Russian writers seem to have a special talent for highlighting the grimness and misery of ordinary life. Roadside Picnic, a novella by the brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, is a fine example of how this morosity shows up even in science-fiction. Computer gaming fans will know this novella, first published in 1972, as the ultimate inspiration for the STALKER series of games, albeit by way of the film version directed by Andrei Tarkovsky that was released in 1979.
Naturally, the original novella differs markedly from the video game. The novella for example is set in the fictional town of Harmont in some unnamed Commonwealth country, instead of the area around the Chernobyl reactor in Ukraine. This in turn is only one of six zones scattered around the global that were created by the alien visitation event. Still, many themes and even individual elements, such as how the stalkers use throw bolts to detect the boundaries of some types of anomalies, will be recognizable to STALKER fans.
For the curious, I’ve recently moved to Seremban and have taken up a new job. This has left me with far less free time than I had previously, so I will no longer be able to update this blog regularly. Nevertheless, I shall try my best. So here is my belated round up of three of the most interesting science related articles I came across in July. Two of the articles in this entry deal wit optics, though in very different ways. The last article is a psychological study on the values championed in television shows.
The first article is from New Scientist and covers a new range of devices that might be called social x-ray specs. It’s basically a pair of spectacles that come with a built-in camera that tracks whatever the wearer is looking at. This data is then fed into computer about the size of a deck of cards and the results displayed to the wearer inside the spectacles itself. What’s interesting about the device is what it looks for. As everyone knows, when engaged in any sort of social interaction with other people, humans will inevitably give out all sorts of unconscious physical responses to their interlocutor. Think of examples such as subtly nodding your head, arching your brow or pursing your lips.
What’s this, you ask? You’ve read all of the Harry Potter books but have never heard of this one? That’s because Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is a work in progress piece of fan-fiction, written by someone under the pen-name Less Wrong. That person is Eliezer Yudkowsky, a prominent American researcher in the field of artificial intelligence and an advocate for transhumanism. Now I ordinarily don’t go anywhere near fan-fiction regardless of how much I may like a series or a setting. It’s a dark recess of the Internet with a well-deserved reputation for terrible writing inspired mostly by the obsession to pair favorite characters into romantic couples, regardless of how little sense that actually makes.
MoR however distinguishes itself from its peers both through the quality of its writing and the strength of its fundamental premise. It’s been endorsed by established sci-fi writer David Brin, been featured on The Atlantic magazine and it is by far the most reviewed story on the popular FanFiction.net website. That’s some heavyweight support and after reading what’s been released so far of it, I agree wholeheartedly. This is something that every person who thinks of himself as a rationalist must read and every person who is a Harry Potter fan ought to read.
I promised to write some of my thoughts on the Bersih rally earlier but never got around to it. The main thing is that others have already written what I’d wanted to say, and said it better to boot. The best one is probably this that was linked by Tan Kien Boon. This post on Marina Mahathir’s blog is good too. I’d hate to repeat what others have already said, so I’ll keep my own thoughts brief:
The government could have handled things much better if they had moved into damage control mode instead of counter-attacking like that. It makes me wonder if this is a reaction born out of panic and fear of losing power, or whether they actually need to be appear to be tough before the more hardcore elements of their constituency in order to avoid being usurped in an internal power struggle. If it’s the latter, it’s at least good politics even if the results aren’t too great for Malaysia. If it actually is the former, then it’s just plain stupid of them to act like this.
Like many other Chinese, I was struck by the high level of camaraderie in the crowd. Since I’ve spent many years living abroad and have little contact with the other races in Malaysia, it was hard for me to gauge how much support the rally had among the Malays. One commentator on QT3 asked me about this and I honestly didn’t know enough about Malaysia to answer. It was extremely heartening to learn that many Malays are far more enthusiastic in their opposition to the Barisan Nasional than the Chinese.
A. Samad Said commented that this was the finest display of 1 Malaysia he had ever witnessed. While this sounds cheesy and I have plenty of things to disagree about with Malaysia’s poet laureate, such as his insistent championing of the Malay language, in this instance I am inclined to agree. It was a truly novel experience for me to speak and cooperate with Malays without having to be conscious of our different races.
