Levels of architectural complexity

One thing modern architecture seems to want to get rid of is texture. All surfaces are supposed to be clean, mathematically precise planes or curves, leading to the suspicion that their highest and best form is as an architectural model peered at from above by clients holding glasses of white wine. The lack of detail at the smaller scales leads to tedium when they are life sized.

Mary and I like the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem. This weekend the children (who are less than enthralled) were both otherwise occupied, so we made a trip up there, had breakfast at Red's, and took in maritime art and a few old houses.  Sorry, 'historic" houses.

The museum is the union of two old Salem institutions. When they joined, they hired Moshe Safdie, of nearby Somerville, to build an addition.  Museum additions tend to bring out the worst in architects (cf. the new wing of the MFA, and don't get me started on the hangar being attached to the Gardner), but, in this case, Safdie did a thoughtful job.  The main atrium is actually light and charming, and a great place to drink coffee.  And it gives a view of the five brick houselike structures that house the maritime and special collections.  I'd never looked at them consciously before.

First, I admired the way the sun hit the wall.

Then I started wondering why I was enjoying that so much. I am a man of simple pleasures, but, still, a brick wall.... Then I noticed that there was a lot of detail in the wall.  Not just the sandstone stringcourses, but something about the bricks themselves.

Each brick is different, with a complex surface pattern that casts shadows. I hadn't consciously noticed it, but I certainly had responded to it.

No one two hundred years ago building a Federal style house a few blocks away, in what is now the McIntire Historic District, would ever have allowed such clearly defective bricks in their facades, of course. They were aiming at a smoothness of surface and failing, lacking the technology. We have achieved it, and now should have a better sense of when it makes sense and when it doesn't.

As a writer, I should give you a little lesson about sentences and large scale structures about here, but it is late, and I must get to bed. I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

Philosophical disclaimers

This week's New Scientist (August 29 - September 3, 2010) notes a road condition disclaimer usage that I too have been amused by: "Icy conditions may exist". Way to take a firm position there, Department of Highways!

It reminds me of my favorite "lost or stolen item" disclaimer, on a coat check rack in a place I no longer remember: "Not responsible for personal loss."

Obviously, these are the result of too-creative responses to the problem of having a warning sign that may or may not be relevant to the actual situation.  Warn of ice in July? List all the things your patrons may lose or have stolen?  It's fear of sounding dumb, which leads to sounding even dumber.

For example, consider the problem of the exit from a long tunnel, where people have put on their headlights.  It may or may not be daylight on the far side.  Do you tell them to turn off their headlights only if it isn't dark?  The solution, I've read, is just one word:  "Lights?" Leave it up to the user.

At work, in the bathroom, is an insultingly detailed discussion of why I should wash my hands after using the toilet.  Now, I appreciate that this is a real hygiene issue:  a physician acquaintance once told me of observers at an infectious disease conference who were startled by how few of the participating physicians washed their hands after using the toilet.  If you want to know how smart doctors really are, just watch their behavior when they aren't pushing you around or giving you useless drugs... On the other hand, don't.  It will just make that health insurance bill even more unbearable.

But as for the sign at my work bathroom:  I'll bet the level of compliance is lower than if the sign just said "Hands washed?" Appeal to my sense of self, not some alleged rational faculty I barely possess, and that I certainly won't activate on your account.

But what communications department is going to leave their work at two words?  Makes you look lazy.  "How much did I end up paying you per word?" So you create a big illustrated poster with a bunch of useless text whose only effect will be irritation.  Believe me:  this is my life.

At least my work life.

Time for Operation Mindrot

Craig Newmark tells the youth of today that competition from earnest Asians will make their lives both mindnumbing and stressful.  He excerpts from Professor Walter Russell Mead, who says, in part

Your competition is working hard, damned hard, and is deadly serious about learning.

Bummer!

Both Newmark and Mead think the solution is working even harder than the competition.

Double bummer!

But they ignore a better solution: bringing some joy to the lives of these grinding cubicle dwellers by moving them into our cultural economy more quickly.  Our greatest export products are titillation, distraction, and pointless pleasure. We should work harder only at getting those out across the world, hobbling our competition before it even gets out of bed.  I certainly try to produce as much of it as I can.  Who's with me?

This blog post has been a test of the Emergency Distraction System. If this had been an actual cultural catastrophe, you would have been asked to face the music, and dance.

