Geek Tip: Seeing Infrared

Infrared light is called "infrared" because it is invisible to the human eye. For this reason, TV remotes use infrared light to send signals to the television without bothering the humans in the room. Every such device has an infrared eye that should be kept clean to it'll work optimally.

There are some times when you want to see whether the TV remote is actually working or not. Sometimes the batteries are weak or dead and the remote doesn't have the power to send those invisible signals.

If you're a geek, you probably know that your smartphone camera has a sensor that is sensitive to infrared light. This means your camera can see what you cannot.

To see what I mean, have a friend aim the remote at you and push the power button and hold it down. If you've got a remote like I'm talking about (Some remotes use radio, those don't count.) there's a little LED light that to the naked eye doesn't look like it's doing anything.

Now, grab a smart phone or any digital camera, turn it on, and look at the remote through its display. If your remote is working properly, you'll see the LED light is flickering superfast.

Though the human retina is not sensitive to IR light, the camera's imaging sensor is sensitive to it. You can use this Geek Tip to see whether your remote's batteries are dead or not. Or just to entertain yourself if you're a Geek.

Terms of Enlistment

I happened upon Terms of Enlistment, by Markos Kloos recently. It's a $2.99 ebook from Amazon and that means it's independently published. I was a little worried once I started it because of its similarity to other Military Science Fiction titles I've read. On the one hand, the dystopian welfare housing project reminded me of Jerry Pournelle's Co-Dominium stories. The induction and basic training reminded me of John Scalzi's Old Man's War as well as Robert Buettner's Orphanage.

And of course, Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers.

I was afraid this was going to be a little too close to those works.

Happily, it was not. Yes, the trajectory of the story is similar.

Andrew Grayson is a young man who escapes a hellish welfare housing project by enlisting in the military. He then goes through the Basic Training and gets assigned to an infantry unit. In a couple firefights our hero demonstrates valor and heroism.

He also manages, like Midshipman Mr. Midshipman Hornblower, to get in trouble by doing good. The trouble he gets into is his ticket to an inter-service transfer which gets him off Earth and into trouble in space.

I was pleased to see that Grayson sucks at flying a drop ship, because I've been annoyed by other stories where everything the hero does he excels at. The writer should eschew superlatives.

When the hero gets into space he's been cross-trained in computer networking. This puts him in a position to know what's going on when the action starts. The battles with the aliens remind me of

All told, I found Terms of Enlistment a pleasant military science fiction novel. The cost was $2.99 and it was well worth the money. I'd recommend it to any fan of military science fiction. Five stars.

Traffic Analysis

I once worked for NSA. At that time it was unlawful for me to say what NSA did, except to say that we made codes to prevent other countries from reading our communications. The rest of what NSA did was an pretty-easily-guessed secret. My job title was cryptologic mathematician.

During WW2, if Hitler turned on a radio, and sent a message to Rommel, it might be that the predecessor of the UK's GCHQ had an antenna and a receiver that picked up the transmission. The Brits had a lot of people employed at places like Bletchley Park. And a lot of other places to do science on that sort of thing.

Imagine you have an enemy who uses the radio and you have smart guys who want to wring as much information out of the enemy's communications as possible. The really juicy stuff is encrypted, so you don't know what exactly they're saying. But you do know that Hitler talks to Rommel, and Rommel talks to Fritz and Fritz talks to Brunhilde. Studying these patterns is called traffic analysis. It's the best you can do if you can't get hold of the internals of messages.

By doing traffic analysis, we may not know what is said, but we know who is talking and when. For instance, suppose you want the Nazis to think George Patton is going to cross the English Channel at Calais. You might put up a bunch of inflatable tanks and planes on the coast, but the Nazis won't fall for it unless you've actually got "ole blood 'n' guts" talking on the radio and lots of radio replies between those rubber tanks and planes. This was one of the reasons why Hitler could not believe that D-Day was going to be at Normandy. His technical boffins told him where Patton was and how much Army he had around him.

The US is smarter than that. We get eye-witness accounts of one of the 9-11 terrorists being in Prague and the 9-11 Commission denies them because we know his cell phone (that won't work in Europe) is in the US. Nobody would ever think to lend his cell phone to a friend while he's travelling.

I figure all of the Al Qaeda operatives are dead who haven't already figured out how traffic analysis works. There's a sort of Darwinian selection process that winnows out those terrorists who don't luck into effective NSA-evading strategies.

Here's another application of traffic analysis that you might be a little familiar with. Your wife asks you some difficult, pointed questions about an unfamiliar number that keeps showing up on your cell phone bills. 

