THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
12/07/07 -- Vol. 26, No. 23, Whole Number 1470
El Honcho Grande: Mark Leeper, mleeper@optonline.net
La Honcha Bonita: Evelyn Leeper, eleeper@optonline.net
All material copyright by author unless otherwise noted.
All comments sent will be assumed authorized for inclusion
unless otherwise noted.
To subscribe, send mail to mtvoid-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
To unsubscribe, send mail to mtvoid-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
Topics:
Open Letter to a Friend Who Asked How to Recycle Compact
Fluorescent Lights (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Not Quite Human (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
THE BEST AMERICAN SCIENCE WRITING 2007 edited
by Gina Kolata (book review by Mark R. Leeper)
JUNO (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
Michael Chabon and Fritz Leiber (letter of comment
by Steve Lelchuk)
This Week's Reading (the "Extreme Word" edition of the
Bible, BEOWULF, 1945, THE YELLOW-LIGHTED BOOKSHOP,
and JANE AUSTEN: THE WORLD OF HER NOVELS)
(book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
===================================================================
TOPIC: Open Letter to a Friend Who Asked How to Recycle Compact
Fluorescent Lights (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Apparently in keeping with the logic of New Jersey taking care
of the environment is really hard anyway, so there is no good
reason to make recycling of fluorescents one nit easier. Virtue
is a tough road, so each part of it should be a test of your
dedication. If you want to avoid the guilt of just throwing the
bulbs out, you will be able to feel very proud of yourself
indeed.
The Monmouth County Household Hazardous Waste Facility accepts
them for your convenience. But, gee, they have to have a life
also so they are not open all the time. You can drop them off
only Tuesday to Saturday. No Mondays and certainly no Sundays.
But it is not all the time those days; it is only during work
hours. Oh, and they take an hour off for lunch. They have to
eat. And they do like to leave early, like 4 PM. That is
particularly nice in the summertime. But during those hours on
those days they will gladly take them.
By the way, don't just drop in on them. They don't want to be
surprised. You have to make an appointment. After all they may
not be around when you show up, they may have something else they
want to be doing, so they need to tell you when to come. But,
yes, I can assure you that Monmouth County is dedicated to saving
the environment. Every good citizen of Monmouth County can feel
proud for every CFL that makes it to the recycling center instead
of just being thrown in the trash.
Middlesex has a facility that will accept them on Mondays, which
Monmouth will not. Of course, ours is closed on Tuesday,
Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and the ever-popular Sunday. It is
in Edison, by the way. But maybe there will be good restaurants
out that way. We can make it a sort of fun outing. And if we
get enough CFLs to recycle we might even offset the amount of
petroleum we use up and the CO2 we release into the air by the
drive.
By the way, we can't use the Monmouth facility and you cannot use
the Middlesex facility. You have to prove that you have not
crossed county lines for the purpose of illicit or immoral
recycling. And we must prevent co-mingling of recycled bulbs.
That's New Jersey, doing its best to keep the environment
spotless for a better future for us and our children. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Not Quite Human (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
With the release of BEOWULF we got a chance to see how far the
film industry has gotten in the realistic depiction of humans in
animation. I thought it was just a little off of being realistic
and they reminded me of the way humans looked in SHREK. I read a
harsh comment by somebody who wanted to be a little cruel who
said they reminded him of the animation in "Clutch Cargo". For
the benefit of those who missed this program, "Clutch Cargo" was
a hero in an almost-animated television series from the early
1960s. Someone recognized that in animation you could save a lot
of change from one frame to the next by just animating the mouth
and that further you could film a mouth in live action and just
superimpose it on the figure. Hence you could do this "Synchro-
Vox" animation extremely cheaply if you did not mind that the end
result looks so weird that it gives everyone who sees it the
willies. It didn't help that the mouths they filmed, male and
female, wore lipstick to make they show up better. The effect
was really bizarre. Small children would be traumatized by the
half-human but not quite human enough effect. The approach was
successful enough (or at least cheap enough) to be used on two
other series Space Angel and Captain Fathom. You can see some
Synchro-Vox from the series at the address below. The lantern-
jawed fellow is Clutch Cargo himself.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MHg1-mpcUY
When I visited a museum at Mount St. Helens there was a creative
display. It was supposed to be a woman lecturing to visitor and
featured a mannequin that was made with a flat spot instead of a
mouth. The mouth was projected to give almost the effect that
the face was moving and the mannequin was speaking. Like Clutch
Cargo the figure was absolutely motionless except for the face
moving. It had the same sort of spookiness. The thing is that
if it were supposed to be a bear up there talking it would not
bother us a lot. We often see in films like THE ROAD TO MORROCCO
an animal talk through animation of the mouth. It did not bother
a generation to see Francis the Talking Mule or his television
descendent Mr. Ed talking (with the help of a little peanut
butter on his gums). Wax museums do not seem to bother people,
but it might if the figures moved. It does not bother us to see
a more human face talking. But there is something that is just
on the edge between that we find spooky. Something very nearly
human is a lot weirder than something that obviously is or
obviously is not human is. And that seems ironic. This also
seems to have some connection with the horror element of THE
INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS where someone near to you starts
seeming like a close replica rather than the person himself.
