There's now a method of modifying the DNA in a blood or hair sample to make it appear to be someone else's DNA.
I saw this on an SVU episode from earlier this season that was on last night while I was finishing up grading an exam. I was hoping they'd just made it up, but I guess not. This is the kind of discovery that it might be immoral to publish if there weren't any way to distinguish the modified DNA from original DNA, but it seems they have concocted a method to detect the subterfuge.
As you can tell by the late posting of this, I've sort of lost interest in looking for license plates on a regular basis. I got a good sense of what I would find by trying it for a while. I might still post license plates I see on long trips, but this will be the last monthly one. It was fun for a while. I haven't even kept track for December.
U.S. States: Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin
other U.S.: District of Columbia, U.S. Government
Canada: British Columbia, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec
Not seen since Oct 2009: Delaware, Iowa, Louisiana, Nebraska, Tennessee
Not seen since Sept 2009: Alabama, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, Oregon
Not seen since Aug 2009: Wyoming
Not seen since April 2009: Idaho, New Mexico
Not seen since Aug 2008: Nova Scotia
Not seen since Dec 2007: New Brunswick, Puerto Rico
Has anyone else ever thought that they get the Law and Order categories backwards in the credits for Law & Order? They list the police detectives, who enforce order, under the heading Law, and then they list the lawyers, who deal with the law more explicitly, under the category of Order.
I suspect this comes from the old slang method of referring to cops as "the law", so it's not without explanation, but it does seem backwards to me in terms of the actual roles of the various characters.
U.S. States: Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin
other U.S.: District of Columbia
Canada: British Columbia, Manitoba, Ontario
Not seen since September 2009: Alabama, Kansas, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, Oregon, West Virginia, U.S. Government, Quebec
Not seen since August 2009: Alaska, Hawaii, Wyoming
Not seen since April 2009: Idaho, New Mexico
Not seen since Oct 2008: South Dakota
Not seen since Aug 2008: Nova Scotia
Not seen since Dec 2007: New Brunswick, Puerto Rico
September was a really good month for seeing license plates, so this is a much shorter list. A trip down to Philly, then NYC, then Connecticut and Massachusetts and then back halfway across NY helped a little bit, but most of the rarer sights were actually in Syracuse. This is the longest I remember the "not seen since" line for the previous month being.
The District of Columbia was ticketing people for parking in their own driveways, and apparently this was actually legal (at least there was a law that provided for this; I'm not sure whether the courts would find it constitutional). I don't know if this is still going on, but it sounded like a hoax when I first heard of it.
David Boies, Al Gore's lawyer in Bush v. Gore, and Ted Olsen, George Bush's lawyer from the same case (who was also Bush's first Solicitor General) are working together to try to get judicial declaration of same-sex marriage at the federal level. Olson, to be fair, is not advocating the kind of policy-preference right that more liberal lawyers and judges often see in the Constitution and that he has consistently argued against his entire career. His argument doesn't even assume that there is a right to marry. It just relies on the fact that our court system recognizes a right to marry and concludes that it ought to be applied to gay couples as well as straight couples if we're going to be in the business of applying such rights. (However, their argument does seem to assume that couples as couples and not just individuals have rights, or else it assumes what an Equal Rights Amendment would have provided but didn't when it never passed.)
Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY) introduced a bill in the U.S. House of Representatives to reinstate the draft during the Bush Administration and then voted against the bill (almost no one actually voted for it, which was what he had expected). I thought it was strange when Republicans kept pushing a marriage amendment that they knew they didn't have enough votes to pass, but it's well beyond that to waste government time and money by pushing something you don't even want passing to begin with.
Jeff Bridges and Beau Bridges are brothers, and Lloyd Bridges was their father. Beau I can understand. But Jeff? I wouldn't have expected it.
All the miscreants who linked the phrase "miserable failure" to President Bush's biography had succeeded in making it the top website in Google for that expression. I was sure this was a joke when I first heard about it. It was pretty quick to verify, though. It had less skepticism when I heard that miscreants on the right had done the same with getting John Kerry's senate bio at the top of searches for "waffles".
Jeremiah Wright, whose heterodox, anti-white language makes him sound as if he doesn't think white people can be genuine Christians, actually has white members actively ministering in his congregation, sometimes even occupying leadership roles. (I don't think that excuses his rhetoric, which I think still counts as heterodox divisiveness, but he seems not to mean what he says.)
Philip Pullman wrote an entire scifi/fantasy series (His Dark Materials, whose first novel is The Golden Compass) out of an anti-religion and particularly anti-Christian agenda. When I first heard this, I thought it must be an exaggeration and that it probably just had some anti-religious elements throughout, but it turns out as the series develops that the agenda is far more central to the books than at first it appears. Pullman has even portrayed it as his remedy to the Narnia Chronicles, which he thinks call good evil and evil good. (I happen to think he failed in some crucial ways at what he was seeking to accomplish, but I wanted to post on that at some point separately, and I just haven't gotten around to it. Finishing up this post, which I started weeks ago but didn't have enough items to finish, has reminded me that I had wanted to do this, so maybe I'll get to it soon.)
Two days after his big announcement revoking President Bush's stem-cell policy, President Obama signed into law the big budget bill for the year, including a provision that prevented any funding from being used for embryonic stem cell research. I was especially skeptical about this, and it took me a long time and some hard Googling to find enough information to confirm it, but it does seem to have happened.
The Obama Administration's original discussion suggestions for his speech to school kids on September 8, 2009 really did ask kids to write about how they could help Obama, but they later changed it to ask about how they could be responsible. This was especially surprising given the actual content of the speech, which was mostly politically neutral. Why would they then ask how kids could help Obama when the thrust of the speech was just calling them to work harder in school and to be responsible? The original question therefore puzzles me a little unless he changed the speech too, which we have no evidence of (and the official explanation that the revision was what they had meant all along is completely implausible).
You can't help out your neighbor in Michigan by putting their kids on the bus for them every morning without a license to operate a daycare business.
So I've listed ten myths that I at one point just believed when I first heard them, even if in some cases it was only when I was pretty young. I also wanted to put together a list of myths that never sounded plausible to me, even the ones I heard as a kid, but that somehow get passed around as if true (and in some cases even get trotted out as if any serious scholar must believe such a thing).
1. KFC changed its name from Kentucky Fried Chicken because they don't use chicken anymore. They use clones of chickens grown without heads, and the U.S. government won't allow them to call that chicken.
2. There's such a person as Santa Claus.
3. The Bush Administration orchestrated 9-11.
4. Barack Obama wasn't born in the U.S.
5. The Pentateuch was compiled over several generations by people with different and conflicting ideologies, and we can reconstruct which ideology is behind which verses or even partial verses with pinpoint precision, according to such tell-tale signs as which name is used for God or whether it happens to involve a negative or positive assumption or conclusion about a certain tribe of Israel. It amazes me how confident scholars can be of this even though no sources have ever been found for such texts, no textual statements in the text we have indicate anything about any such sources, and no two scholars can even agree on which parts come from which sources.
6. J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter novels, is a practitioner of Wicca who sought to convert Christians to Wicca by writing novels about magic.
7. Sarah Palin cut funding for teen mothers because of pro-life convictions.
8. George W. Bush attacked Iraq because he believed God told him to.
9. Sarah Palin thinks God directed the U.S. to attack Iraq.
10. Divine foreknowledge and predetermination are incompatible with human freedom and responsbility. Sorry, I suppose I should find something less controversial. How about the commonly-heard line about how Jesus' statement that it's easier for a camel to get through an eye of a needle than for the rich to enter God's kingdom once you know that there's a gate in Jerusalem called the eye of the needle, and camels can get through it, but it's hard. (I once heard someone repeat that false background to Jesus's statement and then say that knowing that changed her life. Somehow. She never explained any further and probably couldn't have done so even at gunpoint.)
Now that I've seen Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, here are my rankings of the movies and books at this point.
Movies rankings:
1. Chamber of Secrets (movie 2)
2. Sorceror's Stone (movie 1)
3. Half-Blood Prince (movie 6)
4. Prisoner of Azkaban (movie 3)
5. Goblet of Fire (movie 4)
6. Order of the Phoenix (movie 5)
Books rankings:
1. Deathly Hallows (book 7)
2. Order of the Phoenix (book 5)
3. Goblet of Fire (book 4)
4. Half-Blood Prince (book 6)
5. Prisoner of Azkaban (book 3)
6. Chamber of Secrets (book 2)
7. Sorceror's Stone (book 1)
Isn't it interesting that how much I liked the movies is roughly inversely proportional to how much I liked the books? Part of what influences it is how faithful the movies are to the books, not that I insist on getting it exactly like the book, but until the latest film they were increasingly leaving out significant parts of the books, even parts that help explain otherwise unexplained phenomena or actions of characters. It left a much less satisfying experience, especially if you knew that there was an explanation in the books. Plus a lot of the scenes and entire plotlines that were left out were fun, interesting, and suspense-building. When you consider that the movies were actually getting shorter as the books got longer, it just drives home the disappointment, because there was so much room for more in Order of the Phoenix, the longest of the books but the shortest of the movies.
I expected Half-Blood Prince to be an improvement over the last few, because the book is much shorter than the two previous books, and they were willing to make it a longer movie. I figured they'd be able to include a higher percentage of plotlines and scenes from the book, and I was right. They were. There were still places where they changed things needlessly (most annoyingly at the end where they made Harry's incapacity to act because of Dumbledore's spell into a moral choice not to act). There wouldn't have been a huge increase in time if they'd explained a few things a little better with explanations from the book. The most unexplainable thing was the scene they completely made up that wasn't in the book at all with the Christmas attack. Harry's actions there made no sense. But it was far superior to the three previous movies, which all had major plots missing. What was missing from this was no more than what was missing from Prisoner of Azkaban, but it affected the plot less, so I place it above that. I didn't understand from the movie alone everything that had happened by the end, and I didn't get it fully until I read the book.
This film should be understandable in the most crucial ways to those who haven't read the book, and it's the first one since the two directed by Chris Columbus that that's true of, at least in the most important aspects. But those stories made complete sense in pretty much every way as films, and they didn't cut major plots the way this one did with the private lessons Dumbledore gave Harry all year about Voldemort's past, which they abbreviated far too much in the movie to be satisfying. I also thought they shouldn't have cut out the Professor Trelawney storyline, which both explains more on her prophecies, which will play a big role in the next one (although maybe they'll find a way to put it in that one instead). They didn't explain the Room of Requirement well, why Harry couldn't get in, why it looked different from it did in Order of the Phoenix when he did, and why it looked like what it looked for for Malfoy. They had Ginny hide the book rather than Harry, and I wonder if that will create problems when they need to return in the final movie for the item that in the book Harry sees while hiding his potions book. Leaving out the new Minister of Magic might make it harder to explain the transition for the Ministry near the beginning of book 7 as well, and the absence of the house elves again might create problems for when they have to reintroduce Dobby and Kreacher in the next one.
I'm hoping that the decision to split Deathly Hallows into two movies will prevent it from being any worse than this outing, since there really is a lot to include, and pretty much all of the necessary parts could easily make two three-hour movies if done well (and they're shooting for two to two-and-a-half hours per movie). They're going to have to trim some things, as they did here. I'm just hoping that they choose a little more judiciously than they did with a few things in this film.
1. I've been extremely busy. I'm teaching two summer classes and barely keeping up with them. Plus the kids have been sick, meaning some have been home and in need of more attention than normal. So I haven't had time to do much blogging. But I've got a few things I've been thinking about that I did manage to put in Facebook updates, which I might as well put here in lieu of anything that will take more time than I have.
2. Remember when Rosie O'Donnell outrageously called it a separation of church and state for President Bush to take the religious identification on the Supreme Court from three to give Catholics, making Catholic justices the majority? I just thought it was worth noticing that President Obama has nominated another self-identified Roman Catholic to replace another Protestant, and I've yet to hear any similar claims from Rosie O'Donnell (although I did hear that Christopher Hitchens is being consistent on this by finding it grave and troubling).
3. I heard a strange NPR story on the dangers of fracking. It took a little listening to discover that they meant this. It was hard to listen with a straight face. I don't know how the reporter got through it.
4. The Supreme Court could rule as early as Monday on a case Judge Sotomayor was involved in that could lead to some real fodder for criticism in her hearing. SCOTUSBlog has an excellent presentation of the issue and how it might go.
5. Once I get a breather I intend to look closely at some of the Sotomayor stuff that SCOTUSBlog has been posting since before her nomination even occurred. I haven't had time to comment on her nomination, but I'm not sure I would even know what to say just yet. Her actual opinions are kind of important, and most criticism so far has not focused on them but on some political speeches and interviews she's given.
The Holy Observer is back, with a new format that will probably help them get new content up more easily without having to have a whole issue of material before posting stuff. This looks like a nice mediating approach between my suggestion of turning it into a blog (which they really didn't want to do) and the original method of producing whole issues at a time.
I was really looking forward to the eleventh Star Trek film, due out in a few months now. Casting Zachary Quinto as young Spock was brilliant, and I'll have to see the movie for that even if for no other reason, although I think loyalty to the franchise would be sufficient grounds to see it anyway. But I'm no longer holding my breath about whether it will be a good movie. If it is, I'll be pleasantly surprised, but I'm not expecting as much as I had. I was already a bit skeptical about a script written by the writers responsible for the recent Transformers movie, which was fun but was certainly not interesting script-wise. It was fun mostly because of the visuals. The main human character was painful to watch, and the storyline wasn't all that interesting given the richness of the Transformers material available in the comic books.
It was this interview with script writer Robert Orci that put a full stop to my optimism, though, for two reasons. The most important is that the assurances of producers that I've been seeing that it will be faithful to Trek canon for the fans while still doing something new for newcomers turn out to be a mere facade, given Orci's explanation of why he says it's faithful to canon. But I think the theory of time travel he endorses will also make the movie painful for me to watch, even if it won't be as painful as most Trek time travel stories are.
First, this is how Orci understands the time travel in this movie to work. He recognizes that there's a problem with any time travel theory that allows changing the past, although I don't think he makes it clear exactly why it's a problem. The real reason it's a problem is because if the past happened, then it follows that it didn't get changed, so when you go back you can't change it. If you can change it, then it's not the past. He gets into grandfather paradox issues, but I think those are derivative problems. The main reason is that it just makes no sense to think of changing the past. You can't make something that already was one way no longer be that way but be another way.
There's only one plausible way to interpret time travel stories that seem to change the past (other than the people didn't know what really happened and thus thought they changed something but actually only did what had already happened). If I travel back in time and do something that didn't happen, I must have traveled somewhere other than my past. If I ended up in an alternative time line somehow, then it makes sense to do what seems like changing the past. But the past of my time line doesn't change, and that time line continues on without me. The time line I entered always had me entering at that point and thinking I'd changed the past. This is the only way to make changing-the-past stories internally consistent, but it's still not a genuine change of the past, which the authors of those stories would usually not want.
So I applaud Orci for preferring this to the usual time travel approach. It's an improvement. There are still big problems with it, though. It would seem odd if time travel that doesn't change the past goes to our past and time travel when you do seem to change things ends up at other time lines. So a plausible version of this view must have every instance of time travel involve going to a similar time line, where it can generate a change that makes it diverge from the original one. The unwelcome consequence is that there isn't really anything that we can just flat-out call time travel. It's all Sliders-like world-jumping but with time travel too. You can never just time travel. That's an odd result.
Also, it does disastrous things to the fabric of a narrative in a fictional work that takes years and even decades to weave. Little did we know that the Star Trek canon time line isn't a constant world at all. Every time there's been time travel the characters have moved to a different world. We have no idea what happened after the events of City on the Edge of Forever in the time line that our characters began in. With such a view, it's not surprising that Orci wouldn't mind completely revising Star Trek history, because Spock of the TNG period going back to pre-TOS times and changing things would result in a different time line. That it violates canon is perfectly ok, even if the changes are drastic and far-reaching. It's a way to destroy the canon of Trek history while insisting that the original time line is untouched. It's crazy to think this won't anger fans who see Trek canon as something to build on, not to alter with impunity. It seems Orci wants to go by the letter of his time travel theory in good Pharisaical fashion to ignore the spirit of observing Star Trek canon while technically allowing it to remain in a time line that the movie doesn't follow (except to show that Spock and Nero will presumably never be in that time line again).
Worse still, Orci acts as if this theory of time travel is based on hard science, which just isn't true. The many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is certainly held by a handful of scientists working in the philosophical end of theoretical physics. It's a far cry from being the majority view, as far as I've been able to tell, though, and it's certainly nothing in the area of being demonstrable by experimentation. I think, in fact, that it's in principle completely impossible to verify or falsify it. There are several other interpretations of quantum mechanics, and the only reason I know of for preferring the many-worlds interpretation is that it avoids the most plausible fine-tuning arguments for an intelligent designer, not a very compelling scientific reason. If Orci is willing to reinterpret all of Trek canon because of misinformation about what science teaches, that's unfortunate. I hope I'm wrong, but I'm hardly confident with the future of the franchise resting partly in his hands, judging by what this interview reveals. I thought maybe they would finally have an odd movie better than some of the even movies. I'm not so sure now.
It's strange, however, to see some of the response that I've seen now that they've finally chosen the eleventh Doctor, and he turns out to be white. It strikes me as affirmative action absolutism. To be clear what I mean, here are a number of different things people call affirmative action:
It can mean (1) outright quotas, where you guarantee a certain number of spots for whatever group you're extending affirmative action toward. This was originally what happened at the college and university level until the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional for state and federal funding to be used that way.
It can mean (2) idealized quotas, where you lower the usual standards to try to reach a ballpark figure, but you don't do it by the numbers. It's effectively a quota, but because you're not an absolutist about an exact number of spots, the Supreme Court allowed it in 2003 as long as you don't use strict numerical criteria in letting race affect your calculations.
Then there's (3) what George W. Bush calls affirmative access, which is to go out of your way to find qualified candidates but not to lower your usual standards very much, and if there aren't qualified candidates in the target group or aren't as many as you'd like, then you don't lower the standards more to fill up the spots more.
The third policy has always struck me as the best, particularly for this sort of situation. You're casting for an iconic character with a history dating back over 40 years. You want to produce the best artistic product you can, and the choice of the lead role on such a show is huge. It would do a lot of good in the world to cast a black actor for the part. However, there are considerations more important than race, and those should never be put aside if it turns out all the black actors who audition are enough away from what you think the role needs to be like compared with a candidate who just stands out as perfect. According to all reports from the producers, they chose someone who does exactly that. He seemed exactly what they wanted. If they had a black actor who'd auditioned who could do the job passably, it seems to me that it would be immoral to hire him instead of the guy they went with. If they had someone who would have been great for the job if the guy they hired had never appeared, who perhaps might have otherwise been their first choice, then it becomes a harder question. It depends entirely on how much better their first choice is. It didn't sound like anyone was close from the way the producers were talking, though.
