Red Space Rocket

Google chinese name：guge（Google中文名：谷歌） by lannyone

I notice there is a doco called Google – Behind the Screen on Cutting Edge next week.

I think Google is midly interesting in terms of how it came about and how such a simple search engine became basically the default. What is more interesting is what Google doesn’t do, either by choice or out of practicality. Looking closely at Google raises very real questions about how we treat information, copywrite, censorship and monopolies.

One of Google’s guiding ideas is “don’t be evil”. In practice this proves harder than I would have imagined.

I am not sure how many of these issues are covered in this documentary but I figure it’s worth a look anyway.

It runs for an hour at 8.30pm on Tuesday 4th July on SBS. More information here.

The Graduates by Tammy Kirks

I enjoy watching a movie as much as the next person, perhaps more sometimes, but I also think that watching the film is rarely a substitute for reading the book. I can think of examples of instances where the film might be a better story than the book, The Hunt for Red October leaps to mind, but even then you get more from the book even if the story isn’t as good in my opinion.

However now and then you’ll find a film that is so faithful to the book that there’s not a whole lot of point in reading the book once you’ve seen the film (other than to notice how similar they are to each other). I had this experience recently when I watched the 1967 classic The Graduate and then read the much acclaimed novel which was published in 1964. There were differences of course but generally speaking I didn’t gain much from both watching and reading.

Despite the few exceptions like this I think it’s well worth reading classics even if you learn the story first by watching the movie.

Old House 1.19.2005 by 10thAvenue

Since my old student facing blog seems to have died I thought I’d start again here. With any luck I’ll be able to bring those old entries over at some point but for now here I am.

Baldrick just looking at stuff by scarce

I noticed quite an interesting show on the ABC tonight called Time Team which is presented by Tony Robinson (best known for playing Baldrick on the fabulous BBC show Blackadder.

In this episode the were digging up bit of Bath in Britain looking for remains for Roman buildings, roads and a cemetary. Tony Robinson seems to have made a bit of a career out of these things and presented a string of documentaries. There are another two episodes of this mentioned on the ABC website; Athelney Revisited and Kew.

If you’re interesting in ancient and English history or just people digging up old stuff there I think it’s well worth a look. Failing that you could always throw on an old episode of Blackadder, there’s some history in there too.

Tate Turbine by ljcybergal

I happened to see a segment on Behind the News about power generation in the context of the current national debate about the future Australian use of nuclear power. What I didn’t realise is that almost all power is made my spinning around magnets. We use water, wind, coal and steam and nuclear power and steam all to just spin the magnets around.

Not that there is anything wrong with that it was just news to me. I didn’t realise they were all so similar in what they did. The only one that was different in this story was solar which uses crystals to turn sunlight into electricity.

Anyhow the full text of the story is here if you are interested.

The Stage – view from balcony by Mac Thespian

A conventional story has three major parts to it and a common structure of plays it to have three acts. Broadly speaking we meet the characters in the first act, they encounter a problem in the second act and solve it in the third act.

In practice most stories do the introductions and discovering the problem at the same time.

I seem to remember watching an interview with George Lucas in which he explains that Star Wars: A New Hope is the first act where we meet everyone, The Empire Strikes Back is the second act where things get as bad as they can and Return of the Jedi is the final act where they make everything right.

Also, and I know this sounds obvious, but most modern stories have the problem solved by the main characters and usually the characters are somehow changed by all of this, they often discover something about themselves or the world.

I guess this might be part of why I found The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe a bit unsatisfying. The three acts were clear enough but the lion solved their problems for them which made it just a story about things happening to people rather than people doing stuff.

I wondered later if it harks back pre-renassaince stories telling where God was centre-stage rather then the cleverness of mankind. Perhaps that’s for thinking about another day.

carl jung by CuddleCat

I was thinking the other day about personality test and one of the things that people say is thay they are mostly based on Jungian Archetypes. Carl Jung was the inventor of anaytic psychology and came up with a whole lot of really interesting things. The two I am most interested in are Cultural Unconscious and the Archetypes.

The four basic types are self, shadow, anima and animus which are interesting but there is more interesting stuff to come when it comes to stories and characters. The ones listed on Wikipedia include the perfect couple, the child, the trickster, the superman (or ubermensch), the hero, the great mother, the wise old man and the eternal boy.

Just for giggles see if you can put the following characters into one of these baskets.

Indiana Jones
Superman
Obiwan Kenobi
Bart Simpson
Gandalf the White
Bilbo Baggins
The mother or daughter in Freaky Friday
Neo
The White Witch
The Joker

I suspect if you had a bit more skill than me you could easily pick a handful of these archetypes and you’d have a good starting place for a story of your own.

Captain Copyright by adolfoestalella

One of the topics I am just generally interested in is music distribution and consumption. Although I understand the technology it still interests me how it all works since it is so very different to when I was a teenager. Basic then you bought record or tapes and routinely made tapes for friends but that was about it. Also shops carried a much smaller range and there was no Amazon.com or JB Hi-Fi.

Related to all of this is the issue of copyright. In Australia there are all kinds of restrictions and rules and people, including, break the law pretty much every day. Anyhow there is some reform happening which it doesn’t hurt to know about.

test paper by installclass

I guess if I’d thought about this I’d have guessed it existed. It seems you can download copies of the General Achievement Test (GAT) for the last couple of years.

The use of these for Year 12 students is obvious but I think you’d be crazy not to have a go at them when you are in years 10 and 11 as well. I know when I was a student you could access past assessment but it was never so easy as this. At the very least I figure you’d do well to download them and give them a quick read over just to get a good sense of how the tests are structured.

exams off ! by place light

I know a few of you are doing your exams around now so I wanted to wish you the best of luck.

If I can offer one piece of advice it is to look at how many marks each section is worth and divide your time up in proportion to the marks. If one section is worth three marks then you probably need to provide at least three ideas. If another section is worth 15 marks then make sure you get this done and give your teachers lots of information so they can give you those 15 marks.