THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
06/18/10 -- Vol. 28, No. 51, Whole Number 1602


 C3PO: Mark Leeper, mleeper@optonline.net
 R2D2: Evelyn Leeper, eleeper@optonline.net
All material is copyrighted by author unless otherwise noted.
All comments sent will be assumed authorized for inclusion
unless otherwise noted.

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Topics:        
        LIFE Magazine Looks at B-Movies (Nov, 1957) (comments
                by Mark R. Leeper)
        Portable Electronics (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
        Failure Will Always Be an Option (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
        CYPHER (2002) (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
        NOTHING (2003) (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
        Neanderthals (letter of comment by Peter Rubinstein)
        Einstein's Equation (letter of comment by Robert Bohrer)
        THE CIRCUS OF DR. LAO (letters of comment by Charles Garofalo
                and Sam Long)
        This Week's Reading (FOOD RULES, MOSES AND MONOTHEISM,
                "Ken Burns's The Civil War", Arthur C. Clarke's
                stories) (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)

==================================================================


TOPIC: LIFE Magazine Looks at B-Movies (Nov, 1957) (comments by
Mark R. Leeper)

I have long remembered that Life Magazine did a picture spread on
then current horror movies back in the 1950s.  I never got a chance
to see it again, but found it last night.  This is very unlike what
Life usually ran.  You can look at the surrounding pages to see
what Life usually had.

http://tinyurl.com/life-magazine-b-movies

[-mrl]

==================================================================


TOPIC: Portable Electronics (comments by Mark R. Leeper)

True story: I was listening to the radio and someone was saying
they were going around the tent city looking at display stations.
It sounded odd since most tent cities I knew about would no have
the electricity to run a display station.  Perhaps they could run
them off of truck engines I suppose, but why would that be so
important to report.  Then it struck me they weren't talking about
"display stations."  They were saying "displaced Haitians."  That
is something entirely different.  [-mrl]

==================================================================


TOPIC: Failure Will Always Be an Option (comments by Mark
R. Leeper)

I recently wrote about the BP-Gulf situation, but I keep hearing
more about it.  I think what keeps attracting me to this story is
its familiarity.  We have an expedition drilling for oil in some
exotic place like a mile under the water.  It is a place so remote
only robots and other machines can visit there.  In this place
something terrible is happening.  Human error has led forces to be
released that nobody seems to know how to control.  A crack (?)
team of scientists and engineers are trying to stop the problem but
it just keeps getting bigger.  So we have people working against
time to try to find a solution to the problem.  If it were not so
terrible and destructive, it would be exciting and even
melodramatic.  This is a story that someone like Lester Del Rey or
someone like him could have written in the 1950s.  The difference
is probably that he would have started at the solution and worked
back the start of the story.  We unfortunately are living the story
forward in time.  There may not be a solution.  BP's chief
executive officer, Tony Hayward, puts it this way, "What is
undoubtedly true is that we did not have the tools you would want
in your tool-kit."  Essentially he is saying is that whether
failure is an option or not, that is probably what we will have.

What we are hearing is this disaster is unprecedented, and that we
must make sure it will never happen again.  That was what we heard
after the Challenger Disaster.  Facing the unknown is a learning
experience.  We have to have the courage to pick ourselves up and
learn and be better for it.  That is a very clever way of putting
it.  It conjures up images of oil companies out there in the void
facing the Unknown.  And it is a true statement that it is
unprecedented.  But it was not unforeseen.  The possibility of a
great methane blowout was foreseen.  There are "blowout
preventers," but they did not do their job.  Right now it is being
investigated whether they were properly installed.  The problem
with making sure this never happens again is that we thought we
were making sure it would not happen the first time.  Implicitly we
thought that where great dangers are involved that very special
care was being taken.  That is the point of regulation by the
Minerals Management Service.  Making sure some disasters never
happen again will be insufficient.  That means they may happen
once.

CNN reports what caused the disaster:

     The survivors' account paints perhaps the most detailed picture
     yet of what happened on the deepwater rig--and the possible
     causes of the April 20 explosion.

     The BP official wanted workers to replace heavy mud, used to
     keep the well's pressure down, with lighter seawater to help
     speed a process that was costing an estimated $750,000 a day
     and was already running five weeks late, rig survivors told
     CNN.

