On the Occasion of Siggraph 2015

draft

It is a fundamental tenet of western civilization that one must present oneself with confidence and style. No signs of weakness are permitted as it causes the other biped mammals to see you as a potential meal, or the other bipeds, whose support you need, to ignore you or dismiss you.

There are those I suppose who benefit from being so pathetic that it attracts a certain kind of person who likes doing rescues, but I don't think one wants to count on that as a strategy.

I have become more aware this year that my goals for the future are impractical based on my current status, how I am perceived, the resources that I have, and the competition.

Part of the problem here is that in the past I worked with energy and what is, I hope, talent and skill but was also nearly completely unaware of the odds against me. And these efforts all led to great success and total failure, accomplishment yet contempt from my peers, personal attacks that are quite astounding, and generally everything that one would expect from being poor in America, where talent and accomplishment means nothing, only money matters and certain credentials as one gets by being approved and anointed by those with power.

Why then, would I expect things to be any different in the future, when in fact the odds are only worse then they have ever been? They are worse because in the past I was part of a community, now I am alone. They are worse because in the past I had access to resources, now I have no resources. They are worse because now this is an established field and this implies both more competition, as well as competition with access to both resources and those affiliations that I wish I had but do not.

Not only may fools go where wise people fear to tread, but in fact the earlier success of the fool may not only be a result of their energy, talent and ignorance but also because times were different.

There are deeper problems as well.  A fundamental and well-reasoned concern that major elements on which we base our lives and our society are based on lies, or false premises.  Not all, but many of them. And that our public servants know this and do nothing to correct it either because they feel they can't or because they do not care. I have become convinced that our government does not have our best interests at heart and that they are quite capable of cynically exalting the rich at the expense of the rest of the country. I have looked at some of the evidence, evidence that The Economist says does not exist, but it does exist.  Too many lies, too much hypocrisy, too much swept under the rug, too much misery.

On the other hand, what is the alternative.   Perhaps talent, hard work and experience and maybe a sense of humor about the situation, all of our situations, can make a difference.   I guess I have to try again.

These are the thoughts that occur to me on the occasion of a birthday and the annual trial of Siggraph.

Design Your House to Accommodate the Slaves

I have always wanted to be able to design and build my own house. Well thats not quite true. Of course what I really want to do is to specify the big ideas and have an architect and various craftsmen build the house. How else am I going to get a minimum required number of secret passages? If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself, it seems.

It is a common film school aphorism that everyone's first film is about sex. I think that everyone's first house is about themselves. The house reveals something about who they are, their values, their beliefs, their interests all brought into physical reality in some form. It is a statement about how they want to live their lives and what they believe is important.

Houses are often designed to be very boring in order to maintain resell value. What a terrible idea that is! I would hope that all my readers would strive against this horrible constraint on their creativity and not worry too much about resale value. You must have faith. It also helps to have money, of course.

A friend of mine is able to build her own house in a very nice part of Santa Barbara and in the hope that some of these ideas might be in any way useful or interesting, I have compiled here some notes collected over the years, ideas I would consider if I ever built my house. None of these ideas are particularly original, in general they are ideas I have seen and liked, or read about, etc. 

But what is appealing to one person is not at all interesting to another. And this is not my house, it is the house she is building for herself and presumably her partner who I have not even met.   So this list may not be at all valuable to her.  But maybe, I mean, who knows.

This particular list is oriented towards ideas that have been around since about the 4^th century BC through the mid 19^th century or so.

Everything old may yet be new again.

The following is in no particular order.

1. All upper class Roman houses were built around one of several water collection designs, that would automatically collect the rainwater from the room in an underground space, or impluvium. We would probably call such a thing a cistern. In drought stricken California, this would be an excellent way to get water for your landscaping, for example.

This is a modern architects's interpretation of an impluvium.  Although a pool is nice, I was thinking more about just storing the water underground in a cistern.  

2. The Romans built their homes to have layers of public and private space. Any upper class Roman was a patron and would greet clients every day in their home. So a big part of the Roman home was designed to admit the clients into an outer part of the house where they were formally greeted and often received a gift.  This might be the first atrium of the house, a rather large space.    Then there would be other social spaces further in the house for those few admitted within. Beyond that would be private places for the house where the owners and family slept. Then above or below would be cubicles for the servants and slaves. The idea I want to emphasize was that even the public spaces had a hierarchy to them.  

