Film review Oppenheimer (2023), runaway fusion, and runaway AI

In the 2023 film Oppenheimer, during the Manhattan project to develop the nuclear bomb, one of the concerns was whether the nuclear explosion created during a test might create such high temperatures that it leads to the nuclei of nitrogen atoms in the atmosphere fusing together and triggering a chain reaction that essentially sets the atmosphere on fire, frying the entire planet. Oppenheimer tells general Leslie Groves, the director of the project, that the calculations of Arthur Compton showed that the chance of such a thing happening was less that three in a million, and thus acceptable. When Groves said that he was hoping that the answer would be zero, Oppenheimer replied that you could not expect such an answer from theory alone..

While the idea that theory can never give you absolute certainty about anything is correct, the actual story is more complicated. It turns out that the Oppenheimer-Compton story is based on an article written by Pearl S. Buck, based on an interview she had with Compton, and some of the details are apocryphal. Hans Bethe, head of the theoretical program at Los Alamos, who had shown how fusion reactions lay behind the energy production of stars, had concluded early on that the chance of a runaway fusion reaction igniting the air was so small as to not be worth worrying about.
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Film: “I’m not a robot” (2024)

The winner of this year’s Academy Award for Best Live Action Short was the 22-minute Dutch film I’m Not a Robot. It starts with a woman in an office working on her computer when she is faced with one of those CAPTCHA tests (standing for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) where you are given a grid of boxes and asked to click on just those boxes that have show some particular item, such as a traffic light or a car or something similar to prove that you are not a robot. We have all encountered these things many times. So she does it but fails the first test. Again nothing unusual. It shows a different grid and she tries again. And fails again. And again. And again.

Frustrated, she calls tech support and after the person asks her some questions, raises the possibility that the reason she is failing may be because she actually is a robot. The film deals with how she reacts to that.

You can see the full film.

Readers will be familiar with the idea that we may actually be avatars in an advanced computer simulation. The reasoning behind it is that as computer simulations become ever more sophisticated in creating virtual worlds with avatars who look and behave realistically and as if they have wills of their own, at some point they will create one in which the avatars think that they are autonomous humans. How would we know if we have not already reached that state and we ourselves are indeed those avatars, thinking that we have wills of our own when we are merely doing what our controllers tell us to do?

The film reminded me of Black Mirror episodes that speculate on where technology might be taking us. Almost all of them show a dystopian future that rarely ends well for the protagonists. Apparently a new season of Black Mirror is expected to be released this year.

Film review: Around the World in 80 Days (1956)

I posted recently about how the 1956 film Around the World in 80 Days played a role in explaining the sudden popping into my mind of the actor-singer Gracie Fields. As a boy I had read and enjoyed Jules Verne’s 1873 book of the same name on which the film is based but had not seen the film when it came out, presumably because I was too young. In those days in Sri Lanka, if you did not see a film during its first run release, it was pretty much gone forever.

So I decided to watch it now. It is a long and extravagant film done on a large scale, lasting about three hours. David Niven is perfect in the role of the fastidious and punctilious Phileas Fogg who makes a bet for £20,000 with four members of his stuffy mens-only London club that he can go around the world in 80 days. Cantinflas plays his valet Passepartout and provides most of the comedy. He actually dominates the film, seemingly having more screen time than Niven. He has the dress, stature, and some of the mannerisms of Charlie Chaplin and the facial expressions of Chico Marx. There are about 40 famous international actors making cameo appearances and about 70,000 extras from around the world. It was done in a widescreen format.
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Coincidences and brain connections

One day, the name Gracie Fields suddenly popped into my head for no apparent reason. Fields was an extremely popular British singer and actor who lived from 1898 to 1979 and was considered the highest paid film star in the world in 1937. But all that was before my time. My only memory of her was that as a little boy in England, one night I was watching the popular TV variety show Sunday Night at the London Palladium, which was must-watch TV in the UK those days, and she was the headliner for that week’s show.

The British had the endearing practice of taking some beloved performers to their bosom and still enjoying them long after their prime (I do not know if that practice still endures) and ‘Our Gracie’ (as she was fondly referred to) was considered a national treasure and could do no wrong in their eyes. Anyway, I remember as a little boy watching her sing and being intrigued by this great affection for an elderly performer. (In looking up her age now, around that time she must have been just about sixty, but to a little child, anyone over forty seems ancient.) That is my only memory of her. So it was strange indeed for that memory of her singing on TV to not only survive for so long but to suddenly pop into my head a few weeks ago after decades of being submerged in my deep unconscious.
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Back in the saddle again

This has been a somewhat long hiatus from blogging due to being down with flu. That may have suggested to readers that I was suffering from serious symptoms. But in actual fact, after the first two days, I was almost back to normal. ‘Almost’ in the operative word here. My temperature was back to almost normal but I could not get rid of a low-grade fever and had a residual dry cough. The latter is for me a common consequence to a flu, not to be shaken for a couple of weeks.

But what really kept me from blogging was sense of blahness that left me with no enthusiasm for doing anything, such as everyday chores or even an appetite. In that condition, the enthusiasm to write, which comes usually comes easily to me, deserted me until today. The fact that it took me this long to get back to normal may mean that this was a different flu variant or that as I get older it will take me longer to bounce back.

It is not that these days were totally wasted. I did find that I could enjoy reading and so took the opportunity to read books that I should have read a long time ago and watched some films and TV shows.
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Michael Moore responds to the UnitedHealthcare CEO shooting

In response to the outpouring of anger at the for-profit health insurance companies for their predatory practices that was unleashed by the killing by Luigi Mangione of the UnitedHealth care CEO, there has been a lot of pearl-clutching by the ruling classes and their pundits and political lackeys in both parties, pleading with people not to think of the shooter as a hero and saying that ‘political violence has no place in America’. The last sentiment is utterly disingenuous. Political violence is as American as apple pie and has been used routinely by the ruling classes and their repressive state apparatuses when their power is challenged by ordinary people. What they are scared of is when their authority is challenged by protestors and when political violence targets them.

