Jay Lake: Writer

[culture] Now in Bakulavision, in which I try my hand at tv criticism

Yesterday in comments ruralwriter asked me about my watching of Star Trek: Enterprise for the first time, given one of my passing remarks thereupon.

I’m watching Bakulavision for the first time, and I’m not finding it as flawed a show as you seemed to opine in a previous post. In part, I find my perspective is probably affected by the fact I tried to go back to watch TNG…and found it unwatchable. I’m curious what you might find problematic in Enterprise.

I’m not much of a television critic, as I haven’t watched broadcast or cable tv since 1994, and have only caught a few series on DVD or Netflix over the years since. (Specifically, the Battlestar Galactica reboot, Firefly, Futurama, part of Red Dwarf and most of Heroes. And now, Star Trek: Enterprise.) But as longtime readers of this blog will note with an absolute lack of suprise, I do has me some opinions. Here’s what I told in comments ruralwriter, slightly edited for clarity.

Well, to be clear, I continue to be entertained by the show. I am still watching it, partway into Season 2 at this point.

However, the place where I really lost faith was the bit partway through Season 1 where Trip is on an alien ship repairing the hallucinogenic warp drive. (Episode 5, Unexpected.) They’re funny-forehead aliens, with a holodeck that recreates a homeworld scene of a boat on an ocean. Yet when the cute female engineer brings Tripp some food, she hands him something that looks like a bowl of jello shots and says, “This is as close as we could come to water.”

Really? Bipedal oxygen breathers with something very similar to a human metabolism from a world with horizon-spanning bodies of water and you don’t a) drink/metabolize water yourselves and b) with starship level technology can’t synthesize one of the simplest chemical compounds in the universe? That’s a seventh-grade Introductory Physical Science howler, apparently for the sake of a little throwaway alien mystique.

That’s when I decided the script writers were basically idiots, or at least were writing at an idiot level of comprehension.

Also, a number of the plots fail on the very simple point that they have a transporter aboard Enterprise. I realize the transporter is new and unproven and possibly unreliable, but it’s been used a few times, and been discussed at other points when not used for some technical reason like the target area being underground (Season 1, episode 6, Terra Nova). Yet the most recent episode I watched was the Season 2 ep where the captain and Reed go back for the lost communicator (Episode 8, The Communicator) and wind up being arrested and almost executed as spies. There’s a huge fooraw about getting down there in the Suliban cell ship, and cultural contamination, and big old shootout in the prison yard, when in fact all they had to do was use the transporter to pluck the prisoners out of their cell. It would have been a twelve-minute short film if the writers had bothered to remember the logic of their own setting.

So, yeah, written at a level of comprehension of both science and plot logic that pretty much fails for me.

So, do I expect too much from television? Like I said, the show continues to entertain me, but I have to turn off my intelligence insulter to watch it. What do you think?

Tags: Culture, Process, television, Videos

Posted: 5:58 am Thu October 27 2011 | Comments(2) |

[culture|politics] Privileging wilful ignorance

Recently in the car I heard part of an OPB broadcast about changes in Oregon law removing religious belief in faith healing as a valid defense for failing to seek needed medical attention for a child. (This in the context of manslaughter and child abuse charges on the death of a child with an otherwise treatable condition.) The host challenged the legislator behind the law as to why they were targeting religious believers as opposed to vaccination deniers.

My reaction was to think that both positions — faith healing and vaccination denial — are positions of wilful ignorance in the face of plain fact. And fundamentally, while adults are free to neglect themselves as see fit, when a parent applies either of those approaches to a child, they are committing abuse. Plain and simple. The child has no choice about participating in the explicitly counterfactual and risky behavior being chosen by the parent. Children deserve better than that kind of wilful ignorance.

Even filtered through my confirmation bias as a liberal-progressive, most of the privileged wilful ignorance I see in our society these days emanates from the religious and political Right wing of our culture. The notable exception to this is the anti-vaccination movement, which is entirely founded on precisely one widely discredited study two decades old, and seems to be a pet theory of a certain New Age-left perspective. Every other significant example I can think of comes from the Right.

