Derzeit findet in Hamburg eine Spontandemo gegen das Gefahrengebiet statt, die besten Updates gibts per Twitter unter dem Hashtag #Gefahrengebiet, spOnline hat ein Posting über eine Kissenschlacht. Bild oben: Klobürsten und Hulahoop vor der Davidswache von Jonas Walzberg.
Ihr erinnert Euch an die Infusionsbeutel in chinesischen Klassenzimmern, aus denen Schüler während ihrer Examensarbeiten intravenös Aminosäuren zugeführt werden? Das gibt’s auch in der Softcore-Variante: Anscheinend binden sich die Kids dort ihre Haare an die Decke, um beim Lernen nicht einzuschlafen.
Recently on China’s Weibo, photos are currently depicting the ways some students stay away as they cram for exams, whether that be with clothes hangers or scarfs or whatever.
The photo trend seems to have started when a student at Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University posted photos of her “Clothes Hanger Hanging Hair,” which then inspired other to upload their own pics while studying. The idea is that if they fall asleep, it’ll cause their hair to get pulled or they have their heads held up.
Kotaku: Hardcore Studying in China Looks Absolutely Frightening
Vorher auf Nerdcore:
Chinese Intravene Exams
TBBT is not a happy show. Whether it's funny is an open question, but I can find no way of looking that makes it happy. Accepting that I was essentially watching a slowly unfolding tragedy rooted in a very unsentimental and perfectly materialist worldview, it made much more sense...and became rather brilliant.
Since I kept drifting off into defending - or, rather, explaining my rather idiosyncratic fondness for the show - in the post about "Nerd Blackface," I figured I'd just go on about it in it's own post, since liking or disliking is not really relevant to "nerd blackface" being not ok. I suppose this is broadly a response to this essay, that kept getting linked there. I've probably overthought this, but it's exam season - overwrought theories on the internet are kind of my life right now.
So, I adore TBBT, because it is just so delightfully commie.
While I won't go so far as to accuse Chuck Lorre of being a Communist (although, has anyone seen his new show, Mom? Talk about class warfare) I am going to go ahead and say that TBBT easily supports a fundamentally Marxist reading. Bear with me:
To boil it way down, there are two very basic, underlying tenets to far-left politics. (At least as I'm familiar with them. I don't want to speak for everyone who possibly identifies as a leftist here.) These are foundational assumptions and the debate around their validity IS much of the basis of the right/left split. They are:
a. Humans are social
b. Humans are socialized
These seem pretty self evident, not to mention similar, but they're actually rather contradictory and, on most political spectrums today, somewhat radical.
(a) claims that humans need other humans to be human. We are part and parcel of our society, and this is a good thing. In one way or another, our contact with others is at the root of all our capacity for meaning, self-actualization and freedom.
but, (b) claims that were are almost mechanical products of those same societies. Our ambitions, our desires, our sense of right and wrong, is an inevitable, inescapable product of society. How we live shapes what we think about everything. What we want, what we think we want, what we hate, what we fear - none of it comes from some unique, personal place, but from a particular constellation of lived experience and social conditioning. Consciousness is derived from praxis.
Praxis is a neat and awesome word and i'm sad it seems to be dying out in English as some jargony academic term. It means something like the summary of the experience of day to day life. All of it - the job you have, the technology you use, the relationships you take part in, your class, your gender, everything. That day to day living, the years and years of it, shapes you.
So, is society good or bad? Does it trap us or does it give us meaning? Naturally, it's both. The point is, it's unavoidable. It is the underlying reality of the human condition. It is not something (in the marxist view) to be escaped or fought against, any more than the rising of the sun can be fought against. A perfect, socialist utopia still has a praxis - it still shapes the consciousness of those that live in it, it just does it in that image.
All that out of the way, back to the show.
We have Penny, the cute, airheaded waitress who dreams of being an actress lives across the hall from the pair of smart and reasonably professionally accomplished, but extremely socially awkward physicists.
What is Penny's praxis? She's female, rural, young. Her family background is a little vague, but there is no sense that she comes from a family that is particularly well off. Not poor, perhaps, but definitely not raised somewhere where higher education or professional ambitions are a norm, particularly for a woman.
(Obviously i'm drawing on generic tropes and a very, very broad and stereotypical sort of general knowledge here, not just the dry facts delivered within the show, but the show expects us to come to it with that knowledge. When Penny says "I'm from Omaha" it leads, immediately, to think of her differently than if she had said "I'm from New York." When Sheldon mentions growing up in a house on cinderblocks, that brings certain cultural associations to mind, and it is supposed to.)
She's also pretty, vivacious, confident and outgoing, and obviously extremely good at navigating social norms and situations. She's good at communicating, she's good at presenting herself, she's good at using her particular assets ("So tenure is like being a pretty waitress at the Cheesecake factory?") She's good at performing gender in a traditional and accepted way. She's even good at understanding male gender performance when she needs to - it's her the male characters come to when they need someone to beat up a bully or show them how to do guy-things to impress a macho father-in-law - but she would clearly never make the mistake of acting too masculine when society expects her to act feminine. This isn't because she's stupid or shallow - it's because she's very smart and very intuitive about these particular things. In other words, she's good at fitting in.
So, what does the kind of society Penny is portrayed as being a product of celebrate and value? What does one learn to aspire to, as a pretty girl in rural Nebraska, who also believes in psychics and astrology, who is a vegetarian who loves steak, who thinks a screenplay about a "sensitive girl from Nebraska" is at all interesting to anyone? Well, it's celebrity. Penny's vague and ill-formed desire to "be an actress," along with all the rest of it, is the product of her being extremely socializable, and from a society that worships celebrities and indeed rewards them handsomely. It also screws her over: she's internalized a desire to "be an actress" - and what it gets her is minimum wage and misery.
This is where we hit the really commie stuff (sorry, folks.) I say we all have praxis, right? Well, we don't just have a random, neutral praxis. Society isn't a great, even blob - it's structured. Structured to benefit some small percentage, and to use others to be of benefit to that small percentage. The mechanism that does that is called False Consciousness. False consciousness argues that our internalized desires might not be good for us.
