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A Beautiful Mind
The John Nash of Nasar's biography, while less likable, is far more fascinating and multidimensional than his cinematic counterpart; he is a draft dodger, a vicious prankster (one practical joke of Nash's involved filling a light fixture with water, which could have electrocuted a hapless victim when he turned on the light), and an arrogant braggart.
Hollywood has whitewashed much from Nash's life; besides working to dodge the Korean War draft out of fears that it would hurt his career, Nash fathered an illegitimate son whom he refused to help care for, despite the fact that his own circumstances were far better than those of the child's mother. The woman he married, Alicia Larde, is portrayed in the film as the one and only love of Nash's life; no mention is made of their 1963 divorce. (Nearly forty years later, the couple remarried.) To read Nasar's biography is to discover fascinating episodes like Nash's stint in Europe, when he attempted several times to renounce his American citizenship and obtain political asylum, and his encounters with fellow patient and Pulitzer prizewinning poet Robert Lowell in a Massachusetts mental hospital.
The book is as absorbing a history lesson as it is a story; Nasar sets Nash's life beautifully in the context of his time. Nash's bisexuality, for example, was much more of an issue then than it would be now; while today many areas have laws against discrimination based on sexual orientation, in 1954 not only was it legal for employers to dismiss a homosexual employee, but any evidence of homosexuality was sufficient grounds to deprive a government employee of security clearance. Later, the reader learns of many once-credited treatments for mental illness, like insulin injections (thought to deprive the brain of sugar and thus kill off defective brain cells), colonic irrigation, and even "fever therapy," given by inoculating patients with malaria or typhoid. Nasar's description of the politics by which Nobel prizes are awarded, a process purposely shrouded in mystery by the various committees involved, is a particularly fascinating read. Her inclusion of these and other details paints a rich historical picture that's a pleasure to read.
The one thing missing from A Beautiful Mind is, of course, the voice of John Nash himself. Where possible, Nasar plucked quotes from his writings and the recollections of friends and colleagues, but Nash himself maintained, as he put it to a New York Times reporter, "a position of Swiss neutrality" toward his biographer. Throughout the extraordinary story of Nash's life -- his rapid rise to fame, his loves, his illness, his disappearance for decades from the academic community, and his recognition at last as a Nobel laureate, one wants to ask him, "What were you thinking?" Unfortunately, it's a question Nasar was unable to answer.
One true merit of the movie, so highly altered from Nash's real story (and, considered apart from the facts, it is both moving and interesting), is that it will undoubtedly inspire many to pick up Nasar's beautifully written biography. It's time to meet the real John Nash.
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I saw the movie, and it got me wondering about the real John Forbes Nash, Jr. He's got a short (but interesting) online autobiography here, although he skips over his schizophrenic years and focuses on his academic work.
If it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features yet.
The movie was a fight club rip-off? hardly! The movie may have skipped a bunch of mr.nash's life, and watching crowe try and look smart was painful, but it wasn't bad. Thought-provoking, most unlike fight-club.
What geek isn't?
Girl geeks.
We just don't like other women
If a and b in c, and a can create b, and a can create a, and b can create b, and b cannot create a, then a created c.
My girlfriend's father is an economics professor, and was excited to see him speak this year. It seems, however, that he is a shadow of what he once was.
Apparently, his presentation was not terribly insightful. And when asked by an audience member about some of his famous work, he responded that he "doesn't remember any of that anymore."
The entire event was very awkward for everyone in attendance. Here is a man who made some brilliant discoveries in his heyday that are very useful in game theory and economics. People come to hear him speak and it only displays how his mind has gone-- he can't even relive the old glory.
mark
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -- Carl Sagan
It's quite unfortunate that it happened. So many times people's works are not judged by the content, but by who wrote it. Perhaps it's too much effort to actually peruse the work and digest the content, so people rely on arguing ad hominem on its worthiness.
It's refreshing though that he actually did earn the Nobel Prize that he deserved.
I'm not afraid of falling, it's the sudden stop at the end that frightens me.
Ron Howard has said from the very beginning of the project that the film was not a mirror of the book. He didn't make it that way for a reason. Now, his reasoning may not be good, but I think this case of book-to-film is different than most. He did not hide out somewhere pretending to make the film based on the book, he was very public about the inentions and the process.
Yeah the movie was too much of a "feel good" one for me to believe that it was all true. So I did some reading on the net about him and found out about how RAND fired him for suspected homosexuality, and his illegitimate son.
I also thought the movie portrayed him a little too "Forrest Gumpish" like he was retarded in some way but they never made any reference to it.
The bad thing thing was how the movie strung you along to believe that he was actually sane the whole time. Even the whole scene where Nash was being shot at while speeding along in the car. I know its hard to imagine, but it they made it seem real enough.
I guess when you question how a scizophrenic person can imagine such strange things and believe them, I think about when humans dream. How many strange dreams have you had that were totally unbelievable yet you didn't question them in the dream? A person with this disorder just has part of their dreams occurring during the day while awake.
I guess if they told the real story of John Nash, you'd not like him as much, and Russle Crowe wouldn't be getting so many accolades for this movie if he portrayed John Nash as a bisexual, draft dodging, dead-beat dad.
I read the biography first, then went to see the movie. I found the biography interesting and detailed...my favorite part was when Nash replied to an offer by the University of Chicago by saying he was next in line to become emperor of Antarctica. The movie *is not* the story of Nash's life. It is a Hollywood story, cleaned of all extraneous plot and simplified for the screen. Nevertheless, I enjoyed it, even with its extreme omissions and changes. The book and the movie are two entirely different things, don't go into one expecting the other.