So it seems like this sort of complaint relies on a very strange moral premise, which I'll call affirmative action absolutism, a view that becomes very strange when applied to the case of there being only one spot. Somehow the idea is that whenever you've got an ongoing role where the actor can be replaced and not have to look anything like the previous actor, and all the previous actors were white, you've done something bad by not choosing a black one at the next opportunity. Such a view strikes me as completely crazy. Race is an important consideration, but it's not the only one, and there are other ones that can be more important. You have to know that none of the more important considerations are determining the decision to complain that something bad has gone on in the selection of a white actor to play the Doctor.
I can't see how anyone but the producers can flatly say that they've failed at some moral responsibility by choosing a white actor, because only those present at the auditions and casting decision meetings can know enough to assert that the producers are lying when they said Matt Smith stood out so far above the other auditioners that it was hard to consider anyone else. I very much doubt they're lying, though. Steve Moffat isn't out to cater to higher-ups in the BBC. He's a long-time fan who has a very good understanding of the essence of the character. He's a storyteller who wants to tell the best story he can with the best cast he can. Why would he choose someone and then lie about the reasons? It's extremely implausible. Besides, claiming that you know they're lying is stronger than wondering if it's true. Claiming you know it requires having been at the auditions and knowing that there are black actors who tried out who would have done just as good a job or almost as good a job as the Doctor. I very much doubt that's true of the complainers, since they almost certainly weren't present for any of that.
Warner Brothers has announced a science fiction retelling of the Samson story in a futuristic context. SciFi Wire's description of Samson catches my interest:
Samson gives a futuristic twist to the story of the biblical strongman who was invincible until he was betrayed by Delilah, to whom he entrusted the secret that his strength came from his long hair.
I have no idea if they're just repeated something WB had given them or are going by their understanding of what the Samson story is about, but it strikes me as relying on a popular misconception of Samson, one that I've seen gotten right in pop culture only once that I can think of (and that was Veggie Tales' Minnesota Cuke: the Search for Samson's Hairbrush).
Samson's strength in the book of Judges doesn't derive from his hair at all. His hair is only mentioned twice. The first time is God's command to Samson's parents that he would be a Nazirite from birth, an exceptional situation given that a Nazirite vow was usually voluntary and temporary. Those who took the vow wouldn't cut their hair, among other restrictions, for the duration of their vow. Nothing is said there to tie the strength to the hair. His hair is simply part of his being a Nazarite. Nowhere else in the Samson narrative is his strength mentioned in the context of his hair until the Delilah account. His strength is simply something God gives him for use in judging those who are evil toward God's people. When Delilah presses him for an explanation, and he mentions his hair, with every reason to believe that she'd have it cut (given her past responses to his lies about the source of his strength), he in effect sets himself up to violate his vow. So God takes his strength away. But the narrative itself never endorses the view that his strength really did come from his hair.
Now it's possible that Samson himself really did think the hair was the source of the power, in which case the fact that he's willing to boil it down to his hair is a sign that he doesn't get it himself. That theme appears throughout Judges and the Samson narratives in particular. The judges get progressively less faithful and more mixed in motivation, culminating in Samson, who frequently shows little care for the Torah's stipulations, up to the point of putting himself in a position where his Nazirite status gets prematurely cut off (pun intended). But it's not clear that he really thought this, as far as I can tell, and the narrator never tells us this.
I can see how a scifi version of it can get some basic plot similarities, but it certainly loses the main point of the whole thing unless it's not replacing the religious elements with scifi ones but simply tells the story with that side intact but in a different context. I have a feeling they won't do that, though, since the point of doing a futuristic version of it is probably to have some science fiction explanation of how hair can contain within it the explanation for super-strength.
The last leg of the reimagined Battlestar Galactica aired last night. If you haven't seen it yet and intend to, you might want to avoid this post for now.
Eight months ago, I suggested a possibility for who the final Cylon model is. Based on the information available at the time, I had concluded that the final model must be someone who wasn't on Galactica when the four had heard the music. What I didn't have at the time (it came a few weeks later) was D'Anna Biers's revelation when she arrived in the colonial fleet that the final Cylon wasn't in the fleet at all. That actually rules out several people I'd considered in that post, but it doesn't eliminate my favored choice. In fact, it only made me more sure by eliminating the only other serious contender I was considering.
Even though I've given a spoiler warning, I want to save discussion of the details for after the jump, but I can say first that it looks like I was wrong in my May post about the significance of the numbering of the twelve models. Models 1-6 and 8 were the known models before the last scene of Season 3. The final five consisted of a group of four revealed at the end of season 3 plus one unknown, not revealed until the end of last night's episode. I suggested that maybe the four known of the final five were models 9-12 and the unknown one was model 7, a number often significant in numerology. But according to Wikipedia, Ron Moore has said that the final five aren't numbered. It also looks as if what sets the final model apart from the four we've seen is nothing significant in terms of origins. It's just that not all of the final five are still with the fleet, for reasons that have nothing to do (as far as we can tell) with how the final five got into the fleet to begin with. I don't think that's a big enough spoiler to have to put it after the jump, since it's based partly on Moore's statement and partly on information I was thinking through in my post back in May, not on what happened in the episode.
I do want to raise a question about this statement by Moore, though, before I muse on the details of last night's revelations. How can it be that the final five have no model numbers, and yet the seven we know do? It may be that the two groups have completely different origins. I get that. But why are the ones we first knew about numbered 1-6 and 8 if there's no number 7? If they're not going to number the final five, they at least need an explanation of why the seven are numbered the way they are, or they're going to look pretty foolish for setting things up that way and not thinking to work their revised storyline into an explanation for it (because I'm pretty sure the idea of the final five being different is a later idea, after they'd already numbered Sharon's model as Eight). I was almost expecting a downer after the excellent final episode of Stargate Atlantis last week, and there were certainly low points to this episode (most of the scenes focused on Adama, Roslin, Lee, and Dualla). But I'm looking forward to the rest of the season in a much greater way than I was at the end of the opening episode of the season back in March.
(Was it really that long ago? There's got to be some moral rule about spreading out two halves of the same season that much.)
As I was responding to this comment from Neil, I realized that I was getting into a bunch of issues that I don't think I've ever discussed comprehensively on this blog before, and I thought it might as well be its own post. Neil raises some questions about Christians reading (and presumably watching) science fiction and fantasy, questions that are more general (and more legitimate) than the common complaint about magic in fantasy. He wonders whether certain writers or stories (he has in mind a series by Stephen Donaldson that I'm not familiar with) can be dangerous in leaving behind what he calls an amoral residue. There's also the worry that spending time in fictional worlds is escaping from reality and might even be an addiction. It also might be a waste of time when there are more important things to do. He suggests that God might speak through such literature, but hasn't God spoken much more clearly in other ways already, so why should we need this kind of thing?
I think there can be a number of different healthy motivations for a Christian to read or watch science fiction or fantasy, many of them no different from the motivations for any other kind of fiction. One is simply entertainment. The idea that entertainment is just escape from reality seems wrong to me. I know people who think of it that way, but I don't think that's what they're actually doing when they see themselves as escaping. They might be distracting themselves from things they don't want to think about, but the things they're thinking about, while fictional, are based on reality in some way, or they couldn't think about them. It's just a rearrangement of real things, and those are good things that God created. It's also an engagement with the process of creation, an ability that I think God has given to us as part of being made in his image. The use of the imagination develops abilities God wants us to develop. Thinking about fictional worlds is one way to develop intellectual virtue. It's also simply good to enjoy good storytelling and to appreciate people using their God-given abilities to produce something enjoyable.
There are also moral themes in literature, and fiction of any kind helps us evaluate our lives in many ways. If the story in question only motivates moral evaluation of fictional cases, and those cases could never come up in real life, then at least it allows us to practice our ethical thinking in hard and strange cases, which is still a good skill to develop, because we will confront new situations that require such skills, especially as technology develops and social relations become further changed from what we see as the norm. But many ethical issues in fiction, even in fantasy and science fiction, are also going to come up in real life. Sometimes the author wants to make certain moral points, and sometimes we need to develop the ability to think for ourselves about those questions and not just accept what the author wants us to take away from it. But that's not a reason not to read or watch it except in cases where someone has a problem doing that. Maybe in Neil's case the Donaldson series was like that, and for all I know it might have that effect on me too (I know little about the series in question, so I have no idea). It's certainly worth being vigilant about how things affect you, but that's true of any fiction, and it's true of a lot of things besides fiction. It's true of observing how your friends live, and Paul tells us not to isolate ourselves from those who aren't Christians, even if he also says that Christians ought to live differently from the world.
I like fantasy and science fiction in particular because they help illustrate philosophical questions in ways that real life sometimes can't. One way to show that a sophisticated hedonism is wrong is to point out that with Harry Potter's invisibility cloak or Sauron's ring you could get away with almost anything you want, and it would still be wrong to do so. A sophisticated hedonism says it's only wrong to do certain things because it's against your self-interest (given that people will be mad at you for doing it and want to stop you and punish you). But these cases show that the real reason it's wrong isn't because it's against your self-interest, because you can achieve the self-interested goal in such cases, and it's still wrong. Scenarios like the Matrix or science fiction or fantasy worlds with very different social relations raise interesting questions about the moral principles that we assume as fundamental, because they lead us to wonder if they would apply in a very different situation. If I spent ten minutes coming up with a list, I could probably name off at least a dozen examples from science fiction and fantasy that I use regularly in my philosophy classes to illustrate points that are a lot harder to make clear or vivid without the aid of such examples.
So you don't need to think of fiction as revelation in any important sense to think that it provides an occasion for something that can be productive. It's bad if it distracts from more important things, as is true of any kind of enjoyable activity. At the same time, a little rest and relaxation, especially if it engages aspects of our thinking that we don't otherwise use, is part of being productive in the long run. So there has to be a balance, but I think this kind of imaginative fiction can contribute a lot of good toward our moral development and to our lives as well-rounded human beings, even if there are also risks and dangers, as there are with most pursuits in life.
We usually listen to audiobooks while we're driving. We've gone through the whole Harry Potter series (after reading them in hard copy). We've also tried out some new authors. We didn't like Ursula LeGuin's first Earthsea book very much, but we did like Terry Goodkind's first Sword of Truth book (something I can't say about the new TV adaptation Legend of the Seeker, which doesn't have much of anything to do with the book besides the character names and a few very general characteristics taken from the original storyline but modified enough to remove the most interesting aspects). Sam has long been a fan of Anne McCaffrey's Pern series, and we listened to one of those also (after having read a bunch). I'm not as impressed with her writing, but I like the world she's created, which is one of the things I like about fantasy and science fiction in general.
One of the problems we keep running into is that we listen to something and then can't continue on because our library doesn't have an audio version of the next volume in the series. They don't have the second Goodkind book or the next McCaffrey one after Moreta, where we left off. We also are re-reading Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, and the library had book 6, so we've been listening to that, but they only have a few more, and they're much later in the series. We could always listen to books we've read or ones one of us has read. I'm thinking Lloyd Alexander might be good (new to Sam). There is always Tolkien or Lewis if we want to go through those again. Our library system has Stephen Lawhead's first few volumes in the Arthur/Pendragon series. I tried reading the first one when it came out but didn't get very far, and maybe having an audio version would make it easier to get through it.
But I'm wondering if anyone has further recommendations of authors to try who would be similar to what we've liked. I don't like Stephen Donaldson. I thought his white gold series was awful. Besides what I've mentioned, we both really like Terry Brooks. I've thought about Robert Jordan, Tad Williams, Raymond Feist, Fred Saberhagen, Katherine Kerr, and David Eddings, but their respective first volumes aren't in the library system. They do have some of the Dune series, including the first one, but I'm somewhat hesitant about that unless Sam decides to push it. Roger Zelazny's Nine Princes in Amber is available, but I don't know much about that other than seeing his name mentioned a lot in scifi/fantasy contexts.
When I read that Batman was suing WB for the use of the name 'Batman', I was sure I was reading a wrongly-timed April Fools joke. But apparently it's true. It's not what you'd think, though. A Turkish town called Batman has sued Warner Brothers for using their name. I'm not entirely sure why D.C. Comics isn't their target, since they've clearly been using the name for far much longer.
In a bizarrely ironic twist, Richard Dawkins has joined the anti-Harry-Potter bandwagon. I wonder if his allies in this fight will appreciate his help.
It reminds me of when secular feminists decided to recognize the harm pornography contributes toward women. The difference here is that Dawkins' reasons don't seem to be anything like the usual anti-Harry crowd's. Religious opposition to pornography typically involves some reasons the recent feminist opposition hasn't included (such as its being wrong to lust after someone you're not married to), but Focus on the Family and other evangelical groups that have opposed pornography have long accepted many of the same arguments that feminist opponents of pornography have more recently come to. It objectifies women. It sends a message about women that harms them and psychologically influences the men who view it in a way that leads them to do things that further affect women negatively. I've seen one prominent feminist, Catherine MacKinnon, claim that her religious allies against pornography didn't share any of her reasons, but when I read that I couldn't help but conclude that she hadn't actually talked to James Dobson, Josh McDowell, or any others among the most prominent evangelicals opposing pornography. I'd heard almost all of MacKinnon's arguments from evangelicals while growing up.
Dawkins, on the other hand, shares very little in reasoning with other Potter foes. He doesn't fear that kids are going to become Satanists because they read fantasy literature, and he doesn't care a whole lot about whether the series teaches kids bad morals. (By the way, David Baggett's chapter in Harry Potter and Philosophy gives an excellent response to such arguments, especialyl on the latter issue.) Dawkins just worries about whether it's a good thing to stir kids' imaginations about things that aren't possible given the way the physical world works in real life, and his reason for that is that he expects fantastical literature to open kids' minds up to the possibility that naturalism is false, which might make them more likely to become creationists or something.
Warning: for those who have not read the last two books of the Harry Potter series, this post does include spoilers.
Before she wrote Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, J.K. Rowling answered a question about the Fidelius charm on her website:
When a Secret-Keeper dies, their secret dies with them, or, to put it another way, the status of their secret will remain as it was at the moment of their death. Everybody in whom they confided will continue to know the hidden information, but nobody else.
Just in case you have forgotten exactly how the Fidelius Charm works, it is
"an immensely complex spell involving the magical concealment of a secret inside a single, living soul. The information is hidden inside the chosen person, or Secret-Keeper, and is henceforth impossible to find -- unless, of course, the Secret-Keeper chooses to divulge it" (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban)
In other words, a secret (eg, the location of a family in hiding, like the Potters) is enchanted so that it is protected by a single Keeper (in our example, Peter Pettigrew, a.k.a. Wormtail). Thenceforth nobody else - not even the subjects of the secret themselves - can divulge the secret. Even if one of the Potters had been captured, force fed Veritaserum or placed under the Imperius Curse, they would not have been able to give away the whereabouts of the other two. The only people who ever knew their precise location were those whom Wormtail had told directly, but none of them would have been able to pass on the information.
This seemed fine to me when I read it. But then I read Deathly Hallows. Hermione Granger seems to contradict the above explanation. She acts as if everyone in on the secret becomes a Secret-Keeper once the Secret-Keeper dies. If that's right, then the secret can be spread after the Secret-Keeper is dead, and it can be spread by anyone who was told the secret. This is why she thinks the Death Eaters know about Sirius' house once they apparate into its location with a Death Eater in tow. As Secret-Keepers, they can reveal the site to someone.
There's one problem with this. Severus Snape was also in on the secret, and he could have told them the secret. He didn't, and he would have had to have an excuse. If the secret couldn't be told by those who were merely told it, then he would still have that excuse. So is this a sign that Hermione is wrong and Rowling's original explanation is correct? Not necessarily. Perhaps Snape was lying about who the Secret-Keeper was, and Voldemort didn't know it had been Dumbledore. Then Snape would still have an out, and he could pretend not to be able to say. So this isn't really strong evidence that Rowling's original explanation was correct after all.
U.S. States: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin
other U.S.: District of Columbia, U.S. Government
Canada: Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec
U.S. States Lost from August: Montana, Nebraska
U.S. States Gained from August: Arkansas, Kansas, Nevada, New Mexico, South Dakota, West Virginia
U.S. States not seen yet at all: I still haven't seen Hawaii and Mississippi since I started doing this in October.
A couple weeks ago, the SciFi Channel reverted to a failed experiment they tried a couple years ago. They had tried to increase advertising time in their top three new programs, the two Stargate shows and Battlestar Galactica by cutting the credit sequences to almost nothing, thereby not playing the wonderful music and magic effects work that shows how visually and aurally cool the show is. Fans were outraged. You don't do that to a SciFi show. It's evil. It's one thing to make a show with a short intro from the very beginning, the way they did with Heroes. It's quite another to remove an excellent credit sequence that already exists. It just angers the viewers, not to mention the people who put all that hard work into the product you're now refusing to show. The 200th episode of Stargate SG-1 even made fun of the blunder after they'd gone back to the full credits by having a character say something about it right before going into the truncated intro at the end of the teaser.
So what does SciFi do a couple years later? They return to the failed experiment. Why? Apparently it's for a different reason this time, and the reason is even dumber. Here's what Stargate: Atlantis head writer/show-runner Joe Mallozzi had to say:
Oh, for those of you asking - no, you didn't imagine it. That was the abbreviated nine second main title sequence that accompanied last night's airing and not the cool, VFX-laden full version containing the entirety of Joel Goldsmith's incredible score. The decision to scrap the uber-cool main title sequence in favor of the truncated blink-and-you'll-miss-it sequence was a network call. Apparently, prevailing wisdom holds that viewers possess the attention spans of coked-up squirrels who are likely to change the channel if faced with the prospect of investing up to a full minute of their time watching the main title of a show they've tuned into. By airing a shorter sequence, it is argued, viewers will be less likely to suddenly grow bored and wander off into the surrounding cornfields or seek out more enticing programming like, say, TVLand's The Jeffersons/Good Times double-bill. Bottom line: Don't give the viewer an excuse to change the channel. And, to be honest, it's sound logic.
Provided the network rolls right into the show rather than heading into commercials which would, in effect, defeat the purpose of airing a shorter main title sequence.
Uh. Oh.
