Kubrick and UFOs

Stanley Kubrick has long been my favorite director. His top films, the ones I would happily watch at any time, include 2001: A Space Odyssey, Dr. Strangelove, Paths of Glory, The Shining, Barry Lyndon, and Eyes Wide Shut. They are all fantastic.

Of those movies, though, 2001 stands out as the best. It won an Academy Award for visual effects, is often listed as one of the best movies ever made, is definitely one of the best science fiction films ever made, features an artificially intelligent computer going on a murderous rampage, traces the influence of extraterrestrial beings on human evolution, and has an ending that can't be explained, only experienced. As Kubrick stated, he "tried to create a visual experience, one that bypasses verbalized pigeonholing and directly penetrates the subconscious with an emotional and philosophic content."

So, it's a good movie.

Many years ago I came across a well-worn copy of The Making of Kubrick's 2001 at a used bookstore. It's an excellent book edited by Jerome Agel. There's really no narrative; it's just an eclectic collection of quotes, interviews, articles, reviews, fan mail, reactions, 96 pages of photographs, behind-the-scenes notes, basically a hodgepodge of anything and everything related to the movie. It was published in 1970, two years after the movie's release. For a fan of the movie, the book is heaven.

The best part of the book is at the end: a full reprint of Kubrick's interview with Playboy magazine in 1968. The topics are wide-ranging. After trying to get Kubrick to explain what 2001 means, which he refuses to do, saying "2001 is a nonverbal experience", the interviewer asks if the movie is a religious film. The answer is emphatically yes ("the God concept is at the heart of 2001") but in a very nontraditional manner. To explain his point, Kubrick brings up the topic of extraterrestrial life, and proceeds to blow our minds with a discussion of how extraterrestrials may have evolved, given enough time:

They may have progressed from biological species, which are fragile shells for the mind at best, into immortal machine entities — and then, over innumerable eons, they could emerge from the chrysalis of matter transformed into beings of pure energy and spirit. Their potentialities would be limitless and their intelligence ungraspable by humans.

...

They would be incomprehensible to us except as gods; and if the tendrils of their consciousness ever brushed men's minds, it is only the hand of God we could grasp as an explanation.

...

The important point is that all the standard attributes assigned to God in our history could equally well be the characteristics of biological entities who billions of years ago were at a stage of development similar to man's own and evolved into something as remote from man as man is remote from the primordial ooze from which he first emerged.

The interview continues on, focusing for several pages on various aspects of extraterrestrial life, such as the cultural impact of first contact. Eventually, the topic turns to UFOs. "What's your opinion?" asks the interviewer.

This launches Kubrick into a discussion of recent reports on the UFO phenomenon, such as by L. M. Chassin, a French Air Force general, and Dr. J. Allen Hynek, an astronomy professor at Northwestern University. He then covers some of the more conventional explanations for UFOs (ball lightning, etc) and briefly points out how they don't explain all the evidence. Then he adds:
As you've probably deduced, I'm really fascinated by UFOs and I only regret that this field of investigation has to a considerable extent been pre-empted by a crackpot fringe... That kind of kook approach makes it very easy to dismiss the whole phenomenon which we do at our own risk.
I was thrilled when I read this. I had always held the opinion that if you can set aside any preconceptions you have on the topic and seriously examine the evidence, then the conclusion was obvious. UFOs are physical objects that seem to represent a non-human intelligence. To learn that my favorite director thought the same way and shared the same fascination with the topic as I did was extremely exciting!

And speaking of examining the evidence, Kubrick offered this sobering statement: "Actually, if you examine even a fraction of the extant testimony you will find that people have been sent to the gas chamber on far less substantial evidence."

Before leaving the topic of extraterrestrials and UFOs, the interviewer asked one last question about critics who point to the speed of light as a reason UFOs can't be interstellar, saying it would simply take too long to travel between the stars. I've always loved Kubrick's reply:
I find it difficult to believe that we have penetrated to the ultimate depths of knowledge about the physical laws of the universe. It seems rather presumptuous to believe that in the space of a few hundred years, we've figured out most of what there is to know. So I don't think it's right to declaim with unshakable certitude that light is the absolute speed limit of the universe. I'm suspicious of dogmatic scientific rules; they tend to have a rather short life span.
The interview then moved on to other topics, but none were as interesting.

So that was my favorite used-book purchase ever. I bring all of this up for several reasons:
  1. To hopefully demonstrate there's enough evidence to take the UFO subject seriously.
  2. To show that Kubrick was awesome.
  3. To lay the groundwork for a future post, where I'll discuss a book I read this summer. It's the most fascinating book I've read in a long, long time.

