Monthly Archives: March 2006

Spring is Here!

Eggs Stand On End To Mark Spring's Arrival

Well, today is the the vernal equinox, known more informally as the first day of spring.  It’s a blustery, rainy day here, and it probably would have gone unnoticed by me except for the mention on Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy Blog.  The equinoxes are a busy time for Phil, who debunked the idea that on the equinoxes, you can balance an egg on end: it turns out, you can do it any day of the year if you have a little patience and practice. Phil’s egg balancing was what originally drew my attention to his blog,  so I wish him and all my readers a happy spring.

[tags]Spring,Vernal Equinox,Bad Astronomy,Science[/tags]

Movie Review: V for Vendetta

Well, it’s Saturday again, and once again Carmen and I trundled off to the movie theater. In spite of our misgivings about the state of movies lately, fueled no doubt by the bitter pill that was the steaming pile known as Ultraviolet, it was with some general hopefulness and enthusiasm that I approached the subject of today’s excursion: V for Vendetta. The few comments I had heard of the movie were generally positive, and checking with Yahoo! Movies, I found that critics ranked it as a B, with users being slightly more favorable and scoring it as a B+. Thus, I was predisposed to consider the possibility that it might be good, which can sometimes be rather dangerous when a movie fails to live up to expectation. But on to the movie…

It’s the not-too-distant future, where terrorism and disease have fueled an atmosphere accross the world. In Great Britain, chaos has been averted by the rise of totalitarian state, headed by Supreme Chancellor Adam Sutler (played admirably by John Hurt) who employs ruthless thugs who black-bag dissidents and other undesirables (homosexuals seem high on his list) and generally spends a great deal of time shouting nastiness at his various lackies. The media is completely controlled by the government, and people live in fear.

Natalie Portman plays Evey, a young woman employed at the British Television Network, who is caught on the street after curfew, and would have had a very unpleasant evening of it, were it not for the intervention of V (played by Hugo Weaving, you know, Elrond from the Lord of the Rings, or Agent Smith from the Matrix), a mysterious dark stranger in a Guy Fawkes costume armed with very many daggers.

Don’t remember who that is? Well, my recollections are a bit fuzzy as well. Check out the Wikipedia entry on him. The short version: he was involved in a plot to blow up Parlaiment and the King, got caught and was executed. Among cynical Britons, it is claimed that he was the only person to enter Parlaiment with good intentions.

I don’t think I’ll go into the plot in two much greater detail. It’s actually a fairly grim vision of the future, and one that is played more on the realistic side, with some grim imagery recalling concentration camps and rallies of leather booted stormtroopers. While V himself possesses some super-hero like attributes, people get hurt in this universe. People die in this universe. And anger and hatred seem very real.

If you are looking for something light and fanciful, where the good guys always win, where the innocent are preserved against harm by unlikely rescues, and where good and evil are clearly delineated, you’ve come to the wrong movie. This movie is trying to show us a future to which we all could be headed, driven by fear of a world we no longer understand. It’s not classic superhero stuff.

And at one level, I think it succeeded. It’s not just classic comic book superhero fluff. With that mission accomplished, I’m forced to ask whether it succeeds at the higher level, the level of ideas. Is it thought provoking? Does the story lead you anywhere that perhaps you wouldn’t normally stray?

Unfortunately, I think it’s rather less successful at this level. The characters, while admirably played by the principle actors, remain somewhat nebulous and hidden from our understanding. This is perhaps excuseable with respect to V, but much less so with respect to Evey. We really don’t get any kind of understanding of where she comes from, where she’s going, and what she’s thinking as time goes along. The story must ultimately be about these two characters, and I just didn’t feel there was very much meat to feed the hungry viewer.

That being said, I’ll still give it a solid B rating. The story is unusual, the look of the film quite good, it’s not the normal superhero fare, and I did enjoy the film overall. You won’t ache for more when the light comes up, but you probably won’t be disappointed either.