When I see a behavior that I cannot explain in humans I often
think of what sort of a genetic advantage would it give humans.
I probably am a little facile with my explanations. For example,
why do we prefer cold beverages to ones that are room
temperature? Probably when we evolved and were living more in
nature cold water was freshly melted from ice. Warm water was
more likely stagnant and less wholesome. That is the sort of
analysis I give it. So is there a genetic reason that nearly
human is more off putting than non-human is or than human is.
Perhaps while we were evolving something that looked like us only
too different was not a good genetic choice for a mate. Because
it looked sort of like us we could mate with it. But it probably
had genes that were different from our genes and we want our
genes to dominate the gene pool. This explanation is very
similar (like identical) to my explanation of racial prejudice.
This fear of the near human is probably a phenomenon very close
to that of racial prejudice. We want to preserve genes that are
like our own. (I hastily add that this is not a defense of
prejudice; it is an explanation of the source.)
This distaste for near human is becoming a topic for discussion
among roboticists and psychologists. As robots become more and
more humanlike to make them more acceptable, they are reaching
this point where they are just creeping people out just like
Clutch Cargo did. Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori started
looking at this phenomenon in 1970. He has this graph with nice
smooth curves showing the acceptability of various artificial
versions of humans as they become more and more like humans.
(See the references below.) He hypothesizes his data and I am
skeptical of the possibility of getting real data, but it at
least shows the idea that as you move from industrial robot to
humanoid robot the acceptability increases. But when you start
getting to corpses and zombies and prosthetic hands it drops off
like a cliff. Then it increases again with a Bunraku puppet and
it peaks with a healthy person. This low point of emotional
acceptability is called the "Uncanny Valley".
You can find more information about the "uncanny valley" at the
sites below
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_Valley
http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=853
[-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: THE BEST AMERICAN SCIENCE WRITING 2007 edited by Gina
Kolata (book review by Mark R. Leeper)
There are a lot of science and mathematics books published these
days about the cutting edge thinking in particle physics, in
mathematics, in biology, etc. Many of these books I find have
four or five really engaging ideas that you can mull over if you
want to invest the time to read an entire book. The problem is
finding the time to read whole books. I am a 21st century guy
with the 21st century fault that I have a hard time committing.
I am not talking about my personal relationships. I am lucky
enough there. But I have a hard time committing to time a book.
I start an order of magnitude more books than I read cover to
cover.
For my science appetite I just prefer to read short articles than
whole books. There are lots of good sources for short science
articles on the Internet. An article will generally have one
idea while a whole book on a subject will typically have four.
Reading short articles gives you more new ideas per reading hour.
One exception is the annual collection THE BEST AMERICAN SCIENCE
WRITING, a book that is packed with ideas. You can pick up this
book just about anywhere and find ideas very quickly without
having to commit to reading a whole book. The book is published
annually. Each year the book has a different editor. Starting
in the year 2000 the editors have been James Gleik, Timothy
Ferris, Matt Ridley, Oliver Sacks, Dava Sobel, Alan Lightman, and
Atul Gawande. These are mostly very familiar names in the area of
science writing. This 2007 edition is edited by Gina Kolata.
That is another very familiar name. I read her science writing
in the New York Times.
So what does this year's edition of BEST AMERICAN have to offer?
In no particular order, but the order I picked articles, first
there is "Manifold Destiny," the account form The New Yorker of
Grigory Perelman and his proof of the longstanding challenge of
the Poincare Conjecture. He proved one of the great formerly
unsolved problems and then apparently quit mathematics
disenchanted over the surprisingly complex issue of who really
gets credit and should get credit for mathematical proof. A
mathematical proof is itself objective and mathematicians can
determine if it is right. The question of who should get the
credit for proving an assertion is highly subjective. All
mathematicians use results from other mathematicians, some
working on the same problem. What is the difference between
plugging a hole in a proof and in being the person who proved the
assertion?