Big 12 Sports

I'm trying something new this year to stay on top of all the Big 12 football news. The past several days I've been tracking down the major newspapers covering the Big 12 and subscribing to their conference-related RSS feeds. The idea is that I'll collect them all into one mega-RSS feed, so I'll have a constantly updating stream of Big 12 news. This is called a "river of news" in RSS-speak.

Here are the papers and sports sections I've found so far:

If you know of any papers I'm missing, please let me know. After I collected all their RSS feeds (which was a painstaking process), I subscribed to all of them in my RSS reader, put them all in one folder, and then made that folder public.  Here's the result:

http://www.inoreader.com/stream/user/1005856014/tag/Big+12+Sports/view/html

It's a river of Big 12 sports news from all of the above papers. It probably has more content than one person can reasonably keep up with, but that's okay. The idea is you can dip your toes in the river at any time and get a sense for what's going on. Ideally I would like it to focus only on football, but most newspapers don't have sport-specific feeds, just college-specific ones. So I'll have to settle for a mostly football river.

That URL is too complex to remember, though, so I set up another URL here:

http://big12.randyl.org

It will redirect you to the first URL, and is much easier to remember.

I mentioned curating this list was a painful process. There are several reasons:

  • It's not obvious where a newspaper's RSS feeds can be found, or if they even have any. Some newspapers have an RSS page that lists every feed. For others, you have to go to the Sports section, for example, and look for an RSS link.
  • Sometimes the RSS links don't work. Tulsa World was the worst offender. They have an entire page of RSS feeds, but They. Don't. Work. Ugh. As far as I can tell, the only way to get an RSS feed is to search their website for keywords (like "OU Sports") and then choose RSS as the display option.
  • Sometimes the RSS feeds are out of date, like the Houston Chronicle. They have a list of feeds for various college teams, but they return results from last year.

To end on a more enjoyable note, here are several things I've learned from my river so far:

The Charleston Daily Mail is doing a segment each week on the traditions of West Virginia's opponent. 

  • Their first opponent was Alabama and is detailed here. It discusses, among other things, how a muddy field led to Alabama becoming known as the Crimson Tide, and how the varsity team being forced to sit the first quarter of a game led to the elephant becoming their mascot. 
  • Their second opponent was Towson, detailed here. Their mascot has been, over the years, the Teachers, the Principals, the Schoolmasters, the Indians, the Golden Knights, and finally, the Tigers (along with 27 other NCAA teams).
  • Maryland is their opponent this week, but that article hasn't posted yet. Edit: Link is here.

And finally, Bob Stoops' favorite gift ever was a shower head.

Gas Cans

I had no idea gas can technology had advanced so irritatingly in the last 7-8 years. I have a one-gallon plastic gas can I've been using for years. The spout recently cracked, causing it to leak whenever I poured gas into the lawn mower. So I went to the store to buy a new one, but they all had this weird spout that I didn't quite understand at first glance. That was the only option, though, so I bought it.

When I took it home and tried to use it, I couldn't believe how complicated it was. I'm used to two steps: 1) take the cap off the spout and 2) pour. The instructions for the new gas can had four steps (!), not including taking the cap off the spout. It was ridiculous. So I kept using the leaky gas can for a few weeks. At some point I figured I'd go to various stores until I found a gas can with a normal spout.

Then Wendy, by coincidence, stumbled upon a blog post where someone was ranting about the terrible new spouts on gas cans. Apparently they are all like that, and it's California's fault. In an effort to reduce smog, they mandated the use of new gas cans that wouldn't leak fumes and would prevent spillage. The EPA liked the idea, so they mandated the new cans for everyone.

The problem, as many people have pointed out, is that the new spouts are so complicated you need at least three hands to operate them, and you wind up spilling more gas than you ever did with the old spouts.

I am so glad Wendy found that article. I was relieved that I was not the problem, and that everyone else found the new cans terribly irritating. Fortunately, there is a solution: you can buy an EZ-POUR spout online, which is the old-style spout. I bought one immediately.

But here's the most ridiculous part of the whole thing: 

Buying the old-style gas can spouts is illegal in a number of states. But, proving that America is the truly the cradle of innovation, retailers have taken the same spouts, put them in a different package, and labeled them "water can spout", thus making them perfectly legal to sell.

My new spout came in the mail recently. I put it on my old gas can and now everything is good. No more leaks.

It is mind-boggling that something so simple can be made so complex.

Bike Ride

20.87 miles from McHenry to Wisconsin

Riding time: 2 hours 2 minutes

Season total: 129 miles

Notable wildlife spotted: squirrels, snakes, roosters, chipmunks, birds, butterflies, grasshoppers, and mosquitoes.