We now return you to your partial differential equation problem set, already in progress.

And silent it was

I'm...well, I'm an older person.  My brain formed before any personal form of communication other than a rotary dial wall phone was available, and personal musical entertainment was a portable record player or a transistor radio.  Many people of my vintage are now dependent on a constant drip feed of information, contact, and entertainment, but, somehow, I am not.

So, when I go away on vacation, I go away.  And my children are forced to accompany me, while leaving all their electronics behind as well.  And in the Adirondacks, where we were, you can't even get a cell phone signal, and there are actual telephone booths with pay phones in them.  Amazing!

And I don't miss any of it.  That, of course, puts me out of step with pretty much everyone else.  I like quiet and stillness.  I like to sit and read.  In the early morning I write novel notes in a spiral notebook.  I do jigsaw puzzles with my children. Since our usual family media diet is fairly sparse to begin with, they deal with it.  We do have electricity.  And hot water.  I also make them climb mountains and paddle canoes across lakes.  Classic dad, I am.  I can just hear the eulogies.  They'll be sorry then....

The fundamental problem is that my brain is really really slow.  Despite my lack of distractions, I get little done on any given day.  So don't think I'm virtuous, and have one up on you.  You can probably write your tweets, watch videos, track your stocks, update your Facebook status, and still get more of your novel done than me.  And good for you.

Now, if you'l excuse me, I really should get something done....

A brief silence

I'll be away for the next week, in a cabin by a lake.  Despite the obvious charms, I don't have any temptation to stay connected while away.  So, when I get back, I will be still another week further behind everyone else.

Doored!

Urban bicyclists don't fear moving cars that much. There might be the occasional lunatic tearing unexpectedly across an intersection, but mostly they are pretty predictable. Despite their poor reputation, I've found Boston-area drivers to be fairly courteous and flexible (except for the occasional pickup truck, for reasons that still mystify me).

No, what we fear is what I encountered today: the swinging open car door. That can take you out instantly, and if it pushes you out into traffic, can kill you. It's hard to predict, and maneuvering around it can be almost as dangerous as hitting it.

I was on my way to work. I know the pattern of lights on the hill down toward the Charles and the Science Museum on Cambridge Street in Cambridge, so I had timed my approach down the hill for the extremely short green at First Avenue.  I saw the seconds counting down on the pedestrian signal. As it hit zero, I pushed forward along the line of cars that was about to start, keeping half an eye out for anyone who might go suddenly right, across my path. But I was going pretty fast, about the fastest of the entire ride.

A passenger, opening her door and jumping out just as the cars started, hit me like a baseball bat across the forehead.  I smashed into the end of the door and went down instantly, face planting on the pavement. Once I realized I could move, and wasn't lying in a pool of my own blood, I jumped up, and may have uttered a few oaths.

The woman who had taken me out was apologetic. What could I do? My cheek was cut, my prescription sunglasses scraped up and pushed into my face. I got her contact information, but was not sympathetic to her apologies. We've all opened our door without looking, but...Jesus, she could have killed me. I was in a bike lane, I had the green light: rarely am I so virtuously in the right.

Seven stitches and a tetanus shot later, I was in my office.  I should have been home in bed, because the shock had me quite shaky. But I have a week's vacation coming up, and a lot to make sure gets done before I go.

It certainly could have been worse. I'm an aging bag of bones, and don't bounce like I used to.  I'll see how black and blue I am tomorrow, but I think I escaped more serious consequences than a potential GI Joe scar on my right cheek.

It's those passenger doors that are the most dangerous. I regularly scan parked cars for heads.  But I just don't have the bandwidth to keep my eye on passenger-side doors too. Cars in the street naturally have heads in them, so it's impossible to filter. So, please, car passengers who get out in the middle of the freaking street. Give a mind to who you can kill, particularly in a busy biking city like Cambrige, and give a quick look before you swing.

Foundational military read: "How the North Won", Hattaway and Jones

Sometimes I read military history books for the story (and the interesting odd facts).  Sometimes, though, I find one that examines and clarifies the underlying motivations and causes for the surface events that I find so engaging.

How the North Won, by Herman Hattaway and Archer Jones, is the book for someone of non-military background who is interested in the Civil War, but is not a buff.  Buffs read (and own) books about specific units, can talk calibers and muzzle velocities, and can tell instantly that the illustration of the private in the Clinch Rifles is wearing a piece of trim issued only the following year.  People interested in history, but not the Civil War in particular, know the high points, but don't care about the details of military strategy.

