Skyline

Well, I just got back from watching the movie "Skyline," all in all it was not a bad movie. However, I'm sure many other people will have a different opinion, It's hard to make a good action movie these days.

The ending seemed really sloppy, first of all. It tried to answer too many questions and ultimately just broke down the logical order in which everything was happening.

Spoiler Alert.

The whole premise of the movie is aliens coming to invade our planet in order to harvest our brains.

This seems like a great springboard for an action movie, however, it would have been nice if the writer had any skill, or at least less of a heart.

The aliens come in and start abducting everybody, all that has to happen is the abductee has to look at one of their spacecraft and they are immediately entranced and simply float up to the spacecraft, where their brain is torn out of their bodies.

The first hour or so of the movie is the people try not to get abducted. There are a few points at which the military attempts, in vane, to interfere. Nuclear weaponry is for some reason their first choice, afterwards they try to simply fill the sky with airplanes.

Yes, it was all very intense, ultimately humanity is crushed. The two last main characters are beamed up to the space craft and the screen fills with white.

This would have been a perfect ending, a simple little greek tragedy, everyone dies. But no. For some reason they are kept alive in the ship while a machine comes around and systematically kills off each one of the people inside, harvesting each individual brain, and transplanting it into another alien.

This is where the movie lost me.

The aliens are only there so that they can kill one of us, and for each one of us they kill, they get one extra alien.

Alright, I suppose I can understand that, it would have made more sense that they were using each brain as food, or even that they were simply killing us all off to steal the Earth's resources. the only reason it occurs this way is to carry on the story to a point it should not have been carried to.

For some strange reason, when the main character's brain is transplanted in to the alien, the brain is able to take over it. He then proceeds to try and save his wife, who has not yet been killed. This seems like a feeble attempt to try and lead the movie in to a sequel, or perhaps provide some hope for the human race. The writer, who ever it was, shouldn't have done this. It would have made more sense had they simply died.

So, if anybody feels like calling it a bad movie, simply because it had a bad ending, don't. As an action drama, the movie was good up to that point. Bad endings do not imply that the movie as a whole was bad, only movies that are bad as a whole are bad as a whole.

My advice to anyone watching is to just walk out of the theater as soon as they float up, don't bother with the last five minutes.

My advise to the director is to embrace greek tragedies, please.

Mondays

(Written for my english class as the first chapter of an imaginary book)

Tyler had decided he didn’t like Mondays. Today was a Monday, and he knew he did not like today. It was absolutely frigid, he had not seen the sun all day, and it looked like it was about to rain.

Along with all the problems he was having with the weather, Tyler had to attend school today, and he was definitely not one of the strange people who woke up every weekday morning excited about going to school. He quite detested the idea of public education. The idea that someone bigger than him was forcing him to go to school with the threat of fines and even incarceration, horrible.

The school day had not treated him so badly, though. There had only been one quiz, and he was fairly sure he had done well on it, regardless of how challenging Geometry had seemed that September. His other classes were fairly uninteresting, the ninth grade, he had decided, would not be fun. At least the days would all be Monday he thought to himself, with a sense of irony.

He was on his way home, shivering a little because he had forgotten his jacket, debating whether or not taking the bus would have been a better choice. At least on the bus there would have been someone to talk with, here he was alone with his iPod. Of course, the iPod was okay he thought as he turned up the volume a bit for his favorite song. Some people were just aggravating. Sadly, many of those people rode his bus; many of those people also lived at his house. Perhaps it would have been better if he had taken the bus, it would take a little longer for him to get home that way. The question here was how much of his time was he willing to give up to satisfy someone else’s desire to talk to him. Walking home got him away from all the idiots he met everyday, got him the privacy that nowhere else could bring him.

Neil was a bit taken aback by how strange this job was. He enjoyed the challenge of it, but at the same time had to question Father’s sanity for wanting such a thing. He would carry it out either way, not that he had much control over the situation as it was; along with him was Keith and Jarred, his “muscle” in case anything didn’t go according to plan. Keith alone was large enough to take down the boy, bringing Jarred along was just overkill, they only needed me to drive the car. The plan itself was quite simple, in, bang, and out, nothing to it; the guy wouldn’t know what hit him. The question was, why would Father want him? Probably just another ransom, but the kid didn’t seem like he had that much money, not based on the file he had read.