Summer

On our way to the grocery store this morning, we came up with a list of signs that summer is about to end:

  1. Acorns have begun falling.
  2. Geese have returned to the pond.
  3. School buses have returned to the roads.
  4. Halloween stores have opened up.
  5. Preseason football has started.

And that leads to a related topic: it took 8-9 years, but I finally feel like I've become acclimated to northern Illinois. For example:

  1. I started watching hockey the past couple of seasons.
  2. I used to think that summers here were never hot enough; now when temps reach the upper 80s I think it's too hot.
  3. August feels like the start of fall, not the peak of summer.

One of the best parts of watching a Chicago Blackhawks hockey game (sometimes it is the best part) is the singing of the national anthem by Jim Cornelison. The guy is an opera singer, and when he sings, everything in our house stops to listen. It seriously rocks. And it never gets old. If you haven't heard him sing before, check it out here. Every Blackhawks home game starts like that.

Edges of Science

A few weeks ago I took Wendy's car in for scheduled maintenance. To pass the time, I brought my tablet along so I could read a back issue of the JSE. One of the articles was about a class taught at the University of Colorado in 2010 called Edges of Science.

As part of the class, students took part in an experiment to test practical uses of remote viewing, which is a form of ESP. Basically, every week researchers said to the students: "In two days, you will be shown a picture. Please draw that picture now." The students would do their best to draw the picture, having no idea what it might be.

The researchers had an independent person pick two pictures from a pool of photographs, and randomly assign one to mean "the stock market went up" and the other to mean "the stock market went down". Then a team of judges looked at each of the students' drawings and rated which of the two pictures it most closely resembled. The ratings were tallied up to see which picture (market-going-up or market-going-down) got the most votes. The next day researchers would buy and sell options depending on which picture was selected.

Finally, and this was the most crucial step, two days after students drew their pictures, they were shown the picture corresponding to what the market actually did. They called this the feedback loop. Since the students were trying to predict a future event (being shown a picture), it was critical that the event actually happen, and that the picture matched the actual performance of the stock market.

They did this for 7 weeks, and every week the students correctly predicted how the market would perform. The researchers started off with $10,000 and ended with $26,000. They also pointed out that one week there was a timing delay with their market order, which cost them $12,000. Without that delay, they would have nearly quadrupled their money, from $10K to $38K.

The experiment was limited to 7 weeks because it occurred during the latter part of the semester. Researchers wondered whether such a high success rate could be maintained in the long run. Apparently a number of psychic studies have had good success in the short term, but in the long term have declined in performance until reaching what would be expected from random chance.

I'm curious what they did with the money; the article didn't mention it. I also wonder what other topics the class covered. It sounds like a lot of fun.

Movie Notes

Grave of the Fireflies

I finally worked up the courage to watch Grave of the Fireflies, a Japanese animated movie from 1988. I've known about it for a few years, but have put off watching it because, although it's widely considered to be a masterpiece, many people say it's the saddest movie they've ever seen.

The movie takes place in Japan towards the end of World War II. It follows a 14-year-old boy and his 4-year-old sister as they struggle to survive after their mother is killed in a bombing. The first scene of the movie tells you the end: they don't survive.

Yes, it is a very sad movie, and also very good.

Roger Ebert listed it as one of the "Great Movies", and had this to say:

“Grave of the Fireflies” is an emotional experience so powerful that it forces a rethinking of animation. Since the earliest days, most animated films have been “cartoons” for children and families. Recent animated features such as “The Lion King,” “Princess Mononoke” and “The Iron Giant” have touched on more serious themes, and the “Toy Story” movies and classics like “Bambi” have had moments that moved some audience members to tears. But these films exist within safe confines; they inspire tears, but not grief. “Grave of the Fireflies” is a powerful dramatic film that happens to be animated, and I know what the critic Ernest Rister means when he compares it to “Schindler’s List” and says, “It is the most profoundly human animated film I’ve ever seen.”

My Neighbor Totoro

I was surprised to learn that Grave of the Fireflies was released as a double-feature with My Neighbor Totoro, another Japanese animated film. I watched that movie for the first time last year, and it's the complete opposite of Grave of the Fireflies. It's a lighthearted, fun movie about two young girls interacting with friendly wood spirits that live near their house in the country. There's almost no plot in the movie; it's just about the experiences the young girls have.

Although the theatrical double-feature was a flop (people were turned off by the seriousness of Fireflies), both movies became classics. My Neighbor Totoro also made Ebert's list of "Great Movies", and apparently Totoro is as popular in Japan as Winnie the Pooh is in Britain, or Mickey Mouse is in the U.S.

