When George Lucas and screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan decided to make the ancient Jedi at the heart of Luke's spiritual journey into a two-foot tall, pointy-eared alien, it wasn't clear how the character could actually be realized on screen using 1980 technology. At the time, animatronic technology wasn't thought to be advanced enough to pull off Yoda. .... they decided to try putting a trained monkey in a Yoda costume, including a full Yoda face mask. Rinzler showed a picture of the monkey on set, but he explained this idea was quickly abandoned when one of the people who worked on the primate scenes in 2001: A Space Odyssey pointed out "Look, the monkey's just going to pull off the mask over and over again. It's never going to work."
In the picture, a monkey is outfitted with a cane and a mask and measured. The simian was also briefly considered for walking shots of Minch-Yoda that would have been impossible to execute with a puppet.
When doing an apt-get upgrade on my Debian (Lenny) box yesterday I received this message
Since release 150, udev requires that support for the
CONFIG_SYSFS_DEPRECATED feature is disabled in the running kernel.
Please upgrade your kernel before or while upgrading udev.
This was holding back the upgrade of all the packages. Looked around
a bit and it seems that the solution for this problem is to let apt
know that we do not want to upgrade the udev package. The way to do
this is echo "udev hold"|dpkg --set-selections and then run
apt-get upgrade
I wore a pair of torn jeans to office today. I was trying to look fashionable, but I later saw that I was wearing a torn jacket as well. I hope I did not project an image of someone-who-does-not-get-paid-enough.
I watched the pilot of the X-Files tonight. Memorable quote
What I find fantastic is any notion that there are answers beyond the realm of science. The answers are there. You just have to know where to look.
This is a recommendation for my fellow geeks who enjoy sci-fi series.
You should check out Sliders. The premise of the story is that a
college genius invents a machine that gives him the ability to travel
between dimensions. There are infinite number of worlds and there are
an infinite number of story-lines to go with it. With his friend Wade
Wells and Professor Arturo, Quinn (the college genius) decide to take
a spin round the universe and due to some accidents, they are not able
to get back to their home.
We see universes where alternate outcomes to world changing events
have happened and things are different from what they are "back home".
The pilot episode deals with the possibility where communist ideology
has won the cold war.
One of the episodes that I enjoyed was "Eggheads". This is a world
where intellect is prized and nerds are heroes. You have billboard of
Einstein modeling for Gap in khakis, and a sports guide written by
Stephen Hawking. The best part of this episode were the "bad guys",
who threatened using Latin phrases!
I am still on Season 2 (netflix disk 1). Go check it out.
I have been thinking that sometimes personalities of the speaker
affects the way I perceive his ideas. i.e. if the speaker has a
pleasant personality, and presents his ideas with a calm demur, I will
be more agreeable with his point of view and I will take in his
evidence with an open mind. However, if the speaker is unpleasant or
if he is not calm and confident while presenting his ideas, I
sometimes dismiss his ideas and evidence as unworthy of my attention.
I think I might have found a workaround for this issue. Whenever I
find myself strongly agreeing or strongly disagreeing with someone's
ideas, I would do a "vice-versa" on the speaker's personality and see
if I still agree with the evidence. What this means is, if I find
myself strongly agreeing with someone, I will imagine him presenting
his facts and ideas at the top of his voice or in a very shaky voice.
Similarly, if I find myself strongly disagreeing with someone's ideas,
I will imagine him talking in a calm manner and in a strong voice.
The idea here is to try and subtract out the effect of personalities
when listening to new theories and ideas.