I'm in the middle (as I am in many things). The first thing about the Civil War is that it was a war, a bloody one between two determined opponents. How did they fight it? What problems did they face?

While the North had the resources, it had by far the tougher job:  conquering and subduing the hostile and violently resisting South. It proved impossible to conquer and hold territory--that took more troops than the North could possibly raise (even after it finally instituted a draft, and thus faced violent resistance from urban mobs). Hattaway and Jones are extremely clear on the war in the West. As long as they could move along the rivers, they could penetrate South.  When the rivers turned the wrong way, they had to move by land.  Their supply lines were constantly harassed and raided.

And armies need to be supplied. These are tens of thousands of active men. Think about this: when McClellan's 1862 Army of the Potomac was standing still, it was the second-largest city in the South, after New Orleans. An army in one place for a few days devoured the countryside around it. When it moved, it pulled supply lines after it.

Without access to the rivers, it was impossible to progress.  A raid at Grant's supply base at Holly Springs delayed his attack on Vicksburg by months. Grant only took Vicksburg by cutting himself loose from his supply lines and moving across a springtime forage-covered countryside that had not had to support an army.

Incidentally, this need for springtime forage accounts for the seemingly late timing of both Napoleon's and Hitler's invasions of Russia (the 1941 Wermacht was still largely a horse-drawn force, with mechanized forces used only over short distances): they needed to feed their horses, or be stranded.

And Civil War armies, armed with accurate long-range rifles, were like porcupines, almost impossible to get at and kill.  They could be defeated, but then would retreat, falling back on their own supply lines and leaving a devastated country for the pursuing army to pass through.  Even Lee after Fredericksburg did not pursue the savagely defeated Burnside. Decisive battle proved impossible, though it was constantly demanded by the childish and pathetically self-deluded populations of the respective regions.

Grant took what he had learned in the West and applied it when he came East: his war was a series of raids, not invasions. Even the bloody Overland Campaign was supposed to hold Lee's forces in place while raids did their work elsewhere. Sherman's raid on Atlanta, and then to the sea and up into South Carolina, succeeded, while the others (Butler, Sigel, Banks) all failed. And Grant was only fighting Lee in northern Virginia because it was politically impossible not to--he would much have preferred fighting almost anywhere else.

How the North Won also has sharp schematic maps with just enough detail to show interior lines and turning movements, with good explanations for the non-buff of how all that worked.

If you are interested in the military side of the Civil War, and already have a good sense of the sequence of events, you will find enlightenment in this book.  You'll understand why things that seem like they should have been easy, weren't. You'll gain an appreciation for mud. You'll even have some sympathy for McClellan and Halleck, two men who usually get little of it. Solutions are only obvious afterward, and the price Grant paid for his was strikingly high.

How the North Won
Herman Hattaway and Archer Jones

[REC]: further adventures of the first-person vomitcam

[REC] is a Spanish zombie movie from 2007, all allegedly found footage, from a TV show about night jobs that goes horribly wrong when the fire crew a reporter and her cameraman are following gets a call to help a delusional old lady in her apartment who proves to have something more serious than Alzheimer's.

It's tight, scary fun, with a lean 78 minute running time, a novella among films, and, aside from the usual what's-the-rated-life-of-that-battery question about the camera (particularly pressing in one of its predecessors, The Blair Witch Project, which allowed shooting for days), made narrative sense, until a poorly conceived scene near the end, which purports to "explain" something.

I've never gotten why people feel they need to explain zombies. Zombies don't, um, actually exist, so any explanation is just as ridiculous as the zombies themselves. And this one comes out of left field, and is mostly to make us relax a bit before the final horror arrives. Understanding helps nothing.

Now, as usual, I'll come up with a couple of twists I thought the movie would have that it didn't, and are thus fair game for any works I may create in the future.

At one point during the steady collapse of the culture inside the sealed apartment building, ethnic tensions rise between a couple of Asian immigrants and the Spaniards, in an extremely convincing way. The Spanish call them Chinese, though they are actually Japanese. Unfortunately, this tension plays no role in how events play out, and I think it would have been more interesting if it had, and a possible solution to their problems proves impossible because of their squabbling.

