Men In Black A Classic

    Men in Black (1997) [D: Barry Sonnenfeld. Tommy Lee Jones, Will Smith, Linda Fiorentino, Rip Torn et al] I think this is the fourth time I’ve watched this movie. Maybe the fifth. It holds up well.
     It’s inspired by a comic book series that seems to be a rather rambling, unfocused mess. The movie delivers a coherent story, with witty dialogue, well-done riffs on stereotypical characters, a superlative storyboard, and actors who know that to make a fantasy work means hinting at the backstories that animate their roles. The whole crew obviously had fun making this ridiculous story work. Competent photography, well-executed special effects, direction that keeps the story moving fast without ever losing the audience, music and sound that rarely intrude, sly allusions to the tropes of the genre. What more can you ask for?
     It’s the actors that make this fantasy above average. Jones has the world-weary look of a pro who has seen it all, but hangs in there because a) it’s his job; b) he’s good at it; and c) it’s necessary. He’s moderately patient with recruit Will Smith, who delivers his standard smart-ass character, a wise guy who has trouble with authority, but takes the job seriously. All the secondary roles are done well, even the tow-truck driver has a history, hinted at when he reveals a gun tucked into his waistband.
     Movies like this are often underrated. They’re slick, live-action fantasy comic books after all, and what can such a genre teach us about real life? A lot, actually. That loyalty matters. That the cranky outsider is essential precisely because he’s a cranky outsider, and sees things that others miss. That life demands sacrifice. That with luck, a bit of talent, and damn hard work, you can exceed your own expectations. That the universe is a mysterious, dangerous, and wonderful place. And that a movie crew that believes in the project can deliver a classic. ****

Self Service: The illusion of Empowerment

 

 In a current Techopedia article about how Big Data can improve self service, the author claims that self service empowers people to do tasks themselves. Nope. What it actually does is download those tasks onto the customers. However, most of the cost-savings do not accrue to the customers, but to the shareholders.

Image added 2022-03-25. This service station no longer exists.

The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World

    (J. R. Green) The Wonders of the Ancient World (1983) Well done pamphlet about the 7 Wonders. Quick now, can you recite their names? I couldn’t either, still can’t. Anyhow, Green, Assistant Professor of Archaeology at Sydney University (Australia) writes well, packs an immense amount of information into very few words, and manages to get across what these Wonders meant to the Greeks, who made up the list. The illustrations assembled from many medieval and later sources by the Reader’s Digest team (RD take credit for the booklet) suit the text very well, and show how absence of data does not deter people from creating detailed pictures of things they have never seen. Certainly out of print by now, but that’s not the only reason this is a keeper. Lovely little reference, the kind that can settle friendly arguments. ****

Great Model Railroads 2016

     Kalmbach Publishing Co. Great Model Railroads 2016 It’s time to review another of these special annual Model Railroader issues. Model Railroader is a strong proponent of operations: the owners of all the layouts featured here either designed them for operation, or added operations after exposure to the entertainment value of the railroad game. They also want a stage for the trains, the actors in the drama, as Frank Ellison described it in his articles about the Delta Lines, a showcase for railroad-like operations in the 1940s and 50s. So the layouts look good, interpreting or echoing some prototype and set in a recognisable time.
     The articles generally follow the “How I Built My Railroad” format, which will be helpful to the novice. Since the magazine is intended as inspiration and showcase, this makes sense. However, I sometimes wonder whether page after page of basement- or garage-sized layouts might not overwhelm the new modeller, who more likely has a small bedroom or a corner of a family room available. The layouts here range in size from 299 to 1800 square feet. Most are in the 400 square foot range.
     That being said, the photography is excellent, the concepts are interesting, and every builder has solved some common problem in an unusual way. The most successful layouts, to my eyes, are those that use a minimalist approach. That is, design a track plan based on the prototype, which disliked spending unnecessary money, and so tended to build just enough track to get the job done. Use enough scenery to give the trains a setting. Avoid cluttery detail, but set up scenes that tell a story. Use colour and lighting to create the ambience desired, which is of course the illusion that we are looking at a miniature universe. Give the operators what they want while giving the mildly interested hangers-on something to look at and enjoy.
     While these layouts are large, they not complex. They all provide a full evening’s operation, some with a half dozen, other with a dozen or more players. The make playing at railroading easy enough to avoid frustration, and complicated enough to hold interest.
     A few faves:
    The Shasta Route (HO, Southern Pacific), a well thought out train-watchers layout with grand vistas and some switching to keep the puzzle-solvers busy. There’s enough staging to allow for a satisfyingly busy day down by the tracks.
     The Appalachian Route (On30, fictitious), which creates a nice early 20th century ambience for the nostalgia buff who likes to see small trains in large landscapes, and lots of laid back switching in towns and villages hosting small and medium-sized businesses.
     River City (HO, Minneapolis & St Louis), which recreates a few miles of small town railroading, with enough operation to keep a half dozen or so people busy for relaxing evening. The builder kept close to prototype track arrangements, but fudged a bit by including some defunct businesses to increase work for the peddler trains.
     This issue is no longer in print, but back issues are available from Kalmbach, and many hobby shops will still have a few copies on their racks. ***

