It was just added on Netflix. I don't have much to say about it, except:
1) Their continuing belief that they are a live band, and this is how they win people over, is on display here, and it's wrong. The movie is mostly an excuse to get people to watch a whole live show. For people who don't already like Metallica, it's not going to do much for them. For people who do, they'd rather be at a live show.
2) F for use of maguffins. There are two of them. The first is the gasoline, which is not the best one they could have picked and then the bag is introduced too late to be useful or interesting. The main character's motivations for wandering around (and not just going back the way he came when he walks into the middle of a skirmish line between rioters and cops) are never comprehensible and indeed appear not to be considered by the script writers, but at least this is obvious early enough in the movie that you don't waste time trying to figure them out. Add this as support to point #1. Adding this secondary plot was a way to make it seem as if this wasn't just a Metallica concert movie.
Compare to a typical Zorn piece, Osaka Bondage (below, from Naked City's Grand Guignol). Zorn is more grating, but the juxtaposition of genres is actually much clearer in the Babymetal piece, which also includes a visual aspect. Note that this is not Zorn-bashing. I've seen him play New Years Eve shows at Tonic. But does it make a difference when someone is doing the same thing mostly for commercial reasons, and not talking about theory, or for that matter selling to people who care about it?) The point is made that Zorn was doing this 25 years ago, but it's interesting that it's now J-pop with the label confidence implied by an obvious budget.
Performances that seem to be deliberately written to fit into certain genres also force us to ask, what differentiates genre self-consciousness from straight parody? Are we sure that John Zorn and Babymetal's songs were not written by Key and Peele? As the world gets wealthier we're swimming in more art and each generation will be better at picking out the essential aspects of each genre, for ridicule or otherwise.
If the astrobiology fairy tomorrow gave us incontrovertible evidence of (at least) previous life on Mars, there would be massive public interest and a lot of opportunities for astronomy and basic science in general to get funding; and a whole new surge in interest among young people around the world. Consequently an unqualified "so what" might be the wrong question; "so what in terms of impact to scientific knowledge" is more appropriate. We expect to find life eventually, based on our understanding of the origins of life on Earth. Finding evidence of ancient Martian cells would add more support to our picture of an ancient wet Mars. We might, just might be able to infer something about the cells themselves, but this would be very limited. So life on ancient Mars wouldn't actually be that surprising!
Finding living cells on Mars would be huge. There's definitely a non-zero possibility that cells on Mars and Earth might have the same ancestors, which would actually be kind of boring, but would tell us something about the diffusion of life. But seeing such a novel biochemistry in action, even one that is ultimately related to our own, would give us a lot more information that we could use to understand evolution, biochemistry, and complex systems.
Alternative histories have tended so far to be about events in European (or Western) history, because they're written mostly by European-descended people, and mostly by English-speakers at that.
The test at Sitio Trinidad, 1845, Jornada de Muerte, Nueva Mexico. The test was witnessed by governor Manuel Armijo and president Santa Ana, both of whom lost their vision as a result. (It seems both fission and high speed cameras were developed in nineteenth century Mexico but not dark glasses, go figure.) Despite this setback, the dreaded bomba santabarbara was smuggled in wagons and assembled in Austin and San Antonio and led to the end of the decade-long revuelta tejana and ultimately, the conquest of Alto México (previously the "United States".) Sure it did.
But that's kind of obvious. So even forgetting the (so far) Western focus of what-if fiction, there are two clear patterns that betray some of our assumptions. And the first obvious pattern is: alternate histories are about violence transpiring differently. How many alternate histories involve policy decisions or inventions happening out of order? It's not usually: what if Newton and Leibniz had not developed calculus, or antibiotics had never been invented (or been invented in pre-Mongol-sack Baghdad)? No, the large majority of what we see are the effects of different outcomes of battles and wars. What if Hitler won, what if the North lost Gettysburg, what if Alexander or Jenghiz had not turned around at India and Austria. And this is depressing; because it means either that history is mostly determined by violence, or (even if it's not true) it means that we at least believe that history is mostly determined by violence.
