I’d all but forgotten about the 5 novels by Susan Cooper called the “Dark is Rising” series. Written in the 70s, they’re young-adult fantasy about a boy who discovers that he is the last of a race of mystical beings called the “Old Ones” and is thrust into the great battle between good and evil going on behind the scenes of the “ordinary” world. I read them when I was a kid. They probably went a long way to shape my taste in fantasy.

I recently discovered that a film version will be released in October.

Here’s the awful awful trailer:

They’ve taken a moody and eerie and deliberately-paced book turned it into, well, Harry Potter. At least HP has a soundtrack that isn’t generic pop-rock.

It could be have been a fantastic film, but instead it’ll probably a boy-wizard knock-off. The only potential upside I can think of is the casting of Christopher “Last of the Timelords” Eccleston as the mysterious agent of evil called “The Rider”.

I’ve seen enough movies that I think I’ve figured out how Hollywood works.

Nobody makes any fantasy films for a while. Then, a decent director decides to adapt a famous trilogy about hobbits and wizards, and makes it a real labour of love. It’s well received and makes a bajillion dollars. The bajillion dollars gets Hollywood’s attention.

Meanwhile, a series of books about a boy wizard with unkempt hair and a goofy scar makes a bajillion dollars (that’s a bajillion publishing dollars, which is a smaller amount than a bajillion movie dollars, but still significant), so Hollywood makes a movie adaptation. They do a decent job, but the source material is pretty “hollywood” to begin with so it’s hard to go too far wrong.

At this point, the flood-gates open. Unfortunately, instead of thinking “Hmm, a bunch of fantasy novels were well adapted to film and people liked them, lets find some more novels and make apt film versions”, they think “Fantasy is hot! Lets make 10 more movies exactly like the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter! Find some IP to license!”

And along comes Narnia (which I didn’t actually see, but still felt free to comment on), and now, along comes the Dark is Rising. The book is like Harry Potter in that it’s about a boy with magical powers, but the similarities end there. The movie version, however….

Just once I’d like to see a fantasy film that relies on atmosphere and mood instead of flashy visual effects. The Dark is Rising is the ideal basis for such a film. Bah, so much wasted potential.

Meanwhile, the success of “Transformers” (It’s been reported to me that there are people who think Transformers is the best movie they’ve ever seen…), is spawning some more “cartoon giant robot” movies.

That’s right, Voltron is coming to the big screen.

I’ve just finished reading “Science and the Modern World” by Alfred North Whitehead (he was, among other things, Bertrand Russel’s sidekick on the Principia Mathematica). I’m starting to get a nice little Whitehead collection:

Science and the Modern World is a remarkable book on the history and philosophy of science. It is an adaptation of a series of lectures given by Whitehead in 1925, but it feels as though it could have been published yesterday: I was frequently amazed at how clearly Whitehead expressed ideas that have yet to crystallize for thinkers 80 years on.

For me, the high-point of the book is the end of his chapter called “The Century of Genius”, in which he, in a scant seven pages, lays out exactly how “modern philosophy has been ruined”.

The key to this ruin, he says, is that we treat objects/matter as having only “simple location”—existence at certain points in space, at particular moments in time. He says that this simple (and still widely held) view of matter is responsible for all manner of bugbears from Hume’s problem of induction, to the triumph of a materialistic view of the world that many people instinctively find aesthetically unsatisfying:

“These sensations [cf Locke's secondary qualities: colour, sound, etc. as opposed to primary qualities: mass, shape, etc.] are projected by the mind so as to clothe appropriate bodies in external nature. Thus the bodies are perceived as with qualities which in reality do not belong to them, qualities which in fact are purely the offspring of the mind. Thus nature gets credit for what should in truth be reserved for ourselves: the rose its scent: the nightingale for his song: and the sun for his radiance. The poets are entirely mistaken. They should address their lyrics to themselves, and should turn them into odes of self-congratulation on the excellency of the human mind. Nature is a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colourless; merely the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly.

“However you disguise it, this is the practical outcome of the characteristic scientific philosophy which closed the seventeenth century.” (p. 54).

His solution to these problems is to change the focus from the reality of “timeless” objects to a reality of processes unfolding in time. “The reality is a process,” he says, “It is nonsense to ask if the colour red is real. The colour red is ingredient in the process of realisation.”

I won’t replay the whole argument here (Go and read the book if you’re interested!), but it has numerous contemporary consequences. To take two:

First, aesthetically, the objects of reality takes on a much more organic flavour: all of the world is imbued with the same vital energy normally reserved to characterizes living things in their evolution over time (and why should life get special status? We are all made out of the same “stuff” as everything else, after all…).

Second, it has huge implications for Artificial Intelligence (my area: my supervisor recommended the book to me) and related information processing endeavors: our current approaches to modeling information about the world treat objects as static, atemporal things with particular fixed properties. If reality is actually made of temporal processes… well, you can see where our state-of-the-art is in danger of falling far short.

How has this been ignored for 80 years?

Fantastic book. I highly recommend it for anyone interested in the structure of scientific thought and its various implications.

While waiting at the checkout I spotted this and couldn’t resist. Here’s a photo.

I post it without making any particular comment. Take a close look for yourself.

