quickly pointed my way to RawTherapee for raw developing and Luminance for HDR.

So, this is the result of my shooting Sunday...

Raw image:

Developed image (I just equalized the histogram a little bit):

HDR ( 5 shots, ±2 EV in steps of 1 EV, I just used the basic profile 1 for the HDR and toyed a little bit with the color saturation and contrast of the basic tone map. If this were film, I would think a gradient neutral density filter on the +2EV could help a lot, but that's something I need to read about):

I used to enjoy shooting, developing and printing with my old K1000; I really enjoyed my first photography Sunday. I foresee many days of reading manuals, downloading filters and toying with software in the future. It is great to remember the satisfaction of creating something, even when it is not so pretty as I wish it were.

Cheers!

Edit: Final disclosure, I took around 150 shoots and spent some 5 hours toying with Luminance to get the HDR file shown here. I said this because Lyx asked me if this was the only HDR image I made. I composed 10 HDR images from the sets of raw files, and filtered around 100 LDR images trying different tone maps and settings to get this one—the only one that I half liked.

Am I Burnout?

2011-06-24T21:28:00.000-07:00

Today, I made myself that question. What strikes me the most is that I had never considered the option in the past; I guess that's not a question that someone regularly asks oneself, is it?

I had heard the term before, but it never got my attention long enough to search for it. Today, it was different and I found myself at Wikipedia reading about burnout (psychology). I'm surprised at the symptoms, they seem fairly common to me—are they fairly common? Take the list, can you skip through it without realizing some of them are part of your life?

So, Am I burnout? I have no clue. I'm not a psychologist, neither a hypochondriac but this non-specialized article at Wikipedia at least made me see my friends' remarks regarding my "autistic", "strict and non-flexible","work-too-much", "secluded" life in a different light.

I have left behind the daily jog or weekly bike ride that was part of my life in Hsinchu—while riding a bike in Singapur qualifies as having a deathwish, it is very nice to walk the city's parks. I have stop shooting pictures of sky, clouds, and sunsets from the seat of my Iguana. I have done all of it for the sake of "hitting the ground running and get a publication as fast as possible." A fairly stupid reason, to be honest. I managed to hit the ground running at Prof. Lee's group in NTHU and still have a life.

Well, I'm off to walk the city, I may get a camera too...

PS. Ask yourself the question, it may help. It shed a new light for me.

Codex Alera by Jim Butcher

2011-06-21T23:57:00.000-07:00

The Codex Alera is many things, first of them is a six volume saga belonging to the realm of fantasy, it is also a coming of age, lost legion, militaristic, epic. I'm glad that it was this heroic saga that brought me to the mark of 250 books read, or so my Shelfari account says.

Jim Butcher is a great storyteller—I came first to his work through the Dresden Files tv series, based on his homonym series of novels. His characters are polarized heroes or villains that remain solid and human, as great fantasy characters should be. In each novel of the series, He manages to interweave at least three stories that support and enrich the story arc of the codex in such a way that I most of the time I found myself unable to just leave the book and go to sleep—I guess, this is the reason why I managed to finish the six books in nine weeks.

The Codex tells the story of Tavi, covering his life from late childhood to young adulthood, and his close family as they find themselves involved in the succession intrigues of Alera—a continent where humans have a close link to natural forces, called furies, hence being able to control and use them—and an apocalyptic plague.

Aleran society is based in the Roman model—actually, in the story, the Alerans are the descendants of a lost legion—a First Lord rules the land and feudal Lords and Ladies control cities and counties, while a Senate, conformed with the best of the citizenry, oversees the state of law. In this scenario, status is related to furycrafting, that is, the ability to control furies, the most powerful your ability, the highest in the ladder of citizenry you will land. In the bottom of the ladder are freemen and slaves, with little proficiency at furycrafting.

The novels are entitled:

They are a great read to relax and enjoy pure action and intrigue. Two thumbs up!

Joomla! on Win 7

2011-06-20T09:53:00.000-07:00

So, I got the Lenovo x220t and I'm using Win 7 because there's nothing in Linux that compares to MS Office One Note 2010; also, the Linux drivers and the software processing for the tablet input are not nice yet.

Well, Lyx wants to start playing with webpages so I installed Joomla! on the lenovo to start learning how to use it. The hat tip for all the steps and checks goes to my good old friend Orthus who coached me through the installation process.

The first step towards getting a functional Joomla! in your Win 7 is to install Apache, mySQL and PHP. The good news is that there's a nice installer that solves all troubles: XAMPP.

Go to Apache Friends and get the stable release of XAMPP.
Right click on the file and choose: install as administrator.
Follow the instructions and choose the directory of installation, typically c:\xampp
Go to c:\xampp\php\ double click on the file named: php.ini, the notebook should open.
Search for the line containing: error_reporting
Check that it says: error_reporting = E_ALL & ~E_NOTICE
Save and close.
Create a folder named: c:\xampp\mywebpage you will need it.
Go to Joomla! and get the latest stable release.
Double click in the downloaded zip file and extract the contect to: c:\xampp\mywebpage\

Ready. You have all the packages installed. It's time to configure everything!

