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 Shocking Truth about Roman Architecture in France

[Revised 1/7/2012]

This is the story of the first time I actually saw a Roman ruin. I think it is very funny for what it says about me, and maybe, just a little, about how some of us perceive various cultures and periods, perhaps without realizing it.

My high school had a fabulous Latin teacher (1) and I took advantage of the situation, taking many years of Latin and learning a lot of Roman history.   I may have been somewhat influenced by the fact that my high school combined the advanced Latin classes between the Boys and Girls school, so you had to go to the Girls school to study Latin.   Such were the lofty motivations of my youth.  I read Roman and Aegean history and related topics even now and I assure you the past isn't over, it isn't even past yet.

If you never studied Latin, to give you a feel for how nouns are declined and verbs conjugated, see this sequence from Life of Brian (1974) in which anti-Roman activist Brian is trying to write "Romans Go Home" and is corrected by a Roman Centurion.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbI-fDzUJXI

But, to my chagrin, I have never been to Rome. We were not of that economic class that could afford such things when I was growing up, and when I was productively employed as a young adult, I had not arranged a trip. Then I got involved in computer animation and of course my life went to hell and I still haven't been there, except of course in books.

But like so many others of my generation of computer animation, I was invited to speak at various European conferences during the late 1980s, which provided an opportunity to see at least some of Europe. So, after one of these conferences, Imagina, I arranged for a friend of mine to meet me in Monaco and we would sight see for a few days in the south of France.

So my friend, Paul Cross (2), met me at the conference and we rented a car and started driving through Nice on our way to Nimes. As we stopped in Nice, I pointed to a building and said, "Look, Paul, someone has built a building and made it look Roman."

I am still looking for a suitable picture.  This one has some of the right feel, but it is not integrated into a major current building on a busy street, like the building this post is about.

Paul looked at it and said, "No, Michael, it is Roman".

I thought that was a weird thing for him to say, so I repeated myself and tried to explain, see, someone has built a building and made it look really old and Roman. Isnt that nice?

In Los Angeles, you see, we regularly theme various venues based on classic European and other civilizations, including our own. We might have a Chinatown, for example. Disneyland would have a Fantasyland including a notable synthesis of many medieval castles at the center of the park. The little tourist town of Solvang in Southern California has a Danish theme, complete with windmills. Our Japanese restaurants such as Benihana entertain guests with a performance that is alledgedly at least somewhat Japanese in origin. Santa Barbara is zoned for a traditional Hispanic style.  Although most studio backlots have been repurposed as real estate development, a few still exist with their various themes: a New York street, an Old West street with its saloon, a small town America main street, and so forth. Theming is a major design concept in use in our local commercial architecture and culture.

So clearly, what we had here was a modern building that had been designed using Roman antiquity as a theme. I thought it looked good, although perhaps they went overboard on some of the "ancient" aspects of it, as the Roman section clearly had seen better days.   

My friend just kept explaining to me that no, they were not pretending to be Roman, that Nice was in part an ancient Roman city, and it actually was Roman.  That's interesting, I thought, it had never occurred to me that it might not be fake.

_____________________________

1. His name was Anthony Ruffa, I think.   Before taking an exam, some of us would say to ourselves, "AVE RUFFA MORITURI TE SALUTANT"  ("Hail Ruffa!  We who are about to die, salute you!")

2. Paul Cross is a very amusing person, and an alumnus of Symbolics.  He moved to Taos, New Mexico and helped set up one of the internet not-for-profit web sites for the Taos Pueblo.   He has disappeared, and is hopefully doing well wherever he is.

Visual Effects Bake Off 2013, Part 2

I find the Bake Off to be extremely valuable and always regret missing it, even when I can not stand it anymore and have to walk out to the lobby. (Procedural note: since I am not a member of the Academy VFX Subsection, I can not vote, so I am not required to watch the whole thing).

Among the positive attributes are running into friends and colleagues whom I rarely if ever see at any other time of the year. One of my favorite people, Dennis Muren, I *never* see except at the Bakeoff. Last year he said one of the best things I have heard about the current state of visual effects:

"The problem with special effects is that they are not special anymore."

And there is value in seeing the current state of the art from many different projects projected in an excellent screening room one right after the other. Its amusing to try to guess what the theme of the year will be in advance: space battles? giant robots? hordes of zombies?

