Category Archives: Opinion
I’ve been able to almost entirely eliminate commercials and advertising from my day-to-day. One vexing source remains: YouTube. Vexing because, not just commercials between videos, but commercial interruptions (often abruptly timed), and now content providers are promoting products during their videos.
Several of the YouTubers I follow and regard have been promoting Ground News, a different kind of news feed that features bias indicators for each article. It sounded interesting, and I thought I’d give it a try.
Unfortunately, I found it disappointing. And kind of lame.
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5 Comments | tags: Ground News, news, news feed | posted in Opinion, Rant
A badly slanted worldview.
There is a disease of the mind, an awful meme, usually passed from parent to child, that sees a person’s paint job as an all-defining aspect of their personality. This disease blinds the mind’s eye, disabling it from seeing past the color of someone’s skin.
Historically this disease has been one of the great sources of human evil. It’s bestial, a hearkening back to the primitive animal reactions of the perceived other. Tragically, the same minds that rise us so far up give us tremendous power to conceive hate, evil, and destruction.
At its worst, this disease — racism — leads to casual murder of human beings.
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5 Comments | tags: Black Lives Matter, George Floyd, Juneteenth, Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin | posted in Opinion, Politics, Society
I started 2022 with a post titled Things I Think Are True. It was an echo of the Hard Problems post I’d done to start 2021. That earlier post listed a (possibly surprising) number of open questions in physics. Not trivial questions, either, but big ones like: “What is time?” and “What is the shape and size of the universe?”
The post in 2022 was more of an opinion piece about things that, in the context of those open questions, I think are true. Pure speculation on my part, some of it close to mainstream thinking, some of it rather less so (but all, I would argue, grounded in what we do know).
This year, for contrast, I thought I’d make a list of stuff I don’t believe is true.
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16 Comments | tags: causal determinism, computationalism, eternal inflation, ghosts, MWI, String theory, supersymmetry, time travel | posted in Opinion, Physics
Over the last nine posts I’ve been pondering the topic of Who Can Play Who when it comes to adaptations of existing works. To wrap things up, and because ten is a magic number to us humans, it seems reasonable to try to boil it all down to something coherent. If that’s even possible.
I find myself conflicted sometimes between what I’ll call a stage play sensibility that allows huge latitude in casting actors versus my sensibilities about live-action adaptations of well-established existing properties.
I think that changes the equation.
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14 Comments | tags: actors, adaptations, characters, gender, race, women | posted in Movies, Opinion, Society, TV
Speaking of women-centric movies and TV shows, recently I watched Hulu’s Prey (2022), the latest entry in the Predator franchise. Not to be confused with the Aliens vs. Predators mini franchise, the crossover with the Aliens franchise.
The evening was a double feature. First, I watched the second entry in the AvP series, Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem (2007). I can’t say I’m a huge fan of these movies, but I’ve generally enjoyed them. Prey got lots of praise, and I’ve long wanted to see The AvP sequel (although I wasn’t expecting much from it).
As it turned out, AvP: Requiem won the night. Prey has a lot going for it but has too much Mulan and Dances with Wolves for my taste. I found it distracting and detracting.
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6 Comments | tags: aliens, science fiction movies, SF Movies, women | posted in Movies, Opinion
Last time I asked, when it comes to actors playing roles, Who Can Play Who? To what degree do characters, particularly fictional ones, have fixed race or gender? How much latitude exists in adaptations of existing stories? Is there an acceptable spectrum from faithful retelling to jazz riff to based on to inspired by and finally to all but unrecognizable? If not, why not?
Last time I focused on race. This time I’ll focus on the gender side of the equation. Sexual differences and sexual attraction add a large and complex additional dimension. The question expands beyond matters of representation and actor swapping.
For instance, there is the additional notion of the Strong Female Character (SFC).
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14 Comments | tags: actors, female characters, gender, women | posted in Movies, Opinion, Society, TV
I was born in the Bronx and became a young man in Los Angeles, so I lived in racially mixed neighborhoods during my formative years. I’m aghast at the pain we cause over what are essentially paint jobs and accessories. It’s a vast and vital topic — a needed ongoing conversation. For now, suffice that “race” should never be the answer to any important question.
Such as the question of who can — as in “is allowed to” — have what acting roles in movies and TV shows. Specifically, the issue of “race swapping” in previously established roles. Complicating the matter is an asymmetry; swapping X for Y isn’t the same as swapping Y for X.
There is also the question of “gender swapping” and the “strong female character” in modern writing. We’ve forgotten Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor.
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8 Comments | tags: actors, Doctor Who, female characters, gender, James Bond, plays, race, theatre | posted in Movies, Opinion, Society, TV
Everyone knows “Eskimos have 50 words for snow.” Everyone knows that’s an urban myth. Both statements are true for appropriate values of everyone. The truth, of course and as usual, lies in the middle and is both more elusive and more nuanced.
The frosting: as with many of life’s more vexing issues, there is also a definitional component, and things depend, at least somewhat, on perspective. What constitutes a word and how does the basic language structure introduce new concepts, with new words or phrases?
But no matter because this post isn’t about the 50 words for snow.
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17 Comments | tags: language, snow | posted in Opinion, Sunday Sermons
A single line from a blog post I read got me wondering if maybe (just maybe) the answer to a key quantum question has been figuratively lurking under our noses all along.
Put as simply as possible, the question is this: Why is the realm of the very tiny so different from the larger world? (There’s a cosmological question on the other end involving gravity and the realm of the very vast, but that’s another post.)
Here, the answer just might involve the wavelength of matter.
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9 Comments | tags: de Broglie wavelength, QM101, quantum computing, quantum mechanics, qubits | posted in Opinion, Physics
In the last four posts (Quantum Measurement, Wavefunction Collapse, Quantum Decoherence, and Measurement Specifics), I’ve explored the conundrum of measurement in quantum mechanics. As always, you should read those before you read this.
Those posts covered a lot of ground, so here I want to summarize and wrap things up. The bottom line is that we use objects with classical properties to observe objects with quantum properties. Our (classical) detectors are like mousetraps with hair-triggers, using stored energy to amplify a quantum interaction to classical levels.
Also, I never got around to objective collapse. Or spin experiments.
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23 Comments | tags: measurement problem, QM101, quantum mechanics, quantum physics, wave-function | posted in Opinion, Physics
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