Is there any more intimidating entity in the entire cosmos than a blank sheet of paper? That big, white expanse is laying there staring up at you with all its potential just oozing off at the corners. What appears on that paper next relies entirely on your skill as a poet, an author, a commentator, an artist. Properly addressed, that paper could become the greatest work of literature that the human race has ever seen. It could, at your hand, become the most delightful work of art yet known to mankind. The very problems of humanity could melt away in rapturous applause and universal adulation if only you could find the RIGHT thing to put on that FUCKING PIECE OF BLANK PAPER!
But of course you don’t. You prattle on endlessly about lost loves or loves most fervently hoped for or the bit of undercooked sausage that you had for dinner that might later turn into a tapeworm. You’ll scribble indolently for a few moments, realize that the proportions of the head and the torso just aren’t QUITE right and then resign yourself to imperfection and toss your work into the trash. What was such potential mere minutes ago is now nothing more than an angular heap of folds of paper. If you’re extremely lucky, perhaps the parabola which your work traces between your hand and the trash can will be deemed elegant by the gods of aesthetics. But even if that is so it doesn’t really matter.
It’s not the gods who are really important. Those Olympian icons of heavenly perfection are irrelevant. No, what’s really important, what really drives us to spill the results of our imperfect, randomly-firing synapses onto that piece of paper, to spoil all that potential is, in fact, the thoughts of a million other imperfect, randomly-firing synapses. All art, all acts of creation are fundamentally acts of narcissism. We spill out our words and our pictures not to please the gods, not to achieve perfection, not to solve the world’s problems but to bring ourselves into the worlds of more people. Whether we write, or draw, or sing, we do it so that we don’t feel quite so tiny, so small, so insignificant. Every person who knows we exist makes us just the tiniest bit bigger.
So in a way, each work of mankind is about success; and each work of mankind is about failure. We succeed in that we expand our worlds just ever so slightly by each life that we touch. We fail in that what we create, what we call into existence at our bidding is so much less than the potential of what we started out with. Though one may write a million words on a million pages, though one may surpass Shakespeare and Dickens and Tolstoy if one works at it long enough and hard enough, whatever one writes will pale in comparison to the potential of what could have been, what might have been on that blank sheet of paper.
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Sunday, July 12, 2009
God: Still a Jerk After 6,000 Years
In Genesis chapter 22, God commands Abraham, who had no small difficulty having a child at all, to take his son Isaac to the top of a mountain and slit his throat. Abraham doesn’t ask why and no doubt it wouldn’t have done him any good to have asked anyway. God always has his –reasons-. Luckily for Isaac, God sent an angel at the last minute to stop the sacrifice but it still begs the question of WHY you would put someone through such an ordeal. Especially someone who has been as faithful as Abraham.
A few short millennia later I’m watching the morning news and who should grace my vision but a poor child in a wheelchair. She’s the victim of a debilitating condition that will probably take her life before she reaches adulthood. As the reporter is talking to her she pipes up that she’s not sad that she’s this way. God made her this way –for a reason-. Again, here’s the Christian God with his undisclosed –reasons-. What POSSSIBLE justification could there be for purposefully allowing a child to suffer in this way? What chain of causal events could be so beneficial to the world that it would justify a human soul trapped for an entire lifetime in a fragile and decaying body this way? I’m sure that God has his –reasons-.
It endlessly amazes me that we hold the character of God up to such different standards than we apply to ourselves. If a mad scientist came to us and said that he could improve the world in some unspecified way if he were just allowed to inject 10 children with drugs that would cripple them for life, would we let him? Perhaps we would if those were children from some other country since we seem to put a much lower value on those but 10 random American children? Would we? Of course we wouldn’t. There would be rioting in the streets. Would there be any reason that could be given? Would we cripple 10 children to save 100? To save 1000? To feed every starving person in Africa? To educate every ignorant yokel in Appalachia to the point that they could actually spell Appalachia? I doubt it. There is no reason, no objective, that would be good enough to satisfy our combined moral outrage. Yet when God, in his –infinite- wisdom, strikes down a child for no discernable reason we all just nod and say, -he has his reasons-.
No, what it really boils down to is that we don’t understand it and, like every other facet of religion, we rely on the perceived –wisdom- of God as a comfort for our outrage. Truth is, there’s no excuse for it. If God really pulls this shit for some reason then he’s a jerk. Plain and simple. It’s much easier for us to simply shrug it off and say that we can’t –possibly- understand God ‘cuz we’re just too frickin’ stoopid but that if we did then we’d all nod and make the same sad decision ourselves.
Is the alternative hypothesis to this really so horrible? Say for a moment that God exists but that he doesn’t bother himself with every meaningless triviality in the cosmos. Sure, he’s helping NFL receivers catch touchdown passes but he’s not intimately involved in the exact reproductive configuration of every pair of Kentucky cousins who choose to settle down and bring up some yungins. As a consequence, mistakes happen. Chromosomes get lost or shuffled around and defects in the system crop up from time to time but on the whole the human species manages to procreate just fine. Under this system God is not a jerk so much as he is merely careless. Perhaps he just hadn’t yet had his morning coffee. I don’t know about you but I’d much prefer to live with someone who’s a bit of a grump and a smidge careless before he (or she) has had their morning coffee than with someone who clearly has it out for me and has omnipotence to back it up.
A few short millennia later I’m watching the morning news and who should grace my vision but a poor child in a wheelchair. She’s the victim of a debilitating condition that will probably take her life before she reaches adulthood. As the reporter is talking to her she pipes up that she’s not sad that she’s this way. God made her this way –for a reason-. Again, here’s the Christian God with his undisclosed –reasons-. What POSSSIBLE justification could there be for purposefully allowing a child to suffer in this way? What chain of causal events could be so beneficial to the world that it would justify a human soul trapped for an entire lifetime in a fragile and decaying body this way? I’m sure that God has his –reasons-.
It endlessly amazes me that we hold the character of God up to such different standards than we apply to ourselves. If a mad scientist came to us and said that he could improve the world in some unspecified way if he were just allowed to inject 10 children with drugs that would cripple them for life, would we let him? Perhaps we would if those were children from some other country since we seem to put a much lower value on those but 10 random American children? Would we? Of course we wouldn’t. There would be rioting in the streets. Would there be any reason that could be given? Would we cripple 10 children to save 100? To save 1000? To feed every starving person in Africa? To educate every ignorant yokel in Appalachia to the point that they could actually spell Appalachia? I doubt it. There is no reason, no objective, that would be good enough to satisfy our combined moral outrage. Yet when God, in his –infinite- wisdom, strikes down a child for no discernable reason we all just nod and say, -he has his reasons-.
No, what it really boils down to is that we don’t understand it and, like every other facet of religion, we rely on the perceived –wisdom- of God as a comfort for our outrage. Truth is, there’s no excuse for it. If God really pulls this shit for some reason then he’s a jerk. Plain and simple. It’s much easier for us to simply shrug it off and say that we can’t –possibly- understand God ‘cuz we’re just too frickin’ stoopid but that if we did then we’d all nod and make the same sad decision ourselves.
Is the alternative hypothesis to this really so horrible? Say for a moment that God exists but that he doesn’t bother himself with every meaningless triviality in the cosmos. Sure, he’s helping NFL receivers catch touchdown passes but he’s not intimately involved in the exact reproductive configuration of every pair of Kentucky cousins who choose to settle down and bring up some yungins. As a consequence, mistakes happen. Chromosomes get lost or shuffled around and defects in the system crop up from time to time but on the whole the human species manages to procreate just fine. Under this system God is not a jerk so much as he is merely careless. Perhaps he just hadn’t yet had his morning coffee. I don’t know about you but I’d much prefer to live with someone who’s a bit of a grump and a smidge careless before he (or she) has had their morning coffee than with someone who clearly has it out for me and has omnipotence to back it up.
Saturday, July 11, 2009
Old, Old News: November 25, 1911
In pouring over The Literary Digest over the past few months, one of the things that strikes me is just how little and yet how much things change over the years. Take, for example, this political cartoon from the November 1911 edition:
In it, we see President Taft depicted as a fat, round ball being rolled about in a maze. Most certainly he was our heftiest President but did he deserve this kind of abuse? It's one thing to make fun of Bush because he can't pronounce simple words but if we had a fat president today or one with any sort of impairment at all would we be so gratuitous about it? More to the point perhaps, would such a man even stand a chance in our more connected age? Remember, this was in a time before television and radio.
