The Concept of the "Continuing Education PhD"

All the people who matter got their PhD at the correct time, in sequence, as approved by society.  Nobody who matters tries to get their PhD later in life as circumstances allowed.  Those people are scum, and are not permitted nor will they ever be respected or accepted.

But there are such people who feel that they need to try and get the information and training necessary to operate at the higher levels and who want the credential.  Of course these people are outsiders and of course these people will not be able to have an academic career and that is a given.  Nevertheless, this is what they see as an essential part of their life and no one can tell them otherwise.  

Since there is no path for such people in our society I propose that we make one.  Lets call it "Continuing Education PhD" which I think cuts to the chase.  Yes they will be treated with contempt but they are trying and society should allow for it.

Homeless person studying

How we Finance Education and the American Dream

draft

Dear [REDACTED]

You were the kind person to explain the reality of what an educational loan is when I was confused and the information finally got through the layers of self-deception and for that matter, the layers of belief that I was programmed to have. And the core of that belief was: if you want to go to school, there will be a way to pay for it. This of course is not true. What I want to talk about here is what this policy, this system of educational finance, implies about our country and its fundamental mythology.

There is a school of public policy that believes that we can build better systems for our people by understanding how the world works, how we serve justice, how we decide to tax or not tax, how we elect representatives, how we decide to subsidize certain industries, how we feed our people and look to see empirically and theoretically what impact those policies have. It is implicit to this philosophy that ultimately we can distinguish between better or worse policies even though we may not be wise enough to predict the implications up front. The law of unintended consequences continues to screw up our best laid plans. Its complicated out there in the real world. When things go bad sometimes it is because people are being evil, but usually they are just wrong. Or the context changed. Or maybe people were not thinking it through. I have a favorite example and it involves the fairness of our elections. Every Southerner is familiar with various schemes to disenfranchise people of color and people who are poor. We have been doing it for a long time and we are good at it. One way we do this is to finance the election infrastructure by county, not by state. Well its not a surprise to learn that some counties are richer than others and that furthermore wealth is correlated with race. Furthermore, it turns out that some of the election systems are not as robust and have a higher percentage of either a misfire when a voter accidentally does not vote for their chosen candidate or when a ballot must be thrown out for technical reasons. And so it turns out that in a close election, this may be all you need to rig the game. That is the implication of the hanging chad, those chads did not hang at random. Those chads were associated with the cheaper and older voting systems in those predominantly black and poorer counties.

But my point is not about who won that election, or how that system came to be, my point is that we can not be blind to the implications of our system of financing election infrastructure, not after 2000. As a Southerner I was really annoyed. Fix the goddamn voting machines, I thought to myself. I am tired of hearing about it. Yes it will cost a little money, deal with it. How we chose to finance that part of our system of government turns out to have implications that are important. We may not be able to end racism or feed the hungry but at least in this case we can make our elections just a little more fair. We should do it.

How we pay for education in this country is a non trivial part of who has access to education and also to who has access to elite education. Because, in case you had not noticed, America is incredibly elitist. Its not that there arent a few exceptions who through merit or luck can transcend their origins, it can and does happen. But the odds are not great. I laugh when I hear that a justice is an "originalist" because I am from Virginia and in Virginia elections were always for the several hundred families, all intermarried, who were the equivalent of landed gentry, plus a few merchants and bankers and craftsmen if they were well liked. I am very fond of Virginia on a number of different levels and I am proud to be from there. The first rule of an elite who has power is to see to it that they maintain power for their class and set. Not everyone realizes that one reason the military is so important to a Southerner is because it is a recognized way to improve your lot in life, to pay for an education, to have a career if you were not born with one. In 21st century America things are different than they were in 18th century Chesapeake. Now you may need a Doctor of Philosophy just to have a good middle class life. And you may need to be a member of certain clubs to run for office even though there is nothing on paper that says you have to belong.

If the American dream is contingent on who can get an advanced degree, then how we pay for it is crucial. The only people who can get loans are people who dont need one is a fundamental philosophy of every loan officer. This is not a level playing field. I am disappointed, one more time, in the harsh reality of America so different from its promise.

Thank you again for your patience and your good will.

