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May 13, 2009: Perhaps today IS a good day to talk about Star Trek!

Ok, enough waiting — if The Avocado thinks it's time to jaw about Star Trek, by gum, it's time.

• Agreed with Timothy Burke, the movie was pretty goddamn excellent. Consistently exciting and usually very funny.
• I was surprised and delighted that they left Old Spock alive at the end instead of killing him off. As Burke points out, having Old Spock in the universe creates all sorts of problems: he has foreknowledge of all kinds of threatening species and problems that the folks in the 23rd century didn't know about, plus he's a brilliant scientist from 130 years in the future. Frankly, I think these are excellent problems for a science fiction saga to have, and I only hope they don't forget about these problems around the time movie #3 or #4 is ready to go.
• Also, a big thank-you to the Star Trek scriptwriters for not destroying the Golden Gate Bridge.
• The scene in the elevator between Spock and Uhura was excellent. I want to know more about Uhura, and why she would want to deal with the reality of dating Spock — as opposed to the abstract appeal of dating Spock that fandom has been chewing over for forty years.
• Bad biology: The giant red worm/insect is awesome looking, but why is it red? And wouldn't it freeze to death? And why go after Kirk, when it already has a substantial meal?
• Bad engineering: What's with the crazy system of pipes and water in the engineering room? Is this a shout-out to Galaxy Quest? "Why are there chompy-crushy things in here! There's no reason we should have to run through chompy-crushy things! Who designed this? It makes no sense!"
• Bad physics: I'm actually not too offended by the ridiculous black hole physics. Star Trek has consistently treated black holes as magical plot devices, so this is okay. (Though if the black hole was powerful enough to collapse a planet, why did they have to bother drilling to the core?)
• Worse physics: A supernova that "threatened the galaxy?" Oo-kay. And did the supernova happen to Romulus's star or a neighboring star? If the former, there would be no time to evacuate the planet. If the latter, you would have a few years to evacuate everybody. And what exactly a black hole would do to reverse / disperse a supernova?
• Eye-gougingly bad physics: Look, transverse velocity exists, even when you are jumping from a magical flying dragon 23rd century shuttlecraft.
• Loved the TOS sound effects.
• It seems that modern SF franchises subscribe to the "the timeline wants to heal itself" philosophy of time travel. You can make massive changes — kill people, blow up Vulcan, even! — but incredibly unlikely events will conspire to land the entire TOS crew together anyway, in nearly the same state they were in the other timeline. See also the Terminator franchise, where you can't kill John Connor's mom because you'll just end up spawning John Connor, and you can't avert the apocalypse, you can only move it around in time.
• Despite screaming "FIRE EVERYTHING!!!" with gusto, Nero was not, shall we say, the most interesting villain Star Trek has ever seen. I'm not sure we needed a great villain for a movie that's basically about getting the band back together.
• On the other hand: "Hi Christopher. I'm Nero." Hehe!
• If you can get Kirk and Spock on the Narada, why not transport a bunch of armed & armored Starfleet security guards as well? I'm pretty sure "Cupcake" and his buddies could have helped, at least. (In the Star Trek universe, if your enemy is able to transport soldiers over to your ship, you are usually in deep doo-doo.)
• It's interesting to compare the edited trailer dialogue to the lines in the full movie — usually the trailer's dialogue wins. For example, Nero's line in the trailer is, "James T. Kirk was a great man... but that was another life." The full quote in the movie is wordier and not nearly as punchy.
• Also, the trailers' music is better than the movie's music. Unfortunately, the trailer music is not for sale to the public at any price (I checked).
• The final shot before opening credits (Nero's ship crippled, a little trail of hopeful little shuttlecraft creeping away) is brilliant.
• I want to know more about Future Iowa. What are those giant looming barely-visible buildings? What is that giant artificial gouge all about?

