I've been dancing

Hello, I haven't posted for a few years.  At the beginning of 2007 I started going to ballroom and Latin dance classes.  When I was at school my mother had sent my sister and me to a few lessons.  I'd also done a few lessons when I was at university but that was all in the dim and distant past and was in America so there would be differences in what is done here anyway.

Dancing seemed like it might be a good way to get out of the house and meet a few more people.  I'd done art classes and yoga and while people were friendly these activities were not primarily social.  Dancing on the other hand is, that is why people have always danced.  More formal partner dancing became less fashionable in the sixties and seventies, but as the success of TV programmes like Strictly Come Dancing (or Dancing with the Stars in the US) there is definitely an appetite for the dances that originated in the early mid twentieth century.

Many people may be surprised to learn that the dances which they may have supposed date for periods like Jane Austin are in fact far newer.  One of the oldest of the dances we would include in ballroom is the waltz and when a version more like what we would now refer to as the Viennese waltz first came to England in 1816 it was considered scandalous that partners should dance in such close contact.

After World War I there was a lot of social change brought about by many factors including rising living standards and increased access to media.  There was a flowering of many different types of dance some of which turned out to be fads but others had more staying power.  There was a formalisation of dances and the steps in them on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1930's and 1940's which has lead to different forms of the same dance in the American style and in the International style. It has also lead to a different list of dances.

The classes I go to teach the five International style ballroom dances and four of the five international style Latin dances.  The dances are as follows:

Waltz - (also referred to as the Modern Waltz or the Slow Waltz) is the bedrock ballroom dance that all instructors start with.  At beginner level, it is very simple with three steps of even timing in each bar.  The same footwork can also produce different patterns on the floor when an amount of turn is added over the three steps.  This means the waltz is relatively easy for new dancers to do and provides satisfying results with enough variety right from the start.

Foxtrot - The next ballroom dance taught is actually not one of the ballroom dances.  There are two types of foxtrot, one is the "slow foxtrot" which is a ballroom dance, but there is also the "social foxtrot" (or sometimes called the "rhythm foxtrot") which is a social dance.  The social foxtrot is taught to introduce the idea of a "quick" and a "slow" in the steps of the dance, where slows take twice the time of quicks.  The social foxtrot is relatively slow and undemanding so students can concentrate on the timing.

Quickstep - Once students are familiar with quick and slow steps speed is added when learning the quickstep.  The music is significantly faster and because of the quicks, there are a lot more steps to take in the time.  Both the waltz and the social foxtrot are "progressive" dances which mean the dancers travel around the room as they dance.  The quickstep also goes round the room, but much faster and so being able to plan moves and avoid other dancers becomes essential with this dance.

Tango - Tango is a ballroom dance and not a Latin dance contrary to what many people would expect.  As with most dances there are different forms, and when dances were being formalised, aspects of the orignal tango styles were tamed and set in a dance that has the features and style of a ballroom dance.  Tango Argentine is a social dance that is closer to the dance's original form.  Ballroom tango has quicks and slows and the same sort of tempo as a waltz, but the hold and the poise of the dance is what gives it its character.

Viennese waltz - This form of the waltz is closer to the original waltz which has existed for a couple of centuries.  It is fast, very fast.  It is twice the tempo of a slow waltz meaning three steps have to be taken every second.  If the dancers have to think for even a split second about what to do with their feet, it all goes wrong.  So the Viennese  Waltz is not taught until people have been dancing for a couple of years and many of the basics of dancing have become second nature.

Cha Cha Cha - This is the first Latin dance taught.  It can be danced to modern music in 4/4 time and a tempo around 30 bars per minute which is very common in pop music.  Latin dances are characterised by a loser hold and often no hold at all and partners simply dance in front of each other.  The name of the dance is supposed to be onomatopoeic being the sound made when doing the chasse (three quick steps to the side) that are done in each bar.

Rumba - The second Latin dance is the Rumba which has much in common with the cha cha cha, but is slower and replaces the side chasse with a single step.  One of the things that gives the rumba its character is the fact that there are usually no steps taken on the first beat of the bar.  This gives each bar a sense of hesitation.  Many of the initial patterns in the cha cha cha can be transposed directly to the rumba which helps start the rumba quickly, but after time, the patterns diverge.