Notice the reflections on the bottom of the martian attack vehicle

One of the annoying downsides of watching these 10 minute sequences back-to-back (with some gap between them for the introduction of the next one) is the sheer volume of noise involved. You see, visual effects are occassionally used for those gentle and romantic moments, but not all that often, actually. Usually they are used when the director feels the need to blow up a city, or drop a spaceship on a bridge, or have one giant robot sensitively punch another giant robot in the nose, and these are loud, generally speaking, even in a vacuum in outer space. I remember once being in the lobby of the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood (on the telephone of course) while an unnamed very successful effects film was screening, and noting that I could always tell when there was a major effects moment because they were usually synchronized with the subwoofers in the theatre, which from the outside, sounded like a big truck slamming into a wall at 90 mph. About every 30 seconds or so, another truck would slam into a wall, it was sort of amusing. But at the Bakeoff, it may be more like every 15 seconds or less, and it is not muffled. The first 100 or 200 times that happens it can be entertaining, but after a while it starts to get old.

The Academy Visual Effects Bake Off, Part 1

This is the boring part of the post in which I explain the background of the Bakeoff to those who do not know. The fun stuff is all in the second part, if I write it.

The Bakeoff is tonight which is why I can not attend. It used to be the second or third week in Februrary but it has been moving up earlier and earlier. Now it is Jan 3. And instead of 7 excruciating and boring films to see sections of, you now get to watch 10 boring films.

If you have never attended this event and you are the least bit interested in visual effects, then you should make a point of trying to attend one year. The way it works is that the general public is welcome on an available seating basis. You are not permitted to vote, of course, nor are you permitted to ask questions, or sit in the reserved seating.

We're here for the bakeoff! 

1. Here is how a film gets nominated for visual effects. A smoke filled room of "worthies" meet and choose some number of films that are called the "long list". These films have to fulfill certain rules about how and when the film was screened to be eligible, and the producers of the film have to nominate it in this category, listing four people, generally as the people who will be nominated or win, should they be so lucky. The smoke filled room reviews this list and in a completely impartial manner (ha!) chooses the films that will be considered. You can be quite sure that there are no politics in this choice, as we will discuss at some point. (The politics are not too bad, generally there are always a few questions about which films get on the long list, but the major contenders are always there).

Recalling the Days When People Were Merely Called Eccentric

These days I am always careful to look whomever I am with in the eye. Why is that, you may wonder. Well, it used to be, back in the days when people were merely neurotic, I developed an affectation of not looking people in the eye. Beats me where it comes from, I think it has to do with being a little shy. But be that as it may be, these days if you do not look someone in the eye, you obviously have Asperger's Syndrome, and thus must be a barely functioning victim of an autism spectrum disorder. Thus I always make sure to look whomever I am talking to in the eye, at least once, during a conversation. Clever, eh?

I wish that my colleagues and peers would maybe realize that these DSM classifications are not to be thrown around casually, and that doing so is not only incorrect, it is also rude.

Perhaps we could return to a simpler, more innocent time, when someone was merely eccentric and colorful if he was a non-conformist.   That would be ever so much more accepting and positive, don't you think?   This trend of badly diagnosing someone's mental disorders and accusing them of it (or discussing it behind their back) is neither helpful nor accurate.

Eccentricity

Also, and I hate to mention this, but those who live in glass houses should not throw tactical nuclear weapons. It seems to me that the last five people I know who have "diagnosed" me with Aspergers should perhaps look to their own house first.

Even a casual study of the history of such things, these labels for eccentricity, show that society moves fast here.  One period's classification, for example, "moron", becomes a later periods' schoolyard insult.

In fact, I am "in touch" with my mental disabilities, if that is what they are, I think I have a good handle on them.  I am well aware that I am in many respects an outlier.  Some of the issues that some would see as a disability, I have become quite fond of, anyway.   The problem is not their diagnosis or management, per se, it is paying for their management in a society that seems to thrive on punishing the poor.   In other words, my problem is not ADD/ADHD or whatever, my problem today is cash flow.

Thus if you want to be a help, rather than throw diagnosis at me, throw money and that would certainly help me to be better adjusted.   Just trying to be practical here.

_______________________

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders on Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagnostic_and_Statistical_Manual_of_Mental_Disorders

DSM-IV TR (Text Revision)
http://www.psychiatry.org/practice/dsm/dsm-iv-tr

DSM-V (In Development)
http://www.dsm5.org/Pages/Default.aspx

Eccentricity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eccentricity_(behavior)

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

The New Sport of Reading Crazy Internet Comments

[Revised 12/31/2012 to add details about the comments]

There is a new sport in town, a new dance craze if you will, everybody can enjoy it. The sport is reading the comments of the biped mammals to a topical news article. For every rational response, there is at least one irrational one, or so it seems.  Topics that set them off include Radiation and Nuclear Power, 911, Obama, Climate Change and Global Warming, and the Economy.

