THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
11/14/14 -- Vol. 33, No. 20, Whole Number 1832
Co-Editor: Mark Leeper, mleeper@optonline.net
Co-Editor: Evelyn Leeper, eleeper@optonline.net
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Topics:
We Have Touchdown! (comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
Film about Yuri Gargarin
Kaiju Noir (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
The Paradox of Hanoi (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
INTERSTELLAR (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
HOUSEBOUND (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
Knocks (letters of comment by Frank Leisti, Steve Milton,
and Lee Beaumont)
Alternate History (comments by Steven H Silver)
This Week's Reading (CONGRESSIONAL GOVERNMENT: A STUDY IN
AMERICAN POLITICS and SUPERFREAKONOMICS) (book comments
by Evelyn C. Leeper)
==================================================================
TOPIC: We Have Touchdown! (comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
The European Space Agency's ambitious attempt to place a spacecraft
on the surface of a comet succeeded when a signal arrived at the
mission control center at Darmstadt, Germany, at 5:04 p.m. local
time (11:04 a.m. Eastern time).
So far we have landed on Mars, Venus, Jupiter (impact only), Luna,
Titan, Eros, Itokawa, Comet 9P/Tempel 1 (impact), and Comet
67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. [-ecl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: Film about Yuri Gargarin
A Russian/Spanish translation of a Russian full-length movie called
GAGARIN! is at .
IMDB entry is at http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2856930/combined.
==================================================================
TOPIC: Kaiju Noir (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Evelyn was complaining that in the new GODZILLA all the big fight
scenes take place at night. You cannot see Godzilla. That is
actually a realistic touch. You cannot see Godzilla in the real
world either. [-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: The Paradox of Hanoi (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
I have discovered a paradox that I have a hard time trying to
understand and resolve. It involves a puzzle usually called the
"Towers of Hanoi." (I think in RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES they
called it the Lucas Puzzle, another name it goes by.)
Let me describe the puzzle. You have ten disks all of different
diameters. (The number is arbitrary.) They are identical except
for the graduated diameters. Each has a hole at the center so it
could be put on a spindle. You have three such spindles and all
the disks are placed on one of the spindles, smallest at the top,
largest on the bottom.
For a picture see:
http://www.jaapsch.net/puzzles/images/hanoi/hanoi.gif
Now you move the disks one at a time from one spindle to another.
You can move only the top disk on a stack. Never put a larger disk
on a smaller one. The object is to move all the disks to a spindle
other than the one they all started on.
If you had only two disks, the task would be easy. Move disk 1 to
currently empty spindle C, move disk 2 to currently empty spindle
B. And move disk 1 to spindle B. You have now moved two disks
from spindle A to spindle B.
Now what is the paradox? I would claim that anybody knows the
solution with any given positive number of disks. I think I can
prove that using the mathematical principle of induction.
First, what is induction? Well assume you have an infinite ladder
in front of you. You want to prove you can get to any step of the
ladder. You could climb to the first step, then climb to the
second step. But eventually all those proofs would become tiresome
and you still have not proven you can get to every step.
You have just to prove that 1) you can get to the first step and
then give a second proof that 2) if you are step N then you can get
to step N+1. That is, there are just two things to prove. The
first result says that you can get to step 1 as you have just
shown. The second one says that if you can get to step 1 you can
get to step 2. And it says if you can get to step 2 that then you
can get to step 3. And that is all you need to prove you can get
to step 4. And so forth ad nauseum.
So what does this have to do with the Towers of Hanoi paradox?
Well, I can use induction to prove you know how to move a stack of
any number of disks from one spindle to another. Let us start with
the insanely simple task of moving a stack of one disk from one
spindle to another. Pick up the one disk and put it on the spindle
where you want it to go. That's all.
Now assume you know how to move a stack of N disks from one spindle
to another. You are faced with a setup with N+1 disks. Well, you
know how to move the top N disks to another spindle. You know how
to do that by the assumption. Now move disk N+1 to the empty
spindle. Now you know how to move the stack of N disks on top of
disk N+1. Voila. You have moved a stack of N+1 disks to another
spindle.
So because you can do it with a stack of 1 disk you know how to do
it with a stack of 2 disks. Because you can do it with a stack of
2 disks you know how to do it with a stack of 3 disks. Because you
can do it with a stack of 3 disks you know how to do it with a
stack of 4 disks. And so forth.
What bothers me is that at one point I didn't know how to solve the
Towers of Hanoi with ten disks. (I do now, but that was then.)
Yet I have given a proof there that I really knew even then.
There are paradoxes that work on the uncertainty of not knowing how
deeply a person thinks about a problem. The above is one such
paradox. "The Unexpected Hanging" is another. A man is sentenced
to death by hanging some weekday of the following week. But as a
touch of mercy the prisoner cannot know what day he will be
executed until just the moment he is dragged to the scaffold.
