Kim's Game

I didn't realize that the jewel game from Kipling's Kim had been dubbed Kim's Game and popularized in real life:

Kim, a teenager being trained in secret as a spy, spends a month in Simla, India at the home of Mr. Lurgan, who ostensibly runs a jewel shop but in truth is engaged in espionage for the British against the Russians. Lurgan brings out a copper tray and tosses a handful of jewels onto it; his boy servant explains to Kim:

Look on them as long as thou wilt, stranger. Count and, if need be, handle. One look is enough for me. When thou hast counted and handled and art sure that thou canst remember them all, I cover them with this paper, and thou must tell over the tally to Lurgan Sahib. I will write mine.

They contest the game many times, sometimes with jewels, sometimes with odd objects, and sometimes with photographs of people. It is considered a vital part of training in observation; Lurgan says:

[Do] it many times over till it is done perfectly — for it is worth doing.

In his book Scouting Games, Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of scouting, names the exercise Kim's Game and describes it as follows:

The Scoutmaster should collect on a tray a number of articles — knives, spoons, pencil, pen, stones, book and so on — not more than about fifteen for the first few games, and cover the whole over with a cloth. He then makes the others sit round, where they can see the tray, and uncovers it for one minute. Then each of them must make a list on a piece of paper of all the articles he can remember… The one who remembers most wins the game.

Kindle 2.0 Coming Around October 2008

Kindle 2.0 Coming Around October 2008:

An insider let slip that two new Amazon Kindle models will hit stores this holiday season, with the first coming as early as October.

The first is an updated version with the same sized screen, a smaller form factor, and an improved interface. The source told us that Amazon has “skipped three or four generations,” comparing the old Kindle to the 1st gen iPod and the new version to something like the sexy iPod Mini.

The second new model, which is shaped like an 8 1/2 x 11-inch piece of paper, is considerably bigger than the current model and should be available next year.

Both models should come in multiple colors and may be aimed at younger readers.

Dark Knight Shift

In Dark Knight Shift, JR Minkel of Scientific American interviews E. Paul Zehr on why Batman could exist — but not for long:

How would Batman get enough rest?
The difficulty for Batman is he's going to be trying to sleep during the day. He's going to be really tired, actually, unless he can shift himself over to just being up at night. If he were just a nocturnal guy, he would actually be a lot healthier and have a lot better sleep than if he were doing what he does now, which is getting some light here and there. That's going to mess up his sleep patterns and duration of sleep.

Wouldn't fighting Gotham's thugs every night take its toll?
The biggest unreal part of the way Batman's portrayed is the nature of his injuries. Most of the time, in the comics and in the movies, even when he wins, he usually winds up taking a pretty good beating. There's a real failure to show the cumulative effect of that. The next day he's shown out there doing the same thing again. He'd likely be quite tired and injured.

Is there any indication in the comics of how long Batman's career lasts?
The comics are really vague on this, of course. In Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, he deliberately shows an aging Batman coming back after he's retired, and he highlights him being tired and weaker. Somewhere around age 50 to 55, he should probably retire. His performance is going down. He's always facing younger adversaries. That is well at the end of when he's going to be able to defend himself and be able to not have to deal that lethal force. This was actually shown in an animated series called Batman Beyond.

Oh right. It's the future; Batman is old and he trains a kid to replace him.
You're familiar with that one? What we learn is that Batman, when he was older but before he retired, actually picked up a gun against a thug because he had to. His skills had let him down so that he wasn't able to defend himself without harming another person. So that's when he decided to retire.

How would all those beat-downs have affected his longevity?
Keeping in mind that being Batman means never losing: If you look at consecutive events where professional fighters have to defend their titles—Muhammad Ali, George Foreman, Ultimate Fighters—the longest period you're going to find is about two to three years. That dovetails nicely with the average career for NFL running backs. It's about three years. (That's the statistic I got from the NFL Players Association Web site.) The point is, it's not very long. It's really hard to become Batman in the first place, and it's hard to maintain it when you get there.

I believe Dr. Zehr has overlooked a key aspect of being the Batman — he doesn't fight fair. Criminals are a cowardly and superstitious lot, and the Dark Knight plays on their fears, while choosing the time and place of his attack.

I can't say I agree with Zehr's training advice either:

What's a realistic training regimen?
I didn't give a training manual in my book, but he'd want to do specialized weight training to build up an ability to work at a really high rate for maybe 30 seconds to a minute (the maximum time period associated with his fights). One of the early comics shows him holding an enormous weight over his head. That's not the right kind of adaptation toward punching and kicking. He's got to make sure he's doing all the skill training at the same time so that he's actually using the (physical) adaptations he's slowly gaining. In conventional martial arts, when people take weapons training, you're doing a kind of power-strength training.

What effects would all that training have on Bruce Wayne's body?
I looked up what DC Comics and some other books said (about Batman's physique). I settled on the estimate that Bruce Wayne started off at about six-foot-two and 185 pounds. I gave him a body fat of 20 percent (slightly below average) and a body mass index of 26. Let's say after 10 or 15 years, after he's become the Batman, he's weighing about 210 pounds and has a body fat of 10 percent. He's probably gained 40 pounds of muscle. His bones will actually be more dense, kind of the opposite of osteoporosis.

Are we talking freakishly dense bones?
The percentage change is actually quite small—maybe 10 percent. In judo, where people do a lot of grappling and throwing, you're going to have more density in the long bones of the trunk. In karate and other martial arts where they're doing a lot of kicking, there's going to be a lot higher density in the legs. Muay Thai (kickboxing) is a great example. They're always doing these low shin kicks. They try to condition the body by kicking progressively harder objects and for longer.

Lifting an enormous weight overhead — i.e. doing a clean & jerk — is excellent training for building up the muscles, bones, tendons, and ligaments of the legs and core, which are used extensively in judo — and in jumping from rooftop to rooftop. But Zehr is a Chito-Ryu karate-do practitioner who, I suppose, rarely jumps from rooftop to rooftop.

What Batman needs is a cross-fit routine with an emphasis on judo/jiu-jitsu, kickboxing, and parkour.

