I recently got into an extended discussion with someone about Star Wars. Like I've said elsewhere, I feel that Star Wars has had a bad influence on film in general and on science-fiction film in particular.
My favorite science fiction author (and one of my favorite writers in *any* genre), Samuel Delany, said that the true "star" of a science fiction narrative is the episteme - the implicit stance towards the possibilities of human existence upon which the narrative is built. By this measure, Star Trek as an arch-narrative is science fiction (although not necessarily the most sophisticated science fiction, and any given story/show can fail of that charter) and Star Wars is not. Star Wars is simply an epic in tech-fantastic drag. There really is no speculative vision (and don't tell me about The Force, or even Joseph Campbell) that drives Star Wars.
Which is actually fine - when I feel like leaving my mind in a jar at home and getting stupid-kicks, I love that sort of stuff. Unfortunately, the film industry has run with the expectation that science-fiction films be the sort of epic-blockbuster that Star Wars was - it's made it much more difficult to create the good, cerebral, speculative science fiction that used to be made (2001, Stalker, Solaris, THX1138, La Jette, Invasion of the Body Snatchers even Planet of the Apes and Soylent Green.) The only two really great recent science fiction films I can think of are Pi (which is borderline in terms of the genre) and Gattaca - my candidate for best SF film in memory.
But Star Trek qualifies as real science fiction - not because of the technobabble, but because its stories are built on a vision of the possible.
On a more general, related note: even though online docs are updated more regularly, and are free (qua beer), they are still inferior to ink on paper in a well-bound book in so many ways that I see no real replacement for the latter. The human eye was not really designed to absorb back-lit information - the real world uses reflected light. The resolution of the printed page is still much higher. The portability and flexibility of a book is still unmatched, and the multiple strategies for interaction - browsing/skimming, tables of contents, indices, scanning for pictures, distinction by text styles, etc. - are only poorly aped by any digital medium. In the time it takes for me to load even a small local search utility and then render a page or two, I can flip through a text, look up a person's name in the index, check the references on 3 pages, and then scan the bibliography.
The main drawback of the book as interface is its nondynamic content - new information means a new book. However, considering how old a lot of the documentation out there is (when was the last time the Linux-Hardware-FAQ was updated?), in practice that's not a problem limited to the paper media.
My only disappointment with this book was the author's decision to not discuss the (beta) PDC functionality in Samba. I can understand his reluctance to document features that aren't entirely supported in the current release,, but I would have appreciated at least a theoretical discussion of the issues involved.
I believe that the next non-bug-fix version is going to support using Samba as a PDC without requiring a recompile. That's cool.
Let's start with Fritz Lang's Metropolis and go all the way to the early 70's science fiction film Silent Running. I would think of HAL 2000 as a droid with more personality in 15 minutes of his dialogue than the Star Wars droids evinced in 4 films.
I'm a heretic: I think that the space-opera trend started by Star Wars ruined the great cerebral science fiction cinema of the 60's and early 70's. It's cinematic crack.
I've always liked Andrew Leonard, and still do. He regularly participates in Slashdot. He's pretty technically savvy (for a technology writer!) and has, I think, a keener critical eye for the social and cultural aspects of technology than does, say, a certain J. Katz. Frankly, I wish HE were the in-house journalist here at Slashdot. You'll never see ?smart quotes? in HIS copy.
However, this was not one of his finer columns. You win some, you lose some.
No, I don't, and I believe that $30 billion of expenditures will be driven by the needs of the existing market.
However, it is possible to use open source to develop for a Windows-based environment. Just because the OS is not free/open, doesn't mean that the middleware, the new clients, the new protocols can't be. Open > Linux.
As far as the consumers go, there's ALWAYS an overhead for competition. Advertising budgets, distribution channels, redundancies in R & D, mean that a multiplicity of producers will have an overhead that a monopoly lacks. That's no reason to move to monopolistic models - the benefits of competition seem to outweigh the costs.
Liebowitz isn't the only one claiming Microsoft has done no wrong. According to Ted Johnson, cofounder and executive VP of Visio Corp.--and a panelist at the Ralph Nader Consumer Project on Technology Conference, "Extreme remedies would punish Microsoft for being successful."
I believe that Microsoft owns 10 per cent of Vision, and I know that Bill Gates sits on their Board of Directors.
I don't see a new 30 billion dollar market for software development as a bad thing, especially in light of the fact that, outside of a few domains, the mainstream desktop development sphere has been sort of moribund. The current environment is also very favorable to open source, and I think a lot of that $30 billion would be spent on open source projects.
