Iron Man Review in LOLCAT comic form by Daniel Saunders

My man Daniel Saunders made this review of the film Iron Man (Jon Favreau, 2008) using stills from the film, and LOLCAT software to put in captions, most or all of which are actually from speeches given recently.

I think it's very clever and very smart. It shows me a perspective on the film I hadn't thought of at all, making it a chilling metaphor.

Enjoy.

Book Wrap-Up 2007

I have been keeping a book diary since 1993. Now it's online at

http://jimdavies.org/personal/books-read.html

Here is a wrap up of the books I read in 2007. It's a short list, I think in part because I've been reading a lot of magazines.

The Paris Option by Robert Ludlum and Gayle Lynds

Mediocre potboiler novel.

What Is Your Dangerous Idea? Edited by John Brockman

Interesting and provocative. It's a bunch of people writing short essays about their ideas that they deem dangerous for whatever reason. Great fodder for conversation.

Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture by Ariel Levy


Garbage. If you want my full, scathing review, email me and I'll send it to you.


Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert
Wonderful, fascinating look at how we are very bad at predicting what will make us happy. Gives me comfort. Maybe the choices I make are not that big a deal.


Pillars of the Earth*** by Ken Follett
Very good novel about reading a cathedral.



Knife of Dreams by Robert Jordan
Great book, the second to last in a very long fantasy series, the author of which died before he could write the final one.

Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes by Stephen J. Gould
Decent book. Gould's a good writer. He writes broadly but has an emphasis on evolution.

Blood Work*** by Michael Connelly
Very good potboiler.

Metamagical Themas by Douglas Hofstadter
Wonderful and inspiring. Full of great ideas. All cognitive scientists should read this. It is a collection of his essays for Scientific American.

The Body Artist by Don DiLillo A boring and arty novel.

Selection for genes in post-reproductive ages

I have to quibble with some text from Matt Ridley's otherwise awesome book Genome (1999). On page 201 he writes

Natural selection cannot weed out genes that damage the body in post-reproductive age, because there is no reproduction of the successful in old age.

The idea behind this is that natural selection works through gene propagation by those most able to reproduce. The phrase "survival of the fittest" (not Darwin's, by the way) is a bit misleading-- it doesn't really matter how well or how long you survive, only how much you reproduce. So if a person can no longer reproduce, then having great lungs in old age, or having crappy lungs in old age, it doesn't matter; it can't affect evolution.

Makes sense, doesn't it? The problem is that people past their reproductive ages often help raise and protect their descendants. That is, grandma and grandpa survive long enough to be able to effectively help out in raising their little grandchild Simon. Simon will out-compete Alexander, whose grandparents died early. Since Simon has his grandparents' longevity genes (genes that allow him to live into an older age), those genes will get propagated.

So goes my thinking, anyway. Note that I am not an evolutionary biologist.

Pictured is Simon, the Ocelot who out-competed Alexander's genetic ass!

REFERENCE

Ridley, M. (1999) Genome. The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters. HarperCollins.

Elance and Outsourcing Your Life

Elance (elance.com) is a web service that hooks you up with freelancers for writing, programming, etc.

I've been reading The 4-Hour Work Week (Ferriss, 2007) and it has a great suggestion about "outsourcing your life."

I used Elance for the first time recently and it was great.

I got my Ph.D. at Georgia Tech. I had webpages there (a lot of webpages). The problem is after a year of being there they freeze your account. This means you can't change the webpages anymore. This is a problem, because webpages can become outdated and surfers need to know there's a better version out there. I didn't want to delete them either, because the pages are still on the web, just not on tech's servers anymore.

I've asked every year (since 2004) to give me an extension, with the intention of replacing all of my webpages there with links to where I now keep them (http://www.jimdavies.org/). I don't like doing this kind of programming and I have been procrastinating it for three and a half years!

I started working on it in the fall of 2007 and it was annoying and I stopped because I had classes to teach, students to supervise, etc. I read about Elance and put up a post describing what I needed.

You describe the product you want and people bid on it. You choose a bidder and they do the work for you, and you pay them. The minimum is US$50. I found someone, they wrote the script for me in perl!

It changed all of my .html pages on the Tech server to point to the new companion page at jimdavies.org (it has the same directory structure). You can look at

http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~jimmyd/art/pac-man/index.html

to see the results.

Pictured is a pizza, an example of a food I adore.

REFERENCES

Ferriss, T. (2007) The 4-Hour Work Week. Crown publishers.

new blog: Jim Davies Identifies These Things As Cool

This blog is mainly for my ideas, and I found myself wanting a forum to communicate other people's ideas I was excited about. For this purpose I have started a new blog.

Introducing "Jim Davies Indentifies These Things As Cool"

http://jimdaviesidentifies.blogspot.com/

Writing So Beautiful It's Bad

I blogged once about why you should be skeptical of good writers:
http://jimdavies.blogspot.com/2007/06/be-skeptical-of-good-writers.html



I have more to say about the subject.



