My Talented Kids

You may want to skip this one if you're not a relative of mine -- this is just Dad taking a moment to crow about his talented kids.

For his final art project, my son Aidan took one of his guitars apart and sanded down the body and "swirl-painted" it. His first attempt, so it's not a perfect "swirl" but the result is still pretty gosh-darn cool. Yes, he got an A.

(oil paints on wood)

These are a couple of freehand drawings by my daughter Miranda:

(pencil on paper)

(ink on paper)

(Alas, not the best digitization of those past two images; I'm a bit loathe to run them through our scanner for fear of destroying the original).

I'm pretty happy that both of them are very creative (although in very different ways). I hope it's something that stays with them their entire life.

Goodbye SETI

The SETI Institute has fallen on hard times:

In an April 22, 2011 email ... SETI Institute CEO Tom Pierson described in detail the recent decision by U.C. Berkeley ... to reduce operations of the Hat Creek Radio Observatory (and thus the Allen Telescope Array) to a hibernation state effective this month. NSF University Radio Observatory funding to Berkeley for HCRO operations has been reduced to approximately one-tenth of its former level and, concurrently, growing State of California budget shortfalls have severely reduced the amount of state funds available for support of the HCRO site.

This makes me sad. I know that in the past I've expressed some rather pessimistic views on the topic, but I've got no problem with passive scanning: it's safe and cheap, and (even though it's admittedly a long-shot) it has the potential to change humanity's outlook on the universe forever. I mean, can you imagine waking up one morning to see a headline like

INTELLIGENT ALIEN LIFE CONFIRMED!
We Are Not Alone!
(film at 11)

?

But maybe some eccentric millionaire will save the day. Ex-MS honcho Paul Allen has already given them $30 million to fund the initial array of telescopes. "In for a penny, in for a pound" -- maybe he'll pull out the seat-cushions on his sofa and dig around and find an extra $5 million to keep SETI running for a couple more years. I really hope so.

$5 million, though ... it's like pocket lint compared to the, what, $6+ billion that's been spent on the Large Hadron Collider? And SETI is a whole lot easier to explain to the average tax-payer. Although maybe that's a problem and not an advantage. Cynic that I am, if you tell Joe Citizen that "SETI is the search for intelligent life out in space", what he hears is "SETI wants $5 million to hunt for flying saucers." Which is probably not helpful.

On the other hand, if you tell him "The Large Hadron Collider will address some of the most fundamental questions of physics, advancing the understanding of the deepest laws of nature" ... well, hell, I'm not sure what the average person thinks of that. Probably something like "I dunno what it is, but all these science guys are backing it, so it must be a winner." The nice thing about basic pure research is that you never really know what's going to come out of it. So when people ask you questions, you can say pretty much anything you want: "it could lead to unlimited free energy", "it could solve global warming", "it could lead to new medical techniques", etc etc and so forth.

This is not to say that pure basic research is easy to fund -- just look at the poor Superconducting Supercollider that lost its funding in 1993. But SETI has connotations of "flying saucers" and "little green men"; The LHC is all about "the God Particle" and "Baryonic Matter" and cool impressive terms like that. Even Conan O'Brien couldn't make a good joke about Baryonic Matter. (The best I've ever managed involved the "Mushroom Mattar" at the local Indian buffet).

*sigh* Five million dollars. It seems like a trivial sum in some contexts, but I know from practical experience that It's Hard To Make Five Million Dollars. "Well, duh!" you say. But ... my day job involves working for a very large international corporation, one that grosses billions of dollars in revenue every year. A few years ago I was sent to South Korea to assist on a project, one that I can't talk about except to say that it was a very small piece of a much larger project that involved building a new city. My project had an estimated cost of $5 million USD. I met all kinds of VIPs and bigshots, was shown all manner of plans and forecasts and models and whatnot. There was a *lot* of money involved. I figured it was a no-brainer that my measley $5 million project would get approved -- probably rubber-stamped by some junior assistant project approval guy in a basement cubicle.

Boy was I wrong. There were endless meetings, demos, justifications, presentations. And every day the project team grew -- I never figured out what role 3/4s of them were supposed to be doing (although I had been forewarned by someone with prior experience: "Korea? Oh man ... you're gonna love the way they manage to squeeze in all of their cousins and uncles and friends on every deal" and as near as I could tell, he was totally (if not politically) correct).

Anyhow -- in the end, the project never happened. I was surprised: I thought that billion dollar corporate entities would trade off "minor" million dollar projects like pocket change. There's a classic sales principle wherein you attempt to sell the big dollar item first -- a $2000 suit, for instance, and then hit the customer up with $50 cufflinks, a $75 cravat pin, etc, which somehow seems less expensive in the wake of the two grand you just dropped. But that didn't seem to happen here.