It's also amusing to note just how far women have come in the past 100 years. This is the time of the suffragette, remember and such comments as "twelve women cannot be counted upon to agree about anything" are rife in the press. Any paper today making this claim would find itself the object of more than a bit of negative press. Even more amusing is the topics about which the press seems to concern itself. Note at the bottom of the first column in the page referred to above that there's "cause for alarm" because the women on the jury were allowed to keep their hats on. The continuation of the complaint indicating that a man on such a mixed jury of would be "lucky to retain his scalp" because of all the hatpins in use in the jury box. Ladies, you have come a long way since 1911.
By far the best part of these old publications is the "Science and Invention" section. I'm relatively certain that the "open-air" telescope idea never quite made it off the ground. The article on railway sanitation is an eye-opening one. We tend to forget, I think, in our concern over greenhouse gases just how dirty a prospect traveling was a mere 100 years ago. The article following that one must make any modern photographer smile. This was a day even before film when photographs were taken on photographic plates with the standard size being 4 inches by 5. The section goes on to talk about the reclassification of spiders, advances in farming and a few other random topics.
One of the most amusing aspects of the Digest is it's advertising. Since its primary audience was the exceptionally rich most of its ads are thus appropriately targeted. Your grandparents probably recalled the ubiquitous Victrola:
But you'd probably have to go back to your great-grandparents to find anyone who ever drove a Haynes (built in Kokomo, Indiana):
But many of these products are still around more or less in their original form...
But you wouldn't see some of these on the back of Better Homes and Gardens, that's for sure...
Those interested can read the entire issue of the magazine in digital format on my Picassa page.
In it, we see President Taft depicted as a fat, round ball being rolled about in a maze. Most certainly he was our heftiest President but did he deserve this kind of abuse? It's one thing to make fun of Bush because he can't pronounce simple words but if we had a fat president today or one with any sort of impairment at all would we be so gratuitous about it? More to the point perhaps, would such a man even stand a chance in our more connected age? Remember, this was in a time before television and radio.
It's also amusing to note just how far women have come in the past 100 years. This is the time of the suffragette, remember and such comments as "twelve women cannot be counted upon to agree about anything" are rife in the press. Any paper today making this claim would find itself the object of more than a bit of negative press. Even more amusing is the topics about which the press seems to concern itself. Note at the bottom of the first column in the page referred to above that there's "cause for alarm" because the women on the jury were allowed to keep their hats on. The continuation of the complaint indicating that a man on such a mixed jury of would be "lucky to retain his scalp" because of all the hatpins in use in the jury box. Ladies, you have come a long way since 1911.
By far the best part of these old publications is the "Science and Invention" section. I'm relatively certain that the "open-air" telescope idea never quite made it off the ground. The article on railway sanitation is an eye-opening one. We tend to forget, I think, in our concern over greenhouse gases just how dirty a prospect traveling was a mere 100 years ago. The article following that one must make any modern photographer smile. This was a day even before film when photographs were taken on photographic plates with the standard size being 4 inches by 5. The section goes on to talk about the reclassification of spiders, advances in farming and a few other random topics.
One of the most amusing aspects of the Digest is it's advertising. Since its primary audience was the exceptionally rich most of its ads are thus appropriately targeted. Your grandparents probably recalled the ubiquitous Victrola:
But you'd probably have to go back to your great-grandparents to find anyone who ever drove a Haynes (built in Kokomo, Indiana):
But many of these products are still around more or less in their original form...
But you wouldn't see some of these on the back of Better Homes and Gardens, that's for sure...
Those interested can read the entire issue of the magazine in digital format on my Picassa page.
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
The Grinch Always Makes Me Cry
I have to admit that the holidays never really held any special significance for me. Sure, as a kid they mean getting stuff, stuff you don’t really need, but as an adult, the holidays basically just amount to a blip on the budgetary radar wherein you have to spend money on things you wouldn’t normally spend money on. Despite my uncharitable view on the holiday, this particular Christmas has finally managed to cut through the fog of materialism and really get my attention.
To my co-workers, I gave only as chance dictated. My boss got a book on the proper use of the rhythm method of birth control, my co-workers received a simple plastic glass, a copy of the Necrocomicon and a Satanic Bible as their own personal tastes dictated. Amanda and Isabella received very nearly what they asked for with the exception that Amanda is also the proud owner of a large, natural barnacle scraped from some sea-side edifice. Buying for children is always far too easy to be properly satisfying. For that one particularly special person in my life, I simply poured out my soul as best I could. Circumstance is not yet my ally but I had endless enjoyment devising and executing new ideas to express myself through the physical manifestations of gifts.
No, what took my breath away was not the act of giving in this case, but instead what I received. The closest analogy I can draw is that the giver tore away part of her soul and handed it to me. The giver, one of my closest co-workers, is remote to my office in Indy, which makes this all the more astounding. She sent me a bit of her original artwork, one that she describes as ‘her best’ and I have to admit that it’s pretty impressive. It is indeed a very powerful piece and quite frankly I’ve not yet gotten my mind (or my ability to articulate) around the fact that she sent it to me. What makes me shake my head even more is the fact that when I tried, most inadequately, to express my gratitude, she said in the most self-effacing way that I can imagine, “If you decide to throw it away, please send it back to me first.” Sitting here looking at it hanging on my wall, I want to cry even considering such an act. That someone could send such a gift and at the same time consider that the receiver might simply “throw it away” boggles my mind. It is, simply, unthinkable.
What is even more amusing to me is that at a couple of weeks ago when I heard that she’d gotten me a gift, I racked my brain for a few days considering what I could possibly get her, remembering that in order to do so it had to be truly meaningful. It didn’t take long for my mind to wander around to our previous discussions of art and it quickly dawned on me that the only reasonable gift for her would be an original work of art. Sadly, there wasn’t sufficient time left to produce such an item and Monday found me completely off guard, completely trumped and beaten to my own punch. I stand here agog.
What is truly ironic is that this person may never know just how much of an impact her gift had on me. As I sit here in my empty apartment, listening to the putting of some noisy and mysterious engine outside in the parking lot and the echoes of my own keystrokes, I’m reminded of just how incredibly lonely I am. In the past year I’ve given up absolutely everything; my life has been utterly torn asunder. With a few very scant exceptions, I’ve lost all the people I cared about or even talked to on a regular basis. Her gift gives me very real and potent hope for the future. I may be alone now, as alone as the singular, falling leaf on an autumn day, but I rest assured in the knowledge that I’m only as alone as I allow myself to feel.
Thank you, Amy, for being a shining light in my life and inspiring me to seek out true friendship.
To my co-workers, I gave only as chance dictated. My boss got a book on the proper use of the rhythm method of birth control, my co-workers received a simple plastic glass, a copy of the Necrocomicon and a Satanic Bible as their own personal tastes dictated. Amanda and Isabella received very nearly what they asked for with the exception that Amanda is also the proud owner of a large, natural barnacle scraped from some sea-side edifice. Buying for children is always far too easy to be properly satisfying. For that one particularly special person in my life, I simply poured out my soul as best I could. Circumstance is not yet my ally but I had endless enjoyment devising and executing new ideas to express myself through the physical manifestations of gifts.
No, what took my breath away was not the act of giving in this case, but instead what I received. The closest analogy I can draw is that the giver tore away part of her soul and handed it to me. The giver, one of my closest co-workers, is remote to my office in Indy, which makes this all the more astounding. She sent me a bit of her original artwork, one that she describes as ‘her best’ and I have to admit that it’s pretty impressive. It is indeed a very powerful piece and quite frankly I’ve not yet gotten my mind (or my ability to articulate) around the fact that she sent it to me. What makes me shake my head even more is the fact that when I tried, most inadequately, to express my gratitude, she said in the most self-effacing way that I can imagine, “If you decide to throw it away, please send it back to me first.” Sitting here looking at it hanging on my wall, I want to cry even considering such an act. That someone could send such a gift and at the same time consider that the receiver might simply “throw it away” boggles my mind. It is, simply, unthinkable.