Also, I'd hardly say that Bruce Wayne was 185 lbs. at 20 percent body-fat before training. First, he started training as a teen — his parents were killed while he was a child — and, second, even a mildly active young man can be, say, 8 percent body-fat without really trying.

Moebius Redux

Moebius Redux offers a fascinating look at French illustrator Jean Giraud, perhaps best known, under the pseudonym of Moebius, for co-creating the adult comic Métal Hurlant, which spawned an American version, Heavy Metal.



If you know Heavy Metal from the movie, then you might recognize Moebius's work indirectly, from the last sequence, Taarna, which was based on his Arzach stories — but with his protagonist replaced by a hawt chick.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that Giraud made a life-changing trip to Mexico when he was in art school — and that he went back and had an even more life-changing trip there that included some hallucinogenic mushrooms. It shows in his art.

I was shocked to find out that Giraud worked on a film adaptation of Dune for Alejandro Jodorowsky. They had funding but couldn't arrange American distribution, so the project got cancelled. Not only did the project have Giraud doing design work, but also H. R. Giger — and he's as creepy as you might expect.

That team went on to do Alien.

Also, Giraud's artwork for the Dan O'Bannon short story comic "The Long Tomorrow" was a key visual reference for Blade Runner.

(Hat tip to Drawn!)

Mikey Burnett Sues The Ultimate Fighter

Mikey Burnett Sues The Ultimate Fighter for — get this — failing to provide a safe environment:

Mikey Burnett, one of the original Lion's Den members, has filed suit in Clark County District Court against TufGuy Productions, Inc. d/b/a Ultimate Fighting Productions, Inc., the company that produces "The Ultimate Fighter" for Spike TV, as well as American International Group, Inc., an accident and health insurance company associated with the TV show.

According to the lawsuit filed on June 9, Burnett claims alleged negligence against the defendants, who "carelessly, recklessly and negligently failed to provide a safe environment for the Ultimate Fighter 4 participants."

Specifically, the 34-year-old Burnett states that he suffered a career-ending spinal injury during the show's tapings.

Burnett served as a competitor on the series' fourth season entitled "The Comeback," where UFC figures of old and not-so-old got a second chance at glory in the Octagon. Burnett's appearance on the show, which aired from August-November 2006, ended years of obscurity the Tulsa, Okla. fighter endured after personal struggles with alcohol abuse, injuries and a horrendous recluse spider bite.

An intriguing character from his 1998 bouts at UFC 16 and 18, Burnett flamed out on the show when he failed to reach the finals.

The punchline:

During his tenure inside the ‘TUF' house, the show aired Burnett running into a wall to stave off boredom.

Perhaps he needs a home with rubber walls.

Quantum of Solace Teaser Trailer

The new Quantum of Solace teaser trailer is out:



As I mentioned before, the odd title comes from a story by Bond creator Ian Fleming that appears in the collection For Your Eyes Only — but the original is not a story about Bond; it's a story told to Bond. Fleming saw it as a way to write a story in the style of W Somerset Maugham — and to see it published. The movie screenplay is not an adaptation of that story but a continuation of Casino Royale.

Devo is suing McDonald's

Post-punk pioneer band Devo is suing McDonald's over its New Wave Nigel Happy Meal doll, which sports the band's signature red flower pot hat:

In April the fast food chain released a series of American Idol Happy Meal toys in the US based on a range of music genres, including Disco Dave, Country Clay, Rockin' Riley and Soulful Selma.

Devo's complaint relates to New Wave Nigel, a toy kitted out in an orange jumpsuit, pink shades, and Devo's "energy dome" hat.
[...]
"This New Wave Nigel doll that they've created is just a complete Devo rip-off and the red hat is exactly the red hat that I designed, and it's copyrighted and trademarked.

"They didn't ask us anything. Plus, we don't like McDonald's, and we don't like American Idol, so we're doubly offended."

(Hat tip to BoingBoing.)

Dark Knight Director Shuns Digital Effects for the Real Thing

Dark Knight Director Shuns Digital Effects for the Real Thing — but not totally:

"So we got an Imax shot of Christian Bale as Batman standing on top of the Sears Tower," Pfister says. "Here we are with our principal actor standing on the edge of one of the tallest buildings in the world. I think a lot of people will assume that's CGI." Perhaps, but when you see the shot (featured in the first trailer), your eye instinctively detects something different, something thrilling and rare: photographic reality.

Settling for anything less, Nolan feared, would send the Batman franchise back into camp and mummery. That's why he transported his hero to the very real city of Hong Kong. Unfortunately, the real world has its drawbacks. "The Chinese government was a nightmare in terms of filming stuff," Pfister sighs. "They wanted to limit the amount of helicopter activity over the city."

And Nolan needed helicopters. He especially wanted to minimize digital meddling in those high-altitude Imax sequences. His reasons were both aesthetic and practical: Imax film stock is enormous, roughly 10 times the size of 35-mm celluloid, and it soaks up a vast amount of visual information. Those dimensions are what make the image so rich and sharp, even spread over a screen the size of a blimp hangar. While conventional films are digitized at 2K resolution (2,000 pixels across), or 4K at most, adding visual effects to Imax footage requires digitizing each frame at up to 8K. In other words, the difficulty and expense of doing f/x rise exponentially with the size of the negative.

If I may geek out here for a moment — math-geek out, that is — the expense of doing f/x should rise polynomially — quadratically, in fact — with the (linear) size of the negative. An image with twice as many pixels across should have four times as many pixels total — two squared.

What? Why are you looking at me like that?

The Strident Hermit King of Comics

In reviewing Blake Bell's Strange and Stranger — about the artist-creator of Spider-Man and Dr. Strange — Geoff Boucher declares Steve Ditko the strident hermit king of comics:

For students of comics history, there are few names that strike the ear and the imagination quite like Ditko's. In a field defined by brilliant oddballs, embittered journeymen, penniless geniuses and colorful hacks, Ditko is the strident hermit king. He gave the world Spider-Man but then more or less bugged out, deciding in 1969 to stop doing interviews and making public appearances. Now 80, Ditko lives in New York City, and although you can track down his studio, nobody I know who's done so has gotten past the front step. It's not that Ditko is unfriendly -- he's willing to talk, apparently (in one case, for more than an hour), but only while standing in his doorway, blocking any view into his home and his life.

