Ranting Nerd Review: Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Warning: this review will spoil huge chunks of Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

I really liked Star Wars: The Force Awakens. I thought Rey kicked ass, Finn was awesome, and Kylo Ren was whiny. It was great to see the old characters. I even saw it in the theater twice. (I don't remember the last movie I did that for.)

That being said....

I could rant about lots of things about Star Wars: The Force Awakens (like how the Millennium Falcon was just sitting there on Jakku, door open, not locked, and apparently fully fueled), but the almost all of my quibbles, snark, and annoyance comes down to one thing: JJ Abrams does not understand how big space is.

Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.

Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

(This is actually the same problem I had with Abrams' Star Trek reboot. The Federation ships could get from Earth to Vulcan in a few minutes, but when they left again after stranding Kirk on Vulcan's ice moon, they took a long time — long enough to leave the system that Scotty could transport them onto the Enterprise. [Let's ignore for now the total insanity of changing the rules of the fictional universe enough that they could transport across the system, or between star systems like in The Wrath of Khan Strikes BackInto Darkness.])

Let's do the rundown, shall we?

• The Millennium Falcon just happens to end up on Jakku, where Rey is living. (I am favoring the theory that she was a Jedi youngling, sent there — under the watch of Max von Sydow — by Luke and/or Leia to protect her from Kylo Ren.) Maybe this is actually a plot point, but I doubt it.
• Rey and Finn get off of Jakku in the Millennium Falcon, but do not go to hyperdrive. So they are in the same star system as Jakku. And Han Solo and Chewbacca are right there to pick it up. And then Han says something like "Jakku! I knew we should have looked further out on the rim". This is idiotic. And so easy to fix! Just have Han say "I am so glad I rigged the flight beacon so we could find the Falcon when it next went into space.". Again, maybe this is actually a plot point (maybe they were watching over Rey?), but I doubt it.
• They travel to wherever Maz Kanata is ("Takodana", apparently), and they do it very quickly. In the original, it took at least hours (if not days) to travel from Tatooine to Alderaan. This is relatively minor.
• Starkiller Base:
• When they fire the Starkiller Base weapon against the Republic, the beams/whatever are visibly moving across the sky, visible from Takodana, as are the planets that they hit and destroy. This means that Takodana would have to be in the same starsystem as all those planets (because otherwise they wouldn't see the destruction for years). This doesn't really make a lot of sense. And even if those several planets were all within a single star system, the speed of light is still a thing. (Even if Earth had a sister planet in a similar orbit, light would take multiple minutes to get here.) I'm also pretty sure the beams move across the sky faster than the speed of light, too.
• Starkiller Base clearly has to be movable from system to system, because it eats a sun every time it fires. Who the heck would want to do that for a full planet(oid), made mostly of rock? That was crazy enough for the Death Star, which at least was mostly empty space.
• What sun was Starkiller Base eating for the first firing?
• Starkiller Base has a huge trench around its equator, which is at least 10% of its radius deep. The planet(oid) appears to have reasonable gravity, so it's fairly large -- and 10% of its radius would mean (a) a huge amount of digging; and (b) that it would change the weather on the planet by sucking most of the air down into it. (By comparison, the Challenger Deep on Earth is 11km deep, which is 0.17% of the Earth's radius.)
• When Starkiller Base is eating the star in the climactic battle, the star looks to be about as far as the Sun is from Earth, if not farther. The Earth is far enough from the Sun that light takes 8 minutes to get here. But when Starkiller Base starts pulling whatever-it-is they're pulling from the sun, it does it in seconds.
• I don't know how long it takes the Millennium Falcon to get to wherever Luke is, but it sure seemed quick. That could have been easily addressed (just show some shots of them doing various things on ship, in different clothes). But maybe they travelled all the way around the Galaxy in ten minutes.

The thing that bugs me most about this is that it seems so easy to have fixed most of this.

Andrew O'Hehir on the NYPD and its Broader Implications

Andrew O'Hehir is becoming one of my favorite political commentators (he started out as a movie reviewer). This essay about the NYPD mini-"rebellion" is a great example of why. It includes one of the best distillations of American Exceptionalism that I've yet seen:

Rather, these worldviews rest on the idea that America is not defined by its democratic institutions, but by a mystical or spiritual essence that cannot be precisely described — but is understood far better by some of its citizens than by others. If those attuned to this patriotic frequency overwhelmingly tend to be white males, that is not evidence of racism (they might say) but of the clarity and selflessness of their political vision.

A Politician Who Isn't Bragging? Is That Even Allowed?

Via Charlie Pierce, I found the story of Seth Moulton, running for the Massachusetts 6th District seat in the US House of Representatives. Apparently, instead of exaggerating his record, he declined to mention his Bronze Star and other decorations. (Here's another story.)

Is that even allowed?

