Two Different Takes on The Same Tweet

On By Christopher LansdownIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

I recently put up a tweet which said:

In case Twitter ever stops working, the text is:

It’s easy to not notice when people exercise self control and don’t say things, especially critical things.

It’s healthy for your relationships to develop the skill of noticing anyway and appreciating them for it.

Then, out of curiosity, I asked my friend Ed Latimore (who, at the time of this writing, has over 200,000 Twitter followers) how he’d have written that tweet. Here’s his response (published with permission, obviously):

It’s important to notice what people *don’t* say…

Especially when tempers run high and it’d be understandable if they said anything wild.

I found the differences to be quite interesting, which is why I’m sharing it.

One obvious difference, of course, is that Ed’s version is more streamlined and easier to read. That’s partially because it’s a skill he’s worked hard at becoming good at and partially because complicated grammar is a weakness of mine. My first sentence involved a double-negative, while Ed rephrased to a single negative, which has an easier flow. The second sentence does flow more easily than the second sentence of mine, but more interesting is how much it diverges. In mine I had in mind the fairly tame, if quite common, case of people complaining or criticizing.

Ed went for the more vivid case of people being angry. The tradeoff is that this is less common—for most of us, anyway—but this makes sense to me as something that will grab attention better, which is important on Twitter since the dominant mode of reading is doomscrolling—or whatever the term for addictively scrolling while skimming to find things to interest one is. There is also an element of Ed’s brand on Twitter, which involves having grown up in the “hood” and in rough circumstances. I suspect that’s less that, though, and more about catching people’s attention.

There is still very much the same idea of noticing what a person prevents themselves from saying; one thing about the context of tempers running high is that it intrinsically suggests people doing what Dale Carnegie famously said most fools do (criticize, condemn, and complain). This does give the benefit of economy of speech, since in Ed’s version there’s no need to spend extra words. The use of “it’d be understandable if they said anything wild” also interests me because it requires imagination on the part of the reader. Exercising that imagination will predispose the reader to sympathy with the other (hypothetical) person. That’s something which was lacking in my version.

Ed’s version also makes greater use of cadence. There’s the emphasis on the word “don’t” followed by an ellipsis, indicating that the reader should take a moment to think about the implication of the sentence. Then there is the specific example; beginning it with the word “especially” serves to emphasize the first sentence as well as shape the the thoughts that the reader had on the first sentence. I can see how that would create greater sympathy between the reader and Ed, as well as making the reader feel greater ownership over the specifics that Ed then gives.

It’s very interesting to see skill at work.

A Funny Place for Advice

On By Christopher LansdownIn Interesting Finds1 Comment

I was recently at a pharmacy where there was a small TV tucked into a corner displaying something I found rather odd:

If you have a hard time reading the text, it says:

Things To Remember When Lifting Weights
When doing squats, remember to keep your knees behind your toes at all times. You also want to make sure that your back is straight and strong and your head is faced forward.
—The Ginger Marie Blog

Those who are familiar with how to squat properly will know that the advice to always keep your knees behind your toes is a myth. Nothing bad happens if your knees go in front of your toes and many people need their knees to go in front of their toes to get full depth—especially olympic weightlifters who regularly bottom out their squat (so called “ass to grass” squatting). Like all lifting, it’s a bad idea to suddenly do it with near-maximal loads instead of working up to it, of course—but that’s true of all ways of doing all lifts. Walking up to a lift you’ve never done before and maxing out on it is a useful ingredient in maximizing your injury risk—though it should be born in mind that strength sports have pretty low injury risks compared to most other sports. But still, do work up to your maximal lift attempts. You’ll also lift more that way.

Also, does anyone really need to be told to keep their head facing forward when squatting? I’ve never seen anyone even attempt to look over their shoulder while squatting.

That’s not really why I bring this up, though. A pharmacy is a very strange place to get strength training advice in a corner overlayed on top of a picture of people on exercise bikes. To give a sense of how odd this is, imaging walking into a powerlifting gym and behind one of the machines is a TV which shows a picture of technicians putting someone into an MRI machine and the text on top says:

Things To Remember When Taking Medicine: When taking an antibiotic, always drink a large glass of whole milk with it, finish the antibiotics course unless otherwise directed by a doctor, and stand upright on the ground while taking it.

This, by the way, is the front page of The Ginger Marie Blog, as of the time I’m writing this post:

I do not say a word against Ms. Ginger Marie, but I must confess I’m curious as to why this particular site was chosen as the place from which to get advice on proper squat technique.

Though, to be fair to Ms. Marie, when I try searching the site for the word “squats” I don’t come up with anything. A google search for “The Ginger Marie Blog” and “squats” and “knees” also turns up no results, though that may not mean much since Google has been pretty bad for the last year or two. Still, it’s possible that the random TV in my local pharmacy is misattributing its dubious advice to Ms. Marie.

I wonder if we can blame AI for this? Perhaps a large language model mangled a quote from a publication like Marie Claire and then mangled the attribution, as well. This seems like the sort of thing that AI might do.

As dystopias go, this is a much nicer one than what most dystopian movies portray.

Chemistry Between Actors

On By Christopher LansdownIn TV & Movies, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Chemistry between actors—specifically romantic chemistry between a male and female actor—is a complex thing and for that reason often taken to be undefinable. While it is certainly too complex to put into precise words, this doesn’t mean that nothing profitable can be said about how to achieve “chemistry.” And we can do that by looking at the term we all use to describe it, “Chemistry,” because, as G.K. Chesterton once said

The phrases of the street are not only forcible but subtle: for a figure of speech can often get into a crack too small for a definition.

Chemistry is the study of how chemicals interact with each other, that is, how they react to each other. Some reactions are not that subtle, but most of the ones studied by chemists are. And this is the essence of “chemistry” between actors. It’s all about how they react to each other’s subtleties.

The art of chemistry, which is just faking attraction—the art of acting is, at its core, faking sincerity—consists of doing the things that people who are attracted to each other actually do. This is subtle, and is divisible into three main parts:

  1. Being extremely attentive to slight signals from the other
  2. Being very attentive to what slight signals one is giving to the other
  3. Being around the other person is just positive in its own right

Taking these in turn, the first of them consists of watching the other carefully. That’s not enough in acting, though, since we (the audience) can’t tell what’s going on in the character’s head. Which isn’t even what’s going on in the actor’s head, so even if we were telepathic it wouldn’t work. What the actor needs to do is to signal that he’s paying careful attention. That is done through reactions—mostly subtle—to the signals the other is giving. The reactions can be fake, but the paying attention can’t be. The actor needs to actually watch the other like a hawk and improvise appropriate sorts of minor reactions. A slight sign of interest should result in a slight indication of excitement or happiness. A slight sign of annoyance or frustration should result in a small sign of concern.

Of course, reactions are not necessarily linear. If the man is in a mood to flirt, the woman showing slight frustration might result in the man doubling-down on the frustrating behavior. The point isn’t the particular reaction, but that there is a reaction. (Some of this will be contained in the dialog, which is the job of the screenwriter, not the actors, but a great deal can be done with stance, facial expression, where the actor looks, etc.)

Another important part of this is that the actors do actually have to look at each other. You can’t be attentive to what is the focus of your attention without looking at it. This can be long, lingering looks; it can be sly, furtive looks stolen when there’s the least chance of them being observed. There’s a wide variety in how to do it, but it must actually get done, and it needs to be connected to the actions which follow it.

The second item—being very attentive to what slight signals one is giving the other—will typically manifest itself in a certain amount of awkwardness, though that’s by no means the only possible approach. It’s somewhat inevitable that people who are preoccupied will take very slightly longer to respond to everything. The feeling of extra care being taken in phrasing, at least some of the time is very helpful to communicate this, too. It will get more subtle the older the characters are, of course, since experience simply helps one execute better. Teenagers can stumble over their words; people in their thirties should have only slight delays if we’re to think of them as adults and not old children.

The third item—being around the other person is positive in its own right—needs to manifest in at least a slight uplift in all reactions to everything. If you’ve got a pitbull clamped onto your leg, it’s still better to have a pitbull clamped onto your leg with the love of your life around than when he’s not there. It’s not that people ignore everything—again, you can at best kind of get away with that in teenage puppy love—but that there is some improvement needs to be evident. This is going to be particularly hard to pull off because it means remembering to (slightly) lower the reactions in all scenes without the love interest, but without that the effect won’t be communicated to the audience.

These three things, if done, will go a long way to giving two actors “chemistry”. It’s not easy, but then there is a reason why people are impressed with good actors.

Debunking Determinism

On By Christopher LansdownIn Atheism, Missing the Mark, YouTube ChannelLeave a comment

Since so many people who commented on my video about how determinism doesn’t exclude God, it excludes human beings seemed to want this video, instead, here’s a video debunking determinism.

This is my first time using a teleprompter (way less work than recording the audio, editing it, then finding images and editing them into the video), and I’m curious how well this works as a format.

Here’s Determinism Doesn’t Exclude God, It Excludes Human Beings:

Frustrations Can Be Very Frustrating

On By Christopher LansdownIn Christianity, Philosophy, UncategorizedLeave a comment

I’ve been trying to work out a way to use a teleprompter to be able to read scripts for my YouTube channel without having to do any editing. (My traditional scripted videos, which use an audio track with pictures meant for illustration is extremely time-consuming and I just don’t have the time right now.) I’m trying the teleprompter because I’ve found that if you can see a human being speaking, it’s not a big deal if they occasionally correct themselves, but it feels really weird for that if it’s a disembodied voice.

Unfortunately, when it comes to figuring out how to read a script off of a teleprompter, there’s no substitute for actually trying the thing and seeing how it goes. Which means I’ve had various takes of five to twenty minutes that were no good and had to be thrown out. In several cases these got junked by having the teleprompter settings off (too slow/wrong font size) or the AI teleprompter which uses speech recognition to advance the words losing track and giving up. In some cases, it was finding all of the settings on my laptop to have it stop going to sleep automatically. And in one case I had a complete take where I accidentally left something in frame which ruined the take.

All of this was very, deeply frustrating. I lost hours to this stuff at a time in my life when minutes are precious.

But that’s just how life goes, sometimes.

If you spend enough time doing creative work to do anything worthwhile, you’re going to encounter frustrations and wastes of time. For this reason, a man’s ability to make worthwhile creative things is only partially determined by his skill. That’s necessary, of course, but it’s not enough on its own. Equally necessary is the ability to not give up in the face of great frustration.

This is, of course, the lesson of the tortoise and the hare. If life is thought of as a race, it is won, not by whoever happens to be fastest at the moment, but by those who do not give up.

This is also why forgiveness is such a critical skill, particularly being able to forgive oneself. It does matter greatly how often one stumbles and falls so long as one gets up every time. Indeed, the man who gives up the first time he falls will fall only once—and will not finish the race.

It’s also the same idea as Woody Allen’s quip that “80 percent of success is showing up.” It’s not so much showing up the first time that’s hard, but showing up all the time.

How Barbieland Makes Sense

On By Christopher LansdownIn TV & Movies, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Full disclosure: I haven’t seen the movie Barbie. Reading the plot synopsis on Wikipedia has ensured that I’m not going to willingly do that. That said, a defense of it has occurred to me which is kind of interesting. (If you haven’t, Barbie (the movie) rejects the idea that the sexes are complementary and meant to work with each other; Barbieland is an idyllic place where women rule and men are subjugated, and the film involves various things where the sexes are antagonistic towards each other, with an uprising of the Kens and their eventual re-subjugation.)

Barbieland is a young girl’s idea of playing with barbies before she’s old enough to know what boys are for.

I mean, even really young children get that to make new children you need a mommy and a daddy, but there is stage in development—frequently around 7 or 8 years old—where children start to figure out sex differences and it’s more than they can handle so they tend to oversimplify to make it manageable. This is an aspect of the classic “girls are annoying/boys are icky” phase.

The Barbie movie’s setting and plot does make a certain sort of sense if it’s meant to be a representation of this childish beginning-of-understanding of the world. It’s not, in general, good to represent childish mistakes in art without at least pointing to what the correction of that mistake is. And it’s a bit concerning that (apparently) many adult women found that this childish misunderstanding of the world resonated with them. That said, I’m not going to draw any conclusions because I haven’t seen the movie or talked in depth with anyone who actually liked it. (The one adult I’ve talked with who watched it said that the first half was very funny and it fell apart in the second half, which isn’t the kind of reaction I would find concerning, if the summary is accurate to the movie.)

Anyway, it’s just a stray thought that occurred to me; I offer it as a possible explanation because it makes the world seem a little less bleak.

The Basil Rathbone Hound of the Baskervilles

On By Christopher LansdownIn Mystery, TV & Movies, UncategorizedLeave a comment

I grew up with Jeremy Brett as the quintessential Sherlock Holmes and I still think that he is—especially his early portrayals of Holmes. In my youth, though, I met people who held that Basil Rathbone was the quintessential Holmes. Eventually this intrigued me enough to look into it.

Basil Rathbone played Holmes fourteen times, though (from what I’ve read) only the first two were big(ish) budget movies which attempted to the faithful to the Conan Doyle stories. The first, and by some accounts, the greatest, of the Basil Rathbone Holmes movies was The Hound of the Baskervilles. So I bought a copy and watched it.