Maybe you escape those difficult questions because the phone number doesn't show the name "Bubbles Mattressthrasher." Your adulterous communications are a little bit easier to hide because your wife can only see one piece of the puzzle. She can't see Bubbles' cell phone bill, and infer from her communications with furriers and jewelers that certain charges on your credit card can be explained thereby.

If you have the morality of a politician, you're grateful spouses can't do the deeper kind of traffic analysis data I just outlined.

One of the reasons why the US came into WW2 and threw so much effort into the European Theater (as opposed to the Pacific Theater where we'd been attacked), was the collapse of Isolationist opposition. And one of the reasons for that was the active intelligence operation conducted against US politicians by the Brits who actively set up Isolationist politicians with honey traps to blackmail them into voting favorably to the UK. Arthur Vandenberg was a Michigan Senator from my home town of Grand Rapids who mysteriously voted FOR the lend-lease bill despite his Isolationist politics.

But that's OK because they were fighting Hitler. And they were foreigners, no US bureaucrat would do anything like that.

Of course, J. Edgar Hoover managed to stay in charge of the FBI for all of his adult life despite serving Presidents all over the political spectrum who hated him. And despite concerted efforts to depose him, or retire him, he always managed to hang on. It was almost like he had some magic that he could use against his enemies.

Since 9/11 a lot of blood and treasure has gone into creating a comprehensive surveillance regime of digital communications passing through the US. It seems that our wise and benevolent leaders have access to AT THE VERY LEAST all the cell phone bills in this country. 

Despite all of this a couple foreigners managed to plot and perpetrate a bombing attack on the Boston Marathon. So, why did we spend all that money?

If it doesn't catch terrorists, what does it catch?

Put on your tin foil hat before I ask the next question: 

Have you ever noticed how politicians change after they go to Washington? I'm sure there are lots of reasons: getting the money from lobbyists for reelection campaigns comes to mind. Or playing to a National stage.

But if I were a politician with any damaging secrets that could be penetrated by traffic analysis, I'd assume they're known to persons within the NSA. 

And we can trust them like we trust the IRS with our financial data.

We're All Nihilists Now

In the '60s, a politician, or an economist opined, "We're all Keynesians now," to announce the death of common sense in the domain of economics. (And a fun game of a few years later was to troll people with claims that "Obama is a Keynesian" in hopes that someone would confuse Keynesian and Kenyan.)

After watching the 4th season of Arrested Development, I'm willing to hazard that we're all Nihilists now.

In the first three seasons of the show, you got the impression that there were these two relatively nice people I could identify with who had been embedded in a nest of vipers. Fun vipers, but vipers none the less. Michael was the protagonist and I always longed for him to bid adieu to the rest of the family and take George Michael with him. They were characters I could identify with because their moral compasses were not as thoroughly demagnetized as the rest. Sure, the other characters were a lot of fun, but they were evil.

Not the evil of Hannibal Lector, but the evil of Jeeter Lester that is feckless, ineffectual and funny.

The first impression I got from the 4th season was that Michael and George Michael wanted to get in on the fun. And this was reflected in the exorcism of the last shreds of integrity from their characters.

Even the cat-like Maeby who had been amoral and cunning (a perfect fit for Hollywood, right?) was transformed into just another wastrel. Her relative success was a breath of fresh air to the story.

The result is a show I enjoyed, but not one that I felt I could identify with.

I believe the problem was that it is truly nihilist now. The show depicts Gob as a "Christian magician" as a dual of his more successful rival a "Gay magician." Almost as if both homosexuality and Christianity are mere affinity groups with no more significance than being marketing niches. There was a time when a person's appetites gave him significance and meaning. And before that a person's religion. This is un-watered nihilism.

And not the assertive nihilism of the Germans in the Big Lebowski, but a much more flaccid sneer at everything.

Don't get the idea I think Arrested Development wasn't funny. Or that I didn't like it. I have not laughed harder than I did at a couple points in the series. And I've troubled you with not one but two blog posts about it.

I'm just a little troubled.

When my kids were little, we got a copy of Bill Bennet's "Book of Virtues." Which was an anthology of little moralistic essays and stories ranked from easy to hard. The hardest of the essays was written by C. S. Lewis and it was entitled, "Men Without Chests." In it, Lewis suggests that a society needs men who can stand when others run, men who take up the hemlock like Socrates and drink it to make a point bigger than themselves, men who engage something transcendent.

Lewis reminds us of the notion of "proper affections" which is a simple matter of loving that which is good, and hating that which is evil. But what is the good that I may love it? Is it an arbitrary preference to be decided by tribal leaders or dictated to the sheeple by someone with the will to power?

