THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
03/22/02 -- Vol. 20, No. 38
El Presidente: Mark Leeper, mleeper@optonline.net
The Power Behind El Pres: Evelyn Leeper, eleeper@optonline.net
Back issues at http://www.geocities.com/evelynleeper
All material copyright by author unless otherwise noted.
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Topics:
Hugo Nominations Reminder
Early Universe Oscillation (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Paradigms Lost (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
ICE AGE (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
===================================================================
TOPIC: Hugo Nominations Reminder (comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
Just a reminder--Hugo nominations for this year close March 31,
2002. Now that the MT VOID is no longer associated at all with
any corporation, but is a personal fanzine, be reminded it is
eligible for the Hugo. [-ecl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Early Universe Oscillation (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
A few months ago SCIENCE NEWS ran an article about measuring
oscillations from the very early universe, the time just after the
Big Bang. This is almost literally the Sound from the Beginning
of Time. Articles on the subject may be found at:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/05/010525071736.htm
http://www.globaltechnoscan.com/30May-5June01/astrophysics.htm
Now another team has actually measured the sound from the last
instants of time just before the Big Bang. It is "Oops. Uh-oh!"
[-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Paradigms Lost (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
I am going to be talking about language this week but I would like
to give an analogy to help the reader understand what I have to
say. Much of my career I worked with software development.
Basically you are given a task that has to be done and bunches of
people do it. Maybe a new telephone switch has to be developed
and a team of software engineers is given the task of doing it.
One thing you very quickly discover happening in such an endeavor
is that you need some action done and there is a system to track
the request to have it done. You have a "modification request" or
MR. Perhaps what you have requested requires that several actions
be taken. The original request still stands, but you have a
series of sub-requests called "child MRs" They can be broken into
perhaps smaller tasks so child MRs may have their own child MRs.
Eventually someone notes that the entire project of building the
telephone switch can be described in a tree structure of
modification requests. You start out with a really big MR. You
write an MR saying "We need a telephone switch." Well there is
nobody who can just say "OK, here is your switch." So you break
that MR into smaller child MRs. These are sub-requests. You say
things like "We need hardware to run this switch on." You need
the machinery that the switch will run on. That is one sub-
request--one child MR. We need the software, the computer
programs, to run on the switch. Then each of these MRs is broken
into smaller requests. And the request is broken up finer and
finer. You are making little ones out of big ones. Eventually
that gets down to "The opening screen has got to say 'hello.'"
Now one guy can do that. He takes the dialog that paints the
opening screen and types into it "Hello." Then he closes the MR.
That request has been fulfilled. He may have about eight MRs for
this screen. When he has filled all those requests and closed all
the MRs, the screen is complete. He can close the parent MR that
asks for an opening screen. This huge tree of requests starts
shrinking as more and more of the requests are fulfilled. Finally
you can say yeah, we got the hardware and close that request.
Yeah we got the software, we can close that request. OK, the
request that we have a telephone switch is now complete. When the
last MR is fulfilled and closed, you have your switch.
You could even take it back more steps and have an MR from the
Board of Directors to the President of the company saying we'd
like you to run the company. He could break that up into requests
like "we have to get revenue." Some descendent of that MR is "We
need a telephone switch." But the whole running of the company
could be resolved into a tree of MRs.
That was not how people originally thought of the task of running
the company, but it is a way of thinking about it. It is a
"paradigm" to borrow a phrase from philosophy. The whole
constituent matter of the task of running the company comes down
to a set, a huge tree, of requests. That is one way of thinking
about things. My first supervisor at Burroughs way back thought
that accounting was really what the company was all about. I am
not sure how he defended that belief, but that is where it all
came from in his mind. I think upper management is more likely to
think of running the company in terms of accounting than in terms
of MRs, but you could go either way with either paradigm. The
whole enchilada could be thought of with the accounting paradigm
or the MR paradigm.
Somebody once said that all wars are economic wars. They can be
seen that way. They can be seen other ways. The idea that all
wars are economic in nature is an example of a paradigm for
thinking about war. Also conspiracy theories provide alternate
paradigms for thinking about the world. Everything that happens
is the result of sinister manipulations by incredibly subtle
Latvians. You can see the world that way and it all seems to
work. Nobody can prove you wrong.
But the point I am trying to get to is that language too has
fallen under the sway of a paradigm. We have taken one possible
simple structure for a thought and said that is really all there
is. You identify a thing and you identify an action to associate
with that thing. We call the thought a sentence and it breaks
into the subject and the predicate. "I go to the store." What is
the thing? Me. What is the action? Going to the store. All of
your thoughts get framed in terms of ordered pairs of things and
actions.
You stand in front of a waterfall. What is your natural thought?
"Beautiful." That is what your mind and your sense of esthetics
tells you. It is a thought. But it does not fit the standard
model. It is just a free-standing adjective. Your English
teacher cracks you on the knuckles and says that is not a complete
sentence. It didn't have all the information that was required.
What should you be saying? "That waterfall is beautiful." What
is the thing? The waterfall. What is it doing? Being beautiful.
In perfectly spoken language you force all of your thoughts into
this confining structure. At some level that may be the only way
you can think. It frames your entire thinking process. A novel
is just a catalog of objects and their actions. Sentence 1: What
was the thing? The times themselves. What were they doing?
