Cyde Weys Musings

I apologize to anyone who took my recommendation of that abysmal show “American Gladiators” seriously and actually started watching it. It seems like everyone at my work (including me) reached the unanimous conclusion that that show was lame and not worth further watching within a couple of episodes of me writing that post. One can only handle so much Hulk Hogan in one lifetime, after all.

So, mea culpa. To whoever recommended that I watch Fear Factor a couple years back: now we’re even.

Woohoo, I’m going to the DC101 Chili Cook-Off today. It’s been awhile since I’ve gone (maybe five or six years?). I wonder which will be better this year, the bands or the chili?

Post-concert update: All right, that was fun. Unfortunately, I cannot speak as to the status of the chili, because I just saw the live performances. I think my favorite was Finger Eleven, because they closed out their set with a Led Zeppelin and then a Pink Floyd cover. How awesome is that?! My friend that I brought along (Grokmoo from SupComTalk, if any of you are still following along) was kind of “meh” up until that point because he likes classic rock a lot more than modern rock. So finally there was something there for him. Hopefully his opinion of the modern rock acts will improve, because most of them like the rock classics just like he does.

Some of the other acts were kind of “meh”. Too much emo whining, not enough great rock. I actually didn’t pay a lot of attention to some of the songs because I was up close to the stage and I was constantly defending across crowd surfers crashing down on top of my head. The craziest thing I saw was a guy in a wheelchair crowd surfing. I didn’t even know that was possible, but it happened, and the guy was having an absolute blast.

After the concert on the Metro going home I happened to sit in the same car as a bunch of young people (maybe recently graduated from high school?) from Martinsburg, West Virginia. They immediately asked me if I was a local (I am), then proceeded to bombard me with all sorts of weird questions, like “Does the Metro always shake like this?” (he’d never ridden a train before; the answer is yes), and another guy asking if the train’s doors open at all stops (they do).

One of the girls who was with them was so freaked out by the whole Metro experience that she was having some kind of panic attack; she couldn’t stop shaking, and was grabbing onto a handrail really tightly. I guess it was the combination of the speed and being underground. Later, when we emerged from underground and were on a raised track above some local roads, one of the guys commented that he felt like he was flying. I’m guessing he’s never flown in a plane before, because the sensation of height wasn’t even close.

It’s interesting to get that perspective on the world. I’ve known there are many people who’ve never flown in an airplane, but I didn’t really pause to consider there would be better who’ve never taken trains before.

The History Channel has been disappointing me lately. I used to watch it regularly, trusting it because, after all, they’re talking about history; how could they get it wrong?! And their programs on actual history are still good. But they’ve aired a whole flood of pseudoscientific bullcrap recently. For instance, one of their new shows is devoted to ‘examining the wonders of ancient ages’.

In one episode I watched, they credulously reported on people firmly in woo-woo territory speaking about a full-sized glider that the Egyptians could’ve used to fly high above the pyramids. All of this speculation was based on a little children’s toy. Oh, and then there was the broach they said looked like a space shuttle and it had to have an aeronautical inspiration because the wings attached at the bottom, not at the top like with birds or insects. Hello?! Whatever happened to Occam’s razor? Isn’t artistic license a lot more likely than those ancient indigenous South Americans being visited by aliens (or time-traveling US astronauts?).

And I’m not even going to talk about “Ghost Hunters” or that show about alien encounters. That crap makes my blood absolutely boil. So the History Channel has been pissing me off a lot recently, and I’ve been wondering how it’s fallen so far from not that long ago when it used to actually, you know, talk about true things.

Well, here’s a redeeming moment for them. They’re making a new show about Evolution, and by all accounts it looks good. Evolution is one of my favorite scientific subjects. I wrote countless thousands of posts on talk.origins debating it, and just recently I’ve been reading Stephen Jay Gould’s essay books (again). There’s a gaping dearth of coverage of evolution in American popular media, probably because of the many vocal idiots that inhabit the inland and southern areas of the United States, and I admire History Channel to have the courage to go ahead with this show. It’s going to be awesome, and it really could educate a lot of people.

Now if they’d just have the courage to not air all of that other crap.

Clay Shirky, who I saw at Wikimania 2006, has recently given an excellent speech that answers the question “Where do people find the time?” that is oft-asked to people with techie inclinations. I’ll let his own words speak for themselves. Click through to read the rest of it; his main thrust is dead on.

So I tell her all this stuff [about Wikipedia], and I think, “Okay, we’re going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever.” That wasn’t her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, “Where do people find the time?” That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, “No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you’ve been masking for 50 years.”

His point is dead on. Watching television is a completely passive, dead activity, yet the average American spends several hours a day attached to the tube. So don’t look down on the techie who’s enamored with the Internet; at least he’s doing something. Even playing World of Warcraft is better than watching television.

