Diary of a Wimpy Kid should've been titled Diary of a Selfish, Dishonest Punk. That's not exactly a knock against the kid-friendly comedy, directed by Thor Freudenthal from the best-selling series of books by cartoonist Jeff Kinney. It's just an observation. Greg Heffley (played by Zachary Gordon) is almost like the Larry David of the junior high set -- scheming, self-absorbed, prone to lying and manipulating situations to get his own way. I have no idea if that's how Kinney characterized Greg in the books, but it makes for a unique protagonist for a family film. I'm accustomed, through a lifetime of movie-watching, to seeing good kids become social outcasts through no real fault of their own. Diary of a Wimpy Kid's Greg is so selfish that everything that befalls him feels like karmic retribution.

I don't think that's a weakness; that's just the way it is here. Not to spoil anything, but even Greg's big opportunity for a selfless, redeeming act at the film's finale has him lying to everyone at his school, then literally calling them all stupid. The strange thing is that the filmmakers seem unaware of the character they've created on screen, something akin to watching The Wonder Years if it starred Eric Cartman instead of Kevin Arnold.

While I don't really feel like Greg's questionable morals hinder the film, the screenplay's rambling, episodic approach doesn't help it. The movie is about Greg's desire to climb a junior high social ladder of his own creation, a 1-to-200 ranking system where he sees himself in the top twenty, and his best friend Rowley (Robert Capron) hovering around the bottom fifty. This means of course that he'll gladly tromp all over his relationship with his best pal in order to appear cool to a bunch of people he doesn't even really know, taking part in a series of extracurricular activities that he's in no way suited for.

Filed under: Comedy, New Releases, Theatrical Reviews, 20th Century Fox, Family Films

Continue reading Review: Diary of a Wimpy Kid

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19th March 2010: Arturia has announced The One, a single-box containing every Arturia software instrument and a single license to activate one of them. This product comes from a simple observation: in stores, it may...

Dans le cadre d'une refonte de l'interface des futures versions de Firefox, la fondation Mozilla s'est penchée sur les menus et articles que les utilisateurs sollicitent le plus fréquemment. Une observation qui d'une certaine manière peut s'appliquer à d'autres navigateurs, ces logiciels ...

Ask MAKE is a weekly column where we answer reader questions, like yours. Write them in to mattm@makezine.comor drop us a line on Twitter. We can't wait to tackle your conundrums!

Liz writes:

I'd like to install an outdoor wired (or wireless) low light stationary camera outside my residence - I'd like it to annunciate to a mirror sort of similar to the rear view mirror camera that only activates once the vehicle is in reverse. Is there a way to develop a mirror capable of switching to the camera on cue by using a light switch or something along those lines? The "mirror" would be located adjacent to my front door and framed aesthetically as it's primary role would essentially be a mirror until you needed to access the camera. Thank you in advance for giving us a heads up!

Oh, that sounds like a fun project! You can't really buy a mirror that can be turned on or off (at least to my knowledge). Instead, what you want is a 'one-way' or half-silvered mirror. These are the kind of mirror that you might see featured in a movie about an interrogation room, where observers can hide in an an adjacent room and look through.

The mirror doesn't really only allow light to pass in one direction, though. Instead, it has a fine metal coating on it that reflects one half of the light that goes through it, and lets the other half pass through as if it were a regular pane of glass. The trick is that the secret observation room is kept much darker than the investigation room, so that any light that does make it the wrong way through the mirror is overpowered by the reflection from the main room. If the observers mistakenly turned on their lights (or lit a cigarette), the people in the investigation room would be able to see them!

If you build a little cabinet to hide the display for your camera, and put a piece of one-way mirror glass over the front, then I think you will get the effect that you want. To be able to see the feed from the camera, just turn on the display, and it will instantly visible. Look for TV mirror glass- it's a product designed to do exactly what you are looking for. I was able to find a few manufacturers that are selling small sample sizes for ~$20, which should be more than adequate for a small camera monitor. Good luck with your project!

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Publication Date: 2010 Mar 15 PMID: 20231229Authors: Yomtovian, I. - Teerakulkittipong, N. - Lee, B. - Moult, J. - Unger, R.Journal: BioinformaticsMOTIVATION: Intriguingly, sequence analysis of genomes reveals that a large number of genes are unique to each organism. The origin of these genes, termed ORFans, is not known. Here, we explore the origin of ORFan genes by defining a simple measure called "composition bias", based on the deviation of the amino acid composition of a given sequence from the average composition of all proteins of a given genome. RESULTS: For a set of 47 prokaryotic genomes, we show that the amino acid composition bias of real proteins, random "proteins" (created by using the nucleotide frequencies of each genome), and "proteins" translated from intergenic regions are distinct. For ORFans, we observed a correlation between their composition bias and their relative evolutionary age. Recent ORFan proteins have compositions more similar to those of random "proteins", while the compositions of more ancient ORFan proteins are more similar to those of the set of all proteins of the organism. This observation is consistent with an evolutionary scenario wherein ORFan genes emerged and underwent a large number of random mutations and selection, eventually adapting to the composition preference of their organism over time.post to: CiteULike