School blackboards rediscovered after nearly a century

Posted on by June 7, 2015
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At the end of November in 1917 new chalkboards were installed on top of old ones in a school in Oklahoma City, leaving untouched what had been written and drawn on them. More than 97 years later, a few days ago in fact, contractors replaced both sets of blackboards with new whiteboards and digital “smartboards,” in the process discovering writings and drawings and arithmetic problems unseen and untouched for almost a century. Some of it is quite remarkable, including a sort of circular multiplication table and handwriting that’s quite beautifully done.


Link: http://www.newsok.com/article/5425449

You can find an article about the discovery and an accompanying set of photos to click through on The Oklahoman newspaper’s NewsOK website here. There’s also an article in The Washington Post at this link.



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Review: Firefly (2002 television series) and Serenity (2005 movie)

Posted on by May 25, 2015
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I never watched Firefly when the series originally aired, mainly because the whole idea of mixing spaceships and Westerns struck me as dumb. But later having discovered that the same writer-producer’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer was considerably better than I’d expected, I decided to give it a shot and ended up watching all 14 episodes and the movie sequel. (I later learned additional appreciation of Joss Whedon. For the record, the following review was originally written in 2010).

The premise is that about five centuries hence, humans have colonized and terraformed a large number of planets and moons in a giant super-sized solar system an unspecified distance from our own. The more developed central planets control everything, having won a war against the poorer outer planets and moons, many of which are at about the technology level of the U.S. West in the late 19th century, though with some high-tech add-ons.

The main characters are the passengers and crew of a smallish freight-carrying “Firefly-class” spaceship named Serenity, captained by a veteran of the losing side in a civil war between the outer planets and the central Alliance (played by Nathan Fillion, later best known as the title character on the TV series Castle). His second in command is a stern woman (Gina Torres) who served with him in the war. Her husband and near-opposite (Alan Tudyk) is the pilot. There’s an immensely likable farm girl engineer (Jewel Staite.), a mysterious preacher (Ron Glass, one of the stars of Barney Miller), a dim and untrustworthy but usefully dangerous thug (Adam Baldwin), a high-class courtesan (Morena Baccarin), and a young doctor (Sean Maher) whose teenage sister is a brilliant, psychic, mentally unbalanced fugitive from government medical experiments.

They take on what jobs they can, not excluding robbery and smuggling, and the adventuring is elevated by witty dialog, interesting characters, and a cast that really seems to like their work. I’ve read that during breaks in filming the actors liked to hang around in the ship’s mess deck rather than leave the set. The actors who played the doctor and his sister reportedly came to think of each other in brother-sister terms, and Summer Glau (the former prima ballerina who played the sister) kept ruining takes of a scene in which her brother was supposed to be seriously injured by breaking down in genuine sobs.

(Which relates to an earlier standing joke among the cast members during filming of the series. Whenever someone screwed up a take, it became traditional to blame Summer Glau even if she was nowhere around. This is why, if you watch outtakes, you’ll see people periodically exclaim, “Summer!”)

There’s another scene in which the doctor and Kaylee, the ship’s cute engineer, kiss, and this reportedly took nearly 20 takes to shoot. Reading about that reminded me of what Robert Wuhl said about his kissing scene with Kim Bassinger in Tim Burton’s Batman: “And believe me, I didn’t get it right the first time, either!”

I may be the last person reading this to discover Firefly and Serenity, but if not, I recommend reserving judgment during the original 90-minute pilot. You need to watch it, but it sets up so much backstory that I thought the television series got considerably better after that. The movie, Serenity, is in my estimation not quite as good as the best of the series, but if you like the series you’ll want to see it.

The trailer is for the movie:


Link: https://youtu.be/6nEAlpTb4tk



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Review: Goodfellas (1990 movie)

Posted on by May 24, 2015
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The story covers a period of nearly three decades in the life of real-life New York mobster Henry Hill (played by Ray Liotta), and the soundtrack features popular songs partly as a hint to the audience about when the events are taking place. Both Liotta and Lorraine Bracco (who plays his wife) provide voice-over narration.

It’s a decent film with limited though shocking violence, but I think it might be a bit overrated.
Joe Pesci and Robert De Niro get the best roles, Pesci as a cheerful but temperamental borderline sociopath and De Niro as Pesci’s best friend, an Irish-American gangster who seems like a nice enough guy (for a mobster) but isn’t.