The irrational comments fall into a number of categories, they represent a broad diversity of insanity. It would not be fair to characterize it all as right wing ranting because there is, depending on the topic, a certain amount of left wing insanity as well. It depends on the topic.

In this case, the topic is a lawsuit filed by crewmen of the USS Reagan who participated in the humanitarian efforts during the nuclear meltdown in Japan. They are claiming that the Tokyo Power company deliberately lied about the level of radiation exposure and caused the plaintiffs unnecessary harm.

See http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-27/tokyo-electric-sued-by-u-s-sailors-exposed-to-radiation.html

Go to the bottom of the article, there will be a few comments, and click on "load more comments". Keep clicking until you have had enough.

Here is a summary of some of the comments:

The Opening of The Mummy (1932)

As we examine the origin and history of visual effects, from time to time we will come across masterpieces of the art of the opening title. There is a short list of such openings, openings that define the genre and which are as good as the cinema has ever done. Others, though a little more dated, are still important and can be appreciated if you can find your inner child and put yourself in the movie theatre in 1932.

Here we review the first 90 seconds of the 1932 classic The Mummy directed by Karl Freund and starring Boris Karloff.

I quote the words from the Scroll of Thoth:

      Oh ! Amon Ra! Oh ! God of Gods !

      Death is but the doorway to new life

      We live today, We shall live again,

      In many forms shall we return, Oh Mighty One.

The sequence on Youtube:

http://youtu.be/HD_qV_QvDjY

Careful readers will notice the single credit for Special Effects on card #4 above.  Also note the reference to the character "Frau Muller" who perhaps reprises her role in Young Frankenstein (1974).

Now remember what we are talking about here. A classic Universal horror film in the days before television, before even color film, intended to be viewed on a Saturday afternoon for a nickle. To my mind, the titles and music are perfect and completely introduce the movie.

You should do as well when you do the opening titles for your movie.

The Mummy on IMDB
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0023245/

Poetic and Ecclesiastical Implications of Adopting the Metric System

Americans have often heard the assertion that we should adopt the so-called Metric System and that failure to do so is old fashioned and will hurt our competitiveness in the world market. I believe these advocates are disingenuous and are hiding their real reasons, that in fact they are part of a conspiracy to destroy America by pushing it down a path of radical reform that will inevitably lead to chaos, atheism and poetic inelegance.

Advocates of the metric system generally fail to reveal where it came from and for good reason. The Metric System was created during the French Revolution as part of a comprehensive effort to do away with the ancien regime in all its forms. Of course advocates of this radical system never tell you that. But one thing will lead to another.

What comes next after the Metric System? Inevitably it will lead to calls to adopt the Revolutionary Calendar. If you thought that going between Daylight Savings Time and Standard Time was disruptive, just wait until you experience 10 hours per day, 100 minutes an hour, each minute some ridiculous commune-inspired number of seconds! The months will be named for the seasons of Paris: Vendemiaire, Brumaire, Frimaire, Nivose, Pluviose, Ventose, Germinal, Floreal, Prairial, Messidor, Thermidor, Fructidor. Or will we use the British versions, Vintagearious, Fogarious, Frostarious, Snowous, Rainous, Windous, Buddal, Floweral, Meadowal, Reapidor, Heatidor, Fruitidor? What will good American holidays become in this new system? Will Mother's Day be in Germinal or what? How about the 4th of July? And everything will have to be dated from 22 September 1792, of course.

From there it is only a short step to striking at the very heart of America, our devotion to spiritual values. You can be sure of attacks on the church and calls to require people to worship at the Cult of Reason or the Cult of the Supreme Being. No doubt, all preachers and pastors will be arrested and sent to re-education camps.

Inevitably, these so-called reformers of society will insist that we rewrite all literature to conform to their radical notions. Take for example the opening of the following well-known poem:

      Half a league, half a league, half a league onward,

      All in the valley of Death rode the six hundred.

No doubt this will be outlawed and children will be forced to memorize:

      2.778 kilometers, 2.778 kilometers, 2.778 kilometers,

      All in the valley of Death rode the six hundred.

That is the kind of wickedness that these advocates of a so-called more logical system will promote. Chaos will reign, good Americans will never stand for it, there will be violence in the streets as these radicals use force to impose their revolutionary vision.

