theater, natural history and conservation, the utterly mundane, and Etruscan 8-tracks
Ten more things computers (and their users) do in the movies that they don’t in real life.
9. You’ve Got Mail is Always Good News
In the movies, checking your mail is a matter of picking out the one or two messages that are important to the plot. No information pollution or swamp of spam. No ever-changing client requests in the face of impending deadlines. And you never overlook information because a message’s subject line violated the email usability guidelines.
Eighteen years after its hardcover publication date, and the year that it arrived on my doorstep from the Book of the Month Club (probably the last thing that I ever bought from them), and fiteen years after a false start, I have finished reading my copy of The Twenty-Seventh City, Jonathan Franzen’s first novel. I. Have. Finished. The Twenty-Seventh City. I feel that more of a burden has been lifted from me than when I finished In Search of Lost Time.
I never meant for it to go this long. In 1991, I read about fifty pages of this political thriller/social satire set in St. Louis in the middle of the Reagan-Thatcher years. And I was interested, but I put the book aside for some reason. And one month became two and became twelve, and then it was a case of starting over because I’d forgotten who S. Jammu and Martin Probst were. And if you’re starting over, then there are so many other enticements on the “read me” shelf, fresher choices. I let Franzen’s second novel go by, and then I read and enjoyed his third, The Corrections, five years ago. And still the bridesmaid, The Twenty-Seventh City remained on the shelf.
Then, finally, I dug back into it the day before Thanksgiving. It was worth the wait. I think it’s a stronger book than the other, certainly more ambitious, with themes of gentrification and coming of age and cultural assimilation, and what it means to have built something without designing it (Probst is the fictional general contractor who has built the Gateway Arch). And Probst’s antagonists are among the most chillingly manipulative that I’ve met in print. There are good lyrical passages, a little history of urban planning and development, and compelling plot. Oh! and a map!
I don’t know what I’m going to do with myself. The next most-senior book on the shelf is Angela Carter’s final novel, Wise Children, which went with me on vacation to the Outer Banks in the early 1990s and was never finished.
My mother bought me one of these toy digital cameras for Christmas. The packaging disingenuously suggests a retail price of $39.95, but I hope she didn’t pay more than the $10 that seems to be the going rate at Walgreen’s. I’m reluctant to install software drivers from such a flimsy-looking product on my already delicate Windows laptop, so the thing will probably remain in its blister pack until I can do a junk purge.
To Mom’s credit, she found one nice gift: a reprint-house collection of Superman comics from the WWII era.
(Link via robot wisdom.)
Best blog title I’ve seen in some time: the Horn Farm Paste Mob.
Plans are underway to establish the Applalachian Trail Mega-Transect, “a long-term collaborative project to comprehensively monitor changes in the mountain and valley environments” the the famous trail from Maine to Georgia traverses.
“The Appalachian Trail’s 2,174 miles are the spine of the world’s longest publicly owned greenway, a protected home for thousands of special species and for the legacies of the eastern mountains. Downwind and downstream is perhaps one-third of the U.S. population. What happens to the Trail environment soon will happen to that environment,” notes [David N.] Startzell…. “We have a long history of engaging citizens for public benefit, and this seems an ideal way to provide many more opportunities to a broader spectrum of the public.”
Via Boing Boing, a rant that needed to be ranted: What code DOESN’T do in real life (that it does in the movies). Coders, too.
5. Code does not make blip noises as it appears on the screen
This goes for ANY text, not just code. When text appears on my monitor it doesn’t make blip sounds – this isn’t 1902 (or whenever monitors used to do that). This is one of the most common offenses in Hollywood films, almost every movie that has a scene where a character is composing an email or surfing the net has the text make blippity-blip sounds as it appears. Do they have any idea how fucking irritating that would be in real life? This article alone would be like thirty thousand blippity-blips.
Via kottke.org, 50 works of art to see in one’s lifetime…. as chosen by readers of the Guardian.
The special—possibly exaggerated—place that western culture has given to art and artists since Michelangelo’s day means that if you love great art, you’re going to spend a lot of time in Florence, Rome and Spain. Yet the most beautiful work of art in Spain, the Alhambra, is a north African work. “The walls and indeed the floors and ceilings are covered in tesselating abstract weaves that do one’s head in,” wrote an admirer of the exquisite Islamic masterpiece.
