film review: The LEGO Batman Movie

Batman might have had a bit part in the LEGO movie; here he is the protagonist. An isolated Batman feels nothing, not even hatred for the Joker. When Commissioner Barbara Gordon notes that Gotham City is full of crime, despite Batman's best efforts, she decides working together and actual policing, without the help of a certain vigilante, might be a more effective approach. Existential crisis time, for Batman, and for the Joker. But the Joker has a cunning plan to get sent to the Phantom Zone. And Bruce Wayne accidentally adopts an orphan. Mayhem ensues.

This is great fun. The gags come thick and fast, with all the clever verbal and visual wit of its predecessor, and much much more, with ridiculous knowing and self-referential comments, and snark, and meta-jokes. It helps to know all the Batman incarnations, even back to the Adam West era, and your DC Comics universe, and your LEGO, and the entirety of the film and TV world to get all the pop culture references (King Kong! the Eye of Sauron! the Daleks!), but even if you miss half the gags (which I'm sure I did), this is still by far funnier and cleverer than anything else out there.

Highly recommended.

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For all my film reviews, see my main website.

sequestering carbon, several books at a time LXXIX

The latest batch: only a few, as we recover from the Christmas rush.

a titanic error

My first thought was “penguins aren’t from the northern hemisphere”.

Then I read the hover text.

Then I laughed.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

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books keep getting smaller

I think I'd find this a bit difficult to read...

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ooh look, another idiot spam journal request

Another day, another spam academic request:

Dear <co-author's name>, 

Greetings and good day.

I represent EnPress Publisher Editorial Office from USA. We have come across your recent article “Preface: EmergeNET4: engineering emergence” published in Natural Computing. We feel that the topic of the article is very interesting. Therefore, we are delighted to invite you to publish your work in our journal, entitled Journal of Computer Hardware Engineering. We also hope that you can join our Editorial Board. Please reply to this email if you are interested to join the Editorial Board.

I look forward to hearing your positive response. Thank you for your kind consideration.

Best regards,

Chloe Hill
Editorial Office
Journal of Computer Hardware Engineering

Usually these ridiculous spam requests refer to a paper that has nothing to do with the topic of the journal.

This one refers to the preface to a journal special issue, that has nothing to do with anything other than the rest of that issue!

Yet, somehow, it is so "very interesting" that it entitles me (or maybe just my co-author?) not only to publish in their "journal", but to be on their "Editorial Board".

Yeah, right.

TV review: The Librarians, season 1

Flynn Carsen [Noah Wylie] is The Librarian, charged with care of The Library and all its magical artefacts – sort of a more book-oriented Warehouse 13. (Apparently this follows on from where the Librarian films leave off, but I haven’t seen them.) While tracking down a magical artefact, Flynn runs across Colonel Eve Baird [Rebecca Romijn] on a counter-terrorism operation. She later receives a mysterious invitation to become The Guardian. They discover previous Librarian candidates are being killed off, so go to rescue the last remaining three: Jacob Stone (an Art History geek pretending to be a redneck), Cassandra Cillian (a maths genius with a brain tumour), and Ezekiel Jones (a thief). The villain Dulaque [Matt Frewer, channelling Christopher Lloyd as Judge Doom] is behind the deaths, and at the end of the pilot, the Library is lost, Flynn goes off the find it, and Eve and the three Librarians-now-in-Training are left holding the fort (or rather, the Annex) with grumpy factotum Jenkins [John Larroquette], pursuing the Artefact-of-the-Week.

This is mild fun, and definitely improves after Flynn goes off on his own quest: Wylie galumphingly overacts, and the way he frantically pulls books off shelves … shudder.

The episodes strengthen as the various characters bed in, and stop being simply stereotypes. There is actually a season arc, and some of the seemingly-disparate episodic adventures come together in the season finale. But it doesn’t quite gel: it can’t make up its mind if it is slapstick humour or mystical thriller, and falls rather uncomfortably between the two. So I’m not sure if I’ll be venturing into season 2.

