The Invisible Library

PZ Myers attempts to answer the age old question: just what kind of scientist is Batman anyway?

Be sure to read the comments.

Dr. Hawking, while a genius in Astrophysics and Cosmology needs to lay off the Star Trek:

The survival of the human race depends on its ability to find new homes elsewhere in the universe because there’s an increasing risk that a disaster will destroy the Earth, world-renowned scientist Stephen Hawking said Tuesday.

The British astrophysicist told a news conference in Hong Kong that humans could have a permanent base on the moon in 20 years and a colony on Mars in the next 40 years.

“We won’t find anywhere as nice as Earth unless we go to another star system,” added Hawking, who arrived to a rock star’s welcome Monday. Tickets for his lecture planned for Wednesday were sold out.

He added that if humans can avoid killing themselves in the next 100 years, they should have space settlements that can continue without support from Earth.

“It is important for the human race to spread out into space for the survival of the species,” Hawking said. “Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of.”

Amada Marcotte’s response is much more pointed, so I’ll quote her:

Religious wingnuts have invented the Rapture to avoid talking about taking responsibility for the future of the human race (also to justify having more and more Virility Objects, i.e. children, even though the planet is suffocating from the massive explosion in wasteful human beings). Now Stephen Hawking has just put his authority behind an escape fantasy that allows wingnuts who aren’t Rapture fanatics to ignore the fact that we’re destroying our planet and very soon going to make in uninhabitable.

Chris Clarke shoots down the technical aspects of such a monumental brain fart, even bringing up the horrible memories of Biosphere:

And that was on this planet, where the designers could just have a thousand yards of specialized concrete and a million square feet of tempered glass driven up to the site on flatbed trucks. I suspect an attempt to replicate the Biosphere experiment in the Valle Marineris would be a bit more difficult. The construction crew here could actually breathe without tanks, for one thing, and what happens when the New Martians realize they have the wrong gauge turnbuckles for the shadecloth awning, and all the lettuce plants get UV poisoning? We’re talking about an agency that forgot to do a English-Metric conversion for an unmanned Mars probe here. Would you really trust them to buy compatible plumbing fixtures from 400 million miles away?

The heart of the matter though, as Amada points out, is that this is a sad example of escapist fantasy for geeks. Our current policies (and by our, I mean not just the US but China and Russia and everyone else as well) amounts to prolonged attempt to kill Planet Earth before it kills us. That is civilization in a nutshell.

By the time I’m an old man, global warming-spawned superstorms will probably have submerged the city where I was raised, my current home and turned Florida into a barrier reef. That’s the positive scenario. The bad version involves wars for the last bit of oil going nuclear, turning all our old Cold War fears into Hot World realities. Maybe if we adopt sensible ecological policies and implement new technologies, cooperate across international boarders to end our dependance on oil, then we’ll have the time and man-power to devote to Hawking’s wet dreams of living on Mars. But that’s an awful long way to go and we haven’t even started building that road.

As usual, Warren Ellis is on to something:

I’ve long been interested in the chambara form, the Japanese stories of wandering heroic swordsmen. Chambara is a subset of what the Japanese called jidai geki, period drama. I bet you’ve all seen one of them — YOJIMBO, SEVEN SAMURAI, RAN. And you’ve all seen THE HIDDEN FORTRESS, though you know it better as the first STAR WARS film. George Lucas was, of course, a huge fan of Kurosawa.

It didn’t occur to me until I read this tidbit the other day that Lucas, […] in looking for his faded knights of dynasty, would have coughed and California-mispronounced jidai into Jedi…

This is hardly surprising. When not ripping off Kurosawa, Lucas was lifting straight out of John Ford’s films. But with every passing year another tidbit makes it into the stratosphere (and by stratosphere, I mean these here Internets) that Lucas was also padding his script with Jidaigeki tropes and Oh yeah, Joseph Campbell, too (wink). It’s only too bad he didn’t stick to ripping off Kurosawa and japanese mythology. Maybe then the prequels wouldn’t have sucked so bad. *

I’m still looking forward to the September release of the Un-Special Editions, maybe even more so, now that we know that Lucas had even less to do with them then we originally thought.

