Dune: Beautiful but...

Dune is the newest hit movie being released, and I suspect it will win oodles of awards.

The previews suggest a fight for freedom and ecology, with lots of excitement. But there is more action in the preview than in most of the movie, which concentrates on slow but beautiful scenery instead of less trendy things like story line, action scenes or character development. 

Like the classic film 2001, it seems to be a half hour plot stretched out by scenery.

Dune follows Paul Atreides and his family as they relocate from their home world to the desert planet, Arrakis, nicknamed Dune, the only source in the universe of the mysterious but vital spice, melange. Amongst this nest of secrecy and subterfuge, Paul becomes involved in a political plot with universal consequences. In the midst of a grand betrayal, he is forced into the desert to live with the secretive Fremen. It's there that he begins to uncover the true nature of the enigmatic spice and starts to realize his full potential.

So it is about the prince growing up. But since he is forced into the desert only at the end of this film, presumably we won't see that until part two.

So the main character in Dune is a prince, and he has a nice mom and later you find one of the soldiers is his dad, also a prince, and he has a weird grandmom. I think. I'm not sure. Presumably the scriptwriters think you have read the book, not thrown it away in frustration because it too is a long overboring classic.

The prince and his family were sent to the Spice planet to take it over but in reality it is because the empire wants to kill  the prince, not by slipping him some arsenic or sending in an assassin, or having his ship explode in space, but by a multi million dollar plot to land him on the spice planet where they could do it and blame someone else.

And this is where it become confusion. The soldier I thought was the body guard was his father the Prince, who apparently isn't as important as his son. Not sure why. And his mom is a nice lady, but I was confused why she was there with him. And what was that part about the crazy grandmom? 

Unlike the prince, they seemed to have normal human emotions: the father did show concern and dignity under his stiff upper lip ethos, while his mom showed she could grovel. 

But the prince has a flat affect, and even when he is emoting, it looks like the character is acting a part, not really feeling the emotion.

So yes, there was some acting in the film. And I wish that we could have been shown a bit of their backstory, to put the story into context (the backstory was told in a sentence or two that were mumbled and could easily be missed)

There is a subplot about ecology, and of course, the reason the book was a hit in the 1960s was that it extolled Spice, a hallucinogenic substance that not only gave you visions, but let you navigate safely through the universe. (shades of Silicaon Valley using hallucinogens and mini doses of LSD to get more creativity).

My stepson said it reminded him of Mandalorian. Which it does because of the desert scenery and the CGI space ships.

Yes, but you cared about Mandi, who has a backstory and shows more emotion wearing a mask than the prince shows in his handsome face for the whole movie.

You care about Mando because he has human connections: he cares about baby Yoda. And the other characters are different, colorful, and act human (even the robots) and you get an idea of their history and why they do what they do.

Not so here.

 So yes, go to see the film, which will probably win oodles of awards.

But if you want to laugh and cry watching a film about people you learn to care about, go rent a copy of the Mandelorian, or the original Starwars films.

Podcast of the week

 Mythgard Academy and Tolkien Professor Corey Olsen have an ongoing podcast on sci fi/fantasy books.

The latest: An in depth discussion of Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

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A classic story on how to start a revolution. 

With subplots on group marriage (well, it's Heinlein after all), and a computer who learns to make jokes whose name is Mycroft (quick: Trivia question: Where did he get that name? Answer).

I have the paperback in my collection, but for those who didn't grow up on Heinlein, you can listen to the audiobook here: 

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in other news, we are watching the K drama Vincenzo.

I usually avoid crime dramas, but this one has a lot of twists and turns and unexpected plot lines in it.

How to stop the bad guys from tearing down your building by throwing a party.

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Bringing opera to the masses at a time when the PC are trying to destroy such things:

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Multiverse? Nice theory but....

 Scientific America discusses the problem of the "multiverse" theory. They also mention string theory, which was the big theory a couple years ago but is now falling out of favor.

Mainly posted for later reading.

The reason some scientists take seriously the possibility of a multiverse in which the constants vary in different universes is that it seems to explain the fine-tuning. But on closer examination, the inference from fine-tuning to the multiverse proves to be instance of flawed reasoning. So, what should we make of the fine-tuning? Perhaps there is some other way of explaining it. Or perhaps we just got lucky. ------------------- update: LINK.............. ,,,

the alternative way of explaining all of this is to posit a God as the watchmaker: this could be either pantheism or a personal God of monotheistic religions, neither of which are allowed in materialistic scientific thought.

