Eddie Izzard on the Daleks

Based on my personal experience, there seems to a correlation between skeptical thinking and science fiction. I attend functions of a group of skeptics, sometimes physically at local venues, and at other times online with people around the world and I find that a large number of them are aficionados of science fiction and are knowledgeable about the minutiae of those stories.

Recently I created some mild astonishment within this group by saying that I had never actually watched any complete episodes of favorites like Star Trek, The Twilight Zone, or Dr. Who. I knew about them of course and had read about them and seen the odd clip of something from them. It is not that I avoid them. I do read the occasional science fiction but had never had any great interest in seeing science fiction on TV or the big screen. This surprised others who seemed to expect that with my science background, I would find them appealing.

One thing that had always puzzled me were the Daleks, the evildoers in the Dr. Who stories. They seemed to me to be laughably comical and totally not frightening. Eddie Izzard shares my puzzlement as to what the creators were thinking when they created them as conical objects with flat bottoms, like pepper and salt shakers, who moved on wheels and had weird appendages where arms would be.

The precursor to Sherlock Holmes

As long-time readers know, I am big fan of murder mysteries, in books and in TV/film forms. Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie constituted much of my reading as a boy. Doyle’s creation Sherlock Holmes has often been seen as the archetype of the private detective, able to see clues and solve crimes where the official police force could not, and his biographer John Watson served the role of the narrator, observant enough to be a surrogate for the reader and was able to tell us broadly what was seen by Holmes, without being able to distinguish between what was relevant and what was superfluous, and thus unable to make the crucial inferences that Holmes did.

But recently I came across the story The Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allen Poe that was published in 1840 and is credited as being the first modern detective story and it is clear that Doyle was inspired by Poe’s story.

In the earlier story, we again have a friendship between two men, the unnamed narrator in Poe’s case who meets and befriends an eccentric acute observer in August Dupin and the two share lodgings in Paris. Poe’s narrator records his observations of Dupin, and we immediately see the similarities to Holmes, in that Dupin also has acute powers of observation and superlative analytical and deductive skills.
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So much available, so little to watch

In a comment to my blog post reviewing the film The Penguin Lessons, commenter jimf wrote:

I understand it was an offhand comment that had little to do with the post, but I can’t agree that Netflix has “seemingly infinite options”. I find the vast majority of Netflix content to be virtually unwatchable. The majority seems to be either mindless filler or hopelessly violent “action” pictures, or worse, stars Adam Sandler. Most of the comedy specials are flat and predictable. And good luck trying to find any classic pics made prior to 1960.

I actually agree with jimf. After all, I did not say that Netflix had “seemingly infinite good options”. The trope of people wasting their time surfing the site, trying and failing to find something that they really want to watch finally settling for some dreck just to kill time, has become a cliche.
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Exploiting people for ratings and profit

Because I do not watch TV much, there are huge swathes of popular culture that I am oblivious to. Well, not completely oblivious, because I do read news sites and come across news headlines about things that enter into the periphery of my consciousness so that I know that something is going on and may even be aware of the people involved without knowing the particulars. For example, I knew that there was some kind of public feud between two rappers one of whom was Drake while the other’s name escapes me but did not know what it was about. I could look it up of course, but I wasn’t interested enough to bother.

I am also aware that there are a vast number of reality shows out there but have never watched any, though I know that some of them involve squabbling housewives and others involve people trying to find romantic partners while yet others involve some kind of survival tests. I was aware that in their quest for ratings, the TV networks and the show’s producers go to some lengths to create drama among the participants, even providing them with scripts or prompts, so that the word ‘reality TV’, implying that the shows are organically evolving with the cameras being just passive observers, is really a joke. Since the shows are taped well in advance and heavily edited before broadcast to create various storylines, they have to be filmed in secret and the participants are sequestered so that they cannot meet with their families and friends and are bound by confidentiality agreements so that surprises can be sprung on viewers. This isolation likely increases their sense of vulnerability. It is only long after the shows have been broadcast that people start revealing the often brutal and abusive conditions that prevailed while the filming was going on.
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TV review of Adolescence (2025) and incels and the manosphere

I just watched the four-part TV series Adolescence that has created quite a media splash. The show tells the story of a 13-year old boy Jamie who would come home from school and then spend all his time online on the computer in his room. The parents did not worry too much about this, seeing it as somewhat normal behavior, until he is charged with the knifing death of a classmate Katie. They are incredulous that he could have done this but, as the show unfolds, they discover that his world of peers in school and online has taken him down some dark roads. The parents, ordinary people who live ordinary lives and try to do their best to bring up their children well, wonder where and how they went wrong and how they could have missed all the signs that their son was being influenced by others who were feeding them ideas that led to dangerous feelings of inadequacy and grievance.

The show makes a point of noting how adults are oblivious to what is going on in the world of adolescents and even when they know, misread the signals. This is shown in a scene where the detective’s son tells the father that he is blundering ineffectively because he does not understand the nuances of emojis, and that those emojis that he thought showed a liking by Katie for Jamie were actually sarcastic.

