Powers of Ten for the 21st century

JISHOU, HUNAN — In 1968 Ray Eames and her husband Charles Eames (of Eames chair fame) released a remarkable short film called Powers of Ten. You may have seen it in a science class, if you were lucky. It opens with a couple having a picnic, then zooms in with ever increasing detail to an atomic nucleus, then zooms out at high speed into outer space. Each step decreases or increases the magnification by a multiple of ten.

You can watch at Vimeo.

Now there’s a Shockwave version of the same idea, by Cary and Michael Huang. A slide control allows you to explore at your own pace.

It takes a while to load, but it’s worth the wait. Nothing showy or (ahem) flashy, but neither was the Eames film.

Complementarity and ‘America the Beautiful’

Mouseover text: Colorado is working to develop coherent amber waves, which would allow them to finally destroy Kansas and Nebraska with a devastating but majestic grain laser.

It’s a physics joke. If you don’t get it, look up wave-particle duality and the Uncertainty Principle, which only exists as a Wikipedia entry when you are looking at it.

Quiz on Monday.

Next step, actual flames …

Somehow, yelling "Flame on!" just doesn't work

 

But it works for the Human Torch.

SANGZHI, HUNAN — OK, so I’m not really Johnny Storm, but it’s a cool photo, anyway. My friend snapped it as we were leaving Jiutian Cave here. After a long climb out of the cool, humid cave into the warm, drier surface air, I was sweating and my head was literally steaming.

The cave trip Thursday was my last excursion for the week-long National Holiday. Earlier in the week, I accompanied two friends (a young married couple) to a wedding in Huarong, a small city near Yueyang, Hunan. Then they drove me to Yueyang, where I met another friend and visited that city for two days. When I came back to Jishou on Wednesday, I literally turned right around and headed out again to Sangzhi with another friend, her cousin, aunt and uncle.

We also visited the reconstructed home of He Long, a revolutionary leader who was later purged during the Cultural Revolution. He was thrown into prison (where he died at age 74), his original home was razed, and his siblings were prevented from attending university. He didn’t get a formal state burial until 40 years after his death.

On our way back to Jishou, we stopped at a roadside marker for the Guzhang County “Golden Spike” — an international reference point for the sedimentary layer corresponding to stage 7* of the Cambrian Period beginning 503 million years ago. The rather elaborate marker includes relief images of Lejopyge laevigata trilobites, which made their first appearance at this time.

Interestingly enough, I live near another Golden Spike for the next stage of the Cambrian, about 499 million years ago, when Glyptagnostus reticulatus trilobotes first made their appearance. That Golden Spike is in Paibi, in Huayuan, the county just west of Jishou.

——
* Stage 7 apparently has two names: Guzhangian and Dresbachian (for a town in Minnesota). During the Cambrian Period, of course, such names had no meaning, since there was only one big continent (Gondwanaland) and a few smaller landmasses.

As t –> ∞, teaching physics –> teaching math

But only as a first approximation …

Hey, hey, Hefei

HEFEI, ANHUI — I have spent nearly a week in Hefei 合肥, where a friend of mine from JiDa now lives with her husband. They married in June, but because of exams I and her other university friends couldn’t come then. This was in some ways a make-up trip, though I had already posted a wedding gift.

MeiMei is fully bilingual in Chinese and Russian, thanks to several years living in Minsk as a student. Her English (and maybe her Chinese, though I cannot tell) has a Russian accent. In addition, she’s an excellent pianist.

Her job at JiDa was as translator/interpreter for the exchange students and music teachers from Ukraine, but midway through last school year, there was less call for her linguistic abilities. Meanwhile, still unmarried at the age of 30, MeiMei was facing the Chinese cultural pressure to find a husband before she got “too old.” So, she decided to quit her university job, and go back home to Hefei to find a mate, while living with her parents and supporting herself teaching piano and Russian.

About two weeks ago, she and I were chatting on QQ, and she asked about my plans for the future. MeiMei suggested I consider working in Hefei. Then I asked if I could visit her this month to see what Hefei is like. She enthusiastically said yes. So, in short order, I and her other friend and former neighbor, Ailsa, were planning a week’s trip to Hefei.

Hefei is the provincial capital of Anhui, which is northeast of Hunan province. China is building out a high speed rail system at a dizzying pace, starting with the provincial capitals, so Changsha, Hunan, and Hefei are already connected with HSR.