I can definitely see the attraction to Basil Rathbone’s portrayal of Holmes. It doesn’t have Jeremy Brett’s energy and intensity, but he probably looks the part a little more than Jeremy Brett did and he does portray Holmes’ intelligence and confidence as well as Brett did.

The movie itself was curious. There were a few parts which were more faithful to the original story than in the Jeremy Brett version, but for the most part it was considerably less faithful. I think that the unfaithful parts were primarily about making the movie shorter—it had a running time of only an hour and twenty minutes. (The Jeremy Brett version was a full twenty five minutes longer.)

The section with the escaped convict was shortened; we heard nothing about the escaped convict before we saw him and he was discovered almost immediately, as was the connection between Barryman and the convict. In the novel, this formed a considerable part of the initial mystery which Watson investigated. They also omitted Watson’s investigations of the figure who turned out to be Holmes; they had Holmes show up as a peddler trying to sell odds and ends and then leave a note for Watson to come to his hut. Oh, and they also omitted Laura Lyons and completely left out the question of the murder of Sir Charles Baskerville. (I think that this omission is why they added Stapleton trying to shoot Sir Henry with a revolver in London; it gave Holmes a reason to go to Baskerville Hall that wasn’t investigating Sir Charles’ death.)

Also curious was the choice to turns Stapleton’s “sister” into his actual sister. And they had her marry Sir Henry Baskerville. It’s tempting to think that this was meant to make the story more exciting by introducing an uncomplicated romance into the story, but I think that it may have been more about trying to shorten the story. By making turning the relationship into an uncomplicated romance they needed to spend considerably less time on it.

By contrast, I think that the change from exposing Sir Henry to danger from fog to exposing Sir Henry to danger from a broken carriage wheel (and Holmes and Watson arriving late) was really just about saving money. In 1939, it would have been expensive to create a convincing amount of fog. Not impossible, of course; dry ice was commercially manufactured in the US starting in 1925 and putting dry ice into water is a decent way of producing a fair amount of fog. (There are others, and I couldn’t easily find the history of them to know when they were first produced.)

I suspect that cost savings is also why they didn’t get a particularly large dog nor did they put any kind of glowing material on him. (I actually wonder whether they put glowing material on the dog in the Jeremy Brett version; the effect looks a bit weird and it’s possible that it was applied in post-production.)

I’m at a loss to explain why, after Sir Henry Baskerville was mauled by the hound and Holmes and Watson shot the hound, they then had Holmes get imprisoned in the hound’s cave, Stapleton go to Sir Henry and tell Watson Holmes wanted him, then Stapleton try to poison Sir Henry only for Holmes to show up and knock the glass out of Sir Henry’s hand. The speech that Dr. Mortimer gave about how Sherlock Holmes is the greatest Englishman and every man, woman, and child in England sleeps better knowing that Sherlock Holmes is watching over them—that’s not quite the speech, but it’s of that ilk. Anyway, The reason for that speech also escapes me.

For all that, it’s an enjoyable movie.

The timing of it is interesting to consider. It came out in March of 1939, which places it shortly before the start of World War 2 and almost two years before America would enter the war. The Great Depression was in many ways over (at least by economic metrics) though people did not think of the hard times as having past. It had been thirty-seven years since The Hound of the Baskervilles had been published and twelve years since the final Holmes short story was published (The Adventure of Schoscombe Old Place). This, too, may have had an influence on all of the changes. When a thing is sufficiently new, people are more inclined to variation for the sake of it; if you want the original it’s reasonably fresh itself. When enough time passes, faithfulness to the original becomes more valued.

I don’t want to overstate that; true fans of a work will always look for faithfulness in movie adaptations and when things come out of copyright there are always very loose adaptations because that’s easier than writing original stories. For all that, though, I think that there is something to what I said, and the timing of the Basil Rathbone version had some influence on how much of it was changed.

That said, it is interesting to note that—according to Wikipedia—this was the first Holmes film to be set in Victorian times, rather than to be made contemporaneous.

Unfortunately, I don’t have the grand conclusion that I feel like I should have at this point. It’s an interesting film; mostly at this point for historical reasons. I can’t imagine preferring this to the Jeremy Brett version. On the other hand, it probably did help to increase Sherlock Holmes’ popularity; it’s possible for movies to help readership of a book among people who never saw the film. I certainly recommend it if you’re interested in the history of film, detective fiction, or both.

Mystery Novel Cover Iconography

On By Christopher LansdownIn Mystery, Uncategorized1 Comment

The cover art for mystery novels is interesting. Unlike many other popular genres, whose covers feature images depicting the characters in the book doing something which might possibly happen in the book (that part is, admittedly, less common), the covers of mystery novels are frequently iconography. Consider the cover to this Barnes & Noble complete Sherlock Holmes (bought twenty some-odd years ago):

The most prominent is Holmes himself, of course, in his iconic deerstalker cap, inverness coat, and with the curved pipe made iconic for him by William Gillette.

There is also London Bridge, which so far as I know never featured in a Holmes story. Well, not the London Bridge, but a London bridge. That’s actually Tower Bridge. It’s a newer bridge, downstream of London Bridge. It still never featured in a Holmes story, so far as I know, but it is very iconic of London.

There are the buildings of late Victorian London with the smoke coming out of their chimneys and also a street lamp. Also the great Clock Tower (renamed in 2012 to Elizabeth Tower), with the clock popularly known as Big Ben. I don’t believe that it ever featured in a Sherlock Holmes story, either. Like Tower Bridge, though, it is symbolic of London, and Holmes is inextricably bound up with London.

There are also a few symbols of Holmes himself—the curved pipe above the tea pot and the violin. These are quite straight forward.

Then there are symbols of some of the mysteries, or at least of mysteries in general. Starting in the lower left we have an old fashioned key. Certainly keys have fit into Sherlock Holmes stories, though they also work as symbols of detective fiction in general—the detective is always seeking the clue which is the key to the mystery. On the lower right we have a diamond, presumably the blue carbuncle, though it might be a more generic diamond symbolizing the wealth for which people commit crimes.

A little higher we have a silver tea pot—certainly the British in Sherlock Holmes’ time drank a lot of tea. I don’t recall a tea pot being crucial in a Holmes story, though I feel like I might just be forgetful, here. They can easily fit into issues of poisoning, though.

Then we have a smoking gun. What could be more iconic of a murder mystery than a smoking gun? Well, a knife dripping blood, perhaps, but it’s close. There were many Holmes stories featuring guns, though of course the Problem of Thor Bridge comes to mind.

In the top left we have footprints—oh, what can be more iconic of a golden age mystery than footprints? Holmes certainly identified more than his fair share of footprints in the stories.

And then, in the top right, we have Holmes’ powerful magnifying lens. Or, more colloquially, his magnifying glass. What an icon of Sherlock Holmes!

He used a powerful magnifying lens a few times in the stories, of course. Even if he didn’t, it would be such a great symbol, though. A magnifying glass represents sight, as well as focus. One of the great themes of Holmes instructing Watson in his methods is, “you saw, but you did not observe.” There was something similar in a Poirot story, though I can’t find it at the moment. Poirot was remarking that it is not enough to see the facts, you must understand them, or else the pigeons would be the greatest detectives since they see everything that goes on.

The magnifying glass does also symbolize powerful vision, since it makes details greater, but I think that the focus is of greater symbolic importance since the intrinsic tradeoff of the magnifying glass is that you see some things more clearly at the expense of seeing other things not at all. When you look through a magnifying glass, you have a very narrow field of view. It is thus imperative that you look at the right things. And it is that quality of judgement which is really the epitome of the detective, or at least of the most interesting kind of detective. There are the Dr. Thorndykes of the world who do their chemical analyses and present the findings, or even the Encyclopedia Browns of the world who just know an enormous number of facts which occasionally come in handy. But the greatest detectives are those who can see what other men see and understand it where they don’t. And few things represent that as well as does a magnifying glass, since any man can use it, but few know where to look with it.

I Don’t Get the Argument For Agnosticism From Lack of Popularity

On By Christopher LansdownIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

I suspect that this is, in part, an aspect of temperament—I’ve always been fine being alone and unusual—but I really don’t get the argument for agnosticism from lack of popularity. It’s usually a gussied up version of “people don’t all agree and there’s no way to check.” This is, of course, only ever selectively applied.

No one ever says, “there are different ideas of the shape of the world. Some people believe it’s a globe, some that it’s flat, and some that it’s shaped like a velociraptor. The only way to know for sure is to go to space and look, and no one’s flying into space right now and I couldn’t afford the tickets even if they were.”

There are proofs that the earth is a globe available to us here on earth, of course, but there are proofs for God available to us here on earth. The people who apply this kind of argument reject the idea of following arguments because not everyone does, which, if applied consistently, would eliminate quite a lot of knowledge.

Do you believe vaccines work? Guess what, there are people who don’t. Do you think that astrology is bogus? There are people who believe in it. Do you think that the earth orbits the sun? There are people who don’t.

I think that the real answer to this lies in who the person considers part of his society and who he rejects; the people to whom this argument appeals cannot bear of the idea of standing apart from his society, so he falls back on only believing whatever is common to everyone that he considers part of his society.

Which brings me back to temperament; I just don’t get the appeal of that.

Star Trek: Discovery Has Some Bad Writing

On By Christopher LansdownIn TV & Movies, UncategorizedLeave a comment

A friend of mine gave me this link for the first episode of the current (and final) season of Star Trek: Discovery. It starts partway into the episode, but I don’t think that matters. It’s also almost irrelevant who all of the characters are to the plot, which you can take as a bad sign but can also be a criteria of writing that an episode allows new viewers to come on without having to do a lot of reading first.

What really struck me about the episode was the degree to which the writers made decisions which moved the plot forward right before they needed it. Very little was set up beforehand, so everything felt contrived. And stupid.

The episode is mostly a chase for a McGuffin and so the bad guys need to get away a lot. I mean, they don’t need to, per say, but the episode wanted to go with the high-tension constant-near-miss type of chase, so the bad guys had to be always within sight so we could have chases and fast-moving CGI on screen. This meant that the bad guys had to get away a lot, and this was never accomplished through good planning on the bad guy’s part, or superior skill on the bad guy’s part, or really much of anything that the bad guys did right or the good guys did wrong. It was always just a random plot contrivance.

When the bad guys roll some kind of explosive at Captain Burnham, does she move? No. Does she have the ship transport her somewhere else (they have instant teleportation since this is set 800 years later than TNG)? No. She just watches until it cuts a hole in the ship straight through to outer space and sucks Burnham out. Which isn’t a problem because her CGI space suit instantly deploys from her uniform. She then rockets over to the bad guys’ ship (it’s small and nearby, there are only two of them), then magnetizes her boots onto the ship’s hull and stands on it as it goes to warp. She calmly starts using her hand phaser to disable the ship’s engines, which are on the outside for some reason, though nothing ever comes of this because another star trek vessel (who was sent to go on the mission with Burnham’s ship) shows up and puts the ship in a tractor beam. While both are at warp speed.

Which is fine, but apparently the warp bubble is in danger of collapsing for some reason and so Burnham spends a minute or so yelling at the captain of the other ship to disengage while she continues to phaser random stuff on the hull of the bad guys’ ship to no discernable effect.

Then she finally yells at the other captain enough and he terminates the tractor beam and everyone comes out of warp for some reason and Captain Burnham gets off of the bad guys’ ship for some reason and the bad guys deploy warp decoys and warp out, and now it will take too long to track them all down so Captain Burnham has to bring in an old smuggler friend because it takes a thief to catch a thief. Fair enough, though it loses some of the punch when he picks out the correct warp signature in about five seconds.

Then they go to Tatoine where they get to have a speeder bike chase with the bad guys who they narrowly missed (by actually plausible timing) and then somehow the bad guys are on their ship which is flying through the atmosphere and the speeder bikes are keeping up. The bad guys are headed for a tunnel system which will allow them to come out someplace else and then they can go to space and warp out without being detected because the star fleet ships (the same two as before) can only track a ship which is in visual range of the camera, I guess. They say it breathlessly so we’re supposed to not notice. Why no more ships have been assigned to this super important mission (which is revealed to be hundreds of years old) is also not explained.

Then someone identifies the tunnel that they’re going to use because there’s an explosive charge on it and Captain Burnham is against shooting it because there’s a 30% chance of it causing an avalanche which would kill lots of innocent people somewhere and the other Captain thinks it’s the only way and orders his ship to do it and things are fine but then the bad guys use a photon torpedo to trigger an avalanche and Burnham blames the other captain, saying, “you gave them an idea” as if the bad guys aren’t the ones who planted an explosive charge on the tunnel.

Then the avalanche happens and for minutes heads over across a flat plain towards the Tatoine settlement that they had been speeder biking away from for the last several minutes and now are speeder biking towards and all of these innocent people will be killed unless both star ships shove their noses into the ground and merge their shields and oh man is it really stupid.

I can’t say for sure whether there’s some possible way for an avalanche (of rocks and dust, not snow) to travel at full speed along a plain to a place so far away that the mountains look small, but it certainly isn’t plausible. Moreover, with the absurdly advanced technology of Burnham’s ship, it’s a bit ridiculous that putting both ships in the way is the only possible way to save the settlement. They don’t even try phasering the avalanche, they just state it won’t work. But, dramatically, it really should work. It really just feels like they need something to happen so damn it, this is the way things work this minute.

