Iron Sky

I loved the trailer and concept of the movie Iron Sky. Nazis fled from Germany's defeat in 1945 to set up a colony on the far side of the moon. Now, they're coming back.

I did a check on the Rotten Tomatoes website to see how the critics like it. I don't take the critical consensus as gospel about a movie's quality. Some of my favourite films are deeply divisive, it seems. At any rate, Iron Sky has received about a 40% rating. It fails.

One interesting thing, though: American critics haven't weighed in yet. If we look at who likes it, I see reviews from the Daily Mirror, The Birmingham Post, Sky Movies, The Mercury, and At the Movies. The first three are English; the last two are Australian. It will be interesting to see what happens when it receives wider distribution. I suspect that it shows the President of the United States to be Sarah Palin would make some American critics cringe and others cry foul. This is enough to explain why...supporting a violation of Godwin's Law is not smart politics.

Taking a Longer View

A problem with most companies and many governments is that they usually need results from their investments within one or two fiscal years or before the next election. There are exceptions, such as the government-funded fusion research, which has gone on since 1955. Nevertheless, short- to medium-range thinking is the rule, and long-range thinking is the exception.

This is a problem that Robert A. Heinlein addressed in his "young adult" novel Time for the Stars. In it, a non-profit organization called "The Long Range Foundation" (LRF) generously funded projects that would take decades to produce results or, quite likely, would produce no results at all. As the book says,

Its coat of arms reads: "Bread Cast Upon the Waters," and its charter is headed: "Dedicated to the Welfare of Our Descendants." The charter goes on with a lot of lawyers' fog but the way the directors have interpreted it has been to spend money only on things that no government and no other corporation would touch. It wasn't enough for a proposed project to be interesting to science or socially desirable; it also had to be so horribly expensive that no one else would touch it and the prospective results had to lie so far in the future that it could not be justified to taxpayers or shareholders. To make the LRF directors light up with enthusiasm you had to suggest something that cost a billion or more and probably wouldn't show results for ten generations, if ever … something like how to control the weather (they're working on that) or where does your lap go when you stand up.

The LRF could afford to do this because a long-shot bet on the future pays off handsomely, if it pays off at all.

The LRF has inspired some long-range projects, such as the 100 Year Starship Project.

The LRF also shares a long perspective on the future with another organization, the Long Now Foundation, but I don't know that the first inspired the second. The Long Now Foundation is trying to promote "longer term thinking" by designing and building a unique clock:

There is a Clock ringing deep inside a mountain. It is a huge Clock, hundreds of feet tall, designed to tick for 10,000 years. Every once in a while the bells of this buried Clock play a melody. Each time the chimes ring, it’s a melody the Clock has never played before. The Clock’s chimes have been programmed to not repeat themselves for 10,000 years. Most times the Clock rings when a visitor has wound it, but the Clock hoards energy from a different source and occasionally it will ring itself when no one is around to hear it. It’s anyone’s guess how many beautiful songs will never be heard over the Clock’s 10 millennial lifespan.

The Long Now Foundation also has started a project to record 1,500 languages on a single nickel disk (The Rosetta Project), a server, a timeline program, and (simplest of all) it promotes writing a year with an extra zero in the front, to remind us of the thousands of years ahead of us. So, now, in the year 02012, I would think of 12,012 AD, 22,012 AD and so on.

However, as someone with a degree in archaeology, I have to wonder why we should focus on the depth of time in the future and ignore the depth of time in the past. For this reason, I prefer Cesare Emiliani's suggestion in Nature that we add ten thousand to our calendar year (if the year is A.D.) and subtract the date from 10,000 (if it is B.C). This suggestion is called the "Human Era Calendar" or the "Holocene Calendar," so the year number is followed by an H.E. instead of a B.C. or A.D. That would make this year 12,012 H.E.

These dates give a good perspective on the pace of human progress. For example, the current interglacial period (the Holocene Interglacial), the earliest agricultural crops, and the earliest human-made place of worship, the amazing site of Göbekli Tepe,  are within a few hundred years of the calendar's starting point, 10,000 B.C. Proto-writing, such as the Vinča symbols,  dates from a convenient half-way point: 5,000 H.E. The oldest true writings are from Mesopotamia, about 7,000 H.E. The traditional year of Jesus' birth is 10,000 H.E., and Faraday's electric engine is from not long after, in 11,821 H.E. (1821 A.D.).  I appreciate how this calendar shows how events relate to the whole sequence of human cultural development from the Neolithic to the present.

