THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
08/23/13 -- Vol. 32, No. 8, Whole Number 1768
Co-Editor: Mark Leeper, mleeper@optonline.net
Co-Editor: Evelyn Leeper, eleeper@optonline.net
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Topics:
NSA Surveillance Fallout (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Wet-Gating and Fade-Fighting (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
THE END OF DISCOVERY by Russell Stannard (book review
by Dale L. Skran, Jr.)
EVIDENCE (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
M (film comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
Color Extraction from Animated Disney Films
(letter of comment by Andre Kuzniarek)
Radiation and The Oath of a Freeman (letter of comment
by Fred Lerner)
POODLE SPRINGS (letter of comment by Gregory Benford)
This Week's Reading (PROPHET OF BONES and THE LUSIADS)
(book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
==================================================================
TOPIC: NSA Surveillance Fallout (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
I am just devastated by the whole NSA Surveillance Scandal. Okay,
the NSA knows it and who knows who else. Here I am, a healthy
adult male, and there is nothing in my e-mail that is embarrassing.
I never until now realized what a dull colorless life I must be
leading. [-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: Wet-Gating and Fade-Fighting (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
I saw some material about film restoration techniques. It seems
impossible, but the science has now advanced so that it is possible
that a film has a higher quality image in the restored version than
it had on it its original release. That seems to go against
thermodynamics or something.
Many of the classic films were on materials that were not chosen
with much thought for their long-term life. The priorities of film
producers were that the film give a clear image and be cheap.
Everything else being equal they would have preferred stable prints
that would be good for decades or more. But they would not have
wanted to pay for longer life even if film stocks were available
that would have lasted longer.
The simple fact was that long-life materials were not available
back in the early days of cinema. Some film companies did stash
copies of their films in vaults, but that is a long way from
preserving the films. Later studio regimes would sell their old
prints for the celluloid or the silver content. I have been told
that most films ever made are now lost forever. Even if there is a
copy of a film in the studio vaults, it is not just a matter of
taking it out, threading it through a projector and off it goes.
You really need a device call an "optical printer." It takes a
film and photographs it a frame at a time onto fresh film stock and
probably these days makes a digital record. It is filmed with a
much higher resolution than the original film stock could provide.
But it is still just kicking the can down the road since no
recording medium lasts forever. It is in the nature of film
preservation that you are always just forestalling the decay of a
film. If you are lucky you are just kicking the can far enough
down the road that it will not be a problem in the foreseeable
future.
Even with an optical printer your problems are far from over. Very
old celluloid shrinks or sometimes swells. It no longer fits
standard sprockets. Apparently optical printers can be adjusted to
handle a different inter-sprocket length.
Older film, if it has been used, gets dust particles impossible to
totally remove. However today the effects on the image can be
digitally removed.
The next problem is not so easy to correct. When the film was run
originally it may have been scratched or pitted. Frequently this
damage was done when the film was being rewound. Rewinding is done
at high speeds and it is easy for a projectionist to scratch the
film.
Today scratches in film could be removed digitally much in the way
that support wires are digitally removed. But there are easier
techniques. When the damage was done some of the surface of the
print was gouged out. It may have been left as dust in the
projector. The little crevices have missing celluloid.
The technique for fixing scratches is to use a fluid that has the
same optical properties as the surface of the film. The fluid that
works is perchlorethylene, a.k.a. dry-cleaning fluid. If the film
is dipped in the fluid, the liquid will fill up the cracks and
crevices in the surface of the film. For just an instant the film
will behave as if its surface still had the original celluloid.
That will last for only a moment and then gravity will pull the
fluid off of the original film. But that instant is long enough
for the image to be photographed. The image is rejuvenated for
only an instant, but that is long enough for the image to be
photographed. This technique is called "wet-gating". Once all the
frames are photographed they can be used for the new, restored
version of the film. But there is more digital jiggery-pokery that
is used to mend the film.
You have probably seen old color films in which the reds get much
stronger and the non-red color fades. The film has three layers of
color, one for each primary color. The color of the image is
distorted because the yellow layer is less stable than the red
layer. Film is just chemicals held in place by plastic. Chemicals
are only stable so long before they start breaking down. But the
fading can be corrected digitally.
If a single frame decays it used to be lost forever to the film.
The frame would just be spliced out and the eye would just barely
see a 1/24th second jump. Now there are digital ways to
interpolate a missing frame from the two around it.
There is now a very large bag of tricks to restore old films, but
the process is expensive. Only a small proportion of films are
currently considered important enough to preserve and hold on to.
But fore some prized films restoration is quite possible.