Come on, SciFi. You canceled the show. It's getting better ratings now than it did any time last season, when it was doing easily well enough to get picked up for this fifth season. Since you're not going on to a sixth season even though it's doing great, why not just let the show go out with dignity? It's only got ten episodes left. Why make the last twelve of them imperfect? There's still time left to make it only two of the last twelve. Do what you want with new shows and maybe even shows with a lot of life left in them. You know this one's ending, and you want to tarnish its high-ratings end with this nonsense? And in such a self-defeating way?
It be late to be wishing ye a happy International Talk Like a Pirate Day, but I can at least be doing some belated pirate talk.
So I was shivering me timbers and parlaying me dead men's chest, when the skull and bones ahoyed my avast, and I couldn't resist some "Yo, ho ho". In the process, it came to me thoughts that I'd wanted to post about this a year ago but forgot until several days later. I made to find me a record of what I was going to write in me future posts file, and yo ho ho and beho'ld, there was the link to the Pirates Who Don't Do Anything trailer.
Me plundering days are much fewer nowadays, though, so I await the sighting of land ho in the far off land of video. Did anyone find those shores in the meantime? Is it treasure-rich?
U.S. States: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin
other U.S.: District of Columbia, U.S. Government
Canada: Manitoba, Nova Scotia, Ontario, Quebec
U.S. States Lost from July: Arkansas, Louisiana, Nevada, South Dakota
U.S. States Gained from July: Alaska, Montana
U.S. States not seen yet at all: I still haven't seen Hawaii and Mississippi since I started doing this in October.
[cross-posted at Prosblogion]
I'm working on a chapter for the forthcoming Blackwell Philosophy and Harry Potter on the topic of destiny, and one of the things I'm trying to do in the chapter is distinguish between different metaphysical analyses of prophecy. I've come up with three, and I'm inclined to think that it might be exhaustive enough for the purposes of a popular-level work like this, but I'm curious if anyone here can think of any others.
Here's what I've got (and how I'm presenting it in the draft I'm writing):
1. They involve mere likelihoods. No one has access to the actual future, but someone might have magical access to information that's derived from what's likely. Given what's true about the various people involved, it's very likely that a certain outcome will happen. That means prophecies, even the ones Dumbledore is inclined to call genuine, are not infallible. They can turn out get it wrong.
2. They do not derive their content from the actual future. Rather, they make the future happen. When a genuine prophecy occurs, it influences those who hear it in such a way that they end up doing things that will fulfill the prophecy. This kind of prophecy is self-fulfilling in a very literal sense.
3. The seer has some intuitive connection with the way things will really happen, such that the words of the prophecy are true about a future that really will be that way. If it's a genuine prophecy, it can't be wrong, because its origin lies in the very future events that it tells about. In the same way that a report about the past can bring knowledge about the past only if there's some reliable connection with the actual events in the past, a genuine prophecy in this sense must derive its truth from a reliable method of getting facts about the future.
My understanding of J.K. Rowling's view of prophecy, judging by this interview and my sense that the Albus Dumbledore character represents her views when he discusses this issue with Harry Potter, is that she wants to treat Professor Trelawney's two genuine prophecies as the first kind, a kind of prophecy an open theist could accept.
There are hints in at least two of Dumbledore's conversations with Harry that he thinks something like the second kind is going on, but it's clearly not a reduction of prophecy to what happens in #2, because the characters in question (mostly Lord Voldemort) still make free choices and aren't simply caused by the prophecy to do anything the way some ancients thought Laius was caused by Apollo's prophecy to do what he did that led to Oedipus eventually killing him.
My argument at this point is that there isn't really a way for Dumbledore to distinguish between Trelawney's two genuine prophecies and all her vague predictions that can often be interpreted as coming true unless the genuine ones are of the third kind (because the pseudo-prophecies are of the first kind, and the genuine ones can't be completely explained by the second kind). Rowling doesn't seem to want to accept that, and Dumbledore is clearly with her, so there's a consistency issue here both for the character and the author. But my argument depends on the options I've listed being exhaustive. Is that true?
A friend sent my brother a link to Bush or Batman?. It's a pretty funny juxtaposition of quotes from President Bush and the Adam West version of Batman, and the people they find on the street can't seem to distinguish which are which. A moments reflection and a quick look here show that they've clearly picked quotes by each that sound like something the other might have said, but the fact that there are so many is pretty interesting. So does Bush talk about evil the way the superheroes he grew up watching on TV did?
(I should say that I'm not sure why some of the YouTube commenters think this entire video is an attack against Bush. There is one line about the Bush not believing the Batman quote about the Constitution, but I could see a Bush supporter even saying something like that, intending it ironically because so many people do think such a crazy thing about Bush. Anyway, I thought the comparison actually reflected well on him.)
I was originally going to connect this with yesterday's post on Obama and Evil because it relates to the way President Bush talks about evil, but I decided not to do too many things in one post. That does raise an extremely important issue. A lot of people complain about the way the current president talks, but they don't realize how grateful they ought to be. If he's modeling his speeches on Adam West's Batman, then we may have just narrowly missed having a president who talks like the Burt Ward version of Robin.
When I was looking for information on the X-Gene for the mutants and race piece I'm working on, one website I was looking at wrongly cited X-Men (the 1991 series) issues 2-3 as one place the X-Gene comes up. I was immediately suspicious, because I'd just read those issues when I was thinking about submitting a proposal for Magneto's moral philosophy for the Supervillains volume (which in the end I decided not to do, even though it would have used material I've put some work into both from the political section of my ancient philosophy teaching and the just war and terrorism section of my applied ethics teaching). I hadn't seen anything about an X-Gene in my recent reading of those issues, but I decided to read them again anyway, and it led to an interesting thought process about the story, something I hadn't spent as much time thinking about the first time through.
The main plot involves Magneto discovering he was genetically re-engineered by Moira McTaggart when he was reduced to a baby. She decided to figure out how the close friend of Charles Xavier could do the things Magneto did, and she discovered an instability in his brain due to the power he was channeling. This did explain how Charles Xavier's friend could become a terrorist. She apparently saw this as hindering who he really was, so she sought to give him a second chance by removing the instability. Many people might think she was preventing a power outside his free choice from influencing him.
What generates the conflict in these issues, though, is that he has a different view. He sees it as her playing God and making every choice he made since then suspect. It's as if he thinks his choices are only free if they go naturally the way they would have without interference from someone changing his internal structure as he existed naturally. I have to say that whether she's right or not, he certainly isn't. How does removing an instability resulting from too much power being channeled through him count as behavior modification of the sort that undermines free will?
But then he forces her to apply the same process (removing an instability particular to him?) to some of the X-Men so that they will follow him and not Xavier. She does it, and they do. Huh? How can removing the instability particular to him from the X-Men who don't have it make them loyal to him and not Xavier? If they do have it, won't it stop their powers from doing the same thing to them and clouding their moral judgments? So removing it wouldn't make them like Magneto. I'm not sure what Chris Claremont was thinking with this one.
Then they snap out of it eventually, because the process only works if the subject never uses their powers. The use of powers undoes it, because somehow the powers are tied into the way the brain has naturally developed, and the genetic re-engineering gets forced back into its natural state somehow by the powers in order to ensure proper functioning. This is also a little strange, because it sounds as if the re-engineering is messing with nature and proper functioning, except the original explanation with Magneto sounded like it was restoring a natural balance that the powers were interfering with.
This was Chris Claremont's last story on X-Men, and in some ways it was a nice send-off to its longest-running writer to end on a battle with Magneto that hits some of the main themes Magneto has always differed with the X-Men on, but it's too bad that a very important premise of the story is so confused, both on the theoretical level about what's going on in this hypothetical scenario and in terms of ethical reflection on that situation. I remember not really liking this story all that much when it came out (seventeen years ago now!), as hyped as it had been with Claremont returning to start off the new X-Men teams and the new book and my favorite new artist Jim Lee rendering the visuals. The first issue is still the highest-selling comic book ever. I don't remember my reasons, but it didn't strike me as worth the attention. I wonder if this was part of the reason.
My mutants and race piece is in its second draft now, which I'll be sending off tomorrow. I do have some questions that I hope some familiar with recent X-Men occurrences might be able to help with. One of the comments I got back from the editors is that I was taking mutants to be literal mutants, which would mean genes mutated and led to their powers, and these genes would be different genes, genes having something to do with the abilities they end up getting. Nightcrawler's fur would be related to the kinds of genes that produce body hair. Cyclops' force beams would have some connection to genes that affect the eyes. Wolverine's healing factor would come from mutated genes that ordinarily relate to the immune system.
Well, the problem with this, according to my editor, is that the third X-Men movie has a completely different explanation of mutants. They're aren't literal mutants in the sense the term is usually used in biology. Instead, they have this one gene in common. In the movie, they call it the Mutant-X gene. At least that's how it sounds. I later found out this actually does appear in the comic books after I stopped reading them in the mid-90s, and they call it the X-Gene. So maybe it's not the Mutant-X gene in the movie but the mutant X-Gene.
This explanation is just downright stupid. How is it that this one gene explains the variety of powers across all mutants? Also, how did one gene just suddenly appear in all these unrelated people? Whoever came up with this idea knows pretty much nothing about genetics. I did some looking around in Wikipedia, and I found some blog posts about the mutant gene (including this one, which was somewhat helpful). Apparently the Beast, in House of M #2, says the X-Gene is technically a cluster of genes. That's a little better, I suppose, because it allows for different genes to be part of the cluster. Also, the X-Gene was supposed to be scattered throughout humanity but only activated in certain people, and those are the mutants. That's how humans can produce mutant children.
Given that mutants sometimes produce children with the same powers and sometimes end up with children with different or no powers, it seems to me that the X-Gene must not guarantee any particular powers but simply means there's a potential for powers. Without the X-Gene, there will be no powers. When the Scarlet Witch removes the X-Gene from the majority of mutants and the entirety of non-mutants, all the mutants without the gene end up becoming normal humans. So my suspicion is that this would have to be an activator gene (or cluster of genes), and what determines the specific powers is something else. The X-Gene itself is simply an activator, one that probably just isn't turned on in normal humans but is turned on in mutants.
If this is the official explanation in the comic books and the movies, then it changes significantly how my argument in this chapter will work. I think my conclusion still holds, but the argument for it is completely different from what it was in the first draft. So what I'm wondering is if this seems to fit with the recent comic books, since I haven't read any of them. I may have some of them, since I continued to buy them for a little while after I stopped reading them, and I did inherit some more even later from my brother that I haven't read. I don't think I have any House of M, though. I just looked and didn't see any, even though I thought I had some. So what I'd love is if someone could direct me to specific issues where this stuff is discussed, and then I can see if I might have them or if someone could confirm that this is pretty much the official explanation of mutants at this point. If it is, I need to focus on this. If it's not, and it's still sort of up in the air with the more traditional explanation still possible, then I can keep most of what I've written and just add some more on the new explanation.
Update: Someone else has arrived at a similar view, but it assumes one X-gene. If we trust the Beast's analysis, you could make it much more complex, with several genes contributing to activation of the powers, and perhaps all or a certain number of them need to be present. Also, the Celestials, in seeding the human populace with the necessary genetic material for mutations of this sort, might not have included anything like the latent genes to be activated or the activation genes but might simply have placed the necessary genetic materials, with the necessary factors for those eventually to reach a point where they do what happens later on. This would explain a few isolated mutants throughout history and a much more concentrated appearance of mutants in the late 20th century. I like the suggestion that mutates (who get powers later in life due to some stimulus like radiation) have something else activate their latent powers in the way that the X-Gene does with mutants.
Sophia: What are you watching, Daddy?
Me: Doctor Who
Sophia: Daddy, what kind of Doctor Who is that?
Me: That's the Third Doctor. The one you know is the Tenth Doctor.
Sophia: Oh.
(Two or three weeks passed, with no discussion on the matter during the intervening time, except once or twice asking if she wants to watch Doctor Who, with a surprisingly positive response. I was home alone and decided to pull out the Third Doctor serial I was in the middle of to finish it. Sophia came home with Sam near the end of it.)
Sophia: Daddy, what are you watching?
Me: Doctor Who
Sophia: Daddy, what kind of Doctor Who is that? I want to watch the Ten Doctor.
U.S. States: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin, Wyoming
other U.S.: District of Columbia
Canada: Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec
U.S. States Lost from April: Delaware, Idaho, Nevada, Tennessee
U.S. States Gained from April: Alabama, Louisiana, Oregon, Wyoming
U.S. States not seen yet at all: I still haven't seen Hawaii and Mississippi since I started doing this in October.
One of the big secrets to be discovered in the last season of the new Battlestar Galactica show is who the final Cylon is. We knew in the original miniseries that there were twelve models, and seven of those were gradually revealed over the course of the first two seasons. Then we saw no other models, and it became a mystery who the other five models were. Even the seven models didn't seem to know. Eventually one found out and got put in cold storage, and one of them really surprised her. She even apologized when she found out. But at the end of season three, four characters we had assumed to have been human all along turne out to be Cylons. The way they discovered it is that they had all been hearing the same music that no one else was hearing, and it had led them all to the same room. The producers have said these four really are Cylons, and yet they're different from the rest. The prophetic hybrid has said that they've been to earth, which must be how they all have within them the tune to a Bob Dylan song.
But what about the last model? We now know the model numbers of the first seven models we knew of. First we learned 2, 5, 6, and 8. In a recent episode this season we found out the others are 1, 3, and 4. That means the final five are 7 and 9-12. Wouldn't it make sense that the four we know about are 9-12 (as a set), and the still-missing one happens to be the symbolic number 7? It's unclear to me why Sharon would be higher than one of the five but lower than the rest, but perhaps that will be revealed, and perhaps her greater connection with the humans has something to do with it.
Here's my theory. Models 9-12 are a set. We now have seen models 1, 4, and 5 become a set separate from models 2, 6, and 8. I suspect something will happen with 3 and 7. But who might 7 be? I'm sure it's someone we've seen before, and I think it's likely that whoever it is was not on board the Galactica when the others began hearing the music, or we would have seen all five. That means it's probably someone on another ship or someone whose model we have encountered before is dead. It's probably a major enough character that it will be significant when we discover who it is, but it doesn't have to be a primary character. It could just be someone who wasn't on board the ship. Only one character stands out as important enough to be the final Cylon who wasn't on board. That's Tom Zarek. Wouldn't it be funny if the original Apollo turned out to have been a Cylon all along? The only other one not on board is Starbuck. The hints for it to be her would be overkill if she really is one, though, and these writers aren't that obvious. It's got to be deliberate misdirection.
But it might be someone who we've seen die. It could be Billy. I don't think he was on the show long enough for him to be likely, though. There's always the chance that it could be Admiral Cain. I don't think so, though, because I think they wanted her brutality to be oh-so-human. I doubt the other Pegasus characters would be important enough to get such a role, especially if it's the final one who number 3 was apologizing to when she discovered who they were. (Of course, they said things like that about Tigh and Tyrol, too, so this isn't a sure argument.) My guess is Ellen Tigh if it's someone dead, because we know she's still available for filming. She's already been in her husband's dream sequences this season, and he sees her when he sees a Cylon. So my guess is either Tom Zarek or Ellen Tigh, probably Ellen.
Of course, this is all undermined if the last five aren't a set and only the four we've seen. If that's so, then the fifth would be unrelated and thus might not have heard the music but have been there. Then it could be almost anyone.
I have a few requests in case anyone reading this blog can help. If you've been following my recent submissions and approvals for the Blackwell philosophy and pop culture series, you might have some idea of why I want some of the following information if anyone has it readily available. If you have exact quotes or specific scenes from the movies or issue numbers in the comics, that would be wonderful. I have a large number of X-Men comic books (mostly from the mid-late 80s until the early 90s, but I have reprints of older stuff too), but if it's easy for anyone to find some then it will make my work much easier in two weeks once I'm done grading and begin writing, so I can focus on the philosophy.
1. I'm looking for any instances in X-Men movies or comic books where any character or the narrator uses race-language or species-language to refer to mutants as distinct from humans. This includes when it's morally loaded but also when it's not. I'm interested both in Magneto's elevated view of the rights of mutants as superior beings but also in the factual claim that mutants are a separate race, sub-species, or species.
2. I'm also looking for instances where Magneto has given moral justifications for his questionable or immoral actions, again from the movies or the comic books. (I have no cartoon episodes to verify the information.) I'm interested in his attitude toward humans and the moral difference he sees between mutants and humans. I'm also interested in any general moral principles he might state in the process of explaining his reasons for doing things. Any specific descriptions of Magneto's actions as terrorist would also be nice or descriptions of particular actions he's taken that are morally questionable or outright immoral would also help me.
3. For those more wizard-inclined, I'm hoping to compile a list of seemingly-chance occurrences in Harry Potter, where something not under the conscious control of any character, i.e. lucky occurrences, are absolutely crucial for the major plot of the book to move along, particularly if Harry's success or the bad guys' defeat or frustration in their purposes hinges on it. I'm also looking for specific instances where any characters talk about issues related to destiny, the various prophecies, time travel and changing the past, free will, and so on. If you can give page numbers in the American paperback editions (hardcover for Deathly Hallows) or chapter numbers otherwise, that would be great. But even just mention of the events and how important they are could help me if it's something I haven't thought of yet, especially if it's a really big deal.
Whatever help anyone can offer is appreciated.
I wrote before that my proposal for a chapter on mutants and the nature of race was accepted to The X-Men and Philosophy volume and that I'd submitted three other proposals for two other volumes. I haven't heard anything one way or the other about my submission about The Hobbit, but I found out today that one of the two proposals I wrote for Harry Potter and Philosophy was accepted. They liked what I submitted about the limits of authorial intent, but they had a number of good submissions on that topic, and they decided they'd rather go with my proposal on destiny in Rowling's series, so they accepted that one. You can see the blog version of my initial thoughts on the matter here.
Before I even started graduate school, I hoped to be able to write popular-level philosophical discussions about questions that I thought needed serious philosophical reflection that science fiction and fantasy often raise, and I guess now I get to write about two topics I care a lot about in two fictional worlds that I've spent a lot of time in. These will be my first publications besides a book review (although it was a book review that made several substantive points, some of which I thought were genuine contributions to how to think about the issues). That means I need to work hard to submit some parts of my dissertation to journals pretty quickly to avoid giving the impression that I'm a lightweight when it comes to publication. Still, I'm glad to have the chance to contribute to these volumes.
Kevin Sam tagged me with this meme. I don't always get around to following up on these things, but this seemed like less work than the post I'm working on that I'd otherwise be completing right now.
1. What translation of the Bible do you like best?
I probably use the ESV more than anything else.
2. Old or New Testament?
Uh ... they're both the Bible. I spend more time in the Old Testament just because it's bigger and takes longer to get through.
