Year: 2012

Shooter

Being a big fan of anything that involves snipers – movies, video games, books, etc – I am surprised that I haven’t heard anything at all about “Shooter“.  It is one of those niche things that is done for the fans only.

The story is not particularly thick or twisted.  On the contrary, it’s quite straightforward and predictable.  But that didn’t spoil the film too much.  It was shot nicely, with some really nice photography.  And the casting was excellent – Mark Wahlberg, Danny Glover, Rade Serbedzija, Rhona Mitra, and the rest did their job very well.

Overall, there is not much too say more.  If you are a fan of snipers, this movie is a must see.  If not, then I don’t know – it’s a nice action movie based on a rather weak story.  4 out of 5.

Guinness bubbles problem – solved!

If you are a beer fan, you’ve probably heard about the famous Guinness bubbles problem.  While bubbles in most other beers rise up, in Guinness they go down.  A lot of people were puzzled by that fact, and now, it seems, the puzzle is solved.

According to the article in Technology Reviews, Irish mathematicians came up with an answer:

Today, a dedicated team of Irish mathematicians reveal the answer. Eugene Benilov, Cathal Cummins and William Lee at the University of Limerick say the final piece in this puzzle is the shape of the glass, which has a crucial influence over the circulatory patterns in the liquid.

To understand how, first remember that the motion of every bubble exerts a drag on the liquid around it. Now imagine what would happen if there were a region of liquid containing fewer bubbles near the wall of a pint glass and consequently a region of higher bubble density near the middle of the glass.

Benilov and co say that the drag will be higher in the region where the bubble density is higher, in other words near the centre of the glass. This creates an imbalance that sets up a circulation pattern in which the liquid flows upwards in the centre of the glass and downwards near the walls.

That’s exactly as observed in a pint of Guinness.

There are more details and image of an anti-pint in the article.  Read it.

Also, while reading up on the subject, I’ve learned something else about Guinness – the widget.

Beneath Hill 60

I don’t remember how I came across “Beneath Hill 60“, but it was in my watch queue for quite a while.  Yesterday I finally decided to watch it, and now I’m glad I did.  One of the first things that stands out is that it’s not an American movie (it’s Australian).  Even though the main language is English, the story telling, camera angles, special effects, and intensity are all approached differently.

The film tells the story of the Battle of Hill 60 from the First World War.  I haven’t heard anything about the battle before watching the film, and I’ve never thought of the role miners played at war.  In fact, I wasn’t aware they were ever used for military operations, even though not that I think about it – it makes all the sense.

This movie is not a major blockbuster by any means.  But it has a story to tell and it has a soul.  It feels like it was important to people who were making it.  And so, even if you aren’t that much into war movies, it will still be worth your time.

Overall ranking, a 4 out of 5.  Well done.

Responsive typography

I’ve recently made yet another attempt to do so some web design myself.  Of course that ended up being a total fiasco, like every single time before that.  But as every single time before that, I’ve learned something new.  This time, my focus was around typography.  The current trend towards a gadzillion web fonts is probably one of the biggest changes in web design that I see.  Google Web Fonts alone is a resource one could spend countless hours at.

And just as I’ve wrapped up and threw away my web design attempt, I came across an article on responsive typography.  And the very first paragraph of it confirmed what I have realized myself.

With the chaos of different screen sizes and a new generation of web browsers, the design paradigms of layout and typography have shifted away from static layouts and system fonts to dynamic layouts and custom web fonts. Now, screens are changing not just in size, but also in pixel density. In other words: we do not just need responsive layouts, we also need responsive typefaces.

Unlike me though, the authors seems to have a pretty good idea of what they are talking about.