And then, after this ridiculous maneuver where both ships slam their noses into the ground for no obvious reason and the merged shields hold and the settlement is saved, as the dust settles the bad guys warp out and oh well, the ships couldn’t track them because… we’re not told.

And then Captain Burnham and her smuggler friend just sit around for a while and talk about old times as if the episode is over and we’re in a post-credits sequence. It makes no sense why there’s zero urgency to do anything about the McGuffin anymore. Including from the guy in charge of the centuries-old super-secret code double-red mission who’s been laser-focused on the galaxy-shattering consequences of getting the McGuffin before the bad guys do and who has emphasized that lethal force is authorized because it’s this damn important.

Characters’ motivations last only as long as the scene they’re in requires, technology only works whenever the plot wants it to, Bad Guys who will blithely kill (or at least endanger) thousands of innocent people set their weapons to stun when shooting our heroes, Captain Burnham has the priorities of a 1980s Sunday morning cartoon super hero, which wouldn’t be bad if it wasn’t done with no humility and everyone likes her anyway despite her being basically an anti-social narcissistic egomaniac. And also being a soldier on a mission.

The thing is, 1980s cartoon superheroes had the priorities they did because they were essentially reactive. Life was going on and then a super-villain endangered innocent people and so they went and protected those innocent people. That’s good and morally coherent.

This can be complicated by introducing other factors, like a much bigger threat to far more people that the superhero needs to stop, and so he may not have time to rescue just one person. That can make for painful dilemmas where the hero needs the maturity to recognize that no everything is given to everyone and maybe saving that one person wasn’t given to you even though, if you forsook what was actually given to you, you could have done it. Captain Burnham just ignores the bigger issues whenever she doesn’t feel like paying attention to them, which is extremely immature and irresponsible.

It’s good to stop and smell the flowers, but not when you’re rushing a transplant organ to a recipient and it needs to get there within the hour or the organ will die and then the recipient will too.

It’s weird to me how utterly bad this writing is. It would not have been hard to make the script a thousand fold tighter than the plot-hole-ridden contrived mess it was.

Also, and this is related to the entire series, they’ve cranked the technology level up so high that location barely matters anymore. People hold conversations with other people around the universe in realtime, people can find and bring aboard people from far-off planets in minutes—basically, location barely imposes any restraints anymore. And the result is that nothing feel real. It takes on an almost dreamlike quality to it which is not pleasant. (It’s also responsible for the plot being lace, since without limitations it’s impossible to have logically consistent problems.)

It’s really cool for people to be able to teleport around like Q, but the problem with the rule of cool is that you have to be careful with it or you’ll get frostbite.

Delicate Things Don’t Work Well as Inter-Generational Traditions

On By Christopher LansdownIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

I recently saw a story going around about a grandmother who wanted to pass on the sets of fancy plates which she inherited from her parents and her children rejecting them as to her children they were just fancy display items in a case near the dinner table but not actually involved with dinner. There’s a lot of commentary on this, but I think apart from whatever side one wants to take it does highlight the problem that fragile things don’t work well as inter-generational traditions.

I learned this myself with some cherished toys from my childhood which my parents had saved for my children. They were called Construx—they’re somewhere inbetween Legos and Erector Sets but was better than either. The problem, though, is that they’re no longer made—they haven’t been for decades—and so they are irreplaceable. The other problem is that they’re delicate, especially now that the plastic is thirty years older and spent that time in an oxygen-rich atmosphere. This might not have been a problem if I’d only had one child, or if I had all of my children as triplets, but with them being more spaced out than that, I couldn’t really give them to an older child to play with without them being accessible to the younger ones, and that would have resulted in breaking quite a few pieces.

So the result is that my children barely played with them.

It’s a pity, but I also don’t see what else I could have done. It would have been very sad to have little children accidentally destroy them, and since they’ve got different personalities than I do they probably wouldn’t have enjoyed them nearly as much as I did, anyway. I’ll probably have more fun pulling them out and playing with them myself after my children are grown.

Fancy dinner plates have the same kind of problem. It’s way too easy to break them by dropping them—sometimes moreso than normal plates because they are often particularly thin—but it’s also way too easy to damage them through simple use. I’ve encountered fancy plates which would easily be scratched by knives and even some whose delicate gilting could be rubbed off by overly vigorous cleaning.

Fancy dinner plates also suffer from the problem of their virtues only being appreciated by generations now gone.

As far as I can tell, fancy plates were a kind of luxury good that became popular among the middle class during the Victorian period, when the newly growing middle class wanted to ape the aristocracy and did so with fancy clothes and fancy plates which were, because of the same economic developments which produced the middle class, now expensive but affordable. Expensive but affordable is a sweet spot as far as signifiers of social status goes. The latter makes them possible and the former keeps them from being so common that they lose all status.

Fancy plates are, of course, pretty in themselves, but they’re actually not great at showing that off since their function is to be covered with food. (Fancy wine glasses do a better job since they can be seen even when filled with wine.) And their function as signifiers of wealth and importance are basically over since economic progress has made similarly pretty things cheap and easily accessible to everyone.

There are things which you can pass onto your children, but if they’re delicate things they need to be replaceable things; things which cannot be broken cannot be used. (There is an exception, of course, for purely decorative things such as paintings, since their use does not put them in jeopardy.) But it’s far more reliable to pass on things which cannot be broken, such as knowledge, skills, and wisdom.

My oldest son ended up reading the Dragonlance Chronicles in different copies than I did, since my omnibus volume had a weak binding and would not easily fit into his backpack to bring to school for reading during free time. It would have been cool if he’d read it from the same physical copy as me, but it’s far more important that he read the same story—which has enabled us to discuss it together.

Ultimately, physical things like plates don’t really last and it’s a mistake to look to them to do so. Sometimes you get lucky and they do, but ultimately things only last when put into a museum and preserved, and not many things are worth of being in a museum. So, pick wisely.

Feelings and Facts Can Be the Same Conversation

On By Christopher LansdownIn Life Skills, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Conversations about feelings have something of a low reputation and not entirely undeservedly. People who are bad at emotional regulation will talk about little else besides feelings and generally in a very unproductive way. Further, self-control is an important skill which has been rightly lauded by religions and philosophical systems alike. If you want to do something which takes precision, such as building a bridge or disinfecting surgical equipment, “facts not feels” will lead to more success.

All of this is true, and I very much prefer conversations about facts, even if personal facts, to conversations about feelings. But all this misses something.

Conversations about facts and conversations about feelings can be the same conversation in different languages.

The reason for this is that emotions are, in their essence, a kind of sense perception. They’re not a bodily sense perception like sight, smell, etc. but they are a kind of sense perception. Fear is the perception of danger. Anger is the perception of injustice. Gratitude is the perception of received benefit. And so on.

Feelings can be mistaken, of course, but so can bodily senses. We can think we felt something small touch us but when we look there’s nothing there. We can think we heard somebody say something but when we ask them what it was they said that they didn’t make a sound. There’s an entire field of making things that we see incorrectly called “optical illusions.” Our emotions are not infallible, but neither are any of our other senses. All of life requires the humility to acknowledge our fallibility.

When you consider a discussion of feelings in this light, as long as the discussion is between two people with enough humility to admit they could be mistaken, a discussion of feelings is really a discussion of the things that the feelings are perceptions of. If an object caused high amplitude sound waves in the air, among non-narcissists, “a high-energy sound was just produced” and “I heard a loud noise” is saying essentially the same thing. It is true that the latter involves the first person singular pronoun, but that’s merely giving you the added information of what instrument registered the high-energy sound. This can actually be quite useful because every instrument has its strengths and weaknesses and knowing which instrument produced the measurement described allows the other person to calibrate accordingly.

This is true of feelings, too. “In the last month, you washed the dishes three quarters of one time and swept the floors one quarter of one time” and “I’m feeling alone with the housework” differ somewhat in their precision, but they are describing the same thing. (And before you get any ideas, I do most of the housework in my house.)

It is possible, then, when someone initiates a conversation about feelings, to have an actual conversation with them. That won’t work if they have no humility, but no conversations really work with the proud, since pride tends towards solipsism and conversation requires acknowledging the existence of the other person. But most people have at least some humility, and it just takes practice to recognize it in people who are talking about their feelings. In some cases people will even talk about their feelings in order to present their observations more gently; to continue with the above example, they would consider the recitation of facts about the frequency of housework to be likely to come across like a personal attack, whereas if they instead focus the conversation on their feelings they expect it to come across like less of a personal attack. This can work very badly when done with someone else whose conversational style takes facts as non-aggressive and discussions of feelings as nebulous and dire. (This kind of mismatch can happen between anyone, though it is most stereotypically between two people where one has a higher-than-average number of X chromosomes and the other a higher-than-average number of Y chromosomes. (Bear in mind that, across the entire population, the average number of X chromosomes is, roughly, 1.5 and the average number of Y chromosomes is, roughly, 0.5))

The good news is that, like all differences in language, it is possible to become “bi-lingual.” It takes practice and discipline, not to mention humility, but a person who tends to either communication style can learn to understand the other one, and even learn to communicate in that style. It’s ideal if both people learn it, of course, but if one isn’t strong enough to do it it will still work pretty well if the stronger one learns how to do it and condescends to the weaker one. (I mean condescend in the etymological sense, “to come down to be with”.)

What Should Christians Make of AI?

On By Christopher LansdownIn Christianity, Missing the Mark, Philosophy, YouTube Channel1 Comment

In this video, I answer a viewer’s question about what Christians should make of AI. (It’s really the same thing that everyone should make of AI.

Basically, there are two senses of AI:

  1. Like us
  2. Something that does what we would do by intelligence.

All AI that exists is AI in sense 2, not in sense 1, though sense 1 wouldn’t be a massive problem if it did exist.

Riding With Death Was a Weird Movie

On By Christopher LansdownIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

I recently watched the Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode featuring the movie Riding With Death. Many of the movies featured on MST3K are weird, but this one was particularly strange. It was a made-for-TV movie created by editing together two unrelated episodes of the short-lived TV show Gemini Man.

Gemini Man was, according to Wikipedia, a replacement show for a previous show called The Invisible Man, except with cheaper special effects. made in 1976, Gemini Man centers around the federal agent Sam Casey, who in an accident while diving to retrieve something or other from a disabled nuclear submarine was cause in the blast of an explosion and turned invisible from the radiation. Fortunately, scientists were able to turn him visible again through the use of a “DNA Stabilizer.” It’s a temporary effect, though, and he can become instantly invisible by turning it off. He can safely do this for up to fifteen minutes per day (cumulative) before being invisible will kill him. Conveniently for him, the writers, and the special effects department, it’s not just his body but anything he’s wearing that turns invisible—I think it’s got to be something he’s touching (except the ground) when he turns invisible, since he can pick up a gun and it remains visible. The government agency he’s working for is a weird kind of high tech general do-goodery kind of government agency called Intersect. It’s reminiscent of the various shadowy government agencies that would be behind Michael Knight in Knight Rider and behind Stringfellow Hawk in Airwolf, except that it seems a bit less shadowy—the main Intersect building has a large “INTERSECT” logo above its doorway.

The studio show ten episodes of Gemini Man but it was canceled after the first five aired. Based on the two I saw, I can’t say that I’m surprised. It looks to be in a similar genre to shows like Knight Rider and Airwolf, or even The Incredible Hulk: highly episodic shows about a mildly super-powered hero who fights bad guys and rights wrongs throughout America. In the case of Airwolf and Knight Rider the mild super-power comes from having a high-tech means of transportation; in The Incredible Hulk it comes from being about twice as strong as a bodybuilder (they really toned down the strength of The Hulk in that show when compared to the comic books). In Casey’s case, it comes from being able to become invisible for short stretches of time. As super-powers go, you could do worse. During one of the host segments Crow’s short time spent as the superhero Turkey Volume Guessing Man—a man who can accurate guess the volume of turkeys which would fill any three-dimensional space—demonstrates this. That said, you could also do a heck of a lot better. Being invisible makes it harder for people to shoot you, lets you sucker-punch people better, and allows you to listen in to other people’s private conversations more conveniently. That’s mostly what Casey uses his powers for, and the action is typically resolved through Casey being above average at throwing a punch despite not having all that much mass behind it. Also, he’s apparently a very skilled driver.

All good things to have in a government agent, of course, but not very interesting in themselves. Invisibility is, by its nature, not visually impressive, and guns floating in the air pretty much have to look corny. So the result is going to depend almost entirely on the charisma of the characters. Ben Murphy, who plays Casey, is charismatic enough, but the character he’s given to work with isn’t. Casey seems to kind of enjoy being able to turn invisible, but that’s about the extent to which his character is affected by nearly dying and gaining a power that makes no sense which could kill him if his wristwatch ever runs out of battery.

I should mention that I don’t mean “a power that makes no sense” as a nit-picky criticism. In a show like this it’s fine to go with “there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreampt of in your philosophy.” The characters do need to have a sense of wonder and mystery, though. Also, some apprehension is in order. If you don’t understand a thing and it seems to contradict what you do know, you should be aware that it could have “sharp edges.” Casey, by contrast, is easygoing and unaffected, he barely has a care in the world.

Then we come to the movie, which I really would love to hear an explanation for the existence of. Presumably it was a cynical cash-grab where there was a need for a TV movie for some slot and some entertainment hook where something about it—invisibility or trucking, for example—was hot for a few minutes and it takes a lot less time to edit together a TV movie from two fifty minute TV episodes than it does to cast and shoot something original. But it’s really weird how the two episodes were from opposite ends of the show’s short run. They were episode 1 and 10, in fact, and their plots were unrelated.

In the plot for the first episode, a scientist has supposedly invented a chemical additive to gasoline which can cause cars to get two or three times the miles-per-gallon they get with ordinary gasoline, and the big bad oil companies are trying to steal the formula and destroy it to protect their profits. Except it turns out that the additive is unstable and a powerful explosive which can be set off through fairly mild shock (such as dropping it from a foot or two). The scientist has embezzled the $10M in research money that INTERSECT gave him and has set up a plan to destroy the sample and pretend to be killed in the blast, blaming it on the greedy oil companies. This is supposed to happen while he’s riding with the sample in the back of a large moving van which Casey is driving to transport the two gallons of additive over to the department of transportation for evaluation, which has to happen by the end of the business day for some reason that’s never explained because there’s no possible explanation for it.

The scientist has several henchmen working for him and they smuggle him out while pretending to put some extra lab equipment into the truck at his facility and add a radio to the room in the back of the truck where he supposedly is. Then they get on their way for what should be about a thirty mile trip that takes many hours on highways through the mountains and when the bumps in the road don’t set off the fuel additive the scientist (who’s following by helicopter to stay within radio range so he can keep pretending to be in the truck) has one of his henchmen sabotage Casey’s brakes at a stop that he makes for no apparent reason. Along the way Casey meets another trucker nicknamed “Buffalo Bill” on the CB radio, rescues him from some highjackers, and then gets saved by Buffalo Bill who uses his truck to help Casey to stop as he’s coming down from the mountains. There’s also an “exciting” scene where Casey manages to navigate some hair-pin turns at sixty miles an hour due to his superb driving skills. Then the scientist decides that Casey as figured out that he’s not in the truck (which Casey has) and starts shooting at the truck with a sub machine gun from the helicopter. Casey drives the truck to a nearby empty field and gets out before the truck explodes, then subdues the scientist and his henchmen who landed to examine the wreckage.

If you’re wondering what Casey being able to turn invisible with the press of a button on his wristwatch has to do with any of this, the answer is not very much. Mostly it’s helpful for some fistfights and to prevent the guys with guns shooting him as he approaches. Not nothing, but it would have been very easy to work the plot to accomplish this without being invisible.

The second half of the movie is made up on a condensed version of the tenth episode of the series, where Casey runs into Buffalo Bill during an assignment. It turns out that Buffalo Bill has given up truck driving to try to live out his dream of being a racecar mechanic, and the arch villain of the series owns a race car which he personally works on and Bill just happens to have been hired by him. Bill’s girlfriend, “cupcake,” is a secret agent for the archvillain who was assigned to seduce the mechanic, for some reason never explained, and, well, let’s just say that with Casey’s help INTERSECT manages to capture the arch-villain and Buffalo Bill gets the singing career in a truck stop he’s always wanted. (It turns out that Buffalo Bill was played by a real-life country singer.)

I don’t know that I’ve done justice to how disjoint the two sections of the movie feel, or to how easily you could edit out all of the scenes of invisibility while losing very little. Not nothing, but very little.

Also, much of the first half of the movie is CB radio dialog because Casey (who goes by “Easy Rider”) and Buffalo Bill. I found this weird until I looked it up and found out that the hit novelty song Convoy was big on the charts in 1975.

While the TV series ran in 1976, the movie was edited together and released in 1981, by the way, so I suspect it would have felt a bit dated. And speaking of dates, it was set in the not-too-distant future, specifically 1983. I wonder if that was to make the “DNA stabilizer” seem very slightly more plausible.

Also, it’s incredibly jarring that Casey just happens to run into Buffalo Bill who’s made a career change right after Casey’s vacation. In the original filming, this would have felt so much more natural with eight other episodes coming in between. It’s also very strange to get a long-running arch-villain introduced two thirds of the way through a movie.

TV movies were sometimes quite good; I can only wonder what it would have been like in 1981 to have seen the absurdity that was Riding With Death. It made for a pretty good MST3K episode, though.

Murder She Wrote: It’s A Dog’s Life

On By Christopher LansdownIn Reviews, TV & Movies, Uncategorized1 Comment

On the fourth day of November in the year of our Lord 1983, the fourth episode of Murder, She Wrote aired. Titled It’s a Dog’s Life, it’s set in Tennessee, or at least some Tennessee-like place. (Last week’s episode was Hooray for Homicide.)

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It’s set on a horse farm, specifically, as an establishing shot of horses frolicking on rolling fields, well… establishes. We also get an establishing shot of a grand house where I assume most of the action will take place.

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Though I am a mite suspicious, given this camera angle, that the house is not in fact all that big and is just wide but narrow. Not that it matters; uneducated actors play professors, so there’s no reason that houses can’t play mansions.

We then get an establishing shot of some stables which I believe are actually big and ominous music plays. A figure clad all in black, including wearing black gloves, sneaks up and feeds a horse named Sawdust some kind of pill.

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Sawdust eats it as ominous music plays.

When the horse has completely finished eating the pill, the camera cuts to inside the house and a string quartet is playing classic music as a large, expensive party takes place.

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There are so many servants that two maids just stand around. They’ve spent something like four different shots establishing that there is a lot of money here, so that will, presumably, be important.

As the camera pans around we see that most of the people are in fox-hunting clothes. We then meet some characters. First is Trish and Anthony.

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Then comes in her brother, Spence.

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He tells Anthony that the family is sorry that his wife couldn’t make it.

Both Trish and Spence speak their lines like they hate each other, which is impressively poor manners in front of guests, especially for the South. We then get another relative who walks up and asks if they’re having a good fight.

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Her name is, apparently, “Echo,” or at least her nickname is. She’s Trish’s niece, not sure whether Spence is her father, but I can guess how much hair spray she uses a day. Boy is it ever the 80s. She and Trish are extremely catty at each other then Spence asks for peace, if not for his sake, than for the sake of his father. At this, Trish leaves.

We then meet another of Spence’s sisters.

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Her name is Morgana, and she’s very fond of her astral projectionist. Spence is appropriately rude, by which I mean he makes a gratuitous and unnecessarily mean-spirited comment which is carefully calculated to accomplish nothing whatever, then he walks off.

And then we come to the main characters.

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His name is Denton and he’s a famous lady’s man about whom Jessica has been warned. They move on and Denton introduces a friend of his—the owner of a nearby horse farm, and Denton’s old drinking buddy. His name is Tom Cassidy.

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His small talk explains why Jessica is here—she’s visiting her cousin, Abby, who works on Denton’s horse farm. It also comes up that he owns a neighboring 600 acres, which is described as small, though in a tongue-in-cheek way. Tom leaves to get Jessica a refill on her coffee, and we meet Jessica’s cousin.

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They make a little small talk; she tells Denton, in an English accent, to not be “an old lech.” Tom returns and interrupts the banter by saying “how about a toast?” Before he can propose one, though, Spence interrupts from across the room to say that a toast is a marvelous idea.

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I find the blocking of this shot interesting. The characters are in a line to be easily seen by the camera, but it makes no sense at all as a grouping of people who had been talking to each other, and not much more as a group of people who hate each other’s company and are standing next to each other in embarrassed silence for no reason.

He proposes a toast to his father, on his 80th birthday, and many more. Morgana adds a note of affection. Denton rudely takes no notice and merely looks about and asks, “where’s that damn dog of mine?” That damn dog of his is a beagle named Teddy, who comes running from across the house. Spence and his siblings look crestfallen. I guess we can see where Denton’s children got their bad manners from. Oddly, no one else in the crowd seems to have noticed any of this, despite everyone having spoken in a loud, clear voice, to be heard.

Then a man comes in and announces, Ladies and Gentlemen: to horse.

Outside as people are getting on, Trish walks up to her horse with a champagne glass in land, takes a sip, then throws the partially full glass on the ground and mounts her horse. Abby runs over, grabs the bridle, and says, “Trish, you shouldn’t be riding in your condition. It’s dangerous to the horse.”

Trish merely tells her to go away and kiss up to Father while she has the chance. “The day he goes, Honey, so do you.”

Denton calls out to Jessica and Abby, telling him that he’s picked out their horses for them. Jessica thinks that Sawdust is for her, but he tells her that Sawdust is only fit for him; he hasn’t broken out of a trot for years (the horse). He then presses a button and tells Barnes, a security guard, that they’re ready to go and he should open the gates. Barnes, who is sitting in a room filled with monitors and controls, obliged by pressing the Gate 1 button (there are four) which opens the main gates, which we can see on video camera from two different angles.

We then get scenes of the fox hunt over beautiful countryside with swelling music. At one point Denton tells Abby, who is riding next to him, to go on because it can’t be much fun to ride next to an old slowpoke like him. Right after he says this, Trish comes up right next to Denton spurring her horse into a gallop with loud cries, which alarms Sawdust, causing him to bolt. Denton tries to reign sawdust in, but to no effect. Sawdust eventually runs at a bench in front of a hedge and jumps over it. Denton does his best during this, shouting “Tally Ho!”

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The camera then cuts away during the landing.

Many people run up, deeply concerned, because this kind of thing can be easily fatal to an eighty year old man.

As, indeed, it proves to be. We cut to Denton lying dead on the ground and a moment later we screen wipe to a police deputy covering the corpse with his jacket.

After a bit of mourning, Jessica, Abby, and Tom go talk to the Sheriff, who says that it was a terrible accident but Denton led a full life. Jessica says that she thinks that Denton didn’t want to take the jump and Tom agrees, saying that Denton was under Doctor’s Orders to take it easy.

The vet is standing next to the Sheriff and Jessica asks if there’s a test he can perform on the horse. He understandably has no idea what Jessica is talking about, so Abby explains that a calm old horse like Sawdust doesn’t suddenly go wild. The Sheriff asks if Jessica is suggesting foul play and instead of answer we cut to Denton’s children getting into a police car (presumably to drive them home) and then we then cut to the cottage where Abby is staying.

Jessica is looking over papers saying to Abby, “I was so certain that there was something wrong with that horse. I feel so foolish. But, tests don’t lie.”

Abby asks, “Don’t they?” She points out that it was hours before they found the horse and there are drugs which leave no trace. Jessica acts like Abby is just being emotional, but of course she’s right. In fact, we know she’s right since we saw somebody give Sawdust a pill shortly before the hunt. This is an interesting choice, both in the showing us and in having Jessica act contrary to what we know to be true. She was wrong when she felt foolish, but we know that she’s now being foolish. Perhaps this is meant to make Jessica relatable by “not being too perfect”? Another possible explanation is putting the investigation on hold in order to get the episode to last the approximately 47 minutes it needs to.

Abby then goes on about what a great man Denton was, but underneath it all he was unhappy because of his selfish relatives.

Which brings up an uncomfortable issue: if Denton’s children are all awful, why didn’t he raise them better? I know that children are their own people and make their own decisions. Great sinners can be the children of great saints, and great saints can be the children of great sinners. That said, being raised well helps and being raised badly does make being a saint harder, and if all of a man’s children are terrible, it’s only fair to ask whether he raised them in a way that made being good, hard.

Anyway, there’s a bit of odd dialog which implies that Abby was in love with Denton and Jessica offers to stay with her for a few days. Abby asks her to stay until the will is read.

Which is necessary to keep Jessica around for the investigation, of course, but it’s really weird. Why would Abby be sticking around for the reading of the will?

We then cut to the day of the reading of the will, or maybe it’s the hour. The exact amount of time that’s passed isn’t specified, and all we get by way of that is an establishing shot of the front door with a black wreath on it.

Spence and Trish fight a bit, but they do establish that “Boswell,” presumably the family lawyer, is expected any minute. After some more bickering, he comes.

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Denton’s will is done on video. This was quite a new technology in 1983. The first VHS player came to the United States in the summer of 1977 and they would become popular pretty quickly, but consumer video cameras that recorded onto VHS took longer. The first consumer ones actually came out in 1983. A rich man like Denton could afford to rent professional video equipment to make his will, but the thing would have felt very cutting edge at the time. Boswell describes it as “cutting edge will technology.”

Denton starts out by saying that it’s all legal as hell, so don’t get any ideas. This sets the tone. He then has a hate message for each of his children and grand daughter (it turns out that Morgana is Echo’s mother). That parting spite finished, he gets down to brass tacks.

He gives a shotgun that Tom admired to Tom (his old drinking buddy) and there are cash gifts to each of the servants with something extra for the guard. All of the paintings in the house go to the national gallery. He then says, gleefully, “that’s right, Children, a fast three million in oils now on the way to Washington.” Bosley looks remarkably smug at this.

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There’s so much wrong here, but I don’t think that we’re supposed to notice.

Anyway, the rest of his estate comes to about fifteen millions dollars and, except for a modest family trust, goes to his dog, Teddy. Denton’s descendants are upset at this but Boswell assures them that they won’t be able to break the will and if Teddy dies of anything but natural causes, the entire fortune (including the family trust) goes to the SPCA.

And on that bombshell, we go to commercial break.

When we get back, Jessica is on the phone with Ethan, telling him she’ll be gone for a few more days, and adds that Abby is convinced that somebody murdered Denton. And Jessica is afraid that she just might be right.