     BP won the argument, said Doug Brown, the rig's chief mechanic.
     "He basically said, 'Well, this is how it's gonna be.'"

http://tinyurl.com/3yvzfs4

(Incidentally, the claim is probably not true that it is so
difficult to measure the amount of oil released each day.  See
http://tinyurl.com/void-spill.)

I am skeptical that even closer regulation will prevent disasters
like this.  The point is the drilling company knew the right thing
to do and the Minerals Management Service should have made sure
those precautions were taken.  But there are reasons why knowing
the right thing to do even having government regulation will
probably not be sufficient.  That combination will fail again for
the same reasons it did here.

Suppose a disaster like the Deepwater Horizon had is a one-in-ten-
thousand shot of happening from the start of the project.  If a
thousand times on a thousand different wells the safeguard is badly
installed to save money but then is not needed, people involved
will let down their guard.  Saving the expense will probably be
rewarded by the company.  That is why a one-in-ten-thousand chance
of malfunction is more dangerous than a one-in-ten chance.  With a
one-in-ten chance the people involved probably know how to handle
the malfunction and will more likely be expecting it.  Many will
have seen instances of the malfunction and certainly the procedures
for handling the problem will be well known.  Everyone will be more
casual about the one-in-ten-thousand problems.  The executive in
the CNN article probably made the same sort of decision many times
before and was rewarded for the profitable decision.  Some of the
funding saved will go to keeping relations good with the
regulators.  It may not be a bribe per se, but gifts and parties
are de facto bribes.  It is the low-probability events not
sufficiently regulated that will cause the most trouble.

Few people have been put into a position where their greedy
decisions have created something as bad as the BP oil geyser--a
term more accurate than "spill", by the way.  A "spill" is what you
have when you carry a bowl of soup to the table and a little slops
over the edge.  A spill can usually be cleaned up relatively
easily.  This is at best a geyser of oil.  It is worse than a
geyser.  Old Faithful is non-toxic and it turns itself off after a
few minutes.  The BP geyser is 24x7 and it is very approximately
1,600,000 gallons a day--and maybe as much as twice that.  That is
not a simple spill.  We have no idea when it will turn itself off
or how much damage will have been done.

It is a mistake to give it to pessimism entirely, but what happened
with the Deepwater Horizon was probably an unlikely accident
waiting to happen, and there are more out there.  [-mrl]

==================================================================


TOPIC: CYPHER (2002) (film review by Mark R. Leeper)

CAPSULE: Vincenzo Natali's follow-up to the 1996 CUBE is in nearly
all ways a science fiction outing superior to his previous film.
Brian King's screenplay make this a fast paced science fiction
adventure very much of the style of Philip K. Dick.  Jeremy Northam
is a total nebbish who gets to lead a double (and then triple) life
in the shady world of industrial espionage.  He is hired to go to
business presentations that are so dull they put the participants
to sleep.  Then he finds out what is *really* going on.  Also
starring is Lucy Liu in a role that might have been better without
a martial artist.  This is a surprisingly deft film with a pace
that just keeps building as the film progresses.
Rating: +3 (-4 to +4) or 9/10

CYPHER plays occasionally on cable and it available from NetFlix.

Many science fiction films of the last few years are based on the
writings of Philip K. Dick.  Somehow his paranoid view of the
nature of reality, and how it can be completely different than it
is perceived is an idea that appeals to filmgoers.  CYPHER is not a
film that is based on any Dick story, but Brian King's script
captures Dick paranoid atmosphere perhaps better than any other
film ever has.  Morgan Sullivan (played by Jeremy Northam) is a
nerdish sort dominated by his overbearing wife.  But the job he is
taking is anything but nerdish.  DigiCorp and Sunways are among the
two most powerful corporations in the world.  They are vicious
rivals.  DigiCorp has hired him to spy on Sunways.  His job is to
not be very noticeable.  He is to attend conferences under the
false name Jack Thursby and during the conference to turn on a
recorder disguised as a pen.  Sullivan is fascinated by his new
world of codes and skullduggery and allows himself to be pulled
into the strange labyrinth of industrial espionage and the cold war
of the two giant corporations.  Almost immediately the boring
conferences get more interesting when he starts seeing an Asian
woman (Lucy Liu) who may also be playing the same game.

