American Congressional Reform

As we swing into an American Congressional election year, I cannot help but wonder if perhaps there is a better way to run things. Of course, as a Canadian civilian, my political clout in this matter is absolutely non-existent, but I thought I might field some ideas for the sake of it. There are two problems I would like to address; the most pressing one is that upon election House Representatives and, to a lesser extent, Senators must immediately begin devoting considerable time and resources to the project of re-election rather than focusing on their ostensible job of legislating in the interest of the people they represent. Secondly, election campaigns themselves tend to revolve around non-issues and are primarily decided by monetary input from special-interest lobbies and large corporations.

In order to try and minimize these problems, I thought that perhaps it would make sense to expand the judicial branch of the government in the following manner: create a body of judges and constitutional lawyers (hereafter simply referred to as judges) who are randomly assigned in sets of three or five to each Congressman two months (or some other appropriate time frame) before the election cycle is set to begin. The judges will be responsible for reviewing the Congressman's job performance, specifically with regard to whether the Congressman actually participated in the legislative process and whether or not there was evidence of some sort of justification and thought put into that Congressman's contribution, as well as whether any conflicts of interest from special-interest campaign contributors compromised the Congressman's votes and proposals. If the judges deem the Congressman's to have been adequate with minimal ethical issues, then the Congressman need not run for re-election. If there is a serious lack of engagement on the part of the Congressman or ethical breaches such as voting solely on the basis of campaign contributors' wishes, then the judges can call for an election in that district.

It is important that these judges be randomly assigned, as there should be no opportunity for the Congressman to use his legislative powers to further the agendas of any of the judges (thereby corrupting their votes). Likewise, in the same manner that the judicial branch is expected to function as ethically and impartially as possible, so too must these performance evaluations be done. The enquiries should be open, and any challenges to the impartiality of the judges should be evaluated by a judicial ethics board.

The point of all of this is to make Congressmen more accountable to their actual records in office, while also easing much of the burden of campaigning (thereby leaving them more time and resources to devote to their legislative tasks). When Congressmen are called for re-election, the election campaigns themselves should likewise be more focused on their actual performances since the judges will have performed the detailed scrutiny of their records that no voter could possibly have the time to compile (unless they happen to be independently wealthy, really into politics, and very well connected). Since the evaluations will be conducted in an open manner, any reasons for calling the election will immediately be at the forefront of the campaign and open for debate.

An Absolutely Terrible Star Trek: The Next Generation Episode

I thought I had seen every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation over the course of my childhood. Apparently, that is not true. Over the past little while I have been slowly re-watching the series, and I am on the final stretch with the seventh season. Tonight I watched the episode entitled Sub Rosa. It was kind of like watching what I imagine would happen if television writers routinely trolled the internet looking for creepy fan-fiction rather than writing the episodes themselves. Not that I think anyone will mind, but spoilers are ahead.

Apparently, Dr. Crusher's grandmother lives on a weird colony that tries its best to emulate Scotland in the 1800s. While I figured that is what the holodeck is for, I guess it is the future when people can do all sorts of frivolously ridiculous things, including making an entire planet into a Scotland emulation, so perhaps we can forgive the setting. The episode doesn't really have much to do with any of the characters beyond Crusher, with Data, Riker, and Geordi providing minor plot bits. Picard and Troi have slightly larger roles, but their roles are unfortunately mainly served as foils for Crusher's weird and creepy trans-generational ghostly love affair. You see, Crusher's grandmother had a secret lover named Ronin who was actually an "aniphasic" alien who lived in a candle (a regular candle, but somehow it turns out to actually be a plasma candle). Now that Crusher's grandmother is dead, he seduces her. If the story of someone's grandmother's lover seducing them is not awkward enough, he repeatedly tells her how much he loves her within the context of loving her just like he loved her grandmother, and her great grandmother before that, all the way back through the generations.

I not only have no idea who pitched this storyline in the writing room, but I cannot imagine how anyone who heard it thought, "Grandmother's ghost lover seducing Dr. Crusher - how is that not television gold?" Apparently there is another episode that I also have not seen (or at least have no memory of seeing) coming up that is even worse than this one, but I have a hard time imagining that. Also, I realise that this post in no way holds any sort of worthwhile news or interesting bits about science, but I felt the need to share my pain.