Yes, there are a few stories about political decisions (what if the Ming had not called back the treasure fleets is a favorite) but it's really mostly about if people had killed and dominated each other in a different way.
You could also argue that what we see commercially is not an accurate reflection of our beliefs about history. It's the same answer for why in speculative fiction, dystopias far outnumber utopias. There's clear conflict and thus they're easier to write.
The second pattern, or really observation that students of history can make about this sub-genre: even with battles won or lost differently, it's very hard to find believable changes that affect the outcomes. Sun Tzu was right, the battle usually is won or lost before it begins, and even if the tide on one battlefield had turned, the currents were running one direction or another. For example, so what if Lee won at Gettysburg? A big setback for the Union to be sure, but the Confederacy was screwed from the start in terms of their population and economy. To really get big changes, you have to make major shifts long before the obvious change - the kinds of changes that would have given the South a fighting chance would have had to begin many years before the actual war. Case in point: someone once asked me what might have happened if, in the Mexican War, the Mexican factions had unified against the U.S. as an external threat, and the U.S. lost its first major foreign war and gained no territory. (Or if the U.S. had decided to actually press its 54'40" claim.) A suddenly unified and organized 1840s Mexico is (unfortunately for patriotic Mexicans) only marginally easier to imagine than the first atomic bomb being engineered a hundred years early at Los Alamos by Mexican scientists. Such a story might actually make for some really interesting Latino steampunk fiction, but might as well also include unicorns.
Not really, but if you saw the reddit-borne video below, you might think so for a second. And now there's a petition to have Mr. DiCaprio get onstage with the boys at Bonnaroo - sign it here.
Recently I noticed an article making the rounds, which decries the <$1 royalty checks being sent to bands these days. I don't have numbers but it seems the people who are upset about this and forwarding the link, are the same people who get upset when labels protect their product and sue to stop illegal downloading.
Guess what!?!?!? There's a connection!!!!
So to make sure it's clear to everyone, you can have EITHER:
We're increasingly certain that there is ice on Ceres. We've known for a while that Ceres was expected to be more primitive (wetter) than Vesta. I cannot wait for February 2015 when Dawn gets to Ceres.
Time travel is fun to think about, in part because the argument structures involving its effect on the world (if it were real) appear in other kinds of discussions. I'm posting this now because of the fun study that Nemiroff and Wilson did, looking for evidence of time travelers by finding evidence online of people making references to events before they occur. They did not find any such evidence; publication here.
To address the burning public interest in their project, they did an AMA on Reddit, and when asked "Did you receive federal funding for this endeavor?" they responded "Yes. We used funds left over from our study titled: 'Does Tax Payer Money Burn Any Better Than Regular Money?'" (They really did say that but went on to clarify that the real answer was no.)
Let's say time travel in the Back to the Future sense is real. Say that if you go back to the past you can change the present to which you return (no boring branching timeline stuff.) And say that if you remove something from the past, it disappears until you carry it to the present. That is: imagine you have sentimentally precious heirloom silverware. No you don't! I took it from your grandmother when she was a young hottie, and when I get out of the time machine to give it back to you today, you look blankly at me and say "Why are you giving me old forks?"
If that's how it works, shouldn't we expect commodity runs on everything? That is: you realize that gold is valuable. You go back to the pleistocene before people valued it or knew how to pull it out of the ground. You bring back a whole consortium of miners and investors with you, running around the world pulling 50% of the shiny yellow stuff out of the ground, all to the bewilderment of frightened hominids, hiding behind rocks as they watch the incomprehensible doings of these new hairless creatures. You come back to the present and - bammo! Yes the value of gold falls in half overnight, but you still have 50% of that. 25% of the total previous gold market is still nice.
