THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
10/02/09 -- Vol. 28, No. 14, Whole Number 1565
C3PO: Mark Leeper, mleeper@optonline.net
R2D2: Evelyn Leeper, eleeper@optonline.net
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Topics:
Acknowledgement (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Announcement
The New American Prayer (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Strategic Vision (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Water and Space ... Stories Come in Threes (comments
by Mark R. Leeper)
THE INFORMANT! (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
Alphabetical Order (letter of comment by David Shallcross)
Mirror Neurons (letter of comment by Andre Kuzniarek)
The Oxford English Dictionary (letter of comment
by Joseph T. Major)
Digits of Pi (letter of comment by David Goldfarb)
This Week's Reading (THE CITY & THE CITY) (book comments
by Evelyn C. Leeper)
==================================================================
TOPIC: Acknowledgement (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
This week's MT VOID is brought to you by the Pre-Owned-Humvee
Owners Exchange. Buy a used Humvee today. For the man who doesn't
let facts (or pedestrians) get in his way. [-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: Announcement
Our home pages have moved to http://www.leepers.us/markleeper and
http://www.leepers.us/evelyn. The MT VOID archives can be found
at http://fanac.org/fanzines/MT_Void or
http://www.leepers.us/mtvoid.
[This is due to our previous provider shutting down their web
pages. I will not mention it here, since many email providers
think it was a spam generator and would filter out any mail
containing its name.]
==================================================================
TOPIC: The New American Prayer (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
God grant me the credit to purchase the luxuries I can afford, the
self-control to resist the temptation to purchase what I cannot
afford, and the wisdom to know the difference. [-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: Strategic Vision (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
I wrote a few weeks back about how a mathematical analysis of the
Iranian election results indicated that the poll results had been
tampered with.
http://www.leepers.us/mtvoid/VOID0703.htm#iran
It seems possible that the same thing is happening locally.
Apparently influential Republican polling firm Strategic Vision's
figures also show the same sort of tampering. Apparently the signs
are (for example) that 8 appears at the end of a number 60% more
frequently than 1 does. It is hard for a single human mind to pick
numbers as randomly as poll results would show. Sadly, in telling
people this, cheaters are also going to know how they can be
caught. The following articles discuss the highly partisan
brouhaha.
http://tinyurl.com/polllng-numbers2
http://tinyurl.com/polling-numbers
One thing that strikes me as very funny about all this is the name
of the polling firm. It is Strategic Vision. Think about that
name. My own vision is usually very non-strategic. I just want to
see what is there. I have no strategy unless I want to influence
what I find.
I would just like to thank Strategic Vision for being so up-front
about there being a strategy to how and what they see. [-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: Water and Space ... Stories Come in Threes (comments by
Mark R. Leeper)
Once we get off the Earth we find space a pretty foreboding place.
My vision of space was fundamentally altered when I went to 2001: A
SPACE ODYSSEY and saw what it was like to be in space for a few
moments without a space suit. Later shots we got from men on the
moon made it look all the more foreboding and dry. Pictures from
Mars did not help. One of the things making it look unpleasant was
that just about everything we saw portrayed it look very, very dry.
Well perhaps space is not as dry as we thought. Just in the past
week or so there have been three stories making it look a little
less nasty, and all the stories seem to involve water.
It seems almost impossible that there would be water on the moon.
The moon has no atmosphere, and water vaporizes in a vacuum. Any
water on the moon should vaporize and fly away. During the heat of
the lunar day the radiance of the sun should also burn off any
water that is there. It has long been assumed that there can be no
water on the moon. Now water has been detected mixed in the top
layer of the lunar surface. Multiple survey craft including the
NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter report having detected small
amounts of water. The source is probably comet impacts. It is not
going to be too helpful for visitors however. The water is in very
low concentrations. There is about one pint of water dissipated in
1000 pounds of the lunar surface. That is drier than the Sahara
desert. But you never know. Some use may be found. At least the
moon is a little more inviting as a place to explore and settle.