Samba - The Brazilian carnival dance is fast and has a special bounce to it.  Samba music is in 2/4 time but 4/4 time music an be used as well.  There is a rise and a fall in each two beats which gives the bounce.  As it is a Latin dance there is supposed to be a bit of "hip action" which is the pelvis changing angle due to the bending and straightening of the legs and not simply a case of wiggling one's bum!

Jive - The fact that the jive is a Latin dance may surprise some people as it doesn't actually feel very Latin, but it also does not feel ballroomy at all.  Jive comes from Lindy Hop and is a close relative of Swing and is the sort of dance the GI's in WWII would have done.  Jive is relatively fast and there are lots of patterns to learn.  Part of the reason it feels so fast is that one takes steps on syncopated beats.  So although the music is in 4/4 time, there are usually eight steps taken on each bar.

Paso Doble - This is the last of the international style Latin dances, but it is mainly danced in competitions and display dancing and less so in a social context so it is taught less often at classes intended for social dancers.  The music is often a kind of march and the idea of the dance is that the man is a matador and the lady is a combination of the bull and the cape.

Salsa - Salsa is Latin in origin but not included in the official set of Latin dances.  It is danced socially and has both New York and Cuban styles, the latter being much harder because the dancer has to tap his foot instead of not moving his foot for one beat in each bar.

Cats' Tails

Question for the day: Do cats stop chasing their tails because

a) they learn that they cannot catch it
b) their sense body awareness means they no longer perceive their tails as something external
c) tail chasing is merely a behaviour associated with a developmental stage which passes
d) cats get lazier as they get older

The history of video games

Back when I were a lad...

OK back in the dark ages video games were completely new and novel. Pong was quite mind blowingly amazing and fun to play. Part of what was exciting was seeing something you were controlling on a TV screen. These days we are all used to this idea but apart from changing channels, TV screens used to be entirely autonomous. It was also strange to see a generated image as everything on TV was normally from a camera.

Home computers were also just beginning to happen, but they were not powerful. Programming early micros to actually be fast enough to make a video game was a real challenge. (Hands up all those who know what a "pre-shifted bitmap" is.) The screen resolution and colour range (if you had colour at all) was very limited, typically four or eight colours (including black).

With these limitations firmly in place video games had to be really innovative to be both entertaining and to simply work at all. The results were entirely new environments.
Space invaders was a real breakthrough game. This was originally a monochrome game but the screen had horizontal strips of coloured transparent film over it so that the defence blocks were green and the different levels of aliens appeared in different colours.

Here in this precambrian sort of point in the evolution of video games there were some significant branching in the developmental paths.

Obvious descendants of Pong are games like Breakout and Tetris.

Space Invaders was transformed into Defender and Missile Command.

Pac Man spawned a whole line of 2D games involving mazes and obstacles and collecting things and avoiding other things. Donkey Kong, Mario Brothers, Sonic, etc.

Night Rider was a driving game which ingeniously avoided most of the problems of rendering a road by setting it at night with only the cat's eyes at the sides of the road and the car itself in the foreground. All driving and racing games can trace a lineage to this.

And was it Zork that is the ancestor of roll playing games including Tomb Raider and Halo.

All of these were raster image based but there was a separate vector based line which has now become extinct. The first game was Asteroids. Battlezone was one I really liked but it was very difficult to play. And my all time favourite video game was Tempest which had spider web like shafts with geometric enemies crawling out from the centre and your character ran around the top dropping bombs on them to prevent them getting up to the top and killing you.

Looking for screen shots I came across a few oddities. Here is someone's idea of what the pac man skeleton would look like.



This is brilliant, a battlezone tank made for the Burning Man festival.




This video is what started me off on today's posting. It is a "history" of the video game Halo which extends two decade into the future and has a sort of Terminator backstory feel to it. Very funny, but also thought provoking (kinda).




UPDATE: Not that I have anything against HALO, heck I've never even seen it actually running, but this guy has some amusing things to say about it. I'm still not interested.

Invisible Sandwich

I loved that image. There were other invisible things, but the manic look on that cat's face just made this perfect (or should that be purr-fect).

So I was quite amused to find the image below of the despicable Steve Ballmer. I'm guessing steve's sandwich is baguette based. If you have any complaints about Microsoft or its products please send them to this man. Bill is mainly out of the office these days.



Honestly this is the man running Microsoft. Only watch this video if you are not easily embarrased by other people's behavior.



Talking of lack of coolness, this is a fairly odd video.