What is even more amusing to me is that at a couple of weeks ago when I heard that she’d gotten me a gift, I racked my brain for a few days considering what I could possibly get her, remembering that in order to do so it had to be truly meaningful. It didn’t take long for my mind to wander around to our previous discussions of art and it quickly dawned on me that the only reasonable gift for her would be an original work of art. Sadly, there wasn’t sufficient time left to produce such an item and Monday found me completely off guard, completely trumped and beaten to my own punch. I stand here agog.
What is truly ironic is that this person may never know just how much of an impact her gift had on me. As I sit here in my empty apartment, listening to the putting of some noisy and mysterious engine outside in the parking lot and the echoes of my own keystrokes, I’m reminded of just how incredibly lonely I am. In the past year I’ve given up absolutely everything; my life has been utterly torn asunder. With a few very scant exceptions, I’ve lost all the people I cared about or even talked to on a regular basis. Her gift gives me very real and potent hope for the future. I may be alone now, as alone as the singular, falling leaf on an autumn day, but I rest assured in the knowledge that I’m only as alone as I allow myself to feel.
Thank you, Amy, for being a shining light in my life and inspiring me to seek out true friendship.
Sunday, December 21, 2008
On the Futility of Ownership
(Edited from a Tattered Thread blog entry originally made on April 16, 2004)
As I sit here watching Fantasia for only the 3rd time with my 5-year-old I'm reminded of the futility of actually attempting to own anything. Those who know me with more intimacy than that transmitted by mere blog entries are no doubt sitting agog in their chairs at those words.
The 5-year-old in question did NOT want to watch Fantasia; instead she was dead set on watching Lion King 1 ½ which due to some unknown circumstance had made itself unavailable at the moment. Anyone who has a child this age knows that quickly the entire purpose of this child's existence became the capture and interrogation of any individual who knew the whereabouts of her lost movie. Clearly, the child has gone from possessing the possessions to being possessed BY the possessions. My daughter's resultant meltdown caused two distinct threads to unravel themselves in my mind.
First, what exactly is the purpose of the cinematic and other visual art forms? It seems clear that the primary purpose for consumption of the arts is the simple visceral reaction invoked by the artwork being consumed. In short, the arts make us feel good.
Secondarily, the work acts to expand the general realm of experience for the viewer. Since humans are the sum of all that they see and hear in a lifetime, art makes us better and broader people no matter what the format. If we take these two statements as axiomatic, then it follows that the greatest possible benefit is derived from any artwork at first encounter while subsequent repetitions provide diminishing returns on time and energy since they are naught but further study on an already familiar concept.
So now one might ask: what exactly is the purpose of accumulating a library of anything when the value of every item in that library diminishes with each use? It would seem the only items worth owning are those that you wish to study and refer back to over a long period of time. Surely my 5-year-old can have no plans to study The Lion King in depth over the next 15 years and refer back to it in her doctorate thesis? Doubtful, so then why own any but the keenest and most worthwhile of items? Why spend one's hard-earned monetary resources on items which depreciate in value and take up space causing you to need special furniture or a bigger house? Are we so materialistic as a people that the act of owning the possession is actually more important than its real value?
This is a tough pill to swallow for me since I tend to approach my library like a collector rather than a reader. On one hand, my tendency to hoard makes me want the entirety of world literature at my fingertips. Rationally, I realize the sad truth: despite the moniker of "classic" many of the novels in my collection are, in fact, obscure and valueless crap. At least I feel I'm a step ahead of the people running garage sales piled with Danielle Steele paperbacks and the complete series of Rocky movies on Betamax.
Post Script:
The entry above was written over four and a half years ago and since then a lot has changed. I've disposed of an unprofitable collectables business and reduced my material footprint on the world (not counting household necessities) to the referenced collection of classic literature (still numbering about 400 volumes), a small collection of other books and the remnants of my foreign coin and currency collection. As I left my abode the other day I realized, quite abruptly, that if all of these items were to vanish, I would really not be all that upset. I maintain the library merely as a symbol of my own bookish nature and the coins and currency are simply too difficult to dispose of in anything but the most profitless manner. This is significant progress considering that in 2004 I had 400-500 square feet of my house devoted to objects which served no purpose whatsoever. It's still a long way to "own no more than you can carry on your back" but I think a few more garage sales should do the trick. Until that time, I think it's time to enjoy a bit of classic literature.
As I sit here watching Fantasia for only the 3rd time with my 5-year-old I'm reminded of the futility of actually attempting to own anything. Those who know me with more intimacy than that transmitted by mere blog entries are no doubt sitting agog in their chairs at those words.
The 5-year-old in question did NOT want to watch Fantasia; instead she was dead set on watching Lion King 1 ½ which due to some unknown circumstance had made itself unavailable at the moment. Anyone who has a child this age knows that quickly the entire purpose of this child's existence became the capture and interrogation of any individual who knew the whereabouts of her lost movie. Clearly, the child has gone from possessing the possessions to being possessed BY the possessions. My daughter's resultant meltdown caused two distinct threads to unravel themselves in my mind.
First, what exactly is the purpose of the cinematic and other visual art forms? It seems clear that the primary purpose for consumption of the arts is the simple visceral reaction invoked by the artwork being consumed. In short, the arts make us feel good.
Secondarily, the work acts to expand the general realm of experience for the viewer. Since humans are the sum of all that they see and hear in a lifetime, art makes us better and broader people no matter what the format. If we take these two statements as axiomatic, then it follows that the greatest possible benefit is derived from any artwork at first encounter while subsequent repetitions provide diminishing returns on time and energy since they are naught but further study on an already familiar concept.
So now one might ask: what exactly is the purpose of accumulating a library of anything when the value of every item in that library diminishes with each use? It would seem the only items worth owning are those that you wish to study and refer back to over a long period of time. Surely my 5-year-old can have no plans to study The Lion King in depth over the next 15 years and refer back to it in her doctorate thesis? Doubtful, so then why own any but the keenest and most worthwhile of items? Why spend one's hard-earned monetary resources on items which depreciate in value and take up space causing you to need special furniture or a bigger house? Are we so materialistic as a people that the act of owning the possession is actually more important than its real value?
This is a tough pill to swallow for me since I tend to approach my library like a collector rather than a reader. On one hand, my tendency to hoard makes me want the entirety of world literature at my fingertips. Rationally, I realize the sad truth: despite the moniker of "classic" many of the novels in my collection are, in fact, obscure and valueless crap. At least I feel I'm a step ahead of the people running garage sales piled with Danielle Steele paperbacks and the complete series of Rocky movies on Betamax.
Post Script:
The entry above was written over four and a half years ago and since then a lot has changed. I've disposed of an unprofitable collectables business and reduced my material footprint on the world (not counting household necessities) to the referenced collection of classic literature (still numbering about 400 volumes), a small collection of other books and the remnants of my foreign coin and currency collection. As I left my abode the other day I realized, quite abruptly, that if all of these items were to vanish, I would really not be all that upset. I maintain the library merely as a symbol of my own bookish nature and the coins and currency are simply too difficult to dispose of in anything but the most profitless manner. This is significant progress considering that in 2004 I had 400-500 square feet of my house devoted to objects which served no purpose whatsoever. It's still a long way to "own no more than you can carry on your back" but I think a few more garage sales should do the trick. Until that time, I think it's time to enjoy a bit of classic literature.
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
What I learned today: Random Astronomy Tidbits
OK, technically this was from last night but I had neither opportunity nor inclination to write it all down at the time. These bits are from the tail end of “Death by Black Hole and other Cosmic Quandaries.” One thing that was brought immediately to mind was the unscientific fact that it’s often much harder to read on a topic that you know something about than one about which you are a complete novice. Of all the sciences, my grounding in astronomy is pretty solid (I have a state champion medal from the Academic Decathlon to prove that much) so when I pick up these books on astronomy it is with no small trepidation. The last thing I need is yet ANOTHER retelling of how stellar spectroscopy works. This forces me into a bit of a pattern of random skimming which makes it hard to find the bits that may be new to me. In the end, nothing struck me as particularly new but it was interesting to be reminded of a few amusing facts about the universe we live in. Let’s begin…
Like a large man with a dermatological condition, the sun is constantly shedding. This is surely not surprising as the sun does put out a hell of a lot of energy. You’ve got the constant onslaught of the cosmic wind and all that heat and light. What may be surprising is the magnitude of the shedding. Yes, boys and girls, it is calculated that the sun sloughs off 4 Million TONS of mass every SECOND. Yes, that’s every second. Not a typo. This gives one a right and appropriate scale of just how BIG the sun is. Welcome to the universe. Two million pickup trucks just gone into the vapor every time the second hand on your watch ticks.
