What was the hipster?

Mark Grief examines the the birth, evolution and future of the hipster.

It would be too limited, however, to understand the contemporary hipster as simply someone concerned with a priori knowledge as a means of social dominance. In larger manifestations, in private as well as on the street, contemporary hipsterism has been defined by an obsessive interest in the conflict between knowingness and naïveté, guilty self-awareness and absolved self-absorption.

The article is interesting and worth the read, but it’s the comments that make it gold — they’re like reading overwrought YouTube comments written by, well, hipsters.

What could have been public domain

Here’s a short list of works that would have entered public domain this year had the law not been changed.

Current US law extends copyright protections for 70 years from the date of the author’s death. (Corporate “works-for-hire” are copyrighted for 95 years.) But prior to the 1976 Copyright Act (which became effective in 1978), the maximum copyright term was 56 years (an initial term of 28 years, renewable for another 28 years). Under those laws, works published in 1954 would be passing into the public domain on January 1, 2011.

A few of the works that would have been public domain: the first two Lord of the Rings books, Horton Hears a Who!, Rear Window, and Seven Samurai. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Sure, the system is great for the descendants of popular authors and directors, but we’re going to end up with a ton of orphan works that are completely unavailable to the public.

NASA and bad science movies

There’s a list of movies making the rounds that claims to be the best and worst films as judged by experts from NASA. However, I wasn’t able to find an original source at the company. The list was first published in an article by John Harlow at the Sunday Times. The article is behind their paywall, so I had to pony up £1 for access. Apparently the list comes from a private meeting at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Here’s a copy:

Worst sci-fi movies*

  1. 2012 (2009)
  2. The Core (2003)
  3. Armageddon (1998)
  4. Volcano (1997)
  5. Chain Reaction (1996)
  6. The 6th Day (2000)
  7. What the #$*! Do We Know? (2004)

Most realistic films*

  1. Gattaca (1997)
  2. Contact (1997)
  3. Metropolis (1927)
  4. The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)
  5. Woman in the Moon (1929)
  6. The Thing from Another World (1951)
  7. Jurassic Park (1993)

*As named by Nasa and the Science & Entertainment Exchange

The lists strike me as kind of bizarre, they don’t seem exhaustive by any means — you could come up with a lot of changes to either one. Harlow doesn’t mention the parties involved at the private meeting, but he does attribute the list to the Science & Entertainment Exchange. From the SEE website:

The Science & Entertainment Exchange is a program of the National Academy of Sciences that provides entertainment industry professionals with access to top scientists and engineers to help bring the reality of cutting-edge science to creative and engaging storylines.

Ahh, that makes sense. So, there was a meeting between NASA and SEE, in which they discussed movies with bad science. Makes me wonder if those movies were just the ones they happened to talk about rather than some sort of definitive list. It wouldn’t be the first time that Harlow was accused of making shit up. Regardless, NASA definitely doesn’t like 2012, they have a page dedicated to debunking it. Also, be sure to check out SEE’s blog for commentary on the science found in movies.

The lists have been posted on a lot of news websites, but there’s little evidence of any reporting — the articles tend to regurgitate the same information. For many of them, it just seems like a good excuse for a puff-piece with a bunch of Hollywood photos and movie clips.

While searching on the NASA site for an original source, I came across this deliciously old-school listing of space movies from the organization. That takes me back to an earlier web.

Update: I received an email from Marty Perreault, the Director of The Science & Entertainment Exchange, stating that they had nothing to do with the list:

I read your article “NASA and bad science movies” posted on January 3rd. You incorrectly attribute the list of films to the Science & Entertainment Exchange, a program of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). Neither the Exchange nor the NAS was involved in creating such a list.

I reproduced the list from The Sunday Times, in which they attributed the list to SEE. I took a screenshot, here’s the relevant portion of the article.

The Australian is carrying an article by John Harlow, in which he credits Donald Yeomans for statements about the absurdity of 2012. Perhaps Yeomans was the source of the original list, or maybe the meeting was so private the only attendee was Harlow’s imagination.

Update 2: I sent an email to Donald Yeomans, the manager of the Near-Earth Object Program, who was quoted in John Harlow’s piece about 2012 for The Australian.

From Yeomans’ email response (original text):

There is no list and there was no meeting to put together such a list. NASA would never put together a list of “worst sci-fi films.” We are not movie critics.

He stated that he was interviewed by a British journalist, but was subject to misquotes and manufactured quotes. Yeomans also says that there was a meeting at JPL related to how Hollywood and NASA could help each other. The movie 2012 was discussed at the meeting, but he has not seen it. He also linked to a video that tries to dispel general internet paranoia about 2012. Yeomans was also quoted in the original article at The Sunday Times.

There you go — bad reporting to begin with and equally poor journalism from news outlets regurgitating the story without looking for original sources.

The lie guy

Clancy Martin is chair of the philosophy department at the University of Missouri and is known as the lie guy. He left his studies to pursue a career in luxury jewelry.

As I would tell my salespeople: If you want to be an expert deceiver, master the art of self-deception. People will believe you when they see that you yourself are deeply convinced. It sounds difficult to do, but in fact it’s easy—we are already experts at lying to ourselves. We believe just what we want to believe.

Eventually, the business and lifestyle got to him and he returned to academia to study lying.

I went to work on deception not because I wanted to learn how to lie better—I had mastered the art, as far as I was concerned—but because I wanted to cure myself of being a liar. What had started out as a morally pernicious technique had become a character-defining vice. I had to save myself. I needed to understand the knots I had tied myself into before I could begin to untangle them.

Creating the 6502 processor

The MOS 6502 was created as a cheap alternative to the Motorolla 6800, and powered a lot of the consumer electronics in the 1980’s. Its layout was created by one man in one iteration with no errors.

