A speculative mind

If you have never seen it, you should really try to watch an old TV series from the 1970’s called I Claudius . I Claudius was a BBC miniseries that I believe first made its appearance on American television on Masterpiece Theater. The series is based on the books I Claudius , and Claudius the God by Robert Graves and gives us a look inside the Roman Empire from the middle of the reign of Augustus through the reign of Claudius. The emperor Claudius was called Claudius the Stammerer, or Claudius the Idiot. A stammerer he was, but if we are to believe Graves, Claudius was no idiot. We follow the reigns of Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula (yes, that Caligula) and Claudius. Most histories about the early Roman Empire use Tacitus as their source. Tacitus was a man of facts, names and dates (though he was not above throwing in a cutting remark now and then. When Graves wrote I Claudius he based his novelization of this period on the writings of Suetonius. In contrast to Tacitus, Suetoni...

The series Fringe ran on Fox television from 2008 to 2013. It was a science fiction show about FBI agents investigating other worldly technology and events. When I tried explaining that to a friend he said, “so you mean like The X-Files ?” And I am like No, it’s not like X-Files . . .   Okay I guess it does kind of sound like it. But it really was not like The X-Files . First of all it was different in tone. X-Files had a darker, atmospheric tone to it. To me it felt like Fringe was a bit more grounded in the real world. (If I can say that with a straight face about a show with parallel dimensions, teleportation, creatures who could stop or alter time, and a mad scientist who insisted a live cow reside in their Harvard laboratory . . .   but it felt more grounded to me.) Also Fringe felt like it was going somewhere. The mystery was slowly revealed and eventually resolved. With The X-Files (much as I loved the show) it always felt like we were falling down the rabbi...

There is a big push to build self-driving cars and other autonomous vehicles. This push is technology driven, but it is not the technology of the cars or the artificial intelligence or the sensors that make it work. No. What is driving this is the technology of hand-held electronic devices: Cell phones, I-pods, tablets, and the like. It is the inability of people to put these devices down when logic dictates that you should not be looking at them. Like for example, when you are driving, or walking across the street, or operating heavy equipment. Common sense would seem to indicate that these are potentially hazardous activities and perhaps it might be better to hold off on answering that text message instead of responding to it this very minute. But people are stupid. I say this with some authority. Just read the paper every day. Perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad if the stupid people just killed or maimed themselves , but how many innocent people have died because of the action...

I just recently finished the novel 11-22-63 by Stephen King. The date in the title is the day that President Kennedy was assassinated. It is a date that anyone who lived through that time would recognize. I suppose it would be equivalent of September 11 th , 2001 for anyone who was alive on that date, or December 7 th , 1941 for anyone who was alive then. This is a book about time travel. Our protagonist (Jake) is shown a portal that leads him back to 1958. Al, the man who shows him this portal,  wanted to use it to prevent the assassination but Al came down with cancer and is unable to do the job so he encourages Jake to do it. Jake is reluctant to do this because he doesn’t know what the consequences would be. Right on Jake. The whole thing sounded like a really bad idea to me. You can imagine how even small changes in the past can mushroom into larger changes to history over time. But to alter a seminal event like the assassination of a president would have to have en...

Every once and a while I am struck by the journey that leads us to where we wind up. Education and experience have long lasting and sometimes unexpected results. When I took algebra in high school, I learned about SOH-CAH-TOA. This is a mnemonic that helps you find missing information about a right triangle, if you know some of the information. For example the “SOH” in the mnemonic stands for S ine (of the angle) equals the O pposite divided by the A djacent, where the opposite and adjacent are the lengths of two of the sides of the triangle. This is one of those things you learn in school where you say “okay I will learn it for the test, but I am never going to use this in my life.” Then at one point in my life I went to work for a surveyor’s office. Surveyors usually deal in horizontal distances. So if the deed or the survey says that going from point A to point B is 100 feet long, that means it is 100 feet horizontally. If it is steep, you may measure 120 feet on the groun...

The other night I had the experience of going to one of our local theater company’s production of Othello . Now this version was a little different. That statement is almost a cliché now because almost every production of Shakespeare is “a little different.” People are always finding new or inventive ways of producing Shakespeare. They will set plays in the 1940’s, or during the Civil War, or the roaring 20’s, or with all Elvis Impersonators (okay I made that last one up, but I wouldn’t put it past some director out there). This particular production of Othello was set underground beneath New York City and it was steampunk (I will assume you know what steampunk is, if not, look it up. That is a discussion for another day.) This production and the choices made, worked. Alas, not all the alternative settings for a Shakespeare production do work. It all comes down to how much thought the production team put into the concept. It is easy to come up with an offbeat idea for a prod...

Has there ever been a more iconic vision than the sight of Princess Leia wearing that metal bra (and not much else) in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi? It has inspired many an adolescent fantasy and continues to do so today, more than thirty years after it appeared on the screen. You can find images of it, or artistic renderings of it all over the internet. On the one hand it is just another example of Hollywood sexploitation. Of course she appeared that way on the movie poster even though Carrie Fisher really wasn’t wearing it for much of the film, just two scenes. There are many examples of Hollywood sexploitation, too many to name. They have been doing this since the 1920’s and still are today. It is such a common feature of movies that movies without it are almost the exception. And it is not just the women (well okay, it’s mostly women) but from time to time they do put scantily clad males on display too. The whole point of doing this is to get people into the theater. It ...