If you're a journalist, however, it's a different story. Last year, the BBC aired a documentary, "In Search of Steve Ditko," in which reporter Jonathan Ross, accompanied by Neil Gaiman, sought an audience with Ditko. He refused to speak on camera, which only reinforces the idea of him as the J.D. Salinger of super-hero comics. This, I suppose, makes Peter Parker a wall-crawling Holden Caulfield.

When Ditko drew Peter Parker, he drew him as a nerd — a proto-nerd, I suppose — which made perfect sense for the character, but later artists drew him as just another idealized male. Boucher gives this description of Ditko's style:

Although Ditko grew up loving the art of Jerry Robinson and Will Eisner, for much of his career, he had a spindly and off-kilter style that rubbed the heroic off the page and replaced it with an odd, anxious ballet of the surreal and the grotesque.

The recent Doctor Strange: The Sorcerer Supreme DVD played down Ditko's "anxious ballet of the surreal and the grotesque" as well as Stan Lee's impressive-sounding mystic mumbo-jumbo, which always alluded to otherworldly things you assumed someone understood.

Ditko is also famous for creating the Question — and infamous for creating Mr. A — which both inspired Alan Moore's Rorschach, from The Watchmen.

Wake up, First Sun Warrior of the Morning!

I can't say I was an early bird as a child — and I certainly wasn't as a teenager — but orders from my secret superhero commander would definitely have launched me into action at any hour. Wake up, First Sun Warrior of the Morning!

Japanese toy company People has released a new age alarm clock that supposedly helps kids wake up by turning them into Ultraman. It's called the Okiro! Asa Ichiban Taiyou Senshi — Charenjaa Kitto (Wake Up! First Sun Warrior of the Morning — Challenger Kit) and was manufactured for the Japanese Ministry of Education “early to bed early to rise” program. The $38 kit comes with the extravagant eye shield and helmet; a series of talismans and message cards (no doubt world-saving secret missions); and a 27-day program that will involve your child taking orders from "the commander."

The commander wakes the child up at 6 a.m., and prompts players to put on the helmet and hit a "roger" button to acknowledge their wakefulness. Then, they are ordered to count to 10 in five different languages: English, Japanese, German, Swahili and Malagasy. At that point, the player is "allowed to take off the equipment and start the day."

(Hat tip to Tyler Cowen.)

Kermit Love, Co-Creator of Big Bird, Dies at 91

It's hard to believe that Big Bird and Snuffleupagus were created by a costume designer named Kermit Love. He also worked for some of ballet’s most renowned choreographers. He just passed away, at age 91 — which the New York Times reported with some not-so-subtle subtext:

The cause was congestive heart failure, said Christopher Lyall, Mr. Love’s partner of 50 years.

Mr. Love played Willy the Hot Dog Man on the show — a character I do not remember — and helped design Oscar the Grouch and Cookie Monster, but he insisted he was not the namesake of the famous frog.

Scholars set date for Odysseus' bloody homecoming

Scholars set date for Odysseus' bloody homecoming:

Using clues from star and sun positions mentioned by the ancient Greek poet Homer, scholars think they have determined the date when King Odysseus returned from the Trojan War and slaughtered a group of suitors who had been pressing his wife to marry one of them.

It was on April 16, 1178 B.C. that the great warrior struck with arrows, swords and spears, killing those who sought to replace him, a pair of researchers say in Monday's online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.
[...]
Homer reports that on the day of the slaughter the sun is blotted from the sky, possibly a reference to an eclipse. In addition, he mentions more than once that it is the time of a new moon, which is necessary for a total eclipse, the researchers say.

Other clues include:

• Six days before the slaughter, Venus is visible and high in the sky.


• Twenty-nine days before, two constellations — the Pleiades and Bootes — are simultaneously visible at sunset.


• And 33 days before, Mercury is high at dawn and near the western end of its trajectory. This is the researchers' interpretation, anyway. Homer wrote that Hermes, the Greek name for Mercury, traveled far west to deliver a message.

Fruit is Un-American

Fruit is Un-American, as Colbert explains:



"Me have crazy times in 70s and 80s!"

(He also closes the show with the same special guest.)

Are soap operas a form of birth control?

Are soap operas a form of birth control?

In 1960, the average Brazilian woman had 6.3 children. By 2000, the fertility rate was down to 2.3. The decline was comparable to China's, but Brazil didn't have a one-child policy. In fact, for a while it was even illegal to advertise contraceptives.

Many factors account for the drop in Brazilian fertility, but one recent study identified a factor most people probably wouldn't consider: soap operas (novelas). Novelas are huge in Brazil, and the network Rede Globo effectively has a monopoly on their production.

During the past few decades, the vast majority of the population, of all social classes, has regularly tuned into the evening showings. The study, conducted by Eliana La Ferrara of Italy's Bocconi University and Alberto Chong and Suzanne Duryea of the Inter-American Development Bank, analyzed novelas aired from 1965 to 1999 in the top two time slots and found that they depict families that are much smaller than those in the real Brazil. Seventy-two percent of leading female characters age 50 or below had no children at all, and 21 percent had just one child. Hence, the authors hypothesized that the soap operas could be acting as a kind of birth control.

Using census data from 1970 to 1991 and data on the entry of Rede Globo into different markets, the researchers found that women living in areas that received Globo's broadcast signal had significantly lower fertility. (And yes, the study did control for all sorts of factors and addressed the concern that the entry of Globo might have been driven by trends that also contribute to fertility decline. I'll spare you the gory econometric details.) Additionally, people in areas with Globo's signal were more likely to name their children after novela characters, suggesting that it was the novelas specifically, and not TV in general, that influenced childbearing.

Cocaine Cowboys

I found these snippets from Cocaine Cowboys fascinating. As you might imagine, the documentary looks at the Miami drug trade in the 1980s, the Miami Vice era, and these clips look at the Florida pilot who transported much of the coke — he almost seems like the hero of the piece — the New York-born dealer who worked with him, and the Colombians who supplied the drugs:

Andrew Stanton confirms John Carter of Mars

Apparently Andrew Stanton has confirmed that he is writing John Carter of Mars for Pixar.