Penny illustrates this very nicely: she chooses to pursue an unrealistic dream of stardom that leads her to poverty over the very realistic possibility of getting a degree and being considerably better off, and possibly happier. Nobody twisted her arm about it, nobody held a gun to her head. It was a choice she freely made, and yet a choice based on things she had absorbed from society - about what the value of a pretty face is, about the glamour and closeness of stardom as it's reflected in an omnispresent media, about the low value of intellectual persuits for women, etc, etc. Ultimately, it's a choice that is making her miserable and yet one she can't climb out of - neither economically nor personally. Both her finances and her sense of self worth are caught in a vice.
So that, to quote the pilot episode, "Is the story of Penny." Now lets move across the hall for the compare and contrast that is the heart of the show:
What kind of praxis does Leonard come from?
Well, he actually comes from a very similar one, which is the rub. In some ways, yes, it's different - he's male, upper-middle class, from a family steeped in academia. Unlike Penny, he internalized academic achievement as valuable. He internalized a sense of his own intellectual capability. These are important, and it's why he'll stay upper-middle class (even if he'll never exactly be a 1%er on an academic salary) while Penny is sliding into a poverty trap. That's the way the system works and perpetuates itself, economically, using a social mechanism.
But, here's the interesting bit: socially, he wasn't actually raised in a bubble, and today he lives across the hall from Penny. He too is in a praxis that values, say, attractiveness, and wealth, and certain form of masculinity he is not good at doing. He can recognize these things, but he doesn't quite fit, not comfortably. Part of it is his lack of confidence, part of it is the academic setting he so thoroughly comes from, that isn't the greatest preparation for the world outside, part of it is just his personality. He is very bad at doing what Penny is very good at doing, and it leaves him miserable and often isolated. The price of not fitting in, of not participating properly in the social codes, is fairly steep. Leonard knows he sticks out like a sore thumb, and he internalizes that. It's why he has the self esteem of a cupcake and starts sweating next to girls.
So far so glamorous, right? Poor little nerds are good and smart, normal people are mean and stupid and bad? Not quite, because then we get to Sheldon.
What kind of praxis does Sheldon come from?
It doesn't matter.
Sheldon kind of doesn't have a praxis. Sheldon actually, properly, breaks the system. He internalizes virtually nothing and he isn't influenced by what's around him. He neither suffers for conforming nor suffers for not conforming. It all goes over his head. He is, de facto, a kid living in a bubble. His sense of self worth, of achievement and self actualization, is almost entirely independent of anyone or anything else.
Most illustratively, he doesn't care about money. The things he wants to buy haven't been invented yet? Those are words to make an advertiser cry. Penny, in comparison, fills up the gaps in her life with buying expensive things that make her feel better about herself via a cycle of credit card debt. That's half of the collapse of the American middle class explained right there.
So how is Sheldon not awesome? What does Sheldon illustrate about the show's approach? The answer is way back at the beginning. Leonard and Penny are suffering through the connections and contradictions between (a) and (b). Between people's need for genuine contact with one another, and the way that contact is mediated and twisted by a capitalist social structure that requires a false, consumption-based sense of individualism.
Sheldon never makes it that far. Sheldon is stuck at (a), and that makes him the saddest character in the show. Navigating praxis sucks, yes. But the price of being free of it is not worth paying. Sheldon has freedom from shame, freedom from longing and the ability to say anything that crosses his mind with no consenquence. But he lacks the ability to eat pizza on any day of the week, to drive, to live on his own, the capacity to laugh with others and, oh, sex. That's probably not a choice anyone could make. It's certainly not one the show presents as desirable, constantly undercutting any coolness Sheldon might accrue from his unconventionality with really quite harsh infantilization and mockery.
Sheldon and Penny are sympathetic characters, but we're not meant to see ourselves in them - at least, not without a great deal of discomfort. That's the catch. TBBT presents praxis as inescapable, at least for a complete, adult human being, even while it's oppressive. If we accept that no individual has the ability to independently struggle free of the circumstances of their life (the rightwing approach) we're left only with the option of collectively changing those circumstances.
The only hope for Penny to be happy isn't to magically become a star, because that's both impossible and not what she really wants. It's to stop thinking of herself as valuable only for her looks or capable of finding happiness only in wealth. Leonard, likewise, can't become a macho, athletic guy all of a sudden - he just needs to stop placing all his self-worth in being validated by pretty women. Their only chance is to live in an altered paradigm - for example, on the smallest level, with a partner who appreciates them for who they actually are.
This is an obvious platitude, but it's the show's stubborn refusal to deliver it that makes it interesting. On the broad, societal level, these people's only hope is to change the notions that stardom or athleticism (or whatever else they're dreaming of) are either worthwhile or achievable. Ie, to change the praxis. Which is another way of saying revolution. Of course, TBBT is a sitcom, and the audience comes to it with the knowledge that, no matter what else happens, a revolutionary cadre is not going to set up a barricade on the street below. Which is what makes it a tragedy.
The answer, as far as I can tell, is to be a crazy, reckless sonofabitch who likes animals.
Earlier this week I posted about Kevin Richardson, the Lion Whisperer of South Africa. The GoPro video of him interacting with "his lions" is so amazing that I want to include it here, too.
I downloaded a copy of Richardson's book, Part of the Pride: My Life Among the Big Cats of Africa, to give it a read and see if I could gain some insight into Richardson's relationships with the lions and hyenas that we see in the video. What I didn't realize is that I've actually seen Richardson on TV before, when Animal Planet was still pretending to be a channel that featured animals instead of Sasquatch and hillbillies. He featured prominently in an episode of Growing Up, when he was working to hand-raise a hyena pup called Homer. You can view the whole episode here, but I feel I do have to spoil you regarding one thing: Homer unfortunately passes away.