Elvira and I just got back form seeing X-Men 3. We both really enjoyed it. Sure, it’s not Shakespeare but going in you don’t expect life-altering cinema, just comic book fun and as such, it was very fulfilling. Characters die, Wolverine emotes, things explode, bridges move and as always, there are some fun little cameos for the comic book geeks (Stan Lee and Chris Claremont both looking startled as extras was great fun and there are loads of mutant cameos for the hardcore fans).

The story is straight forward on the usual themes of alienation, what it means to be human and the excesses of power in the wrong hands. But do yourself a favor and stay to the end of the credits. It’s worth t.

Some reviews seem to miss the point, grousing about how there’s not much characterization or the story is thin and by the numbers, or that it’s full of fanservice and that anyone coming in to this fresh will be lost. To that I say, so? If you go into a third part sequel expecting clarity, you’re in the wrong theater. MI3 is down the hall, no brains allowed.

PZ Myers of course completely disagrees, which is his prerogative. He makes some good points on the science of the film, namely, that it’s implausible but then, X-Men always did get a D in plausibility. But that’s not the point and never was. A scientifically plausible superhero story would be… pretty lame, actually. It’s Fantasy, with a Scientific gloss. Which I’ll take over the God Did It fantasy (as in, The Ten Commandments) any day of the week and twice on Sundays.

Discovery Channel news:

Dracorex hogwartsia, which translates as “Dragon King of Hogwarts,” was unearthed in 2003 in the Hell Creek Formation of South Dakota by three amateur fossil hunters working in cooperation with the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis. But it wasn’t until it was at the museum, while the fossil was being carefully prepared, that renowned dinosaur researcher Robert Bakker happened to catch sight of it while visiting. Bakker then recruited pachycerphalosaurs expert Sullivan and other paleontologists to take a closer look.

As for how it got its name? A group of children at the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis drew the connection to the fanciful school of witchcraft that the famous fictional wizard Harry Potter attends and came up with the name hogwartsia..

“It’s a very dragon-like looking dinosaur,” said Sullivan.

J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, has been notified and apparently rather likes the new name.

“I am absolutely thrilled to think that Hogwarts has made a small claw mark upon the fascinating world of dinosaurs,” said Rowling, according to a museum press release. “I happen to know more on the subject of paleontology than many might credit, because my eldest daughter was Utahraptor-obsessed and I am now living with a passionate Tyrannosaurus rex-lover, aged three.

“My credibility has soared within my science-loving family, and I am very much looking forward to reading Dr. Bakker and his colleague’s paper describing ‘my’ dinosaur.”

Long-time reader, Lisa wrote me an email that I thought I should share with the class:

I noticed that you post at all hours of the day, how do you manage to blog at work?

The short answer is: I don’t blog at work. That would get me fired. The long answer, for Lisa (and the IT folks at work, hiya boys!) is a little technical. It involves UTC timecodes and PHP programming language but the short answer: I can preset posts to publish whenever I want, simply by changing the timestamp. I can publish things a week in advance or three years in the past (though, that would just be silly).

Basically, I write posts at night and set the time stamp to publish throughout the day so that fresh content appears on the blog while I’m at work (hint: these posts have timecodes that are nice round numbers, usually on the hour or half hour. Look at the timestamp on this post: it says I published it exactly at 1 PM, while I was actually eating lunch. In reality, I published it at about nine minutes to 7 this evening). Mostly, I do this for the Friday Cat Pictures. I publish them on Thursday night and program the blog to post the pictures Friday morning. Otherwise, I’d be a nocturnal blogger which means being half a day behind everyone else. And who wants to read stale commentary? This way, you, the loyal reader get fresh content on a regular basis, and I get to keep my job. Everybody wins!