The lameness of the mainstream media is an old subject by now but I think this episode makes it more apparent than ever. Many, many middle-class Malaysians had to read accounts of the event that they personally knew were untrue from eyewitness accounts. It’s hard to believe all these thousands of Malaysians can go back to trusting what these media organizations say.
On the negative side, I’m still nonplussed that apart from Ambiga Sreenevasan herself and A. Samad Said, most of the leaders prominent in the movement are attached to opposition parties. Where are the heads of the trade unions, religious groups and other NGOs that are part of the coalition? Obviously the opposition politicians have more incentives to trumpet their prominence, but I’d hoped that the other NGOs could be more visible so as to credibly turn the movement into a more neutral affair.
Despite the lower than expected turnout, I think it’s hard to call the rally anything other than a success, especially after how the government repeatedly shot itself in the foot in its response. People are certainly far more alive now to how much in-grained opposition there is to Barisan Nasional and more cognizant of just how far the government is willing to go to hold on to the power. Most people who turned out at the rally are extremely happy and proud that they did so while those who didn’t go have expressed disappointment in themselves that they missed the chance to be part of something big and important. It’s still a long slow grind towards true democracy but the Bersih rally will likely be remembered as a critical stepping stone along that path.
To be honest, I was somewhat reluctant to join in the rally. While I consider myself interested in politics, I’m more of a policy wonk. I like to think about how social engineering is achieved through legislation and education. By contrast, politics in Malaysia is about personalities. This makes the local scene very uninteresting to me. Similarly, while I laud the movement’s aim of clean and fair elections and I do agree that political gatherings are a fundamental right and not a privilege that we need to apply permission for, I also think that there is substance in the government’s complaints that the movement is simply a political rally organized by the opposition parties. I think it is a mistake that the opposition parties tried to grab so much of the focus. Bersih is supposedly a coalition of many NGOs. Why not have them take center-stage instead of the opposition parties?
At the same, I was scared. The risk of being arrested and having to face the consequent legal hassles were slight but non-negligible. One of our friends, who seems to join in all these protests, had also warned us that the authorities would be sure to deploy tear gas. We would also need to run at a moment’s notice, a dangerous activity while being in the middle of a crowd. Then there’s always the chance that things could get really ugly if the Perkasa and Umno Youth counter-rallies actually manage to clash with the Bersih group. Still, my wife was quite insistent, we had plenty of friends who would be going and it was for a good cause, so we went.
Just to prove that this blog isn’t quite dead yet, here are a couple of articles for last month. The first of these is a popular story that has been passing around the net a lot recently. It’s about a scientist’s efforts to make meat fit for human consumption from human feces. The other one is a detailed look by Babbage of The Economist at how Bitcoin works. It’s a new virtual currency that been attracted the attention of economists around the world.
The first article is from Digital Trends and introduces us to Mitsuyuki Ikeda of Japan who has managed to develop steaks that are made from proteins that come from human excrement. Many commentators described the process as eating shit but that isn’t really correct. What the scientists have done instead is to use sewage mud as a base on which to grow bacteria. These bacteria turn out to have high protein content, which can be extracted and processed into an artificial steak. It supposedly tastes like beef.
Knowing that we’d have a lot of free time on our hands while we get settled back in West Malaysia, we’d arranged a couple of hard disks worth of stuff to watch. For the curious, this includes all three seasons of the highly acclaimed Deadwood series and the first season of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, a show that I’d missed out on watching as I was studying in France when it originally aired. Among the films we have are all three installments of the Back to the Future trilogy, a selection that was prompted by an off-hand comment from Deimos Tel`Arin of Flash Games Download. It took me a while to remember that I’ve never actually gotten around to watching the third film of the series.
Part I
Like every guy who grew up in the 1980s, the original Back to the Future film has a special place in my heart as part of a pantheon that also includes other cult classics like The Goonies, Stand by Me and Some Kind of Wonderful. Even watching it today, the scenes are so familiar that I can almost recite the dialogue word for word. I can still perfectly recall the frisson of excitement at the first sight of the DeLorean time machine, the envy-inducing stylish ease with which Michael J. Fox handles his skateboard, the madcap craziness of pretending to be a space alien to scare someone from the 1950s, the infectious power of the Johnny B. Goode performance and so on. There is zero doubt that the original film still holds up and deserves every single one of the many accolades it has received.
