dr_phil_physics | Locked Out

Office Hours Today

As I breeze into campus and wander in from the parking lot, I get to the front door of Everett Tower. And it's locked. Huh. Pull out my ID card and swipe it through the card reader -- no joy. Blinked red LED and it beeps at me.

Are they telling me something? Has the disastrous Michigan economy crashed the university?

Just about that time the department chair came out of the side door -- and I was able to snag him. He was surprised that the door was locked at 11:30am, but his ID card did open it. Turns out the office said that the security computer crashed the other day and things have been wonky ever since. And the system seems to delete people in Physics randomly in its database.

So it's not me yet.

Next week it's two office hour days, then after Labor Day it's PHYS-1060 Introduction to Stars and Galaxies on Tuesdays and Thursday -- and sabbatical time the rest of the week. Should be a fun Fall Semester!

A Few More D9 Comments

Over the weekend we saw District 9, and while I gave it a Highly Recommended, I also expressed some concern about some of the ways racism was portrayed. Was this supposed to be part of the film's message? Or too much revealed about the filmmaker?

Well, science fiction/fantasy novelist and professor of creative writing at Chicago State University Nnedi Okorafor came out with a stronger comment which I think is worth reading. Link courtesy of writer

jimhines Jim C. Hines.

And In Honor Of Starting A New Novel

Jim Hines also had a link to a column at SF Novelists he did on That New Manuscript Smell. He encapsulates the love/hate relationship of starting with the blank page very nicely.

Both of my current novels, OAS which just went to the first novel contest and GRV just started, began as short stories, so on Day Zero of the novel there was already something to work with. But I know what he's talking about.

The Gravediggers is turning into a lot of fun after just a couple of days. The original short story is now the basis for Part II, I have a good idea of how Part I will go -- but the real fun is that Part III is turning into something very unexpected. Cool!

Had things not gone so well at the start, I'd be tempted to set it aside and pick a different project. I'm always working on multiple stories, but this sabbatical time is a gift this year and I don't want to waste any of it. (grin) I'm sure I'll be eating these words when I get stalled three weeks from now. (double-jeopardy-grin)

Dr. Phil

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I'm nervous about stepping into the D9 controversy and I worry that perhaps I'm insensitive (and I worry that I may sound insensitive if I'm not), but I have to wonder if it's artistically healthy to declare any ethnic, cultural or religious group off-limits to negative portrayals. Maybe this is a comfortable white American male perspective, but I saw D9's Nigerians primarily as bad guys who just happened to be Nigerian, and whose presence made a kind of geographic sense. I also saw D9 as being generically misanthropic: most of the characters, with the possible exception of Wilkus' wife and assistant, are portrayed in a negative light--the film's "hero" himself is incompetent, cowardly, unethical (he repeatedly tricks or attempts to trick "prawns" into signing releases and attempts to blackmail another "prawn" into signing by threatening to remove his child from the home; later in the film, he concedes that the "better" camp the "prawns" are being relocated to is basically a "concentration camp"--his words), and kind of dumb.

Indeed, his name--van de Merwe--is, I'm told, a South African in-joke, "van de Merwe" being a stock character in jokes in which someone is extremely stupid of foolish. (An example I heard cited is a joke in which the government wants to build a tunnel beneath a mountain. Two contractors come in with bids in the tens of millions; van de Merwe offers to do it for $500. "How will you do that?" he's asked. "I'll start on one side of the mountain with a shovel," van de Merwe says, "and my son will start on the other and we'll dig until we meet up." "But how will you make sure you connect?" he's asked. And van de Merwe says, "If we miss each other, you get two tunnels for $250 each.")

The more troubling thing to me, personally, is whether the "prawns" should be read allegorically as representing a marginalized group, and whether their behavior is therefore based on stereotypes. I'm inclined to think that's reading the film too literally, and that while there is some obvious allegory, there's also room to interpret the "prawns" as being aliens whose behavior, culture and technology is left open to some interpretation or ambiguity (for all we know, the "expert" who describes the "prawns" as being like an insect hive is on to something, and "Christopher Johnson"'s higher level of competence is because he/she/it represents a higher level in the hierarchy, or the "expert" may be full of beans--I don't have a problem with the viewer being left to decide if that's a plot hole or the result of having imperfect information about the species, or perhaps both, a plot hole that leaves the viewer room to move around in).

I don't know. I liked the film. There were some parts that had me a little leery, but I'm not prepared to condemn D9 for them (among other things, they may have been intentional--e.g. portraying the "prawns" in a dubious light may have been a conscious decision to deny the audience a comfort zone by refusing to ennoble any faction as opposed to a racist decision based on a belief that people who the "prawns" stand in for really scavenge, fight over garbage, or are dumb or hapless).

All of the above having been said, as a liberal white American male, I'm fully prepared to concede that my opinion may be uninformed and worthless. No, seriously. I'll be the first to admit the only shoes I've ever walked a mile in are actually my own.

As I said, I was concerned. There's a lot of ugly to go around in the film. And they go out of their way to identify the criminal blacks as Nigerians. If they were non-South African criminals, why wasn't this an immigration issue? Or were they imported specifically to be as cruel as possible. The mind boggles.

And yeah, there's a whole South African context and subtext which I am only very peripherally aware of. Between your comment and the posting linked above, I have two more data points of that.

All that said, I still gave this a Highly Recommended in my review, and I stand by that.

Confliction is complicated, but even if I don't understand everything that's going on, I can still appreciate some of it.

Dr. Phil

About your building access, the system crash restarted the wave function, which, in your case, hadn't collapsed yet. After observation by the department chair, the wave function would have collapsed, and you should have retried your own access. I'm surprised you didn't think of that.

Oh, wait. You're not a theoretical physicist, are you? Never mind...

I saw the trailer for D9 a few months ago. I think I remember wanting to see it, but there were a number of previews that made me want to see the movie, and I've forgotten most of them. Maybe I should have blogged about the one I saw so I could remember them now.

Tom, Tom, Tom -- ye of little faith.

The system crash was days before. The consequences go on and on and on. Why would I retry my access? The bloody door was OPEN. I have no interest in standing outside a locked door when I can go through an open one and get on with my day. In other words, It Was Someone Else's Problem At That Point. (grin)

Where in the world did you get the impression that I am NOT a theoretical physicist? I'm sure as hell not an experimentalist. Though technically a computational physicist does theoretical experiments -- in the computer, no one can hear the electron wavefunctions scream -- I'm just no pencil pusher.

Dr. Phil

OK, OK. I guess I showed my own ignorance. I thought there were only theoretical physicists and experimental physicists. You don't seem to have your head in the cloud chambers, so I figured you were more down-to-Earth than theoretical. So are you a Dr. Phil-of-all-trades physicist, or theorectical, experimental, general, educational, mud-foot, somnambulistic (I had one of those for high school Physics. He spent a lot of time staring at a foldout marked with 914, 610, 914) or some other kind of physicist? Oh wait! I'll bet you are a Phil-osophical physicist! Yeah, that's the ticket!

These days my interests are heavily in science literacy and physics education -- traits which also color the hard SF stories that I write. Also I'm big on systems -- the basic Physics concepts we start with in the introductory courses are isolated to begin with, but in the real world there are complexities and interactions which require a thoughtful approach.

Those numbers in millimeters? Perhaps your teacher was doing research on image processing and checking out the original published photo of the Standard Lenna (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna), from November 1972, in which case the sequence would be... gets out HP-32S -- 864-660-914.

You're welcome.

Dr. Phil

Locked Out

D9

Re: D9

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject