Culture – Spinor Info

Uncanny coincidence

Culture, History, Politics No Responses »

Jan 052020

Back in 1944, Astounding Science Fiction magazine published a short story, Deadline by Cleve Cartmill, about a devastating war on an alien planet, and the development of a uranium fission bomb. The details of the bomb were sketchy, but at least a few of the details provided (about isotope separation, about the concern that a fission explosion might “ignite” nearby matter and cause global devastation) were sufficiently accurate to earn the magazine a visit by the FBI.

Something similarly uncanny happened three days ago, when the New York Times published an opinion piece by a former Obama aid about hypersonic missiles. The article included, among other things, the following paragraph: “What if the former commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, Qassim Suleimani, visits Baghdad for a meeting and you know the address? The temptations to use hypersonic missiles will be many.”

Hours later, Suleimani was killed at Baghdad airport (although not by a hypersonic missile, just an ordinary drone strike.)

I doubt Mr. Trump was acting on the advice of a former Obama aid, so almost certainly, this was pure coincidence. But that is just uncanny.

The consequences of the Suleimani attack, unfortunately, are another matter. One has to wonder if there was any real thinking, any real strategy. Even Fox’s Tucker Carlson chose to question the wisdom of this act, blasting the hawks who may have been responsible for talking Trump into taking this reckless step.

The attack was a godsend to the ayatollahs. It offers them the best possible way out of an wave of protests unprecedented in the history of the Islamic Republic. It finally prompted Iraq’s parliament to vote in favor of the removal of remaining US troops. And it gave Iran an excuse to completely abandon the nuclear deal.

No, I don’t think the ayatollahs will escalate. They don’t have to. The threat of imminent war is always a more effective means to control the population than actual war. And facing an incompetent imbecile, they can just bide their time, while Trump loses whatever goodwill remains among America’s allies towards his administration by threatening Iranian cultural sites in retaliation.

The roaring twenties

Canada, Environment, History, Personal, Politics, Pop culture No Responses »

Jan 012020

A year ago today, I was looking forward to 2019 with skepticism. I expressed concern about a number of things. Not everything unfolded according to my expectations, and that’s good news. What can I say, I hope 2020 will continue the trend of defying pessimistic predictions.

The political crisis in the United States continues to simmer with Trump’s impeachment, but it remains less dramatic than I feared;
NATO and the EU remain intact for now, though unresolved issues remain;
An orderly Brexit is now possible with Johnson’s election victory; I still think the Brits are shooting themselves in the foot with this idiocy, but an orderly Brexit may be the best possible outcome at this point;
Sliding towards authoritarianism in places like Hungary and Poland remains a grave concern, but there is also pushback;
Russia continues to muck up things in untoward ways, but there was no significant (e.g., military) escalation;
China is ramping up its campaign against the Uyghurs with an ever widening system of concentration camps but there was no significant escalation with respect to their neighbors;
Japan, sadly, resumed whaling, but so far I believe the impact is minimal;
Brazil continues to wreak havoc in the rain forest, but there is pushback here as well;
Lastly, Canada did have elections, but populism was crushed (for now at least) with the defeat of Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party.

And now here we are, entering the roaring twenties! A decade that will bring things like Prohibition and organized crime in the United States, institutionalized antisemitism in Hungary, the rise of fascism in Italy, the Great Depression… no, wait, that was a century ago. Here’s to hoping that humanity got a little wiser in the past 100 years.

Speaking of that century, my wife’s Mom and mine can now both tell us that they lived in every decade of a century, having been born in the 30’s and now living in the 20’s.

A sad day for Star Trek

Television No Responses »

Dec 082019

I just visited Twitter.

This is Deanna Troi from Star Trek: The Next Generation, played by Marina Sirtis.

Deanna Troi was not my favorite character, but I always respected Marina Sirtis. So I was very sad to see the death of her husband, Michael Lamper, announced on Sirtis’s Twitter account. They have been married as long as my wife and I.

And then this is Odo from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, played by René Auberjonois.

According to his Twitter account, René Auberjonois passed away today, at the age of 79.

As I said, a sad day.

De Niro’s opinion on Fox News

Politics, Television No Responses »

Sep 302019

One of the few news shows I still watch is Reliable Sources on CNN, a weekly backgrounder on Sundays.