In truth, I never did figure out what happened to kill the project. When I was over there, I saw a museum quality scale model of the proposed city, complete with lights and working bridges and cranes and such, it was about 15 meters long and probably cost at least a million bucks. So someone was throwing money around. Maybe my team just never met Daddy Warbucks. There was, frankly, a lot of stuff I never quite figured out: the Korean language is composed of about 5% English "loanwords", which means that if I listened very carefully, I could almost kinda get the feeling that maybe I understood about 1/20th of what people were talking about.

All in all, a most educational experience, I learned much. I learned that I could drink most Koreans under the table, and that I don't like Korean food. But the most important lesson I learned was: It's Hard To Make Five Million Dollars.

Good luck, SETI.

And now for something completely different: while Googling for something else I randomly encountered this gem: The Aesthetics Of Science Fiction Spaceship Design, which is the Master's thesis of one Kate Kinnear at U Waterloo. It's a 26MB PDF but fairly easy reading, and the topic is Pure Fun. It must be nice to have a Master's Thesis that other people will actually want to read. I stuck a $10 bill in my (paper) thesis back in 1985 and 4 years later I came back and checked and it was still there. It's probably there now.

Cyberpunk at the Movies

What do the following four movies have in common?

• Death Race (2008)
  
• Death Race 2 (2010)
  
• Crank (2006)
  
• Crank 2: High Voltage (2009)
  

If you said Jason Statham, you're 3/4s correct (Statham didn't appear in Death Race 2, which is a prequel to Death Race).

If you're into movie soundtracks you might guess "all four movies were scored by Paul Haslinger (ex-Tangerine Dream)". And despite impressing me, you'd still only be 3/4s correct -- Haslinger did brilliant scores for Crank and the Death Race movies, but Crank 2 was scored by the one and only Mike Patton (Mr. Bungle, Faith No More). Which was a good choice given the amount of over-the-top mayhem in the film.

This is admittedly a highly-subjective appraisal, but I would submit that these are four of the best cyberpunk movies to come out of the studios in recent years.

"Cyberpunk?" you say, incredulously. Yes, cyberpunk. Here's a few selection lines from the Wikipedia article on the topic:

Giant, multinational corporations have for the most part replaced governments as centers of political, economic, and even military power.

... many cyberpunk protagonists are manipulated, placed in situations where they have little or no choice, and although they might see things through, they do not necessarily come out any further ahead than they previously were. These anti-heroes--"criminals, outcasts, visionaries, dissenters and misfits" call to mind the private eye of detective novels. This emphasis on the misfits and the malcontents is the "punk" component of cyberpunk.

The settings are usually post-industrial dystopias but tend to be marked by extraordinary cultural ferment and the use of technology in ways never anticipated by its creators ("the street finds its own uses for things"). Much of the genre's atmosphere echoes film noir, and written works in the genre often use techniques from detective fiction.

Of course, I am (what fun!) picking and choosing and ignoring certain elements like direct neural connection into a mutual hallucination (ie, "cyberspace") and god-like Artificial Intelligences who manipulate humans for their own unknowable ends. But cyberpunk isn't a hard, fast set of rules; it's a set of (highly engaging) tropes that tend to pull us into the struggle of the "little man" against The System, and (we hope) allows us to share as he ultimately raises a defiant middle finger to the Powers That Be.

It's good stuff. And while I don't want to give away any spoilers, every one of these four movies tips its hat in one way or another to William Gibson (Neuromancer), Richard Kadrey (Metrophage), and Neil Stephenson (Snow Crash). Street culture, "grunge" technology, a manipulated anti-hero who nonetheless manages to "win" in some manner -- it's all there.

Crank 2 -- arguably the most outrageous of the four films, features a great musical score plus a number of cameos by some interesting figures in the music industry, namely Maynard James Keenan (Tool, A Perfect Circle), Danny Lohner (Nine Inch Nails), and Chester Bennington (Linkin Park).

It's just nice to see cyberpunk done right. It's been attempted before -- Vin Diesel's Babylon A. D. (2008) comes to mind, and the post-apocalytic Eastern Europe in the first half was quite well-done. But once the action shifted to New York, things quickly slid downhill.