It's one of the things Richardson writes about, roughly two-thirds the way through the book. As a writer, Richardson makes a good Lion Whisperer. He wrote it with Tony Park, who I think is primarily responsible for presenting Richardson's thoughts in a relatively logical format. The reason I call him crazy and reckless is that he freely admits that he is - when he's not rolling around in the grass with lions and hyenas, he's riding motorcycles and flying ultralight aircraft.
Richardson's approach to his autobiography is, I imagine, very similar to the way he approaches his life and work - fully in the moment, full of emotion and curiosity and deep interest. He writes about growing up being fascinated by keeping and raising animals, and he puts a strong emphasis on building relationships with animals. He carries this importance on animal relationships over to his work with lions and other large predators - when he first started working at Lion Park, there were things he was taught about interacting with lions that he's ultimately disregarded.
Many keepers/handlers will carry a stick when they go into a lion enclosure. They won't look the cats in the eye, they won't raise their voices, and they never get down on the ground or turn their back on them. The Wikipedia article about Richardson that I linked above says he's dispelled many myths about the way to care for and handle big cats like lions - I don't know how true that is, because Richardson continuously emphasizes the fact that his approach to the lions seems to work for him, but he in no way advocates for a radical change in the way most people would interact with them.
Richardson knows the lions that he works with, and he has different relationships with all of them. Some lions he considers "acquaintance lions," lions he says hello to and they abide in mutual tolerance of each other. Some lions, like Tau and Napoleon, or Meg and Ami, who he knew since they were young cubs, he considers to be his brothers and sisters.
And he says that just as with humans, the nature of his relationships with individual lions sometimes changes. He notes that in his experience, a lion is at its most dangerous when it's in its "teenage" years, about two to three years old. A lion in its teens, he says, is big enough to kill you, and young enough to want to. He has not gone through his experiences with these cats unscathed - the book opens on Richardson recounting an incident that occurred when he entered the enclosure of a young lion named Tsavo. He was showing his family around Lion Park for his nephew's birthday, and after playing football with Tau and Napoleon he wanted to show Tsavo to them, who was a little bit older.
Tsavo is not one of those lions that Richardson knew from when he was a cub. Tsavo was mistreated at another facility and moved to Lion Park during his crucial teenage lionhood period. Richardson is very clear about the fact that he ignored the signals that Tsavo was giving him not to approach, but he ignored those signals because he knew his family was watching. Unfortunately for his family, they got to see Richardson take a massive paw to the face (which might have killed him if Tsavo had not been de-clawed at his first home) and subsequently be straddled by an angry, biting lion.
Richardson was able to get away with minor injuries when another handler intervened and distracted Tsavo. He learned that even animals with whom he has a good relationship will react differently when there are strangers present, and that just like humans, animals will have good days and bad days. And when you weigh 500 pounds and are packing pawfuls of claws and mouthfuls of teeth, you get to dictate the terms of any given interaction.
I think that Richardson is successful in his animal relationships because he relates to them as individuals, and does his best to remain in 'animal headspace' while interacting with them. I'm not sure if he occasionally falls into the trap of anthropomorphizing animals or if he's just colorful in the way that he talks about them as individuals, but I think for the most part he avoids projecting human thoughts and/or feelings on them in the moment.
Though Richardson's book is subtitled My Life Among the Big Cats of Africa, most of it is devoted to his beloved lions, and secondary emphasis is placed on hyenas. He relates a few anecdotes about a South American jaguar, a few cheetahs, and leopards, but because Richardson is a behaviorist it's mostly about the specific interaction. Very little about the ecology of these animals' wild counterparts is included in the book - as I said, Richardson is very "in the moment" as opposed to coming off like an academic. This is unfortunate, because he mentions that there are other types of cats at the facility, like caracals, and we hear nothing about them.
If you're looking for a book about zoology this will disappoint you. If colorful memoirs from non-professional writers appeal to you, you'll likely quite enjoy it.
We are in the post-month-and-a-half-of-holidays slump in North America, leaving a number of shows on hiatus, but we have a couple of new ones to bring you. Teen Titans Go! joins Space Dandy and My Little Pony from last week, plus we take a look Rock 'n' Wrestling, a cartoon that defies reason.
As always - minor spoilers ahead!
'Dandy returns for week two as the alien hunters are flustered in the aftermath of Meow posting pictures of their dinner on the internet, a benign act of social media that gives away the coordinates of Space Dandy to each and every one of his enemies.
No clip of the new episode is available at the time of this posting, so instead enjoy this short game play video of Space Galaga, a downloadable video game created to promote the show.
Worlds collide as the Pie and Apple family lines might have crossed in the past making a number of resides of Ponyville relatives. This shocking bit of news sends Pinkie Pie on an Oregon Trail-like quest (complete with "fording a river" scene) to learn the truth.
This week's episode of a TTGo! is a Raven episode, showing us just how evil the young witch can become when she abuses her dark magic around Titans Tower.
It's a short week - you deserve more. You deserve animated sports entertainers teaching you life lessons in less than half and hour. Enjoy.
Andre the Giant (the lovable lug from The Princess Bride if you aren't a wrestling initiate) pretends to be a pastry chef in order to impress his French mother in this episode of the short-lived CBS series.
Also, if you are a fan of Space Ghost: Coast to Coast, Brak and Zorak are hosting a round of morning cartoons Saturday and Sunday on Cartoon Network.
Top image courtesy of The Hub.
Early last year, scientists suggested that our fingers and toes get wrinkles when they're wet to help us better handle wet objects. But a new study, in an effort to re-affirm the theory, fell flat.
The name of the new study, which appears in PLoS, says it all: "Water-Induced Finger Wrinkles Do Not Affect Touch Acuity or Dexterity in Handling Wet Objects."
Sid Perkins from ScienceShot provides a great summary:
Researchers had 40 volunteers—sometimes with dry hands, other times with wrinkly, wet ones—grab 52 items (including small and large glass marbles, rubber balls, and brass weights), one item at a time, with their thumb and forefinger and then pass each object through a 5-by-5-centimeter hole. In some tests, the hole was 45 cm above the table top; in the others it was 75 cm. On average, volunteers with wrinkly fingers completed the task no more quickly than their dry-handed counterparts...
