How hard is that SF?

I got a request to collect participants for an online survey on science fiction — take a look and help out if you want. It’s long, and a little depressing: it’s a list of science fiction movies and TV shows, and you’re supposed to rate their scientific accuracy. I think I’m rather picky about that, so just about all of ’em got slammed when I did it.

I am conducting a small pilot-study on the properties of various sci-fi works (focusing on film and TV in particular). For the purposes of this study I designed two web forms (Web-form 1 & Web-form 2) that ask participants to rate sci-fi works in terms of different sci-fi properties. Web-form 1 asks how accurately a sci-fi work portrays scientific facts and Web-form 2 asks what the work’s general attitude towards science is. The number of sci-fi works that a participant is supposed to rate (121) is substantial (one needs about 20 min to complete one web-form) but it is necessary for the kinds of analyses I’d like to be able to do.

I am in dire need of study participants, as you might imagine. Specifically people who are above average in terms of scientific literacy and who are also fond of sci-fi. I’m more than certain your blog would provide me with just the right sample population- if you’d kindly »nudge« your »hordes« to go and fill out the two web-forms I provided:

WEB-FORM #1: Soft vs. Hard sci-fi
If you were born on an ODD day of the month (say the 1st, 3rd, 5th, 7th etc.) then please fill out VERSION 1 of web-form 1:
https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?hl=en&formkey=dDZXTmM0dFJnQm1sV2ZzWl8yblpkWHc6MQ#gid=0

If you were born on an EVEN day of the month( say the 2nd, 4th, 6th, 8th etc.) then please fill out VERSION 2 of web-form 1:
https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?hl=en&formkey=dDBSYWstbDB0bzlhM1FUMXkyZDBBTFE6MA#gid=0

WEB-FORM #2: Optimistic/Utopian vs. Pessimistic/Dystopian
If you were born on an ODD day of the month (say the 1st, 3rd, 5th, 7th etc.) then please fill out VERSION 1 of web-form 2:
https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?hl=en&formkey=dDNuWE9NdnBzeVpXeEdjcDVkVUxWM2c6MA#gid=0

If you were born on an EVEN day of the month( say the 2nd, 4th, 6th, 8th etc.) then please fill out VERSION 2 of web-form 2:
https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?hl=en&formkey=dExsMDhtWkRqbTN5b1J6aENYU1preGc6MA#gid=0

Important EXTRA instructions for participants:
Each of these two web-forms asks you to rate 121 different sci-fi works. While this may seem a lot it is also a prerequisite for a certain type of data analysis I’d like to do so please bare with me. The works are all English-language movies and TV series made in the period between 1950 and 2009. If one is at least a casual watcher of sci-fi most of these titles should be quite familiar. You will need about 20-25 min to complete one web form.

I’d kindly ask you to complete one web form in a single “run” (do not take big pauses when you are in the middle of it). You can complete the other web form after a break (even say the next day), but please do not forget to fill out BOTH forms or your input will be of very little value.

Please only fill out the forms once and please only fill out the VERSION appropriate for your birth date. The only reason for the different versions is so certain biases in the way the data is gathered will average out. The versions otherwise gather the SAME data and ask the SAME questions.

I hope I am not asking for something completely out of order and that you can help me gather enough participants. I am currently tethering on the edge of 30 respondents but this is nowhere near the number I’d need to get valid results.

With kind regards,
Jurij Dreo
Ljubljana, Slovenia

Episode CXXXXIV: He had it coming

Don’t say I never do you any favors, acolytes of the endless thread. I’m about to spare you the need to see the latest cheap, unimaginative Hollywood dreck to hit the theaters by showing you the ending of the new Yogi Bear movie. Bring the kids around, tell ’em to see what the new kiddie movie is all about, and watch their little faces fall and the tears flow and the screaming begin.

Of course, if they get really excited and demand to go see it right now, you’ll also know that you need to book a psychiatrist, stat.

(Current totals: 11,523 entries with 1,215,620 comments.)

The commonality of bad movies and bad religion

Face it. Star Wars sucked. Even the original movie, which I remember fondly and vastly enjoyed watching, was horribly written — that George Lucas did not have an ear for dialog, and once he drifted away from a simple mythic archetype couldn’t put a plot together to save his life, was something that became increasingly evident throughout the series.

And Star Trek? Embarrassingly bad science, hammy acting, and an over-reliance on gobbledygook and the deus ex machina. There was maybe a small handful of episodes that were more than cheesy dreck.

So why do people adore those shows so fanatically?

Here’s one interesting explanation: cult movies plug into the same cognitive keyholes as religion does. The article is a bit superficial — comparing Star Wars to Catholicism, Star Trek to protestantism, and the recent Star Trek retcon/reboot to Mormonism is stretching the analogy way too much. But there’s something to it.

The Star Wars/Star Trek phenomena are a bit odd; I watch bad movies sometimes for entertainment, but I never lose myself in apologetics for them. They’re bad movies. They’re fun for the comic opera klutziness of them, and half the pleasure is being able to stand above them and outside them, and appreciate the sincerity of the exercise in slapping together a weird piece of crap in spite of little obstacles, like a lack of money or talent. But Star Wars/Star Trek have serious fans who devotedly study the lore and get into arguments about which is better, and even think they represent some high quality story telling.

