Chris Marker RIP

RIP Chris Marker

Marker - apparently nick-named after the Magic Marker, real name Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve - died yesterday, the day after his 91st birthday.  A Left Bank French film-maker, his most famous works La Jetee and Sans Soleil investigated time and memory through film, examining linearity and non-linearity in the always-strictly-linear format of film.

I saw both of those films in the early eighties, and they made a profound impression on me. I've since seen other French film-makers - Michel Gondry, Alain Resnais, Jean Luc Godard - play similar games. I wonder if it's something in the water? La Jetee is a tale of time travel told entirely through rostrum camera shots of still photos - except for a brief movie moment as the protagonist breaks through to the past and the woman he is with wakes up and opens her eyes. The film was remade by Terry Gilliam in 1995 as 12 Monkeys, but the 27 minute still original packs a greater punch in a much shorter time.

[link broke]
La Jetee (turn on close captions)
[link broke]
Sans Soleil (in English)

Roundup of the Internets

The media keeps reporting that this poltroon



told the police that he dyed his hair red to look like the Joker.





The Joker's hair is green. Which means you can add color-blindness to his list of problems.

The news, which seems to rush off after certain scientists like a school of piranhas - why does it do that? Do some scientists possess a certain pheromone that attracts bored reporters to their news conferences? Some scientists toil away forever without even seeing a single cub reporter! - the news has discovered some scientists who have "created an artificial jellyfish from heart cells".  (BBC)

Prof Parker said he wanted to challenge the traditional view of synthetic biology which is "focused on genetic manipulations of cells". Instead of building just a cell, he sought to "build a beast".

They used silicone to fashion a jellyfish-shaped body with eight arm-like appendages. Next, they printed a pattern made of protein onto the "body" that resembled the muscle architecture of the real animal. They grew the heart muscle cells on top, with the protein pattern serving as a road map for the growth and organisation of the rat tissue.

But although this "swims" "like" a jellyfish for a few minutes, it isn't a "beast" any more than if I flayed a scientist, draped the skin over a chair and told reporters it was an artificial human. Even the lead scientist says so, and the news is quite happy to report her saying it, all the while repeating "artificial jellyfish".

Lead author Janna Nawroth...said researchers tried to copy a tissue or organ "based on what they think is important or what they see as the major components without necessarily understanding if those components are relevant to the desired function".[...]The team aims to carry out further work on the artificial jellyfish.

National Geographic has a photo of Mont Saint Michel from space that looks like something from a role-playing game. Although Mont St. Michel looks like something from a role-playing game when you're on the ground too.



Can this be true, or is it another round of scientists with great PR? Gizmodo reports that the Genia Photonics laser spectroscope is being bought by the Dept. of Homeland Security because

The machine is ten million times faster—and one million times more sensitive—than any currently available system. That means that it can be used systematically on everyone passing through airport security, not just suspect or randomly sampled people. [...] But the machine can sniff out a lot more than just explosives, chemicals and bioweapons. The company that invented it, Genia Photonics, says that its laser scanner technology is able to "penetrate clothing and many other organic materials and offers spectroscopic information, especially for materials that impact safety such as explosives and pharmacological substances." 

Wait, that said "more than explosives, chemicals and bioweapons" and then went on to say explosives, things that impact safety and pharmacological substances. Aren't those two lists the same?

Never mind.  Elsewhere it says that the unit can detect adrenaline, other reports seem to think it can detect any molecule, and Genia's website says it could be used for lipids detection and cancer cell detection. Makes me wonder why the laboratory I work at has literally hundreds of quarter-million dollar LC-MS/MS (tandem mass spectrometers) to quantify things like IGF-1 and Insulin in blood samples if you can just point a laser at someone and instantly know everything about them.  Genia's website disappointingly claims, "The versatility of our products offers to the end-user many possibilities and opens door to new researches ever considered," (sic) but we can probably overlook that as the name "Genia" looks to be very expensive.

National Geographic also has an article on a new Maya temple being investigated by archaeologists. I love this stuff - imagine trekking through the jungle and coming across evidence of a lost civilization? It's like something from Edgar Rice Burroughs or H. Rider Haggard!