A Disconcerting Development

For some reason, the default dictionary for the spell-check available in both Open Office and Microsoft Word does not recognize 'neuroscience' as a word. I normally just ignore my spell-checker when it highlights words that I know to be actual words (like my name), but tonight, for the first time, while spell-checking a document I glanced at the suggested words box before I hit 'ignore'. To my horror, the first suggested word as a replacement for 'neuroscience' is 'pseudoscience'. Who knew that Open Office's spell-checking program knew how to insult me so effectively?

"Tea, Earl Grey, Hot."

One of the things that has always fascinated me is the idea of acquired tastes. As a child, whenever someone told me a food was an acquired taste, I wondered just how people ever got started eating it in the first place. For example, I found tea and coffee to be absolutely vile drinks (coffee more so than tea... in fact, I still dislike coffee greatly. Although some predicted that I would never make it through my undergraduate education without learning to drink coffee, it would seem I have proven them wrong). They are also fairly non-trivial to prepare, so one would wonder how and why someone would go through all the effort of preparing coffee grounds or crushed tea leaves, boiling water, and steeping a drink that, on first taste, prompted a scrunched face of disgust. Of course, not everyone seems to have my initial dislike for the drinks, so perhaps the few people who enjoy such bitter draughts convinced everyone else to give it a try.

Alcoholic drinks are another confusing item, as they too are quite non-trivial to prepare. While one might suppose that there was an ancient group of people with a particularly good crop of grapes one year. They juiced some of the excess fruits and stored them in casks, but were not able to consume the juice fast enough to prevent it from starting to go off. A few might have braved the possible stomach ache and consumed the spoiled juice, only to discover a pleasant buzzing which prompted further experimentation in reproduction. Of course, this sort of story might sound plausible, but it is the sort of "just-so" story which plagues fields like evolutionary psychology. With only the vaguest of evidence to support it (namely, wine exists now, so it was discovered at some point), the story could just as easily have been some ancient teenager stole his neighbour's jar of juice, buried it in a field for a few weeks, and then forced his little brother to drink it just to see what would happen.

The reason I have been ruminating on the subject of acquired tastes, though, is I always find it fascinating when traveling to discover the regional acquired tastes, both of the place one has traveled to and of one's home region. For example, vegemite is a vile spread for toast and bread in Australia. Australians, however, do not seem to share my abhorrence for its flavour (judging by the fact that it is still manufactured, sold, and consumed there). While I have yet to discover any popular German cuisines that turn my stomach, I have been informed by several of my European peers who have spent a fair bit of time studying in North America that root beer is a horrible drink, and they don't understand how North Americans can drink the stuff. Oddly, peanut butter is also one of those things which is often raised as a peculiar North American food, although the reactions to it tend to be more divided with some deciding it is unpleasant and others wishing it was more common here.

So, there was not a lot of point to this post. I do not have any answers for why certain flavours are popular in certain regions of the world, nor how people ever got to manufacturing and consuming some of our stranger and more acquired tastes. Idle conjecture can be fun, though.

Hometown Blues

I may sometimes decry the fact that, aside from beer, the only thing that puts my hometown on the map is its proximity to fundamentalist polygamist religious groups. Still, it could be worse... my hometown could be this one. While I have a much deeper philosophical divide with fundamental Mormons than I do with Trekkies (after all, I am a fan of Star Trek. I just don't understand the hardcore Trekkies' desire to base so much of real life around an acknowledged fictional universe... that and the popularity of Klingons continues to baffle me), I think it would be rather hard to live in a place so completely consumed by a single franchise. The Bountiful community, in contrast, tends to spend all of their efforts in shielding their children from our community (aside from baby-sitting jobs, which are seen as valuable sources of income and training...). Of course, I am not advocating that Vulcan should not be capitalizing on their name, as it seems like Star Trek has financially saved the town from oblivion. I just feel badly for any residents who could never stand the show.