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For all my SF TV reviews, see my main website.

book review: Effective Python

Brent Slatkin.
Effective Python: 59 specific ways to write better Python.
Pearson. 2015

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This excellent little book will make you a better Python programmer in many ways. It comprises 59 different recipes of how to use Python more effectively. These range from programming in the small – such as using slicing, list comprehensions, generators, enumerate, zip – to progressively larger issues – such as exceptions, keyword arguments, custom containers – then on to trickier concepts – such as metaclasses, threads, coroutines, built-in modules – to programming in the large – such as reliable pickling, docstrings, packages, unit testing, profiling, and finding memory leaks.

Each one of the recipes explains the issue, discusses one or more solutions, with examples and discussion of tradeoffs, and concludes with a short list of the things to remember. The discussion of various tradeoffs gives great insight into the underlying issues, and the examples are well chosen and very useful.

Even if you follow only a few of the recipes, you will find they make your Python coding more effective. If you follow all 59, your code should fairly fly! Highly recommended.

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For all my book reviews, see my main website.

get over the rainbow

No more rainbows!

Now tell me the spectrum beats a perceptual colourmap...

[h/t Christian Ledermann > Scientific Python]

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Amazon search fail ... or is it?

Rather aggressive and incorrect auto-correct by Amazon’s search bar:

Despite it searching not for what was asked for, but for what it thought was asked for, it nevertheless found what was asked for.  So only semi-fail.

Interestingly, searching just for “judith merril” does not result in “merril” being changed to “merrell”.

Computers.  Doncha just love ’em?

is spam bad for your teeth?

I just got an email invitation.  I’ll quote it in full (I’m beyond the days of saying that I’ve deleted information to protect the guilty.)

Dear Dr. S. Stepney,

Greetings

The purpose of this invitation is to formally invite you to the upcoming Conference World Congress on Dental and Oral Health, which is going to be held during April 09-11, 2018 at Las Vegas, USA.

It will be an honor if you would like to share your in-depth knowledge and research about and education. Dental 2018 will focus on “Exploring the Possibilities in shaping the future of Dental and Oral Health” and aims at bringing together the professors, researchers, and students in all areas of Dental Education and Challenges and to provide an international forum for the dissemination of original research results, new ideas and practical development experiences which concentrate on both education and practices.

Your invaluable guidance and support as a Speaker to Dental 2018 will play a crucial part in making this a memorable event. We are confident that you will enjoy the Scientific Program of this upcoming Conference.

For more information Visit:   http://www.globaldentalcongress.com

We look forward to welcoming you to the USA

With Regards

Mary Frances
Program Manager
Dental 2018
Science Access
dental@sasummits.com

Disclaimer: This is not a spam message, and has been sent to you because of your eminence in the field. If, however, you do not want to receive any email in future from Dental Congress 2018 then reply us with the subject “Opt-out”.

Let me think.  How genuine might this be?  Hmm.  Well, I know nothing about dentistry.  (Apart from the fact I should go to the dentist rather more frequently than I do.)  So, yes, I think that confirms it.  It’s a spam invitation (despite that peculiar teeny Disclaimer).

I can guess why I got it, though.  I happen to be a co-author on a paper in the British Journal of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery (not the journal I publish in with any great frequency, I have to say).  But even the most cursory look at the title, let alone the abstract, would show the paper is nothing to do with dentistry (or even that much with oral and maxillofacial surgery specifically), but is rather on HCI, about a new technique for self-assessing patient quality of life.  So the request seems to be from a particularly naive spam-bot.

I wonder just what this invitation might imply about the quality of this particular conference and its speakers?

For the uninitiated, who don’t already have inboxes and spam filters full of these kind of things, Adam Ruben has a very nice blog post about ways to spot them.  (I have received invitations to speak at genuine conferences, and I can say that the emails are nothing like this in style.)

Oh, and also, “in-depth knowledge and research about and education”?