I urge all true Americans to resist this evil and oppose the Metric System.

Thank you.

Consultant to the Captain of the Titanic

This is one in a series of posts that will discuss issues I have observed while being a consultant. It is my hope that you will find these observations or experiences amusing and maybe even helpful.

I have been involved in literally dozens and dozens of projects since 1991 or so, some of them for as little as a few days, some of them for years. I have on occasion had a very gratifying impact on the project, in some cases I have not been able to help them at all. These projects come in all shapes and sizes, from an individual in his house to, in one case, the largest project of its type in the country or the world.

As different as these projects are from each other, there are some things they have in common: ambition, vision, idealism and politics. By ambition, I mean that the project is striving to do something that is very difficult, in some cases it has never been done before. They are also ambitious in that if everyone on the project were to cooperate and work selflessly to the best of their ability that it would still be difficult or impossible to achieve what the project hopes to achieve in the time and budget allowed. By vision, I mean that my clients often have an interesting idea: in my judgment, what they are trying to achieve is interesting.  For example, the goal of the Digital Galaxy Project at the American Museum of Natural History was, among other things, to build the most advanced theatre for science education in this country.  By idealism, I mean that my clients are sufficiently naive to believe that they can make a difference. And by politics, I usually mean of two general types: those that are internal to the project and those that are external to the project, but within the larger environment that the project is a part of.

Why does that asshole keep whining about icebergs?   Who does he think he is?

And they have one other thing in common. Since almost without exception these are projects that I personally believe in, they are usually not very well paid. There have been one or two outstanding exceptions to this, but usually I am doing this for love and precious little money.

Here are some not very revolutionary observations from these experiences:

1. An outsider can never understand.

If you are outside a company, you really do not know how that company works, unless you study it for a long time, and even then you are probably wrong on significant issues unless you work there every day for a while, usually several years. As time goes by, you will start to see similarities between the different corporate cultures, but ultimately each company and project has (or may have) its own individual insanity.

2. A consultant is an outsider and that means that ultimately he or she is not a player.

There are always politics, every project has them and every company has them, although they can differ wildly in their style and intensity. But you, as a consultant, are at best an aide to one of the players, you are not a player yourself and you should never forget it. If anyone is expendable, you are.

3. Many projects are what I call "roller coaster" projects.

These kinds of projects are pretty much all involving for the consultant, they involve all your time and energy, and you may have very little idea from week to week where the project is going and how much of your time they are going to need. All you can do is put the rest of your life on hold, and do what you and your client think is right on a day by day basis. They do not know how much of your time they will need, nor do they know how long you will be working for them.

4. Those who are with a project at the beginning may not be with the project in the end.

Do not think that by contributing to a project at the beginning, when usually that there is less time or money then there is ultimately, that you will be able to participate in the project when the real deadlines and budgets are revealed. It doesn't work that way.

5. Many projects experience a "moment of crisis" and everything is different from that point on.

I like to describe the differences metaphorically by asking the following question which actually does not have a right or wrong answer, it is all a matter of personal preference: "You are a consultant to the captain of the Titanic. Would you rather be a consultant to the captain of the Titanic before it hits the iceberg or after it hits the iceberg?"

In general, I prefer to be a consultant after it hits the iceberg, and these are the reasons why. People are not arguing about whether or not there are icebergs anymore. We are not arguing about whether or not we should slow down, or whether we should put more lifeboats on the vessel, or whether we should listen to the radio, or any of the other things we might have argued about before we hit the iceberg. Now people are a little more beaten down and we can discuss such things as how many people we can get on the lifeboats we have in the next 20 minutes or so.

But its a matter of personal preference, obviously if you are a consultant before it hits the iceberg you have the potential of having a much larger ultimate impact. Maybe you explain to them about icebergs and get them to miss them altogether. It could happen, you might be allowed to have that much influence. It depends.

I am going to end this first essay with one more observation which I have found to be universally true:

6. You can not force your clients to be successful against their will.

Although they have hired you to advise them in an area where you have considerable knowledge and experience, and even when they are paying you good money to get your ideas, very often they want to do things their way. At the end of the day, in fact, it is their project and not yours. At some point if you keep whining about something they don't want to do, or try to keep them from doing something they do want to do, they will just get rid of you. Ultimately they are going to do it their way.

Some Modest Suggestions for Human Resource Departments to Help Make the Internet Job Application Process Even More Pointless

We here at Global Wahrman believe that online Corporate Employment and Career web sites can do a better job at taking an unpleasant and difficult situation, looking for work in a down economy, and making it not just unpleasant but also hurtful to the worker as well.  We believe that Human Resources Departments must recognize that they have a responsibility to make the job search experience as negative, stupid and damaging as possible.