Introductions

It has been a fairly exhausting last few days. Travelling can really take it out of you, especially if one is travelling alone to a place without previous acquaintances. However, I don't want to take my time this evening to write the long, reflective piece on travel and German culture that has been fomenting in my head for the last few days. So, in my attempt to relax but still get out some thoughts in unrepentent English, I will wax philosophical for a few minutes about telivision. Specifically, I would like to talk about the introductions of television shows.

Introductions at first glance do not really seem that important. After all, if one power watches television shows like a lot of young people do these days (wait for a good portion of the show to have already aired and then download and watch the show in large chunks of several episodes one after the other), often the introduction ends up just being skipped anyway to save those precious few minutes. However, a good introduction can do a lot for a show. Take, for an idle example, the introductions to Star Trek, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Voyager, and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Collectively, they are all really just a bunch of shots of planets and other spacey things interspliced with spaceships making fancy noises before leaping off into the distance with a flash of light and credits with an overlay of some sort of musical score. However, what Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation have is that epicly cheesy voice-over of their respective captains declaring space as the final frontier, and those opening words have been burned into the collective conscience of popular culture almost as deeply as the words, "Luke, I am your father". While I do not necessarily understand the entrenched effect of the original series (after all, there really wasn't a lot that was epic about that series... it was all just Kirk hooking up with alien women in between scenes of fisticuffs and torn shirts in random alien gladiatorial rings), the cheesy seriousness of the voice-over fit the cheesy philosophy for the laymen that was Star Trek: The Next Generation. The show aspired to make people think, and, even if it often did so in obvious, elementary, and predictable ways, the soothingly authoritative voice of Patrick Stewart helps to set the contemplative mood in a monumental way.

I was going to go on to pass a few words of judgement on Star Trek: Enterprise, but I seem to have gone for a good deal longer with the subject of science fiction shows than I originally intended. What originally inspired me to write this post was to point out some of the very best examples of introductory television sequences I have seen in the last few years. Like with most television in general, the best examples come from Showtime and HBO. In the runner-up position is Showtime's Dexter. For those who have not seen it, give it a gander:



For those who have not seen or heard of the show, it is about a sociopath named Dexter Morgan who has the uncontrollable urge to kill people. Raised as an orphan by a police officer, his stepfather recognized the early warning signs and molded his psyche into a strict code of ethics such that he would only murder murderers who had somehow cheated the legal system. While the premise is a little creepy, the show is quite well done with a lot of interesting psychological development (at least for the first two seasons, I stopped watching after that because it was simply too stressful). The reason why I like the introduction so much is because it is so exceedingly fitting to the mood of the show... it is all about ridiculously careful precision with every last detail of even the most mundane of tasks (starting the morning), all the while carrying with it the foreboding visceral imagery of sizzling flesh, drops of blood, a grinder, and squirting juice from a blood orange.

Still, I think the introduction to HBO's True Blood may be even more well done than the introduction to Dexter. Briefly, the show is set in a world where vampires have recently 'come out of the coffin' following the invention of synthetic blood by Japanese researchers. There is still a lot of tension between vampires and people, and the main character, a waitress at a bar in a small southern town who can read minds, finds herself drawn into those tensions when she becomes involved with the a vampire intent on 'going mainstream' who moves into the town. Watch the introduction here:



The disturbing montage of erotica, religious imagery, Americana, racism, and wildlife, all set to a threateningly forward country song, seems to perfectly encapsulate the desired ambience of the American south. This is done with enough rawness to help drive back one's cognitive faculties and make the show more about turgid emotional reactions than logical thought (which is a good state of mind for a show about vampires). Also, the amazing pun of "God Hates Fangs" is highly enjoyable.

Anyway, this has been a longer ramble about exceedingly trivial matters than I had originally intended it to be, so I'm going to end my discourse here. As always, feel free to leave a comment or two with your own opinion on the matter.

Note: I am exhausted and I cannot seem to get my spellchecker to switch to English (it is currently stuck on German... damn IP address), so please forgive what I expect is an unusually high concentration of errors in this post.