I’m talking here specifically about wilful ignorance with a broad base of support or a broad impact. Moon landing denial is a wilful ignorance, but it’s the hobby of a selected few cranks. Holocaust denial has more serious roots and implications, but it’s hardly a major fixture of the American political or social scene. On the other hand, there’s a whole array of conservative hobby horses ranging from evolution denial to climate change denial to stem cell research that have wide ranging implications in electoral politics and educational policy alike.

All of these fixations, no matter where they emanate from, require a belief in a broad-based conspiracy of suppression, a denial of widely available data and plain facts, and a “where there’s smoke there’s fire” kind of logic that says if enough people believe something, it must have validity.

Part of the privileging comes from that idea that if enough people believe something, it must be true. This is the basis of Creationism’s moronic “teach the controversy” mantra. There is no controversy except one arising from wilful ignorance, and that doesn’t deserve privileging as political or social discourse.

Likewise, part of the privileging comes from some of these positions being articles of certain sects of this country’s mainstream Christian faith. Because it’s been defined as an article of faith, evolution denialists can cry foul and claim anti-Christian bigotry to privilege their position. That doesn’t make them an less wrong, of course.

But most of the privileging comes from a deeply cynical long term conservative strategy of building on fear and ignorance to keep the GOP voting base engaged. One of the two major parties of the most powerful country in the world deliberately indulges in all sorts of weirdness from Birtherism to evolution denial to keep their voters activated. That kind of short term electoral thinking comes at the expense of both good government and a rational society.

The principle of crank magnetism weighs in here. (HT to Orac, where I picked this term up.) Once you surrender evidence-based thinking and logic chains in favor of a cherished illogical belief, you strongly risk decoupling your ability to think critically about other matters. Frankly, this is one reason I am an atheist — all faith-based thinking creates this mindset, insofar as I can see. And we can see the evidence in the rapid drift of the Republican party and its standard bearers into increasingly weird territory on a whole host of science and reality type issues. Which then feeds back into deep counterfactual thinking on blackletter issues like budget and tax policy.

I don’t really have any notion how to address this. I do know that undermining the American way of thinking is a great way to score electoral votes, but it’s a lousy way to chart the future course of our country. This is the kind of problem we ought to be able to educate ourselves out of, on the Right and elsewhere (we don’t really have a Left in America), if we’d only listen to reality.

Tags: Culture, Politics

Posted: 5:57 am Fri September 16 2011 | Comments(13) |

[help] Looking for info on genre-friendly college English programs

This is signal boost for a friend, who will pick up feedback here in comments.

Amongst the manifold experiences of my trusty readers, can you all recommend a list of which college English departments are SFF friendly? A student who is applying for college wants to be a creative writing and/or English major, and is also a budding fantasy novelist — and definitely wants to be writing genre fantasy, not “literary” fantasy. While my friend is aware of some of the few graduate programs that are genre-friendly, can the mighty blogospheric brain offer some comments on undergraduate programs?

Many thanks.

Tags: Culture, Help, Writing

Posted: 5:05 am Wed August 17 2011 | Comments(6) |

[culture|tech] Kauai and transportation

I was very much struck by something on Kauai. Here we have a small island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean on which the transportation infrastructure of the continental United States has been fully replicated. The island is chock full of SUVs, pickup trucks, V6 and V8 convertibles, automobiles large and small, serving the 30,000 or so permanent residents and the transient population of several thousand tourists.

Kauai is about 30 miles wide, with half a dozen population centers. More than half the surface area is completely unroaded and unsettled. The longest single point-to-point drive one could possibly make is somewhat less than 100 miles. The total road net can be measured in hundreds of miles, or possibly the very low thousands. The highest speed limit on the island is 50 mph, and the average speed limit is probably well below 30 mph. Also, the traffic gets very congested quite easily at a number of chokepoints.

In other words, limited travel routes, limited destinations and moderate to low travel speeds. And gasoline costs about 150% of West Coast prices, all of it being barged in from elsewhere.

Which would seem to be precisely the use case for electric vehicles. Not to mention making Kauai a terrible place to operate and maintain the high-speed, long-distance vehicles known as the modern automobile.

Kauai would be a perfect laboratory for a seriously ambitious alternative transportation project. At its simplest, a project sponsor could offer a subsidized vehicle swap for extremely efficient automobiles like the Smart car, a move that if widely adopted would likely save a great deal of per-mile transportation costs to the residents, reduce wear and tear on the local roads with a concomitant savings on maintenance and repair for the County of Kauai and the local municipalities, and impact point source pollution on the island, thus improving and preserving the Garden Island’s paradisaical reputation.

