Saturn Return:
Via Bruce Stering, a link to NASA’s Cassini probe web site.
So was it worth nearly vaporizing 72 lbs of Plutonium in the atmosphere to slingshot this probe towards the outer planets? Go look at the pretty pictures and decide for yourself. Be sure and check out the ‘Why Go To Saturn?’ Flash animation.
More movie action, although this time it’s a miniseries from Britain.
‘Quatermass:’ Yet another (and more than likely the final) installment in the Quatermass science fiction franchise.
Over the course of four hours, we learn that the Earth of the near future is a desperate place, full of poverty and crime, especially in urban centers. There are normal people trying to get along in desperate times, there are bands of thugs, and there are hippies. The hippies call themselves the Planet People, and they are searching for the ancient sacred sites where they will be transported by some kind of alien intelligence to a new planet, free from the troubles of Earth.
But… when the hippies (and subsequently much of the rest of the population, as well) get to the stone circles and mountaintop temples they’re drawn towards, a death ray from an unknown source incinerates them. This happens more and more frequently, and it’s up to professor Quatermass to solve the problem through the scientific method, and prevent more destruction, thereby saving what’s left of the human race. Gee, you think he’ll succeed?
There’s some thick acting and a few silly plot points, but there are a few things I really like about this story. For instance: Annihilation come from an undefined source. No one knows what they’re fighting, really. This allows the script to suggest that maybe the planet people are right, or that maybe there’s no rhyme or reason to it at all. There are also bickering scientists. They all disagree about how to proceed. It’s a very chaotic movie. And most of all, I enjoyed the way the script values the elderly, and maintains that they still have much to offer.
Here come the spoilers, if you care…
Watching it, I kept being reminded of ‘Britannia Hospital,’ which came out within a few years of ‘Quatermass.’ Britain was in pretty bad shape at the time, so the science fiction and social satire reflects this. Both movies propose a solution that is worse than the problem in order to whip people back into some kind of perspective, so they’re both pretty bleak, but that’s par for the course in SF. ‘Britannia Hospital’ announces that humanity can’t be pieced back together once it’s torn itself apart, and so humanity will be replaced by machine intelligence. ‘Quatermass’ suggests that the solution is for most of the young people of the world (and German Shepherds named ‘Puppy’) to simply disappear in a conflagration of their own self-centeredness and idiocy. I’m not sure where to go with either solution… They don’t help me understand a real solution, and they also don’t really help me understand the problem, either.
But darn if they aren’t entertaining mind-candy. 
Rented some movies:
‘Paycheck:’ Stupid, fun, boy movie with extraneous action sequences. Demonstrates that, when it comes to Philip K. Dick, you really, REALLY need to work up a good script, rather than simply relying on his stories as written. There are a bunch of really talented people in this movie, and all of their contributions are tossed aside in favor of car chases and fight scenes. Probably a blast if you’re a 12-year-old boy and have never seen a John Woo movie before.
‘Gigantic:’ Documentary about the band They Might Be Giants. Confirms what I’d always assumed, that the two Johns are more interesting than their music, though their music is pretty clever. Lots of enjoyable cameos reading lyrics to their songs, and Ira Glass appears on film!
‘Big Fish:’ Great fun. On one level, it’s the trying-to-understand-your-dad-before-he-dies story, and on another it’s the fantastic adventures the dad has been telling his son about his life. Gloriously sappy, goofy, and sentimental while also managing to be sly, clever, and knowing. Bonus points for the authenticity of shooting on location in Alabama. I should have caught this fish in the theaters.
Finally got around to upgrading my license for Interarchy, and registered a nifty little app called LittleSecrets.
LittleSecrets is only $9US, and it’s a blowfish-encrypted simple notepad with an incredibly cute application icon. My goal: Write at least a window-full every day.
Some day, after I’ve become famous and died, there’ll be some future Geraldo Rivera who will televise the opening of my encrypted file vaults!
That reminds me of a thing I read a while back, about how if the Rosetta stone had been encrypted, we wouldn’t know how to decode ancient Egyptian. The funny thing is, maybe it is encrypted, and we’ve simply reverse-engineered their language to be completely wrong.
Also, another email subject line designed to beat the anti-spam software: ‘Cartographic conflagaration.’ So sad no one sends me emails with subject lines like that except spammers!
Yesterday, I accomplished a few things that had been weighing heavily on me for a while. Frequently, I’ll let the things I need to do pile up into a huge overwhelming monster that keeps me stuck for weeks at a time. Seriously.
But I pulled out a few keystone items from this dread arch, and the other things are falling into place naturally. The point here is that for the past few weeks, I’ve been living under a sort of psychic sword of Damocles (to use FAR TOO MANY METAPHORS), and now I’m not.
So as a result, last night was Superhero Homer dream night. I performed heroic feats like saving small children from herds of thundering unicorns, and reuniting them with their breathlessly thankful parents (“How can we ever repay you?”). And stuff like that. Some of it’s just too embarassing to talk about, actually; too silly to mention. But my favorite part was this:
At some point, the dream was a huge banquet. Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino showed up, and they were slick gangsters in silk suits. DeNiro leaned up against a bar, took out his gun and started waving it around at people while talking to Pacino, using the gun to point out who he was talking about. Finally he pointed it at me.
I got up from where I was, walked across the hall, and grabbed the gun out of his hand. He stared in amazement. I opened the revolver and started taking the bullets out while I was talking. “You know, this is really a bad idea.” “You mean taking a gun away from a thug like me?” “No. Being a thug in the first place.” With each word I was pulling a shell out of the revolver. Eventually, I said, “Damn, there are a lot of bullets in this gun.”