RIP Sally Ride.  She was the 'first American woman in space', which always seemed to be one of those dog-walking-on-its-hind-legs compliments. But she was a lot more than that, being a tireless proponent of science who wrote and published science books for children. It's a losing battle in today's America, where children are going to study whatever's left after big companies have torn everything they don't like out of the syllabus (and not to mention the god-botherers), but she certainly tried. In the obituary, she came out as a lesbian, living with her partner for 27 years. That partner, of course, is ineligible for survivor benefits from NASA as the federal government cannot recognize same-sex partnerships as a marriage under DOMA.  That's how America treats its heroes.

Plus her name always reminds me of Wilson Pickett.

First Moonlanding, 1969.

Happy 43rd Anniversary, Apollo 11.

Yes, I stayed up all night (in the UK) to try to see footage of the first moon landing on July 21st, 1969. I was a kid at the time but something told me this was going to be historic. (Probably my dad.) It was historic; the culmination of our science fiction dreams. Unfortunately, no one had figured out what to do once we got there (for those values of "we" that apply). Mars exploration seems to be going better, but until there are people on Mars playing golf and fooling around, I don't think we've quite made it.

Thank you, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and guy-who-had-to-fly-the-thing and therefore couldn't walk on the moon, Michael Collins.

PS If you need any Mars astronauts, I'm available.

Led Zeppelin's The Starship - NBC video

[Original links died; these are similar but not exact 10/2017]

Dangerous Minds has a piece on Led Zeppelin's Starship, with some nice photographs, a link to some information about Robert Plant's road wife Audrey Hamilton, and a copy of the video of an aggrieved NBC reporter clearly jealous of these uppity young English hippies with enough money to hire a private plane. Now I understand how the media twists things, hearing Robert Plant's joke about what a shame it is the plane doesn't have a pool table repurposed as a dig at his apparent sense of entitlement is quite funny. I bet Robert wasn't pleased at the time, if he ever saw the broadcast.

Here's the video:



Dangerous Mind's photos are great, but they flip between 1973 (The Starship) and 1977 (Caesar's Chariot). Thin Jimmy Page with Stormtrooper hat, and Audrey Hamilton, is 1977. Happy Jimmy Page wearing the checked shirt I call Teh Shirt and drinking Jack Daniels out of the bottle is 1973. But you probably already know that.

Sunday Comic Con

Didn't do too much at Comic Con on Sunday.  We got up at the hotel, packed, and did the usual ritual of eating hard boiled eggs and sugar danishes in the Hotel Guests Only Nook of the dining room, except that on Sundays, the daily paper, the San Diego Union Tribune (The UT) is $2 rather than its weekday dollar. Luckily another fan came to our rescue with an additional 70c in nickels, allowing us to purchase what is almost certainly one of the world's most fatuous newspapers in order to have breakfast in newspapery bliss.


We rode in to the Convention Center on the excellently convenient trolley, as usual, and tried to get on with finishing the exhibits in the main hall. No chance - the huckster room is GIGANTIC and it would seriously take three weeks to actually examine what was for sale at each booth.  I was pleased to see that a fair percentage of the merchandise was:

• Comics
• Vintage comic art
• New comic art
• Pastiche and mash-ups of comic art
• Art supplies
• Fine art (with a comic-y bent)

I felt that Fox and the big three broadcast companies were doing their level best to ensure Comic Con becomes all about Big Entertainment and drops the beardie guys with seventy-year old copies of The Spirit as soon as possible.  Hopefully the Force is strong with these fans, and they won't succeed. 

The comics on sale ranged from $660,000 (six hundred and sixty thousand dollars, for the hard of reading) an issue, to two for a buck (or less if you had trade ins).  We bemoaned the fact that it's hard to know in advance if an issue will eventually break the half-million dollar mark or will forever be traded for a buck or less.  If anyone knows the formula, please let us know. Our retirement fund is beckoning.

As for panels, we went to a humor in science fiction and fantasy panel chaired by Scalzi, which was funny, as advertised. Didn't learn of any new humorous authors. (My own funniest authors are Terry Pratchett, obviously, Douglas Adams, obviously, and Harry Harrison, whose Bill, The Galactic Hero changed my life. (See panels passim.))