See http://tinyurl.com/nt5mqm.
My book discussion group just recently finished taking on Robert
A. Heinlein's RED PLANET, an old science fiction juvenile that
involved people skating on ice on Mars. This is an absurdity.
There seems to be some water under the surface of Mars, and there
may have been more water in the past. But there are no ice patches
on Mars. Silly Heinlein.... Okay, as you have probably guessed,
there is in fact at least one ice patch discovered on Mars. There
is a picture of it at
http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Mars_Express/SEMGKA808BE_0.html.
This is a crater near the North Pole with a nice round patch of
nearly pure water. The article calls this an unnamed crater that
contains the ice patch. If someone from NASA is reading this, may
I suggest that the crater be named Cocytus? That has some class.
But the most bizarre water-and-space news story does not involve
finding water as much as using what we already carry around with
us. There are some bad old sci-fi space movies in which the
filmmakers did not want to spend the money to show that there was
no gravity in space. Sometimes they used wires to "invisibly"
levitate objects in the spaceship. It was not very convincing. I
just recently saw 12 TO THE MOON again after many years of it being
unavailable (perhaps deservedly so, I might add). Some of these
films at least acknowledged that there was a problem by claiming
that they had "artificial gravity". Well, such a thing did exist,
but it involved spinning the spaceship, or whatever, and letting
centrifugal force provide the effect. And that, I was pretty sure,
was the only form of artificial gravity. But some writers claimed
that artificial gravity could be turned on and off like an electric
switch. Well, it turns our there are such ways to play with
gravity and we might well just have an electromagnetic version of
artificial gravity or, in this case, artificial lack of gravity. I
just read an article in which a mouse was levitated
electromagnetically. Well, that is not quite accurate. The water
in the mouse was levitated. The rest of the mouse just had to go
along for the ride. The mouse at first found the experience
unpleasant and no doubt a little bit surprising. But it soon
adjusted and was getting used to the idea that it was floating.
Does this seem like a promising idea for creating gravity in space.
If it can be used to counter-act gravity, it may be usable as a
downward force. Perhaps an ersatz from of gravity can be turned on
and off.
See http://tinyurl.com/artificial-gravity. [-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: THE INFORMANT! (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: This is the mostly true story about the rising executive
at ADM who turned whistle-blower for the FBI and for a few years
was the best corporate inside informant that the FBI had ever had.
But in the shady world of industrial espionage the truth becomes
highly processed before it reaches anyone's ears. This is a
complex tale that had been done well on Public Radio, but in Steven
Soderbergh's hands and with some very strange stylistic choices the
story becomes muddled and more confusing than necessary.
Soderbergh adapts Scott Z. Burns's screenplay based on Kurt
Eichenwald's book. Rating +1 (-4 to +4) or 6/10
In 2000 the Chicago Public Radio program "This American Life" ran a
story about Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) executive Mark Whitacre
and his experiences having turned informant for the FBI. That same
month Kurt Eichenwald published a book on the same story. A
screenwriter, presumably Scott Z. Burns, heard the program and saw
the cinematic possibilities of the story. The result is THE
INFORMANT!, with Matt Damon in the title role of Mark Whitacre.
ADM is a giant conglomerate that makes additives and raw materials
for grain-based food. Whitacre was an important executive in the
BioProducts Division who claimed to the FBI that a spy in the
corporation was sabotaging their lysine production. He said that a
Japanese contact had told him that he could have the name of the
spy for $10 million. Working with the FBI, Whitacre also offered
them information that his own company was conspiring to price-fix.
This became a long, complex, and frequently humorous, relationship
between Whitmore and FBI Special Agent Brian Shepard (Scott
Bakula). At first Whitacre is incredibly cooperative and provides
superb evidence of the price fix. But with time the value of
Whitacre's character and his evidence comes into question.
