THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
04/25/08 -- Vol. 26, No. 43, Whole Number 1490
El Honcho Grande: Mark Leeper, mleeper@optonline.net
La Honcha Bonita: Evelyn Leeper, eleeper@optonline.net
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Topics:
A Prime Talent (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
A Microbe's Eye View of a Rainbow (comments
by Mark R. Leeper)
GOOGLE ME (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
Shakespeare (letter of comment by Fred Lerner)
Strong's CONCORDANCE (letter of comment
by Peter Rubinstein)
The Ku Klux Klan and Movies, and REFUSENIK (letter of
comment by Taras Wolansky)
This Week's Reading (BRASYL, THE LAST COLONY
and THE LOVELY BONES) (book comments
by Evelyn C. Leeper)
===================================================================
TOPIC: A Prime Talent (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
In his book THE ROAD AHEAD, Bill Gates speculates about the
future of computing and on page 265 says, "The obvious
mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to
factor large prime numbers." As it happens I have one secret
talent. I don't like to brag about it. In just one instant I
can factor any prime number I am given. Do you think that Gates
would pay me for the secret? I have known how to do this since
Junior High School. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: A Microbe's Eye View of a Rainbow (comments by Mark
R. Leeper)
One of the most spectacular of (the non-destructive)
meteorological phenomena is the rainbow. Everybody likes seeing
rainbows. Not everybody really understands what they are seeing.
Even if you think you do know what causes rainbows, it helps to
look at them from the point of view of a human no bigger than a
microbe. But I won't shrink you down just yet.
One thing interesting about rainbows is they all have exactly the
same angular measure. If you stretch your arm out to full length
and wrap your fingers around following the outer edge of a
rainbow it will always require the same stretch of the fingers.
There are no little rainbows. A rainbow you get from a garden
hose covers exactly the same proportion of your field of vision
as one in the sky. You may see incomplete rainbows, but you will
never see a small rainbow. Actually there are bigger rainbows,
but I will come back to them later. Why are rainbows all the
same angular size and what is happening here?
Well, most people know that when you see a rainbow you are seeing
the sun hitting water droplets. The sun shows back colors that
form different colored arcs of circles. For the sake of
simplicity I will talk about just the red and blue band of the
rain, but we know there are many bands of light between. In the
red portion the raindrops all look red to you, in the blue
portion of the rainbow the drops all look blue. The reason the
whole band of sky looks red is the combination of millions of
raindrops that each looks red. It is much like a stadium in
which everybody is holding up a red card and the entire seating
area looks like a wall of red. Suppose everybody held up a card
tent-folded that was red to the left and blue to the right. A
helicopter on one side of the stadium would see the seating area
as a sea of red and one on the other side of the stadium would
see the same section as a sea of blue. Similarly each raindrop
has a color based on the angle from which it is observed by the
viewer.
Now imagine you were the size of a microbe looking at one of
these raindrops close up as it falls. The raindrop is not
elongated as it is often portrayed, but the air flattens it a bit
so its diameter at its equator is a bit more than its distance
from pole to pole. But we can assume it is a sphere. Sunlight
enters the raindrop, bends as it goes from air to water. It
bounces off the back of the raindrop and comes back out the front
of the raindrop. However the bounce spreads the light into its
basic colors like white light going through a prism. The blue
part of the light comes out always about 40 degrees from where
the white light entered. The red part of the spectrum comes out
of raindrop at about 42 degrees from where the white light
entered. So the raindrop would look like it had a little bull's
eye of rainbow colored light on the surface. It will have a blue
ring and a slightly wider red ring. The center of ring is white
light, less spectacular, and the very center is where sunlight is
entering the drop.
When sunlight hits many raindrops all around you it hits them
almost precisely parallel. It hits them at the same angle and it
comes out at the same angle. So the colored light coming out
will come out parallel. As the microbe you might be placed just
right to see the red band. If you roll your eye in one direction
you might see yellow and further you might see blue. You get
that view because you are close up and can change the angle you
are looking at the raindrop. But the more distance you get from
the raindrop, the less you can see all the other colors. Soon
the distance has made the raindrop so tiny you can see only the
light sent at your angle. The raindrop looks red as do the
millions of other raindrops right around it. Look off at a
different angle and you will see raindrops that are reaching you
from a different angle and may look all blue.
Some of the sunlight will be reflected off the backs of raindrops
and the red part of the light will be bounced out forming a cone
whose vertex angle is 84 degrees (or twice 42 degrees). A
concentric cone of blue light will be bounced out forming a cone
whose vertex angle is 80 degrees (or twice 40 degrees). When
from the ground you see the red portion of the rainbow the angle
formed by the sun, the raindrop, and your eye is just about 42
degrees. In fact the angle from sun to raindrop to eye will be a
42-degree angle for all of the raindrops near the first one.