For more information see
http://savestarwars.com/filmpreservation.html
[-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: THE END OF DISCOVERY by Russell Stannard (book review by
Dale L. Skran, Jr.)
One take on predicting the future is to look into what might be
impossible, and work backwards. The best example of this is Arthur
C. Clarke's PROFILES OF THE FUTURE, which I consider the best book
on futurism ever written. More recently there has developed a
cottage industry of books attempting to assay the "limits of
science" including, for example, THE END OF SCIENCE by James Horgan
(1997). Stannard's 2010 book brings to the topic his background as
a high energy physicist as opposed to the more journalistic focus
of earlier works. This makes for a more interesting guide to the
impossible, but still one that runs into more than few ruts.
Before starting, it is important to keep in mind that, unlike some
other commentators, Stannard does *not* envision any end to
technology, as the applications of scientific knowledge are limited
only by our creativity.
Stannard lists three reasons why discovery may end: [1] our brains
may simply be incapable of understanding the big questions, [2] it
may just get too expensive to do the experiments that are required
to answer the final questions, and [3] some questions may just be
impossible to answer in some fundamental sense.
The "brain" reason seems an extremely weak reed to lean on. Even
if we are, in fact, incapable of understanding the big questions,
and further, we never evolve, naturally or artificially, to become
more intelligent, our construction of artificial minds is hardly
100 years old. It seems crashingly obvious to me as an
electrical/computer engineer that even a mere additional 100 years
of progress will gift us with artificial minds of more than human
scientific prowess. There may be some limit to the growth of
intelligence, but it lies so far in the distance we cannot even see
its outline. I can only speculate that some combination of
arrogance and ignorance has led Stannard to this "brain limitation"
argument.
The "experiments too expensive to run" is a point also made by
Horgan, and certainly has merit. However, Stannard's book would be
a much better effort if he spent a bit more time looking concretely
at what experiments we would need to be run to answer "big
questions" that seem too expensive to implement. Stannard lists
the questions, but for the most part doesn't give much sense of
what the experimental limits might be.
Stannard does a better job of indicating when questions may be
reaching the point of imponderability. Questions like "ultimately,
what is the nature of matter" are as much philosophy as physics.
Unfortunately, Stannard seems to lack the philosophical training to
write a definitive assessment of these topics. WHAT IS REAL? by
Meinard Kuhlman in the August 2013 Scientific American examines the
intersection between physics and philosophy. Kuhlman has degrees
in both physics and philosophy from Oxford, and is thus better
equipped than Stannard to address these types of issues. Kuhlman's
article is extremely interesting, and provides a deeper look into
fundamental issues than Stannard does.
The two weakest chapters are "Brain and Consciousness" and
"Extraterrestrial Life." Stannard's knowledge of these topics is
superficial, and his conclusions off-base. It is hard to imagine
that the question of the existence and nature of extraterrestrial
life will remain forever unanswerable. Even if we don't develop in
the relatively near term telescopes capable of detecting evidence
of life on Earth-like planets, in the longer term we already have,
or nearly have, the technology to explore the galaxy and definitely
resolve this question, at least on the time-scale of centuries. It
seems equally premature to declare that "consciousness" will never
be understood, given we stand at the dawn of the age of artificial
intelligence and neuroscience.
The rest of the book deals with unanswered questions in the realm
of physics, and contains decent tutorials on the open areas of
modern physics. Unfortunately, Stannard jumbles together
questions that are almost certainly answerable, and may have
already been answered, like "Is there a Higgs particle" with truly
imponderable issues. One nice touch is that Stannard provides
periodically a "summation" question that documents the open issue
at hand. I've listed them below:
- The problem of consciousness
- The free will/determinism problem
- How close to the instant of the Big Bang are we likely to be able
to probe?
- Can we be sure that inflation took place? If so, how are we to
choose which type of inflation it was?
- Was there a singularity in the instant of the big bang?
- Does it make sense to enquire into the cause of the Big Bang?
- Why is there something rather than nothing?
- Where to the laws of nature come from?
- Can one prove mathematically that science will be forever
incomplete?
- What is the status of mathematics?
- Do the physical constants change over time?
- Why is the universe life-friendly?
- Are there universes other than our own?
- What is the nature of dark matter?
- Is the universe infinite in size, and if so, what exactly does
that mean?
- Is there extraterrestrial life, and if so, how do we humans stand
in comparison as regards intellectual capacity?
- How are we to account for the observed value of the dark energy?
- Does the density of dark energy remain constant with time?
- Is there a connection between today's repulsion of the galaxy
clusters and the period of inflation?