Being the best of times and the worst of times. We allow some
limited variation in structure, but not much.
Is this a good way to think? Well each sentence has the
predictable two pieces of information. Certainly our minds'
processing centers finds that a great simplifying assumption. It
knows what to pick out of the sentence. Some poetry throws the
standard format away and it makes it harder to understand because
our minds are not used to it. And a lot of incomplete sentences
also do not convey the thought intended. Read the Usenet if you
doubt that. But if you are standing next to somebody at a
waterfall and that person says "beautiful," you can fill in the
blanks reasonably well and assume he is talking about the
waterfall and not the ground beneath your feet. In a complete
sentence you would know what he is saying is beautiful. But the
truth is that "beautiful" does seem to convey the information. In
fact "that waterfall is beautiful" does not have the same
emotional impact. It feels more distanced from the waterfall and
less immediate. What gives the statement "beautiful" its impact
may well be that it differs from the standard paradigm and hence
seems more sincere. The speaker did not bother to form his
emotion into a complete sentence, he just let the emotion out.
In any case, we have made our bargain with language long ago.
Most of our language will be forming our thoughts into ordered
pairs of things and actions. It does make some communication
easier. Is there a viable alternative? None I can think of.
About the closest is poetry. Even that usually follows the thing
and action paradigm but gives the poet license to express thoughts
other ways.
Perhaps there was another good alternative at one time. But if
there was we probably cannot reproduce it now. It is lost to the
past. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: ICE AGE (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: During the Ice Age a sloth, a mammoth, and a saber-
toothed tiger join forces and go on a trek to return a human baby
to its tribe. The story is weak on logic, but the writing is
warm and frequently laugh-out-loud funny. Three-dimensional
animation continues to improve from film to film. The short 75-
minute length seems a little stingy. Rating: 6 (0 to 10), high
+1 (-4 to +4)
ICE AGE is set just when the title tells you it is set, the
Pleistocene Era about 11,000 years ago. There has been new
interest in this period. Why? As far as storytelling is
concerned, filmmakers are probably sensing that the Age of
Dinosaurs has been very much mined out. Fresher and less
familiar is the Pleistocene, with its own really weird animals.
It is something like discovering a new age of brand new
dinosaurs. Television has brought us the British import WALKING
WITH PREHISTORIC BEASTS that has shown viewers, many for the
first time, the strange creatures of the recent prehistoric past.
Now we have a comic animated film set in this era.
The great glacier is advancing and causing animals to migrate to
warmer climates. A mismatched group of Manfred the Mammoth, Sid
the Sloth, and Diego the Sabertooth (voiced by Ray Romano, John
Leguizamo, and Denis Leary respectively) find a human baby and go
on a quest to return the baby to its parents. The story of
sacrifice for a human is a bit far-fetched (not to under-rate a
surprising number of documented cases of elephant altruism), but
the script is good-hearted and frequently darn funny. The
relationship of the strong hero and the uninvited and unwanted
wise-cracking sidekick seems at times modeled on SHREK just as
the relation of the shaggy beasts and the human baby will remind
some of MONSTERS, INC. Skillful animation of facial expression
well-integrated with voice characterizations give real
personality to the principal characters. Manfred the Mammoth is
outwardly as stolid as he is solid, but as the story progresses
we see into his character. The story is made marginally more
believable as it progresses in that Manfred starts trusting
humans and not knowing of the relationship between humans and
mammoths. The facial animation helps a lot as it does for Sid, a
most un-sloth-like sloth. He is active and curious. Diego has
his own agenda which this viewer knows but the trusting Manfred
does not suspect. The other major character is really just a
background creature who just keeps showing up as a running gag.
The squirrel-like thing with his acorn may be the funniest thing
in the film. There are some logic questions as to where he found
an oak tree and why he is burying an acorn in a place he is
migrating away from.
My reviews of animated films are getting a sort of sameness to
them. Every new film that comes out I seem to notice new feats
of animation that have not been done before. I still think of
SHREK as a recent film and it was impressive that the computer
could handle the surface texture of a furred animal, tracking
each hair. It made a furry animal a full character for the
entire length of the film. That was impressive. Now ICE AGE is
an adventure about furry animals. Everything but the humans (who
are minor characters) and the dodos are furry. The wizards can
do that in animation now, I guess. Animated film continues to
discover itself and broadens what it can do one film after
another. It is going through an inventive stage that much like
live action film did in the 1910s when directors were discovering
things like that a film can have a close-up on an actor's face
and the audience will understand it. Where work still needs to
be done in animation, apparently, is in making the human figures
believable. Humans know their own kind and while we accept an
animation of a sloth or a mammoth, the animated humans still look
a little stiff and statue-like.
ICE AGE is pleasant and funny. It offers adults a little less
than SHREK or MONSTERS, INC did, but a lot more than QUEEN OF THE
DAMNED or a film based on a video game ever could. I rate it a 6
on the 0 to 10 scale and a high +1 on the -4 to +4 scale. [-mrl]
===================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
The American way is to seduce a man by bribery
and make a prostitute of him. Or else to ignore
him, starve him into submission and make a hack
out of him.
-- Henry Miller
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