It appears that the current term for the recently successful democratic revolution in Egypt is “Lotus Revolution”. It technically isn’t a color but is still considered to be one of the color revolutions that started with the mass social movements in various formerly-USSR states in the early 2000s. I keep wondering where these names come from. The Tunisian one that ended with the ouster of President Ben Ali has been the Jasmine Revolution, which isn’t a color either but does at least share a plant theme. The failed movement in Iran in 2009 was called the Green Revolution and that one certainly is a color.
Still, even the revolutions in the former-USSR states weren’t always named after colors. I think things started with the Rose Revolution of Georgia in 2004, which appropriately enough is both a plant and a color. But it really became a trend only with the Orange Revolution of Ukraine later that year. Next came the Tulip Revolution of Kyrgyzstan in 2005. Strangely enough, it seems that the red-shirt protests of Thailand in 2010 doesn’t count even though I distinctly remember them evoking the spirit of the earlier movements.
I don’t really have much to comment on them except to say that I’m all for democracy, even if the will of the people means that the new governments are less friendly to the West. Having Islamist parties come into power is certainly a real possibility but in the long run, I do not believe that this is something to be feared. In fact, I believe that this will be a critical step in enabling the Islamists around the world reconcile themselves to democratic values and find their place in the world. It is one thing to be express extremist views in opposition to gain popularity but as such movements as Hamas has learned, it is quite another to do the same when you’re running the government where compromise is routine and wooing the moderate middle becomes critical.
A bit of a slow start for the year in terms of science news so I’ll have to make do with some softer research articles. All three of the articles are about human psychology. First a short one about how chess grandmasters use their brains. Next, one about how men and women respond to stress differently when under the effects of caffeine and finally an odd look at how having a name that with starts with a letter at the end of the alphabet influences human behavior.
The first article is from New Scientist which talks about how Merim Bilalic at the University of Tübingen in Germany used an MRI machine to look at the brains of various chess players while they were looking at images of geometrical shapes or identifying whether certain situations in chess amounted to a check. Half of these were just novices and the other half were all internationally acknowledged grandmasters.
Late last year China sent Western defense analysts all atwitter when it released photographs of their supposed new stealth fighter, given the designation J-20. Pundits spent much time and effort theorizing what all this meant, especially since the leak was timed to coincide with US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates visit to China. Another worrying sign was that when Chinese President Hu Jintao arrived in Washington DC on January 18th, he was understandably quizzed by US President Barack Obama about the subject, but the Chinese delegation seemed to be genuinely unaware of the J-20, leading some to speculate that China’s civilian and military leadership were at odds with each other.
This week another new development took place, one that suggests that the threat of the J-20 is less than what it appears. China’s state broadcaster, CCTV, ran footage of what was lauded as a live-fire exercise by the J-10 fighter. The J-10 appeared to fire an air-to-air missile that hit and destroyed another aircraft. However, attentive bloggers analyzed the video frame by frame and noticed that the video seemed identical with scenes from the 1986 film, Top Gun. As the Yahoo article points out, Chinese media has been known to do this sort of thing before, and it could be just another example of journalists being lazy and sloppy. But it could also be a sign that China’s military, egged by a newly confident and assertive public, is tooting its own horn.
My wife and I have just finished watching the first season of The Walking Dead series, which isn’t that hard considering that it’s only six episodes. My interest was first piqued by Han’s mention of the series and I even downloaded some copies of the comic to check them out. But it would have been impossible to avoid the buzz on QT3 anyway. Not only is the series about zombies, but one prominent QT3 member, Gary Whitta, formerly editor of PC Gamer and currently a Hollywood screenwriter, appears in a cameo role as a zombie in the premiere episode. This led him to release photographs from the set before just about anywhere else on the net.
Six episodes is too little to go on to form much of an opinion but so far I’m impressed that they’ve mostly managed to avoid having the survivors get into trouble by making stupid mistakes. They make solid plans that take account of the zombies’ capabilities, place appropriate value on stocking up on firearms and ammunition, take care to kill zombies silently whenever feasible etc. One great example is when one sister cradles the corpse of the other sister, knowing full well it was going to be zombified. It would have been cringe-inducing if it had turned out to be just another cliched example of someone being too emotionally weak to do what was obviously necessary. But the tough sister turned out to have her shit together after all.
