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One thing that I didn’t like about The Avengers is how the alien invasion at the end is yet another half-assed one without a chance in hell of actually succeeding. As one QT3 poster put it, “How did they expect to conquer Earth with a few hundred guys on flying motorcycles?” Never mind the Avengers, the US military would be more than sufficient to repel the so-called invasion once it had enough time to organize and deploy. And this is with real-world military assets, not the fancy toys SHIELD has. In the interests of one day seeing a halfway competent alien invasion plan put on screen, here is some advice for would-be alien invaders:

1. So the portal is the only way for your forces to get to Earth. This means that your entire plan hinges on defending that portal and keeping it open. Randomly scattering your advance forces around the arrival area is a terrible idea. Terrorizing unarmed civilians serves no strategic purpose and therefore wastes time and troops. Instead, you need to secure your beachhead. Establish a strong defensive perimeter around the portal and launch assaults only against enemy forces that are intent on seizing control of the portal.
2. Once your beachhead is secure, you need to identify longer-ranged threats. Yes, the Avengers are a clear and present danger. But their military value is insignificant compared to human weapons launched from way out of visual range which can decimate your entire force in a matter of moments. This means casting a sensor net widely outside of your landing zone and preemptively striking at enemy forces that are a threat, such as that cloaked helicarrier with nuclear-armed fighters.
3. When invading a hostile populated planet, it is imperative to invade with overwhelming force. The aliens did not employ overwhelming force. Their pathetic weapons appeared limited to visual range only and their largest war machines relied on physically running into objects to cause damage. That is terribly impractical and tactically worthless. Where were the alien equivalents of bombs, artillery and cruise missiles? In fact, given that collateral damage wasn’t a concern for the invaders, why not just saturate the target area with lots and lots munitions before the first soldier even stepped through the portal? If brute force doesn’t work, then you’re not using enough.
4. For that matter, why are you using an infantry heavy invasion strategy? They’re soft and have limited offensive power. Where are the alien tanks (remember US M1 Abrams tanks have an effective killing range of over 2.5 km, you need to have better performing equivalent tanks) and the alien fighter craft? Leave the infantry at home, at least until you’ve established secure control of a decent chunk of the planet, and bring only the big guns. Use infantry to police the local population only after organized resistance to your conquest have been decimated.
5. Do not, repeat do not, run your entire command and communications system out of a single base, no matter how powerful and impregnable you think it is. If destroying your mothership shuts down your entire invasion force, then you’re doing it wrong. Always have back up command posts. In any case, deployed units that are cut off must be able to function autonomously based on last received orders and reports until the command hierarchy can be re-established.
6. Defend your high-value assets, such as motherships, in depth. Employ screening elements so that enemy forces must go through them to reach your mothership. If your mothership lacks even basic defensive mechanisms that allow it to detect and intercept incoming hostile projectiles, well, you really should build some in before kicking off the invasion.
7. If your enemy has nukes and you do not possess weapons of at least equivalent potency, I’m sorry but you lose. If you do not possess a technological edge over the enemy planet, then you shouldn’t be invading in the first place. In fact, you should be prepared to be invaded instead. And if they have nukes and you don’t and their nukes can kill anything and everything you have, believe me, you do not possess a technological edge no matter how scary you think your flying worms are.

Hopefully with the help of these handy tips future alien invaders will give a better go of it so that our heroes can finally have some serious enemies to fight.

About four years ago, I wrote about this being the golden age of superhero films. I can now say with confidence that the golden age has reached its zenith with The Avengers. Yes, other films like Christopher Nolan’s Batman series and Watchmen have shown that superhero films don’t necessarily have to be mere action movies, they can aspire to be something more. But it’s obvious that with modern film-making techniques that allow anything at all that we can imagine to be put onscreen, action films and the superhero genre are a match made in heaven. And as Davin Arul of The Star has commented, it’s hard to imagine a more perfect superhero action film that this.

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No less than five articles this month! I’ve been a little busy bee, especially with moving into a new house and all.

