No, It's Alright, You Don't Have To Be Back

One of the great things about science fiction is that a story can lead to the creation of an entire world. That is, the audience is inspired to imagine what else is in the world of the story. Yes, I know, lots of stories inspire the imagination of the audience, as any browse through fan fiction archives will prove. But science fiction is particularly well suited to this sort of speculation since it requires creation of a believable world for the characters to inhabit. When well done, the audience will want to know more about that world, even the parts that don't involve the story's characters.

This is one of the few areas where big-budget pop-sci-fi movies can outdo their literary cousins. Those expensive effects can (when done well) give the audience a sense of detail that gives a great sense of realism, where a sparse description may not.

But it doesn't have to be that way. A lot of good science fiction doesn't have a complex world behind it. Usually that's because the science is used more to set up a confrontation than to create a setting. I would point to the Alien series as an example. It's not some mind-bending sci-fi concept, so much as an excuse to create a great villain.

That's not a criticism. Action movies work by giving you a hero who's just slightly stronger/smarter/braver than the villain. Many lackluster movies accomplish this setup by giving you a semi-competent villain and an average hero. But the best action movies give a very powerful hero who barely defeats a seemingly invincible villain. And that's where science fiction can contribute well: by providing us with a seemingly unstoppable bad guy.

But if a movie is primarily about that struggle between a perfect setup of hero and villain, we don't really need to know more about them. Take Die Hard, for instance (yes, despite what I wrote earlier, I did eventually see it.) Hans Gruber was a great bad guy because he seemed so well-prepared as to be invincible, but I didn't really have any interest in learning his back story. A movie about the life and times of Mr. Gruber probably wouldn't be very successful. We didn’t need to know about him, we just needed to know what he’s like.

Similarly, I didn't really have much interest in learning where the xenomorphs in Alien came from. Having said that, there was a movie on that very topic, Prometheus, and I actually did enjoy it. But I approached it as a stand-alone story only tangentially related to the Alien series. I find that Alien fans who saw Prometheus looking for some great revelation about the Alien story were quite disappointed. Personally, I think that was because there wasn’t any way to create a backstory that would add to the franchise’s mythology.

Which brings me to the latest Terminator movie, out this week. Like a lot of people, I liked the first two Terminator movies. I would argue that's because they squarely fit into the pattern I'm talking about, with competent heroes vs invincible villain. And like Alien, it uses a fairly simple sci-fi premise to concoct that situation.

But I - and again, probably a lot of people - lost interest after that. The simple premise produced a nice action movie set up, and did it in an easy-to-follow way that didn't limit the movie's appeal to hard-core geeks. But it also meant that I didn't really feel the need to learn more of the story. I can’t really imagine walking out of Terminator 2 back in 1991 thinking, this story really needs three more movies and a TV series. And yet, they keep going to the well again and again. Yes, I know, it’s because they make money, it’s a recognizable brand, haven’t you been paying attention to the entertainment industry for the past twenty years, etc. But they don’t keep making Terminator properties by rehashing the successful formula. Instead they set movies in different time periods, or focus on different characters. It’s like they think this sci-fi universe demands fleshing-out, Star Wars style. I wish they would understand that some stories don’t need, or even benefit from, extensive exploration.

Getting On My Soapbox

It’s summer, so there may be a soapbox derby in your community on an upcoming weekend. Here's something I've always wanted to know: should a soapbox car be heavy or light.

You might instinctively say, "light," because all things being equal, lighter cars are faster.

...but that's when you have an engine pushing the car's mass. In this case, it's gravity pulling the car down. So the weight shouldn't matter, because, as Galileo showed, things fall at the same speed, regardless of mass.

...but that's in a vacuum. In an atmosphere, heavier things fall faster, because they have more force to overcome aerodynamic drag. So a heavier car would be faster.

...but, a heavier car will have more rolling resistance, because the weight of the car will be pushing down on the axles, increasing the friction.

I tried googling this question once before and never got a straight answer. I tried again just now and found someone with experience had answered this. Yes, there are engineers with extensive experience with soapbox cars; surely that’s not a surprise. The answer is, it depends.

Things the Teenage Me Would Never Have Believed About Life In The Future, #24

One of the world's biggest news stories is something called a “Wikileaks dump.”

I Am Aware Of Too Many Things

I don't normally listen to the music in stores and waiting rooms.  We'll, I guess no one really listens to it; it's intended to be an unconscious, background thing. Saying you listen to it is like saying you look at wallpaper.  I have written about it in the past.  So the fact that I notice it at all shows that I listen to it more than most.

Anyway, the reason I've noticed the background music recently is that twice in the past week, I've heard "What I Am" by Edie Brickell & New Bohemians.  That song is from 1988, and its folky style doesn't make it candidate for 80's nostalgia, so I haven't heard it many times in the quarter-century since it was released.

(For some reason I always associated the song with hearing her perform it on Saturday Night Live, and according to Wikipedia, that was the night she met her husband, Paul Simon.)

So why the sudden popularity of this song?  I've heard that songs can be revived unexpectedly if they test well on focus groups.  Yes, big radio companies do test songs on people before they go into regular rotation, and they'll play even old songs if the guinea pigs like it.  This was a few years ago when Bruce Springsteen's "Dancing in the Dark" suddenly made it onto many radio stations.

