I've only written one or two movie reviews since November of last year so I'm going to fill up a couple of posts and get caught up. Here's the first. Ranked best to worst....
In Frog Mountain Blues, Tucson author Charles Bowden makes a passionate argument for the conservation of the Santa Catalina mountains. The largest and highest peak, Mt. Lemmon, towers a mile and a half above the adjacent city of Tucson and was known by the Tohono O'Odham as Frog Mountain. I really liked some of his quotable quotes regarding conservation. Here are my favorites.
- "Any proposal for a national forest that means there will be less national forest still standing in the end is a bad idea."
- "What kind of national forest are we running where the existence of black bears is a problem and the existence of a bunch of cabins, ski runs, and a lodge is not?"
- "Land Of Many Uses is the slogan of the Forest Service. But so far as I can see, there is actually only one use: anything goes for one species, human beings."
- "The way we live and work kills wild ground and when the wild ground is gone, we will vanish also."
- "All the wild ground our ancestors called tractless wastes--now those spots are our last memories of a better world."
Written a quarter century ago, the book is still timely. Luckily, not much has changed. Well, let me qualify that. The city has sprawled right up to the edge of the national forest, the road has been widened, the village of Summerhaven is still rebuilding after a disastrous wildfire. Restrictions have apparently failed to prevent the extirpation of bighorn sheep. A horrible bear attack some years ago led to many being captured and relocated to more remote areas. People have completely freaked out when mountain lions showed up in a popular recreation area.
But a lot of what Bowden poetically writes about in the book, the remote canyons and rocky peaks, remain completely wild. Many have been decimated by fire, but are slowly coming back.
I'm trying to get caught up in Point Of Inquiry episodes. This is my favorite podcast; it really makes you think.
In the last episode, Bruce Hood talks about "supersense" or an innate instinct that humans have to believe in the supernatural, even despite their better judgement. Take for instance the space program. Here you will find probably the highest concentration of people who operate on pure rationality, yet you will find that it is laden with superstition, particularly of course with high-risk activities (launches and landings). Or recall all the silly superstitions of Barack Obama and John McCain that were reported during the campaign. These are smart people and deep down they know that these things have zero direct effect on the outcome. But Hood believes they are not without value; they get the believer to have more confidence than they otherwise would, and that confidence often has real positive results. And this is at the most secular end of the spectrum, obviously it applies to religious belief as well.
Or take the trees planted from seeds carried by the astronauts (there's one outside the place where I work). Now of course they've received more radiation than normal seeds but they certainly aren't imbued with some special space essence. But it's nice to know that there is that connection, maybe it makes us feel that our campus is a bit more special.
I don't think Hood is trying to argue against rationality in any way, but merely to show how this trait is common (why we have it would be a task for evolutionary psychology) and how we use it. He certainly isn't saying that such ju-ju has objective existence, just that understanding how such beliefs arise is important. And if we can do that, maybe we can minimize our need for such things (IMHO ... imagine Star Trek where Picard needs to eat a bag of peanuts before going into Warp, or the crew needs to pray before using the Transporter ... not that ST is any guide to our future other than in a hope for a secular, superstition-less wiser society).
Joe Haldeman's The Forever War is, I imagine, to Heinlein's Starship Troopers as Vietnam-era Army grunts are to WWII roughnecks. Written in the mid-1970's the story follows the rise through the ranks of space marine William Mandella, drafted by the world government of Earth circa 2005. We're at war with an alien race, the Taurans, for control of a network of wormholes ("collapsars").
My interest was piqued after finding out that director Ridley Scott has had his eye on it for 25 years and by 2011 it could become his first sci-fi movie since Blade Runner.
It's a good story, made better with plausible descriptions of how society changes. Due to the relativistic effects of time dilation, what is a few years in Mandella's reference frame is centuries on Earth. The bulk of the novel is told through first-person narrative so it'll be interesting to see how it is translated to the screen. (FWIW Scott's Body of Lies opens by employing two devices: the protagonist narrating notes to a computer and testifying to a committee).