Scorsese’s mom plays the mother of Joe Pesci’s character and Scorsese’s dad plays a long-time gangster Liotta spends time with in prison. A former federal prosecutor involved in the Hill case plays himself in the film. So, briefly, does Henny Youngman.

Two of the actors later had prominent roles in The Sopranos. Lorraine Bracco was Tony Soprano’s psychiatrist, and Michael Imperioli, who gets shot in the foot by Pesci, later played Tony Soprano’s young protégé Christopher, who in an early episode of The Sopranos himself shoots a guy in the foot and says, “It happens.”


Link: https://youtu.be/1I7j3V1-v_Q



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Review: Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004 movie)

Posted on by May 24, 2015
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I’ve only read one of the books in the long-running series of tongue-in-cheek melodramatic novels this is based on, but the movie seems to do a pretty good job of capturing the spirit and style of the source, including the narrator’s tendency to bemoan his duty to recount such miseries and to pause to explain the meaning of words and phrases in their specific content. Jude Law gives voice to Lemony Snicket, the alleged author of the books.

The three Beaudelaire orphans comprise the resourceful inventor Violet (Emily Browning), the voracious reader Klaus (Liam Aiken), and their baby sister Sunny (alternately Kara and Shelby Hoffman), who can bite through just about anything. The children must be resourceful as events and the villainous Count Olaf (Jim Carrey in a role that’s almost made for him) conspire to move them from home to home. In the course of this they encounter Meryl Streep, Dustin Hoffman (no relation to the twins who play Sunny), Cedric the Entertainer, Craig Ferguson, Timothy Spall, Catherine O’Hara, Billy Connolly, Jennifer Coolidge, Jane Adams, and a number of other well-known actors in the highly imaginative story world.

Unfortunately, the film was probably just a bit too weird, cerebral, and stylized for most audiences, not to mention a bit disjointed and oddly slow-moving during the climax, so it didn’t make a lot of money and the planned sequels never materialized.

But despite its flaws I largely enjoyed it, and if you go in for this sort of thing you might find it worth a look.

A bit of trivia from the Internet Movie Database: When the children first meet Count Olaf he says, “Wait, give me that last line again,” and reportedly that’s neither in the script nor an ad lib; it’s Jim Carrey actually asking for his cue to be repeated. But it worked so well it was left in the final edit.)


Link: https://youtu.be/cj-e039An04



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The first day of summer

Posted on by June 20, 2016
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According to the conventions of meteorology, today, June 1, is the official first day of summer, at least for those of us in north of the tropics. Similarly, autumn starts September 1, winter December 1, and spring March 1.

Of course, lots of people will tell you that the “official first day of summer” doesn’t happen until June 21, the date of the June solstice. That’s when the Earth reaches the point in its orbit where the North Pole is tilted the maximum amount toward the Sun. Actually, the solstice is an instant in time, which this year is about 1639 (4:39 pm) June 21 in London, or 1139 June 21 in New York, but 0239 (2:39 am) June 22 in Sydney. The exact time and date vary from year to year based mainly on where we are in the leap year cycle.

So where do people get the idea that the equinoxes and solstices mark the “official” beginnings of seasons? It may possibly go back to the old convention, observed from the Middle Ages into the 1500s in much of Western Europe, of treating the spring equinox as the first day of the new year.

But to complicate matters, it wasn’t actually the spring (or “vernal”) equinox as such that served as New Year’s Day but rather its then-traditional date of March 25, which had been the usual date of the equinox in the early years of the Roman Empire. (The December solstice, and hence the feast of the Unconquered Sun, Sol Invictus, was similarly around December 25, whence we get the date of Christmas.)

By the 1500s the relatively simple Julian calendar (with one leap year in every four, no exceptions) was about two weeks off from the march of the seasons, so to put it back in sync with the seasons when the Gregorian calendar was introduced (which skips over three leap years in every four centuries), the date also jumped ahead by 10 days. This wasn’t quite enough days to match up with the old Roman conventions, which is why our equinoxes and solstices take place typically on the 21st or 22nd of the month in question rather than the 25th.

Besides that history, it’s also true that early March isn’t quite so spring-like as later in the month, and early December is similarly not so wintry, so treating the solstices and equinoxes as the beginnings of seasons isn’t so unreasonable.

There’s noting “official” about it, though.