A word to the wise, if you have yet to begin reading the Wheel of Time series, please don’t start now. I first started reading the series over fifteen years ago. The Gathering Storm is the twelfth book in the series and the first to be written by Brandon Sanderson following the death of the original author who wrote under the pen name Robert Jordan. The thirteenth book, Towers of Midnight, has recently been released but I’m waiting for the paperback edition. The current plan is that there will be one last book after this to finish the series.
The sheer volume of text alone certainly qualifies the series as being epic. While it’s a tragedy that Jordan died before he managed to complete his tale, there’s no faulting him for not trying his darnest, turning new manuscripts in like clockwork. Unfortunately, the prose is pretty uneven in quality. Some of the last few books that Jordan wrote himself were so forgettable that I actually bought one of them twice because I couldn’t remember whether or not I’d already read it! This is because the books were so full of foreshadowing and plotting that hardly anything of note actually happened and the story barely advanced at all.
Any review that I could possibly write about this film must pale in comparison to Gordon Cameron’s excellent post on his blog Picture’s Up, so I’ll just link it. Some observations of my own:
The characterization and pacing feel a bit off. The slave Davus’ conflicted loyalties don’t seem very convincing at all. He clearly adores Hypatia and has a talent for science, but is attracted towards the egalitarianism of Christianity. But how does that drive him to bloodlust? He just seems far too enthusiastic about the sacking of the library than the situation warrants.
Similarly the flash forward to several years later feels clumsy. Suddenly we see that Orestes, who was happy to grab a sword to kill Christians, is now the Prefect and has been baptized himself. It would have been more believable if the film had previously established him as being ambitious and willing to go along with the tide for political gain. As it stands, it’s odd how he seems to think of himself as a genuine Christian even in private.
My wife totally caught how the filmmakers had chosen to garb the Christians in black robes and generally look and act like the stereotypical Muslim terrorists of our time. This is something that Marginal Revolution picked up on this too.
Some reviewers have claimed that the film is a condemnation of all fundamentalism rather than Christianity specifically but I can’t think of a single sympathetic Christian in the film. At least the Pagans were shown to respect knowledge and seem generally more civilized and orderly, even if they started the violence first. Plus, of course, even Hypatia clearly thought that owning slaves was perfectly normal. But the Christians are just a hateful bunch throughout. Even when Davus is handing out bread at the church, the beggars look like greedy locusts who eagerly take whatever is offered and eat it without so much as a word of thanks or a moment of appreciation. Then there’s Davus’ questioning of whether the Christians should consider forgiving their enemies and the rebuke he gets in response.
My wife says that Synesius is totally evil at the end and I agree. His brand of evil is certainly more scary than that of Cyril. The latter is just the typical religious demagogue. It’s not even clear that Cyril is passionate about Christ. He just seems interested in power. Synesius however seems to genuinely think of himself as being a good friend to both Orestes and Hypatia, and believes that wholehearted acceptance of Christ is what’s best for them, regardless of what they actually want or believe in. He’s scary because there’s no reasoning with him. Cyril at least could probably be cowed with sufficient application of temporal power.
Gordon Cameron thinks that the truest emotion the film evokes is frustration about how easily such valuable progress in human knowledge can be lost. While the film tries to play up that angle, especially obvious with the scenes of Hypatia and her colleagues desperately trying to save as many priceless manuscripts as they can before the mob, I don’t think this is what really rings out to me. After all, Hypatia didn’t seem to work very hard to ensure that her own insights would be recorded for posterity. Instead, the strongest emotional reaction I had was the fearful power of mob rule and how it utterly ignores reason and facts. The frustration that I felt was not so much the loss of knowledge but the downfall of civilization and the end of what seemed to be peaceful and orderly lives for so many.
Anyway I’m glad I watched this film but then as I’m one of those militant atheist types. Setting this aside, I don’t think I could say that this is a very good film. It’s a good subject matter and it’s shot beautifully enough but it’s too handles too many things too awkwardly. It does make for a wonderful film to troll Christians with, if I could ever convince one to watch it with me.
Three articles for the last month of 2010. Two of them are arguably about psychology. The other one is about a weird way of getting rid of drug-resistant strains of bacteria. We’ll start with that one first.
Bacterial infections that are increasingly resistant to currently available antibiotics is becoming a prevalent problem, especially in many hospitals where the bugs are able to attack patients already weakened by disease. This article from The Seattle Times looks at a way to treat one of these superbugs, known as C-diff, which can cause severe diarrhea in patients. Affected patients can use an expensive course of antibiotics to kill the bug but this also kills all of the other benign bacteria in the patient’s gut and after that C-diff can still come back.