So what days can the execution be? It cannot be Friday since if he
makes it past Thursday then Friday is the only day left the
execution could be. The last possible day has to be Thursday.
But the prisoner is still alive Thursday that has to be the day of
the execution. So he can be executed no later than Wednesday.
Wednesday morning the prisoner would have to know his final day had
come. That rules out Wednesday. Repeat that logic and each day is
ruled out. So if he is called to the executioner on Wednesday he
will walk the final mile on a day when it could not be, and he had
a perfectly good logic proof that the hanging could not possibly be
on Wednesday. So there is no day he can be executed. Tuesday and
Monday are ruled out for the same reason. Yet it seems that if the
executioner chooses Wednesday the prisoner cannot know for sure the
execution is that day. [-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: INTERSTELLAR (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: With the depth and complexity of a science fiction novel,
Christopher Nolan brings INTERSTELLAR to the screen, based on an
original screenplay he wrote with his brother Jonathan. As the
last-ditch effort of our dying civilization, a mission is sent
through a wormhole to another galaxy in an effort to find an Earth-
like planet to be a new home for humanity. No previous science
fiction film has ever had the scope and span that this film has.
It is surprising it all fits into a very tight 167 minutes.
Rating: +3 (-4 to +4) or 9/10
Christopher Nolan's INTERSTELLAR is quite possibly the most complex
science fiction film with the most ideas of any SF film ever. It
starts with a family suffering in what at first appears to be the
great 1930s Dust Bowl and spans its way to planets in other
galaxies with references to higher dimensions and other universes,
not to mention examinations of not one but two father-daughter
relationships with in each case father and daughter literally, as
well as figuratively, light-years apart.
But that is getting ahead of myself. As the film opens we think we
are seeing a documentary about the great 1930s Dust Bowl. We
quickly find out that in this near future world, the dust storms
have returned to the Great Plains. Blights and haboobs have killed
off nearly all major crops. Only corn still survives and its time
seems to be limited. Most people are worried, but still make a
priority drinking alcohol made from--what else?--corn. The world
is counting down to its demise. Cooper (played by Matthew
McConaughey) is a corn farmer who was once a very good test pilot
for NASA. He is contacted by NASA who wants him back for a mission
that might save humanity. One end of a wormhole has appears to
have formed near Saturn. There are twelve explorers who were sent
out a decade earlier to study earthlike planets near the other end
of the wormhole. But the information they found never made it back
to Earth.
Now a mission is being mounted to travel through the wormhole and
at the far end to collect what information they can to decide if
any of the planets can be a haven for humankind. On the mission
will be Amelia Brand (Anne Hathaway), the daughter of a former
colleague of Cooper's. Her father is planning the expedition,
called the Lazarus Mission. In the course of the film we go from
cornfields to wormholes, to black holes, to the surfaces of two
alien planets along with spacecraft and robots, all of which are
important to the plot. It is a complex scenario and one that will
tax viewers to just follow what is happening. And all of this
nearly takes back seat to a story that is mostly about strained
family relations. The viewer should expect that with everything
else going on there is a good deal of tearful apologies. It is an
unimaginable feat of story telling to juggle so many elements and
keep them all in the air at once.
In a film with this many ideas packed together, some have got to be
a little on the funky side. It takes our astronauts two years just
to get to Saturn and the wormhole, yet at the other end of the
wormhole there are no less then twelve superficially habitable-
seeming planets all within striking distance, like Starbucks near a
subway stop. TARS, their robot (voiced by actor Bill Irwin), is a
very new and a very original-looking design for a robot. TARS
steals every scene he/she/it is in by being so interesting. Back
in the 1940s film robots looked boxy, but not nearly as boxy as
TARS. On the corny side is that suggestion that love has some
special trans-dimensional implications. And speaking of corn, it
is a crop very susceptible to droughts. It is unlikely that corn
could grow in a region suffering from dust bowl conditions.
Besides Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway the film features
Jessica Chastain, Michael Caine, Ellen Burstyn, Casey Affleck, John
Lithgow, and more.
Not everything is so wonderful about this film. My major complaint
with the film, however, is that the sound editing is a mess. With
the complexity and techi-ness of the talk it is important to hear
every word. The sound is, however, muddy and indistinct, and at
times the music and sound effects tracks overpower the dialogue
track. Also, occasionally the actors just don't project their
voices. I look forward to getting the film on disk so I can turn
on subtitling. After 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY set the standard for
scenes of hyper-light travel and CONTACT had its own sequence, the
wormhole travel depiction us just a bit uninspired, though the
depiction of the black hole is fairly accurate.
INTERSTELLAR is more than just a science fiction story for the
screen, it is a novel aimed at adults with a novel's complexity.
