I didn’t catch it in its entirety and it occurs to me that I’ve never watched the entire telecast from start to finish, even in the years that I was most curious/had the time to do so.
One of the nice things about the internet is that the next day you can pretty much catch everything of importance that occurred in the form of clips and the plentiful articles.
I know I’m not stating anything revolutionary here, but it sure saves time!
One of my latest fascinations is the self-driving, or autonomous, car. I’ve read up on Google’s research into such a device and noted how Tesla cars will soon have automatic driving features as well. Uber, for their part, is working very hard on creating an automated vehicle, and Zack Kanter offers the following incredibly fascinating essay on what he feels might happen when -and he believes this will occur quite soon- autonomous vehicles become the norm:
Central to his essay is the following paragraph:
Autonomous cars will be commonplace by 2025 and have a near monopoly by 2030, and the sweeping change they bring will eclipse every other innovation our society has experienced. They will cause unprecedented job loss and a fundamental restructuring of our economy, solve large portions of our environmental problems, prevent tens of thousands of deaths per year, save millions of hours with increased productivity, and create entire new industries that we cannot even imagine from our current vantage point.
I couldn’t agree more with his assessment, both in terms of the good and the bad of a society filled with autonomously driven vehicles.
Think about it for a second: We have to spend several thousand dollars each year on our cars, from buying/leasing them to buying gasoline (electric cars, while far more fuel efficient, nonetheless will cost to recharge) to paying for insurance.
Now imagine this: A fleet of autonomous cars on the road that you can “call up”, not unlike a taxi, using your smart phone. These vehicles, completely computerized, will give you a time of arrival to pick you up, an estimated time of arrival at your destination (you will be able to set your destination before they show up), will come to pick you up, take you to your destination, then immediately head out to pick up their next ride.
This fleet of cars will be owned by some company. Perhaps it will be Google or Uber or whichever company(ies) service them. When they get low on fuel or their sensors detect they need service, they return to wherever they are warehoused, are refueled and serviced, and sent on their way again, continuing their work until they again need to be charged or serviced.
Assuming there is a very large fleet of such automobiles, actually owning your own car becomes unnecessary to your daily life.
Think about it: You go to work/school and drive back home during the weekdays. On many of those days once you get home you don’t need to go out again. How convenient is it to simply call in a car to pick you up in the morning, let it drive you to school or work while you sit back and either read the paper or do your work, and then, when your work/schoolday is done, you call another vehicle to come pick you up and, viola, you repeat the process in reverse?
If you need to go shopping at your local grocer/mall, you can do the same, get picked up and taken to your local grocery store or mall, you buy/do what you need, and as you’re heading out the door, you call a car and it takes you back home with your shopping.
But what if you want to travel very far? Say you live in New York and want to drive down the coast and go to DisneyWorld? There could be larger automated vehicles designed for this longer trip. Or, conversely, you could simply rent a car for that period of time. Car Rental agencies might have to become services designed for longer transport rather than people who stay within a city.
Regardless, renting a car or using an automated service would be far cheaper than having and maintaining your own car.
The downside of all this, as pointed out above, is the fact that there are many jobs out there involving people who drive others to their destination and these jobs will be crushed. The taxi industry, in a matter of a few years, would completely collapse with the advent of the automated automobile.
So too would gas stations and automobile service centers. If fewer and fewer people have their own cars and rely on automated travel, then what would be the need to have a gas station? How about a car repair center? Suddenly, they too would become irrelevant. The biggest service centers would be located on the grounds of whatever company has the automated vehicles.
And consider this as well: All those parking garages would also become irrelevant. Sure, there would still be people out there who would cling to their personal automobile.
Sure, there will probably be many who don’t “trust” the idea of a computer driving you from point A to B. However, I can easily see that becoming a very small minority.
And as far as safety is concerned, one would expect that a fleet of automated cars would be safer on the road than those driven by humans. Less car crashes, less death and injury. No more drunk driving (again, you call an automated car to take you to a club, you can get totally blitzed, then when you leave you call a car to take you back home).
Another profession that would have to change: Police. Can you imagine how a police force would change with the advent of automated vehicles? No longer would we have speeders or bad drivers. No longer would we have tickets.
I could go on and on and on.
Sure, computers are not infallible and, naturally, rigorous tests would have to constantly be made with the autonomous vehicles’ computer systems. But that wouldn’t be on us, would it?
Since its creation, cars have been a central part of our society and a near must have to anyone and everyone who needs to go from one point to another. Is it now possible we’re on the verge of no longer needing to have a car of our own?