Ah, but it does explain why there is a fringe theory out there that we live in a computer simulation... 

Scientific American article from 2016 discusses the computer simulation theory. 

Like the "Watchmaker" idea, this is not new: some Eastern religions posit that reality is not real, just an illusion; But the modern version of this posits super intelligent E.T.'s behind this, so they don't have to use the "G" word, although they do admit those super intelligent E.T.'s might be seen as gods.

in case you are wondering, these discussions are not really science: Science is a method of exploring reality, not reality. You posit a theory then do experiments to see if your theory is true or not, and discard the theory if the experiment fails.

The entire discussion is philosophy. And the failure to include the concept of a deity (personal deity of the monotheistic religions, or the pantheistic theory of the world as deity e.g. mother gaia of the new agers) or the theory that reality is an illusion (Eastern religions like Buddhism) means they are censoring input from the world's major religions. And that in itself shows a bias.

all of this is above my head. Father Spizer has a lot of discussions of the subject, and here is one very short one.

 

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update:

Audiobook of the week

Black Holes and Entropy

I will have to listen to this again to understand it, but here is the latest theory on black holes and the Big Bang theory (not the TV show but the beginning of times)

JohnBachelor interviews the author of a new book:

What, if anything, came before the Big Bang? What is the source of order in our universe? What is its ultimate future?

Current understanding of our universe dictates that all matter will eventually thin out to zero density, with huge black holes finally evaporating away into massless energy.

Roger Penrose - one of the most innovative mathematicians of our time - turns around this predominant picture of the universe's "heat death," arguing how the expected ultimate fate of our accelerating, expanding universe can actually be reinterpreted as the "Big Bang" of a new one.

Along the way to this remarkable cosmological picture, Penrose sheds new light on basic principles that underlie the behavior of our universe, describing various standard and nonstandard cosmological models, the fundamental role of the cosmic microwave background, and the key status of black holes. 

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in other words, instead of a "big bang" that gradually disappears into nothing, we have a "yo yo" universe.

for those of you who can't understand entropy, let alone cosmology, here is an explanation of the first and second law of thermodynamics:



Arthur Dent, call your office: you have a reservation at Millaways.

UFO's are back in the news

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so has Russia placed top secret airplanes in Cuba that are scaring the Naval aviators?

more here from a local paper:

these sitings rarely get on MSM, so are hyped and exaggerated in the fake media.

Some are probably misinterpreting natural phenomenon.

Some might be spiritual/paranormal/hallucinations/overactive imagination. These stories have been around for a couple thousand years: and Medieval doctors in England had to treat people with elf related diseases.

(note that abductees in the  1950's were examined by a big loud machine coming down on them, whereas after 1990, the abductees were put into a tube. This suggests the Aliens had updated their equipment from old fashioned x rays to CT scanners.... hmmm...)

When I worked with the Apache, they told me that if I saw a "UFO' I shouldn't worry because it was just another experimental airplane.

The reservation was east of the White Sands testing grounds, and not that far from Roswell...

So probably a lot of sightings are top secret projects (how many of those "triangular" UFO's were stealth fighters?)

And no, this isn't a western phenomenon. I saw a meteorite when I was in Africa; a few weeks later there were reports of people seeing a ship carrying aliens flying nearby.

The locals figured it was just the air force doing their thing and didn't get too upset.

SciFi podcast: Solo

I haven't seen Solo, but the Mythgard Movie club has a podcast discussing the new movie.

Ursula LeGuin

Ursula Le Guin has died.

Le Guin's books melded dragons and wizards with spaceships to tackle earth-bound problems of race, gender and class.

and did this years before it became a fad.

This one's theme is about a ambivalent/changing gender society.

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and this one is a parable that is still so non PC that no one wants to discuss it: it can be interpreted many ways:

 did we build our wealth on the suffering/exploitation of poor people in the US and in the Third world?

alternative interpretation: do we abort our children who get in the way of our careers?



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Mythgard institute has a series of discussions of her novel the Dispossed, about an anarchist society (in contrast with an earth that resembles today's world). More nuanced than you think.

The future of pleasure: Under Old Earth

a lot of the questions of genetic engineering (with underpeople/slaves made from animals and body parts grown on condemned prisoners  or pondering the question: If your personality is put into a computer, are you you?) are found in Cordwainer Smith's haunting science fiction, but until now I hadn't found this story on line: from Project Gutenberg Canada: what happens to your soul if you live forever in happiness?