That's $30 billion going to third parties, too, spreading the wealth away from the center. That's development occuring in new places, under different auspices. The consumer would benefit from this upsurge in innovation and competition in the medium term - an upsurge that is unlikely in a market dominated by a single, anticompetitive player.
I don't believe their fondness for Hitler was part of a reasoned or fundemental commitment to Nazism or racist ideology. Instead, it was an icon of anger and hatred that they could grab onto. Hitler is the most easily accessed image of evil in modern history - he's a secular version of "The Devil." They used Nazi imagery and language as part of the expression of their anger and their terror.
I know, because I did the same thing in middle school - associating with Nazi imagery (as well as that of other megalomaniacs and tyrants) as an expression for my inchoate and terrified rage. I was too thrown into my own ongoing emotional crisis to think of the effect it might have on others; it was definitely not a political gesture as we would understand it. My hatred was for my tormentors and those I percieved as aligned with them somehow, not for minorities. I really believe that these kids were in the same boat.
We are *now* among the most privileged of the disaffected. We are now capable of getting academic and professional successes that may go some way to salve our wounded self-images.
However, in the primary education years, one does not have the luxury of living in one's future. It's the time of life in which one is learning how to socialize, forming self-image, and at some point coping with burgeoning sexuality. There's no privilege in being a targetted geek at this point in life - at that point, you're pretty much getting as bad as most get without earning a TV movie.
The last High School I went to, I had a similar experience (well, I wasn't a #1 golfer, but I was the best - and only - triple jumper on the track team.) That school also had only about 200 people in it. I was definitely seen as unusual and different and geeky, but I wasn't persecuted for it - it was just who I was, and I was largely accepted and even liked for it. I was involved with student government, hung out with everyone, got invited to parties - just like everyone else. It was a remarkable change of pace from the other schools I'd gone to.
However, I went to 10 different schools over 12 years as a child - a military family, we moved all the time - and the last school was definitely an exception. I actually ended up diverted to counselling because of a short story I wrote about a fantasy of blowing up one of my junior high schools. Without reiterating the litany of horrors that I went to, suffice it to say that I was pushed to the point of a psychotic break more than once, and if I had been armed, some motherfuckers would be dead now.
One thing I learned is that the teachers themselves are victims of the same popularity anxiety. They *don't* want to reach out to the outcasts because they want to retain the respect of the alpha-kids, so the collaborate in the persecution of the untouchables. After all, most teachers are not the most intelligent and self-aware people, unless they are either self-sacrificing saints or independently wealthy - teaching is renumerated too poorly to attract the brightest and best. They are insecure and depend on the same status games in order to secure their authority in the class room.
Agreed. To that end, the Rethinking Innateness book by Elman et al - shipped along with some very good neural net tools and tutorials - makes for interesting reading that looks beyond some of the current straightjackets.
I don't think evolutionary biology can really go that far in explaining the kind of alienation that creates these events - the American school system is a bizarre social pressure cooker; coupled with the transience of American society, in which people don't know their neighbors and other people are viewed as rivals, threats, or outsiders instead of members of the same community, is a product more of social evolution than anything else.
However, if you really want to work the theory, consider that their suicide-mission has increased "respect" (fear of and alpha-identity for) their "tribe." Which increases the breeding success for the whole type, which makes the latent suicide-mission response an adaptive one.
Hofstadter is more speculative. He's not talking very much about the actual mechanisms of cognition (well, some of the essays in Mind's I do), but largely doing Philosophy of Mind in discussing the philosophical consequences of materialist models of the mind and consciousness. Also, Hofstadter is more involved in computational models (although he is largely from the pre-connectionist school) Dennett is also a philosopher, not a scientist; Consciousness Explained is more an argument against other models of consciousness than an explanation of the neurology of consciousness.
The Dennett book is more of a cogsci primer: there are other good ones out there, too. The "Invitation to Cognitive Science" series by MIT is a good one.
Stephen Pinker is a very good scientist; however, lest everything he say be taken at face value, it should be noted that there are some other perspectives on cognition and language that don't always get represented by the Chomsky/Pinker/MIT school.
They tend to be modularist in their perspective - claiming that the ability to perform syntax is a product of the development of specialized structures that organically develop to do them. While there's definitely a component of syntactic ability that is modular, there's also room for questioning how extensive that modularity is. Also, Chomsky/Pinker et al tend to leave semantic ability out of the picture.
