Hollywood, You Got Some Splainin' To Do

I can't believe there's another movie about technology making a person all-powerful by harnessing the power of the mind.  I already complained about Transcendence, where Johnny Depp is uploaded into a computer, watched over by Morgan Freeman. And now there's Lucy, where Scarlett Johansson is given a drug to let her use all of her brain, watched over by Morgan Freeman.  So apparently this is Freeman's latest typecasting: providing exposition when someone becomes an superhuman ultramind.  How many character ruts has he been in now?  Grizzled detective investigating a serial-killer, thoughtful supporting character giving the star life advice, God, narrator.

And what's with having the hottest actors play the supermind characters?  I know, that will sell tickets.  And it makes sense that if you have a technology that gives someone great mental powers, you might as well use it on someone who's already above-average in other areas.  But still, using attractive people in a movie about minds seems like casting porn based on intelligence.

It's also directed by Luc Besson, who has made a bunch of movies with strong female protagonists (La Femme Nikita, The Fifth Element, Colombiana, and a Joan of Arc film.)  So I'd love to hear a Freudian interpretation of that.  Put him together with Joss Whedon and they might finally get a Wonder Woman movie made.

But what really bothers me about Lucy and its carpet-bomb advertising, is that it perpetuates the myth that we only use 10% of our brains.  It's an especially frustrating misconception, since it likely began with psychologist William James complaining that people don't use their brains.  So in a sense, his remark proves itself.  And now that it's been hammered into our heads by a Hollywood marketing campaign, we'll never be rid of it.  For all the interesting science and technology in the world, they have to make "science"-fiction movies based on things we know to be false, and once again, you'll come out of it knowing even less.

One-Man's Land

Ever have an idea, then see someone beat you to it? That happened to me with North Sudan.

I read about this situation a few months ago: Egypt and Sudan have a border dispute. There were two different treaties marking out the border between them, and each country recognizes a different border. And surprise! They each wasn't the border that gives them the best land. Egypt says the border is a straight line, while Sudan says it has a kind of S-curve in it near the coast. Thus, there's a little bit of land on the Red Sea that they both claim.

Buy here's the weird part: there's another area further inland that neither country claims. According to Sudan’s border, it’s in Egypt, and according to Egypt’s border, it’s in Sudan. As far as I know, it's one of the few places on earth (outside Antarctica) that's not claimed by anyone. Of course, it’s not really surprising that no one wants it, since it's just desert. No people live there, and there are no resources. But still, you'd think someone would want it. And now someone does.  I thought someone should try claiming the unwanted land and declare their own country.

Someone in Virginia has done exactly that. He's claimed the land and declared independence. I have to admit, he has far more commitment than I do. I would have just issued a press release claiming the land. He actually went there and planned a flag, in spite of Sudan being nearly at war with South Sudan, and Egypt in a state of permanent revolution.  He's declared it "North Sudan," and installed his family as the royal family. (Though they rule from Virginia.)

This is far from the first oddball country to be created. Lots of people have tried declaring their own property to be a sovereign country, in varying degrees of seriousness. Sealand has become semi-famous.  There are a number of small places in Europe that cling to claims of independence. In many war-torn regions, there are de facto governments set up that rule small areas, such as Somaliland. And then there is Taiwan, which had existed in legal limbo for decades.

I'm actually surprised it doesn't happen more often, given the huge number of out-of the way islands there are. I suppose part of the reason we don't see it is that strange aspect of human nature whereby the people least satisfied with their own government are usually the ones who take greatest ownership of their country. For instance, The Tea Party may be angry with the American government, but they are the ones least likely to abandon their country and start again somewhere else.

But you would think rich people would get in on it too. Consider: Britain and France are both deep in debt, and have a huge number of small territories around the world. Don't you think that if you offered France $20 billion for the Marquesas they'd at least think about it?  They're on the opposite side of the planet; they won't miss them. And Britain had an island called Inaccessible Island. Why would they want to keep that?

Some wealthy Libertarians have proposed building their own floating cities, where they can craft a government (or lack thereof) to their liking.  This has been especially pushed by Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal. He seems to share the ingenuous spirit of fellow founder Elon Musk, but not the politics.  A floating city with few rules would be entertaining to watch, but that's an awful lot of expense and technology, even for the people involved.  So I doubt that will happen.  Though you could make the whole thing into a reality show and it would pay for itself.

The fact that rich people rarely try creating their own countries would seem to betray the fact that they aren't as offended by their demonization at the hands of the Occupy types as they would have us believe. Or maybe it's because the sort of person who becomes super-rich has to be enough of a people-person that they don't want the solitude of their own country. Not even the quieter techie sidekicks like Paul Allen or Steve Wozniak feel the need for their own private nation.

The Award Goes For...

The ESPY awards are coming up.  They're often criticized for, well, for what they are: awards for accomplishing things in sports.  So it's winning things for winning things.  But I think the idea of sports awards could work.  But don't give them to the stars that are already celebrated everywhere.  Instead, give them to people who don't get fame and fortune, or for things that don't normally get rewarded.

