The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Neil Willcox:

Back when this thread was about half it's current length I meant to add a couple of stories loosely related to the conversation, but failed to get to the end. So a little late;

I was once on a team-building/problem solving course, which would involve rock-climbing, raft-building, an obstacle course on ropes 4 feet off the ground and all kinds of silly games. In our initial talky session, the instructor suggested we might want to come up with some rules or objectives or something like that. Someone suggested that we should support each other and not let anyone fail. "Uh-oh" I thought and suggested that we should support each other, even if someone wants to give up, or when they failed. others re-wrote this and eventually eventually it became "We support each other, whatever we choose to do".

Three of us couldn't/wouldn't cross the rope bridges. We had them cheer us and offer advice on how other people had done the tricky bits of the obstacle course. It worked well.

I'm teaching kids maths at the moment. Some of them aren't doing well, not so much because they are really bad at taking exams. I have a handful of different pieces of advice for them of various levels of woo (breathing/relaxation, imagine yourself back in the classroom/at home/on the beach, find a question you can do and start there) and tell them that "This may not work for you. Everybody gets exam stress in different ways and so needs different ways of coping. Pick one you think helps, but if it doesn't, don't panic, try the next thing we've talked about."

TexAnne @73: They were talking about a Starship Troopers movie, but nothing ever came of it.

That's probably just as well, as they'd have been sure to make two sequels, and Starship Troopers 3 would almost certainly have featured a singing Sky Marshal.

I'm glad none of us had to watch this, especially after attending a beer festival earlier that day.

I'd heard a similar story, but it was about a Tsar. It seems he was inspecting a regiment one day and one of the soldiers was missing a button*. "Get marching" said the Tsar. "Where too?" asked the commander. "To Siberia" said the Tsar.

They were never seen again.

Either this story grew out of the suspiciously unnamed Roman Emperor, or, and I like this idea better, the Tsar had heard the roman story and decided to reenact it.

* Or similar breach of uniform

"In Good SF the science is as accurate as the story is entertaining"

So I could write Good SF with startling inaccurate science as long as I made it really really boring*? Or would it just mean that no one would read it long enough to notice my scientific errors?

* This is probably within my literary and scientific abilities.

Next thing you know, someone is gonna point out that I could head east and end up in Russia or something. And that’s just silly.

and

...was about the same as the distance from Paris to Moscow?

I remember arriving at (I think) the Gare du Nord as a small child and seeing that you could get on a train to Moscow. And then my Dad told me about the Trans-Siberian railway which can take you from Moscow to China.

I hadn't realised that these were places you could buy a ticket and just go to*.

Some years later my brother rode the Trans-Siberian Railway and the agent gave him a bootleg CD of train-related music for something to listen to if the scenery got a bit monotonous, as well as a list of things to look out for with the kilometre marker nearest it.

* This being the 80s, you couldn't as getting a visa etc. was difficult and slow. But still.

Having difficulty getting back together with your partner? K J Parker's Engineer trilogy shows you how.

Also how to lay siege to an impregnable city.

Re: Spock's lateness in saving Romulus:

Perhaps he would have been on time if he hadn't made far, far, far too much "red matter", and maybe if that really fast ship of his would actually go in a straight line.

(A friend tried to get around this which lead me to the conclusion that unless it's the primary of Romulus that goes Supernova, both Spock and the Romulans have months if not years of warning of the event before the arrival of the explosion in the Romulus system. But for the primary of Romulus to be that far off the Main Sequence... and so on and so forth until the whole film makes no damn sense at all.

I enjoyed it a lot.)

My take on Event Horizon is that someone had been to a lecture on relativity and all they'd taken away was the lecturer explaining that FTL travel would be madness and chaos; it would break time and space and anything could happen. Hence when they try to travel FTL, madness and horror breaks in from the outside.

The timing's tight, but it's conceivable that rather than going to a lecture this hypothetical person could have been listening to me and my friends in the student union in 1994 from the next table, immediately written the screenplay and sold it straight away. It would definitely explain this line :"Right. Well, um, using layman's terms... Use a retaining magnetic field to focus a narrow beam of gravitons - these, in turn, fold space-time consistent with Weyl tensor dynamics until the space-time curvature becomes infinitely large, and you produce a singularity. Now, the singularity... "

"Camelot never existed" said the old knight.

"What?" said the boy. "But I heard all the stories - a shining city on the hill, Arthur's seat, the home of the Round Table..."

"Stories? Arthur had plenty of stories. How one day he'd build Camelot, or Tintagel, or Caerleon, or Cardigan, or Carlisle and it would be the great fortress and centre of learning. And then he'd ride off to fight the Saxon invaders or Irish slavers or Frankish raiders and nothing ever got built."

"What about the round table? And the Knights?"

"There was a round table, aye. And every man at it was equal; equal in drunkeness at least. It was that giant cup they'd pass round; no man was allowed to put it down without draining it. The grail they called it. Galahad couldn't hold his ale, but claimed it was the seat that made him fall down, as it had the previous men who'd sat there. But the worst was Lancelot. He was a snake."

"To steal a man's wife is low, and that of your liege lord, lower still..."

"No, he was an actual snake. No legs, forked tongue and scales. He'd ride around on that charger of his, jousting while swigging from a whiskey bottle, sometimes joyful, sometimes dolorous..."

"Dolorous?"

"Aye. Anyway, time's a wasting. Farewell lad."

"Farewell... wait a minute! How did Lancelot open the bottles of whiskey with no hands?"

abi @51, will shetterly @115, I meant to say mid-atlantic rather than mid-american, but was still recovering from attending a beer festival. I'd taken mid-atlantic to be that non-specific american accent that is spoken on TV; shorn of all local words and pronounciations - a very tame american accent slightly influenced by RP. I note that this is the accent I often hear in the voices of spokepeople from Russia, Israel and occasionally from elsewhere in the world; perfect American English that doesn't actually come from anywhere in America.

