Station Eleven and the Fate of the English Major When Society Collapses

Warning, this post contains very modest spoilers associated with the novel Station Eleven by Emily Mandel. They are not much of a spoiler, but you are warned.

One artifact of science fiction becoming mainstream is that one has to deal with reviewers and even readers who have not had the benefit of knowing the genre, those who have not submitted to the discipline required to truly understand faster than light travel, telepathy, multi dimensional time portals and a host of other topics.  These mainstream critics may thus not be qualified to understand the field and its conventions. It can lead to some unfortunate encounters such as when a fellow undergraduate at college once said "You should read Pynchon, he writes science fiction that is actually good" and I thought to myself, I will probably hate Pynchon.  Well, I did not hate Pynchon, nor do I hate Station Eleven by Mandel, but it is not great science fiction despite what the reviews say.   But Station Eleven did have an unexpected benefit.  Although it was not intentional on the part of the author it alerted me to a terrible danger facing this nation as it awaits the inevitable collapse of civilization.

Station 11 is the highly acclaimed fourth novel by Emily Mandel about the world after a pandemic. It has its moments. I might give it a sold B- or so, but never, ever the acclaim that it is getting. The point of this post is not to review the novel per se, but to report to you an unexpected weakness that could inhibit our recovery from the type of disaster the novel describes.

You see, one of the unintended subtexts of the novel is to reveal just how powerless and incompetent a bunch of liberal arts majors are without their internet. This was not an intentional theme of the author, rather it is an accident that is revealed by the author's (and the reviewer's) ignorance of what would be possible technologically even in the absence of electrical power, the internet, and high octane gasoline. This is apparently a disaster novel written by an English major. Very good at crafting paragraphs but not too bright when it comes to technology about which she clearly knows almost nothing.

So now two light spoilers although the first one isnlt much of a spoiler since you probably can not get through the first two pages without figuring it out.

Spoiler number one: Station 11 is set in a near future where 99.9 percent of humanity has died of a particularly infectious and fatal form of the flu. You can be infected by being around someone who already has it, no direct contact is necessary, and anyone who gets it is dead within a few days which is presumed to be long enough to infect everyone else. The end result is that within about a month pretty much everyone is dead. The people who do survive have to go out to the country to find food and create the setting for the rest of the novel.

In our second spoiler, we reveal that people are reduced to bows and arrows and it is a major plot point that some unknown people have actually recreated a small electricity grid. Technology you see has completely gone away and we are back to perhaps Late Antiquity or so. In other words, people know about horses, wheels, and plows, but can only dream of having a refrigerator or an electric light.

This is what comes of a deficient education system. This is what comes of having children raised on the Internet and reality television.

You see, seeing as how this is set in the near future, Toronto and the state of Illinois, where our plot mostly takes place, has something called a library. Probably every small town has one. And in this library are books. And down the street, now abandoned, are machine shops. And yes, while the rotary tools might very well be powered by electricity that is not immediately available, there are other ways to use those tools even without electrical power.

First, build one of these and use it to distill alcohol... 

Then go to your local abandoned hardware store and pick up one of these....

On top of that, it is not so hard to build a steam engine out of all the spare parts left around after everybody dies. One could easily build water driven devices and steam engines even without electricity or gasoline. A handy stream and some wood will do. And they can be rigged to drive a magnet with wire (which is lying around after the apocalypse in every building) and you have an electrical generator.

If you want to repurpose any of those millions of abandoned automobiles, where, you might wonder, would the gasoline come from since the story has established that gasoline went away through evaporation in a few years?

Well, not all engines run well on alcohol, but many can be tuned to run acceptably well.   Many engines such as one finds in things like portable power generators, available and in stock at your local hardware store, are made to run on a variety of fuels.  Even more useful, but more specialized and less immediately available, are belt driven generators which can use a variety of motive forces.  This is something that could be easily interfaced to a water wheel or wind mill.

Here is an article on converting your car to run on alcohol and how to distill your own by Mr. Keat Drane. See http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel_library/ethanol_drane.html.  This article is filled with interesting information about the history of fuels to power engines, and how to distill your own fuel.

The great American philosopher, Clint Eastwood, said that “A man has got to know his limitations” (1) and very clearly Ms. Mandel does not know what she does not know.

But Mandel has done us a favor and just in the nick of time. She has alerted us to the complete ignorance so many of our citizens have about how the basic things in their life work.  We can not choose who will survive the inevitable destruction of civilization, and if they are all English majors then we would have a second disaster on our hands. 

I hope you will join me in petitioning our public servants to create remedial education programs, programs which must be made mandatory for all English majors, to correct this dangerous knowledge gap before it is too late.