3. My father used to struggle heating a home in Virginia that was designed to be wasteful of energy.   We put in insulation in the attic and a heat barrier (basically a door) to the basement and reduced our heating bill by half.  This is a well understood topic in America today, that there are much better ways to heat and/or cool our homes. I spent one winter at 8000 feet in Colorado in a large house that was entirely heated by one freestanding wood fireplace with an exhaust chimney made of metal that extended through the air for 10 feet on its way to the outside. There are particulate (e.g. smog) issues if everyone burns wood, but there are ways to mitigate this problem if one wants to. Am I suggesting that you heat your house with wood? I dont know, I am just pointing out how well it worked in a really cold environment and how economical it was.

On another occasion, I spent some time in the traditional adobe house of a friend of mine in Taos, NM. It was about 1/3 underground and the walls were very thick and made of some sort of compressed earth and straw, I think, and then covered with plaster. It was completely astonishing how well it kept the house cool during the very hot days and warm during the very cold nights.

The point here is not that one should heat ones house with a wooden stove or build an adobe or even that one might build the main level of the house such that 1/3 of it is below the ground, although one might do any of these things.  The point is that these ideas have real merit and are not hard to implement if one wanted to and designed it in from the beginning.

4. Not only is building underground a good use of the available space, it is especially well suited for things that should remain relatively cool and with a stable temperature.   Which is why most older American homes in the east coast and the midwest would have a basement for storage.   We would expect to use the basement for food storage, wine storage, but also computer media, storage of film, and possibly also the location of other types of house infrastructure that does not have to be upstairs in the main living, entertainment or working spaces, such as computer servers.

5.  I have always tried to keep a spare bedroom or at least a couch and made it available to friends from out of town. In Manhattan, I was very well set up for that, which is very unusual there and I wish more friends had taken advantage of it.  One of the lessons of that space is that one can accommodate guests in a way that is completely unintrusive into the rest of one's life.     When one reads novels or sees plays set in England, one often reads about families that extended  hospitality to friends and family for long periods of time, years at a time.   You might have a distant cousin or the son or nephew of an old friend who graduated from Cambridge and has no way to make a living.  So you put him up in a guest house and he tutors your daughter in mathematics.  That sort of thing.  (Arcadia). 

6. Castles in parts of Europe were built with access passages such that fireplaces in guest rooms could be lit without actually going into the room. There was a whole infrastructure behind the scenes for the servants which allowed them to come and go without disturbing the rest of the house. This also provided storage spaces for artwork that was not currently being used. The big idea is to consider building such passages, whether overt or covert, into your house for a variety of reasons and purposes. This might be special access from the kitchen to the outside entertainment area. Or it might be dumbwaiters between levels for various functional rooms of the house.

7. I recently spent the night at a hotel where I was given a room that was built to ADA standards. I loved it. The bathroom was one huge shower stall, nothing to trip over, and a nice seat to sit on while showering. There was nothing to trip over in the entire room.

8. A variety of techniques can be used to blur the outside with the inside. A good skylight or series of mezzanines can completely open up a space. A projection system designed for screenings in the house could perhaps also be designed to be redirected to project on an outside screen for those parties and events on a warm evening. In this way one can also entertain the whole neighborhood in the same way drive in movies used to. A friend of friends has built their master bedroom in Telluride such that the bed is mounted on rails and can be easily be moved outside to sleep under the stars or pushed inside out of the rain.

9. Wherever possible, combine functionality with character. The classic door knocker is of course a lion or some other creature. I always thought gargoyles were just decorative, but no, they are used to redirect water away from the stone cathedrals.

10. The Romans often built interior design into the s tructure of their homes. A painting might be implemented as a fresco and last for much longer than merely being painted. A floor was usually a mosaic made of stone.

11. The British and the Italians were particularly active in building formal gardens. There are some great books on this.

12. All Roman houses in the country were really working farms. I am not sure you want to go that far, but a nice greenhouse or container garden would be useful. Maybe make your own olive oil?

13. All homes should have an observatory of some sort to check out the countryside for hostile forces or perhaps to observe the universe.

14. All homes should have major built in bookcases, perhaps used as entrance ways into storage or corridor areas.

15. Of course we have to consider how to hide the computer infrastructure so it is not intrusive.

16. And it would be only sensible in 21^st century America to consider how we house the slaves. No need to go overboard here, a little cubicle with a stone bed was enough for the Romans and it should be enough for us.

17. One of the odd triumphs of S. California was the Arts and Crafts Movement of the early 20th century.  One might consider recreating some of their designs or setting up a workshop to do so on site or in some way to feed into your house construction.

18. One might research current artists and workshops capable of creating decorative stone or bronze work. And select an artist or two to work from their workshop or at a workshop you create to feed decorative elements into the house.  If one did create frescos one would need to find artists capable of working under those very wonderful and strange constraints (the key to a fresco is to paint it while the plaster is wet, and essentially without making any mistakes).

20. One could set up to do bronzes with the lost wax method but use 3D printing (there I go with these modern techniques again) to create the molds.

21. One might want to create and store spare parts for the house from the very beginning. It would be easier to make spare parts, tiles, sculptures, etc while the workshops that are creating them are building things for the house and just put them underground and wait the 10 or 20 or 50 years until they need replacement.

22. If you do use concrete, recall that Roman concrete is better than Portland cement and that there should be a discussion here.

23. If you do build mosaics, consider designing them with a computer and using some sort of automatic stone cutter or even 3D printer to create elements.  Remember a key to a mosaic is longevity, so it might be better to automatically cut stone or tile than to print with modern materials.

24. When working at Robert Abel & Associates, I would often walk down Romaine to visit Opamp books, which is now out of business after a long decline.   On the way there I would pass a building that was a ruin, uninhabited, that fascinated me.  At some point I noticed some sort of ironwork railings, and older leaden glass in the windows.  I eventually discovered that this was the old Hollywood headquarters of Howard Hughes in the period when he made movies.   The older glass was fascinating.  Consider using handmade or leaden glass, even consider stained glass.  Glass does not have to be boring.

and finally,

25 A carillon is a series of bells, usually played by a kind of keyboard that is below it, that has at least 24 bells or three octaves.  A chime is the same sort of thing but with at least one octave or 8 bells, but not as many as a carillon.   There is a famous chime at Hollywood Forever but it is not playable and would need restoration.   Maybe you can buy it?   I have always wanted a carillon! See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carillon

The carillon in St. Petersburg, Russia.

[By the way, if you look closely at the bells above, you will see that there is type extruded on the surface.  Do you have any idea how hard that is to do?   Its amazingly difficult if it was put there as part of the pouring process, which I think it must have been.  This was an aside.]

That is enough for now.

This needs to be rewritten.

UC Berkely article on Research into Roman Concrete

http://news.berkeley.edu/2013/06/04/roman-concrete/

Cistern on Wikipedia

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

Moat on Wikipedia

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

Fresco on Wikipedia

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

Sunset Magazine reprint on making your own olive oil

http://www.sunset.com/static/pdf/OneBlock_OliveOil.pdf

An entertaining narrative by someone who ended up with an olive grove in New Zealand

http://jaredgulian.com/2009/07/11/make-your-own-olive-oil/

Administrative Notes 8/2/2015

One purpose of this blog was to write down my thoughts about the process of writing it in the hope that this might in some way be useful either to readers of this blog or possibly to those of you who are considering writing one yourself.

Mostly this blog is accomplishing what it was intended to accomplish even though nothing is really finished yet, there has been good progress in a variety of areas. It was not a total surprise how long it takes to write a good post that has some substance to it. It was a surprise however to see how many drafts never see the light of day and are generally rewritten at a later time.

What has been surprising to me is how I have taken to writing this blog as a form of positive procrastination, more positive than many other things I could be spending my time on.  As I type this, I have unfinished posts on our performance character animation at Siggraph in 1988, a post on the recent Marlon Brando documentary, a post on design ideas for a house, a post on what we do know about the Southern Reach trilogy by Vandermeer, a post on using techniques from Nostradamus to write a genre of entertainment fiction, and several other besides.

But right now I am a week away from Siggraph and I am way behind on things that need to get done now, and by the end of the year. I have to focus and that has often been a problem for me. Thus it turns out that at various times writing for this blog has become an activity I can do to avoid doing things that are more time critical.

This further supports the idea that when someone is sincere about procrastination that he or she will find a way to procrastinate in spite of the obstacles. There is always a way to avoid doing what really needs to be done if you put your mind to it.

Has One of John Holland's Submarines Been Found?

One of the problems with being mortal is that you do not know how some stories end and one might really want to know. In science of course, this is obvious but maybe more dramatic than people realize. For those of us of a romantic nature, in the classical sense of romance, there are an amazing number of such stories. Where lies a missing ship? What happened to that expedition. For those of us with a particular interest in matters that involve what is called “intelligence”, then we are well aware that it is unrealistic to expect to know the real story for at least 50 years or more and most of us will not be alive by then.

The age of exploration, however you might define it, is filled with such stories. War, for better or worse, is filled with such stories. Sometimes no one survived to tell what happened. A missing platoon, a missing airplane, no one knows what happened or where. Then 50 or 100 years later a wrecked airplane is found in a field in the middle of the Ukraine or at the bottom of a lake and we have closure.

Some mysteries are partially solved, of course. If an airliner goes missing for over a year and no person or piece of that airplane is found, then you can be quite sure that a tragedy has happened even if we do not know what it was, where, when or why. If a ship goes on patrol and is never heard from again, then unless it really did go to the Twilight Zone or on vacation with the Space Aliens then something very bad has happened.

Sometimes you know in general what happened but not exactly where, and the bodies of your friends are never recovered.

Last week something happened off the coast of Sweden that helps to complete one of these stories. It happened in a somewhat amusing way (assuming the death of sailors can ever be said to be amusing). Sweden has recently been troubled by what they believe are incursions by Russian submarines up to some mysterious activities in Swedish waters. Their Navy believes that they tracked such a submarine for quite a while and that it may have escaped. The defense budget has been increased, people are on the lookout, there have been all kinds of false sightings.

Then, a week or so ago, a diver found a wrecked submarine off the coast within Sweden territory. A private firm was engaged by Sweden to investigate and found the wreck of a Russian submarine which went down with all hands. They thought the submarine looked modern, and they assumed it was a modern Russian midget / spy submarine, perhaps on a mission, perhaps being tested, and that it had experienced some disaster.

They were right that the submarine was Russian and that it had gone down with all hands.  Two officers and 16 crew.  Furthermore, the submarine was approximately 20 meters by 3 meters in size, very cramped quarters.

But it was not a modern Russian submarine. It is almost certainly a submarine in the Imperial Russian Navy which went down and which was lost with all hands in 1916. Not only that, but this may be a very famous submarine.

A model of the Royal Navy's Holland 1.  This would not be the same submarine design as the one that has been found, but it would be similar.  .

As readers of my blog know, the history of submarines is deeply interconnected with our culture, especially the tradition of American Musical Theatre. What you may not realize is that the people who built the original Russian submarines were Americans (well, immigrants to America) from Connecticut.  Designed in America, the first of class was built by Holland's Electric Boat Company, shipped to Russia, and assembled there.   

To briefly recap the history of submarines, they were a technology that came to fruition very early in the 20th century and which saw a lot of contributions from all over the world.  One of the pioneers of this field was John Holland, an immigrant to America from Ireland, who designed and built what is recognized as the first modern submarine.  That is, it was the first to have the important design elements that a modern submarine would have for the next 50 years.  Furthermore, he founded the company that built these submarines for many different countries, including the United States, Great Britain, and Imperial Russia.

In many ways the development of the submarine was similar to the development of the airplane.  It was an international development that achieved success at the beginning of the 20th century and was being used in a major war within a decade.  Airplane use has wildly expanded of course but submarine use, although in most navies worldwide, remain an eclectic tool used mostly for military and research purposes. 

Here is a biography of John Holland in the US Navy's Undersea Warfare magazine: 

http://www.navy.mil/navydata/cno/n87/usw/issue_19/holland.htm

The first of the Som class was built in Connecticut, shipped to Russia, and assembled there. This may be that submarine. If so, there is other history here as this submarine may be the repurposed Fulton, an early Holland design that was built and then sold to Russia.   The articles suggest that is the case, but I am withholding judgment until we know more.

The sailors who manned that submarine are almost certainly still inside having gone down with the ship. In a submarine, this is fairly easy to determine without looking very hard.  If a submarine is at the bottom of the sea and its hatches are still closed, then very likely no one got out.  When leaving a distressed submarine, very few sailors bother to close the hatch behind them.

_________________________________________

Notes:

John Philip Holland on Wikipedia

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

Wikipedia articles on the discovery and the Som Class of Submarines

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Swedish_submarine_wreck_discovery

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Som-class_submarine

News story on a possible fragment from Amelia Earhart's plane

http://news.discovery.com/history/us-history/aluminum-fragment-appears-to-belong-to-earharts-plane-141028.htm

Lions and Tigers and the LAPD, Oh My

One of the great advantages of using mass transit, or at least transit, in this case Amtrak, to go back and forth between LA and Oceanside is that the process throws you in with a lot of other people, and sometimes you end up talking to them while you are waiting for your train.   But if you do that, you might learn something and that might be annoying or unfortunate depending on what it is that you learn.

So here I am minding my own business, waiting for the last train to Oceanside from Los Angeles. It is maybe 9:30 PM at night at Union Station and I am waiting on the platform with about four other people one of them a nice man under 30 or so with his son (who knows, maybe the boy is 8 years old, its really hard for me to tell).

And the nice young man is talking to his son and he says “See that building over there? Thats the big house.”

“Actually”, I say, for some reason adding my two cents worth, “If you mean the jail, I am pretty sure that it is on the other side of the tracks, around the corner. The building you are pointing to is far too nice to be the jail, and besides, it has windows”. So my new friend laughs and looks closer (this is night you understand), and says, “hmmm, you are right, it is too nice and it does have windows”.

