Senator Clinton is now Dr. Clinton

July 5th, 2007 • 1 comment politics

Senator Hillary Clinton has just gotten her doctorate degree. Where from you might ask? Well, the famous Gothenburg University in Sweden. She received an honorary doctorate of medicine from Gothernburg University earlier this week due to her continuing work in the field of healthcare and welfare of children and medical research thelocal.se reports.

I’m not terribly sure what her exact contributions to medical research but it’s not everyday that you hear a presidential candidate is also a doctor of something non-political.

Web 2.0 genealogy site Geni.com hits 5M profiles

July 3rd, 2007 • 3 comments genealogy, web

Genealogy is an old past time that’s usually been relegated to the older members of one’s family, since they typically knew more of the extended family network than younger generations. My grandfather painstakingly researched my Scottish family’s history in various libraries, including the Library of Congress, decades ago and traced our lineage from our last known Scottish ancestor up to about 3 generations ago and it makes a beautiful piece of artwork. Since then, almost no one has been interested in this undertaking except for my father and even then, he doesn’t have the insane devotion to our heritage as my grandfather did. So far, my dad has linked our Scottish family with various cousins, aunts, uncles, you-name-its in various parts of the country, most centrally located in Alabama and southwestern Georgia. I’m not sure what software he’s using but I keep telling him it’s probably pretty crappy compared to recent offerings from people like Ancestry.com and the shiny new geni.com. I’ve been hounding him for months now, literally since Geni opened publicly, for him to get with the program and try it.

In the time since I first heard of the site, they’ve blossomed to over 5 million profiles. As the article will detail, it’s not a profile in the typical sense of the word. There aren’t 5 million users registered but instead, each user adds a family member to their family tree and thus, up springs a new profile. While this may seem confusing or even be seen as a way to portray the site as gigantic when it’s not, I think it’s a good take on the word “profile”. If you compare this to a site such as MySpace, you’ll see that the numbers don’t mean everything (MySpace reports they have tens of millions of “members” with tens of millions of those millions being spambots) but the content and what people are doing with it is what matters. I could realistically believe that Geni.com has very close to half a million registered users and in 5 months, that’s incredible.

There’s nothing overly flashy or any big name tied to the site, it’s just something that “works” and this is what drives it. This web 2.0 fanciness tacked onto an old tradition clearly shows that people like doing research such as this and it’s not a passing fad such as Twitter or Pownce are. While Geni isn’t up to the market power that Ancestry.com is, I’m sure that by 2008′s end, it will be and it may even surpass the genealogy site for the king of the hill.

It was More Than Meets The Eye

July 3rd, 2007 • movies

Last night we saw the Transformers movie. Being a lifelong fan, I thoroughly enjoyed it. While I don’t have all the action figures like I did when I was a kid, I do have the Generation 1 series DVDs and thought that Michael Bay and Spielberg did a fine job bringing these ‘bots to life. The CGI was unreal, all the robots looked very realistic which is what Bay was going for. My girlfriend loved the movie even with vague memories of the TV being the only link she has to the franchise. The movie should please almost anyone on all fronts. It’s got tons of actions for the plebeians who can’t pay attention to a story, a fairly easy to follow — if convoluted — storyline for fans and the one thing everyone wants: transforming action sequences.

Now, spoilers are all over the net already so I’m not divulging anything new. I could have done without some of the extra Decepticons they tossed in for the sake of the storyline because they butchered them. There’s an Abrahms tank called Devastator and is a single Decepticon. In the Generation 1 story (the only one I, and many fans, consider canonical. This includes the late 80s Japanese arcs) Devastator was a combiner, not a singular robot. He was comprised of the Constructicons to become a larger Decepticon a la Voltron-esque combining (this lead to a lot of different characters and confusion in other story arcs). So when I saw Devastator as a singular Decepticon, I was a bit let down but most viewers won’t know the difference. This causes problems in the canon because he’s fighting alongside Bonecrusher, who actually makes up part of Devastator (his leg, IIRC) so this is another discontinuity with G1. I can let it slide a bit because Bonecrusher was still a military vehicle that had some constructional use so it lended itself to his original form in the G1 cartoons. It seems more liberties were taken with the Deceptions than with the Autobots in terms of appearance and function. Sure, Optimus Prime is not a pimped out Peterbilt in the G1 show (he is in fact a Cab-over-Engine Mack truck) but this was actually a body he used in later series and some comics. Since Optimus has had no less than probably 20 different bodies through all the different story arcs, this is understandable. The other Autobots were fairly true to their original forms but obviously modernized. Jazz was a hot mouthed sports car, Bumblebee was still a yellow car (although, he was a Beetle, not a muscle car), Ratchet got a pretty sweet Hummer search-and-rescue makeover, and Ironhide was still a truck although a much cooler truck in this movie. The alternate modes for all the Autobots are understandable since GM was the sole vehicle provider for the Autobots. Some fans are crying because there are too many liberties taken with the robot modes and alternate modes but seriously, get over yourself. It’s 2007, 23 years after the original cartoon first aired. Kids these days do not want to look at boring vehicles and Catepillar construction vehicles that beat each other up. They want to see time-appropriate representations.

I think the two main changes to robots that I seriously hated was Megatron was a jet — mysteriously similar to a closed-wing X Fighter from Star Wars — and Soundwave (the boombox) was replaced with Frenzy who was also a boombox. In the G1 cartoon, Frenzy was one of Soundwave’s cassette tapes and had a symbiotic relationship with Soundwave. Instead, Bay made Frenzy this impish, Pan-esque juvenile Decepticon that in essence replaces Soundwave’s original function entirely. Megatron was by far the biggest disappointment to me. In robot form, he looks like a giant robotic exoskeleton on steroids. He had no true robotic body, just a skeleton. His alternate mode was a shock especially given the fact that it looks like a jet from Star Wars. I understand no one wants to see a 70 foot tall robot transform into a Walther P38 (with scope) handgun. That lacks a lot of realism honestly but still, a jet? Not all Decepticons are military robots in the canonical story arcs, Megatron was one of these. And I didn’t like his personality one bit. The writers made Megatron a very spiteful and very evil leader, far more so than he was in the G1 cartoon. Originally, Megatron spent more time being conniving and scheming against Optimus than he did fighting on the frontline in serial killer-like fashion. I understand the liberties that were taken with characters and the personalities pulled from the last 23 years worth of comics but this was probably the worst liberty I saw in the movie.

Dreamworks has already green lit Transformers 2 and 3 but the second movie is a given based not only on the end of the movie but the fact that it’s a ‘duh’ business-wise. Many characters will be introduced and a producer has hinted at the Dinobots and Constructicons showing up and this will cause some serious story discontinuity with the first movie given the fact that Devastator and Bonecrusher were both already introduced and vanquished, not to mention how are they going to tie in the fact that Bonecrusher was a part of Devastator when the latter was a full fledged robot in the first movie? There are some serious gaping holes that will have to be dealt with if there is to be sequels of this movie, more than I’ve mentioned here.

I know, it sounds like I’m bitching and moaning but really, these are things they should have thought of beforehand realizing that even before the movie was out — or out of production — the sequels would be planned and they should have re-written accordingly to try and avoid story pitfalls. I really did like the movie despite anything else and at the end of the movie, I told my girlfriend there would be a sequel because Bay makes it insanely obvious.

And he’s a crappy picture of my ticket: