Miscellany of Musings

Film Review: Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer

2011-06-07T11:25:00.001-07:00

Last night, I watched Client 9 via netflix in my home from 10pm to 12am. It is a documentary on Spitzer's rise to power, who he went after when he was Attorney General, his brief stint as governor, and the prostitution-finance network in Manhattan. I strongly recommend on account of its insight into the lives of prostitutes and the culture of entitlement on Wall Street.

The narrative of Spitzer's rise and fall is that of a self-righteous golden boy who was doing well taking on medium fish and then fell on his sword taking on bigger fish. He was taking on, quite successfully, men worth 20 million or 30 million or so throughout the 1990s and doing ok. However, he made two powerful enemies. First, Kenneth G. Langone, the billionaire financier and a founder of home depot. Spitzer attacked Langone for being on a board that payed Richard Grasso 140 million dollars to be in charge of the "not-for-profit" New York Stock Exchange, apparently there are "suggestions" in the law on how people should be paid at not-for-profits. A court later dismissed the lawsuit on the grounds that the NYSE stopped being a not-for-profit sometime after the payment was made.

The second enemy was Maurice "Hank" Greenberg, then a CEO of AIG and considered one of the most powerful men in corporate America. Spitzer was stating that he was going to go after Greenberg, and this offended people on Wall Street. We had the spectacle of one Goldman Sachs executive writing an op-ed stating that Spitzer had gone "too far", sullying a "good name". From this point forward, Spitzer had two enemies who were not just millionaires but billionaires, i.e. were 4-star generals and admirals of the US ruling class rather than mere field sergeants. Private investigators were hired, telephone threats were made to Spitzer's father, information was sent to the FBI, and the end was inevitable.

Interesting in the film is how the sense of entitlement, the feeling of empowerement that arises from the culture of white male privilege on Wall Street, just oozes out of the various characters involved. There's a lot of hatred of Spitzer for having the audacity to do his job as Attorney-General. Langone, for example, said that what he resents about Spitzer is that he has caused him to give up on the forgiveness tenet of his faith. Forgiveness is a major part of his faith, but he can't forgive Spitzer, so he holds Spitzer responsible for any increased separation between him and his faith. Langone also argues, incredibly, that Spitzer is responsible for the collapse of insurance giant AIG. He says that it is because Spitzer caused the removal of competent CEO Greenberg that AIG collapsed. The notion of responsibility, of the possibility of failure, is non-existent among these peoples.

Spitzer is an interesting fellow in the movie. He is portrayed as extremely intelligent, he went to Harvard Law school, where he met his wife I think. He saw both the AG's office and Albany as being some sort of competition, and he would aim to engage in debates with his adversaries as a means of achieving progress. He's also seen as a self-righteous asshole. It's basically stated that he would go after people and state or shout "I am going to destroy you" on a regular basis. This is not all that surprising, as nobody is going to achieve that kind of political success without extremely high levels of testosterone. Unfortunately, it's that same high testosterone that caused him to go after prostitutes.

The role of prostitution is interesting. It's stated that professional athletes, financiers, movie stars, European royals, et cetera regularly see prostitutes in NY. They show us how selection is done, and picking a girl is done a la carte, kind of like ordering food off a restaurant menu. A few prostitutes are discussed in depth, one was Spitzer's most frequent hire. They had an interview with her transcribed and played by a hired actress. She said the first time she met Spitzer he didn't like him, because he wanted to get down to business right away -- typically the prostitutes get a night out first, a full simulated date. In the future she relished meeting him, and she would milk him for all she could, forcing them to have their long dinners together so she could enjoy the conversations with him where she would bask in his intelligence, "he was so smart" - quote. She said she'd give him her rants on what's wrong with New York. She would pretend not to know who he is, but she thinks he knew that she knew. On the subject of dating in general, she said she had stopped dating because her career as a prostitute where she meets great men has raised her standards to the point where dating is no longer viable for her. She also referred to as a load of shit the notion that prostitutes come from impovershed backgrounds, pointing out that a lot of them are quite wealthy, quite educated, etc. It's a ~$200-1000/hour job ... When the media story broke out, she said media tried to get in touch with her about Spitzer (even though her conversations with the FBI were supposed to be confidential), and so she fled the state.

This may be obvious but it's worth reiterating. It is not standard for FBI cases to go after prostitution rings at all, and even when they do, it's not standard to go after the Johns. The DC Madam case is shown as the standard, where only the Madam was targetted. The movie basically says that this entire ordeal was a hack job with powerful backers, including appointees of the Bush white house at the federal justice department.

This interesting woman is not to be confused with Ashlee Dupree, known as "Spitzer's girl" and the one who was all over the media. She apparently only had sex with Spitzer once, and the media portrayal was basically just to embarass Spitzer. The documentary states that her media profile went up whenever Spitzer would start getting more media attention, trying to resuscitate his career. In that sense, while it would not be just to call Dupree a whore for her legitimate job as a sex worker in my opinion, the same is harder to say for how she sold her soul to political opportunists like Fox News. She later posed for playboy and got her own column in that Rupert Murdoch rag, the New York Daily News or whatever, where she was a dating advice columnist.

Overall, the movie brings to mind a quote I read on naked capitalism blog a while back. The US ruling classes have spent the last several decades making sure nobody like Roosevelt could rise through the system, and now that they need such a man there's nobody available. It may be possible to order a woman a la carte from the website of an escort service, but that cannot be done with politicians. The same attributes that made Spitzer a steamroller, that made him fight hard and intelligently, that made him charismatic, are also the qualities that made him a competitive asshole and made him go for sex with prostitutes. It's a package deal.

Also, I'm pretty sure that the portrayal of Gotham City's "white knight" Harvey Dent / Two-Face in Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight was at least "motivated" by Eliot Spitzer.

Why the Habs Should Retire Koivu's Jersey

2010-08-22T13:14:00.000-07:00

I had posted this on the official Montreal Canadiens message board, here:
Why the Habs Should Retire Koivu's Jersey
35 of 107 people who voted on the poll agreed, 68 disagreed and 4 voted "don't know". The topic generated 149 posts over 8 pages at the time of my reposting it here.

************************

One of my first memories of the Habs is the 1993 Stanley Cup Win. Either way that cup would be something to celebrate, as if it were not the Habs winning it would be Gretzky winning with the Kings. The Habs won, I was 9 years old. I was watching the game at Chili's with my sister, and people were celebrating... I think we really nailed that game five and I remember thinking "oh cool this is historical", or something like that.

In the 1993 entry draft, we somehow managed to draft Saku Koivu at 21st overall. It was widely seen as a good pick, so it's nice if a Stanley Cup winner goes on to get a future. He didn't play in the NHL the following year when the Habs did badly. I remember hearing Saku Koivu described as "the best player in the world not playing in the NHL. Not sure if that was 1993-94 or 1994-95. In his rookie season, 1995-96, he went off to a good start, with 20 goals and 25 assists. He would eventually be the first European captain of the Habs, captaining them for 13 seasons, the longest stretch of any Habs captain.

Unfortunately, while he was a good player on this team, the best we had for a while, he often played pretty much alone. In the years 1994-1998, the team drafted Brad Brown, Terry Ryan, Matt Higgins, Jason Ward, Eric Chouinard with its first round picks. In 1995, Patrick Roy and Captain Mike Keane were traded to Colorado for Jocelyn Thibault, Martin Ručínský, and Andrei Kovalenko. In 1996, Pierre Turgeon, Craig Conroy and Rory Fitzpatrick were traded to St-Louis for Shayne Corson, Murray Baron and a 5th round draft choice. In 1999 Rechi was traded to Philadelphia for Zubrus, a 2nd rounder and a 6th rounder. In 1999, Damphousse was traded to San Jose for considerations that became a 2nd rounder and a 5th rounder. Basically, this period was a comprehensive catastrophe, the only surprise is that we never traded Saku Koivu for a 3rd rounder in the 2000 entry draft ... we could have drafted Jan Bohac. Koivu's team was largely put together in this period, and to my chagrin, the fans often seem to blame Koivu for the fact we didn't win a cup during his tenure. Later on, the team began to improve under Koivu's continued leadership, but there were still problems. Ron Hainsey and Francois Beauchemin were given up for nothing.

One wonders how he would have done without cancer, without knee injuries and without getting hockey sticks in the eye. In 1996-97, he had 38 points in 38 games before getting a knee injury. When he came back from cancer in 2001, he scored 71 points. In 2006, the Canadiens were crushing the Carolina Hurricanes in the playoffs when he received a stick to the eye. The Habs went on to be eliminated, and the Canes went on to win the cup. His best playoff performances were a 2nd round exit in 2001-02, 2003-04, in 2007-08. These are impressive performances for a team that was largely led by a few good players and a bunch of mediocrities. In the 2007-08 playoffs, Koivu actually had better playoff stats than Kovalev, with 9 points in 7 games whereas AK27 had 11 points in 12 games. To an entire generation of habs fans, those runs were all we saw. I also liked players who came and went, like Brian Savage, Richard Zednik, Jose Theodore, etc. Koivu was the mainstay.

His last season here, 2008-09, was very much a metaphor for his entire career. When he played on a line of Tanguay-Koivu-Latendresse, he was largely ppg. When he played on a line of Tanguay-Koivu-Kovalev, he was largely ppg. However, he also spent large swaths of the season playing with overrated mediocrities like Christopher Higgins who belong on a checking line, or babysitting Max Pacioretty and Matt D'Agostini. Carbonneau never tried Koivu-Kovalev-Kostitsyn. Since that season, Carbonneau has gone on to coach Canada's junior team to a 7th place finish after 7 straight world junior championships, and Latendresse has gone on to become a top power forward and a guy you can expect to score 30 goals. Meanwhile, the Habs have gone on to sign Scott Gomez, a guy who got paid 7.4 million for 12 goals and 47 assists last year. Koivu went on to the ducks, where he got paid around 3.5 million to score 19 goals and 33 assists. He was rewarded with a 2year contract paying 5 million total. Koivu played 13 years without ever getting a Ryan Smyth or Ryan Malone, whereas Gomez got Brian Gionta in his first week.

Saku Koivu would also win 3 bronze and 1 silver olympic medal, a gold, two silvers and a bronze at the world championships, and a silver at the 2004 world cup of hockey.

Earth/Moon would look like twin planets to Mercury-Based Astronomers

2010-08-22T13:10:00.000-07:00

Discovery News

Image taken by the Messener Spacecraft.

I've Now Watched All Nine Seasons of the X-Files

2010-08-19T17:40:00.000-07:00

Last November, my roommate, bought a box-set of The X-Files and over the last nine months I've watched the nine seasons. That gives an immediate measure of my assessment of the series -- I liked it well enough to watch the series from start to finish, unlike, say Six Feet Under. However, I did not like it so much to race through it at a non-leisurely pace, it did not take over my life the way Babylon 5 or The Wire did, two 5-season shows that I finished in less than 6 weeks.

The X-Files is a 1990s-era show about two FBI detectives, Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, who navigate various paranormal cases dealing with elements such as God, the afterlife, demons, magic, mutants, premonitions, and most famously, extraterrestrial life and a government conspiracy of involvement with said extraterrestrial life and the cover-up thereof. The first few nourish the episodic elements of The X-Files, whereas the last one lies at the heart of the show's 9-season story arc(s). It makes for an interesting dual nature. Popular culture's fantasies of yesteryear, such as demons, fulfill the role of antagonists within the more stylistically conservative stream of the show, aka the episodic stream. Our more modern irrational paranoia of extra-terrestrial invasion is what lies sweeping the more contemporary and superior trend of long-form story arc.

There were a lot of really fabulous stand-alone episodes. I like Terms of Endearment, a season six episode of a half-demon man who keeps trying to impregnate human women with a human offspring, and keeps producing demonic offspring, babies he then discards. In this episode, the antagonist, Wayne Weinsider, eventually hooks up with a woman who, unknown to him, is also a demon. She, however, has been seeking a demon child, and when he tries to dispose of the baby she stops him with ease, running off with the baby. Ice of season 1, The Walk of season 3, Three of season 3 which dealt with vampires, Synchrony of season 4, Detour of season 5, Triangle of season 6, Field Trip of season 6, First Person Shooter of season 7, are some of my other favourites. I liked the vampire episode, but that could just be because I'm an innocent and helpless hostage of the zeitgeist -- I wonder. Interestingly, I read somewhere online that the vampire Mulder hooked up with in that episode was played by his real-world girlfriend at the time.

Some of those stand-alone episodes are, in my opinion, classics of science fiction. I would totally nominate them for the official television sci-fi canon if there were such a thing and if I were to have a vote. Unfortunately, they were very much hit and miss. If more of them had been tied together into mini-arcs, such as the episodes Irresistible and Orison dealing with fetishist Donald Pfaster, or agent John Doggett's one and a half season search for closure in the unsolved murder of his son Luke, they would have been more bearable. By the time season 3 rolled around, never mind season 7, I was anxious to see developments in the extra-terrestrial issue and a payoff for my interest.

My favourite episode is probably Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man, the 7th episode of the 4th season. It illustrates CGB Spender's rise to power -- he was the real Kennedy assassin, which was a good plot device as it allowed them to explore two good stories in one episode. My second favourite would probably be Synchrony, to go back to my earlier point, these are the two I'd include in a sci-fi canon. Synchrony involves a visitor from the future who is responsible for the development of time travel... he comes back to kill those who contributed to its development.

This website has a good list:
http://www.starpulse.com/news/index.php/2008/07/25/x_files_10_best_episodes

I much preferred the overall ET story arc though. The characters of Alex Krycek, CGB Spender aka the cigarette smoking man, X, Marita Covarrubias, Deep Throat, and a few others did a great job enriching the story, really, great cast selections. I thought it was a good expose of how a government conspiracy could work, perhaps with Aliens or some other issues. The public players such as the senators move around, but not the real power brokers behind the scene. Even when these players are removed, however, their missions go on. The institution and the conspiracy is bigger than any one man, and goes on with great vigor after the original syndicate, Krycek and Spender depart.

Chris Carter (X-Files creator) may not have realized he was making a critique of the American standard model of governance but he was. Most Americans, indeed most westerners, believe that the way to get better governance is to change the leader. Get a different president, get different leadership. It hasn't worked out that way with Obama, and it didn't work out that way in the X-Files. The syndicate came and went but their agenda remained, being carried out by new power brokers like Knowles Rohrer. The way the final ends, with Mulder broken, is pretty consistent with where the western world seems right now.

I hope they end up releasing a third X-Files movie to coincide with the alien invasion predicted in the show, slated for December 21st 2012. In light of how poorly the movie did at the box office, and the lack of information this late in the game, I'm not holding my breath.

The relationship between Mulder and Scully was interesting. They were friends and colleagues but never lovers in the first few seasons, and I thought that was an interesting change from most of TV, which hooks up any single and attractive male and female coleads in virtually all shows. To my shock, they hooked up around season 8 -- I wonder if this was imposed by the actual writers or by the executives. John Doggett and Monica Reyes then hooked up toward the end of season 9, but that one was more expected, they seemed to have more of a chemistry. I remain unsure how to interpret the gender dynamics of the two characters -- there are two role-reversals from standard reality which muddle the waters. One, Scully is the more scientific and rational one, the exact opposite of most of popular culture which portrays men as technological and women as magical. On the other hand, as this is the X-Files universe, I'd argue that being "rational" in the standard universe sense is in fact irrational... Dana Scully eventually opens her mind more from around season 7 or so, but in light of everything she had seen it should have come sometime before season 4. Mulder on the other hand didn't change much between the start and the end of the series, and that's because the events of The X-Files reality vindicated his world view again and again -- he had no need to change. Later on, in seasons 8 and 9, the personality asignment between Doggett and Reyes is reversed, it is Doggett who is cool and rational and Reyes who makes the more ambitious leaps of faiths.

Overall, I'd have to give this series a B+. It aimed high, asked some tough questions and tackled an ambitious storyline, but it wasn't as addictive as say Mad Men or True Blood. I'm not sure if it's crying out for a remake or not -- I think the modern trend of larger ensemble casts and deeper story arcs would have worked well for a show such as The X-Files, but it's still too soon.

Astronomy Decadal Survey

2010-08-13T10:42:00.000-07:00

Good Preview at Cosmic Variance:
Julianne Delcanton

Here's the home page of the released documents:
Astro 2010

If they actually manage to put these projects through I'll be satisfied, I wish they'd build SIM.

Gary Kurtz on Star Wars

2010-08-13T10:40:00.001-07:00

LA Times

“Star Wars” was born a long time ago, but not all that far, far away. In 1972, filmmakers George Lucas and Gary Kurtz were toiling on “American Graffiti” in their San Rafael office when they began daydreaming about a throwback sci-fi adventure that channeled the old “Flash Gordon” serials as opposed to the bleak “message” movies that had taken over the genre.
“We had no idea what we were starting,” said Kurtz, who was the producer of the first two “Star Wars” films and also a second-unit director. “That simple concept changed Hollywood in a way....”

There was a bittersweet tinge to Kurtz’s voice, and it’s no surprise. This year is the 30th anniversary of “The Empire Strikes Back,” the “Star Wars” sequel that many fans consider the pinnacle moment in a franchise that has pulled in $16 billion in box office and merchandising. But 1980 was also the year that Kurtz and Lucas realized the Jedi universe wasn’t big enough for the both of them.

“I could see where things were headed,” Kurtz said. “The toy business began to drive the [Lucasfilm] empire. It’s a shame. They make three times as much on toys as they do on films. It’s natural to make decisions that protect the toy business, but that’s not the best thing for making quality films.”

Edited to add:

Gawker - A deleted scene from Star Wars: The Return of the Jedi

Caprica Season 1.5 Preview

2010-08-03T11:10:00.001-07:00

This was absolutely hilarious.

2010-07-22T21:14:00.000-07:00

This was absolutely hilarious, a bit high on the profanity though.

Review of Inception

2010-07-21T07:06:00.000-07:00

Inception cements a lot of ideas in my mind. The first is that Leonardo Dicaprio is possibly the best Hollywood male actor of his generation, with the less active Liam Neeson and Daniel Day Lewis providing the only real competition. The second is that the 39 year old Christopher Nolan is probably the best producer-director right now. Inception is a great film, and it comes on the heels of Memento, The Prestige and The Dark Knight.

Inception might actually be better than The Dark Knight. My impression before the film was that it might be a Final Fantasy III / Chrono Trigger situation (it might have been Final Fantasy 7 rather than Chrono Trigger). At the time, industry observers were wondering how Square Soft could possibly make a better game than Final Fantasy III. When Chrono Trigger came out, the response was that they didn't, but they still made a great game. I don't think this is the case here, Inception is at least on par with The Dark Knight.

Inception has everything you need. A great story, a great cast, cinematographic beauty, a great score and a great use of sound effects. Like The Dark Knight, it feels like the climax of the movie is 2 hours and 27 minutes long. It's not a build-up to the climax the way you would expect from what English teachers lecture about story format, it's simply a consistent and energizing emotional high. I don't really know how he does it, every moment feels like the discovery of something new.

That's partly because this was a creative movie. They've created an entire technology, the technology to tap into people's dreams and influence or read them, something which is without a straight analogue in the science fiction I have seen or read. They've created that technology and given it details. Within dreams there are deeper levels of dreams, we've all had a few dreams within a dreams in our lifetimes and we know it's fucked. They've said it's easier to read someones mind than it is to plant an idea in someones mind. They've not just created a new technology, but they pulled through on Avatar's greatest failure: They explored the social ramifications. The dream reading technology is used for industrial espionage, but it's also used a drug, for people who want to escape from the grind of daily life. We see old people in a room hooked up to the dream technology, living out what feels like decades. This recalls the greatness of Babylon 5, and how they actually explored the social consequences of telepathy.

The ideas behind Inception have existed before. Christopher Nolan and his team merely took it to a much deeper level than was done previously. The movie has antecedents in the science fiction canon. In the season 4 episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Hard Time, engineering chief O'Brien lives out a 19-year prison sentence within a dream. We have episodes of Buffy such as "Normal Again" and of Smallville such as "Labyrinth" that have the protagonist blurring the line between dreams and reality, confusing the difference. The Matrix is one of the biggest movies of the past fifteen years, and is all about the bulk of humanity living in a dream. Add Joss Whedon's tv show Dollhouse, the films Surrogate and Avatar, the entire Vampire craze, and the incredible novel Glasshouse by Charles Stross and there is a clear trend: A zeitgeist for mind-body separation. I'm not sure what exactly is at play here. It could be our existential angst due to being the first broadly atheist/agnostic society in history, we search for meaning as to what we are in a world where we have no choice but to take on the responsibility of defining our own meanings. Perhaps it is the collective class consciousness of the unwashed masses, crying out in agony at the futility of a lot of the tedium of our daily lives... we yearn for the more luxurious lives of the vampires, but in reality we're not even as awesome as werewolves. Dream escape is a similar idea, within their dreams Dicaprio and Page's characters can arbitrarily reconstruct the world around to them, tapping into a power they wish they had in the real world of their powerlessness. In that real world, they are no more than employees and tools of the people who can build buildings. This makes me quite sad -- it's a painful reminder of what Dollhouse could have been. It was the right story at the right time, it just wasn't properly executed and marketed in spite of being in the hands of some great executors (Mutant Enemy) and marketers (Fox).

Returning to the zeitgeist, I'm not exactly sure what the meaning of this mind-body trend is in science fiction, but it deep and it is broad. It's a good example of the power of literature and storytelling to explore human interactions and society. Human language and communication is largely just a string of metaphors of varying quality, and storytelling is our medium of cognition. We realize things metaphorically before we realize them literally. Therein lies an irony of Inception, as the dream worlds explored are themselves metaphorical.

I adored Inception. I will likely go see it again. I don't expect a sequel in spite of there being unanswered questions, I think it works great as a stand-alone movie but you never know. I feel very confident about the upcoming Superman film now... Nolan may just be a godfather to the project, but he knows how to pick a team. He's the real deal with a long track record of success, of high success. His use of actors in multiple movies (at least two Dark Knight actors were in Inception, Cillian Murphy and Michael Caine) makes me just wonder: How about Leonardo Dicaprio as John Corben (Metallo) in the next Superman movie?