“I am pretty sure that the jail”, I say, “ is about a block away on the right side of the train as we leave. I had been trying to figure out what building would be that big but not have any windows, just apparently slits for light, and I am guessing that is the city jail.”

So my new friend and I started talking while his son amused himself with a video game. He had his son for the weekend and was just coming back from San Luis Obispo where his son lived with his mother. And he started entertaining me with stories about life inside the jail, something he knew first hand as it turned out that he had a complicated legal history due to his tendency to drink and drive on occasion.

And in the next 30 minutes or so I learned a lot about what the difference was between jail and prison, and what life was like inside the Los Angeles City jail, run as it is by those stalwart defenders of peace and justice, the LAPD.   And what he told me was bad, really actually kind of bad.

You will notice that I am not going to be specific about what it is he told me.  I am not going to be specific here in print.   You can talk to me in person or over the phone if you want more details.

I asked my new friend whether he understood that what he had experienced was, as far as I know, completely against the law and violated his civil rights. That if his experiences were publicized in the press that there would be a brief expression of outrage, some pious promises by our politicians to “get to the bottom of the story” and maybe a scapegoat or two, but that of course nothing would change.

I also asked him, who knows about this? And he says that as far as he can tell, anyone who wants to know about it knows. All the prisoners know, all police officers know because they are required to work at the jail for their first two years on the LAPD, and he presumes that any politician who cares to know, knows. How about rights groups, I asked. He laughs, oh they are easy to fool. They come in and as they walk through the jail things are fixed up while they are there and as they move on, things revert to normal.

By the way, in case you did not know this, jail is different from prison. You can not be in jail for longer than one year or 18 months (I forget which) and therefore have to be transferred to prison. Prison is apparently nicer than jail because it is run by outside contractors and those contractors are afraid that the former prisoners will kill them if they do shit like the LAPD does in the LA jail. But the LAPD is not concerned with that because everyone knows that anyone who fucks with an LAPD officer in any way is killed.

So where is the ACLU when all this is going on?   Where are our Los Angeles political leaders?

Now here is something you might want to know that many people who are white and middle class do not know. It turns out that the LAPD has a well-known reputation for, well, bad behavior, and that reputation is long standing and non-subtle. What is odd about this reputation is that the only people who don't seem to realize this are my middle class, privileged white friends. Every black person who lives in LA has a story to tell, they are not all making these stories up. It is only my white friends, well off by the standards of most Americans, who seem to be in complete denial about the LAPD reputation.

Are the rumors true? The rumors are always true, at least as far as they go.

So whats my point? I am not in a position to do anything about what I learned.   What, are you crazy?  I have more than enough problems just trying to figure out whether or not I have a career.  I dont need to make an enemy of the LAPD.  That would be quite self-destructive.

You on the other hand, my well-off, successful friends, who laugh at the stupidity of the people who live in the south and point the finger at Kansas City or Charleston S. C., it seems to me that you are just the right person to go out there and organize and end this injustice. Why not clean up your own hometown first?

One day this will all come out in the press I think, at least I hope it will.  Hey for all I know it already has and I just didnt notice.   Trust me, when you hear the details of the bad behavior I am referring to, you will not be amused and you will not think it is subtle.

Why do we permit any of this to go on in American in 2015?  Surely we know better by now.

Of course it could be that my friend was just making all this up.

Proposed Naming Convention for Random Acts of Violence

If you are like me, you are confused by the different random acts of violence in this country. Who can remember if the murders were committed by an extreme Muslim, a right wing nut trying to cause a race war, a local police force who traditionally murders black people to keep then in line, murder by special teams of major city police forces, murder by pretend-suicide in jail?  And whether they used an automatic weapon, ran into them with their HUMVEE or dropped a piano on their head.  Nobody can remember, its too confusing.

I think that we need to have a good naming convention, or at least a naming convention of some type in order to keep things straight.

When the time comes to build your digital studio, naming conventions will also be very important so this is good practice for you.   Naming conventions bring order out of chaos, give meaning to otherwise random strings of letters, and help you to find things both during a project or later, when the project is long over.  Because when a project is over, the project isn't over and very often a project needs to be revisited years later.

In this case, I propose that each random act of violence (RAV) have two names: a short one that is easy to remember, and a long one with all kinds of information.

The short one might be something like ELIJAH-2015-3, meaning the third RAV of 2015, named for the prophet Elijah.

The long name would be something like ELIJAH-2015-3-<type of violence>-<weapon>-
                                                                 <number dead>-<number wounded>-<location type>
                                                                  <location by name>

So it might be something like ELIJAH-2015-3-INDIVIDUAL-SEMIAUTOMATIC-5-8-
                                                                        MOVIE THEATRE-COLORADOSPRINGS

Of course we could come up with clever abbreviations to make things more obscure.