These raindrops will all appear red. When you see blue you are
seeing the edge of a smaller concentric cone.
I said when you were seeing one water drop that the light
reflects off the back of the drop but it comes out the front.
Actually some of the light comes out at the back of the raindrop
and is lost. Only some reflects. When the colored light hits
the front of the raindrop some of that comes out and some bounces
around some more in the raindrop. It creates a second spectral
pattern with red at 51 degrees away from the original ray of
sunlight. It will be weaker because the light has bounced around
and some has been lost. But under good conditions from the
ground you will see a second wider rainbow.
But each of the millions or billions of tiny raindrops has on its
surface a complete picture of the entire rainbow two or more
times and each acts as a pixel to show a huge image of that same
picture across the face of the sky. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: GOOGLE ME (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: This light-hearted documentary tells of what Jim
Killeen discovered when he went on a quest to meet and interview
other people whose names were the same as his. He meets a
variety of people and never really comes to any surprising
connections among them, but does just get to know six other
people who by coincidence had his same name. The documentary is
being released first on YouTube on Friday, April 25, 2008. But
the film is a pleasant way to meet seven people whose names all
happen to be Jim Killeen. Rating: high +1 (-4 to +4) or 6/10
Jim Killeen, a theater major at Wayne State University in
Detroit, went west to be an actor and got two minor parts in two
minor films in the late 1990s. Then one day he was playing
around on the computer and put his own name into Google. To his
surprise he found references to other Jim Killeens. He was
curious about the other Jim Killeens. Who were they? What did
they do? Did it have some common influence on them that he had
had this name Jim Killeen? He decided to investigate who the
other Jim Killeens were. His first find is in Cobh, Ireland, and
is a jovial Irish priest named (well, of course) Jim Killeen.
Father Jim is quietly proud of being a part of the priesthood and
says nothing much unexpected or earth-shattering. His interview
gives the director a chance to color the film with some nice
Irish music and some nice Irish landscapes. The next Jim Killeen
is a retired police detective from New York City. The detective
tells some stories and anecdotes about his career on the police
force. Detective Killeen investigated the carnage the Happyland
Social Club in the Bronx when arson killed 87 people in 1990.
So with a priest and a policeman, do we expect that Jim Killeens
tend to be straight-laced guys? No, Jim Killeen Number 3 of
Denver, Colorado, is a swinger who is into group sex. So we go
from hearing about the ecstasy of being a priest to hearing about
the ecstasy of going to a sex orgy where (not very attractive)
people turn out the lights and grope each other. Jim (the
original) goes as far afield as Australia, Scotland, and Ireland
finding people with the same name.
And so it goes, as Killeen interviews his namesakes and also an
engineering vice-president of Google and discusses with him the
project. Killeen earlier thought that Google might tell him that
they did not want their name associated with the film project.
Not too surprisingly, that was not a problem at all. After all,
the film does not put Google in a bad light. Instead it showed
somebody who had found a creative use for the Google search
engine. That is really what Google is all about. The vice-
president gives a little talk about democratization of data.
Then Jim (the director) has his mother talk a little about Jim.
He clearly wanted to get the film up to feature-film length
without putting his audience to sleep.
In the end there seems to be little more connection among the Jim
Killeens than there would be with men chosen at random. One Jim
Killeen has no children while another has eight. Killeen asks
each what the purpose of life is and he gets six different
answers. Those differences seem hardly surprising. About all
that would be expected of seven people named Jim Killeen is that
they would be male and of Irish or Scottish extraction, at least
if you go far enough back. So with very little content for the
film to cover, Killeen has to hold the viewer by making the film
pleasant. He is an affable man, but it is about all he can do to
find enough to say to save the film from becoming trivial. His
style is light-hearted and just barely has enough material to
keep GOOGLE ME going for its 93-minute length. This is not a
very ambitious film in theme or in aspirations. It will be
showing on YouTube, presumably without cost. It is a
semi-professional, semi-amateur production. It achieves its goals,
and is moderately entertaining. That is probably enough. I rate
it a high +1 on the -4 to +4 scale or 6/10.