We then move to a scene where Abby has a pointless fight with Trish, but it is at least established that Teddy is her employer and as such only Marcus Bosley can fire her, and she’s not going anywhere until she finds out who killed Denton.

Interestingly, Morgana warns Abby to be careful of Trish. She does it with some astrological mumbo jumbo, though, so Abby takes no notice. (I say mumbo jumbo because really doubt that the writers got the astrology right, quite apart from my belief that there is nothing to astrology.)

Then there’s yelling, a horse runs out, and Spence is in a horse stall defending himself from Teddy. The scene shifts to the vet examining Teddy and holding up a test tube of clear liquid and saying, “giving this stuff to a dog is like giving loco weed to a horse,” though when asked he didn’t find any in Sawdust. The vest asks who Teddy bit, since he found blood on his collar. The Sheriff then pulls up with a man in the passenger seat who identifies Teddy as his assailant.

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In the next scene Marcus Boswell is on the phone with Abby, telling her that Teddy has been released on his own recognizance and she can pick him up from the Sheriff at any time.

Jessica and Abby talk about the situation and Jessica thinks that they need to talk to Marcus to get more information. The shot of them waiting in his office is interesting, especially with how large and posh the office is.

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To drive the point home, Jessica remarks that Marcus has done very well working for the Langley estate.

After a minute, Marcus and another lawyer come out. The lawyer says that he could drive a freight train through “that loophole” and Marcus replies that his clients need to consider the costs; it could be a long and bloody battle. Then Morgana walks out of Marcus’ office and says goodbye.

To highlight just how much of a suspect Marcus is, as Jessica and Abby enter the office, his secretary tells him, in an exasperated tone, that it’s his broker and it’s the third time he’s called today. That could, of course, mean anything—and in real life would most likely mean that the broker was trying very hard to sell something to Marcus. In Murder, She Wrote, though, it almost certainly means that Marcus is in financial trouble.

Marcus’ office is even more impressive than his waiting room:

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They get down to business. Jessica asks about whether the man who Teddy bit has filed a lawsuit and Marcus says that while he’s made noises, he hasn’t yet and Marcus intends to head him off (whatever that means). They then switch subjects to the will, and the fancy lawyer’s supposed loophole is the question of “sound mind.” Not Denton’s mind, but the dog’s. If a court rules Teddy mentally incompetent…

He doesn’t finish his sentence and I can’t imagine what the end of it might be. You don’t need to be of sound mind to inherit under a will. If Teddy was ruled not of sound mind, he’d require a guardian appointed for him. But he’s a dog, so he needs a guardian anyway. This could only be an issue of the dog literally, rather than figuratively, inherited the money. But that would be nonsense. Animals can’t own property. I assumed that what Denton meant was that a trust was set up with Marcus as the administrator for the benefit of Teddy. That would certainly be, in colloquial English, Teddy inheriting, but it would make legal sense and the fact that Teddy requires a guardian would be irrelevant. I can’t believe that the episode is trying to claim that a dog has literally inherited money and land. You don’t need a loophole, that would be simply impossible. You can only give your property, in your will, to some kind of legal entity capable of owning it. (It can be a fictional person, as in the case of giving it to a corporation, but it has to be some kind of legal person.) I wouldn’t bring this up except that they’re actually making a plot point of it having been done in an impossible way.

Anyway, Marcus says that Denton’s descendants won’t win, but it might take long years and a lot of legal feels to win the battle. He leaves off how much this would benefit him and also explain away the missing money he’d embezzled. (I’m just guessing about that last part, of course.)

He’s interrupted by yet another call from his broker, who insists on speaking to him. Why his secretary seems to work for the broker and not for her employer is not explained. Anyway, he takes the call and after some embarrassing half-phrases, he promises his broker that he’ll send a check today and even put a stamp on the envelope this time.

After hanging up, Marcus tells the women to never, ever buy stock touted by Spencer Langley. His only consolation is that Spencer bought more of it than Marcus did.

This can, in no way, explain why his broker needs a check. No matter how badly a stock does, you’ve paid all of the money when you bought it and can only recoup some money, even if far less, after its sale. Between the purchase and the sale, you do not use money for anything. The only possible way for stock transactions to need cash quickly is if you sold futures and need to buy the stock to cover the future. There’s no way that’s what happened, though.

Jessica only picks up that Spencer is in debt, and Marcus replies, “right up to his Adam’s apple.”

This is not even slightly how stocks work. The only way for a stock doing badly to sink you into debt is… well, there is no direct way. You simply have to take on the debt separately. But you can take on debt in order to buy stock, which you intend to pay off and get profits from when you sell the stock at a higher price. But in that case it would be your banker, not your broker, who is calling you demanding money.

I’m really not sure which is more ridiculous: a dog literally inheriting property or a broker calling demanding money because a stock you bought is doing badly.

Oh well.

We then get a shot of the moon at night to establish that it’s nighttime. Since all pictures of the moon are basically the same, I’ll use one that I took instead of a screenshot. It’s not exactly the same, but you get the idea, and I only use screenshots when they’re necessary for my commentary on the episode:

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We then cut to Barnes, the security guard, sitting in front of his collection of monitors. I wonder if the idea is that he lives here in the cave of security cameras on twenty four hour duty. No wonder he got something extra from Denton’s will.

He then hears a sound and the door and goes to open it. It’s Teddy. Barnes says something about “like clockwork,” implying that Teddy always comes to be with Barnes at this time. “I guess you know you’re safe in here,” Barnes explains.

He then notices Trish’s car pulled up to the front gate. He comments that she shouldn’t be allowed to drive. On the security camera she stumbles out of her car and buzzes for Barnes to open the gate. He presses the button and as the gate begins to open she falls down with her head between the gates that just opened.

Barnes puts Teddy down saying that he needs to go check that she’s OK. He leaves, with Teddy remaining behind on his chair.

When Barnes gets near, the gates start to close. Barnes runs to try to save her but he’s too late. The gates crush her head (off camera, of course). We then cut back to Teddy in the guard room, partially standing on the console, wagging his tail.

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And on that bombshell, we go to commercial break. (I think that the implication is that Teddy pressed the button and killed Trish.)

When we get back from commercial break, we’re outside by the gate while a bunch of police cars are in the area, presumably investigating. Inside the guard room, someone is dusting for fingerprints on the gate button.

Then in a large room with the Sheriff and the family gathered, Morgana says that she saw her sister’s ghost rising from her earthly form and crying like a morning dove. We get some other backstory about her aura thriving on moonlight and such-like, but we also learn that her bedroom has the only clear view of the gate, and she looked out because she heard a car’s horn.

The doorbell rings and it’s Marcus. He’s come as soon as he heard, for some reason.

Then the Sheriff’s deputy comes in and tells him that they found a print on the gate button, but not a fingerprint—a paw print.

Given that they found it by dusting, blowing away the dust and then using tape to pick up the dust which remained after being blown away, I guess we’re supposed to believe that the digital pads on a dog’s paws leave oil residue? I can’t easily find out whether dogs even have oil pores in their digital pads (they do have sweat pores) but my experience of dog feet is that they are very, very dry. I really doubt that they have sufficient skin oil as to leave enough residue to be able to lift a paw print. It’s not impossible, so far as I know, but it’s still a bit… far fetched. And even so would leave entirely open the possibility that someone used Teddy’s paw to press the gate button so as to leave no fingerprints. It can’t be supposed that Teddy understood that pressing the button would hurt Trish as a human could.

Anyway, there’s some arguing and bickering over how this gets rid of the will—I guess everyone has forgotten that if Teddy dies of anything but natural causes, all of Denton’s money goes to the SPCA. Though I don’t see how that would come into play since the dog would likely just be put into prison for life—even if he got sentenced to death, it takes so long to work through the appeals and so on that he would die of natural causes anyway.

I can’t believe I’m actually thinking that through. Why is this episode demanding that we take a dog seriously as a human being?

Anyway, Marcus shouts, “Sheriff, you cannot possibly believe that a dog is capable of murder!” At that, Abby says, “of course not. He’d have to be trained.” Then everyone stairs at her since she’s an animal trainer.

The scene shifts to Jessica going down to the front gate. She runs into Tom driving up in an old blue pickup truck. He asks how the family is doing then says he came as soon as he heard on the police band on his CB radio. He then drives on up to see what he can do to help.

Jessica wanders on down and meets Will, who’s trying to get the victim’s coat into a large plastic bag. Jessica offers to help and examines the coat in the process. Will gratefully accepts the help because he feels that the coat requires a “lady’s touch” to fold.

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As you can see, the deputy is a young man and Jessica comes on with a matronly tone. This part actually feels quite realistic. Also, Jessica’s examination shows that the coat is quite new but the seams are split, just like her “car coat.”

After a bit of small talk, Jessica then walks around, examining the ground. After that she goes and interviews Barnes in the security room.

He left Teddy alone and the door automatically locks when it’s closed. He’s got the only key, and Teddy was left alone in the room. When he asks Jessica if she really thinks that Teddy pushed the button, she replies that she’s quite sure of it. She asks if he heard anything unusual while he was on his way to the gate and he replies no, just the usual. Crickets and a night bird calling.

She then asks the way to Morgana’s room.

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Morgana’s room does, indeed, have a decent view of the gate. While Jessica is looking, we also hear some music which suggests that this is an important clue.

Jessica then joins Abby in the kitchen for tea. (When stressed, the English always go for tea.) When Marcus comes in to fetch ice because everyone in the main room needs a drink, Jessica notices that he has a nasty grease mark on his trousers. It’s important to the plot because we get the kind of closeup necessary in 1980s televsion to make sure we can see the clue even if there’s interference in the signal.

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He says that he had a flat tire on the way over and he supposed that he got some grease off of the jack. A jack is a device for lifting the car up so that one can put the wheel on and take it off, which a human could not possibly do if the weight of the car is still on the tire. They look something like this:

(Not shown is a bar that goes through the hole and is used to give the mechanical advantage necessary to turn the screw.)

There is no realistic way those grease marks came from a jack. Given that this episode has several impossible things already, I’d have figured that this was yet one more unrealistic thing, but the fact that they gave us a close-up suggests that it’s meant to be a clue and not a plot hole.

Jessica then asks where he got it and how long he stopped. He figured about half a mile away and he stopped for about twenty minutes. Jessica asks if that means that anyone who left the house would have had to pass by him.

Marcus says that Jessica is right, but that no one passed by him. Abby says that that means that the killer had to be someone in the house, and Marcus concurs.

After he leaves, Jessica asks Abby how one would go about training a dog to press a button. The answer is endless repetition, and the command could be anything. A voice, snapping your fingers, a whistle—at that Jessica perks up. A whistle was just the kind of thing she had in mind.

Some bickering later, Jessica is forced to explain her theory to everyone, including the Sheriff. Basically, it’s that someone impersonated Trish—whoever got out of the car never spoke on the intercom. At this point Trish was inside the car. After a minute the person impersonating Trish got up, dragged Trish (who was drunk or unconscious) to the spot where her head was in the way of the gate, then gave Teddy the signal over the intercom.

The Sheriff then asks if a whistle like the one he’s holding would do it. When Jessica says that it’s possible, the Sheriff asks if anyone in the house has the initials A.B.F. and Abby replies “Abigail Benton Freestone.” The Sheriff adds that they found the whistle down by the driveway.

The scene then shifts to the Sheriff’s office, where both Abby and Teddy are in jail.

I really don’t know what, if anything, we’re expected to take seriously anymore.

We cut from Abby bemoaning her fate to Teddy to Jessica being angry at the Sheriff. After she insults him and complains at him, he says that the inquest is on Friday and until then Teddy is going to be held as an accessory after the fact. Which is not what he would be. An accessory after the fact is somebody who did not take part in the crime but did take part in trying to help the person who committed the crime to evade justice. Even if you ignore the fact that Teddy is a dog, that’s not what he did. He took part in the commission of the crime, which would make him an plain old accessory. At this point I’m starting to wonder if they’re just getting things wrong on purpose. I guess we should count our blessings that on the fox hunt they rode the horses and followed the hounds, rather than riding the hounds and having the horses follow the scent trail.

In the next scene Jessica is given a lift back to the house by Marcus. She has him drop her off about a half mile away from the house, saying that she needs some exercise. He drives off and she looks at his tire tracks.

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I’m going to guess that the issue is that both tires are bald, or else both tires are the same size, meaning that Marcus did not, in fact, have a flat tire recently. It’s a bit of a problem for this clue to show us that because we’re only seeing the marks of two tires (kind of next to each other, from when the car was turning slightly to get back onto the road). The flat could have been on the other side of the car, which stayed on the road and whose tracks we don’t see. Marcus never said which tire went flat. However, the fact that they’re showing this to us pretty much means that the flat tire had to be disproved. Things are not looking good for Marcus; we’ve had two close-ups on clues related to him.

As Jessica is looking around, the nice young deputy Will shows up and asks her what’s up. He asks if she’s looking for something and she said just a hunch. She asks if he has one of the Sheriff’s new metal detectors and he says that he can get it. She’s looking for a bicycle clip. A plain, ordinary bicycle clip. He doesn’t know what she means and she says that he’ll know it when he sees it.

Later on Jessica is mounted on a horse when Echo comes up. She asks where Jessica is going, and she says that she’s going to see a man about a dog bite. (Jessica asks about Spencer, whose horse is missing.)