Fan awards

• Coldest shirtless appearance
• Most embarrassing televised appearance in the crowd (disqualification for suing the network.)
• Bob Uecker award for staying in assigned seats the longest
• Most elaborate outfit (categories for Raiders and non-Raiders)
• Best original song (categories for vuvuzela and air-horn)

Fan Signs:

• Wittiest sign
• Best use of network initials
• Most sarcastic sign smuggled into stadium

Fanbase awards

(Awarded to a team's entire fanbase)

• Best hyping of bad team
• Most implausible rumour
• Best defense of racist team trademarks
• Steve Bartman award for best scapegoating
• fastest wave

Sportscasters

• Best deadpan asking a stupid question
• Best rewording of a previous question
• Most enthusiastic reading of the copyright notice
• Subtlest segue into a promo for a non-sports show
• Most women picked out of the crowd by a cameraman

Athletes and Coaches

• Fastest soccer player to get back on feet after injury
• Barry Sanders award for most restrained touchdown celebration
• Least-gratuitous use of slam-dunks when layups will do
• Vaguest injury description
• Most creative use of eye-black

Grounds Crews and Maintenance Personnel

• Most creative pattern mowed onto a baseball diamond
• Fastest basketball sweat-mopper

Special Technical Award for Contributions to Sports Technology

Presented to the inventor of the temporary soccer line spray

Not Another World Cup Post

I've been disappointed by the reaction to Germany's win at the World Cup.  In particular, it's the number of references to the World Wars.  No, I'm not offended by humourously touching on an emotional subject - I like dark humour as much as the next person.  It's just gotten tiresome.

There's only so many ways you can make veiled references to a major war.  It's gotten predictable.  And aren't there plenty of things to make fun of them for?  This is the country that dedicates a month to beer.

The same thing happens with France.  They have only a limited number of joke subjects that are rerun again and again.  They're rude, they like Jerry Lewis, and they surrender quickly in war.  That last one is especially galling, since comics can tell a France-surrendering joke and the audience will laugh, even though no one involved knows why France is associated with surrender.

(Bonus points if you noticed the "galling" pun above.)


There has been humour about Germans being humourless and over-organized, and they've actually seemed refreshing.  Also, Angela Merkel has been the but of some jokes, and really, her awkward-sternness can be pretty funny.  So there is hope for German ridicule.  I'll help out: sausage, Kraftwerk, the Porsche Panamera, reallylongcompoundwords, trying to pronounce "Goethe".

Domesticated Animals

I wonder: if a fly enters a house, does that increases its chances of survival?  On the one hand, it will have access to food, and protection from the elements.  But on the other, it is now locked in an enclosed space with one or more large mammals that will try to kill it.

I'm wondering this because we could be breeding them one way or the other.  I've heard evolutionary biologists say that if a mutation helps a living thing survive even one in a thousand times, that will be enough for the mutation to become standard throughout the population.  So given the short life-cycle of insects, you'd think that by now, we would have caused them to evolve either an aversion or attraction to our houses.

It's disappointing that humanity has caused so little evolution in animals.  You'd think that:

• Squirrels would be more decisive, either running across the road or staying away, instead of going into the road and then becoming uncertain.
• Insects and spiders would become cuter, so we'd be less likely to squash them.  Though it occurs to me that this could go the other way: the scarier they look, the more likely we are to run out of the room and hope they go away on their own.

The Face-Lifted Game

Earlier in the World Cup, Bill Nye The Science Guy got into trouble on Twitter for suggesting some changes to soccer.  These fell into the stereotypical criticisms of the sport from non-fans, like calls to create more offence.  So soccer fans weren't convinced. 

I'm far from an expert, but I do have some experience with the game, so I think I'm in a better position to critique it.  And I claim that I'm enough of an outsider to see the sport with objectivity that the vast majority of the world's fans won't have. So, as the perfect person to judge, here are the things I'd like to see changed:

Get a blue line

Okay, it probably shouldn't actually be blue, but I mean a hockey-style blue line. The fact is, the current soccer offside rule is just about the worst-called rule in any sport. I don't think the linesmen even do much better than chance. It's not hard to see why: for one thing, they have to keep track of the relative positioning of moving objects, while a hockey linesman can just look along the blue line. And worse, the assistant referee has to judge the relative position of players, at the time the ball is passed from another position altogether. While sports officiating is impossible to get perfect, this is one rule where it's not even humanly possible to be good at it.

It's an example of a rule that was laid-out primarily to be fair to the players, with no consideration for whether it could be enforced; they'd be better off having a rule that is imperfect but enforceable.

Change penalties

For the most part, soccer's free-kick system is fair: because a foul in an important part of the field results in a kick from the same important part of the field, it seems just. But with penalties, not so much. Other than certain English players we could name, a penalty is a de facto automatic goal. But most things that penalties are awarded for are not worth that much. To put it another way, is hard to blame players for diving in the box, when the reward for trying to draw a penalty is much greater than the reward of a scoring chance by staying on their feet.

