THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
08/12/11 -- Vol. 30, No. 7, Whole Number 1662
Frick: Mark Leeper, mleeper@optonline.net
Frack: Evelyn Leeper, eleeper@optonline.net
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Topics:
Inter-Discipline Answer (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
No Dolce Vita per Gatti (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
JOURNEY TO THE FAR SIDE OF THE SUN (comments
by Evelyn C. Leeper)
Animation Errors (letter of comment by Jerry Ryan)
HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLLY HALLOWS, PART 2
(letter of comment by Dan Kimmel)
This Week's Reading (FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON)
(book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
===================================================================
TOPIC: Inter-Discipline Answer (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Last week I asked this question:
I was watching HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS, PART 1,
preparing to see the second part. Toward the end we get to see the
symbol of the Deathly Hallows as it appears in a signature and as
it is rendered in a piece of jewelry. In the jewelry the cloak is
an equilateral triangle. In the signature it is an isosceles right
triangle sitting with its hypotenuse as the base. If the radius of
the circle is r, what is the length of the wand in jewelry and what
is it in the signature? Assume all lines are infinitesimally thin.
Okay, I will let you cheat on the cinema knowledge part of the
puzzle. You can see the symbol at
http://images.wikia.com/harrypotter/images/2/23/Hallows.png
Answer: In the equilateral case the vertical line has length 3r.
If the triangle is an isosceles right triangle the length shrinks
to r(1+sqrt(2)). David Goldfarb wrote an explanation [-mrl]
David Goldfarb wrote:
It happens that I did the jewelry case first, but the signature
case is much the simpler to solve, so I'll give its solution first:
If you draw the lines from the center of the circle to the points
on the triangle legs where the circle is tangent, it's readily
apparent that these two lines plus the segments of the legs from
the apex to the tangent points form a square with sides of length
r. So the portion of the middle line (the wand line) that reaches
to the center of the circle must have length of sqrt(2) * r. And
of course the remaining portion is a circle radius, so its length
is r, and the total length of the wand line is r * (sqrt(2) + 1).
The jewelry case is more complicated, but you also start by drawing
a line from the circle center to a tangent point. I'll omit the
details unless you want them (which of course you don't since
you've already done this yourself), but it's possible using the
Pythagorean Theorem to work out that the triangle sides have length
of 2r * sqrt (3), and the wand length has the satisfyingly simple
result of 3r. [-dg]
Mark replies:
That is good. I thought this latter was actually the easier
problem. Here is how I did it. Draw a line segment from the center
of the circle to one of the base angles. It, the bottom part of
the sword, and half of the base form a 30-60-90 triangle whose
hypotenuse has to be of length 2r. So the center of the circle is
2r from each vertex of the equilateral triangle. Hence the sword
has length 1r + 2r = 3r. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: No Dolce Vita per Gatti (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
We were at a birthday party recently and had left the table when a
pet cat jumped on the table. Evelyn was concerned that the cat
might get into the cake. (We were across the room at the time.) I
told Evelyn that it was not really very likely. A cat would find
very little of interest in the taste of a cake. A dog might enjoy
a bit of birthday cake, but a cat would probably find it nearly
flavorless. A cat cannot detect sweetness. Evelyn had never heard
this. It happens to be thought to be true. It is believed that a
cake would just taste like bland bread to a cat, I guess. Rob a
cat of the ability to taste sweetness and what else is there in the
taste of a cake? A cat lacks the genetic code to detect sweet
flavors. I believe they are the only mammals that suffer from the
inability to enjoy or even detect things that taste sweet.
Cats evolved to eat meat and they are efficient at turning meat
into energy. But carbohydrates do little for a cat, and if cats
ate too many carbohydrates they would be in danger of developing
diabetes. So cats that had a mutation that did not allow them to
enjoy sweet flavors actually had a survival advantage over cats who
like other mammals enjoyed a piece of cake or something equivalent.
Apparently for a cat, not being able to taste the joys of sweet
foods helps protect the cat from illness. Or it has been
suggested, became a carnivore because it genetically lost the
ability to create sweetness receptors on its tongue.
This all raises a sort of chicken-and-egg sort of question. Did
cats first lose their ability to taste sweetness and as a result
chose more to eat meat and ended up being strictly carnivores? Or
did they become strict carnivores for reasons of environment or
taste or what ever and since they no longer were using their
sensation of sweetness, did it atrophy away? Or was it a
combination of the two in a feedback loop. Did they lose their
ability to appreciate sweetness, concentrate more on meat, need
sweetness receptors less and so they withered more, leading them
even more to an all-meat diet. And this all assumes that when they
could taste sweetness, it was the same pleasurable flavor that it
is to other mammals. Perhaps what tasted sweet to us was detected
by them, but it tasted the way bitter tastes to us? There is no
guarantee that a given food will taste the same to two different
species or even to two different animals in the same species.