Gravity, in the realm of the four basic forces of the universe, is a complete wuss. The somewhat pathetic example that the book gives is that if by some physically impossible process the Apollo astronauts had brought back the electrons (and just the electrons) from a thimble-full of moon dust then the electromagnetic attraction between those electrons and their orphaned protons back on the moon would have been greater than the gravitational attraction of the entire planet.
Totally unrelatedly, the book goes into some small detail about the so-called fourth state of matter, plasma. In short, plasma is just uber-excited matter. If you heat anything up enough then it’ll fall all over itself and become plasma. To those of us bound to the Earth this is most typically expressed as lightning. When lightning strikes, the air around the discharge becomes plasma and behaves according to a wonderously new set of rules. In my book, plasma is boring. What we really want to talk about is the TRULY degenerate states of matter. Let’s start with the stuff of dwarf stars. Think back to high school physics and chemistry and imagine the model of the atom. You’ve got the happy nucleus with its boisterous cloud of rotating electrons. That’s the stuff of normal matter but think for a moment what happens at the heart of super-dense stars. Eventually these massive furnaces run out of fuel. When they do, then they begin to collapse. A typical star is a constant battle between the energy pouring OUTWARD from nuclear fusion and gravity pulling INWARD. I won’t go into the details here but when a star begins to run out of fuel, then gravity begins to win the battle and slowly the star compresses. Eventually, the compression becomes SO intense that the atom itself is compromised. Rather than being comprised of a nucleus and a cloud of electrons, imagine the empty space being crunched down to the point where even the electrons are bound together in the nucleus and the nuclei are stacked right on top of each other. This is the stuff of the dwarf star. All the empty space has been most rudely removed leaving a super-dense material that the sci-fi aficionados refer to as “Dwarf Star Alloy”. Super dense and super tough, this is the no-nonsense material of the universe.
In some cases though, we go even further. If a dwarf star becomes TOO dense then it condenses even more. Based on the description of dwarf stars though, you may ask “how can this possibly be? There’s nowhere else for the matter to go?” And this is exactly true. Dwarf stars are comprised of matter packed tightly together to the nth degree. There’s no empty space left. Neutrons and protons and electrons are stacked on top of each other like a child’s building blocks. Beyond a certain point, the very laws of physics themselves are compromised. Above a certain mass the dwarf star actually punches a hole in the very fabric of spacetime. Once this happens, the star has become a black hole. At this point, the star has collapsed into a quantum singularity, a location of infinite mass and yet no volume. The very laws of physics have been violated. This is the stuff of which quasars are made; perhaps a good topic for another post. The point is, quite simply, that when your physics teacher lectured on solids, liquids and gases, he or she skipped the most entertaining states of matter.
Lastly, the book made some interesting statements about the Earth’s ‘radio bubble’. This is the sphere around the Earth that which has been exposed to radio transmissions from the radio and television age of the planet. Going back to the earliest transmissions this bubble has a radius of about 100 light-years and includes about 1000 total stars; many of which have been shown to have planets in orbit around them. So from a purely technical standpoint, it is entirely possible that a civilization somewhere is enjoying the first days of television on our planet. The problem, however, is one of reception not distance. Simply to detect the carrier wave of our signals a civilization at 100 light-years distance would require a radio telescope 15 times the size of our largest, Arecibo. To actually decode anything would require a radio receiver 20 miles in diameter. Sadly, the omni-directional nature of our transmissions works against us in a major way here. In the popular culture on the subject we like to show alien’s listening in on our every move with ease but in reality they would have to be pretty damn determined to do so.
Like a large man with a dermatological condition, the sun is constantly shedding. This is surely not surprising as the sun does put out a hell of a lot of energy. You’ve got the constant onslaught of the cosmic wind and all that heat and light. What may be surprising is the magnitude of the shedding. Yes, boys and girls, it is calculated that the sun sloughs off 4 Million TONS of mass every SECOND. Yes, that’s every second. Not a typo. This gives one a right and appropriate scale of just how BIG the sun is. Welcome to the universe. Two million pickup trucks just gone into the vapor every time the second hand on your watch ticks.
Gravity, in the realm of the four basic forces of the universe, is a complete wuss. The somewhat pathetic example that the book gives is that if by some physically impossible process the Apollo astronauts had brought back the electrons (and just the electrons) from a thimble-full of moon dust then the electromagnetic attraction between those electrons and their orphaned protons back on the moon would have been greater than the gravitational attraction of the entire planet.
Totally unrelatedly, the book goes into some small detail about the so-called fourth state of matter, plasma. In short, plasma is just uber-excited matter. If you heat anything up enough then it’ll fall all over itself and become plasma. To those of us bound to the Earth this is most typically expressed as lightning. When lightning strikes, the air around the discharge becomes plasma and behaves according to a wonderously new set of rules. In my book, plasma is boring. What we really want to talk about is the TRULY degenerate states of matter. Let’s start with the stuff of dwarf stars. Think back to high school physics and chemistry and imagine the model of the atom. You’ve got the happy nucleus with its boisterous cloud of rotating electrons. That’s the stuff of normal matter but think for a moment what happens at the heart of super-dense stars. Eventually these massive furnaces run out of fuel. When they do, then they begin to collapse. A typical star is a constant battle between the energy pouring OUTWARD from nuclear fusion and gravity pulling INWARD. I won’t go into the details here but when a star begins to run out of fuel, then gravity begins to win the battle and slowly the star compresses. Eventually, the compression becomes SO intense that the atom itself is compromised. Rather than being comprised of a nucleus and a cloud of electrons, imagine the empty space being crunched down to the point where even the electrons are bound together in the nucleus and the nuclei are stacked right on top of each other. This is the stuff of the dwarf star. All the empty space has been most rudely removed leaving a super-dense material that the sci-fi aficionados refer to as “Dwarf Star Alloy”. Super dense and super tough, this is the no-nonsense material of the universe.
In some cases though, we go even further. If a dwarf star becomes TOO dense then it condenses even more. Based on the description of dwarf stars though, you may ask “how can this possibly be? There’s nowhere else for the matter to go?” And this is exactly true. Dwarf stars are comprised of matter packed tightly together to the nth degree. There’s no empty space left. Neutrons and protons and electrons are stacked on top of each other like a child’s building blocks. Beyond a certain point, the very laws of physics themselves are compromised. Above a certain mass the dwarf star actually punches a hole in the very fabric of spacetime. Once this happens, the star has become a black hole. At this point, the star has collapsed into a quantum singularity, a location of infinite mass and yet no volume. The very laws of physics have been violated. This is the stuff of which quasars are made; perhaps a good topic for another post. The point is, quite simply, that when your physics teacher lectured on solids, liquids and gases, he or she skipped the most entertaining states of matter.
Lastly, the book made some interesting statements about the Earth’s ‘radio bubble’. This is the sphere around the Earth that which has been exposed to radio transmissions from the radio and television age of the planet. Going back to the earliest transmissions this bubble has a radius of about 100 light-years and includes about 1000 total stars; many of which have been shown to have planets in orbit around them. So from a purely technical standpoint, it is entirely possible that a civilization somewhere is enjoying the first days of television on our planet. The problem, however, is one of reception not distance. Simply to detect the carrier wave of our signals a civilization at 100 light-years distance would require a radio telescope 15 times the size of our largest, Arecibo. To actually decode anything would require a radio receiver 20 miles in diameter. Sadly, the omni-directional nature of our transmissions works against us in a major way here. In the popular culture on the subject we like to show alien’s listening in on our every move with ease but in reality they would have to be pretty damn determined to do so.
Monday, November 24, 2008
Thought for the Day: Blundering into Success
Over the years the random inputs to my mind have been rife with examples of the fact that sometimes you can just try TOO damn hard. Yes, I remember back in the late 70s I saw a Dr. Who episode in which the only way to solve some bizarre quandary was to simply stop trying to do so. Not long after, the “Key to Time” storyline from the same series has the Doctor escaping his somewhat dualistic enemies by randomizing his own destination so that not even HE knows there the fuck he’s going. Even later we find Douglas Adams’ Dirk Gently proclaiming that the key to learning to fly is to simply “throw yourself at the ground… and miss.” Clearly Dirk’s modus operandi is doomed to a painful conclusion in the cold, hard light of reality but I think that in some twisted way there’s something to be said for the general concept.