Station Eleven by Emily Mandel on Amazon.com

http://www.amazon.com/Station-Eleven-Emily-John-Mandel/dp/0804172447

_________________________________________

1. This is from Magnum Force, and Mr. Eastwood was being sarcastic.

The Journalism of Runaway Blimps

Is it too much to ask journalists to spend five minutes trying to understand what they are writing about, or is it just hopeless.  In particular I am tired of journalists fucking up when it comes to writing about defense or intelligence matters as these areas are so expensive and important that we should stop being ignorant about them.

Misinformation is a problem.

For example, lets review the case of the runaway blimp in Pennsylvania. Its a medium sized blimp, that is or was normally tethered to the ground.  It apparently broke away from its mooring because of the weather although that is not entirely clear.   Like all modern lighter-than-air craft, it is filled with helium.

See, for example, the Guardian's discussion of the rogue blimp.

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/28/us-army-blimp-breaks-free

Its a big helium balloon.  It is not clear whether it caused the power failures in PA.   Maybe it did, and maybe it didnt.  But the balloon did not cost 2.8 billion.  The moron journalist could read about the JLENS project here had he wanted to.

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

Its not a space shuttle. It is part of a program that over the last 10 years or so probably did cost that much money because it is part of an effort to create an over-the-horizon radar for air defense, and radar, which is usually very exotic, weird electronics, can be very expensive.

But the blimp, oh I dont know, maybe a million or two.

Get a grip guys. Make a phone call. Use the internet and read up on the program. Yes, even you, the jounalist, should be able to figure it out with a minute or two of thought.

I know you can do it.

R Stockton Gaines in Memoriam

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One of my favorite people from the RAND Corporation and its no long existent Information Sciences Department has passed away.

R. Stockton Gaines was a PhD from Princeton, a longtime editor of the ACM for Operating Systems and a pioneer of secure computing.

There is a memorial service coming up this weekend.

This has been a very bad year for this sort of thing.

This post will be updated with more information later.

Clarifications about Unity 5

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There is some misunderstandings about Unity 5 out there, so here are the facts as I know them:

1. There are three scripting languages, but one of them is not Javascript. There is a “javascript-like” language but it is not Javascript.

2. It is said that Unity has its own IDE, but it seems to use MS Visual Studio for C#

3. C# seems to be standard but of course there is no .NET, there is an equivalent to it however.

4. I was advised not to try and read data files from Unity but in fact it works very well.

5. Unity does seem to support GLSL shaders for standalone systems (e.g. desktop Mac, Windows, etc) Documentation for this can be found here.

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/GLSL_Programming/Unity

I have mixed feelings about this.

When Neil deGrasse Tyson Spoke at the Virginia Military Institute

Recent events have conspired, one more time, to paint the Southern United States in a bad light. People are so negative and instead of lauding the fabulous cuisine (grits, cornbread, Smithfield ham), for example, they always emphasize the same old negative stuff. You know, racism, slavery, segregation, separate but unequal schools, that sort of thing.

So much for tolerance of cultural diversity.

But I am here to testify to you that at least parts of the South has changed in recent years and I have an example that is pretty amazing, and very specific to Virginia.

A few days ago, while throwing away my life while surfing the Internet, I came across an article on the AAAS website (American Association for the Advancement of Science) about science education that featured Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson who was a speaker at a conference on the subject. You can find this article at the following URL and I have provided some screengrabs of it at the end of the post.

http://membercentral.aaas.org/blogs/stemedu/neil-degrasse-tysons-battle-cry-stem

Neil deGrasse Tyson is, of course, the very eloquent spokesperson for Astrophysics at the Hayden Planetarium of the American Museum of Natural History. A PhD in astrophysics, a graduate of the Bronx High School of Science, an author of many books, the star of the recent Cosmos reboot, and so forth, Neil is very entertaining and is very well known in the New York area and now because of Cosmos is also well known nationally.  I worked with Neil for a few years as a consultant on the Hayden Planetarium rebuild and the NASA Digital Galaxy project and Neil was very entertaining even when he was not in public.  He is also, apparently, a nice guy.  Or at least he was with me.

Here is a picture of Neil.

I don't know if you noticed, but Neil seems to be an African American. Well I am not sure what the whole story is, but no doubt Neil is definitely a person of color, we might say. Or maybe a scientist of color. I dont know, whatever.

Now we get to the point. I can prove to you that Virginia, at least, has come a long, long way since the war, even if it may still have a long way to go.

The conference on science education (STEM) where Neil was a speaker was held at the Virginia Military Institute (VMI) in Lexington, VA.

(pause for reaction)

Well, I can tell that you are not from Virginia, because if you had been from Virginia and I had just told you that Dr. Tyson had spoken at VMI and your jaw did not drop, or your eyes bug out, or you fell out of your chair, then that is a pretty clear indication that indeed you are not from the Old Dominion.

Its a long story but it goes something like this. VMI is considered to be a bastion of Virginian aristocracy. It was said for many years that if you wanted to become Governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia, that it was helpful to have attended VMI. Many famous people have been alumni of VMI including Gen. George Marshall who was the Chief of Staff of the US Army during WW 2, George Patton's grandfather, who died in the War Between the States defending liberty and grandson, the third George Patton, and the one they made the movie about, attended VMI before he left to go to West Point.

