True to MediaCorp tradition, they are airing Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2 on Channel 5. It is the ad for Spider-Man 2 that makes me cringe. It shows some moody emotional close ups of MJ and Peter. And they add text that goes more or less like this:
"You can never escape from a relationship with Spider-Man..."
"... because he is the only one who sticks around."
I'm not sure if this is an attempt at humor or a straight-no-joke stuff; I just find it unbearably bad.
The other night, though, there is such ad for another (much lower budget) program, Lifeline, I think. It's a local drama about civil defense officers. The ad is a collection of shots from the show; but the audio is replaced with siren. With the audio/video goes the text that goes something like:
"Siren sound..."
"... is it a sign of trouble..."
"... or is it a sign of hope?"
For some reason that tag line sticks to my mind even though I saw it only once.
I guess the statement gets into me because recently I experienced first-hand such double-meaning things. Things that can be interpreted in different ways depending on where you were when it happened. For accident victims, siren sound may mean hope. For by-standers,
siren sound may be an annoyance or even a sign of trouble.
I cannot help but thinking that emotion is a function of physical position (how close I am to the siren to be annoyed), social position (if I am with friends I am more likely to be concerned about what happened than if I am alone), and "role" (I cannot find a better word; this means whether I am an accident victim or a by-stander).
I'm sure there are more dimensions to human to fully define the function that explains human emotions; but I was happy to find myself thinking in this somewhat analytic mode. The reason is that I'm currently reading Computer Science: Reflections on the Field, Reflections from the Field. It is a somewhat easy to read book about different areas in Computer Science (CS).
Reading the book is almost like re-living the moments I spent with a friend/more-than-friend who is no longer with me; replacing the emotional pain with intellectual & egoistical pains. The book reminds me of the wonders and excitements I experienced when studying CS during undergrad time. One plus about the book is that it is narrative than technical; I learned quite a number of historical accounts on how the CS concepts I learnt was developed.
Here is a number just for a taste: database (a small joke: what do you mean people are still doing research on database?), algorithm, computability, P and NP, machine translation, NLP, statistical methods, Gaussian classifier, Alan Turing, game playing, Claude Shannon, Noam Chomsky, different levels of grammars, lambda calculus, relational calculus...
(Edited on 5 March 2015)
Ehm, don't quite get the joke. Database research is saturated, or something? ^^0
ReplyDelete(Sorry, just saw your comment today. Is there somekind of mechanism to notify me about comments?)
ReplyDeleteYeah, the joke is on us. An similar example is about buildings. We see them all around, right? We keep seeing new buildings built all the time. Suppose someone from architecture tells me that they are still having research about buildings! My first thought will be, "What? You are still researching on buildings?" The unspoken part is "But I'm spending most of my waking hours (and sleeping hours for that matter) in a building! What do you mean you are still researching on buildings? What for?"
Probably it's not much of a joke explained this way. It's a cynical joke about how knowledge has become so diverse that it's impossible for us to keep track of frontiers in all fields. Thus, imagine if there is a cocktail party where researchers meet. I imagine some awkward hilarity with such questions.
"What? You still research on buildings?"
"What do you mean you are still researching on database?"
"You are still researching on map systems?"
Unspoken final part of those questions are similar: "Isn't that problem already solved since we are using its solution all the time?"