I suspect the answer is yes.
What is the hardest shot in bowling? If you thought it was the 7-10 split, you’d be wrong…
Turns out the hardest shot in bowling is the “Greek Church”, which involves pins standing in the 4-6-7-9-10 position. The odds of getting a spare from such a formation? 0.3%. The odds of getting a spare from a 7-10 split? 0.7%
If you check out the link you’ll also find the fascinating “Spare Success Machine”, which will tell you the odds for getting a spare for virtually any situation.
All right, for those too lazy to check the link and those uninterested in working the “Spare Success Machine”, here are the hardest shots in bowling to get a spare from, shamelessly taken from the same link above:
As I said, you had to know!
Interesting, to say the least, article by Alex McCown regarding the above:
http://www.avclub.com/article/praise-artistic-theft-214962
I’ve grappled long and hard with the line which separates artistic “inspiration” from outright “theft.”
In the above article, poet T. S. Eliot is quoted in what I believe is one of the great descriptions of artistic works, and what distinguishes a good artist from a bad one regarding their “inspiration”:
One of the surest tests [of the superiority or inferiority of a poet] is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.
Let me repeat the quote’s most pertinent lines: “A good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn.”
The term “poet” as mentioned above can easily be replaced with artist, film maker, script writer, novelist, musician, etc.
When Star Wars came out in 1977, and as I’ve mentioned many times before, I wasn’t all that impressed. I believe this was at least partly due to the fact that many of the tropes within the film were recognizable to me. Even on that first viewing I detected elements from, among others, Flash Gordon, Edgar Rice Burroughs, the cliffhanger serials of the 1940’s, and Jack Kirby comic books. Yes, I was a nerdy kid, one who had immersed himself in these various works. Later on, with the advent of the home video market, I came to realize Star Wars also lifted ideas from films by Akira Kurosawa, in particular The Hidden Fortress.
Having said all that, and while acknowledging (once again!) that Star Wars never did much for me, I will now come to the movie’s defense and say that what Lucas did was take elements of many works and, as Eliot notes, “weld(ed) it into something better, or at least something different.”
The same, to my mind, could not be said for the immensely popular Guardians of the Galaxy, a movie that, unlike Star Wars, I wound up loathing. For Star Wars, the inspirations were from (no pun intended) long ago and general audiences were not as familiar with the sources (A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest). Add to that the fact that while Mr. Lucas appropriated elements here and there, the story presented within the movie, of an evil Empire with a fearsome planet-sized weapon threatening innocents, was relatively original.
So for me Star Wars, flaws and all in my eyes, was a film that nonetheless did well with its inspirations. Guardians of the Galaxy, however, stepped over the line of inspiration and into, in my opinion, outright creative theft.
The bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion.
This was exactly my feelings regarding Guardians of the Galaxy. They took the plot of Star Wars, changed only a few elements, and essentially re-created that film but with far less cohesion (again, in my humble opinion and, obviously, I was in a VERY big minority).
So, what can we conclude with all this?
That it is all about opinion.
For me, personally, I recognize the influences of other works on my novels. I will come right out and say that they were inspired by many things. But I will then go on to say that I try very hard to take those elements that inspire me and make something new and interesting with them. Sure, the end result may not be completely original -you’d have to look far and wide to find any work of art that is- but I can at least look myself in the mirror and say that I’m trying to create something that may use familiar (or not so familiar) elements and make something relatively “new” with them.
At least I hope so!
Fascinating and very informative video asking a question that I hadn’t thought of before: Why do mirrors flip images horizontally but not vertically?
“See” for yourself…
I found this video in Slate.com. You should check it out:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2015/02/17/physics-girl-mirrors-flipping-images.html
And, totally gratuitously and incredibly tangentially, the song “Ghost In You” by the Psychedelic furs, from their album Mirror Moves…
There is nothing more frustrating, in my opinion, than a very, very good film that falls just short of being a great film.
That, in a nutshell, is what I feel regarding Predestination, the Ethan Hawke/Sarah Snook time travel film.
Based on All You Zombies, a justifiably famous (and crazy) Robert A. Heinlein short story, Predestination adheres to that story’s plot faithfully, though it does add elements, particularly those involving a mysterious bomber, to the story to expand it to the feature’s length while providing some action/suspense. This expansion didn’t bother me at all and, when the film ended, proved to cleverly form a “loop” to all that we had seen up to that point.