This is probably the most audacious science fiction film anyone has
ever made or even tried to make. I rate it a +3 on the -4 to +4
scale or 9/10.
Film Credits:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0816692/combined
What others are saying:
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/interstellar_2014/
[-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: HOUSEBOUND (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: A 20-ish delinquent is sentenced by the court to eight
months' house arrest in the home she grew up in and finally
escaped. Now she is trapped back there not allowed to leave and
she is losing her skepticism about her mother's claim of a resident
ghost. The horror comedy wildly plays off our expectations. It
transforms from one kind of horror film to another like it were
flipping TV channels. By the time we are done we will have gone
through maybe five subgenres of horror film as well as being a
comedy and the comedy does not destroy the horror. Rating: high +2
(-4 to +4) or 8/10
Kylie (played by Morgana O'Reilly) is an angry savage of a woman.
We first find her sledge hammering an ATM machine to break into it.
Almost immediately she is in police custody. The result is that
she is sentenced to eight months of home detention with an anklet
that will inform her parole officer the moment she steps outside
the bounds of her house and yard or if she attempts to remove the
anklet. The house she has been sentenced to was the childhood home
she detested. The house, old and cluttered, and garden have not
been well maintained and look like the setting of a creepy Grimm's'
Fairy Tale. She is about to be in her own grim fairy tale.
Kylie takes out the full force of her anger on her parents, making
her presence as inconvenient as possible. The parents for some
reason remain pleased to have her home. Kylie's mother, Miriam
(Rima Te Wiata), is a font of non-stop boring banality. As the
electronic anklet is attached the mother asks, "Aren't you lucky,
Kylie, having all that high-technology on your foot?" One of the
things that Miriam tells her daughter is that the house is haunted.
Kylie's response is as angry and rude as everything else she does,
but soon she herself is hearing strange noises in the house. Can
it be that her mother is right about the ghost?
HOUSEBOUND is written and directed by first-time feature director
Gerard Johnstone. His is a fresh approach to horror and hopefully
we will be seeing more of what he has to offer. At the heart of
the film there is some serious drama here as her Kylie finds there
is reason to respect the very things she rebelled about most. Her
mother's apparently ridiculous belief in the ghost actually has
some basis in fact. The security guard who is supposed to be
enforcing the law proves to be a valuable man to have around and to
be looking out for her. Just perhaps the world is more just to
Kylie than she has expected or that she has been to it.
HOUSEBOUND is a horror-comedy-mystery-drama. It is not an easy
task to have all four without each acting at the expense of the
others. Here the cross interference is kept to a minimum. For me
it did not all work together perfectly, but it came close.
In general this film is as creative a horror film as I have seen in
quite a while. There are not a lot of New Zealanders making films
for the international market but like the Singaporeans, the Kiwis
may well outshine the Americans for creative films. And that is
not just Peter Jackson. HOUSEBOUND is a horror comedy that does
work, and it gets a high +2 on the -4 to +4 scale or 8/10.
Film Credits: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3504048/combined
What others are saying:
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/housebound/
[-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: Knocks (letters of comment by Frank Leisti, Steve Milton,
and Lee Beaumont)
In response to Mark's question about the length of door knocks in
the 11/07/14 issue of the MT VOID, Frank Leisti writes:
A long knock is the length of time between the knocks. Of course
for the quotation, that would mean 4 knocks, not the expected 3
knocks. [-frl]
Steve Milton writes:
Long and short for knocks is the length of the interval between
knocks which makes the last knock indeterminate unless you jingle
the handle as a terminator. So two longs and a short would be:
knock, wait 3 seconds, knock, wait 3 seconds, knock and immediately
jingle the handle. "Shave and a haircut" is a much less ambiguous
knock pattern and demonstrated in WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT. [-smm]
(Lee Beaumont also responded.)
Mark responds:
I was sort of bringing up a zen-like question in the last VOID
asking what "a" (in other words "one") long knock sounds like. It
does make a noise, but it is characterized by what you don't hear.
You need a second knock to know if it was a long knock or a short
knock. In a sequence of long and short knocks, you never know
which the last one was. [-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: Alternate History (comments by Steven H Silver)
Not quite in response to the link to Evelyn's interview on
alternate history in the 11/07/14 issue of the MT VOID, Steven
Silver sent the following:
Yesterday, I received a link to an article that was published in
2009 in AMSJ (American Studies) at University of Kansas. I
disagree with much of what was written and found one statement, in
particular, to be among the silliest things ever written about me:
"1995 can be considered the birth year of the alternate history
novel as a genre [...] While hundreds of texts can be
retroactively added to the list of alternate histories, the version
of the literary counterfactual that rose to prominence in the early
1990s was not fully recognized as a genre until science-fiction
reviewers Steven H. Silver and Evelyn Leeper and NASA scientist
Robert B. Schmunk established the Sidewise Awards for Alternate
History in 1995. The Sidewise Award defined the alternate history
as a literary category and became a mechanism to draw and police
the borders of the genre."
