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This post contains no spoilers.

I rewatched Primer this week. I had seen it a couple years ago as one of the first movies I got from Netflix the first time I signed up. It was a successful recommendation. Since I was a kid, I have been totally intrigued with time travel and time travel movies. Time travel movies rank among my favorite films, like 12 Monkeys, Time Bandits, the Butterfly Effect, etc. Time travel books are great too, like The Time Traveler’s Wife. Thinking about the implications of being able to change things — and what happens when you do — filled many teenage hours.  An important part of my fascination then is resolving the conflicts inherent in time travel.  What happens if you change something in the past?  What are the rules in the movie or book?  Does the movie/book adhere to its own rules or do they screw up?

Primer is a time travel movie in a league of its own.  I think it’s pretty much impossible to fully grasp the first time through.  It is probably the most confusing movie I have ever seen (that is not “absurd” anyway).  It’s been bumping around in my head for the past couple years, driving me to see it again.  Mike D’Angelo in Esquire said it’s like “following the path of one blade on a high-speed ceiling fan.”  That’s a fairly accurate description.

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I have been interested in alien (invented) languages since my first brush with elven in the Lord of the Rings. I checked out The Klingon Dictionary from the library in high school and currently own a copy of it and The Languages of Middle Earth.  During high school, I nerdily amused myself by attempting to develop a language for Antarians, which involved gutturals and whistles.  Speaking it myself was nearly impossible and I would occasionally practice, trying to go from a growling sound to a whistle as quickly as my human apparatus would permit.  I imagine the average passerby might have considered calling the police to have me committed, or at least checked for rabies.

New Scientist has a brief article about the possibility of actually preparing for what alien languages might be like.  The argument that Terrence Deacon of UC Berkeley makes (according to the article) is that language serves a purpose.  It is a communication system for describing the world and since the world is in some way a fixed point of reference (though perception of the world is not), then abstract symbolism is a feature common to all languages.

At one point, the study of xenolinguistics would have been a dream job for me.  A nice office at NASA, a field that will probably never be verifiable.  Could you ask for more?

Science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke died yesterday.  He touched many lives through his writing and his ideas had an impact on me at an early age with short stories like “The Nine Billion Names of God” and movies based on his books like 2010 (which I saw in the theater) and later 2001 (which I saw as a young man).   His novel Rendezvous with Rama is being made into a movie and IMDB is quoting 2009 as the release date.  I thought it was interesting to find out he had been living in Sri Lanka for some time.

I visited my family in Ohio this past weekend and my uncle made a few interesting points.  He’s an old-school spring engineer, meaning he learned coming up through the trade rather than by going to school, and he supervises a number of employees at a relatively small spring company.  My grandfather used to own a spring company called, shockingly enough, Adams & Sons Spring Co.  That was later bought out and a number of the employees were moved to a different plant, including my dad and uncle.  So anyhow, my uncle was telling me a story, which I won’t go into, but the heart of it is that you should not wait for people to hand you “what you deserve.”  If you are a leader, regardless of your job title, then lead.  If you see someone who needs help, don’t wait for them to ask you.  Help.  Show that you have the initiative.  That’s probably fairly obvious, I mean we’ve all heard it before, but it came at a particularly important time for me.

I’ve been on twitter for a while now, though I don’t update it super-regularly like some people.  It’s fun and I hope more of my friends start using it, but I’ve noticed an interesting trend.  Just about anything is open to potential spam.  Friendster is sick with it.  MySpace is abominable.  LinkedIn seems fairly immune and I’ve gotten very few spam friend requests from Facebook.  Twitter has so far been very good about it, but there is a new trend that I’ve found interesting.  You can follow people and people can follow you on twitter.  So your status updates are public and potentially seen by thousands of people.  How do you increase the number of people who follow you?  Follow them, of course!  I’m having random people follow me left and right.  It only helps me, since I don’t follow them back, but it’s interesting to note.

I just watched Next starring Nicolas Cage and Jessica Biel.  Oh and Julianne Moore.  I liked it a lot, mainly because it brought together a slew of my favorite elements:  people who can see the future (precogs) and nuclear explosions.  And other explosions.  Plus it was based on a short story by one of my favorite writers of all time:  Philip K. Dick.  Now if they had only found different actors than Nicolas Cage and Julianne Moore, we might have had a more appealing movie.  Spoilers beneath the fold.  This isn’t so much a review as a statement of what I found cool about it.

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Researchers in the video below filled an ant colony with concrete and dug it out to see just how exactly the colony was organized underground. The results are just plain awesome. Ants farm fungus and use livestock (aphids), build cities and wage wars. What the video refers to as a hive consciousness is emergent behavior: each ant following a series of simple rules results in a collective behavior that appears to be driven by a single conscious mind.

This reminds me of one of my favorite books growing up: City by Clifford D. Simak. Simak seems to be a virtually forgotten author these days, though you can occasionally find his books in a Barnes & Noble (and of course, widely available online). City was probably his best work and had an incredible vision (it was written in 1952). I won’t spoil much, but he introduces the idea of a colony of ants that is given the opportunity to survive many winters. They learn to produce heat on their own and make several appearances as the tale unfolds over hundreds of years. I highly recommend it and it’s one of my favorite sci-fi books of all time. I’ve also read The Goblin Reservation and The Visitors by him and I can recommend the former. The latter I still enjoyed, but if you are going to check out anything he has done, make that the third choice. Simak has an easy-to-read style that incorporates fantastic elements into what would otherwise be hard sci-fi, raising interesting philosophical questions in the process.

Unfortunately, no release date yet on this book. I am dying, dying waiting…

While watching the 2000 version of Henry James’ The Golden Bowl, I heard the once-common phrase “The deuce only knows…”  I’m always looking for vintage profanity, and this appealed to me strongly.  I’ve heard it hundreds or thousands of times before, of course, but here it was brought to the fore of my attention.  After some brief research, I found ties to 16th Century Northern German, Family Guy, and playing dice.  The word deuce seems most strongly tied in meaning to “the devil,” and is used interchangeably in old-fashioned profanity (cf. What the devil and What the deuce).

There are attested uses of the phrase “Was der Daus!” in German from the 16th Century, which has my money for being the real origin of the phrase.  Daus meant “devil” though the modern German is “Teufel.”  Deuce also means “two” and comes from the French deux.  Supposedly, the combination of the German phrase and the playing of dice led to the phrase entering English usage.  Rolling two (the Devil’s eyes) inspired the curse, since that was the lowest score and therefore, a loss.  I’m not sold on this particular coincidence.  It seems too much like folk etymology of the sort you hear in email forwards.  Lastly, while I enjoy Family Guy enormously when I hear it, I very seldomly get the opportunity to watch an episode, so the tie to Stewie was lost on me until Google unearthed it.

And when OpenEphyra is given the question What is the origin of the word deuce? the answer is “Watkins.”  It offers as evidence this page.  That page poses the question What does the word deuce mean? but the answer has nothing to do with my information need.  Also, the word Watkins never even appears on that page, so no idea where it came from.

I have been wanting to see The Island ever since it came out in 2005. Not because it looked like it was going to be a great movie, but because it bore a striking resemblance to a book I had listened to on tape called The Experiment. I will go into further details of their similarity below, but I want to warn the reader/viewer that I will be giving spoilers to both the book (The Experiment) and the film (The Island). If you do not wish to read the spoilers, proceed no further.

Warning: spoilers to follow. Read the rest of this entry »

Some random trivia here. In the Masterpiece Theatre version of Jane Eyre, St. John hands Jane a couple books and tells her to begin learning a new language. This was his typically controlling way of telling her she was going to become a missionary with him as well as his wife. Curious about which language she was to be learning, I paused the DVD and found the title was A Dictionary of English to Shosa. Shosa is spelt Xhosa in modern times, and is one of the official languages of South Africa (and spoken by 7.9 million people). In the movie, it is indeed “the Cape” that they would be travelling to and I think South Africa is mentioned elsewhere. I was unable to find any mention of this book on Google.

If anyone knows of any good resources for searching for books from the 19th Century, I’d love for you to leave me a comment with your suggestions. Even more so if you actually find the book.