What is this Cancer Thing All of a Sudden

As you read this, I have four friends who have been diagnosed with cancer that has metastasized and are under various courses of treatment, usually radiation and chemo.  They range in age from 30 to 60.  None of them have particularly evil habits so far as I know, e.g. no heavy drinkers or smokers or obesity, etc.   Furthermore, 3 of the 4 are close friends of mine, people who I collaborate and interact with.  People I will miss should anything happen to them.  (The other one is a more distant friend, but still a friend).

Of the four, three of the individuals are walking around, and one of them is in a hospice and unable to speak. 

When you were growing up, did your parents, or school, or other institution (church, synagogue, community center, whatever), did anyone happen to mention that your life could be cut short at any time and that you could have your body ripped apart by a legion of vicious and deadly diseases?

Did they mention that you could be of any age when this happens, and that while there are a variety of things you can do to avoid this fate at least in terms of the odds, that ultimately it is up to chance and how your genes feel like mutating.

Also, if you catch it early, in other words, if you worry about things like this all your life and get tested regularly, then you can probably, but not necessarily, extend your life, i.e. increase survivability. But if you fail to worry about these things then it is possible even likely that you will not notice the problems until it is far too late.

It seems to me that this sucks.

I also have two friends who are HIV positive and have been under treatment for years, perhaps a decade. But they seem to be out and about and doing well.

I have also noticed that my friends who leave this world early all seem to be the nicer ones.  The evil people seem to go on forever.   What is going on here?

Dangerous Toys Beneficial For the Education of Youth

I want to bring to your attention a threat that is inherent in the emphasis on “safe toys for children” and in the related campaign against so-called violent computer games. I contend that not only do these games provide useful real and simulated experience of the world as it is, but other countries may be way ahead of us in educating their children with dangerous toys thus leading to a threatening and ever-widening "dangerous toys" gap.

What a child learns when they are young stays with them for the rest of their lives. Therefore it is up to us, as mature and experienced parents of these innocent biped mammals to see to it that their education contains the elements that they will need for a healthy and rewarding life, if you call this living.

What are these elements of a proper education? Well certainly there is learning to read and write, learning certain social skills such as not spitting in public, learning to keep themselves relatively clean and tidy, not to chew with their mouth open, that sort of thing. Some would include in this some pillars of a basic education such as the classics of western civilization (Homer, Isaac Newton, Bulwer-Lytton, Blavatsky) and the basics of managing hedge funds and real estate development. Perhaps not all classes of society really need the latter skills and education should be tailored for the different classes. For example, the rich may have to learn how to manage hedge funds but the poor how to avoid getting bitten by rats or how to find discarded but not completely decayed food to eat so that they do not starve to death, etc.

But all of us, rich or poor, can certainly benefit from knowing that the world is, as Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan put it, “a dangerous place”. It is a world filled with things that can drop on you and smash you flat, or people who will shoot you for a dollar, or people who think that they are entitled to distort the political system to get their way, or people who have beliefs that are dangerous to our beliefs. All of these things and more are true. So what benefit is it to educate our children to think that they do not exist? What is the point of waiting until they are adults, or nearly so, to let them in on the secret that they can easily kill themselves and others with that car or that gun? Or to keep from them the knowledge that there are rich and poor in America and that the poor have very little chance of having a decent life or receiving justice? Why keep from them the knowledge that as screwed up as this country is, they should have a look around with their own eyes and see how other countries are doing, some much better and many far worse. Or that people and nations and political groups lie every day both to the public and to themselves, often with tragic or disastrous results.

And that is what the campaign to eliminate dangerous and disturbing toys has set out to do. To hide these brutal facts from our young children out of the misguided notion that being sheltered helps them. Sure it may avoid a few hundred or thousand injuries or deaths, but at what cost? The cost is that our children do not have the first hand experience that they need to understand the world as it is.

Look at how far ahead of us the children of Afghanistan and Iraq are.  In America, misguided parents are horrified that “war toys” are produced and sold. But in Afghanistan, pretty much every boy gets their hands on an AK-47 by the time they are 10 years old and they are not toys. In America, our children do not know what an ammo dump looks like, let alone how to behave around one. But every kid in Afghanistan does. And how many American's have a relative or neighbor who is an internationally wanted terrorist? Precious few, I think.  By the time a boy turns 15 in Afghanistan, he has probably had many years experience smuggling opium over the border and killed at least one enemy of his tribe.   This experience so early in life is priceless.   

