Computers/Electronics

This War of Mine…

Fascinating review of a decidedly different take on the war video game called This War of Mine.  Instead of focusing on a character who goes around building up his weaponry and killing literally hundreds upon hundreds of bad guys, This War of Mine focuses on common civilians trying to survive during a time of war.

From the sounds of it, this is a deeply affecting game that shows both the costs and price of survival in a war zone.  I’m curious to try it out, even though the review paints it out to be a deeply depressing experience, which of course makes sense:

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/gaming/2015/02/siege-survival-video-game-this-war-of-mine-reviewed.single.html

General

Because you had to know! (Part Deux)

I like to think I run a respectable blog, but let’s face it, you don’t daintily nibble on scones and/or caviar while drinking herbal tea each day.  Sometimes, you go for raw, greasy, meat.

So here you go: 35 Funny Strip Club names:

http://www.ranker.com/list/funny-strip-club-names/ashley-reign

General

Renewable energy finally making sense…?

This is the type of article that gives me optimism that maybe our society is finally moving into more forward thinking/futuristic concepts:

http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_juice/2015/02/apple-kaiser-permanente-solar-investments-renewable-energy-is-finally-a.html

I’ve long felt we’ve been using old technologies for waaaay too long.  The gas powered automobile, for example, has stuck with us for over a century now.  To me, this is like going into a computer store and picking up 1994’s latest computer model.

What always holds people back is familiarity.  We’re comfortable with cars because we understand them, and the idea of a car that uses only electricity to run, or runs by itself, is a cognitive leap our brains may find hard to take.

So too with renewable energy.  For decades we’ve known that energy could be made from something that occur naturally each and every day: Wind, tides/currents, sunshine.

What kept us from investing strongly into this potential tech was, I felt, two-fold: We are comfortable with the current polluting technology (which, by the way, is reasonably cheap compared to the big investments needed to pursue renewable energy) and this idea that what we have now works, so why mess with it?

The answer to the later question goes right back to what I said about buying an old computer, and it would appear that large U.S. companies are now becoming more comfortable with the idea of using renewable energy.  The early work is done and the price to get the process working for you is coming down.

As I said, articles like this fill me with optimism about the future.  Perhaps we’ve started to turn that corner and can finally create a more “clean” world.

Movies

Last night’s Oscars….

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!

General

Autonomous automobiles…

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:

http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2015/01/27/how-ubers-autonomous-cars-will-destroy-10-million-jobs-and-reshape-the-economy-by-2025-lyft-google-zack-kanter/

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.

General

Because you had to know!!!

What is the hardest shot in bowling?  If you thought it was the 7-10 split, you’d be wrong…

http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/sports_nut/2015/02/hardest-shot-in-bowling-it-s-not-the-7-10-split-it-s-the-greek-church.html

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:

150118_SNUT_Bowling-chart1

As I said, you had to know!

Books/Literature, General, Movies

In praise of…artistic theft?!

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!

General

Why Do Mirrors Flip Horizontally (but not Vertically)?

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…

Movies

Predestination (2014) a (mildly) belated review

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.

General

Back to the future…

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

 

The Blog of E. R. Torre