I was attracted by Oliver Sacks's account of "Stereo Sue" whose
neurological dysfunction robbed her of depth perception. But he
also brings in the field of stereo photography and several other
issues of interest. Sacks himself has been a longtime hobbyist
in stereoscopic photography. But as a case history this goes
well with the case histories that are covered in his fascination
book THE MAN WHO MISTOOK HIS WIFE FOR A HAT.
On a similar neurological theme is Joshua Davis's piece from
Wired about people with a neurological disorder that makes it
impossible to remember faces and associate them with who it is
who has that face. "Face Blind" is the nickname given to the
disorder. The article looks at diverse aspects of the disorder.
It can be particularly embarrassing in the dating scene.
Gregory Mone tells us about the pleasant occupation of John
Underkoffler, "Hollywood's Science Guru". For films like THE
HULK, MINORITY REPORT, and AEON FLUX he looks at the science in
the scripts and tries to make reasonable explanations that can be
used in the film. We find out how he got the job and how he goes
about the job of turning absurdities into semi-absurdities.
Collections of articles, like the collection of short stories
tend to put their most enticing entries in the first and last
position. The Hollywood story is the last in the book. The
first is Tyler Cabot's article "The Theory of Everything." For
two decades the theory that will unify all physics has seemed to
be String Theory. It describes everything and removes
inconsistencies. It would be every physicists darling but for
one problem. So far it makes no testable predictions. You might
as well say it is angels moving particles around as say that
particles are manifestations of hyper-dimensional strings without
any way to test. The Large Hadron Collider to be completed and
turned on in months will hopefully give some answers.
Perhaps the most exciting piece is "John Koza Has Built An
Invention Machine" by Jonathon Keats. Koza is using Darwinian
approaches in something that goes beyond Computer Aided Design to
letting the computer itself try hundreds of approaches,
evaluating the results, and taking the aspects of the most
successful and recombining aspects of them to make to create new
approaches. In other words he is using Darwinian principles for
the design of non-living devices like antennae. The machine
makes designs that a human would not have thought of.
These are articles that are not written for technical journals.
They are written for general readers in such non-scientific
journals as "Esquire Magazine", "The New Yorker", "Popular
Science". There is not one mathematical formula in the whole
book, I think. These are articles that can be read by just about
anybody.
Contents:
Introduction by Gina Kolata
"The Theory Of Everything" by Tyler Cabot
"Manifold Destiny" by Sylvia Nasar And David Gruber
"Looking For The Lie" by Robin Marantz Henig
"Face Blind" by Joshua Davis
"Stereo Sue" by Oliver Sacks
"Probing A Mind For Cure" by Stacey Burling
"A Depression Switch?" by David Dobbs
"With Lasers And Daring, Doctors Race To Save A Young Man's
Brain" by Denise Grady
"Being There" by Jerome Groopman
"God Or Gorilla" by Matthew Chapman
"The Score" by Atul Gawande
"Truth And Consequences" by Jennifer Couzin
"The Man On The Table Was 97, But He Devised The Surgery"
by Lawrence K. Altman
"Butterfly Lessons" by Elizabeth Kolbert
"In Ancient Fossils, Seeds Of A New Debate On Warmilng"
by William J. Broad
"John Koza Has Built An Invention Machine" by Jonathon Keats
"Mind Games" by John Cassidy
"Schweitzer's Dangerous Discovery" by Barry Yeoman
"Cooking For Eggheads" by Patricia Gadsby
"Hollywood's Science Guru" by Gregory Mone
Paperback: 352 pages
Publisher: Harper Perennial (September 18, 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0-061-34577-6
ISBN-13: 978-0-061-34577-7
[-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: JUNO (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: JUNO is a pleasant as light as possible comedy on the
serious subject, teenage pregnancy. What happens to Juno after
she becomes pregnant seems to cover a wide range of possibilities
of the situation. We see what her alternatives are and how she
reacts. It is a little disquieting that the film takes things as
lightly as it does and the ending just does not feel sufficient
to the situation. Rating: high +1 (-4 to +4) or 6/10
High school student Juno MacGuff (played by Ellen Page) has a big
problem. At the beginning of the film she is just discovering
from her third pregnancy test of the day that she really is
pregnant. This changes everything for her. Now what? Does she
tell her boyfriend? Does she tell her parents? Does she want to
terminate the pregnancy? What are her options? A surprisingly
wide variety of those options are covered in this story and the
approach is kept breezy even if the subject matter is not. Among
the alternatives that Juno considers is allowing the child to be
adopted by a local infertile couple, Vanessa and Mark Loring
(action-hero actress Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman). They
seem like a perfect couple and Juno particularly likes Mark, but
in this course in Life 101 the viewer expects there are some
problems that Juno does not see. Speaking of not seeing the
problems ahead, I had the feeling that writer Diablo Cody did not
give sufficient thought to the emotional impact of what has
happens in the story and what comes after. Juno remains
flippant, but I wonder how long that will last. The end of the
film is by no means the end of the story. At least the film does
not give all the good lines to Page. There are several witty
characters to keep the dialog witty if not always believable.