3. Favorite Book of the Bible?
I can't name a favorite, but some favorites are (in one particular order) Philippians, Isaiah, Deuteronomy, Ecclesiastes, II Peter, and Habakkuk.
4. Favorite Chapter?
Again, I have to list several, but near the top would be Psalm 139, Philippians 2, II Peter 1, Genesis 50, Isaiah 10, John 17, Acts 17, Zechariah 14, and Genesis 5 (I'm not kidding about the last one, either; it's the key to a major theme of the book and of the entire Bible).
5. Favorite Verse?
Phil 3:12-14 isn't one verse, but it's one sentence that would be hard to break up.
6. Bible character you think you're most like?
Moses
7. One thing from the Bible that confuses you?
I don't know if it's really confusion, but one recent wondering that comes to mind is how the Ithamarites ended up with the high priesthood by the time Samuel was born given that the descendants of Phinehas the son of Eleazar should have had the high-priestly role.
8. Moses or Paul?
After my answer to #6, I can't resist saying Paul.
9. A teaching from the Bible that you struggle with or don't get?
I'm currently working on the fact that Paul can see the unknown God in Acts 17 as God, but he doesn't think someone believing a different gospel believes in the same Jesus as he does. He's got to be working with two different senses of "the same as", but I need to figure out what those two senses might be exactly. What's worse is finding the same phenomenon going on within one text in II Kings 17 with the syncretistic practices of the resettled peoples in the former northern kingdom counting as both fearing and not fearing YHWH.
10. Coolest name in the Bible?
Melchizedek is one of my favorites, but it's hard to resist mentioning Maher-shalal-hash-baz. I'm sure there are a few that I might like even more, but I won't be able to remember them now. Or is this a trick question, and it's supposed to be the tetragrammaton?
I have to tag five people, so here they are: Mike, Danny, Mark, Sam, and Nobody.
The eleventh Star Trek film is currently being filmed, and I wanted to express some desires (some perhaps more likely than others) of a few things I want to see in it. I've had three longstanding problems in Star Trek history, and all three of them will be relevant for this film. I've actually wanted to express these in a blog post since I first heard they were doing this (which had to have been at least a year ago), but I never got around to it until now.
1. There are supposed to be Klingons in it, according to rumors. This film takes place between the Star Trek: Enterprise series and the original series. There's always been a problem with the look of the Klingons. In the original series, they look like humans. Then they get those funny foreheads. in the movies It's much cooler, but they needed an explanation of why the look changed. Now until Deep Space Nine came along with their Tribble time travel episode, they might have been able to say that the original series just portrayed them poorly, and they always looked like what we've seen since the first film. But once DS9 revealed that Miles O'Brien didn't recognize the original-series-era Klingons as Klingons, and Worf revealed that something had happened that Klingons don't discuss in public, the franchise had to offer an explanation.
I'm glad to say that the final season of Enterprise did exactly that and did an excellent job with the explanation. Klingon DNA became altered to include human DNA in most of the population, and they projected a time period for how long they'd fix the problem that matches up with how long it took. So that one's taken care of. There is the problem that by the time of the original series the crew believed that no humans had ever seen Klingons. I haven't seen that quite explained yet. If Abrams has Klingons in a film with Kirk and Spock as young officers or cadets, then we'll need some further continuity explanations or some careful avoidance of any contact with the Klingons (which Enterprise was able to pull off a few times with Romulans that the crew never met, or at least never knew they met). We'll see if it works. They claim to be paying close attention to canon so as to avoid any problems.
2. The movie is rumored to contain time travel. I have a huge problem with Star Trek time travel that happens far too often, and I really don't want to see it in this film. Why are there all these episodes that never happened? Most of the time travel episodes end with something changing the past so that the entire episode never happened. Then why did we watch it? Why did they bother filming it? And if it never happened, why did they end up at a place where the events that never happened were able to cause the state things revert to when it becomes true that it never happened?
This, of course, is not something the creators of Star Trek can really do anything about. It's just the result of a really stupid view of time travel. If someone really could come up with a story to explain why all these people keep changing the past and experiencing effects of things that never happened, while retaining a plausible theory of time travel involving a fixed timeline, then I'd be overjoyed. I'm not holding my breath, and I certainly don't think J.J. Abrams is the one to do it. But if he stays away from this problem, I'll be satisfied enough, and if he doesn't do any past-changing at all, which is a metaphysical impossibility, I'll be very happy.
Amazon.com has a page reviewing J.K. Rowling's The Tales of Beedle the Bard, which she wrote out by hand, distributed four copies of to people important to her, and sold the fifth to the highest bidder (with the proceeds donated to charity), and the highest bidder turned out to be Amazon. Unfortunately there's no way to read these stories for yourself, since it's not (at least at this point) being published (and I know of no plans ever to do so. One of them, at least, is already present in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and it plays an important role in the plot of that book, but the others are new (although I believe all the titles were mentioned in that book).
It consists of five short fairy tales told in the wizarding world of Harry Potter. A few elements of magic as Rowling conceives of it do appear, but mainly these can stand alone as simply good fairy tales. I was less impressed by "The Wizard and the Hopping Pot" (although it may be better as a story than the impression I get from the review), but the other four strike me as very well-conceived stories with excellent moral lessons, often with nice twists at the end, excellent ironies, and so on.What if the show 24 had been made seven years earlier with the technology of that time?
It's pretty funny and brings back a lot of memories of what things were like. I just realized that my students in 1994 were the ages my kids are now and would therefore have almost no memories of the technology of that time.
The other day I set out to make a burrito wrap with whatever ingredients I could find. I spread a little sour cream on it, put some ham lunch meat laid over that, sliced some Colby-Jack cheese to put on top of the ham, and topped it off with some of Sam's homemade cranberry sauce spread over the top. When I told Sam, she didn't have any problem until I mentioned the cranberry, which led simultaneously to incredulity and disgust. But it was really, really good. I even went and made myself another one. The next day when we had some rice in the fridge I added that to the mix and had a few more.
It reminded of me of the times I've found myself running out of cream cheese in the middle of making a bagel sandwich. What I do then is spread peanut butter on the rest of the bagel before putting the ham and cheese (ideally provolone) in the middle. Oh, and it's almost always a blueberry bagel unless it's near Christmas (when it's sometimes cranberry). It's nowhere near as good as the cranberry ham and cheese wrap with sour cream, particularly the version with rice. But cream cheese, peanut butter, ham, and provolone on a blueberry bagel has got to be tasted to be judged. Feel free to call it disgusting once you've had a few bites.
Christianity Today is conducting a poll about people's favorite religious satire website. I encourage voting for The Holy Observer.
Gary Cleland reports on a strategy at winning Rock, Paper, Scissors. [hat tip: Geekpress]
Apparently the advice assumes your opponent knows that most people choose rock and that your opponent accordingly chooses paper to beat your rock, so you should choose scissors.
But how many people engage in that reasoning? You might as well conclude that your opponent would choose scissors on the above reasoning and then choose rock or that your opponent would add in that iteration and then choose scissors to beat the opponent's paper. It's ridiculous. The only way this will work is if you have real empirical evidence about how much reasoning of this sort certain kinds of people engage in and some ability to figure out which category your opponent would be in. But no one can do that. It's true that it's not quite a game of chance, just as poker isn't. But that doesn't mean there's any rational way to win.
Of course, what you really ought to do is not play Rock, Paper, Scissors at all. It's much better to play Rock, Paper, Scissors, Spock, Lizard.
It's time for another low-effort post listing off the multitude of license plates I noticed last month. It would have been on the high end even without a trip to New York City and Baltimore at the end of the month, but I got a few rare ones added during those travels.
U.S. States: Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin
Other U.S.: District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, U.S. government
Canada: Manitoba, New Brunswick, Ontario, Quebec
There are nine U.S. states that I didn't see any license plates from in December. I saw one of them on January 1 in a supermarket parking lot and another this morning on my own street.
Missing from previous two months: I saw Montana in November and North Dakota and Utah in October. Those were the only three October and November had that I didn't see in December. So there are six U.S. states that I didn't see in any of the three months I've chronicled so far (although one of them is already in January's list, so there are really only five I haven't seen since I started doing this).
Additions not in previous months: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Kentucky, Nebraska, Nevada, Puerto Rico, US government, Manitoba, New Brunswick
A week ago, I posted about J.K. Rowling's views on destiny, taking my starting point from this interview that she gave a few weeks ago. I ended with the thought that Rowling's own interpretation of what was going on wasn't the best interpretation of her actual text. That raises questions, however, about how an author might not interpret her own work correctly. She created it, after all. Does authorial intent have no bearing on these kinds of questions? [As with the previous post and the interview, there may be spoilers in this post, so don't read it if you don't know how the series concludes and want to find out in chronological order as the author intended it.]
So what does authorial intent contribute to the story when the text itself can be interpreted in several ways? Can an author determine that a character is, for example, gay even if the text itself doesn't make that clear? Can an author declare the character's motivations even if the text itself doesn't make them clear? This arises in the interview when it comes to the motivations and moral character of Albus Dumbledore in his various machinations in the war against Lord Voldemort.
I say the author can declare the intent of the character, even if the text doesn't, but I know some people make the text fundamental rather than the author. But even if that's right, it doesn't follow that everything an author says in interviews after the fact are canon. There's a debate over whether Dumbledore is a bit too manipulative. Apparently Rowling herself thinks so, judging by this interview, while many fans don't (or at least think he's less so than she seems to think; I'm one of those fans, by the way).
She can tell us what a character did and what the character's motivations were. She doesn't, however, have the power to determine whether those actions and motivations count as manipulation or whether they are immoral. Whether the word 'manipulation' applies is a matter of linguistic fact, and authors of a fantasy world can't determine by themselves what the word 'manipulation' means in English.
By the same token, whether what Dumbledore does is wrong is a matter of moral truth. Whatever determines morality (and views on that abound), it's certainly not authors of fantasy novels by themselves. I can't just write a novel where killing innocents for fun is morally ok. That can't be part of the stipulation within the novel. I can write a novel in a world where people think that, but I can't as an author make their beliefs true. I can write a novel whose characters speak a language slightly differently from English, where the word 'manipulation' means something different from what it means in English, but that doesn't change what we who speak English mean by the word when we apply it to those characters.
So there's room for debate over whether a character really is manipulative even if the author takes a side on the issue, and the same goes for whether what the character did (whether you call it manipulative or not) was morally wrong.
Have you ever heard of chessboxing? [hat tip: GeekPress] Neither had I. I'm not sure what would motivate someone capable of competitive chess to put themselves in a position of diminishing that capacity so easily, but I guess some smart people are pretty stupid.
J.K. Rowling did an interview recently with a Dutch newspaper, and it included (among a lot of other things) her thoughts on destiny and free will. (For those who care about spoilers, you might not want to look at the interview or read the rest of this post.)
I have to confess that I'm a little disappointed in her response. She's very smart and well-informed about intellectual matters. But I have to wonder if she presents a false dilemma on this issue, and I'm not even sure the view she expresses here fits well with the books she wrote.
Your books are about the battle between good and evil. Harry is good. But is Voldemort pure Evil? He is also a victim.
He is a victim, indeed. He is a victim, and he has made choices. He was conceived by force and under the influence of a silly infatuation, While Harry was conceived in love; I think the conditions under which you were born form an important fundament of your existence. But Voldemort chose evil. I've been trying to point that out in the books; I gave him choices.
So far so good. It's important to distinguish between being forced into good or evil because of what happens to be true about your conception and making choices. This still doesn't say anything about the metaphysical status of free will. A libertarian will hold that these choices can't be caused by prior events if they're to be free, and a compatibilist will allow that they might be caused by prior events while still being free, because the distinction here is between being forced into something no matter what your own choices would be (merely because of the circumstances of your conception) and making choices (which doesn't yet say anything about whether those choices have explanations and if so what the explanations are).
But where she goes from here is what I find problematic:
Check it out. There are some great articles this time around, including J.K. Rowling's pronouncement that Aslan is also gay, Christmas church shopping, and progressive Christian leaders who believe letting women preach but not drive.
Mare sure you don't miss the advertisement for the next installment in the Matt Damon Bourne series.
It's hard to keep pace with new technology, but sometimes something new appears on the scene that you just have to take notice of. The new Advanced Programmer's Computer is one of those. The Chat Room Keyboard is simply catering to idiocy, and this one would have been helpful when I was running Windows 95. But nothing beats the Ergonomic Keyboard for Pirates. I'm not sure I understand this one or this one, though. [hat tip: GreekPress]
Update: This one's a little more serious than some of the ones above, but the very name suggests otherwise: Keyless Ergonomic Keyboard.
Sean at myelectionanalysis makes great use of a Harry Potter reference in his reflection on the Ames, Iowa strall poll, speaking of Sam Brownback's taking third place and Mike Huckabee's coming in second:
I know a lot of people think that his third place showing is enough to keep him in the race. I’m not so sure. He threw everything he had into Ames, and still came up short. I think donors who are considering Brownback are going to look long and hard at him, then turn to Huckabee. One of them needs to exit quickly though, as neither can live while the other survives.
This is such a nice appropriation of pop culture that I had to mention it here, but I think it's accurate too. Huckabee and Brownback are marketing themselves to those who because of some intellectual vice (ignorance, too comfortable accepting lies without checking them, inconsistency in who to trust) see Romney as a pretender to the pro-life label. Huckabee could be a contender, but if Brownback is taking much of his support he's not going to have a chance. Brownback doesn't have much of a chance if Huckabee steps out, but the same is not true in reverse. So on the assumptions of those who wrongly fail to recognize that Romney is the best pro-life candidate (which is all that's driving the Brownback campaign at this point), Brownback ought to get out.
 | You scored as Marcus Aurelius, Your attention to duty even when the going gets rough has earned you the identity of Marcus Aurelius. A philosopher-emperor, he used Stoic musings to steel his resolve against a hard lot in life. You know few years of peace, and believe the only final answer to the empire's problems is a complete conquest of Europe. Despite this, you are probably one of the most human and thoughtful emperors in the history of mankind. Hail Caesar!
Which Roman Emperor Are You? created with QuizFarm.com |
The final Harry Potter novel is due out tomorrow, and most bookstores are treating that as one minute past midnight tonight. Our copy will be arriving by mail tomorrow, because we did the Amazon preorder deal, which should save us some money over buying it in a bookstore.
I thought I'd record some predictions as to what will happen in the seventh book before my predictions could be tainted by actually seeing the book. Since some may read this who haven't read through book six yet, I'll put the predictions in an extended entry to leave the front page free of spoilers for earlier books.
I have some substantive things to post on, but I think it would be foolhardy for me to create too many new posts for people to keep commenting on when the comments have been occupying too much of my time already in the last few days. So instead of posting any of what I've been working on for the last couple days, I'll post something completely frivolous that I forgot to mention a while back.
Rajjilicious at Wildebeest's Wardrobe has jumped the gun a bit and announced some forthcoming books, including two by me. I didn't know I could write that fast, but apparently I'll have these done by next year.
My favorite is #3. It makes me want to edit an anthology of women philosophers' works, including papers by Hilary Putnam, Shelly Kagan, Marian David, Lois Hope Walker, Hilary Kornblith, and J. Leslie Mackie.
What would you describe as the typical Disney family model? Jae Ran Kim points out how frequently the main character of Disney movies has either an absent or dead parent (or two absent or dead parents), among other unusual anomalies that should be surprising for a line of children's entertainment. I think the only one in her pretty long list to have both parents raise her ends up a cross-dresser.
This isn't necessarily a criticism. This particular story device often simply makes for a good story. But doesn't it seem excessive for Disney to be so overwhelmingly like this? Or is this more common in children's stories in general than we notice? Since we generally don't notice it with Disney, maybe that's so. But why don't we notice it, if we don't?
We saw Spiderman 3 today. It was easly the best of the trilogy, and it gave the impression that Sam Raimi had been hanging on to some of what he did in this from the very beginning. I came away thinking the moral message was the sort of thing a Christian would write to try to motivate some of the less common and less popular elements of Christian ethics. As far as I know, Raimi isn't a Christian, but the influence of Christianity on our culture, as waning as it is in general, is felt very clearly in this film. See Rick Mansfield's excellent review for more.
Update: Sam has further thoughts in a very different direction (with some spoilers).
From an actual church sign: "Hurting people loved here"
I count at least six disambiguations given in the post and the comments, most of them not good.
J.K. Rowling regularly speaks against this sort of thing. It's one thing to photshop women as a matter of course to increase their bust size and thin their waist. Not that it's not immoral with adult women, but it seems to me to be a completely different matter to do it with someone who is underage (just turned 17, probably 16 when she took the picture) who is portraying someone even more underage (15 at the beginning of the movie, 16 at the end).
Several of the commenters have already made this point, but I'll make it again here. If whoever was responsible for this perverse act doesn't think Emma Watson is attractive enough to teenagagers as she is, then our culture's standards of beauty have become even more warped than I had thought (and I've long thought them to be pretty twisted). We already tell girls in too many ways that they're not good enough unless they look like Emma Watson. Now it turns out even Emma Watson isn't even good enough as she is.
Update: More here. I've also now linked above to Rowling's own rant against this sort of thing.
Update 2: Warner Brothers claims that they didn't authorize this. They've asked IMAX to remove it from their site.
A friend of mine told me last summer that he was going to make a film. I thought he had in mind something like the home video movies my brothers and I made with some friends when we were in high school. We had:
Then there were the fake commercials:
Our friend who engineered the whole thing went on to get a degree in film, but I wouldn't exactly say we were making real films. It was some kids having fun.
It turned out my friend wasn't talking about something like that. He was making a real film, using real film equipment with something on the order of a serious film budget (at least serious for an indie film). He told me he was thinking along the lines of Napoleon Dynamite and Nacho Libre in terms of the kind of humor. He's calling it Whip Cracker, and he's not putting out very much information about it yet (even I know only a little more than what's available online), but he has a trailer up in YouTube. So check out the Whip Cracker trailer, and if you like it give it some good ratings.
The latest Veggie Tales video, Moe and the Big Exit, tells the story of the exodus from Egypt in a Western setting. The whole thing is pretty funny, but one of my favorite moments is at the very end, when they list the ten commandments as they might have been given in the old West:
1. Y'all have no other gods b'fore Me.
2. No makin' idols.
3. When y'all use my name, y'better mean it.
4. Lay off the trail one day a week.
5. Mind yer ma and pa.
6. No killin' folks.
7. Dance with who brung ya.
8. No swipin'.
9. No lyin'.
10. No hankerin' for things that ain't yours.
Go to Google Maps, enter "Boston" and "London" into the search boxes for directions, and then look at the results. Pay close attention to the step-by-step directions. [hat tip: Eugene Volokh]
In celebration of Fred and George Weasley's birthday, Mugglenet has posted their first impressions on reading advanced copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the much-awaited seventh and final book in the series. Assuming you've already read through book six, I can say that there are no serious spoilers here.