I'm not offering any answers to these questions, but I will observe that if your answers to them are lame, then your ability to devise believable villains will be equally lame. As will your ability to stand against tyranny.

Rashomon Overdose

Akira Kurosawa and Ron Howard both make movies. They both know more about film making in their little finger than I ever will--which is an accomplishment because most people don't store knowledge in pinkies.

In 1950 Akira Kurosawa made a movie called Rashomon about a crime and the court testimony about that crime. The crime is horrific--a rape and murder--and it is recounted from four perspectives. This was groundbreaking in 1950, because the story differs significantly depending upon who's telling it. It marks the beginning of the popularization of this key insight of Postmodernism: "truth" is always mediated through the subject who perceives it, interprets it, and recounts it.

In the wake of Rashomon we've seen a change in the parameters of storytelling. It's now cool and commonplace to show the same events multiple times through different eyes. And that's the big deal with the new season of Arrested Development. Each episode follows one character or another and tells a story showing the same events with the camera focused on that character. In early episodes, there are clues that something funny or even mystical is going on. In later episodes, the reader can infer what was going on by examining the same event from another character's point of view.

This is catnip for fan boys who can stop. rewind a bit, then examine each frame at a time. After I watched the last episode I felt like going back and watching the earlier episodes again knowing what I now know to pick up the things I missed the first time around.

It's like watching A Beautiful Mind, finding out that the girl is a fig-newton of Nash's imagination, then going back to confirm that she does not disturb the birds in the yard where she's running around them.

Aside: One of the ways to tell whether a photo has been faked is to look for people's reactions to the odd thing that's been added. When a honking huge flight of Soviet jets go roaring over Red Square, someone in the crowd is going to look up. Keep that in mind when you see something remarkable on the Internet.

The fact that the entire season of Arrested Development consists of a few events that are told and retold leads me to think that Arrested Development is suffering from a Rashomon overdose. I think it works because the series has a cult-like following, and here is something that the cultists can chew on.

I also think that it does not work so well for non-cultists. You have to care about the characters before you want to see the same events rerun several times from their several perspectives. The focus on the minutiae of each character's foibles detracts from the larger scope of the story. Does it do it too much? Yes and no. I call this note "Rashomon Overdose" because I think there's a more than optimal amount of retelling from diverse perspectives. It makes some people queasy and others nauseous while others who have built up a tolerance just want more.

There is something else going on here: narrowcasting.

If you can identify a cult and write a story that its cultists will love, you can make serious money serving this niche market. Amanda Palmer broke records for Kickstarter fundraising by reaching just 35,000 enthusiasts.

Felicia Day puts the emphasis on being able to reach your audience and stories with cult-following should be easier to reach.

The Netflix-Arrested Development hook-up can be wildly successful while drawing numbers that would mean instant-cancellation on a broadcasting network like Fox. 

The key is to keep your overhead low enough that you don't spend more money than your cult can pony up.

There Oughta Be A Law

I know the USA is doomed when I hear both parties calling for laws to address lawless behavior when there are already laws on the books that they choose not to enforce.

Let's unpack what I just said. A criminal breaks a law and this criminal act is used to inflame the passions of the electorate. These inflamed passions are cited by legislators to justify more laws. Particularly galling are the promises that this time it will be different.

If you're a Democrat, this means you want more gun laws. And if you're a Republican, this means you want tough immigration reform.

The perfect crime should be perpetrated by an illegal alien using an assault weapon. If he's a Caucasian the Democrats can search for a white male, and if he's a Muslim the GOP can search for an Islamofascist. Everyone wins. The government has a subsidy for Chechens to this very end.

And if you're Whig, you get the impression that you're being played by both sides.

Then there's the fact that when these laws actually get drafted they contain "poison pill" language intended to make it radioactive to the other side. The point isn't to get the law passed, it's to make the law fail and in failing inflame the passions of those disappointed true believers the politicians intend to shake down for more donations.

With this in mind, keep an eye on your postbox. Soon you'll get a flier with a picture of a werewolf on it named Hillary Bush or Richard Milhouse Obama. The text inside will tell you that this demon is about to corrupt your precious bodily fluids. And you must send them money to keep your family safe from this boogieman.

What's Up With Star Trek?

There have been quite a few Star Trek movies. The last two constitute a "reboot" of the franchise.

I haven't thought through what should and should not be done in a franchise "reboot," but I have some specific observations about the two movies of its reboot.

When you consider a fictional universe with as much that's been developed for Star Trek, there's a huge amount of backstory that's known. And where trekkers are fiends for trivia. So, the Star Trek reboot started out by demolishing all of it to build on a fresh foundation. Vulcan got trashed and the story got started before the start-point of the original show. This cleared the decks for the movies to tell all new stories in the reboot movies.