Wow, I have a lot of travelling to do. I am eyeballs-familiar with most the work of the 20th century artists on the list—Pollock, Rothko, Serra, Johns—if not the specific pieces named. A trip to the Great Salt Lake to see Spiral Jetty is perhaps the only reason I have to visit Gilead—sorry, Utah. I did get to see Guernica before it went to Spain: I had a poster of it in high school. I had never heard of the Grünewald altarpiece until it was discussed as a source for Jasper Johns, so I’d like to see it, but I suspect I’ll be disappointed. One of the venues on the list, the Prado, home of Las Meninas, is near the top of my to-see-sometime list.
Wind power isn’t quite the unambiguously benign source of electricity that some have made it out to be—for example, the author of the article for Worldchanging. That’s our big takeaway from the Wildlife & Wind Energy Conference, hosted by the Geography Department of Kutztown University and organized by Donald S. Heintzelman. It was perhaps fitting that attendees encountered blustery weather conditions enroute to the venue, located in Berks County, Pennsylvania, in the Appalachian Mountains, not far from the renowned Hawk Mountain Sanctuary.
The first surprising thing that I learned is how large a state-of-the-art wind turbine is. A typical wind turbine is rated at 1.5 MW, stands 70 meters tall, and its three blades span a diameter of approximately 50 meters. Perhaps, then, it’s not surprising that many consider a row of these turbines arranged along a ridgeline to be a blot on the landscape, although I find the monopole towers supporting three thin blades to be one of the more graceful engineered objects that you might encounter: certainly more attractive than a bristling microwave tower or spiderly powerline structure. The language we use to describe a wind generation facility has become politicized: while supporters popularize the term “wind farm,” cons favor “wind plant.” Finally, most troubling is that wind turbines pose a real threat to flying wildlife, primarily birds and bats. And hence the conference.
Unfortunately, the sessions appeared to be designed more to muster opposition to new wind projects in Pennsylvania and elsewhere in the Appalachians than to entertain a wide spectrum of viewpoints. Two speakers from government were briefly heard, plus a last-minute replacement, out of more than two dozen speakers on the printed agenda, and no industry or trade association officials spoke. Q&A time was given short shrift. We heard from citizen scientists but no engineers.
And it’s too bad, because almost everyone agrees that not only is mortality from collisions with the turbines a serious problem, but also that there’s very little good science that’s been done to understand exactly how serious it is, and why. What’s worse, operators of controversial facilities like Mountaineer Wind Energy Center in West Virginia, after suffering bad publicity from reports of bat kills, have restricted access by researchers to their sites. We didn’t learn at this conference how wind turbine mortality differs from kills at stationary communications towers. We know something, but not a lot, about the different effects on migrating and foraging wildlife, on raptors, songbirds, and bats. We have some anecdotal evidence about the effects of weather: fog and low ceilings can exacerbate. Likewise, it was suggested that quiet-running, preferred by human neighbors, may pose more of a wildlife hazard. What research has been done into mortality is disputed: how do we know that field searchers have found all the carcasses before scavengers have?
More than one speaker struck a defiant NIMBY attitude, among them Laura Jackson of a Bedford County grassroots organization. Speakers cast longing looks at the development potential for Chesapeake Bay and offshore wind farms, but no one spoke about the possible effects on marine mammals, birds, and amphibians.
The most pragmatic notes were sounded by David Riposo, master’s candidate at the University of Maryland’s Marine, Estuarine, and Environmental Science Department, who cited Pacala and Socolow’s “stabilization wedges” concept, which concludes that wind power is but one of many measures that need to be taken to address looming climate change problems; and by Michael Fry of the American Bird Conservancy. The ABC hosted a two-day workshop in 2004, and has taken a qualified positive policy stance on wind power, and Fry’s remarks focused on mitigation and incremental improvements.
Also noteworthy was a last-minute speaker from the Government Accountability Office, who provided hard copies of a September, 2005 report that I haven’t finished digesting. She noted that a National Academy of Sciences report was due for publication in January, 2007. One of the points made by the GAO report, and amplified by other speakers, is that the federal government has a limited role in regulating wind power development. In many states, the burden of oversight falls to counties and municipalities.
Via 11d, please, please do your part to crash Scott’s computer.