These days, you can’t design and lay out a computer chip without a computer. An Intel Core 2 chip has hundreds of millions of transistors. The 6502 had 3,510, and an engineer—a person, not a computer—had to draw each one by hand to lay out the chip. Mainly it was a single engineer, Bill Mensch.

The original paper plans are long gone, but a team managed to a create a visual simulation of the 6502 at transistor level.

On Heathrow this week

Just inside section D at Heathrow Terminal 3

Heathrow was a mess last week. I got stuck in it. I got lucky.

I was teaching mathematics in Hertford, covering someone on sick leave. Was due to finish at the end of December. I returned to Canada for a couple weeks in August, and chose the 20th of December as a return date for the flight back. I finished work on the 17th, figured I’d have a day or two to pack, and then a cheap Monday flight back to Canada. That was my logic when I booked the ticket in July.

The end of term approaches. During the last week of school, I decide to book a hotel near the airport for the day before the flight. I was thinking it might make things a little bit easier. I used Priceline for the first time, and ended up with a really good deal on a room at the Heathrow Hilton, attached to Terminal 4.

Come Saturday, we had the most snow that we had all year in Hertford. I probably wouldn’t have ventured out, but I had bankers to piss off. They don’t like it when you sit there sorting loose change while they want to close early. I don’t like it when I visit the branch on Monday to discuss transferring funds back to Canada, have them tell me to come back on the weekend and when I do, to tell me it takes 3-5 to create a bank draft. I’ll go with electronic transfer when the pound rebounds.

I hit up twitter with a slightly ominous post:

Ugh, lots of snow in the UK. Flight to Canada on Monday, hopefully there won’t be any issues. Don’t have my hopes up though.

Haha. Everything seemed so simple then.

I managed to compress everything into two suitcases and make it to the hotel the next day. I enjoyed my large bed, the gym and the pool. I ate incredibly over-priced hotel restaurant food. I checked the internet, and found my flight had been pushed back about four hours. I slept.

With unexpected time in the morning, I hit up the gym again. I figured that it might help me get some sleep on the plane. I returned to my room to shower. There was no hot water and little point in complaining, man up. Afterwards, I opted for the incredibly over-priced hotel breakfast rather than “finding something” when I got to Heathrow. It was a wise decision.

I had trouble getting from T4 to T3, the Heathrow Express had trains stuck in the tunnel. I bit the bullet, topped off my Oyster and took the Underground across the airport. I arrived just in time to spend an hour attempting to get into the terminal. It was ridiculous, no one had any idea what was going on. Eventually, I got in. The photo above was pretty much what it looked like in the check-in area. Normally I don’t talk to people at the airport, but a few hours hours of mutual agony will turn anyone into a stalwart friend. After a few hours of watching other flights get cancelled, we rejoiced with the news that we could check our bags.

The flight got pushed back multiple times, eventually to the next day, although it wasn’t posted on the big boards at the airport. Yea internet!

Shared misery meant meeting lots of people in the same situation. Amongst others, I talked to professors, a software engineer, an Australian secret service agent, a med-student and a shiatsu masseuse. Almost everything in the airport closed in the evening. The duty-free shop stayed open late, and offered free drinks while they were closing. It was the leftovers from their sample process. The bar was limited to various whiskeys, Bailey’s and an assortment of soft drinks. I took some Glenmorangie and didn’t complain.

I stayed in the departure lounge the entire night. Some people got kicked out early. I imagine the guards thought we were supposed to be out on a late rescheduled flight. They wanted to kick us out in the wee hours but realized it wasn’t worth the hassle of sending us through security again.

In the morning, the internet told us what gate our flight was supposed to leave from. Air Canada operated in true ninja fashion, they told no one of their flight status. I think it was so they could get customers onto later planes, rather than having randoms pestering them about any flight to North America. With all of the flight crew ready to go, we had to wait an extra hour for BAA security to show up and look at our passports. The bouncers moaned about cranky overtired passengers making fun of their pleas for us to move along so the plane wouldn’t be delayed any longer.

We finally made it airborne about twenty hours after scheduled departure. The toilets stopped working halfway across the Atlantic, so we had to divert to Newfoundland to have them fixed.

All-in-all, I made it back roughly on time, a lot of people weren’t so lucky. That said, the entire experience was a giant cluster-fuck of disorganization. No one had any clue what was going on. At the time, I said:

The communications infrastructure at Heathrow reminds of of playing broken telephone when I was a kid.

Purple monkey dishwasher. I’ll stand by that.

In the end, I was just happy that I didn’t receive one of these letters. Valued customer indeed. It would have taken me at least an extra week to leave the country.

All of the flights on the 18th and 19th were cancelled, and my equivalent flight on the 21st was cancelled too. I got lucky.

In hindsight, I should have taken more photos. It didn’t seem like a priority at the time. At various points I took to using twitter, it’s probably my most epic stream of tweets, but it isn’t terribly interesting. Nonetheless, I did want to archive the tweets, just in case a masochistic future-me wants to relive the past.

Patton Oswald on geek culture

Wake up, geek culture. Time to die, a Wired article by Patton Oswald.

When everyone has easy access to their favorite diversions and every diversion comes with a rabbit hole’s worth of extra features and deleted scenes and hidden hacks to tumble down and never emerge from, then we’re all just adding to an ever-swelling, soon-to-erupt volcano of trivia, re-contextualized and forever rebooted. We’re on the brink of Etewaf: Everything That Ever Was—Available Forever.

There are a number of quotable paragraphs in the article, but I went with one that seems vaguely hypocritical for posting. You should read the whole thing. Nerd culture may be harmed by the overabundance of information related to minutiae. The internet creates an instant otaku.