November 2005 Archives

Is a SETI virus just science fiction?... "Computer" virus contamination of a SETI signal?

Apparently, physicist Richard Carrigan is worried about alien computer hackers. I shouldn’t make fun, because he knows about things like "hyperon physics, the magnetic monopole conjecture, high energy scattering, pi and mu mesic atoms," and other things that sound like we’ll destroy the universe with by futzing around with them. And we should pay attention, because we all know fer sure that alien and Terran computers are totally compatible, for that simple fact got us out of this mess:

More likely, though, is that when evil ETs start hacking our computers, our in-boxes are gonna fill up with crap like this:

Dear Earth Creature,

I am Xqwo Zordlorf, Keeper of the Specie of the High Royal Family of Slkikl Sector. I have an important business proposition for you.

On Gytiu 49th, Galacta-Year 32,095, as you are undoubtedly aware, battle fleets from the Uhjwq Void descended upon the ancestral homeworld of the Slkikl royals, driving their eminences from their beloved and glorious gaseous swamps before they could withdraw the accumulated wealth of star systems conquered under their benevolent rule. I, as their loyal and humble servant, have secreted these funds, in the total of Z$67 yeptillion, in unnumbered accounts on the P*jkl finance planet, and as I endeavor to retain the secrecy and solvency of these funds for my imperial masters, I humbly ask for your assistance...

Thanksgiving is over but the leftovers. (Mmm, leftovers...) So it's okay to start talking about Christmas...

One of my Christmas cactuses is suddenly bustin' out all over with red blossoms, and my years-old pointsettia, which has been green for years:

Happy Thanksgiving!

It’s weird, but I had forgotten what a tremendous impact Johnny Cash’s music had on me as a child until the opening moments of Walk the Line: the film begins with Cash’s legendary concert at Folsom Prison, which was recorded and went on to become one of the hottest selling albums of 1969, and probably of all time. And suddenly, watching the movie and feeling the thump-thump-thump of the heavy rockabilly beat reverberating in my chest, I remembered that, man, my dad used to play that album all the time -- the San Quentin one, too. And that’s gotta be part of the reason why I’ve been so haunted by the film and can’t wait to see it again: it’s the story of the music of my childhood.

It never occurred to me that I might not be the only one who grew up with this music, though, until I came across this, in an article about the film and Xer director James Mangold in Time Out New York:

As a kid, director James Mangold remembers there was one particular record that always seemed to be spinning on the hi-fi. "It was Johnny Cash’s At Folsom Prison," he says, speaking over the phone from his office in Los Angeles. "My dad played it all the time...."

My jaw dropped when I read that -- it was my Johnny Cash childhood exactly. But it’s hardly surprising, is it? If At Folsom Prison was what all the grownups were listening to when we were kids, then there must be lots of Xers whose brains got warped by Johnny Cash at a tender age. Right? Or are Mangold and I the only ones? I know lots of music lovers today who were far too young to have been Cash’s fans the first time around -- or who hadn’t even been born yet -- got into his work with his American Recordings series of covers of rock songs, but that’s not what I’m talking about. Is Johnny Cash a heretofore unacknowledged influence on Generation X’s formative years, and is that why the film did relatively well at the box office this past weekend, more than holding its own against the new Harry Potter film? Were the audiences full of nostalgic Xers?

Oh, if I told you of some of the evil things this cat gets up to...

Now that Hogwarts is back in session, herewith the geeky spectrum of magicians: Gandalf the White, Tim the Enchanter, and Carrot Top.

Once again, reality moves beyond the realm of satire:

THE contestants believe that they are taking one giant leap as space tourists.

But their shuttle is a Hollywood prop and its inhabitants are set to become victims of one of the most elaborate hoaxes in the history of television, according to the makers of a new reality TV series....

Four will be chosen to board their shuttle and blast off for a five-day orbit of Earth, where they will perform scientific experiments and return as heroes. Except they will not. Their shuttle was last operated by Clint Eastwood in the film Space Cowboys and despite being built from a Nasa blueprint, it will remain earthbound. The launch sound has been created by a Hollywood specialist and the shuttle will tip and rock in simulation of space flight. A giant custom-built screen outside the shuttle will provide the illusion of a view of Earth from space, including a hurricane over Mexico and a glimpse of Britain.