More ambitiously, an island-wide electric vehicle infrastructure would be relatively simple to implement, compared to doing the same anywhere in the mainland United States. Or an island-wide hydrogen vehicle infrastructure. Or intelligent guideways for autonomous vehicles. Or something far more radical such as personalized ultralight rail.

Who could do this? The State of Hawaii. The Federal government. The major automakers. Universities with significant transportation research groups. A coalition of all of the above. It seems to me there could be a lot of latent motivation among the local population to participate. Kauai represents about the best set of controlled conditions you could find in the United States for such an effort. Thanks to the limited road distances and constrained travel patterns, the sacrifice of a large-scale transformation of the American automotive tradition would be fairly minimal.

I rather imagine much smarter heads than mine have seen this for years, and quite possibly are working on such a project. I can see all kinds of reasons why this wouldn’t work, would be a bad idea, would cost too much, etc. What I know about the Hawaiian economy and culture could fit easily within an old episode of Hawaii 5-0. Chances are quite strong that I’m full of it here in ways I don’t have the first clue about.

But still, consider the possibilities. Transportation transformation initiatives are proceeding fitfully all over the United States today. Kauai is such a perfect laboratory for trying them out in the real world. Wouldn’t it be interesting to take on those efforts as strongly as possible, in a place where the results would be readily apparent, easily analyzable, and create direct benefits across the board?

Tags: cars, Culture, Kauai, Tech

Posted: 5:41 am Mon May 09 2011 | Comments(4) |

[culture] Genetics, religion and society

A day or ago on my blog, with respect to a story about a “gene for religiosity” supposedly taking over due to disparate birth rates among religious and secular populations, I remarked:

For one thing, if this were true, why hasn’t the effect already been overwhelming? Religion isn’t exactly a modern phenomenon.

ericjamesstone offered some speculation in an interesting response:

One possible explanation would be that up until the birth control era, men and women who were not predisposed toward religiosity still had a lot of offspring, due to engaging in offspring-producing behavior.

Another would be that up until concerns about overpopulation caused people to start limiting the number of children they had based on ideology, non-religious people may not have had any additional reason to limit the number of their offspring as compared to religious people. So while concerns about the expense of having children, etc., might affect religious and non-religious alike, concerns about limiting human impact on the environment might reduce the reproductive rate of the non-religious more than the religious.

While neither especially agreeing nor disagreeing with Eric (unusually so for the two of us, in fact), his remarks got me to thinking. I find I question some of the assumptions he proposes.

Prior to the Industrial Revolution, for most people their best available labor source as well as their most likely form of eldercare (as it were) came from having as many children as possible. Infant mortality rates meant that if you wanted surviving adult children, you didn’t stop to celebrate after the first birth or two and focus on raising them. Offspring-producing behavior was highly incented regardless of one’s faith holding. So I think I’m good with his first ‘graf.

However, I’m not sure it’s ever been true that large number of people limit the number of children they have based on ideology. There’s a very strong inverse correlation between economic status and family size that’s demonstrable over and over again across many societies. I won’t pretend to have any deep understanding of that, but I would hazard a speculation of my own that the marginal cost of another child rises as your planned investment in each child rises. Another mouth to feed can be critically expensive if you don’t have enough food to go around, but if you’re living well enough above subsistence to be worried about things like eventual college tuition (to stretch the point), another mouth is also very expensive within the resource calculus of that family.

But I don’t think that’s ideology. I think that’s response to one’s perception of one’s own resource constraints. What Eric refers to above as “concerns about the expense of having children”. While surely people have restricted child bearing for ideological or religious reasons (when’s the last time you met a Shaker?), so far as I’m aware those positions have never been taken up by mass movements with enough force to impact large-scale demographics. Eric’s “concerns about limiting human impact on the environment”, in other words.

I don’t believe the genetics holds up in any case. So far as I know there’s a tendency to normalize back to the center. This is the central intellectual error of the eugenics movement. I’m also not sure the sociology holds up. To be clear, I’m riffing here. I don’t have research to back any of this up. I’m just responding to speculation with speculation of my own. But it’s definitely an interesting question.

Your thoughts?

