BigDog, an animoid robot

Just check it out. There are seven videos in all.

http://gizmodo.com/368651/new-video-of-bigdog-quadruped-robot-is-so-s

Cute li'l beastie, eh?

Movie review: Away from Her

Away from Her (2007. D: Sarah Polley. Gordon Pinsent, Julie Christie, Olympia Dukakis)

Fiona's developing Alzheimer's results in her going into a long term care home. Grant has a very difficult time adjusting to this. At the home, Fiona starts a relationship with Aubrey, a fellow patient. His wife Marian takes him out of the home because she can't afford to keep him there without selling her house. Fiona becomes depressed. Grant comes to ask Marian to bring Aubrey back for a visit. She refuses. Later, Grant and Marian have sex. Marian sells her house, and brings Aubrey back to the home. When Grant is about to bring him to Fiona, Fiona has a lucid spell, as predicted by the nurse, and recalls that recently Grant was reading her Auden's Letters from Iceland. Grant is ecstatic that she remembers him. Fadeout. And that's the plot, based on an Alice Munro story.

Sarah Polley's adaptation of Munro's story, with its multiple layers and constant moving back and forth in time, is brilliant. The film mimics the unexpected and confusing rememberings that Alzheimer's patients are said to experience. The editing helps, with repetitive establishing shots and subtle shifts in colour, sound, and editing. The three leads are very good. The characters are all vulnerable, and it's that vulnerability that I think makes the film convincing.

Christie's performance as Fiona is wonderful. She changes from knowing that she is deteriorating, to repeating increasingly inappropriate social phrases, to being barely aware of where she is. Pinsent as Grant has captured the essence of a man used to having the supports of career, social rank, and a satisfying marriage, who realises that he can barely survive on his own, and must accept a diminished role in his own life. He doesn't realise that he has been defined by his surroundings and relationships all his life; he has believed that he was somehow self-defined. When Fiona loses her self to Alzheimer's, Grant loses his self too. He says he could not ever bear to be away from her, that's why he married her. In fact, he couldn't be himself without her; and now he must learn how do that. Dukakis as the no-nonsense wife-caregiver, who copes by pretending she is self-sufficient, knows she too needs comfort, even if only the illusion of a brief connection in bed. In the end, we have only ourselves. Those we love, and who love us, no matter how close we are, will always be apart from us.

Yet the movie isn't quite satisfying. It's a depressing story, and has its strongest moments at the beginning, when Fiona charts her own descent into non-self, and decides, while she still can, that it's time for her to go. It's Grant who can't accept the loss, who hopes that the stay in the home will be a short one, who wants to believe that Fiona is just being her quirky self, that therapy will bring her back. Towards the end, as he comes to accept that Fiona must move to the second floor (where the end stage patients are housed), we see that he will somehow survive in his new role as mere visitor. When at the end Fiona has one of those lucid times that the nurse has told Grant she will have, he accepts her embrace, blissed out by her mere presence. Is this a note of hope or of resignation? A recognition that we must accept small mercies gratefully, or the delusion that things will return to normal? Or a setup for even greater heartbreak? The ambiguities arise from the vagueness of Grant's character. The movie doesn't give us the answers, nor should it, but it should give us a clearer sense of how Grant has changed. ***

Solar Power and subsidies

An article in today's New York times reports on thermal solar power plants being built in the SW states. Costs are high, compared to coal fired plants, and a subsidy is provided:

"The solar plants receive a federal tax subsidy, like other types of renewable energy, which makes the economics work for builders but also feeds skepticism about the technology’s long-term potential. “Unless there’s a subsidy involved, it doesn’t seem like a very attractive technology,” said Revis James, a renewables expert at the Electric Power Research Institute, a utility industry consortium."