Good Ideas for a Message Board

2010-07-20T09:11:00.000-07:00

Something I may try to do in the future is set up a message board, so I'll include some of my thoughts here on how to make a good board, a better board, over time so I have a place where I've tabulated my thoughts. I will be editing this post many times as more ideas come across, including shameless exporpriation of anything from the comments.

The best moderating I've seen is in the habs board at canadiens'nhl.com... they prevent thread proliferation which is a strength, you get good topics that way.
No more than three quote boxes per post.
Automatic merging of posts like in ksite.
The 60 second flooding rule.
Very high threshhold before getting banned
A vote for "good post" and "bad post".
Invitation-only membership at least for a time, just like on whedonesque I think.
A 30 minute allowance to edit posts, or until the next post, whichever comes first.

And now for the new ideas:

A citation rate, total number of quote boxes divided by total number of posts.
A minimum average word count. As in, a poster has to average 200 words per post with a median above 100 words per post, with the bottom 10% of posts removed from the calculation. This will reduce the number of people who post silly comments, one-line responses, etc. Have the average word count show up on the user box.
A post can be posted in multiple forum topics... this might be a good idea when people make comparisons and contrasts... or perhaps have a note placed in the other forum topic as a request.
A featured posts thing on the front page, perhaps dont by member voting, or member responses.
For the beginning, one topic per franchise. Might eventually become one sub-forum.
A shortened version of the opening post is at the top of every page.

Ultimately, it comes down to members. I could probably poach people off ksite, babble, FD, syfy forums, mfo... maybe a few of the habs boards, and if I'm lucky some real-life friends. It wouldn't be as embarassing to invite them if I set up the board. Content is the most important thing, management follows.

Articles on American Soccer

2010-06-27T13:31:00.000-07:00

Connecticut Post
Published: 03:05 p.m., Sunday, June 27, 2010
Trick is making US soccer lovefest last

NANCY ARMOUR, AP National Writer

I link to a bunch of good articles below:

Wall Street Journal
JUNE 26, 2010, 8:22 P.M. ET
Across the U.S., Soccer Fans Were Plugged In
By WALL STREET JOURNAL STAFF

Bleach Report

Written on June 27, 2010
World Cup 2010 Recap: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly for the US
Jason Zimmerman

Opposing Views

June 27th, 2010
Time for USA Soccer to Part Ways with Bob Bradley
Opinion by I Dislike Your Favorite Team

That's on Point
Land of Confusion
June 27th, 2010
Mike Cardillo

Review of Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine"

2010-06-21T09:21:00.000-07:00

Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism" is a journalistic tour de force. Over nearly 600 pages of text, she traces the rise and implementation of neo-liberal economic ideology in many times and places: 1960s Indonesia under Suharto's coup and his allies in the Berkeley Mafia, in the Southern Cone in the 1970s and in particular in Pinochet's Chile, in Brazil, in Thatcher's UK, 1980s Bolivia, in China following Tiannamen, in Germany, Poland and Russia following the collapse of communism, in South Africa following the fall of Apartheid, in the Asian financial crisis, in post-9/11 USA with the homeland security bubble, in post-9/11 Israel with the same homeland security bubble, in the Iraq war, in New Orleans following Katrina, and in places like Sri Lanka that were victims of the 2005 Tsunami. The cases that get the most attention are Pinochet's Chile, Russia under Yeltsin and Iraq under the USA. As the book was put out in 2007, it does not include the current American financial crisis, it does say later on that the USA is headed toward economic collapse, something Klein might wish she had elaborated on.

The narrative, which is primarily descriptive rather than analytical, is informative if nothing else. Readers will learn of the "Chile Project", a plan to have Chile's brightest economic students receive their graduate education at the University of Chicago. The plan was so successful that Pinochet's finance minister, Sergio de Castro, was one of the alumni, and it would be further implemented to impact the rest of Latin America. The reader will learn that Margaret Thatcher seemed unlikely to hold on to power, up to and until she decided to fight a war over a previously marginalized and neglected piece of land: The Falklands Islands. Following the war, Thatcher would go on to use the same propaganda tactics against coal miners, referring to them as "the enemy within", while the Friedmanite Junta in Argentina lost power.

The comprehensive historical referencing is necessary for Klein's thesis. Her thesis is that neo-liberal economic philosophy has not been able to win support democratically, and that it has been implemented throughout the world via the use of shocks. Over time, the promoters of neo-liberalism have grown aware of this and have taken on an approach to incorporate that into their long-term planning, "instability is the new stability" and allow shocks to take place. She brings up the use of torture and makes it not only relevant but integral. She points out that many of the most economically "liberal" regimes were also the most repressive, and her argument is that it may be impossible to run economic liberalism without a police state to enforce it. Milton Friedman is quoted dismissing this notion as silly. Following his visit to China in 1989, he wrote a letter to a student newspaper asking them if they would critique him for supporting a regime like China, implied to be different from that of Pinochet's Chile [Friedman had visited Chile in 1975 and had said Pinochet's regime was off to a good start]. A few months later the Tiananmen massacre took place. Klein introduces the reader to a narrative of the massacre ignored by the North American press. An alternative narrative, advanced by - among others - Wang Hui in his 2003 book "China's New Order", is that it was not merely about "democracy versus communism," the protesters were against the corporatization of China's economy under Deng Xiaoping. Milton Friedman was in fact supporting a regime much like Pinochet's Chile.

Torture is not just used as a supporting device to neoliberalism, to keep dissidents in line. Klein argues that it's also a metaphor to the shock doctrine, what torture does to the individual, the shock doctrine does to societies. It was found in studies, conducted in the 1940s and 1950s, that an optimal interrogation strategy was to shift from sensory overload to sensory deprivation. With these methods, as opposed to rote sadism, victims might suddenly regress to behaving like children, crawling on all fours, being incontinent at both ends and sucking their thumb. Psychologists like Ewen Cameron believed that this was the blank slate, a fantasy neurological state of behaviorist psychology on which any psychology could be imprinted. By destroying the old individual, a new better individual could be built. Cameron achieved great success at destroying individuals, but never anything other than failure in rebuilding newer, better individuals. Upon destroying the individual, rubble and ruins are left behind, not a plain field. While this was shown in the case of individuals, it was not shown, or rather it was shown and not widely understood, in the case of societies. When the USA moved into Iraq with its aptly named "Shock and Awe" campaign, one of the leaders dismissed accusations of "nation building". He said it was "nation creating", the implication that Iraq was a blank slate. Another major figure, John Agresto, director of higher education reconstruction for the occupation, commented that he had never read any books on Iraq, because he wanted to lead with as open a mind as he could have. A Mormon missionary thought that the Book of Mormon would open eyes in Iraq, and that he would eventually be a hero of Iraqi history for spreading his gospel. The reader is informed that the military knew that museums, holding ancient Mesopotamian artifacts, might be looted, but that the leadership deliberately chose not to protect them. The National Museum of Iraq lost 80% of its 170,000 objects. Meanwhile, some saw the looting as a form of rapid privatization... it would accelerate the destruction of the country, allowing a new country to be rebuilt on Friedmanite grounds. "I thought the privatization that occurs sort of naturally when somebody took over their state vehicle, or began to drive a truck that the state used to own, was just fine," said Peter McPherson, the senior economic adviser to Paul Bremer (Klein, page 427).

The Iraq war ties into the Homeland Security Bubble, a Bush-era source of "economic growth" in the USA which is never mentioned in the mainstream media. Both Rumsfeld and Cheney had at least tens of millions of dollars of assets coming into their positions, with many of those held on. This gave them a direct interest in privatizing the military, a position Rumsfeld advocated in a September 10, 2001 speech to US generals, where he compared the Pentagon bureaucracy to the Soviet Union. As of the book's publishing, the Pentagon sends US$ 270 billion to private contractors. Washington became the next silicon valley. There were 2 security-oriented lobby firms in 2001, but by mid-2006 there were 543. Cameras, data mining, image recognition are a tough business. The CEOs of the top 34 defense contractors enjoyed a 108% compensation increase between 2001 and 2005, compared to a 6% average at other large American companies in that period.

As an aside, the book also benefits from the best explanation I've seen of the collapse of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. What is known is that there was some popular support for peace in Israel in the 1990s, and that this support went away and was replaced by a more hardline outlook. I've never seen this explained in a satisfying manner in the mainstream press, and I was interested in Klein's two points on this regard. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, ironically caused by "Washington Consensus" shock policies such as privatization, there was an influx of nearly 1 million Russians into Israel, equivalent to a ~20% increase in population. At this point, Israeli businesses no longer needed Palestinians for cheap labour. The borders would often be closed off, leading to catastrophic economic problems in the Palestinian territories, amplified by Israel's refusal to allow Palestinians to trade with other countries, which in turn fed terrorism. Additionally, following the 9/11 WTC bombings, there was a homeland security bubble throughout the world, a bubble I've also never seen mentioned in the mainstream press (only the housing bubble is discussed) but well documented in The Shock Doctrine. Israel's leaders, who previously had a vision of themselves as the Singapore of the Middle East, now had another vision, that of a futuristic fortress. Israeli corporations benefit from the media analysis of their anti-terrorism dealings because it is free marketing for their police state technologies. In its December 12th, 2005 issue, Forbes magazine declared Israel "the go-to country for anti-terrorism technologies". Here's a link to the article: http://www.camero-tech.com/pdf/forbes_121205.pdf

This comprehensiveness is depressing. The book was a page turner, in my case, but also a teeth gnasher. The dominance of neoliberal philosophy appears to be total, and it succeeds virtually wherever it goes in the period 1965-2005. Solidaire was hijacked in Poland, and the African National Congress turned its freedom charter, which it had held on for nearly forty years, into a joke once it achieved power. It's begun undermining the very apparatus of its enforcement, the united states military, an entity that was largely privatized under Rumsfeld. Every so often when individuals do end up leaving the fold, they don't go very far, for example Jeffrey Sachs going to debate war with his former friends to argue that more foreign aid is the solution... as if there are no complete ideological alternatives. Perhaps there aren't.

In the 1980s, Sachs was a young Harvard celebrity professor, who brought the shock doctrine to Bolivia, where inflation went down and unemployment went up, which he calls a success.
He was brought to Poland in the early 1990s. They liked the way he was able to raise foreign aid with his connections. He did the same in Poland, moving the Soldaire party to the right, though it took time to convince them.
He tried to do the same in Russia, they got the shock doctrine but to his surprise he wasn't able to raise foreign aid this time. In her interviews with Sachs, he apparently believes that they (the IMF economists) were lazy in not analyzing the Russia situation, which he thinks warranted a Marshall Plan. Klein implies that Sachs is blind, and that the IMF crowd didn't give aid to Russia because they wanted it to fail.
He is now in open ideological disagreement with the IMF crowd and advocating debt forgiveness. He has moved from Harvard's economic department to Columbia's.