Structured connectionism offers a plausible explanation for semantic ability - see Terry Regier's "The Human Semantic Potential" for some viable models using neural networks, that do excellent jobs of understanding, for example, the difference between "on," "above" and "over" with fairly quick learning, and distinguishing between the German "auf" and "an". Also, I recommend the work of George Lakoff, especially "Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things - What Categories Reveal About The Mind."
Interesting statistic is the fact that the rates for depression among women are approximately equal to the rates of alcoholism/addiction for men. It's not an unreasonable hypothesis that much addiction/alcoholism begins as an attempt to self-medicate depression, since men are less likely to deal with depression in social terms or seek professional help.
I agree with your subject - there is a differencfe - but in the case of the Dilbert Hole, the obscenity and churlishness and sheer nastiness of the substituted dialogue created a different context - it turned Dilbert and Co. into libidinal , crass monsters, and transformed the vision of corporate America from a struggle between goofy PHB's and their Oh So Superior professional staff to that of a den of barbarians.
Like Beavis and Butthead, it begs to be misunderstood as engaging on the stupidity and crassness it uses as a device. I not only thought that Dilbert Hole was parody, I thought it was particular barbed, savage parody. It reminds me, too, of Tom Tomorrow's attack on Dilbert.
There are quite a few artists who work with appropriation, and their legal fates vary depending on their resources, standing, and millieu.
The Dilbert Hole was not only completely valid parody, it has its roots in the political/literary/art movements of the 50s called Lettrism and the work of the Situationist International. The act of taking existing narrative works, especially comics but also advertisements and film, and retitling/retracking them to strip them of their cultural posturings, was called detournment and recuperation - it was considered a strategy for recovering one's cultural environment from those who would colonize it.
Both Dysfunctional Family Circus and Dilbert Hole are latter day examples of this practice, and probably self-conscious ones.
For more information about the Situationists, Lettrism, and the like, read Greil Marcus' "Lipstick Traces." Also, check out the careers of composer John Oswald and the band Negativland for more about the conflict between artists who reuse the cultural detritus that surrounds them and the legal minions of those who would vend that detritus.
Slashdot Mirror
No irony. I was quite aware that Lucas made THX1138. I certainly am not making an anti-Lucas post! I am looking at films, not auteurs.
I recently got into an extended discussion with someone about Star Wars. Like I've said elsewhere, I feel that Star Wars has had a bad influence on film in general and on science-fiction film in particular.
My favorite science fiction author (and one of my favorite writers in *any* genre), Samuel Delany, said that the true "star" of a science fiction narrative is the episteme - the implicit stance towards the possibilities of human existence upon which the narrative is built. By this measure, Star Trek as an arch-narrative is science fiction (although not necessarily the most sophisticated science fiction, and any given story/show can fail of that charter) and Star Wars is not. Star Wars is simply an epic in tech-fantastic drag. There really is no speculative vision (and don't tell me about The Force, or even Joseph Campbell) that drives Star Wars.
Which is actually fine - when I feel like leaving my mind in a jar at home and getting stupid-kicks, I love that sort of stuff. Unfortunately, the film industry has run with the expectation that science-fiction films be the sort of epic-blockbuster that Star Wars was - it's made it much more difficult to create the good, cerebral, speculative science fiction that used to be made (2001, Stalker, Solaris, THX1138, La Jette, Invasion of the Body Snatchers even Planet of the Apes and Soylent Green.) The only two really great recent science fiction films I can think of are Pi (which is borderline in terms of the genre) and Gattaca - my candidate for best SF film in memory.
But Star Trek qualifies as real science fiction - not because of the technobabble, but because its stories are built on a vision of the possible.
On a more general, related note: even though online docs are updated more regularly, and are free (qua beer), they are still inferior to ink on paper in a well-bound book in so many ways that I see no real replacement for the latter. The human eye was not really designed to absorb back-lit information - the real world uses reflected light. The resolution of the printed page is still much higher. The portability and flexibility of a book is still unmatched, and the multiple strategies for interaction - browsing/skimming, tables of contents, indices, scanning for pictures, distinction by text styles, etc. - are only poorly aped by any digital medium. In the time it takes for me to load even a small local search utility and then render a page or two, I can flip through a text, look up a person's name in the index, check the references on 3 pages, and then scan the bibliography.
The main drawback of the book as interface is its nondynamic content - new information means a new book. However, considering how old a lot of the documentation out there is (when was the last time the Linux-Hardware-FAQ was updated?), in practice that's not a problem limited to the paper media.