Finding This Blog

Out of curiosity, I recently added a statistics application to this blog. One of the things I just discovered it does is keep track of the keywords to searches that lead one to finding my blog. These results were all-around surprising. The term that came up the most was 'Mozglubov', which sort of makes sense aside from the fact that I honestly cannot imagine why anyone would search for my trans-literated, made-up amalgamation of Russian words unless they already knew about this place. Much more entertainingly, however, were the following:

In the past week:

Five people found the site by searching for 'propulgate'. I had no idea it was such a popular term...

One person searched for 'france diplomacy opening game', and another for 'austria diplomacy allies game'. I hope the advice I gave was good, because I honestly wrote it more for my own amusement than anything else. Since so few of my friends play the game (other than when I manage to force them to), I hardly expected anyone to read my analysis.

Oddly enough, one person searched for, 'hardest life science program at U of T'. I hope I convinced him or her to go into mathematics. Another person searched for '"university of toronto" "class rank"'. I'm not actually even sure how that would bring up my blog, other than my occasional mentioning of U of T.

One person found the site by searching for 'worst logic'. I don't know how to feel about that...

My absolute favourite search, though, was the one person who found this blog by searching for, '"Ancient and Modern Necromancy alias Mesmerism and Hypnotism Denounced" cult'. Yay for the craziness that is Christian Science!

Movie Review: Taken

I just watched the movie Taken. With an even more obscene ass-kicking to age ratio than Gran Torino, it was a little bit ludicrous. However, Liam Neeson is awesome as always and, while he may not have the physique that immediately makes one expect gratuitously well executed violence, his personal charisma makes it seem all right and plausible enough for a mind geared toward the suspension of disbelief (kind of like an older version of Matt Damon in the Bourne series). Anyway, I don't want to give anything away for those who have yet to see the film (and plan to), so I won't go on at length.

EDIT: I realise that the ratio ass-kicking:age should really be ass-kicking:(1/age), but saying "ass-kicking to the reciprocal of age" just didn't flow as well.

Wordplay

Yesterday was a great day which I forgot to announce. Why, might you ask? After all, I still have an exam coming up, so most of the day was spent studying. However, it was the fourth of May, and therefore it was Star Wars Day. Why is the fourth of May Star Wars Day, you might ask? Because on May the fourth you can say, "Happy Star Wars Day, May the fourth be with you!"

Happy belated Star Wars Day.

A Boggle Board I Liked

While I have had nominations before for nerdiest post I've ever written, this one might be a tough contender for dorkiest, saddest, and most trivial. You see, I was trying to relax my brain without getting sucked into anything too time consuming, so I decided to play a couple rounds of Boggle (if you've never played the game before, it's a great game and a description can be found here) with myself (so I wasn't actually playing, but was more just seeing what interesting words I could find until it seemed like I had exhausted everything). Judge me all you want, but while doing so I came up with the following arrangement of letters:

W H O C
N U E R
E T E O
R I T T

While the board arrangement was amusing enough thanks to the fact that the first word that jumped out at me was 'whore', even more exciting than that was that this board contained not only the word 'teeter' but also 'totter'. It's kind of fun when things turn out nicely like that.

Lack of Consistency Annoys Me

A rather bad habit I have picked up over the years of my undergraduate studies is procrastination through the use of television. Part of that stems from the ubiquity of shared media while living in residence, while another part comes from my attempts to limit by game playing (and thereby hopefully promote more work) by supplanting computer games with a less open-ended and somewhat easier to control habit (watching television). While the efficacy of my methods might be somewhat in question, the end result is I have watched a fair bit of television over the past few years, and part of that has involved watching a great deal of the various Star Trek series.