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Review: Moon (2009 movie)

Posted on by May 24, 2015
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I saw this based on a recommendation from late and much-missed friend Dave Locke. As he said, this is a true science fiction movie, not what usually passes for one.

Sam Rockwell plays a man in a solo job at a mining station on the far side of the Moon. Giant roving vehicles process the surface regolith to extract helium-3 atoms, and periodically Rockwell sends the cannisters back to Earth via a magnetic cannon, where the helium-3 is used to fuel fusion power plants. His only companion is an artificially intelligent robot that roams the station hanging from tracks in the ceiling. Then something very weird happens and he’s no longer alone. No, not aliens, something much weirder.

I don’t want to say any more for fear it would spoil your enjoyment. It’s very well-acted and decently written, and most of the flaws, such as the fact that the Moon base interior is obviously not in lunar gravity, can be overlooked as compromises with necessity.

The story isn’t brilliant, but it’s original and thoughtful and on a level with published science fiction. I did find it at times depressing and occasionally predictable, once you start to catch on, but the acting is quite good, the ending was better than I expected, and it is nice to see real sf in a movie for a change.


Link: https://youtu.be/Cb3exxD2nGo



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Ruth Graham is a doo-doo head

Posted on by September 6, 2015
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Some books (and movies and essays and so on) aimed at adults are difficult for children to understand and appreciate. Others may delight children but don’t have much to offer for older audiences. Some can be enjoyed at different levels by both adults and children, with the adults picking up on things that the children don’t (or that the adults think the children don’t) and vice versa. Yet others can be appreciated more or less equally across a great range of ages.

I don’t pretend that the foregoing observation is in any way profound, let alone original. In fact, it strikes me as commonplace, the sort of thing that should be obvious to anyone who has a wide-enough experience with books and movies.

True, I’ve known otherwise sensible people who were dismissive of children’s literature for the simple reason they hadn’t read very much of it, not since childhood anyway, and hence made incorrect assumptions about it. And of course there are those who overgeneralize from a poorly selected set of bad examples. (It’s wise to recall Sturgeon’s Revelation that “90 percent of everything is crud.”) But a naive global dismissal of writing for children and young adults is not something you’d expect to find in, say, Slate, especially nowadays when more and more adults are enjoying fiction and films aimed at younger audiences.

And yet we have this piece by someone named Ruth Graham. It’s headed (probably by an editor rather than Graham herself, though it accurately reflects the content), “Against YA: Read whatever you want. But you should feel embarrassed when what you’re reading was written for children.” According to the accompanying brief author’s biography, “Ruth Graham is a regular Slate contributor. She lives in New Hampshire.” Well, maybe she does, but that’s no excuse.

She begins as follows:

As The Fault in Our Stars barrels into theaters this weekend virtually guaranteed to become a blockbuster, it can be hard to remember that once upon a time, an adult might have felt embarrassed to be caught reading the novel that inspired it. Not because it is bad — it isn’t — but because it was written for teenagers.

The once-unseemly notion that it’s acceptable for not-young adults to read young-adult fiction is now conventional wisdom. Today, grown-ups brandish their copies of teen novels with pride. There are endless lists of YA novels that adults should read, an “I read YA” campaign for grown-up YA fans, and confessional posts by adult YA addicts. But reading YA doesn’t make for much of a confession these days: A 2012 survey by a market research firm found that 55 percent of these books are bought by people older than 18. (The definition of YA is increasingly fuzzy, but it generally refers to books written for 12- to 17-year-olds. Meanwhile, the cultural definition of “young adult” now stretches practically to age 30, which may have something to do with this whole phenomenon.)

So it appears that Graham’s attitude toward young adult fiction can’t be dismissed as mere incidental ignorance (though her essay does indeed have some uninformed things to say). It’s more a matter of her defiantly bloody-minded death-grip on prejudice in the face of all contrary evidence. Perhaps she’s more suited to a career in politics than book reviewing. It would pay better, too.

On the other hand, Graham hints that she’s writing this mainly for readers in her own demographic, which she indicates is the 30-to-44 age range. Maybe as her elder I shouldn’t expect much sophistication from a kid Graham’s age. She might simply have not yet outgrown the adolescent obsession with appearing “mature.” If so, there may be hope for her yet. I should make a note to check in on her again in a few decades to see if she’s grown up.

