Yes, gas prices are very high. Gas now costs so much that it is worth more than some items we would normally consider more valuable. Good irony. Ha ha. You can stop now.
Being the sort of person who doesn’t get out much, I don’t often get the chance to make firsthand observations of the more absurd parts of our world. That’s okay, because, sometimes, the absurdity comes and finds me.
Today, while I was out grocery shopping, I noticed a stand set up near the entrance to the grocery store. I took only enough notice of it to build up a little half-hearted hatred of all advertising promotions, but as I parked and walked towards the store, I came to a bizarre realization. The stand, plastered with the logo of a large beverage company (which shall remain nameless), was selling lemonade.
Some cultural context is in order: I am a member of one of the last generations to have the lemonade stand as a symbol of entreperneuership. The lemonade stand was the big capitalist metaphor when I was growing up, the very embodiment of our ideal of the American small-business spirit.
And there, right there in the parking lot of the big chain grocery store that long ago supplanted the independent local movie house, right there, was yet another gigantic corporation, moving in on the territory of the little guy, the sidewalk lemonade vendor. I desperately wish I’d had my camera with me then, because the symbolism of all that was deliciously painful (or painfully delicious).
So, just remember: if you start to get worried that the world seems to be sorting itself out, don’t worry. Proof will arrive momentarily to remind you that it’s still an absolutely absurd place.
I am a child of the modern media, and thus difficult to shock. But when I hit Slashdot and came across a post proclaiming the death of comedian George Carlin, my jaw nearly hit the floor.
The denial phase was remarkably brief, and now, I am forced to admit that one of the greatest comedians of our time has died.
This may be a cliché, but I don’t care: the world is definitely a worse place now that George is gone. The rest of us are going to have to work even harder to counter-balance the tide of totalitarianism and cruelty here and around the world, adn without Carlin, it’s going to be even harder to keep a sense of humor about it.
R.I.P. George Carlin ( May 12, 1937 — June 22, 2008 )
“Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, tits.”
Last December, I wrote a poorly-argued post about the trouble with modern science fiction. Almost immediately, someone viciously cut me down, and I put up a rather pathetic defense against it. Well, it seems the universe has a sense of irony, because only a few months after I wrote that post, I found myself in my local book shop, where I stumbled upon a hefty tome with the horrific title “Extreme Science Fiction.”
Now, that was almost enough to make me put it down, but I didn’t. I turned it over and read the back of the jacket, and I was intrigued by the premise of the book: it was intended as a collection of inventive, mind-bending science fiction from (mostly) modern authors, edited by Mike Ashley.
And by the time I’d finished reading it, I knew that all those complaints I’d made about the state of modern science fiction were completely idiotic. Everything I’d said was wrong with SF today — the lack of originality, the lack of experimentation, fear of pushing boundaries, and the rest — was rectified by the stories in that single volume.
This is not really meant as a book review, though. Instead, this is a humbled retraction of all the rubbish I said before. I have to admit, I was wrong: good science fiction really isn’t dead.
Thanks to WordPress, I can be very cavalier about suddenly changing the theme around which TLOAMM (lovely acronym…reminds me of the sound I make between when I realize my curry is too spicy and when I actually start screaming) is based. For the moment, I’ve decided to go with a lovely, simple theme called “Garland.” If you love it or you hate it, let me know with your comments.
My father is one of those infamous people for whom it is impossible to buy gifts. So, this father’s day, he relented and suggested that I take him to see The Happening.
I saw Signs, a previous movie by M. Night Shyamalan, who directed The Happening, and found it to be funny, atmospheric, at times absolutely frightening, and a pleasure to watch. I’ve never been a great fan of the horror genre, but there is something about Shyamalan’s films which is more engaging than the dross that usually gets placed in that genre.
The film begins in Central Park, where suddenly, people begin behaving strangely. In moments, there are people committing suicide in droves all over the city. Panic ensues, and an evacuation begins.
For the most part, The Happening follows Elliot (played by Mark Whalberg) and wife Alma (Zooey Deschanel) as they attempt to survive the continuing onslaughts of suicide-inducing poisonous gas. The plot is realistic enough (even if the science is a little “approximate” for my tastes) to be engaging, but surreal enough to also be unnerving, and at times, quite funny.