- Why is there more matter than antimatter?
- How are we to understand the true nature of space?
- Is space infinitesimally divisible?
- Is time infinitesimally divisible?
- Does four-dimensional spacetime imply that the future is, in some
sense, fixed? Does this in turn compromise our sense of free
will?
- Does the loss of simultaneity for events separated by a distance
invalidate the notion that only the present exists?
- What is time?
- Does the perceived flow of time require there to be two types of
time?
- How are we to understand the built-in creativity of the physical
world?
- What significance, if any, ought we to attach to the self-
ordering nature of matter?
- Can we ever be sure that a GUT is correct if we cannot
experimentally test it at the appropriately high energy?
- Shall we ever be able to verify proton decay?
- Why is there no evidence for the existence of magnetic monopoles?
- Is it possible to account for the values of the parameters
featured in the Stannard Model?
- Is there a Higgs particle?
- How are we to account for the masses of the particles?
- Does supersymmetry hold and, if so, why have we not yet seen any
of the supersymmetric partners?
- Does the world-in-itself exist between our discontinuous
observations?
- Is there any value in Everett's many worlds hypothesis?
- Is the task of science to describe the world-in-itself, whether
or not it is being observed, or must it confine itself to
speaking only of our observations of the world?
- How are we to understand quantum entanglement?
- Is there an M-theory, and if so, what is it?
- Is there any way of proving the validity of some form of string
theory?
- Will we ever be able to formulate a fully satisfactory theory of
quantum gravity?
- Does complete understanding require more than solely physical
explanations?
This list is fascinating, and a significant contribution to the
"limits" discussion. Some of the questions obviously bump directly
into philosophy, and indeed, may prove to be fundamentally
unanswerable. Others seem rather prematurely placed on a list of
limits. For example, with regard to proton decay, Stannard says,
"Given that detectors significantly larger than the present one are
unlikely to ever be built, there is concern that perhaps the actual
lifetime is so long that we might never have the ability to measure
it." The instrument Stannard refers to is an underground tank of
50,000 tons of very pure water. It is not at all obvious that this
size represents any kind of fundamental limit, and it is unclear
why Stannard thinks no larger device would "ever" be constructed.
Another odd question to suggest as a limit is "What is Dark
Matter?" Since dark matter was first postulated in 1932 by Jan
Oort, evidence has slowly grown which indicates that it is made up
of some unknown type of particle. This is not a particularly long
time for a puzzle to remain open, and Stannard does not present any
cogent reason why we won't eventually pin down the exact nature of
dark matter. Listing magnetic monopoles as an unanswered question
is reasonable, but I note that the August 2013 issue of IEEE
SPECTRUM has an article titled "The Race to the Pole" by Jonathan
Morris which details the creation of artificial monopoles, called
"spin-ice monopoles," and discusses applications like
"magnetricity." This article suggests why the game of predicting
the limits of science is a hazardous one, with looking foolish
lying just around the corner.
In conclusion, THE END OF DISCOVERY is a valuable contribution to
the "limits" discussion. I hope that it inspires other scientists
and philosophers to examine Stannard's ideas and then create their
own lists of potentially final questions, or to examine in more
depth the questions Stannard lists, especially with regard to
quantifying how difficult the required experiments might be. A
book co-authored by a top-flight physicist and a top-flight
philosopher would be especially welcome. [-dls]
==================================================================
TOPIC: EVIDENCE (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: Mixing found footage with conventional camera footage,
EVIDENCE tells of two detectives who have to solve a puzzle and
play a game of life and death with a serial killer. The game
pieces are video recordings left by the killer's victims after they
are stalked and violently killed at an abandoned gas station in the
Nevada desert. Olatunde Osunsanmi directs a screenplay by John
Swetnam. Rating: 0 (-4 to +4) or 4/10
Serial killer films and found-footage horror films have both pretty
much run their course. With EVIDENCE director Olatunde Osunsanmi
and writer John Swetnam make a valiant attempt to do something new,
bringing the two together, with a found-footage serial-killer film.
But they may lose their viewer before the surprises late in the
film.
Police detectives, Reese and Burquez (played by Stephen Moyer and
Radha Mitchell), review cell phone footage shot by the victims of a
stalker/killer. They are trying to piece together how five people
were murdered stranded in the Nevada desert by a shuttle bus crash.
And they just happened to have the crime all nicely documented with
a cell phone camera. The first stretch of our credulity is that
someone got such complete coverage of the killings and in each
scene remained enough unscathed to continue filming.