But as I said before, the film left something to be desired, and it is frustrating how close it was to being a great work. In the early going the film spends, in my opinion, waaaay too much time on Sarah Snook’s (who is absolutely terrific) Jane character. While much of the information is pertinent to what follows, other parts could, and should, have been trimmed down (just off the top of my head: Did we need to see the child Jane spying her orphanage handlers having sex? Did we need to see the character getting into so many fights?)
Toward the end (and I’m trying to avoid spoilers here), when the revelations started coming as to who is who, it became too obvious where we were going with the added story elements. Again, brevity might have been better here as well. Also, some of the dialogue, while clever in the opening bits at the bar (the chicken/egg joke clues you in well with what’s coming), became so obvious in the later parts of the film, especially when John talks to a woman about a typewriter, that I felt I was being hit over the head with “meaningful” lines.
Having said all that, Predestination is nonetheless a good film worthy of your time. It offers a faithful take on Robert A Heinlein mind-altering story yet adds its own decent elements to the mix. While the film does dwell a little too much on details that might have been better cut and some of the dialogue towards the end is way too obvious, the film is nonetheless still worth seeing.
This story made me smile, and given the barrage of negative news one reads each day, isn’t it worth smiling about something now and again?
Photographer Irena Werning started a fascinating project. She takes old pictures of individuals and recreates them in the present. The results, as I said before, make me smile. Check them out:
http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/15/living/cnnphotos-back-to-the-future/index.html
Though probably not as well known today as it was for much of the twentieth century, author Leslie Charteris’ character Simon Templar aka The Saint was a fixture of the entertainment media for many decades. From his first appearance in 1928, Mr. Charteris would pen novels featuring the character until 1963, when he allowed others to ghost write the character’s adventures. The Saint would subsequently appear in movies, comic books, and the radio during that time. He was perhaps most famously featured in a TV show starring soon-to-become 007 Roger Moore between 1962-69.
The series showed how much of an influence The Saint had on James Bond and vice-versa and I wouldn’t be surprised if this series proved an extended audition for Mr. Moore as Bond.
For in The Saint you had many of the elements that would appear in the James Bond series. Simon Templar, like James Bond, is a suave, sophisticated yet deadly man who the police and society at large view as a criminal yet who works against the criminal underworld from within (a spy, you might say). While he doesn’t have a “license to kill”, he is not at all adverse to knocking out villains with extreme prejudice. His adventures, like James Bond, would take him to exotic locales where he would confront at times garrish villains. He would also meet intriguing women who he’d seduce or who would, alternately, try to seduce him.
Way, waaaaay back in 1938, a mere decade from The Saint’s first appearance in print, the character would make his first theatrical appearance in The Saint in New York. Louis Hayward would be the first actor to portray the character, though this proved his one and only time doing so.
The plot of the movie goes as follows: New York is in the middle of a deadly crime wave. A council of high level functionaries meet to discuss what can be done. A (presumably) high up inspector in the police department is the last to arrive at this meeting and shows his incredible frustration in the current situation. He states that the police have no problems arresting the criminals out there but these same criminals walk within a day or two after being arrested thanks to the courts. (Sounds familiar?)
After the chief of police leaves, the remaining members of the council mull what to do. One of them notes the actions of The Saint and the members resolve to find and hire him to take out the trash.
I guess its a sign of my aging, but these early scenes, frankly, struck me as chilling. These high level members of society effectively decide that the only solution to their criminal problems lies in hiring an outside vigilante, a man the world thinks is a criminal himself, to (let’s not mince words here) murder the criminals plaguing New York.
To that end, one of the members of the meeting flies off to various countries in search of Simon Templar, eventually finding him in South America, where he is about to start some kind of revolution.
Simon Templar is exactly as described above: Suave, sophisticated, well dressed and well versed. He hears the offer and decides traveling to New York isn’t such a bad idea. Once there he gets a lay of the land and a list of five or so criminals he needs to take out. In short order he takes the first of them out just before the criminal shoots the high level police inspector who walked out of the initial meeting at the start of the film.
As Templar continues his “work”, he acquaints himself with that inspector (who is more than willing to look the other way) and a mysterious and beautiful woman who is somehow in the middle of this criminal lot but who is more than willing to help Simon take them out. As things move along, Simon realizes there is one big man above them all, and that once he takes that master villain out, New York will be “free”.
For a 75 plus year old “B” film, The Saint in New York isn’t all that bad though, again, the implications of the story are alarming. One would hope the highest levels of governmental official would have some confidence in their justice system rather than bringing in an outside gunman to clean up their mess. But if you can overlook this rather startling concept, the movie proves a decent enough distraction.
