Michael Offutt's Blog, page 120

Being Human had its swan song and now its all over but the crying

Being Human is over. I shall miss you guys so much.I sit here late at night writing this post because I can't get the images of the series finale for SyFy's Being Human out of my head. This was a gem of a series not because it did anything ground breaking with the mythology behind werewolves, ghosts, and vampires, but because it focused so much on the characters and how their love for each other was all that mattered when they died.

Being Human in its final hour made me sob so many times. The first time came only moments into the show when Sally (by far my favorite character) made the choice to cast a spell that would claim her immortal soul, but she did it because it was the only way to keep Josh safe from an enraged Aiden. Through season after season I thought for sure that Sally would eventually get her door. She missed her door in season one when she helped Aidan, so this isn't how things are supposed to end, right? But that's exactly how it ended, and Sally did what Sally always did: she made a choice out of love, door be damned. And her goodbye was so perfect and so filled with good that it just didn't seem right that this is how this character goes out.

In monologue came the most profound explanation behind Sally's choice:

"The day they moved in was the best day. It felt like the start of something new, something good. After everything that had gone so wrong with my life, they walked in that door and they brought possibility. When you look back at your life with a person, sometimes you wonder, would we be friends if we met now? Or did the path that we went on together lead us to this place? Did every triumph and mistake along the way make us fall in love? I think that everything happens for a reason: love, life, even death. I hold onto this place for a reason, and that reason is now."

In the aftermath of Sally's sacrifice (that made Aidan human) the once mighty vampire is laid low first by sadness at losing Sally, and second by the thread of his own mortality which is quickly overtaking him. All those centuries start to catch up on Aidan, turning his hair gray, and making him move like a man in his nineties. With the specter of dying (and the fear that results from that) Aidan almost makes a choice to become a vampire again. However Josh stops him, and in that redemption I got a new respect for Aidan because he decides to make sure that Josh and Nora would go on to live happy lives by returning to the house that lay at the center of their world. He did this to burn it down in order to kill a malicious ghost that haunted it (and was murdering people because they all moved out). Josh says in monologue to a dream (one Josh and Nora seem to have shared):

"The day we moved in was the first day of my life. Before then, before them, I had no chance, I didn't think I could feel human, feel love. The little things--coffee grounds, laundry day, sleeping late, living life--thank you for every small moment of this world."

I guess Josh's words reminds me of that song, "Little Wonders" sung by Rob Thomas of Matchbox 20. Have you heard it? In any event, each of the cast central to this series gets to say something profound in this final episode. But, I think Aidan's final haunting words as he's dying in their home near Sally's death spot captures the essence of the series the best (and very poetically):

"When the end comes rushing up at you and everything that you thought was real starts to fall away, you consider the meaning of the life that you lived and you realize that the only thing that means a damn thing at the end is what you loved. And you think of who you loved, and you let it take you home."

Oh my gosh. I guess all that ever really matters to any of us who are human is the feeling of home, right? Some like to say it's where you hang your hat. But really, it's where you are loved and where your memories are forged. Home is the place that defines you. This finale was bittersweet but very satisfying. There are series that end with characters leaving an empty apartment or whatever place brought them together. This one ended with Josh and Nora as the parents of two adorable kids named Aidan and Sally. And therein is the true prize: Josh and Nora made it. They got to be happy and have a family.

Josh told Aidan's ghost right as he got his door (a thing that vampires are never supposed to be able to get), "We promise to live ridiculous lives in your honor." The chemistry of this cast made this the little series that could, and I think I'll never forget how it made me feel when all things came to an end.

Aspiring writers could take a few cues from the inventiveness in Godzilla because clever is the new black

I'll just get right to the point: there's a new extended trailer out for Godzilla (due out next month) and you should watch it to prove you're not a complete dullard. Most of the footage in it seems to be new. I don't know if you're one of the people that's following this like I am (I am my own particular brand of crazy), but it is pretty exciting. At around the 2:15 mark there's a glimpse of what looks like a new kaiju through the window of a train. And when Bryan Cranston seals his wife into a contaminated area of the plant they're both working at there's a pink/lavender mist that looks really ominous and has nothing to do with supporting breast cancer. I kept asking myself "What is it?" which is probably what I'm supposed to be asking. But when I ask questions like that I just produce even more questions:

1) Is the Godzilla in this movie going to be some kind of angry god? Or will he be Earth's protector and champion like Toho later evolved him into?

2) What are these new kaijus? Are they enemies of Godzilla? Do they have cool powers?