It occurs to me that we could have two calendar systems--B.C./A.D. and H.E.--in the same way that we have two temperature scales, Celsius and Kelvin. The length of a year is the same in both calendars; the degree measures the same difference in temperature in Celsius and Kelvin scales; what differs is the starting point. H.E. and Kelvin measure from a more logical and more distant point, so we need not specify if a measure is before or after a date, above or below a temperature. Also, as Kelvin is used and appreciated by scientists, while everyone else uses Celsius, I imagine that historians and other scholars might adopt the Holocene Calendar, at least for their own use, while everyone else continues to use the traditional dates.

Notes on the New Space Age

In 1969, I watched the first footstep on the moon on the family black-and-white TV. I was thrilled. Here was a milestone in the space age, I thought. I did not suspect that it was the climax of that age. Three years later, the Apollo program ended, and man has not returned to the moon for forty-three years and counting.

Well before Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, science fiction author Robert Heinlein mapped out a future history  in which space flight was achieved in a period he called the "False Dawn" because it was then abandoned. As much as I admired him, I would not have credited that he was right. He also predicted that space travel would be achieved through private enterprise, not government spending. In this, he was clearly wrong.

Or was he? Private enterprise is working up a glow that may indicate the true dawn of space travel, the one that will last. Several companies are developing hardware to push into space: suborbital vehicles, man-rated rockets, heavy-lift rockets, and space capsules to go into Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and higher. In this post, I'd like to introduce some of the people and companies working to make the New Space Age happen, and the hardware they are making. I will do it from the point of view of NASA.

In 2004, President George W. Bush announced his “Vision for Space Exploration.” In terms of goals, this meant that NASA would return to the moon and move men to Mars.

Then, in 2005, Michael Griffin became the head of NASA. He ordered a study, the "Exploration Systems Architecture Study," which recommended putting the "Vision" into effect through the "Constellation Program." Constellation would complete work on two rockets, the Ares I (to launch crews into orbit) and Ares V (to launch heavy hardware into space), as well as creating the Orion space capsule to hold the crew and the Altair lunar lander to get them down to an interesting place.

 The Orion Space Capsule

In 2006, Congress granted Dr. Griffin less money for Constellation than he had wished from Congress, so he shifted money from other projects to keep Constellation on track. Some important projects were "deferred indefinitely" (cancelled), but he had his moment of triumph when the Ares I rocket successfully lifted off on October 28, 2009.

I assume there was some sense of urgency to the development of the Ares I, in particular, because the U.S. Space Shuttle program would end soon. Nevertheless, Constellation was controversial, even within NASA, for its cost. From 2006, an unofficial, volunteer, group called DIRECT, involving many NASA engineers, proposed the Jupiter Program, a set of other rockets which, like the Ares, re-used parts of the Space Shuttle to save cost. The biggest differences in the Jupiter Program are that it provides one flexible rocket instead of two specialized ones, it keeps safety systems in Orion that were stripped to save mass, and it uses a shuttle-derived upper stage instead of a clean-sheet upper stage. It was designed for faster development and less cost.

Dr. Griffin saw his plans shatter when the Augustine Report of October 2009 suggested to President Obama that NASA's money could be better spent. It reported that, even if NASA received the $3 billion increase to its budget that it sought, and even if it saved money by retiring the International Space Station early, in 2015, the Ares V would not be ready till the mid-2020s. As a result, Ares I and V were cancelled in 2010 due to cost and time problems.

Instead, the “NASA Authorization Act of 2010” that President Obama signed ordered NASA to develop a single rocket along the lines suggested by the DIRECT Team, which would lift either cargo or crew. NASA would continue its work on the Orion capsule and, most interestingly, fund private companies, through fixed-price contracts, to supply the ISS. In effect, NASA is passing some of the work of going to Low Earth Orbit (LEO) to the private sector.

 The Space Launch System

(Brown areas are derived from the Space Shuttle launch system)

The Space Launch System (SLS) now being developed will initially take 70 tonnes to LEO. With one other stage added, it will take 130 tonnes. By comparison, today's biggest commercial launch vehicles, such as the Ariane 5 or the Delta IV Heavy, can put just over 20 tonnes in LEO.

