Transformer (IMAX)

I went to see the popular Transformer movie last evening with some friends. The movie is famous for its special effects, so we watched the IMAX version. The screen is large, and the audio effect is great. The only thing is that we came in too late, and there's only seats in the front row left. And this, causes my experience last night to be extremely bad.

The camera is shaking like crazy all the time, and if I tried to stare at the screen for more than 5 minutes in a row I felt as if I was going to vomit. What makes things worse is that the front row is way too close to the bottom of the screen. For somebody sitting in the left half of the row cannot possibly see the top-left corner of the screen without hurting his/her neck. I was fortunate that I didn't sit in the center (of front row). I figure that the top center part of the screen must be more important. And so, as a result, whenever the robot is transforming, from vehicle to whatever it is, I can't see the whole thing. Plus it's shaking randomly. The theater should really reconsider the design. Every screening, more than 30 people spent their money to enjoy the movie only to find that the back seats are full and their money wasted.

I did follow the plot, more or less. Luckily I wasn't expecting too much. It's more or less the standard storyline one usually see in animations or somewhere else. If not for the special effects, I won't bother to see the movie.

There is also something that bothers me a lot. I didn't read the original work on which this is based, so I might not know the right way to do this, but how can one tell which robot is from which side when a lot of them are battling against each other? I just saw a lot of metal objects flying around and crashing on the ground. The design of the some of the robots also bothers me. They look like a bunch of random metal things joined together to form more-or-less human shape. I remembered that we had transformer toys some 10 years ago (or more), and all of them looked cool, even in robot form.

From my experience last evening, I won't recommend watching it. Don't waste your money. It could be good though, if I sat in a better seat....but I doubt that it would change anything.

Norton Simon Museum

I finished the qualification exam on Tuesday last week, and there are a couple of weeks for me to do visa stuff and preparation for the trip to CERN. It requires me to be around, but it certainly won't take the whole two weeks to finish them. And I searched around the area and found the museum. It's really close by. Why haven't I been there before? It must be like one of those things: people living around a tourist attraction don't visit the place usually. Well, let's give it a try.

I have to admit that I'm really uncultured. I don't know many artists, apart from the extremely famous ones. I don't know how to describe whether a painting is good or not, either. If you want me to write an article about a single painting, I'll simply give up. All I know is whether the work attracts me or not.

Surprisingly, this work by Edgar Degas caught me eye, and made me stand there for five minutes or so. I don't know why, but it is magical to me. Maybe it is the composition. Maybe it is the way the dancer's movement is extended. Then, just a few meters to the right. I really liked this painting, too. In the next room, there is this painting by Claude Monet. Again I was out of words.

Really, I have no idea why it didn't occur to me to come visit the museum before. Maybe it was the illusion that in southern California, one can't go anywhere without a car, and I don't have a car.

I like the place. I will visit again soon.

Essentially done....

Done with my two presentations.  The first one went by pretty fast.  It's just a lot of math, and there isn't much happening conceptually (thanks to my joint representer, who covers all the conceptual points), so it's easy.  The other one is way too vast, and the best I can do is to give an half-an-hour introduction to the field.  The lecturer added comments here and there, totalling about 20 minutes, so the 30 minutes became almost an hour.  As a result, the original plan, which was to have 4 speakers spending 2 hours, become a bit more than 3 hours in total.  Oops.

I'm glad that my part is over in any case.  The additional one hour or so is not a big problem.

Officially what's left for me to do to end this term is the final in the neural system class.  But since I'm a physics major, I don't really care about the grades in that class.  The goal of expanding my horizon has already been achieved.  So I'm taking it easy.  Maybe reviewing a bit, but I won't go to extremes to memorize everything.

It's party time!!??  ......not really.......qualification exam is coming.  #$%@@*#$$#@.  It's in a sense more important than everything else.  Luckily I've passed one already, so there's only one to go.

Travel arrangement and visa application are also coming.  I still need to pack my stuff and put everything in the storage room.  I certainly need more time.