Go to Start: Apache Friends: XAMPP (Sometimes an error message appear, do not mind it)
Start the MySQL and the PHP services.
Open your browser and type http://localhost/phpmyadmin/
Fill the data for a new database, newdatabase, and create it.
Open a new tab in your browser and type http://localhost/mywebpage/
Follow the installing instructions for Joomla!
When it asks you for the name of the webpage and database put the names you used for mywebpage and newdatabase, for the user name use admin and leave the password blank unless you set a password on step 4.
If you want, choose to install some filler data. Finish the installation.
Open the File Manager, go to c:\xampp\mywebpage\ and delete the folder named installation.
Open a new tab and type: http://localhost/mywebpage/ you should see the Joomla!: Welcome to the Frontpage.

Now, you can start thinkering with Joomla's templates.

Is there a solution to violence in Mexico?

2011-06-16T09:06:00.000-07:00

I came home today and found an old good friend online. It had been a long time without seeing him on the chat hence I decided to drop him a line; after exchanging salutations he shared this link with me: "Homicidios en NL a nivel histórico; 33 muertos en un día."

This news piece talks about 33 homicides—two of them personnel from the governor's security retinue, all of them related to the drug war—committed in just one day, yesterday, in Monterrey, the major city where I attended University.

A few days ago, some U.S. Senators issued a report stating that about 70% of the close to 30,000 weapons seized so far in Mexico by the Army and Security forces in 2009-2010 originated in the U.S.

If I remember well, the latest number of deaths related to the ongoing drug war in Mexico is about 30,000 homicides in the last 4 years.

Now, I wonder when the Mexican Political Class—yes, there's such a thing in Mexico and I'm ashamed of that—will decide to take the reins of the country and pass legislation that addresses the problem of corruption in the political system, laundering of drug-related money, and all the political, economical and social issues involved in the actual mess. Oh, I forgot, that would mean that Governors, Deputies, Senators, Mayors, Judges and all public officials should be held accountable for their actions; I guess such a thing beats the idea of being the Mexican Political Class, the Lords and Ladies of our Banana Republic.

Professionals of Violence are needed, the Mexican Army and the Federal Police shouldn't be retired from the line of fire. But the efforts of all these valiant and honorable men and women—I'm hoping the majority of these valiant public servants is honorable and loyal to the idea of a state of law in Mexico—should be complemented with economical measures and foreign policy agreements; as well as social programs as an educated population could increase Mexico's role in the global economy once the state of law is recovered.

We all Mexicans have a role to play voting honest, hard working men and women to office, demanding affirmative actions from our already elected representatives, educating in our sphere of influence, and, in general, striving to reach maturity as citizens. Without such things Mexico will become a failed state.

I am really confused by those "intellectuals" that consider as an option to reach a pact with the drug warlords. It sounds to me like a come back to the times of the institutional dictatorship where mafia syndicates, drug warlords, governors, etc. were all the same thing. I would love to read a full argument because I really don't see how this could help our country. That, for me, is not a Federal Republic, but a grotesque aftermath of a warring warlords period; a failed state solution.

I concede that, compared to the average gross national product per capita of the country is $6,000.00 MXP per month, the $8,000.00 - $12,000.00 MXP per month, the 16 to 21 year old Sicarii captured by the Federal forces say they get as a reward for risking their lives as footmen for the drug warlords, seems like a lot of money. It even seems like a hell lot of money when one adds the fact that nowadays a freshly graduated from university gets around $6,000.00 MXP per month if he/she is lucky to find a job.

I am not gonna complain about the salary as a lot of people do; I find that completely useless. Without education there's no fertile ground for global enterprises to flourish. Furthermore, violence scares investment. Without investment, there's no companies, without companies, there's no jobs. An important point is that we, as a country, became sclerotic with respect to labor legislation—bah! we become sclerotic as a country, and that's our fault as citizens, period.

Now, in order to beat the swords into plowshares, a state of law and consequent peace has to be attained. The only way for that is to change as a whole, as a country and root out corruption for good. Bring out of our cultural baggage phrases like "to live out of the Federal Budget is to live in error" or "that who doesn't cheat does not go forward" that have been ingrained in our society for too long.

3. Awakening

2011-06-16T04:02:00.000-07:00

The real alarm clock beeped. I woke up, faithless and godless. It was uncommon in me to wake up bellowing in anger; or was it pain? Anyway, the alarm clock ended up crashing into the wall. For the first time, I hated myself for being a social drinker and not having any alcohol at home. It seemed like the most logical path to force my mind into oblivion.

The routine kicked in. Every muscle doing what it had been trained to do for years on end independently of the state of my mind. That was me, a part of me, most of the time impervious to the state of my mind, doing the job.

In no time, I found myself walking the road back to the lab trying to keep my mind busy with the eerie world provided by the morning fog out from the river. Sunrise got me at the underpass through the river. The long tunnel filled with thick brume refracting the nascent light in such a way that the passersby were rendered as mere blurry, inhuman silhouettes.

Time stop. I became no better than a piece of marble. Unmovable. All the silhouettes frozen at their places.