[tags]V for Vendetta,Movie Review[/tags]

Addendum: This movie is based upon the 1982 graphic novel of the same name by British writer Alan Moore.  From this wikipedia entry:

Moore stated in an interview:

…the central question is, is this guy right? Or is he mad? What do you, the reader, think about this? Which struck me as a properly anarchist solution. I didn’t want to tell people what to think, I just wanted to tell people to think, and consider some of these admittedly extreme little elements, which nevertheless do recur fairly regularly throughout human history.

Perhaps considering this intention of the author, the film might be viewed as a bit more successful.  Ultimately, we are left to consider what we think.  Is V a monster or a hero?  Can anyone really be both?

Yoda Cookies from ILM

Mmm! Yoda Cookie!

Well, those generous guys at Industrial Light and Magic decided to send us cookies to help us celebrate Pixar’s 20 year anniversary. They were all printed with images of Yoda. Cool! Thanks guys!

[tags]Pixar,ILM,Cookies[/tags]

Addendum: These guys apparently made the cookies.

NPR : Fun with DNA

Smiley Faces constructed out of DNAThis is just too cool! Need to make a few million nanoscale smiley faces?

Rothemund has developed a computer program that can analyze a shape, figure out the right folding pattern, and then tell you what DNA staples you need to make that shape.”It’s really easy and fun, actually, to make whatever you want at the nano-scale. You design it in the computer, you order the DNA sequences, they come in the mail, you add a little bit of salt water, you heat it up and cool it down, and then an hour and a half later, it’s ready to look at under the microscope.”

[tags]DNA,Science,NPR[/tags]

Payment and Apology

A couple of days ago I pointed out the hypocrisy of Isaac Hayes in accepting payment for episodes of Southpark that ridiculed religion but adopting a different standard when it applied to him. Christian Pundits agreed with me. The problem is, I don’t agree with much that Christian Pundits have to say about anything. For instance, they promote all sorts of discrimination against gay people, including opposing any kind of extension of legal rights to same sex couples, like being able extend powers of attorney, medical decision making, and the ability to draw up will and dispense of your property. Or opposes a movie simply because one of the actors is “a self-professed homosexual”. Just in case someone thought that I might agree with such attitudes, I do not, and find such ideas “worthy of ridicule”, as I do the notion that Christians are some kind of victimized minority in the United States, as implied by Christian Pundit’s charter.

Still, today they got upset with me because I called them hypocrites. Were they right? Did I make a mistake? Go ahead and check it out. The author claims that she referred me to this post, (I don’t know how she could have done that, since she didn’t actually link that article in the article to which I was responding, but…) (ah, in my comments, didn’t catch that) which points out that she indeed did think that it was disrespectful to publish such cartoons, but “as a staunch supporter of free speech I have to say that the newspaper had every right to publish the cartoons”. Well, that’s nice: I’m a supporter of free speech as well, and don’t think that Muslims have any right that protects them from offense anymore than anyone else does. Perhaps I do owe Christian Pundits an apology after all…

But let’s shift back over to the article which spawned this debate. Did Christian Pundits say “we support freedom of speech, and while whe disagree with the depiction of Christianity in this cartoon and find it offensive, we continue to support free speech”? No. Instead, Christian Pundits lauded the fire that the University newspaper came under, and the ultimate resignation of their editor, calling it “much too late”. Does anyone else think that this is a reaction which differs in quality from tacit acceptance of cartoons which depict Islam negatively?

Christian Pundits also complained that the story of this offensive cartoon “got NO attention from American main-stream media”. Perhaps that’s because it was published in a school newspaper in Saskatoon for pity’s sake. Do you really have to go that far out of your way to find something to offend you, something that some pimply faced editor did for a school newspaper that has a circulation of 10,000 in another country? If this is the greatest injustice you can find against Christianity, perhaps you really don’t have much to complain about.