There are many other colorful stories one might tell about VMI that would help to illustrate how tightly VMI is tied into the self-image of Virginians. Here is the well-known story behind a famous Southern nickname, not of a student, but of one of the early VMI professors. It seems this professor of Philosophy from VMI got his nickname during the very first battle of that destructive and stupid war between the states when he refused to retreat from the field and the commander of a Texas regiment, exhorting his troops, said “There stands Jackson like a stone wall”, although some people think he was saying that Prof. Jackson was dumb as a rock.

In other words, no less than the Country Club of Virginia, and maybe even more so, VMI is a part of the established order of the very aristocratic would-be aristocracy of Virginia who are still pissed off about the whole slavery thing.

That a black man, however famous, spoke at VMI is not to be sniffed at.

At the very least it surprised me and I grew up there.

Should I want you to conclude that there is racism in Virginia? Of course there is racism in Virginia and I wish it would go away. But things do change slowly for the better. A few years ago there was actually a black governor of Virginia which is a pretty amazing situation right there.

At least many Virginians realize there is racism present which is more than I can say about most of my friends in Southern and Northern California who seem to be in complete denial of the racism in their own communities.

Here are some scans of the article and quotes from Neil that prompted this post.

Virginia Military Institute

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

Cosmos (2014) on IMDB

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2395695/

Bronx High School of Science

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

Stonewall Jackson on Wikipedia

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

Stonewall Brigade on Wikipedia

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

Jim Shaw at the New Museum

        This world is mine, in time. You best of all of us, Gabriel, should understand ambition.

                                                                              Lucifer/Satan from Constantine (2005)

I am happy to report that an alumnus of degraf/Wahrman (dWi), Jim Shaw, is having a retrospective of his work exhibited at the New Museum in New York (see link below).

I have not one, not two, but at least five friends from the early days of computer animation who are recognized as successful contemporary fine artists to varying degrees. But all of the others are involved in the digital arts in one way or another.  Jim is the only one I know who has achieved his success through what we might call "old media", you know, painting and drawing, with no computers involved.

Of course there were many “artists” who helped found computer animation in the 1970s and 1980s and “art” is one of those culturally laden terms that mean different things to different communities.  Hollywood is particularly fond of giving its own meaning to the term "artist" as is discussed in this post:   What is Meant When it is Said Hollywood Needs Artists    Other types of artists in this world might include production designers, fashion designers, commercial art directors, graphic designers, visual effects supervisors, and so forth.

But we are not talking about that kind of artist, as difficult and competitive as some of those fields are. What we are talking about here is the varsity squad, an artist of the sense of museums, collectors, galleries in NY and London and notices in certain elite magazines.  This is what we might call the :"real" world of fine art.

What you may not be aware of is that this is the dream of so many artists, or at least of people who went to art school, and it is far from easy to achieve. Of 100 talented people who attend art school, how many become recognized artists? Of the people who attend film school, how many become noted directors of film?

But the really disturbing thing is not just that my friend, Jim Shaw, is successful at pretty much exactly what he wanted to achieve back when I knew him in 1980, the really disturbing thing is that he is to have a retrospective one person show.  Retrospective?  I just exchanged email with Jim and he is as always creating new pieces right and left.  Perhaps I am giving too much emphasis  to one meaning of the term "retrospective".

There is much more I could say about Jim Shaw, but I will just mention a few of them here. First, he never secretly aspired to be a commercial art director, or a visual effects supervisor, or anything else but what he did. Second, as long as I have known him, from when I believe he was an assistant art director at Robert Abel & Associates, he was producing his own work every day. Publishing his own books of his artwork. Putting on a Thrift Store Art exhibition. Third, and finally, we hired him at deGraf/Wahrman as an art director for various reasons, but the most important one to me was that it would help him make a living while he was building his career as a fine artist.

I haven't talked to him for about 20 years but I recently exchanged email with him courtesy of John Nelson (I had had trouble tracking Jim down).   Not only is he doing well, but he has a life, apparently, and has been married for over 20 years.  Amazing.

Information about his show in New York is at

http://www.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/view/jim-shaw-the-end-is-here

His public statement from the Thrift Store Art exhibit is here:

http://globalwahrman.blogspot.com/2013/01/statement-from-thrift-store-art.html

The Russian Pageview Anomaly on Global Wahrman

Something rather odd has happened to the Global Wahrman pageview statistics over the last few days. Although these events are as yet unexplained, no reasonable person could look at them and not see the influence of some covert menace, a menace that may even at this moment be conspiring against the Free World and Democracy.   

Although I try not to obsess about my audience, like any writer I am gratified to have an audience at all. Google/Blogspot provides several mechanisms to track one's readership and from the very beginning I noticed a certain underlying activity, a murmur if you will from such places as Ukraine, Bulgaria, Romania, Georgia, Armenia, China, Montenegro, Serbia, Albania, Pakistan and of course Russia.