It is Mascombe’s own son, Adam, (Amari Jayden Bacchus), a recalcitrant kid, Fredo’s favorite target, who gets his father to understand his own ignorance. “It’s not going well because you’re not getting it,” Adam explains. “You’re not reading what they’re doing, what’s happening.” He shows his father a comment that Katie posted on Jamie’s Instagram. “Looks like she’s being nice?” Actually, the boy explains, the emojis she uses are coded ways of denigrating Jamie, of calling him an incel. “Adolescence” lives in the paranoid world that Andrew Tate made.

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Exposé of Facebook

Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former director of global public policy at Meta’s precursor, Facebook, has written a best-seller Careless People that describes her former employer as having a culture that is pretty much what you would expect from one run by tech bros.

The memoir is an “ugly, detailed portrait of one of the most powerful companies in the world”, wrote Jennifer Szalai in the New York Times. Wynn-Williams “had a front-row seat to some of Facebook’s most ignominious episodes”.

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On bullshitters

What do the following people have in common: Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Sam Bankman-Fried, George Santos, Joe Rogan, Ben Shapiro, Pete Buttigieg, Beto O’Rourke, Dr. Oz, Yuval Noah Harari, Barack Obama, Sam Harris, Elizabeth Holmes, Steven Pinker, and Jordan Peterson? According to Nathan J. Robinson writing in Current Affairs, they are all bullshitters.

So what constitutes a bullshitter?

The clearest philosophical exposition of a Theory of Bullshit was put forth by Harry Frankfurt in his short classic On Bullshit. Frankfurt argued that bullshit was different than lying, and in some ways worse. A liar knows what they are saying is false. A bullshitter doesn’t care whether it is true or false. The liar has not abandoned all understanding of truth, but they are deliberately trying to manipulate people into thinking things are otherwise than they actually are, whereas the bullshitter has simply stopped checking whether the statements they are making have any resemblance to reality:
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Book and TV review: Bleak House by Charles Dickens

I am fond of the books of Charles Dickens but for some reason never got around to reading this particular one that was published in 1853. It is argued by some critics to be one of his best works. I was stimulated to read it because I came across a 2005 BBC adaptation into a seres that looked like it might be good but I thought I should read the book first.

I am not an authority on Dickens so will leave it to others to judge whether this may or may not be one his finest works but it is undoubtedly very good and one of the most Dickensian in its flourishes and plotting. Coincidences, a Dickens staple, abound and people who seemed to be unconnected suddenly discover that they are in fact related, even very closely.

Dickens also has a penchant for creating eccentric characters with strange names and here we find them in abundance. In this book alone are Jarndyce, Guppy, Turveydrop, Jellyby, Snagsby, Smallweed, Chadband, Pardiggle, Squod, Tulkinghorn, Clamb, and Grubble. You rarely find a Smith or a Jones or a Brown in a Dickens novel. Interestingly, Dickens’s own name was considered strange at that time, as one critic wrote, “Mr Dickens, as if in revenge for his own queer name, does bestow still queerer ones upon his fictitious creations.” This shows that names that we now consider as ordinary became so by virtue of familiarity. If Dickens had not become so famous, his name might still have been considered ‘queer’.
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Creating chatbots of the dead

The short film I’m Not a Robot that I posted about recently, told the story of a woman who suddenly learns that she might be a bot. While that was fictional, the ability for AI to create bots that simulate real people is already here.

In 1970, a 57-year-old man died of heart disease at his home in Queens, New York. Fredric Kurzweil, a gifted pianist and conductor, was born Jewish in Vienna in 1912. When the Nazis entered Austria in 1938, an American benefactor sponsored Fred’s immigration to the United States and saved his life. He eventually became a music professor and conductor for choirs and orchestras around the US. Fred took almost nothing with him when he fled Europe – but, in the US, he saved everything. He saved official documents about his life, lectures, notes, programmes, newspaper clippings related to his work, letters he wrote and letters he received, and personal journals.

For 50 years after Fred died, his son, Ray, kept these records in a storage unit. In 2018, Ray worked with his daughter, Amy, to digitise all the original writing from his father. He fed that digitised writing to an algorithm and built a chatbot that simulated what it was like to have a conversation with the father he missed and lost too soon. This chatbot was selective, meaning that it responded to questions with sentences that Fred actually wrote at some point in his life. Through this chatbot, Ray was able to converse with a representation of his father, in a way that felt, Ray said: ‘like talking to him.’ And Amy, who co-wrote this essay and was born after Fred died, was able to stage a conversation with an ancestor she had never met.
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We are at the meaningless ‘vox pop’ state of election reporting

Today is election day and until the polls close and vote totals start coming in, there is really nothing to report. So the media is filling time and space with responses from voters as they exit the polling stations, asking them whom they voted for and why.

While well-designed and organized exit polls can use this information to obtain trends and do important post-election analyses, these ad-hoc interviews are useless.

Getting quotes from random people about something or other is a standard reporting trope but such quotes are usually selected to support the narrative that the reporter has already decided upon and hence are cherry picked.

But we get them anyway.