UPDATE: It does occur to me that the last major politician I know of who did this sort of thing was George McGovern, who flew 35 missions over Nazi-occupied Europe and won the Distinguished Flying Cross. Make of that what you will.

"Douchebag": The White Racial Slur We've All Been Waiting For

Go read it.

The Worst Muse

The Twitter feed of the Worst Muse.

UPDATE: if you liked that, you may also like Guy In Your MFA.

Peter Watts on the "Scorched Earth Society"

Via Boingboing, we have Peter Watts' talk to the Symposium of the International Association of Privacy Professionals: The Scorched Earth Society: A Suicide Bomber's Guide to Online Privacy (PDF). The title is deliberately over-the-top. It's a great essay, covering many topics, among them why "privacy" matters far less than "surveillance".

Programming Sucks

I'm finally getting around to reading and closing out a bunch of browser tabs. This "Programming Sucks" essay is a couple of months old, but it sure is funny and accurate.

Most people don't even know what sysadmins do, but trust me, if they all took a lunch break at the same time they wouldn't make it to the deli before you ran out of bullets protecting your canned goods from roving bands of mutants.

Thought of the Day

If corporations are people, shouldn't the 13th Amendment bar buying and selling them?

Charlie Stross Explains Why This is a Bad Idea

So apparently the US Secret Service wants software to detect sarcasm.

Charlie Stross explains why this is a Bad Idea. Highlights:

...then the Internet happened, and it just so happened to coincide with a flowering of highly politicized and canalized news media channels such that at any given time, whoever is POTUS, around 10% of the US population are convinced that they're a baby-eating lizard-alien in a fleshsuit who is plotting to bring about the downfall of civilization, rather than a middle-aged male politician in a business suit.

and

Indeed, a successful sarcasm detector implies not only an eerily functional human consciousness emulation and a metric fuckton of encoded knowledge about human cultural relationships, but the ability to engage in primate social interaction with sufficient agility to tell when a primate means something, and when a primate is signalling an implicit negation of meaning. Which in turn means the sarcasm detector requires a theory of mind. Hello, singularity! And while I'm at it, can I have a pony? And the moon on a stick, too. KTHX.

What Chris Hadfield's version of "Space Oddity" can tell us about Copyright

Cory Doctorow at Boingboing points us at a very good essay about Chris Hadfield's "Space Oddity" and what it means for copyright in general.

Doctorow's comment bears repeating:

Ironically, if Hadfield had recorded the song and sold it on CD or as an MP3, there would have been no need for him to get a license from Bowie, and no way for Bowie to remove it, because there's a compulsory license for cover songs that sets out how much the performer has to pay the songwriter for each copy sold, but does not give the songwriter the power to veto individual covers.

Daryl Gregory on Investigating the Numinous

Over at tor.com, Daryl Gregory explores the concept of the numinous from a hard-SF viewpoint. He jumps off from Barbara Ehrenreich's essay in the New York Times.

Gregory's core quote:

But that profundity, that quality of realness, is also just a feeling. If one of the symptoms of the numinous was that it felt “fake,” as some visual hallucinations do, neither Ehrenreich nor anyone else would be lobbying for pursuit of external intelligences.

The brain, after all, is lying to us all the time, about things great and small. It edits our sense of time so that neuronal events that reach the brain at separate times seem to occur simultaneously. It makes us see patterns in random noise. And, in its finest deception, it makes us think that there’s a self behind our eyes that’s steering a body around, an illusion so pervasive and natural-feeling that it makes the numinous look like a cheap card trick.

He also links to Ross Douthat's response to Ehrenreich, which leads me to say something I never thought I'd say: Ross Douthat makes more sense than Barbara Ehrenreich (at least on this narrow topic).

Vi Hart on Net Neutrality

As if I didn't already have enough reasons to adore Vi Hart, she has a fantastic explanation of Net Neutrality and why it matters so much.

Why I read Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow comments on Common Core:

The rise of standardized testing, standardized curriculum, and "accountability" are part of the wider phenomenon of framing every question in business terms. In the modern world, the state is a kind of souped up business. That's why we're all "taxpayers" instead of "citizens." "Taxpayer" reframes policy outcomes as a kind of customer-loyalty perk. If your taxes are the locus of your relationship with the state, then people who don't pay taxes -- people too young, old, disabled, or unlucky to be working -- are not entitled to policy outcomes that reflect their needs.

In case we needed any other reason to oppose Larry Summers for Fed Chair...

In case you needed any convincing that Larry Summers should not be Fed Chair, it turns out he opposed Elizabeth Warren to head the CFPB.

Leaded gasoline and the 20th-century crime wave

As I mentioned in my review of Steven Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature, I was surprised that he didn't look at the effects of lead (especially leaded gasoline).

Now, Kevin Drum at Mother Jones is following up on this.

(Hat tip to BoingBoing.)