Under Old Earth:

There was the Instrumentality, with its unceasing labor to keep man man. And there were the citizens who walked in the boulevards before the Rediscovery of Man.

The citizens were happy. They had to be happy. If they were found sad, they were calmed and drugged and changed until they were happy again.

This story concerns three of them: the gambler who took the name Sun-boy, who dared to go down to the Gebiet, who confronted himself before he died; the girl Santuna, who was fulfilled in a thousand ways before she died; and the Lord Sto Odin, a most ancient of days, who knew it all and never dreamed of preventing any of it.

Music runs through this story. The soft sweet music of the Earth Government and the Instrumentality, bland as honey and sickening in the end. The wild illegal pulsations of the Gebiet, where most men were forbidden to enter. Worst of all, the crazy fugues and improper melodies of the Bezirk, closed to men for fifty-seven centuries—opened by accident, found, trespassed in! And with it our story begins.

more of his stories HERE.

a few of the stories were made into audiodramas:

Podcast of the week: Humans and robots

a follow up to an earlier post: Astronomy cast discusses human robot interaction in science fiction

Hello Ms Robot

alJ has a report on social robots in Japan

There's fear in some countries around the world that robotics will eventually replace humans, but, in Japan, hopes are high that human-like robots can solve some of their problems. Japan's population is rapidly declining, and, according to the United Nations, its population is the oldest in the world. One of the suggested solutions is to replace workers with robots and use robots to take care of the elderly.

so Japan's population is disappearing, and even bringing back the sons and daughters of the Japanese diaspora is not enough.

They could, of course, copy western Europe and import workers from Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa, or they could just hire more Filipina caregivers...These workers of course could come on short term visas, like the caregivers in the Middle East: but the problem of those lovely Filipinas is that they tend to marry local men and stay there... and worse: you get mixed race children.

(this is less of a problem in the USA, where few have servants, and because, despite all the Trumpite/right wing racism against immigrants as "the other", or the rigid multicultural/antiamerican racism of the left wing that implies you are stuck in your grandparents culture for life, the dirty little secret is that immigrants to the US quickly morph into... Americans).

Caregiving robots? in today's world, like the "sex robots" sometimes discussed in the press, the dirty little secret is that, so far, such "robots" are not sophisticated...

but with the trend you can either see the robots taking over the world, or see them as slaves for the rich, without human rights

Isaac Asimov wrote a lot about the problem, including the debate if robots would be given human rights..

Or maybe they will just integrate into society, the way immigrants have done in the past: the most famous story of benevolent robot caregivers is this famous Ray Bradbury story that had been made into a Twilight zone story: I sing the Body electric.



that phrase, by the way, comes from a poem by Walt Whitman.

Xenophon redux

The Last Centurion is on Scribd? Who wudda thot?



I read it years ago on Baen... the funniest part (black humor) for me was the start: describing how bureaucrats botched a job to stop the bird flu. I worked in the IHS, and know how bureaucrats put regulations before patients (or common sense)...

in other words, it is a wickedly subversive right wing fascist book...

but I agree with Sarah Hoyt: reading "forbidden books" tend to make one think.

she writes a lot about the PC takeover of science fiction and gamers, (sad puppies and gamergate) by rabidly pc feminist cabal...  which has been subverted because of Amazon and the ability to self publish.

but if I remember correctly, the rest of it resembles Xenophon's march to the sea.

interview with him here:




and you know, even though I don't agree with these writers' opinions, I actually fear to post this blog post for fear of retribution.

ET call home

DavidReneke post about Space weather.

and asks if ET is trying to call us. and discusses the theory that maybe ET killed themselves via climate change or nuclear war.

or maybe they evolved to a higher power, as in Arthur Clarke's story and the New agers theories.

Nah, I sort of agree with Haldane's idea

Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.

there are some right wing Christian sites that wonder if a lot of ET stuff is demonic, but myself, I go along with CSLewis (and Madeline L'Engle and medieval thought) that thinks that some ET's including stories of elves and ancient gods, might be Eldils or angels.... but of course, this doesn't mean they are all good.

sort of related, but this is the theory posted by the Muslim Valkerie in the latest Rick Riordan series: that God is above all, which is why she wears a veil and prays five times a day in between rescuing heroes for Valhalla, but this doesn't negate other stories of gods, demigods, elves and dwarves.

Ahmad al Abbas, call your office...

Recipe of the week

How to make a Demogorgon pie.




not familiar with demogorgons? Ask your kids...

