What a Programmer Sees When He Watches Inception
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Hehe -- I loved the movie...
None the less, the movie was entertaining and I'm just gonna leave it there. I know movie logic shouldn't be a comparison to real world logic, but the geek in me can't help but point out illogical happenings in the film.
Hence you see your dream to shift from one place, to the other. Here is a very good NOVA documentary on netflix about it: http://www.netflix.com/WiMovie/What_Are_Dreams_Nova/70129639...
The plot was entertaining and a good idea, but it left a lot to be desired. It's not destined to become a classic like: Fight Club, 12 Monkeys, Requiem for a Dream, Primer. If you enjoyed Inception, do yourself a favor and check those out if you haven't seen them.
In dreams (at least mine anyways) there are solutions/objects/processess that suddenly, without explanation, just materialize out of thin air (but makes perfect sense while in the dream) to problems/events that occur in the dream and only realize how absurd the whole thing was when you wake up.
However, I'm in a better mood now and the movie is still wonderfully entertaining.
Particularly on the criteria of plot 'Requiem for a Dream' can surely not be considered a classic. Conceivably if we were willing to overlook the (lack of) plot and consider the cinematography, acting, realism and artistic choice of title then there's at least an argument. Although in my view it is really just 2hrs of Oscar juice and 'great' acting is surprisingly forthcoming given the right subject matter.
Spoilers!
For example, a friend was confused how Fischer could be revived. They explained that death with the heavy sedation would lead to limbo, so it could be concluded that dying was actually just a shortcut to go into a deeper dream state, he wasn't actually "dead". When they woke him up from that dream, he came back.
Another oddity I found was that they needed to synchronize all the kicks, wouldn't one kick in the deepest dream suffice? Well, in one level of dreaming if you think you're falling, you can actually feel it (whether the falling feeling happens in the sleeping environment (dude sleeping in a chair and being tipped) or in the dream (dude being thrown out of a building)), but at 2 levels of dreaming, the falling would be too abstract to cascade all the way up.
You probably found different glitches in the movie, but the above shows the process I used to answer some questions.
(of nesting (of nesting (...)))
It wasn't too much though, the top two were just sleeping in a plane and a falling van, which isn't too much to remember. The elevator scene was just him setting up charges, much more action was happening at the hospital and the limbo level.
* These dreams are far too cohesive and realistic. Dreams aren't like The Matrix where physics is normal and you do something to it. They're more like weird shit happens and you accept it as normal.
* Dreaming nested 3 levels of recursion deep? Done it, didn't need a sedative.
Don't read if you haven't seen it yet!
Saito dies at some level (if I remember right at the top dream level) and he enters limbo. Cobb goes there from the snow compound dream level but Saito has already been there 20-40 years (maybe they said in the movie, I forgot that too). Cobb then helps him remember Saito is in a dream so they can wake up together from the limbo state.
Except they don't, you never see them kill themselves (to exit the dream) or pass through the other levels of dreams, it just cuts straight to the plane. Then at the end he sees his kids, but they're exactly as they appear in his dreams. The top continuing to spin just makes it more explicit.
So he never made it out of limbo, when you see him awaking in the plane that's just him creating his own reality inside limbo, one where he gets to go back to his kids.
Nolan was just doing that to mess with the audience. Yes, the kids were wearing the same clothes, but the top started wobbling right before it cut away. So the audience is left not knowing if he is stuck in limbo or not. It could be interpreted either way.
Anyways, an easy way to tell if you are in a dream without relying on a totem (in the movie's universe) is to look at an analog clock. The numbers appear upside down in the dream world. For some reason this was only illustrated once in the movie.
Indeed, I remember from my own dreams that text and numbers behaves oddly (disappears/changes when you look around).
I've also heard this technique is used by lucid dreamers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucid_dream) to figure out that they're dreaming so they can begin to take control of the dream.
I did really love the idea behind the totem though, very clever.
If someone else has held and seen your totem, they can possible recreate it exactly in a dream. If they can recreate it then they can trick you into thinking you aren't dreaming when you actually are.
...just four?
Hmm, actually there was multi-threading, using sort of kick-based synchronisation primitive.
I think they actually used an actor-based threading model.
try {
// ... do what the OP wrote
} catch (DeathException D) {
enterLimboState() ...
}
}Of course, I also hold a disdain for "proper quoting".
What do you mean here? When talking about "proper quoting", I much prefer what I just did to what you're supposed to do (in American English) for "proper quoting."
I feel like when you quote things they become a unit together with the quotes, and the punctuation should then treat the whole composition as a single object. You wouldn't stick punctuation in the middle of the word at the end of a claus,e so why would you do that with quote?s
By any chance is this one of those quirks of American grammar usage that I've not come across before. The only times where I've seen disapproval of the use of 'they' in that fashion was on the Internet... By any chance is this another Ame
For instance: "if such a person existed, they were very quiet about their existence". Note that it's not "they was", which is grammatically incorrect.
Generic singular "he" is an older usage that is slowly phasing out as society changes. When I find myself using "he" for this, I always notice that it doesn't quite feel right anymore. Of course most people who favor this usage point to its "standard" correctness (cf. this thread), but that's pointing to the past. What's interesting is that we're in a pluralistic stage where there are many competing alternatives -- generic "he", alternating "he" and "she", "he or she", singular "they" -- none of which quite feels right.
This is untenable in the long run because it forces you to think about which one to use. That's way too much runtime overhead, and it's not how language works. Vernacular is a don't-make-me-think thing. That's the real problem with sprout's suggestion in the GP, i.e. rewording to drop the generic singular altogether. It's a viable alternative, and I do it all the time, but it's also the most expensive.
There's no way this gap won't get filled. The only reason we haven't seen it yet is that fundamental language shifts are slow relative to a human lifespan.
The option I find most annoying is the "sometimes use 'he' and sometimes use 'she'" one, which is like solving a design problem in a function by offloading it entirely to the caller. Not only do you have to think about which one to use, you also have to reference-count to keep the two in balance over time. No way is that one going to survive. (I also find that people who do this tend to be annoying tsk-tsk types, though maybe that's a prejudice.) My money's on singular "they", because it's the simplest, it's truly generic, and -- amusingly contrary to all the pseudo-grammarians who freak out about it -- it has a long history in English. Great examples at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they.
However -- while I have heard plenty of suggestions for resolving the issue from college english professors, none of them have managed to convince the Central Board of Oppressive English to accept their proposal, and so we might just be stuck with non gender-neutral pronouns and awkward she/he constructions for the time being.
'They' might emerge as a ambiguously plural/singular gender-neutral pronoun, but in the meantime I won't berate anyone for sticking to the accepted standard.
Don't get me wrong. I don't believe in the strict male/female binary or in universal identity, and I don't know if a woman inherently writes different from a man. But I do think that language's assumptions shape the way we think, and therefore the laws we make. That is enough for me to seek a more neutral and equitable way of speaking.