They will not experience weightlessness because they are only orbiting "near space".

[from the Times of London]

I’d love to be able to wonder how hard it was for the producers of this atrocity-in-the-making to find contestants dumb enough not to question the gravity thing, or to ask why they were not subjected to multiple Gs on liftoff. But I suspect it was depressingly easy to find such ignoramuses. *sigh*

Slate’s Jack Shafer, whom I’m guessing is a Boomer, is looking for the first sign that Xers have arrived in positions of power in the media... by which he seems to mean the print media, because the rise of Xer Anderson Cooper at CNN is pretty much the first nail in the coffin of Boomers in TV news, I think. So he polled a bunch of under-40 journalists (not me, alas) about what they think will be that Boomer death knell in print:

Cassie hates have cameras shoved in her face.

Pennsylvania dumps "intelligent design," but Kansas embraces it. Two steps forward, one step back. Meanwhile, The Revealer looks at why it should be called malevolent design:

The Designer who so Intelligently Designed our world, in theory, could be malevolent or capricious just as easily as he could be all good. He might have designed us intelligently, but for the purpose of watching us tear each others' throats out. He might have designed us intelligently, but on a whim, and then forgotten all about us. In theological terms, ID suggests forces operating upon the world from without, but it does not say whether that those forces are good or evil. You could hypothesize, for example, that a Satanist could step forward to support ID. Yes, the world shows evidence of an intelligent designer, but one with a sick sense of humor. Therefore, the Satanist might conclude, Intelligent Design is correct, and we should worship the Devil, since the world seems more like his handiwork than the Other Guy's.

Is it just me, or:

Cthulhu or the Flying Spaghetti Monster -- is one a worse deity than the other?

As always, The Onion has the most excellent final word:

As an ill-informed pseudo-intellectual with a particular interest in the unverifiable, I'm always on the lookout for some partially thought out misinformation. So, if you have an uninformed solution to a dilemma that doesn't actually exist, don't bother double-checking your information. I'm all ears.

In the absence of new episodes of Stargate SG-1 on Friday nights, I have been forced to improvise my own SciFi Fridays. Last week, I spent Friday night geeking out at the Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival, which as you may have guessed -- if you know who Margaret Mead was (and if you do, yup: you’re a geek) -- is all about science-y stuff in the visual media.

The program I saw last Friday was all about the early days of science on TV, featuring clips from the 1950s shows What in the World? -- a kind of egghead archaeology game show -- and Adventure, which was coproduced by the American Museum of Natural History, where the festival is held. (I saw lots more stuff, too: see my coverage at FlickFilosopher.com for more info.) As cornball as those 50s shows were, I could certainly see how riveting they’d have been had I seen them as a kid, how they’d have gripped me with their focus on ancient artifacts and evolution and exotic musical instruments and the peopling of our planet and all sorts of neat-o stuff like that.

I’d never even heard of these shows before, but there are a few online resouces for learning more: What in the World? was a a production of CBS and the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, and the museum has a site devoted to the series, featuring clips and images and reviews from the time. Classic-TV site Whirligig features clips and such from the British adaptation of What in the World?, called Animal, Vegetable, Mineral.

The funny thing is, I can’t recall any shows similar to What in the World? or Adventure that were on TV when I was a kid. Where was this stuff in the 1970s? I remember lots of TV devoted to pseudoscience, UFOs and alien astronauts and crap like that, and I watched them and got a kick out of them, but that’s not the same thing as real science programming. It’s like cool science TV jumped right over my childhood... though I regressed to watch Beakman’s World in the 1990s.

Looks like I’m not the only one who misses that show...

Geeky Chicken Little’s got his own movie; Savage Chickens dork out every day; Foghorn Leghorn is still clueless after all these years.

(Wikipedia has a section devoted to famous chickens. Who couldn’t love Wikipedia?)

