Friday, October 01, 2010

Critical analysis of Endhiran(ROBOT)

Endhiran (Robot) is a tamizh movie staring Rajinikanth and Aishwarya Rai. This is a high budget commercial sci-fi movie and it wins hands down on all three counts.

I am most excited about the sci-fi component in this movie. I wish the inevitable success of this movie to proliferate the genre in tamizh industry. List of sci-fi questions raised and (atleast partially) addressed by this movie

Can a robot
1) be called alive?
2) be part of our society without emotions?
3) understand/feel complex emotions like love?
4) understand moral rules?
5) replicate?
6) form collective intelligence?
7) break paradoxes?
8) do self evaluation?
9) take over the world?!

Even though I liked the amazing visuals and LOVE rajini's evil villan laughter in the second half, the innocent pj-cracking emotion-free robot version 1 is the best part of the movie DOT

Wednesday, September 01, 2010

self-less-ness and the true athiest

The Agnostic Manifesto

selflessness is a lack of concern of oneself in comparison to others. This is a rare and interesting quality in itself but I am interested in sort of a "variant" of it.

I am trying to imagine a true atheist - a person who shall believe in nothing unless there is a proof or enough evidence pointing to that belief. Such a person will reject gods and UFOs in seconds (rightfully so). But does it stop there? What about the sense of self itself? Its obvious (at least to me) that one cannot prove the existence of ones own self any better than prove the existence of ones own god.

Does the presence of consciousness prove the presence of self? Yes! Is our contradiction resolved? No, because neither self nor consciousness can be proved to an external entity and our true atheist is not allowed to have "gut feelings" which cannot be objectively validated. Alas - the root cause of this problem is that some trivial facts in first person cannot be promoted to third person.

So how can one be a non-hypocritical true atheist? Can a person reject the notion of self and lead a truly selfless "life"? No - I don't see life, as we know it, exist in true selflessness.

Our true atheist has to settle for retaining the "unprovable" notion of self even after successfully defeating every other superstition. Although this is as good as any human could do, our self proclaimed true atheist has almost arbitrarily chosen few unprovable personal beliefs over the other.

Lets consider a true god believer who has forgone his personal identity in pursuit of his visionary god (imagine a lonely saint in a forest trying very hard to commune with god with no care about his primitive impulses .. yeah - u get the picture!). At first glance, our true believer is a lot dumber than our true atheist for he is basing all his life on an unverified theory. Even at second glance, our true believer stays dumb since he probably leads a suboptimal life from the materialistic view of the world. Should we stop at that view? Take the true athiest, remove the sense of self, and replace it with a grander illusion of god, you get the true believer. Our two fictional characters can (and will) argue forever, faithfully but fruitlessly, about which is the right assumption "I" or "GOD".

Both the true believer and the true atheist are having "fun" (yet another subjective entity) based on their own choice of superstitions and they are incomparable.

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

57-el-PJoker

This is my new phone number (google voice number). 57-The-Poor-Joker is the expansion for the non spanish folks.

If you guys are looking for creative ways to publish/communicate your phone numbers, I recommend this site.

As I have decided without any doubt that there cannot be an absolute purpose/meaning to my life, I am preparing myself to solely commit to a series of sweet lies, faked shared preferences, strong group affiliations and occasional get-tog-ethers. In short, stay in touch. (If you dont know me and you are reading this.. Assert(0))

PS1:remove/delete all my previous numbers so that you do not get "who is this?" replies
PS2:I got a Samsung Captivate!!

Friday, August 13, 2010

Faces

A cube has 6 faces- how much does a human have?

I really do not know the answer to the question.. I consider human character to be a continuum of things.. it is the most analog thing out there in the world.In other words, there are no discrete quantum leaps in the scale of greatness of a person. In simpler words, all is grey when u start measuring it!

All my life I have assumed that having a single face is the solution to all problems - absolute transparency and universal objective accountability. But now I can assert based on first person experience that absolute transparency is impossible and hypocrisy MUST be the way of life for any civilized person. There cannot be a single face for all of us - the dichotomy gives rise to personality and character.

In short, if your whole life can be explained based on simple reason - that means u have not been living it. Be a hypocrite or be a stereotype - there is no middle ground!

Wednesday, June 30, 2010

The power of science and mankind

"The world is beautiful, but has a disease called man." Friedrich Nietzsche

We are a disease capable of exponential growth; tolerating, circumventing and eliminating many problems; creating, distributing and managing lots of resources. But where does our power come from ? I am tempted to say "Science". Our mind with its scientific inquiry can unfold mysteries and make this world a better place.

"Simplicity ,when taken to the extreme, becomes elegance"

What happens if we are really really good at science? In the short term, the answer is obvious, more problems solved, increased human life time, more fun time. What if we find everything there is to find? I am afraid that will be a very bad world to live in.. Anyone who cant do physical labor has to become an artist, and I have to go home!

Thanks to Gödel's incompleteness theorems and other crazy quantum physics theories, we can be sure that science will be arround for a long long time. The real power of our species is not in the large amount of complicated things we have managed to decipher but in the never ending quest to increase our understanding.

Sunday, March 28, 2010

Critical Analysis of "Angadi Theru" (Market street)

Breathe eat sleep bathe laugh cry earn save can be done with reasonable tolerance by the protagonists in angadi theru; hope safety comfort progress freedom and prosperity cannot be achieved to any degree of satisfaction; love?

Instead of figuratively touching upon subjects like "love is more important than money" using punch dialog like in most ordinary movies , this movie tackles the above question in a tutorial-by-example fashion. Though we can theorize to some degree that material things are NOT important for love (and in turn happiness), to see the theory exemplified in a real brutal world through live characters in realistic scenarios is an amazing experience.

Despite of having a story about people with bleak future, this movie has a positive note all along, sandwiched between scene after scene of brutal, but realistic abuse. The climax of the movie, though at first glance seems like a movie sequence set in a tone of "final destination" (yet another accident? Really?!!), is a quick summary of the entire plot (in my opinion) : "love + hope > dire circumstances"

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Critical Analysis of Ayirathil oruvan(one in a thousand) - Tamizh movie

Ayriathil oruvan is a tamizh movie by selvaragavan, staring karthik, parthibhan, rema sen and andrea.
If you have seen previous selvaragavan films, you could guess that, this would be another "Chery" boy meets city girl, falls in love, kind of story. Throughout the first half, the familiar selvaragavan scenes are retained with a good blend of humor and reasonably strong story telling. You get to see mass killings, gory deaths following some mystery trail - keeps you awake.
The second half calls for more criticism. Selva changes the genre of the movie from adventure,comedy to mystery,gore in the interval gap. Though all else has changed, sex still takes predominant role in plot development. Seduction, gore, magic, gladiator-sequence, more gore and a 300-climax fight followed by rapes and soldiers dying with the king. The second half of the movie is so intense and some visuals so stunning that I could still recollect them as if it were a ghost movie. The pure tamizh delivery combined with costumes were a definite plus to the movie.
There were a lot of pitfalls in the movie, like lack of graphics budget, our ancient kings de-glorified to barbarians. In spite of all that, to everyone's surprise, there was a story in a commercial movie! How often does that happen?