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Politics = Dumb

So yeah, as Mike has similar posting on his blog today, but there are some real shenanigans going on over “Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas” recently… Essentially, there are a bunch of folks (mainly Republicans and old people…but not entirely…) getting pissed off about “GTA” and its violent content, not to mention the sexually explicit material that’s also included. Mike cites an article at ABC News mentioning how a grandmother is suing Rockstar Games (the publisher) because she bought “GTA” for her 14-year-old grandson without knowing about the violent/sexual material portrayed within. In a second article, which I posted in my “Articles” section, Steven Johnson has an editorial about how dumb Hillary Clinton’s attack on video game manufacturers is equally as stupid…this one was published by the LA Times. In that one, he discusses how activities like football are arguably more dangerous and violent than video games, which can instead be therapeutic for youngsters.

First of all, Johnson is entirely correct: video games today are helping develop cognitive skills, strategy and hand-eye coordination much more than the games of old (i.e. Monopoly, Cutes and Ladders, etc.). A parent today can play a board game against their child relatively easily, but if you drop them into “Halo 2,” they’ll get schooled quickly. Secondly, these games all have ratings on their packaging. A kid can’t just go into a store and buy the games rated “Mature;” a parent/adult has to do it. “Oh, I didn’t know it would have that terrible material in it,” the parents say… Well, maybe they could have read the packaging, researched the game on the internet, asked other parents, etc. before purchasing the game for their child and then complaining about it. Thirdly, these parents that are complaining are the ones who are already relying on video games and TV to babysit their kids. Maybe if they’d actually spend some time with them…you know…go to a park and throw a baseball or something…they wouldn’t spend all their time playing video games…or perhaps they could play some of these games with the kids so they know you’re taking an interest in their lives, rather than just assuming that the TV is cheaper than paying someone else to watch your kids while you avoid taking responsibility for their lives and how they’re raised… Why not stop blaming the media/TV/video games for your screwed up kids and try making a difference yourself in their lives, eh?

Just a thought…

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…busy, busy, busy…

Yeah, I’ve been pretty busy lately… This past weekend, Brooke and I drove to Sedalia for Anne Gumbel’s wedding…it was lovely, of course, but I didn’t get to see as many folks (i.e. Alex, Gavin, Jess, etc.) as I would have wanted to. Tony was along, so that was semi-entertaining… 😛 On Sunday, Brooke and I went with my parents to Lohman and showed some wedding pictures to my grandmas. I think they were happy to see us…but probably somewhat amazed by the technology I brought along (they’ve never seen a laptop, so far as I know…). I’m close to getting some pics up on the wedding website for download, but for now, many of them are viewable through this part of my website.

Otherwise, Brooke and I are looking into replacing one of our cars in the near future, I’m thinking… Both our cars are over 100,000 miles and we’ve had some issues with Brooke’s car recently, so it may be wise to get a better, lower-mileage car to use for driving to Columbia and Hannibal… So yeah, if you know of any cars under 50,000 miles that don’t cost too much and are semi-reliable, lemme know… 😛

But yeah, St. Louis is treating us well… Still keeping busy at work, but not doing anything particularly special right now. We got another shipment of turtles in today, so we’ve got more to “play” with in the coming weeks…hard to believe that tomorrow marks the halfway point of my summer lab rotation…

…on the other hand, Thursday marks my first payday…w00t… 😀

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Wedding Pictures

So Nathan has been uploading to my Gmail drive all day and I’ve got some pictures, but it’s moving rather slowly…by the end of the weekend, I hope to have many of them posted online somewhere…it’ll probably be early next week before they’re up on the wedding website in a download-able fashion… As you may have noticed, the pictures I post in my Photos section aren’t able to be downloaded (easily), but the ones I’ll post on the Wedding Website will be sized for download and can be printed at Wal-Mart or something…

Enjoy…I’ll post more as I receive them…

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Scotty…beamed up for good…

James Doohan, of Star Trek fame, died today at the age of 85 battling Alzheimer’s disease and pneumonia. He will be missed, of course; the man did Star Trek conventions up until last August, which is crazy considering how old the man was. He was a testament to what Star Trek means to a lot of us fans out there, and to the rest of humanity.

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New Section, etc.

So yeah, today was pretty good… I went by the Employee Health center and they said I officially don’t have tuberculosis…woo hoo… For some odd reason, SLU makes all its employees take a TB test every year…I guess if I don’t have to pay for it, I don’t really care… Anyway, after that I went to work and saw a Master’s thesis defense, which was relatively interesting…I guess it’s good to see what research counts as Master’s degree material…didn’t seem too hard…hehehe… 😛 After that, Dr. Ariel ended up leaving early, which meant I got to leave early too… I went by EB Games and got a used copy of “X-Men: Legends” for Gamecube, which I’m quite pleased with so far. Should keep me entertained for the rest of the summer, certainly…

Other than that, I have started a new section of the website titled “Articles” (link’s up at the top, yo…). I’m intending this as a place to post things like…well…like the editorial I posted there by Paul Krugman, who writes for the New York Times, among other periodicals/books. This editorial is essentially about why politics shouldn’t dictate what is taught in our schools…and I agree with it wholeheartedly…which is why I posted it… 😛

Anyway, check that page from time to time…I’ll post other stuff there, too…eventually…

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w00t to Galileo…

“Science tells you how the heavens go, and the Bible tells you how to go to heaven.”
— Galileo

