Down With Numbers

For many years I knew very little about the world of films. Sure, I’d seen some, but I really didn’t know about many actors, directors or films considered to be classics, cult or otherwise. I’m gradually changing this through the wonders of cheap DVDs.

Due to this, it should come as very little of a surprise that it was only a month ago that I first saw The Usual Suspects. I bought it because I liked Kevin Spacey in Se7en and The Negotiator (having not seen L.A. Confidential at that point in time either), and also because of its top 20 ranking in the IMDB’s top 250 films list. I have seen many people rank it as one of their top 5 favourite films of all time, so naturally it seemed like a very good choice.

I’ve watched it twice since I bought the DVD, and my opinion of it didn’t really change much from the first to the second viewings. While it is certainly a clever film with a brilliantly executed plot twist at the end, it still remained fairly underwhelming for me, considering how many people ranked it as being one of their favourite films of all time. I certainly think that the plot twist alone merits its position in the IMDB top 250, but number 18 is a bit too high up in my opinion - I’d put it somewhere around the 100 or 150 mark, going by the quality of other films that I’ve seen from that list.

Why’s this? Well, I just don’t feel that it flows between each plot point as it could do. The scenes seem somewhat disjointed, and the characters don’t really appeal to me either. Indeed, I found myself thinking that other than Verbal Kint, my favourite character was Kobayashi, the lawyer, who didn’t even appear that much. The movie seemed to make no distinction between major plot points and minor plot points, simply skipping between them as if they were all the same.

Another reason for not liking it as much as others do is that I didn’t really enjoy the finalé. To my eyes, it appeared confusing and poorly executed, not placing enough emphasis on showing what the hell is going on and placing too much emphasis on watching the characters going around a giant boat, shooting lots of people.

The scenes that I enjoyed the most were those where Kint is being interviewed by the police officer, telling the story as the movie shows it. The actors portrayed their characters very well, and it certainly gave the movie a boost.

Anyway. Those’re my thoughts, in a rather messy and ragged nutshell. Good? Yes. Very good? Probably. One of the best? No.

SETI@Home has been in the news a fair amount recently, due to an anomalous signal they’ve been picking up. Of course, as the sane among us expected, it was simply a slight anomaly blown completely out of proportion (mainly by the New Scientist misquoting a SETI guy). They’ve come out saying that it’s nothing special and they don’t intend to spend much more time investigating it. Surprise surprise.

Why do I say this? Because SETI@Home is a waste of your computer’s time. It is by far the most popular distributed computing project on the internet today, and has been since its launch. However, it doesn’t deserve this massive popularity these days - sure, it was ground breaking before, but searching for alien signals in the sky? Come on.

There are other far more useful distributed computing projects that one can join instead of SETI. The one I run is Folding@Home, which studies protein folding and has direct applications in the development of new medical treatments. Another is GIMPS (the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search) which has future applications in creating stronger RSA encryption keys, vital to the security of e-commerce and online banking to name two.

Compare Folding@Home and GIMPS against SETI@Home. The first two have easily quantifiable impacts on society and bring great improvements to their respective areas. SETI, on the other hand, has no direct use. Even if we did happen to find aliens who happened to be broadcasting radio waves out just for the hell of it, what would we do with them? It’s not like we’re going to be able to communicate with them.

So please, I implore you; throw down your SETI and pick up something else, because you’re wasting your CPU’s time.

So, The Herf is now at version 0.3. As for 0.2, I won’t be updating this site to run off it, since I have no need to at the moment. Rather, I’m just going to crack on with 0.4, which will be debuting at Graham’s site when it’s finished.