We shoot our selves in the foot, so to speak, to think that this pretense of a safe world that we construct for our children helps them or us. It just leads to shock and dismay when our privileged and self-entitled narcissist child has to face the real world. The shock may lead to total collapse and psychological disintegration. That is where this ill-considered policy leads.

But by no means does that mean that we have to start selling war toys to our children. There are other ways to get the ideas across that are more in the areas of industry and manufacturing than in warfare. My favorite is a toy my older brother had and which I loved. It was made in the very early 1960s by Mattel and it was called VAC-U-FORM.

VAC-U-FORM gave a child the ability to create vacuum molded plastic parts at will. It consisted of a very hot heating element, a vacuum pump, a contraption to press things together, sheets of thin plastic as material, and various molds to use as templates. Think of it as a 3D printer ahead of its time.

The smell of the melting plastic issuing obviously dangerous and probably cancer-causing chemicals was the joy of every teenage boy. One could easily damage oneself on the hot heating element, or on the melted plastic before it cooled. Or with exacto blades to chop out the manufactured parts. There were so many ways that a child could get themselves sent to the hospital with an irate and hysterical parent accompanying them.

Now that is the kind of toy that won the cold war. That is the kind of toy that bred tough and realistic Americans who were capable of manufacturing and surviving in this dangerous world. Its a toy that would send parents of today screaming in rage at the borderline-insane cavalier attitude of the toy designers towards safety or the lack thereof, not realizing that these toy designers were just trying to make America that much stronger.

I hope that America will come to its senses and return to these educational toys before it is too late. I could imagine a line of toy drones being used to find and disarm neighborhood land mines, for example. Or toy drones used to find insurgents hiding in the neighborhood during a play guerrilla attack. What fun that would be!

The future has so much promise if we just embrace it.

_______________________________________________________

Here is a video from the 1960s showing the VAC-U-FORM at work

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCvgvWiZNe8

The Wikipedia page on the VAC-U-FORM

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vac-u-form

Improving Elementary Education with H.P. Lovecraft

Education for young people is an area that most agree should be improved but there is no consensus as to what should be done to improve it.  I am aware of one specific area which I believe that we can all unite behind and work to see that this area is better represented in our elementary curriculum.

After some study, I have concluded that our school children are not being sufficiently exposed to the genre of American horror fiction.   This is a disgrace.   Immersed in a diet of graphic novels that emphasize sexually aberrant superheroes and heroines, our children are sadly unaware and uninformed about important topics such as the hollow earth, the elder gods, the forbidden knowledge, the unspeakable horror, ancient curses, and other important topics.  Why many have never even heard of Cthulhu, let alone understand his/its importance to the traditions of American fiction.

We must take action now and correct this error in our educational process.  We must make the point to our school boards and teachers that our children would benefit from being exposed to a greater diversity of outsider fiction.  And first among them should be the autodidact and self-published author H.P. Lovecraft who is considered one of the greatest writers of horror fiction in this or any country.

H. P. Lovecraft

But it has been argued that Lovecraft is not suitable for very young audiences.  These people are wrong. What could be more appealing to a young child than The Nameless City, The Dunwich Horror, The Shadow Out of Time or The Call of Cthulhu?

If it is still believed that some of Lovecraft is a little advanced for our very youngest readers, I have a solution. I want to present to you an approach that the artist R. J. Ivankovic has created and I think that this will answer any objections, silly as they may be.

R. J. Ivankovic has pioneered a mashup of Dr. Seuss with H.P. Lovecraft and other authors of the macabre, the horrible, and the grotesque.   Here are some images from his/her “Call of Cthulhu for Beginning Readers”, a reimagining of the original Lovecraft story about Cthulhu published in Weird Tales in 1928.

I believe that we should embrace Mr/Ms Ivankovic's vision and bring it to all our young children. I feel certain that the Dr. Seuss estate would look favorably on the request to use the Seuss style in such a noble cause.

And here is a “One Fish, Two Fish...” as reinterpreted through a zombie, night of the living dead, filter.

Please join me in recommending to our various school boards and committees this important work and help improve elementary education in our country.