That's when the infernal sound came. If pure, distilled pain had a characteristic sound, that unearthly cacophony would have been it. My skin wanted to crawl; it couldn't. A silhouette at the other end of the tunnel—no, not a silhouette, rather a dark void devouring all the scattered light—started moving towards my direction. Whenever it brushed one of the human silhouettes, the tunnel was filled with the hellish sound, and I felt this urge to ran away in every cubic centimeter of my body.

It advanced slowly, the silence in between encounters a periodic witness to its approach. The silhouettes of those in front of me getting blurrier as soon as my ears ringed again with the infernal sound. I thought of destruction... of undoing, but the silhouettes remained. Tendrils of pure darkness slowly creeping over them, slowly engulfing them. Everything in me begged to flee.

The black void stood in front of me. At its heart, a figure clad and hooded in a black robe stood.

A sleeve slowly rose until its empty end was in front of my face; a pale hand covered in thick, lively tendrils of pure darkness reached out for my face.

My skin crawled. Before I consciously registered the feeling and the though, I found my hand flying towards the hooded figure.

My fist hit the mark and I found myself staring at Corruption itself. It had my face...

Cantar de Mio Cid

2011-06-15T21:11:00.000-07:00

The Poem of the Cid is an epic Dark Ages Spanish masterpiece written in verse and prose both. It narrates the life of Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar, known as El Cid, who is exiled by the King Alfonso VI after years of faithful and loyal service to the crown.

This is one of the first books I remember reading. It was an old version, belonging to either my Grandfather or my aunt Eda, with old Spanish on the left page and modern Spanish on the right page. I guess that this was the cause behind my reading of the "El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha" and "La chronique de Rains" before I was 15. I guess it turned out good, it the end I don't think I am such a big pain in the neck of people who care for me like the fictional Alonso Quijano was to family and friends.

Two days ago, I found myself reading again "El cantar del mio Cid." I quote,

De los sos ojos tan fuertemientre llorando

tornava la cabeça e estávalos catando,

vio puertas abiertas e uços sin cañados,

alcándaras vazías, sin pielles e sin mantos

e sin falcones e sin adtores mudados.

Sospiró mio Çid, ca mucho avié grandes cuidados,

fabló mio Çid bien e tan mesurado,

-Grado a ti, Señor, Padre que estás en alto,

esto me an buelto mios enemigos malos.-

Allí piensan de aguijar, allí sueltan las riendas,

a la exida de Bivar ovieron la corneja diestra

e entrando a Burgos oviéronla siniestra.

Meçió mio Çid los ombros e engrameó la tiesta,

-¡Albriçia, Álbar Fáñez, ca echados somos de tierra!-

Mio Çid Ruy Díaz por Burgos entrava,

en su conpaña sessaenta pendones,

exiénlo ver mugieres e varones,

burgeses e burgesas por las finiestras son,

plorando de los ojos, tanto avién el dolor,

de las sus bocas todos dizían una razón,

-¡Dios, qué buen vassallo, si oviesse buen señor!-

I love the epithet closing the third verse. I guess that's why I like militaristic fantasy and science fiction, they are always epic and portray polarized, morally upright or downright characters that belong to realm of fiction inside our heads, that gives plenty of space for epithets.

Last weekend movies...

2011-06-12T05:38:00.000-07:00

These last weeks have been a hell of a time with referee reports on the papers we have submitted and trying to finish the latest manuscript; but we have managed to squeeze some time to watch some films and television series...

Rio, ***
A very well done animation by the guys at Blue Sky studios, the same that made Ice Age. The music is fantastic, the locations are amazing. I really didn't care about the story, I just sat down, enjoyed the crazy angry birds cameos, the wonderful music and the virtual tour of Rio. It's money well spent at your local cinema.
Thor, ***
Disclosure: I'm really waiting for the Avengers movie. So you can imagine that at least one star is just due to my hype about watching Robert Downey Jr., Edward Norton, Stellan Skarsgard, Natalie Portman, and Samuel Jackson directed by Joss Whedon. Anyway, the film is entertaining, the story came a little bit close to what Thor is about in the Marvel comic books and, again, it is money well spent at your local cinema.
Gnome and Juliet, **
"Two households, both alike in dignity. In fair Verona, here we lay our scene. From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, where civil blood makes civil hands unclea. From forth the fatal loins of these two foes, A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life..." Well, they actually don't end up dead in this one. It's a funny film, but it is not a masterpiece of good jokes or animation...

This week, I'm really sad because "The Big Bang Theory" just finished its fourth season one week ago. The season's finale was not bombastic but it was actually unexpected, so Priya is going back to India, what will Leonard do?

Glee! has just finished its second season in the city that never sleeps. The kids were free in NYC visiting all the landmarks and, of course, Broadway. This season's ending was a little bit too cheesy.

Win 7 for Linux users

2011-06-10T07:40:00.000-07:00

I just got my new laptop ---I broke the screen of the old one by falling while walking with it on my hands. As it is a tablet (Lenovo x220t), I'm keeping Windows 7 due to the beautiful MS Office One Note. Now, I haven't used Windows in more than 10 years, so I thought that there might be someone there in a similar situation that could benefit from my current experience.