Director Jason Reitman, who previously gave us THANK YOU FOR
SMOKING, plays the situation for as much comedy as he can muster.
The dialog is kept whimsical and breezy.
Halifax-born Ellen Page has a sort of light bubbly personality
that reminds one of a younger Parker Posey. The personality is
attractive, but perhaps not quite so appropriate considering the
gravity of her situation and the fact she is playing with lives.
She seems not quite right, but that could be just the style of
the film. J. K. Simmons really shines as Juno's father. He
usually seems to play abrasive personalities like J. Jonah
Jameson in the Spider-Man films. Surprise: He is just about an
ideal father figure. He has humor and generates genuine warmth.
I had mixed emotions about his daughter but a genuine affection
for his character. And Allison Janney as Juno's stepmother is
nearly as genial. I had just seen her in HAIRSPRAY when I saw
this film. She had a very visible role in "The West Wing" and
she seems to be in demand. I had the feeling that the film was
aiming in a large part for a teenage audience and it is ironic
that the parents of the main character are so much more likable
than the character herself. Most of the other performances are
also pretty much on target.
The original music is by Matt Messina, but the music seems to be
mostly songs with words that occasionally distract from the
action.
Overall this is a reasonable teen comedy, a cut above most teen
films, but perhaps sending mixed signals. I rate the film a high
+1 on the -4 to +4 scale or 6/10.
Sidenote: If "Diablo Cody" seems a slightly over-the-top name for
the screenwriter, she has gone by many names. Her biography in
the Internet Movie Database says that her real name is Brook
Busey and that she has been a stripper under the names Bonbon,
Roxanne, and Cherish. She has also been a phone sex operator.
This is a somewhat atypical background for a screenwriter, but I
suppose she should know something about life.
Film Credits: http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0467406/
[-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Michael Chabon and Fritz Leiber (letter of comment by Steve
Lelchuk)
In response to Evelyn's comments on Michael Chabon in the
11/30/07 issue of the MT VOID, Steve Lelchuk writes:
This is a somewhat sideslip comment/question provoked by Evelyn's
comments about Michael Chabon's new book, GENTLEMEN OF THE ROAD.
Is it just me, or is the premise of this book strikingly similar
to Fritz Lieber's "Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser"series?
From a Publishers Weekly review of GENTLEMEN OF THE ROAD via
Amazon: "Zelikman and Amram, respectively a gawky Frank and a
gigantic Abyssinian, make their living by means of confidence
tricks, doctoring, bodyguarding and the occasional bit of
skullduggery along the Silk Road."
From the Wikipedia entry on "Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser" series:
"Fafhrd is a tall (seven feet) northern barbarian; Mouser is a
small, mercurial thief, once known as Mouse and a former wizard's
apprentice. Both are rogues through and through ... but theirs is
a decadent world where you have to be a rogue to survive. They
spend a lot of time drinking, feasting, wenching, brawling,
stealing, and gambling, and are seldom fussy about to whom they
hire their swords."
I loved the "Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser" books, and I loved the
YIDDISH POLICEMEN'S UNION, so I'm looking forward to reading
Chabon's book. I hope I'll enjoy it more than Evelyn did. [-sl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
A few weeks ago, in the 11/02/07 issue of the MT VOID, I talked
about how Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch explains the problems in
reading the Bible as literature. Among other problems, he says
that poetry is printed as prose, paragraphs and even sentences
are broken into short verses, and then we "pepper the result all
over with italics and numerals, print it in double columns, with
a marginal gutter on each side, each gutter pouring down an inky
flow of references and cross-references." Well, in pulling out
books to read along with this course, I ran across the "Extreme
Word" edition of the Bible, which attempts to address at least
some of these problems. It reduces the chapter numbers to a
light blue background design at the start of the chapter, and
verse numbers to very small, faintly printed numbers. While it
does have two columns, paragraphs look like paragraphs, and there
are even topic heading (e.g. "Jeroboam II Reigns in Israel").