This is my birthday present.* I plan on using it to conquer the world. But first, I need to install an airport card. everyone knows you can’t rule the worldwith dialup.

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*That’s a G4 mini by the way, not one of those imitation Intel knockoffs Apple is foisting on us now.

I love, love, love Battlestar Galactica. The only thing that could make it even better, is if the show were animated in the style of the Simpsons. Here’s more.

Sometimes, whining does pay off:

In response to overwhelming demand, Lucasfilm Ltd. and Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment will release attractively priced individual two-disc releases of Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. Each release includes the 2004 digitally remastered version of the movie and, as bonus material, the theatrical edition of the film. That means you’ll be able to enjoy Star Wars as it first appeared in 1977, Empire in 1980, and Jedi in 1983. This release will only be available for a limited time: from September 12th to December 31st.

When I was a wee lad, I saw this strange Japanese film on TV. It was part of the Saturday Afternoon Matinee that has been a major influence on my creative aspirations over the years. But unlike the other Saturday Afternoon fair like Buck Rogers or the old Flash Gordon Serials, all I remembered for years about this movie was a haunting unreality, a sense of dread as these characters ran around, slowly turning into Mushroom People.*

Recently I decided to put this here Internet to the test and see if I could track down information about this movie, maybe even dig up an old VHS copy so that I could see if it really was as weird and fun as I remembered. Sure enough, Matango (US title: Attack of the Mushroom People) has an IMDB entry and was recently reissued on DVD.

The film was made in 1963 by Toho Company Ltd., the same studio that made Godzilla. In fact the director, Ishiro Honda, made his name directing many Kaiju, most notably, several of the subsequent Godzilla films.

But Matango is something altogether different. The Wikipedia entry mentions the odd parallels between Matango and Gilliagan’s island, with the seven castaways representing the seven deadly sins. Which is intriguing, though in tone and ambience, the film is much more in the vein of Lost, but with mushrooms.

The sense of dread and something intangibly odd is present from the beginning, and at several points, could run off into a typical monster movie direction (going into the haunted house, answering the evil telephone and stopping mid escape to have sex so the bloodthirsty maniac can catch up), but instead, this film subtly subverts all of those tropes. Though, I guess subverting them is the wrong idea; the movie predates most horror films and so most horror film cliches and so isn’t consciously subverting any of them. But we’ve come to expect lazy writing wearing it’s metaphors inside out in an attempt to appear post-modern or Ironic with a capitol I, and so we often expect there to be certain monster movie cause and effect scenes. Matango instead lets the character’s drive the story to the inevitable conclusion, skirting into the monster movie world, but staying close to the blurry edges so that it still overlaps the naturalistic world. This way, we manage to get most of the way through the film before the men in rubber suits show up. We see their silhouettes and brief glimpses of them but just enough to make the full out Mushroom mayhem at the end seem plausible rather than contrived. In this sense, it has a nice Lovecraftian turn to it, slowly pushing us int the fantasy world one twist at a time, so that when we realise we’re in a monster movie, it’s too late and we have had some moments of genuine suspense.

Of course, the movie isn’t perfect. Some of the editing is weird and jumpy. It’s hard at times to tell if this is a stylistic choice to heighten the sense of disorientation or just technical flaws (the infamous Toho Style) showing through. What is most striking though is the bleak tone. The characters overtly critique Japanese society and civilization as a whole, ultimately deciding that maybe we’d all be better off in the jungle eating mushrooms instead of living in the soporific splendor of Tokyo (or New York, or Los Angelas or Savannah…). This sort of nihilistic edge is hard to find in any film, let alone one made in 1963.

I give it 4 out of 5 stars for some MST3K worthy dialogue in the first act and the minor technical flaws. Maybe it should be rated a half star lower, but I’m biased, due to it being part of the creative influence from my childhood. I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a fun, weird and utterly creepy movie.
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* These half remembered images of lugubrious mushroom people and the beshroomed forest in which they lived found their way in to my novella, The Machine of the World. Everything is inspiring.