DrFaustusAU can be found on Deviant Art at

http://drfaustusau.deviantart.com/

Find his or her The Call of Cthulhu for Beginning Readers here

http://drfaustusau.deviantart.com/gallery/34469914/The-Call-of-Cthulhu-for-beginning-readers

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Notes

Cthulhu on Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cthulhu

H. P. Lovecraft on Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._P._Lovecraft

Animators Without Passports Turned Back from Border, Blame Education

As a result of last week's announcements from two major players in the visual effects business, (1) animators have been attempting to cross the borders into Canada and flying into the UK at Heathrow Airport, only to be turned back or put into immigration holding areas due to a lack of passport or work visa. Apparently the would-be immigrants, nearly all of them 3D animators and graduates from art school, were completely unaware that Canada and the United Kingdom were separate countries and required the appropriate paperwork for entry.

“I am completely gobflapped,” said one animator, “art school taught me how to stab colleagues in the back, to take credit for their work, to slander competitors whenever possible, and to point & click at moronic 2D and 3D packages but nothing about being a migrant animation worker. Now what am I going to do? “

When explained that Canada had its own government, constitution, military, courts, education and health systems separate from the US of A, several of the animators became violent and demanded their mothers. They were quickly brought to heel by being told to take their afternoon nap.

Quite a few were upset to hear that Canada and the UK had “socialized medicine”.

Arrangements are being made to ship the illegal immigrants home to their parents.

__________________________________________

1. Sony Imageworks announced that they would move the headquarters for their visual effects operation from Culver City to Vancouver, Canada and Industrial Light & Magic announced they were opening permanent offices in Vancouver and London, England. In both cases, the announced reason was to take advantage of government subsidies for filmmakers of the two countries.

Is the Giant Pangolin Evidence of Evolutionary Convergence in Cartoon Villains?

We are all aware of the controversies around the issue of whether or not evolution should be taught in our public schools and/or whether this "theory" should be augmented with other theories that may explain the world we see around us.  One theory in particular, the so-called "intelligent design" theory calls upon a particular hypothetical cosmic energy source that although invisible has caused the design of all the millions of existing types of creatures, not to mention the billions that no longer exist.  

I have recently come across a strange relationship between one of these existing creatures, the Giant Pangolin of central Africa, and a certain classic cartoon character archetype: the weasel. This relationship has the potential to break open the entire discussion of evolution vs intelligent design and extend it to the role that this potential cosmic energy source has had in the creation of genres of the cinema.   I think you will see from the discussion below that "intelligent design" may very well need to be added to the "auteur theory" in our film schools, except perhaps instead of "intelligent" this type of cosmic design might more properly be called "whimsical".  Yes, I propose that it is "whimsical design" that may need to be added to the discussion of theory in our centers of film education.

I was having a discussion with Professor Ken Perlin of NYU about how one properly categorizes an animal as a biped (which most humans are, at least after the age of about two except when very drunk) versus other animals with or without backbones that have legs, flippers and wings.   It turns out that this issue is more subtle than it might at first appear with criteria based on such things as how often and for what purpose a creature is believed to walk, hop, shuffle or otherwise proceed on two legs.   For example, birds on the ground stand and ambulate on two legs, but they can be said to more properly hop than walk.   Are they then bipeds?  

In researching this topic, I came across a type of animal I had never even heard of before, let alone had ever seen: the giant spiny anteater of central Africa, aka the Giant Pangolin.   This improbable creature is known to spend quite a bit of time walking on its two hind legs as it proceeds to terrorize the locals of Africa with its large size (over a meter) and its amazing and intimidating profile as it goes about its business decimating unlucky ant colonies in its ravenous path.

You dont see one of these every day in America, thank goodness.

Although the Giant Pangolin were entirely new to me, yet they seemed strangely familiar somehow.   It took me over a day to realize where I had seen something like this before.  The Pangolin reminded me of an important type of villain in the classic cartoon, the Weasel.    Most prominently known as the evil sidekicks in Roger Rabbit (1988), they have been around cartoons for many years before that.

Here is an example from 1955 called Poop Goes the Weasel.

Is this resemblance an accident?   An example of evolutionary convergence?  Or is it something else, something more important, proof of a divine and loving God who causes bizarre semi-bipeds in Central Africa to be styled after cartoon archetypes in a medium barely a hundred years old?   We may never know the answer to this burning question but it seems to me that this issue needs to be fairly and impartially presented to students in our public film institutions in order to give a balanced account of what we know about where our character archetypes used in film come from. This is a vital issue I think.   And how ironic if it turns out that Whimsical Design is accepted not in the science community but in the elite film communities. Its not very likely to happen, but it might, and we will just have to see.