If I had written a book like this I might have contemplated suicide. I suspect this is where her last chapter "Shock Wears Off" originates... perhaps her publisher told her that her text was too gloomy, and she needed at least some bloomy to compensate. In her last chapter, she argues it is difficult to pull off the shock doctrine on the same population multiple times. She argues that the current socialist successes in Latin America are largely due to the excesses of the Juntas in the 1970s and 1980s. If true it's a nice story, but I wonder if there's more. Are there truly more successes in Latin America now than there were in other parts of the world in other decades? Is the region better protected than South Korea, Thailand, etc were before the Asian Financial Crisis hit? If Venezuela is such a beacon of socialism, how has the US military not yet bombed the country? I guess history will tell. I do want to believe Klein's final conclusion, that shock wears off, but it is hard to do so following her encyclopedic cataloguing of their skill at manipulating the world over the previous four decades.

Ironman 2: Unfortunate

2010-05-19T12:07:00.000-07:00

[Originally posted on Ksite as an example of how not to make a movie, some edits below]

I saw Iron Man 2 last Friday.
It was garbage for the most part, and is the exact example of what a superman movie should not be. The best part of the movie was the constant T&A shots of Scarlett Johansson.

The storyline had no complexity, the bad guys were one-dimensional, the good guys were one-dimensional, scenes were constructed around making the biggest explosions, the portrayal of women was sexist throughout (I'm thinking of the birthday party in particular), an annoyingly cartoonish depiction of government and military, the science was cringe-inducing, and the fighting was boring.

Basically, it was a bad version of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen with a lesser story but with a hotter version of the eye-candy female lead.

RDJ's characterization was absolutely retarded. It's offensive to anybody who has a clue about how the world works or how hard it is to build anything. Somehow, this man is in great physical health, is an expert at all branches of science (software, hardware, biology, atomic physics, aeroynamics -- all of science), did a decent job running a business... and he always has time to party whenever he wants?

I was watching it with some other people, we burst out laughing when he instantly understood the new atomic nucleus his father, and we laughed even harder when he built a particle accelerator out of spare parts, in a few hours, and made a fundamental discovery that was only missing an extra strong wrench. The way he discovered the new element is even more retarded than the ending of Independence Day, were an alien invasion was beaten back because - wait for it - they were infected with a computer virus. They must have been using Windows 95 !

Sam Rockwell was ridiculous as Hammer. He was too much of a weasel to be in charge of a large corporation. He had private security that was somehow comprehensively beaten up first by a Russian loser, and then by Scarlet Johansson. The real villain was Vankov... here you have this super-genius who never did anything with his life until he saw Iron Man on the news. Then all of a sudden, within a few days and with zero budget, he built an ironman suit. Wow, if he's such a hard-worker and genius why did he never do anything with his life before? No reason - the characters are simply implausible. I liked the part where he hacked into the Hammer industries' computer system... that's not how computers work. If they did work that way, Vankov would have been living in a huge mansion for being such a genius, not in a dump.

As for my sexism reference no I'm not a chick. Just because someone is against gratuitous sexism/racism/homophobia/etc doesn't mean they're a member of the group. I was not referring to SJ. She may have been gratuitous T&A, but at least she had some plot elements going - sort of like the Bond girls. They're drop-dead gorgeous and wearing tight clothes, but at least they have other talents as well and they fulfill roles in the overall plot. I was talking about the women in the background. For example at his party, you have leggy, large-chested blondes throwing stuff around the room, and then jumping up and down in joy whenever he blows something up using his suit. It was very silly, and a very transparent trick to compensate for a poor storyline. As a male viewer, you're supposed to be excited by this sight and thereby not noticing that the party scene is nonsensical. I low how the war machine suit was just stolen, just like that.

I'll also note James Bond is not the standard. Bond, for the most part, is also ridiculous. It survives as an anachronism of the 1950s and 1960s, it's a form of escapism to a different era. If it was released now as a brand new concept it would do as well as all other spy movies - it would flop.

Awesome: CoRoT-9B is 95-day Period Transiting Planet

2010-03-17T11:54:00.000-07:00

Background information on CoRoT-9B
Extrasolar Planet Encyclopedia

Nature Paper
A transiting giant planet with a temperature between 250K and 430K
Deeg et. al.

With a semi-major axis of ~0.4 AU, this is by far the planet that is most distant from its star among those thus far discovered by the transit method. It's about 2.8x as massive as Saturn, and 0.8x as massive as Jupiter, while being 5% larger than Jupiter and thus 26% larger than Saturn. It kind of says a lot that such a beast excites me in spite of being at a mercury distance.

I imagine that over time this world should be a prime candidate for spotting exomoons and detecting Transit-Timing-Variations.

The image from page 3 of their nature paper, linked to above, along with their caption, shows a good reason to be excited. Their black point is much further up than the other black points - this planet is at a higher period. Hopefully we'll start seeing more of these planets now, which are in my opinion more interesting. CoRoT is certainly supposed to be capable.

Smallville season 10 Fantasy: President Lex Luthor

2010-03-17T08:44:00.000-07:00

I had posted this on the fan community site, Kryptonsite.

I believe that upon Lex Luthor's return in season 10, the writers need to either draw the roadmap of his journey to the oval office, or show him assuming the presidency.

I have three reasons for this:

1) It completes Lex's Arc.
2) It sets Lex up as an antagonist worthy of superman, and fulfills Dr. Fate's prediction that he'll be his "greatest adversary".
3) It's more current than Lex's traditional power base of a megacorporation.

The completion of Lex's Arc
The series finale must be a notch greater than the usual predicted vision of showing superman flying in his tights, and showing Lois Lane's cover story. It needs to show Lex completing his journey as well.

Most fans think of Smallville as Clark Kent's journey, and it is that, but it is also more. It's the formation of the superman universe. Season 1 and 2 of smallville where set up as a comparative study between Clark and Lex, with Lex getting many storylines independent of Clark. What they had in common was friendship, and strong [albeit different] father figures, tremendous talent, and they were on their way up. The ladder they were climbing was different though, Lex was climbing the ladder of power, and Clark was climbing the ladder of influence.

In episode 1x06, "Hourglass", a woman predicts the futures of Clark and Lex, or rather, she sees them. Clark's future is one of great influence, she tells him she's seen him many times before, saving other people. Lex is seen as president of the united states, surrounded by death. Her predictive powers, in this show, are shown to be absolute. He needs to become president. I suppose the death surrounding him could be due to his failed defense of Earth during Darkseid's invasion, but that can be left to fanfiction.

Lex's dream in Smallville is to step out his father's shadow. To be his own man. In seasons 1 and 2 he sets up LexCorp, and helps the plant employees buy out their plant. He sets up Cadmus labs to investigate the meteor rocks independent of his father. He eventually assumes management of LuthorCorp, when his father goes to jail, and he keeps it through continued blackmailing of his father. He eventually kills his father, to step out of his shadow. How can he step out of the shadow of one of the world's most connected businessmen? He cannot do it by becoming one of the world's most connected businessmen, as he has in the comics. Pretty much the only way up is the presidency.

In the pivotal Lex episode of the series, 5x09, "Lexmas", Lex chooses the path of power. The presidency is the office that best personifies power.

It sets Lex up as an antagonist worthy of superman, and fulfills Dr. Fate's prediction that he'll be his "greatest adversary".

Clark's main adversaries thus far in the series:

A) Lex and Lionel Luthor - corporate executives
B) Brainiac - Artificial Intelligence
C) Davis Doomsday - Ultimate Soldier
D) Major Zod - General

I can think of no greater power base that one-ups the above occupations and power base than that of president. First, it directly incorporates the power bases of A and D. The government is in many ways just the largest corporation, and it has several generals working for it.

It has many great minds working for it, none as great as Brainiac's but it doesn't suffer Brainiac's and Davis' biggest weakness - they worked alone. There is no banishing the president to the phantom zone, there is no burrying the president underground and there is no having the legion capture the president and send him to the future for reprogramming. Smallville has hinted that Superman will suffer in his quest for public acceptance because he's an alien. The legion told him in season 8 that he was the one responsible for bringing acceptance to alien. In 8x15, Infamous, we see an alternative reality where he is rejected, and it's a probable eventuality. Clashes with the president will never help his public image, even if the president is unpopular.

In order to withstand a Luthor powerbase enshrined in the oval office, he will not just need the brawn to fight billion dollar military machines, he'll need to win the hearts and minds to appeal the public, to keep their trust, and the brains to keep those two goals in harmony.

It's more current than Lex's traditional power base of a megacorporation

Superman was written in and is a product of the 1930s, in the era where companies made things but the economy was run into the ground by robber barrons . 75 years later, the economy has again been run into the ground by robber barrons (they're called banksters now), but there are no longer many American companies that make things. The sectors in the USA that do, such as pharmaceuticals, software developers and defense contractors, do so almost entirely because of the pork barrel and protectionism they receive from Washington, not due to the ingenuity of their CEOs. Lex Luthor, supervillain and CEO, does not make sense in a world with no Henry Fords.

By and large, the government has become the central processing unit of American capitalism, and it is responsible for a disproportionate amount of the good and the bad going on. It is a logical powerbase for a supervillain.

There are a few responses to this. The first, and weakest, is that 2011 (season 10) is not an election year. Whatever, if they don't show Lex winning the white house they can show him running seriously. Additionally, it's a parallel universe, so maybe they're having elections in 2011.

Another one, more substantial, is that the president is perhaps just a lackey of the system, a figurehead, and that neither Bush or Obama have any power. That is true, they are both expert followers of the wind. I do not believe Lex Luthor would be that kind of president. I think he would be the smartest man in the room, the most well-connected, and that would allow him to access the constitutional powers of his office in a way that recent presidents have not been able to. A good example of this would be Cheney. I believe Lex would command authority in the office, he already knows the generals from his work as a defense contractor, and he already has some connections in Washington.

Similarities between Buffy and Smallville

2010-03-17T08:42:00.000-07:00

I had posted this on the Smallville fan site, Kryptonsite, it's somewhat cleaned up here.

My impression watching the show, and I'm a fan of both don't get me wrong, is that Smallville owes a tremendous amount to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and is very much a superman version of Buffy. I bold the most impressive similarities.