• Jon Stewart commented that you rarely see a headline in 2012 that sounds like it should be a headline in 2012 when you were just a kid. This is of course apropos of the asteroid mining plan announced by space startup Planetary Resources. There are lots of articles on this all over the web but this one from Forbes talks about the firm’s plans to be cashflow positive even though no actual mining will happen for more than ten years at least. That makes it sound a bit more real and less of a pipe dream, even if it is backed by Google’s founders and the creator of Microsoft Office.
• The wise old mentor is a trope that everyone knows, but is it true? Does age actually confer wisdom? Inasmuch that wisdom can be quantifiable, researchers from the University of Waterloo, Canada, has attempted to verify just that, as detailed in this article from The Economist. The results are nothing short of astonishing. North Americans do appear to gain wisdom with age, but the Japanese appeared to be nearly as wise as wizened North Americans even when young and their wisdom scores never varied much with age. This is just the sort of finding that calls for lots more cultural study.
• When I was studying in France, my French language professor liked to comment about how the Chinese can say so many things with so few words. This is because each syllable in the Chinese language is unusually dense with information, possibly because of the different tonal variations possible. This Scientific American article shows how to correlate this fact with another observation: different languages are spoken at different speeds. It turns out that while each syllable in Chinese is packed with more information than the norm, the Chinese language is also one of the slowest spoken languages, so its overall information transmission rate still roughly matches that of other languages. In the same way, languages which are spoken very fast, such as Spanish, have less information per syllable.
• Ever since buckyballs were invented in 1985, it was hailed as a game-changing revolutionary material and science writers loved to hype it up. I suspect that it’s at least partly because using the word buckminsterfullerene in print is so fun. Until very recently however, very few practical applications have been found for its unusual properties. This blog post points at a completely unexpected use for it. A team studying the long-term toxicology effects of the molecule by giving it to rats in a solution of olive oil not only found it to be completely non-toxic, it actually extended the lifespan of the rats by some 90% making it the most effective life-extension treatment ever found for rodents. Now, that is game-changing indeed.
• On the astronomy front, a huge new discovery about what surrounds the Milky Way is new reason to think that the mysterious dark matter might not exist after. Dark matter was posited to explain why the relatively sparse matter that we can observe is far less than the mass that the universe needs to have. It turns out that we simply haven’t been looking hard enough. This news release from the AlphaGalileo Foundation trumpets the discovery of a vast structure of satellite galaxies and clusters of stars that surrounds the Milky Way. I guess space just isn’t that sparse after all.

I did not participate in the latest iteration of the Bersih protests. My wife and I are currently living in Seremban and in fact we are in the process of moving house this week. My wife wanted to check out the local chapter of the protests here but it turned out that we were too busy for that too. We had some furniture deliveries to handle on Saturday and our carpenter came in too to do our kitchen cabinets. We did pay attention to the central square where there the gathering was supposed to happen but there was only like a couple hundred or so people in yellow shirts and some police looking on disinterestedly.

I should note that my wife is much more enthusiastic about the movement than I am. I guess my own interest in local politics only go so far and no further. As I’ve explained to my wife, Malaysian politics is about opposing personalities rather than opposing policies. Neither the governing coalition nor the opposition has any real ideology beyond getting into power however possible. It makes things no fun at all for a policy wonk. Headline proposals such BR1M and the cancellation of student debts are attention-grabbing populist measures with no attempt at all to spin them around a coherent and differentiated political philosophy.

Be that as it may, and with acknowledgment that all this is coming from someone who is self-admittedly neither particularly interested nor particularly knowledgeable about local politics, here are some comments:

1. Bersih 3.0 turned out to be more political than previous iterations, with opposition politicians playing a more active and visible role. This has upset many participants in the protests. I agree that this is sad. At the same time, I don’t see how this can be avoided. In fact, I think it is a necessary part of the political awakening of Malaysia. Elections are a zero-sum game. There is a clear winner and a clear loser. After the governing coalition tried its best to shut down the last round of protests in no uncertain terms, it was always a given that any future iteration would not be just for clean elections, it would also necessarily be against the government. Implicit in a show of popular strength of this type is the message, “This is what we want. Do it or we will put the other guys into power.” How can this be anything but political?
2. Malaysians are reluctant participants in the political process. There are things that we want and there are things that we are against, but we find it difficult to translate this into support for a specific politician or opposition to a specific politician. We prefer to stick to statements of general principle. This is because we perceive all politicians are dirty and that politics is an inherently unsavory business. But I believe this is a naive view of the democratic process. The process is all about picking winners and losers so let’s not pretend that it isn’t.
3. Winston Churchill’s dictum that democracy is the worst system of government except for all the others is probably the one quote I pull out the most often in this blog. But once again, it’s worth looking into what it really means. What it’s saying is that government is inherently bad because it involves coercion against citizens. It would be better for everyone if no coercion was necessary at all and people could just live and let live. But that’s not realistic and since no government is worse than a bad government, we might as well employ democracy to ensure that the coercion we must exercise is at least backed by a plurality of the country’s voters.
4. By the same token, you could say that all politicians are bad. These are by definition people who have expressed a desire to possess power over other people’s lives. Surely there is something egotistical about that? So in line with Churchill’s dictum, I would say that democracy isn’t about choosing the best leader, because they’re all bad. Arguably, it isn’t even about choosing a good leader, because anyone who has come into a position of power in a democratic system must surely have made many, many questionable compromises along the way because you just can’t please everyone all of the time. Instead, democracy has the much more modest aim of choosing the least worst leader.
5. So what I’m saying is that not supporting the opposition parties because they’re not perfect is a terrible way of looking at democracy. At the same time, if you’re a Malaysian who wants change, I can’t imagine how you can avoid baldly stating that you want the ruling National Front coalition to be toppled. Unless you sincerely believe that it is capable of internally reforming from within, which seems wildly implausible. So why pussyfoot about it? Any protest in favor of change is a protest against the government. And any protest against the government is a token of support for the opposition. Perhaps one day power can slip easily enough from party to party that we can have real civic bodies around specific policy issues and such bodies would be able to endorse whichever candidate, regardless of party affiliation, that best exemplifies their values. But that day is far in the future.

With all that said, and again bearing in mind that this is coming from someone with no real knowledge of Malaysian politics, I think those who despair about the worth of our opposition politicians and have the energy and drive to do something about it, could do well to get in touch with their local representatives. I have a friend who regularly volunteers to do work on behalf of the DAP. He has no illusions about the worth of grandees like Lim Kit Siang, but he has plenty of nice things to say about his local representative. From what I understand, the low-level MPs in the opposition coalition are very approachable and you might be pleasantly surprised by how easily you can be involved in the thick of things if you’re so inclined.

My wife and I don’t watch television in the normal sense. What we do is we pick a season of a show after it has finished airing and watch an episode every night until we’re done with the season. If we like the show, we get the next season and so on. In the case of Mad Men, after we’d finished the first season, we went right out and got seasons two to four. It’s just that good.

Choosing to give the first season a try was a no-brainer given the plethora of awards this shown has won. But it wasn’t quite the show we expected it to be. The premise is an inside view of a middleweight advertising firm set in 1960s America. As such we expected to see all manner of creative ad campaigns and the wacky people who come up with them. This show does admittedly have that. But mostly what it does is act as a sort of time capsule of what living in this period was like. And in a “so similar and yet so different” sort of way, this makes it incredibly fascinating to watch.

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Once again, I’m sacrificing verbosity for sheer quantity of science-related links. Here goes:

• I notice that despite that my very liberal political sympathies, many of my posts have been showing a markedly anti-democratic bias. This article from LiveScience is a good demonstration of why democracy is inherently flawed: most people aren’t smart enough to judge the competence of other people. The article cites research by a Cornell University psychology which shows that not only are people incompetent at judging the competence of other people in fields in which they are not an expert, they are ignorant about their own incompetence. As the familiar anecdote goes, most people, if asked to rate their personal ability in a particular field, will give themselves an above-average rating. This poses obvious problems for democracies which in theory rely on elections to help us pick the most qualified leader. But as always, the Churchill dictum that democracy is the worst form of government, except all of the others, remains true. Such findings don’t invalidate that. They merely remind us that natural and inalienable human rights should never be contravened even by a democratic majority and that direct rule through referendums is probably a bad idea.
• I remember when mixing descriptions between senses, like hearing a color or feeling a smell, was just a literary flourish but as this article from The Economist points out, not only do synaesthetes exist, but most people probably have cross-modal associations of this sort without being consciously aware of it. In this case, researchers from Oxford University asked volunteers to describe different smells and tastes in terms of music, and there turns out to be a surprisingly correlation in how people associate the same type of smell or taste with the same pitch or even specific musical instrument.
• This doesn’t count as a science article in that sense of news coverage of a recently published scientific paper. It’s a blog post by a statistics expert but I’ve come to like his blog very much so here it is. This one is an analysis of the relationship between changes in the availability of pornography and perceived social effects. The upshot is that increased availability of pornography has no detrimental effect on anti-social behavior. Japan for example, which many now know for its widespread availability of violent pornography, went from almost no porn to lots of porn within a short of period time, actually reports a decrease in sexual crime. It’s worth noting that increasing availability of porn reduces sexual crimes only and has no effect on other crimes. Watching porn does seem to induce some sociological changes, such as reported happiness in marriages among different types of couples, but I’ll leave it up to the reader to read the report in full and judge if it’s good or bad.
• Another year, another species of early hominid discovered. This article, also from LiveScience, covers fossils of heretofore unknown species discovered in China. Daubed the “Red Deer Cave People”, they are unusual in that they have a combination of both modern and archaic anatomical features and seemed to have coexisted with modern humans in the earliest age of agriculture up to around 11,000 years ago.
• Finally, an evolutionary psychology article. I just love them, both for what they reveal about cognition and for how they drive a certain class of intellectual bonkers. This one comes from ScienceDaily and talks about how communities of chimpanzees seem to have police officers of their own. These take the form of respected and senior members of the community who intervene as a third-party in disputes.

Once again, I’ve been remiss in posting entries, so here’s a smattering of stuff that I’ve recently found to be of interest around the web:

• After a long hiatus, Less Wrong (Eliezer Yudkowsky) finally updated the ongoing Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality fanfiction work with a few new chapters. I actually didn’t care that much for the Hermione-centered SPHEW arc that immediately preceded this latest update, but the newest arc is totally mindblowing. Chapters 80 and 81 together constitute probably the greatest crowning moment of awesome in a courtroom in anything I’ve read. My only worry is that this ratchets the epic up so high it’s hard to see how this version of Harry Potter can have any kind of normal Hogwarts life after this.
• In the same vein, I’ve started reading the Sequences on the Less Wrong site. It’s a series of essays on rationality with the explicit aim of teaching you how to refine your way of thinking. It involves plenty of logic and math and absolutely no crackpot fuzzy thinking.
• The in-thing du jour is the Hunger Games series. I haven’t read the books and have no real interest in watching the movie but this did remind of the much earlier Battle Royale story which I’ve always wanted to check out. So I started reading the manga. Not quite as good as I imagined, but much more brutal than I expected.
• I’m always a sucker for entertaining anecdotes about creative and/or smart people and this page on the Math Overflow website turned out to be a treasure trove of them. Here’s one of my favorites:

One of the most common and popular Norbert Wiener (1894-1964) stories is of a student coming to Wiener after class and saying, “I really don’t understand this problem that you discussed in class. Can you explain to me how to do it?” Wiener thought a moment, and wrote the answer (and only that) on the board. “Yes,” said the student, “but I would really like to master the technique. Can you tell me the details?” Wiener bowed his head in thought, and again he wrote the answer on the board. In some torment, the student said, “But Professor Wiener, can’t you show me how the problem is done?” To which Wiener is reputed to have replied, “But I’ve already shown you how to do the problem in two ways!”

Dick Swenson, who was at MIT in those days, tells this variant of the story: Wiener showed the kid the answer twice, as just indicated. Then the student said, “Oh, you mean…,” and he wrote the answer (and only the answer) on the board. Wiener then said, “Ah, very nice. I hadn’t thought of that approach.”