No you don't! Because unless time travel dies with you and your investors, people from YOUR future will sabotage you and take it for themselves. And from their future...and their future...etc. What this means, in economic terms, is that if this kind of time travel is real, then of course it's already happened, and people furthest in the future have perfect information about everything (100% efficient markets) which means everyone has it. Or, that no one has it, because there's no stable reality. (Remember when Bill and Ted said "remember to do X in the future" and got out of a jam? Why can't their enemies say "remember to stop Bill and Ted from doing X"? And so on and so forth ad infinitum. Neither Bill and Ted being the good guys or writers not being able to think their way out of a plot problem can count for your answer.)
So we have either
a) a totally efficient market with everyone knowing the allocation and value of all items throughout time
b) a constant maelstrom of shifting reality
If it's a., the fact that we still see things with apparent value around us instead of in the Big Commodities Exchange at the End of Time (or that we're not getting invaded by people from the End of Time looking for causal high ground) means either that everything "has already happened in order" (the simple Douglas Adams model of time travel), or that time travel of this sort is not possible, or that nothing has any value in a 100% eternally efficient market. (It also means no free will, because we're basically all just watching ourselves in a movie then.) And here's where things start to track other arguments. Here we run into an argument familiar to Singularity buffs, simulation argument maniacs, and Fermi paradox jocks. And it's basically this:
X appears to be an arbitrarily powerful process not provincial to humans. We look around the universe and we do not see evidence of X dominating everything. Therefore, either X is not powerful, or we can't see it, either because it's not see-able (to us), or we don't know what to look for.
Fair enough, except it's very difficult to tell the difference between "it's not see-able (to us)" and "I'm a snake oil salesman insisting that you believe me without evidence". That's also called a PEP, a Pointless Epistemological Problem (see #3 here). Fans of politics, religion and marketing will find these sorts of claims familiar.
Returning to time travel for a moment: the fact that aliens have not used time travel (rather than measly space travel) to visit us (and beat us up!) suggests (again) some combination of: there are no intelligent aliens; we are of little interest to future galactic events because we are boring, weak, or go extinct soon; or that everyone is nice to each other forever. Boy, talk about unrealistic!
This is from an anti-war pamphlet distributed by French socialists at the outset of World War II. That Signor Anzalone is not aware of this suggests a lack of erudition that, to be frank, I think we all suspected. But, ever the cut-up, we know that he has long been a source of mirth!
Not realistic as in setting attainable carnage-causing goals, but realistic as in he resembles real-world psychopaths. (Of course this refers to the character in Cormac McCarthy and the Coen brothers' No Country For Old Men.) That is, per Leistedt and Linkowski in the Journal of Forensic Sciences; summarized at Mind Hacks. More here on Chigurh's use of language as a tool to move around people-shaped objects, and how he seems to be about the only person in the movie with functioning frontal lobes.
That's the result of an analysis in Seismological Research Letters by Robert Thériault et al (Nature summary here); the Smithsonian has a video of earthquake lights in Sichuan in 2008. Rifts are defects in plates far from the edges of plates - so in other words, not where two plates are grinding alongside each other (like in California) or where one is going under another (like in Japan or the Pacific Northwest). The unexpected and massive New Madrid quake in Missouri in 1811 was a rift quake.
I've written about earthquake lights here before, related to a recent quake in Peru; one theory is there is ultra low frequency ULF) EM generated by these events, and that the lights (but not the quakes) are reproduced by ULF usage elsewhere. (See the Vogel study at the link, which investigated lights on a reservation near Yakima.) That's not the theory that Theriault is advancing, which is that oxygen ion release is in the causal pathway. (What would be really interesting is an experiment showing similar ionization with ULF.) Earthquake lights have been reported before earthquakes for centuries - surprisingly, these articles don't mention the glow that one swimmer saw at Ocean Beach, San Francisco after a pre-dawn swim on a certain April morning in 1906, a few hours before the big one - but it wasn't until someone actually filmed them in Japan in the 1960s that people started taking them seriously.
