Titled “Blue Harvest”, this season premier will be a spoof of Star Wars, my favorite movie series. I normally do reviews after the fact, but I wanted to give everyone an heads-up to check it out when it arrives on Sunday Sept 23, at 9/8c. I can’t wait to see it, and will review it in a follow up post. Check out the movie poster.
There is a preview of the first 10 minutes out on YouTube, but it is a poor quality Cam version, I’d suggest just waiting until it comes out and watch the whole thing on TV. If you didn’t already know, Family Guy has made many references to Star Wars in the past. As far as I know this is the first episode dedicated to Star Wars. Essentially it will cover Episode IV: A New Hope. Check out the following 9 scenes out on YouTube as a warm-up. These aren’t all of them though. –update– The video is no longer available, probably thanks to a Fox take down notice.
–update–
I’ve finally made time to write out my review for this episode, check it out under my TV section or the direct link here.
This book was my first experience with writing by Kurt Vonnegut. His writing, at least in this book, is very original and unconventional. The “Timequake” according to the dust jacket is an event where on February 13th, 2001, everyone is thrust back to February 17th, 1991. Vonnegut treats this as a contraction of the Universe, not simply time travel in the traditional sense. In many time travel stories, the characters look for ways “to put right what once went wrong,” a la Quantum Leap. Vonnegut doesn’t give the characters in this story that opportunity. Everyone is forced to live their lives on autopilot, doing the exact same things they did before, but with the knowledge of what was to come. (more…)
It had been a few months since I watched Battlestar Galactica: Razor, so I figured I would watch it once more before finally reviewing it. I of course watched the Unrated Extended version. I wonder why they even bother releasing the regular cuts. Does anyone buy them? Anyway, I’m just a bit behind because I wanted to review it prior to the season 4 premier. There are four separate storylines told with lots of flashbacks involved.
William Adama’s mission at the end of the first Cylon War.
Helena Cain’s loss of her family at the same time.
The events on Pegasus during and shortly after the Fall of the Twelve Colonies.
The events surrounding the Battle of the Guardian basestar, set in the time period between “The Captain’s Hand” and “Lay Down Your Burdens, Part I”. (more…)
Tonight with my wife, I watched an interesting episode of Nova titled “The World’s Smartest Machine.” Romantic, right? You can tell we are a couple of geeks at heart. Being a huge fan of Asimov and his robot creations, I am continually amazed at the progress of robotics and artificial intelligence. As a kid I was playing chess as early as the 3rd grade. I’ve always thought of myself as a pretty good chess player. When I heard about a computer that supposedly could beat a world champion chess player, I was intrigued. Garry Kasparov battled IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer in 1996 and won, however he eventually lost a rematch in 1997. Well, IBM is back at it, this time taking on Jeopardy. Nova takes us behind the scenes with the developers of “Watson,” the next step in AI. I was disappointed when the episode ended and it didn’t say who won. I didn’t realize until logging on PBS.org that the contest actually was taking place while I was watching Nova (on my media center PC). After some frantic Google searches, I eventually came across a Twitter feed with a link to a Youtube posting of the episode. This was not quite 2 hours after the episode aired! Isn’t technology great? I expect the Youtube post to be served a DMCA take down, so watch it soon if you plan on it. In addition to the episode at the end of this post, I’ve embedded the Nova preview and an humorous parody of the challenges Watson overcame during his development. I suggest watching the Nova episode first. If you are at all interested in AI, you must check these out!
There are two more nights to the match, airing Tuesday February 15th, and Wednesday the 16th. Be sure to check them out, along with some live blogging on PBS.org. I find myself rooting for Watson, not because I want to see humans defeated, but because I want to see humans capable of making something smart enough to do it. Who do you think will win? Who do you want to win?
