Quotulatiousness

February 10, 2018

When cinematography wins out over reality

Filed under: Books, Media, Space — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Earlier this month, Charles Stross talked about why he’s been reading less and less science fiction lately, and touched on SF movies and (for example) why George Lucas chose to model space combat on World War 1 aircraft battles:

When George Lucas was choreographing the dogfights in Star Wars, he took his visual references from film of first world war dogfights over the trenches in western Europe. With aircraft flying at 100-200 km/h in large formations, the cinema screen could frame multiple aircraft maneuvering in proximity, close enough to be visually distinguishable. The second world war wasn’t cinematic: with aircraft engaging at speeds of 400-800 km/h, the cinematographer would have had a choice between framing dots dancing in the distance, or zooming in on one or two aircraft. (While some movies depict second world war air engagements, they’re not visually captivating: either you see multiple aircraft cruising in close formation, or a sudden flash of disruptive motion — see for example the bomber formation in Memphis Belle, or the final attack on the U-boat pen in Das Boot.) Trying to accurately depict an engagement between modern jet fighters, with missiles launched from beyond visual range and a knife-fight with guns takes place in a fraction of a second at a range of multiple kilometres, is cinematically futile: the required visual context of a battle between massed forces evaporates in front of the camera … which is why in Independence Day we see vast formations of F/A-18s (a supersonic jet) maneuvering as if they’re Sopwith Camels. (You can take that movie as a perfect example of the triumph of spectacle over plausibility at just about every level.)

… So for a couple of generations now, the generic vision of a space battle is modelled on an air battle, and not just any air battle, but one plucked from a very specific period that was compatible with a film director’s desire to show massed fighter-on-fighter action at close enough range that the audience could identify the good guys and bad guys by eye.

Let me have another go at George Lucas (I’m sure if he feels picked on he can sob himself to sleep on a mattress stuffed with $500 bills). Take the asteroid field scene from The Empire Strikes Back: here in the real world, we know that the average distance between asteroids over 1km in diameter in the asteroid belt is on the order of 3 million kilometers, or about eight times the distance between the Earth and the Moon. This is of course utterly useless to a storyteller who wants an exciting game of hide-and-seek: so Lucas ignored it to give us an exciting game of …

Unfortunately, we get this regurgitated in one goddamned space opera after another: spectacle in place of insight, decolorized and pixellated by authors who haven’t bothered to re-think their assumptions and instead simply cut and paste Lucas’s cinematic vision. Let me say it here: when you fuck with the underlying consistency of your universe, you are cheating your readers. You may think that this isn’t actually central to your work: you’re trying to tell a story about human relationships, why get worked up about the average spacing of asteroids when the real purpose of the asteroid belt is to give your protagonists a tense situation to survive and a shared experience to bond over? But the effects of internal inconsistency are insidious. If you play fast and loose with distance and time scale factors, then you undermine travel times. If your travel times are rubberized, you implicitly kneecapped the economics of trade in your futurescape. Which in turn affects your protagonist’s lifestyle, caste, trade, job, and social context. And, thereby, their human, emotional relationships. The people you’re writing the story of live in a (metaphorical) house the size of a galaxy. Undermine part of the foundations and the rest of the house of cards is liable to crumble, crushing your characters under a burden of inconsistencies. (And if you wanted that goddamn Lucasian asteroid belt experience why not set your story aboard a sailing ship trying to avoid running aground in a storm? Where the scale factor fits.)

Whatever you do, don’t go asking him about Han Solo’s claimed Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs…

US military will disrupt GPS signals in western states during certain periods of the Red Flag wargames

Filed under: Military, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

For much of February — and in some places, well into March — the US military will be jamming signals from the Global Positioning System as part of training exercises over vast swaths of the Western United States, as well as in smaller areas surrounding major military facilities across the US.