But as time went by and as I presumably built up a readership, this poking and occasional comment spam reduced until I barely noticed it.

Well in the last three days, someone in Russia seems to have become very, very interested in Global Wahrman, to the point where it far overshadows my normal readership. In fact it overwhelms the exceptional readership that happens from time to time (such as when someone in France seemed to notice my post about SIGGRAPH (see here) and my pageviews from the country that invented Semiotics skyrocketed for a week or so which makes a certain sense to me, somehow.

But Russia all of a sudden can't seem to get enough of Global Wahrman. Could this be Putin interested in the history of Computer Animation?  Perhaps they are interested in my analysis of secret aerospace programs? Or on the archaeology of the Cold War?  Am I being recruited by Russian Secret Intelligence?

Should I mysteriously disappear or hang myself in my cell, please notify the appropriate authorities that I may be a victim of some sort of Russian conspiracy.

[10/12/2015 The interest in Global Wahrman from Russia is continuing.  I wonder why?]

Is that you, Vladimir, reading my blog?

Communication & Anecdotes About Early Computer Animation

Dear Friends,

Some of you have noticed that it is hard to reach me on the phone.  That is correct it is, and it will continue to be so for a while.

One of the fun manifestations of being abused by the medical community is the difficulty in getting the medication necessary to process stress, where stress may include such things as going to the grocery store or starting thermonuclear war.

Therefore in order to prevent you from experiencing thermonuclear war, I constrict most communication to such things as email and text messages, with no guarantee for a prompt response to either.   Its for your own good, trust me.

Now on other news, we are collecting anecdotes on how you first did computer animation.  I had to walk through the snow for five miles each day, for example. Someone else had to type up vector lists on punched cards.  Still a third took a course in programming a plotter in Fortran from Nelson Max in 1975.  Please send me your stories.

You suffered and now you should get some recognition for your suffering.

Sincerely,
MW

Learning Unity 3D

Unity (3D) is one of those all-in-one, inclusive, cradle-to-grave 3D packages that has a billion and one things that it tries to do in an effort to provide some sort of structure or environment for real time 3D animation, what many would call “games”. Or “VR”.

It is clear that they have done a valiant job to both provide a framework, and also to provide scriptability and programmability at every level. Thank goodness the bad old days when somehow people thought they were going to do computer animation without being able to program computers seems to be dead. It is also clear that Unity has put a lot of serious effort into providing real documentation in contrast to so many other firms out there who seem to think that they can "group source" their documentation from random users.  I appreciated that they recognized that there is user documentation online that is not very good.  They have an entertaining IDE that seems to work right out of the box and supports not one, not two, but three different but related scripting languages.  This is all good news.

The bad news is simply that with software of this type there are barriers to entry and one needs to reach a certain critical mass before you can do much of anything useful with it.  This is just a fact of life.  And at least in Unity's case everything makes sense, at least so far.  That is more than I can say about many other software packages out there whose name I will not mention, other than Photoshop and Gimp, those two I will mention by name.

So it takes time to get traction as with any serious software package.

There is one silliness which I have noticed they try to conscientiously document.  One of their three embedded scripting languages is "Javascript-like" but when you look closer you realize it is not Javascript much at all.  So that is a little weird and it has the side effect that in fact you only think you know how to program one of their scripting languages, the reality is different.

So why do I mention all this?  Its because a friend asked for some help on a demonstration he was doing in Unity and he had a little less than a week.  The problem is, in about a week one can start thinking about getting something simple done in a system like this.  A month would be more realistic.

And this is not an isolated situation. The fact is that there are dozens if not hundreds of these packages out there, each in their own niche, and none of them are terribly difficult to learn, at least up to a point. But it is not instantaneous and figuring out which ones to learn and become good at is not intuitively obvious, most of the time.

[10/16/2015 As an addendum, although it has taken longer than I like to learn elements of Unity, it is proceeding and it will be entertaining and useful to pursue this at least as far as doing a non-trivial trial application, maybe something in the so-called VR world which is certainly trendy right now]

My "Hello, world" script in C# for Unity.  From tiny acorns might oaks grow.

Words Stolen from the English Language

First Uber, then Jaunt, two of my favorite words, now gone forever. Or at least as long as I live.

It used to be that I could show some multilingual sophistication by creating Germanic compound words, using Uber, such as uberdog, uberschmuck, and uberswine, just to name three. But now with Uber, the taxi service which is worth billions because it is able to find a way to employ the masses of unemployed that the US has created with globalization and with failing to provide any alternative for them, Uber is forever associated, in this country at least, with that quasi-taxi scam.

In other words, a favorite word has been stolen from me, and I dont like it.