But the plot isn’t what I really noticed about The Happening. What I really noticed was the fact that, at times during the movie, my heart rate began to edge up. From a twitchy, nervous guy like me, a movie that can get my heart going is really something. Even in the scenes where the outcome is obvious, there’s often a great deal of suspense.
Interleaved with the suspenseful scenes are the aforementioned surreal scenes. We see person after person sit down calmly and come up with bizarre and disturbing ways to do themselves in. The fact that there is no real enemy, that the enemy is your self-destructive tendencies, while a little disorienting, about doubles the creep factor.
The music helps this along a great deal. It’s unfortunate how little attention some films pay to their score, but that was not a problem with The Happening. Lonely piano and symphonic melodies underscore the surrealer and creepier moments, but the film isn’t afraid to use silence when necessary.
Still — and once again, the same is true for all the Shyamalan movies I’ve seen — there’s something slightly off about The Happening. It’s not exactly clear, but there’s a sort of strange, almost hallucinatory eeriness to the whole film. It’s hard to pin down, but at times, it can get distracting, and sometimes, it manifests directly, like in a particularly sadistic scene featuring a child and a shotgun. It doesn’t detract much (if any) from the film, but it does give one the feeling that Shyamalan is not the kind of person you’d like to sit next to on a long bus ride.
All in all, though, The Happening seems to be classic Shyamalan: the normal world backlit by strange and horrible circumstances. And although it starts to drag its feet a bit in the end, it’s still interesting, entertaining, truly scary, and very engaging. Worth seeing. Not worth buying any popcorn for, though. That shit’s gotten expensive!
I’ve been writing since I was pretty young, and as I’ve gotten a general sense of the craft (how’s that for a snooty word?), I’ve noticed a few things. Here they are:
There are other things I’ve noticed, but these five are probably the most general and the most helpful. I hope this is of some use.
Author’s Note: Okay, this should have been published a week or so ago, but somehow, I managed to make it into a page instead of a post. Sorry about that.
Yesterday, I was thinking that I hadn’t actually written much of substance lately, so I thought I’d try an exercise I read about in some fiction writers’ book some years back. I looked around my office and tried to find inspiration in the random objects that were laying around. I tried to make a CD of the game “Risk” into something, but after a while, my eyes settled on a coffee cup sitting by my computer monitor.
And thus, The Unbreakable Cup was born. I really enjoy this kind of short-but-sweet story, mainly because my insomnia has shortened my attention span to just about that of a particularly hyperactive squirrel.
After I’d finished The Unbreakable Cup, I was struck by inspiration once more, this time in the form of a plastic cup I saw laying on my desk. The result was A Trillion Red Plastic Cups.
Enjoy!
In a very rare turn of events, I actually managed to see Iron Man while it was still in theaters. I’d been hearing good things about it, and since my father is still intent on seeing a lot of movies, I thought I might as well give it a try.
Not too long before I saw iron Man, I watched A Scanner Darkly for the first time. In addition to being a cinematic gem, I was fascinated by Robert Downey Jr.’s quirky style in that film. And, in Iron Man, I was treated to more of the same. Downey may very well have been the perfect actor to play the eccentric-billionaire-genius role, which he does with expertise and a kind of genuineness that’s hard to see in movie theaters these days. Watching the film, one gets the impression that his character really is a brilliant mechanical prodigy and weapons dealer.
The plot is full of interesting little details that make it better than the campy, somewhat clichéd thing it otherwise probably would have been. Like the electromagnet implanted in Downey’s character’s chest to keep the shrapnel out of his heart. The film is fairly rich with little personal touches like that which lend it an air of authenticity. In addition (spoilers ahead), Stark’s (Downey’s character) first rendition of the suit is a rough welded-together sheetmetal monster that looks (as much as is possible, I suppose) like a giant armored suit assembled out of spare parts in a cave somewhere.
This is the part where I usually say “Even though I liked the film, it had its problems.” Well, even though I liked Iron Man, it had its problems. There was a weird edge of unrealism to it, which may or may not have come from the adaptation from a comic book. And the actual plotline of the film itself, if you cut out all the little details which make it rich and believable, is really nothing but a series of meandering film clichés. Even so, Iron Man testifies to Downey’s acting ability, because the way he plays his role breathes life into a plot that we’ve all seen before. Even the stupid little jokes are funnier, just because Robert Downey Jr. has a weird sort of goofiness and hyperactive energy about him.