Posted by Evan Goer on May. 13, 2009 at 8:15 AM | Comments (8)

April 20, 2009: Sorry, My Amicus Briefs Only Work Against Chaotic Evil

Commenter Harry Lewis, on the Google Books settlement:

The proposed settlement includes a “most favored nation” provision. The parties agree that IF the Authors and Publishers ever come to terms with another party who is scanning books, Google has to get the same deal. That is an anti-competitive provision that will make it impossible for anyone else ever to underprice Google. If the Court adds its signature to the deal, it is sanctifying the creation of a monopoly.

Driven by despair, or perhaps fragile hope, my old classmate Sam Mikes responds with poetry:

The law condemns the man or woman
who steals the goose from off the common
but lets the greater villain loose
who steals the common from the goose.

One thing is clear: Brewster Kahle is going to need all the help he can get if he's going to slug it out with Google. So what are our most prominent knights of the commons doing to assist us in our hour of need? I sauntered on over to Larry Lessig's place to see what he thought about the original settlement in October.

Oops, looks like Lessig's in the tank.

Maybe the EFF... hmm, no. They're a little more measured, but they don't seem all fired up to go after Google either.

Being a Paladin of the law is tough work, I guess.

Posted by Evan Goer on Apr. 20, 2009 at 8:51 PM | Comments (1)

April 7, 2009: Time for Some Good Old-fashioned Embezzling

Today I received the following mail from Amazon:

Dear *****@goer.org,

Greetings from the Amazon Honor System.

We wanted to let you know that we have initiated transfer of the
balance of your Amazon Honor System account to your checking account.
It may take your bank several business days to record the transfer.

$1.40

Here is the receipt for the transfer:
------------------------------------------
Date:          07-Apr-2009
Amount:        $1.40
Last Digits: ****
------------------------------------------

Your Amazon Honor System balance will be automatically transferred to
your checking account every 14 days. You may also transfer the funds to
your checking account manually if your account balance is at least $1.00.

To view your account summary at any time, visit:
http://s1.amazon.com/exec/varzea/fx-account/your-account

Thank you for participating in the Amazon Honor System.

Best regards,

Amazon.com Customer Service

At first, I was like, "whaa-a?" But then I remembered — oh yeah, the Amazon Honor System! It was all the rage six, seven, eight years back. Remember how all those warbloggers in late 2001 had these plaintive little buttons in their sidebars, "Hi, $username! Please donate to this blog!" (I was like, whoa, freaky! How is this blog talking to me?)

Well, all good things come to an end, and it looks like the payment system that helped launch the blogosphere as we know it — thanks Amazon! — is finally shutting down.

I had to scratch my head to remember why I was getting a notification from Amazon. I mean, I'm not a pathetic warblogger — I can actually afford to pay for my website my own damn self. But then I remembered... the infamous Save Ken Lay campaign of 2002! Against all odds, it turns out that people were not immune to Linda Lay's heartfelt plea about her husband's plight. These generous souls managed to scrape together a grand total of $1.40 to help Mr. and Mrs. Lay in their hour of need. I think we've all learned a lesson here: never underestimate the power of the Internet to help people come together and make the world just a little brighter.

Unfortunately, it appears the Lay family's hour of need is long past. So I think I'll be spending that money on beer instead.

Posted by Evan Goer on Apr. 07, 2009 at 6:20 PM | Comments (1)

March 30, 2009: Does 'FIRE EVERYTHING!!!' Sound Better in German?

Strangely, it does not!

Star Trek Trailer — USA Version

Star Trek Trailer — German Version

Star Trek Trailer — The Original Series Version

Posted by Evan Goer on Mar. 30, 2009 at 11:04 PM | Comments (11)

March 10, 2009: Pop Quiz: Good Parenting

You are a software engineer with a wife and two young children. Your coworker "Evan" has invited you out for beers at The Faultline after work. The last two times you had to take a raincheck. This evening might actually work, except you're supposed to get home early to play with the kids before bedtime.