3) Is anyone else tired of the Golden Gate Bridge getting trashed?

4) Could Bryan Cranston make me believe anything? Seriously...this guy's acting ability could sell me on using paper towels as toilet paper. He's that good. Example: Bryan Cranston is panicking? Okay shit just got real folks.

5) Is the plant featured in the film (that has a nuclear accident) Fukushima? Are they really going to go there? That probably means either the Japanese are going to love this film, or they're going to hate it. There won't be any middling "feels" here. The last time Americans made a Godzilla film, the Japanese put out one of their own (in short order) that featured the Godzilla from the Mathew Broderick film. It got its ass kicked by the real Godzilla in under ten seconds. I'm not kidding.

The film coming out next month has the awesome potential to be a really huge deal because it has a solid cast, a good story, and effects that are impressing the hell out of me. And by solid story, the writing seems to "frame" history in clever context. Take (for example) these particular talking points (and yes I know I've used up my allotted ration of bullets):

1) All those nuclear tests that we did in the Pacific? The public was told they were tests...but what was really happening is that the army was trying to kill something huge.

2) And if that is Fukushima going up (with the purple mist that kills Cranston's wife) then the earthquake that started it all may have been caused by Godzilla. How cool is that? Or uncool if you don't like the idea that a huge fire-breathing lizard thing is responsible for the deaths of thousands of people.

Either way, I like it when writers get clever with history. It feeds into my "conspiracy theory" gene that for the most part remains dormant. I'll even go so far as to say this: aspiring writers could take a few cues from the inventiveness in Godzilla because clever is the new black. As I edit my own manuscript this week, I'll be thinking of ways I can frame historical context or scientific observation to make sense of the weirdness in my stories.

Flash Boys is an eye-opening reveal of the highway robbery taking place on Wall Street every day

It's amazing how quickly technology changed how Americans do business. I had assumed prior to picking up Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis, that computers had taken over trading with algorithms going back to at least year 2000. However, the change was more recent than that. It happened in and around 2007-2008. Mr. Lewis conjured an image of a trading floor full of screaming brokers slamming telephones along with a hysteria-infused ticker tape like you see in the movie Trading Places, and all of that ended less than a decade ago. It's now pretty quiet at the exchanges and much of what gets done happens in secretive black boxes.

The New York Stock exchange and the Nasdaq are two "for profit" businesses that provide a platform for the buying and selling of stock. Because they are "for profit", high frequency traders have been able to get an edge on everyone else. One company (calling itself Spread Network and under stealth conditions reminiscent of Cold War espionage) built an absolutely straight tunnel to run fiber-optic cable through the mountains of Pennsylvania. This involved drilling, getting permission from every small town along the way, making sure that no one ever figured out what the tunnel was for, and spending hundreds of millions of dollars. When completed, Spread Network sold access to their "cable" for $14 million each...access that gave a .00008 second advantage on the buying and selling of stock.

What does this mean? Well with the right algorithm (and they did have the right algorithm) a high-frequency trader could identify a big order coming in from say Pershing Square (hedge fund controlled by Bill Ackman) for scooping up a million shares of a company, buy all that available stock on the open market a micro-second before the order hit, and then turn around and resell those stocks to Pershing for more money because they were no longer available.

If you don't understand how this works imagine this: you are at a supermarket and there are a limited number of bananas on the shelf (as there always are) and you need to buy some. As you reach for the bananas, someone pushes you out of the way, buys all the bananas, and then offers to resell them to you for five cents more.

Is this at all capitalism? Is this what America is about these days? Or is this just highway robbery?
As you can see from this graph, high-frequency trading happens in bursts.
The line at the bottom is the stock market activity involving General Electric
shares over 100 milliseconds (one-tenth of a second) at 12:44 p.m. on Dec 19th.
So these 44 trades basically happened during that time (source: New York Times).There are two camps of thought on this subject and they've been raging ever since Michael Lewis' book came out earlier this week (I started reading it on Monday).

The first train of thought goes like this: It is capitalism because high-frequency traders provide liquidity to the market. Additionally, Spread Network paid to have the tunnel built and the exchanges (which are "for profit" businesses) gave their blessing, and if you wanted to they would do the same for you (the only problem being that the average Joe like you and me doesn't have hundreds of millions of dollars to spend on a cable).

The second train of thought (mine) goes like this: These people are crooks. They are pirates and need to be stopped. Forcefully making yourself a middleman in a two entity transaction is criminal. Sure, these high-frequency traders are making a very small margin of profit per share, but the thing is, when mutual fund managers of 401K's and retirement plans are moving assets around that total billions of dollars, these mosquitoes ravage the common person's money (essentially adding hidden fees on top of what you're already getting screwed out of by taxes and regular fees). In other words: it's bullshit.

