Ramblings about entertainment and other things
I’m watching the Super Bowl right now… It’s halftime and The Stones are on right now.
Right before they came on, ABC ran a LOST commercial using the song “Addicted to Love” adapted to be “Addicted to LOST”. I hope they run it again… it was a fun commercial!
The Writer’s Guild awarded LOST the Best Dramatic Series award yesterday.
I didn’t see anything about this all day today, but apparently Firefox posted an upgrade.
An interesting “easter egg” in the “Fire + Water” episode of LOST. The scene with Charlie’s mom and Claire on the beach shows the drug plane crashing on the island.
Spoilers ahead…
What was THAT all about? Charlie has had a problem for a few episodes now watching how Locke is interacting with Claire, and feeling jealous. I think between Michael going off to find Walt, Sayid vs Ana Lucia, and Charlie vs Locke, we’re seeing the beginnings of how the survivors might eventually split. Charlie has definately become an outsider.
I thought it was interesting that a couple of things people on the web have been discussing were mentioned on the show. First, Hurley called the people in the tail section “tailies”, which seems to be the general nickname people have given them on the web. The second was that while he and Libby were washing clothes, Libby said something about the washer and dryer being a lot newer than the rest of the things down in the hatch.
I’d assumed that the newer looking washer and dryer were just a continuity error on the show, but since the characters mentioned it, there might be more to it. Everyone’s been assuming that people have been down in that hatch for a long time with no contact with the outside world…. now we know that probably isn’t true.
Other random thoughts:
It surprised me that Locke didn’t destroy the statues he took from Charlie, but put them in the vault instead.
I think the reason Hurley recognized Libby was not because he stepped on her foot (he was at the front of the plane, and she was at the back!, but because she was a nurse or possibly a patient in the hospital he was in.
Eko was marking trees, I think because he intended to build a chapel there. From the way he was sifting through the ashes after the fire, it looks like Charlie burned the area that Eko marked.
In the previews, we see Sun taken away. It looks like The Others are going to try and get Jin to go after Sun, which will cause him to leave the group in the same why that Michael was coaxed away.
Mark Loveless has discovered a flaw in Windows wireless security. The fix is pretty simple:
Go to “Start,” “Control Panel,” “Network Connections,” and then right click on the entry labeled “wireless network connection” and select “Properties” from the drop down menu. Then click on the “Wireless Networks” tab, and then on the “Advanced” tab at the bottom of that window. A box should pop up that gives you three buttons to choose from: Select the one next to “Access point (infrastructure) networks only.
SPOILERS AHEAD! Don’t read any further until you’ve seen this week’s episode of LOST, “The Hunting Party”
A few things about tonight’s show:
1) Alex (The French’s Woman’s child) brought Kate over when the bearded man called Alex by name.
2) The Bearded Man’s quote: “From the dawn of our species, Man has been blessed with curiosity. ” is a quote from Alvar Hanso, on the Hanso Foundation website
3) In the preview, Hurley asks Libby “Do I know you from somewhere?” Libby is a clinical psychologist…. Maybe Hurley saw her at the institution he was committed to?
Check out this optical illusion.
If you haven’t read my posting A Theory about LOST, you should probably go read that before you continue reading this page.
In the “23rd Psalm”, we got a really good look at the monster that the crash survivors have been hearing (and seeing) on the island. So far, the only two people that have really stared down the “black swarm” are Locke and Eko.
So, what the heck is that “black swarm”? The nanotechnology theory I posted about previously explains this. The monster appears to be smoke, but is actually made of many tiny machines that communicate with each other.
The idea of many tiny machines communicating with each other isn’t all that far-fetched. Research Smart Dust at Berkeley, and at companies like Dust Networks and Crossbow is being done right now. A few years ago, I worked with some of the Smart Dust “motes”. (I just worked with them, not on the actual project itself…just wanted to make that clear). They’re about the size of a quarter and have a tiny radio built into them. Each “mote” communicates with the other motes within it’s radio range to communicate the data it’s tracking. In the case of the devices I used, they communicated the temperature. The motes nearest to the base station communicate all the data from the rest of the “swarm” to that base station. The base station can then do whatever it wants with the data.
Now, extrapolate the idea of smart dust out in every direction. Make the motes as small as real dust (the size of machine in nanotechnology), increase the processing power, really soup up the software the things run, and it’s not all that far fetched to think that the smoke monster we saw would be possible. All they would need is some sort of propulsion.
I think that’s really what the monster is. A swarm of nanotech machines. “Nanites”, if you want to use a “Star Trek: The Next Generation” term. They’re moving around the island, and they’re smart. Or at least they appear that way. They could just be following their programming and have no real intelligence of their own. Right now, that’s my bet.
Eko stared the swarm down. While the swarm was in front of Eko, we saw a number of images from Eko’s past flash through the swarm itself. It appeared to read Eko’s mind. That could be just the “sci-fi” part of LOST that doesn’t need to be explained, it could be that it read Eko’s electrical brain impulses….however it did it doesn’t matter really. The main point is, it flashed scenese from Eko’s life and then moved on. Presumably, this is the same thing that happened to Locke. What was the swarm doing?
I think it was assessing whether or not Eko was an “enemy”. A enemy of what? ….Well, that’s the question. An enemy to the island? An enemy to something it’s trying to protect? Is it just deciding that anything that’s “hostile” is an enemy?
Well, that very well could be. The pilot was in a military-like uniform that the swarm could have taken as the identifying mark of someone that’s “hostile”.
Say for a moment that all that is true. There are people on the island that the swarm would kill (or worse… more on that in a minute) if it got a chance, and there are people on the island that the swarm would leave alone. If the swarm won’t touch anyone it doesn’t perceive as a threat, the vulnerable people on the island would surround themselves with people that are “safe”. I think that’s a reason they could be taking all the children. What could be safer than a child? Everyone assumes Walt was taken for his “psychic” abilities that everyone think he has; it could just be he was taken because he was a child.
So, what could be worse than being killed by that thing? I think it’s also likely that the swarm might have the ability to take people over, based on what Danielle said to Sayid (see my previous posting ).
In the comments someone asked why the word “quarantine” was inside the hatch, instead of the outside. If the swarm was able to infect people, that would be the reason. It also explains the reason Desmond has been taking the injections. If Desmond spent any time at all outside (gathering fruit, other food, wood, etc), he’d take injections to prevent the swarm from infecting him.
If you’re a fan of the show “24”, check out Dave Barry’s blog. A zillion posts on some of the silly things in the show, and some genuinely funny posts.