Indeed, it is an excellent biography, and this review is right on target: the Nash of the book is far more multidimensional and interesting than any Hollywood creation could be.
Something the book draws out wonderfully is the tension between Nash's tremendous virtue as a thinker, and the fact that he was a really dislikable person for much of his life. His attitude generally seemed to be that his intelligence was the sole measure of his merit as a human being, and should open the doors of the world to him regardless of whether or not he was a pleasant or decent person. The places where he was right and wrong about this -- and how that changed during the "lost years" of schizophrenia -- is a fascinating cautionary tale for all of us fringy geeky types, whether fighting mental illness or not.
After two weeks of reading praise in the reviews, I finally went to see the movie. I must say I didn't like it, possibly because it hits too close to home.
Watching Nash's life suddenly reveal itself as an empty shell, a madman's delusion, was too painful. It creeped me out so much that I lost interest in the rest of the film and the recovery to normal life that he made. I guess I became afraid of what it would be like to lose control of your mind in this manner, a very disturbing perspective.
Needless to say, beyond the amount forced upon me by the movie, I could not sympathize with the character much because of the pride and prejudice and contempt and even, I would say, malice in his competitiveness (while he had it), that he touts.
To summarize, I felt sorry for him, but even more repulsed by him, and thus by the movie.
As for his portrayal as a mathematician, it had both parts that I liked and those that I didn't. There wasn't much specifics to it though, predictably.
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I've read the book. I've gotten through some pretty dry stuff just for pleasure, but I have to say I really don't think the book is so much "beautifully written" as "beautifully researched" or "closely footnoted". It looks like Infinite Jest on the page, but it sure doesn't read that way.
I'm sure there are people who like this kind of writing--maybe the same people who think Ken Burns understands jazz--but to me it comes off a little too dispassionate for what is basically a human interest story.
The way he was portrayed in the movie, there is absolutely no way that such a man could score a woman as beautiful as Jennifer Connelly!
This story is total balogna ( baloney ) because everyone knows that everyone that visits this site on purpose DOESN'T have a girlfriend. Nice try pal! xXxRobertDowneyJr.xXx
His presentations were pretty much always like that, even before the schizophrenia. He was a terrible speaker, disorganized and unclear, who gave the impression of babbling nonsense off the top of his head. He was also a terrible teacher, who bored his students out of their skulls. His presentations always made other mathematicians skeptical that he was actually generating any valid ideas at all -- until he managed to get them down on paper, and proved himself a genius.
So I'm not sure that a bumbling presentation now is a sign that "his mind has gone".
Girl geeks.
We just don't like other women
What about lesbian 'girl geeks'?
off topic, wtf?! If we don't learn from our past we are doomed to repeat it.
I have seen the movie, it ok , more enttertaining when you watch it as FICTION, which basically it is.
Only hollywood could turn a Bisexual, Schitophrenic, Deadbeat dad into someone you fell for, or the Nazi's propoganda machine did with that whole crew of loonies.
Its amazing, it sells so sugar coat it. I doubt many would have wanted to see Crowe portay the REAL Nash.
BUT in this country, and much of the world, the CONSUMER rules, who wants to see a movie about an asshole no matter how smart he is.
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
It sat badly with me; I'd say that if you wish to make "a film about genius and madness" (as Howard has said) without showing much of the true nature of the particular [un]fortunate vessel therefor, then don't bother giving the character the same name as a real and moderately public person.
That is to say, don't capitalise on the "true story" boost the story gets while you simultaneously try to distance yourself from the true story.
when people compare books to movies. I've never come across a single instance where someone said, "Man, the movie was SO much better than the book!" It's intellectual snobbery at its finest. So next time you go to a Mozart concert, make sure you bring the sheet music, and as you're walking out, loudly proclaim, "That performance was NOTHING like the score! The London Symphony left out critical intricacies of Mozart's work!"
It seems, however, that he is a shadow of what he once was.
And you're surprised? Nash was a mathematician. Mathematicians tend to do their best work before the they are 25 years old, and it's rare for a mathematician to make major discoveries after 40.
Mathematicians have also had a long history of mental disorders; as my supervisor once said, "you can count on your fingers the number of sane great 20th century mathematicians". (which is just slightly worrying...)
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
in a Nutshell.
Such is the infinite Grace of Popeye.
Have you ever thought that sometimes you just don't want to talk about the past anymore? What was your girlfriend's father hoping for a 'Nobel' quality rant on genius, thus validation of the intellectual superiority of all present? If you want to move into the future think, if not collect baseball cards and talk to collegues about how cool you were at university.
Everybody knows that beautiful, attractive women invariably go for the guys that abuse them most. :)
What about them?
I've got such a friend. It's great fun sitting in a bar together and trying to spot and hit on the hottest girl in the crowd.
Besides, she's almost been able to encourage me to try sex with a male gay friend of hers. Perhaps this will be the weekend... who knows?-)
They couldn't figure out whether to be a romance or a documentary, and so it ended up being too empty and shallow for a romance and not focused/interesting enough for a documentary or biography type of narration.
Very disappointing.
This is a great movie from what I hear, but it makes one simple mistake:
It makes people with mental illness think they can also be like Nash and 'fight back'.
This isn't the case, and gives people an unrealistic look into the life of someone who is mentally ill. As an advocate, I find it kind of hard when the public is shown a movie like this. They think... "why can't `they` all do like he did?"
A mistake indeed. Not that a story where someone overcomes a great hurdle is bad, but it's dangerous in this case.
Next movie: A person who has AIDS, but fights it and somehow beats it. Then everyone will think it's possible.