The previous study used fewer objects, like glass marbles and lead fishing weights, and used half as many participants.
A second experiment showed that water-wrinkled fingers were no more or less sensitive than smooth ones. Consequently, the researchers say pruny fingers don't confer any kind of evolutionary advantage.
Instead, the researchers suggest that finger wrinkles are just a byproduct of immersing them in warm water. It's an automatic response triggered by our nervous system, one that happens to cause vasoconstriction — the narrowing of the blood vessels resulting from contraction of the muscular wall of the vessels.
Image: Taratorki/Shutterstock.
There's an almost storybook feel to the animation in Marine Duchet's short film Cyclope, but it quickly turns trippy as its protagonist descends into his girlfriend's mind. But by the time he discovers the horrors that accompany her surreal delights, he's found that he is lost within the landscape of her imagination.
Cyclope was conceived and directed by Marine Duchet and produced by the Octopus Collective.
Cyclope [via Cartoon Brew]
It is best to observe the humans in their natural habitat by taking on the form of a natural human ally. At least, that's what Queen Layla and Princess Delilah thought.
This photograph by Xan Latta just got picked by Colossal as one of the best Flickr photos of 2014 so far. See more by Latta on Flickr.
There have been plenty of successful comic to movie adaptations, but finding the right balance for a TV series has been a little trickier. Still, TV adaptations of comics have a lot of potential.
In response to a post on the lessons Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D could learn from Star Trek: The Next Generation, commenter lightninglouie mapped out some of the potential pitfalls of adapting a comic, and looked at some of the ways that a TV-adaptation of a comic could still succeed in ways beyond movie-adaptations:
The big problem fans have with AoS is that they were hoping for a real, honest-to-Uatu weekly Marvel series, and what they got was an espionage show with sci-fi elements in which the characters occasionally interact with superhumans or alien technology. This is an acute disappointment, because the weekly TV serial format is ideal for comic book stories, much more so than movies because it's so much closer to a monthly comic series. You can develop characters and their worlds so much faster, and in greater detail, without having to wait two or three years for the next installment.
The downside of that is that TV, while much more sophisticated and deeper than it used to be, is still constrained by budgetary concerns, even with the backing of a giant conglomerate like Disney. You really can't do superpowered characters zooming around every week, and a giant Avengers-style battle is out of the question. Even a single shot of Iron Man flying over L.A. is probably more expensive than the average episode of AoS. On the one hand, not being able to do huge fireworks every week is a major benefit to stuff like worldbuilding and characterization, which can be hard to squeeze into a two-hour movie. But not having access to that kind of spectacle means inevitably that the show will fall back on familiar plots and storytelling.
So far, AoS has had a handful of episodes with characters who could develop into full-fledged superheroes or villains. But for the most part it's relied on tried-and-true plots reminiscent of spy shows like Alias, or weird science/MoW series like X-Files, Torchwood, and Fringe. I suspect this was deliberate, because of budget restraints, but also because TV tends to be conservative, and often you have to soft-sell stuff before it can get good or interesting, lulling audiences into a false sense of calm. Lots of people who hadn't read George R.R. Martin assumed that Game of Thrones was going to be all about Ned Stark until the end of the first season. I don't expect anything quite as severe — though the events of Winter Soldierportend some pretty dark, heavy stuff for SHIELD and the MCU — but it seems to me that sometimes you have to go through periods of necessary boredom and experimentation before the writers figure out what really works, and then know which buttons to push. TNG is a good parallel. It started out as a beige shadow of the original program, but once the writers and performers had laid some basic groundwork (and there'd been some shuffling around on the creative level), it could start to get good.
So, what do you all think? Should we expect a golden age of comic-adaptations on television anytime soon? And what would it take to get us there?
Biophysicists theorize that plants tap into the eerie world of quantum entanglement during photosynthesis. But the evidence to date has been purely circumstantial. Now, scientists have discovered a feature of plants that cannot be explained by classical physics alone — but which quantum mechanics answers quite nicely.
The fact that biological systems can exploit quantum effects is quite astounding. In a way, they're like mini-quantum computers capable of scanning all possible options in order to choose the most efficient paths or solutions. For plants, this means the ability to make the most of the energy they receive and then deliver that energy from leaves with near perfect efficiency.
But for this to work, plants require the capacity to work in harmony with the wild, wacky, and extremely small world of quantum phenomena. The going theory is that plants have light-gathering macromolecules in their cells that can transfer energy via molecular vibrations — vibrations that have no equivalents in classical physics. Most of these light-gathering macromolecules are comprised of chromophores attached to proteins. These macromolecules carry out the first step of photosynthesis by capturing sunlight and efficiently transferring the energy.
Previous inquiries suggested that this energy is transferred in a wave-like manner, but it was a process that could still be explained by classical physics.
In the new study, however, UCL researchers identified a specific feature in biological systems that can only be predicted by quantum physics. The team learned that the energy transfer in the light-harvesting macromolecules is facilitated by specific vibrational motions of the chromophores.
"We found that the properties of some of the chromophore vibrations that assist energy transfer during photosynthesis can never be described with classical laws, and moreover, this non-classical behaviour enhances the efficiency of the energy transfer," noted supervisor and co-author Alexandra Olaya-Castro in a statement.
The vibrations in question are periodic motions of the atoms within a molecule. It's similar to how an object moves when it's attached to a spring. Sometimes, the energy of two vibrating chromophores match the energy difference between the electronic transitions of chromophores. The result is a coherent exchange of a single quantum of energy.
"When this happens electronic and vibrational degrees of freedom are jointly and transiently in a superposition of quantum states, a feature that can never be predicted with classical physics," explained study co-author Edward O'Reilly.
In other words, quantum effects improve the efficiency of plant photosynthesis in a way that classical physics cannot allow. Which is pretty wild if you ask me.