Having enjoyed the radio broadcast of the story, I expected to
enjoy just as much the film version. Soderbergh surprisingly
muddles the story, both in the writing and in his choices for the
visual style. The dialog comes fast and the storyline is
frequently hard to follow with cues from the musical score to
indicate what just happened was really whacky. This is a current
film and it covers events of the 1990s, but it has cameo roles for
1960s comics Tom and Dick Smothers. So far that is fine. But the
font for the frequent labels is of the style that would have been
used on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. It is sort of a
psychedelic flower-petal font. And the music frequently is
reminiscent of the Smothers Brothers' style. All this completely
evokes the wrong era. The entire film looks dulled-out as if it
had been filmed in 16mm and blown up to a larger format.
Backgrounds frequently have all detail washed out in bright light.
The image quality is substandard. A message at the beginning of
the film that tells us that some of what is in the film cannot be
taken literally ends with "So there!" That appears to be a joke
borrowed from AIRPLANE!. The settings jump from country to
country, not unlike films from Matt Damon's Bourne franchise, but
the scenes have absolutely no feel that they really are from those
countries.
On the other hand Matt Damon looks very believable as an
unglamorous Every-man. This ability to not look magnetic is not
easy for an actor so familiar. The ability to look non-descript
served him well in THE GOOD SHEPHERD and serves him well again.
Toward the end he even loses his hair to (a Ron Howard sort of)
male pattern baldness. I am not always fond of Damon's acting, but
I liked him here. Additional acting surprises, beyond the presence
of the Smothers Brothers, are a very straight role for Clancy
Brown, best known perhaps as the sadistic guard in THE SHAWSHANK
REDEMPTION. Here he is in a role that did not require his stature,
but in which he is surprisingly believable. Whitacre's
philosophical musings in the narration are a definite plus.
The choice of the story is quite good, but the radio version (a
link is provided below) is probably a bit preferable. I rate this
film a straight +1 on the -4 to +4 scale or 6/10. It is a new
group running ADM these days, but I wonder how they are taking this
negative publicity.
Film Credits: http://us.imdb.com/title/tt1130080/
What others are saying:
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1200661-informant/
This American Life version:
http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode8
[-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: Alphabetical Order (letter of comment by David Shallcross)
In response to Evelyn's question about alphabetical order in the
09/25/09 issue of the MT VOID, David Shallcross writes:
If Wikipedia is to be believed, there are tablets from the 14th
century B.C.E. that give the alphabet in two competing sequences.
So the order of the alphabet is very old. The complete idea of
sorting words in alphabetical order is young in comparison.
I have seen facsimiles of books from the 1600s in whose indices
entries are sorted only by first letter, with no obvious order
between words with the same group. And sorting books by
alphabetical order of their titles or authors is another question
again.
I know Japanese sorts words by a canonical order of the syllables,
that is, "alphabetical" ordering of the words written in hiragana.
This was noticeable in the credits of the recent Miyazaki/Studio
Ghibli film, which had long lists of names in hiragana, in hiragana
order. I wonder what Chinese does. [-dfs]
Evelyn responds, "Chinese sorts by stroke count. (I know this from
reading dictionaries of Chinese restaurant terms.)" -ecl
==================================================================
TOPIC: Mirror Neurons (letter of comment by Andre Kuzniarek)
In response to Mark's comments on mirror neurons in the 09/18/09
issue of the MT VOID (in which he wrote, "We used to say,
metaphorically, that 'I can feel another's pain.' But now we know
that my mirror neurons can literally feel your pain."), Andre
Kuzniarek writes:
I think lots of guys know this first hand, particularly when it
comes to their privates. You see a lot of gag reels on TV about
hits to the crotch that can make us flinch, but especially movies
like CASINO ROYALE and EASTERN PROMISES (the knife fight sequence
causes an instinctive protective response in guys).
Selfishness and altruism probably compete very closely as survival
mechanisms. They both have strengths and weaknesses as such.
