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| date | 2000-11-29:16:15 |
| SelfConciousness | There is a difference in the way I solve certain types of technical problem vs. the way I deal with other problems. There's a difference in the structure of the problems themselves that is important to this. Technical problems are local, concrete and finite in a way that most other problems aren't, and so the kind of reasoning we use on them can be much more formal than on most other problems. We generally know all or most of the facts, or have a way of finding them out. We also frequently don't have much sense of what the final solution will look like, so we aren't able to do much except apply formal reasoning and try to work things out. |
| Humans |
There's been something funny happening on the Web. It used to be that whatever I was looking for with a search engine I got hits on sex sites. Especially fun effects appeared with acronyms--back in my SGML days I once got interested in "Computer Based Training", as the CBT industry in the '70's had some influence in the development of the SGML spec. It turns out that CBT is an acronym that is heavily overloaded in some quite unexpected ways. Try it yourself if you like, but be warned that the results may broaden your mind in directions where you'd like to stay narrow. For myself, nothing human is alien to me. In a similar vein, typing in random URL's used to produce sex sites with surprising frequency. In the days before decent search engines my habit was to type in a reasonable guess at a URL, like the company or product name, if I was looking for information on a product. There was a proposal to use the Blowfish encryption software, so in the course of doing some background research I looked at http://www.blowfish.com, which also turned out to be an education, although about sex toys rather than encryption. Now, it seems that where-ever I look there's music. Type in a random string, like "Maxwell's demon" and you'll find that there's a band of that name or someone with an album of that name or songs of that name. The shear quantity of music out there seems to ensure that almost anything will generate hits, some of them pretty close to exact matches. I was searching for some data on x-ray attentuation coefficients yesterday and was getting hits on MP3.com! I use MetaCrawler as my search engine, which up until a couple of months ago seemed to do a pretty good job of filtering out irrelevant stuff. Before that, up until Carolyn suggested MetaCrawler, I used AltaVista, which is good for the degree of control it's advanced search gives you but bad for the promiscuity of its results--almost any query is likely to give you fifty thousand hits, with half of them to do with sex. At least, that's how it was a year ago; maybe today half of them will be about music. |
| Movies |
Saw Gladiator last night. I'm sure it was impressive as hell on the big screen, especially the opening battle scene. I'm going to talk a bit about what happens in the film here, so don't read on if you don't want to know. The film was interesting because while I think it was pretty technically accurate, the plot doesn't resemble history much at all, and the characters are very different from the individuals they are supposed to represent. Commodus was much nastier in real life than in the film, although at least some of the disapprobation he got from later commentators was based on the fact that he liked to have sex and was pretty eclectic in his tastes, and while Christian historians have rarely had any trouble glorifying war-mongers like Marcus Aurelius they have tended to treat sexual lust, rather than lust for killing, as clear evidence of the mark the beast. It appears that the historical Commodus had lusts of all kinds, and used his powers as emperor to sate them. So I can understand why he was given a more sympathetic treatment--if he were depicted as historians portray him he'd be a cartoon, a caricature of pure evil. Are liberties taken with character in the name of art better or worse than liberties taken with plot? I started writing this thinking that the real problem with the film was the liberties taken with the plot, but that was because I appreciated how accurately the general character of the times was depicted. That's one of the film's real strengths--it captures a sense of Rome in 180 A.D. as a real place that's very different from our own place and time. The opening battle scene especially is first rate in this regard. But the plot itself bears almost no resemblance to history, nor do the characters. Although Commodus did participate in the circus, he didn't die there--he was poisoned by his favorite concubine. His sister remarried before the events in the film took place, and there was no Maximus. One could have made just as good a film from the historical material, and even explored the same themes of duty, celebrity and power. The thematic content of the film isn't that high anyway. And it isn't as if the film-makers were stuck with the problem that the producers of U-571 had, of making a story loosely based on a real mission by the Royal Navy appeal to an American audience with very little idea of the actual contributions of the United States to the Battle of the Atlantic. So it isn't clear what the reason was for the film being scripted as it was. I get a sense that the producers wanted to do a remake of Spartacus but didn't care to be compared to the original, so they fabricated a very loosely similar plot set a couple of hundred years later. |