Oh well, he would get paid either way. The mission could turn in to a complete disaster and he would still get 50% of what he was entitled to should the mission succeed. Father was very understanding in that respect. Failure did sometimes happen, especially in this line of work, and a small punishment would be enough to convince someone they had been in the wrong.

They had began at the target’s school, where they ultimately determined which plan they would go off of. Luckily the target had not taken the bus, which made it much easier on them. The streets running from the school to the target’s house were mostly residential, very empty at this time of day.

Their target was a small Hispanic child, about 15 years old, who would now be walking home, unsupervised, for the next 10 minutes. Neil’s job was to drive, Keith and Jarred’s job was simply to get the target into the trunk, by any means necessary. Easiest thing in the world.

The white car swerved around the corner near the limit the street conditions would allow, leaving a noticeable screeching noise, along with the distinct odor of burnt rubber, and quickly approached its victim. Had Tyler heard anything at all, he still would not have had enough time to react, as the car passed by Jarred harshly opened his door into the boy, knocking him out and leaving him on the ground. Dang, Neil thought, as he worried briefly about the implications this might have for his door.

Keith and Jarred exited the vehicle and quickly bound Tyler’s hands with duct tape, being sure to put a carefully placed strip around his mouth, and tossed him in the trunk. “Hold on,” Tyler said, “let’s not give him too much hope,” and then removed the glow in the dark handle which opened the trunk from the inside. They shut the trunk got back in the car and were gone as quickly as they had arrived. In, bang, and out, just the way Neil liked it.

Tyler awoke with a start was almost immediately aware of two different facts. The first was that he may not have done so well on his math quiz. The second was that his Monday had somehow managed to get a lot worse. He looked around, only to discover that that was pointless, wherever he was, it was pitch black. So, he instead listened around him. Behind him there was somebody playing Queen obnoxiously loudly, and underneath him was some strange, almost distant roaring noise.

Tyler’s head hurt quite a bit, and the tune of “Bohemian Rhapsody” only made things worse for him. He tried to think back to the last thing he remembered. Something about idiots on the bus. Was that what this was? Some cruel prank by those arrogant bastards on the bus who couldn’t leave him alone when he clearly didn’t want to talk to them. He felt that this wasn’t quite right, but at that particular moment didn’t care too much about reasoning, his whole body ached severely and he just wanted to take a nap. The fatigue in his muscles eating away at what little bit of his energy was left after a day of school was leaving him quite exhausted.

Something inside him, however, knew that something was horribly wrong, and it nagged away at him until he listened to it. It’s not that Tyler disagreed with it, he just didn’t care too much. At least, not yet he didn’t. He felt that it must be late and he reached for his pocket, where he kept his phone. He then discovered that his hands were somehow tethered together, and he could not move them. This greatly surprised him and he immediately tried to stand up, simultaneously striking his head on some hard piece of metal and discovering that his feet no longer worked, no doubt tied together as his hands were.

Now, to add to everything else, He had a headache from multiple bangs to the head, there was some idiot playing loud music, he could barely move, and he may have failed his math quiz. Why did this all have to be on a Monday?

Randall Munroe

Recently, a great nerd figure, along with his family, has fallen ill due to some unknown ailment. In response to these misfortunes me and one of my good friends has decided to send Randall Munroe, the aforementioned victim, a get well card. Our current idea is to have a comic attached to it that has been drawn in his own style (for those of you who don't know, Randall Munroe writes the web-comic xkcd).

If you can't quite read what it says, here is the script:

A: I'm having some trouble, I just don't understand why more bonds in a covalent bond corresponds to a shorter bond length.

B: Well, you see, bonds can be thought of as rubber bands. The more you have the closer whatever they're holding together becomes.

A: Ok, but that doesn't explain why they actually get closer, there aren't quantum rubber bands holding all this stuff together.