Probably why our societies are as dynamic as they are (to put it
mildly). [-ak]
==================================================================
TOPIC: The Oxford English Dictionary (letter of comment by Joseph
T. Major)
In response to Evelyn's comments on READING THE OED: ONE MAN, ONE
YEAR in the 09/25/09 issue of the MT VOID, Joseph Major writes:
Did [Ammon] Shea mention his predecessor, Clark Ashton Smith?
Smith read the OED, which is why his stories have so many obscure
words. Which makes him the first person in the field to have read
Tolkien, of course.
As he had written two books about obscure words, presumably he was
living off of that, though given the return on writing that day it
still sounds marginal. I've looked over Robert Bloch's THE EIGHTH
STAGE OF FANDOM, which has an essay on the writer and his fans.
The fans make more money than he does, and all think he should make
even less money than he does, because a starving writer is more
artistic. Fifty years old and applicable today. Can that be said
of the "serious literary" writers of the Fifties? [-jtm]
Evelyn replies, "I don't recall any mention of Smith." [-ecl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: Digits of Pi (letter of comment by David Goldfarb)
In response to Mark's comments about numbers in the 09/25/09 issue
of the MT VOID (where he said, "Some numbers we can express only in
words. Like "the 248465489th decimal place of pi"), David Goldfarb
writes:
I'm curious to know if you've heard of the Bailey-Borwein-Plouffe
formula:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bailey-Borwein-Plouffe_formula
It lets you calculate any digit of pi *without* having to know all
the previous ones. Just one catch: that's any *binary* digit.
Which obviously lets you calculate the nth digit of pi in any base
that's a power of 2, but doesn't help you with decimal places.
Still, we can know the 248465489th octal place of pi just for the
asking, which is pretty cool. [-db]
Mark responds, "I was familiar with the result, but not the name.
At first I thought that knowing the right binary digits you could
trap the value of pi in a range that has only one 248465489th
decimal digit. But with more thought I decided that was not true.
Or rather it was, but you would still have to know the binary
digits up to that point to know what range you were in. That just
brings you back to having to compute all the preceding digits. So
using the formula we could theoretically compute the 248465489th
decimal place of pi if we had enough computing power. But we can
do that already without Bailey-Borwein-Plouffe. That value is
computable but probably currently unknown. I did not know how many
decimal places of pi are known, but it looks like they have gone
this far--and much farther. A Google search on 'how many digits of
pi have been calculated' turned up a story in Slashdot saying that
a Japanese team has calculated out to 2.5 * 1012 digits:
http://tinyurl.com/n2zyjk. [-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
THE CITY & THE CITY by China Miéville (ISBN-13 978-0-345-49751-2)
is all about identity and duality in a very Borgesian way.
(Actually, the title is "THE CITY & YTIC EHT"--but with "YTIC EHT"
printed in mirror image as well, more like "THE CITY & YTI) 3HT".)
I am going to try to write this review without too many spoilers.
I cannot even say outright what the book is really about, for fear
of spoiling some of the point.
The premise is that we have two "sister" cities, Beszel (with an
accent on the 'z') and Ul Qoma. Beszel is a cross between Budapest
and Prague; the accented 'z' is Hungarian; and "beszel" is actually
Hungarian for "to speak". But some of Beszel's neighborhood and
suburbs, such as Lestov, have more Czech (Slavic) names. However,
"feld" (which is Besz for "cat") is not "cat" in either language,
or any other language in my CONCISE DICTIONARY OF 26 LANGUAGES.
Illitan, the language of Ul Qoma, is written in the Roman alphabet,
while Besz is written in a Cyrillic-like alphabet. (Shades of
Borgesian mirrors!) One is reminded of the old Yugoslavia, with
Serbian in Cyrillic alphabet and Croatian in Roman alphabet,
although in Miéville has the Cyrillic in the more Western-seeming
city, and the Roman in the more Eastern, because there was a
follower of Ataturk there who converted the alphabet to Roman, just
as happened in Turkey. (Ul Qoma also uses dinari, just as
Yugoslavia did.)