The thing is, calling Star Trek science fiction is a bit of a misnomer, as it is more of a fantasy that just happens to be set in a future which purports to share our history. It includes magic (like telepathy) and technology at best only tenuously connected with our actual understanding of science. Accepting, then, that Star Trek can be given the same leeway one gives to other tales like The Lord of The Rings in that it exists in a universe apart from our own and thus can be accepted as functioning on its own system of rules, it should at least be consistent with itself. When I was younger and contemplated pursuing a career as an author (I know, I'm a tremendous dork. While normal adolescent boys dreamt of becoming rock stars like Kurt Cobain I dreamt of becoming an author like Isaac Asimov), one of the things that was appealing about writing fantasy novels was the idea that I was in control of everything. However, given my brain's propensity for over-obsessing over small little details, there always had to be an underlying system to the way things functioned in my world, and therefore I would make up elaborate rules for the applications of things like magic such that I would always be consistent without the arduous task of rechecking all my previous work (I'd just have to follow my own rules). The way I viewed it, when you get to make stuff up, you should at least make every possible attempt to stay consistent, at least as a courtesy to your readers (or viewers, in the case of Star Trek).

While I recognize that there are certain things that are going to be overlooked across several seasons and several different spin-offs, there are certain things which I think at least someone should have thought of at some point. To avoid ranting for too long on the subject, I am going to bring up perhaps one of the most obvious ones: the Universal Translator. This handy little device (which it is unclear where it exists, just that it seems to always be available to the characters, with the notable exception for a trio of Ferengi who accidentally went back in time to the 1950s) allows everyone to speak the same language. Accepting that it works and not worrying too greatly about the details, how then do Klingons somehow still purposefully revert back to speaking their own language in particular and well-chosen circumstances (almost always just for short little things like "Kapla" instead of "Goodbye")? Why isn't that getting translated by the handy little device? Most offensive are the scenes where there are only Klingons present and they spend the majority of the scene speaking English, but then, often for dramatic purpose, one will say something in Klingon (this seems to happen a lot when Worf is hanging out fighting some sort of war on Klingon ships).

Anyway, I propose the following: if ever any reader of mine is in charge of the production of a science fiction show with a widespread and ludicrously dedicated fan base like that available to Star Trek, create a position on your writing staff for one or two of those insane fans to proof read your scripts and look for internal inconsistencies. You could probably even convince them to do it for free (maybe they get a souvenir from the set or something like that).

More (Arguably) Humorous Procrastination, or a Deep Philosophical Question?

Ah, but who decides which pictures are humorous? Do Lolcats trump LolVader?

"That's why I never kiss 'em on the mouth."

In keeping with my status as a dork, geek, and nerd, I watch a lot of science fiction. I'm not particularly sure why, as the acting is often very bad and the plots not much better. Maybe I just like all the shiny lights. I also often find the "science" on the shows painfully bad, but, like with almost all television, I mostly watch it to turn that part of my brain off and relax. In a similar way to which Isaac Asimov recommends watching mindless action films in his essay The Eureka Phenomenon, Sci Fi television to me is a way to relax the brain and recharge.

For all my disparagement, however, there are some parts that I really do like. For example, despite having some truly abysmal actors in its ranks, Star Trek does have some good ones too. I will never figure out how Star Trek managed to snag Patrick Stewart, one of the premiere Shakespearean actors of his day. Brent Spiner is also highly enjoyable, as well as many of the supporting characters from Deep Space Nine. The one thing I will never understand, though, is how some shows make it and others do not.

Take, for example, Stargate: SG-1. How is that the longest running continuous science fiction series in history (technically, that is a claim disputed by Dr. Who, so it is more correct to say it is the longest running North American science fiction series)? Yes, there were some funny bits and even some clever bits, but for the most part that show was background noise. I never really cared about the characters in it to any excessive degree, nor was I ever wildly worried about what the future of the show might hold. Yet somehow the show lasted 10 seasons and so far has had two movies (I believe both went straight to television).

Contrast SG-1 with a show like Firefly. It only lasted a season, but its fourteen episodes make up some of the most enjoyable science fiction I've ever seen. The characters are witty, well-acted, and engaging. The story is continuous and interwoven without making it absolutely necessary to have seen preceeding episodes or have long recaps at the beginning of each new episode. Also, they don't have sound effects in space! That one little bit of realism is enough for me to forgive all the terrible neuroscience espoused by Simon Tam when he scans his sister's brain to figure out what the government did to her. The fact that it only lasted a single season just never seemed quite fair to me.