I’m happy to say that I’m down to just a few hours of television a week (I watch Battlestar Galactica, The Deadliest Catch, The Office, The Big Bang Theory, Doctor Who, South Park, and Mythbusters regularly). And I download everything I watch even though we pay for cable, just because I can’t stand wasting time on the ads. What have I done with all of that extra time that I don’t spend on watching television? I think my work speaks for itself.

This could either turn out incredibly good, or incredibly bad. DreamWorks, thanks to the dealings of Stephen Spielberg (who isn’t necessarily signed on as director), has acquired the rights to make a live action 3D Ghost in the Shell movie. Ghost in the Shell is an anime and manga that follows the exploits of an elite counter-terrorism rogue government unit in the cyberpunk future. The integration of humans and technology (think “cyborg”) is a major theme in the series.

Naturally, I’ve been a huge fan of Ghost in the Shell ever since I first heard of it. I’ve watched both seasons of the Stand Alone Complex series twice over, along with both films and the made-for-TV movie. I’ve even read the manga, which is a rarity for me, since I generally don’t like comics (let the flaming begin). Ghost in the Shell is just such a unique, gritty vision of a technology-enabled future that, as a techie, I can’t help but feel enthralled by it. Ever since 3rd GIG aired on TV, though, I’ve been aching for another fix. An American-made live action movie wasn’t my preferred vehicle of choice for that fix, but if it’s actually better than nothing, I’ll take it. Here’s how it can be done well.

DreamWorks has to resist the urge to mess with the source material, thus screwing everything up. It needs to be set in Tokyo, not relocated to New York City or Los Angeles or whatever American film studios typically do. It must remain just as gritty and realistic as the original. If I see anything that looks like magic or impossible stunts with no basis in the technology of the series, I’m going to scream. Basically, if DreamWorks approaches this from the angle of “this’ll be a cool action/thriller flick”, then it’s going to suck. But if they approach it from the original angle, a philosophical exploration of the intersection of man and technology in the coming decades, then it has a fighting chance.

I’d been looking forward to Slashdot’s take on April Fools’ since last year. So what happened? There was nothing unusual on the site yesterday. It was as if the only April Fools’ joke was that there was none. Even Google does April Fools’ jokes; does Slashdot all of a sudden think they’re too serious for it? Color me disappointed. I wanted to see another take on OMG PONIES!

It is with much sadness that I learn of the death of Arthur C. Clarke at the age of 90 in his country of residence, Sri Lanka. Arthur C. Clarke was the last surviving member of the trio of great golden age science fiction writers affectionately known as the “Big Three”, which also included Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein. Arthur C. Clarke’s work was hugely influential in the genre of science fiction. In particular, he co-wrote the screenplay for 2001: A Space Odyssey with Stanley Kubrick (and a novel of the same name), yielding a groundbreaking science fiction film that still stands on its own decades later.

Arthur C. Clarke was also hugely influential on a very personal level to me. He was my first introduction to the amazing genre of adult science fiction (up until that point I had read a lot of Tom Swift novels, but that’s more adventure than true scifi). I still remember, as an elementary school kid, finding a mysterious slim black volume amongst my dad’s book collection entitled Rendezvous with Rama. I don’t know what drew me to it, but I know I wanted to read it, and once I cracked that cover, I couldn’t put it down. It was unlike anything I had been exposed to up until that point. It had fantastic concepts, a ridiculously huge enigmatic alien spaceship, a vision of the future in which travel to space was becoming commonplace, forward thinking, and philosophical questions about how first contact would affect humanity. It even had a little bit of sex in it, something my young mind wasn’t quite ready to grasp but found fascinating nonetheless. I didn’t even realize something that awesome existed up until that point. I was enthralled.

From Rama I began branching out into other works by Arthur C. Clarke (2001 amongst them). Then I discovered Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, Greg Bear, Greg Egan, Stephen Baxter, and other greats of the field. I have read dozens, perhaps hundreds, of speculative fiction novels since then, but I will never forget my first. It affected me in a profound way. Within short order at school I was writing stories about spaceships for class assignments. I lacked the skills to come up with a setting of my own that even came close to rivaling that of Rama’s, my gold standard at the time, so I shamelessly ripped it off, writing a story about a hollowed-out, rotating spaceship with a four letter name that came unannounced to Earth, exactly like Rama, except only bigger: I multiplied all of the dimensions by two. Surely that made it even better than Rama?

I will go to bed tonight sadder than when I awoke this morning, knowing that the world is a little poorer off for seeing the passing of one of its great creative minds. You may never have read any of his works, but Arthur C. Clarke touched generations of people, filling their minds with wonder and their hearts with hope. I know not how many people like me were introduced to science fiction through his works, but I do know that all of us, however many there are, will be mourning his death tonight. Rest in peace, and may your singular works continue to inspire for generations to come.

The comic Garfield has taken a lot of grief on the web in the past few days, most of it deserved. The comic has been around since the 1970s and it really just isn’t that funny. For instance, Garfield Without Garfield makes the strip much funnier by removing Garfield entirely. The resultant strips show Jon Arbuckle talking to himself, with hilarious results. The description says it all:

Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolor disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life? Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against lonliness in a quiet American suburb.