Another such word is Jaunt. You may not be aware that “jaunt” a rather rare but normal part of the English language also has a secret meaning and a secret history. One of the most important early science fiction novels is/was The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester in which teleportation is called “jaunting”, or “to jaunt”. Now it will probably lose that meaning because everyone will assume you mean the new, very well financed, VR game company.

You want to steal a word from me, fine. Love you too.

An early use of the concept of synesthesia

The Stars My Destination on Wikipedia

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

The Stars My Destination on Amazon.com
http://www.amazon.com/The-Stars-Destination-Alfred-Bester/dp/1876963468

The Tourist Guide to Cemeteries, War Zones and Prisons

I have come across a site which will be of interest to all readers of Global Wahrman.

A former academic linguist by the name of Peter Hohenhaus has created a site which catalogs for the international traveler sites of interest for those who are entertained by the macabre or darker side of history.

Such sites would include famous cemeteries, battlefields, unused nuclear reactors, missile launch sites, sites of massacres and crimes against humanity and so forth. His categories include grave tourism, cult of personality tourism, prison and persecution tourism, communist tourism, cold war tourism, disaster area tourism and so forth.

His sites include all the big hits of recent history.

Everything is very well organized. He offers practical experience, what is involved in visiting most of these sites, and so forth. Its quite a resource.

www.dark-tourism.com

Dr. Hohenhaus himself 

Why the Socialists Will Always Be a Fringe Party in American Politics

For the first time in my life, there is a candidate for the President for the United States for a major party who has a chance of winning the nomination who is also, at least in part, a Socialist. There have been many presidents and even more candidates with agendas that came originally from a Socialist agenda, suitably sanitized and sold to the American public, but none to the best of my knowledge that could explicitly identify their origin as Socialist.   And there have been major candidates (and contenders) who have been slandered by their opponents as being Socialists, or even card-carrying Communists, who of course were nothing of the sort.  

But as long as one hides the origins of ideas, a reasonable portion of the Socialist agenda from the 1920s and the 1930s were achieved in this country for a period of time, such things as the 5-day and 40 hr work week are all from the Socialist agenda and were opposed by all the major parties as being too radical, back in the day.

So with Bernie Sanders being a leading candidate for the Democratic Party nomination, I thought it would be interesting to see how the “real” Socialists, the hardcore, the truly committed, what they thought about his progress.

The answer is too predictable to even be funny.

They hate him.

No, more than that. They passionately despise him.

You see, a real Socialist would never work with the Democratic Caucus in Congress. A real Socialist would never, ever disagree with the Party Line in any way. To do so would be betrayal, and that is what Bernie is in their eyes. A traitor to the cause.

So helpfully, www.truthdig.com has published a nice 6 page article on all the things you must be willing to die for to be a Socialist, or you are not a Socialist.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/what_it_means_to_be_a_socialist_20150920

For example, in order to be a Socialist, you must immediately call for the destruction of Israel in order to protest their “genocidal” policies against the “Palestinians” or you are not a Socialist. Say again, what? Although I think that pretty much every American wishes that particular conflict to go away and many of us are aware that it never will, to make that a precondition for Socialism means that the Socialists have no interest in being in any way a part of the mix of American politics.

This helpful piece goes further into the beliefs of a real Socialist, but most of all he makes clear that any failure to completely support *all* of these issues means that you are not a Socialist.  What I like about this approach is that it is very clear.  Clear writing is important.  Ambiguity can be good as well, but ambiguity allows doubt.  Ambiguity might promote inclusiveness and the point of this well written article is the opposite of inclusiveness.  If one could be a "Cafeteria Socialist" then there are many of their proposed economic policies that I think Americans would find appropriate.

Its all very well to say that we must prosecute Pres Bush and Pres Obama for war crimes, but I think it is going to be hard to build a consensus to go after both of them.   In fact I would venture that about half the American public would agree to one but not the other, and the other half the reverse.   

Unilaterally destroy all nuclear weapons?  That would be nice!  Call for full employment and unionized workplaces?  Absolutely.   Declare Global Warming an emergency and invest in renewable energy and turn away from fossil fuels.  I am all for it.  Nationalize all public utilities, banks, railroads and energy companies? You bet. Give full citizenship immediately to all undocumented workers?   Hmmm, thats quite a few people, isnt it  Give $600/week to anyone who is unemployed or disabled.  Sure! Demilitarize all police (e.g. disarm all police).  Uhh, well, uhh.

And he goes on and on and on, irrespective of whether or not any of these can achieve a legislative majority, and certainly without prioritizing.  They are all equally important.  I think by the time he is through there might be several 1000 people nationwide who will agree with his entire agenda.  Maybe.

Impractical is not the word.

I like it when he goes on to say ... 

Socialists do not sacrifice the weak and the vulnerable, especially children, on the altars of profit. And the measure of a successful society for a socialist is not the GDP or the highs of the stock market but the right of everyone, especially children, never go to bed hungry, to live in safety and security, to be nurtured and educated, and to grow up fulfill his or her potential. Work is not only about a wage, it is about dignity and a sense of self-worth.