For a discussion of whether or not an animal is biped or not, see this paper by Alexander.

Apparently Not Everyone Realizes that Poetry is Down Market

I have often said on this Blog and in real life "everyone who goes into the business of writing sonnets or the short story pretty much knows that it is going to be a hard way to make a living".   This has been part of an argument that people who go into Computer Animation do not in fact know that their employment possibilities are limited (in other words, if they go into computer animation they had better be rich because otherwise they are destroying their lives).

Well, I was wrong.  And when I am wrong I freely admit it, because I am an idiot...  no, wait, its because I am fearlessly honest with myself and with my readers!  

Apparently not everyone knows that studying and writing poetry is a very non-economic thing to do, and I cite as evidence the following article and comment from the Chronicle of Higher Education: The Danger of Victimizing PhDs by Elizabeth Segran.  The article is about whether or not PhDs who can not get a tenure track position but must labor away at being an Adjunct have only themselves to blame. The article correctly points out that the whiners could get a job doing something else that they are qualified for in this depression economy, such as cleaning sewers, for example, or programming web sites that sell violence and pornography.  There are plenty of things for them to do in our dysfunctional society that only favors the rich and lets the others fend for themselves as best they can (as long as they don't break the law that favors the rich, of course).  The free market is not only always right, it is just (as in justice) as well, Dr. Segran seems to be saying.

 Doomed to the life of an adjunct?

But it is a comment to this article that I found so interesting. Quoted below without permission:

Christina Hitchcock  miamisid • 2 days ago 

The simple answer to your question is that our undergrad professors and advisors listened to our plans and never once told us that we might be going into a field that will have no jobs for us. I specifically asked some of my English professors if I should pursue an M.A. in Literature or an M.F.A. in poetry writing. Not one of them instructed me that an MFA was a terminal degree and would help me to get into the job market whereas an M.A. would be a worthless degree. I, for one, did want to teach. And I am, indeed, a career adjunct now teaching online. I received my M.A. at the age of 50 - an age when other options were not that available. So, yes, there is a big problem with the use of adjuncts, and I'm glad that the writer was, indeed, able to get a full-time tenure track job, but each year it gets harder and harder to break into academia, yet schools accept graduate students and even scholarship them through.

So clearly we were wrong in thinking that students-of-the-sonnet would know what a bad career mistake they were making if mere employment and making a living was a requirement.  Choosing to go into pig slaughtering would almost certainly pay better and have greater opportunities but these innocents did not know this, just like our typical computer animator does not know how badly their choices have fucked up their lives.

Destined to a life of poverty and unemployment in the modern globalized economy?

Apparently the business of education is willing to lead pretty much anyone into self-destructive poverty whether the subject is trendy computer animation or poetry.  And what is the alternative, surely not everyone can or should go into Business Management or Typing school? 

At Global Wahrman, we are fearless at pointing out our mistakes.  We admit them, we dont exactly cover ourselves in glory by doing so, but I am sure that those who are reading the blog now and in the future will appreciate our integrity.

Relationship Between Grad School Acceptance and 6th Grade Clique Selection

[2.12.2013 complete rewrite]

As many of you know, I am applying to Graduate School in a futile effort to be accepted as an adult by society and in order to set the stage for a second act to my so-called career.   I have found the process to be very confusing, arbitrary and limiting thus far.

The impression I get is one of rigid rules and preconditions designed to winnow the applicants down to a small set of people who will act and obey as a ruling elite demand. And who have done nothing whatsoever but exactly those things they are looking for in the most conventional and unimaginative way.  "Those who are like us may apply but those who are not like us should not even attempt it.", they seem to be saying. (1)

It is not a new insight that situations in elementary and jr. high school prepare us for life as an adult by putting us through apparently incomprehensible and damaging social circumstances.   "Life is high school with money" goes the joke.  One example of such a situation is the "prom" nightmare many of us have had to go through.   Another is the weirdness of those who are accepted by a clique and those who are not.

Its been a long time since High School, however, and I was never very good at being accepted by cliques.    But I have come across a 6th grader on the Internet, by name of Hayley, who has two very interesting blogs that may enlighten me on this topic.  Her first blog is called "The Thoughts of an Almost Teenage Girl" and the second, "The Popularity Papers of 6th Grade", about her efforts to be accepted by an elite clique in her Elementary School in Minnesota.  (The URLs for both blogs are below).