Though films with a similar plot have been made, I found this one
genuinely exciting, and to me it has the feel of a science fiction
novel.  While some of the ideas now familiar, standard paranoiac
fantasies, I think the execution is great, creating genuine
excitement.  This is a lot for a seven-million-dollar production to
do.  The film has little homages to films like NORTH BY NORTHWEST,
SECONDS, and THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE.

There are some interesting visual tricks.  The film begins almost
black and white as Sullivan is unsure of himself in the shadowy
world of industrial espionage.  As his character develops and
becomes more sure of himself the colors fill in more and more
vivid.  Sullivan's very world has changed.  Jeremy Northam
traverses the path from nerdish to superman with impressive grace.
Only Lucy Liu seems a little out of place in a role that really did
not need her martial arts skills, but could have used an actress
that fitted in better with the story.  Director Vincenzo Natali
(CUBE, NOTHING, and SPLICE) has a sure hand and could be a major
talent.

This film is actually much better than Natali's higher profile
films CUBE and SPLICE.  I rate it a +3 on the -4 to +4 scale or
9/10.

Film Credits: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0284978/

What others are saying: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/cypher/

[-mrl]

==================================================================


TOPIC: NOTHING (2003) (film review by Mark R. Leeper)

CAPSULE: A morality tale with a word of warning about getting
everything you desire.  Vincenzo Natali, best known for CUBE and
the current SPLICE tell the story of two boys who are the constant
victims of all ages who suddenly find they have the ability to make
their wishes come true.  Director Natali wrote the story with the
two actors who star.  This is a very dark comedy.
Rating: +2 (-4 to +4) or 7/10

Vincenzo Natali could well be a major talent of Canadian cinema and
perhaps even international cinema.  Previously he made CUBE and
CYPHER.  As of this writing his SPLICE is in theaters.  In between
CYPHER and SPLICE he has made NOTHING.

NOTHING starts as a comedy but soon becomes an original fantasy.
And few films we see really are so original.  Andrew and David
(played by Andrew Miller and David Hewlett) have been the picked on
by others since they were boys.  They have formed a strong
friendship and an alliance based on self-defense.  Together they
live a really ugly house (uh, half a house), apparently right under
a freeway.  Life is not great, but at least they have each other.

But the time has come to break their partnership and for each to go
his own way.  David has a girl and is going to move in with her.
Or so he thinks.  In one day each has his world fall apart.  David
loses his job, and discovers he never had a girl to lose.  David
returns home.  Meanwhile Andrew is wrongly accused of child
molestation, David of embezzlement, and the city has determined to
demolish David and Andrew's house.  The locals are besieging the
house throwing rocks through the windows.  The two are left
cowering on the floor.  When suddenly...

There is a white flash and after it Andrew and David hear nothing.
Cautiously they step outside the door and find the reason they are
hearing nothing is that that is what now surrounds their house.
Nothing.  Beyond the property line there is a great white expanse
of nothing.  Alex and David have been given the ability to wish
things out of existence and everything outside the foundations of
their house is gone.  It seems that Andrew and David have the power
to erase things from reality very much like the ability that the
little boy had in the "Twilight Zone" episode "It's a Good Life."
And if nothing else, the film will at least show the bad end that
that little boy probably had.  This is a premise that rates about a
B+.  But Natali is quite clever in his search for implications of
this strange power.

Natali's script is constantly inventive in finding implications of
this power. NOTHING has the dimensions of allegory in among other
things being a story that dissects human behavior and the nature of
aggression.  The special effects used are not expensive, but the
plot allows them to be used very effectively.

This is a unique fantasy that has not been found yet by it
audience, but will be enjoyed when it is found.  I rate it a +2 on
the -4 to +4 scale or 7/10.

Note: NOTHING is a very inconvenient title for a film.  "What did
you see last night?"  "NOTHING."  "Then where *did* you go?"

Film Credits: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0298482/

What others are saying: http://tinyurl.com/24wsv9q

[-mrl]

==================================================================


TOPIC: Neanderthals (letter of comment by Peter Rubinstein)

In reponse to Evelyn's comments on CRO-MAGNON in the 06/11/10 issue
("A. C. Grayling writes, 'An equally significant discovery, made
this year by Svante Paabo's team at the Max Planck Institute for
Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, is that between one and four
per cent of modern human DNA is Neanderthal. Modern Africans share
no DNA with Neanderthals.'"), Peter Rubinstein writes:

It follows from the above, that A. C. Grayling is of the opinion
that Africans are not human.  One wonders what he views as the
distinguishing characteristics of "humans."  (Unless, of course,
Grayling is quoting original source from Svante Paabo or his team.
It might be interesting to explore what they think qualifies as
human.)  [-pr]

Evelyn replies, "Well, it could be that it's one to four percent of
*all* human DNA, but none of it in Africans.  (For example, some
small percentage of humans have some DNA marker that is not found
at all in (e.g.) Maoris.)  I agree, though, that it's poorly
phrased (or poorly translated)."  [-ecl]

==================================================================


TOPIC: Einstein's Equation (letter of comment by Robert Bohrer)

In response to Mark's comments on Einstein's equation in the
06/11/10 issue of the MT VOID, Robert Bohrer writes, "If mass and
energy are equivalent, then why doesn't energy have a gravitational
force like all mass does?  Does energy have momentum?"  [-rb]

Mark replies, "Light does have momentum, but no rest mass.  But
then it is never at rest.  See
http://crib.corepower.com:8080/~relfaq/light_mass.html."  [-mrl]

==================================================================


TOPIC: THE CIRCUS OF DR. LAO (letters of comment by Charles
Garofalo and Sam Long)

In response to Evelyn's comments on THE CIRCUS OF DR. LAO in the
06/11/10 issue of the MT VOID (in which she claimed the Hound of
the Hedges was original with Finney), Charles Garofalo writes, "The
Hound of the Hedges is also known as the Mystic Dog of China, and
has appeared in some books on mystical animals.  I'll go check to
see if our library still has a copy.  The one picture I saw of the
critter was impressive, although he was not a dog version of an
Arcimboldo composite man."  [-cg]

Evelyn responds, "Ooops!  I tried Googling it, and all references
were to Finney's novel, so I assumed he had invented it."  [-ecl]

And Sam Long writes:

Re Evelyn's note "Slick calls his friend Paul 'Oom Powl', which is
Dutch for "Uncle Paul", which in turn is a play on the idea of a
Dutch uncle--though admittedly Paul does not play that role.":
Could that instead be a reference to "Oom Paul" [Uncle Paul], the
nickname of Paul Kruger (1825-1904), who lead the Boer resistance
to the British in the Boer War?.   (See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Kruger.)

Some more trivia on the Dutch/Afrikaans word "oom":

  - There is that other leader of the resistance, Georg Simon Ohm
(1787 [or 1789--references differ]-1847) for whom Ohm's Law and the
unit of electrical resistance is named; his surname is a German
dialect word for "uncle".

  - There is the Hindu sacred syllable OM is sometimes written OOM,
in which capacity it is the code name of the Hindu secret agent
James Bonze, who would meditate to the mantra "Om, Moneypenny, M"
before going after evildoers.  (He's not to be confused with "Tex
Thong, Frontier Buddhist", a character an item about "possible
upcoming" TV shows" in MAD magazine back in the '50s, I think it
was, long before the "Kung Fu" series hit the airwaves.)

  - There is the English dialect word "eme", meaning "uncle", that
you almost never run across except in crossword puzzles.  [-sl]

==================================================================


TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)

FOOD RULES: AN EATER'S MANUAL by Michael Pollan (ISBN-13
978-0-14-311638-7) is basically a condensation/reworking of his
previous IN DEFENSE OF FOOD.  In that he proposed the following
basic guideline: "Eat food.  Mostly plants.  Not too much."  This
is so succinct that one would have to get even a haiku, such as:
        "Eat food.  Mostly plants.
        Not too much."  And this advice
        Is what Pollan writes.

Anyway, in FOOD RULES Pollan expands this into 64 rules, many of
which were in the earlier book, e.g. "Don't eat anything your
great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food."  (One problem with
this rule is portrayed in MATEWAN, where one of the Appalachian
miners' wives is talking about the Italian miners' wives and
complains that when they are given corn meal, they "ruin" it by
turning it into polenta instead of cornbread.)

Many of the rules in this book seem repetitive or redundant.
"Avoid food products containing ingredients that no ordinary human
would keep in the pantry" would seem to encompass "Avoid food
products that contain high-fructose corn syrup."  "Avoid food
products that contain ingredients that a third-grader cannot
pronounce" is only as valid as the quality of education in our
schools?  (For that matter, how many third-graders can correctly
pronounce "thyme"?  My father used to tell of when he had first
arrived in New York from Puerto Rico and was working in a grocery
when a woman asked him for the thyme.  He told her the time, but
somehow this did not satisfy her. :-) )

Even Pollan admits that "Eat only foods that will eventually rot"
has a few exceptions (e.g., honey).  "Buy your snacks at the
farmers' market" assumes you have access to a farmers' market.
"Eat only foods that have been cooked by humans," "Don't ingest
foods made in places where everyone is required to wear a surgical
cap," and "If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a
plant, don't" all seem very similar.