Grass that tastes bitter to us is quite pleasing to a sheep. Does
it taste bitter to the sheep also and the sheep just likes the
flavor as a matter of preference? Or might the grass taste to the
sheep like German Chocolate Cake tastes to us? Sadly, without the
electronic telepathy of the "hat" from the film BRAINSTORM we
cannot tell what the sheep is experiencing when it eats grass.
Generally foods that taste good to us are healthy for us, or at
least were at some stage of our evolution. German Chocolate Cake
has energy that could be useful for our survival. Whatever the
primeval equivalent was, it was useful for survival to our
ancestors. But is the correlation between tasting bitter and being
bad for your health just a coincidence or did our evolving species
learn to assign the flavor bitter to those foods that were
unhealthy? Meanwhile did the evolving sheep learn to assign the
flavor sweet to healthy grass? And today might we be able to take
a baby (or an adult) and reassign the flavor sweet to healthy
vegetables and bitter to double fudge sundaes? It is food for
thought.
Incidentally, I found out later that some cats do like cake
frosting, but who knows how it tastes to them? We could tell the
cat who started this train of thought was innocent of all but
walking on the table since there was no sign in the frosting that a
cat had touched it. There are cats that like frosting and there
are cats that like ice cream. But it is not surprising that a cat
that likes cream likes ice cream. I don't think that humans drink
cream because it tastes sweet to us. We drink it because we like
the taste and texture of cream. That sensation is probably what a
cat eats ice cream for.
Reference: http://tinyurl.com/leeper-cats-sweetness
[-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: JOURNEY TO THE FAR SIDE OF THE SUN (comments by Evelyn
C. Leeper)
We have been watching a Teaching Company course on "The Physics of
the Impossible," and the lecturer was talking about symmetries. As
an example, he mentioned the film JOURNEY TO THE FAR SIDE OF THE
SUN, which portrayed a mirror-image world on the other side of the
sun. According to the lecturer, this was done was simply filming
as normal and then flipping the film. While that would be one way
to do it, that was *not* the method used, and I will explain why.
[SPOILERS AHEAD]
I watched the film with two questions in mind:
- What would be reversed on Mirror-Earth?
- What did the film actually show on Mirror-Earth?
For the first question, I started by noting asymmetries on Earth
before the mission to Mirror-Earth was sent. For example, Ross's
wife parts her hair on her left side. The Eurosec symbol has its
open end to the right. (For that matter, many of the numbers and
letters are asymmetric, and of course the left-to-right direction
of writing is asymmetric as well.) People wear their logos/badges
on their left breast. Men's jacket breast pockets are on the left.
The space suits have the large orange shoulder packs on the left
shoulder. And so on. All this is true throughout the flight to
Mirror-Earth and during the crash landing.
After Ross wakes up in the recovery room, he starts noticing
differences. When his wife is driving him home, he says the on-
coming truck is on the wrong side of the road--but he doesn't say
anything about which side of the car she is driving from (the
left). He looks at his apartment strangely, and reaches for a
light switch on the wrong side of the door. But it is only when he
looks at the bottles in the bathroom in the mirror and then
directly and says that the writing is reversed that we know what is
going on. No, he is not on Mirror-Earth; he is *from* Mirror-Earth
and on (our) Earth, because all the writing looks fine to us. We
also notice that the badges and jacket breast pockets remain on the
left side, the Eurosec symbol is the same, and so on.
(One wonders at a world where he did not see any writing or
printing for almost twenty-four hours after his release.)
So the only time we have seen the Mirror-Earth so far is the brief
period during and right after the crash of the ship from Earth. We
see Ross black out on Mirror-Earth; we see Mirror-Ross wake up on
Earth.
All the second part takes place on our Earth up until we see Ross
get into the ship with the reversed name "Doppelganger". Towards
the very end of this section, Ross tries to shake hands with his
left hand, and they say they are "reversing everything", so seeing
the orange pack on his right shoulder just re-affirms this.
But after launching the Doppelganger, we are on (or above) Mirror-
Earth. The lettering on the Doppelganger (which had looked
reversed to the inhabitants of the planet) and on the Phoenix looks
fine to us (and to the Ross we see), and the orange pack is on his
*left* shoulder. In the shots of Ground Control, the badges and
jacket breast pockets are on the *right* side, and when the crews
get into the emergency vehicles, the drivers are sitting on the
right-hand side.
And based on how the clothing buttons, the very final scene, of
Herbert Lom in the nursing home, is also on Mirror-Earth.
(Throughout, everyone wore turtlenecks, zippered jackets, or other
clothing without buttons to give it away.)