Start off in high school for a few years
Go to college for a bit and then they drop out because of their fantastical duties,
Have a female friend that turns into a witch,
Have a long and tragic high school romance, but end up hooking up with their true love (Spike, Lois) later on, lovers with whom they started off as "enemies"
Start off with a supervisor (Jor-El, Giles) whom they outgrow
Have a brief arc of the government getting involved, the initiative in Buffy, and now Checkmate in Smallville
Have identical episodes. "Labyrinth" is a direct copy of "Normal Again", both season 6 episodes in their shows. They both have a one-off insect-person hybrid episode in their first few episodes, who goes romantically after one of their close friends.
Buffy runs away at the end of season 2 after she kills angel and spends time in Los Angeles. Clark runs away at the end of season 2 after he kills his unborn sibling, and he spends time in Metropolis.
The end of Buffy was somewhat confusing due to the presence of numerous potential slayers. Smallville is currently confusing due to all the Kandorians.
All the other slayers in Buffy either die or become problem slayers. All the other Kryptonians in SV either die or become problem Kandorians.
Buffy's mom dies in season 5 in a predictable tragedy, the other parent is still alive but doesn't matter. Clark's pa dies in season 5, in a predictable tragedy, the other parent is still around but doesn't matter.
Buffy focused on vampires and freaks of the week in seasons 1 and 2, expanding to different mythology enemies in season 3. Smallville focused on the Luthors and FOTW in seasons 1 and 2, I think we meet Morgan Edge in season 3, and later on Brainiac, Doomsday, etc.
There's a single bar/pub where everybody in Sunnnydale hangs out: The Bronze. There's only one place where SV people hang out: the Talon. Since SV is aimed at the CW crowd it's a fancy coffee shop that serves mocha java frapuccino lattees with whip cream rather than a dive bar.
For both shows, season six is season sux.
Apocalyptic high school graduations in both shows.
Buffy dies in season 5. Clark dies in season 5.
In season 5 of Buffy, "perfect" Riley Finn develops addiction problems, and goes to be sucked by a vampire, in part to overcome the lack of intimacy he feels from Buffy. In season 5 of Smallville, "perfect" Lana Lang gets injections of krypto-death, to see her dead parents and in part to overcome the lack of intimacy she gets from Clark.

Please fill in the other 140 items I am neglecting.

Looking at this list, what's kind of sad is I'm not sure of any point where Smallville did a better job.

Buffy>Smallville
- Willow's witch arc was much more interesting than Lana's.
- Xander > Pete Ross
- "Normal Again" > "Labyrinthe"
- Buffy's mom dying felt more tragic than reckoning

Debatable:
- When Buffy ran away in season 2 finale, she came back on her own. When Clark ran away, both his fathers made him come back - I'm not sure which is more interesting.

Smallville > Buffy:
- ?????

ETA:

David/Doomsday is like Ben/Glory

Wall Street Vanity License Plates

2010-01-28T16:10:00.000-08:00

Images below are taken from Andrew Sorkin's blog.

http://www.andrewrosssorkin.com/?p=386

They're apparently owned by Robert Kindler, a vice chairman of Morgan Stanley.

Palin supporters

2010-01-28T15:51:00.001-08:00

A funny video of Sarah Palin supporters.

I got it from this blog post by Matt Taibbi, which is the best analysis I've read:
Taibbi on Palin

List and Comments: "Magic Lust" Episodes in Smallville

2010-01-26T15:03:00.000-08:00

This list is for reference purposes and I expect to be updating this page with edits several times. I used to think there were only 3 such cases in SV, with Desiree Atkins, Simone and Maxima, but rewatching it I realize there have been many more. I'm not done rewatching :-)

Episode 1.14, "Nicodemus"

Episode 2.2, "Heat"
We discover Clark's heat vision, so Desiree Atkins does start off having an effect on Clark but it doesn't keep up. They choose for this meteor freak not to affect Clark. Would distract from the sense his feelings for Lana are strong. Jonathan and Lex are affected though. In hindsight this is Lex's first failed marriage, this will happen to him a few times in the series. No woman ever loves him.

Episode 2.4, "Red"
Clark meets red kryptonite for the first time. Without his inhibitions we see him go after Lana for the first time, however, surprisingly, he drops her pretty quick.

Episode 2.14, "Rush"
Clark almost has sex with Chloe on the red meteor rock. He left Lana pretty quickly... again.

Episodes 3.1 & 3.2, "Exile", "Phoenix"
Clark, on red-k, goes for a bunch of girls, but doesn't stick with any of them, he just doesn't like them much as he prefers Lana. He didn't really give Chloe the time of day when she visited, but he does for Lana.

Episode 3.4, "Slumber"
In Clark's dreams, he goes skinny dipping with Lana. She's real thrilled when she finds out, taunting him, with a massive smirk on her face.

Episode 3.6, "Relic"
Jor-El and Lana's great aunt look just like Clark and Lana, and they had a similar relationship. As with Lana, her great-aunt had the attention of just about every man, including Lex's grandfather, and random crazy men who tried to kill her. Ostensibly an episode about different people - we do learn how human Jor-El was - it can also be seen as another retro episode, they could be Clark, Lana and Lex had Smallville been filmed 50 years prior, indeed they use the same actors.

Episode 3.7, "Magnetic"
Lana is easily swayed to love the guy with the magnetic meteor ability, and she almost kills Clark trying to get rid of him. At the end, she feels bad, and tells Clark she trusts him more now.

Episode 3.19, "Memoria"
Clark's most repressed memory? His mother Lara.

Episode 4.1, "Crusade"
Clark, in a pure and true state, is found by Lois. The first moment between them has some sexual tension entirely at her end. What we see about Clark is his trust in Lois and comfort with her.

Episode 4.4, "Devoted"
The cheerleaders mix green kryptonite with a love molecule, and convince the football squad it must be Green gatorade or something. Clark is unaffected, as this wouldn't be useful, he still nominally loves Lana at this point but the writers are trying to introduce and foreshadow his future love for Lois. When she realizes he took some fluid, she thinks he might be infected, and she looks at him with a naughty smile for a moment, obviously hoping she could wrap him around her finger for a bit. Later on, Clark fakes it with a cheerleader, where he's very awkward and tells Lois to hurry. We see that as horny as he may be, when he's not interested in a girl, he's really not interested. Jason Teague is affected, and he almost kills Clark. Chloe's affected, we see she still loves Clark, she drops everything to cheer for him. Later on she almost kills Lois. Chloe, the smartest person on the show, immediately sees the sparks between them, as Lana did a few episodes back.

Episode 4.10, "Scare",
A LuthorCorp experiment goes into the water in Smallville and infects people. They start imagining their biggest fear. Clark's biggest fear? Lana rejects him upon learning his secret, blaming him for the havoc in Smallville including the death of her parents.

Episodes 4.11 & 4.12, "Unsafe", "Pariah"
Alicia Barker is back for two episodes. He likes it with her. He likes the honest. When she puts him on red kryptonite, he goes nuts, marries her, and they're about to have sex.

Episode 4.17, "Onyx"
Lex is split into two due to black kryptonite. One thing his evil half does is demand Lana be with him, and he uses blackmail. Possibly the first explicit confirmation that Lex loves Lana.

Episode 4.18, "Spirit"
When a dead prom queen possesses Lois and makes her dress hot, Clark agrees to go to the prom with her, he's willing, even though before he was anti-prom.

Episode 4.19, "Blank"
Clark falls for Lana again, even without his powers, Chloe learns about his premature ejaculation when he sees Lana. He tells her "this time it will be different" when he's without memories, and says the same thing when he gets his memories back after, though not remembering the previous 24 hours. With Lois, he says to her in one scene "I think we don't like each other" or something like that, demonstrating his lack of emotional acuity. She looks sad following the comment. She's starting to like him.

Episode 5.2, "Normal"
Without his powers, Clark pursues a normal and very happy relationship with Lana. It's probably the most beautiful and heartwarming Clana we'll ever see on the series, out of 7 years their best time comes when they're both normal and she has no idea anything is amiss. They have sex for the first time either in this episode or the next in Lana's apartment, they could not do it in his farmhouse earlier due to a lack of privacy. It's the first time for both of them.

Episode 5.4, "Aqua"
Superpowered Aqua man rescues Lois and they have a brief romance that foreshadows her future romance with Clark.

Episode 5.5, "Thirst"
Buffy the Vampire spoof. Lana turns into a vampire, she discards Clark at first but then she wants him. The only thing she remembers of the whole ordeal is the fundamental good she felt when she bit him.

Episode 5.7, "Splinter"
Exposed to silver kryptonite, Clark grows paranoid. The last person he loses trust in is Lana, though he eventually almost kills her, and it seems he would have killed her had it not been for Brainiac's intervention. His greatest paranoia about Lex is about Lex stealing Lana.

Episode 5.9, "Lexmas"
The good future for Lex, revealed to him by premonition, is of a simple life with Lana. There's also some hidden homoerotic subtext with Clark. Lex's idea of a perfect life has him being Clark in a way. He even lives in a yellow house, like Clark lives in. Clark and Chloe are friends to Lex and Lana the way Chloe is Clark's friend... outsiders, platonic from Lexana's end, but lustfully covetous from Chlark's end. Lex rejects this "perfect future" because of the one thing he doesn't have in it, power.

Episode 5.12, "Reckoning"
Clark tries to live a happy, perfect life with Lana. He takes her to the fortress and proposes to her, following events in previous episodes where they were growing apart. She ends up dying, they cannot be together. Clark reverses time back and then Jonathan dies. Lana ends up going closer to Lex, exactly what Clark was trying to avoid. This was the other consequence of the episode.

Episode 5.16, "Hypnotice"
Simone's seduction powers have absolutely no problem controlling Clark this time. He breaks his relationship with Lana with little concern. This is a strong contrast to both "Heat" in season 2 and "Instinct" in season 8.

Episode 6.12, "Labyrinth",
A plagiarism of the season 6 Buffy episode "Normal Again", Clark ends up in a dreamworld where he has no powers, he was only imagining them, and because of that he's in a mental institution. In a way it's his fantasy world as he's normal. He also loves Lana in this world, and she loves him, and is willing to be with him.

Episode 6.13, "Crimson",
Lois puts on red-kryptonite lipstick, kisses Clark and he goes nuts. He's very affectionate with her, he goes out of his way to impress her, he wants her approval as a full-superpowered man. He then switches to Lana-gear at the engagement party, with a hilarious scene where he gives Lex a baby toy. Even without his inhibitions, he goes after Lana over Lois, with some hesitation when he says "This is the present" following Lois saying "Lana's your past, I'm your future". He doesn't behave as warmly with Lana as he did with Lois, indicating his choice may be due to a lack of emotional acuity. However, he *is* learning, since this time he hesitated and acknowledged the idea by saying "This is the present". The present is fleeting.

Episode 6.20, "Noir",
Not sure if this one was meant to show the same relationships in an alternate setting, like "Relic" was. They did use the same historical period as Relic, interestingly the period when Superman was first starting as a comic book. I found the episode too boring to pay too careful attention.

Episode 7.1, "Bizarro"
Bizarro is attracted to Lois at first sight. Meanwhile, Lex meets Kara in exactly the same way he met Clark. His homoerotic obssession with Clark continues as he now wants Kara, the same way he wanted Lana.

Episode 7.7, "Wrath"
Lana is temporarily as superpowered as Clark. They have sex again, we get a broken bed and some earthquakes.

Episode 7.10, "Persona"
Bizarro and Lana are quite happy together. She doesn't notice, and tells him he's more affectionate than he's ever been. We meet Dax-Ur, another kryptonian, who used blue kryptonite to try and live a life of normalcy, with love and family.

Episode 7.18, "Apocalypse"
Alternate reality. Chloe and Lana are happilly married. When he meets Lois, he saves her, holding her in a classic iconographic position. She's possessive of him, saying something along the lines of "My very own meteor freak". Meanwhile, Kara seemingly loves Lex in this universe, though he does not love her.