All in all, I liked Iron Man, even when it strayed into preachiness, even when it stumbled into cliché, and even when it meandered somewhat pointlessly. The special effects are pretty, the dialogue is fresh enough not to be boring, and even some of the more minor characters feel fairly real. A good film, and probably worth seeing, even if you aren’t a fan of the comic books.
My regular readers (if there are any still left) may have noticed that I’ve been quite inactive over the last few weeks. Well, I thought I ought to explain that. You see, last week and the weeks before that, I was laboring under a mound of late-in-the-semester homework and the preparation for final exams. And this week, I’ve spent most of my time decompressing and trying to deal with a strange case of insomnia that hit me out of the blue. I promise, though, that once I’ve got my head back together, I’ll be back with some more thoughts and speculations.
And many thanks to the readers who’ve stuck by me through my little random hiatuses (hiati?).
I’ve been noticing something lately, as I wander through various social groups and talk to people who seem to be the independent-minded type: nobody talks about revolution anymore.
I am not a child of the sixties. I’m a child of the nineties. But I’ve always admired the sixties- and seventies-era idea of getting tired of the way the current system works and trying to tear it down. Free love, free food, the careful and spiritual expansion of consciousness, all attempts to create a world that is better than the one the revolutionaries found themselves in.
What happened to that ethos? Although we are living in a time, it could be argued, that is just as unstable and unpleasant as the sixties, I have not heard a single young person even hinting at the idea of revolution. I haven’t heard anybody suggesting that this society needs to be changed. What I hear instead is talk of work. Of making money. I hear of drinking problems and parties and drug abuse. I don’t hear anybody trying to change the world, I only hear people trying to ignore it.
And I’m not saying that I’m immune from this. I spend a good deal of my day ignoring the world. I spend a lot of time trying not to think about $120 a barrel oil and genocide in Africa and cyclones in Burma and human-rights abuses here and abroad. Perhaps it’s a psychological defense mechanism. But it seems to me that a better way to solve the problem would be to return to the “hippie” ethic of trying to eradicate hate, to enjoy life, and to create a world that is more comfortable for everybody.
I saw a couple of trailers for The Mist, based on the Stephen King novel of the same title, and I was wandering through the bookstore a few months ago and thought that I’d give it a read. I found it gripping, interesting, and ultimately satisfying, as I find many of King’s novels.
Since I’m a firm believer in the ancient principle that a movie will always be worse than the book it is based on, I wasn’t expecting much when today I rented The Mist. But I wasn’t quite prepared for just how bad it is.
For the first three-quarters of this two-hour (two-hour!) movie, the plot sticks very close to the plot of the novel: a strange mist descends on a town, trapping a bunch of terrified people in a grocery store. Horrible things come out of the mist and do horrible things to the people. Classic Stephen King.
Given that the plot is interesting and psychological — two things you don’t see in movies these days — you might wonder how it would be possible to screw it up. Let me give you a list of good ways, although I might make director Frank Darabont angry, since he’s really the one that came up with these:
Now, I do have more than bilious hatred to spew about The Mist. I do enjoy tearing a bad movie to shreds, but I can’t do that with every aspect of the film. For one thing, the special effects are as incredible as anything you’ll see today. The mist feels real, and the filmmakers know when to use computer-generated mist and when to use an actual fog machine. The creatures are not only fairly faithful to King’s description, but they’re also suitably creepy. Even some of the scenes they made up and threw in there are fairly grotesque in a good way, the kind of good way that makes people want to watch horror films. As I said above, the ending, while depressing, is at least fairly daring. And Darabont, some of the time, keeps very close to King’s original idea.
But that last point actually becomes a problem at times. Nobody expects any film based on a book to stay close to the original storyline and dialogue. At least not as close as Darabont stays. I’ve been hoping for a long time to see a movie that was really just a visual version of a book, but now I see the error of my ways. If every book-direct-to-movie adaptation is as contrived and clumsy as this, then I’d rather see the director change what needs to be changed.