So I say:

• Narrow the area. Fouling someone halfway to the corner flag isn't worth a penalty.
• Move the spot back. Far enough that the goalie can react to the shot instead of having to guess. 

The one amendment to this rule: there should be an allowance for the referee to call an automatic goal for ridiculous fouls (say, a defender grabbing the ball out of mid-air to prevent a goal.)

Get a clock

The "referee's watch" approach to time keeping adds nothing to the game, but does open itself up to epidemic exploitation. So figure out how long, on average, the actual play of a soccer game lasts, and set the clock to that, stopping it whenever play stops, as in basketball or hockey.

Redefine handballs

The sport's most famous and most basic rule is also one of its most poorly defined. Handballs aren't supposed to be called if they are unintentional. Yet you still see it called against players who clearly didn't have time to move their arms.

Again, this is a rule that's fair, but too hard to enforce. We need a simpler-to-interpret concept. I've heard the suggestion that it should be a foul for any arm-ball contact, intentional or not; essentially putting the onus on players to not let the ball touch their arms. That seems to swing too far in the easy-to-enforce direction. And no one wants to see defenders running around the penalty area with their arms behind their backs.

A couple of possibilities:

• Say that players have a right to keep their arms by their sides, and no handballs are called if their arms are in that position, regardless of intent. On the other hand, it's automatically handball if their arms are in any other position.
• Base it on movement. Sort of like blocking/charging fouls in basketball, as long as the player's arm had come to a complete stop, there's no handball if the arm contacts the ball. But any case of a moving arm touching the ball is handball.

A new way to break ties

One of the most common and universal complaints is the use of penalties to break ties. How many problems are there with that?

• It's mostly random
• Lesser teams know it's not skill-based, so they play for ties
• It's an individual skill in a profoundly team-oriented support.

A simple alternative would be unlimited (presumably sudden-death) overtime. That would be exhausting, but the exhaustion would lead to mistakes and lead to goals. You could augment the overtime solution by taking players off the field occasionally.

Two referees

Hockey - a similar sport-religion - made the decision to add a second ref a few years ago. In that case, it was mainly a concession to higher-speeds and the greater body-contact that comes of bigger players. Soccer hasn't really been through such a change, but the epidemic of fakery and missed calls has demonstrated that one person simply can't competently officiate the game. Since professional and international games already have a fourth official, it wouldn't be difficult to do.

Get tough on diving

Speaking of hockey, people from outside Canada are always asking about why it has fighting in it. But the real question is, why is fighting tolerated? After all, all sports have fighting occasionally; but most of them have consequences that prevent it from happening often. I don't know how it happened, but in most of the world's sports someone, sometime, decided fighting was not acceptable, while hockey said, ah why not?

What's interesting is how attitudes have diverged. In hockey, most fans love the fighting, and couldn't imagine the sport without it, while in other sports - even similarly violent sports - hockey's acceptance of fighting is seen as strange and inexplicable.

It seems to me that diving in soccer is on the cusp of such acceptability. Diving happens in all sports, but in most it's seen as unacceptable, and something - whether rules or just referees' skepticism - stops it from getting too commonplace.

In soccer too, diving is generally considered a bad thing, but I've noticed a creeping acceptance of it. Players practice it at the behest of coaches. Fans defending the sport to non-fans have started implying that it is a sort of skill. And don't even get me started about how big a part of the sport it's become in Central America.

Something needs to be done now before some charismatic Italian soccer analyst starts convincing fans that it's an integral part of the game. I would hope that adding the second ref (see above) would help. But I think the best change that could be made would be retroactive justice. So many dives are obvious on replay; I'm not asking for gridiron-football-style replays during the game - that would slow things down far too much in a sport that had no natural breaks. But throw the book at people after the game.

Unimpeachable Sources

Today there were many news stories about Sarah Palin joining in the effort to impeach Barack Obama. It's on the basis of not protecting the borders or something. Most of the articles I read were rather flippant in dismissing the campaign and Palin's participation in it as silly and futile.

Much as I hate Palin, my first reaction was that the articles were unprofessional. I have an old-school approach to news, that outside of any articles clearly marked as opinion, you just keep to the facts.

But now I wonder how realistic that is. I've noticed that my less-politically-aware friends often miss subtleties about which happenings are important, and which are the silly things everyone is laughing at. For instance, If you just report that there's going to be an attempt to impeach the president, they have no way of knowing it's a long-shot effort that's mainly a publicity stunt.  So you could argue that tongue-in-cheek reporting on this story conveys more information.

A way out of this journalistic quandary would be to quote someone opposed to Palin.  This quoted person would deliver the sarcastic put-down illustrating the desperation of the impeachment call.  But the problem is that: first, the journalist is just handing-off the dirty work to someone else, and secondly, there will always be someone willing to offer supportive or dismissive quotes on any given action.  For instance, let's say Palin had broken from her bombastic style and called for a bipartisan effort to find a pragmatic compromise on immigration reform.  You could easily find a politician willing to offer a quote calling her statement delusional and far-fetched.  So perhaps my high-minded principles of unbiased reporting are naive in today's hyper-politicized world.