We went to a panel Where Do Ideas Come From? and learned how to stick to an idea, but little about how to squeeze one out of the ectoplasm when you're not feeling creative, which is what I wanted. Then we went to a costuming panel chaired by members of the 501st, a Stormtrooper association with, they said, 6000 accredited members. I thereby learned that male Cosplay folks are exactly the same as the female ones I talked about the other day, except they are more likely to talk about what adhesive you use on your armor and less likely to talk about how to have your handler smooth things over when someone tries to hit on you. 

I've always loved the 501st - I'm an Imperial fan - so this was a great panel for me. 

After that, we left in order to get lost on the trolley lines, ditch our Comic Con badges, and eventually drive home, still failing to grasp why the freeway is jammed (30mph) from San Diego to Orange County on a Sunday evening. I know that it's because everyone is coming up from Mexico, but given the superbly clear freeway, I don't understand why it doesn't flow at 75 mph, like every other freeway. 

Oh well. I'm home now. 

Comic Con and the Pigs of Uranus

Saturday at Comic Con was even more crowded than Friday -  at one point we spent an hour in line and eventually realized that at the rate the line was getting in to the ballroom, we would enter just as Family Guy came up, which was such a horrific thought that we left the line and went to the exhibition hall instead.

We did see a How To on Proper Pitching and Promoting Yourself, which was excellently attended and equally excellently hosted by Professor Bryan Tillman. I felt better connected already by the end of the hour.  The main thing, he said, was to know your product (if your product is yourself, you should know yourself), and have an answer for any question about your product that can be thrown at you - if you don't know the answer, make it up on the spot, fast. But don't make up something you can't live with. And network, network, network.

There was a change in programming and another How To - The Art of Writing with Gregg Hurwitz - was also held on Saturday afternoon. Gregg writes Batman comics, film scripts, TV scripts and novels. Not surprisingly, in order to accomplish all that, he has a work ethic that I couldn't possibly emulate, working (as in working on a word processor) from 7 am to 5 pm every day. He had a number of tips - like what to do about "notes", the slips film and TV actors/directors/producers send to writers telling them the script isn't working for them. He said that the trick was to ignore what the note said, as it was probably wrong, and find out where the error in the script actually was. For instance if a director says that he got bored on page 50, it's quite likely the problem in the script that led to the loss of interest was much earlier. Gregg also said you should learn to steer a course  between responding to every note, which would mean becoming a pushover, and ignoring everything, which would mean getting a reputation as difficult or egocentric.


Gilbert Shelton meets my nose and signs my book. Photo by STB.

Then I got to attend a great hour and a half with one of my  heroes, Gilbert Shelton, the creator of Wonder Warthog, and follow it up with a trip to the Last Gasp booth in the exhibition to get my copy of the complete Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers book signed by him. I told Mr. Shelton that one of my happiest moments was first hearing the Pink Fairies song Pigs of Uranus, from What a Bunch of Sweeties. I asked him if they'd collaborated or if he'd been ripped off. "Well, they asked my permission," he said. "I don't know what it sounds like."

He's never heard Pigs of Uranus? "Well," I said, "You'd probably like it - it's very Texan. It's a Country song, odd though that might be from a bunch of Englishmen."

I have to say that Last Gasp Books have an incredible catalog. (Although the Gilbert Shelton book was on their table, it's produced by Knockabout, an English publisher. He has no current US publisher.) I couldn't afford many more of their books, but they had the complete set of Tintin and a huge number of fine art books. 

Then STB and I went for a bucket of chimichangas and enchiladas, served by the merry Karen, wreathed in smiles, at the Whatsis Mexican restaurant in Old Town, and thence to bed. 

San Diego Comic Con - Friday

It turned out that yesterday's coffee was just the tip of the plastics using iceberg. When I went down for "breakfast", a three by four foot nook cordoned off for "hotel guests", I got to drink more coffee in a plastic lined cup, eat a hardboiled egg off a polystyrene plate (nothing to go with said egg except salt and pepper),  a bowl of Sugar-Os in a polystyrene bowl with a plastic spoon, and a sugar-filled sugar danish on another polystyrene plate. Only about ten hotel guests were daft enough to eat of this bounty, but even so the trash filled an entire plastic trash bag before we left.

