Of comics and films

Let's be honest. Whether you're a big fan or comics or not, the Marvel franchises have been doing great in the film industry. When I say great I don't only mean they've done some serious money with them but also they are very fun to watch.

  

  

Somehow they managed to introduce characters with they own film and then connect all of them in one big awesome combo, which is still fun on its own. Personally, I've always been a huge fan of Spiderman, which is my favourite superhero. I started watching Spiderman cartoons since the 80s, then in the 90s I also watched the X-Men cartoon.



However, what really got me into the X-Men were not the comics nor the cartoons, but the videogames. It all started with the Capcom fighting game X-Men: Children of the Atom, but then came X-Men: Mutant Apocalypse (for SNES in 1994), Marvel Superheroes (1995), Marvel vs Capcom: Clash of Superheroes (1998), and finally Marvel: Ultimate Alliance (2006)



So that's basically all my knowledge on Marvel characters comes from. I became a fan of some particular characters such as Jean Grey, Psylocke, and Gambit besides of course Spiderman during all those years.

But after the Iron Man film in 2008 I became an immediate fan, I think it's a pretty awesome film. I also enjoyed the rest of the films of the Avengers team: The Incredible Hulk (2008), Iron Man 2 (2010), Thor (2011), and Captain America: The First Avenger (2011). I even enjoyed the first Hulk film in 2003 which I still think is good. But Joss Whedon's The Avengers (2012) is just beyond amazing.

I started watching, everything Avengers after that film. My favourite being this TV show called Avengers: Earth Mightiest Heroes which had a pretty cool intro. I guess it was cancelled because Disney preferred to have some consistency among the cartoons and the films rather than the consistency between the cartoons and the comics.

The awesomeness reached by the Marvel Cinematic Universe is way too far over the top for DC comics to try something similar now. They had a pretty cool Batman trilogy where the popular opinion is that was increasingly good, I, in contrast, think the opposite: Batman Begins (2005) was way better than The Dark Knight (2008) which was better than The Dark Knight Rises (2012). Don't get me wrong, I think the three of them are really cool. 

DC then presented Man of Steel (2013) with a fresh start on Superman, but apparently they want to develop this story into a Justice League film. First they announced that the next film will include not only Henry Cavill as Superman but also a Ben Affleck as Batman and, interestingly, Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman.

Clearly, DC is trying to do things differently. I expect them to be able to pull off this really cool too. If their attempt to a Justice League film (which by the way, it totally diminishes the importance of the team when one says Justice League of America) makes it big there's a chance spin offs of solo films will appear and that'd be really awesome. 

What am I expecting from the next "Batman vs Superman" film? Well, firstly, not to be called Batman vs Superman, I expect it to be a story where Superman meets Batman fighting against a common threat, namely: Lex Luthor. I hope it really pays off.

Meanwhile, I'm expecting Days of Future Past and Guardians of the Galaxy to be the big films of this year. One will be released until August but the other one's released by the end of May, so nearly one month now, so I better start watching all existing X-Men films now... you know, just as a reminder of the story so far.

Spoiler free

This is a very serious topic. Decision making would be a trivial problem if there were no uncertainty over the consequences of our choices. Therefore, the knowledge, or lack of, information is vital for the decisions we make, whether they are thoroughly thought or subconscious ones. If one already knew where the goat is in the Monty Hall problem, right?

Well, when one is watching a film or reading a book there are a lot of things going on with one's mind. I'm going to take for example Harry Potter... so this is the spoiler alert, skip this paragraph or keep reading under your own discretion... In the Philosopher's Stone, Rowling keeps developing the idea that Professor Snape is the bad guy of the story but it ends up not being it. During the Chamber of Secrets, the idea still lingers but by The Prisoner of Azkaban we are all quite sure he is a, bad tempered, good guy. Plot twist! In the Half-Blood Prince, Snape kills Dumbledore! Major WTF moment! No one saw that one coming. Would it be cool knowing this from the very beginning? I don't think so.

In recent weeks a couple of very good friends casually posted on facebook a couple of spoilers for Game of Thrones and The Amazing Spiderman 2 respectively, and they're justifying it by saying that the internet is full of spoilers. They do have a point, the internet is full of spoilers. As soon as the plot of anything hits the general public one can find the story on the web. But I believe that one thing is to actively search for that information and another very different is to just find it while reading your facebook.

There's nothing wrong on writing anything, but I think it is quite inconsiderate to post spoilers, or more generally, give spoilers on casual conversations. One should find out if the person one's addressing has already seen the film or if he's intending to see it before giving up a spoiler. Or at least, as I did here, warn your audience with a spoiler alert so that they can decide accordingly.

Another argument I heard is "Dude, read the books!" Well, it so happens that I do read some books, but just as the films I see, I only see the books, films, and shows I like. I read the first LOTR book and I didn't enjoy it on the other hand I really like the films. The other way around, one of my favourite books is Timeline by Michael Crichton, years later they made a film out of that book. I thought it was going to be awesome... and it's one of the worst films ever. But sometimes I enjoy the film and the book too like with Ender's Game.

The point is that the book, the comic, the graphic novel, the videogame, and the film are all different objects even when based on the same story. One should not expect that everybody should know everything. 

So next time you are about to give away some information that was not required by your audience, think about it twice, don't be a dick and don't give away spoilers.

2048

Yes, I became a bit obsessed with the game for a while. If you don't know the game I'm talking about, I'm referring to the 2048 and the objective is to gather powers of 2 to get them add to 2048. You may want to go play the original version here.

The Internet of course didn't stop there and as an unstoppable avalanche created different versions of the game. I must say that professors of both my universities star in some of the games. See the ITAM edition and the Uni of Bath edition. Personally, my favourite version is the Doctor Who edition starring all 11 doctors.

Later on, I found an app for my phone and I was able to play it on the go. The problem was that when I posted my score on facebook I realised there is an option menu to play indefinitely. That meaning that the game wouldn't stop after getting 2048... so the natural thing to do was go for the 4096 and of course 8192.

The problem of course is that space is crucial and optimising the space to get higher and higher numbers becomes increasingly difficult... and of course there's a random element that complicates things even further. I haven't seen any pages where there are some serious maths on the game, however I found some people are gathering Matlab implementations and algorithms that give high scores. Personally I haven't done (nor plan to do) any algorithmic implementation or real maths about it. Having said that, here's my personal best mark when I decided to retire from the game from a while.

Find the function!

I've been seriously busy so I haven't had time something "interesting"... however, let me share this problem I found in the board of the kitchen:

Find all functions $f:\mathbb Q_+\rightarrow\mathbb R$ such that:
1. $f(x+y)\geq f(x)+f(y)$.
2. $f(xy)\leq f(x)f(y)$.
3. $\exists a>1$ such that $f(a)=a$.

If you find them... I guess your having more free time than I do. Good luck!