Ask Alexa, or Google Assistant, or whichever AI you’re impressed with:

How much would could a wood chuck chuck if a would chuck could not chuck wood?

Unlike the more common phrase which asks how much wood the beast in question could chuck under the hypothetical that it was capable of chucking it, this question has a very simple, obvious answer. An answer that, in the year of our Lord 2022, none of the AIs I tested gave.

I recently came across an article about plant-based fake meat (“beyond burger”, “impossible burger” etc) titled After Billions in Investment, Plant-Based Meat is a Branding Catastrophe. It makes some fair points about how the fake-meat companies thought that merely having reasonably plausible fake meat was enough and have utterly failed to market it. However, it strikes me that it misses a bigger problem with regard to marketing fake meat: their target market is mostly into natural food.

When it comes to people who have extra money to spend on food, they don’t generally think that the big problem we have in our food these days is that it’s too real.

There’s a further issue that fake meat doesn’t solve any actual problems. Well, that’s not quite true. It does make it easier for burger places to have a vegetarian option when mostly meat eaters and a vegetarian want to go to a burger restaurant. But that’s about it.

Now, I say this as someone who is about halfway to being carnivorous (on an average day meat makes up half to three quarters of what I eat): if you want to eat vegetarian food, there are plenty of tasty ways of doing that which don’t taste like meat.

The big problem with eating vegetarian food, though, is its nutrient content. I know that there have been endless decades of propaganda about how many vitamins there are in vegetables, but it’s way easier to get most of the nutrients you need, and without absurd amounts of starch, by eating meat. It’s best, of course, to eat a varied diet because that will ensure that one doesn’t miss out on anything for too long, but especially in terms of macro-nutrients, getting a large amount of protein which has a good balance of amino acids without getting a ton of carbohydrates at the same time is just a ton of work. If your diet isn’t going to be primarily composed of nuts (tree nuts and peanuts) you’re going to have to rely quite heavily on processed proteins. In practice, that means eating a ton of soybean-based foods. It’s not hard for that to get old, fast.

Fake hamburgers don’t actually solve this problem. While they do taste a fair amount like meat, they don’t have the nutrients of meat, and while our bodies can be fooled some of the time—especially by sugar—our bodies are actually really good at figuring out what nutrients and micro-nutrients are in foods and making us want them or not want them according to what we need. Soy protein and coconut oil don’t acquire all of the other stuff that’s in animal muscle just because one adds in some plant-based heme which is normally one of the easiest ways to detect that we’re eating red meat.

Which brings me back to the marketing issue: the sort of people who would normally form the market for fake meat are the sort of people who shop at whole foods. But fake meat is not a whole food. Fake meat is a heavily processed laboratory product. It’s not a healthier way to eat soybeans and coconut oil, and if you really want to base your diet on soybeans, you’re probably better off learning how to do it with tofu, which as a fermented food has all sorts of nutrients in it that the original soybeans don’t.

(Fun fact: in the cultures that tofu originates in, it’s not a replacement for meat but often a complement to it, being put in the same dishes at the same time.)

According to this article, it turns out that the song is not about LSD but about a child’s drawing. From the article:

Thus the meaning of this song is rather abstract, but Lennon was adamant about the meaning of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” during his life. Lennon repeatedly expressed that this song was about a drawing that his young son, Julian, created while in school. Julian had drawn one of his schoolmates and friends, Lucy O’Donnell, among a smattering of stars. And when he showed his father the picture after school, he told the elder Lennon that it was “Lucy in the sky with diamonds.”

Inspired by his son, Lennon got to work creating a sonic picture of his son’s drawing. Lennon gave Lucy a story and animated her in a fantastical, whimsical story.

It goes on to say:

Soon after its release, there was a widely held belief that “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” was a song about the hallucinogenic drug LSD… Lennon, however, adamantly disagreed with his fans. “It never was [about LSD] and nobody believes me,” he said in a 1971 interview.