The SLS is also intended to mount an Orion capsule to go to the moon, asteroids, or Mars. Orion will be completed first, so a Delta IV Heavy rocket will launch an unmanned Orion in July 2013. The SLS design will be completed in 2015. Current plans call for an SLS to send an Orion on an unmanned trip around the moon in 2017.

This posting focuses only on NASA's plans, but there is an amazing bubbling of new activity among people interested in space. Russia is building new rockets and plans a new space station; China has a new space station and is planning a trip to the moon; India and Japan have plans for the moon; space tourism will turn large-scale when Virgin Galactic begins its flights; and SpaceX is developing plans for trips to Mars. All this will go in later posts.

This is an exciting time.

To Be or Not to Be, and the Klingon Language

Here is a demonstration of the various ways that an actor can deliver the "To be, or not to be" soliloquy from Hamlet: (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-11380973)

Here is another version of the same speech, translated into the Klingon language:

For those who do not know, this language was developed by linguistics professor Marc Okrand for the Star Trek movies, so that the language spoken by aliens would sound like a language, as opposed to baby talk or babble. Interestingly, Dr. Okrand deliberately chose language features that are statistically rare to make the language sound more alien. At any rate, the entire text of Hamlet has been published in Klingon, thanks to the Klingon Language Institute.

Disney later approached Dr. Okrand for help in developing a language for the city of Atlantis, to be used in the film Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001). Learn it from this video:

I could say quite a bit more on invented languages, but later.

Expatriate Elections

Yesterday, I was fascinated by a BBC story about elections being held for a French député (Member of Parliament) to represent French citizens who live in Northern Europe but outside of France. All of the candidates live in London, as it has the largest French population outside France. The article calls London "the sixth largest French city."


Wow, this is an idea that had never occurred to me: People voting for a parliament so that it could make laws on taxes, hospitals, immigration, and other issues that do not affect those voters. They, instead, would live under the laws of another nation which, most likely, they could not influence by voting. Then there are those people who have dual citizenship, and would be able to vote for both a député in France and an MP in Britain. Their influence through their ballots would be twice as great as their neighbours'.

I thought about the contrast between the French accommodation of its citizens in London and the American disenfranchisement of its citizens in Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico is not part of the United States, but American federal laws apply to it. People born there are American citizens, but residents of Puerto Rico (wherever they were born) cannot vote in federal elections. Although Puerto Rico has no Congressman or Senator, it does have a "Resident Commissioner" in the House of Representatives. He cannot vote on the floor of the House but can vote on procedural matters and in House Committees. If that were not confusing enough, residents of Puerto Rico cannot vote for the President but could become the President. The constitution requires, though, that a President must have lived in the United States for fourteen years, and time residing in Puerto Rico does not count towards that.

Putting this electoral puzzle to one side, I wondered what it would be like if Canada had a few electoral ridings outside Canada's boundaries. One would need to be in Los Angeles, and probably another in New York. (According to this Wikipedia article, "In the 1980s, Los Angeles had the fourth largest Canadian population of any city in the [sic] North America, with New York close behind."

Still, I cannot imagine a Member of Parliament for Los Angeles standing up to speak in the House of Commons. Even less can I imagine a Prime Minister who represents a seat outside Canada. If he was considered "a non-resident of Canada" for tax purposes, he would not even pay Canadian taxes until he took up his new job in Ottawa! Perhaps the French experiment causes too many border cases and too much confusion for other countries to copy.

Property Rights according to Locke and Marx

John Locke justified the existence of property this way: (God gave) the earth to all mankind, to have dominion over in common and equally. We therefore have a "state of nature" without private property.

However, if a man clears a forest and makes a farm, he combines his labour with nature to make something not entirely natural. The result is his property, by right of his work. Locke says that this right of property should be within limits...he should be able to control enough property to sustain himself, and just enough that he can work it personally. Locke believed this degree of private property is “fair” (i.e. it is justified by natural rights).

Karl Marx points out that Locke's "fair" definition of private property is simply not how property is defined and used in our society. The ownership of land (or any other “means of production”) does not imply that one works the land. In fact, most of the time people’s labour is alienated from them; they labour, and the benefits go to the owner, not themselves. Marx believes this is “unfair” (i.e. it is not justified by natural rights).

Locke says that human beings have the right to resist if an individual tries to take their natural rights away, and to revolt if a government tries to take them away.

Marx agrees.

Translations of Two Rilke Poems: Herbsttag and Panther

Rainer Maria Rilke was not taught in any English class I have taken, probably because he wrote in German. It is a pity, though, because the short quotations of his work that I occasionally read in translation seem wise and beautiful. He is well known for his book Letters to a Young Poet as well as for his poetry.

The movie Awakenings included a translation of the poem that seems to be the best-known of his works to the English-speaking world, "Der Panther." He wrote it after seeing a panther pacing his cage in Paris. It was published in 1902.  This page contains many alternative translations of this poem. The original looks like this:

Der Panther (Im Jardin des Plantes, Paris)
Rainer Maria Rilke

Sein Blick ist vom Vorübergehen der Stäbe
so müd geworden, daß er nichts mehr hält.
Ihm ist, als ob es tausend Stäbe gäbe
und hinter tausend Stäben keine Welt.

Der weiche Gang geschmeidig starker Schritte,
der sich im allerkleinsten Kreise dreht,
ist wie ein Tanz von Kraft um eine Mitte,
in der betäubt ein großer Wille steht.

Nur manchmal schiebt der Vorhang der Pupille
sich lautlos auf -. Dann geht ein Bild hinein,
geht durch der Glieder angespannter Stille -
und hört im Herzen auf zu sein. 

It sounds like this:

I wrote several translations of it, using German dictionaries and other translators' comments as a guide. I wanted to retain the formality of its structure and the original rhyme scheme, as much as possible. Out of those translations, the best, I think, is this one:

The Panther

By Rainer Maia Rilke

Translated by Gareth Jones

His gaze is, from the passing of the bars,
exhausted; they are all it holds,
as if, surrounding him, a thousand bars,
and past the thousand bars, no world.

The strong and supple motion of each joint
move him in the smallest round,
like rippling forces dancing round a point
where, numb, a mighty will is bound.

At times, the curtains pull back in his eyes
without a sound--an image comes,
through the tension of still limbs it flies,
and touches on his heart, and dies.

Another of Rilke's short poems is "Herbsttag" ("Autumn Day"). It is, apparently, a common favorite in Germany. The original is this:

Herbsttag
Rainer Maria Rilke

Herr: es ist Zeit. Der Sommer war sehr groß.
Leg deinen Schatten auf die Sonnenuhren,
und auf den Fluren laß die Winde los.

Befiel den letzten Früchten voll zu sein;
gib ihnen noch zwei südlichere Tage,
dränge sie zur Vollendung hin und jage
die letzte Süße in den schweren Wein.

Wer jetzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr.
Wer jetzt allein ist, wird Es lange bleiben,
wird wachen, lesen, lange Briefe schreiben
und wird in den Alleen hin und her
unruhig wandern, wenn die Blätter treiben

The original sounds like this:

There is a wonderful play of alliteration, rhyme, consonance, and assonance in this poem that makes it a challenge to translate. Similar sounds ripple through a line like "Wer jetzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr." You can hear the wind whistling with the "ss" sound in the phrase "laß die Winde los." I did my best and came up with this.

Autumn Day
By Rainer Maria Rilke
Translated by Gareth Jones

Lord, it's time. The summer's greatness, done.
Lay your shadows on the sun clocks and
Let the winds across the grasslands run.

Tell last fruits to ripen on the vine.
Give them two more days of southern heat
Urge them to perfection and then speed
Their final sweetness to the heavy wine.

He who has no home will build no more.
He who is alone, for long will be,
Will lie awake, read, write endlessly
And throughout the broad streets here and there
Restless wander while the leaves blow free.

I am proud of this, but I would enjoy reading your comments on it.

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Update: I wonder if "the mighty supple motion of each joint" is better than "the strong and supple." It does sound better, I think.

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Update: I've had more problems with the second stanza of "Autumn Day" than any other. Specifically, the second and the last line of it. The original just says, "Give them two more southern days," but there is no word meaning "to hurry" that rhymes with "days." Thus, I ended up with "heat" (which is implied by the word "southern") and "speed."

It just occurred to me that I could also use

Tell last fruits to ripen on the vine,
Give them two more Southern days to blush,
Urge them to perfection and then rush
Their final sweetness to the heavy wine.

"Rush" is a better word than "speed." It sounds like liquid flowing. And though "blush" is no more in the original than "heat" is, its meaning connects to the next line ("urge them to perfection") and is the purpose of asking for the southern days.

I don't know if, overall, that's an improvement, though. Those two lines have been hard.