It's going to be interesting to see the fallout from this book and whether or not the heroes, one is named Bradley Katsuyama, are vindicated or vilified for daring to come out and say that the markets are rigged (high-frequency traders have been attacking him publicly ever since the release of the book). For me, Katsuyama is a hero, pointing out what I'd suspected about Wall Street but never had any proof. I'm not a day trader but a long-term investor, so the impact on what I do personally is minimal (outside of my retirement plan). But because my retirement plan is getting bigger and more significant, it pisses me off that these swarming insects will scalp further profit from a pile of money that should rightfully be mine.

Consider this fact: In early 2013, one of the largest high-frequency traders, Virtu Financial, publicly boasted that in five and a half years of trading it had experienced just one day when it hadn't made money. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley can't do this, so how is HFT even allowed to happen? The more I think about it, the more it really starts to make my blood boil.

Do any of you have an opinion? Or has apathy at how unfair life is finally taken its toll and beaten you into the ground? I look forward to reading your comments.

The Walking Dead explores the last taboo by hinting at cannibalism in season five

Sunday's "A" episode of The Walking Dead had what looked like a
slaughtering pit filled with human skeletons. I could be wrong though.If there is insecurity in my writing, it's that the things that I like to read or watch broach subjects so hard-hitting and in ways that are so real, that I doubt my own abilities to recreate the same. I think I'll never be able to evoke this kind of emotion. Take dark fiction as an example. Everyone knows that I'm a fan, especially when it comes to science fiction that takes on a horror twist. When I'm engrossed in these kinds of stories, inevitably I compare them to my own works. The little voice inside pipes up and says, "Your stuff is boring compared to this." Maybe it's just an uncomfortable truth; I guess only a lifetime of writing will give me the perspective to answer this to my liking.

Cormac McCarthy published The Road in 2006. It's a post-apocalyptic story where a father and his young son (over a period of several months) cross a landscape languishing in the fall of civilization. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2007. In thinking of the blasted environs of The Road I am reminded of the sardonic voice of Tyrion Lannister in George R.R. Martin's magnum opus, A Clash of Kings. Tyrion at one point turns to his "beloved" sister Cersei and says, “A day will come when you think yourself safe and happy, and suddenly your joy will turn to ashes in your mouth, and you'll know the debt is paid."

In The Road, there is no debt to pay unless it is to the unnamed sins of the survivors who are ambiguous in the insistence that they are the good guys. The land is ashes, it is devoid of living animals and vegetation, and many of the remaining human survivors are cannibals, scavenging the detritus of city and country for flesh to eat. The horrors they face include seeing a newborn infant roasted on a spit and captives being gradually harvested for food.

This is the kind of darkness that has come to The Walking Dead whether by caveat that it was always this way and we were in denial, or whether it was driven in this direction because it is exhausting its ability to continually shock the audience. In either case by the close of season four Rick, Michonne, his young son Carl, and the other survivors reached "the end of the line" at Terminus, are now imprisoned in a rail car painted with an "A" (by what we can presume are cannibals), and are in a heap of trouble.

Is it disturbing how effectively Scott Gimple has been able to build attachment in these characters? Disturbing, yes but also brilliant. It's hard for me to not squirm in my seat. The creepiness of Terminus makes the Governor look tame. I can only imagine that next season will probably be a grotesque blood bath, with amputations being done via tourniquet because the world has no refrigeration. In other words, the living monsters are alive while they eat you (and probably discussing the day's business and how much they miss Facebook). The hints have been strong, from the constant barbecuing of meat when there are no animals around, to what looks like a slaughter pit filled with the bloody skeletal remains of butchered humans (shown only briefly on screen), and the strange foreshadowing of the rabbit trap.