Of course, the promise of a Barsoom movie goes way, way back:

In 1931, the first documented attempt was made by animation pioneer Bob Clampett. It was to be his first independent project since making a name for himself as an animator at Warner Bros. Clampett approached Edgar Rice Burroughs himself about making an animated version of the books Clampett adored. To the animator's pleasant surprise, Burroughs was enthusiastic about the idea of an animated film as he was eager to give his characters wider exposure. (The Mars books had won a reasonable level of success on their own, but nowhere near the author's Tarzan book series.) Burroughs' son, Jack Burroughs, recently-graduated from college, was fascinated by Clampett's unique animation style. He and the animator collaborated in creating an extensive cachet of notes, sketches, and models--that would be the film's blueprints--and a reel of test footage. All the while, Burroughs the Author sold the film rights to Metro Goldwyn Mayer, the studio that was already producing the Tarzan film series starring Johnny Weismuller.

The project was moving ahead expeditiously, until 1935. The executives at M.G.M soon clashed with Clampett and the two Burroughs men over the direction in which to take the film: the creators wanted a serious sci-fi adventure tale; the execs wanted a slapstick comedy with a swashbuckling hero. Eventually, the studio put an end to the entire project, citing it as "too expensive". Had it been created, the first in a series of short films would have debuted in 1936.

When Clampett toured colleges and universities in the late 1970s, he would screen test footage he had co-created with Jack Burroughs. The audience reaction was always ecstatic.

Take a look:



Ray Harryhausen also gave it a go in the early 1960s.

I can remember Terry Rossio and Ted Elliott talking in the late 1990s about their go at it:

The project came the closest to fruition in the late 1980s when the film rights were acquired by the Touchstone Pictures division of The Walt Disney Company. To help off-set unforeseeable costs, Carolco Pictures heads Mario Kassar and Andrew Vajna were brought on as producers. For the first time since Bob Clampett was let go from the project, an official director was announced in 1988: John McTiernan, fresh off the back-to-back successes of Predator and Die Hard. McTiernan hired then up-and-coming screenwriters Terry Rossio and Ted Elliott to write the screenplay, while production designer William Stout was brought on board to create the unique look of the film. Both McTiernan and Stout have gone on record as saying that Tom Cruise was in talks to play John Carter (there are long-persistent rumours that Julia Roberts was in talks to play Carter's love interest, Dejah Thoris, but there is little evidence to substantiate this.)

However, the project was once again marred by its sheer scale and rising budget. Furthermore, McTiernan was unhappy with the state of cinematic special effects at the time, feeling they needed to advance to achieve the appropriate effect needed for the landscape of Barsoom. The growing budget is one of many factors that contributed to the eventual bankruptcy of Carolco Pictures.

During the 1990s, Disney/Touchstone made several attempts to get the project up and running again, but to no avail. Sometime after, the rights expired.

That's when I lost track of things, but it obviously kept bouncing around:

In 2002, the rights were acquired by Paramount Pictures, which originally planned to release the film under the title A Princess of Mars. It was changed during development to John Carter of Mars. Although this title has the same name as Burroughs's final book in the Barsoom series, the content was to be based on several Carter novels. If the film was successful, Paramount made it known sequels were likely as the studio wanted to make it into a franchise.

The film was to be produced by Alphaville Productions partners Sean Daniel and Jim Jacks. The script was written by Mark Protosevich and rewritten by Ehren Kruger. No actors were attached to the project.

In 2004 it was announced that Robert Rodriguez would direct from a screenplay by Mark Protosevich. Soon after, Rodriguez' friend, webmaster, and life-long fan of the books, Harry Knowles, was named as a co-producer with Daniel and Jacks. It would have been Rodriguez's largest project with a reported starting budget of $100 million. Rodriguez even went so far as to hire as production designer one of his favorite painters, fantasy artist Frank Frazetta (whose commissioned painting have graced many covers of Edgar Rice Burroughs books, particularly the Mars). However, later that year Rodriguez got into a dispute with the Directors Guild of America (DGA) over the credits of his movie Sin City, forcing him to resign from the guild. As a result, he was forced to relinquish the director's chair on what had just been re-named John Carter of Mars, the producers having an agreement with the DGA only to work with guild members.

Soon after, Kerry Conran, director of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, was named as the new director. In 2005, Conran left the project for reasons that are unclear. As of October of that year, Jon Favreau was scheduled to direct the film; subsequently, it was said to be helmed by Brad Bird of Pixar fame. Finally, in 2006, Paramount decided not to renew their option on the work, determining to make a new Star Trek film instead.

Rodriguez + $100 million + Frazetta = Wow! I won't sneeze at Pixar though.

Retropolis Transit Authority

Shannon Love of Chicago Boyz loves the Retropolis Transit Authority, purveyor of Art Nouveau sci-fi t-shirts.




The site is created by geek-artist Bradley W. Schenck, who got his professional start illustrating the Arduin role playing game book Welcome to Skull Tower (1978). Only a true geek-artist could create Ctheltic Cthulhu.

The Spice must flow

I'm not a particularly big fan of either Dune or of lolcats, but this hit me just right:

Telegraphy without Electricity

I recently got around to reading Lest Darkness Fall, the influential alternative history science fiction novel that inspired Harry Turtledove to switch his studies to Byzantine history and to become an alternative history science fiction novelist. (Perhaps I should read some Turtledove...)

The story is in the style of Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court — which I finally read last year — only the protagonist is an American archaeologist transported back from Italy in 1939 to Italy after the fall of Rome, while it was under barbarian rule, and the east was under Justinian's rule. It shares the same progressive tone as Twain's story.

Anyway, one of the first important inventions our protagonist invents — after brandy, which bankrolls everything else he tries — is a semaphore telegraph that relies on telescopes in towers.

As Kris De Decker of Low-Tech Magazine points out, such a system existed in the 18th century:

Centuries of slow long-distance communications came to an end with the arrival of the telegraph. Most history books start this chapter with the appearance of the electrical telegraph, midway the nineteenth century. However, they skip an important intermediate step. Fifty years earlier (in 1791) the Frenchman Claude Chappe developed the optical telegraph. Thanks to this technology, messages could be transferred very quickly over long distances, without the need for postmen, horses, wires or electricity.