Finally -- while we're on the topic of cyberpunk -- it's strange to me to hear people refer to Bladerunner as a "cyberpunk masterpiece". The Syd Mead production design gave the movie a dark, noir-ish texture that had something of a cyberpunk "feel" to it, no argument there. But the actual plot of the movie itself was basically "cop tracks down bad guys". And -- maybe this is just me -- the first time I saw it, I found myself hoping that Rutger Hauer would kick Harrison Ford's ass.

I've noticed this tendency of late for high school english teachers to put Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep on student reading lists, and it makes me wonder if there is a sad "group-think" dynamic going on here. Dick wrote a lot of books, and DADoES is most certainly not one of his better works; it's simply (thanks to Bladerunner) his most well-known book. He's written much, much better: A Maze of Death and UBIK come to mind, as does A Scanner Darkly, which is a dark, serious book about Dick's life in the 70's drug culture that carries an anti-drug message about as strong as Hubert Selby Jr.'s Requiem for a Dream -- yet I fear that most people won't read the entire book and thus miss the point. It reminds me of that time in 1999 when David Howard, aide to the mayor of Washington, D. C., used the word "niggardly" while discussing a budget.

Of course, no discussion of cyberpunk in the movies would be complete without a mention of The Matrix.

---

I can't resist a final comment: if you like cyberpunk or the Death Race or Crank movies, you owe it to yourself to check out Richard Kadrey's novel Sandman Slim:

“The most hard-boiled piece of supernatural fiction I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading. … all confident and energetic and fresh and angry. I loved this book and all its screwed-up people.” (Cory Doctorow)

“The best B movie I’ve read in at least twenty years. An addictively satisfying, deeply amusing, dirty-ass masterpiece, Sandman Slim swerves hell-bent through our culture’s impacted gridlock of genres…it’s like watching Sergio Leone and Clive Barker co-direct from a script by Jim Thompson and S. Clay Wilson.” (William Gibson)

Terms of Enrampagement

I've grown to be a huge fan of Archer (Thursdays at 10pmEST) on FX. It's an animated show about secret agent Sterling Archer and -- well, you just have to watch it yourself. It's raunchy, foul-mouthed, twisted, and hilarious. The two-part "Stage Two" and "Placebo Effect" that aired recently were amazing; "Placebo Effect" had some jaw-droppingly outrageous over-the-edge writing: Archer (who is fighting breast cancer) finds that criminals have been replacing cancer treatment drugs with sugar pills and Zima, and the result is non-stop violence and ethnic slurs and medical marijuana as he "rampages" his way to the top of the criminal hierarchy. Interrogating criminals by pretending to play Family Feud and blowing out their kneecaps with a shotgun probably doesn't sound like a recipe for comedy gold-- but it had me rolling on the floor. That's only a small part of the extremely "non-PC" frolics that the show pulls off, ending with a warm homage to one of the most memorable Magnum, P. I. episodes ever. Some of the very best television I've seen this year.

It sure ain't Little House on the Prairie. It may not work for you. But if you like television that pushes the boundaries, you really need to check out Archer.

On Aliens

First things first: I definitely believe that there is other intelligent life in the universe. The universe is just too damn big for it to be just us humans. I guess it's kinda funny, I have a lot of faith in this, probably the kind of faith that Christians are supposed to have in Jesus. But I'll probably die without ever knowing for sure.

This does not mean I believe in UFOs. I'll concede that it's possible that Earth has been visited by extraterrestrials sometime in the past 4+ billion years. I even have my private suspicions that life on Earth may have started from some extraterrestrial "seed" -- some kind of spores or chemical precursors that floated through the void for a long time until they came to the Earth and somehow flourished and after a million or billion years became a thriving concern. Where did that seed come from? Who knows -- in one or more places life arose "naturally" and -- as living things are prone to do -- spread itself everywhere it could. I could be wrong and life really did arise spontaneously on Earth. I'm not complaining.

But people bring up the Fermi Paradox -- if life exists elsewhere in the universe, how come we haven't met them yet? There are many possible reasons for this:

• We really are alone.
  
• Intelligent life exists but it's uncommon.
  
• There's a whole galactic Internet out there -- but it uses some kind of technology that we can't detect.
  
• Etc.
  

I have my own thoughts on this. Part of the Fermi Paradox is the assumption that any intelligent species will completely colonize the galaxy in just a few million years, because they'll inevitably colonize nearby systems, and those colonies will eventually send out colonies, etc. It's a big self-replicating system that grows and grows until life is everywhere.

This may not be an original thought --and I have no evidence to support this, it's simply an idea -- but what if we are one of those colonies? Referencing the aforementioned "spore" idea, maybe we're part of the outwardly spreading wave, not yet at the point of sending out our own 'child' colonies.

