Learning from a Harsh Mistress

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Today was a good day on the novel.  I figured out a plot device to externalize the main character’s decision making.  I’m going to have one or more conversations between him and the AI.  Now this may sound like a faddish decision because of all the AI-associated jibber jabber we hear about lately.  But actually, I can think of a very famous usage of AI friendship in classic science fiction.

In Robert Heinlein’s novel, “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” the human protagonist is friend to and conspiracy partner with a self-aware computer named Mike.  The conversations between them are a good chunk of the story and critical to the plot at many points.  Now I don’t need anything that extensive for my plot device but I need a sounding board for my character’s decision making.  I can turn a soliloquy into a dialog and that works better for the dramatic aspect of it.  And since the AI is “female” it provides a different emotional feeling to the talk.  It’s funny, I had added a scene where the protagonist is mediating an armed standoff between two military groups and without realizing it, I had decided that he would follow up by surrendering himself to the US government.  But once I did that, I realized that I had not foreshadowed this move anywhere in the story and no one would have expected it.

So, I decided I needed to build up some of his thought process in advance for the readers to see.  What I’m still working on is the reaction to his “capture.”  I’m thinking about something like a general strike with the Teamsters and other truck drivers shutting down the supply chains for everything and the country grinding to a halt.  I haven’t thought all of that out yet.  I need to up the ante and bring the book to an end on a high note but so far it doesn’t have enough drama and excitement.

Maybe I’ll introduce an external threat to provide a reason for unifying the splintered Americans.  Or maybe I’ll have the protagonist provide a stirring speech to the nation that will galvanize a movement to strip the federal government of its oppressive powers and reassert the freedoms in the Bill of Rights in all of their aspects.

And I have to do all of this without it seeming too much like a “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” moment.  And that means I’ll actually have to figure out what practical changes would be made to the current state of the federal government.  Some of the things are easy.  I’ll abolish the FBI.  I’ll cancel the Patriot Act and the FISA Courts.  The CIA will have to be reformed so that it can’t touch American citizens at all.  I’m tempted to eliminate the IRS.  In many ways the second Trump administration seems to be stealing a lot of my thunder.  Maybe I should strike back by eliminating the Education department and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.  No, I’ll be big about it and stay in my lane.

So today was a good day.

She-Hulk X

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I was watching the 1930s King Kong movie yesterday and thought, “That was a damn good idea for a motion picture.”  It had a love story, a damsel in distress, prehistoric monsters, an ocean voyage to a tropical island, a battle scene involving the latest weapons technology of the time, a strange culture, a scantily clad pretty woman and the capitol city of the world as a backdrop.  It was a fantastic story and considering the special effects technology of the time it must have been a truly exciting movie to watch.

Now I compare this to what passes for adventure movies today and what have we got?  Most of what is out there are superhero movies.  One or more characters dressed up in spandex running or flying around battling each other to cause or prevent mayhem to the human population around them.  And after two hours of this, usually nothing much has happened.  Some space jewel or other has been found or lost and some bad guys have been captured or chased off.  But to all intents and purposes nothing substantive has been achieved or lost.  For the most part no one even dies.  It seems rather pointless.

I think something has been lost from the art of storytelling.  Now this isn’t completely the case.  There are still movies with a beginning, middle and end.  I guess a decent example would be Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy.  Batman Begins, The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises; beginning, middle and end.  We see why Bruce Wayne became Batman.  We see him defeat his greatest adversary and we see him walk away when he can do no more.  It’s not Shakespeare but it is decent story-telling and effective spectacle.

Now compare this to the Marvel “Avengers” series.  There have been dozens of these movies if you count all of the sequels, spin-offs and television productions.  Each “hero” has a sequence of movies and then there are the ensemble films and basically nothing meaningful happens.  And now they’ve gotten to the point where they want to swap out the older white male heroes with black and female successor heroes.  The most laughable one I’d say is “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law.”  I have to assume that if she loses a case she hulks out and rampages through the court building until her client can escape the pulverized masonry.  Basically, these people have no conception of story-telling and are just building boring envelopes that they can fill with CGI effects.