The optical telegraph network consisted of a chain of towers, each placed 5 to 20 kilometres apart from each other. On each of these towers a wooden semaphore and two telescopes were mounted (the telescope was invented in 1600). The semaphore had two signalling arms which each could be placed in seven positions. The wooden post itself could also be turned in 4 positions, so that 196 different positions were possible. Every one of these arrangements corresponded with a code for a letter, a number, a word or (a part of) a sentence.

Every tower had a telegrapher, looking through the telescope at the previous tower in the chain. If the semaphore on that tower was put into a certain position, the telegrapher copied that symbol on his own tower. Next he used the telescope to look at the succeeding tower in the chain, to control if the next telegrapher had copied the symbol correctly. In this way, messages were signed through symbol by symbol from tower to tower. The semaphore was operated by two levers. A telegrapher could reach a speed of 1 to 3 symbols per minute.

The technology today may sound a bit absurd, but in those times the optical telegraph was a genuine revolution. In a few decades, continental networks were built both in Europe and the United States. The first line was built between Paris and Lille during the French revolution, close to the frontline. It was 230 kilometres long and consisted of 15 semaphores. The very first message — a military victory over the Austrians — was transmitted in less than half an hour. The transmission of 1 symbol from Paris to Lille could happen in ten minutes, which comes down to a speed of 1,380 kilometres an hour. Faster than a modern passenger plane – this was invented only one and a half centuries later.

The technology expanded very fast. In less than 50 years time the French built a national infrastructure with more than 530 towers and a total length of almost 5,000 kilometres. Paris was connected to Strasbourg, Amsterdam, Toulon, Perpignan, Lyon, Turin, Milan and Venice. At the beginning of the 19th century, it was possible to wirelessly transmit a short message from Amsterdam to Venice in one hour’s time. A few years before, a messenger on a horse would have needed at least a month’s time to do the same.

Film content, editing, and directing style affect brain activity, NYU neuroscientists show

Film content, editing, and directing style affect brain activity, NYU neuroscientists show:

The researchers relied on two methodological tools in their study: functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and inter-subject correlation (ISC) analysis. fMRI utilizes a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner—like that routinely used for clinical evaluation of human anatomy. But it is reprogrammed to get a time-series of three-dimensional images of brain activity. In a typical fMRI experiment, a time-series of brain activity images is collected while a stimulus or cognitive task is varied. ISC analysis is employed to measure similarities in brain activity across viewers—in this case, it compared the response in each brain region from one viewer to the response in the same brain region from other viewers. Because all viewers were exposed to the same films, computing ISC on a region-by-region basis identified brain regions in which the responses were similar across viewers.

"In cinema, some films lead most viewers through a similar sequence of perceptual, emotional, and cognitive states," the researchers wrote. "Such a tight grip on viewers' minds will be reflected in the similarity of the brain activity—or high ISC—across most viewers. By contrast, other films exert—either intentionally or unintentionally—less control over viewers' responses during movie watching. In such cases we expect that there will be less control over viewers' brain activity, resulting in low ISC."

To stimulate subjects' brain activity, the researchers showed them three motion picture clips: thirty minutes of Sergio Leone's "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly"; an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents "Bang! You're Dead"; and an episode of Larry David's "Curb Your Enthusiasm." To establish a baseline, subjects viewed a clip of unstructured reality: a 10-minute, unedited, one-shot video filmed during a concert in New York City's Washington Square Park.

The results showed that ISC of responses in subjects' neocortex—the portion of the brain responsible for perception and cognition—differed across the four movies:

• The Hitchcock episode evoked similar responses across all viewers in over 65 percent of the neocortex, indicating a high level of control on viewers' minds;
• High ISC was also extensive (45 percent) for "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly";
• Lower ISC was recorded for "Curb Your Enthusiasm" (18 percent) and for the Washington Square Park, or unstructured reality, clip (less than 5 percent)

"Our data suggest that achieving a tight control over viewers' brains during a movie requires, in most cases, intentional construction of the film's sequence through aesthetic means," the researchers wrote. "The fact that Hitchcock was able to orchestrate the responses of so many different brain regions, turning them on and off at the same time across all viewers, may provide neuroscientific evidence for his notoriously famous ability to master and manipulate viewers' minds. Hitchcock often liked to tell interviewers that for him 'creation is based on an exact science of audience reactions.'"

It turns out that episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents is online:

Gladiator

Before he devoted an entire work to obscure proto-superhero references, Alan Moore wrote Watchmen, which includes one important proto-superhero reference.

On the shelf of Hollis Mason — the original Nite Owl, turned car mechanic — are three books: his memoirs, Under the Hood; Automobile Maintenance; and Philip Wylie's 1930 novel, Gladiator , which many argue is the original inspiration for Superman.

I didn't catch the Gladiator reference in my first, pre-Google reading of Watchmen, decades ago, but my recent re-reading spurred me to move my copy of Gladiator to the front of my reading queue.

Reading Gladiator now, as someone who takes Superman for granted, is an almost disorienting experience; it's almost as if Siegel and Shuster took Wylie's work and surgically removed, even inverted, all of its dark, lost generation irony.

In Gladiator, the protagonist, Hugo Danner, is born in a small town in the Midwest — Indian Creek, Colorado — but his parents are a hen-pecked local college biology professor and an obsessively religious shrew of a woman — more backward and small-minded than salt of the earth.

Danner leaps across a river, jumps fifty feet straight up, lifts a cannon overhead with one arm, kills a shark by ripping its jaws apart, fells a charging bull with a fist between the eyes, and lifts a car by its bumper and turns it around in the road. "All of these were, in 1930, fresh and new and very exciting to read about," Wylie's biographer notes — but even though Superman goes on to do all of these things, the tone of Wylie's novel couldn't be further from a four-color comic book. When Danner joins the French Foreign Legion at the start of the Great War — which certainly sounds romantic, doesn't it? — he ends up killing German soldiers. Many, many German soldiers. When his friend dies in an artillery barrage that he survives, he goes into a berserk rage and tears apart his enemies with his bare hands. It feels like digging his hands into warm cow manure.

