Went and sat in on the first installment of the Feynman (pronounced Fine-men) Lecture at CMU today. Since he has already passed away, the lecture was basically an hour of watching one of the video taped recordings of his lectures. I really dug his style of teaching. Not a moment of it really came across as being a real physics lecture if you know what I mean. Of course a part of that is probably because I am who I am now with quite a bit of interest in various aspects of science, but I think many would agree that the way in which he teaches is certainly not your typical boring powerpoint-driven lectures you see day in and day out ( fortunately, they didn't have powerpoint back then... ^^; ). He seemed to bring in a lot of other related yet advanced ideas into the lecture without making them sound very advanced. I'm guessing that the reason why he brought them in was because he believed they were important in giving the students the big picture of how ideas were introduced and how they were discovered. The host talked about how Dr. Feynman was one of the most "truth-oriented" professors, and I guess that's along the lines of the impressions I've gotten from this particular lecture as well. All in all I got to revisit a lot of ideas I was introduced way back when in a new perspective, and rekindled my fascination of the world of nature and physics, so that was good! I'm def. going back there next week for the second installment. :)

Speaking of revisiting stuff... I just found out that a movie called Casshern is due out in Japan soon. When I heard the name I couldn't help but ask myself if they meant "Kyashan" which is an awesome animation series I saw back in elementary school. The hero was this dude in white spandex ( all good heroes need spandex ) with a transforming robot dog and a robot swan that had his mom's soul. Much to my delight I was right! I dunno why they opted to spell it in such horrendous way, but I guess that's just how Japanese people like their English. ^^; The aesthetics of the movie is highly matrix meets underworld meets bladerunner, but it doesn't quite have the finesse of a movie with a hollywood budget and a matching hollywood CG studio. Obviously 70s anime/manga aesthetics had a huge influence on Americn cyber-punk style movies, but Japan still needs to do some work on making movies that are as good as their animations. At least it seems to surpass all other Japanese sci-fi attempts ( how many were there anyway? ) I've seen, so it may be worth looking forward to. One thing that kinda bugs me is that the manga was never this dark, but I guess if you think about the whole robot taking over humans theme, the aesthetic goes along pretty well... and dark is in these days... All cape-clad CMU goth heads rejoice! :P Oh, on a random note... Utada Hikaru does music for the movie and she is married to the director of this movie... Utda Hikaru is married???? Isn't she like 19?