I am not sure if I really like this naming convention, but maybe with more thought we can come up with something that would work for us and help us to remember and keep separate the various criminals, nuts, insane and other people who are running around in America these days.

Thomas Piketty and the New Celebrity Economics

You know that things are going to hell in a handbasket when Economists become cultural heroes. When America, the ultimate anti-intellectual state, starts reading and discussing economics, then that is all the evidence you need that things must be bad, really bad.

For decades even centuries, the only economist that Americans needed was Adam Smith and a Cliff Notes for The Wealth of Nations.  But now not even Adam Smith is proof against revisionist Economics.

And Piketty has been particularly vicious and non traditional.  Looking for any evidence that the free market results in increased wealth for everyone, he discovered that, whoopsie, there was no evidence.  You mean that all that crap about capitalism and the free market has no evidence to support it? Thats a bummer, dont you think?

See
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/apr/13/occupy-right-capitalism-failed-world-french-economist-thomas-piketty

The Obsolete Vision of Dr. Heywood Floyd

When I was very young, I went to see 2001 in what must have been a 35 mm print in Richmond, VA.  . I was of course bored out of my mind.  I remember the concerns in the city that people might go to see this movie stoned, and I could certainly understand why.   Boring but beautiful.      But even though I was bored, it was clear to me, even then, that a particularly innocuous scene, that of Dr. Heywood Floyd's briefing on the Moon was filled with meaning.   A meaning that I, as a callow youth, could not understand.

Many critics have noticed this scene as well.  And completely misunderstood it.    One of the more well known, by Tony Macklin of Film Comment, said as early as 1969 that this scene was filled with tongue-in-cheek Kubrick irony.   And he made fun of his fellow critics for not realizing this irony and satire.  Or maybe it is the case that Macklin completely screwed the pooch here and himself misunderstood this subtle but criitical scene.

But before we go much futher, perhaps it would be best if you reviewed the scene to refresh your memory.

The scene can be found on Youtube. Note the natty checker suit of the photographer.

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

A partial transcript of the scene:

Dr. Ellison: Well, I know you will all want to join with me in welcoming our distinguished friend and colleague from the National Council of Astronautics, Dr. Heywood Floyd. Dr. Floyd has come up especially to Clavius to be with us today. And before the briefing I know he would like to have a few words with you. Dr. Floyd ?

(applause)

Dr. Floyd: Well, thank you Dr. Ellison. Hi everybody. Nice to be back with you. Well, first of all I bring a personal message from Dr. Howell who asked me to convey his deepest appreciation to all of you for the many sacrifices you have had to make. And of course his congratulations on your discovery which may well prove to be among the most significant in the history of science. Well, uh, (laughs), I know there have been some conflicting views held by some of you about the need for complete security in this matter. More specifically, your opposition to the cover story, created to give the impression that there is an epidemic at the base. I understand that beyond it being a matter of principle, Well, I completely sympathize with your point of view. I found this cover story personally embarrassing myself. However, I accept the need for absolute secrecy and I hope you will too. Now I am sure you are all aware of the extremely grave potential for cultural shock and social disorientation if the facts were made known without (bla bla bla, I got tired transcribing this dialog).. Anyway this is the view of the council. Oh yes, the Council has requested that a formal security oath be signed by everyone present. Well, are there any more questions?

Now how does our intellectual interpret this scene in Film Comment ? Tony Macklin says:

“When Floyd gives his remarks at the briefing the satire of the inept language fairly leaps out. It is trite and inarticulate. But it is not Kubrick's (or Clarke's) inadequacy, it is the characters' inarticulateness, their loss of language. A parade of meagre "well"s fills the air. Halvorsen, who introduces Floyd, starts out, "Well, . . . " He sticks his hands in his pockets. If this were done once, one might assume that it didn't matter. But this stance and feeble language are the imprint of the scene, the exposing of dullness.

“Floyd is no more competent in talking, "Hi, everybody, nice to be back with you," He follows this with the refrain, "Well, . . . " and then comments "Now, ah . . . " He too puts his hands in his pockets. When the floor is opened for questions, there is only one, about the danger of "cultural shock." Floyd responds, "Well, I, ah, sympathize with your point of view." (The questioner is against the cover story of an epidemic which has been used to protect the secret of the monolith on the moon.) Floyd concludes. "Well, I think that's about it. Any questions?" Halvorsen thanks Floyd, "Well, ... " "No more questions [there was only one]. We should get on with the briefing."

http://tonymacklin.net/content.php?cID=169

In my humble opinion, this is wrong, wrong and completely wrong.  Idiots.  Wouldnt you know that he would write for Film Comment, a nutty intellectual film magazine if there ever was one.