Comic Con is a little more understandable now we know more about Cosplay. As well as people dressed as every imaginable video game, manga, anime and Doctor Who companion, there are a buttload of people with professional cameras and tripods. Now we know why - they're there to photograph the Cosplay characters. This means every time a particularly striking character and a particularly large-camera'ed man happen upon each other, they stop and go into a mating dance, which attracts others and then the whole corridor silts up - because Comic Con, man, is CROWDED. Any turbulence in a corridor jams the whole thing up.

We went to see DeviantArt's main lawyer talk about intellectual property rights (we're just crazy that way) and several fellows who had based their career on Blade Runner (funny to think of a film as ending up with a team of kind of Temple Guardians who maintain it and it maintains them). It's Blade Runner's 30th anniversary, which makes me feel old. They told a lot of anecdotes. We saw the entire cast, crew and catering staff of Spartacus talk and make fap jokes (with hand motions)...well, actually Lucy Lawless didn't. She was extremely classy.

We also did Star Wars origami, avoided the cast resin class after last year's snoozathon, and went to a panel of Sci Fi that would change our life. The presenters, i09, were wildly popular, but the selections were so very mainstream - Scalzi's Redshirts, that guy who wrote that book about stuff, and that other guy who wrote that other book about stuff - that I can't remember them.

We had fish at the very nice Fish Market restaurant, parked in the shadow of the Midway, and this boat came past while we were eating.

Quite a distinctive profile.

When we got back, via the world's most jam-packed tram, San Diego had gifted my car with a little flower from those poisonous native California shrubs whose name escapes me. The little black spots all over the hood are the remnants of yesterday's "rain" - large, black, sparse drops of soot fell out of the sky for a few minutes and made everything smell bad. Ah, San Diego!

Plastics and coffee

So I wake up in this motel - or Inn, as it calls itself, although there is a definite shortage of ostlers, horses and tradesmen from the shire - and I have a coffee headache.

Making coffee involves stripping the sealed plastic bag off the plastic-lined paper cup, tearing and discarding the plastic wrapping/labeling of the coffee bag, and putting the coffee bag, which comes with its own disposable plastic tray, under the spout of the coffee maker. Water and heat are added.

It occurs to me while drinking the coffee that people these days are prone to saying things like, "My phone has more computing power than the entire Apollo program!" which may be true, but it's nearly as true to say that this morning's first coffee used (and threw away) more plastic than America as a whole used in 1950.



True video - Dustbin Hoffperson in The Graduate

None of the items were recyclable.

Comic Con, July 12th 2012

Today was the first day of Comic Con 2012. Registration was much simpler than last year - took about five minutes, if you don't count the ten minute walk from the $30-guarded-by-folks-from-the-methadone-clinic parking wasteland. I've written before about San Diego's deserts, and although Comic Con is in the Convention Center in the Gaslight District, much of the parking is behind Petco Park, in the badlands. Having registered, everything became fun, for those values of fun that include lining up for an hour to see an hour's worth of entertainment.

We saw Yaya Han talking about Cosplay first.  I've never really understood the cosplay impulse but she did a good job of explaining it. Everyone knows that Comic Con is where you'll find people dressed up as Stormtroopers or as anime characters, and 90% of mundanes - she called them "normal" people - laugh at "those people".  I was in the 10% who didn't laugh, but didn't quite get why, and now I think I do. They are the same completist people who would like to have a set of every Third Man Records tri-color, except they do it by having the most exact (or best interpretation) of a canon costume it's possible to make.  She also covered some of the differences between the scenes in different cultures and countries, and what cosplayers like to pose for, and be photographed doing, and what they don't. (Hint: If they are posing in a corridor, you might ask to take a photo. When they're eating or in the loo, not so much. The costumes are heavy and intricate, and they don't look at their best when the cosplayer is trying to do normal things, like eat.)

We went to see Gilbert Shelton, my favorite cartoonist, the creator of not only Wonder Warthog, and not only Fat Freddy's Cat, but also the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers.  (Excellent!) I got a photo of Mr. Shelton drawing on the overhead.



We saw two podcasters called something like Two Buck Chuck talk about time travel to a packed room who were way ahead of them on the science (slight miscalculation there) and we watched a presentation on Guerrilla Art by Lori Gordon and had the opportunity to make a miniature guerrilla art poster ourselves.