I recently picked up a book called Powers of Horror by Julia Kristeva (1982). I could not get through more than a page and a half of it, but what I read seemed to be a great example of what I'm talking about. It starts:

There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. It lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated. It beseeches, worries, and fascinates desire, which, nevertheless, does not let itself be seduced.

I won't bore you with any more, but it goes on like that for a least another page or so.



I asked the person from whom I'd borrowed the book what it was supposed to be about, and it's about, among other topics, something rather interesting: how under certain contexts we find things like saliva disgusting (when spit on a wall) and at other times attractive (when kissing.) So I am not saying that what the book is trying to communicate is bad. I'm saying that the way it's written obfuscates the meaning.



The book is written so beautifully that its comprehensibility suffers.



I don't want to say that writing should not be beautiful. I think, for example, Dawkins's The Selfish Gene is beautifully written. And certainly one can write prose so ugly and boring that its comprehensibility suffers. But beauty can go too far.



Poetry, ideally, is very beautiful writing, or at least very interesting writing. I didn't understand poetry for a long time. When I'd try to write it, I'd think of some idea I wanted to communicate, and then poetize it! That's short for making it obfuscated and beautifully written. I could have just written the idea itself, and been perfectly clear, but then it wouldn't be much of a poem, would it? Ideally, the meaning of a poem should be subtle: it's meaning comes out through the subtle connotations and meanings of the words in their particular arrangement.



When asked about the meaning of their works, I've heard some artists say that if they could explain it in simple words, there would have been no reason to make the art in the first place. The work of art requires interpretation. The act of interpretation by the audience is part of the artistic appreciation. A good work of art (IMHO) affords different interpretations by different people in different contexts.



But this passage is not poetry. This passage is trying to make psychological claims. It should not be written like poetry, so that it's open to interpretation. If this were turned in as a paper to any of my philosophy professors it would not even be graded-- it would be sent back. Kristeva would have done the assignment wrong.



When you're trying to help someone understand something, or trying to communicate something important about the world, don't mess around. It's too important. Write clearly. Write so that you're maximally effective.



The book might get better; I admit I didn't give it much of a chance. But my criticism still holds for the first two pages. The beginning sets the tone, and (one hopes) grabs the reader and makes him or her want to go on.



Is it fair that I'm judging it from the perspective of philosophical and scientific writing? Yes. Is it fair that I judge the English version of this book, given that it was originally written in French? Probably; French literary stuff like this is famously obscure. And even it it's not, I'll just shift the blame to the translator instead of the original author. Some number of people are to blame. Shouldn't I be judging it by the standards of the field in which it's written (literary criticism and psychoanalysis)? No. If she's trying to say something true about the world, as opposed to making art, then I'm in the right here. If this is the kind of writing that's considered good in those fields, then FSM help those fields. Their insights are like scientific experiments conducted but never published-- uncommunicated, destined never to have impact.



I'm not going to go into the details of what's wrong with the quoted passage. I'm tempted, as a professor, to get out my red pen and tear it to shreds. But I have student papers to correct.



There's still hope for them.



ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to Vanessa Corcoran, Daniel Saunders, and Anthony J. Francis for their comments on this essay.


REFERENCES



Dawkins, R. (1976). The Selfish Gene. Oxford University Press.



Kristeva, J. (1982). Powers of Horror. Translated from French by Leon S. Roudiez. Columbia University Press.

Pictured: Kristeva. At least she's a good dresser.

Theater and Film

This is in response to the following blog post about plays and films/TV shows:
http://complicationsensue.blogspot.com/2008/03/zarathustra-said-some-things-no.html
(You can also see there later comments by the blog author and my stage director friend Montica Pes.)

Hi.

I think you're misrepresenting what theater has going for it over film a bit, which you say is "essentially, the ritual of the actors being in the same space."

One thing that theater does really well is deal with symbolism and ambiguity. This difference with film can be clearly seen when plays are adapted to movies.

For example, the play Equus, the main character stabs horses in the eyes. The blood rom the eyes can represented with streams of fabric; the horses can be shiny metal horse heads. This does not work on film, because of the audience's expectations of realism. Having actual horses and actual blood makes the scene more about gore and emphasizes less the ritualistic aspect of it. I'm not saying film can't find this meaning in other ways, but it has a hard time doing it in this way.

Very few films try to do what theater does in this way-- "Dogville" is one example. And it's so weird to see it on film, but it would not have been at all weird in a play.

I think this is the reason that the diagetic/non-diagetic concept is basically absent in theater. There's too much symbolism, which walks the border between them.

Of course there is symbolism in film, television, and in novels, but it's of a different kind. The sword in a film might symbolize ambition, for example. That's easy to do in film. But in a play, you can have a broom represent a sword, or a wheelchair represent a car, or a two actors holding hands represent a door to a saloon, a piece of masking tape can be the horizon. These choices have effects on the meaning of these things in the mind of the audience. You can get these beautiful, subtle flavors of meaning.

As a playwright, I try to ask myself "why does this need to be a play?" If it's better as a book, or a screenplay, or a painting, then I'll try to do that.