Really important things to do once you get your fresh Windows 7 install,

Be paranoid! The first thing to install is an antivirus. Go to Microsoft Security Essentials, download and run it. Follow the instructions.
Be hip! Go to Start (The Windows icon in the bottom-left corner), search for Windows Update, click on it and relax while your system gets updated. You may have to restart once and run it again.
Be prepared! Go to Start, search for Backup and Restore, click on it and follow the instructions to create a backup of your fresh install.

Hereby, it is all about what you need. I'm going to start with all those things that most people use and need everyday---for free!

Summon the Intertubes! Go to Google Chrome webpage, download the installer and run it. Follow the instructions.
Secure the Intertubes! If you are a little bit paranoid, like yours truly, you may want to set Google Chrome to use Secure Socket Layer (SSL)---nowadays most of use do internet banking. Click on the wrench at the right of the address bar, select options, under the bonnet, verify that the SSL options are checked on.
Say Cheese! Lets keep on with Google. Go to Google Picasa webpage, download the installer and run it. Follow the instructions. You can even import your online folders to your fresh system.
And do something funny! Pictures are usually not enough, so lets install a very nice media player that usually has no problems at all with codecs. Go to Videolan webpage, download VLC and run it. Follow the instructions, and you will have THE media player.
Do not close your eyes! Nowadays, everything is Flash. Go to Adobe Flash Player webpage. Download the installer and run it. Follow the instructions.
Just feel the vibe! There's a very nice audio player, that usually has no problems with codecs. Go to Foobar webpage, do not get confused with all the adds asking for a click to download something that is not the latest version of foobar, download the installer and run it. Follow the instructions.
Get your coffee cup ready! Java is sometimes needed for those fancy webpages with proprietary controllers. Go to Java webpage, download the installer and run it. Follow the instructions and don't forget to verify your version at the end.
And prepare to work! Now, here it is about your choosing of buying a MS Office license for some $150 USD or go to Open Office webpage. Download the installer and run it. Follow the instructions and you will have a free functional productivity suite that can do most of what MS Office does.

Now, my line of work requires some fidgeting with figures and a special formatting system called Latex. What follows are those programs related to my work.

MiKTeX is a very complete distribution of latex for windows. Go to MiKTeX webpage, look for the latest release, as of today v2.9. I recommend you downloading the Basic MiKTeX 32 bit Installer as I got troubles with the 64 bit version---the on-the-fly installer of styles and classes never worked.
TexMaker is a free and very solid latex editor. It may not win a beauty pageant but it gets the work done. You can download the latest version at TexMaker webpage, run it and follow the instructions.
The Gimp is a free image manipulation program that competes with Photoshop---actually, in my standard, The Gimp wins as it is for free. There's a working Windows installer here or you can get the source files at The Gimp homepage. Whatever you choose, just follow the instructions.
Inkscape is a scalable vector graphics editor; you may be interested in this if you use Illustrator often. Go to Inkscape webpage, download the windows installer and you know the drill.
Python, iPython, wxPython, NumPy, SciPy, Matplotlib, and Python Toolkit are a great combination for producing quick numerical routines for your everyday physics problems. Just follow the links in the order presented here and make sure that you choose the adequate version of each one. iPython is a nice IDE for quick scripts and running proper scripts. Python Toolkit looks and feels like Matlab a few years ago, which is very good for a free product.

And I think that is it for now. I hope you find this helpful.

Update 12/25/2011:

Lately, I found myself using more and more the following free software:

Magic ISO is an almost free ISO burner and mounter, for some reason Windows 7 didn't come with a mount app and this is a nice supplement to the file manager. In order to mount ISO files it will ask you to install Magic Disc, it is just a matter of following the instructions and, then, mounting a ISO file is just a right click away.
Adobe Digital Editions is the free library manager and DMR enforcer from Adobe. It allows you to download the epubs associated to those acm files you get whenever you buy an ebook. It has a nice interface and it basically works with almost any epub ereader.
Raw Therapee is a free RAW image file developer, it has very useful basic preset and a nice batch processing utility. I have developed all of my latest photos with this software and I'm very happy with the result.

Broken...

2011-06-05T01:26:00.000-07:00

I walk the land.

I come and go randomly following the wind, the tide or the stars.

Sometimes I live, most of the times I watch. Every time, I do.

I'm broken. By doing, I hope to be fixed.

My hands fixed, brought grins back to the surface.

In fixing, I hope to be fixed.

My hands fix no more. My hands break, mash... destroy.

I'm broken.

Now, my hands are broken too.

Reuters' Special Report: Monterrey

2011-06-02T08:15:00.000-07:00

I was chatting with Lyx and she shared with me "Special Report: If Monterrey falls, Mexico falls" by Reuters. Among a plethora of horrifying statistics, this is one is very disconcerting and hits me deeply:

"Perhaps hardest of all for city leaders to stomach is the exodus of some 2,500 students, some 20 percent of the student body, studying at the Tec University, considered one of Latin America's top schools for engineering and business and at the heart of Monterrey's industrial success. "

It is sad what's happening there, but it is good that at least someone is writing about it. I have heard testimonials of kidnapings, shootouts, abuse, theft, and lack of government at Tamaulipas and Nuevo Leon but up to this day I have never read such a detailed account of all that is happening in one of the cities.

