Last weekend movies...

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...

1. 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.
   
   
2. 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.
   
   
3. 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.
   
   
4. 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.

1. 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.
   
   
2. 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.
   
   
3. 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.
   
   
4. Castle S04 E06, ***
   Castle and Beckett are now involved with the paranormal, which happens to be a decades old passion crime.
   
   
5. 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.
   
   
6. 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).
   
   
7. 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...

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

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...

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...

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...

1. 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.
   
   
2. 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.
   
   
3. 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.
   
   
4. 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!
   
   
5. 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.
   
   
6. 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.
   
   
7. 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.
   
   
8. 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.
   
   
9. 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.