Instead of seeing Dr. Floyd's speech as inept, I see it as a masterwork; a bureaucratic tour de force and just what the situation called for. You see, Dr. Floyd is not there to bring new information: his mission is to tell everyone that they must keep quiet and do as they are told, and he finds the nicest possible way to say that.

In other words, Dr. Floyd demonstrates that he is in fact a senior and skilled bureaucrat perfectly capable of getting up in front and saying absolutely nothing in a genial and businesslike fashion.  And if there are no more questions as he points out, they can go on with their briefing.

But this is not the end of the story of the search for meaning in 2001.  Although 2001 is a solid 14 years behind us, clearly we can see that our psychohistorians have gone awry.  Pan Am and AT&T are way out of business, we do not have bases on the moon.  We did not send a manned expedition to Jupiter.   The interpretation of Dr. Floyd's speech required a firm grasp of the cold war aesthetic and the cold war bureaucracy.   But where is that bureaucracy now that Communism no longer exists and we have in its place the gangster capitalists of China and gangster gangsters of Russia not to mention the incompetent scum-politicos of America without two neurons to rub together?

New art requires new artists and our new society requires a new Heywood Floyd.  In the modern cinematic aesthetic, I can envisage Heywood Floyd ducking into the back to put on his superhero outfit and go out and punch a monolith in the nose.   Take that you damn monolith, he will say, go back to your masters, the giant robots, we will never allow you to turn Jupiter into a mini-mall.

Corruption and Degradation in Orange County

“The law must be honest, just, reasonable and according to the ways of the people. It must meet their needs and speak plainly, so that all men may know and understand, what the law is. It is not to be made in any man's favor, but for the needs of all them who live in the land. No man shall judge contrary to the law, which the king has given and the country chosen. [...] neither shall he [the king] take it back without the will of the people.”

English translation of the Latin from the Danish code of Holmiensis from roughly 1291. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Holmiensis

Why should we, as citizens, be concerned if it turns out that the District Attorney office of Orange County is a snake pit of unconstitutional illegalities?   I am of the opinion that nothing we do could possibly make a difference to our justice system.   Just publicly discussing the issues will probably result in some sort of action against the citizen who complains.  

I suppose that the reason we should care about the local insanity is that it puts us in a better position to accuse the rest of the world of being unjust and racist.  I mean how does it look for us to point the finger but not be aware of our own little, or not so little, corrupt cesspools?

So I want to bring to your attention two scandals closer to home.  The first is in Orange County and involves the District Attorney's office.  The second will be for another post and involve the LAPD.

To give you a feel for the magnitude of this gross violation of law, by those that we trust to enforce the law, consider the following paragraph chosen almost at random from the articles listed below:

In recent months, we've learned, over the objections of the Orange County Sheriff's Department (OCSD), that the agency created TRED, a computerized records system in which deputies store information about in-custody defendants, including informants. Some of the data is trivial; other pieces contain vital, exculpatory evidence. But for a quarter of a century, OCSD management deemed TRED beyond the reach of any outside authority. In Dekraai, deputies Ben Garcia and Seth Tunstall committed perjury to hide the mere existence of TRED. Those lies didn't originate from blind loyalty, however. The concealed records show how prosecution teams slyly trampled the constitutional rights of defendants by employing informants—and then keeping clueless judges, juries and defense lawyers.

from  http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/05/29/1388819/-Judge-disqualifies-all-250-prosecutors-in-Orange-County-CA-because-of-widespread-corruption#

The scandal in Orange County is pretty amazing. The news broke about 16 months ago, but I never heard a word of it until I stumbled on this about a month ago. Why not?   Why isnt our media discussing this, what should we call it, gross abuse of justice? A scandal that affects thousands and thousands of innocent citizens who have been victimized by a corrupt justice department in flagrant and egregious ways.

The thing to realize is that the corruption in Orange County is that it is so bad, that it may literally be the worst of its kind in American history.  True there has been a lot of corruption in American history, so that is quite a statement.  But it may be true because this is a particularly specific form of corruption. 

Its a complex story, a very large story, and I am sure I only know a few percent of the big picture. But let me tell you what I think I know and point you to some news articles. Then the both of us, you and I, can watch our justice system fail to punish the guilty and release and compensate the innocent. We can watch together as our system does what it has always done: support criminals as long as those criminals are in bed with the politicians. As it has always been in America.