All the video is from one camera run by a single cameraman. Several times he drops the camera, or there is some other interruption. It would have been interesting if something significant happened during the dark time, and then we, as viewers, would have to figure out what that might have been, since everyone else went through it and knows it perfectly.

Who is the cameraman?  His name is Pablo, but has no real existence. But he is just as terrified by zombies, and just as likely to have bad things happen to him as anyone else. Could you tell that something has gone badly wrong by a significant change in his camerawork?  Can how you pan, focus, and zoom be diagnostic of becoming a zombie? After one of those significant blackouts, someone else, not as skilled, is running the camera.

I don't make movies, but the use of the "actually part of the movie" camera would seem to make stunts like that irresistable.

Anyway: face ripping, sinister child, buckets of gore. As Joe Bob Briggs used to say, check it out.

"The Secret in Their Eyes" vs. "Memories of Murder": the police procedural under oppressive regimes

A few weeks ago, I reviewed the excellent South Korean film Memories of Murder. Now I have seen Argentina's entry in the "police procedural under oppressive regime" genre, The Secret in Their Eyes. Despite its Oscar, it is far inferior to the other film, substituting a touching but bland romance for the interpersonal complexities that characterized Memories.

Joon-ho Bong's film is interesting because the consequences of the oppression are seen through its effects on character. The rural cops have spent their time breaking up demonstrations and beating demonstrators. A real criminal is something far beyond their experience. And the thuggish and befuddled cops are, finally, sympathetic characters, or at least characters whose fate we care about. In Secret, who is oppressive and who isn't is kept carefully clear, so that there is no audience confusion about the compromises everyone makes in order to survive in an unfree society.

Secret seems like half a movie.  It sets up a situation, and then pretty much fritters it away, quickly getting to an ending that doesn't really make any sense. I won't say what it is, except that you have to spend a lot of time with the least interesting of the story's characters, to discover that he has kept an impossible secret for decades.

In order to buy the way things get resolved, we have to believe that a woman, a woman in macho Argentinean society, humiliates and degrades a violent sex criminal who ends up being a deadly and active secret policeman--and then has to have no fear of the consequences. This is the key piece of tension, and the film-makers decided to completely ignore it.

Various reviewers compared this to an episode of Law & Order, partially because of director Juan Jose Campanella's history with the show. It is really more like the first episode of a two-parter, where you only got to see previews for the second episode. Extremely unsatisfying. And don't get me started on the ridiculous typerwriter with a missing key, which seems a lot of build up for changing one word to another.

Of course, no episode of even the dumbest TV cop show would have someone fingering the killer because of a few sidelong glances in the background of photos in a photo album. Esposito's certainty (not just "here's a possibility") is itself a totalitarian attitude. He breaks into a house without a warrant, seeking evidence.  His certainty is exactly that of the rural South Korean cops of Memories, except that, through the generosity of the writer, he turns out to be right, whereas they, much more realistically, get it, not only wrong, but wrong in a way that actively hampers their investigation.

Secret does have an extremely well-cut and paced foot chase scene through a soccer stadium, and a great character in Esposito's drunken and self-sacrificial friend Sandoval.

As so often happens, my feeling about the movie is quite at odds with most commentators, who seem to universally love it.  Now, to be clear, it wasn't a terrible movie.  But it certainly does not deserve the amount of praise heaped on it.  See Memories of Murder instead.

Another step toward the bikepocalypse

Here's an odd local story (the man is pictured standing just a couple of blocks from my house).  Our neighboring town of Arlington has decided to redesign the main street through town (Massachusetts Avenue), to allow for easier and safer bicycling.

The gentleman pictured, Mr. Berger, objects.  He is motivated by "a deep distrust of government". And he fears "that the redesign would make it difficult for emergency crews to pass through snarled traffic, endangering lives."

I haven't seen the plan, and can't judge how well it would actually work. But, as I have wondered before, why does opposition to bicycles always take on such a melodramatic tone? Mr. Berger seems to feel that the Mass Ave. exists in a state of nature, untouched by the hand of man, or oppressive government. Clearly any road redesign will involve government action.  Just, in this case, government action of which he does not approve.  Car-oriented design is just natural, dammit. Why mess with it?