Read the entire study at Nature Communications: "Non-classicality of the molecular vibrations assisting exciton energy transfer at room temperature."
Image: Krivosheev Vitaly/Shutterstock.
Person of Interest is back from mid-season hiatus, and already the show is delving deeply into science fictional themes, like the nature of AI consciousness. We caught up with producers Jonathan Nolan and Greg Plageman to talk about what comes next, and their real-life inspirations for the guns-and-malware world of this show.
In this week's mid-season premiere, we heard the AI known as the Machine finally speaking for itself, through its agent Root. The Machine has been one of the show's most mysterious characters, and it has changed over three seasons as it develops a more autonomous identity. When Person of Interest first launched three years ago, Nolan and Plageman shied away from calling the Machine a character, or anything more than a futuristic version of the kinds of surveillance devices the government is currently using. But now, they are clearly thinking about it in the context of science fiction stories about what happens when non-human minds come to life in our machines.
Indeed, they've been thinking for a while about how to make sure the Machine doesn't come across as just a person in a box. They don't want their AI to feel anthropomorphized, or human. Unlike humans, the Machine has a mind that seems to contain many minds at once.
"We're excited by science fiction stories that de-anthropomorphize the machine," said Nolan. He continued:
A lot of science fiction turns AI into a singular voice, with a singular plan. Our analogy for the Machine is more like the CIA, or government, or any large complicated organization. The CIA is one entity with one name, but in 1959 they had one group working toward assassinating Fidel Castro, and another group down the hallway working toward courting Fidel Castro's friendship and support in case he became an ally.
Humans are not capable of parallel processing in that way. But there are many examples of animals that are. And we imagine the machine would be different. What that means is that it [can be] authentically itself while also entertaining different relationships with everyone. It has a different relationship with Finch than it does Root, and it honors the terms of the relationship that Finch wanted.
The Machine as Nolan sees it is a kind of massively parallel mind, but it's also a hive mind like the government organizations that are vying to own it. Nolan also mentioned that Spike Jonze's latest film Her has a similar perspective on AI. Describing that movie, he said (spoiler alert):
There's this gutting moment when [the AI is] entertaining discrete relationships with thousands of people, and she loves hundreds of them. That's what we're going for [in Person of Interest]. AIs will be complicated. They won't have relationships the same way people do. And that will be alienating and difficult for people with whom they are interacting.
And this gets to the heart of one of the most tense scenes from this week's episode, when Root speaks to Control, the intelligence agency honcho, on behalf of the Machine. That version of the Machine is Root's version, but Nolan says "the fact that there are different machines in the Machine makes it no less dramatic for me in that moment." Root is channeling the Machine, "but the fact that you have many, many versions doesn't invalidate what she's saying to Control."
In many ways, this idea for the Machine is very similar to what Ann Leckie writes about in her incredible new novel Ancillary Justice, about an AI ship that is also a hive mind, its loyalties divided between two political factions. Along with Ancillary Justice and Her, Person of Interest is part of a new wave of science fiction stories that are trying to imagine AI as a multiple consciousness, with flaws and contradictions, rather than a monolithic, single-minded "superintelligence."
One of the subthemes that emerges from this thought experiment with AI consciousness has to do with memory. As Plageman notes, memory has always been "a recurrent theme" on the show — both as a unit of computer storage, and a way that humans understand their own histories. In a recent episode, we discovered that the only other AI out there, Samaritan, came to "life" after its creator erased its memories over and over. The Machine went through a similar evolution.
Meanwhile, we're learning more about Finch's history and how he lost his father to Alzheimer's. He built the Machine in part because when he was a boy, he wished he had a device that would help his father's ailing memory and take care of him when Finch was away. Everyone in this show, from the intelligence agencies to the most humble human characters, seems to be trying to erase the past or hoard records of it for good or ill.
Like a lot of dystopian science fiction, Person of Interest is also a paranoid tale of surveillance and its consequences. The rest of this season will take us deep into the overlapping interests of private industry and government spies, and Plageman promises that ultimately we'll find out who Greer, Control and other shady operatives really work for.
"We imagine all these people in the beltway have a day job that doesn't represent full array of what their doing," Plageman said. "They call it a black budget for a reason. As we head into final episode we'll see how that dynamic works." He notes that Hersh and other characters "were all part of this small group — not really rogue — and we'll find out how much it's officialy sanctioned."
Plageman and Nolan say they get a lot of inspiration for the show from what's happening in Silicon Valley. With Greer, a character who runs a mysterious company called Decima, they wanted to offer a composite of many different kinds of private data brokers like Google, Palantir, or even the traffic app Waze. "Greer operates in a world where information is power," Plageman said. But more importantly, Greer operates in what the producers call a "post-nation state world."
Plageman continued:
Greer views the nation state as anachronistic. All he cares about are information and money. Consider the scope of the larger data companies today — Google reaches around the world, and it's even putting things on barges! In this world, corporations aren't tied to nations, and the allegiance of these entities is suspect.
Added Nolan:
[In the writer's room], we talked a lot about the rise of private data brokers. And the idea that Mark Zuckerberg knows more about people than most intelligence agencies. That's a level of power that people underestimate. With Greer, we're anticipating the emergence of private data brokers as a post-nation state development. 20 years ago, Raúl Castro had to recruit a million people for his spy network in Cuba. Imagine the cost! Only a government could afford to do that. But in 20 years, you'd have tiny startups — even something like Waze the traffic app — aggregating data, huge amounts of it, transformative amounts. You have the emergence of figures like Greer whose business [has a transformative power that] could actually be compared with the Manhattan Project. Once, only nation states used nukes, and that power remained with them. But that's not true of transformative levels of data.
Nobody thinks Google knows less than the NSA. We just imagine that we trust them more than the NSA, which is pretty fucking bizarre all by itself. I mean, if your company's slogan is "Don't be evil," it suggests the capacity for evil.