[Before you flame me, I'm not alone on this issue. Also, if you want to flame me, look around and see why someone like me has to become an advocate.]
Get your Unix fortune now!
ken burns is directly responsible for every MF that conplains that there are no good vantages to see the drummer from the non-smoking section. FOAD.
While others like Andrew Sullivan probably disagree, I think his bisexuality was intentionally kept out the film because the producers of the movie did not want to associate bi/homosexuality with mental illness.
Brian Ellenberger
I'm about half way through the book.
Von Neuman plays a role in the book.
Von Neuman invented the min-max algorithm which
is widely used in artificial intelligence game
playing programs such as chess. Nash's equilibrium
point is supposed to be a powerful generalisation
on min-max, but I don't see it often used in A.I. programs.
Also in the book Von Neuman flips off Nash as being a pompous grad student.
Nash gets the final laugh when he WINS the Nobel prize
and Von Neuman doesn't.
The founders of Artificial Intelligence John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky
were classmates of Nash and have cameos in the book.
Later in his career Nash becomes something of
a computer hacker, but I haven't reached that part of
the book yet.
Both the book and movie are rare lterary depictions of grad school life.
They capture the stresses of science/engineering nerds.
Also things have changed since the 1950s and now,
but not as much as you'd think.
I am clinically depressed with psychotic episodes and I can tell you that you're plain wrong.
You can fight the illness! Take the fucking drugs, participate in the therapy and accept that the rest of the world is filled with insensitive morons. The last one is the most important realisation.
I whole hearteddly agree. The prose reads like a narrative. I read the first quarter of it last night - and it kept me awake through the night. And though have not dug into the footnotes yet, I'm sure they will be as informative as the description of John's grandparent's wedding in the 1890s.
I completely agree... while Fight Club might not be as profound as, say, A Clockwork Orange, it certainly is a worthwhile commentary on socitey.
Regardless, it is also a well filmed, engaging movie with some truly enlightened moments and effects (and example of the latter being the walk through Ikea catalog)
_sig_ is away
Excuse me? I thought that particular canard was debunked many years ago!
p
http://www.adl.org/presrele/HolNa_52/2968_52.as
I am an academic economist and saw Nash give two lectures a couple of years ago. The one talk was not bad, he was trying to pick up where he left off but didn't realize that some of his "new" ideas had already been developed by others while he was "absent." The second talk was pretty nutty, although not entirely out of the range of the nutty ideas you sometimes see in economic seminars.
Here is one example of what he missed out on while he was mad. He had figured out that computers are now useful for numerical solutions to equations that would have been very difficult to characterize. However, his model had some greek letters in it and he thought that a computer could not ("of course") print out letters of a non-latin alphabet -- he was thinking of a simple typewriter style printer.
water, which could have electrocuted a hapless victim when he turned on the light)
Probably nonsense. If the 'victim' weren't actually touching the fixture in question, (i.e tuyrning on via a wall switch) there is no possibiliy of electrocution. If the victim were touching the fixter it would require all of the following to occur:
The media have created this illusion that you can be electrocuted by being anywhere in the same county with water and electricity. This just isn't the case. The electricty must somehow flow through you, and it doesn't do this unless you are a path between 'hot' and neutral or ground. The classic example of the radio falling into the bathtub is probably harmless unless you touch the faucet or the drain, for example.
"that's not encryption - it's a new perl script that I'm working on..." - from some Matrix parody
Forrest Gump
The Godfather
Some people say 2001. I'd argue for Jurassic Park.
The problem is that the book itself is full of evidence that this picture of genius is simplistic in the extreme. While Nash was there, Princeton was full of first-rate intellects --- geniuses by any yardstick --- who shared nothing of Nash's sociopathic nature. Einstein was reserved and eccentric, but good-natured. Von Neumann was articulate and cosmopolitan, and heavily involved in politics. Godel (before his paranoia set in) was sophisticated and urbane. Each of these men easily outrank Nash. None of them shared his tendency to strut around proclaiming his own genius or his habit of sneering at the worthlessness of other minds. And yet both the film and the book push all the old myths of genius. When I was a grad student at Princeton the main consequence of this myth, as far as I could tell, was that everyone had to put up with jerks who thought they could induce genius in themselves by being an asshole to everyone else.
This was not a case of Nash being unwilling to talk about old work because he has bigger and better plans. He seemed incapable of fully understanding his old research and incapable of making any new headway. This wasn't a presentation where people wanted a "Nobel" performance. Basically, it was as though this guy wasn't the same person as the one who made the discoveries. Certainly not his fault by any means, but it was difficult to see.
mark
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -- Carl Sagan
But I've seen the movie, and I found it to be very informative. Just about every person I've ever met that was exceptionally intelligent, even if appearing totally normal on the outside, had something greatly odd and different about them. Usually, the smarter they are the stranger. I've found this to be true in many cases. It seems to me that, if you are blessed with high intellegence, you are at the same time getting something else taken away from you to make up for it, and it seemed like the movie portrayed just that kind of image about it, and the book makes him yet stranger.
I would suggest a movie on Erdos or about Ramanujan.
And Kevin Spacey to play the first. And Ben Kingsley the second. He played Gandhi, after all...
It's just a BloJJ
So in other words he's almost as nuts as Larry Wall...