So I’ve been reading A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram, the creator of Mathematica. It was hyped up big time back when he first wrote it, since he had gone silent for a number of years, hinting that he was about to do something big. So my middle little sister got me the book for Christmas (cuz she rocks) and I cracked it open a few times. It’s about 846 pages of text (yipes!) and then another 351 pages of notes. Quite daunting. So I put it down and have meant to pick it back up a thousand times. Today I was needing a diversion because a particular C++ issue was giving me fits.

In Chapter 2, Wolfram introduces a fairly simple 2-dimensional cellular automata (one spatial dimension, one temporal dimension). The temporal dimension can be plotted as another spatial dimension producing a nice little spreadsheet style graph. Each cell of the graph can be considered a bit. Depending on whether the bit is set, the cell is either shaded or not. So the single line in the spatial dimension contains some initial setting. Let’s say there is one single bit set in the middle of the line, so it might look like this:

000000000010000000000

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Erin McKean, the Dictionary Evangelist, has a post today on the coinage of the term ygology, meaning the study of palindromes.

Her take is that the word was an inevitability of English, demanding birth. No argument there.

But then she also references ambigrams, which are visual representations of words that are somehow symmetric. If you flip them upside down, they form the same word. Or perhaps the negative space in the word forms another word. Probably the most famous such figure is the cover of the book Gödel, Escher, Bach. She points to another site by John Langdon that features a lot of really cool ambigrams — definitely worth checking out.

Ever since Facebook added apps, there has been a gradual bloat on profiles.  Some people are app minimalists, adding just a couple things that don’t clutter up their profile.  From my quite informal perusal of Facebook, these people seem to be fairly inactive users.  They log every once in a while, but don’t seem to be using it on a daily basis.  Then you have your Facebook app junkies.  I’m thinking of one friend in particular.  Yeah, that’s right.  I just outted you.  My friend, you are a Facebook app junkie.  But I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with it.  Some of my best friends are like that.  It’s just not how I roll.

But I have noticed that as time progresses, there is a gradual app bloat in my profile.  I’ve tried to keep it down as much as possible, but then Pandora comes out with their app, which is cool.  Dogbook is an essential.  The makers of Dogbook are coming out with Babybook, which I won’t be using since Dogbook and Babybook are synonymous for me.  Another of my favorite apps was the Books app.  I liked being able to display some of the things I’ve read and rate them and compare them to friends, there were just two problems.

1. The books app is hard as hell to use.
2. No one is using.  Not my friends anyway.

So now I’ve tried out Visual Bookshelf and it seems we have a winner.  The benefit of it is that it automatically presents you with Amazon results for your nationale (assuming you’re in one of the five non-US countries they support).  So instead of having to enter ISBNs or names and then going through a lengthy addition process, you just click “read it” or “want to read it” or “reading it now” and the book is in your profile.  Very handy and it recommends a book to you after you add one, which lets you add an entire series pretty quickly and easily, which is good for me since I read several fantasy series.

The only thing it seems to be missing is a “skip book” option.  If you don’t want to read it, but you want the next recommendation, you’re out of luck.  I’m hoping they’ll fix that soon, though.

I read The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper a few years ago at the insistence of my ex-brother-in-law.  It was one of his favorite books from his childhood and I believe he put it near the level of The Chronicles of Narnia and Lord of the Rings (but not quite).  I figured that was bloody high praise, but waited a while before I got around to it.  I’m not above reading kids books and seeing kids movies.  Especially when they promise to be dark.  I love dark fantasy.  So anyhow, I enjoyed the book, though there were parts that were a little slow.

And now of course, there is a movie coming out next Friday.  I’m curious how well they will pull it off.  I never read the whole series, but in the first book there was a lot of mystery about the back story.  Hopefully they won’t destroy that feeling.

It is a sad, sad day. James Rigney, aka Robert Jordan, author of the Wheel of Time fantasy series passed away on September 16, 2007. He had been battling with amyloidosis for a while now and the publisher announced he died of “complications from primary amyloidosis with cardiomyopathy.” He was working on the final book in the Wheel of Time series.