This idea was brought to mind today as I was creeping up on 5:00 and writing the same UI for what is at least the 5th time. As a sidebar, let me say that when I say “the 5th time” I do not mean “the engineer-exaggerated version of the phrase which really means the 2nd time but has become the victim of hyperbole to elicit sympathy” 5th time but the more than a little annoyed version of the 5th time. This is the 5th time that comes just before the 6th time when you actually throw a coffee cup at your screen. Sidebar ends.
The clock was hovering around 20 minutes to 5 and therefore, as any employee knows, I had exactly -0- interest in what I was doing. The only purpose of even TRYING to do anything was the knowledge that doing NOTHING would simply make the remaining 20 minutes of the day seem even longer than they were already doomed to be. So as I was diligently and apathetically typing out code I had absolutely no interest in I was shocked to find that what I had carefully crafted out of my own ennui and general desire to be anywhere else but in the office was actually… working…? No… no, no, no, no, no… At this point I must take reality by the short and curlies and shake it until it yelps in an unmanly falsetto.
But no, gonadal agitations aside, it was indeed true. What I had TRIED to do 4 times without success despite much careful research and care and feeding had in fact appeared quite figuratively out of nowhere. Unluckily for my new creation, its sudden call into existence, though miraculous, was insufficient to keep me in the office even one nanosecond past 5:00 but I did ponder the significance of the event long enough to at least consider immortalizing its spontaneous generation with a blog entry. It was during that mental memorialization of the miracle that other strange examples of this came to mind.
My eldest daughter Amanda, for example, is profoundly personally apathetic. She walks down the hall and kids will trip all over themselves to say hello to her. She is the most accidentally popular kid in the class but her universal response to all such greetings is a stony silence. Her reaction isn’t due to snobbishness; in fact it’s quite the opposite. She is absolutely CONVINCED that she has no friends so the people who say “Hi, Amanda!” with such enthusiasm must most certainly be greeting some OTHER nearby person who happens to share the same name and therefore she needn’t embarrass herself by responding to them in error. In counterpoint you see people every day who try *SO* hard to be liked and to be popular and inevitably they are universally disregarded. They’d give their left arm for even the tiniest measure of what Amanda garners so effortlessly yet despite all their trying they come up empty.
On a personal level, I’ve noticed this bizarre phenomenon come into play for me in the most unimaginable ways. Invariably, the greatest things befall us when we least expect them and when we weren’t even really looking for anything to happen. The surest way to fuck them up, of course, is to overanalyze them too much and start asking questions of The Fates. Nothing pisses off a woman with a pair of shears more than unnecessary cross-examination. If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the past few years it’s that sometimes you just have to grin, shake your head and quietly accept the gift that life has given you.
Lastly, if you think about it, this actually really makes perfect sense. The entire body of life on Earth is the product of a lot of time and a hell of a lot of random chance. A billion years ago the planet was a ball of chemicals, a huge chemistry set waiting to find its true potential. As time passed, a little bit of this met up with a little bit of that until you had simple cells. Once those cells learned to reproduce then the wheels of fate and fortune really hit their pace as every conceivable organism that the laws of nature and probability could dream up found its place in the Cambrian Explosion. Forms came and forms went but in the end, standing at the top of the tree of life you find the miracle that is man. We really are the luckiest of the lucky, the pinnacle of success from a billion years of throwing dice. Should it really be any surprise that from time to time life smiles on us when we’re least expecting it?
This idea was brought to mind today as I was creeping up on 5:00 and writing the same UI for what is at least the 5th time. As a sidebar, let me say that when I say “the 5th time” I do not mean “the engineer-exaggerated version of the phrase which really means the 2nd time but has become the victim of hyperbole to elicit sympathy” 5th time but the more than a little annoyed version of the 5th time. This is the 5th time that comes just before the 6th time when you actually throw a coffee cup at your screen. Sidebar ends.
The clock was hovering around 20 minutes to 5 and therefore, as any employee knows, I had exactly -0- interest in what I was doing. The only purpose of even TRYING to do anything was the knowledge that doing NOTHING would simply make the remaining 20 minutes of the day seem even longer than they were already doomed to be. So as I was diligently and apathetically typing out code I had absolutely no interest in I was shocked to find that what I had carefully crafted out of my own ennui and general desire to be anywhere else but in the office was actually… working…? No… no, no, no, no, no… At this point I must take reality by the short and curlies and shake it until it yelps in an unmanly falsetto.
But no, gonadal agitations aside, it was indeed true. What I had TRIED to do 4 times without success despite much careful research and care and feeding had in fact appeared quite figuratively out of nowhere. Unluckily for my new creation, its sudden call into existence, though miraculous, was insufficient to keep me in the office even one nanosecond past 5:00 but I did ponder the significance of the event long enough to at least consider immortalizing its spontaneous generation with a blog entry. It was during that mental memorialization of the miracle that other strange examples of this came to mind.
My eldest daughter Amanda, for example, is profoundly personally apathetic. She walks down the hall and kids will trip all over themselves to say hello to her. She is the most accidentally popular kid in the class but her universal response to all such greetings is a stony silence. Her reaction isn’t due to snobbishness; in fact it’s quite the opposite. She is absolutely CONVINCED that she has no friends so the people who say “Hi, Amanda!” with such enthusiasm must most certainly be greeting some OTHER nearby person who happens to share the same name and therefore she needn’t embarrass herself by responding to them in error. In counterpoint you see people every day who try *SO* hard to be liked and to be popular and inevitably they are universally disregarded. They’d give their left arm for even the tiniest measure of what Amanda garners so effortlessly yet despite all their trying they come up empty.
On a personal level, I’ve noticed this bizarre phenomenon come into play for me in the most unimaginable ways. Invariably, the greatest things befall us when we least expect them and when we weren’t even really looking for anything to happen. The surest way to fuck them up, of course, is to overanalyze them too much and start asking questions of The Fates. Nothing pisses off a woman with a pair of shears more than unnecessary cross-examination. If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the past few years it’s that sometimes you just have to grin, shake your head and quietly accept the gift that life has given you.
Lastly, if you think about it, this actually really makes perfect sense. The entire body of life on Earth is the product of a lot of time and a hell of a lot of random chance. A billion years ago the planet was a ball of chemicals, a huge chemistry set waiting to find its true potential. As time passed, a little bit of this met up with a little bit of that until you had simple cells. Once those cells learned to reproduce then the wheels of fate and fortune really hit their pace as every conceivable organism that the laws of nature and probability could dream up found its place in the Cambrian Explosion. Forms came and forms went but in the end, standing at the top of the tree of life you find the miracle that is man. We really are the luckiest of the lucky, the pinnacle of success from a billion years of throwing dice. Should it really be any surprise that from time to time life smiles on us when we’re least expecting it?
Sunday, November 23, 2008
Movie: Nosferatu (1922)
This ancient silent movie adaptation of Dracula is set in 1838 in the fictional town of Wisburg and if there’s one thing you can say for it it’s that it certainly doesn’t fuck around with any of that silly “setup” crap. The first lines of actual dialog occur when our protagonist Hutter brings his wife Ellen some flowers and she responds by saying, “Why did you kill them… the beautiful flowers?!” One gets the feeling immediately that something is amiss. The second line of dialog occur in the street only a minute later. After exchanging friendly greetings with someone… (we know not who) Hutter is greeted with the words, “Don’t be in a hurry. No one can escape his destiny.” I’m sure this is a lot to digest for someone who only 2 minutes and 37 seconds before was happily standing before his shaving mirror.
An almost immediate observation on the silent movie genre is that in a bizarre way it leaves much more to the imagination than even reading the story. It’s clear from the action that a lot more dialog is occurring then the audience is privy to. Since actually conveying dialog in textual form requires the filmmakers to cut away to a printed card the use of words is pretty scanty. The primitive state of film-making is also glaringly obvious. Outside scenes appear in either blue and white or red and white while inside scenes are a happy brownish tone. The action scenes, such as when Orlock’s coach appears to retrieve Hutter, leave one laughing a bit with their almost claymation-like choppiness. Clearly we’ve come a long way to our HD DVD players.