And even though he stays painfully close to the original story sometimes, at other times, he deviates shamelessly, wandering off into irrelevant or story-crippling (see bullet point #3 above) tangents, adding things that needn’t be added (gratuitous unnecessary gore, and in all the wrong places, too), and subtracting things that he probably should have kept (that hazy, panic-induced, shocked sex scene between the main character and the girl comes to mind). But probably the most painful loss is the feeling of panic, the feeling of dread, and that sense that everybody is slowly starting to break down and go mad. King does this very well. Darabont doesn’t do it at all until very near the end, when suddenly it was as though someone slapped him on the back of the head.
One final note. In the book, Mrs. Carmody, the religious lunatic, was more of a shriveled old bat, a hag with little more to do than play with her stuffed raccoons, read tabloids, and babble about the state of the world. But in the film, she’s about thirty years old, and delivers all of her lines with a kind of sickening melodrama not seen since the Wicked Witch of the West menaced Dorothy.
All in all, a bad movie. It has its good moments, but in the end, it’s far too clumsily-executed to be interesting, and long enough to make you feel like you’ve wasted a good chunk of your life. If you’ve read the book, don’t bother seeing the movie. And if you’ve seen the movie, I’m sorry, but Frank Darabont has already ruined the book for you.
Final Judgment:
* ` ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ (1.5/10 asterisks)
Lately, I’ve been reading Oliver Sacks’s new-ish book Musicophilia. While it’s not quite the tour de force that The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat was, it’s gotten me thinking once again about the neurology of consciousness, and after a few days’ contemplation (and a few years spent reading neurological books), I think I finally have a rough sketch for my own theory of how consciousness comes into existence. Of course, I’m not a neurologist. I don’t know the details of how all this works, and none of it is based on empirical evidence, but that’s the beauty of the Internet: you can talk about ideas abstractly. And, since that’s what I’m good at, that’s what I’m going to do. So, here goes: consciousness.
There are a few structures which are vital to conscious experience. These are:
The other structures are more involved in the contents of consciousness. They are the raw material that the conscious structures process. Here’s how it seems to me that consciousness happens:
Of course, this says nothing about memory formation, which is very important for making sense of conscious awareness. It just so happens that I have a theory for how memories form as well.
I’m not really sure how a memory would be recalled in this model, though. I’d venture to guess that it’d have something to do with the prefrontal cortex sending a signal to the temporal lobe, in order to retrieve the memory for comparison to current events.
This little model (and I’ll say it again, I’m not a neurologist. Not even close, so think about this model in the spirit in which it was intended: as a useful idea, not as anything approaching a theory) does shed some useful light on certain kinds of mental illness and the effects caused by certain sorts of brain damage.
I won’t go any further, for fear of over-inflating my ego and for starting to make claims that I have no hope of arguing for. But this, I think, is at least something to get people thinking. Of course, there are a billion things that I haven’t taken into account: the left versus right hemisphere functional disparity, the effects of neurotransmitters, and no doubt I’ve left out quite a few very important brain structures.
After a few days’ work, I’ve finally finished another short story. Lately, I’ve been getting the disturbing feeling that, if I keep actually finishing stories like I’ve been doing lately, then I might set a precedent and accidentally amount to something.
Anyway, enough disjointed self-deprecation. I present to you: The Long Wait. It tells the story of Derek, who’s spent the last ten years trying to escape from the Harvesters, even though he knows they will find him eventually. As he wanders through the desert, trying to scratch a living out of the sand, his life becomes an a miserable burden, and he begins to wonder if there’s any reason to go on living.
(Beware: Existentialism ahead!)
I haven’t really written anything of consequence for a while, and for that, I apologize. Let me explain.
For the last two or three weeks, I’ve been sleeping pretty damn badly. Every morning, at around 5 or 6 A.M., I find myself awake, and usually, unable to get back to sleep. I have no idea what’s going on, but with final exams looming, this is about the worst time that this could have happened.
The result is that I am completely and utterly exhausted. I feel stressed and moody, and generally just lousy. I’m hoping this will clear up in a week or two, and when it does, I’ll be back writing again. Until then, I may publish one or two of the posts I wrote but never released.