What this means is that hardly anything was filmed that was going
to be on Mirror-Earth, and none of that really needed to have the
film flipped. It is conceivable, I suppose, but I think the real
error is in thinking we are seeing Mirror-Earth for more than a
couple of very short scenes.
Now, Mirror-Earth could not be perfectly symmetric. The planet's
rotation relative to its revolution would seem reversed. (Clearly
the revolution cannot be mirror-image, or the two planets would
collide.)
Making two orbital passes and finding "no signs of life" seems
unlikely; wouldn't there be cities lit up on the night side? This
is explained by saying they had been in a polar orbit over the
oceans, but I'm still skeptical. And their choice of a landing
site was pretty poor, although there seems to be a grand tradition
of landing spaceships in rocky canyons instead of on a nice flat
plain.
Biologically, Ross shouldn't be able to eat the food on the other
planet either, or rather, if he did, it would not nourish him,
because it would have the wrong handedness. Trivia: the molecule
Carvone has a left-handed and a right-handed version. One tastes
like spearmint; the other tastes like caraway. [-ecl]
[I discussed much of this plus some of the mathematics of symmetry
in a 2009 editorial:
http://fanac.org/fanzines/MT_Void/MT_Void-2738.html#6. -mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Animation Errors (letter of comment by Jerry Ryan)
In response to comments on animation errors in the 08/05/11 issue
of the MT VOID, Jerry Ryan writes:
On animation errors... I remember going to a talk at Lucent by a
former Lucent guy who had gone to Pixar. He spoke about the
fascinating details of making TOY STORY.
They had a lot of challenging things they were expecting to face.
For some reason they decided to do the Sid character first -- he's
the nasty kid that beats on the toys. They had someone sculpt a
Sid head, they did renderings of him ... and it took *way* more
time than they had expected that it would.
To "catch up" they came up with a time saving idea: for all the
other characters, they sculpted and rendered *half* heads for all
of the other characters, then mirrored the half-heads to create
the full images.
As a result of this, Sid is the only character that is slightly
asymmetrical. When you see him on screen with the other
characters, there's something vaguely odd about him, and slightly
creepy. The speaker claimed it was an unintended consequence of
the creation process, but that it worked really well.
Once it was pointed out to me, I noticed it when I next saw the
movie... [-gwr]
===================================================================
TOPIC: HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLLY HALLOWS, PART 2 (letter of
comment by Dan Kimmel)
In response to Mark's comments on HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLLY
HALLOWS, PART 2, in the 08/05/11 issue of the MT VOID [ in which
he said there was not enough of Voldemort's backstory], Dan Kimmel
writes:
Then you weren't paying attention. Voldemort's backstory was
rather thoroughly explored in the previous films, particularly
HARRY POTTER AND THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS and HARRY POTTER AND THE
HALF-BLOOD PRINCE.
Glad I could clear that up. :-) [-dk]
Mark responds:
Well, admittedly it has been years since I have seen either film.
One is two years old, the other is nine (!). I remember only
snatches about Voldemort from either film. For me they do not add
up to a very complete story of who this Voldemort really is. I
was hoping the latest film would tell a coherent story and
complete picture of who Voldemort really is. And didn't you tell
me in the "This Island Earth" discussion that a film really has to
stand on its own? :-) [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
In preparation for one of the Worldcon book discussions this year,
I read FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON by Jules Verne. The translation
I read was the 1874 translation by Louis Mercier and Eleanor E.
King (hereafter referred to as Mercier/King), in a book published
in 1905 (no ISBN). The other translations I referred to were the
Edward Roth, from the same era and reprinted by Dover (ISBN 978-0-
486-46964-5), and the Walter James Miller in THE ANNOTATED JULES
VERNE: FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON (ISBN 978-0-517-14833-4). I also
compared them to the French original, available on-line. You can
take it as a given that any public domain (pre-1922) English
translation of Verne is pretty bad. I've commented on this before
(in my review of JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH), but will
point out a few examples here. (Why did I read these translations?
Because they are the ones we had in the house.)
The result of all the bad translations is that Verne's knowledge of
Florida (and the United States in general) often seems as shaky as
his knowledge of the moon. Mercier/King has Stones Hill, near
Tampa, have an elevation of 1800 feet; the highest elevation
anywhere in Florida is 345 feet. The Edward Roth translation is
only marginally better than Mercier/King's, with and elevation as
"nearly a thousand feet." But Verne got it right: the original
French gives Stone's Hill an elevation of only 300 feet. (Well, I
*thought* it was the original French, but Miller also says 1800
feet. Was the on-line version corrected by someone?)