And what about previous episodes? Remember this painting? Contrast it with the appearance of Mary, the woman we met at Terminus played by Denise Crosby, a.k.a. Tasha Yar from Star Trek: The Next Generation.
The image (posted on Reddit) suggests that Michonne and Carl were in this lady's house. Take a look at the hair, the layers of clothing, and remember the bloodbath in the nursery. There was also a picture of a dog on the wall that looks eerily similar to the dog that distracted Daryl and led to Beth's kidnapping.  The dog on the wall behind Carl looks a lot like the one-eyed dog in
the episode that resulted in Beth's kidnapping.The theme for this season's The Walking Dead has pretty much been "internal monsters." It isn't too much of a stretch to imagine that the food on Mary's barbecue is human (probably Beth's and that makes me sad). Unfortunately, these events also parallel those that occur in The Walking Dead comic book, a.k.a. the appearance of "The Hunters" that I mentioned in a post last week. This leads me to the next question: what is it about cannibalism that we find so terrifying? Perhaps it's the idea of being someone else's food, and that we can imagine those around us adopting this lifestyle were times to get tough. Yes, you read that last line right. Your neighbors are perfectly capable of eating you if they were starving.

According to a new poll from the Society for Progressive Meat, I learned that 10% of Americans would consider eating humans while a measly 3% would consider going all vegan. 2,500 respondents were polled over a two-week period. Interesting eh? Admittedly, this poll was commissioned by an organization associated with efforts to introduce human meat to the mainstream. So there's no doubt that the members of this society get their buddies to drive up the numbers similar to how bloggers get their followers to do the same on goodreads (should I be disturbed that there's a society devoted to cannibalism?) But the study does seem to point to an unsettling fact: many of us could become monsters if the situation warranted it.
I suppose it shouldn't surprise me that The Walking Dead is exploring this last human taboo. It's arguably one of the components that led Forbes to declare the season finale "the most watched hour ever." Zombies have been chomping down on humans through four seasons now, so why should it be any different when those humans are actually alive? For me it has to do with the horror of a reality check in which there is no sanctuary at all in a society that utterly collapses. Without some measure of trust, society is impossible. After all, how can you trust anyone who could possibly view you as dinner?

I've got to hand it to the likes of The Walking Dead. The story (in my opinion) is part of a select group of fiction I label "the best in the business." Can something be so good that it actually discourages you in your own ambitions? I think so.

This post is part of the Insecure Writer's Support Group collective. Go HERE to find out more.

Da Vinci's Demon's Blood of Brothers shows us how Big Talk can turn the tide on anyone

Lorenzo de'Medici as he appears in "Blood of Brothers."I am so glad that Da Vinci's Demons is back on Starz! I know it doesn't follow the actual history of the character of Leonardo Da Vinci all that well. However, I do like the times when his inventiveness is allowed to be used in a real life situation. In "The Blood of Brothers," the clever idea for the week is to employ brass panels, which are used to surround the city center in order to amplify Lorenzo's voice (Lorenzo Medici is Leonardo's patron and basically the ruler of Florence). With Lorenzo's brother, Giuliano, dead there's rioting and mayhem in the streets as the people do not know of the fate of their ruler or (for that matter) what's going on.

So how does the idea come to fruition? Well, Leonardo observes members of the conspirators whipping a crowd into a froth. Only the thing is, you can't hear what their saying. Basically only the people directly around the podium are able to hear anything at all. This gives Leonardo the genius of applying the principle of Big Talk to win arguments.

And you know what? Big Talk is actually a real thing.

Here's the observation/study behind this statement:

Pairs of people were shown two sequences of images. One had an image that the pairs were supposed to notice, but both sequences went by quickly. Much of the time, people were unsure which sequence contained the target image. Afterward, each member of the pair made a guess as to which sequence contained the target image. If the pairs disagreed, they had to follow one of two procedures. One group exchanged written communication only. Another was allowed to talk. Neither side did badly. However, the written communication only pairs came up with better results. The reason the verbal communicators did so poorly? Big Talkers drowned out the silent minority.

The people who were allowed to talk did not improve their accuracy, but they radically improved their own opinion of their accuracy. In other words, people talk themselves into believing that they're right. More talk doesn't convince them otherwise, so they're lacking vital data that the silent pairs had. So basically, talking obscures the situation. Outside of this study, this kind of behavior goes on in any number of scenarios. Just think of the last time you couldn't get a word in edgewise because someone was talking over you about something.

Well, employing this principle is exactly what Leonardo Da Vinci did in "The Blood of Brothers," and it worked like it should have (and was absolutely brilliant to boot). Lorenzo's speech outshouts anything the conspirators can say, the mob listens, events turn around quickly as the people of Florence proclaim their allegiance to the de'Medici family, and the conspirators all get rounded up and summarily executed.

The lesson here is this: for a debate to be fair, both sides need equal time. One side shouldn't be allowed to outshout the other. The side that does get outshouted is probably going to lose. It doesn't even matter if they're right. That's just how humans roll.