As it happens I've been working with kids to improve their maths. One of them brought up the "can't we just use a calculator" so I used a real life problem* to demonstrate.

They absolutely and totally need their times tables (although up to 10x10 would do with the method for long multiplication we teach them), and sadly some of them haven't. Which leads us back to why I was hired to help them. The only thing we can really do is get them to practice and practice and hope the knowledge sticks this time.

* from the time I went to a wedding in Rome and I and 3 friends hired a villa for a week for €995. I put down a €300 deposit, so how much did everyone owe who? Apart from proving my point, at least one of them learnt that the Euro is divided into 100 cents**.
** Except in France.

Also, in my head everybody I haven't met has my peculiar mid-Atlantic accent.

In my head, most of you have my English accent* right up to the moment when someone uses an Americanism**, at which point they get a peculiar mid-American accent. I don't know for sure that it's abi's accent, but how many peculiar mid-American accents can there be at Making Light?


* Except clearly pronounced; how I speak English when abroad for example, rather than here in the South East
** Xopher once used a phrase that is very Irish, so sometimes I hear him with a Dublin brogue even though I know that this is wrong.

NelC #53 I think I recall reading that moondust smells of gunpowder, if I'm remembering correctly.

I recall reading and/or hearing that it is a similar smell and it's due to the dust/rock oxidising in the Earth's atmosphere.

Serge @46 - Anthony van Dyck/ Dick van Dyke/ dikes in the Netherlands/ beards - about then we decided not to go any further with the puns; he was still jetlagged and I'd been working.

Bruce Cohen @59 ...they can't imagine any future in which theirs is not the boot and ours is not the face.

In an alternative interpretation, they can't imagine any alternative to boots in faces, so if you aren't the boot, you're the face.

My brother has just returned from Amsterdam sporting a magnificent Van Dyck (or possibly Frank Zappa) style beard and moustache. Clearly this is the influence of the Netherlander love of facial topiary.

On the other hand he's been in various central asian countries for the last 15 months so it may be representative of an Uzbek or Azeri fashion for all I know.

I do wonder if the Blue Penis of Doom was why they had to get the R rating, which seems a bit silly. If ever there was non-sexy nudity, that's it.

Over here in the UK it has an 18 certificate. I assumed that the 18 and/or R were going to be there for the sex and violence, and if you're going to have the high rating anyway, why not make Doctor Manhattan nude and, as inevitably happens when nude men wander around, have his penis visible.

That said, one of my companions noted that he appeared significantly better endowed in the movie than in the comic, and a quick look at the book afterwards confirmed this. I'm tempted to use this a metaphor for the whole translation from comic to film process.

There is a pool table in the movie.

It seems to me that if the credits really are the best part of the film that that would be an extra incentive for Warner to WANT the credits to be seen as widely as practical.

Well, yes. Which is why all the best stunts for action films and all the best jokes for comedies appear in the trailer.

I'm off to see the film this evening. From 300 and the credits though, Zack Snyder looks like he's becoming quite an interesting director. I look forward to seeing what he might do with some original material.

I have just returned from a daylong course given by Edward Tufte.

Great! Hey, do you know if the slides are on...

[Looks over shoulder at bookcase where The Visual Display of Quantitative Information suddenly appears much more menacing.]

Sorry.

In fact, I got the most flak from people who cut class that day, expecting to be able to just skim the slides posted online and get all the information that was in the presentation. They were mad that my slides weren't completely redundant with my talk. (I was inclined to not feel sorry for them, but eventually I gave in and posted my written talk alongside the slides.)

Wasn't there a sub-thread about students not following instructions somewhere around here? Slightly related to that, why is there at least one, and sometimes many, many more pupils who turn up without a pen to every class? And why don't they borrow spares from their friends, rather than expect adults to produce them?

Has anyone here gotten a negative reaction from an audience for not using Powerpoint? How did you deal with it?

A couple of times I've followed a Tufte suggestion by providing a double-sided A3 handout. I think they expected the stuff on the handout to appear on a screen, but were okay when it didn't. Also that did mean they had something to distract them by reading while I warmed up* with my introduction (which was "tell them what you're going to say", so you could listen to that OR read ahead and still not miss the actual talk)

* By which I mean use most of the "um" and "er" quota for the day and try to remember the logical thread that flowed through the presentation.

C. Wingate #247 - Realising I'd skipped over the introduction to the 25 best conservative movies(see sub-thread on following instructions) I looked again. They say "Our approach in selecting them doesn’t rise to the level of an actual methodology, but there was a method to it" and their description makes me think it wasn't a straight vote. Probably most of them were the most popular amongst the of "hundreds of suggestions" though, so my hypothesis shouldn't be taken too seriously.

#226 ajay - I would have been trying to slip the phrase "liberal czarist regime" in, but that's what was on the top of my head too.

Dave Bell #274 - I won't swear this story is true, but a friend who is teaching English in the Canaries has apparently been threatend with being fined for not claiming the money she's owed by Inland Revenue.

C. Wingate #181 The subtext I see running through the whole discussion (except for the discussion of Serenity, which I haven't seen) is that people really like these movies for more basic reasons, but for whatever reason feel they need to put a political spin on them. Well, in this case it's because they were asked to.

For some of them I got the impression they'd picked those movies partly because people would look at it and say "Huh? Ghostbusters?" and then impress us with their deep and innovative thinking (and maybe have people go back and watch it again from a new angle).

If by some mischance I was asked to contribute to a list of conservative movies, I'd probably go out of my way to prove that The Matrix or Sunshine or if I wanted a challenge Battleship Potemkin were actually conservative movies.

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