What seems to have happened is that through a series of misadventures, a few judges demanded some information which revealed that the entire justice system of Orange County was completely corrupt. That they were keeping a database of evidence that proved the innocence of people which the County was prosecuting and getting convictions for. That the system was running an informant system in the jails that violated the rights of prisoners in an egregious and systematic fashion.

Check these out.  They are pretty terrific.

http://blogs.ocweekly.com/navelgazing/2015/06/national_review_calls_forepublicans_to_take_responsibility_in_orange_countys_informant_scandal.php

http://blogs.ocweekly.com/navelgazing/2015/03/seal_beach_salon_massacre.php

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/05/29/1388819/-Judge-disqualifies-all-250-prosecutors-in-Orange-County-CA-because-of-widespread-corruption#

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/03/orange-county-da_n_6993390.html

Excuse me? All 250 prosecutors for the county are disqualified? Excuse me, the entire office of the District Attorney of Orange County?

The problem is, you don't get to wash this shit under the rug forever you know. One day you wake up and find that citizens no longer believe that there is any justice, that all politicians are corrupt, and that the state exists purely to exalt the rich. Of course that is the case, now, all of these things are true: the politicians are corrupt, there is no justice except for the rich, and the state and the law and the economy only exists for the rich. But not everyone knows it. But when everyone does know it, then you have a bad situation. So you want to correct the problems before everyone figures it out. That would be the smart thing to do. Unfortunately, as proven over and over again, our leaders and their masters, the rich, are not smart. They are just greedy and corrupt.

Before we go beating up our friends in the South, I think we should clean up our own puddle of nastiness first.

Lets start with the Orange County DA office.

In another post, I will write up what I think I know about the LAPD and the jail that they run.   But that will be extra credit and later.

Internet Provides A New Way for Human Resources to Confuse Victims

When I first worked for a large corporation, I had a very benign view of Human Resources.  I assumed that HR was there to help everybody get their job done in an organized and civil manner. Yes I was so naive that I believed that HR had the employee's and potential employee's welfare in mind as well as that of the corporation. Of course as years went by I realized that this was rarely so, and that HR was there first and foremost to protect the corporation and nothing else.

Nevertheless, in spite of our experience, most American's seem to have a very naive view of various elements of the HR process.  They believe, against all experience, that many HR mediated processes are fair, that there are rules to the game and that the game is not entirely crooked.   They believe that people only get fired for just cause, that everyone gets the same shot at opportunities, and that corporations work hard to get the best person for the job, not merely the one that has surface validity or who expresses the same corrupt values as the people they will work for.

Of course the reality is different.  And not all of these differences are necessarily bad.  For example, one reason that not everyone gets the same opportunities, is that for most people I know at a fairly senior level, their jobs are created for them, in some sense tailored to the person who is being hired.   That has often been the case for me in the past, and is very much the case for many friends who are further along in their career.  Of course one side effect of this is that not everyone gets the same opportunity.

Related to that is the phenomena where jobs are not listed until there is a candidate in mind, or that a job is listed but will not be filled, or that the real qualifications are not the ones that are listed, or that the job is listed for pro forma reasons only, or that the job opening(s) is/are created as a way of gathering data about one's competition.

The single biggest lie is that people get hired without having contacts at the company that hires them.  In other words, that it can be done anonymously via the internet, a cover letter and a resume. It turns out that there are people for whom this has occurred, but it is not very common in my experience.  Usually you need someone inside pulling for you.

But even if the above is all true, it is certainly not a new phenomenon.  All of these issues have existed for years and decades and maybe even longer.

But there is one part that is new.  It used to be that there was a job board that was never quite up to date, with job openings tacked to the wall.   Or a book of job openings at the corporation that was unwieldy and difficult to use.  But now all corporations have Internet job boards online and what is great about these job boards, which the potential job seeker is required to use, is that they, in my humble experience, are rarely up to date and often are just wrong.

For the last several years, I have at irregular intervals, and purely manually, reviewed the job boards for a series of companies that are on a select list. In some cases I am interested in jobs at that company, in some cases I am just interested in the kinds of jobs that they advertise and what skills they need. There are a variety of reasons for this research, if that is what it is, and one of the reasons is to see to what extent companies perceive computer animation as a desirable skill.

But for whatever reasons I do this, I have noticed the odd situation where jobs seem to appear or disappear on a daily basis. One day here, one day not here, and seemingly at random. At first I just thought that the job opening had been pulled, or was filled, or some other normal explanation.

But recently I had a very egregious situation and proved to myself that the job listing did exist, but only if you knew the correct term to search for.  If you just did a general search for all job openings, it might or might not appear.

In other words, the Internet has helped create a whole new dysfunction for Human Resources to exhibit: the database-backed web page that is broken.