Apparently Mangione had issued a hand-written manifesto. Many of the mainstream media have refused to publish it in full even though it is very short and have instead quoted bits of it. They have not given any reasons why they did this even though there are many fake ones circulating. Ken Klippenstein says that he has obtained the genuine one and has published it and it is reproduced here in full.

“To the Feds, I’ll keep this short, because I do respect what you do for our country. To save you a lengthy investigation, I state plainly that I wasn’t working with anyone. This was fairly trivial: some elementary social engineering, basic CAD, a lot of patience. The spiral notebook, if present, has some straggling notes and To Do lists that illuminate the gist of it. My tech is pretty locked down because I work in engineering so probably not much info there. I do apologize for any strife of traumas but it had to be done. Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming. A reminder: the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy. United is the [indecipherable] largest company in the US by market cap, behind only Apple, Google, Walmart. It has grown and grown, but as our life expectancy? No the reality is, these [indecipherable] have simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allwed them to get away with it. Obviously the problem is more complex, but I do not have space, and frankly I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument. But many have illuminated the corruption and greed (e.g.: Rosenthal, Moore), decades ago and the problems simply remain. It is not an issue of awareness at this point, but clearly power games at play. Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.”

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Film review: The Name of the Rose (1986)

I saw this film a long time ago, soon after it came out. I did not remember much of the details except that it was dark and moody and set in a remote abbey in the Middle Ages and involved the murder of several monks that a visiting monk William of Baskerville (played by Sean Connery) and his assistant Adso of Melk (a very young Christian Slater) try to solve.

I read the book of the same name by Umberto Eco last month, and disliked it for its tedious and lengthy discussions of esoterica involving theology and heresy and religious and political intrigue of that period. The main redeeming feature of the second edition of the book was that it had a postscript by the author explaining how and why he wrote it the way he did, including his choice of the title. While it did not improve the book’s standing in my opinion, it did shed light on the writing process and what an author seeks to achieve.
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TV Review: A Man on the Inside (2024)

I recently watched this enjoyable comedy series consisting of eight half-hour episodes that is being streamed on Netflix. I expected it to be good because it comes with a pedigree and it did not disappoint. The series creator is Michael Schur who has had such hits as Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Parks and Recreation, and The Good Place with the last also starring Ted Danson who acts in this series.

Danson plays a retired professor of engineering who, after his wife dies after a prolonged period of dementia, falls into a lethargy that worries his daughter, his only child. She recommends that he take up some hobby and he stumbles across a classified ad in the newspaper that is looking for someone aged 75-85 who knows how to use a phone. He decides to apply and the job turns out to be with a private detective agency that has been hired by the son of a resident in an upscale retirement home in San Francisco to investigate the loss of his mother’s expensive ruby necklace. The detective agency feels that having someone pose as a resident would be a good way to solve the crime by gaining access to the all the people who live and work there. He does not tell his daughter exactly what he is up though, fearing that she might not approve or be worried.
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TV review: Maigret (2016)

The prolific author Georges Simenon, in the years between 1931 and 1972, published 75 novels and 28 short stories featuring Jules Maigret, a police officer working in Paris in the mid-twentieth century.

In some ways the stories resemble Columbo in that the focus is not on providing a surprise ending. In many stories, like Columbo, Maigret strongly suspects who the criminal is early on and sets about finding ways to get evidence against him. Like Columbo, he prefers not to use his first name and is referred to as just Maigret, even by his wife. Like Columbo, he is said to be happily married with no children. But unlike with Columbo, his wife does appear in the stories in a supportive and empathetic role. Also unlike Columbo who works alone and seems to be given a free hand by his superiors, Maigret has a team of assistants to aid him but is often interfered with by his superiors for political reasons.

Maigret is a middle-aged man who smokes a pipe and is soft-spoken, contemplative, and measured in his utterances. He is extremely low key and in solving cases, he uses psychology to to get in the mind of the victim and the criminal, trying to figure out the reasons behind their actions. He is kind, empathetic, and a good listener and is known to be highly ethical and thus respected even by the criminal classes.
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Teri Garr (1944-2024)

The endearing actor had an offbeat zany charm that made her perfect for comedy. I always enjoyed seeing her in films and so was saddened by the news of her death at the age of 79.

She became famous after she appeared in Young Frankenstein.

Her big film break came as Gene Hackman’s girlfriend in 1974’s Francis Ford Coppola thriller “The Conversation.” That led to an interview with Mel Brooks, who said he would hire her for the role of Gene Wilder’s German lab assistant in 1974’s “Young Frankenstein” — if she could speak with a German accent.

“Cher had this German woman, Renata, making wigs, so I got the accent from her,” Garr once recalled.

The film established her as a talented comedy performer, with New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael proclaiming her “the funniest neurotic dizzy dame on the screen.”

She was a popular guest on TV talk shows.

The actor Lisa Kudrow, who became famous for her role as Phoebe in the hit TV series Friends and then went on to act in many films, strongly reminded me of Garr, both in terms of looks and zaniness and charm. So it seemed like no-brainer casting to have Garr playing Phoebe’s mother in a few episodes of the show. I had not watched Friends and so was unaware of this until I read about it in her obituaries.

Here is a clip from one of those episodes that I found and you can see the resemblance in looks, personality, and acting styles.