“readings”

The complexity of a living individual minus its ability to anticipate (in respect of its environment) equals the uncertainty of the environment minus its sensibility (in respect of that particular individual).

As an activity, as a state of mind, science is fundamentally optimistic. Science figures out how things work and thus can make them work better. Much of the news is either good news or news that can be made good, thanks to ever deepening knowledge and ever more efficient and powerful tools and techniques. Science, on its frontiers, poses more and ever better questions, ever better put. What are you optimistic about? Why? Surprise us!

Jessica Rose was suspicious and frankly a little pissed off. She had come to this organic-tea shop to discuss what she thought was a feature film called Children of Anchor Cove. Now Beckett and Flinders had made her sign a nondisclosure agreement and, clearly pleased with themselves, told her that they wanted her to play the lead in what they billed as the future of entertainment. For free. It was an Internet-something-or-other –- she wasn’t listening. They were also going to “hire” another actor to play a character named Daniel. It sounded a lot like porn.

It was exactly what her acting coaches at Universal Studios’ film program had warned her against: unkempt producer-types hawking shady deals.

When he got to college, Flinders [cocreator of lonelygirl] dreamed up an alter ego—an awkward, geeky homeschooled girl. As a camp counselor, he told fireside tales about her experiences. He wrote short stories about her, and when he tried to make it as a writer in Hollywood, he put her in his screenplays.

There’s something about Jessica Rose that the webcam loves. Her distractingly large eyebrows and small round face are bent and stretched by the fish-eye lens into a morsel of beauty that fits perfectly in a pop-up window. That’s not to say she isn’t pretty off camera—she is—but every step she takes closer to the cam multiplies and enhances her looks. It’s a face made for the browser screen.

[Miles] Beckett was at home trying to decompress. He had been working as an urgent care doctor to pay the rent and was exhausted. Between filming and editing the Lonelygirl15 series and dealing with severed fingers and dog bites at the hospital, he wasn’t sleeping much. It didn’t help that Goodfried called at 2 am.

”Miles, it’s time you quit being a doctor,” he said. “We just passed 200,000 views.”

Within 48 hours, the video had half a million views. Goodfried knew that to be considered a success, a cable television show needs to get between 300,000 and 500,000 viewers. “My Parents Suck …” had vaulted into that territory.

Each episode needs to be short, no more than three minutes. ”You wouldn’t show a sitcom at a movie theater, right?” Beckett says. “You make movies for the big screen, sitcoms for TV, and something else entirely for the Internet. That’s the lesson of Lonelygirl15.”

This Web series not only looks different, it’s made differently than other filmed entertainment. As Bree’s universe expands, each new character will have his or her own vlog. Flinders can’t write and film them all, so new writer-directors have been hired and paired with actors playing the new characters. Unlike television, where writers sit in a room and come up with a single script, the Lonelygirl15 team comes up with a general plotline and then sends its writer-directors out to produce independent but interconnected videos. All the characters, in essence, have their own show.

Rose leaps onto the bed and jumps up and down. She makes faces at the camera and waves her hands, knocking askew the picture of the rose hanging on the wall. Beckett got it at a 99-cent store because it was cheap and looked like something a teenage girl would buy. Nobody seems to have noticed the faint pink quotation printed beneath the flower: ”It is by believing in roses that one brings them to bloom.” 

Of all the controversial topics I’ve raised on this blog, free will is the one that seems to most grab people by the nuts and/or teats and twirl them around. I understand why. Belief in free will is the reboot button for civilization. Don’t read any further until you have saved your applications.

Today I offer a new approach to understanding why you don’t have free will. I call it The Little Robot That Could. I will show that a robot, designed with current technology, could exhibit everything you call free will. Once you accept that the robot has every bit of “choice” that you have in this world, your superstition about your own choices will begin to dissolve. That process will take about a month.

[Stephen Jay] Gould claimed that science and true religion never come into conflict because they exist in completely separate dimensions of discourse:

This sounds terrific, right up until you give it a moment’s thought. You then realize that the presence of a creative deity in the universe is clearly a scientific hypothesis. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a more momentous hypothesis in all of science. A universe with a god would be a completely different kind of universe from one without, and it would be a scientific difference..

To see the disingenuous hypocrisy of religious people who embrace NOMA [‘non-overlapping magisteria’, Gould’s “argument”], imagine that forensic archeologists, by some unlikely set of circumstances, discovered DNA evidence demonstrating that Jesus was born of a virgin mother and had no father. If NOMA enthusiasts were sincere, they should dismiss the archeologists’ DNA out of hand: “Irrelevant. Scientific evidence has no bearing on theological questions. Wrong magisterium.” Does anyone seriously imagine that they would say anything remotely like that? You can bet your boots that not just the fundamentalists but every professor of theology and every bishop in the land would trumpet the archeological evidence to the skies.

You could give Aristotle a tutorial. And you could thrill him to the core of his being. Aristotle was an encyclopedic polymath, an all time intellect. Yet not only can you know more than him about the world. You also can have a deeper understanding of how everything works. Such is the privilege of living after Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Planck, Watson, Crick and their colleagues.

I’m not saying you’re more intelligent than Aristotle, or wiser. For all I know, Aristotle’s the cleverest person who ever lived. That’s not the point. The point is only that science is cumulative, and we live later.

It’s often said that people ‘need’ something more in their lives than just the material world. There is a gap that must be filled. People need to feel a sense of purpose. Well, not a bad purpose would be to find out what is already here, in the material world, before concluding that you need something more. How much more do you want? Just study what is, and you’ll find that it already is far more uplifting than anything you could imagine needing.