Must add Stephen Colbert -- late of The Daily Show and now hosting his own Colbert Report -- to the Gen X arts summit. And not just for his biting, snarky work on The Colbert Report, but for the fact that he has clearly authorized a parody fan site that pokes fun at himself and his own geeky proclivities. (The address of the domain owner is the same as Comedy Central’s NYC address.) And Xers are nothing if not the first to make fun of themselves.

You may not be aware that in addition to being an Xer and one of the premiere cultural commentators of the moment, Colbert is a huge Lord of the Rings geek. He and I were in attendence of the same press screening of The Return of the King a couple years ago, and he was so full of beans in anticipation of the film that while we were all waiting for the movie to start, he literally ran around the theater trying to get us all to join him in doing the wave. And you may have noted that on the recent Daily Show episode on which Viggo Mortensen guested, Colbert was the LOTR dork who supplied Aragorn’s complex lineage to a bemused Mortensen (who, it must be said, is his own kind of dork, but that’s a post for another day).

Anyway, the "fan site" is complete with the requisite mangled images, animated GIFs, and -- oh, my -- fan fiction:

"The name’s Stephen Colbert," said the stranger, offering his hand, which Gandalf ignored because it was not a custom with which he had any familiarity. "I’ve come to help you defeat Sauron."

At this, Gandalf allowed himself a sharp intake of breath. "You must not say his name aloud! You cannot possibly imagine the dangers we face; they are manifold and frightening, the merest mention sufficient to attract the very same dark powers that we seek to eliminate."

Stephen was nonplussed. "Don’t hide behind your precious political double-talk, Gandalf. Let’s call a spade a spade: I know about the Ringwraiths -- who will soon become the Nazgul - not to mention Gollum, Saruman, and Shelob. Just saying ‘dangers’ and ‘dark powers’ doesn’t accomplish anything; you can’t fight a war against abstract nouns."

Colbert Nation also features excerpts from Colbert’s, ahem, unpublished SF novel. No kidding. Well, we’re all kidding, but the bad SF really is there on the fake site.

You don’t have to agree with the author -- identified only as "Me" -- of the 100 Greatest Internet Moments that these are, indeed, the 100 greatest Internet moments, but how cool is it that there really (probably) are 100 moments in the history of the Net that actually had enough of an impact that they will reverberate, if only in some small way, through human culture?

I like how Me summarizes one of the moments, the arrival of The Phantom Edit, the fan edit of Star Wars: Episode I:

Geeks: 1. Lame-o Self Important Hollywood Movie Producers: 0.

If there is a curse that afflicts Generation X-- Okay, if we're going to be honest, there are probably many curses that afflict Generation X, but the one I'm thinking about here is our tendency to see everything as a put-on, even the things we love. It's very postmodern, I suppose, to see the joke behind it all, to not only not be able to ignore the man behind the curtain but to laugh at him while also thinking, Hey, how cool is that man behind the curtain, anyway?

Let's call it Schrödingerian metaphysics: I can see the cat as simultaneously all funny and all serious. (And yeah, if you know who Schrödinger is, you're definitely a geek.)

To wit: I am highly intrigued by this in a devoutly geeky way, and I simultaneously find it utterly hilarious in a totally GenX-ironic way:

As Star Wars works to make us aware of its own narrative structure, other odd things about the films start to come into focus. Most significantly, we start to notice that the films are an elaborate meditation on the dialectic between chance and order. They all depend upon absurd coincidence to propel the story forward. Just what are the odds, in just one of near-infinite examples, that of all the planets in that galaxy far, far away, the droids should end up back on Tatooine, in the home of the son of the sweet (if annoying) boy who had built C-3PO decades before? Throughout all six films there are scenes of crucial serendipity. Such dependence on unlikely coincidence isn't unique to Star Wars. As literary critics have long pointed out, the arbitrary yoking together of events in the service of storytelling is one of the fundamental characteristics of all narrative. R2-D2 needs to hook up with Luke on Tatooine, just as Prospero's enemies need to wash up on the shores of his island, and Elizabeth Bennet needs to marry Mr. Darcy, for the narrative requirements of those stories to be fulfilled. The audience's willing surrender to narrative coincidence is demanded by the story's need to conclude itself.

