A documentary about how food is made in US. Good questions, and good attitudes. The movie tried to be too sentimental at times, but still it had delivered the message! I never thought about how customers change the supplier. According to the movie, fast food chains are the largest customer for meet, and crops. Now it is only logical to see that the production methods from fast food chains must be applied to the food suppliers if they are too support the demand. How good are the methods? That is for you to decide. On the other hand, we are the customers for the food chains. They will give us what we ask them for. Hence, we vote for what kind of food we get with every meal we purchase! That is a lot of power in our hands. http://www.foodincmovie.com/
Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category
Alexander Shyrokov has reviewed
Sunday, October 18th, 2009The cove
Sunday, October 18th, 2009
Interesting documentary that focuses on one particular place in Japan, where dolphins are slaughtered. It is a story of a man who is trying to undo something that he had started. Some moments were really intense (better than action movies), some were very brutal. The goal of the movie is to rise awareness about the issue of dolphin captivity and killings. The author says, that if it is not possible to stop killing in one particular place, then it is not possible to address the global problem of killing whales and dolphins world wide. http://takepart.com/thecove.
The Holy
Monday, October 5th, 2009
The Holly by Daniel Quinn.I was and is greatly impressed with Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. Hence, I am trying hard to find the same greatness in his other books by comparing them to Ishmael. I understand, though, that every work must be judged by itself and not as a clone of something else. Still, it seems to me, that all of the Daniel’s books, I have read, do touch the similar subjects and talk about the same messages. Surprisingly, each time, the author finds very different angles to deliver the messages, which is very entertaining.
The Holy did not impress me as something exceptional. It did not provide the comprehensive picture of the environment and did not even hinted into the direction of how the environment can be explained. The notion of “them” vs “us” is an old one and is well popularized by Matrix movies. But Matrix does show how this separation came about, why it was possible, and where it would lead. I failed to grasp that reading The Holy. The book, of course, is well written and reminded me of Master and Margarita by Bulgakov. Still I found myself waiting for something more until the very end of the book. In my opinion, the last few chapters of the book contained the important things, which were not really explored during the rest of the book.
The neocube – a magnet puzzle
Thursday, September 24th, 2009I have played with the neocube. This toy is a collection of spherical earth magnets. Magnets make it very entertaining to play with this toy. One can create many shapes as shown in the video below. After getting a taste of it, I am planning on purchasing it.
Defense grid
Monday, September 21st, 2009
Following a good review of a tower defense game Defense Grid, I looked at the demo of the game. I liked it at the first glance, but eventually I was not impressed by the game balance. No need to use different kinds of towers to finish all four levels. In fact, basic towers were sufficient even to get the medals. The last level available in the demo allowed to use different strategies: use different towers (four types), use different upgrades (up to three on some towers). It turned out that it is easier to finish the level (with a medal) using only the basic tower even without upgrades. It seemed that attempting to use different towers created more risk than benefits. I hope the other levels in the game are more balanced. I did find that graphics, sounds, and narration were nicely done. The speed-up feature of the game is great. I really liked that each level could be completed in a short period of time, which makes the game attractive for casual games.
I wonder why such a task as balancing is not done automatically? If I work for a game development company I can see myself developing an automatic “game balancer”. Checking if a level is balanced is possible with a simulation, especially for such a deterministic games as tower defense games.
9
Wednesday, September 16th, 2009I have watched 9. I will give it 3/5. The movie had nice action sequences and the movie world had an interesting perspective, given the size of the characters. Alas, the movie did not answer too many questions to make complete sense, and no amount of interesting scenery or action sequences could hide it. Why did the machine stop working? Why did it need what it needed? Why there were 9 of them? Overall, I missed the message… was it there? The Nightmare Before Christmas had it all a message, cinematography, characters. I could see that this movie had this potential, but it was not fulfilled.
Alexander Shyrokov has reviewed
Friday, September 11th, 2009
Not highly realistic movie. I liked some intense action scenes. Dialogs oftentimes were very close to being cheesy. I would not recommend watching it in a theater, there are very few scenes with beautiful settings of snow and ice, the rest is inside or almost whiteout conditions.
Online reading list
Wednesday, September 9th, 2009I am looking for a place to keep the list of the books I’ve read or would like to read. I have looked at the following services:
- Amazon lists – too cluttered, could not locate import feature.
- Ravish – focused mostly on reviews
- LibraryThing – looks too simple, 200 books in free account, so it is not an option
- Shelfari – looks very nice, though import did not work out as well as I expect it to.
- Googl books – no import (without ISBN)
- Goodreads – the least problem with importing
I did like how Shelfari looks, but I will use Goodreads, because it allowed me to import most of my data.
Atlas shrugged by Ayn Rand
Saturday, September 5th, 2009
I have finished reading Atlas shrugged by Any Rand. The author talks about strong people, fighting and winning. The book is long and I had a feeling that the book consists of three more on less independent books. But towards the final pages I felt that I do not want the book to end.
I read “Atlas shrugged”, because I liked “The Fountainhead” by Rand (my wife suggested both books to me). “The Fountainhead” talks about struggle of individual men to remain true to their values. “Atlas shrugged” takes this struggle to a national level. Now the fight is between groups of people. One group is represented by men of mind aka industrialists, and the other group is men of no-mind aka politicians. The book outlines what methods are used by both groups and why they use them. The main point of the book is that a person must use mind to live and happiness is the ultimate goal. The author provides very logical explanation of why this statement must be true. Of course, the statement comes with a premise that one can not obtain happiness by the price of someone else happiness. I did not remember that it was explained why this premise is logical. In either way, my major concern with the book is that it creates a vision that people achieve by the means of logical reasoning alone. Rearden (one of the books main characters) spent 10 years in the lab to create his metal. The picture that books draw is that logic was the tool for discovering the metal. As a scientist myself, I know that it is very unlikely scenario. “Intuition” by Osho has a very good explanation of the sources for our achievements.
Overall, “Atlas shrugged” is a great book. It is very well written and the subject of the book is worthy of writing a book about.
Healthy at 100
Thursday, December 13th, 2007“Healthy at 100” by John Robbins impressed me with the amount of scientific references the author used to support his points. I found this book a little too long, but it’s hard to disagree with the approach that John uses in his book. I have found certain statements in this book surprising, because of my assumption, that information of such importance would be known. But it turns out that even though there is a lot of conclusive research on some important subjects (nutrition, exercise, cancer, heart disease, etc…), I would never know about it. The excuse for that is that I do not read medical publications (how many people do?) and the research is not widely publicized in any other way. But the actual reason for my ignorance is that I never even tried to look for this information. Hence I never knew what the white flour is and why we have it. It has low nutrition value (lower than 50% of whole grain flour) but long shelf live. As a consumer I see no reason to chose white flour instead of whole grain flour. It maybe a common knowledge for some people, but it was not for me.