"Blood of Brothers" was a fantastic end to the whole plot arc that we can now assume goes in the direction of Leonardo and his quest for the Book of Leaves. If only all shows could be this clever. If you have time, check out the new title credits for season 2. How can you go wrong with a lead-in of the Mona Lisa?
Da Vincis Demons titles season 2 from HUGE on Vimeo.

I saw Neil DeGrasse Tyson live at the University of Utah and he made me dream about tomorrow

Dr. Tyson exudes personality on stage. I was impressed by how entertaining,
informative, and humorous he was. And I loved it when he read from "The Book
of Carl", i.e., an honorary nod to Carl Sagan who was so important in my life
that I quote from him in my novel, Oculus (it's no coincidence that the story
takes place at Ivy League school Cornell University, Sagan's Alma Mater.Wednesday night at around seven o'clock mountain time, Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City took the stage at Kingsbury Hall here at the University of Utah to thunderous applause. He immediately started talking about Pluto and how he "drove the car" that got it reclassified as a dwarf planet and how hate mail (see below) has poured into his office ever since. "I didn't fire the gun, I just drove the car." Maybe the New York Times started it all by taking the reclassification of such notable scientists as Tyson and making an eye-catching front page headline "Pluto's Not a Planet? Only in New York."

If you take the time to read the piece I'm talking about by following the embedded link, it's kind of humorous. Also, here's the letter that Tyson displayed behind him, and it had me laughing my ass off. In my opinion, if you're going to get hate mail, this is the best kind to get.
You gotta love any child that starts a letter in earnest with "Dear Scientist" and then goes on to be concerned about science books not being "right" and concerned about the possible people who may live there who won't exist if Pluto ceases to be a planet. I'm also fairly sure that Dr. Tyson responded to this little girl by handwritten letter (and I'd love to read that). I say this because it's simply too cute to ignore.

Tyson went on to give a summary of scientific observations about the night sky that many of us never notice (probably because we live in cities that drown out the light of the stars). For example, Uranus was originally discovered by a Brit who named the planet "George" after the English King. Really?

Thinking about the order of the planets in that way, i.e. Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, ... and George makes me chuckle. Later it was renamed by Britain to a more suitable roman god with one concession: the moons of Uranus would be named for Greek characters that appear in Shakespearean plays (or in a poem by Alexander Pope). That's how we get Titania and Oberon (A Midsummer Night's Dream), Ariel (The Tempest), Umbriel (The Rape of the Lock), Miranda (The Tempest), Cupid (Timon of Athens), and Mab (Romeo and Juliet). You see, people that discover scientific things get naming rights, and this was a more fascinating topic than I thought it would be. Allow me to elaborate.
Ancient Baghdad as depicted by an artist. Perhaps this might have been
a scene during the Golden Age of Islam.People have been looking up at the sky for a long time, and Dr. Tyson focused his lecture on a 300 year span in history known as the Golden Age of Islam. According to Dr. Tyson, Baghdad (during this era) arose as a cultural epicenter of all things scientific and wonderful.

Baghdad welcomed people from far and wide who had differing views and observations of the natural world. Arabs invented algebra and trigonometry and gave us the concept of zero (which even the Romans had no clue). They gave us words like algorithm and a numeral system we still use today. Because of the golden age of Islam humans explored biology, medicine (hospitals were open 24-hours and a system requiring medical diplomas to license doctors was put into place), and they gave us some of the most fantastic architecture and engineering the world has ever seen. And of course some people turned their eyes to the heavens to begin what would become the field of astronomy.
Ibn al-Haytham was an Arab scientist,
mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher
who made significant contributions to the
principles of optics, astronomy, and the
scientific method. Before him, people used
to think we were able to see because beams
of energy emerged from our eyes. Picture
Superman and his x-ray vision and you get
the idea behind "emission theory," which
proved to be completely wrong.
This is why most of the brightest stars in the sky have Arabic names. Betelgeuse (in the constellation of Orion) and Pollux are just two examples. But all of that scientific advancement ended after 300 years because there was a cultural shift in the Islamic population away from scientific questioning and observation.

Tyson gave an example of this by pretending to knock something off of his podium. Instead of pursuing why something falls to the earth and looking for a reason, the people in the region explained the event as simply being "Allah's will."

Tyson says you can't go through a day in the Muslim-centric area of the world without hearing someone make a reference to "Allah willing, the weather will be good tomorrow" or some other such nonsense. They've completely stopped their participation in forward and advanced scientific exploration and fall back upon the idea that "god did this" for all things they don't understand or don't want to understand. Religion has basically become the ultimate excuse to stop learning.