I’m not sure what I’ll do with it now that I own it. Perhaps I’ll put it on the shelf with my copy of “Baby Names for Dummies”.

You thought I was making that one up, didn’t you?

I seem to be starting a collection of unfortunately-named guide books.

I was reading one of those “Common mistakes newbie writers make” guides, and the author discussed my “personal favorite”: he called it “Failure to deal with consequences”.

If you write a story where they finally do shoot all the lawyers, who’ll try the cases when the guilty are brought to justice? Don’t just ask yourself what if once. After you get your answer, ask yourself what if about the answer, and then ask it about the answer to your answer.

Too often, Science Fiction writers fail to ask “what if” with enough tenacity. When I encounter such an oversight in a book/story/film, I call it a “don’t think” moment, because you either have to turn your brain off and go with it, or have the otherwise enjoyable story ruined.

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My research-mate Dave is leaving UNB and decided to give away a great big pile of his books. Between his generosity and my supervisor snagging some books for me from a retiring prof a few months back, I now own no less than seven books with the title “Artificial Intelligence” (yes, they are all different. AI authors need a bit more creativity in their book-naming).

Other highlights from Dave’s castoffs include the MIT Algorithms book, Bertrand Russel, Freeman Dyson, Richard Dawkin (The Selfish Gene – I’ve now got three Dawkins books, which I think is enough to start calling it a “collection”), and a book on wine.

Who knew that August 25th was also Christmas?

Today as I did some planning for the remaining work on my thesis, the phrase “A journey of thousand miles begins with a single step” popped into my head. It’s a good bit of inspiration for anyone embarking on a large task. I couldn’t quite remember the origin, so I googled it.

It’s from the Tao Te Ching, that wonderful (and short) book of Chinese philosophy, for which there are as many different English translations as there are spring rolls at a Chinese food buffet (next time you’re in Chapters look for the Tao Te Ching shelf…).

I happened across this page that suggested

Rather than emphasizing the first step, Lau Tzu regarded action as something that arises naturally from stillness. Another potential phrasing would be “Even the longest journey must begin where you stand.”

Which made my happy little “go get your work done” slogan sound like it belonged on a motivational poster and not in an ancient wise text. I suppose that means the way the Tao sounds depends a lot on the translator. For example, a quick search turned up an online version that contains the “first step” translation:

Prevent problems before they arise.
Take action before things get out of hand.
The tallest tree
begins as a tiny sprout.
The tallest building
starts with one shovel of dirt.
A journey of a thousand miles
starts with a single foot step.

It’s too bad Lao-Tzu wasn’t around today, he could make a killing on management training seminars. An alternative translation of the same passage reads:

Yet a tree broader than a man can embrace is born of a tiny shoot;
A dam greater than a river can overflow starts with a clod of earth;
A journey of a thousand miles begins at the spot under one’s feet.

Therefore deal with things before they happen;
Create order before there is confusion.

Yesterday something Squire James said made me suddenly want to read some nice lightweight fiction. I haven’t braved a Tom Clancy novel in a year or two, and it suddenly felt like that was exactly what I wanted to read.

I’m not necessarily a Tom Clancy fan, though I did read a lot of his books while I was a teenager. I think my desire to read one now is a bit like wanting to spend the day eating corn chips in front of a Battlestar Galactica original series marathon. It’s not high art, it’s not particularly edifying, but it is good entertainment once in a while.

The only problem is, I was feeling like reading some Clancy right then and, after poking through my bookshelves on the hope that one of his novels had spontaneously generated itself, I was forced to conclude that I had no Tom Clancy to read. I settled instead of Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose”. Eco is a medievalist and scholar who occasionally writes clever novels that draw on his wide knowledge of things historical and religious.

It struck me that this is probably the first time anyone chose Eco as a substitue for Tom Clancy for anything. I mean, there aren’t even any F-16s! Oh well, I guess I’ll cope. =)

I’ve slowly been wading through Richard Dawkins’ The Ancestor’s Tale, which I got for Christmas (take that Dawkins! I religious holiday was the reason you got paid for your book! Muhahahaha – Aside, for those who don’t know, Dawkins is about the most outspoken hardcore atheist there is, and that’s why we love him).

The chapter I’ve just read blew my mind. Using the example of elephant seals, Dawkins discusses how species with large differences between the sexes tend towards polygamy. Elephant seals are an extreme case: the males can weigh up to six times more than the females. They use all that extra body-mass to beat other males into submission and claim large harems. In the extreme case, Dawkins says that in one study of elephant seals, 4% of males accounted for 88% of the next generation. The rest of the males apparently moped around watching TV and never getting laid.

Closer to home, Gorilla males have harems (or no women at all) and tend to be twice the size of gorilla females. Gibbon males and females are equal sized and are very monogamous.

So what of humans? “In most physical sports”, writes Dawkins, “every single one of the world’s top hundred men would beat of every single one of the world’s top hundred women”. There are slight, but noticeable differences between the physical prowess of males and females, in other words. It’s plausible that in our recent evolutionary history, we were a “mildly polygamous”. Crazy!

Meanwhile, I’m barely 5’8″, scrawny, bespectacled, uncoordinated, and single.