Just go read the whole damn thing -- it's at Slate, and it's by Aidan Wasley, who says he was eight years old when he saw Star Wars in 1977, which makes him my twin brother. His deconstruction of the series is brilliant in every possible way.

Mrs. Kennedy is so dumb, she gets jealous when I water the plants. She doesn't care if I play with or talk to or groom the other cats -- she's fine with that. But when the watering can comes out, all I hear are complaints.

A group of college-aged twentysomethings were in front of me joking around about what I can only surmise was a friend, when one girl said "he's such an Anderson Cooper." From context, I was able to translate and determine it was a compliment -- something akin to a smart/geek/hottie-hybrid. That a group of college students know Cooper and freely admit it has to make the CNN demographic research team salivate.

[from Romenesko Letters]

Lately I’ve been fantasizing about a Generation X version of those Renaissance Weekends the masters of the universe throw for themselves, only my GenX Arts and Cultural Summit would bring together Xers who are doing intriguing work, work that’s hinting at the new golden age of entertainment being born right now. We’d sit around and shoot the shit and find out what ideas we have in common about where art and entertainment and culture might be going and we’d network and all sorts of amazing projects would grow out the gathering.

The totally imaginary GenX Arts and Cultural Summit, v. 1.1:

New names:

Shane Black (filmmaker)
Nicolas Cage (actor, filmmaker)
George Clooney (actor, filmmaker)
Philip Seymour Hoffman (actor)
Josh Lucas (actor)
Josh Marshall (blogger)
Andrew Niccol (filmmaker)
Liev Schreiber (actor, filmmaker)
Tilda Swinton (actor)

These were prompted by recent films Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, Capote, Good Night, and Good Luck., Everything Is Illuminated, and Lord of War, among other things.

(The whole list is after the jump.)

I hear masks are quite comfortable, and soon everyone will be wearing them.

From TVWeek.com:

Anderson Cooper, one of the breakout stars of Hurricane Katrina coverage, will become the sole anchor of CNN's 10 p.m.-midnight (ET) weekday block, to be re-titled "Anderson Cooper 360," effective Monday, and Aaron Brown will leave the news network he joined in 2001.

I discussed the rise of Anderson Cooper as a symptom of the cultural ascendency of Gen X back in September... and now his position has perhaps been solidified.

An article in the Los Angeles Times, published earlier today, before what was obviously a contentious behind-the-scenes drama at CNN had resolved itself, inadvertantly points out the generationalism of this move by the network:

Network officials are now looking to better showcase Cooper, considered a favorite of CNN/U.S. President Jonathan Klein. One possibility involves the two swapping their original time periods, sources said, with 56-year-old Brown taking over the 7 p.m. slot and the 38-year-old Cooper anchoring the flagship 10 p.m. newscast, presumably in the hope of attracting a more youthful audience. [emphasis mine]

Ooops. Sorry, Aaron -- seriously. But the times, they are a’changin’, I guess.

Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith is out on DVD today, and it’s a bittersweet feeling I’m dealing with. The supreme myth of Generation X is done, finished, over. It is no more. It has ceased to be. It is an ex-cult.

Not really, of course. The arrival of this last DVD means we can now gobble up the entire saga at home, and oh, you know that will be happening -- Star Wars parties, at which the entire sexogy is shown, will now become staples of geek entertainment. As Forbes freakin’ magazine noted today:

Mission completed. At just under 13 hours, the entire six-part saga of Star Wars can now be viewed from start to finish on a single sitting.

It’s true that Star Wars is part of what helped geekiness go mainstream, made it sorta cool to be into science fiction (though of course we still haven’t gotten past the idea that it’s weird to dress up as Obi-wan Kenobi but not weird to paint your naked torso in team colors and display your decorated beer belly in a football stadium in subzero temperatures). But it’s only the true geeks who will be spending some weekend this holiday season with a few true-geek pals sitting on the couch and dissecting the whole series frontward and backward, having fun but being totally, solemnly serious at the same time.