Double Indemnity
I really liked
The Postman Always Rings Twice.
Double Indemnity is also by James M. Cain, and shares many of the same elements: the protagonist has an affair with a woman and they plot to murder her husband; after the murder, the forces of justice which pursue them are driven by the financial interests of the insurance company. If anything, the murder setup may be even better in
Double Indemnity than in
The Postman Always Rings Twice.
But I did not like the ending of
Double Indemnity as much as
Postman, because it requires an additional coincidence that was too much for my suspension of disbelief. Basically,
Double Indemnity requires the protagonist to fall for a woman to the point where he is willing to risk prison or the death penalty for her; and he has to do this not for one woman, but for two different women over the course of the book; and the two women are stepmother and stepdaughter. I found that to be a little too much to swallow.
Tempting the Gods
As an aspiring roboticist, I'm always aware of the megalomaniacal nature of trying to make a machine that is (even a little bit) like a living thing. It is traditionally the sort of thing that Man Was Not Meant to Know, and just cause for the villagers to storm the laboratory with pitchforks.
I was thinking though that the criteria for outrageous technical hubris have really changed over time. Once upon a time just
weaving a tapestry or
playing a flute or
constructing a tall building was enough to get you in dutch with supernatural powers. By the nineteenth century you had to be making new creatures by sewing human and/or animal parts together. Nowadays you pretty much have to be doing something involving DNA or possibly altering past history. I'm not sure that building giant robots even counts any more; it is becoming respectable.
The Leisure Class
I heard old-time punk band
The Leisure Class on NPR this morning and thought they sounded interesting. But I don't think I'm ready to fork over $25 for the 2-CD set that seems to be their only offer. That's a little
too old-time. I hate it when bands think they're too good for a 99-cent download.
Other offenders largely missing from iTunes Music Store:
Timbuk 3
Madonna
Past offenders:
ChanticleerMarc Cohn
The Demolished Man
I finally got around to reading this science fiction classic, so now I know what
Tenser, said the Tensor is a quote from.
Synopsis: In the future, when there are thousands of people who have various levels of telepathic ability, serious premeditated crime is generally impossible because of the telepathic police. A non-telepathic business tycoon nevertheless resolves to murder another business tycoon. He carries out the murder and the Prefect of Police must then prove that he did it, using objective evidence, not just telepathy alone.
Quibbles:
* Probably the most memorable part of the book is the device of arranging words on the page in interlocking patterns, in order to suggest a telepathic conversation. But I think
the edition I read (and maybe earlier editions too?) did a poor job of printing this. I have a suspicion it looked better on Alfred Bester's typewriter and then they screwed it up a bit when moving to a proportional font.
* The Esper Guild has a eugenics program which has the goal of one day bringing psychic abilities to everybody. This program requires that telepaths must marry other telepaths. Umm. This doesn't seem as if it's going to spread the gift around much.
* There are two plot twists at the end. One is a standard murder-mystery device and is okay, if nothing special: it fits with the theme of the book in being a "psychological" twist. The other thing that happens is that the book gets rather mystical about the murderer being a pivotal figure in history; the intent, I guess, being to pump up the stakes for the telepathic Javert. I found that rather weird and unnecessary.
Liebeck v. McDonald's
Comments on Matt Weiner's blog made me think today about the infamous
McDonald's coffee lawsuit.
If you bought a bottle of sulfuric acid from a chemical supply company and then you spilled it on yourself in the car, the chemical company would not be inclined to pay for your medical bills, and I imagine you would have no luck suing for damages.
I think McDonald's problem was that, so to speak, it thought it was in the sulfuric acid business. McDonald's figured that it sold "very hot coffee," a perfectly legitimate and desirable product, like sulfuric acid, that one should handle with care and not spill on one's sweatpants. But some customers, and ultimately the jury, didn't know that McDonald's was in the "very hot coffee" business. They thought that McDonald's was in the "coffee" business and that its product should be no more dangerous than the coffee at the diner across the street.