My only disappointment with this book was the author's decision to not discuss the (beta) PDC functionality in Samba. I can understand his reluctance to document features that aren't entirely supported in the current release,, but I would have appreciated at least a theoretical discussion of the issues involved.
I believe that the next non-bug-fix version is going to support using Samba as a PDC without requiring a recompile. That's cool.
First screen droids? I think not.
Let's start with Fritz Lang's Metropolis and go all the way to the early 70's science fiction film Silent Running. I would think of HAL 2000 as a droid with more personality in 15 minutes of his dialogue than the Star Wars droids evinced in 4 films.
I'm a heretic: I think that the space-opera trend started by Star Wars ruined the great cerebral science fiction cinema of the 60's and early 70's. It's cinematic crack.
I've always liked Andrew Leonard, and still do. He regularly participates in Slashdot. He's pretty technically savvy (for a technology writer!) and has, I think, a keener critical eye for the social and cultural aspects of technology than does, say, a certain J. Katz. Frankly, I wish HE were the in-house journalist here at Slashdot. You'll never see ?smart quotes? in HIS copy.
However, this was not one of his finer columns. You win some, you lose some.
Um, what is "the market" made of, animatronic robots?
"The market" is an abstraction of human economic behaviour. It isn't an entity in itself.
No, I don't, and I believe that $30 billion of expenditures will be driven by the needs of the existing market.
However, it is possible to use open source to develop for a Windows-based environment. Just because the OS is not free/open, doesn't mean that the middleware, the new clients, the new protocols can't be. Open > Linux.
As far as the consumers go, there's ALWAYS an overhead for competition. Advertising budgets, distribution channels, redundancies in R & D, mean that a multiplicity of producers will have an overhead that a monopoly lacks. That's no reason to move to monopolistic models - the benefits of competition seem to outweigh the costs.
I mean Visio, not Vision. My fingers are like splintered popsicle sticks.
I believe that Microsoft owns 10 per cent of Vision, and I know that Bill Gates sits on their Board of Directors.
I don't see a new 30 billion dollar market for software development as a bad thing, especially in light of the fact that, outside of a few domains, the mainstream desktop development sphere has been sort of moribund. The current environment is also very favorable to open source, and I think a lot of that $30 billion would be spent on open source projects.
That's $30 billion going to third parties, too, spreading the wealth away from the center. That's development occuring in new places, under different auspices. The consumer would benefit from this upsurge in innovation and competition in the medium term - an upsurge that is unlikely in a market dominated by a single, anticompetitive player.
I don't believe their fondness for Hitler was part of a reasoned or fundemental commitment to Nazism or racist ideology. Instead, it was an icon of anger and hatred that they could grab onto. Hitler is the most easily accessed image of evil in modern history - he's a secular version of "The Devil." They used Nazi imagery and language as part of the expression of their anger and their terror.
I know, because I did the same thing in middle school - associating with Nazi imagery (as well as that of other megalomaniacs and tyrants) as an expression for my inchoate and terrified rage. I was too thrown into my own ongoing emotional crisis to think of the effect it might have on others; it was definitely not a political gesture as we would understand it. My hatred was for my tormentors and those I percieved as aligned with them somehow, not for minorities. I really believe that these kids were in the same boat.
We are *now* among the most privileged of the disaffected. We are now capable of getting academic and professional successes that may go some way to salve our wounded self-images.
However, in the primary education years, one does not have the luxury of living in one's future. It's the time of life in which one is learning how to socialize, forming self-image, and at some point coping with burgeoning sexuality. There's no privilege in being a targetted geek at this point in life - at that point, you're pretty much getting as bad as most get without earning a TV movie.
Oh, look! It's the Java logo! No more styrofoam cup!
What happened?
Jarod -
The last High School I went to, I had a similar experience (well, I wasn't a #1 golfer, but I was the best - and only - triple jumper on the track team.) That school also had only about 200 people in it. I was definitely seen as unusual and different and geeky, but I wasn't persecuted for it - it was just who I was, and I was largely accepted and even liked for it. I was involved with student government, hung out with everyone, got invited to parties - just like everyone else. It was a remarkable change of pace from the other schools I'd gone to.
However, I went to 10 different schools over 12 years as a child - a military family, we moved all the time - and the last school was definitely an exception. I actually ended up diverted to counselling because of a short story I wrote about a fantasy of blowing up one of my junior high schools. Without reiterating the litany of horrors that I went to, suffice it to say that I was pushed to the point of a psychotic break more than once, and if I had been armed, some motherfuckers would be dead now.