Whether our Socialist likes it or not, or whether the Tea Party likes it or not, the American political system is based on being able to find a workable compromise.  Extremists who insist on moral purity make the system unworkable as the Tea Party has proven so well over the last decade or so.

So what this article convinces me is that Socialism, at least in its pure form, does not have a chance in hell in the American political system, short, perhaps, of armed revolution.

Pat Cole, Kathy White, Nancy Bernstein, Brian Jennings: In Memoriam

All of the above were each in their own way involved in the early days of computer animation, Pat Cole was earlier than any of the others. Nancy was involved in NY, the rest mostly in Los Angeles, and in Pat's case also SF.

Pat Cole first came to my attention when she worked at JPL for Dr. Jim Blinn and Bob Holtzmann. She was also responsible for some very important early parties in Los Angeles, where I met many people. I know that she struggled with some sort of very long term illness for many years before she passed away.

Kathy White had been a technical director at Robert Abel & Associates after I was no longer there and then was one of the early technical directors at Rhythm & Hues. I barely knew the woman, but she was friends of friends and seemed like a very nice person. She was also depressed and her passing was unexpected to many.

Nancy Bernstein was an early producer at R/Greenberg & Associates and then came out west to work at Digital Domain. She died after a long illness.

Brian Jennings was a computer animator who worked at Kroyer, at deGraf/Wahrman and many other places. He moved to India and seemed to love the place. His passing was a surprise and a shock.

Is Applying to Graduate School Self-Destructive?

At this point I am well into the process of applying for graduate school, although I am also in the awkward, anxiety driven stage where literally none of the important milestones have been achieved.

And so the the topic “applying to graduate school when outside the normal demographic” or some other title to-be-determined will become a formal topic of this blog.

As is often the case in this blog, the reasons for having such a topic, which could potential expose me to public derision or embarrassing failure, include the usual ones of (a) working through my own issues during this process and (b) as a lesson to the others who might have similar aspirations.

It is probable that the topics of this blog will change as this and other activities become more active.

It is probable that I will become unavailable to write for the blog as I slam into deadlines, although sometimes the reverse is true in that the blog becomes a meritorious way of procrastinating.

It is probable that I will create posts that accurately explain what I have learned and what I feel about them in the context of expectations about life and society, and that these posts will then mysteriously disappear as I reconsider whether they can be part of a public image.

This latter is pretty sad because these posts are usually among the most interesting, and I already have pretty high standards of self-deprecation, so these extreme posts can be entertaining. But thats too bad, as it is this blog could use more editorial to keep it on track and avoid random diversions and self indulgence.

The first topic, probably, coming soon is why in the world I would do something as silly as applying to graduate school.

More later.

Understanding Kusonoki Masashige

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More good information from Yayoi which needs to be added to this post.  Let there be no doubt, whatever was originally meant by this epigram, I am sure that it is not the meaning that I would want it to have.

I came across an intriguing poem, or maybe an epigram, written by a historical figure of 13th century Japan, Kusonoki Masashige, who is as famous in Japan as Abraham Lincoln or Brad Pitt is in America.  

It seemed to me that this poem had been translated in a way that probably left out a lot of nuance that would be clear to someone Japanese when read in that language, but to a contemporary American was somewhat inscrutable.

It did not help to discover that this poem had been used as the motto of one or more of the Japanese Special Attack Units of World War 2, nor did it help to discover, after I first wrote this post, that it had been used by Pynchon in Gravity's Rainbow.  It just reinforced the impression that there was some sort of deeper meaning concealed within.

This epigram/whatever is apparently so well known that it has its own abbreviation in Japan, based on the Chinese characters HI RI HO KEN TEN.

In one translation to English we read

        Wrong cannot prevail over Truth

        Nor Truth conquer the Law

        The Law cannot prevail over Power

        Nor Power conquer Heaven

Although Thomas Pynchon would translate it as 

        Injustice cannot conquer Principle, 
        Principle cannot conquer Law, 
        Law cannot conquer Power, 
        Power cannot conquer Heaven

We will update this post as more information is acquired.

So my first guess for what this means is as follows: An unjust act, however excused, can never triumph over the principle of what is right and what is wrong. Stealing from the poor as the banks do in this country can never be the right thing. But that principle of right and wrong can not triumph over the laws of a society, however unjust. Thus when the banks conspire with the judiciary to impose grossly unfair tariffs on the poor to punish them for being poor, then the law overrides the principle of right and wrong, even though the principle still holds.  But the laws of a society will submit to power. In Japanese society this might have been the power of the individual lords, in America this may mean the power of wealth and privilege. So a wealthy man steals and nothing is done but a poor man goes to jail for life. Power conquers the law. But ultimately power must submit to Heaven, the powers of life and death.   

This is probably not what Masashige meant, this is just my first effort at understanding this.  So far, none of my Japanese knowledgeable friends have been able to help.  One thought is that Law refers to Dharma, but that would not work with my definition here.