Perhaps I have gotten the wrong impression about Christian Pundits on this issue, but I think it’s understandable, and in all fairness, they probably think its fair too, otherwise they wouldn’t have felt the need to clarify their position again. To make sure that I have been clear, here’s my position:

People will say whatever they want to, and people should be allowed to say what ever they want to. That’s freedom of speech, and it’s important. Nothing anyone says should be cause for violence against them. Sticks and stones may break bones (and call for physical conflict as a result), but names will never hurt you. If someone offends you, take responsibility and don’t talk to them anymore. Talk positively about what you believe.

Christian Pundits concludes their article with this:

I don’t expect an apology from brainwagon, nor am I asking for one. What will be interesting to see is if he admits his ‘mistake’ to his readers.

Well, I don’t feel I’ve made a mistake, nor will I feel I have to “repay” the link with an apology. I do feel there are two distinct levelsof outrage displayed in your postings, an inconsistency in how you reacted to these two situations. I’ll let my readers (I think there is still more than one) decide for themselves whether I have over reacted or not, and they can choose to read me or, as I mentioned above, take their valuable time elsewhere. I’m quite happy holding opinions that are truly in the minority, and nobody has to stay and listen to me out of politeness.

Lastly, I will apologize to all my readers who read this blog (as I suspect most do) simply to find out about geeky computer stuff, baseball and the like. I usually limit my comments on politics and religion: that isn’t what this blog is about, because quite frankly that’s not what I find fun to blog about. My rants are usually a bit more esoteric (and therefore less inflammatory), and I’m not going to make a habit out of this momentary weakness.

If you’ve made it this far, you deserve a break, check out this highly inoffensive website.

[tags]Religion,Politics,Hypocrisy[/tags]

101 Cookbooks – Thin Mint Recipe

Have those little sirens of cookiedom (otherwise known as Girl Scouts) lured your diet onto the rocks with promises of Thin Mint cookies? Me too. Well, I’m probably preying on you when you are already in a state of weakened resolve, but check out the following recipe:

101 Cookbooks – Thin Mint Recipe – homemade and all-natural

All natural ingredients, including whole wheat flour and obsessively organic ingredients. I suspect I’ll have to give these a try.

[tags]Cookies,Recipes,Thin Mint,Girl Scout Cookies[/tags]

Addendum: Here is the Girl Scout cookie FAQ.

Gutenberg Gem: Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare

Today is the Ides of March, and as such, it seems appropriate to place a link to Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare, and to remind everyone that all of Shakespeare’s works are in the public domain and available from Project Gutenberg.

[tags]Julius Caesar,William Shakespeare,Ides of March[/tags]

Addendum: Okay, here’s a slightly more personal story to pad out this brief niglet. Despite being a dyed in the wool science geek, I did my got my B.S. from the University of Oregon. Fine educational institution that they are, they required undergraduates to pursue a somewhat diverse curriculum, including the completion of a number of classes in “arts”, which included literature, theater, and language skills. To pad out this part of my schooling, I decided to take a class in Shakespeare, and since I did reasonably well, I decided to take two more, all from Professor William Rockett. My recollections of him was that he always came into class with a smile, and would open discussion the with the same two questions:

  1. “Did you read the play?”
  2. “What did you think of it?”

But for reasons which aren’t all that clear to me, twenty-some odd years later, it is our discussion of The Tragedy of Julius Caesar which are embedded in my mind. We were discussing the funeral oration of Mark Antony, you know the one:

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears!
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them,
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious;
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answer’d it.
Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest-
For Brutus is an honorable man;
So are they all, all honorable men-
Come I to speak in Caesar’s funeral.
He was my friend, faithful and just to me;
But Brutus says he was ambitious,
And Brutus is an honorable man.
He hath brought many captives home to Rome,
Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill.
Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?
When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept;
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious,
And Brutus is an honorable man.
You all did see that on the Lupercal
I thrice presented him a kingly crown,
Which he did thrice refuse. Was this ambition?
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious,
And sure he is an honorable man.
I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke,
But here I am to speak what I do know.
You all did love him once, not without cause;
What cause withholds you then to mourn for him?
O judgement, thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason. Bear with me;
My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar,
And I must pause till it come back to me.