I think there is no better demonstration of the differences than Julie Taymor's DVD commentary on "Titus," which she adapted from a her stage version of the same script. You hear her say "well, we did this in the play, but that wouldn't work in a movie, so we..." Fascinating!

JimDavies
jim@jimdavies.org

Choosing Preferences

In Ray Kurzweil's fascinating book "The Singularity
is Near" (2005) he predicts of the future of humanity, and I
feel like my mind is bigger. Expanded. It's wonderful. I highly
recommend it.

He's very optimistic about the future of technology, and if he's right
then within my lifetime it might be possible to alter your brain and
mind in very exacting ways. It got me thinking about preferences, and
under what circumstances one would want to change them. My question to
you is this: if you could change your preferences and opinions, which
would you change?

Currently, we can sometimes change our preferences, but it takes work and
time. Growing up I didn't like coffee, but sometimes it was the only
thing around to drink. I really wanted to like coffee, so I just
started making myself drink it. It worked! Now I can tolerate a cup of
coffee, and even enjoy it if it has enough milk and sugar in it (to
quote my man Ad-Rock "I like my sugar with coffee and cream."). I
don't want it every day, but at least now I can go to a coffe shop and
find something on the menu I can stomach.

Back to rapid change...Here are some examples of things people might
want to do:

• Make yourself enjoy broccoli as much as you currently like chocolate
  
• Make yourself find your spouse the most attractive person in
  the world, for as long as you're with him or her
  
• Make yourself find funny things about twice as funny as you do now
  
• Make yourself love jazz
  
• Make yourself dislike video games
  

It's interesting to think about, because on the one hand our
preferences are part of what makes us who we are. For example, I adore
Reece's Pieces Sundaes from Friendly's. If I changed my adoration for
them, I think, in a small way, I would be less "me." I might be a
better me (if you believe in nutrition), but I'd be different.

There are some things I really don't like, such as most alternative
rock music from the 90s (e.g. Green Day and Nerfherder). I have
temptations to be proud of my dislikes. I often get a laugh when I
refer to a band as "some asshole with a guitar." But ultimately I'm
surrounded by this stuff, and it just hurts me overall that I don't
like it. I can say pretty confidently that if I could just flip a
switch and suddenly appreciate that whiney whiteboy crap, I would.

People who knew me would be all "Jim, I thought you hated that stuff!"

To which I would reply "That was before I flipped this awesome
switch!"

One thing that's disturbing about it is that once you like something,
you usually don't want to give it up. For example, I love hip hop
music, in spite of (not, mind you, because of) the sexism that's
rampant in it. I feel like if I suddenly didn't like it anymore, I
would lose a huge part of life that I now enjoy. I probably would
feel similarly about alternative rock if I found myself liking
it. This means that the trend would probably be toward liking more and
more things, because you probably would not decide to turn back once
you've appreciated something.

Now there are bad habits too, and such a switch would be great for
people with addictions or other bad habits. You might wish you hated
picking your nose or gambling.

It's uncharted waters. Changes that might happen probably would, in
the short term, have unseen consequences. For example, if you changed
yourself so that you liked yourself more, then it might have the
inadvertant effect of making you not want to change anything else
about yourself!

The scariest part about it is just that: changing yourself so that
your preferences about changing yourself are changed. Maybe you'd
change yourself to be more open to change, which might lead to more
changes in yourself. Or maybe you'd change yourself in some way that
would make you want to stay very much the way you are. I can imagine
scenarios in which both would hurt you.

I'm reminded of some cults who have instructions in place to keep
people from leaving the cult. E.g. don't talk to anyone outside the
cult, don't think about questioning the cult, etc. Such things help
the cult's success by insuring the cult stays legitimate in the mind
of the individual. (Seductive Poison, by Deborah Layton, is a
fascinating memoir about living in the Jonestown cult. It gave me a
lot of insight into the cult mindset and lifestyle.)

http://www.amazon.com/Seductive-Poison-Jonestown-Survivors-Peoples/dp/0385489846/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1198518612&sr=1-1

Anyway, it's interesting to think about your preferences, how you
might want to change them, and what that means for your
identity. Someday we might have the power to change them
instantly.

Some react strangely to the question. If you want something, why would
you want to change that? Dennet in his book Brainstorms distinguishes
between first and second order desires: What we want and what we want
to want (1981).

Obsessive-compulsive disorder makes this difference very clear. The
victims want to wash their hands because it gives them temporary
relief to their compulsive urges. But they don't want to want those
urges. Indeed, those urges can ruin their lives (Rappoport, 1989).

What preferences would you change?


Pictured are me and my fellow improvisor Mitch in a recent improv show.

REFERENCES

Dennet, D. (1981). Brainstorms. MIT Press.

Kurzweil, R. (1995). The Singularity is Near. Penguin books.

Rappoport, J. L. (1989). The Boy Who Couldn't Stop Washing: The
Experience and Treatment of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. Plume,
Penguin Books, Markham, Ontario.