Even something as absurd as the John Wick movies is better than this.  At least it started with an original movie that had a character and a plot.  Granted the character is a cartoon and the plot is as simple minded as any imaginable but there is an arc to the story and things definitely happen; mostly flying bullets and dead Russian mobsters but within the confines of the story it keeps your interest mostly.  Now it is almost unbelievable that they’ve been able to turn this into a series.  The body count in the first movie was in the high two figures.  In the second movie, which was the last one I watched, the action was so frenetic I couldn’t even tell how many people he killed.  The automatic weapons fire was almost continuous for ten minutes at a time.  I don’t even know how we’re supposed to believe that the guns don’t start to melt from the heat.  But even this absurdity is preferable to the boring Marvel movies.

I understand that Hollywood is solely driven by return on investment and pumping out sequels to existing intellectual property like the comic book characters is one of the only allowed pathways to getting a film made.  The exception is someone like Christopher Nolan whose reputation for success will allow him to make a movie like Oppenheimer.  But you can count those trusted movie-makers on the fingers of one hand.  And they’re getting old.  What happens when they’re gone?  She-Hulk II or III or X?

One Small Cup for a Man. One Giant Carafe for All Mankind

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The Future Circular Collider (FCC) or as I call it “The Really, Really, Really Large Hadron Collider (TRRRLHC) is proposed to be 91 kilometers in circumference and estimated to cost $30-40 billion.  Now granted, this is chump change when US military projects are considered.  But when it is taken into account the fact that it is very, very, very unlikely to provide any useful information at all to scientists it does seem somewhat uncareful with the public’s money.

I was just watching Sabine Hossenfelder’s latest video where she explains why the community of high-energy particle physicists despise her.  You see she was a high energy particle physicist herself but she discovered that the whole field had become a racket.  All of these highly intelligent scientists are basically engaged in fraud.  Instead of doing actual research in physics they are employed at fabricating theories for which not a shred of evidence exists but for which tests can be devised to justify building larger and larger colliders.

I give Hossenfelder credit for her integrity.  She describes the personal vitriol that her colleagues heap on her for calling out their fraud.  She is right.  American and European governments fund these outrageously expensive instruments and also foot the bill for all of the research grants that fund the half-century long careers of all the thousands of particle physicists that subsist on this government gravy train.

Well, at least in the United States a lot of this will probably be going away very soon.  DOGE is tallying up the costs for and analyzing the alleged benefits of all these research grants.  I think that the great majority of these research grants will be denied funding starting next year.

Now, before being accused of being a Luddite, let me state that a case can be made for some scientific research being facilitated by federal money.  I can see how research on nuclear weapons, laser systems to knock down drones and lots of other military adjacent categories could justify the government underwriting some part of the work.  And there is probably biological research that the various government agencies on health could decide deserve government funding.  But anything with dark energy, dark matter, worm hole, black hole, multiverse or string theory in the title should definitely be denied funding automatically.  Likewise, any social science grants with the words diversity, equity, inclusion, DEI, intersectional, BiPOC, Latinx, gender, transgender, gender fluid, pansexual, LGBTQ, pronouns, feminist, white nationalism, white supremacy, whiteness, white privilege, white fragility, resistance, sanctuary or Trump in the title should be denied and the authors put in a database for rejection from that point forward.

Look, industry will foot the bill for any scientific research for which applications in the real world exist.  And the government can make a case for expanding knowledge in certain limited academic categories where knowledge can improve the lives of Americans.  Predicting weather and solar storms are easy examples.  But as fascinating as black holes and multiverses are let’s leave these subjects to the Marvel Cinematic Universe to imagine and let scientists try using reality and experiments involving reality as their province.

For my part I am willing to do my part and fund research on coffee that doesn’t turn bitter after fifteen minutes on the stove.  You see I believe in following the science.