So McDonald's should have made sure that its customers knew it was in the "very hot coffee" business. There apparently
was a warning on the coffee cup ("Caution Contents Hot") but the jury found that insufficient because it was small, on the side of the cup, and it did not say "No Seriously This Coffee Will Burn You." Maybe McDonald's should actually have made "Extra Hot Coffee" the description of the item on the menu. Would you like extra hot coffee with that?
But, from what I can gather, McDonald's did not choose to use bigger warning labels after the lawsuit. Instead it chose to serve colder coffee. So I guess it only had a limited desire to be in the very hot coffee business after all.
Collapse
I finished
Collapse by Jared Diamond. Diamond reviews a number of past societies that went into decline or were destroyed because of environmental damage or climate change: Easter Island, Mangareva, Henderson Island and Pitcairn Island, the Anasazi, the Maya, and the Greenland Vikings. He also looks at some societies which managed to do a better job of dealing with their environmental problems (Japan, Iceland, Tikopia, the Netherlands) and some places that currently have fragile environments (Montana, Australia, Haiti, Rwanda). Of course the most important question is what this all means for the future of Los Angeles, where Jared Diamond and I live.
My favorite chapters were the ones on Easter Island (in a nutshell, they cut down all the trees, so they couldn't make canoes to hunt porpoise with, and their vegetable fields eroded, and then they ate all the birds, and then they ate each other) and on the Greenland Norse (climate change killed off their livestock and blocked their contact with the Scandinavians back home; also the native Americans kicked their asses, which is why they failed to colonize Vinland).
Chapter One is on Montana. Before starting the book, I read a review that made it sound as if Diamond were really sounding the death knell for Montana as a state on the verge of collapse. In fact he rather pulls his punches, or hedges his bets, saying that of course Montana is not about to collapse, it just has problems (mine tailings poisoning the water, climate change reducing agricultural production), and if even lovely and pristine Montana has environmental problems, think how much worse off the other 49 states must be...
I enjoyed
Collapse, but as in
Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond is a trifle long-winded, subscribing to the "tell them what you're going to tell them, then tell them, then tell them what you told them, then re-iterate how this ties into what you told them in chapter thirteen, then explain how this foreshadows what you will tell them in chapter fifteen" school of pedagogy.
I wonder if a repetitive style is key to writing a blockbuster work of popular science that will be made into a mini-series, like
GG&S or like Dava Sobel's
Longitude. I started reading
Longitude the year it hit the bestseller lists, but I couldn't finish it; it was so repetitive it drove me nuts. Jared Diamond is not quite that bad.
Letter to Matt Miller
Matt Miller
c/o KCRW
1900 Pico Boulevard
Santa Monica, CA 90405.
Mr. Miller,
I am writing to you because of the
Left, Right & Center broadcast of August 5, 2005, on which you appeared to defend the teaching of Intelligent Design by asking, “Why is it wrong, because it’s not irreconcilable to me, if you’re talking about the origins of life, which is I think this is what it’s about, to talk about to our children, which we’d say at home anyway and in school, that while evolution is the best understanding we have now that science has given us, of how we evolved, that there are still many people who think that the original matter and life that got here, was something from God? That’s what I believe. And I don’t find those things irreconcilable at all.”
That is all perfectly true and unobjectionable, but it has nothing to do with Intelligent Design. To break it down:
“Evolution is the best understanding we have now that science has given us.” That is ideally what we teach now. That is not what Intelligent Design advocates want schoolchildren to be taught. They want to teach schoolchildren that the Darwinian understanding of evolution is wrong, or at least highly dubious and much debated by mainstream biologists.
“There are still many people who think that the original matter and life that got here, was something from God.” This too is what we teach now and I don’t think anyone objects to it. This fact is well-covered in history, literature, and social studies classes. It is hard to imagine anyone graduating from public school without knowing this to be true.
