A speculative mind

A few years ago I saw the movie Lucy with Scarlett Johansen (I mean to say that she was in the movie. I did not go to the movie with her. We are not that close). Anyway the movie is a fun little romp. Bad things happen to Lucy, but she is able to overcome the villains and kick some glorious butt while she is doing it. Like I said, it is fun, and stylistically it is a beautiful film to watch. The problem is it is based on a premise that is a complete fallacy. There is an experimental drug that Lucy is exposed to. This drug allows a person to access unused portions of their brain. Because, as we all know, we only use 10 percent of our brains right? Wrong. This is one of those myths that has been repeated so often that people think it is true. We do not know everything there is to know about the human brain. I am sure there are astounding discoveries yet to be made. But humans use all of their brains (with the possible exception of politicians). I should point out that Lucy ...

I was a little kid growing up in the 1960’s. By all accounts I should have been a fan of westerns. Most kids my age were. The 1950’s and 60’s were really the heyday of westerns. There was Gunsmoke , the longest running television drama of all time. But besides Gunsmoke there were tons of others: Cheyenne, Maverick, Have Gun Will Travel, Wagon Train, The Rifleman, Laramie, Rawhide, Bonanza, The Virginian, Daniel Boone, Branded, F Troop, Laredo, The Big Valley, The Wild Wild West, The Monroes, Iron Horse, Cimmaron Strip, The Guns of Will Sonnett, The High Chaparral . There were many more that I have not mentioned. This is remarkable when you realize that there were only three networks then (four after PBS came on, but they weren’t doing westerns). Most people in America did not have more than three channels. How did they fit all these westerns in? And this is just the television shows; if that wasn’t enough there were plenty of westerns at the movie houses and western novels. ...

Game of Thrones is a superb television series based on a superb set of books by George R.R. Martin. Contrary to popular perception, only the first book in the series is called “Game of Thrones.” The series as a whole is called “The Song of Ice and Fire.” Television and novels are two very different media, and so they have to tell their stories in different ways. The pacing is different. And with TV you have to be concerned about budget. I remember an interview with George R.R. Martin where he said he had written an episode for the TV version that showed all the bannermen of the Starks being called, each receiving a raven (call to arms) and getting their houses together and riding off to support the Starks. He said the producers came to him and told him that if they shot that scene as written, would use up all the money in the budget for the year. One of the things that both media have to wrestle with is exposition: telling information the audience needs to know. It is backsto...

I just saw “First Man”, the Neil Armstrong biopic. It was quite good, but there were moments that were hard to watch. Because I was a boy who grew up in the 1960’s, I knew when the movie was approaching a point where something bad was going to happen. The movie did a good job making me like the characters (real people) so that made their deaths hard to take. People did die during the space race. They died firstly, because space travel is inherently dangerous. There is just no margin of error. NASA backed up whatever components that could be backed up, but there were many mission critical components (components that, were they to fail, would result in the loss of the mission). Some components simply could not be backed up. If your main engine shuts off: loss of mission. If your fuel tank ruptures: loss of mission. They tried to plan for everything they could think about, but that leads me to the second reason people died during the space race: it was a race. You can do a good...