Sean M Elliott’s Theoretikos.com

In my last expedition to a second-hand bookstore I came across a moldering book with yellow-to-brown pages called “Fortunes in Formulas for Home, Farm and Workshop.”  First published in 1907, the edition I found is from 1937, and contains 10,000 formulas for ACID PROOFING to YELLOW (CHROME), TEST FOR.

It’s the sort of book that every handyman would have had in their shed, though the copy I found automatically falls open to the CONDIMENTS section.  (The more I look through it, the more I’m sure a future reader will find it falling open on PYROTECHNICS.)

A friend of mind flicking through it was saddened by the thought that a text like this no longer exists, and the book in his hand amounted to lost knowledge.  On the other hand, it could be argued that as some of the formulas contain ingredients or procedure that today are questionable if not downright dangerous it might be best out of the hands of Joe Bloggs, Esq.

But as you and I are are above the crowd (admit it, you clever sausage) I’m going to post the odd formula from Hiscox and Sloane.  But I hasten to add that, for safety to yourself and the world at large, I don’t recommend trying out said formula.  Basically: if you do and it leaves you with less fingers, a chronic skin condition, or really embarrassed, then it’s your own damn fault.

This week, something titillating.  Strangely, nowhere in the book are there instructions for how to apply the mixture.

REDUCER TO MAKE BUST SMALLER AND FIRMER:
50 grams Lanolin
50 grams Vaseline
20 drop Tincture of Benzoin
Mixed with water in which 10 grams of iodide of potassium has been dissolved.

ABC is expanding their stable and will be introducing ABC3 in a few months time. It’s meant to be a totally kids channel, and for the past couple of weeks they’ve been advertising for people to apply for being hosts.

On a completely unrelated note, I’ll point you in the direction of this:

In the trapsing over the countryside to various schools I get a lot of time in the car to remember about unpaid bills, fret whether my son loves me, and to come up with new and interesting blasphemies to swear at the stupid drivers on the road.  Now and then I actually think over what I do for a career, and start to analyse that day’s presentation.  I rake over its bones trying to figure out where it worked, where it maybe failed, and on the odd occasions, what made it sizzle.

To get this straight in my head I’m going to start getting elements of it down here.  Also to offer it up for others to for questions, comments or observations.

Observation number one:  We’re in the business of Science Communication Communication.  On the face of it that seems like a terrible tautology, but bear with me a sec.  Not only are we presenting an idea, observation, piece of fact that not only has the audience go “Gosh that was interesting/exciting/morally ambigious”, but also want, at the soonest opportunity, to go and tell someone else about it.

Let me tell you what I don’t mean.  I don’t mean like that kid in your class who doesn’t play sport, usually has his nose in a book during lunchtime, and delights in using big words like “dioxyribonuclaic acid” in grade five.  You know the kid I mean.  You all went to school with him.  Except for me: I was that kid.  This kid gets his feelings of importance through knowing the obscure stuff that the rest of the class doesn’t know, which is fine if you want to rub someone else’s nose in your knowledge, but kind of crap for teaching it.

These days I think hard about the one take home message that the rest of the presentation can  hang off.  This message is preferrably one, but at most three, sentences that I try to drum into the audience Derren Brown-style.  For instance, a presentation on energy and its uses may have its take home message as “Energy doesn’t come out of thin air, it has to come from somewhere”, and from that hang ideas of types of energy and conservation of energy.  When the audience heads home that afternoon and is discussing the day’s schooling with parents over cookies and a glass of milk, the Sentence can then launch out of their beautiful minds like a sparkelling gold Easter egg.  Here the rest of the session can be reaccounted around the Sentence, including the really cool bit where the presenter explodes a bottle full of volitile vapour and burns himself.  Or something.

The idea about the single idea is that it lowers the bar of entry for retelling the story.  It’s clear and unambigious, but most importantly it’s not “dumbing it down”.  It allows those audience members who have a better grasp on the material to talk about it later without resorting to big, scary words, without cutting out other students who may be new to the material.

And if nothing else, it gives the presenter a single ancor to build the presentation around without turning it into a “Shopping List Show”, which is something I’ll launch into next time.

A few months ago I saw Southland Tales.

I thought the original Donnie Darko was genius, but the Director’s Cut wasn’t. That should have told me something about the direction Southland Tales may take. I wanted to like this film, and as it opens I’m impressed. It sets up America as a near-police state in the near-future after an enormous terrorist attack. The opening sequence is handy cam footage of a public holiday when three cities are hit with nuclear bombs. (It’s a variation on the old “Mushroom cloud about the ‘burbs” as seen in a score of movies since the 1960s. Its still an important image that resonates with me; at least directors are still reminding people of the destructive power of a nuclear bomb.)

But then the movie starts to wobble.

In engineering, we’re taught methods that can be used to calculate at what point a system may go from stability to instability. For instance, a control system like an autopilot for an aircraft that flies the plane at a particular speed and direction. As it gets buffeted by air currents and up-drafts, the autopilot makes corrections by shifting the flaps and gently adjusting the direction of the aeroplane. A good control system returns the plane back to the line of flight while the occupants barely notice anything. A poorly designed control system may attempt to return to the correct line, but then overcompensates. In correcting it overcompensates in the other direction, and again, ocillating further and further like an unbalanced weather vane, until it wildly throws around passengers and luggage, and eventually fuselage and wings. The important and frightening thing that started to niggle in the back of mind as I worked through tute sheets of equations is how quickly things could go from plain sailing to ohcrapohcrapohcrapohcrap.