The Past's Long Shadows: Trophies and Dead Things, by Marcia Muller

     Marcia Muller. Trophies and Dead Things (1990) Sharon McCone tracks a serial killer who’s randomly picking off people, including Perry Hilderley,  a client of Hank’s, colleague and lawyer at the All Souls Legal Cooperative. She solves that one, but the case isn’t over yet. Hilderley has left his fortune to four people whose connections to him and each other are obscure. McCone solves that one, too, but not without two more deaths. Muller likes stories in which the past’s long shadows darken the lives of the more or less innocent young. Here, it’s the anti-Vietnam War protest movement of the 60s. Multiple betrayals and confused motives messed up lives back then; unfinished business prompts some people to lethal action now.
     A plausible plot with not overly-TV’ed characters. The story moves at a leisurely pace. The back-stories of the All Souls characters advance a few steps. A couple of kittens appear here and there, and end up at McCone’s place. Love hurts are healed, somewhat. There’s no mention of fees, especially McCone’s, ever being paid. Well done entertainment, a cut or two above the average for the female PI genre. **½

Schrödinger's Cat has Kittens

     John Gribbin. Schrödinger’s Kittens (1995) Gribbin’s follow-up to his In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat, an earlier attempt to explain quantum mechanics. Here, he begins with an overview of the weird results of experiments inspired by various interpretations of QM, and an overview of several attempts to explain the weirdness. He focusses on non-locality, as evidenced in entanglement for example. Non-locality appears to require instantaneous exchange of information: If you determine the polarisation of one electron, the other instantly “collapses” into the complementary polarisation.
     And so on.
     I’ll note in passing that Gribbin spends a lot of time debunking the Copenhagen Interpretation (CI), which he claims requires a conscious observer. I don’t think it does, but let that pass. Either way, the CI relies on the metaphor of collapsing probability waves.
     Gribbin’s first insight, with which I agree, is that interpretations are metaphors or analogies. The question is of what? Gribbin says “Models!”, by which he means theories. And fails to see that "Models" is another metaphor. But he does say a couple of useful things about the relationship between theories (or models) and what they purport to explain, in particular that they are stories we make up in order to make sense of our observations. I don’t think he emphasises enough that these stories are told in mathematics.
     His second insight is that all experiments, and hence all theories that explain experimental results, are deliberate reductions of degrees of freedom, aka variables. Hold as many variables as possible constant, and see what happens when you mess with the rest, preferably just one if you can manage it. Create a model of just one aspect of reality (whatever it is). E.g., the laws of motion don’t concern themselves with the chemical properties of the objects whose motion they describe.
     So which of the many models of reality embodied in QM and its interpretations is “true”? They all are, as far as they go. Which one goes farthest?
     Gribbin plumps for string theory, which was fairly new in 1995, and Cramer’s transaction interpretation, which hasn’t gained as much traction as string theory has. Cramer points out that a key equation in QM has two solutions, one of which implies that “waves” propagate backwards in time. Gribbin claims that this “myth for our time” resolves the paradoxes and weirdnesses of QM.
     Well, it made sense while I was reading it.
     Throughout his book, Gribbin, like other scientists who’ve offered interpretations of QM, talks as if theories are descriptions of reality. He does this even when he reminds us that any theory that works is true only as far as it goes. Thus the Rutherford atom works just fine in chemistry, which deals with the interactions of the electrons that surround the atom. Newton’s equations work just fine for small jaunts into space. The notion of a photon as a wave works for certain experiments, and not for others.
     By “works”, I infer that Gribbin means “predicts observations accurately to the desired degree of precision”. Gribbin neither states this concept explicitly nor examines what it might mean. I think he doesn’t think about what a model is. I’ve built models, so I’m acutely aware that a model is not a replica of its prototype. You can get close, as with a model steam locomotive that operates on steam. But its boiler will have thicker than scale-size walls because otherwise it would be too weak to hold the necessary steam pressure. Its control handles must be bigger than scale so you can work them. And so on.
     In short, all models compromise, and in doing so they misrepresent what they model. A model is limited to the features that the modeller finds interesting, and leaves out or caricatures everything else. So if we declare that a theory is a model, just what does that imply?