Plageman also marveled at the way young people's priorities have changed in the world of high-tech entrepreneurialism. At one time, he recalled, college students would have been suspicious of CIA recruiters coming to campus. "But Palantir was funded by the CIA," he said. "Today, students are just thankful for the startup money."
The post-nation state data brokers in Person of Interest have their roots in a culture where we've seen the rise of the private military contractor, Nolan said:
A lot of the stuff that the armed forces don't want to do, stuff that used to be their grunt work, is now actually done by private military contractors. Not just running around with guns, but building latrines, and camps, and bases. So much is outsourced. We're looking to the emergence of the private intelligence sector that takes over the role of CIA and NSA. Because with everything being wired, that capability becomes more and more of a possibility — and the question of what happens to that data is very frightening.
Both producers think of this season as having two chapters. Chapter one focused on New York City corruption, and the band of dirty cops in HR. That chapter ended with Carter's death. Chapter two will focus on Greer's company Decima and the rise of the private intelligence sector. By the end of the season, Plageman promised, "you might be able to see what Decima is trying to put together," and we'll know whether Samaritan is going to help him with his goals.
Of course, Decima and other private data brokers have their detractors. On Person of Interest, the activist group Vigilance violently protests the surveillance state. Plageman said that Vigilance doesn't really have a real-life counterpart, though the writers discussed the group Anonymous as well as the underground group in Fight Club as analogies. Nolan called Vigilance a group of "crypto patriots," making them unlike Anonymous, who, Nolan noted sardonically, "all wear those Warner Bros-produced Guy Fawkes masks."
In the midst of all this discussion of real-world politics, Nolan wanted to return to a 1970s science fiction story. He was glad that io9 commenters picked up on an important inspiration for the show: the movie Colossus — The Forbin Project.
"There's even a moment where you hear the voice of Colossus in the elevator sequence in the second episode this season!" he enthused. He continued:
We were excited. We watched [Colossus] many years ago. It's the idea of the arms race again, and a comparison to the Manhattan Project. Americans weren't the only people to develop an atom bomb. Watching [American Cold War spying] helped usher in the nuclear arsenals of Russia, China, India and more. That's its own fascinating story, so we couldn't resist the possibility of a second Machine.
So if you want to understand what's coming next on Person of Interest, you obviously need to watch Colossus — The Forbin Project, read up on your Cold War history, and — of course — read io9 comments.
Getting the full San Diego Comic-Con experience just got a lot more complicated. According to a new announcement, SDCC 2014 will no longer be selling two-day, four-day or full week passes. Convention goers will now have to buy each day pass individually.
The SDCC Blog just announced the change:
New for 2014! Only single day badges will be sold. The Preview Night badge option may only be purchased if you buy a Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday badge. Preview Night is not a stand alone badge option. As in 2013, anyone who purchases a Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday badge will have the option of consolidating them into one 4-Day badge onsite.
Here are the prices (if you're interested).
Looks like prices have gone up — and now, if you want a full week's pass you have to buy up all the days individually, which could get disastrous when things start selling out. Also, if you registered for a badge in 2013, you are eligible for pre-registration. All the details at the official SDCC website.
Because Da Vinci's Demons apparently hasn't pushed its ahistorical fantasy far enough, our can't-fail Renaissance man Leonardo Da Vinci heads to the Americas in the trailer for Season Two, years before Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic.
I can see why David S. Goyer chose to break the series out of its Florence and Leonardo vs. Rome and Count Riario format from Season One, although given that the culture of Florence was so highly idealized by Leonardo last season, it seems strange to leave it behind. And as Riario is by far the show's most intriguing character, it's exciting to see that he'll be teaming up with Leonardo, and apparently even wins the race to the Americas. But the ludicrousness of Leonardo secretly voyaging to the New World aside, I'm nervous about seeing the show's fantastical take on history transported to pre-Columbian America.
Who wants to hear Aaron Eckhart's Batman voice? The first clip from I, Frankenstein features the most heavy-handed conversation involving a reanimated corpse talking about other reanimated corpses. This looks just terrible. We can't wait.
I, Frankenstein will be released on January 24th.
When a villain comes onto the scene for the first time in a movie, book or TV show, he or she has to do something to make a mark right away. Put an eel in someone's ear. Murder someone we love. Do something horrible. What's the darkest, most memorable villain introduction ever?
Please include a clip or picture of this totally insane scene. And please mention where it comes from, and why it establishes the villain right away.
World Fantasy Award-winning author Lavie Tidhar has already gone to some dark, strange places — but in The Violent Century, his brilliant Cold War epic, he does the closest thing we've seen to Alan Moore's Watchmen in book form. And along the way, he questions what it means to be a hero.
Some spoilers ahead...
The Violent Century begins with the novel's two main protagonists reuniting in a London Bar in the present day; Oblivion is under orders to bring his former partner, Fogg, in to revisit one of their old missions, back during World War II. They're superheroes from a bygone era, who helped to defend the British Empire during the conflict.
They haven't aged since the day that they were imbued with powers: The Change has imparted a sort of immortality to those affected. While the world has continued forward, they're a curious relic of the past that persists into the present.
As Fogg is brought in for a chat, we're treated to a rapid-fire jump across the century as Tidhar leaps from 1936 to 1944 to the 1960s, 70s and 80s. There's a final loose end that's eluded everyone at the Retirement Bureau, and it might have something to do with the state of the world since the Change. The book's structure is a bit jarring at first (as is Tidhar's lack of quotations around dialogue), but soon, as the format sinks in, it begins to flow along nicely.
The story bounces around as Fogg and Oblivion recount their work and experiences throughout their service in the name of the United Kingdom, lurking and assisting from the shadows. They've got some pretty interesting powers that were certainly helpful, and Tidhar likes to play with the names of his characters. Henry Fogg appropriately can manipulate fog, hiding escapes and creating cloudy golems. Oblivion has a much more troubling power: he makes things vanish from this universe.
