'Cosmic Voyage' and 'Journey of Man'

Two library dvds, which I took out mid-week and forgot to review: Nova's 'Cosmic Voyage' and Cirque du Soleil's 'Journey of Man'.

'Cosmic Voyage' was super. It's a visual journey that starts from human-scale, and gradually zooms outward 22 powers of ten to the size of the known universe. There were nifty bits going from Milky Way scale to the local supercluster of galaxies. I've never seen that animated before. Then it rewinds time to show the Big Bang; then forward again 10+ billion years later, it zooms in 43 powers of ten to the scale of subatomic particles. With detours showing colliding galaxies, the developmnent of the Earth 5b years ago, and what it might look like as particles collide in a synchrotron. Very visual, and the right length for this, about 45 minutes. I'd have paid to see this on IMAX.


'Journey of Man'... sucked. Imagine Cirque du Soleil with a pair of Jar-Jar Binks characters, and a sanctimonious plot that goes thud. There were a few neat images: acrobats wearing streamy tassles and spinning in midair; and a muscular dude in tights spinning a big hollow cube. That was about it for me. I folded the laundry that I didn't fold while I was entranced by 'Cosmic Voyage.' :)

Weekend fun

Friday night, I went to dinner with Quaker friends; two who are going away on a 4 month trip to walk across Spain. We'll certainly miss them, partly since they are responsible for a lot of the week-to-week repair tasks for the Meeting House. Speaking of which, the weekend also featured not one but two Quaker Meeting House disasters, one sewer-pipe-related and expensive, they other boiler-related and expensive. Those became the capstone to Sunday's Quaker Meeting, which included an emergency Business Meeting to deal with the problems. Otherwise, the Quaker Meeting continued the last month's string of really good Meetings- there were a few surprising messages, all of them good.

Saturday, I lazed and programmed. Fish and I talked about photo mosaics and by the time we were done talking, we were most of the way toward planning the code, so we (mostly he) went ahead and wrote a mosaic-builder. That will get its own post, later.

I also went over to our favourite neighbours' (L & D) house for an extended chat and coffee. They just bought a shiny silver espresso-maker for L's birthday. D, being D, had to try out what happened if he turned on the steam-maker when there wasn't a cup in place ("to clean it out") with predictable results. L, being L, rolled her eyes and shoed him from the room while we made coffee. :)

In the evening, I went to the concert for melted_snowball's chorus, themed for Easter. Most of the first half was a capella and I was really feeling the harmonies. Great stuff.

Oh, Sunday also featured a walk uptown with roverthedog, to try and buy a book and a ticket to see Karen Armstrong speak next Saturday (her latest book is about the 9th century BCE, during which time she says all of the following were created: Confucianism and Daoism in China; Hinduism and Buddhism in India; monotheism in Israel; and philosophical rationalism in Greece. I don't exactly believe her dates are that tight; Confucus lived 350 years later; but I liked her other books on comparative theology so I'll go see her speak again.)