     A theory is a collection of interconnected equations that describe the possible states of some natural system and how it may change states. In this sense, a theory is a model of the system. More precisely, if it’s well enough constructed, it’s an algorithm. Input some data (say, the present position and velocity of a rocket), turn the crank, and output some data (the position and velocity of the rocket a few minutes or days or weeks from now). The simple model of rocket motion ignores the effects of wind as it rises through the atmosphere, and the effects of gravity as passes by the Moon and Mars. To fix that, more complex models are devised. Divergence between calculated and observed values require that the model be rerun with the new actual values. And so on.
     In short, the model supplies information. It tells us where to look for the rocket. It’s not a description of reality, but a recipe for acquiring knowledge. But it’s limited: The Newtonian model tells us about the rocket’s velocity and location, but it doesn’t tell us how the crew is doing, and whether they will survive. For that, we need a different model (and a rather more complicated one).
     A theory is about how we can know some things about some entities. It is not a description of those entities. Philosophically, it’s epistemological, not ontological.
     So also with QM. It doesn’t tell us what an electron is, or even where it will be. It only tells where it’s been, and where it might be if you look again. The probability wave isn’t a description of possible states of the electron, it’s a description of how likely we are to know that the electron is in any given state.
     Even if you don’t go as far down the epistemological path as I’ve gone, you still don’t know what an electron is. All we know of the electron is a list of interactions, and some recipes for predicting which interactions will be observed when and where. Those recipes are amazingly accurate. Well, they amaze people who know how difficult it is to make accurate and precise observations, which includes me. I think it’s the success of QM that tempts physicists into thinking they are talking about reality. They aren’t. They’re talking about interactions, of which observation by a human is merely one more, and which I don’t believe is privileged in any way.
     Still, the book is worth a read if you have the time. It’s a good introduction to some of the wonderful strangeness of our universe. Gribbin has continued to publish his ruminations about QM and many other topics, his website will tell you more. The Wikipedia entry includes a complete bibliography.
     Recommended, but sometimes heavy going. ***
     Reposted 2016-07-13 after accidental deletion.

 

Holmes, the Man of Action.

     Sherlock Holmes: The Game of Shadows (2011) [D: Guy Ritchie. Robert Downey Jr, Jude Law, et al.] Conan Doyle’s Holmes this isn’t, but it’s a consistent re-imagining of the character. Moriarty wants massive profit by selling arms, so he arranges for assassinations intended to provoke war. Holmes and Watson manage to spike his guns, literally. Holmes takes Moriarty with him over the Reichenbach Falls, and the movie ends with Watson typing "The End". Holmes materialises out of the armchair against the wall, and adds a question mark.
     Nicely done as a movie, good script with a clear enough narrative line and enough characterisation to give the actors something to work with. But the trend to CGI-enhanced, over-long “action” sequences doesn’t improve it. Robert Downey Jr does a creditable job as Holmes, Jude Law as Watson, and Kelly Reilly gets a nice bit part as Mary Watson, expert at solving ciphers and codes. Jared Harris’s Moriarty doesn’t convince me as the master of evil. Overall, a comic-book version of Holmes, a pleasant enough entertainment. **½