The marginal gutters are a function of trying to get an enormous
book into a single volume (hence the tissue-thin paper in most
editions as well), but footnotes have taken the place of marginal
notes. The footnotes are no worse than a lot of non-fiction
books these days, and the sidebars are presented in the same way
that one finds in news magazines, etc. There are still some
random italics, though.
Before seeing the film BEOWULF, I decided to re-read the poem
BEOWULF. I read the translation by Burton Raffel, because that
was one of the ones in the house, but I would recommend a more
recent translation: Seamus Heaney's is highly recommended
(ISBN-13 978-0-393-32097-8, ISBN-10 0-393-32097-0). Mark has
reviewed the film in the 11/23/07 issue of the MT VOID, but I
wanted to comment on the similarities and differences between the
two. At first, I was reasonably impressed with how the film
stuck to the poem. The arrival of the Geats was pretty much as
written, and the swimming competition included, even though it
was not critical to the main plot. It was, in fact, fairly
faithful up until the moment that Beowulf walks into the cave to
kill Grendel's mother. Well, except for adding a fair amount of
sex, and having Beowulf completely naked during the fight with
Grendel. The latter change resulted in a lot of austin-power-
izing, with strategically placed elbows, tankards, and so on.
And the original had no hint of Beowulf and Hrothgar's wife being
interested in each other. But from the point Beowulf enters the
cave, it all falls apart (from the point of view of
faithfulness). Grendel's mother did not look like Angelina
Jolie, and the various connections with Hrothgar, Beowulf, and
her were non-existent in the poem. And the dragon episode in the
poem was a completely separate episode that took place back in
Sweden, not in Denmark, and was completely independent of the
Grendel story.
Also, they changed the "attitude" of the story. In the original
poem, Beowulf and others are boastful, but this is considered a
good thing. Modesty was not prized in Beowulf's society. But in
the film, after Beowulf recounts the story of the swimming
competition, one of his warriors says to another something to the
effect that the last time Beowulf told the story, he had killed
three sea monsters, and this time he claimed nine--a very
unlikely thing for a fellow warrior to do in Beowulf's time.
The film--with its special effects--is entertaining, but I felt
that all the added love interests detracted from the epic nature
of the tale.
1945 by Robert Conroy (ISBN-13 978-0-345-49479-5, ISBN-10
0-345-49479-2) is an alternate history that takes as its premise
that Japan does not surrender after the dropping of the atomic
bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but rather that a coup imprisons
the Emperor and insists on continuing the war. The premise is
fine, the way the story unfolds is reasonable, but the writing
style is wooden. Conroy often insists on referring to characters
by full name and military rank, even when such usage is awkward,
and misuses some words as "decimated". I suppose that military
strategists might find this of interest, but I cannot really
recommend it for other readers. (Conroy's other books are 1901
and 1862, which are not easily remembered titles, and also liable
to be confused with the 1632, 1633, 1634, 1812, 1824, or whatever
from Flint and Weber. Actually, I think that Flint and Weber
have multiple books titled 1634, differing only in their
subtitles.)
THE YELLOW-LIGHTED BOOKSHOP by Lewis Buzbee (ISBN-13
978-1-55597-450-3, ISBN-10 1-55597-450-3) is a paean to the
bookstore, through the ages and in the present. Buzbee worked in
several bookstores in the San Francisco area, and has shopped in
many more. While I suspect that the description of various
bookstores in the last chapter may already be out of date, the
book as a whole is something all bookstore lovers will want to
read.
JANE AUSTEN: THE WORLD OF HER NOVELS by Deirdre Le Faye (ISBN-13
978-0-711-22278-6, ISBN-10 0-711-22278-9) is a delightful book
that is divided into almost precisely two halves. The first,
"The World of Jane Austen", is an overview of the England of the
early 19th century: its society, its clothing, its
transportation, its housing, and indeed every aspect of life of
that time, with frequently references to how something
specifically applies to Austen's novels (e.g. which characters
drove which kind of carriages). The second half, "The Novels",
is a summary of the plots of the novels, with elaborations on the
topics discussed in the first half. This is a must-read for all
Austen fans. [-ecl]
===================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
We can't solve problems by using the same kind
of thinking we used when we created them.
-- Albert Einstein