Detectives Reese and Burquez get the somewhat damaged recording
chips and review the camera footage for clues. Improbably, that
may be sufficient to solve the crime. We watch them solving the
crime and we see the same extremely shaky camerawork that they see.
In fact the shaking of the image may be more jarring than the
killings themselves. The unedited shots may lend some realism to
the proceedings, but frequently they seem to be just padding out
the film. Watching too much of someone walk wordlessly through a
dilapidated building at night leads to impatience and even boredom.
Since the film is being released on disk there may be some fast-
scanning going on from impatient viewers.
EVIDENCE starts with one nice CGI 3D rendering of the overstuffed
crime scene. The producer could afford that because so much of the
rest of the movie is done with economical digital video, done with
a particularly shaky camera. But there is very little interest
created in any of the characters so the video segments are just
repetitive without being really involving. It seems the camera is
always luckily aimed well enough so no plot detail is lost. We see
a bit too much of the abandoned buildings falling apart but little
to grab us. Too much we see in the footage pads rather than adds
to the plot.
The real problem with EVIDENCE is that it stretches the viewers'
credulity that there is so nearly-perfect and complete a video
record of the crime that the police can sit in one room watching a
screen and do so much in solving the crime. That contrivance makes
the detective work seem much too easy. It also makes the
filmmakers' job of making the film feature length--94 minutes--seem
just a bit too easy. If they wanted to make the film two minutes
longer it is too easy to just show two minutes more of walking
around with nothing happening. The problem with found footage is
that it too simple and too tempting to just throw in more minutes
of nothing happening. I rate EVIDENCE a 0 on the -4 to +4 scale or
4/10. EVIDENCE will be released on August 20 on DVD and Blu-ray,
and will be available for download.
Film Credits: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1828970/combined
What others are saying:
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/evidence_2013/
[-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: M (film comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
I recently watched Fritz Lang's 1931 movie M again, and was struck
by how timeless it is. To be sure, there is much that is dated
about the criminals, and the police, and the businessmen--or is it
that they are stereotyped? But so much of the psychology is the
same as today.
For example, we see the beginnings of "helicopter parenting," with
mothers constantly looking out the window for their children,
walking them to and from school, and so on. (Apparently they don't
do what the parents of our generation did, which is to drill into
our heads never to take anything from strangers, and never to go
with strangers.)
There is also a sequence of scenes in which perfectly innocent
people are attacked by mobs. In one case, a little girl asks a man
what time it is, and he tells her, then to make conversation asks
where she lives. A crowd immediately gathers and accuses him of
being the "child-murderer." In another scene a pickpocket being
arrested shouts at the police that they should not be wasting time
on pickpockets, but instead arresting the child-murderer. The
crowd just hears the words "child-murderer" and assumes that the
pickpocket is actually the child-murderer and starts to attack him.
All of this resonates with our reactions to people who seem to have
any connection, however tenuous, to terrorism. All it takes is two
people Googling pressure cookers and backpacks from the same IP
address and suddenly the FBI shows up. [-ecl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: Color Extraction from Animated Disney Films (letter of
comment by Andre Kuzniarek)
Andre Kuzniarek writes:
You might find this blog post interesting. Seems to be a
variation on something similar you posted in a previous MT VOID:
http://tinyurl.com/void-disney
[-ak]
==================================================================
TOPIC: Radiation and The Oath of a Freeman (letter of comment by
Fred Lerner)
In response to Mark's comments about radiation in the summer in the
08/16/13 issue of the MT VOID, Fred Lerner writes:
You wrote "Something about summer makes silicon-32 emit radiation
more and winter makes it emit less. It does not make sense, but
there you have it."
Does this mean that in July silicon-32 emits radiation at a greater
rate in Canada than in Australia, and vice versa in January? And
what does it do in Singapore, which is on the Equator (or close
enough for government work)? [-fl]
Mark responds:
The article I read did not answer the questions you ask. They seem
like obvious questions and I don't think anyone has answered them.
If I were to guess, and I am not really qualified to do so, I would
look at distance from the sun. Or perhaps the measurement
equipment has a fault.
They say the most exciting words to a scientist are not "Eureka"
but "that's funny." This is a "that's funny" situation. [-mrl]
In response to Evelyn's comments on HOAXES in the same issue, Fred
writes:
In discussing a book on hoaxes Evelyn mentions the "Oath of a
Freeman", but says nothing more about it. I don't suppose it has
anything with the Freeman's Oath that I took when I moved to
Vermont and registered to vote there--but I am curious as to what
this one is, and what makes it so important to a connoisseur of
hoaxes. [-fl]
Evelyn Leeper replies:
"The Oath of a Freeman" was a loyalty oath to be taken by men of
the Plymouth Colony. It was supposedly the first document to be
printed in the Colonies (1639), but no copies exist from that
printing; the copy "discovered" in 1985 turned out to be a forgery.