B: Clearly you've never heard of string theory.

Statistics and Religion

Earlier this week I came upon a rather interesting entry in a mathematics book at the library; it discussed statistical concepts that had to do with religion.

Now, as I'm sure many people are aware of, logic and religion don't often meet, which is why this particular article stuck out to me. As many of you, my loyal readers, are aware, I am an atheist and firmly believe that mathematics is one of the most important subjects we cover in our lives. So, reading someone mathematically prove that we should all be devout christians was quite surprising to me.

the proof went like this:

Let's suppose we flip a perfect coin, with a perfectly random result. If it lands on heads, we will win $50, but if it lands on tails we win nothing. Our expected winnings, if we play the game a large number of times, according to the law of large numbers, is $25, because:

.5 (the proportion of results that yield us money) times $50 = $25 and:

.5 (the proportion of results that yield us no money) times $0 = $0

Add the two of these together and we get $25, our expected winnings.

Now, let's apply this to the christian faith. Suppose we lead devout christian lives and God rewards us for this by admitting us in to heaven where we live in paradise for eternity, since it is forever, the reward is (infinity, sorry it didn't come out as well as I would have liked). Suppose, now, that there is no God, and we live our lives accordingly and die at the end of it, here our reward is Zero. Now let's assume that, after our life is spent ignoring the presence of God, we are sent to Hell for our sin, for we have broken the first commandment, and done so most of our lives, our gain here is eternal suffering, hence we win - (negative infinity). So, if we write everything up, we get:

X (the chance there is a God) times (the reward for believing in him) =

(1-X) (which is the chance there is not a God) times 0 (the reward for believing in him) = 0

Expected reward:

Sounds pretty good, now if we don't believe in God:

X (the chance there is a God) times - (the reward for not believing in him) = -

(1-X) (the chance there is not a God) times 0 (the reward for not believing in him) = 0

Expected reward: -

Hold on, this can't be good. Assuming we don't believe in God, our expected reward is -, the worst possible loss imaginable. This means that, for anybody familiar with gambling, it makes more sense to worship God than to not worship him, as it has the greatest likelihood of yielding an appealing reward.

So, christians, statistically speaking, y'all aren't as crazy as I originally took you to be, I apologize.

Fear

There is something i feel that many people, throughout their lives, lose sight of: the fact that one day we are all going to be dead, we will simply reach the end of our lifetime and pass on. Now, I'm not saying we don't all know this, most people know it. It's because we know this that we created religion, which we use merely as a way to avoid the subject of real, permanent death, of actually not existing. No, people have not forgotten it, they've just distracted themselves from the real thing, real death. Ultimately, it doesn't matter what you do in your meager little life, you will die, quite soon in the grand scheme of things, and be forgotten.

Now, there are a lot of things people worry about from day to day, but, unless you follow some form of obscene deity who promises you immortality, many of them are quite frivolous. Actually, they're frivolous especially if you believe in some kind of obscene deity. In your life there are very few things that matter, because, no matter what you do, no matter how hard you try, you're always just fighting your way towards a better death.

Really, there's nothing that you have to do in life. Do nothing and you'll only die a little faster than the rest of us; put in a little effort by eating every once in a while and you'll survive for at least a few years, but, for many of us, those few years are not enough; that meager existence would simply not be enough for us, which is why we choose to overload ourselves with work and conflict which, complication our lives in a fashion which we claim to hate. We validate our own existences by making others' seem less than our own, meager in comparison to what we have accomplished. We fight our ways up some infinite ladder, one which the bottom cannot be seen, only felt, and the top is strived for, but never reached.

So, you might have a hard time one day, you might slip up, and what you do might cause irrevocable damage to you life, but really, what's the worst that can happen? You'll only die. Now, let's suppose you live you life perfectly, not a single flaw, everything goes exactly as you want it to and you never face a single bit of conflict, hatred, or pain. You'll still only die.

So, really there's not much to worry about in life, because the end result will always be the same. We should make the best of the time we have and not dwell on the few mishaps that we encounter. Everyone has problems, everybody's broken, but what matters is what we make of it.