Not so long ago, some six months if I remember well, I was wondering if Mexico was a failed state; I think I have found my answer at least for Tamaulipas and Nuevo Leon. Sad but true.

In Vino Veritas... et Consentio

2011-05-28T09:54:00.000-07:00

Solitude... Beer... tequila... and music... random music...

Enanitos Verdes - Luz de Dia
Estopa - El Run Run
Santa Sabina - Estando aquí no estoy
Los Lobos - El Canelo
Juan Luis Guerra - La Guagua
Cabas - Bonita
Jarocho - El Colas
Chucumite - El Palomo y la Paloma
Gianmarco - Lejos de Ti
Gianmarco - Canta Corazón
Joan Sebastian - Con la Duda
Duelo - Pobre Loco
Joan Sebastian - Quiero Compartir con Alguien
Selena - Bidi bidi bom bom
Selena - Fotos y Recuerdos
Maldita Vecindad - Querida
Delux - De mi Enamorate
Los Estramboticos - Camino a Niguna Parte
Genitallica - Trasero
El Gran Silencio - Tonta Cancion de Amor
La Verbena Popular - Un Domingo en la Alameda
Panda - Hola
Juan Gabriel y Banda El Recodo - Adorable Mentirosa
Panda - Maracas
Ana Belén, Víctor Manuel y Raphael - Quiero Abrazarte Tanto
La Cuca - El Son del Dolor
Molotov - Me Convierto en Marciano
Panteon Rococo - La Dosis Perfecta
Café Tacuba - Las Flores
Inspector - Amargo es el Adiós
Caos - La Planta
Ximena Sarinana - No Vuelvo Más
La Liga del Sueño - Semilla Negra

The best, the last... good night... Salud!
Julieta Venegas y Marisa Monte - Ilusión

The Great Dictator, Final Speech by Sir Charles S. Chaplin

2011-05-26T10:09:00.000-07:00

I'm sorry but I don't want to be an emperor. That's not my business. I don't want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone if possible; Jew, Gentile, black men, white. We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each others' happiness, not by each other's misery. We don't want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone. And the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way.

Greed has poisoned men's souls; has barricaded the world with hate; has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge as made us cynical; our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost. The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in man; cries out for universal brotherhood; for the unity of us all.

Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world, millions of despairing men, women, and little children, victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people. To those who can hear me, I say "Do not despair." The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed, the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish.

Soldiers! Don't give yourselves to brutes, men who despise you and enslave you; who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think and what to feel! Who drill you, diet you, treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder! Don't give yourselves to these unnatural men---machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have a love of humanity in your hearts! You don't hate! Only the unloved hate; the unloved and the unnatural.

Soldiers! Don't fight for slavery! Fight for liberty! In the seventeenth chapter of St. Luke, it’s written “the kingdom of God is within man”, not one man nor a group of men, but in all men! In you! You, the people, have the power, the power to create machines, the power to create happiness! You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure. Then in the name of democracy, let us use that power.

Let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world, a decent world that will give men a chance to work, that will give youth a future and old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power. But they lie! They do not fulfill their promise. They never will! Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people! Now let us fight to fulfill that promise! Let us fight to free the world! To do away with national barriers! To do away with greed, with hate and intolerance! Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness.

Soldiers, in the name of democracy, let us all unite!

References: I took the speech text from here and you can watch the scene here.

Long day, bullshit writting

2011-05-26T08:57:00.000-07:00

Moon, rise the tides of dreams;
break the surf of memories;
wash the shores of reason.

Night, devour the light of faith;
hide the forest of hopes;
confound life's vagabonds.

Come to me, oblivion;
conceal me from the eyes
of afar and nigh ones, both

Let me forget, Lethe;
bring me respite,
the childish smile!

Moon, bring me the sea;
may it close the distance
and my heart beat to its crash.

Solution to the Landau-Zener problem via Susskind-Glogower operators

2011-05-22T19:02:00.000-07:00

We just uploaded a short, simple manuscript showing how to deal with a time dependent Jaynes-Cummings Hamiltonian where the time dependence is linear and you end up with a quantum Landau-Zener-Majorana (LZM)-like Hamiltonian.

This LZM-like Hamiltonian, under the rotating wave approximation, is simple to diagonalize in the field basis and the solutions to the classical Landau-Zener problem holds; that is, you can express the time evolution of the state in terms of Parabolic Cylinder or Hypergeometric functions.

As it goes, the Hamiltonian without the rotating wave approximation is also simple to diagonalize in the two-level system basis. The evolution of the initial state can be reduced all the way to two-uncoupled infinite sets of first order differential equations; of course, I have no clue how to solve these or else I would not be calling this a simple manuscript *wink* hehehe.

If you want, you can learn more about this by reading the Arxiv preprint.

Edit: If someone knows a reference for equation 16, please tell me about it. I cannot believe no-one has used it before, but I haven't found anything about it in the literature so far.

Last weekend movies...

2011-05-22T06:41:00.000-07:00

I thought I will manage to keep on time with the film report, but it seems like work got the best out of me these last two weeks. Anyway, Lyx and I managed to watch some movies...