Yesterday, Robert De Niro was interviewed in one segment.

He certainly did not hide his opinion about Fox News. Gave me a good chuckle, too, but then I remembered why he was saying what he was saying and it no longer felt funny at all.

Amazing paintings by Vilhelm Hammershøi

Art No Responses »

Sep 172019

I just came across the name of an artist, a painter, that I never heard before: Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864-1916) of Denmark.

Amazing paintings. Here is one example.

I find the subdued, melancholic atmosphere of his works irresistible. If I had the talent (which I most decidedly lack), this is what I would paint.

Tears in rain

Film No Responses »

Jul 242019

Rutger Hauer was a Dutch actor. He is best known perhaps for his role in the science-fiction cult classic Blade Runner, in particular for his improvised tears in rain soliloquy, spoken by the character Roy Batty just before his death:

I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.

I just learned that Hauer himself died a few days ago, after a brief illness, at age 75.

The Great Radio Bonfire

History, Radio No Responses »

Jul 152019

In 1929, probably just weeks before the great stock market crash, people were entertained by the sight of thousands of burning radio sets.

Some suggested that the apparent zeal with which these poor radios were burned had to do with the fact that they were obsolete regenerative receivers, notorious sources of radio frequency interference.

But no, the pictures make it clear that many of these old radios were simple tuned radio frequency (TRF) sets, not regenerative units. Besides, it was not until the early 1930s that superheterodyne receivers began to dominate the market.

No, this was just good old capitalism. People were encouraged to trade in old, “obsolete” radios and purchase new ones. And the wanton destruction of the old sets became a public spectacle.

One can only wonder about the amount of toxic smoke that was produced by this stunt. Not that anyone cared back in 1929.

Bill 21 vs. SJWs

Canada, Film, History, Politics, Religion No Responses »

Jun 182019

So on the one hand… here I am, praising Canada for being true to its values, only to learn yesterday that Quebec’s provincial legislature approved a ban on “religious symbols”. Not once in my life did I worry when I was being served by a person wearing a kippa, a cross, a turban or a headscarf that nature that they might discriminate against me. Should I have been? Perhaps naively, I always felt privileged to live in a society in which persons wearing kippas, crosses, turbans or headscarves were welcome, even into positions of authority. But now I am worried that a person whose religion demands wearing a kippa, a cross, a turban or a headscarf will not be allowed to serve me anymore. And that’s even before I look at the more hypocritical aspects of the bill.

But then, I learn that south of the border, social justice warriors scored another “victory”: at Bowling Green State University, Ohio, they managed to get the name of silent era film star Lillian Gish stripped from the university’s Gish Film Theater because a student union protested on account of her role in the rather racist 1915 silent classic Birth of a Nation.

I fundamentally disagree with the idea of judging the past by the standards of the present. I dare hope that our societies are becoming better over time, and thus our standards are higher, but it is grossly unfair to the memory of those from generations ago when they are judged by standards that did not even exist at the time. But putting all that aside… isn’t it obvious that such acts of cultural intolerance (committed, ironically, in the name of tolerance) are just oil on the fire? That those who are behind the rise of xenophobia, nationalism, racism and intolerance will see such acts as proof that their grievances of valid, that it is truly they (and by “they”, I mean mostly middle-aged or older white men) who are being prosecuted here?

Are these truly the only choices out there? Xenophobic nationalism and Islamophobia vs. social justice militants? Where have all the sane people gone? Please come back wherever you are and help put an end to this madness.

Doris Day, RIP

Film, Music No Responses »

May 132019

I have learned to love the voice of Doris Day.

Her version of No Moon At All is one of my all-time favorites.

Early this morning, I found out that she passed away. May she rest in peace.

Movie night with a Chinese blockbuster

Film No Responses »

May 082019

Today was a most unpleasant day for a whole host of reasons, so by the time I finished my dinner, I needed a distraction.

And then I recalled: Just the other day, I read that China’s most successful sci-fi blockbuster to date, The Wandering Earth, is now on Netflix.

So it was time for movie night. I watched it. And it was… fun.

It is not a flawless movie by any means. And the so-called “science” is as warped, as bogus as the science behind any Hollywood blockbuster.

But it was fast-paced, visually stunning, engaging, and occasionally even had sparks of genuine humor, just in the right quantities.