Anyway, back to the story. Hutter is apparently on his way to work for Knock, the local real-estate agent. The film finds Knock reading a page of what is obvious gibberish but is apparently a letter from Count Orlock of Transylvania. He wants a home in Wisburg. Since he is of noble birth he of course has requested something abandoned and run-down. Something like the house just across the street from Hutter. Knock hypes Hutter up with promises of a “lot of money” and assigns him to travel to Transylvania to negotiate a deal. Hutter is ludicrously excited and runs back home to tell the wife, “I’m going to travel far away to the country of thieves and ghosts!” Ellen doesn’t bother to voice the worry that cascades most obviously across her face and so Hutter is off to his presumed doom. This will be a lesson to all of you young wives out there. Speak up, men are idiots.
Hutter eventually arrives in the Carpathians where one mention of Count Orlock puts the natives on their guard. Staying the night in a local inn he happens to find a copy of a tome on the subject of “Nosferatu” but poo-poos it with a hearty but unheard laugh. The next morning he finds natives who will drive him within sight of the castle but refuse to go any further on the grounds that the castle is “creepy”. I’d like to thank the makers of my particular copy of this movie for their BRILLIANT rendering of the movie’s subtitle cards from their original German into Leave it to Beaver-Style 1950s English. Creepy… unbelievable. ANYway… since the villagers won’t take Hutter to the castle he sets off on foot but no sooner does he step down than a coach arrives unbidden from the castle driven by someone who looks a LOT like the villain wearing a pointy hat. Wordlessly the coachman directs Hutter into the coach and then to the main gates of the castle.
Hutter is greeted inside by another man who has the same ghastly look as the coachman. He offers Hutter a meal despite the late hour. Our unwitting hero cuts himself slicing some bread leading our host to another bit of wonderously opaque dialog, “You’ve hurt yourself… The Precious Blood!” Said blood he of course licks from his guest’s hand. It should be noted that this is standard guest etiquette at Slaven dinner parties. To hell with band aids, we’ll drink the blood right off your bloody finger! After his snack, the host comes on to Hutter with the words, “Should we not spend a little time togther, my very dear friend? Sunrise is not far away.” This is also standard Slaven parlance for “get the fuck out, it’s late.”
Hutter awakes after a fade cut with a cut finger and a sore neck but is greeted with a fresh meal including wine but absolutely NO vanilla vodka. Very sad in my book. After his meal he goes outside for a morning constitutional and to write a letter home. He writes, amusingly, that “the mosquitoes are a real pest. I have two bites on my neck very close together.” Transylvanian mosquitoes ARE the worst in my experience. Despite the fact that no villager will come near the castle, the place does apparently get mail so our hero can send his missive and retrieve the incoming mail for Count Orlock. While giving our good Count the mail, he drops a picture of the beloved Ellen. Upon seeing her, the count remarks simply, “Your wife has a beautiful neck…” I can relate to the man’s viewpoint on women. Personally, I always look first at a woman’s kneecaps, then left pinky toe and then her neck but to each his own. Driven by lust, the Count agrees to buy the beautiful, deserted house across the street from Hutter. Definite stalker tendencies coming to the forefront there.
Hutter returns to his room and peruses the book he found at the inn for more details on Nosferatu. Somehow, after all his giddy chortling he finally starts to take things seriously and exactly 30 minutes into the film we find Orlock standing in the doorway in that iconic pose that we’ve ALL seen a million times. Hutter finally realizes that he’s in deep shit. Meanwhile Ellen is somnambulating on the balcony in a most precarious manner as her husband is again set upon by the Count. Hutter awakes to a seemingly deserted castle and finds his way IMMEDIATELY to the casket of the Count who lies with his face exposed to the sun. In horror, Hutter runs away and swoons but awakes in time to find the Count packing to move. The count exits via carriage and Hutter makes his escape.
At this point, the movie either takes a horrendous turn into the unfollowable or else the wine has finally taken hold. OK, so Knock goes a bit inexplicably insane and starts eating bugs. This is a callback to the Renfield character after which he’s based but in the context of this movie… makes NO sense whatsoever. Ellen, in response to all this, decides to go to the beach while wearing a long, flowing black dress. Meanwhile Hutter is recovering in a hospital and sets sail for home. It’s a bit odd that he didn’t need a ship to GET there in the first place but needs one to get back. OK, so Orlock has booked passage on a ship and the whole crew is taken out by a plague. The first mate goes below to hack open one of the boxes below deck for no reason and out pops Orlock. The first mate is horrified and jumps overboard while Orlock takes out the captain.
It is at this point, that I completely lose the thread of the story. Orlock has presumably entered the neighborhood, the plague has taken hold. Hutter has returned home but his wife is worried and reading Hutter’s book about Nosferatu… OK, I have to admit that this movie makes no sense. Even when I was less distracted by the wine, it made little to no sense to me and lacked continuity. The town has turned on Knock which makes sense since he caused this mess by selling a house to Orlock, I suppose. Four minutes from the end, another iconic moment in movie history; Orlock is creeping up the stairs and all we see is his shadow. He’s closing in on Ellen… Oh the suspense! But wait! Orlock has failed to notice the sunrise! The cock has crowed and Orlock dies in most dramatic fashion! I failed to mention that Ellen read in the book that if someone gives willingly of their blood and distracts the Nosferatu from the coming of dawn then the villain shall be undone. Apparently that’s what I missed in this grainy dialog. In summary: yay. The forces of good prevail and the plague is ended with the death of Orlock.
Boy. That was a bitchin’ movie.
An almost immediate observation on the silent movie genre is that in a bizarre way it leaves much more to the imagination than even reading the story. It’s clear from the action that a lot more dialog is occurring then the audience is privy to. Since actually conveying dialog in textual form requires the filmmakers to cut away to a printed card the use of words is pretty scanty. The primitive state of film-making is also glaringly obvious. Outside scenes appear in either blue and white or red and white while inside scenes are a happy brownish tone. The action scenes, such as when Orlock’s coach appears to retrieve Hutter, leave one laughing a bit with their almost claymation-like choppiness. Clearly we’ve come a long way to our HD DVD players.
Anyway, back to the story. Hutter is apparently on his way to work for Knock, the local real-estate agent. The film finds Knock reading a page of what is obvious gibberish but is apparently a letter from Count Orlock of Transylvania. He wants a home in Wisburg. Since he is of noble birth he of course has requested something abandoned and run-down. Something like the house just across the street from Hutter. Knock hypes Hutter up with promises of a “lot of money” and assigns him to travel to Transylvania to negotiate a deal. Hutter is ludicrously excited and runs back home to tell the wife, “I’m going to travel far away to the country of thieves and ghosts!” Ellen doesn’t bother to voice the worry that cascades most obviously across her face and so Hutter is off to his presumed doom. This will be a lesson to all of you young wives out there. Speak up, men are idiots.
Hutter eventually arrives in the Carpathians where one mention of Count Orlock puts the natives on their guard. Staying the night in a local inn he happens to find a copy of a tome on the subject of “Nosferatu” but poo-poos it with a hearty but unheard laugh. The next morning he finds natives who will drive him within sight of the castle but refuse to go any further on the grounds that the castle is “creepy”. I’d like to thank the makers of my particular copy of this movie for their BRILLIANT rendering of the movie’s subtitle cards from their original German into Leave it to Beaver-Style 1950s English. Creepy… unbelievable. ANYway… since the villagers won’t take Hutter to the castle he sets off on foot but no sooner does he step down than a coach arrives unbidden from the castle driven by someone who looks a LOT like the villain wearing a pointy hat. Wordlessly the coachman directs Hutter into the coach and then to the main gates of the castle.
Hutter is greeted inside by another man who has the same ghastly look as the coachman. He offers Hutter a meal despite the late hour. Our unwitting hero cuts himself slicing some bread leading our host to another bit of wonderously opaque dialog, “You’ve hurt yourself… The Precious Blood!” Said blood he of course licks from his guest’s hand. It should be noted that this is standard guest etiquette at Slaven dinner parties. To hell with band aids, we’ll drink the blood right off your bloody finger! After his snack, the host comes on to Hutter with the words, “Should we not spend a little time togther, my very dear friend? Sunrise is not far away.” This is also standard Slaven parlance for “get the fuck out, it’s late.”