I know they made a movie, but, like all things Joss Whedon does, he decided it was best to destroy his creation in his way than let it fade away. Between the rewriting of the series' history, random character death, and virtual lack of certain characters from the movie's storyline, I was not a fan.

Anyway, I am procrastinating right now by rambling about science fiction, so I should probably stop it and get back to work.

Irksome

For everyone, there are some things that drive them nuts. It often seems, though, that people in mathematics and science have an inordinate amount of neuroses bordering on obsessive-compulsive. As an aside, that is one of the reasons I like the webcomic xkcd so much. In addition to the general dorky humour, he seems to get the comical OCD things that I cannot help but think about. Of course, these neuroses often manifest in fairly different ways. For example, I remember making a joke about being OCD when some friends from engineering science were over at my place, only to be shocked by one of my friends arguing that I couldn't possible be OCD because my counter was so full of randomly discarded objects, something which drove him nuts and he had to restrain himself from trying to tidy (clearly, he had never played cards with me... I neurotically straighten the deck, without even thinking about it. If someone points it out and asks me to stop, I actually find it incredibly difficult to restrain myself).

Anyway, one thing that has always bothered me is poor bathroom layout. It seems like something that should be incredibly easy to do when the bathroom is being installed. After all, bathrooms are rooms that everyone has used before, so it's not like a high tech lab where the technicians installing the equipment might not fully understand what they are used for. Today, for example, I went into a bathroom where there were five sinks but only one soap dispenser and one electric hand-dryer. Who thought that made sense?

Making Something Geeky

This past weekend my internal filter failed to kick in. Rather than saying something inappropriately sexual, however, I said something inappropriately dorky. While sitting with a group of friends in the rear car of a streetcar, one of my friends made a comment about the driver detaching our car at the next stop because it was so empty, to which I responded before adequately thinking it over, "Well, at least we would have the warp engines."

So, I happen to have watched and enjoyed some Star Trek episodes over the years. The fact that certain things are considered incredibly geeky and others are not made me start to wonder about how such classifications were made. After all, the Lord of the Rings is the basis for many of the geekiest things around, including the Dungeons and Dragons games, but when the movies came out they became a huge hit and widely popular. Riding on their success and the success of science fiction hits like the Matrix, a huge number of sword and sorcery style and science fiction movies were spawned (some good, many quite bad). Among them, comic book heroes have gone through a similar rebirth of going from epic geekdom to mainstream, widely popular and accepted film.

It cannot simply be the transformation into movie format that makes things shed their geeky nature, however, because Star Trek and Star Wars are still considered rather geeky (although, to be fair, I think Star Wars has more of a widespread popular acknowledgement as not excessively geeky), and Dungeons and Dragons failed miserably at elevating itself beyond the stigma of geek with its film a few years ago (though that might simply have been a result of the movie being supremely poor). Anyway, I should have left for work many minutes ago, so I leave this question up to my readers:

What makes something geeky?

Getting the Americans to Go Metric

Warning: the following is arbitrarily trivial and most likely not worth reading.

On my way home from work this afternoon while suffering from a headache, I was suddenly struck with an inspirational idea (or, in other words, a completely useless idle thought that I figured was cleverly funny enough to be written down). So far, while the ubiquity of the metric system world-wide has caused it to be adopted within the scientific establishments even in America, the common American (and even common useage in Canada and Britain, though it pains me to admit it) still operates within the antiquated imperial system. Then I realised a brilliant way to start getting people to use the metric system - start referring to monetary units in a metric fashion. No longer would we have dollars and cents, but now we would have dollars and centidollars. You might get paid a decadollar an hour, and everyone would want to be a megadollaraire (or just megaire for short). The nice thing about this is it would not even require switching the magnitude of the unit, since a dollar would stay a dollar, so it would be much easier for people to get used to than having to start thinking in terms of meters instead of feet. Then, once the metric system terminology has been driven into the common mindset (while I recognize this is already partially being done by computer terminology with bytes, money tends to come up in conversation rather a lot more often), the rest of it might be more readily accepted.