Do you:

• A) tell Evan that you can't make it this week, but next week for sure
• B) apologize to your family and promise to make up for it with extra play time at this weekend, cross your heart and hope to die
• C) growl, "You kids gotta learn about the cold cruel world sometime!" and slam the door on the way out

Hint: there is a right answer!

Posted by Evan Goer on Mar. 10, 2009 at 7:07 AM | Comments (12)

March 6, 2009: Thank Gods for the iPhone App Store

Thanks to Jax Schumann, I just learned that there is now a Cylon Detector iPhone app available:

Friends. Family. Coworkers. Everyone around you has one thing in common: They might be a frakking cylon.

With the iPhone Cylon Detector, you will know the truth.

This is an outstanding development. Previously, the only known reliable methods for identifying Cylons were:

• Dismantle a nuclear warhead and use the enriched radioactive material to construct a lab-sized Cylon detector.
• Have sex with the Cylon and check to see if his or her spine lights up.

This iPhone thingy seems a lot easier.

Posted by Evan Goer on Mar. 06, 2009 at 7:38 PM | Comments (2)

February 28, 2009: Why "Never Let Me Go" is Boring As Hell

Jen Pelland has read Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, and she is unimpressed:

I've made it to the halfway point, and I still have no idea why people are being raised as organ donors. Why? Because the book is both claustrophobic in its focus, and the POV character is disinterested in the world outside. The claustrophobia comes in the settings. Part 1 takes place entirely on the grounds of the boarding school, and Part 2 takes place (so far) strictly at the protagonist's post-school home. We don't get to see what's happened to the rest of the world that's made them so desperate for organs that they've turned people into cattle. And the POV character (and just about all the other students around her) are given opportunity after opportunity to ask questions, but they don't. Worse, they then spend time privately mooning over why they didn't think to ask that question that they really wanted to have answered. What do they do? They worry about grades, teachers, and sex.

Bo-ring!

This is supposed to be science fiction! You're supposed to tell us all the cool stuff that's happening in this crazy world you've invented!

I read Never Let Me Go a year back, and it bored me too — I barely finished it. That said, it seems unlikely that Ishiguro wrote Never Let Me Go specifically to piss off SF readers. The simpler explanation is: Ishiguro was trained to write in a genre that cares only about well-turned sentences and phrases, and doesn't give a rip about plot or pacing. Therefore, the book is boring.

Also, keep in mind CLONING! and ORGAN HARVESTING!! are very very intrinsically exciting to someone who's never bothered to read any of the thousands of SF stories that have already covered this ground. So it doesn't occur to Ishiguro to go further — to him and his audience, these subjects are already very daring. We can deduct points for lack of curiosity and laziness, but I doubt we can chalk this up to malice.

Comparing Never Let Me Go to, say, The Road, the latter comes off far better. Like Ishiguro, Cormac McCarthy hasn't bothered to read any of the thousands of post-apocalyptic SF stories out there, and so he ends up writing a novel that doesn't really tell an SF fan anything new about the apocalypse. But McCarthy at least has a plot — not a very fast-moving or complicated one, but at least there's some there there. His characters actually do stuff. Even better, McCarthy does a fine job fleshing out his nasty post-apocalyptic world. We don't find out how exactly the apocalypse happened, but we at least have a good sense of how this world works and how people try to live in it. So we at least get something readable, even if it makes us want to drop off a pile of books at McCarthy's house with a note saying, "Please Read."

Posted by Evan Goer on Feb. 28, 2009 at 9:28 PM | Comments (11)

January 31, 2009: Two Thousand Hours

A couple weeks back I posed this question to some folks at work, and then again on Facebook, and it got some interesting responses. So here it is again: If you could spend two thousand hours diving into any one new hobby or skill, what would it be?

In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell cites 10,000 hours as the amount of time required to become a world-class expert in a subject. To be fair, Gladwell's embrace of this rule might be more breezy than scientifically accurate. That aside, I'm willing to accept 10,000 hours as a gut-level assessment of how long it takes to become a real expert.