Greg Williams, a cartoonist for the newspaper The Tampa Bay Observer, is certainly moving with the times. He draws a comic called Blogjam for the Observer based on blog posts from various sources. He took an interest in my long-ago post about the helium shortage, and turned it into a comic. The result? A delightfully-illustrated comic of the post, including a cartoon version of me!
You can see the comic here. And be sure to check out some of Williams’s other comics here. And I’m not just suggesting that because he drew me as flatteringly less scruffy than I actually look in real life, but because it’s actually an interesting and well-executed series he’s got going there.
I can’t believe it. It was only a few months ago that I was celebrating my 5,000th view. I guess my intuition was right, people are more interested in blogs that actually talk about something interesting, rather than just blathering on about the weather. You’d think I would have figured that out before now.
Anyway, in celebration of my 10,000th view, I give you: every number less than or equal to 10,000, with the primes highlighted. Yes, I know I’ve done an image like this before, but I thought it would be fitting.
Many thanks to all of my 10,000 readers thus far, and thanks especially those of you who were nice enough to leave all those encouraging comments!
And here’s hoping for another 10,000!
Factors: The numbers from 1 to 500 are plotted horizontally across the top row. Along each vertical column, if N divides the number X (represented here by distance across the top row) evenly (that is, if N is a factor of X), then the pixel N pixels down from the top is black.
Prime Factors: The same general principle as above, but in this image, only the prime factors are shown.
Blue Over Yellow: Basically, a combination of the previous two images. Numbers from 1 to 250 are plotted horizontally, and factors are plotted vertically. If a factor is prime, the little square representing it is blue, otherwise, it’s yellow.
That tantalizing structure is still just slightly out of reach…Oh well, back to work!
This is the beginning of what I hope will be a fairly long-running series of posts, each containing one or two (or three, if I’m feeling adventurous) numerical or mathematical visualizations. If you need a concrete example of what I’m talking about, just check out the image here).
Anyway, here goes:
Meet the Primes: Every pixel represents a number from 1 to 250,000. The image wraps horizontally; that is, the first pixel of the first row is the number 1, the first pixel of the second row is 501 (since each row is 500 pixels wide), the first pixel of the third row is 101, and so on and so on. Pixels representing prime numbers are black. From this view, it’s quite obvious that there’s likely some sort of structure to the primes, but it’s hard to say what that structure might be.
A few days ago, I was mucking about in the vast swampland that the Internet has become, and I stumbled upon yet another reference to a programming language I’d heard about a few times before: “Processing.” My interest piqued, I went in search of a compiler, and found one at Processing’s website (www.processing.org), and immediately started learning the language.
Given my many previous failures trying to learn Java, upon which Processing is based, I didn’t think I’d have much chance of learning the language, but I tried anyway, and actually found it just about as intuitive and elegant as Python, which remains my favorite programming language of all times. For a while, I cobbled together various tiny programs to do things like graph functions in one and two variables, graph parametric equations by replacing x, y, and z with rgb color values (producing a rather strange-looking wave of color that wasn’t nearly as interesting as I’d hoped), and visualizing one-dimensional celluar automata (which, by the way, was a complete failure, because Python is the only language I’ve found whose array-handling I can both tolerate and understand). Then, since I’m always a mathematician at heart, I thought I’d do something that mathematicians love to do: visualize the primes.
Before I go on, I should re-iterate just how much of a godsend Processing is. I’ve been trying to write methods in Python to visualize various kinds of functions and data for many moons, and my results have never been much more than mediocre. The only graphics module I’ve learned in Python (Tkinter, in case you were interested) is clumsy and runs slowly, and really isn’t meant to handle the kind of pixel-by-pixel manipulations I’d had in mind. Processing, though, exists solely for this purpose, which is the reason for my gushing for the last three paragraphs.
Anyway, the primes. I put together a simple program that computes the gap between the current prime number and the last prime number (using the standard Sieve of Eratosthenes method), and draws a circle at the location of the current prime whose size is based on the gap between the two primes.
I suspect I could have saved these thousand words by doing as the cliché says, and just giving you the picture:
(You can see a higher-resolution version here).