Wylie's original introduction to the Book League Monthly edition, from March 1930, makes it clear that Danner's powers aren't going to save the day:

A temperamental consciouness of material force brought Hugo Danner into being. The frustration of my own muscles by things, and the alarming superiority of machinery started the notion of a man who would be invincible. I gave him a name and planned random deeds for him. I let him tear down Brooklyn Bridge and lift a locomotive. Then I began to speculate about his future and it seemed to me that a human being thus equipped would be foredoomed to vulgar fame or to a life of fruitless destruction. He would share the isolation of geniuses and with them would learn the inflexibility of man's slow evolution. To that extent Hugo became symbolic and Gladiator a satire. The rest was adventure and perhaps more of the book derives from the unliterary excitement of imagining such a life than from a studious juxtaposition of incidents to a theme.

Previous to the appearance of Gladiator, although not before its conception, I wrote Heavy Laden and Babes and Sucklings. Both ware realistic stories of people and places which I had known. The brief I held for realism convinces me less and less. Space is wide. Man is small. That he exists is romantic. The novelist now usurps the chair of the educator, the pulpit of the preacher, the columns of the journalist. Yet his original purpose of entertaining may have been his highest purpose.

Philip Wylie is a fascinating writer, who didn't restrict himself to science fiction, but whose science fiction works were highly influential. In addition to Gladiator, which likely inspired Superman, he wrote The Savage Gentleman, which likely inspired Doc Savage, and When Worlds Collide, with Edwin Balmer, which inspired Alex Raymond's comic strip, Flash Gordon.

No Capes!

Edna Mode declared No Capes!, but years before The Incredibles, Alan Moore made a similar point in Watchmen:

Dollar Bill was one of the nicest and most straightforward men I have ever met, and the fact that he died so tragically young is something that still upsets me whenever I think about it. While attempting to stop a raid upon one of his employer's banks, his cloak became entangled in the bank's revolving door and he was shot dead at point-blank range before he could free it. Designers employed by the bank had designed his costume for maximum publicity appeal. If he'd designed it himself he might have left out that damned stupid cloak and still be alive today.

— Under the Hood, Hollis Mason

Quinton "Rampage" Jackson on Jimmy Kimmel Live

I must admit that I enjoyed Quinton "Rampage" Jackson on Jimmy Kimmel Live:



Quinton's just a fun character. Kimbo might make a better B.A. Baracus though.

Who Will Watch the Watchmen on DVD?

Domestic DVD sales fell 3.2 percent last year to $15.9 billion, the first such drop in the medium’s history, and this is a big deal, because DVDs can account for 70 percent of the revenue for a new movie.

So Warner is going to try a new tactic to revive it DVD sales. After Watchmen — based on Alan Moore's graphic novel — hits theaters in March, 2009, Warner will then release Tales of the Black Freighter — which is based on a comic within the Watchmen comic — five days later as a separate direct-to-DVD piece.

My first thought was Cool!, because I would have enjoyed, say, a "scouring of the Shire" bonus feature, so we could get the real ending of The Return of the King.

My second thought was Wait, this doesn't make any sense, because Moore's comic-within-a-comic exists purely to play with the comic medium. It provides a separate, parallel line of narration to events in the main storyline — it exists to provide subtext.

At least that's what I remembered from two decades ago. So I decided to re-read Moore's magnum opus and see it through fresh eyes — and I found that it's very much a product of its time. More accurately, it's very much a product of a progressive — well, left-anarchist, in Moore's case — view of the Reagan-Thatcher years, with the following features:

• A sense of malaise, and a sense that we deserve this terrible situation — not because we've turned away from traditional virtues, but because we've devoted ourselves to violence, rather than caring for the poor, the old, etc.


• Sex as violence, with characters emotionally scarred by rape, child abuse, and uncaring lovers. Violent images in the media, within the comic, are closely tied to sexuality, and vice versa.


• Criminal gangs composed of white men and women with silly "punk" haircuts and outrageous sunglasses — and an occasional swastika. Crime is a right-wing phenomenon.


• A fear of all things nuclear and a clear distrust of all things military. Nuclear power exists to destroy the world.

In a video interview, Moore makes it clear that no one before him had applied a political or sexual interpretation to the genre, and his work on superheroes is a meditation on power.

How all this will translate to the movie — or movies — is an open question, but Moore and his fans have seen his previous works dumbed down terribly. Moore no longer wants anything to do with Hollywood:

I don't see how adapting it [Lost Girls, another graphic novel of his] to another medium makes any sense at all. But that's me. [...] My position is, I don't want my name on it and I don't want the money. [...] But I really doubt that any of my comics can be [successfully] made into films, because that's not how I write them.
[...]
I met Terry Gilliam, and he asked me, "How would you make a film of 'Watchmen'?" And I said, "Don't." I think he eventually came to agree with me that it was a film better unmade. In Hollywood you're going to have the producers and the backers putting in their ... well, I don't want to dignify them by calling them ideas, but ... having their input, shall we say.
[...]
I don't have any interest in directing films of my work. If something worked perfectly in one genre, why is there any reason to assume it's going to work as well or better in another genre that it wasn't designed for?

Judging from the early preview images, Hollywood didn't "get" some key elements of what Moore was going for. Nite Owl, for instance, is supposed to be middle-aged, retired from crime-fighting, and decidedly chubby.

Indiana Jones and the Magnetic Skull

I just watched Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and I'm baffled. Early in the movie — yes, there are spoilers ahead, but nothing major — Indy is held captive in an Air Force hanger in Area 51, and his captors demand his help in finding a particular crate — not the one with the Ark, by the way.

Indy declares that the crate they're looking for has highly magnetic contents and demands a compass to help find it. The soldiers holding him captive have no compasses. So he demands... gunpowder?

There's nothing ferrous about gunpowder — the nitrocellulose and nitroglycerin in modern smokeless powder have no iron, and neither does old-fashioned blackpowder, which is charcoal, sulfur, and saltpeter — so I assume Indy is setting up some kind of ruse. I'm just upset that his captors are being played for fools. He throws the powder in the air, and it starts floating in a trail through the warehouse. What is it really?, I'm thinking.