Along the way, we're introduced to a range of American superheroes. And it's here that we find the great strength of the book: Tidhar's examination not of what makes a hero, but how we perceive our heroes. The American heroes are an almost parody of the comic heroes that you know and love: Tigerman, Whirlwind, The Electric Twins, The Green Gunman, Girl Surfer and Frogman, the League of Defenders. There's their German and Russian counterparts as well: Wolkenstein (Wolf Man), and Schneesturm (Snow Storm), and the Red Sickle. They're propaganda icons, pumped up, brightly dressed and there for the show, in a pointed look at their real world counterparts.
The British heroes are more reserved, while the Germans play into the iconography of the Third Reich. This alternate Second World War is rife with superheroes and historical supporting figures, ranging from Alan Turing in England to Wernher von Braun, who both use the war effort and these supermen help to reach their own ends and goals.
Eventually, we come to understand that a Doctor Vomacht, a German scientist, is responsible for The Change, and it's the interactions between Fogg and his daughter, Klara that bring the past violently into the future. It's Klara and her unique power that holds a vital key to the entire story, and her relationship with Germany complicates her dealings with Fogg during the War. Along the way, we visit horrific concentration camps which Jewish and captured superheroes are brought, Jewish supermen who are fighting against the Germans for their very existence, and pulpish action scenes that are both violent and beautiful to behold. Frequently, Fogg and Oblivion recall their orders while in the field: "Don't be a hero." They're to observe and report back, working out of the shadows, something they ignore more than once.
The Violent Century covers a lot of ground: the pre-war years in England, the Second World War, the Vietnam War, the Eichmann trials, the Soviet War in Afghanistan and the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11th. (Chillingly – It's a bird, it's a plane, it's… a plane.) The book runs out of order, with the plot teased out of each section, growing as a larger and more complicated puzzle throughout. It's a strange reveal, one that slowly draws you in; first with action and then with some excellent character drama.
While Tidhar looks at the violent narrative of the twentieth century, he has his eyes firmly planted on how we've interpreted the violence in our own real world. The entire modern superhero genre comes out of the state of the publishing industry in the 1930s, from Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster's Superman and Joe Simon and Jack Kirby's Captain America. Tidhar's own Übermensch are an interesting play on the comic book creations.
Indeed, Stanley Lieber (popularly known as Stan Lee), shows up as a historian and author of a book titled Le Dictionnaire Biographique des Surhommes (The Dictionary of Superhuman Biographies), alongside artist Jerry Siegel and author Joe Shuster, authors of The Super Man: His Myth, his Iconography. The Violent Century is filled with small Easter eggs such as these, which ultimately support Tidhar's main idea here: the superheroes we create are an extension of ourselves:
"Our American heroes are the wish-fulfilment of immigrants, dazzled by the brashness and the colour of this new world, by its sheer size. We needed larger-than-life heroes, masked heroes to show us that they were the fantasy within each and every one of us. The Vomacht wave did not make them, it released them. Our shared hallucination, our faith."
This falls pretty closely to the character of the comic book heroes that we know and love, they're more than simply their own characters; they're part of a collective psyche from those they come from. Tidhar's heroes play into this nicely in this self-aware book. There's a wonderfully fantastic scene when one character, doped up on opium, dreams of the world in with thought bubbles, confined by black borders - the very medium Tidhar is examining. On top of that, his characters are as ageless as their Golden/Silver Age counterparts, endlessly playing out the same battles over and over again.
There's been a number of fantastic novels that have drawn on the mythos of the comic book world, ranging from Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay to Austin Grossman's Soon I Will Be Invincible, but Tidhar's is probably one of the best prose examinations to really examine the superhero and what they mean.
Ultimately, The Violent Century is about legacy and how heroics play into it, a deeper message than defining what heroics mean: The actions of Fogg and Oblivion have lasting consequences, while at the same time, we can see the weight of the world they've helped to build grow on their shoulders. By the end of the book, it's clear that their own journeys are defined by the actions which they've undertaken because it's what they felt was right, rather than what their orders were.
If you've watched the first two movies in Gainax's movie retelling of their hit anime Evangelion, then you know the first movie was pretty much a straight-forward recap of the TV series' first episodes. The second movie added new characters and new angels to fight, taking the story into new territory (our review is here). I'm here to tell you that Evangelion 3.33: You Can (Not) Redo, doesn't just find new territory, it finds an entirely new dimension, destroys it, and then hops two more dimensions over.
What I mean is that the third Evangelion movie is pretty much nothing like any Evangelion you've seen before. The characters are still the same — well, not all of them look the same, not all of them act the same, but they all still have the same names — there are still EVA Units and Angels, and that's about it. Seriously.
It's impossible to discuss these changes without revealing major aspects of the story, so here's a SPOILER WARNING for those that want to know a bit about it. The movie takes place 14 years after the end of 2.22, at which point Shinji caused the Third Impact. Pretty much all of humanity is dead, Tokyo-3 is gone. Misato is leading Asuka and Mari in a war against Gendo and NERV. Shinji wakes up from suspended animation to learn he pretty much destroyed the world and almost every single person left on the planet hates his guts. Different enough for you? END OF SPOILER WARNING.
As an old-school Evangelion fan, I assure you that these major changes to the series are shocking, but I don't know that they're making Evangelion any better or more meaningful. Maki, the new character introduced in the second film, basically sits on the sidelines. Kaworu is introduced, but his relationship with Shinji is so rushed that it doesn't have anything close to the impact of the TV series. Additionally, the film almost spitefully refuses to give Shinji — and thus the audience — information, so instead of capitalizing on all these major changes, we're treated to scene after scene of Shinji asking what the deal is, and everyone else giving him the silent treatment. But my biggest problem is that while the differences may blow your mind, they don't seem to take the series' core themes in any new directions.
But that's not to say you shouldn't see it. While I'm sure a few grumpy fans will be disturbed by the scope of the changes, I imagine the majority will be captivated with just how strange the Evangelion story gets in this movie. It's interesting to see these familiar characters in some radically new situations. And the joy of seeing any version of Evangelion told with cutting-edge animation is undiminished.