…therefore…stop trying to have each one explain the other… 😛

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Review: War of the Worlds

Finally got to see War of the Worlds today…for the most part, it was worth the wait. First of all, I’ve read the book (many years ago…) and seen the original movie (also awhile back…), so I was looking forward to this re-telling of a good story. The main difference is that this movie is told from a different point of view than the original movie and the H.G. Wells classic. This one is about a dock worker and his family, while the original (1953) involved quite a few diverse characters…and worse special effects. Tom Cruise and Dakota Fanning do a good job making the audience feel like they’re going through the frightening times of an alien invasion…and Fanning really makes me glad I don’t have a 10-year-old… 😛

Regardless, the acting and story itself are good, and the special effects are what one would expect from a Spielberg movie. I was kinda disappointed in the amount of action in the movie, however. The obvious comparison between this movie and another would be Independence Day, which is a favorite of mine. ID4 had much more action and more points of view for the story to be seen from, which I have always appreciated. On the other hand, War of the Worlds tells us a very similar story from a different point of view, which is also refreshing.

I also didn’t really like how they brought the aliens into the picture this time around. In the original, the alien ships came to Earth encapsulated in meteors and then started attacking…but this one does it differently and makes less sense… They do at least end the movie the same way as the original and the book, which is the most important, I guess.

Overall, the movie is certainly worth seeing, but I don’t think I’ll end up buying it…seeing it once is probably enough for me, honestly. ID4 is still the favorite in alien invasion movies in my book, but this film definitely brought an interesting story to the table for a new generation.

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So true…

“Well, Bible…Wrath of Kahn…what’s the difference?”
— Kyle Brovloski; South Park

Dude…I’m telling you…Star Trek rocks…so does Stargate…but not as good at Star Trek…

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…fun with turtles…

So yeah, I’m working for Dr. Michael Ariel here at Saint Louis University in the Pharmacology and Physiology department for the next six weeks. This is the first of three lab rotations that I need to carry out for the Ph.D. before I can start my actual research work. Dr. Ariel’s focus is the brain, specifically, the reflex action that causes muscles to move your eyes when you turn your head. As he explains it, when you turn your head, your eyes want to stay focused on a given location, so the muscles cause your eyes to stay on that position while your head moves from side to side. He does this work in turtles, which is somewhat rare in a world where mice and rats tend to dominate research. He uses turtles because, this specific box turtle, can live underwater in the winters of Wisconsin for up to 5 months without having to come up for oxygen (crazy, eh?!). Well, when you remove the brain tissues from the turtle’s body, the tissues will actually stay alive for a few days without being attached to the rest of the body…something that mice/rats/us can’t do…

Currently, I’m helping Dr. Ariel set up his new $70,000 camera device that will record brain stimulation. We will put a voltage-sensitive dye into turtle brain tissue and then shock it with an electric pulse; the neurons are then excited the response travels throughout the neurons along certain pathways. The camera reads the changes in the dye so that we can trace where the signal starts and stops. Neat, eh? 😉

Thus far, the work has been interesting, but it’s difficult getting used to 8 hour workdays again… Now that the camera is mostly set up, I’m sure I’ll be working on other projects by mid- to late-next week… Fascinating times, I tell you…

…and on a side-note, I get to play with my new praise band tonight at Webster Hills UMC…those drums won’t know what hit ’em…

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Review: Fantastic Four

First of all, lemme preface this by saying that I owned lots of comic books and comic book collector cards back in elementary school, so I tried to learn lots of stuff about Marvel Comics’ heroes and villains… Spider-Man was my favorite (of course), and the X-Men were popular and cool…but the Fantastic Four had been around for a long time and weren’t quite as popular anymore… Sure, they were a staple of comic book heroes, but they just weren’t that interesting for a kid in the 1990s.

Flash forward to today, 2005. Comic book stories are a hot property for the motion picture business, so Fantastic Four gets picked up for a movie deal. How’d it turn out, you ask? Pretty well, overall. As far as the story goes, I’d classify it between Spider-Man and X-Men: it has the “what the hell happened to us and how do we deal with it?” of Spider-Man, as well as the variety of powers and characters of X-Men, which makes it a bit more interesting. The acting was relatively good, but perhaps could have been a little better…just seemed awkward at parts toward the beginning, I guess, but it got lots better later on… The dialogue was on par with other movies in the genre with few dumb lines (“It’s clobberin’ time” just had to be said, folks…it’s classic!). The special effects were good and the action was fun to watch, although, sadly, the bulk of the action was at the very end of the movie and it would have been nice to see more throughout…but again…when you have four people fighting against one adversary, there’s only so much you can do…

I only had a few real complaints with the movie:

1). The Thing was focussed on a lot compared to the others. This is, of course, because his power was more obvious and had him affected by the outside world more than the others. He steps outside, you see him, you stare at him, he gets affected… It was easiest for the audience to identify with his character more than the others since the others could still live out “normal lives” if they wanted, while the Thing couldn’t… I just would have liked to see more of the others, I think…and certainly more Jessica Alba (heh…)

2). Dr. Doom’s entire character was overhauled for the movie. In the comics, he wasn’t on the ship, wasn’t changed like the others, and couldn’t shoot lightening out of his hands. Now, granted, it made the story easier to deal with and more fun to watch on TV…but still…it was all a bit too convenient, I think. That can be overlooked, however.

So in short, the movie overall was good. Not as good as Spider-Man or X-Men…but it was good… It was good mainly because it was a “super hero” movie that was different enough to be interesting yet similar enough to be entertaining… Frankly, it’s a 2 hour long movie and I didn’t look at my watch once, which is more than I can say about many other movies I’ve seen this year. Does it make sense that “cosmic rays” can “fundamentally change” their DNA to give them super powers? No, not really…but it can still be fun to watch…