tasuki’s blog

To continue my previous post about films…

A Fish Called Wanda, 1988, 8/10: It’s a comedy, a reasonably good one too. Undeniably Pythonesque.

A Hard Day’s Night, 1964, 7/10: Something between a comedy and a documentary. Maybe documenting a comedy.

Citizen Kane, 1941, 10/10: Classic, well worth watching (some people said that they expected too much and were disappointed afterwards; well, I don’t expect anything anymore (I still remember “expecting” before watching Pulp Fiction, no thank you), so I was more than satisfied).

Sling Blade, 1996, 10/10: Absolutely stunning film, wonderful atmosphere, great plot, and fitting end.

Black Cat, White Cat, 1998, 7/10: Romantic village comedy… a bit too many characters, but otherwise ok.

Taxi Driver, 1976, 3/10: The main problem here was that I couldn’t associate myself with the hero at all. After a while, I started actively hating him. It got a bit better when he had a good chance to bang a 12 year old girl and chose not to do so. The four points are solely for the ending, which was rather good (but the ordeal of the first three quarters of the film is not really worth it, me thinks).

Seven Samurai, 1954, 9/10: Great movie, many interesting ideas and good points. Moreover, the ending was just marvelous.

You can expect more posts like this, I guess…

Helium Vola is a German Darkwave or “Electro-Medieval” band, at least that is what wikipedia says. But the article is a stub and there isn’t much more info. There is a bit more on last.fm, but nothing special. Amazons has a few good comments on the album.

After searching for half an hour or so, I even managed to find Helium Vola lyrics. This page has no pagerank and I am not sure anymore how I found it, anyway, I am pretty sure it’s about the only page with complete Helium Vola lyrics (as you will see if you search for snippets of the text). Quite funny that the main page of something as wonderful as Lyriki (they have shitloads of lyrics and no ads whatsoever, as opposed to all the lyrics sites which are virtually cluttered by ads) has only PageRank 2. Gotta share some google love…

And now for something completely different: my impressions. My first most favourite song was of course…

Omnis Mundi Creatura

Omnis mundi creatura
quasi liber et pictura
nobis est in speculum.
Omnis mundi creatura
quasi liber et pictura
nobis est in speculum.

Nostrae vitae, nostrae mortis
nostri status, nostrae sortis
fidele signaculum.

This is not the full lyrics, just a highlight… The melody is very catchy but it can get on your brain a bit after a while…

Les Habitants Du Soleil

Les habitants du soleil jettent sur nous un regard impassible
Nous appartenons définitivement á la Terre
Et nous y pourrirons, mon amour impossible
Jamais nos corps meurtris ne deviendront lumière

I completely love the atmosphere of the “sun inhabitants”, especially the male voice “nous apartenons definitivement a la terre” contrasted with the female voice… extatic.

Je Chante Par Couverture

Je chante par couverture
Mais mieulx plourassent mi oeil
Ne nul ne scet le traveil
Que mon pouvre cuer endure

Very captivating song, repeating the title over and over, yet it never gets boring.

Next great song is Do Tagte Ez, however, it’d be a bit difficult to pick up part of the lyrics (it has no refrain), definitely the most “magical” song of the entire album (where most of the songs are rather magical). And I can’t omit mentioning Selig, which is the last song of the album, and has an extremely catchy and merry melody.

And in case you are now wondering how comes that some lyrics are Latin, some French, and some German… all the lyrics from Helium Vola are based on various medieval texts (feel free to google them to find out more).

This post is not about math, it is about how I perceive the world.

I know, fourth dimension is easy, for example you can easily create vector v=(1, 2, 3, 4) … but somehow, this is just numbers and tricks, I can’t really feel the fourth dimension. I recently had some free time to think about random stuff, and, well, I thought about this:

Let’s start with: 1 = x² + y². As we all know, this equation draws a circle.

The next step consists of substituting the one for another variable: z = x² + y². Now we get one more dimension. Although it might not be completely clear on the first sight, this is paraboloid. If we assume z is a variable that we can set to anything we want, different values of z create different circles (z is the height at which we cut the paraboloid to get that particular circle).

We had a circle already, so let’s bring the circle to the third dimension and make a sphere: 1 = x² + y² + z²

Now, what do we get when we make the transformation we made in the first step – substituting the one for yet another variable?

w = x² + y² + z²

I don’t know about you, but I can finally feel the fourth dimension within my reach.

While I don’t know what exactly this “w = x² + y² + z²” looks like (neither know what it is called, for that matter), I can see that there is precisly the same relation – the same way circle is one “slice” of paraboloid, sphere is one “slice” of w = x² + y² + z² (for some concrete set value of w).