[-ecl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: POODLE SPRINGS (letter of comment by Gregory Benford)
In response to Evelyn's review of POODLE SPRINGS in the 08/09/13
issue of the MT VOID and Kip Williams's comments in the 08/16/13,
Gregory Eenford writes:
Indeed, after Evelyn's comments on POODLE SPRINGS I reread it ...
and alas, agree. The self parody in PLAYBACK--a talky, sad guy in
La Jolla wearing white gloves and sharing insights with Marlowe--
should've been a sign: he was running out of material. I was amused
to note in a Chandler biography that he had never seen a jail until
the 1950s; his Marlowe was not brought from any experience.
I wrote my own semi-Chandler in a novella, "Dark Heaven," with many
Travis McGee touches too. It's an SF mystery, a sub-genre of which
I'd like to see more. [-gb]
==================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
PROPHET OF BONES by Ted Kosmatka (ISBN 978-0-8050-9617-0) is an
alternate history with the premise that the Earth really is only
six thousand years old and this has been proved with carbon dating.
But some bones found in a cave in Indonesia apparently are evidence
of something that people in power want covered up. The best part
of this is that (so far as I can tell) the fact that Darwin was
completely discredited meant that genetic research and testing have
proceeded much faster than in our world. Why? Well, because
everyone knew that any "evolution" happened in the last six
thousand years, there was nothing dangerous about it. It was
perfectly reasonable to decide that the San (previously known as
the Bushmen) split off from the rest of humanity first, because it
is still within the six-thousand-year period.
At least I think that is the reasoning, but it is never explicitly
stated. This is good, because otherwise it is an expository lump
to explain it, but it also means I could be completely off-base.
In any case, the plot seems to bifurcate at the end, with two
different secrets rather than just one, and not very satisfying
ones at that.
THE LUSIADS by Camoens (translated by William C. Atkinson, ISBN
978-0-14-044-026-3) is the "national epic of Portugal." (Do we
have a national epic? Why not?) Written in the mid-sixteenth
century, it is a poem recounting the voyage of Vasco de Gama in
1497-1498 from Portugal around the tip of Africa to India and back.
Though originally in verse, Atkinson has rendered it in prose, and
six pages of the introduction explain why.
In on easpect, Camoens set himself an impossible task. Modeling
his poem after such epics as THE ILIAD, THE ODYSSEY, and especially
THE AENEID, he felt obliged to put in all the Roman gods fighting
over whether to help or hinder de Gama, as well as mythological
tales of the founding of Portugal (a.k.a. Lusitania) by Lusus, the
son of Bacchus. At the same time he is writing about what a pious
Christian nation Portugal is, and how evil the Muslim infidels are.
There is a real disconnect here, particularly in Canto 7 where he
rails for four pages about how the other Christian nations of
Europe should be fighting the infidels in Turkey, and Egypt, and
North Africa instea of each other, and then says, "Now let us see
what is happening to our famous navigators, now that Venus has
calmed the blustering fury of the hostile winds and they are come
at last in sight of land, the goal of their so constant
perseverance, the land to which they have come to spread the faith
of Christ, bringing to its peoples a new way of life under a new
sovereign." It is good to know that the Roman goddess Venus is
helping to promote Christ, though a bit strange.
In keeping with the classical epic style, Camoens uses a lot of
similes. For example, he writes, "When the provident ants impelled
to unwonted effort by fear of the harsh winter ahead, move in
cumbrous supplies to the ant-hill, they show a vigour none had
believed possible. Such were the strivings now of the nymphs as
they sought to avert from the Portuguese the fearsome end that lay
in wait for them."
It is also a bit strange how Camoens is constantly talking about
how the Muslims are deceptive and lie to de Gama, and then in Canto
8 has the following: "And now the devil, speaking true for once,
revealed to one of [the heathen soothsayers of Calcutta] how the
[Portuguese] would mean their perpetual subjection to an alien yoke
and the destruction of their lives and property." Sometimes one
has to wonder which side Camoens is really on. Then again,
probably Camoens thought that the perpetual subjection of heathens
to the "alien" yoke of Christianity and the destruction of their
lives and property was a good thing. [-ecl]
==================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
The printing press is either the greatest blessing
or the greatest curse of modern times, sometimes
one forgets which it is.
--J M Barrie