We cut to Potts operating a chainsaw while his arm bandage is on a shotgun. Jessica rides up the horse then sneaks up and steals Potts’ arm bandage. When she gets back to her horse it’s actually Spencer’s horse, he took the liberty of putting her horse in the stable. He then calls Potts.

Potts and Spencer interrogate Jessica at gunpoint. Potts is in favor of killing her and hiding the body, but she talks him out of it, saying that his little scheme of fraud will hardly be noticed once she reveals who killed Trish. There’s a bit of bickering, but then we cut to a court house. Well, some kind of building in which court is in session. It feels more like a gymnasium.

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I’m not sure what it’s supposed to actually be. When the deputy brings in a speaker on a long wire, the judge—or whoever he is—asks what’s going on and Jessica says that this is part of her presentation. I suppose that this is actually supposed to be an inquest, and I must confess that I need to do more research on them to get a sense of whether this set makes any sense. It doesn’t feel like it, and from the rest of this episode I would guess that it doesn’t.

The judge indicates that the proceeding is going to begin with Mrs. Fletcher acting as an amicus curiae. He then says that, for the yahoos in the back, that’s a friend of the court.

Jessica get up, makes an introductory remark, and then says that to keep this short she’s only going to call one witness: Teddy.

Sure. Whatever. I don’t see any way to care at this point that an Amicus Curiae presenter (they’re more normally written briefs, but this is TV) would have no right to call witnesses. She’s calling a dog as a witness and everyone is OK with it, so I guess we’re just in clown world.

Teddy is carried in by a deputy and put in the chair next to the small table. Jessica then has the deputy blow on the whistle that was found by the gate. No one hears it but Teddy because it’s an ultrasonic whistle. She then has the deputy go into the other room and blow the whistle over the speaker. After he says that he blue the whistle, Jessica notes that Teddy didn’t react, because the whistle is above the range of the speaker. She actually says “any loudspeaker” which is probably wrong, but it probably would be above the range of a speaker system used in a security system, even back in the 1980s when they were all analog. (Most modern digital systems have a hard cutoff at either 22.05 or 24KHz, while according to Wikipedia most dog whistles are in the 23-54KHz range, so for most dog whistles it would be impossible to record or transmit them over normal digital systems. I only bring this up because it relates to adapting this kind of idea to modern stories.)

Jessica then explains that it was Marcus—he desperately needed the money years of litigation would bring him. He persuaded Trish to drug Denton’s horse by lying to her about whether she would inherit under Denton’s will. Trish was, of course, furious when she found out the truth, but he had prepared for this and trained Teddy long in advance.

She then starts interrogating him. Does he own a bicycle, does he ride out by the Langley manor, etc. When he denies having ridden by the Langley manner on the night of Trish’s death, Jessica then confronts him with the bicycle clip. While he quite reasonably points out that the bicycle clip could have belonged to anyone, she counters with her observation of the characteristic grease stains of a bicycle chain being on his pants that night. When he claims it came from changing a tire as he said that night, she counters that all four of his tires had identical tread, while a spare tire should have had deep, new tread. She then suggests settling the matter by looking in his trunk.

Before he can answer, she calls out to Will to “go ahead, please” and places the gate button next to Teddy. When a mockingbird whistle plays over the loudspeaker, Teddy presses the button several times, then goes over to Marcus and looks to him for a treat.

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Jessica in fact asks him, “why don’t you feed him his treat? Just like you did when you trained him to help you murder Trish.” Marcus looks around and seeing no way out sinks into a chair, crying, his face in his hands.

Back at the Langley manner Jessica and Abby are talking. Abby confesses that she doesn’t understand why Marcus did it and Jessica points out the obvious that he would have found a hundred ways to bleed off as much money as he needed from Teddy.

Then Tom drives up and takes Teddy, while Abby and Jessica say that Teddy will be very happy in his new home. After a bit of small talk in which he promises to do absolutely nothing for Denton’s children, he drives off with Teddy in the back of his pickup truck and we go to credits.

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What an episode.

I have no idea what to make of this—is it supposed to be a parody? It’s early enough in the first season that they may well have tried several different kinds of episodes to see what felt right or hit it off with fans. If this wasn’t meant to be a campy parody-type episode, a lá the 1960s Batman series starring Adam West, then this was a really stupid episode. If it was supposed to be a campy parody, it wasn’t very funny.

I really don’t know what to say about it.

If we ignore all of the asinine stuff about the dog actually inheriting the money directly, being charged with murder, etc. we do have the skeleton of a decent murder mystery. The family lawyer needed money and convinced one of the millionaire’s heirs to murder him, then when she found out she wasn’t inheriting, he murdered her. That’s pretty solid. Training a dog to do it isn’t wonderful, but it does have a bit of a golden-age “clever twist” feel to it.

Unfortunately, the dog training doesn’t really make sense in this story. For one thing, how on earth did Boswell train Toby to scratch on the door every night? He’d have to be there to do it, and are we really to believe that the security guard didn’t notice Boswell there giving Toby treats every time he scratched on the door? For another, dog training isn’t a context-independent thing. When you train a dog to a command in a place, it mostly only responds to the command in that place. This is why police dogs get trained to a command in about twenty different contexts—that’s what’s necessary to get them to respond to a command in any context. And the specificity of pressing a specific button out of a collection of buttons—that’s doable, but it would basically require training Toby in the security guard’s office. All of which might possibly be a stretch of the imagination if Boswell lived on the grounds and had constant access to the contexts necessary to train Toby. As somebody who did not have regular access either to Toby or to the grounds? That’s just not how dog training works.

Of course, I don’t know why I’m bothering with that because this is an episode where a dog inherits money and is arrested for murder.

Ultimately, I’m inclined to write this episode off as an early episode where the writers hadn’t decided on the tone for Murder, She Wrote yet. It had some nice visuals and the hint of a decent mystery, but if this was what Murder, She Wrote was generally like, well, I don’t think I’d be writing these reviews, forty years later.

Next week we go to Virginia for Lovers and Other Killers.

Travelin’ Man

On By Christopher LansdownIn Interesting Finds, UncategorizedLeave a comment

There’s a song by Ricky Nelson which was on a mix tape that my mother used to play for me when I was a child. Called Travelin’ Man, it’s got fairly simple lyrics but it’s an interesting song:

In case you don’t have time to listen, here are the lyrics:

I’m a travelin’ man and I’ve made a lot of stops
All over the world
And in every port I own the heart
Of at least one lovely girl

I’ve a pretty señorita waiting for me
Down in old Mexico
If you’re ever in Alaska stop and see
My cute little Eskimo

Oh, my sweet Fraulein down in Berlin town
Makes my heart start to yearn
And my China doll down in old Hong Kong
Waits for my return

Pretty Polynesian baby over the sea
I remember the night
When we walked in the sands of the Waikiki
And I held you, oh so tight

(It repeats the last two verses and then has a coda where he repeats that he’s a travelin’ man, whoa a travelin’ man, etc.)

Ricky’s performance is interesting, as he imbues the vocals with a tinge of boasting and a tinge of sadness which seems very appropriate. The boasting is appropriate to the natural virtue of being attractive. The sadness is appropriate to the moral vice of being deceptive and unfaithful.

The character in the song is going to greatly disappoint all but one of these women, and since they’re waiting for him they’re not just going to be disappointed, they’re going to waste possible years of their life in finding their real vocation. This could easily result in not having as many children or not getting as good a father for their children as they could.

And in practice, we know that he’s going to disappoint all of them, of course, because he’s not the kind of man to make a good husband to anyone.

All of this does serve as an interesting kind of observation on just how powerful romantic attraction can be. It’s often easier, in art, to highlight the magnitude of something by illustrating how terrible it can be, rather than how great it can be, and this song makes subtle use of that.

The World’s Fastest Indian

On By Christopher LansdownIn Interesting Finds, TV & Movies, Uncategorized3 Comments

The Critical Drinker recently put an interesting review of a movie his Dad recommended to him twenty years ago and he finally watched a few weeks ago:

Indian, here, refers to an Indian brand motorcycle. If you didn’t watch the review I linked above, the tl;dw is that it’s the story of Burt Monro who is a New Zealand retired farmer, motorcycle salesman, farmer, and motorcycle racer (he did various things to earn his living) who now, in his sixties, spends much of his time tinkering on his old Indian motorcycle. He dreams of traveling to the Bonneville salt flats and setting a world record, eventually saves up barely enough money to try, goes, and eventually succeeds. (It’s based on a true story.)

In the Drinker’s review, there’s an interesting quote (salty language warning):

The story of a little guy with big dreams given a once-in-a-lifetime shot at glory is the stuff of cinema legend at this point and it’s been done so many times that it’s easy to become cynical about movies like World’s Fastest Indian. What, prey tell, is the angle? You might ask. What makes it stand out from the crowd? How does it subvert the tropes of the genre? The answer, quite simply, is that it doesn’t. And fuck you for asking. Because it doesn’t need to. Because not every movie needs to reinvent the wheel just to get your attention.

This is an interesting point. I think that this is related to the difference between watching movies as a reviewer and watching them as an ordinary human being. Reviewers watch a ton of movies, and moreover they watch them with an eye to evaluating them. That is, they watch the movies for the sake of the movies. Ordinary human beings watch movies for entertainment or enjoyment or to witness art—in short, as a means to something else. We watch movies for the sake of humor, or to have pretend friends for a few hours, to be inspired, to be reminded that happiness is possible, to consider human sadness, for the thrill of romance or the romance of adventure—whatever it is, we watch movies for the things that they depict. If what we want is to be inspired by seeing a man defy the world for the sake of something nobler or even if we just want to see a proud man humbled by being hit in the balls, the things that we want are timeless. Different movies will bring out different aspects of these timeless things, and some will do them better than others. Variation helps us because at times we need different help in contemplating the timeless truths, whether they’re big or small. But the variation is only helpful because the help we need in contemplating the timeless things varies. The variation is not good in itself and variation from what we need at the moment is anti-helpful.

A man who has watched a thousand movies about two a man and a woman falling in love may be desperate to be reminded that there is humor in a man being hit in the crotch with a baseball, but very few of us watch a thousand movies about two people falling in love. We watch however many we need to be reminded of what we wanted to remember, then we get on with life.

So the Critical Drinker is right. Movies don’t need to surprise people who are tired of their genre to be good. They just need to be good at their genre. If a genre has gotten less popular, that means that there will be fewer people who are interested in it, but that’s OK. Sometimes you have to wait twenty years until you’re in the mood for it a movie. The nice thing about movies is that they’ll still be there when you’re ready.

The Development of Psycho-Analysis Makes Sense if you Assume it Doesn’t Work

On By Christopher LansdownIn Philosophy, UncategorizedLeave a comment

I recently read the transcript of Freud’s lectures explaining to a Clark University audience what Psycho-Analysis is (Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis). One of the things that struck me was that the development of Psycho-Analysis that he outlined makes sense if you assume that Psycho-Analysis doesn’t work.

The background we need was provided by Freud in the first lecture: a description of hysteria, which was the condition he was trying to treat. Basically, it’s a catch-all for severe ideopathic symptoms in a female. That is, if there’s something really wrong in a woman and doctors can find no physical cause, that’s then called hysteria. This isn’t trivial stuff—one example Freud gave was a woman who suffered paralysis in part of her body for extended periods. But, here’s the background we need: according to Freud, instead of despairing, doctors tended to give a good, if indefinite, prognosis. That is, the symptoms often went away on their own, though on their own time frame and not a predictable one.

So before we look at Psycho-Analysis, let’s look at the properties that a scheme of treatment which doesn’t work needs to have in order for the person developing it to be able to convince himself that it works, if it’s applied to conditions which tend to eventually get better on an unpredictable time frame.

The first and most obvious property it needs to have is that it can’t be supposed to work immediately. If it was supposed to work immediately, it would be obvious that it doesn’t work. Any such scheme of treatment must, therefore, be a process. However, it cannot be a definite process, because the patient might get better before the process is finished (which would not be a disaster because it could be credited to the process working extra well, somehow, though it would sew seeds of doubt) or else they might still be ill when the definite process has finished. It must, therefore, be an indefinite process.

What sort of properties would an indefinite process need to have, given that it’s not actually doing anything? Well, it will be tremendously helpful if it consists of a series of steps, each of which does have a definite conclusion, since that will give a feeling of accomplishment. If the indefinite process were just endless repetition of the same thing (e.g. identical breathing exercises), most people will get bored. By breaking the process up into steps, the feeling of completion of each step will give a sense of accomplishment, even if the total number of steps are not known. There will be a feeling that something has happened.

It would also be helpful if at least parts of this process are enjoyable or fulfill some other human need such as companionship, sympathy, etc. People will be a lot more inclined to believe that a process is doing what they want if it’s at least doing something that they want. This one you nearly get for free, though, since it’s hard to have a human being who sees you on a recurring basis and not have this feel like some amount of companionship. As long as the process doesn’t feel entirely adversarial, most any process that involves regularly meeting another human being will check this box.

The indefinite process also needs to be able to be explained as completed whenever the patient gets better. If you were supposed to keep doing something forever and the patient gets better, that creates a big credibility problem. And remember that we’re not talking about credibility to the patient, but credibility to the practitioner. A patient can just think he got lucky and who wants to question being well too soon? But a practitioner can only get lucky so many times before he starts to think that there’s something wrong with his theory.