In short, it is on par with any A-rated sci-fi blockbuster from Hollywood.

One suggestion: Watch it with subtitles in the original Mandarin. This is not meant to be a criticism of the voice actors of the English-language dubbed version. It just… didn’t feel authentic. And you might miss out on subtleties, such as (ok, this is one of the less subtle subtleties, I admit) when one character: a blonde, mixed-race Chinese-Australian man from Beijing who speaks Mandarin as a native throughout the film, suddenly shouts “Fuck this shit! No fucking way!” in unaccented English when he makes an uncharacteristically self-sacrificing move, risking his own life.

Notre-Dame

Culture, History, Religion No Responses »

Apr 152019

I have no words.

Personalized music

Cybernetics, Music, Programming No Responses »

Mar 252019

The other day, I started listening to Google Music’s personalized music stream.

I am suitably impressed. The AI is… uncanny.

Sure, it picked songs that I expressed a preference for, such as songs from the golden age of radio that I happen to enjoy. But as I continue listening, it is presenting an increasingly eclectic, enjoyable selection. Some of it is quite new, from artists I never heard about, yet… it’s music I like. For some reason (maybe because I am in Canada? Or because it knows that I am trying to improve my French? Or was it a preference I once expressed for Édith Piaf?) it started presenting a whole bunch of French music, and again… some of it is quite likable. And now that I purposefully sought out a few classical composers, the AI realized that it can throw classical pieces at me as well, which is how I am suddenly listening to Schubert’s Ave Maria.

As a matter of fact, the eclectic choices made by Google’s AI remind me of two radio programs from the CBC’s past, long gone, long forgotten by most: Juergen Goth’s Disc Drive and Laurie Brown’s The Signal. Both these shows introduced me to music from excellent artists that I would otherwise never have heard about.

And now Google’s AI is doing the same thing.

I am also getting the sense that the more I listen, the bolder the AI becomes as it makes its choices. Instead of confining me to a bubble of musical genres of my own making, it is venturing farther and farther away from my presumed comfort zone.

Which is quite impressive. But also leaves me wondering how long before our machine overlords finally decide to take over.

It’s cold in Toronto, but…

Television, Weather and Climate No Responses »

Mar 242019

Yes, it can get cold in Toronto. Usually not as cold as Ottawa, but winters can still be pretty brutal.

But this brutal, this late in the season?

Yes, according to The Weather Network earlier this morning, the temperature overnight will plummet to -59 degrees Centigrade next weekend.

Yikes. Where is global warming when we need it?

Talented cartoonist (or is it deluded?)

Art, Humor, Personal No Responses »

Feb 242019

In case anyone had doubts, allow me to dispel them by demonstrating just what a talented cartoonist I am:

There. Isn’t that a beautiful qat?

Sorcery or glitch in the matrix?

History, Politics, Television No Responses »

Jan 112019

I first read about this in George Takei’s Twitter feed. Then I checked it on Snopes, and it is true.

There really was a 1958 episode of a television Western (an episode titled The End of the World, of the series Trackdown), in which a character named Trump, a con artist, proposes to build an impenetrable wall to protect a town’s inhabitants.

Snopes confirms: the episode is real. In fact, the full episode is available on YouTube.

Admirable purity

Film, Humor, Politics No Responses »

Jan 092019

This editorial cartoon from the New York Daily News is not new; it seems to be from 2016, drawn by Bill Bramhall. I only just saw it though, in the feed of a Facebook friend.

Yet I think it is even more appropriate today, now that we have seen two years of the Trump presidency.

It of course is a reference to one of the scariest scenes from the 1979 movie Alien. I don’t know if the caption (those words were uttered by Ash, the film’s robot antagonist who is willing to sacrifice the spacecraft’s human crew in order to return the alien to his corporate masters ) was part of the original version of the cartoon, but it is this caption that makes the cartoon especially poignant these days.

Most distant visited object

Music, Space No Responses »

Jan 042019

Even as China was celebrating the first successful landing of a spacecraft on the far side of the Moon, NASA’s New Horizons continued to radio back data from its New Year’s Day encounter with Ultima Thule: a strange, “contact binary” asteroid in the Kuiper belt, far beyond Pluto.