And this "emergency vehicle" thing gets trotted out in all sorts of urban design issues, from raised pedestrian crossings to alleys. It's childish. Yes, I picture a flood of bikes, like Peking before capitalism, so dense that fire trucks are stranded, wailing their sirens desperately as small children are burned alive in their ramshackle Arlington slums.

Now, maybe he can't actually say, "I think bicyclists are a bunch of smug jerks, and don't want them in my town. Every time I see one I want to run over him." But that is, I think, what underlies a lot of opposition.

Good military history read: How Far from Austerlitz?

Late in the summer of 1805, the Army of England, which Napoleon hoped to put across the English Channel to invade England, stood at readiness at the Channel ports, as it had the previous year. A coalition of Austria, Russia, and some of the German states, bankrolled by England, gathered to make a thrust at Strasbourg.

Napoleon liked a gamble, but even he was probably uncomfortable with spinning the roulette wheel and putting all his chips on the double zero of a cross-Channel invasion. So having some slow-moving enemy armies on the other side of Europe must have been a relief. He turned the Army of England around and sent 200,000 men east.

They moved with incredible speed, and were masked by a splendid deception operation, and in 20 days they were crossing the Rhine. In early October they were at the Danube, to the confusion and shock of the Austrian army.

Napoleon had accurately predicted where the Austrians would station themselves, and what route the lumbering Russian army under Kutuzov (ten days late because of a confusion between the Gregorian calendar, used in the West, and the Julian calendar used by the Orthodox Russians) would take in joining them.

He defeated the Austrians under Mack at Ulm (readers of War and Peace might remember the shabby figure saying: "You see before you the unfortunate General Mack!", though he actually said this to Napoleon), and then the Coalition army at Austerlitz, probably his greatest tactical victory.

The story is excitingly told by Alistair Horne in How Far from Austerlitz, Napoleon 1805-1815, and if you want to get up to speed on Napoleon's military career in an entertaining way, there are few better. Horne has written a number of pleasing military histories, mostly dealing with the encounters between France and Germany in their three wars--Austerlitz then forms the first of these, for it is during this period that Germany really starts to get it together as a military power.

Aside from clearly delineating the strategy and operations of the wars, Horne gives us the required illuminating anecdotes.  Napoleon was

an indifferent horseman (Odeblen says scathingly, 'Napoleon rode like a butcher.... Whilst galloping, his body rolled backwards and forwards and sideways') and was thrown more than once

not too surprising for a former artilleryman. Horne details the detail Napoleon went into to make his dispositions:

As soon as the site for Imperial Headquarters in the field had been decided, d'Albe would set up Napoleon's 'operations room', the centre-piece of which would be a vast map table of the theatre of war, so large that the Emperor and his topographer would often be forced to lie on it full length together. 'I have seen them more than once,' wrote Baron de Fain, the Cabinet archivist, '...interrupting each other by a sudden exclamation, right in the midst of their work, when their heads had come into collision.'

Though it covers the period 1805-1815, Horne sketches in Napoleon's early career, including Italy and Egypt, as well as Napoleon's fate after defeat.  Highly recommended.

Alistair Horne
How Far from Austerlitz, Napoleon 1805-1815

Academic cheating and plagiarism: the obesity of the mind

There's a perennial journalistic genre, effective because news readers skew older: why kids today suck.

The latest reason is because, as students, they cheat and plagiarize so much. The New York Times has dealt with this pressing issue a couple of times in the past month.  Here they handled how to keep kids from cheating on tests, and here about  plagiarism via cutting and pasting.

First:  is this new? No, of course it's not new. Schoolwork is hard and challenging, and when it isn't hard and challenging it's boring and repetitive. Many students want to evade its demands a lot of time, and pretty much everyone does at least some of the time.

Also not new is the posture that none of that work is necessary, and is actually hazardous to the sensitive youthful psyche. The argument now is that, since sampling, collaboration, and pastiche are the way we live now, and so schools should reflect that reality.

And the last thing that isn't new is that that posture is one taken by lazy and corrupt fools who are desperate to be liked. Every student knows that "work in groups" really means "rely on smart and motivated students to do most of the work". And a bland defense of "that's the way we do it anymore" is at least worth a try, to see if some clueless instructor actually buys that story.