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Notes: 

1 The quote from Pynchon is:

2. A french glossary found on Google Books has the following

3. Kusunoki Masashige's page on Wikipedia:

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

4. Japanese Special Attack Units on Wikipedia

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

Fan Service in Space Movies: An Evolving Artform

In his work on Smut, the American poet and philosopher Tom Lehrer once said

    All books can be indecent books

    Though recent books are bolder

    For filth, I'm glad to say, is in

    The mind of the beholder

                  (Lehrer, 1-4)

The sexual exploitation of women in film is a much misunderstood tradition that goes back to the very origins of the filmmaking craft.  What is not normally acknowledged however is the rich variety and subtle nuance of sexist exploitation, from mere "fan service" to plot-motivated actresses in skimpy outfits.  In this post we propose to review some of the details of the myriad forms that cheesy exploitation of women can assume, in particular with reference to movies that take place in what we used to call Outer Space.

One important distinction between the greater and lesser uses of exploitation is whether having scantily clad women (and in a very few cases, men) is whether there is even the most shallow excuse for the exploitation in the story.  Just like in American musical theatre any song is supposed to advance the story, the same should be true for the exploitation of women.  The lowest form of exploitation is that which has no possible reason or justification.

The Japanese term-of-art for the gratuitous insertion of scantily clad women, or men, or aliens, in order to stimulate the viewer is "fan service" which simply provides without reason whatever viewer stimulation the intended audience prefers.

On the higher and more refined part of town, though, one can work elements consisting of women in spandex into the raison d'etre of the film and thus reinforce the important ideas that underlie the film experience.  One film in particular that did this well was Roger Vadim's Barbarella (1968) in which the sexually active lead, a woman ahead of her time, played by Jane Fonda, causes the Orgasmatron-like Excessive machine to expire after a sex marathon with Ms. Fonda thus demonstrating her superior capacity for pleasure.  No cheap exploitation of women here.

And certainly we can say that the casting and costuming of Ms. Jovavitch in Luc Besson's Fifth Element (1997) was motivated by the highest ideals of the motion picture industry.

Milo Jovovitch from the Fifth Element (1997), above, and an unknown actress from Planet of the Vampires (1965).  

The cinema must move on from these brilliant yet analog expressions of cheesy exploitation and find new ways to demean themselves.  Directors and producers struggle to find appropriate and stylistically valid ways to exploit women of both genders in order to increase the appeal and the box office of their creative works.

We are less than a month away from the release of The Martian (2015) and the material released so far seems to give very little opportunity to exploit women.   This has left many scholars and fans of the cinematic arts worried that Ridley Scott may let down the side.

This film has unusual conventions for a space movie.  Most movies set in space will generally make use of a giant robot or a superhero or two, perhaps an alien race of Amazon Women, or other sophisticated plot elements that naturally provide opportunities for the filmmaker in collaboration with their costume designer. 

But things are not so easy in The Martian as the various female leads are supposed to be serious working professionals, and thus diving into the gutter to pander to the adolescent male of all ages requires some sophistication and sophistication has never been known as a motion-picture industry strong point.  If this were a James Bond movie, it would be straightforward to simply introduce one of the female leads in a scuba outfit, but this is space, the final frontier, sans superheroes, or even Uhura, or other Star Trek rebooted characters, so what is a filmmaker to do?

As you can see from several of the recent Star Treks, the role of women in space cinema has come a long way

Not only is the The Martian a hardcore, mostly scientific man-vs-nature adventure film about an astronaut marooned on Mars, but it is a Mars very explicitly without any Martian Princesses lounging around. At first glance its hard to see where exactly the sexist exploitation of women can be derived.

Nevertheless, a few stills from a viral marketing promo about this upcoming film gives us hope. Its subtle, true, but it makes us optimistic for the future.

Good posture, don't you think?

I want to encourage Ridley Scott and his filmmaking team to grasp this opportunity with both hands and supply the fan service for which he is known.  It is small things like this that can cheer up the otherwise pointless and dreary lives of their audience.

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Notes:

1. Tom Lehrer. Smut can be found at
http://www.guntheranderson.com/v/data/smut.htm

2. Those interested in reading further should check out the Wikipedia page on
Catsuits and Jumpsuits in Popular Media.

3. The Martian(2015) on IMDB  
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3659388/

4. Barbarella (1968) on IMDB  

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062711/

5. Planet of the Vampires (1965) on IMDB

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0059792/

Mythopolis

First animated film that I have seen in years that I loved.   A story of very appealing characters drawn from Greek mythology in daily life.

https://vimeo.com/137734846

Enola Gay Smithsonian Exhibit Disaster Part 2

In this post, I review the book that historians wrote about the issues involved in the disaster of the Enola Gay exhibition at the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum, a disaster that was very public and very embarrassing for the historians involved. You can find this book here.  You can read a synopsis I wrote about some of the issues here.