John Nash never received a Nobel Prize. The only "real" Nobel prizes are the ones in chemistry, peace, literature, physics, and medicine/physiology. Those were the ones established by Alfred Nobel in his will, and first awarded in 1901. The Nobel prize for Economics was established about 70 years later, in 1968. The Bank of Sweden created a foundation to award, "The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel". It was basically a marketting ploy to celebrate it's 300th anniversary. :)
While the selection process is done similarly (the Economics award is done by the Royal Swedish Academy of Science, which also awards the prizes for chemistry and physics), the awards are quite distinct. Some physicians will complain bitterly if one mentions the Nobel Prize in Economics, since economics is not a "real" science.
is far more multidimensional and interesting than any Hollywood creation could be.
I would say that Ed Harris portrayed Pollock right to the point. Beautiful Mind just was not a good movie.
http://dtum.livejournal.com
Disclaimer: I read the book a couple of years ago, so much of this is from memory.
Irony: People who discover the book because of the movie tend to be more critical of the movie.
I thoroughly enjoyed both the book and the movie. Sure I was aware of things that got left out, but as we all know from for example LOTR, when movies are made from books choices have to be made. I really appreciate the way them movie chose to emphasize the importance of relationships in Nash's li fe, as troublesome as they may have been at times.
Nash's bisexuality: The book shows this ambiguously, not as a well-developed preference. It reflects Nash's narcissism more than anything else.
Nash's divorce: Although they did separate for a short time after the divorce, they lived together for 25 years before getting remarried. When they were remarried last summer, Nash referred to the event as a retraction of the divorce, like a journal would retract a publication error.
Terry Gross interviewed Sylvia Nasar on last night's Fresh Air (Real Audio). She was strongly supportive of the choices made while writing the screenplay. She suggested that if more emphasis had been put on Nash's sexuality or political views, it would have detracted from the more important stuff, ie, Nash's lifelong relationship with Alicia and his descent into schizophrenia.
...and his recognition at last as a Nobel laureate...
The Nobel Prize in Economics is given for lifetime achievement, unlike the other Nobel Prizes which are granted for particular discoveries. All Nobel laureates in Economics must wait to be recognized at last. The Economics prize was not setup by Nobel himself, but by The Bank of Sweden in the 1960s. They chose the different rule.
Try The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for more info.
So this movie is primed to win the Oscar over Lord of the Rings. After the jingoistic trash of Black Hawk Down, a disgusting propaganda film, we get this watered down crap from Ron "What em worry?" Cunningham.
Just goes to prove that all the money for art is in Hollywood, but none of the talent.
Films like 'A Beautiful Mind' are not meant to be complete biographies and they're not even meant to be documentaries -- they are meant to tell a story and to be entertaining. It would be impossible to depict the events with complete accuracy, so they might as well make something that people will enjoy.
Art not completely accurately reflecting life is not a new issue, no matter what the medium. You think that thousands of years ago animals looked like what we see drawn on cave walls? Even one's best memories of the most recent things that one has witnessed won't be true to life, so don't expect 2 hours of film that is responsible for recouping the cost of its production to be.
Actually, I would think that the radio falling into the bathtub would work because tap water does conduct electricity well. Thats why all those hair blow dryers have built-in surge protectors to blow just in case.
The last part about the radio (or other electric device) falling into a tub is not quite right. Depending on the water in your area there can be quite a bit of mineral content that would make the water conductive. Even if this is not the case, the stuff (ions, etc.) that comes of the human body in the water will make it conductive. If you don't believe that then give it a shot.
Let me know what happens if you can....
"It's comin' back around again..." -RATM
1. The victim would have to touch a "hot" potion of the fixture, or be connected to a hot portion of the fixture via moisture that had acquired enough contaminants to be conductive (pure water doesn't conduct electricity very well)
Just a nit, but I doubt he used "pure" water in his practical joke. He probably got it from a tap, and tapwater often contains enough ions to conduct electricity just fine. In fact I remember a demonstration from high school chemistry where water straight from the tap conducted enough electricity to light a light bulb.
Timothy's text isn't Latin-1 compliant; most likely due to his use of a Microsoft editor to write his article. For Linux users like myself please turn off the smart quotes if you insist on using a Microsoft editor to write your articles.
I/O Error G-17: Aborting Installation
"[...] a brilliant young man who doesn't quite fit in, ignores his classes, is gawky with women and, above all, is consumed with a desire for an original idea."
Woah! Sounds like a few people around here!
An optimist believes we live in the best world possible; a pessimist fears this is true.
"It take 9 months to bear a child, no matter how many women you assign to the job."
"J. Edgar Hoover, what a fuckhead he was, when he died they found out he was a Transvestite, they said, 'ah, that explains his weird behaviour'. Yeah, Fuckin Weirdo Transvestite!"
darius
Ironically, one of Crowe's first leading roles (The Sum of Us) was a gay man and his comically over-supportive father. Haven't seen it yet, but will someday...
You say that you felt sorry for him, but repulsed at the same time.
The movie got a reaction out of you, and apparently a strong one at that. I think that in a way, that was the intention, and by getting that reaction out of you, it accomplished it's objective.
I, too, had many of the same feelings toward Nash. However, by actually having those feelings, I believe the movie was good. If I didn't feel that way towards the character, I would consider the movie "a bad movie".
In essence, I think the movie ROCKED! 'Grats to Russell Crowe and the rest of production for making me both sympathize, admire and loathe Mr. Nash. What a ride.
Gotta try everything once, i guess.
...the movie, so highly altered from Nash's real story...
A life is made up of years that could never be represented in either a book or a movie. A life is an order higher in content. The fault of the movie, as with so many things, is what was left out, but such ommisions are made in the book as well. To understand all of Nash's story would require living his life.
Faulting the movie altering Nash's life is ignoring the requirements of the medium. Things were selectively removed to tell a single story.