Antony goes on to incite the crowd against Brutus and the traitors who conspired to murder him through his eloquence. Anyway, Professor Rockett said (from memory, but the general idea and flow is correct) “What did you think of this speech? Did it get you fired up? I was out in my garden, trying to transplant a rhododendren, and I was going over it in my mind again and again. You know rhododendrons have the most enormous rootballs? It took me well over an hour to dig it out, and as I was working, I kept thinking about the speech that so moved the Romans, until finally I managed to get the plant out. I then, ran in to the house and yelled to my wife, ‘My God, the traitors have slain Julius Caesar!’ She thought I was crazy. What about you?”

I took three semesters of Shakespeare from Professor Rockett, read every play, every sonnet. He had great enthusiasm and humor, and I enjoyed his classes immensely. Great stuff.

Addendum2: If you don’t have as great a passion for Shakespeare as I do, but nonetheless find yourself taking a class, try getting a recorded version of the play, and follow along by reading it. We used the Oxford Edition Shakespeare which had lots of footnotes, and I had no trouble following the language when I could both hear it and flit down to the various footnotes to figure out some of the idiomatic speech. Two hours, you can get through any play, and have a much easier time than trying to just read it.

Isaac Hayes, in a huff, hangs up Chef’s hat

Bye to the ChefSouthpark has lampooned, roasted, poked, prodded and generally mocked religion at every turn since its very beginning. It’s mocked Catholics and Jews, Hindus and Muslims. Whether you think it’s justified or not, whether you think its funny or not, one can hardly say that Messiers Stone and Parker had a secret agenda: their assault has been relentless, consistent and unceasing. But apparently when Scientology comes under the microscope of their comic stylings, Isaac Hayes has had enough.

ContraCostaTimes.com | 03/13/2006 | Isaac Hayes, in a huff, hangs up Chef’s hat

We have a word for people who feel comfortable with mocking other people’s religious beliefs, but become indignant when it happens to their own: we call them hypocrites. To me, hypocrisy is a worse crime than not being funny. If you are going to cash a check at the expense of people’s religious beliefs, but suddenly gain a conscience when your own religious beliefs are subjected to the same scrutiny, you get a special measure of my contempt.

I suspect we’ll see the Chef meet a particularly odious end.

[tags]Scientology,South Park,Isaac Hayes[/tags]

Addendum: S. McPherson over at the Christian Pundit’s blog  also thinks that Hayes may be a bit of a hypocrite, and linked back to me in agreement.  The problem is that I don’t actually agree with Christian Pundits: I’m not offended in the least that Southpark portrays religion negatively.   The problem that I have with Hayes is that he thinks that different rules should apply to him and his religion than to others.   But in the view of this blogger, there is much worthy of ridicule in most religions.    In fact, there is much that is linked from the Christian Pundit which is worthy of ridicule, such as their `manifesto’:

With the millions of people worldwide that profess to be Christian our voice should be the one heard above all others. But far too often the voice of the Christian becomes obscured in the barrage of liberalism that is invading every area of our lives and attempting to abolish our religious and constitutional rights. Now is the time for Christians to rise up and let the world know we’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore.

Ah, nothing like the tyranny of the majority.   Ironically (if somewhat predictably) Christian Pundits is guilty of precisely the same crime that they accuse Hayes of: adopting a different standard for protection of their beliefs than for the beliefs of others.

Witness this plea for outrage.   I could see how the image of Jesus performing oral sex on a pig might be offensive to Christians, but what I want to know is where is Christian Pundits outrage over “political” cartoons which mock Islam?   Aren’t they falling into the same kind of hypocrisy that they are accusing Hayes of?  Perhaps somebody should read Matthew 7:3 and think about their own actions…

Drivel from Intelligent Design the Future

Oh dear. Check out Intelligent Design the Future: Percival Lowell, Mars and Intelligent Design

Today’s Google icon pays homage to Percival Lowell, the 19th century astronomer who popularized the notion that there were Martian-made canals on the surface of Mars and, therefore, Martians. The larger story surrounding his famous blunder discredits the idea that science moves inexorably forward, with never a major backward step.

