The Best That Might Have Been?

An internet meme I've seen crop up over the last couple of months has been the re-imagination of movie posters to show some ways that famous movies might have looked if they had been made in different times. What stars would have been cast? What would the promotional art look like? How would a movie's central concepts have been expressed in terms of different marketing schemes? Some of them have been well-done and some of them not so much, but the ones here look very realistic. I'd probably want to see some of those movies even though I hadn't any wish to see them as they actually existed.

Oh, What a Relief It Is!

I had earlier said that former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich presented me with a problem.

Although he would be an awful president and I would really rather not vote for him under most any circumstances you might care to name, he was not so completely rotten that I could in good conscience skip casting a ballot altogether, as I would have if the Republicans nominated Rep. Ron Paul (currently on leave from playing Arlo Givens on Justified) or former corporate CEO Herman Cain (currently enjoying the ignoring he should have been receiving all along).

By robo-calling Holocaust survivors in Florida with claims that rival Mitt Romney, while the governor of Massachusetts, vetoed kosher meals in nursing homes, Mr. Gingrich has removed any qualms I may have had that he would merit a vote. In fact if I had time, I would change my voter registration to Republican long enough to vote against him before switching back to independent.

Should the bizarre become the new normal and Mr. Gingrich receive the GOP nomination, I will join the half of my fellow Americans who go to the polls on election day. But my presidential ballot will remain blank.

Forbidden Colors!

Not actually "forbidden" in any real sense of the word, the color mixtures of red-green and blue-yellow are not easily visible to the human eye. That's because the wavelengths of these pairs cancel each other out when they reach the eye at the same time.

It's especially true with the red-green border -- blue and yellow can mix to show green and red and blue can mix to show purple, but red and green stay distinct in most cases. Apparently, the neurons which carry the "This is red" signal to the brain are shut down by light in the green wavelength of the spectrum. The same thing happens between neurons which register light in the blue and yellow wavelengths: The neurons that carry one signal cancel out the neurons that carry the other one.

A 1983 experiment showed a way that the forbidden colors can be perceived, if stripes of the two opposing colors were put next to each other and subjects stared at them for awhile. A special "eye tracker" held the surface on which the color was found stable relative to the eye, meaning that it was moved if the eyes themselves moved. The subjects' eyes thus didn't shift back and forth between red and green but instead could stay focused on the border. After some time, the border seemed to disappear and the viewers saw a reddish green and a bluish yellow -- the colors previously "forbidden" by the eye's structure.

Later experiments cast some shadows on the earlier ones, but the scientists working from the earlier set of experiments point out that their version used the eye tracker but the later ones didn't. One of them thinks that when the image is stabilized in front of the retina the opponent neurons no longer cancel each other out and the brain can process the dual signals in a way it ordinarily can't.

Which of course won't help you if you claim that your eyes caught the traffic signal as it changed and you couldn't distinguish between red and green, or even if the light was yellow, sir. Especially if the officers got SCMODS.

Brief Moment of Sanity

A rare instance of firing neurons at a major television network prevented the airing of a Fear Factor episode that involved contestants drinking donkey semen, followed by donkey urine.

Fear Factor, for those of my readers who haven't bothered to care about it, is a show in which contestants perform nerve-wracking stunts and consume gross things in order to become full members of the fraternity...wait, no, that was the Omegas in Animal House. On Fear Factor, the person who does all of these things the fastest or something wins some money.

I have always said that were I for some reason to be a contestant on Fear Factor, my goal would be to get through the first stunt round and then eat the gross stuff so I could puke all over the über-obnoxious Joe Rogan.

Fear of an Oozing Planet

As writer Ian O'Neill notes here, some of the planets astronomers have been finding in other solar systems are weird.

Among the weird worlds is 55 Cancri e, a planet about 45 light years from Earth orbiting the star 55 Cancri A. It's roughly the size of Neptune and it orbits its star every 18 hours because it's 26 times as close to its star as Mercury is to our sun.

So you'd think it would be a hot ball of half-melted rock, but that's only part of the story. Immense pressures beneath the surface of the planet mean that liquids which would ordinarily boil away remain liquid in a state called "supercritical fluid state." Under great pressure, liquids don't boil at their usual temperatures. Supercritical carbon dioxide, O'Neill notes, is used to decaffeinate coffee beans.

This means that the supercritical fluids ooze to the surface of the planet through cracks in the overheated rocky surface and there sublimate to make an atmosphere we can actually see from 45 light years away. In other words, this thing is a Neptune-sized super-sauna. It is doubtful that any life exists under such extreme conditions, but scientists have theorized that if it did, it would have very open pores.

Prescience Fiction?

The young Friar avidly consumed science fiction novels, but being young he leaned towards some more action-oriented stuff. The measured, cerebral work of Lithuanian-born Algis Budrys didn't hold his attention, and he returned Budrys' 1977 media-centered tale Michaelmas to the library with only a chapter or two read.

Today's Friar, thanks to a trip to the superb little store Aladdin Book Shoppe, gave Mr. Budrys a second try and found him to have had more than a little prophet in him when he created the story of the famous independent investigative reporter Laurent Michaelmas, pursuing an amazing story of an astronaut's resurrection in 1999.

Michaelmas also happens to more or less rule the world through the secret artificial intelligence he calls Domino, a computer program able to spy out things in almost every corner of the world, eavesdrop on almost any conversation and control what other computers do. Using Domino's abilities and influence, he has calmed most world conflicts and brought countries to work together through the United Nations. On the eve of the millennium, the greatest achievement of his combined space agency is preparing for its launch of a manned mission to the outer planets of the solar system. But the miraculous return of the American mission commander, presumed dead in a training accident, could restart old rivalries. The Soviet Union's astronaut was elevated to command of the mission when the American died and the Soviets are unlikely to quietly accept his demotion. But a nationalist group within the U.S. may have evidence that the accident which injured the American astronaut wasn't an accident. Michaelmas must use every advantage his media celebrity and Domino can give him to find out who is behind these developments before the world resets to its Cold War footing. He also has to see where Clementine Gervaise, a video producer who strongly resembles his late wife, may fit into the situation as well as his own personal life.

Budrys does a very good job of predicting some media developments which played out in real life, such as the kind of information glut brought about by the internet and the meaningless nature of a good deal of modern news, entertainment-based and otherwise. Michaelmas and other independent reporters file their stories via personal recording/transmitting units that also gather up and play back information from other sources -- not unlike the role laptop computers and personal data pads play today. Politically, shady Gulf state oil barons fund unrest in the Middle East similarly to the way they still do today. Budrys has some misses -- having the Soviet Union still around seven or eight years after it fell, for example, and his foreseen level of technology of 1999 both undershoots the level of the actual technology of 1999 and overshoots it. Unless there really is a secret artificial intelligence named Domino hanging around in the electronosphere, in which case, howdy!

Much of the novel is made up of conversations between Michaelmas and Domino as they try to puzzle out what happened with the astronaut's return. They frequently wax philosophical, and Michaelmas' own thoughts about the world he more or less helped to make are sometimes rueful. But Budrys' rich prose and low exposition quotient reduces the boredom level of such passages considerably. Michaelmas is a short 183 pages packed with fascinating retro-speculation, food for thought and an intriguing premise. The young Friar might not have been able to keep with it when it was published, but his older counterpart found it worth the time.

Not Exactly? Exactly!

Talking about a book turned into a post better for the long-post blog, here.