Ailsa had already bought a train ticket to Changsha, where she lives, so rather than taking the bus as I usually do, I agreed to keep her company on the eight-hour (slow) train ride. We booked our tickets to Hefei at the Jishou train station. We were on the D150 train to Wuchang station in Wuhan, and then the D3062 train from Hankou station in Wuhan to Hefei.

The distance between Changsha and Wuhan is about 362 km, and the D150 covers that in three hours, a third of the time the next fastest train (the T98A) takes. That works out to an average speed of 121 km/hr (75 mph). The distance from Wuhan to Hefei is 364 km, but the D3062 covers that in 2:23, also a third of the next fastest time, at an average speed of 156 km/hr (97 mph). The ticket price for each leg was 112 RMB, or about $17.

[Incidentally, you can take the D3062, or one of the other D-class trains, from Wuhan and be in Shanghai 820 km (512 miles) away in six hours. Amazing.]

Our “layover” in Wuhan was about six hours, giving us plenty of time to find our way from Wuchang station to Hankou station across town. We decided to do some sightseeing, since Ailsa had never been to Wuhan. But the heat was oppresive (42 C, or 107 F), so we just hit Yellow Crane Tower (Huanghelou 黄鹤楼), then grabbed an air conditioned cab to the air conditioned train station to recover.

Cities in the USA are lucky to have even one train station, which in a lot of places is now some kind of museum, office building or shopping mall. New York has two train stations, and as far as I know, no city in the States has more than two. By contrast, Wuhan has three railway stations now; the third one, in the northern suburbs, is part of the new G-class HSR trains connecting Wuhan to Changsha South station (also new) and Guangzhou North in Guangdong. The G-class trains zip between Wuhan and Guangzhou North — a distance of 1022 km (639 miles) — in just three and half hours. (That works out to be about 180 mph on average.) Tickets are $76, cheaper than airfares, so the domestic airlines have had to cut their prices to be competitive.

(We rode a G-class train from Wuhan to Changsha (90 minutes) on the way back, because it would allow both of us to grab afternoon buses home. The ticket was $25, only $8 more than the D150 fare.)

Anyway, on to our itinerary. We had dinner first with MeiMei and her husband, went to a KTV, then crashed at a hotel on Changjiang ZhongLu near Suzhou Lu downtown for the night. The next few days were packed with activities, as MeiMei and her parents wanted to show us a lot of sights.

Her dad is partner is a small metal stamping factory in Sanhe. The company supplies parts (brackets and chassis pieces) to JAC, one of China’s domestic auto and truck makers. As a boss, he gets a company car, similar in size and style to a Buick, and a driver, Mr Wang (no relation). So, we were able to tour Anhui in comfort.

We visited ancient cities at Sanhe, She (pronounced “shuh”) county and XiDi, a UNESCO World Heritage Site; the Bao family gardens; the ancestral home of former Chinese President Jiang Zemin; the boyhood home of physicist Yang Zhenning*; the home of Qing dynasty diplomat Li Hongzhang; Fantawild, an amusement park; and the Golden Peacock Spa Resort. We also did some shopping — I needed a new supply of contact lenses, for one thing.

We ate a lot of great food, and drank of lot of expensive and potent Chinese liquor. Ailsa, who weighs all of 90 pounds soaking wet, held her own liquor very well. (One of the popular sayings in China is that Hunan woman are not only the most beautiful in the country, but also the best drinkers. Then again, they say the same thing about the women of all of the other provinces, too.)

Ailsa has been fretting over my newfound bachelorhood, and MeiMei wants us both to move to Hefei, to each find jobs and significant others. MeiMei was trying to fix Ailsa up with at least two young men during our trip, but I don’t think anything clicked. On Wednesday night, the two of them persuaded me to sign up with a Chinese matchmaking site, jiayuan.com (literally, “family garden”). MeiMei and her husband, a busy journalist, confessed that they found each other on jiayuan.com last year, and were both happy with the results.

So, Ailsa helped me navigate the elaborate questionnaires on the site — it’s all in Chinese naturally — and we’ll see what happens.My little precis of myself is all in English, so it’s going to stand out like a sore thumb. I’m not expecting un coup de foudre, but it can’t hurt to try.

Having taken a whirlwind tour of Anhui, which has many other places worth seeing, my next trek is to Beijing to welcome the new American family coming to JiDa. I’ve been to Beijing now five times, so I am almost an old hand at it. This time, I am going with two students from my college, neither of whom has been to Beijing, so I get to be a tour guide to five people. Holy crap. Wish me luck!

