What is the photo copier?

Short skit of 2 F1 drivers

Perelman article

Good article about Grigory Perelman being asked to accept a Fields Medal and $1M for solving the Poincare conjecture, and refusing.

Perelman Article (warning: very small scroll slider)

I know nothing about topology or academic mathematics. Also, this New Yorker article definitely has some likely-stupefied-for-laymen math background to it, but I think it does a good job of explaining why someone wouldn't want fame, glory, and a million dollars.

Since I think about 100% of the four of you have deeper backgrounds than me in math and physics, can you tell me more about this?

Robot Jox, the Quintessential Hollywood Mecha Movie

I doubt any of you three have seen Robot Jox, a live-action/stop-motion giant robot sci-fi made in 1990.

Rent this movie. Or maybe have a friend rent it to avoid using up a netflix queue slot. Or maybe download it, as I fully expect the production company that made this film to have gone bankrupt immediately after release, likely neglecting to keep the copyright from lapsing into the public domain out of sheer incompetence.

I'll let the lone imdb review ("Greatest Giant Robot fighting after World War 3 movie ever") speak for itself. I watched this movie when it went to VHS, which must have been '93 or so, and thought it was awesome. I still do, but for entirely different reasons.

The dialogue is horribly funny. It is almost inconceivable that the writers were being serious, as each line somehow seems a parody of itself.

Yet, at the same time, the action sequences of the movie are actually very good. There is a hand-to-hand (human) fight scene where the choreography actually made it seem real, even out of context, in the way that the Hong Kong style of the Matrix made each hit seem exaggerated and unrealistic. The stop-motion animation of the giant robots might sound cheap, and other effects were definitely low-budget, but within those constraints they still managed to pull it off. As an example, there were a few cockpit perspective sequences where they greenscreened the actors in cockpit facing against their stop-motion robot opponents, and it didn't seem awful. I'm still not sure how it didn't seem worse.

That's basically the baseline for this movie... awful. Yet somehow the schizophrenic combination of awesomely bad dialogue and surprisingly good action means that I highly recommend this movie, because it is probably free.