Waitress, ****
This film portraits the life of a not-so-happily-married waitress, who happens to be an excellent pie maker, in a rural town somewhere in the, maybe, Bible belt of the United States. I got this one thinking that it will be a romantic comedy because of Nathan Fillon (at this point you have surely realized that I'm a big fan of his work in Firefly, Dr. Horrible's Singalong and Castle), but it ended up as a good drama/comedy, is the word tragedy? Anyway, it has great moments and it is a good film to watch with your girl.
Red Cliff 1 and 2, ****
I have only one word: Epic. This film tells the story of the Battle of the Red Cliffs. A decisive battle that lead to the Three Kingdoms period of Chinese history, where Cao Cao was defeated by the combined forces of Liu Bei and Sun Chuan. John Woo is the director behind this epic film effort. A must watch!
The Thirst, ****
I was surprised to find a Korean Vampire film during my weekly dive into the movie bin. I was more surprised when I watch it and found that it deals with a Catholic Priest in Korea that becomes infected with Vampire blood and tries to keep going with his life of service to an epic fail ending. I might lack the Korean background but I loved the film, to me it started a vampire movie, became a romantic comedy and ended a drama. Thumbs up! What are you waiting, go for it!
Shaolin, ***
Set in the modern warlord period of China (I would say late XVIII century due to the military uniforms and armament), this fiction film deals with the exploits of a military man turned into Buddhism by the winding path of fate. Curiously enough, one of the generals have the name of Cao Man, that is the father of Cao Cao, the Prime Minister from the Han dinasty that lost the Red Cliff Battle. It is an action film and Jackie Chan plays a supporting role. A good film to take the edge off.
Ghost Town, ***
A romantic comedy, the lead character played by Ricky Gervais; yes, you read it right: romantic. It is a funny turn of the "I see dead people" theme. Filmed in New York city, it is about love, redemption, stupidity and all those things that make a nice romantic comedy with a twist or two. Go get your copy and your girl!
Operation: Endgame, *
The idea sounded entertaining on the cover. Two spy teams, one destructive and the other following subtler moves, balancing each other approaches at the service of the United States, trapped at their headquarters facing destruction. It sounds great, isn't it. Well, you watch it and give me your opinion.

This week, "The Big Bang Theory" was again at its best with the girls playing spy games at Pria and Leonard. Meanwhile, Amy and Sheldon conducted a gossip flux experiment involving gardens and babies.

Glee! has a recession turn, as "lips" family lost it all and it stired up things a little bit with the paranoid teens, nice songs as always but Santana's love song was awesome.

2. Dreams...

2011-05-20T10:59:00.000-07:00

The door welcomed me in silence and stubbornness. Time warped by each blink of my sleepy eyes... hallway... darkness... staircase... darkness... hallway... darkness... lonely bed... darkness... fast approaching pillow... darkness... 03:14 in square red numerals... darkness.

*bleep bleep*

Repetition of an every day's routine made an automata out of me. Morning came, I was a mere mechanical imitation of a human being, the incarnation of the "instant human, just add coffee" meme.

Turn off the alarm clock... check. Get naked and grab a towel... check. Walk to the bathroom to have a shower... in progress.

The bathroom's door was friendlier than the apartment's door; it received me with a warm mist and the calming sound of flowing water. "That's how a morning is started," I thought while getting into the shower.

"Ayip, Birtanem!" She said with the most wonderful and radiant smile upon her face. It was contagious! I couldn't help but grin. "That's really how a morning is started!" I said to myself again.

"Günaidin askim," I said while staring at her, taking delight on her wavy reddish brown colored hair, amber eyes, pale skin and red lips. We kissed.

"All is well that ends well," I thought, the grin still on my face. She left, to get the morning choirs started. Sleepy, I put myself into taking a shower, with the feeling that I was missing something. I dismissed the feeling; I have never had a good memory, anyway.

I came to the hallway in my usual polo and denims. Before I took five steps, the most primitive, dangerous and adorable beast leapt upon me, slowly climbing from leg to waist, from waist to back, and finally settling down on his regal throne: my shoulders. "Tsao Papa!"

"Elijah, you are gonna break your Papa; he's not young anymore!" Said Lale. We laughed.

*bleep bleep*

Last weekend movies...

2011-05-03T06:13:00.000-07:00

It seems like this weekend I will manage to write about last weekend and this weekend movies for the first time...