And then there’s Lasagna Cat, which is a collection of cleverly edited “tributes” to Garfield cartoons that start with a hysterical live actor costume reenactment of a Garfield strip, then segue into bizarre musical numbers. You must see it.

However, Garfield has also had its moments. This series of six strips, published in the week leading up to Halloween 1989, is actually very clever and thought-provoking. I wish more Garfield comics were like this, then I might actually bother reading it regularly. Some urban legends seem to be circulating saying that these strips are hoaxes; they are not, and were published in all newspapers in which Garfield was syndicated. I’ve linked the comics to Garfield.com’s archive as proof.

Read the rest of this entry »

The news media is full of shocked responses to the latest report showing that incarceration is at an all time high in America, with one out of every 99.1 adults behind bars. Of course, not one mainstream media article addresses the obvious issue at hand: we would have much less of a problem if marijuana wasn’t illegal. Many of these one out of 99.1 adults wouldn’t be in jail, saving billions in annual prison costs in addition to saving billions spent on the war on drugs annually.

So here we have all of these older, stuffy people gasping at the enormity of our problem (and don’t kid yourself, it’s a huge problem, sapping large percentages of GDP just to keep people locked away), but they aren’t even willing to consider its causes. They are so stuck in this ridiculous mindset that marijuana must remain illegal, despite being less dangerous than alcohol and cigarettes, that they don’t dare even mentioning it. They do suggest softer prison penalties for drunk driving — which, you know, actually does kill people — but not one mention of legalizing marijuana, which doesn’t kill anyone in and of itself, and legalization of which would actually sharply decrease the number of deaths in the drug trade.

Remember the 1960s? (I don’t, but play along.) It’s too bad that all of the societal change the social movements of the day tried to effect failed to materialize. We’re still making the same stupid mistakes, and we’re suffering more for them now than ever before. How much worse does this problem need to get before we see real change?

CNN is running a “heartwarming” human interest piece about a fourth grader who came up with a mnemonic to help “those having trouble remembering the newly assigned 11 planets” as part of a National Geographic contest. Unfortunately, the contest, and thus the mnemonic, are wrong. It’s too bad they didn’t consult an astronomer before running with it. Here’s the mnemonic she came up with:

Her award-winning phrase is: My Very Exciting Magic Carpet Just Sailed Under Nine Palace Elephants.

The 11 recognized planets are Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Ceres, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto and Eris.

Ignoring the literary merits of her mnemonic (though personally I think “Pallid” would be a better replacement for “Palace”), it’s wrong because there are actually only eight planets. Ceres, Pluto, and Eris are dwarf planets. Where the contest got confused is they think that dwarf planet is a sub-classification of planet; it is not. According to the three-way classification system now in use, there are three entirely separate classes of solar system bodies: planets, dwarf planets, and small solar system bodies (SSSBs). At the time of the new definition in 2006, the International Astronomical Union took a bit of flak for putting the word “planet” in the name of the “dwarf planet” category because it has potentially confusing to laymen. It’s looking like those concerns were valid.

Now don’t think I’m just picking nits here. There’s another reason this mnemonic is untenable: it only includes the currently recognized dwarf planets. But there are dozens and dozens of likely dwarf planet candidates out there we simply haven’t officially classified yet (42 in the Kuiper Belt at last count alone). The definition of dwarf planet, an object that “has sufficient mass so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape” (and is not a natural satellite), is pretty darn inclusive, and was intended to be. Its purpose is to fit in all of the large round objects that don’t make it into the exclusive planetary club. For example, here are a few of the objects in the solar system that are likely to be classified as dwarf planets in the near future: 2003 EL₆₁, Sedna, 2005 FY₉, Quaoar, Orcus, and Ixion. Some of these names will be familiar if you’ve been keeping up on your astronomy news. Note that all of them are larger than Ceres, which is already an official dwarf planet. So if we’re going to play the game of including dwarf planets in our planetary mnemonic, it’s quickly going to balloon to an unmanageable length. Better not even to try, and just stick with the eight.

So, here’s the takeaway. Dwarf planets are not a sub-classification of planets, but rather, are a completely separate category. There are only 8 planets and 3 current dwarf planets, but as astronomers get around to officially declaring more dwarf planets there will be dozens more. School children will continue learning all 8 planets but they will not learn all the dwarf planets because there are simply too many of them (and unlike studying the eight planets, each of which has many unique features making it worth learning about, most of the dwarf planets will be somewhat similar round iceballs too far out in the solar system for us to get much good information on). So this fourth grader’s mnemnoic, while cute, is destined for the rubbish bin of history. Not that I fault her at all (I blame National Geographic). I commend her for her astronomical precociousness, which puts her above 99.9% of kids her age. It’s just unfortunate that the facts aren’t correct.