More can always be told, but would the movie be better for including these details or would it cloud the central story. Brevity shouldn't be confused with inaccuracy.
To do a decent treatment of most books, the film would have to be many hours long. Some (but not all, of course) of the better transitions from print to film tend to come from short stories. A Boy and His Dog comes to mind as a good example, IMO.
I can tell you the meaning of life,
but you have to promise not to laugh.
Plus, a 120V house-current is unlikely to electrocute most people. It's not fun, but not usually fatal.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
John Forbes Nash Jr., a mathematical genius whose doctoral thesis earned him a Nobel Prize -- and a schizophrenia patient whose illness kept him out of the academic community for decades.
Poor guy. I didn't know that sort of thing was included in the Nobel prize package.
However I felt Sylvia Nasar's defense of the film's intentional disregard of John Nash's sexual history to be disingenuous. Yes he may be bi or gay or straight or it may have been a mistake or experimentation or whatever but the arrest had a profound affect on his life, one certainly relevant to the film.
Frankly the author lost a great deal of creditability with me when she broke down in tears describing Nash's recent remarriage to his wife and kept babbling about how wonderful and beautiful a person he is. While biographers doubtless have opinions on their subjects I've never heard one get so maudlin or express such overt and unconditional adulation.
It will be interesting to someday compare Nasar's Nash biography with another perhaps more objective one. In the meantime both this book and the film appear deeply flawed by their attempts to present overly sympathetic views of their subject.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
You didn't think fight club was thought-provoking?!?!?
And "Animal Farm" was a book about pigs, right?
Now wait a minute. Suddenly it's OKAY to not tell the whole story and make a movie from a book and not put everything in because one's a book and a movie can never include everything from a book (let alone this guys REAL story). Your egregious duplicity is undeniably annoying!
loudly proclaim, "That performance was NOTHING like the score! The London Symphony left out critical intricacies of Mozart's work!"
I would also be good to yell "Yeah! Classical!" at the symphony the way people yell "Rock & Roll!" at a rock concert.
Some spoilers follow, but not many.
I am paraphrasing here what Philip K. Dick said about the movie from memory:
I have just seen the rough cut of Blade Runner. It is terrific! It has nothing to do with the book. What my book will become is a futuristic alien shoot-em-up. This is just as well, because my book would have made a terrible movie. It is full of Deckard's introspection and wondering about humanity. But a book is something to be read, and a movie is an experience that moves.
IMO, the book is excellent. I came to reading Dick as a result of seeing Blade Runner. The book isn't much like the movie. There is Deckard, and there are Replicants (called Andys in the book), and Deckard kills them, and there's a Rachel who's a borderline, and both book and movie approach the question of what is humanity, though from complementary directions. The main plot set of the book (A post-apocalyptic world, Mercerism, the ethic of taking care of animals and artificial animals as fakes, Sydney's catalogue with the E for extinct species, the attempt by the Andys who control the media to discredit Mercerism, the schism between the thought processes of the Andys who cannot understand empathy and cannot take part in polycephalic fusion, the Ezekiel-like tomb world) is almost completely absent from the movie, except for some bits about manufactured animals. Also absent are many subplots (the phantom police agency, the concept of fake fakes, Deckard's wife and the Penfield mood organ, and the [shudder] scene with the spider). Nevertheless, the book is excellent if you don't expect it to be like the movie.
Seems to me like the best way to get a Golden Globe or Academy Award or one of those other 10,000 self-congradulating things is to play an eccentric genius or loveable mentally-handicapped person. After all, is there anyway easier to examine humanity than to observe someone who is extremely polarized one direction in the head? Yeesh. A Beautiful Mind was a well done movie and well acted movied but cliche in plot (even if it was based on a true story).
My pick for favorite movie? Probably "Amelie." Though a bit long, its sweet without being too saccerine and Jean-Pierre Jeunet's style is just incredible.
That is like comparing "Lawnmower Man" the movie to "Lawnmower Man" the short story.
The are nothing alike. A data items are shared, but that is about it. They are two different stories. Two different works.
I would recommend that anyone read "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep", the Philip K. Dick novel that Bladerunner was supposedly based on. I would recommend that they read the book before they see the movie, as it is easier to ignore the book while watching the movie, than it is to try to ignore the movie while reading the book.
Plus, a 120V house-current is unlikely to electrocute most people.
That all depends on the contact resistance where the wire meets the skin, and that resistance becomes awfully low when the skin is wet. It's not the voltage that kills you, it's the current generated by that voltage.
Of course, the original poster is most likely correct that there is little danger of electrocution in the "water-in-the-fixture" situation. You do need a path for current to follow, after all...
The Fresh Air program segment with the interview with Sylvia Nasar is here (RealAudio).
___
Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum.
The only thing the movie did was to show that schizophrenia is not multiple personality disorder and that schizophrenia is "real."
There is at least a twenty year span of Nash's life where the movie represents the love of his wife, the avoidance of drugs, and counciling was all he needed to do. The never updates the 1950's view of psychology and only mentions in a single sentence at the end that "newer drugs" actually made it possible for Nash to have a coherent life.
There should be several people who read slashdot that should have knowlege of schizophrenia. What do you think?
Many of the posters here have mentioned that Nash was a "bisexual, schizophrenic, deadbeat dad" not deserving the lovable storyline. This really hacks me off! Have you people learned nothing? Bisexuality is a natural fact, nothing to be ashamed of..and nothing to be scorned. Also, schizophrenia is a mental disorder, again something not to be stigmantized but something to be dealt with as a disease. Dead-beat dad? Well ok but that guy was bat-out-of-his-gourd for most of his life so maybe his priorities werent exactly in order. In his day, there was no viable treatment for schizophrenia, just a bunch of pseudoscience mumbo-jumbo that probably just made things worse.