Then he demands a shotgun shell and some pliers. I'm a bit surprised that his captors have a shotgun — they're soldiers, not hunters — and that they're still playing along, but OK. Then he breaks open a shell, and the lead pellets — shotgun pellets are normally lead, which is not ferrous, in case you were wondering — race toward one of the crates.

His captors then open the crate, and various ferrous things — lamps hanging from the ceiling, the villain's sword, etc. — finally start getting pulled toward the highly magnetic contents. But the soldiers' assault rifles aren't generally affected.

Huh?

Later in the film they find a similar relic, which attracts gold — inconsistently — and they seem to recognize that as not quite magnetism.

And those were some of the less implausible elements of the story. You can tell the screenplay passed through a number of hands before getting produced.

Getting "Served" at the India-Pakistan Border

When I visited India a few years ago, I did not visit Pakistan, so I did not cross the India-Pakistan border, where this ceremony occurs each evening:



It's one part The Man Who Would Be King, one part Ministry of Silly Walks — even without Michael Palin's narration — and one part You Got Served.

It's also a reminder that combat is often more about posturing than killing.

(Hat tip à mon père.)

Jon Favreau's D&D background

Los Angeles Times staff writer Geoff Boucher writes about Jon Favreau's D&D background:

Some filmmakers get their start making shaky home movies, others catch the bug in a high school drama class or maybe through an art institute where they put paint to canvas. Favreau has more of an eight-sided education.

"It was Dungeons & Dragons, but I wouldn't have owned up so quickly a few years ago," Favreau said sheepishly.

"It's rough. It's one of the few groups that even comic-book fans look down on. But it gave me a really strong background in imagination, storytelling, understanding how to create tone and a sense of balance. You're creating this modular, mythic environment where people can play in it."

Maybe there should be a new Hollywood respect for eight- and 10-sided dice and a talent for troll tales: Robin Williams, Mike Myers, Stephen Colbert and Vin Diesel have all professed their passion (past or present) for the role-playing game.

For Favreau, it was the fantasy element that pulled him in, but it was the sense of story that he carried with him.

"It allowed me to not tamp down my imagination; I think there's a tendency to turn that part of you off," he said.

"Every kid has imagination, but at a certain age, that spigot gets turned off. I set it aside in high school. I really couldn't do it now," Favreau said, shaking his head. "There's something in my heart — there was such a stigma to it.

"When I was young, it was exciting, but as I got older it felt like it was keeping me from progressing. You're social in your small circle, but it's asocial to the wider world."

Favreau read comics, but he connected more with J.R.R. Tolkien, especially with Bilbo Baggins, the homebody-turned-hero of "The Hobbit."

"It's about a guy who just wanted to sit by a fire at home and live a very comfortable life, but then he was drawn out into the world onto an adventure," he said. "I always related to that character. That's sort of how I feel now. Going around the world to promote this picture, it's exciting, but it also feels like I just want to sit at home with my family and have a nice boring life."

Oingo Boingo on the Gong Show

Somehow, despite being a long-time fan of Oingo Boingo, I didn't realize that they had appeared on the Gong Show:



Actually, I think that's the first time I've seen them in their older incarnation, as the Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo. Oh, and the red-haired guy with the rocket appears to be the original leader of the group, Danny's older brother, Richard Elfman.

I think I'm OK with having missed that whole Mystic Knights phase.

Addendum: Old-school fans may enjoy this American Dad homage.

Steampunk Moves Between Two Worlds

When the New York Times is talking about steampunk, I guess it's gone mainstream. Steampunk Moves Between Two Worlds:

It is also the vision of steampunk, a subculture that is the aesthetic expression of a time-traveling fantasy world, one that embraces music, film, design and now fashion, all inspired by the extravagantly inventive age of dirigibles and steam locomotives, brass diving bells and jar-shaped protosubmarines. First appearing in the late 1980s and early ’90s, steampunk has picked up momentum in recent months, making a transition from what used to be mainly a literary taste to a Web-propagated way of life.

To some, “steampunk” is a catchall term, a concept in search of a visual identity. “To me, it’s essentially the intersection of technology and romance,” said Jake von Slatt, a designer in Boston and the proprietor of the Steampunk Workshop (steampunkworkshop.com), where he exhibits such curiosities as a computer furnished with a brass-frame monitor and vintage typewriter keys.

That definition is loose enough to accommodate a stew of influences, including the streamlined retro-futurism of Flash Gordon and Japanese animation with its goggle-wearing hackers, the postapocalyptic scavenger style of “Mad Max,” and vaudeville, burlesque and the structured gentility of the Victorian age. In aggregate, steampunk is a trend that is rapidly outgrowing niche status.

“There seems to be this sort of perfect storm of interest in steampunk right now,” Mr. von Slatt said. “If you go to Google Trends and track the number of times it is mentioned, the curve is almost algorithmic from a year and a half ago.” (At this writing, Google cites 1.9 million references.)

“Part of the reason it seems so popular is the very difficulty of pinning down what it is,” Mr. von Slatt added. “That’s a marketer’s dream.”

Devotees of the culture read Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, as well as more recent speculative fiction by William Gibson, James P. Blaylock and Paul Di Filippo, the author of “The Steampunk Trilogy,” the historical science fiction novellas that lent the culture its name. They watch films like “The City of Lost Children” (with costumes designed by Jean Paul Gaultier), “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” and “Brazil,” Terry Gilliam’s dystopian fantasy satirizing the modern industrial age; and they listen to melodeons and Gypsy strings mixed with industrial goth.

If you go to Google Trends and track the number of times "steampunk" is mentioned, the curve is almost algorithmic?

Anyway, what's lost in this discussion is that "steampunk" was originally a merger of the cyberpunk aesthetic of the 1980s and '90s — "the street finds its own use for things" — with Victorian technology, as in The Difference Engine, by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling.

Pixel Perfect

Some people are shocked — shocked! — to find out how much digital retouching goes into modern magazine photos. I'm not, of course, but this bit from Pixel Perfect, which looks at digital artiste Pascal Dangin, seems pretty rich, even to me:

I mentioned the Dove ad campaign that proudly featured lumpier-than-usual “real women” in their undergarments. It turned out that it was a Dangin job. “Do you know how much retouching was on that?” he asked. “But it was great to do, a challenge, to keep everyone’s skin and faces showing the mileage but not looking unattractive.”