I handed the gun back to him. Pacino’d had his gun drawn, too, by this point, but now that I was done with DeNiro, he had wandered off.
I went back to where my friends were, and then noticed Pacino on the other side of the hall. He was sitting at a table getting more and more drunk, slamming one after the other of something brown on the rocks.
He saw me approaching and pulled his gun out again. He screamed, “Well if it isn’t the KING OF THE FAGS!” and shot at me, only he was so drunk he shot the ceiling. I grabbed his wrist, pried the gun loose, and he passed out drunk. His body guard approached and I handed him the gun. I said, “You should take better care of your boss; he might have shot someone with this thing.”
I woke up and burst out laughing. I had dreamed the worst Martin Scorcese movie imaginable!
More on the Mac OS X URL security hole: Daring Fireball’s ‘Ounce of Prevention’
I’m jazzed that George Lucas has chosen this moment to re-release ‘THX 1138‘ as a director’s cut, in September.
My problem with it is that it’s going to be all jazzed up like he did with the first three Star Wars movies. I like that it’s all old-skool and dated-looking, but the trailer shows a lot of computer-generated slick stuff added in. George, just in case you don’t realize: You were brilliant then, you’re a hack now.
Cool web site, though.
“Take four red capsules. In ten minutes, take two more. Help is on the way!”
I had this dream yesterday (referring to ‘last night’ would be misleading). Just to update the newcomers to my ‘blog: I have this strange belief that many dreams are collaborative, such that dreams are shared between a number of people. It’s like improvisational storytelling between strangers, which is why so much of it is so alien. This dream had the collaborative feel to it.
I was in a pirate movie. I was being held captive on a strange tiny island the size of a house. It was more like a room that was supposed to look like it was an island, like maybe it was an indoor ride at some cheap Disney knock-off theme park or something. I was on a big bed that was being lowered into the water in the tiny lagoon at the center of the room. And this was supposed to be threatening. I was bored, so I hopped into the water and waded out the room.
Before long, I was being instructed in the finer points of kung fu. A lovely Asian woman was my martial arts instructor, and I was on a movie set. I had to kick ass on cue, and she was going to show me how to do it. So she says, “Here, try this.” And she did some forms, doing her shouts to go along with the strikes. Very solid and forceful.
It was my turn, and I didn’t know any forms. So I leapt up, and delicately balanced on the branch of a cherry blossom tree, the pink petals falling all around me. I kept leaping higher and higher, onto tinier and more delicate branches with each leap, until all that was left was the idea of a limb, and an abstract swirl of pink petal archetypes contrasting against what was now my all-black ninja outfit.
I dove back down through this abstraction, to meet the woman on the ground. She was dressed in faded jeans and a corduroy shirt. She looked at me like I was an idiot. She showed me her hands, calloused and hard from a lifetime’s training. She broke my ribs with a single strike, so fast that it almost didn’t feel like it happened. She said, “What the hell are you doing here?” And walked off with some friends.
Continuing my never-ending search for relevant information about Asperger’s Syndrome on the web, I discover this Yahoo email group:
asperger_adhd_wearing_shorts: People with autistic spectrum disorders have unusual sensitivities, and for some, skin sensitivity and high metabolism are a known reason for liking to wear shorts all year round. I made a submission to the Scottish parliament in 2001 that this proves all dress codes and uniforms are against international law on minority rights. There are too many foul Yahoo groups around and here I seek a morally clean place to share any civil liberty and social problems with the lifestyle of wearing shorts as a scientifically serious sensory need because you are on the autistic spectrum.
The group’s maintainer also maintains a web site called Spectrum Fairness, which is basically an opportunity to rail against people who try to diminish his concerns.
Now, I can totally relate, even though I can wear jeans just fine. And I hope the dude reaches some degree of satisfaction about it. But the scenario is so completely ironic and funny that I can’t help myself. The guy’s appealing to the Scottish parliament to allow students to wear shorts in a country famous for men wearing skirts. And he’s so righteously Aspie about it, too, creating a social forum for talking about the widespread injustices against people with a neurological disorder who strongly prefer to wear shorts.
That aside, there are 244 Yahoo groups dealing with Asperger’s Syndrome. 244! I wonder how that works out per capita of people with AS.
Here’s another link I found:
Understanding Our Gifted and Complex Minds: Intelligence, Asperger’s Syndrome, and Learning Disabilities at MIT[..]
Aside from anecdotal evidence that the son of two MIT graduates has Asperger’s syndrome, why should this story be of interest to the MIT community? My hypothesis is that the “abnormal” condition known as Asperger’s syndrome is remarkably similar to the “normal” functioning of an engineer’s mind.
[..]
This raises some interesting questions that we as MIT alumni, and MIT as an Institution, need to think about. Asperger’s syndrome, attention deficit disorder, learning disorders, and just plain giftedness affect members of the MIT community – alumni, faculty, staff and students. One alumna, Meredith Warshaw ’79, has rearranged her life around this. She created Uniquely Gifted, a Web site of resources about gifted children with special needs, and made a mid-life career switch to start advising families with these twice-exceptional kids. She and fellow alumna Janis Bestul Ossmann ’76 also started the GT-Special email list for families with gifted/special needs children when they found themselves in need of support and advice from other parents dealing with this perplexing combination.
Visiting the Uniquely Gifted web site, it looks pretty decent after a once-over. Maybe I’ll get back to it soon.