I hated it for many reasons, but trashing a Corvette Stingray in the opening scene was unforgivable.

When the second movie came around, all I knew was that Benedict Cumberbatch was the villain. And that was a huge source of interest to me. He's the actor who plays Sherlock Holmes on the BBC adaptation of the Arthur Conan Doyle stories. Any actor who can play Sherlock would do sociopath well.

At this point, I shall begin to disclose spoilers from the Star Trek movie "Into Darkness."

Tune out if...

...you...

...do...

...not...

...want...

...see...

...spoilers.

Benedict Cumberbatch plays a villain who is delightfully evil. He is marvelously competent at villainy as he starts blowing stuff up and killing Star Fleet personnel wholesale.

One of my hobby-horses is how the writer finds suitable motivation for the villain.

If you watched Star Trek the original show, and the second Star Trek movie, the motivation of Khan Noonien Singh changed with time. In the backstory of "Space Seed," there was this thing called the Eugenics Wars wherein Khan conquered a significant portion of Central Asia, and before he was defeated, he skipped out on a space-ship called the Botany Bay.

In this chapter of his life, Khan's motive was mere power. He was in the warlord business and he was motivated to gain power and rule. This is a very easy motivation to understand and to depict.

Khan's motivation is unchanged in "Space Seed" as he goes about taking over the Enterprise. All he wants is power. That's cool. And when he's dropped off at a nearby planet he's cool with reigning in hell rather than serving in heaven.

When "The Wrath of Khan" comes around, we discover the nice planet he was dropped off at has become hellish, his wife is dead, and he blames Kirk for these unhappy events. Now, Khan is angry with Kirk and he is consumed with wrath. Grumpy villains intent upon revenge is also a good motivation for villainy.

With this in mind, let's consider "Into Darkness." Benedict Cumberbatch is doing all the mayhem but it is not clear to me why. In the movie, we learn that Peter Weller is worried about Klingons so he thaws out Khan and puts him to work dreaming up weapons to fight Klingons with.

However, it's not completely clear to me why Khan decides to start blowing stuff up. Sure, he could be mad at Peter Weller, but why?

After things start getting blowed up and Kirk's friend Captain Pike gets killed, the movie is clearly misnamed. It should have been "The Wrath of Kirk."

And that's what doesn't quite work in the movie. It's a neat concept. Take a movie that everyone knows, "The Wrath of Khan" and then swap all the roles: Instead of Khan being wrathful, it's Kirk. Instead of Spock sacrificing himself and getting a deadly dose of radiation, and dying while Kirk looks on, "Into Darkness" swaps Kirk and Spock. And instead of Spock getting resurrected by some plot device, Kirk gets resurrected.

It's a fun concept, but you can't get the joke unless you're a long-time fanboy.

This works today, but I don't think it'll hold up with time. I've said before that Han Solo shooting first worked because the viewers in the 1970s were familiar with Sergio Leone's "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" wherein Angel Eyes showed he was a bad man. It quit working when George Lucas became a bigger filmmaker than Sergio Leone and nobody except film buffs and old guys understood how Han shot first because Lee Van Cleef shot first. By that same logic, everyone today interprets "Into Darkness" in the context of "Wrath of Khan," but they won't thirty years hence.

Does Benedict Cumberbatch work as Khan? Oh yeah. Anyone who plays Sherlock must speak arrogant as his native tongue. The best line in the movie is when Khan tells Kirk he's "better." Kirk asks, "at what?" And Khan says, "Everything." He carries off Khan's superhuman competence and aggressiveness marvelously. I really believed this was a genetically-engineered superman.

His only weakness from a story-telling perspective was his motivation. The writers needed to show a link between Khan's murderous campaign at the outset of the movie and some specific betrayal by Peter Weller or injury at his hand.

It would be trivial to do. The Botany Bay set off with 84 souls aboard, only 72 survived--including Khan (in "Space Seed's" time-line). In "Into Darkness's" time-line at least 73 survive--72 inside photon torpedoes plus Khan.

Perhaps Peter Weller got to the Botany Bay with all 84 cryogenic chambers intact, but he killed nine of Khan's crew by experimenting on them before he thawed out Khan. And when Khan finds out, he gets the motivation to launch his campaign of terror.

More likely, Khan's plan was to manipulate Star Fleet into launching the photon torpedoes at Kronos and somehow they don't blow up and somehow he thaws out his buddies and somehow he takes over the Klingon Empire? Yeah, that's what Khan had in mind.

The unclear motivation is what prevents me from saying Khan is the best villain ever.