Dr. Tyson says this is a tragedy because the Muslim world comprises 1.4 billion people; that's 1.4 billion people that have washed themselves of all responsibility to make the human race better. "There have only been 2.5 Nobel Prize winners in the realm of SCIENCE that have come from Islamic backgrounds. I say .5 because one was in economics."

Imam Al GhazaliWhen Dr. Tyson frames the conversation like this, it's sobering. Literally one-sixth of the world could care less about science. So how did all of this start? He put up a picture of an Imam named Al Ghazali. A religious reformer and mystic who (in Tyson's words) is one of the people responsible for the decline of science and civilization in Muslim culture with works like Mathematics is the work of the Devil, Al Ghazali essentially started a movement to get people to accept the following: all events had to be caused by the divine instead of being the product of some external force.

In other words, Al Ghazali killed curiosity and Tyson insists that this is going on in America today. It saddens me to agree so wholeheartedly with Dr. Tyson. Here's how I identify the problem at hand: we now have an entire population of self-absorbed scientifically unmotivated adults, and it hurts all of us because adults are in charge. Think about it. Adults wield resources and create or destroy opportunities. In my own state of Utah, assault on education from the Eagle Forum is continuous. For example, these backward thinking conservatives want to remove sex education of any kind from the classrooms to just teach one thing: abstinence.

In my opinion, one of the biggest problems with the world today is that we have large groups of people who will accept whatever they hear on the grapevine, just because it suits their worldview--not because it is actually true or because they have evidence to support it. We live in a world where we see headlines like "Eighty percent of the passengers who survived had studied the locations of the exit doors on takeoff." This headline doesn't provide any real information. It's not like we can ask the dead people if they studied the locations of the exit doors. And what about a congressman who (Dr. Tyson points out) said, "I've changed my views 360 degrees on that subject!" The guy that said this makes a huge salary, yet remains scientifically and mathematically ignorant (either that or diabolically evil). We live in a world where elevators don't have a 13th floor because superstition is so powerful that people actually fear a number. And we live in a world that's afraid to use negative numbers to indicate basements. Instead we get "B" for "Basement" and "SB" for "Sub-Basement." Dr. Tyson says, "We have a perfectly established numeric system that can eliminate the need to buy a vowel."

"I don't recognize America today," Dr. Tyson said over and over. He emphasized that his reboot of Sagan's Cosmos is an attempt to reignite America's curiosity about science. "It's to remind you of how science works." As a viewer and fan of Dr. Tyson, I have to say that Cosmos is pretty darn amazing. Hearing him talk about future episodes of the show was exciting. But he also went on to show the audience how insignificant we really are by telling a story from his own life.
Cosmos is a reboot of Sagan's mini-series filmed a
generation ago. Sadly, it will have only 13 episodes like
the original. I got the answer straight from Dr. Tyson
himself in the Q&A period (see below).
Here's how it went down. Dr. Tyson was invited to speak before a crowd of very bright and young science and mathematics scholars who had all won awards and were headed to the colleges of their choice (boy wouldn't that be nice?).

One young man wore a Harvard tie and Dr. Tyson took the tie away from this man and asked him, "Why are you wearing this tie? Is it because you want the respect of others who recognize the pedigree of an education from Harvard?"

The young man admitted that this is exactly why he wore the tie and this is how Dr. Tyson responded: "The reason you want this is because people that went to that institution before you went out into the world and accomplished great things. After they did these great things, the institution claimed them as one of their students." Tyson eluded in his tale that many people focus on the wrong thing: an educational pedigree. "Accomplish great things and no one will care about your educational background. Does anyone here know what school Einstein went to? Do we care? Nope. He won the Nobel Prize in Science because his achievements exceeded that prize." For those of you that may be concerned about the young man's tie, Dr. Tyson said he intends to return it to him soon and follow-up on the guy's ambitions and projects now that he's graduated.

Because I work in the public sector, this uncomfortable truth from Tyson really struck a nerve. In government, education is valued over skill (at least in the agency I work for). It has to do with justifying the expenditure of tax payer money. In order to do that, people have to have letters after their names. In the private sector, companies like Google and Facebook could care less about your education. If you have the gravitas and ability to demonstrate incredible skill in the field of software engineering, you can go to work for Silicon Valley right out of high school and make a six-figure salary. My point? Skill is prized above education.

