| Monday
August 12, 2002
A reader just saw Signs...
I wasn't expecting much, certainly the trailers were
a turn off. But I had read a couple of brief reviews from sources I trust
that basically said, "don't ask any questions, just go and see
it."
It's like some lost 50's low budget science fiction
script that for some reason didn't get made until now. Rod Serling dialog
(without the overt irony) and a Charles Beaumount/Richard Matheson plot.
It's also full of a strange Max-Shulman-on-acid weirdness, with
apocalyptic overtones (the scene in the Army Recruiting office is
priceless). Add a touch of the best of EC horror comics (definitely a Jack
Davis story) and a gentle dash of Ray Bradbury for imagery.
The director understands that not showing is scarier
than showing, and that hearing is scarier still. He also knows that the
most frightening (and unexpected) thing to a modern American would be for
CNN to suddenly going off the air during a crisis. From one minute to the
next you don't have a clue what's really going on or what's about to
happen. And its as scary as shit...
Visually, it was made as if effects were still
expensive and you had to use good writing, acting, and clever
cinematography to cover up the fact you can't afford to really show
anything. It does make effective use of the same kind of color styling
that _O brother, where art thou_ used.
The script is the tightest, most structured story
I've seen in some time. Its as full of detail as a _trompe l'oeil_
painting with a sound track to match. And nearly every detail is
significant (pun intended) to the plot. If anything, it may be too
structured, although that fits in with the basic conceit of the story
(which I won't go into and don't really buy as advertised).
I will add that the story really makes no sense
what-so-ever outside of its own premise. Its a well worn device used to
support an excellent 50's style psychological character study/drama.
Imagine Sidney Lumet directing _The beast with 10,000 eyes_ or _It came
from outer space_.
Fortunately, for me anyway, I am a complete sucker
for this type of thing. I enjoyed it greatly even as I didn't believe a
word of it.
David Reynolds
We saw it over the weekend. It's not
science fiction, or rather, it's closer to C S Lewis's idea of science
fiction than the hard science Niven and I write. We liked it, and it will
be in the August column as movie of the month, but do not go see it
expecting to see hard science fiction. It makes no attempt to be that.
I don't have time to do the
following justice:
Jerry, just found a link at Bruce Sterlings Veridian
Design (www.viridiandesign.org) to a Guardian UK article about the
carrying capacity of the Earth, or at least its fuel/food resources. They
state that we'll be on empty and need to colonize 2 other planets by 2050,
or cut our consumption levels radically. Interestingly, they didn't
mention more feasable options, such as mining the asteroid belt, merely
stated that finding 2 human colonizable planets by then would be needed. I
think the fact that they fail to mention in-Solar System resources and
state that due to the infeasability of interstellar colonization by then
("there is no other option") reveals there left leaning
eco-political bent, but we knew that already, no? :-)
Anyway, I find the mere presence of a discussion of
space exploitation in such a mainstream media outlet encouraging, even
though they do not see it as a viable option yet, they see it as
inevitable and needed implicitly.
This is a Good Thing!
Story is at <a http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6903
,750783,00.html">http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/
0,6903,750783,00.html
Cheers,
Raul
Ninety percent of the resources
easily available to mankind are not on the Earth. Getting to space and
using space resources is fairly easy once we make it getting to orbit
about as cheap as air travel around the world. That can be done: see my various
space papers here on this site. The carrying capacity of the Earth
isn't really the point. Again see my old Step Farther Out essay on
Survival with Style. I still give that lecture sometimes, although no one
has paid me to do it in a while.
And Harry Erwin comments on the Mid
East Policy as Fantasy paper:
An interesting paper. One issue is that I'm not sure
anyone can claim they see the world as it really is. Mammals seem to live
in an internal model that is updated asynchronously based on sensory data,
and they choose their behavior based on that model, not on their
sensations. This is particularly clear in bats, where we see the
Wiederorientierung phenomenon: bats flying in a familiar area often seem
to ignore sensory afference and instead depend almost exclusively on their
memory of the area. First reported by Möhres and Öttingen-Spielberg in
1949, it describes two states: . Erstorientierung-when bats first
encounter a novel situation. . Wiederorientierung-when bats fly in a
familiar space. It was observed in the behavior of a bat that was
accustomed to roosting in a cage in a room. The researchers rotated the
cage and eventually removed it, and noted that the bat continued to behave
as if the cage were in its normal position until forced to reorient. This
suggests that bats use and maintain a world model that is only modified if
circumstances force it to.
Rawson and Griffin investigated this further (see
Griffin, Listening in the dark, the Acoustic Orientation of Bats and Men,
Yale, 1958, and Griffin, "Cognitive aspects of echolocation," in
Nachtigall and Moore, ed., Animal Sonar: Processes and Performance, Plenum
Press , 1988). . Asked whether the bats even made cries at all. .
Experiment involved placing and moving obstacles in a flight room. .