There’s a great deal of hidden beauty in this picture, most of which I can’t claim responsibility for. There’s a certain order to it, even though the primes seem to be quite random. Really, the beauty comes from the delicate, elegant structure of mathematics. The structure of the primes, as the structure of pi, is an expression of the deep structure of numbers, and thus, of the deep structure of the universe itself. It can be an almost religious experience, a sort of holy communion with the Numbers, to be given a glimpse of that structure.
I don’t know why I’ve been so sentimental lately…either way, the point I’m driving at is this: visualization is a really powerful tool for understanding mathematics. And Processing is a great programming language for visualization. (And, once again, I sound like I’m on somebody’s payroll, but I’m not. As far as you know.).
Ever since I moved out, my father, apparently afflicted by some sort of empty-nest syndrome, has suggested that we go see a movie nearly every weekend. I can’t fault him for it, though, since it’s given me an opportunity to hone my review skills. An unfortunate side-effect of this, however, is the fact that I have to see contemporary movies, which are, almost entirely, cliché-riddled retreads (or outright remakes) of old storylines, with one-dimensional characters and atrocious dialogue apparently inspired by a 1990’s soap opera.
Pete Travis’s Vantage Point, however, is not such a film.
Vantage Point follows…actually…I can’t use my standard “follows the adventures of grizzled action hero X” here, since it doesn’t actually follow anyone in particular. More on that later. But basically, the plot of the film is thus: the president is speaking at some sort of anti-terrorism summit, and an assassination attempt is made, then the summit is bombed. But then, the audience finds out that it goes much deeper than that, but I wont’ spoil the rest.
This is one of those rare films that’s built around a concept. This is quite refreshing, since I haven’t seen a concept film in at least a decade. Most of the films I’ve seen of late have been character-based (which, don’t get me wrong, is probably the best way to tell a story) or based on nothing in particular (such as, say, any movie with Resident Evil in the title). But Vantage Point is based more around the idea of slowly assembling the plot by showing it through the viewpoint of five or six different people. Not an idea that’s been used very often.
Now, I must admit, I wasn’t expecting much. This kind of film is usually little more than an interesting experiment. Telling a story this way is also horrendously complicated, and I have a very low opinion of the ability of most modern directors to handle complicated stories. So I was incredibly surprised when I watched Vantage Point. It was actually good.
Its major saving grace is the novel way of telling the story: basically, you see one person’s view of the assassination attempt, the bombing, et cetera, then you jump back in time to the original starting point, and get to see those same events through the eyes of another character. Although this sounds like an idea that would have been done to death by now, it hasn’t, and is fresh enough that what would have been a fairly boring action-movie plot is transformed into something quite fresh and engaging. There were times, such as a car-chase sequence, when I actually found myself on the edge of my seat. I haven’t been excited by a movie since I saw Twister as a child in 1996, but the continual jumps don’t give you a chance to get used to, or worse, get bored with, the action.
The other thing that surprised me about Vantage Point was the maturity of the plot. Of course, any action movie is bound to have a juvenile flavor to it, but this movie overcomes that by trying its hardest to feel genuine and to really say something. I’ve seen a few movies which try to cope with the idea of terrorism, but this is one of the few that I’ve seen that actually tries to say something about the politics of it, which is a nice change. And it helps the maturity factor a great deal that the characters aren’t so much cardboard cutouts. As you might expect, a film like Vantage Point, which basically has to be five or six mini-films, doesn’t have much time for character development, but it manages this quite competently nonetheless, using clean, concise exposition.
All that said, this is not a perfect movie. While the film’s multiple-viewpoint concept is interesting and refreshing, it really feels like a great deal was sacrificed for its sake, leading to some really contrived plot segments that annoyed me a great deal. You’ve heard of deus ex machina, that horrible “storytelling” technique where something unlikely appears at the last second to save a dying character or pull the storyline back together? Well, Vantage Point is guilty of using deus ex machina’s dark cousin, deus ex technologica. I won’t give anything away, but suffice to say, one of the terrorists does more with a high-tech little cell phone than I ever knew was possible. For example, I searched my own phone’s menus for hours after the movie, looking for the “fire a sniper rifle”,” detonate a bomb”, and “make the plot make sense” buttons I saw the head terrorist use. After accidentally deleting most of my contact numbers, it dawned on me that the mutant phone-gadget-thing was no more than a way to neatly tie up the dozen or so loose ends that are the inevitable product of trying to do a story like this.