That fact is the man, flaws and all, made some major contributions to mathematics despite serious personal difficulty.
Why is it that the true life story of this guy sounds really fascininating and bizzare, yet I have no desire at all to see the movie since I can already predict the way it will be processed into a predictable set of cliches.
I would have liked to see a director like David
Lynch or Altman direct this. It would have been a lot more interesting.
Or did His Royal Semantic Majesty mean Physicists?? Those 2 are quite different streams of science, you know.
The Nash Equilibrium is a very strange beast. It's a solution to the non-zero-sum game corresponding generally to a solution to the zero-sum game, but nastier. Interestingly, a number of the workers in Game Theory, in ESS Theory, and more generally in sociobiology have had similar mental illnesses. I suspect it has something to do with the nature of the problems game theorists like to work on.
As a person who graduated with almost a dual-degree in math and psychology, I was interested to read Naser's recounting of Nash's story. About a quarter of the way through, however, I am having trouble continuing.
The book is a dedicated biography and reads a lot more like a text book than "the actual story of his life." (emphasis on "story"). It is not a very easy read, even for someone used to reading biographies (especially of mathematicians) and pscyhology textbooks.
Be forewarned: It is an interesting book, but not an easy one to tackle.
On a completely different note, one problem I had with the movie (of many, I did not think very highly of the movie) is the phrase "Based on a true story." I think that a much better phrase would have been "Inspired from a true story." I think that the English language, and Hollywood, have agreed on what these two phrases mean. Having seen the movie, and having known a bit of Nash's life, I think that "inspired" is a much closer description of what the movie is.
It is a nitpick,but an important one, especially for people out there who are not going to research Nash's exact life.
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
Dead Man Walking, the book, is half about the two convicts Sister Helen Prejean "adopts" on death row. Although not a professional writer, Prejean's story is quite interesting, even though I had no previous interest about capital punishment. The other half of the book (interspersed) is a listing of facts and figures and data about which states have more prisons, effectiveness of different procedures, etc. I began to skip those parts. Overall, I liked the book, even with it's faults.
The movie is totally different. Where the book focused on facts and a literal storytelling, the film concentrated entirely on the Sister's relationship with the death-row inmate (a composite of the two real people.) Susan Sarandon rightly won the Oscar for this role.
The movie is emotional, the book is factual, but they both fit together perfectly as two viewpoints on the same story. Amazing!
(1) if McDonalds decides tomorrow to cut a dollar off the price of a Big Mac and leaves all the other menu items unchanged, they will sell more Big Macs (relative to the other items on the menu) than they do now.
(2) If McDonald's doubles the price of the Big Mac they will sell fewer Big Macs (relative to the other menu items) than they do now.
(3) If McDonald's cuts the price in half their outlets, people will flock to those outlets; the ones with the lower price will get more business (relative to the ones with the higher price) than before the pricing change.
Care to argue with any of those? I thought not. :-)
Getting out of demand management and more into the realm of politics, one thing economists know pretty well is how to create a shortage (legally fix prices below the market level) or a glut (legally fix prices above market). If you tax something you get less of it, if you subsidize something you get more of it. So rent control laws tend to aggravate a shortage of housing (relative to what there would have been), and increases in the minimum wage law tend to increase unemployment (relative to what it would have been). These effects can be measured, and have been, and experience bears out the theory.
Economics is a real science.
I play Nerd-Folk!
lucky for you you're a nobody & nobody cares what you've ever done
They may even be willing to mail it to you, or barring that deliver it to your nearest branch if it's anywhere in the county system.
Damnit I AM acting my age. I'm 15 in hex!
Girl geeks.
We just don't like other women
we don't? crap. so I guess I'm a lousy girl geek. such is life.
By the time Nash was awarded the prize von Neumann (yes, two n's!) had been dead for almost forty years.
By the way (completely off topic), your writing style is really awful. A piece of advice: try to keep sentence n related to sentence n-1 as often as possible. It facilidates things for readers quite a bit.
The question is -HOW?
How do you get work done without being eccentric?
Feynmann rightly noted that thinking about things requires long uninterruptable periods of time. He compared thinking to building a house of cards.
Other "geniuses" have agreed. (They are also almost universal in saying that there is nothing particularly special about their brains or way of thinking. Einstein was quite adament about this.)
The question in my mind is: How do you do it?
I'm addicted to thinking, but I also value the happiness of the people around me. Feynmann was okay with declaring himself irresponsible in order to make time for his intellectual persuits, but what is the father of a needy daughter to do?
Torvalds has two kids, but I get the impression that he neglects them, given the way that he holds his behavior in contempt ("I'm not a nice person; I'm a hard-boiled bastard who doesn't give a damn about anything but the technology", or something like that). If I recall right, Feynmann had his kids after he did his major works.
Einstein is famous for rocking a cradle while working on a paper. That's relatively easy; I've written architecture on paper while rocking Sakura's when she was just 1 month old. I'm sure anyone could; 1 mth olds don't really DO much. Einstein has attributed much of his ability to work on problems to time available at the patent office.
So, can you think a lot and Love your Neighbors at the same time? I'm not really all that sure. I think you just have to wait for steady blocks of time to show up, or start fucking people over with an angry temper.
A flaw in the novel, though some may quibble and tell us that is 'literacy liberty' is that Nobel never wished to have a prize given to a Mathematician, due this failed relationship to one.
Consequently, the equivalent of a Nobel prize in Mathematics is called the Fields Medal.