I was going to post something substantial today, either the next post in the Theories of Knowledge and Reality series or what I've been wanting to put together on inerrancy and infallibility, but last night I became what can only be described as violently ill. I'm much better now, but that just means I'm not violently ill anymore. I think it was the pizza I ate at the dissertation workshop I was commenting on yesterday, since no one else in the family is sick, and we've all been eating the same foods otherwise.
But it's nice in times like these to see things like this. [Hint: you can alter the URL, and it gives accordingly altered results.]
Maybe I'll feel better enough later on to post something else, but I'm not having an easy time motivating myself to do anything of much import.
I'm not sure how I missed this, but it's one of the most intelligent (not to mention one of the funniest) parodies I've ever seen of anything.
I just found this old Freakonomics post, but it raises an interesting enough question that I thought it worth posting. It used to be that blacks and whites had very different TV viewing habits. According to recent data, these different viewing habits have begun to converge. I can't think of any good reasons why that might be. Any thoughts? Is it because the particular shows that are on now have something that appeals to both audiences when nothing before did? If so, what would that be? Or is it because something has changed in one or the other audience? If so, what would that be? The explanations offered in the comments don't seem very convincing to me.
From Ian Vandewalker, the greatest minds of all time now have great bodies to match. For the ad-free version, see the mirror site. The action figures used in the pictures looked awfully familiar to me. We used to take our figures apart sometimes and exchange their heads and arms, so this isn't all that different from that. It was a lot easier with G.I. Joe than the Masters of the Universe and similar ones used here (I believe I detect some Lost World of the Warlord bodies as well, and there are some that don't look familiar to me at all). As the John Locke entry says, "a barrel-chested action figure with an enormous wig is objectively funny."
Descartes has an excellent accessory, an immaterial mind that you can't see or touch. Wait, the toy is actually conscious?
I have to love Augustine's weakness: "inability to do anything that will earn the divine grace necessary to make up for original sin". In other words, he doesn't have any weakness that his opponents don't also have. I guess that's just one more reason to consider him my favorite philosopher in the history of western thought.
I was slightly disappointed with the entry for the greatest modern philosopher, G.W. Leibniz. It focuses on his original views rather than what he spent much of his time on, which was defending traditional views. He does have an interesting pseudonym, however: G. Dubya. That way he can line up with the greatest president of the 21st century.
Phil Vischer, creator of Veggie Tales, gives an account of why he thinks The Nativity Story bombed. Key quote:
No intrigue about the artistic vision, combined with no intrigue about the subject matter, leaves a movie with very little to stand on except, "Hey Christians! Please come see our movie about your savior! We made it just for you!" And that pitch, as Hollywood is about to learn, will only get you so far.
In some ways, this is another example of what we regularly see in politics. The leadership of the GOP is much better at coming up with policy proposals that evangelicals will accept. There's also such a clear sense of a lack of genuineness coming from many on the left who try to come off as religiously sensitive but just end up appearing religiously ignorant. Howard Dean and John Kerry don't come across as a genuine Christian to most evangelicals, but neither should Newt Gingrich or Rudy Giuliani. Most importantly, there's always the worry that evangelicals' concerns aren't at the heart of any candidate's views, and attempts to satisfy evangelicals will then just amount to vote-grabbing with no real concern for those issues.
Brian Weatherson links to the Unsuggestor, which uses Amazon personal profiles to match up books people have with books they're not likely to have. It's sort of the inverse of Amazon's engine for recommending books based on what other people who bought what you bought have bought. I tried a few books I've got, and I discovered some disturbing things. Consider the following sets of unrecommendations:
They have the second Harry Potter book opposed to The Gospel According to John, by Leon Morris, a fairly respected evangelical commentary on the fourth gospel. I have both books and like them both very much. Most of the Harry Potter books have several John Piper books turning up in the top five, mostly some of his newer books (which I don't have), but his earlier Desiring God turned up with some of novels by Terry Brooks, one of my favorite fantasy authors. This would again be a case of two books I pretty much like (even if I criticize Piper on a few issues here and there). Some books in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series are put up against John Piper, Josh Harris, Wayne Grudem, A.W. Tozer, J.I. Packer, and other books by evangelicals, including several books I've got or have at least spent time looking through. Pratchett's Reaper Man isn't my favorite of the Discworld series, but a lot of it is funny. Its opposite is Doug Stuart and Gordon Fee's How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth, one of the best popular introductions to biblical interpretation ever written. Pratchett's much better Lords and Ladies is opposed to Knowing God by J.I. Packer, one of the most important popular introductions to theology in print. While I don't think Grudem's Systematic Theology is well-argued on the level of detailed exegesis (as in the classic tradition of Reformed systematic theologies like Hodge's), it's an excellent reference work, and I think his positions are largely correct on most issues. It's opposed to Pratchett's Pyramids, a Discworld book I very much loved. D.A. Carson's guide to New Testament commentaries, something I use all the time, lists Harry Potter book 6 as its opposite, a book that is next on my list to read. Carson's How Long, O Lord?, the best book I've seen on the problem of evil, also lists Potter book 6 as its first unsuggestion.
| What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Northeast Judging by how you talk you are probably from north Jersey, New York City, Connecticut or Rhode Island. Chances are, if you are from New York City (and not those other places) people would probably be able to tell if they actually heard you speak. | |
| Philadelphia | |
| The Inland North | |
| The Midland | |
| The South | |
| Boston | |
| The West | |
| North Central | |
| What American accent do you have? Take More Quizzes | |
This is actually the first one of these I've taken that indicated where I'm actually from (Rhode Island, but even just the northeast would be good enough). That's probably because it didn't ask about the ways I differ from many people in the northeast but just about ways I'm with the northeast in differing from people in other parts of the country.
I should note that one question didn't have any right answer. It asked about the words 'Mary', 'merry', and 'marry'. You could choose (a) All three sound different, (b) 'Mary' and 'merry' sound the same but 'marry' is different from them, or (c) All three sound the same. The way I learned to talk, 'Mary' and 'marry' sound exactly the same, but 'merry' sounds extremely different. That wasn't an option. I chose (a), because that was better than (b) or (c), since 'Mary' and 'merry' really don't sound anything alike, so much that it struck me as much worse to indicate that. Other than that, this was probably the best accent test I've seen.
[Hat tip: Random Intolerance]
Devon Carbado at blackprof.com raises some interesting questions about race on the Grey's Anatomy show. [hat tip: Racialicious] I've never watched the show, but these issues come up with quite a number of shows that I have seen. Some people have called the show colorblind because it has non-white characters playing a prominent role without ever making an issue of their race. Many who say this are thinking of colorblindness as a good thing. Racial ways of thinking involve thinking of the less privileged races as lesser or as not part of the mainstream. This kind of colorblindness is often thought of as good. It mainstreams the marginalized. On the other hand, it does mask genuine racial issues when they might be lurking beneath the surface, unnoticed by those who aren't tuned into them, ignored due to no one's willingness to talk about them for fear of being seen as cooperating with the unfortunate implications of a good deal of the negative racialized thinking that colorblindness wants to avoid.
Carbado steps into this with a claim that I think shows some great insight.
I don't think the show is colorblind at all. It is color conscious in a particular way -- namely, it presents non-white actors in roles that do not explicitly invoke race. That is neither colorblind nor race neutral.
It didn't occur to me to call this approach color-conscious at all, but I think this is right. The producers of this show are surely aware of what they are doing. The writers may not be addressing race issues, but what is color-conscious is the placing of non-white actors into these parts, and I suspect they are consciously not referencing the characters' races very much.
It's clear that it's color-conscious in at least that way, then. The question is whether this is a good or bad thing to do. Carbado worries about one aspect of it:
Was Steve Irwin a Christian
steve irwin christian
I've been getting searches like this up to several times an hour (but usually less) since Steve Irwin died, but nothing I said was relevant to this. Maybe those searches will get diverted to this post. I know nothing for sure about Steve Irwin's views on religion. He did, of course, accept current scientific understanding on the process of human origins, which will automatically disqualify him in the eyes of some people who think views on the means and time frame of creation count as the gospel (or, even worse, think evangelism consists of sending creationist tracts to celebrities). But of course plenty of people accept common descent who are genuine Christians.
He did believe in God, or at least he sometimes talked that way, saying, "But I have a gift. God put me on this planet with a mission. My mission is to educate people about conservation." But lots of people believe in God without being Christians, and lots of people speak of God's purpose metaphorically, mostly to suggest that they feel a purpose for their life. Someone in this thread remembers him saying he believed his mom was in heaven and looked forward to joining her, which suggests some sort of Christianlike view of heaven. I can't find any substantiation for him saying this, however. It says it's in the Larry King interview, but I didn't see anything even close to that there.
One piece of evidence against his being a Christian is that they had Buddhist nuns (his term; I don't know the proper term) bless their child in a sort of public baptismal ceremony. I doubt they would have done that in addition to a private Christian service, but it's possible. More likely is that this was all they did in that area, and it's probably not something serious Christians who accept and follow biblical teaching would have done, since this looks strikingly like the kind of pagan temple worship that the early Christians would have considered idolatry.
Update: Snopes.com finally tackles this issue (or at least the issue of the hoax discussed in the comments).
[hat tip: Matthew Mullins]
In little league baseball, there's a rule that every kid on the team needs an at-bat, or your team forfeits the game. What if you realize late in the game that you're going to win on score but lose by forfeit because one kid hasn't been up to bat and won't unless you let the other team score a run? This happened in a recent game between the state champions of Vermont and New Hampshire. The Vermont coach decided to let the other team score so they could then get another chance at bat to avoid the forfeit. The NH coach figured this out and told his players to refuse to score. Did the VT coach violate sports ethics? Did the NH coach? See the Ethics Scoreboard for the arguments in each case. I think I pretty much agree with their analysis. [hat tip: Eugene Volokh]
I think this is actually an interesting case of conflicting rules, because it's not just some abstract set of moral rules. These are actual rules that are explict and written down, and those playing the game have agreed to follow them. One clear commitment is to strive to win, and another is to do your best. But way hat happens when striving to win requires not doing your best at the normal game play? Or is it still doing your best because it's doing your best at winning the game? That does seem to me to be the intent behind doing your best. If a strategy at winning means walking rather than hitting a home run, that's not usually seen as a violation of ethics. So why would allowing the other team a run in order for you to win be a violation of ethics? I'm not actually sure if this is a real moral dilemma in the end for the Vermont coach, because it might turn out that fulfilling one of the principles does fulfill the other one in the end, even if it doesn't seem so at first. I do think the NH coach was violating the motivaiton behind the rules and thus violating the spirit of the rule. I'm not sure I agree with all the reasons given, e.g. the NH coach was trying to win but by making the other team forfeit, so it's not strictly speaking true that he was trying to lose, as #3 in the analysis says. It would be more accurate to say that he was trying to win by forfeit via losing by score. Still, I think the general analysis is correct. The Vermont coach did the right thing, and the NH coach responded in way that can't easily be reconciled with fair play.
[cross-posted at Philosophy et cetera]
Steve Irwin died today in the process of filming a new documentary on marine life. He was stung by a sting ray in the chest, right next to his heart. Doctors have said that such an injury is nearly impossible to survive, even though people survive stings from them all the time in other parts of their bodies. Most of the reporting on this describes it as a freak accident, because the chances of a sting ray doing something like this are very low. My suspicion is that the chances of dying any time you get in your car might even be higher.
Irwin was widely known as the Crocodile Hunter, whose animal documentaries are unfortunately best known for what they are not. He's been viewed as a danger-seeker who liked to show off by treating very dangerous animals cavalierly. The reality is that he really did know what he was doing. Bloggers are already criticizing him for engaging in the sort of life that would bring on this kind of death, but that sort of attitude is at odds with the great care Irwin took to do what he did safely. Contrary to public opinion, he was not motivated by trying to appear foolhardy. He was emphasizing the danger so that others would not try what he was doing without the kind of training he had.
His primary motivation came through in almost all his productions, and that was not entertainment (though he was very talented at doing documentaries in an entertaining way) but education and awareness of environmental and conservation issues. One of the earliest episodes I saw showed his deep concern for whales that had ended up on a shore and were probably going to die. His love for wildlife and preserving ecosystems always struck me as the real reason he did what he did, starting at the very beginning when he filmed himself catching crocodiles to move them to places where they would not be threatened by poachers. I consider Steve Irwin to have contributed a great deal to the world in terms of education about the environment and awakening those who might not care as much to the importance of conservational concerns. His method of promoting environmental issues is not only far more consistent with careful scientific understanding but also much more effective than the traditional means, and for that I really have appreciated his work. He will be missed.
When I'm reading a philosophical work, and I have to put it down, I usually have to skim through the paragraph or two before I stopped to put myself back into the train of thought necessary to move on. I picked up my Cambridge Companion to Augustine to resume my reading of the chapter on his political thought, and I skimmed the paragraph I had just finished before I put it down. (Mind you that this was also in a darkening room at the end of the day without yet having the light turned on after several hours out in the sun.)
This is what my mind interpreted the author as saying: "Augustine intimates in one place that rubber bands count as societies." Something didn't sound right there. Augustine wouldn't even know what a rubber band is. So what was it that I had just misread? Oh, right. I'd even typed up notes on this earlier today. Somehow replacing 'rubber' with 'robber' didn't occur to me without having to go back and read it again to remember what it really said.
I wonder if this is partly because 'rubber band' functions as one word in my mind and not a compound of two things. It's not a band that's rubber. It functions as a unit. Also, the different kind of band plays some role here too. I was trying to figure out what other kind of band Augustine might be talking about, and nothing came to mind, because a robber band isn't another kind of the band in the sense that a rubber band is a band.
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[hat tip: Lord of the Kingdom (in the sidebar)]
OK, it's sad that enough people are passing this around as if it's real that it would make it to snopes.com, but this is really funny. The 50% figure shows that they're just talking about the half of American society that is below average, but what the genius of it is the totally over-the-top statements the various politicians say about people who are merely below average ("do not possess the competence and drive necessary to carve out a meaningful role for themselves in society"). Whoever altered the original Onion piece to make the President Clinton quotes of the original be from Senators Barbara Boxer and Ted Kennedy is probably responsible for turning an obvious satire into an urban legend. I can't hear President Clinton talking this way. Except for one bit, the quote attributed to Senator Boxer in the later version sounds just like her, and Senator Kennedy has acquired a reputation for a willingness to say anything without giving any indication of meaning it. Besides, there are some words in there that sound designed for his accent.
 | You scored as Beast. Beast is an intelligent, politcal spokesman for the X-Men. He has a Ph.D in Genetics and is well versed in literature. He may look like a blue fuzzy monster, but deep down he's very benevolent and logical. Powers: Enhanced strength and agility
Most Comprehensive X-Men Personality Quiz 2.0 created with QuizFarm.com |
[hat tip: Matthew]
I was surprised to find out that so many of the Veggie Tales voices were done by Phil Vischer. Bob the Tomato and Mr. Nezzar don't sound like they could be possibly be the same person.
But that pales compared to what I just discovered. Apparently, Elmo and Sam the Eagle are voiced by the same guy. That's a little disturbing, isn't it?
Update: The term 'frell' originates in Farscape, which was executive produced by Brian Henson, son of Jim Henson, creator of the Muppets. I generally prefer 'frak' from Battlestar Galactica, but 'frell' seemed more appropriate given the Muppet connection. It also has a better sound for this form of statement. By the way, catalogues of fictional curse words abound, so if you don't like 'frak' or 'frell' you can choose any of a long list.
My grades for two classes are due today, so I've been kind of lying low for a bit. I've still got five papers to grade, and then I'll need to go hand in the sheets personally. Syracuse University is still living in the 90s with respect to grade reporting. Grades for my third class are due Friday, but I submit those online. So I welcome the opportunity to post something that takes very little time.
I've done the Visited States thing before, but it got lost in one of the moves this blog has undergone, so I'm using Matthew's posting of his as an occasion to do it again. It's nice to see that, even though he's hopelessly outdistanced me in terms of numbers, I've been to six of the twelve states he's never been to.
create your own personalized map of the USA
or check out ourCalifornia travel guide
My Visited Countries post from way back is still up, but its map has long stopped loading up properly, so I've used this new site to update it with a working map.
It's pretty funny seeing Dr. Seuss artwork in political cartoons. Explore the links to the cartoons. There's some interesting stuff there. Some of the issues he's dealing with are old enough that I have no clue what he's getting at, and some were probably really controversial for their time but now seem amazing that they were an issue to begin with. But what struck me as especially strange was the comment thread.
The very first comment links to a cartoon related to Japanese internment. I find it absolutely astounding that everyone in the discussion would just assume that what Geisel is portraying in that cartoon is an endorsement of internment rather than a portrayal of how strange the policy was, showing the paranoia in thinking every single Japanese American is all lined up ready to betray this country. Given his thoroughly liberal (for the time) views on racially-related policies, why would people simply assume that the cartoon endorses internment? Even leaving aside what we know about Ted Geisel, I look at the cartoon and can see how someone with either view might have created such a portrayal. This is a political cartoon. People do things like that all the time. I seem to remember a Eugene Volokh at the very same blog about someone who produced three political cartoons intended to portray three very different and in fact contradictory views of the same incident (but unfortunately I couldn't find it when I just looked). Yet on the same blog, people completely ignore that and assume that a cartoon portrays the literal views of the person doing it. Has the possibility of satire completely left our political consciousness?
Ah, the d10! While you aren't actually a true regular polyhedron, you are the only die that makes logical sense--metrically speaking. Chances are, others see you as over-analytical or a goody-goody. While that may be true, you also have a gift for patience and tolerance. Growing up you probably had a calculator wristwatch that you never really needed to use (since you were faster on your own), and you probably aced all your classes (except for gym). You use the metric system almost exclusively, but are able to quickly convert in mid-conversation for the sake of your backwards Imperalist friends. You've coded in at least two different programming languages, and have created more original gaming systems than you'll ever admit. You're generally not a show-off, but you do take pride in being called either a geek or a nerd.
This survey is completely scientific. Despite the mind-boggling complexity of mankind, the billions of distinctly different personalities found on Earth can easily be divided into seven simple categories that correspond to the five Platonic solids, a pseudo polyhedron, and whatever the hell a d100 is. The results of this quiz should be considered not only meaningful but also infallible, and pertinent to your success as a fully realized individual. If you feel the results of this examination do not match your perceived personality, you should take whatever drastic measures are needed to cram your superego back into proper alignment, as described by the quiz results.