The pairing is not just of the two cities, or of the two
languages/cultures Miéville used for Beszel. For example, in
Beszel "ébru" is a collective term for both Jews and Muslims. (The
narrator, Tyador Borlú, says, "[Our] tradition of jokes about the
foolishness of the middle child derives from a centuries-old
dialogue between Beszel's head rabbi and its chief imam about the
intemperance of the Beszel Orthodox Church.") And there is the
Besz traditional DöplirCaffé: "one Muslim and one Jewish coffee
house, rented side by side, each with its own counter and kitchen,
halal and kosher, sharing a single name, sign, and sprawl of
tables. ... Whether the DöpplirCaffé was one establishment or two
depended on who was asking: to a property tax collector, it was
always one."
Another aspect I liked was that while reading the book, I thought I
knew were it was going. To some extent, it did follow the expected
path, with Inspector Borlú of Besz teaming up with Senior Detective
Quissim Dhatt of Ul Qoma to solve a murder with connections in both
cities. Because of this, they are constantly concerned about
Breach, which apparently patrols the connections between the two,
and Orciny, a shadow city which may or may not exist in the gaps
between Besz and Ul Qoma. The two detectives find clues that there
is something much bigger and far-reaching than a simple murder
here. But at some point, Miéville has his plot take a different
turn than what most mysteries would, with a resolution that is both
unexpected and satisfying.
All this is fascinating from a literary standpoint, and Miéville
has invented some lovely words for it: grosstopical, topolganger,
insiles, dissensi. And there are marvelous descriptions: "It was,
not surprisingly that day perhaps, hard to observe borders, to see
and unsee only what I should, on my way home. I was hemmed in by
people not in my city, walking slowly through areas crowded but not
crowded in Beszel."
But there is another level. Miéville is a British Socialist, and
it is not beyond the realm of possibility that the two cities, each
"unseeing" the other, are representative of the "haves" and the
"have-nots" in our own world, living intermingled, yet neither
really seeing the other. There are many other examples of unseeing
in our world. For example, in a hospital, one "unsees" a person
whose nightgown is open in back. (In New York, many claim,
residents tend to "unsee" everything. :-) ) On a different level,
consider the Jim Crow laws in the South: that is your water
fountain, this one next to it is mine, those are your bus seats,
these are mine, each existing among the other. And one is reminded
of the Robert Silverberg story "To See the Invisible Man" in which
a criminal's sentence might be for a period of "invisibility",
during which everyone was ordered to "unsee" him. And, yes, there
is a lot of THE CITY & THE CITY about nationalism, cultural
identity, borders, and so on. (For an earlier intimation of
Miéville's idea by Mark, see http://leepers.us/ireland.htm#31--
but only after you've read THE CITY & THE CITY.)
Miéville's previous book, UN LUN DUN, was in some sense a trial-run
for this. The idea is that there is a parallel world with Un Lun
Dun, Parisn't. Lost Angeles, the River Smeath, and so on. But Un
Lun Dun is not in our world, while Ul Qoma is in Beszel's.
In a sense, this book is uncategorizable. It is not science
fiction in a strict sense, but it is not fantasy either, at least
not in any normal sense. One might argue that it is alternate
history, but it is impossible to see how it might come about. It
is also impossible to see how it might be sustained without some
assumptions that are simply unsupportable in our world, Like
Borges's Library of Babel, or his Babylon of the Lottery, the world
of Beszel and Ul Qoma exist in their own inexplicable space. They
are what they are, and have to be accepted without rational
analysis.
As you might guess, I highly recommend this book. It will be on
the top of my Hugo nomination list for this year.
(After I wrote of the Borgesian nature of the story, I came across
the fact that Miéville said that two major influences on him for
the novel were Jorge Luis Borges and Philip K. Dick.) [-ecl]
==================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
If the rich could hire other people to die
for them, the poor could make a wonderful living.
-- Yiddish Proverb