As we all know, the new way of getting a job is to apply through the Internet.  No other ways are permitted.  This is an excellent improvement for society as a whole over the old and discredited way that people got work: through colleagues who recommended them. This old way was very inefficient because it allowed employees and friends who knew the skills of individuals and the needs of corporations to find a match that was good for both parties.   With the new system we can depersonalize the process, fail to get the information necessary to find that match,  and destroy the self-esteem of the job seeker all at the same time.  Clearly, this is a great improvement.

J. Pierpont Finch reading about how to get a job on the Internet.

But some web sites for major corporations have failed to completely embrace this new paradigm, and still make modest efforts to do a good job of hiring people.   This is completely out of line with the Internet paradigm which works so hard to use technology as stupidly as possible in order to make life as unpleasant as possible.   This post serves notice to those archaic practitioners of the old, bad ways to get with the program.

To make their job of crafting an unpleasant experience for the job-seeker easier, we have compiled a series of suggestions based on our examination of the Career sections of major corporate web sites as well as some selected smaller companies.  We have also personally tested many of these web sites.  Many corporations are making excellent progress along the lines of making the online application process both self-defeating and destructive, but clearly there is more to do.

Here are some specific suggestions:

1. Do not permit the work candidate to upload a cover letter.  A cover letter can be used to defeat the process of depersonalizaton by providing information that is useful to the hiring process.  Therefore, cover letters must not be permitted.

2. Do not permit the work candidate to upload a resume for each job they apply for. The work candidate must acknowledge that their resume is generic and has no useful information that could contribute to the hiring process.  One resume should be sufficient no matter what job it is, or when that resume was created.

3. Do not permit the work candidate to efficiently upload information, instead demand that information as if they were a disabled child, and make them fill in endless categories about education, skills and so forth no matter how well that information is presented on a resume, it is important to waste their time and badly and stupidly elicit that information on a case by case basis.  We are not going to use that information, it is only there to waste the candidates' time and that is why it is important.

4. Do not allow the candidate to know whether or not they have successfully applied for the position. To do so would be to give the candidate some degree of reward for going through the immensely stupid process we have had them endure online.  Much better to not acknowledge whether the job was applied for and leave them in a state of uncertainty.  By frustrating the candidate in even this basic way, we can contribute to the psychology that nothing they do matters.

5. Do not allow the candidate to be able to contact anyone at the company in order to be able to ask questions or seek points of clarification.  That would be inefficient and far too expensive.  The work candidate is not interesting enough to be worth providing this kind of individual treatment.  In fact, the work candidate should realize that they are worthless, faceless garbage.   Allowing them to ask questions and seek clarification is counterproductive to achieving that realization.

6. Do not permit the worker any choice in the format with which documents are prepared.  Thus if they are permitted to upload a resume at all, make certain that you do not accomodate the standard formats of text, html, doc and pdf, but at most one of them, or better yet, none of them.

7. Make jobs come and go and make it very difficult to return to a job listing once found.  In this way, the job seeker can experience character-building frustration as he or she tries to find that previously listed job (which probably wasn't real anyway) and fail to find it.

8. Do not in any way serve notice to the applicant that the job is no longer available, or give him or her any useful information about how the job was filled, or even if the job was filled.

9. Do not in any way indicate that the job applicant's paperwork or application was in any way looked at by a human, but rather give the impression that they were dismissed without consideration.  Even better, is to not reply in any way at all, and thus they do not know whether they ever successfully applied and got rejected or have any other information.  Under no circumstances give constructive feedback.

But more important than any of the above is the following hard and fast rule: DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES LIST ANY GENUINE OPPORTUNITIES ON YOUR WEB SITE.  The only jobs that are permitted to be listed are (a) entry level jobs, or (b) jobs that are already filled and are being listed in pro forma compliance with law, (c) as a way of getting information about your competition and (d) as a way of misleading your competition.

The candidate must understand in a deep and meaningful way that any real opportunities will never be listed on your web site, now or in the future.

Remember, your employment web page is a way of communicating to the worker what the company thinks of their workers and that by treating them with contempt at this stage you accurately and efficiently communicate Corporate policy. More than just a human resources department and web site, you are an instrument of the Corporation's desire to demean and destroy the worker.

This is an important task you have been given by the Corporation, remember that, and work as hard as you can to achieve it.