Even so, it’s an interesting movie, and entertaining, and the concept it revolves around is well-executed enough that it feels quite fresh. Even with the magic phones and the “shell-shocked old-time secret service agent” bit, it still comes together well enough that it’s worth seeing. Hell, it might even be worth it to see this one on the big screen.
Final Judgment:
* * * * * * * ` ~ ~ (7.5/10 asterisks)
No doubt there is going to be quite an outpouring of posts like this on all the nerd blogs all over the world, but I don’t care. It still needs to be said.
Today, Arthur C. Clarke, one of the most well-known science fiction writers and futurists of the twentieth century died.
I’m not going to launch into a long, sentimental retrospective of the man’s life. That’s what obituaries are for. I just wanted to say that he will be missed. A lot.
R.I.P., Arthur C. Clarke
December 16th, 1917 — March 19th, 2008
When I was in primary school, I hated math. It bored me to no end. To me, all it was was some heavyset woman making us do endless addition or subtraction or multiplication drills, for no reason other than the fact that we were ordered to. What was worse, all I ever saw of mathematics was a single, linear path. You started with a problem, and then you proceeded by the same old steps through the same old terrain until you found the solution. Even if the numbers involved changed, the methods didn’t, and after a few years, I started to realize that it was really all just repeating the same few problems over and over again, in different guises.
It wasn’t until I entered college that I started to re-discover the beauty of numbers and patterns (which the public school system had blinded me to, but that’s another post entirely). And today, I came to an amazing realization.
You see, I’ve been taking Differential Equations for the past few months, and it’s always struck me as the way math is supposed to be. Differential Equations is a class where it must be acknowledged that there are some problems we don’t know how to solve in the traditional way, or that we can’t solve at all. It’s the logical opposite of algebra.
You see, algebra was the first subject that really made me despise math. There was no freedom in the solutions: all you did was shuffle some numbers around, and eventually figured out the value of the variable in question. There was no room for beauty or creativity; it was just a very roundabout way of doing regular arithmetic.
Not so with calculus. Not so with differential equations. You see, in calculus, there is more freedom. You’re usually not searching for a number, but for a function. And whether or not you can find the solution depends on how creatively you can construct and reconstruct the problem. For example, in order to find the area under the curve defined by y = exp(2x), when x varies between -1 and 1, you have to use an integral. But you can’t just integrate right away. First, since there’s only a fairly small types of integrals that can actually be evaluated, you have to rebuild the problem from the ground up. Usually, this particular problem would be solved by saying that u = 2x, which turns the problem into the one of integrating y = exp(u), which is solvable.
That’s why I’ve always loved calculus: there’s always room for creativity and exploration. And the more complex the mathematics, the more ways there are to solve any given problem.
Thinking about all of this led me to an epiphany while I was walking home from my philosophy class: once you get past arithmetic, mathematics is not about doing the same thing over and over to slightly different problems in order to get slightly different answers. In fact, most problems don’t have a single answer. For example, take Schrödinger’s Equation, which is the basis of most of quantum mechanics:
What the variables represent isn’t terribly important. What’s much more important is what the equation represents. If this were an algebraic expression, it would simply represent an answer that you haven’t found yet. But Schrödinger’s equation, and other equations like it (such as the Einstein Field Equations of general relativity), they simply represent constraints that select certain solutions and correct, and others as incorrect. They’re not number just waiting to be found, they’re more like intelligent little computers that decide what is real and what is not, mathematically.
To understand what I mean, consider a much simpler differential equation (and please forgive the ugliness of the notation, but I’m working from some pretty severe graphical limitations):
y’ = k * y
This is not just a number in disguise. Instead, it’s a pattern that any function f(x) must fit in order to be called a solution of the equation. Contained in that tiny equation is the “truth filter” that passes through any exponentially growing or decaying solution. Likewise, Schrödinger’s equation is merely a filter that determines whether or not a given function can occur in real life or not. According to Schrödinger’s equation, electrons can change energy levels and emit photons, and particles can occasionally jump through barriers.