Dr. Tyson touched on how people and their tremendous "Egos" have damaged scientific discovery. For example, many cultures raise us to believe that we are special in this universe or that we were created to rule all other things. In his opinion, this is far from the truth (as disparaging as it may be). But he went on to say that there's something deeply spiritual about being connected by DNA to all living things. I tend to agree. As an example, Dr. Tyson told the audience that there are more bacteria in your colon right now than all the people born on this world even if you go back to the very beginning of time. And every once in a while, those bacteria will remind you of who's in charge.

One of the slides Dr. Tyson showed the audience was a phylogenetic cross-section of a "Tree of Life" showing the relationship between species whose genomes have been sequenced as of 2006. The very center represents the last universal ancestor of all life on earth:
Click to EMBIGGENClick on this sentence for an even bigger picture of the above so that you can see all the names going around the outside.

Homo sapiens occupies one small line in this list of species at about the eleven o'clock position. If that doesn't make you feel insignificant, then he followed up with a picture of Saturn taken by the Cassini spacecraft (Saturn was gorgeous by the way) that shows a pale blue dot called Earth. Then he read from Carl Sagan's own book Pale Blue Dot: A vision of the Human Future in Space:

"Consider that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

"The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity--in all this vastness--there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

"The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known." -- Carl Sagan

Dr. Tyson showed us how America used to dream about tomorrow by putting up an image from the 1950's. I don't have a copy of the exact image Dr. Tyson used in his presentation, but it looked something like "Tomorrowland" as seen below:
He said that we no longer have these visions; that it basically ended when America stopped going to the moon. "We don't even have the ability to visit our own space station. We have to rely on Russia, which is one of the reasons why we don't want to make them too angry with sanctions over their invasion of Crimea." Again, he reiterated the theme of "I don't recognize this country." He put up a map that showed nations distorted on purpose to reflect scientific growth. You'll notice that the United States is now smaller in contribution than Japan, Europe, and China. This is a result of people electing representatives who do not value science and the thing it inoculates us from (here's looking at you Michelle Bachmann, Ted Cruz, and insane Senator Mike Lee from my own state of Utah--I hang my head in shame).
The world map of scientific growth by country.Notice Africa. It's non-existent. An entire area of the world that rejects science in favor of something else. Europe is huge because the United States walked away from the super collider project in the 1990's (that could have discovered the Higgs Boson not to mention made thousands of jobs for people in Texas), and we allowed the Europeans to achieve that milestone. Brazil is growing because of aerospace and Japan remains huge as it has been during the entirety of the post World War 2 generation. Tyson does not want the United States to go the way of the Golden Age of Islam.

So why should America be worried about the decline of science? Well for one, "Science inoculates you from cult leaders by giving you the tools to question their authority." He described how the Heaven's Gate cultists all committed suicide because they believed a spaceship was traveling behind the comet Hale-Bopp and that (through dying) they'd arrive on the spaceship wearing their shoes and carrying their backpacks. In every generation there are people who claim the world is ending and they base it on some lie that has no evidence. Science gives you the ability to question these claims. "Oh you say there's a spaceship? Can you show it to me?"
The vest he's wearing was bought right here at the planetarium in Salt
Lake City. He said there were no more on the shelves and the guy
working the register had one on and offered to sell it to him. It remains
one of the most favorite of his vests to wear.In the question and answer session, I actually got to ask Dr. Tyson a question. Boy was that fun. I said, "Dr. Tyson, will there be a second season of Cosmos?" He reacted with a huge smile and capered about the stage comically. "DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW HARD IT WAS TO GET THE FIRST SEASON to television!? Holy cow. I don't know. It's up to Fox, but as much as I love it someone else needs to do it. I'M A SCIENTIST. I want to be in my lab and watching my kids grow up." He shook his head to many affectionate "awhh's" coming from the audience (including my own) and replied, "Folks, that's how it works. Someone else gets to take over. We pass the baton to someone new."

Well I asked a question and got an answer. I love Cosmos, but it appears there will be only thirteen episodes just like Sagan's mini-series that was on PBS a generation ago. I guess I will have to savor them. TL;DR: I saw Neil DeGrasse Tyson live at the University of Utah and he made me dream about tomorrow. It's a dream I haven't had in some time, and I'm glad it's back.

Do you think the United States can turn itself around, get a hold of education, and instill the love of science in the next generation? Do you think the first man on Mars will be an American? I'd like to think so, but Neil DeGrasse Tyson is right. Only science will show us the way.

Is the Walking Dead the most successful dystopian for grownups?