DVD Copyright Warnings

DVDs whether purchased or rented begin with copyright warnings. These cannot be skipped or fast forwarded which means one has to sit through them every time the disk is inserted in the player. Because UK DVDs are region 2 which covers Europe and Australia and other parts you often have to sit though the pointless legalese in several different languages.

The point is that regardless of whether renting or owning DVD, I am a paying customer and not violating their copyright and yet they are punishing me. Do these warnings deter piracy? I suspect not. On rental DVDs they even have an advert comparing film piracy to other acquisitive crime which again cannot be skipped or fast forwarded. The movie below is a spoof which is pretty close to the originals bar the extreme consequences.

Digital technology has made the creation and distribution of films cheaper and easier than ever before. The best result for the consumer would be an increase in choice delivered by more titles from a larger number of creative people who can express more and varied views. The worst scenario for the consumer is that the studios pile more money into producing a small number of hackneyed blockbuster films and then promote them until everyone is sick of the ads. They then print millions of disks and use copyright law and their monopoly position to charge £15-£20 for a disk that has cost them less than £0.50 to manufacture. How else are they going to cover the $100m film budget plus the $40m promotional budget.

Until the gap between the cost of manufacture and the price of the product closes, there will be piracy both by individuals and at an industrial level. Good films can be made for £10m-20m. In the mean time we have to pay though the nose for films and sit though the warnings which are there only to serve the people who are doing us a disservice.

Star Wars Prequel Trilogy - A Missed Opportunity

Star Wars is part of the cultural fabric of the modern world. Its influence has been substantial and the generation that loved the original trilogy as children are now the established professionals within film and media. And even if you are not a fan of the films you cannot escape their influence.

That is why it is so sad that the recent prequel trilogy was frankly so weak. When episode I (The Phantom Menace) was released in 1999 sixteen years after the Return of the Jedi in 1983 there were huge expectations and a real pent up demand. The effects were stunning and broke new ground in the Industrial Light and Magic tradition of always pushing the envelope on every film.

The plot was dull and contrived and fairly aimless. That could be forgiven as this was the first instalment which had to set up the story for the remainder of the trilogy and then dovetail into the existing films.

There were, however, three things that were simply unforgivable.

The first is Jar Jar Binks. If at any moment there was any risk of you getting absorbed into the story and actually believing any of it up jumps Jar Jar with his prat falls an "stupid negro" talking which is simply cringe worthy if not actually racist. A similarly disgruntled "would be fan" created a version of episode one and put it on the internet calling it "The Phantom Edit" which was a cut down version which simply removed all shots that included Jar Jar. I had considered doing the same myself simply to see what the film would be like without this hugely annoying creature.

The second unforgivable mistake was the inclusion of the droids R2D2 and C3P0. Yes, the use of the droids , inspired by the servants in Akira Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai, as the unifying thread by telling the story more or less from their point of view did work in the first trilogy. And a similar device could have been used in the new trilogy. But to use the very same robots at a point in the story set 25 years earlier is just moronic. The idea that Anikan, a ten year old boy, could actually have built C3P0 is just insult to injury. If C3P0 was unique that would not be so bad, but other robots exactly like C3P0 are present in both the original trilogy and this film. It would be like a film where a modern kid built his own Sony PlayStation 3.

The third thing was the dialogue which was simply awful. Lucas had too much control as write/director/executive producer. Rick McCallum may be a good producer but he is in awe of Lucas and simply does what he is told and does not question or attempt to rein in Lucas' excesses. The screen play should have been handed to someone else to fix the dialog at some point.

There are all sorts of things that also undermine the story which are more than minor quibbles:

• Anikan's "virgin birth"
• The introduction of midiclorians
• The fact that Anikan and his mother are "slaves" but seem to come and go as they please, have a nice home and posessions
• The idea that Anikan also built his own pod racer (how much free time and spare cash do these slaves have?)
• The trip though the Naboo planet core in a submarine space ship
• The fact that the "queen" was elected
• The menagerie of impractical and unlikely creates on the Jedi council.

The second and third films picked up the pace and reduced Jar Jar's part which initially gave the impression of an improvement. But now with a few years perspective, these films are in many was even lesser films that Episode 1. By the end of Episode three you just want to smack Yoda over the head and tell him to stop talking backwards.