So the plan is to monitor Hayley's blog and then report back how the process of getting accepted to graduate school is like or unlike the process of being accepted by a clique in 6th Grade.

Think of it as a research paper in Cultural Anthropology.

A spy vs spy comic I got from Hayley's general blog, demonstrating great taste in one so young.

The Thoughts of An Almost Teenage Girl

http://theteenagegirlthoughts.blogspot.com/

The Popularity Papers of 6th Grade

http://sixthgradepopularitypaper.blogspot.com/

___________________________________________

1. In particular, I have been advised not to apply to any top school because there is virtually no chance in hell that I will be accepted.  Thanks a lot, people, I appreciate your words of support!  But seriously, these people who give such advice are trying to help: by being realistic about the odds, one is more likely to be accepted to a school with good people that does not get the same deluge of applications that the so-called top schools get.

Which school is a top school is different in each field, but it should not surprise you to hear that, depending on the field, Harvard, Stanford, MIT, UC Berkeley, Oxbridge are on the list.  The point of the advice is that there are many other excellent schools in any field you care to name that are not one of the short list mentioned above.  And that is true.  The counterargument, however, is that America has always been elitist and it may only be those who attended the elite schools who will be offered a chance to participate later.

The Importance of a Classical Education for Writing Renderman Shaders

[NB: Scott Anderson supervised the visual effects of Starship Troopers for Paul Verhoeven, and many facilities participated, including Sony Imageworks, ILM, Tippet and MASS ILLUSIONS.  The pictures below are just to illustrate the movie and, in a few cases the types of elements involved, e.g. thrusters.   I have no idea who did these particular shots, with the possible exception of the one of the escape pod, which was probably done at MASS ILLUSION.  People are very touchy about their credits and who can blame them?]

Through this story I hope to demonstrate the importance of knowing Latin, or of at least having a classical education, when writing Renderman Shaders. It is also a story about what a small world the world of visual effects is.

In 1997 or so, I had been hired by MASS ILLUSION to help them finish their work on Starship Troopers (1997) and get it out the door. They had two other projects that were about to start, What Dreams May Come (1998) and The Matrix (1999), and people needed to segue from Starship onto the new projects. MASS ILLUSON won two academy awards for these latter two projects, an amazing achievement. (1)

If you look closely at the lower picture, the thrust exhaust has a detailed structure which animates slightly

So new talent was needed to help finish the project so that the regulars could move on, and I was available, on the East Coast, and actually like to help finish projects. Often bringing in new people near the end of a long complicated project can be a help, because the new people in many ways are, frankly, unaware of the history and can just look at things with fresh eyes, and they are not yet tired of the project, so they can be energetic. Its not unrelated to some of the tactics of replacements in sports.

I had some credentials for this because I have supervised lots and lots of shots and projects and happen to be very good at rendering, having a Scitech award for writing a renderer, and very good at using Renderman (2), having helped bring it into production in its earliest form at deGraf/Wahrman and enjoyed using it.

MASS ILLUSION was a pioneer in attempting to do visual effects projects remotely from Los Angeles, in this case Western Massachusetts, and not all the bugs were worked out yet, and there was friction which I attributed in part to the problem of communicating 3,000 or so miles away, as well as other complications having to do with a very complicated project and a famously demanding director.

One of the ongoing and unresolved issues was matching the thrusters, or exhaust, of the starships. The exhaust in the starships done at Imageworks had a specific look and we were not close enough to that look for the starships we were doing. But it wasn't clear what Sony had done to make their thrusters, though, because as is so often the case, the people who had done the work at Sony had moved onto other projects, and possibly also because they had used a consultant who was no longer with them to write the primary Renderman shader for the thrusters.

Escape pod thruster detail 

They were hesitant to give us the shader and when I got on the project this was one of the long standing issues between the facilities. But obviously, given that we were having trouble matching the look, having the specific shader would be a big help, and communicate to us in no uncertain terms what was going on here. We thought that they might have some proprietary technology in the shader, but that was probably not the concern. It may have been nothing more than caution, or concern that they would be asked how the shader worked, or didn't know where it was, or who knows.

The shader was called "ROSASRF" for some reason.