If the indefinite process consists of some kind of peeling back of layers, that will do a pretty good job with this, so long as there’s no way to tell how many layers there are before you hit the last layer. Each layer being peeled back will feel like an accomplishment, and whenever the patient gets better anyway, you can declare that the layer you most recently peeled back was the last layer and this explains why the patient is cured.

Another requirement for the indefinite process is that the steps involved need to be something that everyone can do. You can only remove a splinter from the skin of someone who has a splinter, but you can massage anyone who has a body. If the process is a peeling back of layers, the process needs to be something where anyone can think that they have those layers.

OK, so, given all of that, what do we see in Psycho-Analysis?

The basic premise is that the patients’ symptoms are caused by unresolved conflicts from the past which they have purposely forgotten in order to not have to deal with them (“repressed”). These must be dealt with in reverse chronological order, that is, you have to resolve the most recent first. There are various techniques for uncovering the memories so that the patient can deal with the repressed conflict but one of the chief ones is doing free association with dreams, guided by the therapist.

So, how does this correspond to what we’d expect to see in a treatment that doesn’t work for a condition which will eventually get better on its own?

Perfectly.

We have an indefinite process with distinct steps—the uncovering of each individual repressed conflict (and its resolution, though that’s often easy once it’s faced directly). This allows a feeling of accomplishment with each step. We also check the box of fulfilling some other need—regularly spending time with someone who is interested in us usually feels good. Indeed, a noted feature of psychotherapy is “transference,” which is the patient feeling for the therapist feelings that they “actually” have for someone else. Often this is sexual attraction, but it can be anything—friendship, a parent-child relationship, etc. Of course, another interpretation of this is that the patient, who is lonely in some way, is starting to believe that the therapist is meeting this need. That will certainly provide the reason to keep coming back.

We also have a peeling back of layers. Each repressed conflict must be dealt with before the next one, starting from the most recent to the oldest. This can be terminated at any time—once the symptoms stop, you conclude that you’ve finally uncovered the original repressed conflict. We also have the feature that anyone can do the work. One of the main techniques is to free associate on the substance of one’s dreams. We all dream, and anyone can say whatever comes into one’s head when thinking of some part of the dream. The analyst’s chief job in this free association is to direct it. The analyst picks up on the key parts and asks for more free association on that, as well as asking questions about the subject. Whenever that stops working, there are always more dreams and more free associations to be made. Truly, anyone can do it.

In short, I could not have predicted Psycho-Analysis merely by the assumption that it doesn’t work at treating conditions which tend to get better on their own, but nothing about it surprised me at all.

Well, that’s not quite true. I didn’t expect Freud to redefine “sexual”to mean “sensory.” Which means that a lot of his theories about things like the oedipal complex aren’t nearly as whackadoodle as they sound when you first hear them. I’m dubious that they’re true, but they’re not “had your brains surgically replaced with rat droppings” insane.

Unsustainable Things Give the Biggest Short-Term Benefits

On By Christopher LansdownIn Philosophy, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Change in dynamic systems always brings with it opportunities, and, in particular, unsustainable opportunities. These opportunities come from the mismatch between the parts of the system adapted to the new system and the parts which have not yet adapted. And unsustainable things usually give the biggest short-term benefits, which creates an incentive for people to instigate change in order to take advantage of the huge short-term benefits available before the system has adapted.

A simple example can be seen in the inflation or deflation of a currency. Let’s take deflation since it’s less common and less likely to have negative associations. In deflation, money is removed from an economy. The same amount of economic activity can go on as long as the price of everything lowers, and indeed this is what will eventually happen as the people who still have money offer less of it to others for goods and services and out of desperation they take it. The money then flows from the people who have it to the people who don’t, prices tend to lower, and we’re eventually back to where we started but with different numbers. Instead of the average wage being one Florentine per hour, it’s now half a Florentine per hour, and instead of a loaf of bread costing one Florentine it now costs half a Florentine. (Florentine is, I hope, a made-up currency purely for the purpose of illustration. It can be paper or gold or platinum, it doesn’t matter.) So the same amount of labor buys the same amount of bread, but the numbers have changed. We’re back to a stable situation, because a human economy needs (roughly) a certain relationship between the price of labor and the price of bread in order to function. It will go back to that. But what happened along the way? A lot of things, including a lot of suffering, but the relevant part here is a lot of opportunity.

If a person foresees the coming deflation, he will do what he can to save money, knowing that it will go up in value. He will forgo luxury goods and save, while he works extra hours to amass even more money. Then when the deflation hits he finally pays himself back, with all the money he saved buying twice what it would have back when he earned it. His new riches will only last with his savings; eventually he will have to go back to work and there will be the same relationship between his labor and the things he can buy with it as before the inflation. But while it lasts, he’s living high. And people who realize this will have a motivation to try to influence government policy to create deflationary periods. If his country is on a gold standard, he will have a temptation to help revolutionaries who want to sink ships carrying other people’s gold.

(We don’t see deflation nearly as often because far more people appreciate the potential for personal short-term benefit in inflation, but that’s a discussion for another day.)

You see similar opportunities for short-term gain in social changes as you do in economic ones, though because society is more complex and also more subtle than economics, these are often better disguised. Let’s take a simple case, though. Suppose a man in the 1950s desires to insert his penis to the vaginas of many women who, unlike him, are not interested in being promiscuous. The number of promiscuous women is irrelevant to this man since promiscuous women are, by hypothesis, not the object of his desire. If you need a story to make this more plausible, suppose that he is attracted to the feeling of conquest in bedding a woman who is saving herself for marriage, or if that is too old fashioned for you, who only feels sexual attraction within the context of what she beliefs to be a long-term relationship. In stable times, this will not work. His dreams of many such penis-insertions will result in very few actual insertions, and most of those will end up being with women who deceived him while he was trying to deceive them. He may, however, have the opportunity to realize his dream during times of social change.

If the social norms protecting women who are only interested in coitus within the confines of marriage or at least a long-term relationship are shifting, some of these women will rely on the old social protections while they are no longer being afforded and will, because of that, be easily deceived. To give a concrete example, suppose that women no longer tend to stay near family members but instead are exposed to unrelated young men whose reputation they do not know. Let us suppose, for example, that public schooling as been instituted and that automotive transport has brought a large number of people together, and moreover it has become normal for teenagers to use cars to go to places where none of their family are. While people are still getting used to this new normal, some young women may rely on reputation and their family not allowing males of ill intent near them to filter out the males of ill intent, and so a pretty face coupled with charming words may well convince her that she is consummating a marriage with him that they effected (the sacrament of marriage is confected by the couple, not by any priest or officiant) while he has simply lied to her because he is a bad man.

This state of affairs will not last; young women will, fairly quickly, learn to rely on different things to vet males than applied in their old environment. But during this transition, they will have none of these things, and some will be easy prey.

It is interesting to note, though few will care because people are naturally less sympathetic to males and even less so to bad males, that the changing social norms will also result in young women who are eager to be promiscuous having a better shot at this hypothetical male who only desires to insert his genitalia into women who wouldn’t want him if they knew what he was doing. During these hypothetical changes in social norms, he will be far more easily misled into thinking that all women are shrinking violets who object to using sexual intercourse like heroin because that might as well have been the case under the previous social norm and the exceptions were easy to spot.

When everyone gets used to the new circumstances, things will return to their previous difficulty, albeit with small modifications for differences in exact circumstance. People will develop new ways of getting to know a person’s reputation, people will treat strangers as unfiltered by people they trust, etc. etc. etc. There will be no lasting benefit, but there can be huge short-term benefits.

(Bear in mind that this example was a change in social circumstances that didn’t alter people’s fundamental preferences. It’s not an example of temporary sterilization. That will still cause changes that can be taken advantage of, but it also alters people’s fundamental preferences and the changes that will be adapted to are in things affected by it but not its direct consequences.)

The example I gave above was of a social change induced by a shift in (transportation) technology, which our hypothetical cad had no real control over. Yet even there, you can imagine, if he was sufficiently far-sighted, how he could champion government funding for roads as well as mandatory public schooling.

In practice, of course, the sorts of advocacy that people can have on social changes tend to be far more limited in effect and tend to look far more like simple bad advice. Loosen up, don’t be such a prude, you only want to treat sex like it’s not a safer form of heroin because the mean Christians are trying to control you, etc. etc. etc. These people are not, in the main, Machiavellian masterminds who are trying to create chaos to take advantage of it before they settle down. Mostly they are fools who think that the good times will last forever. In ten or fifteen years they’ll probably be writing op-eds about how great jumping off the cliff was but you don’t want to take things to their logical conclusion, you just want to keep falling forever because it’s a lot more fun. What they’re trying to do is to get the advantages of the change.

A big part of why they don’t realize that this is what they’re doing is because a lot of people never consider that human beings have two phases: childhood and adulthood. Childhood is a time of change, when human beings are easily molded. People can still change in adulthood, but nowhere nearly as easily. Accordingly, if you institute a social change in all of society, it will take far more hold in the young than in older people. The young will take it to its logical conclusions because they’re not held back by being stuck on adaptations to a previous order.

To give an example (painted with an absurdly broad brush), social norms were changed in the 1970s to where family, friends, and aquaintances no longer protected young women from the sexual advances of bad men. So for a decade or so, bad men could sexually harass women to their heart’s content and it was a cad’s paradise. But then young women who were raised without the expectation of social connections helping them adapted to the circumstance and sought the protection of law, and we had the crime of sexual harassment, as well as all sorts of corporate policies against it. And things went back to more-or-less normal.

As a brief aside, it is amusing to see people who grew up at just the right time think that the 1970s were representative of how society worked throughout all of human history up until some people agitated for legal protections. These people have clearly never watched movies from before the 1970s! Back then, important customers could get thrown out of an office for making advances on a secretary in terms sufficiently veiled that they’d never get past the initial stages of filing a sexual harassment lawsuit. Heaven help an employee who was sexually aggressive with fellow employees! This weird historical myopia is a subject for another day, but it is funny how people have managed to continuously think of their grandparents as downtrodden slaves and themselves as the first generation to be free for several generations in a row.

Anyway, the amnesiac attitude towards the developmental stages of human beings is often behind quite a bit of agitation for social change; the people doing the agitating only ever think about what things will be like when people set in the old ways partially change over, and are always shocked at what people who grow up with the changes do in order to lead human lives within the new order.

Admittedly, part of that is that people rarely adapt to change well within a single generation. They go to excess on some things and utterly miss out on others. It takes time to refine complex systems. The people having to do the adapting often suffer for it, too. Adults have fewer needs because their lives are already largely set; children have a ton of work to do in setting up their lives and will often do less of it due to the uncertainty of tumultuous times. The adults who advocate for social change thus reap more of the rewards and pay fewer of the costs, then blame the new generation for not doing as well as them. It’s a bit cheeky to burn the furniture then complain that people don’t sit down, but then most people are not philosophers.

One final note I should add is that none of the above means that social change is always and everywhere bad. Much of it is inevitable with a changing environment (such as is caused by developments in technology). Some of it is needed merely in order to fix the mistakes of the past. Indeed, as the paradox of Chesterton’s post states, you need constant change merely to be conservative. As he so rightly said, if you leave a white post alone, it will, in short order, become a dirty grey post. Only by continually repainting it white will you and future generations have a white post.

Change there must be, but it’s often best to limit it to fixing mistakes. And have a thought for the people who have to grow up in the new system because they won’t have the advantages of having grown up in the old one. Only their descendants will have that advantage, and only if the people who have to grow up in the new system don’t change it again.

I Became Medically Obese By Drinking a Glass of Water

On By Christopher LansdownIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

A while ago the medical definition of obesity became a certain Body Mass Index (BMI). Thirty or higher, to be specific. And the body mass index is a remarkably crude formula. It’s just the mass (in kilograms) divided by the height (in meters) squared. Since I’m six feet tall (that’s 1.8288 meters), the cutoff for a BMI of 30 is (depending on how you round the inputs) 100 kilograms even. This morning, when I woke up, I weighted 99.9kg, classifying me as “overweight.” Then I drank a glass of water and was 100.1kg, classifying me as obese. The moral of the story is, of course: don’t drink water because it will make you fat.

If You Have To Believe It, Maybe It’s Not False

On By Christopher LansdownIn Missing the Mark, YouTube ChannelLeave a comment

A video in which I look at the relationship of pragmatism to truth as inspired by an exchange between Chris Williamson and Jordan Peterson on the Modern Wisdom podcast. I emphasize it in the video, but to be clear: this is a reflection on something that Chris Williamson said and something that Jordan Peterson did NOT say, but might have. Their discussion was just a springing-off point, and this is not any kind of criticism of either man.

Psycho-Analysis Began in Hypnosis

On By Christopher LansdownIn Philosophy, Science, UncategorizedLeave a comment

In my (low-key) quest to understand how on earth Freud’s theories were ever respected, I’ve recently read Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. It’s definitely been interesting. (If you don’t know, this is the transcript of five lectures he gave on five consecutive days at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1909 which were meant to give a concise summary of Psycho-Analysis.)

Something I did not realize, but which makes perfect sense in retrospect, is that Psycho-Analysis began in hypnosis. A tiny bit of background is necessary, here: In the 1800s and early 1900s, the term “hysteria” seems to refer to any idiopathic problem in women with severe physical symptoms. Basically, when a woman developed bad symptoms and called in a doctor and he could find no physical cause, the diagnosis was “hysteria,” which basically meant “I don’t know, in a woman.” At this point, since the symptoms don’t have physical causes it is assumed that they must have mental causes and so doctors of the mind would step in to try to help, supposing, of course, that the patient or her family could afford it.