Which still doesn't answer the question "where is everybody?". Strictly speaking, it's "improbable" that we would be the most advanced technological race in the neighborhood. But somebody has to be first, and it's not impossible that it's us. Just unlikely.

One theory -- one that I find easy to believe even though it scares the hell out of me -- is that advanced civilizations tend to be really, really quiet. Not because their communications technology is uber-efficient (although that won't hurt), but because It's A Jungle Out There.

The Russian astronomer Nikolai Kardashev came up with Kardashev Scale, which is one way of thinking about the sophistication of hypothetical civilizations throughout the universe:

• A Type I civilization has achieved mastery of the resources of its home planet.
  
• A Type II civilization has achieved mastery of the resources of its primary star and associated planets.
  
• A Type III civilization has achieved mastery of the resources of its entire galaxy.
  

Neat, mind-expanding stuff, but one thing to take away from it is that civilizations use resources. Given that the universe contains a limited number of resources, some forward-thinking civilizations, recognizing that they are growing larger and larger, might decide that any competitors for resources are a Bad Thing.

I trust you can see where I'm going with this. The Great Big Silence In The Sky may be due to a combination of a) smart civilizations keeping themselves hidden and b) not-so-smart civilizations getting wiped out by other civilizations who want to eliminate the competition.

This is one reason why Alien Invasion movies drive me crazy. Sure, it's possible that the aliens want to "enslave" us for some unknowable reason. But I'll bet you a dollar that we don't have much to offer any civilization that's capable of interstellar travel -- except for our resources. Practically speaking, it'd be a lot easier to simply wipe us out and mine our system at leisure.

And believe me, we'd be easy to wipe out. I've been reading science fiction for over forty years and there's no shortage of ideas on how to kill off the human race, and that's just from writers trying to earn three cents per word. Imagine an advanced race who really put some serious thinking into the matter.

And forget Independence Day. Probably the simplest, cheapest, most pragmatic technique would involve dropping a big rock on us. Or a bunch of little rocks -- traveling at relativistic velocities. They wouldn't even need to leave their home system -- just put some kind of drive / navigation units on the rocks and point 'em at Sol and let 'em rip. When they get close enough they target Earth and *boom* it's Game Over for the human race.

I'm admittedly making a fair number of assumptions here: that interstellar travel is difficult and there's no way to travel faster than light, that advanced civilizations aren't necessarily peaceful and there's no magic way to create energy and matter (ie, resources) from nothing. I'd be happy to be proven wrong on any of these points.

Let's put all that aside for the moment, though, and assume that aliens don't want to kill us outright. Why won't they talk to us?

One thought I've had is that the aliens are out there -- and they don't want to talk to us. Either because we have nothing to offer them, or -- maybe -- because we scare the hell out of them.

Not that we're in any position to wage interstellar war at this point. But let's be honest: we are an aggressive, warring, intolerant species. Even our entertainment is full of violence, conflict, and an unspoken assumption that the human race is somehow superior. If we made radio contact with another race that was just like us, we'd be terrified.

A well-worn cliche in science fiction is that war-like races like us inevitably wipe ourselves out -- to the grateful relief of the peaceful races of the universe. What if that's true? Maybe they're out there just waiting for us to commit racial suicide.

One final thought on this topic: maybe it's quiet because everybody moved?

I'm serious. There's a passage from Carl Sagan's novel Contact that's always stuck with me.

"If we're figuring out ways to extend our lifespans, think of what those creatures on Vega must have done. They probably are immortal, or close enough. I'm a practical person, and I've thought a lot now about immortality. I've probably thought longer and more seriously about it than anybody else. And I can tell you one thing for sure about immortals: They're very careful. They don't leave things to chance. They've invested too much effort in becoming immortal. I don't know what they look like, I don't know what they want from you, but if you ever get to see them, this is the only piece of practical advice I have for you: Something you think is dead cinch safe, they'll consider an unacceptable risk."

One of the things that I think that most science fiction has gotten wrong, from square one, is the unspoken assumption that all life lives on planets. Planets are relatively unsafe places to live: you have to deal with earthquakes, volcanoes, asteroid impacts, and other things that make death easy and immortality difficult. I suspect that truly advanced civilizations -- who may indeed have achieved some form of immortality -- will live in nice, controlled, predictable, and secure space colonies. And these space colonies may not be located anywhere near a star. Stars are great energy sources but sometimes they act up and turn into supernovas and gamma ray bursters (from the Wikipedia article: "It has been hypothesized that a gamma-ray burst in the Milky Way could cause a mass extinction on Earth.") -- which can also be problematic for immortals.