First, let's all agree that science fiction is awesome (how many tech entrepreneurs today can't rattle off a list of their favorite novels based on the ideas within?) but the predictions are not all that astonishingly accurate. A currently circulating article of Isaac Asimov's 1964 predictions for the 2014 World's Fair has been combed its accurate predictions - but these have to be considered in light of the total denominator of all predictions he made. There are a lot of clunkers in there. (Glowing wall panels? Polarized touch-sensitive windows?) Yes, there are some good ones. But we need a science fiction version of Bonferroni correction; i.e., a broken clock is right twice a day.
People have been writing science fiction as a self-conscious genre unto itself for close to a century now, which means a lot of the basic political and technological realities of the world have changed in the meantime. Ender's Game referred to the Soviet Union dominating Europe in the novel's past; in Card's defense, he does later (after the Cold War ended) explain that actually it's the New Soviet Union. Old Isaac himself more than once in his robot novels has a scientist, in the midst of artificial intelligences and domed cities, whipping out a slide rule to do calculations. It seems an easy solution to this is that these are science fiction writers, and they're not perfect, and they don't have crystal balls. Even the climate around how certain topics could be addressed in respectable prose changed during Asimov's lifetime, i.e. sex, and he (quite honestly, I think!) justifies his characters' differing treatment of the subject within the novel has his characters address this within the story. But critics insist on inventing ways of interpreting what are clearly missed targets as having some literary meaning.
Outside of science fiction, an egregious example is the insistence by some of the literati that Shakespeare's use of anachronism was deliberate. For example, in Julius Caesar, Shakespeare's Rome has chimneys and books and toga pockets. But these things just did not exist in Caesar's Rome. And Occam's razor applies here as well: there's no meaning, no point Shakespeare is making; he wasn't even consciously trying to make his audience more comfortable. He's a sixteenth century English writer, and he made a mistake, relative to historical fact, and that's fine - because he wasn't a Near East anthropologist, and he wasn't writing historical textbooks. Maybe it's more interesting to believe he had some purpose, but only rarely do the imaginations of critics of any genre match up with the conscious designs of the art's producers. Listen to any popular musician being interviewed about the deep meanings in their lyrics and this becomes obvious and uncomfortable.
I've seen critics living in the same region of fairy-land claim that we can think of science fiction universes with an ascendant Soviet Union, or future scientists with slide rules, as alternative histories. As much of a devotee of that sub-genre as I am personally, that's foolish, and here's why. Alternative history is explicitly about the importance of specific events in history to the real, based on the implications of their having occurred differently. There's a control and an experimental condition. The intent of the author matters, because it is the basis of what the work is for. David Wingrove's Chung Kuo is about a China-dominated world of the future, but it's not explicitly in contrast to any other world we expect, even if (like 1984) it's not one most of us would want to live in. On the other hand, Harry Turtledove's Southern Victory series stands in contrast to the world the writer and authors know to be real, and the author and the text clearly know that, and she or he makes points on that basis. Turtledove knows what's actually relevant to us in 2014 and how that might have been different, and he uses the book to tell us. Wingrove doesn't know what will be relevant in 2200, so the back can't be consumed that way.
Another trick is explaining didn't-come-true science fiction written in the past as crypto-history - this is what really happened, but it's been kept from us. Again, this is an interesting way to think about the text, but it still doesn't tell us anything about the author's intentions or indeed how best to enjoy the work. This is how (for hardcore fans who cared) Star Trek explained the apparent absence of the Eugenics Wars in the real 1990s, which the original show mentioned. (You know who I haven't noticed leading legions of genetically superior followers to conquer Asia? KHAAAAAN!) It's also the basis of the narrative in All Nightmare Long, the second-best Metallica video ever. Come on, it has the Tunguska blast!