Hutter awakes after a fade cut with a cut finger and a sore neck but is greeted with a fresh meal including wine but absolutely NO vanilla vodka. Very sad in my book. After his meal he goes outside for a morning constitutional and to write a letter home. He writes, amusingly, that “the mosquitoes are a real pest. I have two bites on my neck very close together.” Transylvanian mosquitoes ARE the worst in my experience. Despite the fact that no villager will come near the castle, the place does apparently get mail so our hero can send his missive and retrieve the incoming mail for Count Orlock. While giving our good Count the mail, he drops a picture of the beloved Ellen. Upon seeing her, the count remarks simply, “Your wife has a beautiful neck…” I can relate to the man’s viewpoint on women. Personally, I always look first at a woman’s kneecaps, then left pinky toe and then her neck but to each his own. Driven by lust, the Count agrees to buy the beautiful, deserted house across the street from Hutter. Definite stalker tendencies coming to the forefront there.
Hutter returns to his room and peruses the book he found at the inn for more details on Nosferatu. Somehow, after all his giddy chortling he finally starts to take things seriously and exactly 30 minutes into the film we find Orlock standing in the doorway in that iconic pose that we’ve ALL seen a million times. Hutter finally realizes that he’s in deep shit. Meanwhile Ellen is somnambulating on the balcony in a most precarious manner as her husband is again set upon by the Count. Hutter awakes to a seemingly deserted castle and finds his way IMMEDIATELY to the casket of the Count who lies with his face exposed to the sun. In horror, Hutter runs away and swoons but awakes in time to find the Count packing to move. The count exits via carriage and Hutter makes his escape.
At this point, the movie either takes a horrendous turn into the unfollowable or else the wine has finally taken hold. OK, so Knock goes a bit inexplicably insane and starts eating bugs. This is a callback to the Renfield character after which he’s based but in the context of this movie… makes NO sense whatsoever. Ellen, in response to all this, decides to go to the beach while wearing a long, flowing black dress. Meanwhile Hutter is recovering in a hospital and sets sail for home. It’s a bit odd that he didn’t need a ship to GET there in the first place but needs one to get back. OK, so Orlock has booked passage on a ship and the whole crew is taken out by a plague. The first mate goes below to hack open one of the boxes below deck for no reason and out pops Orlock. The first mate is horrified and jumps overboard while Orlock takes out the captain.
It is at this point, that I completely lose the thread of the story. Orlock has presumably entered the neighborhood, the plague has taken hold. Hutter has returned home but his wife is worried and reading Hutter’s book about Nosferatu… OK, I have to admit that this movie makes no sense. Even when I was less distracted by the wine, it made little to no sense to me and lacked continuity. The town has turned on Knock which makes sense since he caused this mess by selling a house to Orlock, I suppose. Four minutes from the end, another iconic moment in movie history; Orlock is creeping up the stairs and all we see is his shadow. He’s closing in on Ellen… Oh the suspense! But wait! Orlock has failed to notice the sunrise! The cock has crowed and Orlock dies in most dramatic fashion! I failed to mention that Ellen read in the book that if someone gives willingly of their blood and distracts the Nosferatu from the coming of dawn then the villain shall be undone. Apparently that’s what I missed in this grainy dialog. In summary: yay. The forces of good prevail and the plague is ended with the death of Orlock.
Boy. That was a bitchin’ movie.
What I learned Today: Lagrangian Points
While reading “Death by Black Hole and other Quandaries” I was reintroduced to a REALLY cool concept referred to as a Lagrangian point. You can read the long-winded Wikipedia version of this concept here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point.
The short and sweet description of this concept is that if you put an object out in space at a Lagrangian point then it’ll quietly just sit there forever. On the surface, yeah, I admit, this is pretty unassuming but think about it. In the vast majority of locations in the solar system if you set an object down it’s going to slowly make its way toward SOMETHING. Usually that something is the sun and anybody who’s had a sunburn knows that THAT is no fun whatsoever. So a Lagrangian point is the universe’s version of Free Parking. If you fly a satellite and park it at such a point then it’ll hang out there for a long time which in the grand scheme is damn convenient. These points have been used already by NASA for various long-term missions which you can read about in the Wikiepedia entry.
Executive Summary: Lagrangian Points – Solar System’s version of Free Parking. Mega-cool.
The short and sweet description of this concept is that if you put an object out in space at a Lagrangian point then it’ll quietly just sit there forever. On the surface, yeah, I admit, this is pretty unassuming but think about it. In the vast majority of locations in the solar system if you set an object down it’s going to slowly make its way toward SOMETHING. Usually that something is the sun and anybody who’s had a sunburn knows that THAT is no fun whatsoever. So a Lagrangian point is the universe’s version of Free Parking. If you fly a satellite and park it at such a point then it’ll hang out there for a long time which in the grand scheme is damn convenient. These points have been used already by NASA for various long-term missions which you can read about in the Wikiepedia entry.
Executive Summary: Lagrangian Points – Solar System’s version of Free Parking. Mega-cool.
Monday, October 13, 2008
Notes for “The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules our Lives”
So now we begin…
Evolution is apparently no guarantee of success at even the simplest of tasks. When faced with a light which randomly blinks red or green, humans are regularly out performed by rats. If the light blinks green 75% of the time, rats and lower mammals will choose the food dispensing button linked to the green light every time, guaranteeing themselves success 75% of the time. Humans who take the exact same test tend to believe that they can perceive a pattern in the blinking of the lights and their attempts to outsmart the randomness results in a success rate of around 60%.
Humans are also easily fooled by the patterns of randomness in their daily lives. One example given is a group of Air Force pilots in training during World War II. Their flight instructor stated emphatically that his brutal methods of roundly and publicly criticizing his trainees when they did poorly was much more effective than praising them when they did well. His reasoning went something like this: When his pilots did well, if he praised them then the next time they went out they did much more poorly than the previous flight. If, on the other hand, he simply criticized them when they did terribly then their next flights were invariably better. What the instructor failed to realize was that the good and bad flights were merely statistical outliers. So if a trainee had an exceptionally good flight then chances are good that no matter what feedback he was given he would have a worse flight the next time. The same holds for the opposite case. This phenomenon is known as “Regression to the Mean”. As a general rule, exceptional outcomes are typically followed by more average ones.
The author is also obviously a big fan of sports and gives us several pleasant statistical tidbits from the sporting world:
* The odds that a player with Roger Maris’ career home run stats will break Ruth’s homerun record in any given year: 1/32. [So you Mantle fans can sit down a shush for a while]
* From a statistical viewpoint, the 7-game playoff series in many sports is woefully insufficient. If two teams A and B have a probability of winning 55% and 45% of their head-to-head games respectively then the inferior team will still win a 7-game series 40% of the time. You’d need a series of 269 games to really prove anything. Think your teams aren’t that closely matched? If the teams compete at 66% and 33% then the inferior team still wins 20% of the time and 23 games would be required to determine the true champion.
* Justin Wolfers analyzed the outcomes of 70,000 college basketball games and found that when compared against the point spread there was a significant surplus of games that ended just below the predicted point spread at the expense of those that ended just above the point spread.
The Greeks had no proper concept of the laws of probability and this may have at least partially had to do with the fact that they had no dice. Instead they have astragali, the heel-bones of sheep. To the Greeks, the result of every throw of the astragali was the direct will of the gods themselves. This belief persists in the NFL where every touchdown reception is still the direct result of divine intervention. [at least if the touchdown celebrations are to be taken at face value]
DNA evidence in the courtroom can identify a crime suspect with a probability of error of 1:1 Million to 1:1 Billion. What is not typically talked about is the fact that the incidence of laboratory error is 1%.
This author, like so many before him treats us to an exposition of the “Monty Hall Problem.” The issue goes something like this. You’ve given three doors with three prizes. Behind one is a brand new car and behind 2 are goats. You pick your door, it doesn’t matter which one and in response Monty opens one of the remaining two doors revealing a goat. So now there is one door with a goat and one door with a car. To make your chances of winning as high as possible, do you stay with your original door or do you switch? As it turns out, if you stay with your original door your chances of winning are 1/3. If you switch, however, your odds are an even 50/50. This result, to say the least, is TERRIBLY unintuitive. To make it clearer though, it’s useful to extend the example to 100 doors with 99 goats and 1 car. Just as before, you pick your one door and in response Monty opens up 98 doors revealing 98 goats. Now you’re left with your original door and the one tantalizing door that remains unopened. So do you switch in this situation? Hopefully the answer now is a “damn right you do.”