I will boldly predict that some people will be arguing for that in the comments. Of course, they’re wrong. They sucked. Just like religion.

So the question is why do people cling to them…and it seems to me that our brains are equipped with a kind of ideological inertia, which is probably a good thing, since you don’t want to too casually flip-flop on ideas before you’ve worked out their viability. But sometimes we seem to be prone to a pathological degree of attachment, where because once we favored some strange object of worship, whether it’s Jesus or Spock or America or the Green Bay Packers, we can’t let go. Changing our minds would be an admission that we were wrong and could be wrong about something we regard as important in our lives, and there’s a reasonable fear that opening the door to that kind of uncertainty might lead to chaos.

There’s also a peculiar inability to separate the parts from the whole. You can like classical sacred music without endorsing the silliness about magic crackers and Original Sin, just as you can enjoy a light sabre battle on the screen without getting goofy over The Force.

So what is religion? It’s a parasite on a couple of useful features of how the mind works, its tendency to try and model the world around us as a coherent whole and its reluctance to abandon models that fail to work. It’s a particularly successful parasite because it can be introduced early, with mother’s milk, well before they get plonked down in front of the boobtube, and so it generally outcompetes Captain Picard…and it also gets relatively little pushback from the culture once the child leaves the breast to spend more time with outsiders, who are all praising the same mysterious being, and so far Yoda worship isn’t very common.

But it’s the only good song on the whole CD!

It’s almost Thanksgiving, and you know what that means: the deluge of Christmas carols is about to commence. This is the time of year when I dread turning the radio on, because I know I’ll hear the same sets of songs over and over again, and the kind of uniform anti-eclecticism characteristic of Top 40 AM radio gets amplified and expanded and starts to spread everywhere. I’m always pleased to see something new, especially since it doesn’t happen very often…Lennon’s Happy Christmas (War is Over), Minchin’s White Wine in the Sun?

Some people get cranky about anything that isn’t sufficiently antiquated or sufficiently reverent, though. Now some people are freaking out over the inclusion of a song they don’t like.

A Christmas CD aiming to raise funds for a Christian charity has been slammed for featuring an anti-Christian song.

Faith and family groups have labelled the song, which includes the lyrics “I get freaked out by churches,” and “I’m not expecting a visit from Jesus”, as “disrespectful” and a “sick joke”.

But the executive producer of Myer’s annual star-studded Spirit of Christmas CD has defended his decision to include the song, White Wine in the Sun.

The song, written by atheist entertainer Tim Minchin, features alongside traditional Christmas carols such as Joy to the World and Little Drummer Boy.

I don’t know. I’m offended by both of those traditional Christmas carols — should I scream at WalMart and demand they be pulled from the store? Or, maybe, I should just look at the CDs and buy the ones with music I like, and understand that other people might want to buy Elmo & Patsy’s Grandma Got RunOver by a Reindeer on the Country Christmas CD.

Minchin’s song is quite nice. Here it is, if you hadn’t heard it before:

There is one thing in this story I find objectionable.

Profits from CD sales go to The Salvation Army.

Uh, what? Tim Minchin’s work is now being used to prop up a notoriously anti-gay organization? That sounds wrong.

Tell Tim Minchin where to get off

I know Tim Minchin wants to tour the US, maybe this summer, but his agents weren’t exactly frantically lining up the gigs for him just yet. Now you can light a fire under their butts and tell Tim Minchin where he should play. Vote for your home town! Vote for the nearest place with a giant arena!

I voted to have him come direct to Morris, Minnesota, but I’d be fine with Minneapolis.

Is this an evolution game?

I don’t know, because my eyes kind of glazed over as this review explained all the rules for Dominant Species.

It doesn’t exactly look elegant in its implementation — it’s more for hardcore board-gamers than a family fun night, if you ask me — but at least it seems to be taking an ecosystem approach to modeling evolution which is far different than the usual ‘battling individuals’ concept you usually see in games.

I think I’m hoping the world does end in 2012

It would be a mercy. George Lucas is preparing another release of all of his Star Wars movies, after yet again tweaking them.

The new versions will be in…cheesy post-processed pseudo-3-D.

When the first one was released back in 1977 it was phenomenal — a pulpy space opera with dialogue that had the panache of a Hugo Gernsback short story, and we liked it. Then came the sequel, and we were overjoyed…it was still good old fashioned science fiction, but it was better than the first. And from that point on, unfortunately, it was dissolution and decay, beginning with the Ewoks and ending in the terminal embarrassment of Jar Jar Binks. Yet Lucas keeps tinkering with the sell-out garbage, trying to restore that brief moment of magic by hammering it all flatter and paving it over with a virtual steamroller of reprocessing and rewriting.

Nothing will save them, George. They were badly conceived and badly written, and yet another digital makeover will not change that fact. Maybe if you’d written them competently when you made them, you wouldn’t be masturbating their corpses now.