And if you believe that, we have some really great critical-hit insurance to sell you.
[HT: Sam]Tyler Williams' Love Poetry for Biblical Literalists is hilarious. I just can't get over that picture.
For an encapsulation of the Song that does transfer nicely into a contemporary context, see Michael Card's "Arise My Love", which I sang to Sam at our wedding.
Ira Steven Behr was responsible for some of the best Star Trek episodes ever produced, particularly in Deep Space Nine, which he eventually became the head writer for. I have tremendous respect for him as a writer. I have to wonder, though, about one statement he made in this interview. When asked what super power he would want, he responded, "In addition to the ones I already have? I've been blessed with so many that I would feel like a Republican to ask for more."
I've been trying to figure out what he could possibly mean by this. Even if he's working with some nasty and uncharitable stereotype of Republicans, what could it be that Republicans are supposed to be like that even remotely resembles having super powers and asking for more super powers? If anyone has any ideas, I'm really curious, because this just makes no sense to me.
You are Simon, the young, brilliant doctor. Your devotion to your sister drove you to part with the world you knew. Raised on a civilized planet, you are not used to coping with the situation you have landed yourself in -- though you seem to be adapting well enough to suggest robbing a hospital.
"You may not believe this, but I am not all that good at talking to girls."
Which Firefly character are you?
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[Hat tip: Sam]
The ESV blog posts some statistics (with nice graphics) of which passages have gotten the most searches and views at their site. Some of it's pretty interesting. What's sad is that Jeremiah 29, a wonderful chapter, gets viewed pretty much only when people read Jer 29:11 out of context.
Christian Carnival XCIX is up at Attention Span. The 99 theme is kind of fun. One more to the big 100, which will be returning to the Carnival's founder. I didn't get Agent 99, but at least I ended up with the second best of the categories, Interstate 99, which I'd never known about before. Current plans include extending into my own state. (They violated interstate naming conventions, though, by putting 99 west of 81. I'm not sure what they were thinking. It's immoral to break that sort of convention, particularly when people put such great work into organizing it in a way that you can usually predict what an interstate's number means.)
At the Banty Rooster, Global Warming is Really Global Cooling. [HT: Blogwatch]
Eugene Volokh has an op-ed in the L.A. Times about how easy it is to get a Nobel Peace Prize nomination. Previous nominees include Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, and Castro. Now what I'm wondering is who counts as a professor, because there are some low-lifes that I might be able to nominate if all it takes is to teach at the college level.
Jollyblogger points out a beautiful Yale prank against Harvard.
Sam's put some more pictures online. Ethan and Isaiah were wrestling this week. For some reason Ethan was really frustrated that Isaiah kept not being where Ethan wanted him, so he kept pushing him and lying on top of him to prevent him from moving. Eventually Isaiah started enjoying it, thinking it was playful wrestling. Ethan continued in his frustration the whole time. It was really weird. It was as if the world would end if Isaiah got up. There's also one of Sophia watching the boys go off to school.
Stuart Taylor examines the claim that Judge Alito is outside the mainstream, concluding that he's well within both the general American mainstream and the legal/judicial mainstream. [Hat tip: SCOTUSBlog]
William Wainwright has updated his Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Jonathan Edwards, originally authored in 2002. Most Edwards fans don't look at his philosophy as much as other aspects of his work, so I very much appreciate when a philosopher takes an interest in the first great American philosopher. Wainwright has done a lot to motivate thinking of Edwards as up there with the great early moderns, and I have to agree. Edwards and G.W. Leibniz are by far my favorite early modern philosophers. Edwards anticipated both Berkeley and Hume in interesting ways.
Brooksilver at The Lord of the Blog Rings has a nice post about Christian parables within The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. I'm beginning to realize how little I remember from those books. I must have been 10 or so when I read them. I highly recommend his blog as a whole, by the way. I discovered it during his recent hiatus when he wasn't posting anything, but he's been a good friend for years, and I intend to read everything he posts now that he's back to blogging.
Two more pictures of the kids: Isaiah prim and proper and Sophia's underwear hat
Click on the picture for the full-size version. They've got Robby Steinhardt's photo above the Phil Ehart blurb, but otherwise this is pretty funny. One of the people on the discussion list where I found this spoke of Phil looking more and more like Robby every day!
What's funniest to me about this isn't intentional. It's that the members who would be most likely to favor ID aren't even in the current lineup, which is the group the picture shows. What follows close behind is that Kansas actually does have lyrics that deal with intelligent design. Then there's the fact that Kerry Livgren now thinks of Dust in the Wind as expressing the main theme of Ecclesiastes. It's not as if that song is contrary to Christian teaching, except in a couple of details ("nothing lasts forever but the earth and sky?" as if either would last forever anyway).
What's a little disappointing is the insinuation that intelligent design is about religion and the suggestion that it has anything to do with opposition to gay marriage. I'd guess that Kerry Livgren does oppose gay marriage, and I know he encourages all to become Christians, but this isn't about Livgren's current views and how he'd adjust the song in light of them. It's about how Dust in the Wind could be adjusted to sound like the ID proponents. Those would have been more important to put in the last box with those who prefer Foreigner to progressive rock. It's also a little unfortunate that ID is being held up against evolution, given what I argued in my last post on the topic. Good humor is good humor, but it still needs to be evaluated for its philosophical presuppositions.
 | You scored as The Hulk. The product of a science experiment gone awry, Bruce Banner turns into the unstoppable green monster the "Hulk" whenever his temper rises. The more angry he gets, the stronger the Hulk becomes. Bruce travels the world, hoping to find a cure for the Hulk and bring his life back to normal. However, he often has to become the Hulk to save those he loves when danger threatens.
Which Marvel Super Hero Are You? created with QuizFarm.com |
Blogs4God has President George Washington's Thanksgiving Proclamation of 1789.
More Ethan pictures: Sam took him outside to play with the fallen leaves.
Proto-Kaw (the band Kerry Livgren of Kansas has reformed based on an earlier incarnation of Kansas that never released anything until this decade) has a new album coming out in February, called The Wait of Glory. We had the pleasure of seeing them and meeting them all this summer, and it was one of the highlights of the last decade for me. The lyrics for the Wait of Glory are up now. I can't wait to hear it. Everything I've heard is that it's even better than their last album Before Became After, which was one of Livgren's best works.
For some really perverse fun, see A Night at the Roddenberry. [Hat tip: The Gnu]
Speaking of the Gnu, he has a response to a few of Scott Adams's comments on Intelligent Design (see Abednego's post). I think his point about Crick and Watson is particularly interesting.
 | You scored as The Amazing Spider-Man. After being bitten by a radioactive spider, Peter Parker was transformed from a nerdy high school student into New York's greatest hero. Peter enjoys the thrill of being a super hero, but he struggles with the burdens of leading a double life. He hopes someday to win the heart of his true love Mary Jane, the woman he's loved since before he even liked girls. Right now, he just wants to make it through college and pay his bills.
Which Action Hero Would You Be? v. 2.0 created with QuizFarm.com |
Christian Carnival XCVI is at Jordan's View.
Have you heard about the 18-year-old elected mayor as a write-in candidate? [Hat tip: Mark Olson]
Ben Witherington reviews Anne Rice's new novel about Jesus' childhood. I can't help but mention that he also gives Firefly and Serenity a thumbs up.
Here's Ethan a few years ago looking like his ducky (that's old ducky, which his mean aunties lost at the store 723 days ago; the new one has a much bigger bill, which I hope his mouth never looks like).
The USPS has a form on their website where you can type in an address and find the zip code. Stuart Buck notices that the form has a place on it to enter the zip code. Why would anyone want to use such a form if they already know their zip code, right? Actually, I can think of one reason. It gives you the zip+4, which hardly anyone ever knows about their own address, never mind about other people's. It's still redundant, because there's no need for a zip code field if it can look up the zip code without the zip code, but it's not as if no one who could know the zip code to type it in would want to use such a form.
What do you get when you cross Battlestar Galactica with the Three Stooges? [Hat tip: Unofficial Battlestar Galactica Blog]
Don Adams, legendary comic actor who played Maxwell Smart, Agent 86 in spy spoof Get Smart, died Sunday. He was also the voice of Inspector Gadget but was too typecast to land any other sort of role despite his wide-ranging talents.
Get Smart, created by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry, ran from 1965-1970 and parodied almost every James Bond feature you could do on TV. Adams contributed quite of a few of his trademark lines and gags, some of which have been common in everyday conversation among people who never saw the show and don't know their origins. He won three emmies himself for the show, and it received two as a show. I believe I have all the episodes on tape now, but I'm sure I've only seen something like half of them.
Despite a pretty well-done TV movie The Nude Bomb in 1980 complete with a really cool evil bad guy lair, another return in 1989's Get Smart, Again!, which brought back even more elements of the show than the first movie, and a nowhere near as good TV series bringing the Smart twins into the spy business in 1995 with Andy Dick as Max and 99's son, Adams was never really able to get his franchise going again in full form. I haven't seen any of this later stuff in years, so I hope some of it gets played in honor of his memory.
When I was a kid, my favorite superhero was the Beast. He furry and cuddly. He was built like a football player who could nonetheless jump around like an ape and hang on the ceiling. Most importantly, he was a brilliant scientist who had an expansive speaking vocabulary that he was quite fond of using. My favorite moment was when he told someone to go orally extract the embryonic fluid from a hen's egg. It was almost as good as when Namor the Submariner told Hercules, "May your beard grow inward!"
It's a little suprising (given his physical form) who they've cast for him in the third X-Men film, but it's pretty clear why. They wanted someone who could perform as Hank McCoy the intelligent scientist, and I assume they're figuring they can work out the physical look with special effects, depending on how much they want to spend on Beast's look. If that's their criterion, then their choice is absolutely perfect -- none other than Kelsey Grammer. According to the Wikipedia entry I linked above, he will be the blue and furry second mutation version, but that seems to trace back to this story, which doesn't quote anyone from Marvel as saying that he will be blue and furry. It seems to be more of an editorial assumption, as far as I can tell. You never know how reliable reports from people claiming to have seen something on set are, but this one describes the prosthesis for Beast's head. It doesn't say much, but it does describe blue skin on his neck, ears, and the sides of his head, with black fur on his face. That suggests that it's not the original human-looking but superhuman form.
Mimi & Sam: Melodies of Nature is a fun DVD for kids under three who love stunning visuals along with music. Even our oldest son, an autistic four-year-old, absolutely loves it. He loves to see various shapes changing into other shapes, and the animal footage is pretty fun for him as he tries to name everything that's going on. You see colorful birds, a tiger, elephants, orangutans, various small mammals from around the world, and lots of other animals. The nature visuals range from mountain waterfalls to beaches to the desert canyons to flowers (with stop-motion filming as a flower blooms). Shapes and colors are interspersed among nature shots in Sesame Street fashion (though without the flashy commercialized feel), and you see some repeating characters popping up to do fun things, either through computer animation or puppets. There's a pretty fun penguin with a hat and sunglasses who keeps popping up, and the stuffed bear is a favorite with our kids, especially when it dances to the funk beat. That always gets a giggle. Children pop in here and there as well. One really cute scene has a girl falling asleep as she's eating, with stuff all over her face.
In a few parts, a girl's voice says the name of a shape or an object being drawn, but there's not much in the way of words. There's a music soundtrack throughout the whole thing, with classical and original compositions, using a wide range of timbres. Our oldest son drums along with the soundtrack as he watches and calls out the names of things as they come up. The special features allow you to watch just the puppet portions, just the scenes with the computer-generated boy and girl who are pictured on the front cover, or just the parts involving the naming of shapes, fruits, letters, and colors.
One of the original goals of the husband and wife team who created it is to display the beauty of the world God has created while stimulating children's senses. They've succeeded. Some of the visuals are really beautiful, and kids love it. It's got a half-hour running time, and our kids are fixated for much of that time. The creators of this video, Baby Ventures, have children in the age group this is intended for (0-3 years), and they certainly know what kids in that age group enjoy and what will facilitate learning some of the basics. I highly recommend it.
The next Veggie Tales product The Lord of the Beans is now listed at CBD [HT: Marla] with a release date of October 29.
They've also got a third trailer for it (not the same one in Duke and the Great Pie War or the new one in Minnesota Cuke, both found on the Big Idea site here). It shows more of the final look than either of the first two. Any Lord of the Rings spoof is worth my interest, but if it's also Veggie Tales then it will be great for the coolness factor even if the overall story is completely stupid, which is possible but not likely. Since Jonah, they had some I wasn't all that impressed with, but they weren't inane. They just weren't as good as some of their best stuff. Some of their best stories have come since that time as well (Little Joe, the first half of A Snoodle's Tale, Sumo of the Opera, and Minnesota Cuke).
Interestingly, Phil Vischer, who founded the company, wrote this one. I believe he left Big Idea over a year ago when they moved to Nashville and he didn't want to move, and he's now starting up a new company making children's videos. Big Idea has continued to hire him as voice talent, since he's always done more than half of the main characters' voices (Bob the Tomato, Jerry Gourd, Mr. Nezzar, Pa Grape, Mr. Lunt, Archibald Asparagus, Scallion #1 who's been around since show #1 but never given a name, two of the three French Peas, and at least a few more minor characters). Apparently he's still submitting scripts to them too.
I once saw the following joke posted on the wall in a science building. Bear with me, as it's a short proof of sorts:
Knowledge is power, which we will abbreviate K=P.Time is money, or T=M.
And, as any scientist or engineer knows, power is work per time (P=W/T).
Substitute into the third expression T=M and P=K to get K=W/M, then solve for M:
M=W/K.
That is, money equals work per knowledge.Conclusion: For a fixed amount of work, the less you know, the more you make. And as knowledge approaches zero, money approaches infinity.
The rumor is that Bill Gates stumbled across this proof as an undergrad at Harvard and thus dropped out of school. Apparently it's worked pretty well for him.
And while we're talking about equivocation, or at least something like it, I recently heard this joke, which is a pretty good example, too:
Everyone knows that fire engines have 8 wheels and 4 men. 4 and 8 make 12. There are twelve inches in a foot. A foot is a ruler. Queen Elizabeth, a ruler, is the name of one of the largest ships on the seas. Seas have fish and fish have fins. The Finns fought the Russians and Russians are red . . . and fire trucks are always rushin' therefore, fire trucks are red!
The latest Veggie Tales, Minnesota Cuke and the Search for Samson's Hairbrush, opens with a philosophical dialogue between Bob the Tomato and Larry the Cucumber in good Socratic fashion. Here's the crucial part for understanding Bob's epistemological framework:
Larry: Eli says here that there's a bully in his school, and ...
Bob: A bully?
Larry: Yeah, you know, a kid that's real mean to all the other kids?
Bob: I know what a bully is, Larry.
Larry: Then why'd you ask?
Bob: Well, it's just that Caleb wrote about the same thing.
Larry: Wow. That's one busy bully.
Bob: Well, it's not the same bully.
Larry: How do you know?
Bob: Well, I don't but...
Larry: But you seem so certain.
Bob: Well, I am certain.
Larry: How do you know?
Bob: Well, Larry, it's just highly improbable statistically speaking that one bully is bothering two kids 500 miles apart! I mean, sometimes being certain of something just means highly probable! Highly probable!
Rene Descartes is rolling in his grave.
I'm working on a project to index a bunch of sermons for my church. I'm hoping I might be able to get some advice from some readers with experience on databases and/or scripting.
I've been talking to people in real life and online about a site that as far as I can tell looks as if it's an official George Lucas Star Wars site. There's lots of interesting stuff there. It has plot synopses of episodes VII, VIII, and IX. They don't sound all that thrilling, but these are pretty general at this point, and many things would all depend on the director. Lucas says he's got a short list of directors that would pass muster for doing these.
There's a list of Midichlorian counts for most of the major characters, but you can see from the most powerful Jedi list that a Midichlorian count doesn't always line up with how powerful a Jedi is.. There's a history of the Jedi and the Sith, and Lucas (supposedly) answers questions in a blog format.
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Which Revenge of the Sith Character are you? created with QuizFarm.com |
Before I saw Revenge of the Sith, I gave some preliminary thoughts on some claims people had been throwing about uncarefully. If you haven't read that post, I suggest you read it and the comments before reading this one, because I'll be assuming some points that I spent time establishing there.
I'm interested in two questions. I addressed both of them in the first post, but now I've seen the movie. What do I say (now that I've seen the film) about the claims that the movie is a glaring slam against Bush? What do I say (again, now that I've seen it) about Lucas' portrayal of Jedi and Sith and Obi-Wan's statement about absolutes? The short answer is that I say basically the same thing. There are a few minor points that I'd adjust based on having seen it for myself, but the major issues are the same. If anything, the context confirms for me what I suspected about Obi-Wan's statement. It has nothing to do with relativism. As for Bush, I see almost nothing in the film that fits well with what someone who just wanted to slam Bush would have done.
Some bozo scheduled Democratic political analyst Bob Shrum and former Bush speechwriter David Frum to be on Hardball tonight at the same time. Was this someone's sick sense of humor, or was it just incompetence in scheduling? The average viewer who doesn't know these two must have been feeling a little confused between the two. It sounds like a Dr. Seuss book:
We finally made it to Revenge of the Sith late Saturday night. We tried a few times to find time to see it, only to have other events prevent it, with traveling, planned activities at ideal times, and less availability to babysitters during some times when we did have time. Finally we decided to go Friday night for her birthday because my parents would be in town to watch the kids, but Sam forgot that Friday was even her birthday, never mind the movie date, and scheduled something else. We wanted to go later that night, but it would have taken us until way past midnight, which we didn't want to do. So we decided to go Saturday night instead. Then we arrived at the theater, and it was sold out (three weeks after its release!), so we had to go at the late showing anyway so we could still take advantage of my parents' presence. I want to come back to the issues of Lucas on Bush and Lucas on relativism and absolutism, but I'm going to save that for another post. For now, I just want to record my thoughts on how this film stands in relation to the others in the series.
I have the scoop on the truth. Somehow the source that leaked a political scandal in the 1970s had previously been a star of a famous porn film, and no one has ever thought that strange. Yet no one has known who this mysterious Deep Throat character is. Well some of us know. Deep Throat is Jerry Hardin. How he managed to pull off the porn film playing the particular character he played will have to remain a mystery, of course, and Bob Woodward and the Washington Post crew will continue with their cover story of some FBI guy who knew Nixon, but the truth is out there.