Glenn atop a cave-in looking down on a dark tunnel filled with undead.I saw Divergent this weekend, and I liked it even if I thought the training sequence went on too long. I suppose one shouldn't complain if you are completely and totally in love with the characters. At that point, the desire to spend more time with them overwhelms the biological need to move onto something else. But I never reached this stage with Veronica Roth's magnum opus. Rather, I'd check my watch every now and then, but in the end it was still entertaining.

Dystopians are the new hotness these days (and to you literary buffs I acknowledge that there have always been dystopians like 1984, however, they never stole center stage like they do today). From Suzanne Collins to Allie Condie, you've got quite a plethora to choose from. But here's the thing: all of these are written for young adults. They star teenagers fighting for goodness against a backdrop of something that loosely resembles our world.
Are there even dystopians for adults? Sure. Atwood's Oryx and Crake is one that I've read. But it has none of the colossal influence that The Walking Dead has. This comic book series by Robert Kirkman is so powerful, it even eclipses Monday Night Football.
Why is The Walking Dead so popular? Dystopian stories written for teenagers speak about a world that they can affect. The real world can be seriously messed up and most of us have no idea of how to go about fixing it. Some of us blame big corporations while others blame big government. It really is two sides of the same coin and both present problems so hideously huge that a single person basically has no chance at all to make a difference.
However, in a story, one person can make a difference. For teenagers, it manifests as the heroine who faces down her fears and finds love and then wins through skill and hard work. For adults, it's a little bit more realistic. Our fears eventually get realized in an apocalyptic collapse of civilization, and now it's up to the individual people to try and survive. Every living person is now important in the scope of the big picture, because you need numbers to stay safe from the zombies. That's what The Walking Dead is all about, and it's probably why I'm addicted to it so much.
The Walking Dead finishes up its fourth season this weekend, and there's a dread growing in the pit of my stomach. For one, we've had foreshadowing all season long with Daryl lying in a coffin and Glenn allowing Maggie to burn the only picture he had of her. Sure, she says "you won't need a picture of me" and that's supposed to be reassuring. But it probably means Glenn is going to end up dead. Second, I know from the comics that the group is going to be encountering the Hunters soon (a group of cannibals). And ya know, Beth is still missing... Ugh. How creepy was Terminus to have only a single woman doing BBQ and there was no evidence of any animals around? Where did the meat come from? This one panel explains why I think Terminus is just bad. "Those who
arrive, survive...to be eaten slowly."This show is a master at making me care about the characters. The latest one that has grown on me is Eugene. He won me over my misleading Rosita back to the tunnel just to make sure Glenn and Tara made it out alive.
So what do you think? Is The Walking Dead the most successful dystopian for grownups? And are you looking forward to the season finale? If you're watching the show, do you think the people at Terminus are cannibals?

This Dragon's Lair playthrough took me back twenty years

Were you around twenty years ago? If so, you may remember the arcade game "Dragon's Lair." It was the first video game that I can recall that charged fifty cents at the arcade. I used to go there with a friend on Friday night and go through ten bucks in quarters trying to finish it. I never actually made it to the dragon, so watching this playthrough was kind of fun because it allowed me to see the ending that I never achieved myself.

Boy, video games sure have come a long ways. But there's a certain charm to Don Bluth's animation that still
makes me smile today.
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Finally Snoopy gets the soft fur fans always imagined he had in a new 3D movie

I loved reading Peanuts as a child. So I was surprised and happy to learn that Charlie Brown and Snoopy are getting the 3D makeover (yes there will be animated fur) that's propelled Dreamworks animation and Pixar to the forefront of movie-making wizardry. Charles M. Schulz's cartoon classic is being updated/done by 20th Century Fox. They're the ones behind the fantastic "Rio" franchise (and last year's "Epic" which basically made me a fan of Aziz Ansari for life). If you don't know who Aziz is, he plays in Parks and Recreation (which to its credit has many colorful characters).

I can't believe it's more than a year away :(. Ah well, at least I've got How To Train Your Dragon 2 coming out this summer. If you want to read more, go to this article on Yahoo News.

My next post will be on Monday as I have things to do this weekend and need to take some time off.

Malaise is a short film that proves spaceships were cooler in the 70's

I love coming across neat things like Malaise. Daniel Beaulieu made this film as his final film project at the Vancouver Film School's 3D animation program. It has a lamprey like monster, animation quality that's sure to grab the attention of Pixar or Dreamworks, and shag carpeting in the corridors. That just proves that spaceships were way cooler in the seventies. And how can you go wrong with an homage to Alien? You can't, that's how.
MALAISE from Daniel Beaulieu on Vimeo.