Tags: Culture, Religion, Science

Posted: 6:46 am Thu February 03 2011 | Comments(7) |

[culture] The Challenger

In the end, what I had to say about the Challenger explosion I said in fiction.

“The Angle of My Dreams“.

Tags: Culture, Fiction, stories

Posted: 8:24 am Fri January 28 2011 | Comments(5) |

[culture] My one comment on the current steampunk kerfuffle

For those of you who complain that the goggles in steampunk do nothing, what, precisely, do the neck ties in Mad Men do?

This post has been brought to you by Cultural Signifiers ‘r Us.

Tags: Culture, media, steampunk, Writing

Posted: 4:38 pm Thu November 11 2010 | Comments(1) |

[culture] Spirit Day

Originally posted by at Spirit Day

 

It’s been decided. On October 20th, 2010, we will wear purple in honor of the 6 gay boys who committed suicide in recent weeks/months due to homophobic abuse in their homes at at their schools. Purple represents Spirit on the LGBTQ flag and that’s exactly what we’d like all of you to have with you: spirit. Please know that times will get better and that you will meet people who will love you and respect you for who you are, no matter your sexuality. Please wear purple on October 20th. Tell your friends, family, co-workers, neighbors and schools.

RIP Tyler Clementi, Seth Walsh (top)
RIP Justin Aaberg, Raymond Chase (middle)
RIP Asher Brown and Billy Lucas. (bottom)

REBLOG to spread a message of love, unity and peace.

Tags: Culture, gay

Posted: 8:04 pm Sun October 03 2010 | Comments(2) |

[culture] Scenes from an oncology unit

Gentleman with a booming voice is having a loud, lengthy conversation next to us in the surgical oncology waiting room. After a few passive-aggressive dirty looks from me and calendula_witch, I finally go up to the receptionist and ask if this is a cell-phone free zone as most waiting rooms at OHSU are. He’s unsure, and clearly doesn’t want to be drawn in. I return to my seat and the woman with the loud talker looks at me in disgust and says sarcastically, “Really?”

Me: “Yes. This is a pretty quiet place, and his voice carries. It’s quite disruptive.”

Her: “Well, he was having a problem at work.”

Me: “Yes, I know. I heard all of it. But there’s an area down by the elevator lobby for cell phones.”

Her: “He’s quite ill, you know.” (This she tells me in an oncology unit. Ahem.)

Me: “What do you think I’m doing here?”

It’s that weird po-mo etiquette that says objecting to someone’s intrusive cell phone conversation is the height of rudeness, but doesn’t see the intrusive conversation as a problem. She was most put out at my objection.

(The guy was quite apologetic and very nice about it, btw.)

Tags: Calendula, Cancer, Culture, Funny, health

Posted: 6:59 pm Wed September 15 2010 | Comments(3) |

[culture] The politics of American healthcare

Having a bit of a discussion on Facebook with my friend Bryan Schmidt. We don’t agree on much politically, but we manage to get along just fine, and remain happily civil when we get into political interchanges. My response to his remarks from overnight was such that I’ve decided to promote it to a blog post.

Jay, I have a friend in England who hs been denied surgery by their public healthcare several times for surgery the govt claims is non-essential but his doctor says is. In fact more than one doctor because he got multiple opinions hoping to influence the govt decision.

Unlimited government healthcare can be great stuff.

As the case may be, though I’d hardly describe the UK system as “unlimited” anything. I’ll point out also that no system is perfect, but the UK has the virtue of nearly universal coverage without significant compromise in social outcomes measured by infant mortality, average life expectancy, etc., where in many cases their system provides superior outcomes to the American system.

Also, though you did not raise this point as such, I’d like to highlight the fact that many Americans don’t understand the difference between “single payer” and “single provider” systems. This is largely because the GOP, the AMA and the insurance industry have spent the years since WWII throwing up a deliberate cloud of confusion about “socialized medicine” in order to short-circuit any reasonable discussion of these concepts.

The UK has a single provider system. Canada has a single payer system. In the US, the VA medical system is an example of single provider. Medicare is an example of single payer. Oddly, most people in both those systems like them quite a bit, and would be appalled to discover they are victims of socialized medicine.

The issue is not privatization, it’s capitalism. HMOs and drug companies and our culture of greed have created a health care environment where the rich get the best and everyone else settles.