Forbidden Planet, *****
Before star wars arrived from a galaxy far far away and Captain Kirk commanded the Enterprise, Leslie Nielsen was not a comedian but a hunk and took part in one of the best science fiction movies ever! Faithful to my tradition, I will not tell more than you should sit down and order this film immediatly!
The Road, ****
Lately, I haven't been in the mood for stressing films. Hence, this good piece of apocalyptic storytelling sat unwatched for more than 2 months in my desktop. The story is plain simple, a man and his son trying to survive just after an event that brought demise to most of the human population of the U.S.A. and, possibly, the world. While they walk the road to the shore and south looking for more of the "good guys," they walk the road of life. Good photography, good storytelling, it flows.
The King's Speech, *****
The story of the abdication of Edward the VIII and the ascension of King George VI to the throne of the U.K. told from the angle of his stuttering. The film is well done, the characterization is remarkable, the character development is very good and the storytelling is relaxed and flows extremely well. This one was also sitting in my desktop for long because I thought it will be boring. It is not! You must see it.
Sucker Punch, *
I was really expecting this movie. I had great hopes on it. Actually, the first star is because I really loved the alternate steam-punk-fantasy-gothic setting where the character lives while performing. The idea of the story is great but, somehow, I felt it ragged and patched together. Magic realism is usually a great thing. Here, there were too many great things to tell and they were not told in the best way, in my opinion.
Salvando al Soldado Perez,
No, I didn't forget to put a star. If I could, I would ask for the two hours of my life that this movie took. I will be honest, I laughed in some scenes; specially the first "TOMATES!" But the movie is bad, bad choice of characters as things go in Mexico, bad script. I really hope that they were aiming to make something ridiculously bad, because they made it.

This week, "The Big Bang Theory" was as it best with Pria helping Leonard drive Sheldon to the edge with the roommate's agreement and the first kiss of the geek couple!

I managed to catch up with the last three episodes of Glee! and finished watching the third season of Castle. Both are still good and entertaining. I really hope there will be a fourth season of Castle, because it ended with a nice crossroad.

1. Beginnings...

2011-04-29T12:18:00.000-07:00

The world came to me in sporadic bursts of colors. Sounds were beyond my ability to register the reality of my surroundings. The long walk leading to the staff's living quarters became shorter due to the intermittent darkness brought by my erratic blinking. My depleted energy reserves barely allowed me to perform route correction. Still, I managed to imagine myself raising arms and mumbling "brrrraaaaiiiiiinss;" it put a grin on my face. I was a picture perfect zombie after three days of troubleshooting my piece of the elephant. Back then, we called it "the elephant." Each and every one of us was hired to design a pretty specific piece of equipment under the most stringent specifications. Each and every one of us was kept in the dark as to what other pieces of hardware were being built. Our confidentiality agreements clearly stated that any breach of secrecy were to be considered an immediate forfeit of the involved parties' remuneration. The certainty of being under surveillance 24-7 and the lack of interest in losing a seven figures paycheck kept our mouths shut off.

The Age of Odin by James Lovegrove...

2011-04-27T09:13:00.000-07:00

I came to The Age of Odin after finishing reading the other two books of the trilogy written by James Lovegrove, The Age of Ra and The Age of Zeus. I enjoyed the book.

For starters, the switch from third-person omniscient narrative to first-person narrative was refreshing. Lovegrove's really found a compelling human voice for this story.

Also, I find his fantasy style to be more honed than his science fiction attempts. In reducing the science fiction elements to a few constructions by the end of the book, and changing the focus from character development from campaign description to character development through human interaction, Lovegrove manages to entertain and fulfill his role as storyteller.

The novel is good; it kept me interested and I almost didn't realize that he was using here the same well defined sectioning that he used in the previous deliveries of the trilogy. Furthermore, I really loved the way how he opens up his hand and delivers all the subtleties of the story twists through character interaction; I failed to put one plus one together and predict them.

In short, it is a good fast read. The best of the trilogy. I hope you enjoy as much as I did reading it.

Thank you Mr. Lovegrove for these hours of entertainment.

Last weekend movies...

2011-04-17T08:55:00.000-07:00

It seems like this weekend I will manage to write about last weekend and this weekend movies for the first time...

Moon, *****
An awesome movie! I was surprised about the much that good acting, and just a few of actors, can do when I first watched Solaris and now the feeling comes back to me again. Sam Rockwell does a great job portraying the engineer in the moon and Kevin Spacey voice work is good. As always with the good films I will keep this without spoilers. A must watch! Go, fetch your copy now!

Tropa de Elite 2, ****
The second film following BOPE, the elite troop squad of Rio de Janeiro military police. It is a fiction work portraying the violent reality and mob dynamics of Rio. It is an action packed film with a lot of socio-political discourse located in different layers. I would love to see an equivalent Mexican film but, wait, it most probably will be stopped by the corrupt politicians and officials in our tricolor Banana Republic.

The Messenger, **
War, loses, KIA, and the messenger delivering the bad news. I wish I could say something objective, but a very different war is ravaging my home state and I really cannot find a way to put into words the fear that something can happen to one of the family...

Little Fockers, **
The adventures of psychologically castrated Gaylord Focker and his father in law keep going on as the extended Focker family deals with cheating and infidelity.

Gulliver's Travels, **
A modern time retelling of the classic with the same name written by Jonathan Swift centered in Lilliput only and with the romantic comedy twist. When will the movies about lucky losers without attitude/brains/charisma will stop?

Megamind, ****
It seems like redemption season has not finished yet. Good but not great animation.

Black Dynamite, **
This is a parody, I hope, of those 70s b list films and tv series on black empowerment. It is great to see extras change in a take, different cars being burned, and all those glitches that made those old films funny. Awesome cheesy/pimpy lines and nunchakus too.

This week, there was no episode of "The Big Bang Theory" neither of Glee! but I managed to catch up with the third season of Castle. It is still a good entertaining tv series, a must see.