Finally, after some effort, I had a success and many, many months after MASS ILLUSION had first asked, we got the source to the shader after a particularly colorful telephone conference call in which I quoted a famous biblical prophecy of what would happen if they did not give us the shader. (3)

Now, I have to backup a little. I have read and written hundreds, perhaps thousands, of shaders, about half of which are written by other people and about half of which were written by myself. Of those which are written by others, if you find a single comment in their shader its a miracle from Jesus himself. Shader writers do not often write comments, it seems, perhaps they believe that it is all self-explanatory.

But ROSASRF which was a very dense and complicated shader was not only well-commented, but one of those comments was highlighted with the cryptic two letters: NB.

NB?

I started laughing. I hardly ever read shaders with Latin abbreviations, in fact it had never happened before. NB, of course, is Latin for "Nota Bene" or "note well", its a convention used by mathematicians of the old school and classical scholars of all types. It basically means "pay attention".  Its the sort of thing one would expect to find when reading a scholarly treatise about St. Augustine's City of God (de Civitate Dei) or perhaps the notes of a 17th century alchemist. Or a mathematical proof.

So whoever Rosa was, as by that time I had determined that ROSASRF was named for the consultant, someone named Rosa, clearly she had a classical education and was not one of the "repurposed garage mechanics" we normally get in visual effects. The shader was very well written, well commented, and indeed, without it, it would have been very hard to figure out how to solve the problem. So we were happy.

But I was even happier to discover that I already knew Rosa, that in fact this was my old friend Rosa Farre, whom I had met a decade before in Barcelona at a company called Animatica, and who had married my friend Darnell Williams of Symbolics. I had never seen her work before, I just knew her as this very pleasant person from Barcelona, but now I had seen her work, and clearly she was not only good at what she did, but most important of all, had a classical education and was comfortable with her Latin abbreviations.

I hope that everyone reading this will take away the final thought that they should study Latin and incorporate Latin abbreviations in all their shaders.

Thank you.

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Notes:

1. By the time these two projects were done, the company had gone through at least one and possibly two different reorganizations, and may or may not have been called MASS ILLUSION by then. However, the people were the same for the most part and the same spirit and sense of excellence existed, so far as I can tell. Also, a facility does not win an Academy Award, only people do. But they had been the primary facility on those two films (What Dreams and The Matrix).

2. Technically, Renderman is the standard and the actual renderer was called Photo Realistic Renderman or PRman. The name may have changed a few times since then.

3. I dont actually remember exactly what was said during the call, but I vaguely recall telling them that we really, really wanted the shader and for them to remember the prophecy "The sun will be turned into darkness and the moon into blood when the great and terrible (day) of the Lord shall come", which in Medieval Latin, by the way, is SOL TENEBRAS ET LUNA IN SANGUINEM MAGNUS ET HORRIBILIS DEI VENIET, which I think has a nice feel to it. Anyway, they gave us the shader.

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References:

Starship Troopers on Imdb

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120201/

City of God (De Civitate Dei) by St. Augustine

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_God_(book)

Latin Abbreviations on Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Latin_abbreviations

The Perception of Time and Historical Events

I am fascinated by how we perceive the passage of time and how this effects our perception of history. These perceptions are probably also affected by the region that we grew up in. America is famously said to pay very little attention to history, their own or anyone else's.

I use the following story to illustrate how events that we consider to be very distant in the past were actually not very long ago at all. Growing up as I did in Virginia, the story involves the American Civil War.

My father also grew up in Virginia and when he was ten years old, his elementary school brought a man to speak who had been Gen. Robert E. Lee's personal assistant and valet from before and during the war. He was a black man, probably in his 70s, and he had started working for Lee as a very young man. He stayed with Lee after the war and was with him when Lee passed away in 1870. 

The man my father heard speak was probably the Rev. Wm. Mack Lee.  Mack Lee was well known in Virginia, helped to build many churches after the war, and spoke very highly about Lee.

A short biography of William Mack Lee is here:
http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/leewilliam/summary.html

The electronic edition of his autobiography is here:
http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/leewilliam/lee.html

Since my father was ten years old in 1920 and the Civil War ended in 1865, that means that the Civil War had been over for about 55 years. What I find fascinating about that is that World War II, which was one of the defining events of my father's generation, has been over for longer than that (almost 70 years).

In other words, we think of the Civil War as being impossibly long ago. But for our parents, it was more recent than World War II is for our 20 somethings that we work with.