This post is likely to be only interesting to those of you who are interested in museums, or historiography, or possibly how the history of the cold war is interpreted for the public.  The rest of you should skip this and move on to more entertaining posts.

There are four questions I had in mind when I read this book. The first was whether the accusations that veterans made about the historians during this encounter were in any way validated by this book. The second was whether the historians were disingenuous in how they presented the issues here. The third was about whether the historians gave any serious credence to what people who had been involved in the event told them. And the fourth was whether the historians involved should have realized that they were about to cause a major controversy and whether they took reasonable steps to prevent it.

1. During and after the Enola Gay exhibit controversy, which you had to be deaf not to have heard about at the time it occurred, two accusations were made by the veteran associations about the historians writing the exhibit. The first was that the historians were adamant that they were going to present revisionist conclusions about this event whatever the veterans thought and the second was that the historians involved were incredibly, unbelievably arrogant. After reading this book from the historians point of view, I can tell you that without doubt the historians involved were adamant that they were going to present their revisionist point of view and that furthermore as far as they were concerned that was the only legitimate point of view, period. And the second impression I got, dripping from every page, was exactly how superior the historians thought they were to anyone else involved. Exactly like the veterans said. No misunderstanding there, whatsoever.

2. One of the things I look for in reading arguments from one side or another of a debate, is how well they present issues that I happen to know something about. If, let us say, there are 20 issues discussed and it just so happens that I know very well what is involved in two of them, I look with special interest at those two. It lets me judge to what extent those other 18 issues are presented in good faith. This is especially useful in the situation where one side admits honestly to something that does not help their argument, but they do so anyway in the interests of fairness. This may be a lot to ask, but I do it anyway.

At one point, the argument is made that the B-29 was an uninteresting airplane technically or aeronautically (is that a word?) and in and of itself had no particular justification for being in the Air & Space Museum. They even trot out an Air Force Officer to make that comment and then leave it there in the book as being decided. The B-29 was uninteresting.

This is an astonishing misrepresentation of the facts. It is so outrageous as to call into doubt anything else the authors of the book say. The B-29 was not only an incredible technological achievement, it was an achievement that had to be reached in order for the Army Air Corps to make their argument that they deserved to be a separate service and this is all intertwined with the history of aviation and the theory of strategic bombing. The B-29 was the technology that was going to prove this principle and it was the second most expensive R&D project of the war.  In other words, it was not only technologically interesting, it was of tremendous importance to the history of how we fought the war and how we planned the future of aviation. Without doubt, this plane and the effort to create it, deserves a place in the history of aviation.  The B-29 deserves to be at the Air & Space Museum.

 It makes me wonder just who they thought was going to read this book that they would make such an outrageous misstatement.  But this behavior fits the model that says that the historians of this period live in their own world and believe what they want to believe.  

Years after this disaster, the Smithsonian restored the Enola Gay, presumably over their dead body, and exhibited it at their secondary location outside Washington.  They still have not told the amazing story of the 509th Composite Group to the best of my knowledge.

The second issue is a bit more subtle but without doubt demonstrates bad faith on the part of the historians. At one point, they talk about how much money was spent to restore the Enola Gay with the implication of “there, are you happy now” referring to, in their opinion, the childish wishes of the veterans. What the book fails to tell you, but I happened to know, is that the Enola Gay had been treated like garbage by the Smithsonian, and left to rot and rust for decades in spite of the complaints of the veterans and the Air Force. The reason it cost so much to restore was because the Smithsonian had treated this artifact with contempt. But this was not mentioned.

In other words, the historians who wrote this book were completely ok with misrepresenting the facts to try and win their argument. Lying was not a problem for them. This is a bad way to get credibility, it seems to me.

3. If there is one thing that this book makes clear, the historians involved did not give a fuck what the veterans thought. As far as the historians were concerned, the veterans were unintelligent, ignorant children relative to a brilliant academic historian. They were given no credible voice in the dialog until the veterans and the Air Force forced the issue..

4. Should the historians have realized they were walking into a touchy situation and somehow avoided it? I think that they did know that what they were saying was controversial but they thought they would come out OK for one very good reason. They assumed that everyone understood going in that there was one truth, and only one truth. And that truth is what the historians said it was. Period. There could be no other truth, no other truth had any credibility. The veterans were just children, immature children who did not want to admit, naturally, that they had murdered all those innocent Japanese for no reason. That was the only conclusion, a historian conclusion, and that was that.

So, to ask the question, were the historians involved in this disaster arrogant?

No, not arrogant. Not merely arrogant. Unbelievably arrogant.

The book was a fabulous eye opener for me. It brought doubt on the credibility of the academic field of history and of historians, at least historians of the modern period. In that sense, the book was very successful beyond its goals.   It not only explained the disaster of the Smithsonian Enola Gay exhibit, it lowered the credibility of the field of academic history in general.

Good work, guys.