There's a number of other things that Haldeman does really well such as describing activity on cryogenic worlds or battles at near-light speeds (with computers controlling, frozen in near-statis and encased in gel, the soldiers can endure accelerations up to 25g). As in Troopers, barracks are coed and fraternization is accepted; a large part of the human interest is provided by Mandella's relationship with a female compatriot.
I won't give away the ending, but one interesting and imaginative thing was that in its last look at Earth, a millennium in the future, a transhuman or posthuman society has taken over. The clone of a single person, multiplied into the billions, residing on many worlds, is a hive-mind entity. The Taurans, likewise, have a collective mind. Mandella, returning from the Large Magellenic Cloud, asks how the Tauran and the Human are able to communicate mind-to-mind. The human immediately replies that Mandella is incapable of understanding (implying that it's by a post-human mental power).
Cool stuff. If Ridley Scott puts anywhere near the effort he put into Blade Runner, it'll be an amazing movie!
Frederick Pohl's Man Plus has been on my want-to-read list for about, oh, 22 years. That's when I first saw it in the school library. I don't recall reading the jacket, but the title conjured visions of sweeping, far-future science fiction. Well, I finally got around to it; it is every bit as good as I had hoped. It's not the epic novel of my lofty imagination, but is something more fun and accessible with a great story and fantastic characters.
Just a brief description of the setting: it's the near future, an Earth near the brink of WW3, and the President of the U.S. is staking his legacy on an extremely unconventional space initiative: surgically altering and augmenting astronauts so they can live on the surface of Mars. With humanity on this planet in it's 11th hour, such radical steps are deemed necessary, and polling seems to strongly support the initiative when details of it are leaked. Roger Torraway ends up being the astronaut chosen for the trip to Mars. Most of his body is upgraded with prostheses, such as bug-like eyes that can see beyond the visible spectrum, and collapsible wings to capture solar or microwave radiation. A backpack supercomputer augments his reality in extraordinary ways.
There's one horrific or funny scene (depending on point of view), where NASA bureaucracy fouls up, almost destroying the program (and for it to seem funny, you've got to see it as a parody of the long history of NASA's disdainful attitude towards how much astronauts needed to know). It is summed up in the official-ese: "We had not properly estimated the trauma Roger Torraway would receive from the loss of his genitals...."
The story centers around his transformation into a superhuman creature. I don't think it'll be giving too much away to say that he eventually does reach Mars. There are some almost poetic descriptions of what Mars might be like.
...He really wanted that very much, to stroll the ebony surface of a Barsoomian night, with the stars pinpoints of color in a velvet black sky. It was easy enough to see the brighter stars even by daylight, especially for Roger, but at night they were fantastic... steel-blue Sirius, bloody Aldebaran, the smoky gold of Polaris. By expanding his visible spectrum into the infrared and ultraviolet he could see new, bright stars whose names he did not know...
It's a character and plot-driven work, with technology described only as far as suits the story. There are several sex scenes, each leaving a judicious amount (nearly all) to the imagination. The final chapter broaches the topic of transhumanism (without specifically naming it) in a clever way that ties it in with the plot and leaves the reader amazed. Written in the mid-1970's it still seems contemporary in language and, for the most part, in technology. This is a classic work of science fiction; highly recommended!
This story is not getting the attention it deserves. It reminds me of the infamous raid on Steve Jackson Games. But this time, federal law enforcement stupidity is harming dozens of businesses instead of just one. As a leaser of a co-lo machine myself, it's disturbing to think that it could just disappear at any moment, through no fault of my own, due to these heavy-handed tactics.
I just finished reading Riding Rockets: The Outrageous Tales Of A Space Shuttle Astronaut by Mike "Tarzan" Mullane. An apt title, this book was a great read, with laugh-out-loud funny anecdotes on nearly every other page, plus sobering looks into the culture of NASA plus the aftermath of Challenger, and glorious descriptions of the Earth as viewed from space.
Mullane entered NASA as part of the first class of astronauts after Apollo-Soyuz, a group that included the first female and the first non-military astronauts. The culture clash is extreme between these "post-docs" and Mullane and his cohorts cut from the old-school military 'Right Stuff' jock mold. And by his own admission, his attitude towards Sally Ride, Judy Resnick and the other female astronauts starts out as condescending and sexist, but he gradually overcomes his biases. Ultimately he becomes a good friend of Resnick's and they share a flight prior to her death in the Challenger accident. His respect and admiration for her is evident, and an effective eulogy.