Many of the issues that we have in this country today are in many ways a result of those two wars. They were just the day before yesterday in the bigger scheme of things.

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For those who are interested in such things, Mack Lee, who has the same last name as R.E. Lee was a slave originally for the Lee family, and stayed with Lee when he was freed in the course of the war.   What I find amusing is the southern tradition of keeping the same last name, e.g. if you were a slave for the Lee family, you were also a Lee.   I have many friends who are part of the Carter family (e.g. Carter Burwell, Carter Emmart, Jimmy Carter, etc) and they report that there are a lot of African American Carters around.  Well, maybe I should say this is interesting, not amusing, given what we are talking about here.

The Story of Columbia University's Second Campus

So I am going to tell you a New York real estate story, the story of Columbia University's second campus. Their current location is their third campus.

Columbia University has been around since 1754, in other words, before the American Revolution. It is a recent college by the standards of a Virginian or a European, but it is still venerable.

It was originally located down by Wall Street, the street named for the wall they built to keep the Native Americans out. That's right they built a wall, and south of that wall was "civilization". How ironic given the pestilent sore of moral depravity that Wall Street represents to the world today! Back then, there was a lot of open country, a lot of farms, and no skyscrapers. But it started getting crowded, people were building the area up, so they decided to move out of there and bought a second campus somewhere around what we call today midtown, and sold their first campus.

After a while, they realized that they had made a mistake. They should have kept their first campus as a long term real estate investment and merely leased it out to others as Wall Street real estate was proving to be a good investment. So, when, years later, midtown was also getting crowded and they started looking for a new campus, they remembered this lesson. This time they leased their old campus and moved to their new location, the location they have now, in Morningside Heights.

So the question you are supposed to be asking yourself, is where in midtown the second Columbia campus was located and what is it called today.

The second campus was Rockefeller Center.

When I heard this, I realized that I had been told this long ago, but had not understood what I had been told. I remember reading that when the Japanese bought Rockefeller Center that what they had actually bought was the buildings not the land. The buildings themselves had been built on land owned by the Columbia trust on a 99 year lease said the article in the NY Times.

Now Columbia is one of those old American names filled with Symbolism and doesn't necessarily refer to Columbia University.  We used to call everything Columbia. The Statue of Liberty is called Columbia. So I thought nothing of it, and just assumed it was the name of an old financial institution or something like that. But no, when they said Columbia Trust, what they meant was the Trust for Columbia University.

The moral of the story is that educational institutions are well positioned to benefit from long term real estate investments in the cities where they reside. For two other examples, check out the history of the real estate investments of Harvard and Stanford.

Wikipedia page for Columbia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_University

The Run-on Sentence and Charles Dickens

You will have noticed by now that I am fond of run-on sentences and use them all the time, often with a sense of barely repressed glee. You have no idea how it used to irritate me to have my sentences corrected back in the day when anyone cared enough to try and correct me. Now they know better.

But I do realize, I mean, I am aware, that there are many out there in Internet-land who believe that this style of writing is wrong, also very wrong, and some people believe that it is also extremely and definitely very wrong.

Well, I just don't agree and for support I am going to call upon my friend the well-known writer Charles Dickens. This is from an essay he wrote in 1852 about the "Ragged Schools" movement in England of the time. I am sure you will agree with me that Mr. Dickens knows how to write English and that we should strive to emulate him in our own work.

I offer no apology for entreating the attention of the readers of The Daily News to an effort which has been making for some three years and a half, and which is making now, to introduce among the most miserable and neglected outcasts in London, some knowledge of the commonest principles of morality and religion; to commence their recognition as immortal human creatures, before the Gaol Chaplain becomes their only schoolmaster; to suggest to Society that its duty to this wretched throng, foredoomed to crime and punishment, rightfully begins at some distance from the police office; and that the careless maintenance from year to year, in this, the capital city of the world, of a vast hopeless nursery of ignorance, misery and vice; a breeding place for the hulks and jails: is horrible to contemplate.

Now that is a run-on sentence to be proud of.  I have a ways to go before I reach Mr. Dickens' level of excellence in this area.  But I will try.

If you don't know about the Ragged Schools, its a great story, and here is the Wikipedia page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ragged_school

The above quote is from an article written by Charles Dickens for The Daily News, published in 1852. See http://www.infed.org/archives/e-texts/dickens_ragged_schools.htm for the complete essay.