The Age of Zeus by James Lovegrove...

2011-04-09T04:24:00.000-07:00

As you, my four readers, already know, last weekend I got my lazy derrière all the way up to Page One in Vivo City and got myself "The Pantheon Trilogy" written by James Lovegrove.

After finishing the first of the trilogy, "The Age of Ra," I was a little dispirited but I started with the second book of the trirlogy, "The Age of Zeus," as soon as possible in order to finish with what I thought will be an ordeal. I am very happy to say that "The Age of Zeus" was a better read, all in all, and I do not regret buying all the trilogy at once.

The age of Zeus is a kind of militaristic science-fiction story set up in an alternate version of our earth. Note, that it is not militarisctic-science-fiction any more. Now, this book is proper scifi with powered robotic armor and genetically engineered humans in almost every page. But it remains a "kind of militaristic" as the description of strategy and tactics still lack that flow and feeling of military novels.

It seems that Lovegrove favors a very well defined three sections structure, with the introductions made in the first, again a hundred and something pages, the plot developed in the second reaching the climax by its end, now a three hundred and something pages of compact short stories dealing with well defined operations, and the third bringing the great finale, again a hundred and something.

This book is neither a prequel nor a sequel of Age of Ra. It is set in an alternate earth and only shares the motif with Age of Ra.

All in all, "The Age of Zeus" is a good, fast and no-brainer read, it took me some ten hours of bus and before-bed time, with a couple of interesting twists that you can imagine and figure out but they are not so plain, simple and clear as in "The Age of Ra."

Go and get your copy, you will enjoy it.

The Age of Ra by James Lovegrove...

2011-04-09T03:56:00.000-07:00

Last weekend I got my lazy derrière all the way up to Page One in Vivo City and got myself "The Pantheon Trilogy" written by James Lovegrove. I came to the trilogy without any prejudice and without a clue. The books seemed to be either science-fiction or speculative-fiction. I took the bait and bought the three of them.

"The Age of Ra" is a kind of military-science-fiction work set in an alternate current time earth. I say "kind of" because it is not really that military, it lacks the vivid descriptions of tactical maneuvers of the military genre, and it is not really that scifi as the only futuristic equipment are the god-powered weapons and arms.

The book deals with an alternate modern era earth that is identical to ours but for the fact that the Egyptian Pantheon rule over the human population of the planet. In the beginning it brought memories of "The Lathe of Heaven" by the greatest Ursula K. Le Guin, but I was too fast to make the comparison.

The story is simple, it is quite possible that by the first hundred and something pages, where the first third of the book dealing with the introduction of characters finishes, you will figure out what will happen in the following first hundred and something pages, where the main plot develops and gets epic.

Actually, the book is a good no-brainer read. It flows easily, the plain story helps a lot with the flow, and I finished reading it in some seven hours distributed in mornings and afternoons at the bus and before-bed time.

Truth be honored, by the end of the book I was banging my head in the wall for buying the trilogy but I started the second one and I liked it better.

Last weekend movies...

2011-04-09T03:08:00.000-07:00

Two of them were chosen by lovely Lyx and one by me. Of course, my choose was the teen movie...

Inception, *****
Truth be told, I have become a fan of Christopher Nolan almost as much as I am a fan of Darren Aronofsky. Inception is beautifully piece of art; it's story, storytelling, photography and visual effects are as close to perfection as you can get. All of the actors make a good job portraying their characters. And, the best thing of them all, I never knew what was coming next. As you, my two readers, know, that is what wins my confidence vote. A must see!

Easy A, ****
When I choose this film, I was expecting just another teen movie. One when I could just sit down, turn my brain off and relax. Do not jump to conclusions too fast, this is a no-brainer. But the story does not suck big time, the story telling is quite fluid and fresh and the actors manage to do their job. I was won when I realized the title was a reference to "The Scarlet Letter" of Nathaniel Hawthorne which still sits half read in my bookcase. It was great to see footage and good references to the 1926 film and not so good reference to the 1995 film, where the great Gary Oldman and Robert Duvall acted. If you have nothing to do and want to laugh a good time, this is your film.

It's Complicated, ***
I cannot say that I wanted to watch this film. I really did not have a clue about what it was about. Moreover, I was starting to be afraid of the existence of a new kind of movie genre: the grown-up movie; that is a teen movie, but with grown up characters in the range from 40s to 70s instead of teens; the ones with characters in their 20s to 30s are called romantic comedies. And it is confirmed, this is everything a teen movie is but played with characters in their 60s. Anyway, the movie is good and a good laugh too.

I sat down and watched the latest episode of "The Big Bang Theory"; that is, episode 20 of season 4. It was back to see useless nerd saved by farm girl penny but yet not even close to being one of the best ones. So far this season was getting closer to the super funny first season and took a dump with this last episode.

I have also managed to finish the first two seasons of the animated series "Star Wars: The Clone Wars." I think I am starting to become a fan of animated films and television series. The Clone Wars fills in the gaps in between the second and third episodes of the Star Wars saga. This particular 3D CGI tv series is made in Singapore! Somewhere in this beautiful city, someone is animating Anakin Skywalker and all the Jedi council and making them wage war!