One thing I learned is that the teachers themselves are victims of the same popularity anxiety. They *don't* want to reach out to the outcasts because they want to retain the respect of the alpha-kids, so the collaborate in the persecution of the untouchables. After all, most teachers are not the most intelligent and self-aware people, unless they are either self-sacrificing saints or independently wealthy - teaching is renumerated too poorly to attract the brightest and best. They are insecure and depend on the same status games in order to secure their authority in the class room.
Word.
Agreed. To that end, the Rethinking Innateness book by Elman et al - shipped along with some very good neural net tools and tutorials - makes for interesting reading that looks beyond some of the current straightjackets.
No, the mind is simply one of the brain's more important tasks.
I don't think evolutionary biology can really go that far in explaining the kind of alienation that creates these events - the American school system is a bizarre social pressure cooker; coupled with the transience of American society, in which people don't know their neighbors and other people are viewed as rivals, threats, or outsiders instead of members of the same community, is a product more of social evolution than anything else.
However, if you really want to work the theory, consider that their suicide-mission has increased "respect" (fear of and alpha-identity for) their "tribe." Which increases the breeding success for the whole type, which makes the latent suicide-mission response an adaptive one.
Hofstadter is more speculative. He's not talking very much about the actual mechanisms of cognition (well, some of the essays in Mind's I do), but largely doing Philosophy of Mind in discussing the philosophical consequences of materialist models of the mind and consciousness. Also, Hofstadter is more involved in computational models (although he is largely from the pre-connectionist school) Dennett is also a philosopher, not a scientist; Consciousness Explained is more an argument against other models of consciousness than an explanation of the neurology of consciousness.
The Dennett book is more of a cogsci primer: there are other good ones out there, too. The "Invitation to Cognitive Science" series by MIT is a good one.
Stephen Pinker is a very good scientist; however, lest everything he say be taken at face value, it should be noted that there are some other perspectives on cognition and language that don't always get represented by the Chomsky/Pinker/MIT school.
They tend to be modularist in their perspective - claiming that the ability to perform syntax is a product of the development of specialized structures that organically develop to do them. While there's definitely a component of syntactic ability that is modular, there's also room for questioning how extensive that modularity is. Also, Chomsky/Pinker et al tend to leave semantic ability out of the picture.
Structured connectionism offers a plausible explanation for semantic ability - see Terry Regier's "The Human Semantic Potential" for some viable models using neural networks, that do excellent jobs of understanding, for example, the difference between "on," "above" and "over" with fairly quick learning, and distinguishing between the German "auf" and "an". Also, I recommend the work of George Lakoff, especially "Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things - What Categories Reveal About The Mind."
Interesting statistic is the fact that the rates for depression among women are approximately equal to the rates of alcoholism/addiction for men. It's not an unreasonable hypothesis that much addiction/alcoholism begins as an attempt to self-medicate depression, since men are less likely to deal with depression in social terms or seek professional help.
What will I do for extrinsic motivation? Exactly enough as I need to get the reward, if I want the reward enough.
What will I do for intrinsic motivation? The very best I can.
I agree with your subject - there is a differencfe - but in the case of the Dilbert Hole, the obscenity and churlishness and sheer nastiness of the substituted dialogue created a different context - it turned Dilbert and Co. into libidinal , crass monsters, and transformed the vision of corporate America from a struggle between goofy PHB's and their Oh So Superior professional staff to that of a den of barbarians.
Like Beavis and Butthead, it begs to be misunderstood as engaging on the stupidity and crassness it uses as a device. I not only thought that Dilbert Hole was parody, I thought it was particular barbed, savage parody. It reminds me, too, of Tom Tomorrow's attack on Dilbert.
There are quite a few artists who work with appropriation, and their legal fates vary depending on their resources, standing, and millieu.
The Dilbert Hole was not only completely valid parody, it has its roots in the political/literary/art movements of the 50s called Lettrism and the work of the Situationist International. The act of taking existing narrative works, especially comics but also advertisements and film, and retitling/retracking them to strip them of their cultural posturings, was called detournment and recuperation - it was considered a strategy for recovering one's cultural environment from those who would colonize it.
Both Dysfunctional Family Circus and Dilbert Hole are latter day examples of this practice, and probably self-conscious ones.
For more information about the Situationists, Lettrism, and the like, read Greil Marcus' "Lipstick Traces." Also, check out the careers of composer John Oswald and the band Negativland for more about the conflict between artists who reuse the cultural detritus that surrounds them and the legal minions of those who would vend that detritus.