In related news, we now know the name of that guy who kept popping up in the first season of The X-Files whenever Mulder would put the X in his window, that guy way up in the conspiracy who would leak little bits of information to gave Mulder enough to get himself into trouble but never to get any proof, at least nothing he could hold onto. That guy, apparently, is named Mark Felt, and he was second in command at the FBI, right below the Smoking Man. I'm actually a little disappointed. I was hoping it was Pat Buchanan.
I can't resist commenting on two lines people keep talking about in Episode III. If you want absolutely no spoilers, don't read this, but this spoils so little that most of you won't care. People have been complaining or rejoicing (depending on their view on the issue) at what they perceive to be Lucas' use of this film as a jab at Bush in the war on terrorism. I haven't seen it yet, but I did hear Lucas' response to these claims, and I know enough about the film and about the issues in question to say something, pending my viewing of the film of course for a final judgment. I'll keep the rest of this in the extended entry for those who are absolutists about spoilers, but this really won't spoil much of anything.
| You Are 31 Years Old |
|
13-19: You are a teenager at heart. You question authority and are still trying to find your place in this world. 20-29: You are a twentysomething at heart. You feel excited about what's to come... love, work, and new experiences. 30-39: You are a thirtysomething at heart. You've had a taste of success and true love, but you want more! 40+: You are a mature adult. You've been through most of the ups and downs of life already. Now you get to sit back and relax. |
No, I did not gerrymander this to get the results to come out right, but yes I did deliberately wait almost a day so it would be correct.
Here's a review of Revenge of the Sith that gives me A New Hope that long-time Star Wars fans will accept this one. [Hat tip: Volokh Conspirator Todd Zywicki] This review is by someone who was pretty disappointed in Episodes 1 and 2 but thought Lucas redeemed himself with this one. A lot of people say they liked the originals but didn't like Episodes 1 and 2. If you're in that category, then you might still like Episode 3, according to this review.
Of course, I've never understood the insistence that the prequels are much worse than the originals. When I saw Episode 1, I didn't expect something like what I as a kid had thought Star Wars was. I knew Star Wars wasn't really what I as a kid had thought it was. I was simply looking for a good ride in the first movie, which led to my enjoying it. I ignored the awful Amidala-Anakin scenes in Episode 2, which meant I could really enjoy all of the fun stuff in that one, and there was a lot of it. The original trilogy wasn't any better in terms of scriptwriting or directing, at least in the details (except Empire, which was written and directed by people much better than Lucas, so it was good even in the details). It was just incredible fun based on what Lucas does do well -- come up with a great overall story and secure great people for special effects. People who like the originals but not the prequels simply don't realize that the prequels are pretty much the same sort of thing and can't get over the child's appreciation of the originals that they just won't apply in the same way to the prequels.
Captain's Quarters reviews the new Hitchhikers movie. This is one I definitely want to see. Of course, I said that about Spiderman 2, and that ended up being a DVD viewing for us.
I didn't know Douglas Adams had written the script. It's not common that an author who's been dead for years is the author of the script for a new movie based on his books, so I guess I can be excused for assuming he hadn't written it. I'm usually more of a purist, but if the author himself approves the changes because of what the film medium requires I suppose I can give him that right. I'm sure it could never lead to anything as radical as the vast character changes in the Lord of the Rings films if Adams is behind the changes (and it's not as if changing something from this series is as grievous a moral error as changing the moral character of someone from Tolkien).
Anyway, it looks fun, even if it won't be fun in exactly the same ways the first first four books were. (I say that with hesitation, because even the fourth was marginally fun, paving the way for the fifth one that everyone says not to bother reading, which advise I gladly heeded if I had the assurances that it was much worse than the fourth.)
Ethan's getting really into Dr. Seuss, and Green Eggs and Ham is one of his current favorites. In searching for some Babylon 5 stuff, I ran across this, which contains the text of a long-lost Dr. Seuss work. If you don't know B5, this will not be funny.
Peter Jackson is talking about beginning work on a film version of The Hobbit, perhaps in 3-4 years. I was under the impression that he wasn't really interested, but I guess he just wanted to take a break to do something different first.
I'd like to see them use Ian Holm again for Bilbo, since Bilbo was only a little younger than Holm is when the Hobbit took place. I'd really like to see them include the Council of the Wise attacking Dol Guldur during the time Gandalf is away from the party, with guest spots by Saruman, Radagast, Elrond, Galadriel, and Cirdan. I know this isn't in the book but in The Unfinished Tales, but Jackson included material from the appendices and other works in the trilogy. It would also be great to include Gandalf's discovery of Thrain at Dol Guldur at the beginning to set it all up, along with the meeting of Gandalf and Thorin in Bree before they go to Bilbo, which I believe are both also in The Unfinished Tales. Of course, those last two would also work nicely as DVD extended edition extra scenes. I wouldn't put it past them this time around to film certain scenes specifically for the DVD.
I'd always thought of Mahna Mahna (that's apparently how it's spelled) as my favorite Sesame Street sketch, but it turns out to be from the Muppet Show. I actually hadn't remember very much of it (except the audio) over the years, so it was nice to see it again. Now I need to find out which episode this is from, so I can see if it's one of the ones I taped a while back when Hallmark was showing them.
It takes a while to load up even on a fast connection, but for some reason it insisted on playing very erratically while I was still loading it, so you might want to pause it until it's fully downloaded if this happens to you.
[Hat tip: In Hoc Signo Vinces]
Paramount has canceled Star Trek: Enterprise right at its high point. The writers this year have been systematically dealing with every single problem ever raised by critics against the series. They have written a few absolutely incredible multi-part stories after a pretty good season-long arc last season. They've tied the show into the original series in ways fans had originally hoped would happen but never did until now. The character development has tremendously improved. Most importantly, the stories this year have been some of the best of the entire franchise. I've liked the show all along, but it took until last season to get really good, and the non-filler stories this year have been some of the best Trek ever. It's not quite up to the final ten-part season finale for DS9, but the only things that high up the scale are Babylon 5 and the best episodes of the two Stargate series.
Paramount made one mistake. They moved the show this year to Friday, the night that they knew the SciFi Channel runs the most popular science fiction show of all time, Stargate: SG-1. They even play it at the same time. Since the Stargate shows show in the summer and spring, the Paramount execs had an entire fall to realize that they were going to be competing in the spring with the most popular show ever to air in the genre of their show. The one piece of information they cite for why they're canceling the show is that it got low ratings, especially low in the first week of the complete SciFi Friday lineup on the SciFi Channel. Unfortunately, Paramount owns both the show and the network, so it's not even clear that another channel could run it if another one could be found to run it (though SciFi themselves might do so if given the chance; they're willing to run the complete tripe Andromeda has turned into). [Hat tip: Ramblings' Journal]
There's a new controversial theory out now about where the synoptic gospels came from. It was once commonly accepted that Matthew was the first gospel written, but that view is largely out of favor, despite some vocal proponents. Most people believe Mark to be the earliest, and most people think Matthew and Luke used Mark and a hypothetical collection of sayings of Jesus now popularly called Q. Well, a new theory has appeared on the scene to rival these contenders: the Two-Sauce Theory!
Hat tip: NT Gateway
The latest edition of The Holy Observer came out on Christmas. If you haven't seen it yet, check it out. My favorite story of the current issue is Pentecostal Man's Glossolalia Echos [sic] NBA Rosters. I actually know someone who deliberately faked tongues to get some glossolalia evangelists off his back. Also, check out the Demons and Deacons advertisement on the main page.
| Which member of the JLA are you? Batman Losing his parents to a tragic mugging, Bruce Wayne took a vow to wage a one man war on crime. Using the image of the bat to strike fear into criminals, he dons the guise of the Dark Knight after the sun sets. A genius detective and scientist he is a valuable member to the League even without powers
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| Click Here to Take This Quiz Brought to you by YouThink.com quizzes and personality tests. |
Hat tip: Jollyblogger
Some headlines, upon immediate viewing, reveal that one of the following was true. The writer was either being intentionally funny or not paying close attention to what the headline actually says. I have no idea which one this was. Hat tip: Texan Tattler.
For those who haven't seen it yet, there's a long trailer for the extended edition of The Return of the King at the Quicktime site. It looks good. 50 minutes of new stuff: Saruman meets his revisionist end, the Mouth of Sauron, the Houses of Healing, more on Aragorn, the Army of the Dead, and the Corsairs of Pelargir, and lots more character development and new CGI stuff.
Update: I was going to say one more thing, that I hope they've fixed the pacing and timing problems with the battle of Minas Tirith. As I was typing that, I decided I should link to my review of the problems in Peter Jackson's portrayal of these books, and I discovered Syracuse Unversity had taken my old website down. Apparently it's now fixed, and it wasn't just my site but a number of others too, but that led me to post my whole review in the blog post that had originally linked to it. So there we are. The pacing problems are just one of many issues I had with Jackson's take on Tolkien's story, but that may be something they could have fixed in this (but probably didn't).
After a month or two off, the latest issue of The Holy Observer is up.
Michael Moore is at it again. This time he's investigating the regime of Aragorn and the combination of ineptitude and calculated evil that he manifested at Helm's Deep. I didn't get a chance to finish watching it a couple days ago, but in case in never get around to it I wanted to post it.
While we're on political humor, check out these hilarious fake ads against John Kerry. It seems to make fun of both candidates equally. Why not to vote for Kerry: "America doesn't need a leader who is dumb enough to trust George W. Bush."
I've been weaning myself off posting these quiz things, but when someone does one close to my heart my self-control goes out the window. Without a truly geeky appreciation for Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, you'll be a bit clueless with this one, but those who know Pratchett should know about this one, so I have to promote it. My title is a lie. It's not about all the Discworld characters but just the City Watch, but the Discworld name has more name recognition.
Discworld: Which Ankh-Morpork City Watch Character are YOU?
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In honor of the revisionist history George Lucas has introduced into the Star Wars universe with the latest round of changes to the original trilogy, Wink has posted someone's alternative account of Darth Vader's revelation of his fatherhood to Luke. It's pretty funny.
Are you Addicted to the Internet?
The Are you Addicted to the Internet? Quiz at Quiz Me! |
From Rebbeca Writes
For analysis and further results, continue reading.
You speak eloquently and have seemingly read every book ever published. You are a fountain of endless (sometimes useless) knowledge, and never fail to impress at a party. What people love: You can answer almost any question people ask, and have thus been nicknamed Jeeves. What people hate: You constantly correct their grammar and insult their paperbacks.
What Kind of Elitist Are You?
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I think I might have had this one as my runner-up:
Someone I know and trust fairly well through the Kerry Livgren and Kansas internet circles (I think we even got married the same day or maybe a week apart or something) sent this:
I hate those hoax warnings, but this one is important! Send this warning to EVERYONE on your E=mail list immediately. If someone comes to your front door saying they are conducting a survey and asks you to take your clothes off, DO NOT DO IT!!! This is a scam; they only want to see you naked. I wish I'd gotten this warning yesterday. I feel so stupid and cheap now ........
Stargate Atlantis, the spinoff of my favorite currently-running TV series,
Stargate SG-1, made its debut last Friday. Check out the review at Back of the Envelope for more details. I'm excited about two hours of Stargate every Friday night. The new show looks really good so far and will easily be one of my favorite three shows (depending on how Enterprise does with the change of show-runner in the fall; it's been #2 on my list this season).
Also, be sure to update your blogroll if you have a link to Donald's blog, because it's moved.
I posted that Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski has given advice to Paramount about how to save the Star Trek universe. I have no idea what he said to them, but that together with all the time travel postings has got me thinking about what I think are the three biggest problems in the Star Trek universe. This has nothing to do with writing, character development, plots, acting, or anything someone evaluating a TV show or movie is likely to question. This is purely about the Star Trek universe itself, which will have serious continuity problems unless they can deal with these three issues.
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Um, shouldn't that be 'trekker'?
Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski has written up his plan to save the Star Trek franchise. When I saw this on the mailing list of everything he posts to newsgroups, I was incredibly surprised. He never wanted to have anything to do with Star Trek. Apparently they asked him to take over Enterprise, and he refused but was willing to tell them how to improve their franchise with a plan for a new show. I'd love to see such a show, even if he wouldn't be willing to produce it himself. I consider Babylon 5 to be the best TV show ever, not just the best scifi show ever. His followup Crusade was canceled before it ever aired, and they only made 13 episodes, but what they produced together with the scripts released on the internet that were never filmed gave a sign that it would be equally good.
Which Historical Lunatic Are You?
From the fecund loins of Rum and Monkey.
A fine, amiable and dreamy young man, skilled in horsemanship and archery, you were also from a long line of dribbling madmen. King at 12 and quickly married to your sweetheart, Bavarian Princess Isabeau, you enjoyed many happy months together before either of you could speak anything of the other's language. However, after illness you became a tad unstable. When a raving lunatic ran up to your entourage spouting an incoherent prophecy of doom, you were unsettled enough to slaughter four of your best men when a page dropped a lance. Your hair and nails fell out. At a royal masquerade, you and your courtiers dressed as wild men, ending in tragedy when four of them accidentally caught fire and burned to death. You were saved by the timely intervention of the Duchess of Berry's underskirts.
This brought on another bout of sickness, which surgeons countered by drilling holes in your skull. The following months saw you suffer an exorcism, beg your friends to kill you, go into hyperactive fits of gaiety, run through your rooms to the point of exhaustion, hide from imaginary assassins, claim your name was Georges, deny that you were King and fail to recognise your family. You smashed furniture and wet yourself at regular intervals. Passing briefly into erratic genius, you believed yourself to be made of glass and demanded iron rods in your attire to prevent you breaking.
In 1405 you stopped bathing, shaving or changing your clothes. This went on until several men were hired to blacken their faces, hide, jump out and shout "boo!", upon which you resumed basic hygiene. Despite this, your wife continued sleeping with you until 1407, when she hired a young beauty, Odette de Champdivers, to take her place. Isabeau then consoled herself, as it were, with your brother. Her lovers followed thick and fast while you became a pawn of your court, until you had her latest beau strangled and drowned.
A severe fever was fended off with oranges and pomegranates in vast quantities, but you succumbed again in 1422 and died. Your disease was most likely hereditary. Unfortunately, you had anywhere up to eleven children, who variously went on to develop capriciousness, great cruelty, insecurity, paranoia, revulsion towards food and, in one case, a phobia of bridges.
The second time I found this, it was at Jollyblogger. I took this test a couple months ago and got someone entirely different (the self-declared emperor of the United States). Somehow I lost it before I could post the results.
 | Gimli Gloin's son If I were a character in The Lord of the Rings, I would be Gimli, Dwarf, handy with an axe when orcs are about. In the movie, I am played by John Rhys-Davies. Who would you be? |
 | Treebeard If I were a character in The Return of the King, I would be Treebeard, an Ent and one of the last of the shepherds of trees. In the movie, I am played by Joyn Rhys-Davies. Who would you be? |
The only things I can think of that these two have in common are:
1. They both have beards.
2. They're both ents, except for Gimli.
3. They're both played by John Rhys-Davies, the one cast member who has his political head on straight (at least out of the ones talking about politics).
I found one of these at Jollyblogger, and the other was listed at it.
You're a Speak & Spell!! You nerd, you. Just because you were disguised as a toy doesn't mean you weren't educational, you sneaky b*st*rd.
What childhood toy from the 80s are you?
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I was hoping for a Transformer, but this is at least accurate.
via Rebecca Writes
From The Holy Observer, Tru Dawgma, theological hip-hop. Of course, Tourniquet really did do something like this. They're a Christian prog metal/thrash group who frequently use technical medical jargon as metaphors for theological and moral issues. See Psycho Surgery and Pathogenic Ocular Dissonance. Then there's also the theologically rich Harlot Widow and the Virgin Bride complete with a heavily distorted power chord wedding march with guitars tuned down a step and a half. You need a pretty good education just to figure out what they're talking about. I'm not sure even that will help a lot with Tru Dawgma, though. Check out the lyrics.
Here's some more stuff I've been catching up on from the weekend away:
The universe has been expanding faster than the speed of light (via Volokh).
Poliblogger links to a story about three washed-up action hero actors playing three washed-up action hero actors who open up a private investigtor firm. The actors? William Shatner, Robert Wagner, and Lee Majors. I'd watch that.
King of Fools points out that John Kerry is now advocating unilateral engagement with North Korea. He's also got a good post on lust and objectification that picks up on themes I blogged about recently.
Bill Hobbs gives a mini-roundup of connections between Saddam and al Qaeda (link from One Hand Clapping).
Rebecca Writes gives some helpful reflections on the moral implications of Philippians 2:1-8, including just what it is about Jesus' giving of himself that Paul is telling the Philippians to imitate. This post got a mention on Blogs4God.
What Color is Your Brain?
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I would have thought my brain was gray, but there is interesting information here. There's something right about this and something distressingly wrong. It's the same sort of thing that often causes more simplistic personality tests to put me in the wrong category because my interests are more similar to those with a personality almost opposite mine, but I approach those interests very differently. So I'll use this opportunity to write a little bit about personality tests and why they often fail to describe me well.
| What kind of things do people say behind your back? Scared People tend to call you "scary" or "deadly". |
| Click Here to Take This Quiz Brought to you by YouThink.com quizzes and personality tests. |
This one's actually true. A friend of mine knew someone who called me the scary philosophy T.A.
| Which one is your strongest Multiple Intelligence? Musical Has superb ability in performing, composing, or analyzing music. Knows how to play more than just "Rock and Soul" on the piano. Has a good sense of what sounds right vs. what sounds stupid.
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| Click Here to Take This Quiz Brought to you by YouThink.com quizzes and personality tests. |
This is a little surpising, not that it's strong but that it's my strongest. Whoever wrote the title of the test doesn't understand that the mulitiple intelligences are different kinds of intelligence. It's not as if each is a multiple intelligence. I can't figure out how the questions had much to do with the results. Only one question was about music. (found via Proverbial Wife)
Digitus, Finger & Co. gives the following argument (with premises number and steps made more explicit and step 5 added for rigor):
1. Girls = Time x Money (premise)
2. Time = Money (premise)
3. Girls = Money x Money or, Money2 (1, 2 identity substitution)
4. Money = √evil (premise)
5. Money2= evil (4, squaring both sides of an identity yields a identity)
6. Girls = evil (3, 5 transititivity of identity)
©2004 Neil Uchitel
I think my argument for God's being outside time was at least as good:
I frequently get people visiting my site when searching for personality type information on Google. It might be good to have some actual content on that now and then instead of just the link in the sidebar to Keirsey's book that I'm reading.
Here's a good collection of Myers Briggs links.
