Lucas presents the Gungans as a violent and irrational race. They live underwater and are thus symbolically associated with the subconscious/id (the OTHER race on Naboo represents the ego if we stop to think). It was hardly accidental that the Gungans formed the "good" army in the first film.
So having Jar Jar propose the motion makes thematic sense. Scratch that.... it is the ONLY thing that makes sense. The point is that Palpatine COULDN'T have counted on Padme. Lucas expects his audience to pick up on this and realize the irony.
Incidentally, for those curious souls who aren't willing to dismiss Star Wars as a piece of popular fluff, the same logic tells us why Kamino is a water planet.
Lucas is making an allusion to the scene in ESB where Yoda raises Luke's ship. If I remember correctly, we even have the same music playing in both scenes.
Luke senses the good that remains in Vader. The Emperor can't sense Luke because he represents pure evil. Good is aware of good, evil is aware of evil. In the new trilogy, only the Trade Federation is aware of the existence of Sidious because it is the allegorical representation of greed. The Jedi Council is blind to the power of evil because it is represents everything that the Sith do not - evil, hatred, greed, lust etc.
But not for long... because the new films are all about this fall from grace. Anyone else do a double-take at the cognitive dissonance of seeing Yoda fight alongside a bunch of stormtroopers? Lucas had me grinning ear to ear!
First of all, I think you're dead on with 1, 4 and 6. But I believe 5 is intentional, and seeing what Lucas is doing here actually makes TPM watchable for me in spite of the the flat acting.
Padme abandons diplomacy for war. Qui Gon attacks Maul (and dies). Obi Wan is rash and impulsive. And we don't even get the happy ending until everyone (including Jar Jar) is literally "disarmed".
So it doesn't surprise me that the Jedi are giving way to arrogance and violence. They HAVE to for the first trilogy to make thematic sense. What surprises me is that reviewers continue to interpret the film as some bland battle between Good and Bad guys instead of understanding that Jedi and Sith are simply allegorical representations of love and hatred, etc..
I find ihis "post-hoc" argument odd - it implies that Lucas "got it right" by rehashing generic adventure cliches (an even better critique if we can slam Lucas for stealing them from OUR favourite book/author/genre). This is wishful thinking; it ignores the way ANH signals the themes of the entire trilogy. A few examples:
Q: Why on earth does ANH have so many references to "The Searchers"? A: Quest for family theme of a man who sets out to kill a family member, and ends up redeeming himself through his love of them.
Q: Why do all of the characters who attack end up losing? A: Aggression always loses. Always.
Q: Why does the film end with a visual reference to Triumph of the Will? A: See point above. The victory built on military strength is illusionary.
I find it much harder to believe that Lucas stumbled across meaning in his films than simply to accept his stuff at face value.
O Brother Where Art Thou may be based on The Odyssey, but claiming that makes it a great film is like saying that Strange Brew is brilliant simply because it's based on Hamlet. I found the film unintelligible.
And frankly, when it comes to literary allusions I'll take Lucas anyday. Remember Anakin's opening line to Padme in Episode I? Sounds to me like an allusion to Odysseus and the Sirens. If we catch the reference we know what Lucas signals throughout in various subtle ways (come on folks, that blanket is RED!): Anakin's attraction to Padme is what leads him to his destruction. It doesn't hurt that Anakin's story is also that of the quest for family, much like Homer's.
Barbs about films being "grossly misunderstood by the masses" fly a lot better when people have some clue about the films they're actually critiquing.
That if he is really that any economic losses associated with piracy are completely dwarfed by the economic costs imposed on the United States by its ludicrous
The only piracy I see is in paying upwards of $400,000 US through tariffs to save each job in the steel industry, or forcing homeowners to fork out an additional $1500 average per house because someone decided to lock down lumber imports from Canada.
Frankly, the costs of software piracy look fairly trivial in comparison.
What clinched it for me was the recording capabilities of the Nomad. I needed something portable to record large high-quality.wav files. VERY useful for portable dubbing from a variety of audio sources I can't just hook up to my comp.
But it isn't really a portable player, and I doubt this new one is either. If the claims/performance ratio on the Nomad3 holds constant from the version I have, Creative's 11 hours of playing time will probably net the average user 3 hours of power.
That being said, I don't quite understand why adding firewire support suddenly makes the new product newsworthy.
Re:Distinguish between Modelling and Emulation....
on
Simulating Societies
·
· Score: 1
This blackboxes the agents. ALL individuals are assumed to behave in a certain way.
Maybe there is some threshold in some variable that turns the social outcome from "genocide" to "cooperation". But this is as satisfying to me as saying that "hatred causes genocide". Someone ring up the Nobel Committee on that one....
Distinguish between Modelling and Emulation....
on
Simulating Societies
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
A model pictures reality by simplifying it. This research is emulation.... The problem is that everyone KNOWS the outcomes. The IMPORTANT question is whether the underlying assumptions catch the true causal forces.
And there are real problems with this school of thought, not the least of which is its claim that getting complex interactions out of simple assumptions is any harder than getting complex interactions out of a great deal of assumptions. It should be self-evident that complexity in this type of research stems largely from the number of actors, not the determinants of their behavior.
Deeper problems include assumptions of rationality and intentionality on the part of actors. There is also a tendency towards selection bias and selectivity THAT IS NEVER ADDRESSED. IE, this author may think he explains ethnic genocide in Rwanda, but never points out that his logic fails miserable in places like Switzerland, Brazil, Mexico, Russia and much of the Middle-East, where his model would predict much MORE conflict than we see.
Yes. But he was referring to allegories that invoked individuals, not concepts. Sauron might not have been "Satan", but he was certainly "evil". Tolkein might not be Jesus, but he was certainly good.
The end mirrors Jedi, actually. We have one space battle, one lightsaber fight, and one ground battle.
And it is VERY significant that the victories are accidental. The structural comparison is Jedi, where Lucas invites us to see victory as a product of Luke's conscious choice to disavow violence. It is only AFTER he renounces violence as a means to an ends that we get the victory scenes literally hit us in order. Should we be surprised that Anakin does not make the same moral choice??? Of course not -- and if you read the film's visual imagery, you'll notice that the ending of TPM is remarkably negative. Day falls to night, characters are cowled, etc. Compare the mournful funeral of TPM to the celebratory one at the end of Jedi.
Skeptics may want to remember that no character EVER wins in Star Wars through violence. Even in the much reviled TPM, the good guys need to be "disarmed" before they are allowed to carry the day. Cute or not, it is hardly accidental that Jar Jar's "wesa give up" line is followed immediately by the collapse of the droid armies, that Anakin's guns overheat, that Obi-Wan loses his saber, or that Amidala "gives us" before her decoy appears.
A broader error of the article is assuming that Lucas draws on pop culture unintelligently. Many of his references are quite deliberate. It is hardly accidental that he makes visual allusions to "Ben Hur" in TPM, or "Triumph of the Will" and "The Searchers" in ANH for instance.
I find it interesting that the libertarian ethos pervasive on Slashdot prevents people from realizing how powerful govt CAN be when done right, and how much regulation has contributed to the structure of the Net as it is today.
Lest we forget, it took the FCC prying open AT&T's monopoly (regulating it into being an "open-ended" instead of "closed" network) that fostered the intense competition in data-communications service provision that lowered data-transmission costs to the point where network growth became feasible. Lest we forget, before the FCC stepped in it was illegal to connect non-AT&T devices to the network.
Frankly. I'd like them more proactive in their procompetitive policies. It would be nice to see them do the same thing with the Microsoft API, for instance, so third-party developers aren't hitched to paying Microsoft simply to get the OS to function as promised.
The pod race is a visual allusion to the chariot race in Ben Hur. Ben hur, for those who haven't seen it, is the story of a man who turns to violence to avenge his mother and sister, and finds redemption through the love of Christ.
I actually find it odd that people complain about the lack of "adult content" in TPM. The film was probably the most densely symbolic to come out in the last five years, with the possible exception of AI.