So maybe they moved ... to some nice quiet safe place in the vast gulfs between galaxies. Which means they're very very far away, and also very hard to detect. What do they use for energy and other resources? I don't know -- maybe they took some black holes with them and use those for energy. Maybe they have a vast automated industrial pipeline, tens of thousands of light years long, that ferries in resources from neighboring galaxies. It's just a guess -- but if you're looking for total security, safety, and control over your environment -- it's hard to think of a better place to live than those dark, empty, and uneventful spaces that separate the galaxies.

Obligatory iPad 2 Post

So the iPad 2 is out! Well, okay, not until March 11th, but now we know all about it: front-and-back cameras, dual core processor, thinner, lighter, chock-full of extra goodness -- at the same price. I confess that I enjoyed watching Mr. Jobs and his friends showing it off and rubbing some of their success in the competition's face: 100M iBooks downloads, 200M Apple accounts, 100M iPhones, and there was a killer line about iPad pricing: "ask our competition what they think of our pricing now".

I wonder if the iPad 2 will also emit the same mysterious energy rays that apparently turned me into a Fanboi.

As nice as the iPad 2 is, I don't think I'm going to jump in and buy 4 of them for my family. Or even 1 of them just for me. If I were filthy rich, I would ... but I'm not filthy rich. It's a little hard to justify dropping that kind of money again, with rumors of an iPad 3 in 4Q 2011.

It leads me to speculate on Apple's overall biz plan. I don't think I'm the only Happy iPad Owner who isn't going to mindlessly upgrade. Maybe the iPad 2 is targetted at all of those people who last year said "the iPad looks nice, but I'm going to wait until they release one with a camera". Surprise! To misquote Roy Batty: it's "time to buy".

I might change my mind and decide to buy one, but even if I do, I'm going to wait until after March 11 to see what the public consensus is. Just me being paranoid. If iPad 2 turns out to have some design flaw -- using FaceTalk too much makes it explode, say -- I'd rather read about it than experience it. If iPad 2 really is "a completely new design", then they completely new designed it awfully damn fast. Short product cycles make me nervous.

I have high hopes for iPad 3 (which is, I know, rumor-ware at best). But (again, speculating about what Apple marketing is thinking) I'm guessing the iPad 3 will be the one that's intended to make iPad 1 owners switch. My best guess is that it'll have a Retina display -- which would be totally awesome but it's the kind of change that ripples down into each and every little subcomponent and will probably raise the price. But I'd almost certainly pay for it. And I would rather wait for it to be done correctly than settle for a bugged-up rush job.

All that said, the part of the announcement that got me really excited was towards the end, which can be summarized as "iMovie for iPad: $4.99; Garage Band for iPad: $4.99".

Glee / Tool

So I'm sitting here watching Glee (not because I really want to) and, for an episode that's supposed to be on an anti-alcohol theme, so far they've sung "One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer" and Pat Travers' "Snortin' Whiskey, Drinkin' Cocaine" ... okay, I'm lying about that last one. But it would have been awesome. Actually -- I think the writers maybe had some trouble finding a reasonable "alcohol is bad" song -- God knows I'm having a difficult time thinking of one myself except for Tool's "Sober" ... be still my heart, would the Glee gang cover Maynard and the gang? Oh please please please please yes!!!!

Naw, it'll never happen. But it's fun to think it might.

[Update: for some reason Comments don't seem to be working right. That said, I've had someone point out that Pink's "Sober" and Mike Cross's "I Don't Need Another Hit" are songs with "booze is bad" messages. Frank Zappa's "Cozmik Debris" is another (and, like the Tool song, it's another one I'd love to hear the Glee kids attack, but it'll never ever happen), and Googling about I guess there's an entire musical genre called "straight edge" that promotes a no drugs / no alcohol lifestyle. Here's a Yahoo Answers page that goes deep into it.

I guess I was not surprised to read that last night's episode of Glee was not well-received by a number of viewers -- the consensus being that showing the main characters using alcohol with no dire consequences is "against the rules". As near as I can tell, they thought the show needed to end with everyone tearfully singing at a funeral. I guess at one time it really was against the rules, back when the Reagans started their "Just Say No" program and (so the stoary goes) Hollywood and television were given strict 'guidelines' about how drug abuse must always be portrayed in a negative light, etc. Strange that today it's "edgy" to do a show that tries to portray the less-than-lethal aftereffects of (moderately responsible) alcohol consumption.

Personally, I don't drink -- which oddly enough seems to make many people think I'm an alcoholic. Go figure]