However, both Mercier/King and the original French has the highest
elevation of the Appalachians (in New Hampshire) as 5600 feet; it
is actually 6288 feet. (Roth re-writes the passage to get it
right; Miller claims Verne said 6600 feet.) Both Verne and
Mercier/King have that the highest elevation of the Rocky Mountains
is 10,700 feet; it is actually 14,433 feet. Verne does not seem to
know about the Sierra Nevada at all. And when he places the high
point in "the territory of Missouri", he is being anachronistic,
since while the Missouri Territory did include Longs Peak, the
territory was re-organized and renamed in 1821, well before the
time of the story. As it reads, though, it could easily be read as
the state of Missouri, which is patently ridiculous. There are no
peaks that high in the state of Missouri. (Again, Roth corrects
Verne's errors, and places it in the "Territory of Colorado";
Miller annotates it.)
Indeed, Roth takes such liberties with sections of Verne that at
times it is scarcely a translation at all. When one reads
Mercier/King, one gets an abridged version with sloppy translation
and most of Verne's science left out; when one reads Roth, one is
reading an American author's paraphrase of Verne containing a lot
of elaboration that Verne never wrote. The result is that when I
compared one translation to the other, or to the original French, I
often got the feeling I was looking at four different books.
One entire chapter Mercier/King leaves out is titled (in Roth's
translation) "Which Lady Readers Are Requested to Skip". There is
nothing racy here--it is full of scientific information about the
moon. But the title scarcely represents Verne's attitude toward
women, because his original title is "What It Is Impossible Not to
Know and What It Is No Longer Permissible to Believe in the United
States" (as Miller accurately translates it).
And another minor translation example: Mercier/King translates "en
deux mots" as "in two words" when clearly what is meant is "in two
sayings".
Much has been made of the similarities between Verne's moon launch
and the Apollo program. Both launch from Florida, both carry three
men, both use up-to-the-minute materials, one named the cannon
Columbiad and the other the ship Columbia, and so on. But Verne
launches from the west coast of Florida, not the east, and uses a
"count-up" (to forty) rather than a count-down, providing
additional support to the claim that Fritz Lang invented the
countdown in FRAU IM MOND.
Verne had an odd idea of how duels were fought in the United
States: he seemed to think that the two participants entered a
forest with guns and dogs, and hunted each other like wild game.
He thought there was a venomous spider as large as a pigeon's egg--
and with claws--that was native to Florida. (To be fair, the
naturalist William Bartram describes a spider of this size, though
I doubt he mentions claws.)
Verne has included humor--though at times one is more likely to
call them attempts at humor. There is certainly black humor in his
description of the Baltimore Gun Club: "Crutches, wooden legs,
artificial arms, iron hands, gutta percha jaws, silver skulls,
platina noses, false teeth--nothing was wanting to the collection;
and W. J. Pitcairn, the statistician already mentioned, calculated
that in the Gun Club, on an average, there was only one arm for
every four men, and one pair of legs for every six." And he gives
us (according to Miller) Tom Hunter, whose "wooden legs, resting on
the fender in the smoking room, were slowly charring"; Billsby
"trying to stretch the arms he no longer had"; Colonel Bloomsbury,
who could not stuff his hands in his pockets, "though it was not
pockets he lacked"; and J. T. Marston, "scratching his gutta-percha
skull with his iron hook." (This is Miller's translation; Roth
gives Bilsby one glass eye and makes Bloomsbury the only armless
member named; Mercier/King's is much shorter and omits Bloomsbury
altogether. Miller's is the most accurate.)
On the other hand, a lot of Verne's attempts at humor rely on
national stereotypes, such as in his descriptions of how much money
each nation contributed and why. Again, the two translations
disagree on details, but the general idea is certainly Verne's.
(Another example of this in Roth's translation, describing the
tourists from all over the world who come to the launch, seems to
have been entirely invented by Roth; it does not appear in Verne's
original at all.)
What was not made clear was whether the book discussion would
include ROUND THE MOON (a.k.a. ALL AROUND THE MOON), which is
usually included as the second part of FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON.
The Dover book lists both titles, but the Mercier/King volume just
calls itself FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON even though it includes
ROUND THE MOON. Miller does not include it at all.
And I will note in passing that the 1958 film version of FROM THE
EARTH TO THE MOON is terrible, and as inaccurate as the earlier
translations, providing yet another story in place of Verne's.
One feels obliged to compare this to H. G. Wells's FIRST MEN IN THE
MOON. Verne was dismissive of Wells's work, saying, "Where is this
cavorite? Let him produce it." But Verne's method of propulsion
is no better, for all his attempts to make it scientific. You can
fire a shell from a cannon, but not a capsule containing human
beings. Well, not and have them survive, anyway. Wells's work
certainly has more characterization and less infodump, and frankly
has aged better. [-ecl]
===================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
Work with some men is as besetting a sin as idleness.
-- Samuel Butler