And yes you have guessed it, the Nobel foundation has nothing to do with it.
I think that's a very unfair reading of Nasar's writing.
She makes it clear throughout the book that many of Nash's colleagues were also geniuses, and that there were all very different from him and from each other. Some were also assholes; some were extraordinarily generous. She gives them their credit both as being geniuses and as not all fitting the same "genius" mold.
Nasar does make the argument that Nash's particular genius and his particular personality were tied together, which is almost certainly true. Certainly Nash was a driven, competitive, egotistical fellow -- and that had a great deal to do with what problems he chose to tackle (usually the ones that would grab the most attention if solved), and how he tackled them (angrily, obsessively, jealous of others working on the same problem).
I didn't read that as anything other than a description of Nash. It is one model of one genius, and certainly Nasar does not present it as a model for all geniuses everywhere. I think your reaction may be based on a (very reasonable!) general irritation with the myth of the genius, and what you read into the book based on that irritation.
As for the movie, I haven't seen it and can't comment on it.
What Stella used, I'm not sure, but it looks fine for me reading in Mozilla (under both Mac OS and Linux).
I don't use any MS editors, at least on my own machines.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
I really have a low tolerance for this sort of thing. I'm not going to talk about my own diagnosis, because that comes across as whiny. However, in 1999 my ex-wife and I started what was only the second program in the United States to teach English to residents who were not native speakers of English. Most of these were schizophrenics.
Our success was phenomenal, at least prima facie. The discharge rate amongst our students was twice the discharge rate of the hospital at large. Most of these were long-term residents. All students who attended more than one class achieved dramatically improved functioning. One woman had a chronic undifferentiated schizophrenic who also had a seizure disorder, had been there for four years, and was understandable neither in English nor in her native Spanish came to one lesson, and after that, we recieved reports that she was much more understandable. It was a very simple class, with a simple "Hi, how are you" dialogue. She went out and enlisted other residents to practice the dialog with her.
Now, of course, this remains at the anecdotal level. The program was effectively killed by administration after a couple of months, though this was after we had gotten the Florida Department of Children and Families volunteer of the year award.
It could also be said that I'm biased. We did, of course, recieve reports from other people who weren't part of the program, but as someone who was a research scientist for 13 years and has been active in the skeptic movement, I am aware of those dangers. On the other hand, there is also a danger of dismissing something casually. In any event, I don't think it can be rationally said that it isn't at least promising.
One would, ideally, try this sort of thing at a larger scale, doing extensive followups to test the long-term effects if any and also trying to find out just what it was about the teaching that was effective if it was. What we did was a mixture of the European Direct method, in which both my ex and I got trained and certified, and the Dartmouth method, in which I had taught German some years earlier. Both methods belong to the class of "intensive" methods, and perhaps subjecting a schizophrenic to that kind of highly social rigor has unexpected side-effects. I don't know, but it would be interesting to study.
My best guess is that we could do a hell of a lot better than we're doing. As the administrative reaction highlights, people don't want this. They want to look at the "green monkey" and go eeeew and put him into a warehouse run by sadists. (Up until 1991, at this hospital, any resident who tried to bite a staff member had all their teeth extracted as punishment. If anything, Ken Kesey pulled his punches. The reality is way worse.)
To talk about the dangers of giving people "false hope" seems to me a rationalization. Sure, Hollywood isn't realistic. The guy in Awakenings, in real life, didn't do much but masturbate. OK. But still, the danger of squelching real hope which spurs real effort that sometimes works is much greater.
I don't know if the author of the book got this confusion, but it doesn't help to promulgate it.
Sociopathy (nowadays usually called Antisocial Personality Disorder, which I think is too euphemistic) and schizophrenia are completely different things. Schizophrenia is a thought disorder, diagnosed on Axis I. Sociopathy is a personality disorder, diagnosed on Axis II.
Sociopathy doesn't seem to be related to genius at all, except that sociopaths tend to be pretty intelligent. Schizophrenia, or at least schizoaffective disorder, and manic depression (which often has schizoaffective features in manic and mixed states), on the other hand, do appear to be related to genius.
I would go so far as to say that the cluster B personality disorders, of which sociopathy is one, aren't mental illnesses at all, but rather styles of dealing with others. It is certainly possible that someone could develop sociopathy as a result of being tormented for being schizophrenic, but it could happen for boatloads of other reasons as well.
Bash Timothy or MS (which we all love to do) and get a +1 moderation regardless of the topic?
Why wasn't this moderated as -1 Offtopic?
True enough. But since 120V house current is likely on a 15 or 20 amp breaker, you're still unlikely to die. You can get burned pretty nicely, but not likely a pine box.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
Moderators - please show some common sense.
(and if I may brag a bit, my Erdös number is no greater than 4.)
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
Nash is (was) extraordinary in a number of ways: a genius, a mathematician, a paranoid schizophrenic. Probably none of us will ever understand what any one of those is like: put them together in one person and you have a total mystery.
Instead of approaching Nash head-on, the book looks at the effect he has on the people around him. You can get a strong feeling for what it must be like to know Nash by seeing how more "normal" people react to him. His wife, even after divorcing him, takes him into her house and takes care of him. Princeton maintain a safe stable environment for him to wander in. Friends and colleagues fight to get him the recognition that they feel he deserves. The sacrifices these people make are uplifting; the recovery they help bring about is heartbreaking. That is the real story of the book. Perhaps not a great theme for /., but important
nonetheless.
...as an intellectual in the book than Russell Crowe is in the movie?
...here.
Is "peace" a "real science" ?