Episode 8.4, "Instinct"
Maxima arrives on Earth, she seduces Clark at first with ease, but then when she asks him to leave Lois her affect wears off. His love for Lois is tronger than her powers.

Episode 8.5, "Committed"
Due to a powerful lie detector and an armed crazy man, Lois admits she loves Clark.

Episode 8.8, "Bloodline"
Clark and Lois go to the phantom zone. He's very protective of her there, and she trusts him in that scary place, they work together to try and get out, rescuing Kara in the process. Faora briefly inhabits Lois' body, and sees that Kal-El is attracted to Lois.

Episode 8.9, "Abyss"
Chloe begins forgetting everyone... except Davis. They come closer together.

Episode 8.10, "Bride"
Doomsday crashes Chloe's wedding, to get Chloe, he says her name which might be the only time we hear Doomsday speak, and the only time we see Davis in Doomsday... his love for her goes across metamophoses.

Episodes 8.13 & 8.14, "Power" and "Requiem"
Lana gets powers, and as Clark's equal, they briefly come together until she is imbued with green kryptonite.

Episode 8.15, "Infamous"
This episode is the Clois version of Requiem. Clark has Lois write an article on him due to threats by Linda Lake. She trusts him and accepts him immediately, and we get her reasoning. Later on he has to turn back time, he tells Lois the reason she won't know is "Because she is special". When time is reversed and then changed, a rift between Chloe and Davis is prevented, in the same manner that a Lexana rift was prevented in Requiem.

Episode 8.17, "Hex",
Chloe gets Lois' body, and Clark loses his memories of being superpowered. We see signs of Clark loving Lois, for example Chloe pointing out it's weird to have him look at her that way.

Episode 9.4, "Echo"
Hearing other people's thoughts, Clark learns more about Lois' feelings for him, and asks her out.

Episode 9.7, "Kandor"
Through Flashbacks, we learn of Zod's past, and the death of his wife and child, and Jor-El's refusal to clone them. Implied: this was the beginning of Zod's turn to evil.

Episode 9.8, "Idol"
Lois kisses Clark at the end, when he's wearing glasses, she gets some of her memories back and faints. The trauma was likely seeing Clark weak.

Episode 9.9, "Pandora"
Alternate future. We hear from alternate Clark talking to Lois, "I'm stronger with you than without you". Lois and Clark start dating at the end.

Huxley vs Orwell

2010-01-26T13:50:00.000-08:00

This one is very funny, albeit very one-sided in my opinion. It makes Orwell look completely incorrect, I think he deserves more credit.

Click on the image to view it without the right part cut off.

Bookkeeping: Links to Tribune, CUPJ articles

2010-01-23T16:46:00.000-08:00

Put out for personal bookkeeping purposes.

As of now, my non-academic "publications" are made up entirely of the CUPJ and the McGill Tribune. I'm proud of each of the CUPJ pieces, though there's more diversity in the Tribune articles, naturally, since there's 30 of them. For the more interesting ones, I add comments in bold and in brackets. I couldn't find some of the Tribune articles, such as the 2nd and 3rd conservative leadership race articles. There are probably some other less interesting Tribune articles missing, but if I don't remember them ...

Also missing are the two McGill Daily columns I wrote on facebook, and the the pieces I wrote for the Champlain Edge. I'd show the former but maybe not the latter :P

Canadian Undergraduate Physics Journal
January 2005 - April 2007

Understanding Martian geology with X-ray spectroscopy
By David Nataf
How a University of Guelph team is piecing together Martian geochemistryhttp://cupj.ca/0503_mars.pdf

Editorial

Reinventing the study of the wheel
Noble goals of undergraduate curriculum reform lack realism
http://cupj.ca/0401_editorial.pdf

Applying physics to human health
How a UPEI student found himself at the technological forefront of
research in cancer therapy
BY DAVID NATAF
http://cupj.ca/0401_ryerson.pdf

Editorial
Astrophysics and cosmology at crossroads
Searching for consistency in the contradictions of the cosmos
http://cupj.ca/0403_editorial.pdf

Building Martian exploration science, one mission at a time
David Nataf
http://cupj.ca/0403_mars.pdf

Noble neutrinos
Understanding the Sun from under the Earth
BY DAVID NATAF
http://cupj.ca/0303_noble.pdf

You are the product of frozen accidents
Nobel physicist addresses student research conference
David Nataf
http://cupj.ca/0302_sigmaxi.pdf

McGill Tribune
September 30th, 2003 -March 15th, 2005

LAW

David Nataf | Published: 3/15/05
McGill Tribune

SCIENCE: Candidates square off on A+, tuition fees

David Nataf | Published: 3/8/05
McGill Tribune

Law: Krajewska and Peters vie for sole seat

David Nataf | Published: 3/8/05
McGill Tribune

Science picks dean

Physics chair to focus on undergrads
DAVID NATAF | Published: 3/2/05
McGill Tribune

Former Conservative leadership candidate changed his mind

Prentice now in favour of same-sex marriage
DAVID NATAF | Published: 2/15/05
McGill Tribune
[Prentice liked this piece, I guess, since for a time it was on their website. ]

CAMPUS NEWS: Word is out on SSMU book drive

New market for students looking to clear the slate
David Nataf | Published: 1/11/05
McGill Tribune

The US can't fix their mistakes in Iraq

Poli sci professor Brynen talks about foibles and faults
David Nataf | Published: 11/30/04
McGill Tribune

Term papers for a fee

Is buying your way out of that paper that hard to get away with?
David M. Nataf | Published: 11/9/04
McGill Tribune
[I thought this was very interesting, didn't get much of a reaction though.]

SSMU BRIEFS

| Published: 11/9/04
McGill Tribune

NEWS ANALYSIS: Preventing sexual aggression in a student environment

DAVID M. NATAF | Published: 10/13/04
McGill Tribune
[I think my only News Analysis, took a lot of time, many hours actually but the final product was quite nice imo.]

Pita Pit no more

SSMU sets up sandwich service
DAVID M. NATAF | Published: 9/14/04
McGill Tribune

SSMU BRIEFS

| Published: 9/14/04
Turnover in clubs and services portfolio
McGill Tribune

New EUS council gears up

Engineering students elect all-female executive
David M. Nataf | Published: 3/18/04
McGill Tribune

Trouble at McGill's computer capital

David M. Nataf | Published: 3/18/04
McGill Tribune

Democracy in McConnell

Engineering students head to the polls
David M. Nataf | Published: 3/9/04
McGill Tribune
[I believe this was my only front page.]

News Briefs

| Published: 2/17/04
Communications program still in limbo
McGill Tribune

News Briefs

| Published: 2/10/04
McGill engineers, warriors of the mind
McGill Tribune

News Briefs

| Published: 2/3/04

Red Planet dazzles audience
McGill Tribune

CKUT and SSMU soon to be whistling the same tune

Transfer of radio station to SSMU control nearing agreement
David M. Nataf | Published: 1/27/04
McGill Tribune

U21: early problems linger

Concern over student rights at on-line university
David M. Nataf | Published: 1/20/04
McGill Tribune

News briefs

| Published: 1/13/04
U21 looks at restricting exchanges to members
McGill Tribune

Birth the Right way

the merger of the conservatives and possible leaders
David M. Nataf | Published: 1/6/04
McGill Tribune
[1st of 3 pieces on 2004 CPC Leadership Race]

CKUT faces program and funding changes

David Nataf | Published: 12/2/03
McGill Tribune
[Rough draft would have been my worst article ever, I was completely lost. I remember Kate Fugler bringing me in and asking me to fix it.]

MECC referendum Engineers pass

Career centre and equipment fund supported by undergraduates
David Nataf | Published: 11/11/03
McGill Tribune

Philip Cleary

| Published: 10/21/03
McGill Tribune

Liberal MP says same-sex marriage cold "further deteriorate Canadian family values"

David M. Nataf and Sarah Dolgoy | Published: 10/7/03

McGill Tribune

Manley on Canada: "The natural resources between people's ears"

Liberal MP addresses economic and international issues
David M. Nataf | Published: 9/30/03
McGill Tribune
[First article for the Trib... I liked it!]

The Universe, by the AMNH.

2009-12-18T12:31:00.001-08:00

Summary of the Universe by the American Museum of Natural History

Funniest Facebook Snafus

2009-12-10T19:43:00.000-08:00

Huffington Post

In particular, I like this one:
[Click for better resolution]

Smallville's Lois and Clark

2009-12-06T10:35:00.000-08:00

I've given it some thought, and I've decided that this may be the best romantic story arcs I've seen on T. I wasn't sure why I like this show so much. Certainly the villains have not been well-handled. Lionel and Lex were great, Brainiac was great; but in the past few seasons it's been a disappointment with underwhelming presentations of Doomsday, of Metallo and now of younger General Zod. I think what may be driving my interest in the latter seasons is the strong way in which they've developed the Clark-Lois romance.

[I took that picture from a live journal page I found through google images.]

I'm not normally a shipper. In the case of Battlestar Galactica, for which shipping was a top topic among fans, I thought the Kara-Lee romance was a huge distraction. Not so with Clois, where I think it contributes to the story in a manner that recalls Buffy and Spike.

In hindsight they've done an excellent job of foreshadowing it and putting it together since season 4. In season 4's premiere, "Crusade", Lois found Clark naked, confused and Kryptonian in a field, the same field where Martha and Jonathan found him. It's a direct parallel and puts her in a position of trust vis a vis his life. When Lana first sees them together she immediately predicts they'll end up together...

They get on each other's nerves a lot in season 4, and one might superficially think they hate each other. That's not it. They're in psychological resonance. We don't see Clark get "annoyed" so to speak from anyone else. They're on the same wavelength, and everybody knows what's going on except for those two key characters on the screen.

There's that great scene, also in the season 4 episode "Facade", where Lois drops Clark into the water, we see them laughing at each other and Chloe is looking on, jealous. She can see they have a connection, and the viewer sees that it's obvious to others they're closer to each other than to other people.

Overall the transition from Lana to Lois could have been done 1 season faster but there was a lot of good that happened in between. I'm thinking of the episodes with Simone and with Maxima. Simone came in in season 6 for an episode with powers of hypnosis. She seduces Clark, and she asks him to leave Lana and he does so with little hesitation. Maxima comes in 2 years later with powers of seduction, and she seduces Clark taking great control of him. She in turn asks him to leave Lois... he hesitates, and then refuses. He leaves Maxima aside and runs after Lois... that makes an excellent contrast. His love for Lois is stronger than some superpower spell, which was not true of his love for Lana. Furthering the contrast this is before they even are together, whereas with Lana he treated her like crap in full relationship mode.

I now better appreciate why Lana was such an important role in Clark's development. As a viewer I really wanted to see Clark and Lana become a couple, and they could not. It kept being a trainwreck, mostly relating to issues of Clark's powers. In Lois' case, the contrast, it is with those powers that they will come closer together. He says to her in Pandora that he's stronger with her, whereas with Lana it seemed she always made him weaker. The symbolism reaches a crescendo in season 8 when Lana's veins become porous with Kryptonite. She is poison to him, entirely related to issues pertaining to his Kryptonian heritage. Lois, on the other hand will prove to be a perfect match.