I’ve run into the sort of person who will shout with adamantine certainty that the song most certainly is about drugs. To this sort of person everything that they like is really about drugs, probably because drugs are nearly the only thing that they like. It goes deeper than this, though; this sort of person desperately wants to affirm that society—or at least the good parts of society—agrees with them.

These sort of people never actually need the song to say anything about their idol, merely mentioning it is enough for them. (This is often necessary in order to make their drug-interpretation fit the song they’re talking about; since they are imputing the drug interpretation there’s no substance there.) It makes sense, though, that these sort of people don’t require that a song actually say anything about the drugs. They are intellectually dead, which is the easiest step to take on the path to their goal—to leave this world. They’re not suicidal (for the most part) in the traditional sense of the word, but they fundamentally don’t want to be here.

There are two things that human beings are given to do in this world, and one of them will persist in heaven. The one that will persist is to love God and enjoy His goodness. The other thing, the temporary thing, is to take part with God in His act of creation. These are what are often called doing good or “good works”, and in our fallen state people often think that they are incompatible with enjoying God’s goodness. (It is hardest to do both at the same time when one misunderstands the cooperation with God in the act of creation as some sort of requirement, rather than a privilege, or worse as the price of getting something good.)

People who really like drugs want to avoid that second thing we’re given to do in this world. They don’t want to take part in creation, they just want to skip straight to heaven. Drugs are, in general, a chemical lie which allow us to fool ourselves into thinking that we’re already in heaven. This is why (with exceptions) people on drugs don’t accomplish anything (while they’re on drugs). This is also why people who regularly take drugs rarely accomplish much when they’re not taking the drugs. At a fundamental level, they don’t want to be here.

It would be bad enough if these people killed themselves slowly, as G.K. Chesterton put it “using the tools of pleasure, not the tools of pain”, but it is worse than that. Like all idol worshipers, they are not content to privately worship their idol. They want everyone else to worship with them. So they go around insisting that everyone interpret art as badly as they do, that is, they go around trying to ruin it for everyone else. They try to talk others out of wanting to be here, too. Their saving grace is that they’re horribly unattractive. After high school, one pretty much never has to interact with them again.

Except occasionally in comments on the internet.

As a result of a conversation I looked up the history of Technicolor, and it turned out to be more complex than I thought. For those who don’t know: technicolor was the first technology which was used to create full color motion pictures that were widely distributed. That last part—widely distributed—is where the complexity lies; there were a whole bunch of technologies which came before the technicolor we know and love, but which never became popular. Technicolor was not the first color process, it was the first color process that won. It was expensive and difficult to work with, which was why the black-and-white era didn’t come to a close until (roughly) the 1970s, when Eastman Kodak’s much single-film color process brought the price of color film down so far black-and-white was no longer cheaper. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The Technicolor corporation was founded in 1914 by Herbert Kalmus and Daniel Frost Comstock, two recent graduates of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, better known as MIT. The first process used two strips of film and only captured red and green. The basic technology, would persist until Eastman Kodak’s single-film process, was to use a prism to split the spectra of light coming into the camera into different physical locations, which would be used to expose different negatives. Thus there would be a negative which only captured the red light and another that only captured the green light. These would be developed into films with only the respective colors of light on them, which would then be shown onto the same theater screen, superimposed, and so we’d see both red and green.

For those who don’t know, this works surprisingly well because our eyes only have three types of color-sensitive photosensitive nerve cells in our eyes. One is sensitive to green, one to red, and the third to blue. (There are some people, mostly women, who have a fourth, which is a slight variation of one of them, and gives them better color discrimination.) They’re not point-sensitive, they have fall-offs in how much light of different wavelenths stimulates each one. We can see the wide spectrum of colors that we can because for any given photon it stimulates all three to differing amounts, and we can thus reconstruct from how much the three types of nerve cells are stimulated what the original color was. However, it is possible to fool this system by manipulating the light to be made up of just the right amount of red, green, and blue in order to reproduce the other colors; this is what using multiple film strips projecting different colors does.