—————————-
* Yang won the Nobel Prize in 1957 with T.D. Lee, for discovering a key law of the Standard Model of particle physics. Yang and experimental physicist C.S. Wu once gave a symposium at Palmer Labs at Princeton. My freshman year physics classes were in the same building almost four decades later. So maybe there are only a few degrees of separation between Yang and me. Another noteworthy fact about Yang is that, at the age of 82, was engaged to a woman only 28 years old. They married in 2005. Lucky fellow. I suspect they did not use jiayuan.com, though.

Ooooo … pretty!

The Milky Way galaxy: The microwave version

This lovely image is of our home, the Milky Way galaxy, but in a way our mortal eyes cannot perceive it. It doesn’t show stars, but the stuff that makes (or will make) up stars and planets and whatnot — clouds of gas and dust.

Our eyes can see only a tiny fraction of light — the visible spectrum, ROYGBIV (rainbow colors) — but the universe also glows in other kinds of light: gamma ray, X-ray, ultraviolet, infra-red, microwave and radio. And each frequency tells us something different.

The atmosphere blocks some of those frequencies (fortunately for life in Earth), so to view the universe in this exotic light astronomers have to depend on telescopes out in space. The European Space Agency, for example, launched the Planck Surveyor telescope to capture images in the microwave range, like this one here.

Microwave imaging gives us two important sets of information about the Milky Way and the universe we are in.

First, the huge clouds of gas and dust in the galaxy (which are mostly invisible to our eyes) are what eventually turn into stars and planets (and all the stuff that ends up on planets). In the photo, those clouds are all those wispy bluish-white and pinkish-white tendrils stretching out from the center (the galactic equator).

Putting it another way, that’s what we looked like about 5 to 6 billion years ago, before the Sun, the Earth (and the rest of the solar system) condensed out of a cloud of dust and gas. Needless to say, everything on the Earth was once in that same cloud, including the atoms that make up you and me.

So studying present-day dust clouds can help us understand the clouds that became us a long time ago.

Secondly, astronomers are also keenly interested in the background “behind” the Milky Way, because that’s the radiation left over from the Big Bang — the beginning of the universe. In the image, it’s colored magenta and orange. (Those are “false colors,” since microwave light doesn’t really have color.)

Our best estimates now put the Big Bang around 13 to 14 billion years ago. At the time, the universe was much smaller, denser and hotter than it is now. It was so dense, in fact, that light could not travel very far at all. It wasn’t until matter spread out far enough to become transparent that light from the Big Bang could get through. That happened about 380,000 years after the Big Bang.

So those microwaves are really, really frakkin’ old. And the pattern of magentas and oranges can help astronomers learn more about the early universe, before there were even stars and planets around.

The Cosmic Background Radiation is one of the main sources of evidence for the Big Bang. In 1948 physicists George Gamow, Ralph Alpher, and Robert Herman calculated that the expansion of the universe after the Big Bang would have shifted the original radiation from gamma rays to microwaves of a specific frequency (corresponding to a temperature). Other theoretical physicists at Princeton revisited the prediction in the mid-1960s and started to build a detector to test their predictions. (One of those guys was my freshman year physics lecturer, David T. Wilkinson, one of the best teachers I ever had.)

Meanwhile, down the road at Bell Labs, two researchers looking for something entirely different had already built such a detector. No matter how they fiddled with the contraption, there was a constant “noise” corresponding to a temperature of 3.5 K that they couldn’t get rid of. So, they phoned the physics guys at Princeton and asked their advice. Entirely by accident, the Bell researchers, Arno Penzias and Robert Woodrow Wilson, had detected exactly the kind of temperature that the theoretical guys had anticipated!

Penzias and Wilson later got a Nobel Prize in Physics for their accidental discovery. The Princeton physicists only got the simple satisfaction of knowing they were right.

The image above is a high resolution version of what Penzias and Wilson found with their ground-based “telescope.” In a way, it’s a portrait of what the Big Bang looks like 13 to 14 billion years after the fact. Studying the “afterglow” can tell us more about how the early universe behaved, so we can better understand how it is now.

Remember, a picture is worth a thousand words.

Cool pic from space: Those southern lights

A crewmember aboard the International Space Station caught this view of the aurora australis (the Southern Lights) during a geomagnetic storm last month.