The author does cite Karen's 2000 taxonomy article from
EXTRAPOLATIONS and her 2001 THE ALTERNATE HISTORY: REFIGURING
HISTORICAL TIME.
[-shs]
==================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
In honor of the mid-term elections, I did a little political
reading. CONGRESSIONAL GOVERNMENT: A STUDY IN AMERICAN POLITICS by
Woodrow Wilson (ISBN 978-0-486-44735-3) makes clear that in 1885
things were very different from now.
On the one hand, Wilson seems to feel that the two parties exercise
little discipline over their members in Congress: "Our parties
marshal their adherents with the strictest possible discipline for
the purpose of carrying elections, but their discipline is very
slack and indefinite in dealing with legislation. ... [The]
legislation of a session does not represent the policy of either
[the majority or the minority party]; it is simply the aggregate of
the bills recommended by Committees composed of members from both
sides of the House, and it is known to be usually, not the work of
the majority men upon the Committees, but compromise conclusions
bearing some shade or tinge of each of the variously-colored
opinions and wishes of the committee-men of both parties."
On the other hand, he writes, "Any individual, or any minority of
weak numbers or small influence, who has the temerity to neglect
the decisions of the caucus is sure, if the offense be often
repeated, or even once committed upon an important issue, to be
read out of the party, almost without chance of reinstatement."
So it sounds as though the party insists on obedience from its
members, but is willing to compromise or modify its position when
it comes to working in committee. (Of course, these days the
latter does not seem to be happening as often.)
Apparently the budget problems were very different then: "It has
come to be infinitely more trouble to spend our enormous national
income than to collect it."
And things have obviously changed since Wilson wrote, "But there is
safety and ease in the fact that the Senate never wishes to carry
it resistance to the House to the point at which resistance must
stay all progress in legislation; because there is really a "latent
unity" between the Senate and the House which makes continued
antagonism between them next to impossible."
Some things are the same, though: "A few stubborn committee-men may
be at the bottom of much of the harm that has been wrought, but
they do not represent their party, and it cannot be clear to the
voter how his ballot is to change the habits of Congress for the
better. He distrusts Congress because he feels that he cannot
control it." This is the situation we have now, where the
Congresspeople the voter may see the "obstructionists" are not from
his district or state, so he cannot do anything about them.
Another "eternal verity" would be that "the utterances of the Press
have greater weight and are accorded greater credit, though the
Press speaks entirely without authority, than the utterances of
Congress, though Congress possesses all authority. ... There is
no imperative demand on the part of the reading public in this
country that the newspapers should report political speeches in
full. On the contrary, most readers would be disgusted at finding
their favorite columns so filled up. By giving even a notice of
more than an item's length to such a speech, an editor runs the
risk of being denounced as dull."
Wilson seemed to think our Congressional system will keep our
government weak: "As at present constituted, the federal government
lacks strength because its powers are divided, lacks promptness
because its authorities are multiplied, lacks wieldiness because
its processes are roundabout, lacks efficiency because its
responsibility is indistinct and its action without competent
direction." Although nothing has changed in the Constitution to
modify the powers, authorities, processes, responsibility, or
direction, most people would not call our Federal government weak--
indeed, many would say it is far too strong.
Ultimately, Wilson seems to be saying we need more partisanship,
not less (or at least more than we had in 1885), and that we should
have a system more like the British parliamentary system, where the
party in power drives the government, where the executive is not as
independent of the legislative as here, but the two form an
integrated whole. Given the current problems with partisanship in
government, perhaps Wilson's recommendations are no longer
advisable.
In SUPERFREAKONOMICS by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
(ISBN 978-0-06-088957-9) they claim that winning a Nobel Prize
extends your life span--a classic post hoc ergo prompter hoc if
ever there was one. More seriously, they spend three pages at the
start of one chapter relating the "standard" account of the Kitty
Genovese case as if it were factually true. Only twenty pages
later do they revisit it and point out all the errors. There are
two problems with this. The casual reader could easily come away
with the flawed account reinforced in their brain, rather than
debunked. And the reader who knows that the standard account is
seriously flawed would think that Leavitt and Dubner do not know
this, hence that Leavitt and Dubner have not done their research,
and so spends twenty pages with a highly skeptical and even
dismissive attitude towards Leavitt and Dubner's claims.
On the other hand, their analysis of the economics of prostitution
is probably unique in the economics books for the general public.
(If that doesn't get people to read the book, nothing will. :-) )
[-ecl]
==================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
Heaven goes by favour. If it went by merit,
you would stay out and your dog would go in.
--Mark Twain