The original process went with red and green because our eyes are most sensitive to these colors, and so we see most of the brightness of an object from these. It further turns out that since looking at objects is not passive but actually a highly active process, our brains, which have trained for many years on the real world, are good at reconstructing missing information based on what’s available. A film made up of only red and green doesn’t look right, but it looks surprisingly good. Not really good enough, though, and neither this process nor the two that followed it—which were two-color processes that just improved the practicality of capturing and showing movies using them—really took off.

It was the three-color process, which produced a full range of lifelike colors, that would become popular. Technicolor had developed it to the point of it being usable by studios by 1931, and Walt Disney was the first to use it commercially. It was an 8 minute long short film, released in 1932. This three-color process used the same prismatic separation to expose multiple negatives, but this time it was onto three black-and-white negative strips, one for red, one for green, and one for blue. These would then undergo a complicated process that turned them into a single, color, strip of film which could be shown in the same projectors used for showing black-and-white films. This was a huge competitive advantage for Technicolor over its competitors, because they relied on specialized color-only projectors which were expensive and movie theaters didn’t already own.

The other half of this story, though, is why movie studios were willing to invest a large amount of money in making full-color movies. It cost more for the equipment, more for the film, the cameras were huge and bulky, there needed to be a “Technicolor Director” on set to make sure that the color was being captured properly (who had to be paid), and providing enough light to properly capture the color required enormous, powerful, and very hot lights. The heat from these lights was so intense actors needed more breaks, slowing down production. In short, Technicolor might have been the best color process available at the time, but it was way more difficult and expensive than black-and-white. Obviously, color would be the future, but the question is not why did movie studios switch to color at all, but why did they switch to color when it was so new and expensive?

Of course, one part of that answer is that they largely didn’t. Most films would be shot in black-and-white with color films only being a select few big-budget movies until the 1950s, with the introduction of the Eastman Kodak process. That said, another part of the answer is that in the 1930s the Great Depression was going on and movie-viewing was being hit by it. A new and exciting technology seemed like just the thing to get audiences excited to come to movie theaters again. (Always left unsaid, new technologies are much easier to introduce than making good movies is.)

I find it interesting how often I’ve heard that explanation for the adoption of new technologies. It seems that technological progress is often as dependent on someone desperate enough to give it a try as it is on someone clever enough to invent it.

Be that as it may, while this expensive and difficult process got color films off the ground, it was not what would make color the norm. To give a feel for this, there were twelve Technicolor films produced in 1940 and sixteen in 1941. 1942 saw a dip down to eleven Technicolor films. Granted, America officially entered World War in December of 1941, but if we fast forward to 1946, only twenty seven films were made in Technicolor. 1947 bumped that up to twenty nine. Color films being the norm would only come about in the 1950s because of the Eastman Kodak single-film color process.

This was not merely an effect of the Eastman Kodak process being cheaper, it was also vastly easier to work with. It didn’t need nearly so much light, the cameras were much less bulky, film developing could be done in-house—in short, it was significantly better in every way. Also interesting was that in the 1950s television viewing significantly cut into movie attendance, or at least that was the generally accepted explanation for the decrease in movie viewership the industry was experiencing. One of the approaches to combat this and bring people back to the theaters was changing the aspect ratio from the 4:3 which both movies and TV shared to Cinemascope, which was an anamorphic lens technique for recording and displaying movies in an aspect ratio close to the modern 2.35:1. Other approaches soon followed which had similar aspect ratios, as well as compromise widescreen aspect ratios such as 1.85:1 (which is pretty close to the modern 16:9 aspect ratio that TVs and monitors use). These shifts, which were not hard on a single-film camera, would have been very difficult on a prismatically separated three-film camera, and this helped to end the age of Technicolor.

Film would, of course, eventually come to be replaced by digital recording which was another big leap in being cheaper and more convenient, but that’s a story for another time.