Jo Marchant brings us up to date on the reconstruction of the Antikythera Mechanism, a second- or first-century BCE gearwork model of the heavens salvaged from a shipwreck more than 1,900 years later. Michael Wright has used computer-assisted tomography on the badly-corroded assembly of bronze to reveal a pin-and-slot model of a nine-year cycle in the Moon’s movements:
One of the wheels connected to the main drive wheel moves around once every nine years. Fixed on to it is a pair of small wheels, one of which sits almost—but not exactly—on top of the other. The bottom wheel has a pin sticking up from it, which engages with a slot in the wheel above. As the bottom wheel turns, this pin pushes the top wheel round. But because the two wheels aren’t centred in the same place, the pin moves back and forth within the upper slot. As a result, the movement of the upper wheel speeds up and slows down, depending on whether the pin is a little farther in towards the centre or a little farther out towards the tips of the teeth….
The researchers realized that the ratios of the gear-wheels involved produce a motion that closely mimics the varying motion of the Moon around Earth, as described by Hipparchus. When the Moon is close to us it seems to move faster. And the closest part of the Moon’s orbit itself makes a full rotation around the Earth about every nine years. Hipparchus was the first to describe this motion mathematically, working on the idea that the Moon’s orbit, although circular, was centred on a point offset from the centre of Earth that described a nine-year circle. In the Antikythera Mechanism, this theory is beautifully translated into mechanical form. “It’s an unbelievably sophisticated idea,” says Tony Freeth, a mathematician who worked out most of the mechanics for Edmunds’ team. “I don’t know how they thought of it.”
Follow links in Marchant’s piece to more technical material, nifty illustrations of the reconstructed device, and Freeth et al.’s paper.
RHT brings a gentle touch to the theatrical elements of this adaption of the short novel by Saint-Exupéry, the wide-eyed fairy tale well-known to tenth-grade French students nationwide. The Snake first appears behind a scrim, then fully lit but still in pantomime, manipulated by a puppeteer, before finally appearing in the form of a human actor; the various “big men” that the Little Prince meets in his fall to earth appear in a circus wagon-sized frame.
But the text of the production is faithful to the words and drawings of the novel, at times slavishly so, as when Craig Wallace (the aviator-narrator of the story) speaks to us exactly what he’s thinking. On the other hand, something we miss from Saint-Ex is the Little Prince’s jaunty cutaway royal gown: to accommodate the exuberant physicality of Jamie Kassel’s characterization, perhaps, the Prince wears some sort of bedraggled nightshirt. Kassel fully commits herself in her playing, but two shows in a row in Bethesda that feature principals with squeaky voices is a little too much to ask of us.
In the second half, as the Fox, Wallace has more scenery to chew, and he does so endearingly. The episode of the taming of the Fox is managed as a manic dance to Jacques Brel’s “La valse à mille temps,” and it’s a show-stopper.
Christopher Joyce hangs out in Thomas Circle with Brian Hayes, student of street furniture. Not in the Thomas Circle neighborhood, but in Thomas Circle. Follow the link for a nice slideshow of manhole covers.
Related: Drainspotting, including snaps of manhole covers in Rome marked SPQR. (Say thank you, Leta.)
Daphne Merkin covers a lot of the usual ground in her profile of Tom Stoppard, born Tomas Straussler. (The piece accompanies the opening of The Coast of Utopia in New York.) But, towards the close of the article, an insight glimmers:
The longer I ponder the Stoppard legend—the difficult beginnings and then the smooth ascent, with nary a glitch to be seen—the more I find myself wondering at the gaps in his history, at how much he has discarded along the road…. Stoppard may in fact be that rare creature, an untortured creative artist for whom art is not an escape from trauma but rather an extension of his intellectual largess. Or he may be someone stuck in his own characterization, playing out the upside of an absurdist existential situation…
I am thankful that, of all my problems, or issues that I think are problems, I always have some means of controlling the outcome or mitigating the situation.
I am thankful for the printed word. Wherever I am, I can fold open a “clothy brick,” as John Updike would have it, and magically hear someone else’s voice in my head. If it’s a script, I can hear three or four voices. No incompatible technologies, no licensing restrictions, no planned obsolescence.
I am, by nature and necessity, pretty self-sufficient in terms of relationships. But when Leta came into my life, she was the seventh on the top of the major chord that makes it sound all the more resonant. Darn right I’m thankful for her. And her folks, too: family Thanksgiving dinners are something that I actually look forward to, now.
(Inspired by wockerjabby’s wonderful mash note to her husband.)