What about a smaller time investment, a couple hundred hours or less? Last quarter, I took a basic drawing class at Mission College. Those of you who were art students remember this stuff — ink and charcoal, the prerequisite for every class you might want to take in visual arts, you know the drill. I'd never had any talent for art, but I do like looking at art, and I figured what the heck. Don't be afraid to try something you suck at, right?

Conservatively speaking, between evening classes and homework, I sunk about 150 hours into that drawing class. And compared to most the kids in the class, particularly the ones who were future visual arts majors, I did suck. But the good news is that after 150 hours, you do get better. I went from being barely able to sketch little plastic toy dinosaurs with vine charcoal to drawing actual human faces. Not that these faces actually looked like the original people. If you're slightly off on the shape of the nose or the mouth... well, let's just say that Homo Sapiens's built-in facial recognition software is powerful and damned unforgiving. Still, being able to draw any faces at all was way more progress than I expected.

Two thousand hours is an interesting timescale because logarithmically, it sits sort of close to the midpoint between 150 hours (starting to make progress) and 10,000 hours (mastery). It's the equivalent of taking a full year off to study, or of taking one class at a time for several years. It's enough time to learn a skill that will impact your life forever, without necessarily making that skill your full time job. It's enough time to become "pretty good" at just about anything, even if you lack God-given talents in that direction. It's enough to actually know something.

Nothing about this is mystical. Lance Armstrong has trained for well over ten thousand hours and is a mutant for cycling. Henri Matisse painted for well over ten thousand hours and was a mutant for art. So no, you can't be Armstrong or Matisse, unless you're a mutant with lots of free time too. But you can still be accomplished — in playing the violin, in metalwork, in basketball. I think that my two thousand hours is in painting and drawing. What's yours?

Posted by Evan Goer on Jan. 31, 2009 at 3:32 PM | Comments (6)

January 21, 2009: I Will Make You Stuff!

The first five people to comment on this post will get something made by me! My choice. For you.

This offer does have some restrictions and limitations:

• I make no guarantees that you will like what I make! What I create will be just for you.
• It’ll be done this year. (might be a little while)
• You have no clue what it’s going to be. It may be a story. It may be poetry. I may draw or paint something. I may bake you something and mail it to you. Who knows. Not you, that’s for sure!
• I reserve the right to do something extremely strange.

The catch? Oh, the catch is that you have to repost. We can all make stuff!!

(hat tip FutureSarah)

Posted by Evan Goer on Jan. 21, 2009 at 11:46 PM | Comments (11)

January 8, 2009: I'm so evil and... skanky. And I think I'm written for the IBM 7094!

The things you learn from conversations on Facebook...

• Evan Goer [status]
  Oh, $5 clearance wine from Santa Rosa -- you are surprisingly delicious! Why oh why did I only buy four bottles of you?

• Michael Toback at 7:30pm January 8
  I sense a problem here. http://www-ai.ijs.si/eliza/eliza.html
  Cheap therapy for cheap wine.

• Evan Goer at 7:34pm January 8
  You: Why did I not buy enough cheap, delicious wine?
  Eliza: Can you elaborate on that?

• Sarah McNeil at 7:41pm January 8
  I think... I think it was your girlfriend's fault. :-(

• Michael Toback at 7:43pm January 8
  Eliza: But you are not sure you think it was my girlfriends fault?

• Evan Goer at 7:44pm January 8
  You: Ek er reiðr ok á brand!
  Eliza: Please go on.

• Evan Goer at 7:47pm January 8
  Wait -- has Eliza just come out? After all these years?

• Michael Toback at 7:50pm January 8
  Yes. First LiLo, now Eliza!

Note for the People Magazine-challenged: "LiLo" refers to an actress/singer/starlet named Lindsey Lohan, not Lilo Pelekai of Hawaii or LILO the Linux bootloader. Now back to your regular programming.

Posted by Evan Goer on Jan. 08, 2009 at 7:58 PM | Comments (4)