If nothing else, Evangelion 3.33 is beautiful. There are scenes in the movie that will make your jaw drop —if you have the chance to watch the film in its limited theatrical release (it opens today in select cities; check here to see if its playing anywhere near you) I definitely recommend it. I just don't know that when these four movies are finally finished they're going to replace the original TV series in anyone's hearts.
For hundreds of years, people wore mourning jewelry to commemorate their dead loved ones. But what secrets about the past can you learn from these dark baubles made of diamonds, skeletons and bits of loved ones' hair.
We stumbled upon Erica Weiner's wondrous collection of mourning jewelry while window browsing through New York, and the collector and jewelry designer was kind enough to give us an education on the intricate history and secret meanings behind the jet-black jewelry that's been around since the 1600s (but saw a tremendous rise in popularity in the 1800s).
According to Weiner, "People started making memorial jewelry because there was no photography, and if your loved one died you wanted something as a touchstone to remember them every day." You could also get a painting made of your loved one, and later on there was a fad in "death photography" — but before photography came along, this was the main way that people remembered their departed loved ones. These items weren't limited to women, either: Men could have memorial cufflinks or pocket watch fobs that included parts of the deceased's hair braided in (image below).
Men's watch with a hair braided FOB Image via ebay.
As far as materials go, black enamel is the hallmark of most mourning pieces. But different metals and various gems meant different things. Weiner elaborated that white enamel means the deceased was a woman who died unmarried and a virgin. Pearls would indicate the loss of a child.
Different colors represented different stages of grief. If you were observing traditional Victorian public mourning time, the necklace or ring could incorporate various colors that would match the changing period of mourning. It was permissible to wear mourning jewelry with other jewels. However, if you were following the strict Victorian mourning procedure, mourning jewelry was the only jewels allowed for the first two to three years of "deep mourning." The beautiful jewelry would change with the times, eventually incorporating pictures.
The items would be worn by friends and family, royalty. Queen Victoria, whose epic sadness over the loss of her husband, Prince Albert, popularized the tradition. And she wore her husband's morning ring for the rest of her life.
Here's a collection of some of the fascinating pieces with hidden secrets we discovered.
According to Weiner, "This particular ring is sort of our prized possession in our mourning jewelry collection. It's unusual to find them with diamonds in them. This was for an older gentleman from 1734. He died when he was 60. And he and his family had clearly saved up to produce these for when he died. The more elaborate it was, the more money the family had." Oftentimes, the family would produce a number of memorial items to be handed out at the funeral as a token of remembrance.
Additional information at Erica Weiner. Photograph by Michelle Smith McLaughlin.
A Momento Mori Skeletal Band. The ring is dated 1727 and features a full skeleton wrapped around the entire ring. Which is absolutely gorgeous, and just a little macabre. According to Rowan & Rowan, the crown above the skeleton's skull represents that "death is the master of all." Below the figure's feet is a tablet with the words "Momento Mori" edged by symbols of the Passion. The bezel of the ring is in the shape gold coffin — and if you look through the coffin, you can see an additional skeleton in the coffin.
Images and and additional information at Rowan & Rowan.
Spotted on Erie Basin this ring features one of the most elaborate paintings we've ever seen this small. Created sometime in the late 1700s what makes this ring special is the ship, which collectors say is uncommon among these types of items which usually feature urns or willows (see below). The ship's presence on a ring like this represents the journey into the afterlife, while the beached anchor symbolizes hope for those the loved one left behind. And if you look closer you can see that the golden details on the ship were created out of tiny bits of hair. The deceased's hair was chopped up and used to paint with, and oftentimes incorporated into the piece of jewelry itself.
Images and additional information from Erie Basin.
A Mourning Locket. Once photographs were introduced to the public, the combination of lockets and mourning jewelry was pretty obvious. This enamel locket on a banded agate bracelet was created sometime around the 1900s. The locket features lilies of the valley which was a common flower used in mourning jewelry and they symbolized the tears of the Virgin Mary. Since the locket is blue, one could speculate that this piece of jewelry was created for the final stage of mourning when darker colors (like blue, grey and purple) would be integrated back into the wardrobe.
Addition information at Erica Weiner. Photograph by Michelle Smith McLaughlin.
An 1850s diamond ring with a coil of hair under crystal. The hair inside of this ring was from the deceased and would often be referred to as a "collar."
Images and additional information from Erie Basin.
This middle finger ring contains the braided hair of a memorialized loved one. Weiner explained to us that back in the day, you had to be careful who you sent your deceased's hair to for transforming into jewelry or artwork or a wreath. Apparently there was a big scandal as some companies would replace damaged or difficult-to-manipulate hair with a stranger's hair, or even horse hair.
Image from Erica Weiner.
Weeping Willows and Urns were common images on mourning jewelry. This navette shaped ring has a hand painted scene with the message " Not Lost But Gone Before." The Bell And Bird speculates this ring is from 1760-1810.
Images and additional information from Bell And Bird.
Another example of an urn and weeping willow imagery being used in this Georgian-era ring. However the leaves and branches of this weeping willow are made out of tiny pieces of hair. The ring was created in memory of J.S. Cowen, who (according to the inscription) died on February 10th, 1780 at age 65.
Image and information from Erie Basin.
This super fancy piece of memorial jewelry has a band with the saying "Drop the tear of sensibility on the grave of virtue." Which is a testament to the virtue of the lost loved one, who was named J R Wilmer, and passed on January 7th 1804 at the age of 27. All this wrapped around a single old-cut diamond weighing half a carat. Impressive.
Additional information and image from Rowan & Rowan.
And on the flip side you have a much more understated and common piece of mourning jewelry. This enamel ring still has the inscription inside which says "Joseph Watson, died 14 Feb., 1849 aged 80."
Addition information at Erica Weiner. Photograph by Michelle Smith McLaughlin.
And here's a collection of the mourning jewelry on display in Erica Weiner's store:
To see these gems for yourself, we suggest you head over to one of Erica Weiner's boutiques in Nolita, New York.