Some things that we don’t or shouldn’t teach in public school biology class are, “Life probably came from God,” “Matter probably came from God,” and, “There are strong scientific objections to the theory of evolution.” The first two are unconstitutional advocacy of certain religions, the second one is outside the scope of biology, and the third one isn’t true.
If we teach Intelligent Design in schools, then on what basis should we exclude Transcendental Meditation, or any other theory which suspiciously resembles a religious belief, but which has a few Ph.D. adherents who like to characterize it as scientific? It may be that either Intelligent Design or Transcendental Meditation advocates are really valiant Galileos, who will one day be vindicated by history. But I think that they should have to win over the mainstream scientific community before we let them take their case to K-12 classrooms.
Regards,
Richard Mason
Proof
About two and a half years ago, we went to see the play
Proof performed for radio at the Skirball. Anne Heche played the lead role of Catherine. Last night they
rebroadcast that production on KPCC.
Now as I understand it, the role of Catherine was first performed on Broadway by
Mary-Louise Parker (whom I associate with her role of Amy Gardner on
The West Wing). Parker was followed by Jennifer Jason Leigh, who was followed by Anne Heche. Gwyneth Paltrow played the role in London and will be in the
movie version.
Here's the thing. Listening to Anne Heche's performance again, I was struck by how much she sounded like Mary-Louise Parker's character on
The West Wing. Both characters are moody, abrasive, smart young women, but they even have the same sort of speech patterns and slightly nasal quality. "I just didn't want to
taaalk to
YOU!"
This can't be a coincidence, but I wonder what the chain of causality is. Was Anne Heche modeling her performance on Mary-Louise Parker? Or does Heche just normally have those speech patterns which is why she was cast? Does Mary-Louise Parker sound like that all the time? Or was Parker on
West Wing directed so that her performance there would be similar to her recent Tony-Award-winning performance in
Proof?
Howl's Moving Castle
We went to see
Howl's Moving Castle last week. We didn't check beforehand whether it would be the dubbed or the subtitled version (probably we didn't have much choice, since the movie is on its way out of theaters) but it turned out to be subtitled, which I suspect was the better option anyway.
I thought the movie was good and in places the animation was terrific. Lots of motion on the screen, not at all like the low-rent form of Japanese anime (or as I call it, inanime) in which, say, just the characters' lips move while as much as possible of the scene is static.
There were a couple of points where the logic of the story was hard to follow. At the climactic moment, the protagonist decides that everybody should get out of the castle, including the fire demon who holds the castle together, accepting the fact that this will cause the castle to collapse. A minute later they all run back into the collapsed castle and urge the fire demon to get the castle moving again. Huh? I must have blinked and missed something.
I wonder if
Diana Wynne Jones' novel will see increased sales (more even than would normally be caused by a movie) as moviegoers read the book to try to figure out what was going on.
Malthusian Mathematics
From
Collapse by Jared Diamond ("Malthus in Africa," page 312):
"That's because (Malthus reasoned) population growth proceeds exponentially, while food production increases only arithmetically. For instance, if a population's doubling time is 35 years, then a population of 100 people in the year 2000, if it continues to grow with that same doubling time, will have doubled in the year 2035 to 200 people, who will in turn double to 400 people in 2070, who will double to 800 people in the year 2105, and so on. But improvements in food production add rather than multiply; this breakthrough increases wheat yields by 25%, that breakthrough increases yields by an additional 20%, etc."
Of course a 20% or 25% increase is multiplicative, not additive. Apart from lightly mocking Diamond's choice of phrase, I never really bought into the "food production is additive" bit. It seems like an unsupported assumption. I have to admit I've never actually read Malthus.
Boggle
A new personal best in
Boggle! A score of 215!
Not 215 factorial, just an emphatic 215. I was drinking vodka which may have helped.
Second highest score was 103 (by a decent but not intimidating player).