The Southern Lights from orbit

Auroras happen when electrically charged particles from the Sun smack into Earth’s atmosphere and ionize the oxygen and nitrogen there. Since the high speed particles follow the Earth’s magnetic field, they primarily end up over the magnetic poles. B ut, when the Sun is especially active (or when it burps out a solar flare, as it did on May 24), the auroral displays can be seen at lower latitudes.

Ionized gases emit light of particular frequencies — colors. Neon, for example, glows a bright red color. Oxygen in the atmosphere typically emits green light, as we can see in the photo.

Bizarro world “What’s Up, Tiger Lily?”

CHANGSHA, HUNAN — While I wait for my lunch companions to show up, I will try to dash off a quick movie review.

Of course, it’s not very current. GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra opened in the USA weeks ago, but I saw it for the first time here just last week. In Chinese. With Chinese subtitles.

I didn’t miss a thing.

Some B-movies have redeeming virtues, despite poor acting, bad direction, cheesy scripts, or lousy camera work. Really bad movies (grade Z’s), though, combine all four to make a US Grade A turkey.

And being a science-fictiony kind of film, GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra, brought really bad to a whole new level with really awful science concepts.

Here’s a few glaring mistakes.

The Bad Guy (TBG) has a huge underwater lair that puts Stargate Atlantis’ digs to shame. Yet, this underwater metropolis is supposedly a secret. How? Its heat signature alone would be as bright as lighthouse beacon to a spy satellite in orbit.

For argument’s sake, let’s suppose the US government knew about The Bad Guy’s secret underwater lair. Wouldn’t the Defense Department be just a teensy bit interested in why TBG has all of that expensive hardware hidden away, especially since TBG is supplying high-tech stuff to the DoD?

(Then again, maybe not. Consider the DoD’s careful monitoring of Blackwater and Halliburton operations in Iraq.)

And he also has a secret weapons facility in the Arctic! Apparently, he hasn’t read up on global warming.

Meanwhile, The Good Guys have their own top-secret underground lair in, of all places, the Sahara Desert. No heat signature problems there (maybe), but if keeping water out of a high tech facility is difficult, think about keeping sand and dust out of one. Not a clever choice, in my book.

In this Saharan facility are hangars the size of aircraft carriers, a deep-water training tank the size of Seaworld, and multiple levels of living, dining and training quarters.

How did all that stuff get there? Without being noticed. By anyone, like the Saudis, or Mossad, or the Russians, not to mention the Egyptians. (I won’t even go into the money required to buy and build all that stuff, secretly.)

One of the cool GI Joe gadgets is an exoskeleton that enables the wearer to run (judging from a fleeting glimpse of its heads-up display) up to 80 mph. It seems impervious to denting, abrasion, gunfire, explosions and high impact collisions with trucks, automobiles, pavement and nearby buildings.

Setting aside the difficulties of manufacturing something from such wonder materials, consider the safety of the poor guys inside. Someone forgot to read up on the law of inertia here.

Imagine you are in a metal can hurtling along at 60 mph when you suddenly hit a larger, immobile object. Your metal-can conveyance (commonly known as a “car”) stops moving and crumples into a mere shadow of its stylish design. Meanwhile, you and anything else in the car keep on moving at 60 mph until something gets in your way. If you’re lucky, your seat belts and airbags will do the stopping job, slowing your body at a rate safe enough for you to walk away. If you’re not, the rapid deceleration will make mincemeat of you.

So, our Heroes are bounding around Paris at high speeds, with acrobatic agility, and slamming into things left and right, without feeling a thing! In the real world, their insides would be a slurry after two or three high-speed impacts. An exoskeleton (especially one that is form fitting!) cannot protect its occupant from concussions and broken bones, unless the engineers also designed inertial dampeners (à lá Star Trek) to evade the law of inertia.

And speaking of inertia, TBG’s force weapons also violate Newton’s Laws. Somehow, a henchmen fires one of these things, concentric rings of — something — fly from the barrel, and heavy objects going flying like feathers in the wind. But there’s no recoil. It seems that pushing a car aside with one of these things would at least muss up your hair.