When people sample, pastiche, reference, and satirize, they don't claim the original works as their own.  They may proclaim a kind of dominance over them, or label them as superceded and irrelevant, or use them as springboards for their own creativity, but that those bits are not the actual creation of the compiler is usually not at issue. Allusion is the highest form of literary connectivity, after all. We can't write without all those other writers.  This, too, is nothing new.

So don't give me "the information doesn't seem to have an author for these kids." When they turn their papers in with the plagiarized material, they do claim an author:  themselves.

People cheat because they are tempted to do so, just as they eat too much because they are tempted to do so. So we don't learn and we get fat. We are weak and fallen creatures. Our job is to work to surmount our fallen state, develop habits that allow us to work honestly and fairly, and to give credit to the hard creative work of others. Hard, certainly. Fraught with the possibility of failure, definitely. Impossible?  I don't think so.

Movie review: Timecrimes

I don't usually watch science fiction movies, and rarely enjoy them when I actually do.  They usually seem fairly pedestrian when compared to either written SF or other movies.  I've made a few exceptions in the past couple of weeks, with, I'd say, largely positive results. But that's because the movies are odd.

First up, the Spanish time-travel tale Timecrimes. A middle-class householder in a new house sits in his backyard, looking around through binoculars, and sees an attractive young woman remove her shirt.  A little later, he looks again, and she lies unconscious and naked. His wife is off running errands, so he naturally wanders off to check things out. He gets pursued through the woods and ends up at a mysterious facility his realtor really should have told him about. Things go downhill from there.

Any low-budget loop-back time travel movie must be compared to the nerdy extra-credit-homework-assignment Primer. Timecrimes adds bare breasts and eliminates motivation, but leaves in the nerd (in the person of the stiff "Is this what it's really like in front of the camera?" director, Nacho Vigalondo). Primer was unsatisfactory in its human dimension, suddenly adding some murder-at-a-party huggermugger when it exhausts its initial  backwards-self-storage premise. Timecrimes starts out being about violence and sexual perversity, but never makes the existence of time travel make any sense at all.  Both are short, and kind of fun, and despite their flaws, are worth seeing. Neither is about using time travel to restore some lost love, which is a much more common, and more boring theme, using SF as just another way to deny the existence of death.

Intricate loopback time plots have been around for decades. I don't know if Heinlein's "By His Boostraps" was the first, but it was the one that caught my attention when I read it as a boy. That one relies on a startlingly obtuse POV character, but who wouldn't be obtuse when confronted with a double from the future?

The problem with each of these knots of crisscrossing character is that it exists without ever being tied.  It's as if they were created along with all of space-time.  All we see is the smooth embroidery on one side. What does the tangle of stitches look like on the back side? That's what I'd like to see.

The nerd in Timecrimes is a befuddled tech working the weekend in a gleaming but empty facility that apparently lets him monkey with the fabric of reality as long as he gets his regular job done. He is utterly clueless, and never seems to catch up with things, though you would expect him to have a bit of a jump on the main character, since he's been working with this machine for a while, and must have considered the possibilities. Primer really treats its nerd heroes with realistic respect. They aren't ethically superior to anyone, as the plot of that movie makes clear to them. But they can figure things out.

Timecrimes' soullessness is exemplified by the way it treats the main female character who, significantly, never even gets a name.  She is listed in the credits as La Chica en el Bosque, like some character in the background of a single scene.  You get to see her take her shirt off. You get to see her naked and unconscious. You get to see our former voyeur smack her around, chase her, force her to play the role of someone else, and then do something truly terrible to her. The movie would have left me feeling vaguely degraded if it had left me feeling anything at all. Because, of course, if someone has traveled in time, he knows things you cannot possibly know, and can take advantage of you in ways you cannot figure out.

The movie lets the main character be creepy, but why he's creepy, and what he's after, is completely obscure.

By their nature, time travel narratives challenge our understanding of free will. Now, of course, daily existence challenges our understanding of free will, if we're paying attention, but science fiction is about "heightening the contradictions", to use an old Marxist term.  Science fiction is the laboratory of exquisite tortures, and that is why we (or at least some of us) keep going back to it, to experiment with human needs, potentialities, and flaws.

Timecrimes does play the sexual perversity card, which, now that it is played, seems inevitable. As I mentioned, time looping gives you power, by giving you knowledge no one else has, or could have.
But that doesn't make the time looper smarter than everyone else. It only appears to. So the first thing I would do would be to have a really smart non-looping character. An outsider could actually spot the looping before the inside looper would, because he could see multiple versions of the same person. This would be an interesting conflict. And the looping character can excuse all sorts of vile behavior under the rubric of keeping paradoxes from consuming all of spacetime and bringing the universe to an end. Who can argue? I'm already thinking about the possibilities.