Amidala ain't dressed in black and red for no reason, folks.
It may be a moot historical point, but the reason Canada produces cars for the North American market has nothing to do with unionism. It is due to the 1965 Auto Pact, which required a certain percentage of cars sold in Canada to be produced in Canada.
Automobile manufacturers consequently gravitated to Ontario (Windsor)... from where they could tap the Canadian market, but also be able to accessthe American market. In his later years, Lyndon Johnson would vehemently claim that Lester Pearson (the Canadian PM) "screwed him" over the issue. In Canada, Pearson is remembered fondly for his role as the "father" of United Nations peacekeeping in the Suez Crisis.
Ironically, Canadian unionism is probably worse than its American variant. At least, this is one of the explanations for the fact that unemployment in Canada is persistently higher than in the US. This last December, for instance, the unemployment rate in Toronto was a "low" 7.5 percent, whereas it peaked at an "outrageous" 6 percent in Silicon Valley.
The Bank of Canada's refusal to follow a flexible monetary policy is more responsible for Canadian woes than anything else (we live and die by Alan Greenspan too...), but perhaps American techs might be less quick to condemn their northern counterparts if they knew how horribly the economy was managed up here....
The GPL was never intended to stiffle development, which is what a "death penalty" would accomplish. Lest we forget, Nusphere is actually ADDING features to MySQL, particularly in the area of complex "transactions".
As far as I can tell, this entire case is MySQL trying to protect its market share. Nusphere's strategy seems to have been to drag its feet releasing source code to make it a more attractive partner than MySQL. It could offer to support MySQL code, but not vice versa. If you're a firm, your choice of partner is a no brainer.
The problem is that the GPL was not designed as a commercial license. Firms are not EXPECTED to make money selling code.
Presumably they were dealing with language/GUI issues. Anyone who has dealt with Mandarin (simplified or complex) knows that interface issues can be hellish.
Given that, it isn't surprising tho adapt an existing (reliable) distribution rather than build a completely new one. Given that the market for linux in China is NOT english-speaking computer nerds, another reason to build on top of an older version is to avoid the dependency issues that come with the most "cutting-edge" material.
The only problem with the Solow paradox is that it's wrong....;)
Solow made his infamous statement in 1986, long before email, the Internet, and even word processing were standard business tools. More recent stats tell us that productivity SURGED in the late 1990s (at least in the US). Slashdotters might even remember (fondly?) the debate from about three years ago when some were questioning if any limits remained to perpetual productivity gains!
This is a nicely written piece, but he has no evidence other than rampant speculation to suggest that Wal-Mart is somehow a greater source of productivity gain in the American economy than... say... email, or the plummetting costs of telecommunications.
A nicely written article, but Schrage should be more careful not to draw such unsubstantiated conclusions.
I agree with you about Stephenson. THE DIAMOND AGE is probably the best thing he has written, but half-way through it becomes a cliched pot-boiler. CRYPTONOMICRON and SNOW CRASH spill into geek-boy fantasy. I am not Asian, but the way in which his novels characterize Asian cultures irritates me tremendously.
I think you're being too hard on "A.I." though. The film lacked a clean ending (the "failed quest"... succeeded because man can create God in his own memory????) but it was probably the most thought provoking film of 2001. From the very opening shot (of cascading waves) we're ushered into a realm of complex visual symbolism. Everyone picked-up on the Pinnochio aspects because the heavy-handed script hammered them home, but the film was more a treatise on reality, and used fairy tales as a general vehicle for commenting on stories as giving life meaning....
Anyone else catch the Sleeping Beauty references? Hint: listen for the Tchaikovsky....
Congrats to the editors for overrulling mob irrationality on this one.
My first reaction to seeing this post was one of incredulity. Reading other people's posts, I get the impression that they just loving handing out passwords and personal info to complete strangers.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting that Boba uses EXACTLY the same trick to follow Han in ESB that Obi Wan uses to follow Jango.