One thing that surprised me was how willing the astronauts were to accept extreme levels of risk, fueled by hyper-competitiveness and the desire to earn their astronaut wings. He says something like 'if God himself had told be there was a 90% chance I would die on my rookie flight, I would have taken it.' The way he describes the intense emotions leading up to launch makes the statement totally believable. He talks about how this attitude played into the Challenger disaster, with the secrecy regarding crew selection boosting the effect, so there was incredible pressure to not jeopardize your flight, if not your entire career, by not speaking up.
Of course, similar pressures were going on in NASA's bureaucracy, leading them to dismiss calls to scrub the Challenger launch (and not inform any of the astronauts of the discussions). His frank opinions include a relative lack of surprise that history basically repeated itself with Columbia. His own flights included a near burn-thru of an O-ring and the worst foam strike damage prior to Columbia's destruction. The latter story was recently summarized on spaceflightnow.com.
This autobiography is remarkably candid; he let's it all hang out. I think the word "penis" must appear a hundred times in the book. If you're curious about how the astronauts (of both sexes) go to bathroom in space, then this is the ultimate reference. He casually mentions things like how the pre-flight quarantine gets Playboy TV, and how waking up in zero-G gives guys the ultimate morning wood.
I loved his stories of staying awake in the shuttle cabin to float and watch landscapes, cities, sunrises, sunsets, storms and all manner of other phenomena. They are well written, conveying the grandeur without being overwrought.
Bill Maher's Religulous was completely one-sided, presenting a totally biased and simplistic view of religion. I loved it!
It should be noted that, with a couple of exceptions, he doesn't exactly talk to the best and brightest religious personages. Nor does he give them time to make any good points; they're frequently interviewed long enough for him to make a joke at their expense, then he moves on to the next scene. He uses fundamentalism to paint with a broad brush all people of faith. Nor does he even consider any of the positive things that can come out of religion and faith.
However, the movie manages to succinctly make a number of good points here and there. One is to dispatch the notion that America was created as a "Christian nation". With some choice anti-religion quotes from Franklin, Adams and Jefferson he establishes that these guys were free-thinkers; to claim otherwise is revisionism. Second, in a nice little segment he backs his skepticism regarding the story of Jesus by alluding to commonalities between the Gospels and the myths made of many other historical figures of the Middle East. I.e. born of a virgin, born on the solstice, etc. One prior myth, that of Horus, is basically identical to that of Christ.
He spends most of the time on the big three monotheisms: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. But there are a couple of diversions to look at Mormonism and Scientology (the funniest scene is where he preaches OT-III stuff like Xenu and Thetans to Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park, ranting like a lunatic).
I really like his monologue at the end, an extended diatribe against the damage that fundamentalists in power could do and a plea to recognize that doubt is good. I've transcribed it in the paragraph below.
Spoiler Alert!
I'll tell you what I didn't like about the unsatisfying series finalé to Battlestar Galactica. It wasn't the revelation that Kara was an angel, though that seemed like a deus ex Galactica cop-out that could have been handled by explaining her relationship to Daniel. It wasn't the fact that Baltar's (and Caprica 6's) faith ending up saving humanity; I was pleased to see his character redeemed and brought full circle. It wasn't the fact that we were left with no explanation for so many things, including the phenomena of Baltar and 6's "head" versions of themselves (other than that they were angels that no one else could see); though like the reincarnation of Starbuck, it would seem that it could have been explained in terms of creative malfunctions of resurrection technology. It wasn't the fact that they ended up on our Earth in the distance path, that seemed like a natural if not obvious place and time to end the series. Rather than any of these, it was that their civilization came to such an abrupt end after an entire series spent in pursuit of its salvation.
Let me get this straight, they saved 30,000+ lives only to force them to scatter, become hunter-gatherers and fend for themselves? On some hoaky, touch-feely, spur-of-the-moment decision by Lee to abandon all of their technology? Sure, that makes some kind of sense, to explain why there would be no archaeological record of them in our world. But why try so hard to make that connection clean, rational, sensible but invoke miracles to close all the other loopholes? It was completely ridiculous. I'm inclined to agree with those who say they ran out of ideas in season three....