The existence of the time knot implies someone who tied it--and that entity is outside the immediate structure of the knot. A time machine exists--and does not stop existing, at least not in this narrative. In whose interest is this particular knot? What does it accomplish? It is not an accident.

Now Timecrimes gets along fine without that metanarrative, because it is a fast-paced violent movie that lets you see some skin. In this regard it is my favorite type of movie, fun, interesting, but with something missing, or a narrative path not taken. It gets the wheels turning.

Brutalist architecture: a style whose time will never come.

I had occasion to bring up Boston's City Hall the other day, and say that I didn't think it was as bad as people say.  Certainly not the ugliest building in the world.  Whoever can say that simply hasn't traveled very much.

But, a few months ago, there was a flurry of articles here in Boston about rehabilitating the Brutalist concrete architecture of the period from roughly the late 50s to the early 70s, starting with City Hall, but including the truly appalling Government (or State) Service Center, which I ride past every day on my way to work.

The argument seems to be, "much fine architecture of the past fell out of fashion, was denigrated, and then torn down.  We now miss these buildings.  These Brutalist works are denigrated, and people want to tear them down.  If we do, someday we will miss them."

Despite the logical fallacy, it could still be true.  But since they seem to me somewhat Pyongyang-like, I don't think it's true. There really are poor works of architecture, that start unattractive and stay unattractive.  Sometimes they gain some affection just by hanging around for a long time and getting associated with some supposedly better past era.  But the 70s--energy crisis, bellbottoms, sideburns, Jimmy Carter, Iranian hostage crisis, Son of Sam--can be a tough sell, particularly as it was the tail end of the architectural heart of darkness the country entered after the end of WWII.  Great popular music, though, better than anything since.  And blockbuster summer movies.  So it had some great art forms.

Not architecture, though.  Every era has art forms that exemplify its genius, and others that...don't.

The Globe architecture critic, Robert Campbell does not agree.  He says

I’m against tearing things down just because we happen not to like their looks. What you do with ugly buildings is live with them, add to them, give them a new face or a new use, and treat them with disrespect — not with murder

(I think he means "respect", but maybe not)

What would city life be like if you could never tear a building down? "Murder"?  Sounds like architecture critics should spend a little more time talking with real estate developers, businesspeople, and citizens, and less time with...architects.  To keep things living you tear down even pretty good buildings--something that can be a real problem in "historic" areas, where age equals virtue. The fact that a mistake was made with a lot of concrete doesn't require you to keep it.

Architecture is hard. In fact, I think it is too hard for an individual depending solely on genius. In the past, no one depended solely on genius. They came out of a tradition with a series of rules and established patterns, had peers who could tell good work from bad, and worked with masters of various building trades who were trained in the same tradition. One advantage of a tradition is that it is both more complex and more flexible than an invented style. With a good architectural tradition, even a non-genius can create good work. Without it, even a genius can succeed only occasionally, and almost by accident.

As I said above, I don't hate Boston City Hall.  I think the problem with City Hall (at least in its external aspect--I'm not a resident of the city and have never had to transact bureaucratic business there) is mostly its setting.  The vast Soviet-style plaza in front of it, the tedious Center Plaza with its relentless windows, and the other bureaucratic storage containers around it create a zone of architectural tedium that it seems to fit into.  But it has some level of complexity to its facade. If I were redoing Boston, I'd keep it to represent the period, while eliminating its fellows. Then I'd build up around it so that you get glimpses of it down streets before seeing it whole, and maybe grown vines on it.  It actually looks designed to survive the collapse of civilization and to spend the better part of its existence in ruins, like the Colosseum.

Get rid of the rest of them, though.  They tend to be huge superblocks, so each one could open up space for a half dozen decent structures.  Do we dare?

A dumb logo for a useless coin

Why are there still pennies?

The Federal government keeps making them, but clearly doesn't take the poor things at all seriously, because they've taken away the Lincoln Memorial on the reverse, and replaced it with....

something that looks a lot like the logo of a service station or maybe a brand of motor oil from the 1930s:  "Defending your engine from corrosion!" It looks best on a rusty sign swinging in the breeze in the background of a dramatic confrontation between the detective and the killer greasemonkey.