I don't know what else Mr James said, but his comment is disingenuous. Coal and other fossil fuels receive subsidies of all kinds. The oil and coal companies receive tax rebates to compensate them for the diminishing supplies of coal and oil. The power companies receive rebates for building the plants in the first place, and more rebates for installing pollution control equipment. And everyone involved externalises the costs of whatever pollution remains after scrubbing, and of course the cost of CO2. Externalised costs are indirect subsidies. We all pay for them one way or another.

No one knows exactly what these subsidies amount to in cents/kWh, but there's no question that it's high. One thing is for sure, though: power generated from fossil fuel is not priced to reflect its actual costs. If it did, solar power would look a lot more attractive, and there would be a lot more effort to conserve power. There's not much point in increasing electricity supply if there isn't also an effort to cut electricity use.

The illustration used to help the reader understand the potential of solar thermal power is also interesting: "A megawatt is enough electricity to run 1,000 room air-conditioners at once." One of the things that struck me when I visited south Texas some years ago was the lack of insulation in most of the homes. Proper insulation would cut power consumption for air-conditioning by a third or more. The use of ground effect heat pumps would cut the remaining power demand by 75%. These two modes of conservation should be heavily subsidised. The payback in dollars for each installation would be ten years or less. The payback in energy savings would be substantially less.

Update 2020-03-03: The efficiency  of solar power cells has increased  substantially, They now convert a higher percentage of solar energy into human-usable energy than plants do. Dow has developed a method of painting solar cells onto any surface, which could make just about any surface available for generating power. The other problem of solar (and wind) is storage of surplus power. Betteries, heat sinks, and pumping water back into reservoirs are all feasible, Denmark has become the first country in the world to eliminate all fossil fuel power plants. Oil prices remain low, while extraction costs continue to trend up. Without subsidies the oil business would have folded long ago.

9/11 Conspiracies

     Try the following link: Prison Trains

     Funny, eh?
     Then look at the comments. While most people see the humour (such as it is), a few earnestly propose or point to what they believe is the truth: that 9/11 was "an inside job", conceived to provide excuses for the reduction of civil liberties and engagement in foreign wars.
     Well, the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade centre did provide those excuses, on which the Bush administration has acted with too many signs of glee. Not that they wouldn't have used some other excuse if 9/11 hadn't happened. They have been trying to find an excuse for a pre-emptive attack on Iran (also a former ally in the Middle east, by the way), citing Iran's nuclear weapons program as reason enough. A number of factors, which I needn't enumerate, have prevented them from acting on this excuse.
     I don't think there will be a strike on Iran in the foreseeable future. The next President, Republican or not, will have enough problems to deal with, without adding a gratuitous one.
     The ancient Chinese are said to have cursed their enemies with "May you live in the most interesting of times." We do live in the most interesting of times. But then, we always have.

Theatre Review: The Drawer Boy

The Drawer Boy, by Michael Healey. Gore Bay Players, Gore Bay ON, June 27 2007.

Two bachelor farmers, Morgan and Angus, friends since childhood, live together. Angus has been damaged by war. Morgan tells him the story of how they met two English girls, Sally and Frances, brought them back to Canada, and lost them in a car accident. This story fills in the gaps in Angus's memory, for five minutes or so. Myles, a young actor, asks to stay with them in order to learn about farming, as his collective' is 'writing' a play about farmers. This affords an excuse for a number of more or less corny jokes about how the uncouth farmer takes in the sophisticated city slicker.

But Myles overhears the story, and uses it as his scene in the play. Morgan and Angus see the rehearsal, and when they return from the theatre, Angus remembers not only Myles but the story as well. His memory seems to be restored, until Morgan has to admit that he made up the story. The injury that robbed Angus of his memory also made him moody and depressed, until Sally and Frances left them. Not much of a story, really, but Healey presents and reveals it layer by layer until we are left with what seems to be the truth.

The three actors did a creditable job, making us believe their characters and the gradual unfolding of Angus' and Morgan's history. Myles was played a little too much on one-note, but then he's not a complex character. Naive and trusting, he accepts Morgans deceptions and tricks at face value, and thinks he can somehow cure Angus. He almost succeeds, too. Morgan was more subtly portrayed, and he is a more complex person. Who would have thought that the boy who loved action and adventure, who went to war because he wanted an adventure, would be so sensitive to his friend's needs, and invent such a tale to comfort him? Angus was the most difficult character to play, as his memory loss and repetitive compulsions tempt the actor to caricature, but this did not happen here. The transition into apparently full recovery of memory, his realisation that his memories are false, and that the truth would hurt, and his relapse into the forgetfulness that keeps him happy, were very well done. The set was a simple, semi-abstract portrayal of the kitchen and porch. Lighting shifted attention to the two acting areas, and colours, though simple, effectively signalled shifts in time. The music (what play these days doesn't use a soundtrack as a movie does?) was blessedly unobtrusive, and served more to reinforce the mood than guide it.

All in all, a very good production. Walter Maskel can be proud of his cast and crew. Marie and I thoroughly enjoyed it. If you get a chance to see it, do so.

Book Review: WLT, A Radio Romance

WLT: A Radio Romance by Garrison Keillor (1991)

I vaguely recall negative reviews of this book when it first appeared. It didn't conform to the cosy, down-home image that Keillor's fans had formed of him, based on his Prairie Home Companion tales. It's raunchy, rude, and cynical, yet underlying it is the streak of melancholy that also supports PHC.

Keillor is a master of the deadpan style that make horrors and ecstasies equally mundane - in this, he belongs with Raymond Carver and like-minded writers. The plot line that holds these rambling chapters together is Francis With's rise in radio and his eventual jump to TV. He renames himself Frank White, cultivates a resonant voice, makes himself an indispensable factotum to the station's owners, and after a bizarre road trip (designed to jettison an out-of-date Gospel music group from WLT) walks into a TV studio and starts talking. In the last chapter, told from the point of view of a muck-raking biographer, we learn that White married his sweetheart, had three children, and became the grand old man of television news. Hence the romance of the sub-title: Keillor's novel is a melodramatic fantasy. But despite the weirdness, the story has the ring of truth. That's the secret of Keillor's success as a raconteur. His husky, slightly bemused voice makes us believe even the most bizarre incidents and improbable coincidences. But unlike well-crafted novels, life does consist of bizarre events and improbable coincidences.

If you want to pick a nit, this book at times seemed to go on too long. ***

Book Review: The First Chimpanzee

The First Chimpanzee, by John Gribbin, & Jeremy Cherfas (2001)

An extended (and IMO unnecessarily long) argument that humans, chimps, and gorillas shared a common hominid ancestor some 3 to 4 million years ago. In other words, the chimp-gorilla line split from the human line after the evolution of hominids, not before. That would make chimps and gorillas hominids.

This hypothesis was developed by Sarich and Wilson in the late 1960s, when the molecular clock was first calibrated. The argument rests on molecular biology, and the development of the molecular clock in particular. It's been shown that DNA/RNA and hence proteins evolve at surprisingly steady rates. This enables the calculation not of dates but of ratios of time spans, and hence of the relative positions of divergence points in the evolutionary trees of related species. Add a few dates, and the ratios can be used to locate points in time. Fossil evidence has calibrated the molecular clock pretty accurately for non-human genera, and for vertebrates and chordates generally, so that its application to the primate group should be a no-brainer.

However, paleontologists don't like to have their speculations checked by external objective evidence. Even amongst themselves, they get rather testy when a colleague finds a fossil that requires "re-evaluation" of existing guesses.

Along the way, Gribbin and Cherfas provide reams of interesting data, the most important of which is that the sum total of all humanoid fossils could be laid out on a dining room table. Most of them are teeth. Insofar as I can judge the evidence, I go with Gribbin and Cherfas. Well written, but somewhat whingey in the final chapters, where they discuss the reception of the Sarich-Wilson hypothesis, which they support. So the rejection of that hypothesis becomes quite personal for them. **-½