Lucas presents the Gungans as a violent and irrational race. They live underwater and are thus symbolically associated with the subconscious/id (the OTHER race on Naboo represents the ego if we stop to think). It was hardly accidental that the Gungans formed the "good" army in the first film.
So having Jar Jar propose the motion makes thematic sense. Scratch that.... it is the ONLY thing that makes sense. The point is that Palpatine COULDN'T have counted on Padme. Lucas expects his audience to pick up on this and realize the irony.
Incidentally, for those curious souls who aren't willing to dismiss Star Wars as a piece of popular fluff, the same logic tells us why Kamino is a water planet.
Lucas is making an allusion to the scene in ESB where Yoda raises Luke's ship. If I remember correctly, we even have the same music playing in both scenes.
Luke senses the good that remains in Vader. The Emperor can't sense Luke because he represents pure evil. Good is aware of good, evil is aware of evil. In the new trilogy, only the Trade Federation is aware of the existence of Sidious because it is the allegorical representation of greed. The Jedi Council is blind to the power of evil because it is represents everything that the Sith do not - evil, hatred, greed, lust etc.
But not for long... because the new films are all about this fall from grace. Anyone else do a double-take at the cognitive dissonance of seeing Yoda fight alongside a bunch of stormtroopers? Lucas had me grinning ear to ear!
First of all, I think you're dead on with 1, 4 and 6. But I believe 5 is intentional, and seeing what Lucas is doing here actually makes TPM watchable for me in spite of the the flat acting.
Padme abandons diplomacy for war. Qui Gon attacks Maul (and dies). Obi Wan is rash and impulsive. And we don't even get the happy ending until everyone (including Jar Jar) is literally "disarmed".
So it doesn't surprise me that the Jedi are giving way to arrogance and violence. They HAVE to for the first trilogy to make thematic sense. What surprises me is that reviewers continue to interpret the film as some bland battle between Good and Bad guys instead of understanding that Jedi and Sith are simply allegorical representations of love and hatred, etc..
I find ihis "post-hoc" argument odd - it implies that Lucas "got it right" by rehashing generic adventure cliches (an even better critique if we can slam Lucas for stealing them from OUR favourite book/author/genre). This is wishful thinking; it ignores the way ANH signals the themes of the entire trilogy. A few examples:
Q: Why on earth does ANH have so many references to "The Searchers"? A: Quest for family theme of a man who sets out to kill a family member, and ends up redeeming himself through his love of them.
Q: Why do all of the characters who attack end up losing? A: Aggression always loses. Always.
Q: Why does the film end with a visual reference to Triumph of the Will? A: See point above. The victory built on military strength is illusionary.
I find it much harder to believe that Lucas stumbled across meaning in his films than simply to accept his stuff at face value.
O Brother Where Art Thou may be based on The Odyssey, but claiming that makes it a great film is like saying that Strange Brew is brilliant simply because it's based on Hamlet. I found the film unintelligible.
And frankly, when it comes to literary allusions I'll take Lucas anyday. Remember Anakin's opening line to Padme in Episode I? Sounds to me like an allusion to Odysseus and the Sirens. If we catch the reference we know what Lucas signals throughout in various subtle ways (come on folks, that blanket is RED!): Anakin's attraction to Padme is what leads him to his destruction. It doesn't hurt that Anakin's story is also that of the quest for family, much like Homer's.
Barbs about films being "grossly misunderstood by the masses" fly a lot better when people have some clue about the films they're actually critiquing.
That if he is really that any economic losses associated with piracy are completely dwarfed by the economic costs imposed on the United States by its ludicrous
The only piracy I see is in paying upwards of $400,000 US through tariffs to save each job in the steel industry, or forcing homeowners to fork out an additional $1500 average per house because someone decided to lock down lumber imports from Canada.
Frankly, the costs of software piracy look fairly trivial in comparison.
What clinched it for me was the recording capabilities of the Nomad. I needed something portable to record large high-quality .wav files. VERY useful for portable dubbing from a variety of audio sources I can't just hook up to my comp.