But that doesn't explain how they decide which songs get to the focus groups.  I mean, they can't test the entirety of recorded music on those people - someone must make a decision what gets put in front of the test groups, and they are the closest thing we have to the traditional DJ.

I Am Panning The Games

Last week, the "Stats Canada" satirical Twitter account reported that the Pan-Am Games are 3% as impressive as the Olympic Games. If you're outside Ontario, I probably have to give you context that Toronto is hosting the Pan-Am Games this summer. And in needing to inform you of that, I've pretty much confirmed the point of the joke. I'd been meaning to write something about the Pan-Am Games, and that tweet was closely related to the point I was going to make, so here it is:

Hosting the Olympics is expensive - the summer games will cost $10 billion+, and that's even if you don't have a Putin-style ego-and-corruption-fueled spending spree. We can argue ‘til the cows come home about whether that is - in any sense - "worth it" in terms of our spending priorities and value for the money. But let's acknowledge that when it comes to buying publicity, it is at least possibly worth the money: you spend through the nose, but the prize is that you get the world's undivided attention for two weeks, and get a mention in sports history forever.

If you're going to host one of the "secondary" games like the Pan-Ams (or equivalents on other continents) or the Commonwealth Games. You'll spend about a tenth as much (Toronto is spending about $2.5 billion.) So if the Olympics are close to worth it at ten-times as much, the question is, do those secondary games get you one-tenth the publicity for one tenth the money?

And the answer is clearly no. The fact is, hardly anyone who's not hosting notices these games. To put it in perspective, I tried naming the Summer Olympics host cities off the top of my head, and was able to name all of them back to Rome in 1960. But when it comes to the Pan-Am hosts, well, I remembered Winnipeg hosting it back in the 90's, and I remember Indianapolis in the 80's when I first heard of the Pan-Ams, but that's it.

The fact is, we in Canada are suckers for the lesser games like the Pan-Ams. They appeal to two of our main national characteristics: wishing the world would pay attention to us, and being cheap. So we spend big-but-not-huge bucks on these events that seem Olympicy.  It's sort of like buying off-brand products at Walmart and congratulating ourselves on saving money, not considering that they'll fall apart in a couple of months.

Soccer Stars

You may have seen this week that a new galaxy has been named after Cristiano Ronaldo. Well, it’s technically named “CR7” which is his nickname/brandname, combining his initials and number. As you may know, he’s one of the sports megastars with his own symbol, which is a stylized CR7.

It's bad enough that we confuse him with Ronaldo, now we have a galaxy in his honour too. And there are so many galaxies out there that Ronaldo will eventually get his own, and that will surely lead to a massive war centuries from now.

And that's what's weird about this. For a while now they've been naming asteroids after people, and that seems reasonable. You're a good person; here, have a big rock. But galaxies? It may seem like a little smudge on the lens from our perspective, but it is a collection of billions of stars and planets. The billion-year-old collective experience of entire civilizations, and we named it after the second-best soccer player of his generation.

(Speaking of which, there's a list of major galaxies and other astronomical phenomena called the Messier objects. I tried to make a "Messi-eh" joke, couldn't make it work.)

Now really, this is unlikely to be a problem. If humanity survives and advances to the point where we could ever get to the Ronaldo galaxy, it will surely be so far into the future that our current names for things will be long forgotten. But who knows. In the same way we still use the name America long after we’ve forgotten what was so great about Amerigo Vespucci, these names could survive.

Sure, it may seem like there are lots of things out there to name after people. It’s estimated that there are far more galaxies out there than people on Earth, so we could afford to hand out galaxy names just for remembering to do a shoulder-check changing lanes. But if we were to expand through the cosmos, we’d run out of galaxies to name after ourselves, and then we’d regret wasting a bunch of them on athletes. "Well, Zartog, we appreciate your single-handedly saving the Stellar Alliance from the Jarfan raiders of the Beckham Galaxy, but we ran out of unnamed galaxies a few years ago. Here, have a rock."

American Woman, Listen What I Say

Donald Trump's entry into the U.S. presidential race has attracted quite a bit of attention.  There were a lot of complaints about the rally in which he introduced his candidacy, mostly his bizarre and insulting remarks about Mexicans.  But one of the more predictable reactions was that Neil Young didn't appreciate Trump's use of Keep On Rocking In the Free World.

Of course, that was obvious.  I mentioned before that conservative politicians have to get used to a limited selection of artists who will allow the use of their songs.  At this point, I'm assuming they're betting on the no-such-thing-as-bad-publicity concept.  Although in Trump's fault, I'm betting he just didn't care.  He certainly didn't care that the song was a criticism of the conservative American politics of the eighties.

What's weird is that at the same time, Nike is running ads in the U.S. promoting the Women's World Cup.  And the featured music?  American Woman by the Guess Who.  I'd assume that in this case, the necessary permissions were granted, but the bigger question is, has anyone listened to the lyrics?  The song is quite anti-American, using the titular character as a symbol of a seductive but dangerous culture.

Of course, misunderstanding songs is hardly new - here's a list, and here's another example. But in the two songs I've documented here, the similarity is not just that they are inappropriate, but in both cases people were looking for pro-American songs, and somehow used anti-American songs, by Canadians.  Somehow that represents our national personalities perfectly: we're so obsessed with them that we write songs about them, and then they don't listen to what we actually sing.