Friends May Be the Best Guide Through the Noise

Friends May Be the Best Guide Through the Noise on the Net:

Following the feeds of people you like and admire, these companies say, allows the serendipitous discovery of needles in the information haystack. “Friends are likely to have some similar interests and tastes. Just the fact that your friends find it interesting should make it more interesting to you,” said Paul Buchheit, one of FriendFeed’s four founders, all of them former Google engineers.

Last week, for example, Mr. Buchheit’s followers on FriendFeed were treated to what he himself had discovered and found valuable online: links to interviews with the investor Peter Thiel in Reason magazine and the Google co-founder Larry Page in Fortune, an article about Justice Antonin Scalia’s views on torture on a political Web site, and a YouTube video of nine kittens moving their heads in rhythm to a song, among other Internet ephemera.

I must admit to a double-take when I read "links to interviews with the investor Peter Thiel in Reason magazine and the Google co-founder Larry Page in Fortune" — since I just cited each of those (here and here).

A Final Farewell

Professor Randy Pausch became an "accidental celebrity" last year when he gave his "last lecture" not as a formality but knowing he was dying of pancreatic cancer. In A Final Farewell, Wall Street Journal writer Jeffrey Zaslow describes how he co-wrote The Last Lecture with Pausch:

Years ago, Jai had suggested that Randy compile his advice into a book for her and the kids. She wanted to call it "The Manual." Now, in the wake of the lecture, others were also telling Randy that he had a book in him.

He resisted at first. Yes, there were things he felt an urge to express. But given his prognosis, he wanted to spend his limited time with his family.

Then he caught a break. Palliative chemotherapy stalled the growth of his tumors. "This will be the first book to ever list the drug Gemcitabine on the acknowledgments page," he joked. But he still didn't want the book to get in the way of his last months with his kids. So he came up with a plan.

Because exercise was crucial to his health, he would ride his bicycle around his neighborhood for an hour each day. This was time he couldn't be with his kids, anyway. He and I agreed that he would wear a cellphone headset on these rides, and we'd talk about everything on his mind -- the lecture, his life, his dreams for his family.

Every day, as soon as his bike ride came to an end, so did our conversation. "Gotta go!" he'd say, and I knew he felt an aching urge (and responsibility) to return to his family life.

But the next day, he'd be back on the bike, enthusiastic about the conversation. He confided in me that since his diagnosis, he had found himself feeling saddest when he was alone, driving his car or riding his bike. So I sensed that he enjoyed my company in his ears as he pedaled.

Randy had a way of framing human experiences in his own distinctive way, mixing humor here, unexpected inspiration there, and wrapping it all in an uncommon optimism. In the three months after the lecture, he went on 53 long bike rides, and the stories he told became not just his book, but also part of his process of saying goodbye.

Watch the video:

J.K. Rowling, Lexicon and Oz

In J.K. Rowling, Lexicon and Oz, Orson Scott Card excoriates Rowling for her hypocrisy:

Can you believe that J.K. Rowling is suing a small publisher because she claims their 10,000-copy edition of The Harry Potter Lexicon, a book about Rowling's hugely successful novel series, is just a "rearrangement" of her own material.

Rowling "feels like her words were stolen," said lawyer Dan Shallman.

Well, heck, I feel like the plot of my novel Ender's Game was stolen by J.K. Rowling.

A young kid growing up in an oppressive family situation suddenly learns that he is one of a special class of children with special abilities, who are to be educated in a remote training facility where student life is dominated by an intense game played by teams flying in midair, at which this kid turns out to be exceptionally talented and a natural leader. He trains other kids in unauthorized extra sessions, which enrages his enemies, who attack him with the intention of killing him; but he is protected by his loyal, brilliant friends and gains strength from the love of some of his family members. He is given special guidance by an older man of legendary accomplishments who previously kept the enemy at bay. He goes on to become the crucial figure in a struggle against an unseen enemy who threatens the whole world.

This paragraph lists only the most prominent similarities between Ender's Game and the Harry Potter series. My book was published in England many years before Rowling began writing about Harry Potter. Rowling was known to be reading widely in speculative fiction during the era after the publication of my book.

I can get on the stand and cry, too, Ms. Rowling, and talk about feeling "personally violated."

The difference between us is that I actually make enough money from Ender's Game to be content, without having to try to punish other people whose creativity might have been inspired by something I wrote.

Henchman

Ever wonder where the term henchman comes from?

The first part of the word, which is recorded in English since 1360, comes from the Old English hengest, meaning "horse", notably stallion, cognates of which also occur in many Teutonic languages, such as Old Frisian, German and Dutch hengst.

The word appears in the name of Hengest, the Saxon chieftain, and still survives in English in placenames and other names beginning with Hingst- or Hinx-. It was often rendered as Henxman in medieval English.

Young henchmen, in act pages of honour or squires, rode or walked at the side of their master in processions and the like, and appear in the English royal household from the 14th century until Tudor Queen Elizabeth I abolished the royal henchmen, known also as the children of honour.

The word became obsolete for grooms in English from the middle of the 17th century, but was retained in Scots as "personal attendant of a Highland chief".

It seems to have been revived in English through the novelist Sir Walter Scott, who took the word and its derivation, according to the New English Dictionary, from Edward Burt's Letters from a Gentleman in the North of Scotland, together with its erroneous derivation from haunch. The word is, in this sense, synonymous with gillie, the faithful personal follower of a Highland chieftain, the man who stands at his master's haunch, ready for any emergency.

The modern sense of "obedient or unscrupulous follower" is first recorded 1839, probably based on a misunderstanding of the word as used by Scott, and is often used to describe an out-and-out adherent or partisan, ready to do anything.

Kaibo Zonshinzu Anatomy Scrolls

Kyoto-area physician Yasukazu Minagaki (1784-1825) produced the Kaibo Zonshinzu anatomy scrolls in 1819.

(Hat tip to Drawn!)

Sita Sings the Blues at Tribeca