Freud begins with an interesting story about a patient that a colleague of his, Dr. Breuer, was treating. It was a young woman under great stress (nursing her dying father) who started developing a bunch of really bad symptoms that sound, to my ear, like a series of small strokes. She couldn’t use her right arm or leg for a while, sometimes she couldn’t use her left side, she forgot her native language (German) and could only speak English, etc. She also developed a severe inability to drink water and survived fro several weeks on melons and other high-water foods. And here’s where it gets interesting. Dr. Breuer hypnotized her and in a hypnotic state she related the story of having gone into a companion’s room and seen the woman’s dog drinking from a glass. This disgusted her terribly but she gave no indication of it because she didn’t want to offend the woman. He then gave the young woman a glass of water, brought her out of hypnosis, and she was able to drink normally from then on.

Freud moved away from hypnosis for several reasons, but the big one seems to be that most people can’t be hypnotized, which makes it a therapeutic tool of dubious value. The particulars of how he moved away is interesting, but I’ll get to that in a little bit. Before that, I want to focus on the hypnosis.

The history of hypnosis is interesting in itself, but a bit complex, and the relevant part is really how it was more popularly perceived than by what it was intended as. In its early stages, hypnosis was seem as something very different from normal waking life and, as a result, excited an enormous amount of interest from people who desired secret knowledge of the universe’s inner secrets. There were plenty of people who wanted to believe in a hidden world that they could access if only they had the key (spurred on, I suspect, by the many discoveries of the microscope in the late 1600s and the continued discoveries as a result of better and better microscopes). Hypnotism, where a man’s mind seemed to alter to a completely different state, and in particular where it could receive commands that it would obey without remembering in a subsequent waking state, was perfect for just such a belief. Here there seemed to be another behind, behind the mind we observe, which seemed to govern the observable mind’s operation. This is the sort of stuff out of which real power is based—if you can control the real source of the mind, you can control the mind!

This context really makes Pysho-Analysis’s model of the compartmentalized mind and further its insistence on the power of the sub-conscious mind make sense.

As I said, Freud abandoned hypnotism, and the means by which he did it really should have been a tip-off to his whole theory being wrong. What led him to discard hypnotism were some experiments he became aware of in which a person who could not remember what he did under hypnosis could be induced, without any further hypnosis, to remember. Freud only took this instrumentally rather than considering that it undermined the whole idea of the powerful subconscious and went about bringing up the “repressed” memories which were (putatively) causing physical symptoms by talking with the patient without hypnotism. I suppose that the idea of this secret knowledge was too attractive to give up.

How to Balance Gratitude With Ambition

On By Christopher LansdownIn Christianity, Philosophy, UncategorizedLeave a comment

I was watching a Chris Williamson Q&A video recently and a question he was asked was how to balance gratitude with ambition (or aspiration for improvement, if you dislike the term ambition). The exact phrasing of the question was:

How do I manage the dichotomy between being grateful for how far I’ve come and wanting to become more? The dichotomy between working for my future and being present in the moment.

There are several answer to this, and the thing is, they’re all primarily religious. It’s actually kind of interesting how often hard-won, top-level secular wisdom is beginning religious education. The Jewish sabbath is exactly this. God created the heavens and the earth in six days, and on the seventh day God rested, so human beings will work for six days and rest on the seventh. (Bear in mind that rest implies contemplation, not merely sleeping.) There you go, there’s your management of the dichotomy between working and gratitude. (The Christian moving of the day of rest to Sunday is an interesting and rich topic, but all of that rich symbolism doesn’t materially affect the current subject.) To put this in secular terms, a regular 6-to-1 balance of time dedicated to work with time dedicated to contemplation will keep your balance. If you keep it regular (that is, according to a rule), it will ensure that the effects of contemplation do not wear off. And guess what: you need to impose rules on yourself to make yourself do it because human beings don’t perfectly auto-regulate. (Just don’t make the rules so rigid you can’t live; the sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath.)

Another answer, here, is to keep God always in mind. This will make you strive to be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect and also make you grateful for all that He’s already given you.

Here’s where Jordan Peterson’s language of “God is the highest good” falls a bit short, since keeping the highest good in mind will stimulate ambition, but it doesn’t tend nearly so much to gratitude. For gratitude you need to keep in mind the nothingness from which you came and which you could, apart from the positive action of The Good, become again. This requires a leap of faith that the world is not evil, though. If you can do this, you’re not going to be secular for long, and the whole exercise of trying to put this into secular language will be unnecessary. If you can’t take this leap of faith that the world exists because of good, then you’ll never actually be grateful anyway. People try to use “grateful” as an intransitive verb, but it’s not. It’s a transitive verb. You don’t have to conceive of God as a person to be grateful to Him, though it helps. But if the world is just a cruel joke with no punchline which no one told, gratitude is nonsensical. But here’s the thing: if you aren’t sure whether life is a cruel joke with no punchline that no one has told, that is equally paralyzing.

To see why, consider this thought experiment: you receive a text message from a friend which says something complementary about you, but there are enough odd word choices that you think it might just be his phone unlocked in his pocket interacting with auto-correct. Try to feel grateful for this message which you think might be a real compliment and might just be random noise that accidentally looks like a message. You will find that you can’t do it.

Nevertheless, it can still be interesting to say what is true, even if it will do no one any good: the way you keep perspective is by comparing, not to one thing, but to two things. If you want to keep perspective on your achievements, you must compare them both to the fullness of what you can achieve as well as to the nothing which is the least you could have achieved. Comparing to only one will not give you a proper perspective, because neither, on its own, is the full picture. Only by looking at the full picture will you have a correct perspective on where your achievements are within it. This is as true of metaphorical photographs as it is of literal photographs.

Socially Awkward Women Have a Really Hard Time

On By Christopher LansdownIn Philosophy, Uncategorized1 Comment

I came across the subject of how women interact with each other socially when studying female bullying, originally with the books Queen Bees and Wannabes and Odd Girl Out. (They’re both very interesting books and I recommend them.) I’ve studied more about it since then and one of the conclusions I’ve come to is that socially awkward women have an incredibly hard time. (This probably includes, but certainly is not limited to, women on the autism spectrum.)

The background you need to know (and will probably know better than I am if you are female, in which case please bear with me) is that women tend to prefer, within social interactions, subtle interactions to explicit ones. You can tell Just So evopsych stories about women being more vulnerable and needing to not offend people to explain it if you like, but the preference for more subtle nudging than direct confrontation means that women are (as a rule) highly attuned to subtle signals. (None of this comes with any value judgement attached; like all natural substrates it is the canvas upon which moral virtues are painted—in other words, it can be used well or badly.) In general this works out, in much the same way that if you have a quiet speaker and a sensitive microphone, you get a recording at a normal volume. Or to vary the metaphor, if you have a dim light and a wide-open pupil, your eye sees clearly.

By contrast—and of course I’m painting with a broad brush—men tend to dislike subtlety in social interactions. We value openness and directness. It does need to be said that that’s not the same thing as being a bull in a china shop. You can be direct, quiet, and precise—hence Teddy Roosevelt’s famous advice to speak softly and carry a big stick.

Now, it’s fairly obvious that these two strategies don’t mesh perfectly; when the male is trying to communicate to the female this can be like shouting into a sensitive microphone, and when the female is trying to communicate to the male this can be like whispering into a mic with the gain turned really low. This often causes problems to males and females who are just starting to communicate with each other (i.e. teenagers) but women pretty quickly learn to stop looking for subtle queues from men, often with the explanation that “men are simple” or “men are dumb.” A similar phenomenon happens when a woman is first married—she’ll often be trying to figure out what’s wrong all the time until she figures out that if something’s wrong the man will say, and most of the time she can’t figure out what’s going on with him, it’s not that he’s being too subtle or she not sensitive enough, it’s that nothing (relevant) is going on. This is the classic case of the woman wondering why the man is staring off into space and trying to guess why he’s angry at her while he’s just trying to figure out whether he thinks it’s actually plausible that batman could be superman in a fight. I mean, superman has super-speed, so even if batman has cryptonite…

And, again, after a while most young wives figure out that a husband staring off into space probably doesn’t mean anything, and “men are just weird/simple/stupid/big children/different”.

All well and good for women interacting with males.

But for the most part, it seems that women can’t learn to make these allowances for other women.

And this causes enormous problems for women who need them.

I’m speaking, of course, of socially awkward women. They don’t give off appropriate subtle queues, especially the positive ones, which often causes other women to take offense. This probably needs some explanation.

Often, the way women communicate that they have been offended is to somewhat reduce the amount of positive signals they’re giving, or to still give them but to make them less enthusiastic. Since the other woman is hyper-vigilant and analyzes her behavior in great detail to see where she might have given offense, she’ll probably figure this out and take action to repair the relationship. If the woman does not do this analysis and take that action, this communicates her disinclination to a close relationship, i.e. is an insult. Hence the offense.

A socially awkward woman may or may not notice the subtle variations in the other woman’s positive signals, but if she does she’ll have no idea how to respond and so the other woman is highly likely to take offense when she gets it wrong.

There’s also a pretty good chance that the socially awkward woman will have no idea how to respond properly to when her female friends try to do collaborative emotional processing with her, making the experience unsatisfying for them if they don’t interpret her actions as being judgmental or all negative and taking offense when this doesn’t seem right.

All of this will cause female friendships to be very stressful for the socially awkward woman, and in all likelihood, short-lived.

None of these problems apply to friendships with males, though, so there’s a pretty good chance that you’ll find socially awkward women having mostly male friends. This has its own pitfalls, of course, because a woman who shares a man’s interests and likes talking to him about them is extraordinarily attractive to males who are looking for a wife. There’s the further issue that women of marriageable age usually won’t talk (extensively) to males of marriageable age unless they’re open to romantic interest because they’re very sensitive to whether there’s interest and careful to not encourage it. Again, I’m painting with a very broad brush and there are tons of exceptions to that—especially in contexts which are not purely social, such as workplaces. But the point is, there’s a real danger in her friendships with males that the male will develop romantic interest in the socially awkward woman and if she’s not interested that will kill the friendship.

So we come back to the title of this post. Life is really hard for socially awkward women, and I think they deserve more sympathy than they often get.

Testing Computer Programs

On By Christopher LansdownIn Philosophy, UncategorizedLeave a comment

My oldest son, who does yet know how to program, told me a great joke about programmers testing the programs they’ve written:

A programmer writes the implementation of a bartender. He then goes into the bar and orders one beer. He then orders two beers. He orders 256 beers. He order 257 beers. He order 9,999 beers. He orders 0.1 beers. He orders zero beers. He orders -1 beers. Everything works properly.

A customer walks in and asks where the bathroom is. The bar catches fire.

It’s funny ’cause it’s true.

It’s easy, when you design a tool, to test that it works for the purpose the tool exists for. What it’s very easy to miss is all of the other possible uses of the tool. To take a simple example: when you’re making a screwdriver, it’s obvious to test the thing for driving screws. It’s less obvious to test it as a pry bar, a chisel, an awl, or a tape dispenser.

This disparity is inherent in the nature of making tools versus using them. Tools are made by tool-makers. The best tool makers use their own tools, but they are only one person. Each person has his way of solving a problem, and he tends to stick to that way because he’s gotten good at it. When he goes to make a tool, he makes it work well for how he will use it, and often adds features for variations on how he can think to use it to solve the problems he’s making the tool to solve. If he’s fortunate enough to have the resources to talk to other people who will use the tool, he’ll ask them and probably get some good ideas on alternative ways to use it. But he can’t talk to everyone, and he especially can’t talk to the people who haven’t even considered using the tool he hasn’t made yet.

That last group is especially difficult, since there’s no way to know what they will need. But they will come, because once the tool exists, people who have problems where this new tool will at least partially solve their problem will start using it to do so, since they’re better off with it than they were before, even though the tool was never meant to do that.

This isn’t much of a problem with simple tools like a screwdriver, since it doesn’t really have any subtleties to it. This can be a big problem with complex tools, and especially with software. When it comes to software design, you can talk to a bunch of people, but mostly you have to deal with this through trial-and-error, with people reporting “bugs” and you going, “why on earth would you do that?” and then you figure it out and (probably) make changes to make that use case work.

The flip side is a big more generally practical, though: when considering tools, you will usually have the most success with them if you use them for what they were designed to do. The more you are using the tool for some other purpose, the more likely you are to run into problems with it and discover bugs.

For me this comes up a lot when picking software libraries. Naive programmers will look at a library and ask, “can I use this to do what I want?” With more experience, you learn to ask, “was this library designed to do what I want to do?” Code re-use is a great thing, as is not re-inventing the wheel, but this needs to be balanced out against whether the tool was designed for the use for which you want to use it, or whether you’re going to be constantly fighting it. You can use the fact that a car’s differential means that its drive wheels will spin in the mud to dig holes, but that will stop working when car manufacturers come out with limited-slip differentials because they’re making cars for transportation, not digging holes.

That’s not to say that one should never be creative in one’s use of a tool. Certainly there are books which work better for propping up a table than they do for being read. Just be careful with it.