Please dont take this the wrong way *shields face*, but can you propagate the vids please? We need more of the excellent stuff. I hope someone on site was in a/v class because it would be counter-productive to release bad quality. Please don't be angry...
very good point. you're repeating it right now, aren't you.
_________________
EBAY SAFETY TIPZ!
nt
Go See "I Am Sam".
thumbs up for that! my younger brother is also rapid cycling bipolar, and after I got out of the movie I thought "I hope that kid never sees this one." We've had plenty of problems getting him to take his meds, and it doesn't take much convincing to make him think he can go without them. Sure, fighting back is definetly part of it, as is taking the drugs carefully. The movie made it seem like Nash gave up on the meds and just decided to go it on his own, which just isn't practical. It's really a rather irresponsible portrayal of that facet of mental illness.
I find it hard to feel less than suspicious when I have NEVER seen a book rated less than 7/10 on slashdot, and yet, there's always a link to a commission-dolling book store.
Sorry slashdot, but you've finally become your own worst enemy.
I will agree that the depth of information is terrific. This is the first biography I've read that wasn't assigned in a class. A fascinating story. Definately see the movie. If not for the Nash story, but to understand a glimpse of what it might be like to have schizophrenea(sp?).
My disagreement in the book being written well stems from the constant re-referencing the author uses. I suppose if I was ten and needed to be reminded of what was stated previously and in what time frame, I could forgive the writing style. But, this is done constantly. I just hope it was the editor trying to be helpful. The style is so irritating, that I had to put it down. Fortunately for the author, I wanted to learn more about Nash and I kept picking it back up. Writing style aside, I really am impressed with the information she was able to put together about this amazing character.
Regarding the movie, Hollywood did a great job of putting together an enjoyable film. It should serve to peak viewers' interest learning more about such an interesting mathematician.
There was an interview with the author on Fresh Air via NPR a couple years ago and a couple other shows just recently. You should be able to find more easy information listenting to some of the streams at npr.org.
Speaking as a pseudo intellectual mad person (Engineering not mathematics and bipolar not schizophrenia), the John Nash story suggests to me
:)) short of nobel prize winning stature).
1/ Review your college years in the vain hope for something worth remembering (obviously (just
2/ Try to think your way out of mental illness. [but keep taking the tablets]
http://www.geocities.com/totierne
Be Free: Free Software Tuition
After seeing the movie several weeks back(I thought it sucked), I found an old review of this book in the mathematics zine "Ferment." This review pretty much dismantles every shred of purported clueness in Sylvia Nasar's book.
t m# RH
http://www.maths.ex.ac.uk/~mwatkins/zeta/nash.h
It's not such a big deal, actually, since the paper isn't very great. It's nice to see people online who even know what stuff like that is. Actually, I was surprised at the number of people who replied to the Beautiful Mind story. It's a lot more popular than I expected, even with a community like /.
:-)
Why can't they amend prize categories without stigma? Science changes.
However, if they *did* have a Computer category, and gave one to Bertrand Meyer, I would just puke. His reasoning has more holes than a Taliban tank.
Table-ized A.I.
Ah, but the current threshold for killing a person is somewhere between 70 and 100 mA. Under the right circumstances, a plain old wall socket has enough juice to toast your ass. :-)
With this in mind, and being clinically depressed at the time, I decided to ask myself what basic grounds one could use to establish trust in a relationship - kind of like Descartes's decision to ask himself the same sort of question in relationship to reality, to bore down until he arrived at the answer to life, the universe and everything.
I had to close it off after I concluded there was no basic grounds for any such trust, except for trust itself. The effort almost drove me into paranoia, until I had the sense to back out.
In short, anyone doing such thought-experiments with themselves, in the context of game theory, is taking a risk with themselves. It's bad luck if they lose it, but it's a species of risk similar to what test pilots undertake.
John Milnor, who knew Nash at Princeton in in 50's, says:
http://www.ams.org/notices/199810/milnor.pdf
For those who didn't read the book, some examples illustrating the more colorful sides of Nash's personality:
-His arrest in California, while working for RAND, was put in motion by exposing himself to an undercorver cop in a public bathroom.
-He threw Alicia Larde to the ground at a pic-nic and placed his foot over her throat to boast his dominance over her.
-As a teenager he constructed bombs with his friends (leading to the death of one).
I am not saying these examples make Nash a bad person. Instead I am trying to point out that there is much more to his character than the movie reveals. In my opinion the movie hardly reveals who Nash trully was.
Hope it reads better for you now! :)
I ought to put in a slashcode feature request to make those curlies more obvious; that mozilla makes them look fine for me obviously isn't exactly a help.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Anyone care to comment on the ability to break codes just by looking at pages and pages of numbers? I would guess that very few people possess that kind of mental processing power...
In the actual book, rather than the () summary, the idea was that Nash would take the bulb out of a bowl-shaped fixture and fill the bowl with water, immersing the contact. Hapless victim #1 comes along and, noticing no light after flipping the switch, tries to change the lightbulb. He sticks his hand in the water and gets zapped.
Very nasty. Fortunately, he never managed to catch anyone.
You can order a videotape of a recent interview with John Nash here:
http://www.ideachannel.com/Economics.htm
("Game Theory Applications")
It's not about Nash, but about game theory.
Video clip: http://www.ideachannel.com/Media/D1195.rm
No, animal farm was about commies, and yeah, fight club may have been very thought provoking and I missed watching the second half because the first half put me to sleep.
Sure enough. And, under the right circumstances, a bunny rabbit can kill you as well.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
Point taken. :-)
"with nasty, sharp pointed teeth!!!"
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.