I don’t think we disagree much here. Healthcare is a market segment where the profit motive is fundamentally at odds with the nominal mission, which creates a permanent tension.

The government can’t run health care any better than any other of its failed, mismanaged programs, espc. In this culture of greed.

Now you’re falling into empty conservative rhetoric. Ronald Reagan’s greatest, most successful lie was “Government is the problem.” Government is no more automatically prone to failure than the private sector is automatically prone to success. The private sector fails all the time. Look at the statistics on the number of private sector mergers and acquisitions that meet their stated financial and business goals. It’s abysmally low. Likewise, look at the statistics on how many major IT projects are cancelled or truncated. If the market were the magic conservatives like to think it is, companies would never go out of business.

Similarly, plenty of government programs work very well. Emergency services, for example. Virtually every community in the United States has a publicly-operated fire department, which generally enjoy sufficient funding and little political opposition. And fire departments tend to poll very well. How well would private sector fire departments function?

When you make a baseline assumption that everything government does will be a mismanaged failure, you’ll find plenty of evidence for that due to observational bias.

For whatever it’s worth, I don’t presumptively assume that government healthcare is the answer. As it happens, Medicare is by far the most efficient healthcare funder in this country, measuring by overhead. That is to say, Medicare spends a larger percentage of every dollar on healthcare than any private sector insurance provider. It also polls very well in customer satisfaction. Hardly a failed, mismanaged program.

What government’s proper role here is in regulation. That’s how our system is established, right there in the Constitution, Article I, Section 8, Clause 3 — Congress is given the responsibility “To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes”.

The conservative panacea of industry self-regulation is a laughable myth. This has been demonstrated over and over again through our history, from the Gilded Age to Enron to the Wall Street derivatives nonsense of recent years. For-profit companies are by design and law intended to maximize both revenue and profit. Our current system evaluates this on a quarterly basis, with the “long view” being a year or two. There are explicit structural incentives for private health insurance providers to limit payouts, and reduce or eliminate coverage for expensive insureds. Like, say, me.

So whether government enters the coverage business directly (say, by expanding Medicare) or simply regulates the behavior of insurance providers, it must have a role.

Also, for more on my response to Ronald Reagan’s anti-government rhetoric, see this post of mine.

If we want to change health care, we need to redefine it as about “Care” and “Health,” not a family’s egos. When the Schiavos can waste hundreds of thousands of dollars and resources keeping alive their dead daughter, money and resources better spent on someone with the hope of a quality of life, while other people die of diseases and injuries we long ago learned how to easily treat, the system is broken not from conservatism but from its heart. It’s not about what it’s supposed to be about, but the soft, bleeding heart Americans can’t give up, can’t let people go, can’t allow our loved ones to die. Fine if those poor people do, but not our families.

The Schiavo case is a very odd example to cite in making a conservative argument, given the specifics of it. Her life was prolonged (at great expense, as you point out) against the wishes of her husband through the effort of significant conservative legal and political muscle, given that her parents had rallied the Right-to-Life movement. That was pretty much the opposite of bleeding heart liberalism, forcing government intervention into a private family matter and seeking to remove the decision from the hands of her husband, where it legally and morally rested. Conservative action prolonged Terri Schiavo’s life, extended the expense for years, and made a political and media circus out of the tragedy of her death.

Speaking as someone who’s been at death’s door more than once in the past two and a half years (I came within about two minutes of death at the time of my original ER admission that led to the primary cancer diagnosis), I’d strongly prefer my loved ones not let go and allow me to die. I don’t think it’s a simple as people being willing to let go, and I don’t think that’s a “bleeding heart” issue.

It’s a sick, corrupting philosophy which government control doesn’t change. I’ve been around the health industry all my life. My dad’s a doctor, mom’s a nurse, dad trained paramedics and techs, uncle developed ultrasound tech and died of cancer for his effort — it’s a bigger problem than “limited government.” It’s an attitude.

Again, I don’t think the American dysfunction around end-of-life issues is an inherently political issue, though it is certainly subject to politicization. Palin’s mendacious “death panels” meme is a very good example of conservatives explicitly undermining efforts to make end-of-life care reasonable, for example. The dysfunction is much deeper in our national psyche than that.

Tags: Cancer, Culture, health, healthcare, Politics

Posted: 5:28 am Thu July 29 2010 | Comments(9) |