What Charlie Pierce Said

Charlie Pierce often crystallizes, cogently and entertainingly, something that I think. His endorsement of Barack Obama for re-election is a good example of this.

I miss Molly Ivins

The late great Molly Ivins said of George W. Bush (and Rick Perry): "The next time I tell you someone from Texas should not be president of the United States, please, pay attention."

I feel the same way about Mitt Romney and Massachusetts.

Review: The Better Angels of our Nature, by Steven Pinker

Every so often a book comes along that literally changes the way I think about the world. Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions was probably the <cough> paradigm case for me.

Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined is one of these books.

His core thesis, supported by a huge array of data and documentation, is that violence has declined dramatically over time — not always smoothly, not always consistently, past performance does not guarantee future results — but there's a clear downward trend.

The kernel of insight is one of those really-obvious-in-retrospect ideas that changes perspective on a huge amount of history: if you look at conflicts and categorize them not by how many people they killed, but by how many people they killed per capita (i.e. divided by the world population at the time), then generally speaking, the fraction of people who die in armed conflicts has been getting smaller over time. A lot smaller.

Review: Among Others, by Jo Walton

I recently read Among Others, by Jo Walton, of International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day fame. (She blogs entertainingly at tor.com. She "live-blogged" re-reading the Miles Vorkosigan saga in publication order, which I found quite interesting. And I commend her post on The Suck Fairy.)

Among Others came out last year and got such effusive praise from other writers that I wondered whether it was a case of a book from "a writer's writer", who (similar to "an actor's actor" or "a comedian's comedian") is someone doing stuff that is interesting but not compelling to anyone other than people in the same field. I am happy to have been proven wrong. Or maybe what it is is that Jo Walton is "an SF reader's SF reader", and since I'm an SF reader, it really worked for me. I do fear that it would not work as well for someone who hadn't been an SF-steeped 15-year-old.

Among Others is the (first-person) story of fifteen-year-old Mori (Morwenna), who has fled her half-insane mother in Wales after an accident that killed her twin sister and shattered her leg. In the summer of 1979, she ends up with her father (who had abandoned them as children), because British law prevents her extended family in Wales from being able to take her in. She is sent to an English boarding school, where she is basically the designated outcast: Welsh, semi-crippled, academically talented, and constantly reading SF and fantasy, which buffer her from the pain of her life.

Oh, yeah — there are also fairies and magic. The magic is (usually) subtle and intertwines slowly through the story.

Half-autobiography (Walton explains in an afterward that getting her own childhood right was way harder than historical research), half-fantasy, this setup could have been a twee or treacle disaster. But Mori's whip-smart, clever-but-not-worldly, astringent voice is a treat to read. I laughed out loud multiple times and subjected everyone within earshot to (sometimes extensive) quoting.

You could argue that "not much happens" in the book — most of the action is interior, but that hardly matters. I enjoyed reading it immensely.

As much as anything, the book is a love letter to reading and interacting with other readers, and to libraries and librarians. A central part of the plot is Mori discovering an SF reader group in the town where her school is located; she had performed a small magic to find herself a group with which to fit in (a karass, in Kurt Vonnegut's language from Cat's Cradle), and it is an open question (for Mori herself as well as for us) whether the magic caused this or if it was just luck, or fate. We get to see Mori read, discuss, and analyze books that were just coming out (or just arriving in England), and there are occasional in jokes for those of us who have read the books she's reading (e.g. Mori wonders about the implication of some feature of a book that, which that book's [still-in-the-future for Mori] sequel will address).

If you've ever been fifteen and reading was an escape, or "merely" a joy, and especially if you were reading SF at that point, I strongly recommend Among Others.

Also of potential interest: Jo Walton's "Big Idea" post on John Scalzi's Whatever blog.

Places to purchase Among Others: Amazon BN Powell's Harvard Bookstore

Why I Oppose SOPA and PIPA

I oppose SOPA and PIPA. Here's a good summary why: http://nielsenhayden.com/503_sopa.html.

The argument I included in my notes to my Congressional reps was this:

Imagine that Walmart and Target got up in front of Congress and argued that since people shoplift, they should be able to stop cars and trucks randomly on the streets and highways looking for stolen goods, and to take away drivers licenses at will. They would (I hope!) be laughed out of Washington. But that's effectively what the RIAA and the MPAA are demanding with SOPA and PIPA -- except that it's not just roads, it's the Internet they're demanding police powers over (with no oversight or appeal).

The Internet is the greatest force for free speech since the printing press. It is the medium through which a huge fraction of our news, entertainment, political discussion, and, indeed, of our economy flows.

Intellectual property piracy may be a problem -- although all independent research says that the RIAA and MPAA are exaggerating the problem by several orders of magnitude. Giving the five Hollywood studios, four multinational record labels, and six global publishers the keys to the Internet is an awful idea.