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Something to Watch: DVDs

It doesn’t look like we get any genre movies this week, so I thought I would mention the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi, about the award winning ten seat sushi restaurant in a subway station in Tokyo and the man that runs it.

We do a little better in TV this time, with both Touched By An Angel: The Complete Fifth Season and Touched By An Angel: Seasons 1 through 5. The show ran 9 seasons, so the latter set brings you to just past the halfway point. If you missed it when it originally aired it was quite a well done fantasy about helpful spirits. The other TV release is Sheena: The Complete Second Season, which completes the series which ran from 2000 to 2002. The original Sheena TV series ran in the 1950s, and both series were based on the comic book which ran from 1937 to 1953, the very first comic book series with a female protagonist. Wil Eisner and Jerry Iger created the character, which they based on H. Rider Haggard’s 1886 book She.

The anime release for this week is Golgo 13: The Professional, and that is more spy thriller than sci-fi or fantasy. It is also a re-release, the original feature length film came out in 1983. And yes, this is the movie, not the OVA.

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Tesla’s Hungarian Rhapsody

A Tesla Coil is a transformer that is able to generating extremely large voltages, which allows it to throw huge but extremely short-live sparks. So what looks like one long spark is actually a bunch of sparks each second. As any musician with a scientific background will tell you, a given tone is a given frequency of vibration, producing each unique note. So by adjusting the sparks per second from the coil, different notes can be played. And that is exactly what they did in this video; enjoy!

The coil was invented by Nikola Tesla, who also invented AC power, the electric motor, the alternator, the generator, the audio speaker, radio (they took the patent away from Marconi when it turned out it was based on 17 of Tesla’s patents), the florescent light four years before Edison used brute force slave labor to invent the light bulb, and ever so much more which he patented. He also invented some stuff the patent office couldn’t figure out how to process, like broadcast energy and the related wireless charging of batteries (a company finally figured out how to make a profit on that one a decade or so ago for all our portable electronics), Ball Lightning, Radar (it was WWII before anyone decided building that could be useful), and oh, yeah, that earthquake machine he almost sank Long Island with. Tesla has been one of my personal heroes since I was a kid, and if you don’t know about him it is time you learned.

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New Continuum trailer

You still can’t see Continuum here, at least not yet, but there are rumors they are working on a deal for a US network to carry it. In the meantime though, there is another trailer to watch.

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Higgs Boson Explained

One of the modern holy grails in physics is the Higgs Boson, AKA The God Particle, and several weeks ago Cern announced they believed they had finally proven it exists. As in all such advances, some will only go so far as to admit that a Higgs-like particle has been identified, but even if it is not the elusive Higgs itself a major step along the road to understanding how the universe works has been taken. As complex as both the question and the means of answering it are, there is a simple explanation put forward by Assistant Professor Daniel Whiteson of the University of California that anyone can understand. And just to make it easier to follow, this excellent animation was assembled; thanks to Open Culture for the heads up on this one.

The Higgs Boson Explained from PHD Comics on Vimeo.

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Radiation Anime explains to children

A Cat Anime done with stop motion wooden dolls from Nekomacitta did a pretty good job of explaining to Japanese children the dangers of a nuclear power plant issue such as the one Fukushima and the surrounding countryside just suffered last year. It is a fairly balanced presentation which cites both the good and bad points of such a power generating system, apparently not driving one to a preordained conclusion but rather letting the audience weigh the options and come to their own conclusions. I say apparently because I have not had the opportunity to watch the entire 20 minute animation so far, but just the outtake presented here. Thanks to The Asahi Shimbon for the heads up on this one.

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