Nanomites. The main premise of the movie is that TBG, who also appears to be the sole hardware supplier to the US government (strategically a really bad idea), has developed a nanoscale robot that eats anything in its way, like army ants. [Reminds me of another B-movie I saw ages ago, with South American villagers yelling, "Moribunda! Moribunda!"] These little buggers can chew through a tank in no time flat, leaving nothing but … dust? I’m not real clear where the waste products go, exactly. Anyway, the nanomites can be turned off, or their voracious appetites could possibly eat up everything, including The Good Guys and the Whole Earth. (But not other nanomites, hmmm…)

So, the TBG, not content with being the sole hardware supplier to the US government, owning a secret underwater lair the size of Denver, Colorado, and an Arctic weapons facility, decides he will unleash his miniature terror weapons on a strategically important site … the Eiffel Tower. A logical choice, since France has such a dominant role in world affairs now.

He sends two of his loyal underlings, the Hero’s Ex-Girl Friend and the Mysterious Asian Dude, both of whom have serious anger-management issues, in a high-tech SUV to race around the streets of Paris to use a handheld rocket launcher to splatter the nanomites all over the base of the Eiffel Tower .. from about a mile away.

A boat up the Seine would have gotten the job done much more effectively, methinks. Paris has a nifty Metro system, too. Careening SUV’s around Parisian traffic is tres inélégant. You’d expect someone with a Denver-sized underwater lair (and an Arctic weapons facility) to be a little more efficient.

TBG’s high-tech SUV survives crashes, explosions and all kinds of mayhem until it is broadsided by a TGV. There’s three problems with this premise. To the best of my knowledge, the TGV does not have surface-level crossings in Paris — they kind of defeat the purpose of high speed trains. Two, the SUV survives explosions and all kinds of collisions, and hitting a train barely dents it, but it gets knocked out when it lands on its roof? What is it? A turtle? And what of the train? It (well, its cheesy CGI simulacrum) keeps zipping through the Parisian streets as if nothing happened. Real trains, like, derail when they hit cars.

Talking about characterization in an action movie like this one is pointless, but comic books do a better job at character development.

Take the Hero, his GF and her brother/his buddy for example. Hero and girl are engaged, hopelessly in love. Well, I can tell she is, anyway. Sienna Miller acts better than the wooden Channing Tatum (Who picked this guy’s name? Seriously, I think of Carol Channing and Tatum O’Neal whenever I hear his name.) On a mission in Iraq, Her Brother/His Buddy gets killed by friendly fire — he goes into an enemy bunker and the Air Force takes it out. Boom!

Hero’s now Ex-GF gets seriously pissed at the US government because her brother was killed in Iraq. So, she signs up with the TBG’s outfit, where she specializes in being a cold-hearted, ass-kicking bitch of a killer with really nice cleavage. Even meeting her ex-BF, our Hero, in the GI Joes’ sub-Saharan lair doesn’t slow down her single-minded rage of vengeance.

Oh, yeah. She has a secret identity, too. He’s married to some rich dude. So, she’s not helping TBG for money and glory. She’s just really, really pissed.

Our Hero gets captured saving Paris from even further destruction from nanomites. Then TBG says he will use our Hero as a test subject for some nasty nanomite surgery. Faced with this gruesome demise of her (formerly) beloved BF, the Hero’s Ex-GF loses her anger-management problems and tries to set him free. We then discover that TBG’s evil doctor henchman — her own fucking brother, who didn’t die after all, but just got warped, like Anakin before he went Darth — has nanomited her, to make her do TBG’s bidding.

No amount of dialogue could help explain this plot point. Brother almost killed. He signs up with The Bad Guy. His sister gets really pissed off. She signs up with the same bad guy. She doesn’t recognize her brother in his Darth Vader-like suit, but surely he knows who she is. (Human resources would have noticed. Trust me on this.) He doesn’t say, hey, sis! It’s me! I’m not dead! Surprise! No, he shoots her up with nanomites to make her a lackey of TBG. These kids have some serious family issues, I’d say.

Then there’s the whole Mysterious Asian Dude-Silent Good Guy in a Full Bodysuit subplot. MAD was a star pupil at a martial arts school in Japan (?) apparently. SGGiaFB was a (white) street urchin who nevertheless had kick-ass martial arts skills. MAD catches SGGiaFB stealing food in the academy kitchen. They fight, pretty equally matched. Kindly, wise, aged sensei stops MAD from inflicting serious damage on the street urchin, accepts the boy into the academy, and eventually voices his approval when SGGiaFB finally defeats MAD in practice.