The movie’s age and pace will probably be difficult for some modern audiences to take. We’re very far down the road from the action-fests that populate modern cinema. Yet there is a fascination in seeing a prototype of a James Bond-like character, minus the gadgets, on screen.
A curiosity, for sure, yet an interesting one.
Interesting Q & A found on Quora.com regarding the above question:
Its been many years since Star Trek: The Next Generation came and went, but way, waaaay back in 1987 when the very first episode of it appeared and the concept of a “Holodeck” was revealed (a neat digression: What came first, the Holodeck or the X-Men’s Danger Room?), for the first time I, a HUGE fan of the original Star Trek series, found myself questioning the whole concept of Star Trek’s society’s viability.
The question linked to at the top, whether the Star Trek economy is essentially a welfare state, is a –ahem– logical one to consider. If this society has moved beyond the use of money and all your survival needs are given to you for free (food, lodging, medical care, etc.) then one wonders: Wouldn’t that result in a society of worthless, useless beings who sit around all day playing their music or video games or movies, etc., while doing nothing else that is worthwhile?
And if you add to this society a Holodeck, essentially the ultimate “mind” playground where you immerse yourself into your own movie/video game/wish fulfillment arena, then whatever could make you want to leave it?
These questions have stayed with me for a while. So much so I wrote a short story called “Virtual” a few years back (shameless plug: it can be found in my Shadows at Dawn short story collection) that tackled the issue of getting so involved in a virtual world that you don’t want to face the real one. The key to making this scenario/story work for me was this line:
The virtual world could go on, but only when paid for with real world cash.
The author of the first link states that a Star Trek society could work and isn’t a “welfare one” in the classic sense. But I suspect that it is one that couldn’t work. Mind you, I’m not an Ayn Randian proponent, but I do feel that you have to have a motivation to progress.
Whether you’re literally or figuratively hungry to improve yourself in some way, to find a reward for your actions/work, whether they be monetary solely to keep your alive or more figurative in the sense that you wish to create some work that might be admired by others, money rewards be damned, there has to be some kind of motivation.
And I’m afraid the universe of Star Trek, at least as presented starting with Star Trek: The Next Generation, lacks that concept. In my mind, every one of the adventures presented in all the series could well be on set on a Holodeck, and the entire human race never bothered to leave their living rooms.
There’s something intellectually satisfying in seeing a film that challenges your imagination in all the right ways. If done well, you leave the experience with a sense of wonder. You admire the fact that the creators of this work have delivered something truly new and (hopefully) unique. Something that keeps the gears in your brain moving as you sort out the pieces in this particular jigsaw puzzle…
Which is a very nice way of saying the James Ward Byrkit written/directed Coherence is one hell of a mind-fuck of a film.
The story starts out simple enough: A group of disparate friends get together for a dinner. Though they are all friendly enough, there are noticeable tensions here and there between them, though nothing Earth shattering or soap opera level outrageous.
That same night a comet is scheduled to pass close to Earth and, as it does, the electricity in the household -and neighborhood- is knocked out.
But the friends in the house realize that another home some two blocks down still has light. Two of the guests decide they should go there and investigate…
What follows from that point on is quite the journey.
Before I get to the very good of this film, first let me point out the not so good. To begin with, Coherence is a very, very low budget feature and it shows. The direction/lighting/editing, while not terrible, isn’t as sharp as one would like and at times, especially toward the beginning, it feels as if you’re watching home movies of a not so interesting party.
But if you get past these opening scenes (about fifteen minutes or so worth of them), the film suddenly takes off and finds its voice and pace. By then you understand the individual characters (the cast consists of only eight people) and are as fearful for their situation as you are curious about what will happen next.
For that’s when all the really trippy stuff begins.
I’m tempted to not go any farther than that for fear of spoilers, but offer this much: The movie involves split realities and the interactions between alternate versions of these eight characters. There are many surprises, both subtle and not so subtle, and an ending that kicks you in the teeth (pay attention to protagonist Em’s story of the Norwegian comet early in the movie…it clarifies what happens toward the end).
Though low on budget, this movie’s story is incredibly, deliciously high in concept and very smart. The best way to describe Coherence is that it is like a really great extended Twilight Zone episode. Considering how much I admire The Twilight Zone, this is very high praise.
If you like your science fiction to be challenging and intellectual, Coherence is a (pardon the pun) no-brainer.
Highly recommended.