Robert Jordan was the first fantasy author I read and really enjoyed. He is the reason I started reading fantasy at all. He influenced the entire genre over the past couple decades, helping authors like George R. R. Martin get a start by providing a cover quote for his first Song of Ice and Fire book, A Game of Thrones. He also provided many of the ideas for Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth series, though Goodkind denies it vehemently. All you have to do is read the books (that’s not a suggestion, by the way, Goodkind is a talentless hack) to see the similarities and ideas that were pulled right out of Jordan’s pages.

The last news I had heard from Jordan was a while back since I don’t check the Dragonmount website frequently. At the time, it seemed he was beating the disease with promising news from the Mayo clinic where he was getting treatment. When I read about this today on George R. R. Martin’s Not a blog, I was blown out of the water. We should all go light a pipe for this once physics major turn fantasy writer who survived hurricanes and Vietnam, but was no match for the ravages of time.

Over Christmas while visiting family in Greenville, SC, I bought a stack of books at my favorite old haunt: Barnes & Noble. Among those books was Stardust by Neil Gaiman (more about this in a sec). Being a grad student with a raging blagoblag addiction, I don’t have a whole lot of time to read for pleasure. When I had a week to read during my vacation this summer, I did manage to catch up slightly. First I read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which I loved. I also read The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Mind you, I don’t read anything because it’s an Oprah Book Club book (the thought sickens me to the core), but I did first hear it mentioned when my wife Donna was watching Oprah a while back. I tend to sit by on the computer while she watches TV. It’s an unfortunate feature of my brain that I can’t not pay at least a little attention to the tube when it’s on. So I heard about the book and the premise seemed interesting. I’m big on post-apocalyptic stuff, and The Road did not disappoint. It was a very dark and sad tale of a father’s love and perseverence in the face of utter desperation.

Returning from this digression, I actually finished reading Stardust just prior to said vacation, but it had taken me several months to do so. Really that’s a shame when you consider how short the book is. Just before I finished reading it, I saw a preview on TV that looked extremely familiar: an air ship, a fallen star, a unicorn, and Wall. I love when a movie comes out that really gets me excited. When Stargate came out years and years ago, I was just walking by the TV and it captured my attention and riveted me for the remaining 20 seconds. I remember thinking, I have to see this movie. I didn’t quite get this thunderbolt for Stardust, but I did get a nice chill.

I deliberated reviewing the movie here with spoilers, but decided in the end to avoid that. I highly recommend reading the book. One of the things I like about Neil Gaiman is that he takes old ideas, like fairy tales, and makes them new. If you haven’t read his short story “Snow, Glass, Apples” (off of Smoke and Mirrors), you are really missing out. Stardust the movie was good, but there were additions, deletions and modifications that bothered me at first. The fact that Gaiman is an executive producer eased that pain a little, since I can only assume he had a major creative influence in the end product. The main thrust of the book — the central love story — still came through in the movie, which was the important part. Also, the special effects were decent and the pace of the adventure never left me wondering what time it was. So all in all, a very enjoyable movie. If you haven’t seen the movie or read the book, then I suggest starting with the movie if you suffer as I do with modifications.

Marc Andreesen, co-founder of Netscape, has an interesting post on his blog about luck and entrepreneurship.  My entrepreneurial genes are currently switched off after a few years of wheel-spinning, but this is good info to store against a future need.  He describes the four types of luck written about by Dr. James Austin in his book Chase, Chance, and Creativity:

1. pure dumb luck (I)
2. keep busy and luck (II) will find you
3. luck (III) will find the prepared mind
4. who you are and how you behave draws out luck (IV)

So type I is the kind of luck that most people associate with the word luck or chance (Austin refers to all of these as types of chance).  Type II luck is the kind of luck that happens because you stumble upon it.  It doesn’t often happen to people who are inactive.  Type III luck is the kind tailored to a person specifically prepared for it.  Andreesen gives the example of Sir Alexander Fleming who discovered penicilin.  Type IV luck is the kind of luck that happens because you are pursuing your hobbies or interests in your own way.  This luck won’t find someone else because that person would be doing things differently, presumably.