MAD (who if you remember has serious anger-management issues) goes postal, kills the kindly, wise, aged sensei, and flees the academy. Meanwhile, the street urchin grows up, dons a full body suit (including a face mask with no apparent means of allowing air, water or food in), and becomes a kick-ass GI Joe operative. Predictably, these two foes duke it out in the end, and MAD falls — apparently — to his death.

Now, the movie’s makers have left things open for a sequel, gods help us. One of TBG’s henchmen, who likes to whistle, “For he’s a jolly good fellow,” has undergone nanomite cosmetic surgery to become a dead ringer of the movie’s President of the USA. He switches places with the real POTUS in the POTUS’s emergency bunker (supplied by TBG and protected by TBG-nanomited Secret Service agents). And, given the surreality of this movie, he impersonates the POTUS so well that no one notices … yet. (Dare I say this movie was made while George W. Bush was still in office?)

The best part of the movie is Sienna Miller, and not just because of her cleavage. Until the ridiculous change of heart/character at the end, Miller oozes evil, kick-ass bitchiness throughout the other 85% of the flick. The budding romance between Hero’s Other Best Buddy Who’s Not Dead or Warped and Red-Haired Heroine with Really Nice Cleavage is kind of fun to watch, if only because she’s so frosty military .. and white … and he’s so bumbling affable … and black.

And yes, I know these characters have names. Mine are more descriptive. Get over it.

By the way, we paid 25 yuan (about $3.50) each to see this flick, on the insistence of my friend’s younger brother. If you paid substantially more to see it, I am sorry for your loss.

———–
Cultural enrichment sidebar: What’s Up, Tiger Lily? was Woody Allen’s debut as a film director. In 1966, he took a Japanese action movie, dubbed English dialogue that had nothing to do with the original plot, and created a comic masterpiece. As for the Bizarro world, see here.

Bizarro world "What's Up, Tiger Lily?"

CHANGSHA, HUNAN — While I wait for my lunch companions to show up, I will try to dash off a quick movie review.

Of course, it’s not very current. GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra opened in the USA weeks ago, but I saw it for the first time here just last week. In Chinese. With Chinese subtitles.

I didn’t miss a thing.

Some B-movies have redeeming virtues, despite poor acting, bad direction, cheesy scripts, or lousy camera work. Really bad movies (grade Z’s), though, combine all four to make a US Grade A turkey.

And being a science-fictiony kind of film, GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra, brought really bad to a whole new level with really awful science concepts.

Here’s a few glaring mistakes.

The Bad Guy (TBG) has a huge underwater lair that puts Stargate Atlantis’ digs to shame. Yet, this underwater metropolis is supposedly a secret. How? Its heat signature alone would be as bright as lighthouse beacon to a spy satellite in orbit.

For argument’s sake, let’s suppose the US government knew about The Bad Guy’s secret underwater lair. Wouldn’t the Defense Department be just a teensy bit interested in why TBG has all of that expensive hardware hidden away, especially since TBG is supplying high-tech stuff to the DoD?

(Then again, maybe not. Consider the DoD’s careful monitoring of Blackwater and Halliburton operations in Iraq.)

And he also has a secret weapons facility in the Arctic! Apparently, he hasn’t read up on global warming.

Meanwhile, The Good Guys have their own top-secret underground lair in, of all places, the Sahara Desert. No heat signature problems there (maybe), but if keeping water out of a high tech facility is difficult, think about keeping sand and dust out of one. Not a clever choice, in my book.

In this Saharan facility are hangars the size of aircraft carriers, a deep-water training tank the size of Seaworld, and multiple levels of living, dining and training quarters.

How did all that stuff get there? Without being noticed. By anyone, like the Saudis, or Mossad, or the Russians, not to mention the Egyptians. (I won’t even go into the money required to buy and build all that stuff, secretly.)

One of the cool GI Joe gadgets is an exoskeleton that enables the wearer to run (judging from a fleeting glimpse of its heads-up display) up to 80 mph. It seems impervious to denting, abrasion, gunfire, explosions and high impact collisions with trucks, automobiles, pavement and nearby buildings.

Setting aside the difficulties of manufacturing something from such wonder materials, consider the safety of the poor guys inside. Someone forgot to read up on the law of inertia here.

Imagine you are in a metal can hurtling along at 60 mph when you suddenly hit a larger, immobile object. Your metal-can conveyance (commonly known as a “car”) stops moving and crumples into a mere shadow of its stylish design. Meanwhile, you and anything else in the car keep on moving at 60 mph until something gets in your way. If you’re lucky, your seat belts and airbags will do the stopping job, slowing your body at a rate safe enough for you to walk away. If you’re not, the rapid deceleration will make mincemeat of you.