(Updated mainly to add additional snark in keeping with Internet norms)



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Alas, another example of naïveté about climate change

Posted on by November 8, 2015
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A friend of mine recently drew my attention to last year’s March 2 episode of the Prickly City comic strip, which you can view here. (Incidentally, it appears that this website, GoComics, lets you subscribe to a variety of strips, all of which will appear on your own personalized comics page every day, which is good to know.) Prickly City is drawn from a conservative viewpoint — not that there’s anything wrong with that — and this particular episode reflects an unfortunately commonplace misunderstanding, especially on the right, about global warming.

(Prickly City is credited to and was created by Chicago Tribune editorial cartoonist Scott Stantis, but for several year now it has been drawn by Eric Allie. I’m not sure who does the writing. Possibly they both contribute, as they seem to have similar political views.)

In brief, this episode shows Carmen, the strip’s conservative protagonist, saying across a series of panels, “The Earth has been molten … a solid sheet of ice … bouncing between ice ages … Isn’t climate change kind of what Earth does?” To which her liberal friend Winslow (a coyote pup) replies with a dismissive gesture and the exclamation “Lunatic!”

Winslow’s response really ought to be something more on the order of “Good grief! Didn’t they cover this in school?” Then again, Prickly City takes a negative view of schools as well. (Did you know, for example, that truancy laws are a conspiracy on the part of teachers’ unions to get more money? See this strip.)

OK, I admit that my suggestion wouldn’t make for a very good punchline, but the original isn’t particularly funny either. Anyway, my main gripe isn’t so much with the comic as the lamentable fact that even at this late date a lot of people are likely not to realize what’s wrong with the underlying assumptions here.

Yes, the Earth’s climate has varied a lot over its history, but that’s hardly reassuring given that the results have sometimes been pretty unpleasant and even catastrophic. Moreover, while the Earth has experienced periods of warming in the past (coming out of ice ages, for example), the rate of warming over the past few decades has been extraordinarily rapid, about 10 or 20 times as fast as change coming out of the last ice age, for example.

(One quibble in passing: It’s possible that the Earth was frozen over one or more times, most recently as a glaciation roughly 650 million years ago, but that’s uncertain. For a summary of the evidence for and against the hypothesis, see Wikipedia’s “Snowball Earth” article.)

Another difference is the current level and complexity of modern human civilization. Humans have faced global and localized climate change in the past, sometimes leading to serious disruptions of agriculture, the depopulation of whole regions, mass migrations, and even the collapse of cultures, if only in the affected areas. Today there are vastly more of us, global climate change by definition isn’t just a local problem, and comparable events would be proportionally far worse.

Fortunately, while past major climate change resulted from events beyond our control, such as variations in the Earth’s orbit or gigantic meteorite strikes, this time the main cause is human activity, which means that we can do something about it. We’ve waited too long to prevent it entirely (for one thing, it’s already happening, and we don’t have a time machine), but we can still limit how bad it will be.

For more on the notion that past climate change means we can ignore the present global warming, see these links from the Royal Society (the original national science academy), the Skeptical Science website, Grist, and Weather Underground (a meteorology website, not the group from the 60s!).

Also, if you haven’t yet read it, you might want to take a look at this previous post on research by former climate-change doubter Richard Muller and his team, some of it funded by fossil-fuel interests. See also this page on the Skeptical Science website about the overwhelming number of scientists and scientific organizations who agree that the evidence clearly does point to human-caused climate change and that it’s past time to do something to mitigate it. (You can also find my earlier posts about climate change here if you’re interested.)

(Updated 2015 June 7 to add some additional links, fix typos, and try to improve my writing.)



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Review: The Gamers: Dorkness Rising (2008 movie)

Posted on by May 27, 2015
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I ran across this surprisingly likable independent comedy quite by accident. It depicts a group of adult role-playing gamers (I’m tempted to say they were diagnosed with AD&D) not as predictable caricatures but as believable, if weird, people (though the writing and acting sometimes fall a little short of the ambitions here). As they play we see the action unfold inside the game as well, often hilariously. I enjoyed it quite a lot despite not being all that familiar with role-playing games.

Despite a very limited budget, the fantasy-world sequences are pretty decent, and when the computer-generated images aren’t as good as one might hope, that’s not so bad in the context of the film.

It’s not a great film, but it’s a fair amount of fun, and if you’re more familiar with role-playing games than I am I suspect you’ll like it that much more.


Link: https://youtu.be/DvH4PskPZ4M



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