Ultima Thule will remain, for the foreseeable future, the most distant celestial object visited by spacecraft. While there is the odd chance that New Horizons may find another target within range (as determined by the on-board fuel available, which limits trajectory corrections, and the aging of its nuclear power source that provides electricity on board), chances are it won’t happen, and it won’t be until another deep space probe is launched, quite possibly decades from now, before we get a chance to see a world as distant as Ultima Thule.

Another piece of news from the New Horizons project is that so far, the probe found no moon orbiting Ultima Thule. No Moon At All.

https://youtu.be/4GxvSALRLzM

My wife at the Glebe Craft & Artisan Fair

Art, Local Ottawa, Personal No Responses »

Nov 072018

It was a last minute decision, but my wife was once again accepted as an artisan vendor, featuring her beautiful knitted hats, mittens and other things, at the Glebe Community Center’s annual Christmas Craft & Artisan Fair. She attended this fair every year for more than twenty years. I hope she will do well again this year.

I also hope that the Glebe Community Center will forgive my little Photoshopping efforts here, as I decided to copy-and-paste one of Ildiko’s designs onto their card advertising the Fair.

Insane asylums everywhere

Culture, Education, Politics, Science No Responses »

Sep 092018

OK, so we’ve had Trump for nearly two years now, and we know that the White House has become a combination of kindergarten and insane asylum. My conservative friends still support Trump because he “delivers”, and are willing to completely overlook the fact that this president is not only a bumbling dilettante, an offensive excuse of a human being (waste of skin, to borrow a phrase from Lexx, a science-fiction series from a few years ago) but quite possibly a traitor to his nation, too, working for Putin’s Russia.

But if I hoped that Trump’s opposition is any better, they bitterly disappoint each and every day.

Take, for instance, the made-up controversy of a Kavanaugh aide presumably flashing “white power” hand signs while sitting behind Kavanaugh during his Supreme Court hearing, visible to cameras. Never mind that the hand sign was, in fact, a perfectly ordinary OK sign. Never mind that it was a well-documented Internet hoax from last year that suggested that this OK sign is, in fact, a secret hand gesture used by white supremacists. None of that stops many of my liberal friends from tweeting and retweeting the meme, complete with obscenities and death threats. Fact checking is for wimps, I guess.

And now I am reading about the bitter fate of a paper exploring the mathematics behind a controversial hypothesis dating back to Darwin’s times, called the “Greater Male Variability Hypothesis” (GMVH). The GMVH basically asserts that there are more idiots and more geniuses among men than women. It was Darwin who first noted that such greater variability is prevalent across many species in the animal kingdom. But politically correct guardians of science publishing would have none of that. Poor Darwin… the right hates him because he dares to challenge the idea that the world was created 6,000 years ago, but now the left hates him, too, because he dares to offer us politically incorrect science. The paper by Theodore P. Hill was first accepted and then rejected by journals, including a journal that already published the paper online, only to replace it with another a few days later. Never even mind the attack on academic freedom that this represents, but how about blatant sexism? You know, those impressionable young female scientists, fragile little flowers that they are, who cannot handle scientific truth and must be protected at all costs, unlike their ever so manly male colleagues…

One of the guests on Fareed Zakaria’s show today on CNN was Jonathan Haidt, one of the authors of the book, The Coddling of the American Mind. The authors explore the consequences of what they dub “safetyism”: Keeping children away from danger, real or perceived, at all costs, thus denying them a chance to become independent human beings. The result, according to the book, is that rates of anxiety, depression, even suicide are rising at an alarming rate, even as both students and professors on college campuses walk on eggshells, less they offend someone with a careless word, or heaven forbid, a hand gesture…

All in all, I am ready to conclude that the world is going bonkers, and those who seek salvation from Trump’s political opposition on the left (or seek salvation left-wing political opposition to right-wing populism and nativism elsewhere in the world) are deluding themselves.

Museum in flames

Culture No Responses »

Sep 042018

This tragic piece of news from this weekend escaped my attention. Brazil’s National Museum and its collection of some 20 million artifacts, going up in flames in a devastating fire.

And it’s not just artifacts. One thing mentioned was irreplaceable written and audio records, which likely have not yet been digitized, of indigenous languages no longer spoken.

The scale of devastation becomes clear from aerial photos, which show that almost nothing remained between the building’s exterior walls.

It is almost incomprehensible that such a disaster could take place in a national museum. The loss… it’s beyond belief.

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