But it isn't really a portable player, and I doubt this new one is either. If the claims/performance ratio on the Nomad3 holds constant from the version I have, Creative's 11 hours of playing time will probably net the average user 3 hours of power.
That being said, I don't quite understand why adding firewire support suddenly makes the new product newsworthy.
This blackboxes the agents. ALL individuals are assumed to behave in a certain way.
Maybe there is some threshold in some variable that turns the social outcome from "genocide" to "cooperation". But this is as satisfying to me as saying that "hatred causes genocide". Someone ring up the Nobel Committee on that one....
A model pictures reality by simplifying it. This research is emulation.... The problem is that everyone KNOWS the outcomes. The IMPORTANT question is whether the underlying assumptions catch the true causal forces.
And there are real problems with this school of thought, not the least of which is its claim that getting complex interactions out of simple assumptions is any harder than getting complex interactions out of a great deal of assumptions. It should be self-evident that complexity in this type of research stems largely from the number of actors, not the determinants of their behavior.
Deeper problems include assumptions of rationality and intentionality on the part of actors. There is also a tendency towards selection bias and selectivity THAT IS NEVER ADDRESSED. IE, this author may think he explains ethnic genocide in Rwanda, but never points out that his logic fails miserable in places like Switzerland, Brazil, Mexico, Russia and much of the Middle-East, where his model would predict much MORE conflict than we see.
The irony being that he kills his way to the top out of love. As late as ESB he's still rambling on about using violence to bring peace to the galaxy.
Exactly the trap Luke falls into in Empire.
Yes. But he was referring to allegories that invoked individuals, not concepts. Sauron might not have been "Satan", but he was certainly "evil". Tolkein might not be Jesus, but he was certainly good.
The end mirrors Jedi, actually. We have one space battle, one lightsaber fight, and one ground battle.
And it is VERY significant that the victories are accidental. The structural comparison is Jedi, where Lucas invites us to see victory as a product of Luke's conscious choice to disavow violence. It is only AFTER he renounces violence as a means to an ends that we get the victory scenes literally hit us in order. Should we be surprised that Anakin does not make the same moral choice??? Of course not -- and if you read the film's visual imagery, you'll notice that the ending of TPM is remarkably negative. Day falls to night, characters are cowled, etc. Compare the mournful funeral of TPM to the celebratory one at the end of Jedi.
Skeptics may want to remember that no character EVER wins in Star Wars through violence. Even in the much reviled TPM, the good guys need to be "disarmed" before they are allowed to carry the day. Cute or not, it is hardly accidental that Jar Jar's "wesa give up" line is followed immediately by the collapse of the droid armies, that Anakin's guns overheat, that Obi-Wan loses his saber, or that Amidala "gives us" before her decoy appears.
A broader error of the article is assuming that Lucas draws on pop culture unintelligently. Many of his references are quite deliberate. It is hardly accidental that he makes visual allusions to "Ben Hur" in TPM, or "Triumph of the Will" and "The Searchers" in ANH for instance.
A nice story.
I find it interesting that the libertarian ethos pervasive on Slashdot prevents people from realizing how powerful govt CAN be when done right, and how much regulation has contributed to the structure of the Net as it is today.
Lest we forget, it took the FCC prying open AT&T's monopoly (regulating it into being an "open-ended" instead of "closed" network) that fostered the intense competition in data-communications service provision that lowered data-transmission costs to the point where network growth became feasible. Lest we forget, before the FCC stepped in it was illegal to connect non-AT&T devices to the network.
Frankly. I'd like them more proactive in their procompetitive policies. It would be nice to see them do the same thing with the Microsoft API, for instance, so third-party developers aren't hitched to paying Microsoft simply to get the OS to function as promised.
The pod race is a visual allusion to the chariot race in Ben Hur. Ben hur, for those who haven't seen it, is the story of a man who turns to violence to avenge his mother and sister, and finds redemption through the love of Christ.
Agree with the "too much CGI" comment though.
I actually find it odd that people complain about the lack of "adult content" in TPM. The film was probably the most densely symbolic to come out in the last five years, with the possible exception of AI.
