Remember when I used to be behind schedule? Those days are long gone because now I'm planning to see movies 2 years in advance. However, many unanswered questions about these movies still remain. Who stars? Will the script ever be completed written? Will the world end before 2009? Who am I? Questions aside, here are the facts about everyones future favorite films.

First off... Fantastic Voyage

Director: Roland Emmerich (Godzilla, Independence Day, The Thirteenth Floor)
Writer: Cormac Wibberly, wrote 6th Day also working on the movie G-Force (A specially trained squad of guinea pigs is dispatched to stop a diabolical billionaire from taking over the world)
Synopsis: A scientist with a potentially fatal health problem takes a risk on his only chance of survival: For five of his colleagues to be miniaturized in a ship and injected into his bloodstream.
My 2 cents: Okay, judging by the success of director and writer, there's a good chance that this movie will be terrible, and frankly I just included it to fill up the movie list. The synopsis sounds like a serious case of Magic School Bus where they take the field trip inside the kid when he's sick. One can only hope that Roland pulls a high budget and the graphics get done like the "Inner Life of a Cell" video.

Second off... Master of Space and Time

Director: Michael Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,
Writer: Daniel Clowes (Art School Confidential, Ghost World. Both comic books)
Writer of Novel It's Based on: Rudy Rucker (Crazy Sci-fi author and retired Math professor )
Synopsis: Two mad scientists discover a way to control reality.
My 2 cents: Most awesome combination of writer, director, and book author ever. Gondry's imaginative film techniques combined with the weird emo art comic book influence of Clowes all backed by a dude with a PhD in math. I haven't read the book but it doesn't even matter, it's going to be guaranteed amazing IF the screenplay ever gets written...

Third, and best off... Interstellar

Director: Steven Spielberg (Hook, Twilight Zone: The Movie)
Writer: Jonathan Nolan (Memento, The Prestige, and next year Dark Knight)
Synopsis: An exploration of physicist Kip Thorne's theories of gravity fields, wormholes and several hypotheses that Albert Einstein was never able to prove.
My 2 cents: You may have thought Memento was just a fluke for Nolan. After all, it was his first script adapted to film. But then the dude comes out with The Prestige, and next Dark Knight, and now this? On top of that you take a wildly brilliant physics professor at CalTech and get him to make up some wormhole theories to base the script on and you have the Jacks of Science Movie of the Year for 2009. Oh, I guess Spielberg might help a bit too.

As we saw in the last post it sometimes takes the cold, calculating eye of a machine to truly capture the beauty of nature. Such is the case with my current research project at school, where I am looking at the fine-scale social dynamics of our friend the bumble bee. I won't go into the details, but I will show you some pretty pictures that I've generated.

This psychedelic mush is actually the sum of the movement paths of six bumble bees around their colony over a period of twelve hours, where each bee is represented by a different colour. The colony was reared in a plastic box, the floor of which can be seen behind the coloured mass. Jackson Pollock, anyone?

More bumble bee psychedelia. The nectar feeding dish can be seen in the near-top-left portion of this trace. Evidently, these bees weren't very hungry. Probably just colony collapse disorder.

Here's a zoomed-out view of group of individual bumble bee movement traces, which are combined together to make the psychedelic-mush-o-grams pictured previously. Each square shows the movement vector of one bumble bee over a period of one hour (so, five hours for five bees in this case).

That's all the weirdness I have for now. If you are in interested in seeing some more traces like these or actually learning about my research project, please leave a comment!