Geralamo Cordano (died 1576) was one of the founders of probability theory though like so many never really lived to see his work used or popularized. The technical bits of his work aren’t all that interesting but his life in general was an odd one. His mother was unwed at the time of his birth so she tried to abort him using an evil brew of wormwood, burned barleycorn and tamarisk root. This obviously failed making Garalamo a pretty lucky fellow (or his mother a pretty shitty pharmacologist). He died a pauper after his own son testified against him in some uninteresting civil matter or other just to get himself a plum job as a torturer with the inquisition.
In 1995, the German lottery pulled 6 balls from a set of 49 as it always does each week. This would not normally be news except that the result was exactly the same as one week in 1986. The chances that a lottery of this sort will pull the same numbers twice in this time period: 28%.
Blaise Pascal gave up mathematics and went into religious seclusion near the end of his life, presumably after pondering an enigma termed “Pascal’s Wager”. It runs something like this. Assume there is no God. In that event the best you can do is to live a life of debauchery and then you die and it’s over. Contrarily, assume there IS a God. If you live a pious life then you have gained an infinite reward of an eternity in heaven. If you don’t, then all you got, again, was a brief life of pleasure. So, if one assumes there’s a 50% chance that God exists, the risk that he does NOT exist is dwarfed by the INFINITE reward you can receive if he DOES exist. Therefore, you should just assume that he does and thus at least take a shot at your life of bliss for all eternity. It’s obvious from Pascal’s behavior after this revelation which path he chose…
In 1992 the Virginia State Lottery offered a prize of $27,000,000. The lottery is configured to 6 random numbers from a pot of 44, a mere 7,000,000 possibilities. An investment group in Melbourne Australia got the bright idea to buy 7,000,000 tickets, one with each number combination. After a massive logistical nightmare, 1.4 million tickets filled out by hand, the group was almost too late. They managed to only get 5,000,000 of the numbers submitted in time but none the less did win the prize and collect the jackpot.
Joseph Jagger took his statistical prowess to Monte Carlo in 1873 to turn himself a tidy profit. He and six assistants took careful note of the outcomes on six roulette wheels over a 2-week period. At the end of that time, it was found that one of the wheels had a distinct bias towards certain numbers. A few days later exited with the equivalent of five million dollars in winnings. He was eventually foiled when the casino noticed his turn of luck and began reconfiguring the wheels at the end of each night.
The Greeks had far too much time on their hands it seems. Zeno, yet another Greek philosopher, postulated that you can never actually go anywhere. His logic runs this way. In order to travel 1 meter, you must first travel half a meter. Before you can travel half a meter though, you must first travel a quarter of a meter and so on. Therefore, to travel any distance at all requires you to travel an infinite number of finite distances which would of course take an infinite amount of time. Zeno, it seems, was married to the Red Queen. You’ve got to run TERRIBLY fast just to stay where you are! The Greeks had far too much time on their hands it seems. [This Geeky Greek sandwich is known as ‘Zenos Paradox’]
Bernoulli originated the idea that in order to obtain a good estimate of something’s true value you must first obtain a large sample of data for analysis. Unfortunately, in practice his original formulae are a bit off and often require the ENTIRE dataset to be obtained before any certainty is obtained. [U.S. political polls under the original Bernoulli mathematics would require polling 80% of the houses in the country]. This concept is known as the Law of Large Numbers.
On the other side of the fence, Kahneman and Tversky coined the ironic Law of Small Numbers to describe the tendency of the human population to assign inappropriate significance to vanishingly small data samples.
People pay respect and homage to numbers when clearly they shouldn’t. One large example given was the business of rating wines. When asked about the system the editor of Wine and Spirits Magazine was quoted as saying, “On many levels the rating system is completely nonsensical.” His colleague at the Wine Enthusiast is no more enthusiastic as he states simply, “The deeper you get into this system the more misguided and misleading it is.” Apparently even at the aesthetic level things are no better. When subjects are presented with five bottles of wine whose contents are identical but have different labels and prices ranging from $10 to $90 they will invariably state that the $90 wine is significantly better. In a similar test, most can’t tell a red wine from a white wine that has food coloring added. Perhaps most damning of all, when wine experts were presented with three wines, two of which were identical, half the time they could not even determine which wine was which.
The human mind is very poor at detecting randomness even when it encounters it. In a string of 1,000,000 random 1s and 0s, for example, one should expect to find strings of hundreds of 0s or 1s in a row. Recently, Apple’s iPod received hoards of complaints about its shuffle feature. Customers complained that sometimes the same song was played twice in a row; statistically, a very normal occurrence even in large libraries. Apple has since revised their shuffle algorithm to be LESS random so that it’ll appear MORE random.
People have a fundamental and deep-seated problem with randomness because it messes with our need to be in control. Ellen Langer did a study with nursing home retirees. In one group the retirees were allowed to arrange their own rooms and pick a plant to take care of. In the other it was all done for them and they had no say in the arrangement of their rooms. After 18 months the mortality rate in the group that had no control over their rooms was DOUBLE that of those that got to pick their own room layouts. [This is a stunning conclusion but one that lends itself to sample-space bias. Sicker individuals are going to a priori be placed in the no-control group so this could be a total red herring.]
The idea of Confirmation Bias also tends to skew our view of events. If a situation arises about which we have pre-conceived notions then we will tend to fit the facts to meet our theory rather than viewing them with complete rationality. David L Rosenhan demonstrated exactly that when he sent 10 people, 5 of them doctors, into a psychiatric ward. He told them all to act completely normally but to claim only that they were hearing voices that were not there. All 10 were admitted to the hospital. After being admitted, the subjects dropped the pretence of insanity and went about their normal activities while in the mental ward. Despite the fact that the participants were acting perfectly normally the doctor’s notes for the patients reflected obvious psychosis. Every simple everyday action the subjects performed pointed at some mental condition or other. The subjects were eventually released from the hospital after an average of 19 days.
It’s not just enthusiastic wine enthusiasts who can’t make qualitative judgments on a consistent basis. In a recent music experiment 14,341 participants were given the chance to download 48 songs by bands they had never heard of. The test subjects were divided into 9 different groups. The first 8 groups could see the average rating of each song by previous downloaders and how many times it had been downloaded but only for subjects in their group. So what you ended up with was 8 distinct music microcosms that had no connection to each other. The 9th group rated the songs but they couldn’t see the ratings of anyone else. Ostensibly this was the group that was totally unbiased by the influence of other participants so these ratings were more akin to true musical quality. Unsurprisingly, the 9 groups differed wildly on their ratings for the 48 songs. One song in particular was a #1 smash in one group but a #40 bomb in another. The control group ranked it at #29. Apparently what happens is that some songs jump out to an early and random lead and this results in their popularity. The pop music charts have little to do with the actual quality of music it seems.
Our author also relates one anecdote that jives perfectly with my notion that Bill Gates is just a normal schmuck like the rest of us who happened to just get lucky. The story goes somewhat similarly to this. Back in the day IBM came to Gates and said they needed an OS for their new personal computer. Gates initially balked at the idea and sent them to someone else. Well, the someone else apparently didn’t impress IBM much so they came back to Gates. Gates in the mean time had heard of a bit of software that might do the trick so he brought it up to IBM. After what must have been a comical bit of shrugging and “what do we do now” Gates obtained the software for $50,000 from this unnamed source, modified it slightly and then licensed it to IBM. The rest, it seems, is history. Gates didn’t do anything special. He just happened to be a software nexus of sorts. I gotta get me a nexus.
Vodka, it seems, is a masterfully marketed product. Despite the fact that it’s intended to be non-distinctive and neutral every vodka out there seems to make some weird claim to be unique. Ironically, when the New York Times put 21 vodkas to a blind taste test, the winner was the bartender’s cheapest, Smirnoff.
Publishing too is no stranger to the laws of luck. When the Sunday Times of London took the first chapter from two winners of the prestigious Mann-Booker prize for fiction and submitted them to publishers, not only did the publishers not recognize the pieces, 19 out of the 20 publishers rejected the books for publication. Gotta get lucky in this world I guess. Or maybe just verbose…
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