[…]

The jamming will be restricted for the most part to periods between 11pm and 2am Eastern Time. This is when commercial air traffic is at its least dense, so the impact on air travel should be negligible. But the exact times may vary. And jamming tests for other exercises during the same period — including some at or off the coast of Navy nuclear sub bases at Bangor in Washington and Kings Bay, Georgia — may have an impact on commercial shipping and fishing vessels.

Red Flag 18-1 includes participants from all four service branches of the Department of Defense, as well as units of the British Royal Air Force and the Royal Australian Air Force. “[This] primarily is a strike package focused training venue,” said Colonel Michael Mathes, commander of the 414th Combat Training Squadron at Nellis. But while strike packages — practice bombing missions and stand-off missile attacks — are the end product, the exercise also includes a “cyber” component, in which the adversary team will attempt to disrupt operations through everything from phishing emails to electronic warfare.

More information at Ars Technica.

Protecting (some) women from their own decisions

Filed under: Business, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Kirio Birks on the Formula One “grid girls”:

Objectification, we are told, is degrading. Why? Because any job that requires employees to be sexually attractive and gazed upon for that reason necessarily dehumanises them. It encourages others to treat them as pretty ‘things’ rather than as autonomous people with their own lives, passions, thoughts, and desires. Or so the thinking goes. ‘Grid Girls’ – models employed by Formula One for promotional purposes – have just discovered that their role is to be discontinued. As Formula One’s managing director of commercial operations explained: “While the practice of employing grid girls has been a staple of Formula 1 Grands Prix for decades, we feel this custom does not resonate with our brand values and clearly is at odds with modern day societal norms.”

But in their hurry to spare Grid Girls the indignity of the male gaze, nobody making this argument seems to have stopped to wonder whether Grid Girls might have an interest in defending what they do. Instead, a collective of ostensibly progressive voices leapt to their defence without bothering to ask the girls themselves if they needed defending at all. In response, Formula One abandoned its Grid Girls so that it can be seen to be moving with the times and hip to contemporary mores. In doing so, Formula One’s executives have implicitly conceded that they have spent too long objectifying women instead of empowering them. They would like it to known that they’d rather see women driving the cars, or as members of the engineering teams, or just about anywhere other than track-side holding a driver’s name-board and looking beautiful.

What baffles me is that a move supposed to empower women came at the expense of other women, and only because a minority of outsiders found Grid Girls inappropriate, problematic, and otherwise an offence against good taste. But even if Grid Girls are being objectified, then – contra the explanation offered above – it’s not at all clear that objectification is wrong in and of itself. It is acceptable to use people as a means to an end – that’s called employment. Grid Girls obviously know that they will be objectified and they make an autonomous, informed decision to take the job anyway. They are not harmed, they are paid for their time and their work, and many of them have come forward to say, with understandable indignation, that they enjoy what they do. Needless to say, this has not impressed those feminists who applauded their redundancies. But surely a woman has a right to be the object of somebody else’s desire if she wants and surely it doesn’t matter if she is being paid for it?

Opponents may suggest that Grid Girls have internalised their own oppression in a society shaped by patriarchal values, but not without making two claims: (1) that Grid Girls are unable to adequately think for themselves because of the society they live in and (2) that thinking for yourself is only evidenced by acknowledging the existence of a patriarchal status quo and resisting it.

Johann Sebastian Bach; Toccata & Fugue in Dm, by Sinfonity

Filed under: Europe, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

SinfonityTV Guitar
Published on Dec 14, 2014

Johann Sebastian Bach; Toccata & Fugue in Dm, BWV 565
Live recorded in Segovia (Spain), Aug 2014. Video produced by NURILANDS FILMS, directed by Núria García.

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QotD: “The masses”

Filed under: Politics, Quotations — Tags: — Nicholas @ 01:00

I don’t believe that the ordinary people in fact resemble the normal description of the masses, low and trivial in taste and habit. I put it another way: that there are in fact no masses, but only ways of seeing people as masses.

Raymond Williams, Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism, 1989.

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