Where the original trilogy was strengthened by having a back story, this trilogy was weakened by being the back story. In the original 1977 Star Wars film we know in the first few minutes that Leia is the good princess who needs to be rescued, Darth Vader is a terrifying baddy, that there are some stolen plans that are important and need to be delivered to the good guys to defeat the bad guys. There are clear dramatic objectives for the audience to follow. The final space battle has primarily two models of ship, good ones and bad ones, the objective of the battle is to fire a torpedo into a ventilation shaft and we have identifiable pilots in both the good and bad ships. The consequences of failure are also very clear in that if they fail to destroy the Death Star, it will blow up the planet on which the rebels are based and that will be the end of the good guys.

By contrast, the new trilogy seems to exist almost solely to tick points on a checklist of things prerequisite for the original films. These are not in themselves of any dramatic interest. There is a huge cast of characters, few of whom make any impression on the viewer. The battles have no apparent objective and there are so many different types of space craft it is simply too confusing an ambiguous to inspire much desire to see a particular outcome.

Despite this the new generation of ten year old kids have lapped up the films and they have been hugely successful. I have to wonder if the problem is not the films themselves but the fact that both trilogies are kids films and that the difference is that I was a kid in 1977 and not in 1999. But somehow I just cannot believe that.

By way of contrast there is Battle Star Galactica. This was a 1978 Star Wars copy cat film and TV series. It too was set in a different galaxy. The premise was that man who inhabited "the twelve colonies" (which were separate planets) had created robots called Cylons which looked like chrome covered storm troopers from Star Wars. The Cylons had rebelled and a long war had followed. The series begins on the eve of a peace deal which turns out to be a Cyclon ambush which wipes out all of humanity except for one "Battle Star" a sort of spaceship aircraft carrier called "Galactica" and a "rag tag fleet" of civilian ships carrying the last surviors of humanity. They flee the old colonies in search of the mythical thirteenth colony known as Earth.

Again I was a kid and enjoyed the series, but it had limited success. Galactica has also made a come back in the "re-imaged" series. Fans are divided and die hard supporters of the old series refer to to this as GINO (Galactica In Name Only). The premise is more or less the same except that the Cylons had left man alone for 40 years and unknown to man had developed themselves to be almost indistinguishable from real humans. Their sneak attack to wipe out the real humans was facilitated by their ability to jam all the networked human computers with viruses.

The big difference is that the new BSG (Battlestar Galactica) series is devised as a drama for adults. Unlike Star Trek and its derivatives, these are not morality plays, but focus on the relationships among these surviving humans and their struggle against the Cylon threat. They do not have laser beams, only real bullets and tactical nukes. The rockets use directional thrusters to manoeuvre and the space scenes are shot as if by a hand held camera by a news crew with frequent rough zooms and pans. Everything about the series seeks to be credible and engaging to a grown up audience.

If only Lucas had tried to make something new with the prequel trilogy and not wasted a real opportunity to create something truly great.

So for some fun examples, illustrations and irrelevancies.

This is simply a clip from Episode I with a subtle change made a couple of minutes in. Bare with it until then because the point it makes is startlingly valid.



This is a funny song about the new series of Battle Star Galactica with clips from both the old and new series.



And this is a video a group of guys made at home with the Imperial Cruisers from Star Wars doing battle with the Battle Stars of BSG. What is amazing is how little difference there is between the efforts of multi-million dollar visual effects companies and what has been produced by six guys and their home PCs. Sure there are differences and some would argue this is just a good animatic but I'd be proud of it.

Balloon Fiesta 2007

Another year another balloon fiesta, and this one was pretty good. The first morning was simply perfect. The sun had just risen above the tree line and bathed everything in a golden light, the sky was blue and clear except for some cirrus, and there was so little breeze that the balloons just went up and stayed overhead waiting to be photographed. There were also lots and lots of balloons that morning.



Just before the sun was up preparations were under way and pilots were testing their burners.

The ground was damp with dew so the balloons were getting wet, but once the burners started heating the air inside, the dampness on the balloons soon came off as steam.



These are three of the prettiest balloons this year. I love everything about the orange one. The blue one with the gold "flames" is just so elegant and has a beautiful upside down tear shape.

Below are past favourites including the black and silver one at this years event. Note that it is the same size and shape as this year's orange one.



The forecast for this morning was not so good and I was pretty tired from the previous two days so I decided not to go this morning. I think the balloons missed me because the few that did launch came right over my house.