This seems like a "gimmick" book--a condensation of his previous
book in a mass-market size (but at a trade paperback price).

In MOSES AND MONOTHEISM by Sigmund Freud (ISBN-13
978-0-394-70014-4), Freud talks about the standard myth of the hero
as son of a king who is exposed/cast adrift, rescued, and brought
up by peasants, only to eventually discover his royal lineage.
But, he then notes, Moses was the son of peasants and brought up by
a king.  So Freud assumes that the Moses myth was originally
composed to match the traditional structure as much as
possible--given what Freud asserts is the historical fact that
Moses was Egyptian.  In fact, Freud seems to do most of his arguing
that Moses was an Egyptian in reverse: "If Moses was an Egyptian,
then that would explain X."  But what he needs to do is to show
that nothing else will explain X.  When he does this, it is often
by dismissing everything else as being made up to cover up the fact
that Moses was Egyptian.  For example, Egyptians practiced
circumcision, so that was where the Hebrews got it.  Yes, the Torah
describes circumcision as occurring among the Hebrews before they
came to Egypt, but Freud says that this is just because the Jews
wanted to cover up the fact that their religion was derived from an
Egyptian one.

In other words, it's basically a conspiracy theory: any
contradictory evidence is just something that has been created and
planted to deceive people.

Freud seems to commit other logical fallacies.  For example, he
writes, "I venture now to draw the following conclusion: if Moses
was an Egyptian and if he transmitted to the Jews his own religion,
then it was that of Ikhnaton, the Aton religion."  This is well and
good, if actually a bit obvious, but then somehow these seems to
mutate into, "If there are similarities between Judaism and the
Aton religion, that supports the idea that Moses was Egyptian,"
which is not the same thing at all.

And he says, "It must have been a considerable number that left the
country with Moses; a small crowd would not have been worth the
while of that ambitious man, with his great schemes."  Joseph Smith
led 170 people west to Utah, not what I would call a considerable
number.

Having finally treated ourselves to a DVD copy of THE CIVIL WAR,
and since we were planning on a trip to Richmond, we watched the
series again.  We have watched it three times in the last decade,
and probably a couple more the decade before that, but it is a
series that bears multiple watching.  A historical perspective
indicates how lucky Ken Burns was in making it.  Not just the
little things, but some of the big decisions.  Could he have known
how much Shelby Foote's comments would add to the series?  And
without the diaries of Elisha Hunt Rhodes and Sam Watkins, would he
have had the thread that ran through the whole series?  Did Burns
realize how Jay Ungar's "Ashokan Farewell" would become a minor
classic?  Burns's story of the filming of 103-year-old Daisy Turner
reciting the poem "The Boy We Loved So Well" about a soldier's
death is a perfect example of this luck/serendipity: Apparently she
just started it unbidden after her interview was finished, and
Burns and the cameraman were smart enough to keep filming even
though they were very near the end of the reel.  In fact, they
barely got the whole recitation.

In "The Star", Clarke has the Jesuit take the speed of light into
account when calculating when the light of the nova would have
reached Earth, yet at the end of "The Nine Billion Names of God" he
writes, "Overhead, without any fuss, one by one the stars were
going out," without any acknowledgement that they must actually
have gone out millennia ages.  In the former, one might assume that
God knew when the Nativity would be and set the nova in motion the
right number of millennia earlier.  In the latter, though, while
there is a God, one might presume it is not the omniscient God of
the former and so one might ask how the stars happened to know to
go out millennia ago so that they disappeared from the Earth at the
right time.  [-ecl]

==================================================================

                                           Mark Leeper
 mleeper@optonline.net


            I do hate sums.  There is no greater mistake than
            to call arithmetic an exact science.  There are
            hidden laws of number which it requires a mind like
            mine to perceive.  For instance, if you add a sum
            from the bottom up, and then again from the top down,
            the result is always different.
                                        -- Mrs. La Touche, 19th c.