Film Credits: http://us.imdb.com/title/tt1176730/
[-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Shakespeare (letter of comment by Fred Lerner)
In regard to Shakespeare being performed in the nude, Mark had
written in the 04/18/08 issue of the MT VOID, "Well, that was the
point of the joke, but actually the answer is yes, at least with
males. And not just Jewish ones. (No, as Evelyn points out the
Jews would look the same. But again I don't think the Globe had
many Jewish actors.)" [-mrl]
Fred Lerner writes, "Authenticity in these matters didn't seem to
bother Renaissance sculptors, as a stroll through Florence will
attest." [-fl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Strong's CONCORDANCE (letter of comment by Peter Rubinstein)
In response to Evelyn's comments on Strong's CONCORDANCE in the
04/18/08 issue of the MT VOID, Pete Rubinstein writes, "With
respect to Strong's Concordance, there exists a good online
version that also utilizes some more recent interpretation at
http://www.eliyah.com/lexicon.html. That won't help if your
size problem results from wanting to carry it around, but it does
put it anywhere from which you can reach the Internet." [-pir]
Mark responds, "Actually I have seen it there, but it is tough to
carry out to the porch to use against pesky Jehovah's False
Witnesses. Even a laptop with wireless would not be smart to
throw at them." [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: The Ku Klux Klan and Movies, and REFUSENIK (letter of
comment by Taras Wolansky)
In response to Mark's comments on the Ku Klux Klan in the
04/04/08 issue of the MT VOID, Taras Wolansky writes:
Another entry for the anti-Klan movie list is STORM WARNING
(1951), in which Ginger Rogers witnesses the lynching of a
journalist, and crusading D.A. Ronald Reagan tries to persuade
her to testify against the KKK, explicitly named here.
The Democratic Party, of which Reagan was an active member, had
broken with the Klan shortly before, at least at the national
level.
It's a dirty little secret that the Klan was a significant part
of the New Deal coalition. When FDR nominated former Klansman
Hugo Black to the Supreme Court in 1937, he told Black not to
worry about it, that "some of his best friends and supporters he
had in the state of Georgia were strong members of that
organization." (Black quoted by Wikipedia.) Certainly, FDR's
policy toward Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany might just as
well as have been written by the KKK. Even today, Sen. Robert
C. Byrd's past as a Klan organizer, Kleagle, and Exalted Cyclops
(in the 1940's) does not seem to affect his high status within
the Democratic Party. [-tw]
And in response to Mark's review of REFUSENIK in the 04/18/08
issue of the MT VOID, Taras writes:
On arch-refusenik Natan Sharansky: he didn't know it at the time,
but he had another advocate in his corner, aside from his wife.
Pres. Reagan's recently published diary reveals he secretly
pressed the Soviets to release Sharansky, again and again,
starting just a few months after his inauguration. After
Sharansky's release in 1986, he visited the White House. He
records that, when he told Reagan about the joy of political
prisoners, like him, when they heard about the "Evil Empire"
speech, Reagan jumped up, glowing, and called in his aides to
"listen to this man". That was when, Sharansky says, he first
realized just how much grief and abuse Reagan must have been
subjected to for calling the Soviet Union an Evil Empire. [-tw]
Mark replies, "The documentary REFUSENIK does speak very highly
of President Ronald Reagan's efforts to help Soviet Jews.
Certainly Natan Sharansky's wife, who I believe the film said was
in the United States by this time, was aware that Reagan was a
powerful ally so the word had probably gotten to Natan." [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
BRASYL by Ian McDonald (ISBN-13 978-1-591-02543-6, ISBN-10
1-591-02543-5) is a Hugo nominee, but it has a major strike
against it--the book comes with a six-page glossary (and a
suggested reading list, and a playlist of songs). It also has a
long description of a soccer game (which I can't follow). The
only one of the three threads it follows that I could understand
was the one taking place in 1732. Maybe if I studied the
glossary first.... Or maybe not. I *really* wanted to like
this one, but it didn't happen. (In fairness, I will add that I
gave up around page 60.)
THE LAST COLONY by John Scalzi (ISBN-13 978-0-765-31697-4,
ISBN-10 0-765-31697-8) is a classic science fiction novel. It
doesn't need a six-page glossary. It doesn't have an
impenetrable style. It just tells the story of a group of
colonists caught in a mess: militarily, politically,
sociologically, and environmentally. Whether the resolution is
entirely plausible, I am not sure, but I'm willing to suspend
disbelief. For all those who yearn for "science fiction like
they used to write," this is recommended.
THE LOVELY BONES by Alice Sebold (ISBN-13 978-0-316-16668-3,
ISBN-10 0-316-16668-5) is a fantasy, but one of those fantasies
that shows up on book club and high school reading lists. The
narrator is a girl who has been murdered by a serial killer;
because she is dead and in heaven (?), she is an omniscient
narrator. It has a sort of New Age feel to it--if the narrator
is in heaven, there is no sense of God (or Jesus) in it, and the
various contacts between the living and the dead are more
spiritualism than religion. I wouldn't have read this had it not
been picked for our book discussion group (*not* the science
fiction one), and I cannot recommend it. (Oh, and whoever
copy-edited it did not catch that the name of the Confederate
diarist is "Mary Chesnut", not "Mary Chestnut".) [-ecl]
===================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
How I wish that somewhere there existed an island
for those who are wise and of good will.
-- Albert Einstein