That is the true beauty of mathematics: every equation, every principle, every theorem is nothing more and nothing less than a little filter that produces reality from all the infinite possibilities inherent in the universe. Mathematics is incredibly intelligent in that regard, a perfect structure that selects real reality from the infinitude of possible realities.
And that is why I’m a math major.
As a card-carrying nerd (all right, so there is no card, but there should be), I am obligated to wish my readers a happy pi day. Today is March th 14th, which means that the date is 3-14. To commemorate the occasion, I present to you: all the digits of pi that I have memorized:
3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820(974?)
Okay, so it’s not much, but I occasionally forget my own telephone number, so it’s quite a feat as far as I’m concerned.
Pi has always been one of my favorite mathematical constants. It’s probably the most abstract. What pi is to me is the perfect expression of the structure of mathematics, a sort of symbol for the deeper order that lurks beneath the foamy surface of our universe. Pi is built into the structure of everything, from the geometry of spacetime to the fluctuations of quantum mechanics, and I have a hunch that it will appear in some form at the intersection of the two. I like to think of it, if you’ll forgive the theological reference, as God’s Rivet, the little pin that holds everything else together.
So, happy pi day.
And also, happy birthday Albert.
And I hope you’ll all join me in my Ultimate Pi Day celebration on March 14th, 2015, at 9:26 and 53 seconds (AM or PM, your choice)!
I went into this movie not expecting much. I’ve seen a lot of the older movies about the stone age, and none of them have impressed me either in storyline or in scientific or historical accuracy. The “prehistoric” genre has a tendency towards cliché and unoriginality.
On the whole, however, I was pleasantly surprised. 10,000 BC thrusts you into the world of Dalay (or Delay…I don’t know), a hunter of woolly mammoth for his tribe. As a result of a prophecy of some sort, he finds himself wandering through the wilderness, beyond the borders of the tribe’s tiny known universe. There’s a lot of action and adventure along the way and good things happen and tragedies happen and then it all gets wrapped up by the ending.
All in all, it’s a very atmospheric movie, seemingly filmed partly in that same beautiful stretch of New Zealand that served as Middle Earth in the Lord of the Rings films. The tribe’s social organization feels genuine, as does the technology and the characters’ daily lives. I also like the fact that, when they encounter other tribes, none of them speak the same strangely-accented English that Dalay’s tribe speaks. It’s a refreshing change from films where everybody speaks English, although, in this film, apparently everybody else in the world speaks a common language, which seems rather odd.
The film starts to lose me when the characters walk over a snow-covered mountain range to find themselves in a rainforest, and then only a few minutes later, in a desert. I’m not certain, but it seems unlikely to have those three climes so close together. Even so, the environment is used to good advantage throughout the film, and they manage to make even the desert look pretty, in a desolate sort of way.
The film loses me even more, though, as it plunges into a series of strange semi-spiritual “spirit-guide” sort of side sequences, which seem to me not to add anything to the film but to allow them to hack together a happy ending. It all seems rather unnecessary, and did a great job of keeping me distracted from the main plot.
That aside, though, the film rapidly degenerates into a slag heap of sentimentality, clichés, and overwrought action sequences. About halfway through, it seems that the creative members of the writing staff went home, and from then on, 10,000 BC follows the standard cookie-cutter action movie plot almost to the letter. Also, there were some sequences that looked to be copied right out of 300. Now, it’s possible to copy from or pay homage to a film without looking pathetic, but that’s not the case here. Here, it feels more like sycophantic desperation to soak up some of 300’s impressive success.
In the end, though, it’s not a bad movie. The various tribes feel authentic enough, and the casting and writing were done competently enough that they really feel like different cultures with different traditions. The landscapes are pretty and, in general, it certainly feels like prehistory, which is fairly impressive, considering the difficulty of making a movie about a period with no historical record on which to base the plot. Perhaps, in light of this, some of the historical inaccuracies can be forgiven (unless, that is, you’re a hardened and obsessive science nerd, like me). The plot’s not much to speak of; it’s basically standard adventure movie canon, with some interesting extra bits tacked on. But still, you have to admire the filmmakers for being bold enough to build a film around such an innovative historical setting, even if the story does fall flat in the telling.
Final Judgment:
* * * * * * ~ ~ ~ ~ (6/10 asterisks)