Maybe I'm reading too much into it.  But the Lincoln penny (originally with the wheat ear reverse) went into circulation in 1909.  A penny in 1909 was worth the equivalent of $0.24 today--in other words, it was a quarter (and, to bring the point home, my keyboard doesn't have a cent symbol on it, because who needs it?)  That actually seems a bit steep as your smallest coin.  But now it is a pathetic remnant.

The Lincoln Memorial one is the one I grew up with, which incidentally made the penny the only coin with a presidential portrait on both sides, since you can see a tiny Abe in the Memorial as well as on the obverse:

 Cab drivers in Boston used to point to this as the inspiration for our little-loved City Hall:

Just turn the coin upside down:

 Maybe.

Visualizing energy flow

Via Ezra Klein, a superb graphic that shows all energy flows in the US economy. Such an image is only as good as its underlying data, of course, and I have no way to check its accuracy. But presuming the numbers are right, it really helps to understand where energy comes from, and where it goes.  I sometimes feel a glut of infographics, but this one will improve your understanding significantly.

Note the huge amount of waste.  Some is inevitable, but it's clear that improvements in electricity generation and transmission could have significant payoffs.

Coal makes electricty.  Coal is dirty, and electricity inefficient.  Improving mileage on our cars won't do anything about that.

Natural gas has a role in everything that doesn't move.

Nuclear is still way bigger than any of the alternative sources of energy, which are almost impossible to see on the chart.

Stealing from history for fiction

"History is philosophy teaching by example" seems, oddly enough, to have been said by President James Garfield, whose pithy quotes are otherwise unknown to me.  Of course, this one itself isn't actually pithy, since the full quote goes on to say "and also warning; its two eyes are geography and chronology."  I have no idea what any of that means, so let's stick with the first part.

As a special case, straight historical fiction leases history for its productions, but SF and fantasy can use history in a way no other literary form does: by stealing it, filing off the serial numbers, and claiming ownership.  Asimov took the idea for a collapsing empire from Rome and stretched it across the galaxy in the Foundation books, and it's been a  staple ever since.

Well, someone thinks Brain Thief is funny

When writers say a reviewer "gets it", they mean the review is positive.

My novel, Brain Thief, is supposed to be a work of snarky humor which is also suspenseful. Needless to say, this is a difficult thing to achieve.  The two mental states are somewhat in conflict. I still think it was worth doing.

Still, the suspense seems to have thrown some reviewers.  Those people have to read too fast.  Fortunately, you don't have to.

This guy understood it, and also quotes one of my favorite rants by Bob, the waiter at Near Earth Orbit, the diner where a lot of the story ends up happening.  It's one of those reviews that really lets you know whether you would enjoy the book.

Or not.

Historical ignorance, redux

A few months ago I wrote about how the fall in crime over the past couple of decades has no good explanation, even though huge amounts of analysis has been done on it. So how can we presume to explain why any historical trend occured?

Well, it continues. Recent numbers show that not only has the decline not slowed, as one would have expected by this time: it has accelerated.

What is going on here? Are we suddenly more virtuous? Nicer? Accepting of the social contract? No one seems to be claiming this. But if none of these is true, what is the cause?

What if a great moral movement had swept the nation in the past ten years?  Imagine vast stadiums filled with citizens of all conditions and ethnicities raising their hands and swearing peace and brotherhood. Such movements have certainly come through in the past, and there is no reason to think that they won't again. Wouldn't we now be saying that the Empirical Brotherhood Movement was responsible for this dramatic drop in violence and property crime? And who could argue?

Those opposed to the EBM would, of course, be saying that they had nothing to do with it, and they would be right. But they would be saying it, not because they were right, but because those fraternal empiricists are so annoying and self-satisfied.

What if the things that erode our stern moral virtue, like video games, pornography, fast food, reality shows,drugs, and surfing the internet for movies of pets doing cute things are the same things that cause us not to go out and rob people at gunpoint? Is the sacrifice of our moral autonomy in favor of passive consumption of entertainment a price worth paying?

A few days ago, I argued that virtue has nothing to do with our refusal to own other humans as slaves. Maybe it has nothing to do with our refusal to assault and rob others either. We just have other, more fun things to do now.