It helps that these two actors are phenomenally good-looking.

We certainly want to see them get closer together. And while an army of prudish fans may prevent the executives from going in that direction, I'd like to see them take their clothes off and have sex. He was always hesitant of having sex before fearing he' physically hurt the woman. Would be a great completion if he does have sex with her, fully juiced, and is in great control. He would then have full control over his powers, and be Superman.

Apparently many others think so. Over at fancast.com, Lois and Clark won the best kiss of 2009, for the same kiss scene in Idol I posted two weeks back:
http://www.fancast.com/specials/year-in-tv-2009

Twilight and Transformers alternate endings.

2009-12-06T09:59:00.000-08:00

2009-12-06T09:43:00.000-08:00

An absolutely hilarious fan video mocking Terminator, merging its plot line with that of Back to the Future.

Smallville: Great Lois and Clark video

2009-11-14T14:50:00.000-08:00

This was posted by cntrygrl85.

Posted some time ago on youtube, over a month I think, but it fits in well with last night's episode.

Cyclical Evolution

2009-11-13T09:18:00.000-08:00

The image below I got from a Cosmic Variance post by Sean Carroll. The man on the nuclear missile is a reference to the ending of Stanley Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove".

26 years old

2009-11-12T16:05:00.000-08:00

Wow, that's one third of a typical lifetime for western men. I feel really old. It's kind of scary.

George Bernard Shaw introduces Albert Einstein

2009-11-10T10:46:00.000-08:00

Ah, the charm of the old era, they have such a different accent, ways of dress and manner of speech :-)

There are some interesting looking links about George Bernard Shaw over at youtube.

DVD Sales Charts, November 1st

2009-11-10T09:38:00.000-08:00

http://www.the-numbers.com/dvd/charts/weekly/thisweek.php

I guess that link will become outdated eventually, it's the data for the week ending in November 1st.

I'm dissapointed to see Galactica: The Plan grossed only ~$3 million. Unless it has long staying power somehow, or the numbers are somehow wrong or it does very well overseas, this will not produce much profit for the studio and thus we can't expect many additional direct to DVD TV movies in the BSG universe. Perhaps that is for the best however as there is a risk of tarnishing the series.

I'm amazed by Transformers, 155 million cumulative for the second movie and 280 million for the first movie. This says a few things, one of them is that science fiction is not necessarily a money loser (each successful example counts!) the other is that movies still dominate over tv shows in DVD sales. The first 6 spots are all theatrical movies, and the top thing with the word "season" in it is the last season of the L word, which is in 30th place with a weekly gross of 1.3 million.

Even Twilight has fewer receipts than Transformers, 168 million or so from Twilight.

Jon Stewart spoofs Glenn Beck

2009-11-07T12:46:00.000-08:00

Obtained from the Credit Writedown Blog

And I've got to say - absolutely hilarious. I particularly like the Hitler comment at the ~3:30 mark or so.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

The 11/3 Project

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Political Humor

Health Care Crisis

New Caprica Preview, with James Marsters

2009-11-04T06:59:00.000-08:00

This is a preview of Caprica I found on the Caprica TV blog , it includes snippets of the James Marsters characters. He looks like he will rock, as always.

I really like the actors who play Daniel Graystone and Joseph Adama, there's a lot of intensity about them and their roles, and they succeed in doing this without some usual directorial bullshit like in Smallville, which just focuses on the character's face for 2 seconds.

I see Zoe's mother will soon know that Zoe has been recreated. Daniel Graystone will be alienated from his "friend" (Adama), his wife, and has lost his daughter. He'll be a truly isolated character.

Clintonian Economic Hall of Fame

2009-10-31T18:14:00.000-07:00

Behold, Bill Clinton's economic team from the late 1990s, Robert Rubin, Alan Greenspan and Lawrence Summers, looking smug because they prevented an economic crisis.

In hindsight, they did not prevent... rather it seems like they delayed.

MSNBC: ‘Clone Wars’ makes the Force matter again

2009-10-31T13:32:00.000-07:00

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33510165/ns/entertainment-television/

Clone Wars’ makes the Force matter again
Cartoon Network’s top show an olive branch to ‘Star Wars’ loyalists
By Mike Avila
updated 8:44 a.m. ET, Fri., Oct . 30, 200

Time to Jedi Up.

“Star Trek” may have hogged the spotlight during its recent return from pop culture purgatory, but “Star Wars” is cooking up its own comeback. And a plucky Padawan and a couple of Clone Troopers are leading the way.

The revival of George Lucas’ space opera has been positively Sith-like in its stealth and cunning. It hasn’t even become a trending topic on Twitter yet.

It's pretty sad, but I think that article is enough to convince me!

Well, not that sad, I was and am a fan of the storylines. I owned like 20 of the books, used to own the VHS of the old trilogy and now own the DVDs of the new trilogy. I'll probably give it a shot at some point. I notice Farscape: The complete Series is cheap on Amazon, $107 last I looked. The reboot of V is starting next week, and Caprica starting in January, Dollhouse returning in December and hopefully longer than that, there should be plenty of sci fi avaiklable. I oughtta learn to ration or else I'll be in trouble :P

Our species has produced too many good books

2009-10-29T12:27:00.000-07:00

I was thinking about my long-term reading list, and whether or not I'm ever going to get through most of the books I want to read.

Just from my Amazon shopping list:

Politics of Experience
Sookie Stackhouse 8-copy Boxed Set (Sookie Stackhouse/True Blood)
Sex and the Slayer: A Gender Studies Primer for the Buffy Fan
Five Seasons of Angel: Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Discuss Their Favorite Vampire (Smart Pop series)
Seven Seasons of Buffy: Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Discuss Their Favorite Television Show (Smart Pop series)
A Mathematician's Apology (Canto)
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
Outliers: The Story of Success
Civilization and Its Discontents
Capital : A Critique of Political Economy (Penguin Classics) (Volume 2)
Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
Harry Potter Paperback Boxed Set (Books 1-7)
Starman Jones

Which doesn't include some graphic novels. 27 books plus the graphic novels, plus Capital Volume 3, and I'll read Breaking Dawn when the paperback edition comes out - at the latest. Just not a realistic expectation of my time? Since the beginning of this year I've read:

New Moon - Stephenie Meyer
Eclipse - Stephenie Meyer
The Door into Summer - Robert Heinlein
First part of Capital Volume 1, currently working on it - Karl Marx
Terror Dream - Susan Faludi
Volumes 1, 2, 3 and 4 of Angel: After the Fall.
Most of Black Holes and Time Warps

Add the fact in my library I have most of an Einstein biography to go through, half or more of Steven Pinker's book The Stuff of Thought, the second half of Patrick Buchanan's book, I think "State of Emergency", well, I may have unrealistic expectations of my time :P

In the near future, I would like to finish:
Capital Volume 1
Freedom Evolves, Daniel Dennett
Harry Potter
Black Holes and Time Warps
What's unfinished in my library

It's kind of a bit sad to think that I'll never get through most of the good stuff. I have not even thought about other languages. A bit of a shock for someone who had no shortage of intellectual ambitions and pretensions growing up, this is somewhat sad :-)

Felicia Day talks Astronomy

2009-10-29T11:55:00.000-07:00

Felicia Day talks Astronomy and Galaxy mergers in this video prepared by the Spitzer Science Center.

I think that's awesome, she just totally gains a +1 in my books. For those unfamiliar she was one of the potential slayers in Buffy season 7, where she kicked ass, and she was a guest star in the Dollhouse DVD episode Epitaph One.

Thomas Dekker Interview on TSCC Season 3

2009-10-28T18:06:00.000-07:00

The youtube interview I link to below has an interview with Dekker where he reveals what some of the plans for season 3 were.

Sounds pretty amazing.

1) John becoming John Connor. They were doing a very decent job of that in season 2, especially in the second half when things redeemed themselves from the mediocre first half. I recall especially when he confronted Riley, and latter Jesse (do I recall that right?).

2) A love triangle between John Connor, Alison (Young?) and Savannah Weaver. I thought Josh Friedman did a pretty good job with the love stories. Tnhey weren't soap operas that took over the show like on certain other science fiction stories, but they were deep, interesting and attracted my attention - like Sarah and Charley, and Derek and Jesse.

As of now, I hold that this series is a great tragedy of television history. I think it's as good as Firefly and Crusade. I hope one day such high-concept, high-sophistication TV becomes more popular.

Mars Missions: A Pictorial History

2009-10-28T17:56:00.000-07:00

This chart shows the history of Mars missions in a pictorial manner easy to understand, and which facilitates appreciation of the historical progress and treds.

I saw this chart on an io9 page, it's due to IEE's special issue on Mars exploration issues. Click on the image for sharper resolution.

Among other observations, the US missions had a much larger success rate than the Soviet/Russian missions, and the success rate has risen in recent times. We're also seeing the emergence of new players. Japan in 1998 (though their Nozomi mission failed), the EU in 2003 and 2004, with one future mission (expected: 2016), and there's a joint Chinese-Russian mission called Phobos-Grunt/Yinghuo-1 expected for launch later this year according to the graphic, and in 2011 according to Wikipedia.

As friends now, I am a believer in the long-term good of such exploration, and eventually, colonization.

Space Navy Hall of Fame

2009-10-28T17:47:00.000-07:00

I found this picture on io9 some time back, it shows th relative sizes of various ships known to science fiction. Reality-based 20th century human vessels are at the top. They're depressingly small.
Click on the image for sharper resolution.

Explore our Planet-Bearing Stellar Neighbors

2009-10-27T18:24:00.000-07:00

This awesome resource allows one to "travel" to nearby extrasolar planetary systems, and to view the planets as populations. It's a really cool visual aid, and a triumph of web design in my opinion, befitting the triumph in astrophysics it seeks to portray :-)

Extrasolar Planets

BSG, Firefly and Trojans: One Way Science Could Feed Science Fiction

2009-10-27T17:34:00.001-07:00

Two of my favourite shows of the past ten years are Firefly and Battlestar Galactica. For the most part good, however among the more annoying mistakes are the packing of a great number of planets in a single star system. BSG claims to have 12 planets in a single solar system - the 12 colonies of Cobol. Firefly seemed to have even more.

From a forum post on SyFy, I learned of Kethinov's commentary on the issue.

And I decided to write a response of how it could be solved.

***************************

I have to agree with you. Having 12 planets in a single solar system is very implausible, there are some ways to resolve it but they are very improbable. There are three ways around.

1) One such trick would be with Trojan planets. You could pack multiple habitable planets within a single circle if you have a gas giant in that circular orbit, and the two habitable planets (Earth mass) being 60 degrees apart. Jupiter does it with populations of small asteroids in this solar system called Trojans and Greeks, there are no large bodies there but it's thought there could have been.

Where you see, in the first picture, the green (trojan and greek asteroids) and the orange (hilda asteroids) you could have larger bodies. Add 1 or 2 moons around the gas giant and you then have 5 habitable bodies. We're already rather contrived here, because while these configurations might be stable in computer codes, they have not been observed. Admittedly, we barely have the technology to do so if they were blatantly common and obvious and I don't believe much time has been invested in the effort.