Utopian novel podcast

The podcast from Mythgard, which discusses scifi/fantasy novels, this weeks starts a discussion on the Dispossessed.

 The Dispossessed describes the twin worlds of Anarres, an anarchist world, and Urras, a world much like our own with countries of varied political systems, including two very large countries with systems that are at odds with each other. Told from the perspective of the Anarresti scholar Shevek, the book provides a thoughtful and shrewd look into the various political systems that Shevek encounters, including the one into which he was born, and finds both merits and faults in each. The Dispossessed is part of Le Guin’s larger Hainish cycle, which explores a variety of worlds and social systems.

I had the book in the US but didn't bring it with me to the Philippines.

However, you can listen to the audiobook by visiting Youtube.

part one

Part two 

I usually download these to listen to at my leisure, but lately the downloads won't work on my webbrowser, so I use youku downloader.

so far, no problems with it. and it means I don't have to rely on an iffy wifi to listen.

The Goonies meets D&D

Ruby passed me a copy of the Netflix series Stranger Things that she got from a friend in Manila.

Only enjoyable if you are a Nerd, and understand the references to LOTR, the Goonies, Dungeons and Dragons, Ender's Game, and ET.

With a bit of C2C conspiracy theories about remote viewing experiments by the military thrown in for good measure.



and soon: Season 2.

and maybe we will get answers to the big question:

Will the Eggo's bring El back?

Stories below the fold

Trump as Caesar? Professor Mary Beard says Not exactly: Caesar was bald...

from Popdust:

The Donald Trump hair mystery is one of the greatest enigmas of our time—combover, hair transplant, toupee, just pure and simple follicle faux pas?

and I always assumed he had a hair transplant, since this is cheap and doesn't fall off like a wig/toupe.

now the real story no one is discussing: What about Hillary's hair? 

She was a brunette in college, so should be grey now... and is her hair thinning from her hypothyroidism?

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China dissed Obama when he visited but Trump went into the Lion's den in Mexico and Detroit, and was treated with respect.

I'm not sure what this means, but be afraid, be very afraid...

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for later viewing: AlJ has a series about who is the Caliph and the history of the Caliphate.



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Startrek is 50 years old this year.

Your science lesson for today

Remember how happy everyone was when the DeathStar blew up in SW6?

UH OH. There go the Ewoks.

  Endor Holocaust Question

headsup from SciFi writer SarahHoyt at Instapundit.

Lady Panc Ashash call your office

I posted awhile back about putting personalities into robots, as was seen in the film Chappie  and in the classic short story The Dead Lady of Clown Town

A therapist named Elaine becomes involved with a group of fugitive underpeople, living in a maze of drab service corridors jokingly dubbed "Clown Town", who are being helped by Lady Panc Ashash (a personality recording of a deceased Lady of the Instrumentality, hence the eponymous "Dead Lady") and a telepath called The Hunter. Panc Ashash had predicted Elaine's coming, and how she would help the dog-girl D'joan create history.

Unlike Chappie, where it is assumed the dead characters can be uploaded and live (as does Chappie) by putthing them into a robot brain, Lady Panc Ashash is dead: but a robot has her memories.

But the modern trend is to freeze the brain, so that "you" could be ressurrected in a new, biological brain, not a robot.

Transhumanists who posit such things might lead to immortality might better examine this NYT essay by Doctor Miller who discusses if by freezing your brain, will future scientists be able to rebuild "you" into a new (biological) brain:

Neuroscience is progressing rapidly, but the distance to go in understanding brain function is enormous. It will almost certainly be a very long time before we can hope to preserve a brain in sufficient detail and for sufficient time that some civilization much farther in the future, perhaps thousands or even millions of years from now, might have the technological capacity to “upload” and recreate that individual’s mind.

of course, the real question is why some future scientist would want to do this. I mean, reviving the memories/thoughts/personalities of past celebrities like ______ (fill in blanks with your favorite rich/powerful or even saintly person's name) might sound nice, but would you actually want them running around the world today?



via WSmith who points out this is a religious discussion.

 Yes it is...and variations of it have been pondered in numerous sci fi stories. HERE is a discussion if using the transporter system in Star Trek kills you.

Reading list: E.T. and Baptism

Right now (on Scribd) I am listening to the book Would You baptize an extraterrestrial..

So far it's great: and as a Catholic one is happy that scientists can explain the faith vs science kerfuffle is mainly a straw man argument used to manipulate the public.
One of the authors gives a talk here.