MovieLens

Finally, last year I discovered movielens.org, an excellent movie recommendation site. It's run by the University of Minnesota, and is basically their research laboratory for testing recommendation algorithms. It's free for anyone to use. Once you create an account, you start rating a bunch of movies, and it will then give you predictions of movies you might like. It even predicts what you'll rate a movie. There are lots of other cool features, too.

I've found its predictions are really good, almost always within half a star of my rating (it uses a 5 star rating system). In fact, I decided to watch My Neighbor Totoro based on movielens' prediction. It predicted I'd rate it 4.5 stars; I gave it 4. It predicted I'd rate Grave of the Fireflies 4.5 stars, and that's exactly what I gave it.

Assorted Links and Notes

Notes:

  • We've gotten a lot of rain this spring and summer. It's led to mushrooms sprouting up in a few spots in our yard.
  • One day last week I looked out the window and saw a squirrel eating a mushroom. He'd picked it up off the ground, and was nibbling all along the edges. I'd never seen a squirrel eat a mushroom before; it was somewhat comical.
  • One evening during the spring we saw a raccoon eating a squirrel. Sort of. We heard a strange cry from the front yard that repeated several more times. Wendy looked out the door and saw a raccoon walking headfirst down a tree, with a squirrel in its mouth. We were hearing the last cries of a desperate squirrel. That led to us learning (via Wikipedia) that raccoons can rotate their hind legs 180 degrees, which allows them to descend trees headfirst.

Links:

  • China and the new Transformers movie. I had no idea the target demographic for the new Transformers movie was basically China. It was co-produced by a Chinese company, has Chinese product placements, and is intentionally flattering towards the Chinese government.
  • Alaskan bear cams are surprisingly dramatic.
  • An overview of studies that show when the homeless are given money, they spend it wisely.
  • The Politics of Housework. A 1970 essay arguing men should help with household chores. "He's losing some leisure and you're gaining it. The measure of your oppression is his resistance."

Bike Ride

12.37 miles south along the Prairie Trail

Riding time: 1 hour 7 minutes

Season total: 84 miles

On the first half of the ride, there was a guy mowing the side of the trail. He was driving a small tractor that was pulling a mower. On the last half, there was a different guy driving a small buggy. He had an air blower on wheels hitched to the back; it was blowing the grass clippings off the trail.

McDonald Observatory

StarDate is an astronomy magazine published by the McDonald Observatory, which is owned by the University of Texas. I've read it for years. It does a decent job of being interesting without being too technical. They also have a daily radio program you may have heard before.

A few months ago I got the May/June issue in the mail. It was the observatory's 75th anniversary, and the feature story was about how the McDonald Observatory was created. I didn't read it because, frankly, it looked boring. It wasn't about astronomy. So I skipped it.

However, a month or two later, I found myself sitting down and reading the article. Turns out, it was way more interesting than I thought, and it even had a Chicago connection! I was quite glad I took time to read it.

So here's the scoop:

In the 1920's, there was a Texas millionaire, William McDonald, who died and bequeathed all his money to the University of Texas to build an astronomy observatory. His relatives, though, were aghast that they wouldn't receive any of his money, so they sued, claiming he was of unsound mind when he made the will. The verdict went one way, the appeal went the other way, and after round three ended in a tie, a settlement was reached: the relatives got some of the money, but the university got most of it.

But, there was another problem: the university had the money for an observatory, but not the manpower. It had no astronomy program, and on the entire campus there was only one astronomer: the president. Their best plan was to invest the money until it grew large enough to hire a staff. This is where the Chicago connection came into play, thanks to Otto Struve, a fourth generation Russian astronomer. 

Struve was the head of the University of Chicago's astronomy department, and also the head of the Yerkes Observatory in southern Wisconsin. (The observatory is still there, by the way; Wendy and I toured it several years ago after I learned about it in the footnotes of an old science fiction novel.) Struve had the opposite problem that Texas did: he had a large staff and faculty, but his observatory was becoming obsolete, and was in a poor location for viewing the stars. So when he heard of Texas' situation, he offered a deal: if they built the observatory, he would provide the staff and funds to operate it. Apparently such collaboration was unheard of at that time, but it solved a problem for both universities, so Texas eagerly accepted, and in May of 1939, the McDonald Observatory was opened.

Those were the most interesting parts of the article. It was fun to make the connection between the Yerkes observatory, the StarDate magazine I read, and the McDonald observatory. I've never been to McDonald; it's located near Fort Davis, TX, deep in the southwest corner of the state. Someday I hope to take a trip down there to see it.