While Lowell may have popularized this idea, he certainly was not the only one speculating in that direction, nor even the first to observe these “canals”. Schiaparelli produced a highly detailed map of the planet in 1887, showing “canali” or channels. These sightings were confirmed by other observers, including Burton (who saw linear features which perhaps tellingly didn’t match Schiaparelli’s map) and Pickering. Lowell certainly believed that he observed such, and did publish a book suggesting that these canals were the work of intelligent beings, but it’s fairly clear that such ideas were never really mainstream in science. As scientists of the day noted, the appearance of these features could be due entirely to optical illusions. The conclusion of their paper:

Our conclusion from the entire experiment is that the canals of Mars may in some cases be, as Mr. Green suggested, the boundaries of tones or shadings, but that in the majority of cases they are simply the integration by the eye of minute details too small to be separately and distinctly defined. It would not therefore be in the least correct to say that the numerous observers who have drawn canals on Mars during the last twenty-five years have draw what they did not see. On the contrary they have drawn, and drawn truthfully, that which they saw; yet, fior all that, the canals which they have draw have no more objective existence than those which our Greenwish boys imagined they saw on the drawings submitted to them.

It seems a thousand pities that all those magnificent theories of human habitation, canal construction, planetary crystallisation, and the like are based upon lnes which our experiments to compel us to declare non-existent; but with the planet Mars still left, and the imagination unimpaired, there remains hope that a new theory no less attractive may yet be developed, and on a basis more solid than “mere seeming”.

I suggest that the proponents of Intelligent Design read this conclusion very carefully.

[tags]Intelligent Design,Mars,Lowell[/tags]

Addendum: Using the link above to get to Evans and Maunder’s article was tedious, so here’s a link to it as a PDF file. Enjoy!

From metamerist: Pigeonholing Algorithms & Self-fulfilling Prophecies

Metamerist was musing abut Pigeonholing Algorithms & Self-fulfilling Prophecies this morning, a subject that I’m kind of interested in as well.   We’ve all used these systems which try to evaluate our choices in music or books, and then make suggestions based upon what we say.   They are sometimes useful, but most often useless in trying to find new material that’s of interest.

The reason is actually pretty easy to understand.  Let’s take books as our example domain.  Amazon knows that recently I’ve bought books on baseball, on the chinese language, on filmmaking, and on computer graphics.   So what does it do?  It gives me more of the same.   It’s not a bad idea really: there are undoubtedly lots of books in these subjects I don’t have.   But they are unlikely to actually suggest books in other, even related subjects that might be of interest.  Does an interest in filmmaking suggest an interest photography?  If I’m interested in Chinese language, might I not be interested in Chinese food or Chinese history?

It seems most of these systems work to dramatically reduce the number of possibilities that they present to you rather than expand them.  In that sense, they just reinforce your narrow tastes, rather than help you expand and educate them.  That’s too bad.

What’s the answer?  What algorithm will help?  Frankly, I don’t know.   The way that I deal with it is to read a wide variety of sources, keep a wide variety of interests, and actively work to break out of the ruts in your thinking.  Don’t be afraid to explore deeply, but also work to explore broadly.   Make it your responsibility, not just the responsibility of software.  Invest time in making yourself more interesting.

[tags]Rants and Raves[/tags]

Peel a potato in one step – Lifehacker

Courtesy of a Japanese TV show, learn how to peel a potato in one step.  Well, to be fair, it’s not really one step.  You do this by:

  1. Cutting the skin all around the middle of the potato.
  2. Boiling the potato.
  3. Immersing it in cold water to the count of ten.
  4. And then, just pull the skin off.

It’s not quite as radical as folding T-shirts, but it’s kind of cute.