Bloginality keeps track of how many people of each Myers Briggs type have taken the test on their site. As of this writing, there are some real disparities:
This is excellent. I found links to it this morning on both InstaPundit and Josh Claybourn within minutes of each other, so I'm giving credit to both.
Update (June 2006): That page has been dead for quite a while, but I found a new location for it.
from Proverbial Wife.
This is good.
From Patriot Paradox
This is a new test (and isn't the ethics one I posted a few months ago that I don't want to bother finding -- if you're interested, type "ethics test" into my search engine). [via Jollyblogger]
My results:
Li>My #1 result for the SelectSmart.com selector, Which famous philosopher do you most agree with?, is Aquinas
Read on for who I'm less like and my brief thoughts on the results.
I lied in my 250th post below. I do have something with content worthy of being my 250th post, but I didn't write it, so I decided to keep it separate. I haven't had a lot of Easter-related stuff here, and this helps remedy that. It also ties together my current focus on things Kerry Livgren (whose new album with Proto-KAW still hasn't arrived) with the events we remember during what we call Holy Week (not that any period of time is really more or less holy than any other).
My friend Michael Brooks (whom I've never met in person but is someone I consider a friend nonetheless) wrote the following and sent it to some of the music discussion lists we both participate in:
I am infinity You may worship me, but from afar _ |
Thanks to Classical Values for the link.
This just in, via Rebecca. Apparently I've been taking the wrong tactic in responding to my critics on race. I should just give them this link, which shows how I live in two worlds.
I'm having trouble figuring out why most of the dialects in the Dialectizer are funny or even why they have the names they have (Moron?), but Jive seems better than most of the rest. The Swedish Chef one is pretty good but a little too comprehensible.
The time has arrived once again when I have too many things to blog about and not enough time to do it, so before some of this stuff gets too old I'll at least link them and say something about them.
Discoshaman comments on the scientists on the verge of creating life in a laboratory to the effect that someone's going to start denying that it's happened on the grounds that only God can create life. Read the first comment, the one about the dirt. It's hilarious and exactly the right to say here.
This one's been old for a while, but I just found it. Philosopher Keith Burgess-Jackson has been a gradual convert to conservative thought over the course of his life. He wrote this before the big brouhaha over liberal professors in academia of the last few months, but it looks at why so many liberal thinkers think conservatives are stupid in a way that's neither insulting to liberals nor favorable to the position that conservatives tend to be stupid.
Speaking of philosophers discussing important issues, Jeremy Chong gives a near-formal deductive argument for the conclusion that soy milk is indeed milk. I would have argued on the same basis but in a very different way, focusing more on philosophy of language but really for the same reasons and based on the same intuitions.
Volokh: A 15-year-old girl is up for child pornography charges for taking pictures of herself and sending them to people through the internet. Get a load of what they're charging her with.
Also at Volokh, Jacob Levy, from my alma mater Brown, mentions two things of note in one post. First is his reference to Buddy Cianci, former mayor of Providence who was convicted of a felony and then later re-elected mayor for multiple terms while still not serving any terms. It's as if he's a cartoon character. What Jacob says about him is precious. Then he goes on to tell a great story of the new attorney general of RI calling Marvel Comics to get Stan Lee's permission to use a quote from the first appearance of Spiderman.
Yet again at Volokh: Anyone up for a vampire slaying? This one wasn't posted on April Fool's Day. At least the guy was already dead.
Last but not least, you have to see the latest two comments on my post from January about the racist Condoleeza Rice poster that had been circulating at the time. It would be ideal if you go and look at the family pictures on my old blog site first to appreciate the full humor of what these two guys (assuming they're two people -- I haven't checked the IPs yet) think they can get away with saying. Update: Sam weighs in. I like the MTV comment. It's too bad I didn't catch that. It's insulting enough to assume that I don't know my wife. To assume that I watch MTV may even be worse.
I've got a couple more, including another from Volokh, but I'll hold off on them in the hopes that I might be able to say a little more about them.
Volo anaticulum cumminosam meam!
"I want my rubber ducky!"
Okay, so you're a little childish. You know how to
have a good time.
Which Weird Latin Phrase Are You?
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| Parableman's Battle Imp is |
 Urud |
|
Backstabbing: 9
Dodgin': 10 Guts: 2 Magic Mojo: 10 Smackdown: 4 |
Also check out the imp at Spare Change and the imp at What in Tarnation?!?!? A die roll gets added to each of your stats to decide the battle, so try again if your imp fails!
I'm not sure I even knew about this character. Apparently he was Linus' little brother, added later in the strip. I even changed two of my answers and still came up with him, so I guess this is accurate.
You are Rerun!
Which Peanuts Character are You?
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I generally don't find anything anyone forwards to me funny, and I detest many of the dysfunctional behaviors involved in forwarding to everyone you know such mass volumes of unsupported (and usually false) information and stuff that's called funny that really isn't, contributing to band width problems, causing to people to pray fervently for problems that never existed or have long since ended, and leading to all manner of false beliefs. Most forwards I receive lead immediately to a vist to snopes.com to see what's wrong with it, which leads to a response to everyone who had received the message to tell them what's wrong with it and why not to keep perpetuating this stuff.
This one excerpting the diaries of a cat and a dog is quite good. It's a good thing I ran into it on a blog, because I might well have deleted it if it had been sent to me by email. There really is something to this, though we had plenty of cats who were outside more than the dogs.
EXCERPTS FROM A DOG'S DIARY
8:00 am - OH BOY! DOG FOOD! MY FAVORITE!
9:30 am - OH BOY! A CAR RIDE! MY FAVORITE!
9:40 am - OH BOY! A WALK! MY FAVORITE!
10:30 am - OH BOY! A CAR RIDE! MY FAVORITE!
11:30 am - OH BOY! DOG FOOD! MY FAVORITE!
12:00 noon - OH BOY! THE KIDS! MY FAVORITE!
1:00 PM - OH BOY! THE YARD! MY FAVORITE!
1:30 PM - ooooooo. bath. bummer.
4:00 PM - OH BOY! THE KIDS! MY FAVORITE!
5:00 PM - OH BOY! DOG FOOD! MY FAVORITE!
5:30 PM - OH BOY! MOM! MY FAVORITE!
EXCERPTS FROM A CAT'S DIARY
DAY 752 - My captors continue to taunt me with bizarre little dangling objects. They dine lavishly on fresh meat, while I am forced to eat dry cereal. The only thing that keeps me going is the hope of escape, and the mild satisfaction I get from ruining the occasional piece of furniture.
Tomorrow I may eat another houseplant.
DAY 761 - Today my attempt to kill my captors by weaving around their feet while they were walking almost succeeded, must try this at the top of the stairs. In an attempt to disgust and repulse these vile oppressors, I once again induced myself to vomit on their favorite chair...must try this on their bed.
DAY 765 - Decapitated a mouse and brought them the headless body, in attempt to make them aware of what I am capable of, and to try to strike fear into their hearts. They only cooed and condescended about what a good little cat I was...Hmmm. Not working according to plan.
DAY 768 - I am finally aware of how sadistic they are. For no good reason I was chosen for the water torture. This time however it included a burning foamy chemical called "shampoo." What sick minds could invent such a liquid? My only consolation is the piece of thumb still stuck between my teeth.
DAY 771 - There was some sort of gathering of their accomplices. I was placed in solitary throughout the event. However, I could hear the noise and smell the foul odor of the glass tubes they call "beer.." More importantly I overheard that my confinement was due to MY power of "allergies." Must learn what this is and how to use it to my advantage.
DAY 774 - I am convinced the other captives are flunkies and maybe snitches. The dog is routinely released and seems more than happy to return. He is obviously a half-wit. The bird on the other hand has got to be an informant, and speaks with them regularly. I am certain he reports my every move. Due to his current placement in the metal room his safety is assured. But I can wait; it is only a matter of time.
I want to get my page to load more quickly (eventually, at least) by removing some of the graphics and other fun stuff from my side column, but I don't want to lose the stuff I've got there, so I'm putting some of it in a blog entry, as I've done with fun stuff that didn't fit in the side column.
What part of the Body are you?
Congratulations! You are the heel. You often feel trampled on but reassure yourself that the church wouldn't be getting anywhere without you.
| "God will not suffer man to have the knowledge of things to come; for if he had prescience of his prosperity he would be careless; and understanding of his adversity he would be senseless." |
| You are Augustine! You love to study tough issues and don't mind it if you lose sleep over them. Everyone loves you and wants to talk to you and hear your views, you even get things like "nice debating with you." Yep, you are super smart, even if you are still trying to figure it all out. You're also very honest, something people admire, even when you do stupid things. |
Cullen Murphy speculates about what sort of literature produced today might go into something like what the Bible now is if they were to be compiled into a great work that could serve a similar purpose for people of the future. I think some of his analogues are pretty far from the purpose of the original, and he's got some glaring omissions (Tolkien, the U.S. Constitution, a few key modern philosophers, of which he has none listed at all). Also, he's assuming secular society would be producing this. Some of the works are remotely religious, and perhaps Emily Dickinson's parallel with the psalms is adequate for that, but there's nothing really theological to be an equivalent of Romans or Ephesians.
One of the problems is simply that nothing really parallels biblical works. The closest thing we have to the Song of Songs would be smutty romance novels, except those are far removed from the spiritual significance applied to the Song of Songs by the typology of love themes in the Hebrew scriptures. There's never been any literature produced that's even close to what the Gospel of John is up to. It's simultaneously a story, an argument, an extended teaching, and a set of overlapping and interactive metaphors and other poetic imagery. Those who have tried to do such things have failed to produce anything quite so magisterial, and they usually have no spiritual significance whatsoever. We would need tales of the past heroes of the people but also accounts of the failures, and these would need to be constructed so as to be making a theological point (or at least something like one). Then there's also the issue that literature today would have to include more than just the printed word. Would things like Star Wars, Saturday Night Live, Friends, Gone With the Wind, Seinfeld, Cheers, X-Men, Sesame Street, Survivor, and Wheel of Fortune be in it?
Despite all this it's interesting to think about what literature of our time fills some of the roles that biblical literature filled for the ancient Hebrews and early Christians. For what it's worth, I think the biblical literature itself fills many of those roles for contemporary Christians as it is and in a way better than anything else could, but that misses the point of what's being done here. It's an attempt to find what represents the culture of today in a way that the Bible represented cultures of the past. That misses so much of what the biblical books are all about, though.
This is a good one. The questions seem totally unrelated to biblical characters. I hate these things when you can almost predict how it's going to go, but this one has little of that.
Which Old Testament Character are you?
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Apparently in France "until death do us part" allows for some counterintuitive conclusions. A French woman just married her boyfriend. The French president had to give special permission for this marriage to take place. Why? He's been dead for over a year. Yes, that's right. This woman just married a dead guy. I wonder how "until death do us part" would function in this kind of marriage.
Usually we measure the length of a marriage as the time interval between the ceremony and the death of the first one to die. If we did that in this case, the length would be about 17 months, since that's the interval between his death and the ceremony, ignoring the fact that the death was before the ceremony instead of the usual order. Once you factor in the backwards order, it would be -17 months. However, this can't be right either, since the marriage wasn't even existent during those 17 months and continues onward even now.
The following two claims seem to follow:
1. We're moving away from the end of their marriage, since it ends with the death of the first one to die, which would be him.
2. We're moving away from the beginning of their marriage, since it begins with the ceremony.
In some sense its length must be increasing, since we're moving away in time from its beginning. However, we're getting further away from its end, since that was in the past. The only way I can interpret this is that their marriage has negative duration, and it's getting smaller (by getting a higher magnitude and in that sense getting larger). This can't be right, though, for too many reasons to list. One is the issue of when we stop saying the marriage's length is getting smaller (or greater in magnitude). Will it keep going after she dies? Surely not.
So maybe her death is the important one. But that can't be right either. If his death doesn't end the marriage, why should hers? The only reason I can think of is that he was already dead when it started. But then why think that he should be able to enter into the contract in the first place?
I wonder if this is bad enough to say that describing her action as a marriage is already contradictory. It's certainly bad enough to say that it's going to be incredibly difficult to sort through all the implications without changing one of our fundamental notions about the effect of death of a married person on the status of their marriage.
This is less interesting than some people but probably more interesting than most. Unfortunately, Barbados doesn't show up very well. Aside from Kazakstan, which was just a 10-minute drive-through, I've spent more time in any of these than I have in most of the states on my U.S. map. Barbados and Ireland were a week each, Germany and Uzbekistan were something like 6-7 weeks each, and Canada probably adds up to at least a couple weeks when you combine the various visits. The U.S. is going on three decades. For obvious reasons the 5-6 other international visits I had weren't on the map (4-5 sovereign Native American nations and the United Nations building in New York City).
create your own visited country map
or check our Venice travel guide
Update: I've added a new map, since the old one stopped working, and I've updated the link to the Visited States post, since that one got deleted accidentally during a change in location for this blog.
Will Baude has a nice discussion of a tough legal issue that would come up if vampires turned out to be real. If I were a vampire, would I have the right to make my own kid a vampire? One of the reasons this does have a point is because it deals with what parents have the right to do that they believe is in the best interests of their children but most people think is against the child's best interests. We know that I can't deliberately make my child dead and give such an excuse, but making a kid a vampire doesn't make the kid dead. It just makes the kid undead, which is to say not alive. Not alive doesn't mean dead. Remember that the binary opposites of alive/dead are not the only possibilities anymore if there are vampires. Baude concludes that a state does have the right to outlaw this, given the constitutionality of assisted suicide bans, but he also thinks a state would be able to allow it.
Maybe this should go in the forthcoming The Undead and Philosophy, in the same series as the esteemed Seinfeld and Philosophy: A Book About Everything and Nothing, The Simpsons and Philosophy: The D'oh! of Homer, The Matrix and Philosophy: Welcome to the Desert of the Real, and apparently other forthcoming ones on The Sopranos, Bob Dylan, and The Onion.
I recommend none of these. It only sounds fun. A quick browse of the three volumes already out led me to believe fairly quickly that there wasn't much philosophy of value being done in these. Only a few of the philosophers in here were people I'd heard of, also, and that's not a good sign, though some of them were big names, a couple even people I like. It still didn't seem to me to be worthwhile philosophical work.
Even worse was a growing sense that most contributors had little connection to the pop culture item they were supposedly commenting on, often oversimplifying, or in some cases even misunderstanding, what was going on in the show or movie. This isn't true of all of them, but it's true of enough to discourage me from wanting to spend much more time or any money on this series. If they do Babylon 5 or Stargate SG-1, that might be harder to resist, but at this point I'm not too thrilled about the series.
I just discovered that there's a major war between blogs that support Instapundit and those who want to dethrone him from first place in the Ecosystem at Truth Laid Bear. Truth Laid Bear includes a section on alliances, and two of them have formed on each side of this war. The Alliance of Free Blogs sounds like a nice, independent sort of organization until you discover what's required to be part of it. In addition to declaring war on an insightful commentator, members must have a fake quote attributed to Glenn Reynolds. Members are required to vote in Truth Laid Bear's weekly New Blog Showcase, guaranteeing maximum support from their side. Other dishonorable activities are encouraged, including direct lies about Instapundit (although at least these lies are required to be listed as lies).
On the other hand, those who actually support the fine commentator can join The Axis of Naughty by doing nothing other than posting something in support of Glenn Reynolds and making sure those in charge of the Axis find out about it. When I first saw the lists of alliances, I thought this one must be about those willing to align themselves with some sort of sexual impropriety, so I was surprised to find out it was simply those committed to supporting Instapundit. After comparing the two groups, and given all the insights I've gleaned from Reynolds, I see no choice but to side with the ill-named group over the ill-conceived group.
Update: It's come to my attention that most of the Alliance are conservatives who just want to get Instapundit more attention but do it in a funny way. Still, I don't like the deceit. I just had a strange quote attributed to me falsely, but I won't link it. Apparently Instapundit himself joined the Alliance, but that doesn't surprise me. He thinks he's overrated and often links to other people rather than saying something himself just so his readers will read other blogs. This is totally in character. I still support him.
This is hilarious. A British historian has argued that Queen Elizabeth is illegitimate, and so is every monarch since Edward IV (1461-1483), who was fathered by a French archer. During the five-week period that Edward could have been conceived, the man who was supposed to be his father was at war and nowhere near Edward's mother. Therefore, Edward's younger half-brother, the Duke of Clarence, should have been the legitimate king, and the rightful king now is Michael Abney-Hastings, a forklift driver in Australia. The royal family at the time had been aware of this and tried to avoid the scandal by suggesting that the conception date was earlier, which would have led to an 11-month pregnancy!
Update: For those who aren't inclined to look at the article, go to it at least to see the picture of the guy, whose whole demeanor and physical shape stand in stark contrast to the in-bred, uptight, sickly royalty who have now been shown to be illegitimate after over 500 years. Terry Pratchett is probably enjoying this.
Amazon.com has a feature today on J. Michael Straczynski, best known for Babylon 5, the best show in the history of television, but also more recently for his work in comic books, especially The Amazing Spiderman. Unfortunately, it says nothing about the new B5 project that he's working on and won't say anything about, but it does have a new short story by him that raises some very interesting ethical questions.
Update: JMS has informed his readers that Amazon moved the story after the first day. I've updated the link. In the event that anyone tried it after the move and therefore missed it, you can now read it at the new location.
Now that I've had a couple weeks to think since having seen the third episode in Peter Jackson's visualization of the best novel in history (Tolkien saw it as one novel), I've finally put together my thoughts on the overall project. I haven't seen every extended scene in The Two Towers extended edition yet (but have seen all the completely new scenes), and the final version of The Return of the King isn't done yet, but here's what I've come up with.
I should say that almost all of what I say in this is a critical evaluation of what I didn't like, focusing on the more deep and meaningful things Jackson left out or ruined. I haven't focused as much on things I did like (which I should probably do at some point just for balance, though that sort of thing is much harder for an ISTJ inspector/troubleshooter), so it might be easy to get the impression that I didn't like these movies. That would be a mistake. I enjoyed them thoroughly. The Two Towers was the most disappointing of them all, and I still look forward to going through the special features of the extended edition with a fine-toothed comb when I get it, as I did with The Fellowship of the Ring.
I also haven't bothered as much with things I was just disappointed not to see. The important stuff that really should have been there is my focus in these reflections, including significant character-twisting, huge Tolkien themes that were ignored or contradicted, and major plot points that were dismissed as unimportant but were in fact crucial to the storyline. As always, feedback and evaluation are welcome.
Pretty much everyone (with some important qualifications)! Check it out:
http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/002852.html
Thanks to Brian Weatherson for the link.
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