You cannot, however, go from 5 to 12. Look at the picture from this solar system. Jupiter is very far out - behind the "snow line" and thus the inner planets like Earth can be in peace. Put it into the inner solar system and all the inner planets will likely fly out. You could try something clever liking having 2 planets at each Lagrangian point, or having, somehow, an extra inner planet even though there's a gas giant there bullying everything. I've already stretched credibility, so I'll stop at 6 planets.

To be fair, everything we've seen so far was a complete surprise. The technology to see the type of system I described here will be online within twenty years, at this rate, and thus if these kinds of configurations exist, we'll probably know by the time the next reboot comes around, assuming they don't shorten the time between reboots.

2) Another trick is a cross between a single star system and multiple star systems - binary stars. The sun is a single star - the nearest star is 4.3 light years away. Most stars, approximately two thirds of them, come in binaries. Sometimes they come in hierachial binaries, such that two stars orbit each other, and much further out you have a third star. Using this, you could get multiple habitable zones if these are wide binaries. Some binary stars, indeed it seems most, are relatively close to each other which makes most planetary orbits unstable. A system like the Tatooine system in star wars would have a high probability of instability, and indeed even if it's stable, there's a single habitable zone that's a ring with both stars in the middle. You want the stars far apart such that they both have their own separate habitable zone.

Alpha Centauri A & B, the nearest major stars, are themselves a binary, with a distance between them about double that between Earth and Pluto, and they're very similar to the sun, the smaller one is 0.8 suns, and the larger is 1.25 suns, if i recall correctly. People are currently looking for planets around the smaller one (it would be easier to identify) , you can read about it here:
http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/the_long_shot/

3) Globular clusters are dense agglomeration of stars, tens of thousands or more stars within a few cubic light years. You could hop from star to star in a relatively short time in such a system. I have not seen any speculation I can recall for habitable planets to abound in such systems.

*******************

If you combine the first two tricks, you could potentially make it quite high up but again I still find 12 unlikely. On the other hand, what we've seen (gas giants super close to their star) was considered unlikely.

I do think there's a sociological appeal to these configurations. If you had so many planets nearby, there would be a drive to colonize them, and to develop exploration technology. A friend of mine speculated the other day that the space program in the USA would have done a lot better if Venus and Mars had been more "interesting", e.g. potentially habitable without tremendous technological efforts. Analogously, having a "brother" planet at a distance of 0.2 light years or something could drive us to develop FTL technology.

Why would they ever develop FTL technology and integrate them in half their ships if they were within a single star? It helps, but it seems unlikely.

Review: Terror Dream: Myth and Misogyny in post 9/11 America, by Susan Faludi

2009-10-27T17:13:00.000-07:00

I recently read "Terror Dream" by Susan Faludi. She's an American journalist and author of the well-known books "Backlash" , and "Stiffed". In this book she explores the myth and misogyny in the cultural/media response to 9/11. It's interesting in my opinion, some of the more famous case-studies she talks about are the firefighters, the 9/11 widows, Jessica Lynch, the media's feigned concern for illiterate afghan girls. Faludi's thesis is that there was a dichotomizing between male heroes and female victims; regardless of whether or not this was the reality of the players involved in any situation. The male heroes had to be gritty, masculine, characters of action; whereas the female victims had to be innocent, helpless, preferably virgins. She said this originates in America's historical cultural continuum, going back to John Wayne, and beyond that, to captivity stories from the frontier days.

She draws a very strong analogy between Cynthia Anne Parker* and Jessica Lynch. It was an interesting read for me in particular due to my knowledge-level. At the time of the attacks and in the events following such as the Iraq war, I didn't have much of an awareness of how the media manipulates gender. As Faludi would revisit some of the developments I would remember some of them. In hindsight it seems like it was so obvious what was going on, though I don't think I caught much glimpse of it at the time.

There's a chapter on the firefighters of New York for a chapter. The media portrayed them as heroes, and I remember debating this with people online at the time, if they were really were heroes. Faludi argues that they were actually victims. 343 of them died on 9/11. One fact which I was not aware of was the extent to which they did not need to die. There was a warning put out to rescue workers to get out, as the towers could fall. The warning was never received as the FDNY were using malfunctioning radios. This information was later suppressed. This is well-explained by her thesis, the firefighters needed to be heroes, gritty heroes. Following the events and the media brouhaha, there was a backlash against female firefighters in the country and their numbers actually began to decline. She also discusses some of the accompanying mythology. A viral story on the media at the time was that American women were horny for firefighters, because of how manly they were. She goes through so many of these stories and she fails to find a single specific example of the media use an actual, named woman dating a firefighter; it's all hearsay and assumptions.

Outside of this book, I never heard that the flight attendants on United 93 were making coffee to throw on the terrorists' faces. The media portrayal was entirely that of a few men, in particular Todd Beamer, rising up to the challenge of the situation, finding strength, saying "let's roll" and thus saving the planes from crashing into the white house.

A chapter is devoted to the 2004 presidential election. One thing which I did not recall was the competitive machismo between Bush and Kerry. Kerry spent a lot of time in hunting garb, and talking about how to kill animals. We know the historical verdict: he was not successful in his election strategy. Faludi pointed out a key difference is that while both Kerry and Bush tried to be male heroes, Bush's team also inserted accompanying female victims who needed to be saved. Laura Bush was made a spokesmen for "security moms" and said he husband wanted to keep people safe, and there was this huge TV ad where Bush hugged an ~11 year old girl called Ashley, who had lots her (mom?) in 9/11. I don't recall the ad but she said it was aired 30,000 times, so it was clearly important.

I won't say much about the chapter on Jessica Lynch as I think that event has been successfully dismantled. Faludi did interview Lynch and it seems Lynch didn't know the woman in her own story. She has no recollection of being raped by her Arab "captors" (hospital medical staff), something which the media interpreted as "suppression of memory". She remembers being well-treated in the hospital from which she was "rescued" by American troops who broke down the doors on their way in rather than waiting for the doctors who were planning on opening the door for them.

She has a very strong explanation of the attention devoted to the plight of women in Afghanistan. The propagandist image of "Afghan girls in school" is a lot more about chivalry than about feminism, even if it gets called feminism to be more politically correct. The narrative is that the girls in Afghanistan are helpless against the lesser advanced men of the orient, and they can only be saved by western male soldiers -- "heroes" -- coming in to save them. It fits seamlessly into the dichotomistic 9/11 media mythology of male heroes (Bush, Giuliani, firefighters) and female victims (pregnant WTC widows, Afghan girls). This was used to justify the invasion. She chronicled how the tone of the media's commentary shifted over time once the attention shifted to maintaining occupation. There was a quote from National Review, where it was said that imposing equality on Afghanistan would be justifying the stereotype of the "ugly American".

Evolving media portrayals with time is something Faludi revisited in almost all of her case studies. Lynch was eventually criticized for "seeking" too much media attention (It seems like the media was chasing her). It seemed particularly aggravating with the 9/11 widows. The media sought them out, in particular those that were pregnant at the time for which there was a competition. They would be a given a script which was generally followed early on. Over time many would veer from the script, and the virgin Mary became the evil bitch. Within a few years, there were criticisms of the widows for moving on rather than mourning their man forever. A made-up story about "boob implants" is one example, there was also a scandal when one of the FDNY widows "seduced" a married man. The Jersey girls in particular veered off script.

I recommend reading it, you might find it a bit frustrating to read though it's very annoying, to read about the American media. It's also written, I think, for an audience of slightly higher sophistication than my own. Being a Canadian born in the 1980s I didn't know who John Wayne and what he represented, and I was not as interested in the chapters chronicling gender in the American captivity stories back in the frontier days of wars with native Americans. One thing I wonder about is how Faludi would fit Sarah Palin into this narrative. Palin's media portrayal does not strike me as being that of a helpless victim, I wonder if this means Americans have moved on from 9/11 and shifted to another state of psychosis.

*[Nota Bene: Cynthia Anne Parker was a Texan white girl from the 1800s who wads captured by (Commanche?) tribesmen along with some other people; her uncle is said to have made a strong attempt to rescue her over the years; turns out when she was rescued she didn't want to go back to white society; though that part was suppressed. Her uncle was played by John Wayne in the 1950s movie The Searchers, which is apparently a critical to the historical development of Hollywood narratives.]

Review: Dreams from my Father, by Barack Obama

2009-10-27T17:11:00.000-07:00

I highly recommend it, one of the top pieces of English literature I´ve read in years.

He wrote this autobiography after graduating from Harvard Law school and being the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review, early 1990s I think, which got him a lot of attention and thus a book deal. I picked it up because I wanted to learn more about the man, and I thought it was nice a political biography was written before he became a serious politician, as such I assumed it would be more genuine then the usual sloganism and propaganda of political manifestos.

My overall impression right now of the man is left-wing heart, moderate mind, tons of tenacity, long-term focus, gifted intellectually, and fascinating family and cultural background.

The book is split into a few main sections, a history of his (white) family on his mother´s side and how she met his father, a discussion of the time in Indonesia, and then the time in Hawaii (high school), undergraduate at Columbia, his activism in Chicago when he was a community organizer, and then his visit to Kenya before going to Harvard Law. He only briefly discusses Harvard Law in the epilogue.

His family background is very complicated. His father married his mother in Hawaii, while he had another wife back home in Kenya. They split up when thew father went to Harvard, as he didn´t have enough money to support them. The father had a few more wives after that, including one other white wife, and it´s very interesting in the Kenya chapter when he meets all his family.

After the mother split with the father, she moved to Indonesia where she married another man, Lolo, who in the biography came off as an excellent stepfather. From that relationship Barack got a sister, Maya.

He´d move to Hawaii for high school, he had trouble adapting to the culture of the different sports for example, as nobody played soccer or badminton. There´s an amusing anecdote from when he was young, he told his classmates his father was an important tribal prince in Africa, that he was very important. He was crushed and afraid when he heard his father was visiting and would speak to the class about Kenya for an hour. It turned out ok and his classmates were impressed with his father.

For those who are curious about the media meme that his grandmother is not really his grandmother, his father´s biological mother ran away from home when his father was 9, because of her husband´s behavior. He was then raised by another wife of his father, and that was the woman Barack Obama Sr. considered his mother, feeling his biological mother betrayed him. The older sister Sarah, being old enough to understand the treatment her mother was receiving, felt differently.

I have not read in a long time a piece of african american literature, and such a description of the african american experience. Racism is a central meme of this book, and several events are discussed such as Obama´s alienation. What I thought was the most interesting section was when he spent a year, or maybe it was two, as a community organizer in Chicago. I found it a very insightful description of the racial situation there in the 1980s. His first success at organizing, I think, was when he found out the city of Chicago had jobs banks virtually everywhere, except in the black neighbourhood where he was working, Altgeld. His second success was on the issue of asbestos in public housing pipes.

·····

Altogether I am impressed. While it is of course a biased expose as it his life in his words, realistically the average 30 year old (his approximate age when he wrote it) would have little to show that would be interesting in an autobiography. He had a lot and he demonstrates strong character.