Southland Tales begins and I am with it, I am so there, I get what he is setting up. There’s some gentle buffeting from odd characterisations and slightly strange plot points, but it’s early in the movie and I can still keep to the path the director is setting up, I’m so there, I’m so with it. Then BAM the odd plot points have built up and the credibility of the movie starts to topple like a toddler on one leg…

Which is not to say there weren’t some great moments in the movie. Justin Timberlake’s Private Pilot Abilene miming to “I Got Soul”. A car ad featuring two SUVs humping each other. The deal scene between Baron Von Westphalen and Hideo Takehashi. And Christopher Lambert was it in, but you have to look close.

But there are too many half ideas and semi-explored points that by the end the movie is an unstable metaphysical pile of celuloid that careens into the ending credits with a final awkward line. Had Kelly scrapped half of his script and focussed on some of his key sub-stories and ideas, he would have another Donnie Darko, maybe better. But instead he is wanting a Magnum Opus, and ends up with the movie equivalent of Vietnam.

I can only recommend this to lovers of Donnie Darko, and only for the same reasons why you might rubberneck while passing a car accident.

Bow, Nigger changed the way I looked at writing about computer games. Instead of a list of requirements and features, writing about computer games could be a postcard from imaginary places.

Another piece I was following from the same site was Fools Rush In which was documenting a different way of getting storytelling into a computer game. This piqued my interest because for years I have been bugging the disinterested around me with my wild ravings about how computer games could be different. Or to put it another way, here’s a kick-arse realtime 3d engine; can we do something with it other than running and shooting zombies? “Fools Rush In” is an interesting, though incomplete read; it hasn’t been touched since 2005 and I have a feeling the author has a few more pressing things on his plate.

Last Friday saw the first conference performance of The Cheese Man, not to the adoring General Public, but instead to the hard and steely gaze of the “performance in cultural institutions” big names.  To my credit, I did it without too many hitches, and even managed to spray milk over the girls in the front row.

I was gratified to later find that some were genuinely impressed; even Tubby the Robot said he enjoyed it, and that meant a lot coming from him.

So Cheese Man has legs.  The Science Week experiment may see another revival next Science Week, and hopefully with a drop more funding.  

The conference also saw the official launch of IMTAP: International Museum Theatre Asia Pacific with typical Patric Watt aplomb and fanfare.

Last week’s best ad libitum:

(Scene: 70 year seven kids after lunch listening to Science-Talking Guy (me). There is one Irritating Kid sitting in the front row. You know the guy. Probably went to school with him. Smart-arse twerp who won’t shut up. Science-Talking guy fills a plate with shaving cream from a can.)

Irritating Year Seven Boy: Oh sir! Put some in my hand! Put some in my hand!

Me: Why? Do you have hairy palms?

Boo yeah.

To stay on the theme of comics a-moment: Spider-Man. And I’m only interested in this because I collected Amazing Spider-man comics in my teenaged years, then gave them all away to a girl I had a crush on in Year 12. Dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb.

Fresh after unmasking himself in front of the world, and after the shooting of his Aunt May, Peter Parker bought back a new life for himself by selling to Mephisto (the devil, sort of) his marriage to Mary Jane.

In other words: the editors of Spider-Man comics never liked Peter and MJ being married (Amazing Spider-Man (Vol. 1) Annual #21 (1987)), and the whole “everyone knows who Spiderman is” thing was too restrictive, and over Friday night drinks decided that it would be so much better if the whole thing hadn’t happened in the first place. So in a grand deus ex machina they swept the whole thing away and did a soft-reboot on the Spider-Man franchise.

Peter Parker is no longer married to MJ, and no one remembers who unveiled themselves in front of TV cameras. How amazingly convenient!

To be honest, Spider-man has be going since 1962, and if you want to keep it fresh to keep new buyers coming in, sometimes you’ll need to shake out the storyline and start again.

It reminds me of something Brian K. Vaughan said about his comics: “That’s storytelling, with a beginning, a middle, and an end,” he says. “Something like Spider-Man, a book that never has a third act, that seems crazy.”

The US Navy have shot down a spy satellite that was threatening life on Earth.

Specifically, it had some canisters of hydrazine used for propulsion that would cause ‘harm’. Something had to be done!

Uh-huh.

If I’m reading this right, a spy satellite that would burn up on reentry was shot down so that it could burn up on reentry.

With this coming (relatively) hot on the heels of China shooting down a weather satellite, it’s hard to read this as anything other than “Anything you can do, we can do better.”

Interestingly, they used a projectile with no warhead. Good ol’ kinetic energy from something moving very fast smacking into something else moving very fast.

And in the “Bad American News Story” file, this CNN feature has (among paranoid New Yorkers expecting a satellite to fall on their heads) a picture of the Hubble Space Telescope as “the satellite”.

I’ve come to Y: The Last Man via Ex Machina. In short, it tells the story of the world when every mammal possessing a Y chromosome, i.e. dudes, suddenly and at the same time keel over. Except for two: a young guy call Yorick and his pet monkey Ampersand (that symbol you get when you press shift-7).

Having read the reviews and had friends recommend it, I want to love this book. But no matter how I cut it, I’m enjoying it but not blown away. At the moment I find Pia Guerra’s pencils competent to the point of being dull The colouring has been done with a very limited palette like someone who has just discovered the paint-can tool in Photoshop. I don’t hate it. I’m just not impressed by it.

But then there’s the writing. In most comics the writing cowers behind tight pencils. In Y, without the art to hide behind, the writing is thrown into relief. It’s good. It’s still finding it voice at the moment, but its fun and at times thrust its tongue into its cheek. I particularly liked the American government having a Democratic majority because of the relatively percentage of female Republican representatives, and a witty discussion about all the male singers and bands that have now disappeared.

But for me, comics is the double-headed Janus that needs the art just as much as the writing. Maybe this will change for Y, if I keep going with it. Mind you, to stop now would be like judging the entire Sandman series on its awkward first book.