So, our Heroes are bounding around Paris at high speeds, with acrobatic agility, and slamming into things left and right, without feeling a thing! In the real world, their insides would be a slurry after two or three high-speed impacts. An exoskeleton (especially one that is form fitting!) cannot protect its occupant from concussions and broken bones, unless the engineers also designed inertial dampeners (à lá Star Trek) to evade the law of inertia.

And speaking of inertia, TBG’s force weapons also violate Newton’s Laws. Somehow, a henchmen fires one of these things, concentric rings of — something — fly from the barrel, and heavy objects going flying like feathers in the wind. But there’s no recoil. It seems that pushing a car aside with one of these things would at least muss up your hair.

Nanomites. The main premise of the movie is that TBG, who also appears to be the sole hardware supplier to the US government (strategically a really bad idea), has developed a nanoscale robot that eats anything in its way, like army ants. [Reminds me of another B-movie I saw ages ago, with South American villagers yelling, "Moribunda! Moribunda!"] These little buggers can chew through a tank in no time flat, leaving nothing but … dust? I’m not real clear where the waste products go, exactly. Anyway, the nanomites can be turned off, or their voracious appetites could possibly eat up everything, including The Good Guys and the Whole Earth. (But not other nanomites, hmmm…)

So, the TBG, not content with being the sole hardware supplier to the US government, owning a secret underwater lair the size of Denver, Colorado, and an Arctic weapons facility, decides he will unleash his miniature terror weapons on a strategically important site … the Eiffel Tower. A logical choice, since France has such a dominant role in world affairs now.

He sends two of his loyal underlings, the Hero’s Ex-Girl Friend and the Mysterious Asian Dude, both of whom have serious anger-management issues, in a high-tech SUV to race around the streets of Paris to use a handheld rocket launcher to splatter the nanomites all over the base of the Eiffel Tower .. from about a mile away.

A boat up the Seine would have gotten the job done much more effectively, methinks. Paris has a nifty Metro system, too. Careening SUV’s around Parisian traffic is tres inélégant. You’d expect someone with a Denver-sized underwater lair (and an Arctic weapons facility) to be a little more efficient.

TBG’s high-tech SUV survives crashes, explosions and all kinds of mayhem until it is broadsided by a TGV. There’s three problems with this premise. To the best of my knowledge, the TGV does not have surface-level crossings in Paris — they kind of defeat the purpose of high speed trains. Two, the SUV survives explosions and all kinds of collisions, and hitting a train barely dents it, but it gets knocked out when it lands on its roof? What is it? A turtle? And what of the train? It (well, its cheesy CGI simulacrum) keeps zipping through the Parisian streets as if nothing happened. Real trains, like, derail when they hit cars.

Talking about characterization in an action movie like this one is pointless, but comic books do a better job at character development.

Take the Hero, his GF and her brother/his buddy for example. Hero and girl are engaged, hopelessly in love. Well, I can tell she is, anyway. Sienna Miller acts better than the wooden Channing Tatum (Who picked this guy’s name? Seriously, I think of Carol Channing and Tatum O’Neal whenever I hear his name.) On a mission in Iraq, Her Brother/His Buddy gets killed by friendly fire — he goes into an enemy bunker and the Air Force takes it out. Boom!

Hero’s now Ex-GF gets seriously pissed at the US government because her brother was killed in Iraq. So, she signs up with the TBG’s outfit, where she specializes in being a cold-hearted, ass-kicking bitch of a killer with really nice cleavage. Even meeting her ex-BF, our Hero, in the GI Joes’ sub-Saharan lair doesn’t slow down her single-minded rage of vengeance.

Oh, yeah. She has a secret identity, too. He’s married to some rich dude. So, she’s not helping TBG for money and glory. She’s just really, really pissed.

Our Hero gets captured saving Paris from even further destruction from nanomites. Then TBG says he will use our Hero as a test subject for some nasty nanomite surgery. Faced with this gruesome demise of her (formerly) beloved BF, the Hero’s Ex-GF loses her anger-management problems and tries to set him free. We then discover that TBG’s evil doctor henchman — her own fucking brother, who didn’t die after all, but just got warped, like Anakin before he went Darth — has nanomited her, to make her do TBG’s bidding.

