Message 964

I forgot to mention in yesterday’s message that I watched a PBS documentary about building the Panama Canal. It was very interesting. Yesterday I watched Obama’s State of the Union speech. As usual, I thought he did a great job. Afterward I watched a DVD of the movie Inception. Julian had watched this movie on his flight to Tokyo a few weeks ago and asked what I thought about it. It stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Ellen Page (of Juno fame), and was well made. It was a very complex thriller, but it mostly was about dreams and the question of what is reality and how do you tell the difference between dreams (or fantasies) and reality. It gets so convoluted that it is hard to follow at times, but it is entertaining. I give it three stars. I also read Science yesterday. It had an interesting article about analyzing all the words in the millions of books that Google has scanned to give a quantitative measure of cultural trends.