Answer: the bat still made echolocation cries, but seemed to ignore the
resulting returns. Maintenance of congruence between the internal model
and the environment is asynchronous, low-rate, effortful, and involves a
'dialog' (Griffin) between the animal and its environment. There is also
evidence from human psychology for similar ideas (see Walter J Freeman,
1995, Societies of Brains, LEA). The concept that brains are isolated from
the objective world is called epistemological (not metaphysical!)
solipsism.
Why do I mention epistemological solipsism? Because
it implies _everyone_ lives in an internal model in more or less
incomplete agreement with objective reality. The interpretations of 9/11
as a martyrdom and as a war by terrorists are both descriptions of
internal models in incomplete congruence with reality. Objectively, it was
an event involving the deaths of thousands, made 'meaningful' only by
those internal models of how things 'really' work.
The implication for me is that since those internal
models are causal (i.e., minds express intention), we need to understand
them to predict them. (Note that one interpretation of evolution in Homo
is that need has driven brain growth!) Calling them 'fantasies' begs the
question. To some extent, everyone lives in a fantasy world, but being
able to model the fantasies of others allows us to predict their actions.
--
--- Harry Erwin, PhD, Senior Lecturer of Computing,
University of Sunderland. Computational neuroscientist modeling bat
bioacoustics and behavior. <http://www.cet.sunderland.ac.uk/~cs0her/index.html>
Well, I have never thought that
Plato and the parable of the cave were entirely irrelevant to modern life,
but then I'm one of those old dinosaurs who reads philosophy books.
Scientific method has been so successful that we forget some things about
why it works.
And another comment on the same
paper:
Dr. Pournelle:
Do you think there is a parallel between Bin Laden
and Charles Manson? Manson told his followers about Helter Skelter, a plan
loosely based on lyrics of a Beatles song, where the Tate and LaBianca
murders were to be conducted to look like the work of black gangs against
white victims, which would provide the spark for an apocalyptic race war.
I get the impression that Bin Laden's attacks were
not so much to vanquish or intimidate the U.S. as to provoke the U.S. into
a retaliatory strike, which would bring more recruits to radical Islam,
resulting in a cycle of escalation between cultures as Helter Skelter writ
large.
While there will always be crazy/evil/sociopathic/fantasy-prone
people like Manson, Bin Laden, and perhaps Hitler is in that group too
(the Nazi racial theories go far beyond self interest for the German
people), there is a social and cultural setting that permits them to
thrive. Manson, and perhaps Donald Defreeze fo the SLA, were operating in
the twilight days of the counter-culture/hippie/anti-war movement and were
perhaps able to draw followers representing themselves as leaders willing
to keep those respective dreams alive. Hitler of course thrived in a
defeated, depression-ridden Germany, while Bin Laden is an epi-phenomenom
of our appetite for oil, the peculiar geography of where oil is found in
abundance, and the large amount of money poured into a feudal regime for
resource extraction -- no country has achieved greatness from profits of
resource extraction alone -- with nothing to show for it in terms of
economic development.
Paul Milenkovic Madison, Wisconsin
More commentary, this time on the
Internet paper. And a question
Dear Dr. Pournelle,
I just read the screed
by Bill Thompson. What is a "professor of philosophy manque"?
Manque translates to "missed" (according to Google), which
certainly brings his essay into sharp perspective, but I gather that's not
the full contextual meaning... Pseudo-intellectuals seem to fear clarity,
likely for good reason.
Once I got past his sneering contempt for all things
American, particularly our core principles of individual rights and
limited government, and his adolescent delight in ad hominem, his argument
boiled down to this:
"We, the elites, must control the Internet as
we control everything else, in order to prevent our peasants being exposed
to ideas we have not approved. We know better."
I particularly enjoyed this revealing statement:
"In Europe community standards for freedom of
speech differ substantially from those of the United States, where any
sensible discussion is crippled by the constitution ..."
I can imagine his horror at having his
"sensible discussion" "crippled" by opposing
viewpoints, particularly from the hoi polloi! That won't do at all; we
must have Ordnung! There are policies and procedures and rules and...no
place for the individual except to submit and obey.
Of course, this attitude is actively infesting the
US as well; we are perhaps a generation behind them in terms of
"progress".
Could a link to the article be added to the
discussion on "Transnational Progressivism"? It looks like an
excellent example.
Regards,
Gordon Runkle
-- "Far and away the best prize that life has
to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing." -- Theodore
Roosevelt
A writer manqué is a person who
wants to be a writer, poses as one, but is no good at it.
"Failed" would be a better translation than "missed"
although missed works if you think of it as missing a mark, attempting
something and failing.
An ONION for MICROSOFT
Jerry- I know that it's way early for
orchids and onions but I would like to nominate the XP programmer that
thought it was a good idea to not only default num lock to off but to also
make sure that it couldn't be overridden by the bios setting for a large
onion. I administrate a good number of PC's that routinely mix letters and
numbers in passwords. Every reboot, numlock goes off. What a pain. I suppose
I can write a vbs script to fix it but shouldn't have to. Oh well, thanks
for letting me vent. Best regards, Barry Zakes
The problem is solved. See below.
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