In between we had a pretzel dog...if you don't know, don't ask...and a fairly nice but also fairly expensive curry.

Good first day, I'd say.

Round up of the internets 07/07/2012

Agony Aunt Dear Prudence of Slate magazine gets an anguished letter:

Q. Wedding Protocol: My son will soon be married to a lovely woman, and I'm very happy and excited for them. I realize that the mother of the groom is a minor figure in the wedding party, but I admit that I was looking forward to the mother-son dance at the reception. […] I was surprised, then, when he mentioned to me that his bride doesn't like being the center of attention, and she wants the father-daughter dance and the mother-son dance held at the same time. It's the bride's day, not mine, so I'm prepared to be a grown-up and suck up my disappointment. […] Can you say something that will help me get over this?

R. What the fuck even is a mother-son dance? Is that a thing now? And can it be worth this much angst? What planet am I on? (That wasn't Prudie's answer, that was my reaction.)

The Wall Street Journal discusses an English push to determine the best anthem for Cheddar cheese. Several songs are discussed, and rejected, by the judges. In order to document his attempt at hearing the voice of reason, the writer asks a senior partner of a public relations firm about it.

James Gordon-Macintosh, managing partner of Hope&Glory, a London public-relations firm, dismissed the competition as a publicity stunt. "It's wantonly daft," he said. "If pure intellectual rigor were applied, cheese doesn't need a song, let alone an anthem."

On reading that, it occurred to me that I had never tried to use pure intellectual rigor on the question of whether cheese needs an anthem. Now I'm trying, I don't really know where to start. My dad used to have a copy of a math book called The Elements of Euclid. It was the sort of fusty book – I imagine it could even be called a tome – that grammar school boys would be expected to memorize in the 1930s, and he passed it on to me when I went to grammar school (that's from age 11 to 18, for you Americans or younger readers).   Unfortunately for both of us, Fusty Tome Era had ended by then, and Geometry had been partially replaced with Gym teachers exhorting us to "Be a tree!" and even the beloved Latin courses had been replaced by Philippe et Alain et leur chat Kiki (or was he a dog?) vont en vacances en Normandie.

Nevertheless, I took Euclid partially to heart and learned to define a point, a line, a plane, and angle then – I think, because I got lost around this part – that from this you could prove that two parallel lines would never meet. Also there were a few things about isosceles triangles and how the angles add up, all stuff you can imagine an ancient Greek doing with a long piece of string and a couple of pegs.

Although I never did get to the end of the book, I'm pretty confident that for all his pure intellectual rigor, Euclid never did manage to prove whether cheese needed an anthem or not, one way or the other.

Oh look! Project Gutenberg has a copy of a very similar edition of Euclid to my dad's. (PDF) Perhaps I'll finish it this time.

Perhaps concentrating on Euclid more would have helped with this article in The Atlantic, The 11 Ways That Consumers Are Hopeless At Math: 

You walk into a Starbucks and see two deals for a cup of coffee. The first deal offers 33% extra coffee. The second takes 33% off the regular price. What's the better deal?
"They're about equal!" you'd say, if you're like the students who participated in a new study published in the Journal of Marketing. And you'd be wrong. The deals appear to be equivalent, but in fact, a 33% discount is the same as a 50 percent increase in quantity. Math time: Let's say the standard coffee is $1 for 3 quarts ($0.33 per quart). The first deal gets you 4 quarts for $1 ($0.25 per quart) and the second gets you 3 quarts for 66 cents ($.22 per quart).

I've read it three times now and I can't see where the 50% increase in quantity is coming from. On the better deal, you get 75% of the coffee cup for 66% of the price…where's the rest? If you buy three of the first (bad) deal, you get 12 quarts for $3. If you buy four of the second (supposedly good) deal, you get 12 quarts for $3.52. 

Still, I can agree I'm bad at math in stores. Mostly because the items you take home don't have a price on them, so unless you write it on the item with a Sharpie® , or have some app that does so for you, the next time you go to the store you're clueless as to whether the current price (50% off! Three for the price of two!) is actually higher or lower than it was the last time. I've worked out that I usually don't want four avocadoes for a dollar, as they'll only go off anyway, so I might as well have two for a dollar and actually eat them. (Similarly, who would want four quarts of coffee? I drink coffee all day long, but I suspect the article writer excellent grasp of stats may have come at the expense of a broad understanding of fluid quantities.)