No amount of dialogue could help explain this plot point. Brother almost killed. He signs up with The Bad Guy. His sister gets really pissed off. She signs up with the same bad guy. She doesn’t recognize her brother in his Darth Vader-like suit, but surely he knows who she is. (Human resources would have noticed. Trust me on this.) He doesn’t say, hey, sis! It’s me! I’m not dead! Surprise! No, he shoots her up with nanomites to make her a lackey of TBG. These kids have some serious family issues, I’d say.

Then there’s the whole Mysterious Asian Dude-Silent Good Guy in a Full Bodysuit subplot. MAD was a star pupil at a martial arts school in Japan (?) apparently. SGGiaFB was a (white) street urchin who nevertheless had kick-ass martial arts skills. MAD catches SGGiaFB stealing food in the academy kitchen. They fight, pretty equally matched. Kindly, wise, aged sensei stops MAD from inflicting serious damage on the street urchin, accepts the boy into the academy, and eventually voices his approval when SGGiaFB finally defeats MAD in practice.

MAD (who if you remember has serious anger-management issues) goes postal, kills the kindly, wise, aged sensei, and flees the academy. Meanwhile, the street urchin grows up, dons a full body suit (including a face mask with no apparent means of allowing air, water or food in), and becomes a kick-ass GI Joe operative. Predictably, these two foes duke it out in the end, and MAD falls — apparently — to his death.

Now, the movie’s makers have left things open for a sequel, gods help us. One of TBG’s henchmen, who likes to whistle, “For he’s a jolly good fellow,” has undergone nanomite cosmetic surgery to become a dead ringer of the movie’s President of the USA. He switches places with the real POTUS in the POTUS’s emergency bunker (supplied by TBG and protected by TBG-nanomited Secret Service agents). And, given the surreality of this movie, he impersonates the POTUS so well that no one notices … yet. (Dare I say this movie was made while George W. Bush was still in office?)

The best part of the movie is Sienna Miller, and not just because of her cleavage. Until the ridiculous change of heart/character at the end, Miller oozes evil, kick-ass bitchiness throughout the other 85% of the flick. The budding romance between Hero’s Other Best Buddy Who’s Not Dead or Warped and Red-Haired Heroine with Really Nice Cleavage is kind of fun to watch, if only because she’s so frosty military .. and white … and he’s so bumbling affable … and black.

And yes, I know these characters have names. Mine are more descriptive. Get over it.

By the way, we paid 25 yuan (about $3.50) each to see this flick, on the insistence of my friend’s younger brother. If you paid substantially more to see it, I am sorry for your loss.

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Cultural enrichment sidebar: What’s Up, Tiger Lily? was Woody Allen’s debut as a film director. In 1966, he took a Japanese action movie, dubbed English dialogue that had nothing to do with the original plot, and created a comic masterpiece. As for the Bizarro world, see here.

Physics quiz: What is Stephen Hawking’s nationality?

(a) United States
(b) United Kingdom
(c) Manchester United
(d) United Arab Emirates

You have 2 minutes.

{Cue Jeopardy thinking jingle}

The answer is B! Author and theoretical physicist Hawking was born in Oxford, England, 67 years ago and is currently the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, which at last report was still located where it has been for the last 800 years, in England.

Reading comprehension quiz:
Now read this excerpt from a recent (fubar) editorial from the Investor’s Business Daily, and identify the logical fallacy. You have 5 minutes.




The U.K.'s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) basically figures out who deserves treatment by using a cost-utility analysis based on the "quality adjusted life year."

One year in perfect health gets you one point. Deductions are taken for blindness, for being in a wheelchair and so on.

The more points you have, the more your life is considered worth saving, and the likelier you are to get care.

People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.

Discuss your answers among yourselves for the remainder of class.

Words fail me.

[ADDENDUM: IBD has since corrected its error, by deleting the graf mentioning Hawking.]

[ADDENDUM 2: The Guardian‘s Hugh Muir asked Hawking about UK’s National Health System, the one that the IBD says would have left Hawking to die decades ago. Hawking’s reply was

“I wouldn’t be here today if it were not for the NHS,” he told us. “I have received a large amount of high-quality treatment without which I would not have survived.”

Muir should have gone to say that, if Hawking were a US citizen covered by a private health insurance, he would still be shelling out tens of thousands of dollars annually for the specialized, ongoing care needed for his motor neuron disease.

Don’t believe everything anything the Republicans say about health care reform.