2009: A good year for movies

I've seen several movies this year in first-run theaters. I know, unusual, right? I've even been positively impressed. I saw Star Trek, Up!, District 9, The Hurt Locker, and Avatar.

And I'm definitely thinking that District 9 and Avatar are good science fiction movies, of the sort we haven't seen too many of lately. They were good, they were serious, and they were original. It's not really a combination we see too often, but the similarity doesn't stop there. Both films were exploring alienation, race, and loyalty, edgy topics that simply were not fashionable when Bush was president.

Both have a human plunged into the society of the aliens, experience the oppression humans place upon them first hand, turn against the human military apparatus, and become physically transformed into aliens themselves. Both films make exceptional use of aesthetics - the Prawn are revoltingly ugly, and the gritty documentary style makes the ugliness of the slum life very real. The Na'vi, on the other hand, are strikingly beautiful, and the film is visually gorgeous.

Both make intense use of historical metaphor to talk about the times in which some humans - and yes, ladies and gentlemen, white Western European industrial English-speaking humans, if we're to be specific - have decided to treat other humans as subhuman. District 9 uses apartheid. Avatar uses the american indian wars. I even noticed Colonel Quaritch, the military leader in Avatar, making what seemed like a deliberate reference to the Ghost Dance.

Now that Obama is in office, those who found it fashionable to be not only patriotic, but nationalistic and jingoistic are becoming rabidly anti-American, cheering when Chicago lost its bid for the Olympics, jeering when a sitting president is handed a Nobel prize. The Democrats haven't picked up the slack; nationalistic fervor has tapered. If The Hurt Locker had the temerity to suggest that some soldiers get hooked on the rush of putting it all on the line in Iraq back in 2004, would it have been labelled anti-American and bad for soldiers' morale?

And heaven forbid that a film show ex-US Marines as ruthless mercenaries engaging in massacring civilians. But that nationalistic fervor has faded, enough that it's no longer fashionable. Suddenly, it's fashionable to talk about race, to examine the question of social identity.

I suppose the bombing of the Home Tree plays a little more like My Lai than any of the battles of the Indian Wars we're familiar with, complete with the soldier who says they didn't sign up for this and decides they've had enough, but I don't think the Vietnam War is a much more comfortable piece of history than the systematic destruction of the american indian nations.

I've heard a few people complain that Avatar has no plot. I count several - a conflict between science and short-term ignorant greed, a romance, a unification story, a sequence of alienation, initiation, and adoption. It's not even badly written, and I didn't spot so many of the egregious hard-to-ignore physics errors so common in flashy big-budget SFX movies. Spiderman 2, I'm looking right at you. That was painful. Anyway, back on topic:

Good science fiction tries to push a little bit beyond our comfort zone. When I see some people reacting in a very visceral way to the "race traitors" of District 9 and Avatar, I see it as a sign those movies are doing something right. Aside from making half their critics look like white supremacist nutjobs, they're prodding hard enough to make some very meaningful statements and ask people questions they might not ask themselves enough.

The moral I see in both films is this. It doesn't matter if they're ten foot tall blue beauties in a neolithic tribal structure or technologically advanced tentacled bugs who get high on cat food, everybody deserves to be treated with a full measure of "human" dignity. If we don't, we are already traitors to our ideals. And that's a radical statement, because we have a devil of a time managing that with other humans.

From tae kwon do to fencing

I suppose I've spent around five years taking lessons in tae kwon do, and a similar length of time fencing, when we account for my lengthy lapses in both, and it's always been interesting to me the similarities and differences.

Some correspondences are very close.

The parrying edge used in TKD is the leading edge of the forearm, about the same length as the forte of the fencing blade used for parrying. With that in mind, it's pretty clear that the mechanics are the same for a parry five and a high block. Parry four is an inside block; the outside block lines up neatly with parry three. Those three are the normal saber parries. There's another direct correspondence; the fourth basic TKD block, the low block, is parry is a parry eight; parry two would be a high low block, something a little too awkward to use comfortably. Parries one, six, and seven would correspond to blocking with the inside of the forearm; in TKD, you would use the other hand instead, something you do not do in fencing.

The lunge and the front stance are similar, but there's a key difference. In TKD, the back foot and hips are squared to bring both arms to bear, while in fencing, they are twisted sideways to minimize target area. In both cases the back should be completely vertical in practice - no martial artist is advised to lean into their attack and overcommit to it as a matter of habit, though at a crucial moment, overcommitting may be occasionally worthwhile.

The classic fencing en garde stance falls between TKD stances. The feet are in an L - as in a back stance - but the weight is further forward. TKD uses asymmetric weight distributions to make light-leg kicks easy and quick, and heavy-leg kicks powerful due to whole-body momentum shifts; fencing uses even distributions to let you change directions from forwards to backwards more quickly.

When it comes to stretching, fencers are advised to use many of the same leg stretches. The reason in TKD is that being able to split one's legs apart gives you easier higher kicks; in fencing, it is to maximize lunge range. Fencers, however, use their wrists a great deal more; I have found the stretches TKD students do not use, but aikido students do, to be quite useful as well.

The latest developments out of Iran

In what Nate Silver is calling the worst damage control effort ever, the Guardian Council admitted that the votes collected in 50 cities exceeded the number of eligible voters in those cities, "only" affecting 3 million odd votes.

Even given that the reported turnout was a historic high - over 80% - that's an indication of fairly massive fraud in those cities. While local turnouts, counted by the number of ballots, of more than 100% necessarily imply fraud, it is not necessary for the number of votes to exceed the number of voters in order for fraud to happen - and to do so is a strong indication of the strength of fraud in those cities. If turnout was about average in those cities (and actually a historic high of ~80-85%), then fraud accounted for more than 15-20% of all votes cast in those cities.

And if that figure held in many areas - with or without red flag overturnouts - turnout may not have been at record highs, and we're seeing the sort of degree of massive falsification that could swing an election so dramatically. And if the Guardian Council is admitting that massive fraud happened, I think the case is now quite materially convincing that the sitting president cheated. Not only that, but that the cheating was extensive enough to make a difference.

If I am convinced that fraud was indeed definitely present, and of an order of magnitude large enough to potentially swing nearly any contested election, I doubt that supporters of the opposition are anything but convinced that it did swing the election, and I hope that a peaceful runoff election, rather than violent revolt, is the outcome of this.

Patterns from nothing

Today is the day several people I know have a birthday. Five, according to Facebook, which informs me that I knew four of those in high school, no less - what a remarkable coincidence! - and two of them were reasonably good friends with each other, enough to share a five-way birthday party with several other nearby May-birthday friends.

Yet while it's quite unusual to have to have a couple of close friends from the same circle with a May 23rd birthday, it's hardly unusual to have two friends share the same birthday. By the time you know 23 birthdays, the odds are better than even that you know two people with shared birthdays. A remarkable coincidence - but of course, you're special, and you probably had to go through around 250 friends to find one who shared YOUR birthday.

We are inclined to recognize patterns in life. It's a useful skill, one that serves us well every day of our lives, but we're not always good judges of statistical significance, so sometimes we recognize patterns that are in fact simply random noise. This is where superstitions come from, and those little errant beliefs that aren't quite rational. Rationally, I know that having an ice-cold draft from the bar won't improve my motor control, but I swear, it seems to improve my bowling from atrocious to merely terrible!

Once we've picked out a pattern, and consciously identified it, we start to become emotionally attached to them. We've invested time and effort in it; every time you wear your lucky underpants and make out with a cute boy, you've reinforced the idea that they're lucky in your mind. When you wear them out and go home frustrated, you focus on another cause - a black cat, maybe a friend causing drama, there was something out there that interfered with your lucky underwear.

Psychologists have found intermittent reinforcement works very well, which might explain not only gambling addictions, but how doggedly we hang onto our curious patterns; medical doctors have found that delusion is remarkably effective at influencing how our bodies work. And there, we've come full circle. Most of the false patterns we see in life don't cause us much harm, and some even help us cope with the varied vagaries of life.

And who knows? Maybe a beer does relax me enough to let my cerebellum handle everything; maybe I treat my friend Terry like a little sister because I share a birthday with her big brother; and maybe, just maybe, your lucky sock makes you run just a little bit faster. But if you look hard enough for a pattern, one will emerge; whether it means anything or not is another matter entirely.