Atlantic also had this mandala…no, apparently it's a piece of equipment in the Large Hadron Collider.

This article, Death by Degrees from N+1 is about the changing value of a degree.

Today, we take it for granted that practicing medicine or law requires years of costly credentialing in unrelated fields. In the law, the impact of all this “training” is clear: it supports a legal system that is overly complicated and outrageously expensive, both for high-flying corporate clients who routinely overpay and for small-time criminal defendants who, in the overwhelming majority of cases, can’t afford to secure representation at all (and must surrender their fate to local prosecutors, who often send them to prison). But just as a million-dollar medical training isn’t necessary to perform an abortion, routine legal matters could easily, and cheaply, be handled by noninitiates.

The standardization of these professional guilds benefited undergraduate institutions immensely, a fact that was not lost on university administrators. College presidents endorsed the Hopkins model and the AMA’s consolidation of medical authority for good reason: in the mid-19th century, bachelor’s degrees in the United States were viewed with skepticism by the private sector, and colleges had a hard time finding enough students. The corporate-sponsored consolidation of the medical establishment changed undergraduate education from a choice to a necessity. Where once there was indifference, now there was demand: “I want to be a doctor when I grow up,” the child in the PSA says. “I want to go to college.”

I'm completely with the writer on the uselessness of most degrees, but we appear to part ways on the cause of the degree bubble. Right now you HAVE to have a degree to get work, and the cost of a degree has ballooned over the past few years. Is it because the necessity of having training to enter the workforce has expanded? No. Is it because the underlying cost of tuition has exploded? No, it's because the powers that be have found a new population to fleece. Undergraduates don't have any cash money, but if you can trick them into paying debts for years afterwards when they gain access to money, then they become a money farm like any other consumers. It's a classic bubble, and as unsustainable as the tulip bubble. We can all make money off the undergrads if we get in on the ground floor, but later, when it becomes obvious it's a bubble, the late-comers get fleeced. But in the short term, only the undergraduates have to pay. 

The bullshit rationale is that all people trying to obtain a degree are trying to maximize their earnings, and so they should pay for the privilege.  Only they will benefit, so they should pay.

Where we were coming from, in socialist communist nazi Britain, lo all those years ago, was to suggest that if society wants to maximize its overall efficiency, it should promote young people by giving them the best education in the world. At cost. Or less. Society will benefit from having bright people, poor or rich, in the workforce. Which means the government should get involved. Rising tide, lifts all boats, et cetera.

Current 1% thinking doesn't even recognize the idea of having an educated workforce. It has plenty of options overseas, at least until the overseas guys' money runs out. The current option may be unsustainable, but it's certainly profitable, and that's to get as much money from the under-25s as is physically possible, bank it, and then look the other way.

Collaboration Culture

Here is a BBC photostory from the Collaboration Culture series, which features a white artist called Bob and Roberta Smith working with a Ghanaian coffin-maker called Paa Joe. They're making a sculpture in honor of Pablo Picasso, which they will bury in one of Paa Joe's carved coffins to 'return Picasso to one of his most significant sources of inspirations' - Africa.  One caption refers to it as a "ceremonious burial", which suggests the writer has unusual ideas about English usage.

The caption to this one cements the belief.



The caption is, "Carved by hand from a block of wood, Paa Joe does not use plans or sketches."

Bob and Roberta's contribution - if I may be so bold as to call him by his first names - is to add his 'signature found objects'  - pieces of litter - including an 'old milk container'.  (The picture fails to clarify whether it is a container for old milk, or something else.)

His sculpture is placed in the lion coffin and the coffin is nailed shut. The caption points out that this surprises him, although it does not explain why.

I'll probably never get to see the TV show, but I wonder if the traditional, highly-regarded coffin-carver was equally surprised to be working with a Leytonstone Litter Supremo?

Here are some other memorials to the Pabster.

Jack White at Eurockéennes - impromptu acoustic

Jack White deals with a power cut to the PA at the festival Eurockéennes, Belfort, on July 1st, 2012.




He just keeps on singing! And the crowd already know the chorus We Are Going To Be Friends, so...

(Thanks to uploader concertslive.)