MSNBC is currently having a poll on whether 'In God We Trust' should be removed from our money. I'll bet that most people don't know that it was added relatively recently.
I actually had a dream the other day wherein I thought of a slogan to replace 'In God We Trust'; I remember thinking it was brilliant, and I'd have to write it down as soon as a I woke up. That's all I remember. 
What slogan would you replace it with?
I've spent my evenings this week tracking down a website hack. It's not on this server, but on another some friends and I maintain. A message came in on the trouble ticket system, "you have a hack". Someone had noticed pages full of links to "blue pill" sites stuck up on our site. I volunteered to look into it. I've had to do this sort of forensic/detective work a few times in the past; it's pretty fun and challenging.
The first clue was that the files were all owned by the web server process, indicating a high likelihood that a vulnerability in the web site had been exploited (as opposed to some other type of hack masquerading as a web sploit). The second clue was that there was a zip file, plus all the files had the same timestamp, indicating that they were extracted from the zip (versus uploaded individually). That meant that the hacker had been able to execute code on our server. Arbitrary code execution is a severe vulnerability, it means the hacker can pretty much do anything (limited only by the privileges of the web server process).
This all pointed to PHP. There's a ton of PHP code on this system. PHP itself was notoriously crackable early on, but by about age ten they'd rooted out all the major security flaws (it's still a case study in how not to design, or grow, a programming language). But since PHP has such a low barrier to entry, the code that web programmers write with it is often flawed.
We're using third-party software like mediawiki (wiki system), vbulletin (forums), gallery (images) and wordpress (blogging). Some of those have a pretty bad track record, and I'm looking at wordpress when I say that. And there's a variety of WP vintages on this system. But there's also a lot of custom code written by people I don't even know, with a variety of skill and attention to security concerns. But there's also some legacy Perl CGI code, some of it written by me, that could be at fault....
"All Your Religions Are False" is a very funny rapid-fire presentation by Joel Grus from the recent BIL conference.
If you like that, check out comedian Dmitri Martin's "Creed-o-cide" and a humorous speech about atheism by Editor-in-Chief of The Onion Scott Dikkers at the Freedom From Religion Foundation conference.
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"Never been done before." That's how Mr. X of Tucson's X Hiking Club described his intrepid plan to hike the steep Blackett's trail, blaze through dense desert to Thimble Peak, then descend through the perilous Seven Falls back to the base of Sabino Canyon. [For the record, he puts together a full range of hikes from beginner/training to... this].
For nearly ten straight hours we (he, Wafer and I) were scrambling up and down steep, near-vertical chutes. That's when we weren't hopping across boulders, traversing slide-rock above waterfalls, dodging tumbling boulders ("ROCK!") or plowing through desert scrub and cacti (in Sonora, what looks barren from far away always turns out to be a thicket of dry, stickery plants). We surprised two white-tailed deer who took off, climbing the ledges like mountain goats.
And, to reach the summit, a small rock climb (plenty of holds) then, ultimately, a 15-foot ledge with a fixed rope. A few years ago I would have been too chickenisht to tackle that. A few years ago I wouldn't have been fit enought to do all that in a day. As it was, I felt like I'd spent an evening in a Syrian prison... but it was worth it!
Check out Wafer's photoset on Flickr, with some good video of us crossing the Falls on page 2.
Check out Mr. X's videos (indexed below) and photos.
Update: Here's the GPS data you can open in Google Earth. It doesn't always line up with the terrain, but that is to be expected.
Mary turned me on to the botanical splendor of hedgehog cacti. Last year, I hiked a few miles in the Cactus Forest area of Saguaro National Park (East) to photograph a bunch of them for her (since she'd be unable to do the hike). It was mid-April, probably a little late to catch the best show, but there were still many good ones in shadier areas. It was thick with the suckers, every few steps brought a new one into view. Below is a montage of the shots I took, click it for a larger version (3.7 MB).
But first, an image of a rattler that I very nearly stepped on during the hike!