Amidala ain't dressed in black and red for no reason, folks.
It may be a moot historical point, but the reason Canada produces cars for the North American market has nothing to do with unionism. It is due to the 1965 Auto Pact, which required a certain percentage of cars sold in Canada to be produced in Canada.
Automobile manufacturers consequently gravitated to Ontario (Windsor)... from where they could tap the Canadian market, but also be able to accessthe American market. In his later years, Lyndon Johnson would vehemently claim that Lester Pearson (the Canadian PM) "screwed him" over the issue. In Canada, Pearson is remembered fondly for his role as the "father" of United Nations peacekeeping in the Suez Crisis.
Ironically, Canadian unionism is probably worse than its American variant. At least, this is one of the explanations for the fact that unemployment in Canada is persistently higher than in the US. This last December, for instance, the unemployment rate in Toronto was a "low" 7.5 percent, whereas it peaked at an "outrageous" 6 percent in Silicon Valley.
The Bank of Canada's refusal to follow a flexible monetary policy is more responsible for Canadian woes than anything else (we live and die by Alan Greenspan too...), but perhaps American techs might be less quick to condemn their northern counterparts if they knew how horribly the economy was managed up here....
Are those "Land van herkomst" stats representative of the slashdot audience overall? Looks like the Netherlands is completely clocking the UK....
The GPL was never intended to stiffle development, which is what a "death penalty" would accomplish. Lest we forget, Nusphere is actually ADDING features to MySQL, particularly in the area of complex "transactions".
As far as I can tell, this entire case is MySQL trying to protect its market share. Nusphere's strategy seems to have been to drag its feet releasing source code to make it a more attractive partner than MySQL. It could offer to support MySQL code, but not vice versa. If you're a firm, your choice of partner is a no brainer.
The problem is that the GPL was not designed as a commercial license. Firms are not EXPECTED to make money selling code.
Presumably they were dealing with language/GUI issues. Anyone who has dealt with Mandarin (simplified or complex) knows that interface issues can be hellish.
Given that, it isn't surprising tho adapt an existing (reliable) distribution rather than build a completely new one. Given that the market for linux in China is NOT english-speaking computer nerds, another reason to build on top of an older version is to avoid the dependency issues that come with the most "cutting-edge" material.
The only problem with the Solow paradox is that it's wrong.... ;)
Solow made his infamous statement in 1986, long before email, the Internet, and even word processing were standard business tools. More recent stats tell us that productivity SURGED in the late 1990s (at least in the US). Slashdotters might even remember (fondly?) the debate from about three years ago when some were questioning if any limits remained to perpetual productivity gains!
This is a nicely written piece, but he has no evidence other than rampant speculation to suggest that Wal-Mart is somehow a greater source of productivity gain in the American economy than... say... email, or the plummetting costs of telecommunications.
A nicely written article, but Schrage should be more careful not to draw such unsubstantiated conclusions.
I agree with you about Stephenson. THE DIAMOND AGE is probably the best thing he has written, but half-way through it becomes a cliched pot-boiler. CRYPTONOMICRON and SNOW CRASH spill into geek-boy fantasy. I am not Asian, but the way in which his novels characterize Asian cultures irritates me tremendously.
I think you're being too hard on "A.I." though. The film lacked a clean ending (the "failed quest"... succeeded because man can create God in his own memory????) but it was probably the most thought provoking film of 2001. From the very opening shot (of cascading waves) we're ushered into a realm of complex visual symbolism. Everyone picked-up on the Pinnochio aspects because the heavy-handed script hammered them home, but the film was more a treatise on reality, and used fairy tales as a general vehicle for commenting on stories as giving life meaning....
Anyone else catch the Sleeping Beauty references? Hint: listen for the Tchaikovsky....
Yes, especially if you happen to use keyboards made out of soft, malleable substances like pudding.
Congrats to the editors for overrulling mob irrationality on this one.
My first reaction to seeing this post was one of incredulity. Reading other people's posts, I get the impression that they just loving handing out passwords and personal info to complete strangers.
But they don't like Microsoft? Funny that.