The Acrobat and the Flea -- The Unexplored Science in Stranger Things

I just finished watching what is available of Stranger Things Season 4, and planning to watch the rest tonight.  I've been meaning to comment on the show for a while.  There are a lot of really neat ideas present in the series, that sadly I don't think get fleshed out as much as they could have been.

I was inspired to finally start writing some commentary by a scene near the end of vol 1 of season 4.  That is your spoiler warning.

God and the Law of Identity

 I remember my first few years as a grad student, a professor reassuring my friend and I that no physicist ever gained true expertise in the topics by taking the classes.  We'd learn the subject matter, but the real mastery would come when we had to teach it.  Since about January my wife and I have been teaching a Sunday school class on logic and critical thinking, and even though the subject matter is pretty basic, I'm finding more insights into the topic that I just hadn't noticed before.

One of these is with the Law of Identity, which is our next topic.  Stated, the Law of Identity sounds really dumb: "A thing is itself, and not anything else."  This apple is this apple, and not a banana.  This apple is this apple, and not that apple.  It applies to claims, as well.  The claim that the sky is blue, is the claim that the sky is blue, and not some other color.  It's the claim that the sky is blue, and not that my car is blue.  And if we disagree on what is meant by "the sky" (do we mean the night sky?) or "blue" (my wife says this color is "blue"), the language disagreement doesn't make the claim itself ambiguous or unknowable.  My claim still means what it means.

I was thinking recently how this applies to God.

What do we mean when we say the word, "God"?

No One Should Care What Kate Turabian Thought About Style

I have recently had to write and turn in my dissertation.  To do this, I had to adhere, at least somewhat, to the stylistic whims of Kate Turabian.  Which has been a painful process.

Who is Kate Turabian?  She is a former bureaucratic pencil-pusher who leveraged her tiny bit of control over dissertation layout into a world-wide empire enforcing her anal-retentiveness about margin widths and heading formats through a book she wrote explaining how she liked things to be.  Because she had to approve dissertations at the University of Chicago, students had to do whatever she said to graduate.  She herself never even finished college, and never wrote a dissertation.  She certainly never wrote a college term paper using her made-up style.  She just made others follow it.  Margins on the left should be 1.25" while the right 1"?  Appendix titles are only 1" from the top margin, but chapters 2"?  It doesn't matter if it makes sense, you just have to do it, or you can't get your PhD.  

And that's all her wikipedia page should say about her.

Twelve Years a Grad Student

I drew this on a white board at my 
last school, in 2013.  Nine years later
and I slayed the dragon.

I recently finished my PhD in physics.  My particular field is astrophysics, and my thesis topic was on Newtonian and relativistic white dwarf asteroseismology.  All I have left to do is get past the whims of Kate Turabian, whose opinion on formatting people for whatever reason care about.  

The first post on this blog was almost ten years ago, while I was a grad student.  Inspired by some of my classes and books I was reading, I had some crazy ideas mixing science and fiction and wanted to post them somewhere.  The most famous of those crazy ideas was about the Berenst#in Bears, which is now a meme far beyond my mere tiny blog.

Ten years ago I was a graduate student.  One week ago, I was a graduate student.  In fact, I started graduate school in 2010, meaning I have been pursuing a PhD for for twelve years (eleven not counting my year teaching high school).  

I have been twelve years a grad student.

I figured, given the momentousness of the situation, I would reflect on this overlong time.

Trying to decode The Beginning Place by Ursula Le Guin

 I recently reread this favorite of mine.  My copy is an old, worn paperback I purchased at a used bookstore in the middle of nowhere in Georgia.  The cover art shows the two man characters Hugh and Irena lost wandering in a forest, Hugh dressed in the vest from Tembreabrezi with the ceremonial sword drawn, and Irena in the red traveling cloak the inn lent her.  I've seen other covers for the book, and this one blows the others away.  It is apparently also the author's favorite, because it's the one she shows on her website.

This book, especially with this cover, might make you think this story is in the same genre as Narnia or Bridge to Terabithia.  It is and it isn't.  For one, this book is not meant for children.  It's actually too mature for young adult.  It'd be better for students just entering college.

If you recently read this book and are trying to understand it, or read it long ago but didn't really get it or don't remember much, I'm going to offer an explanation for the story that should help it make more sense.  (Spoilers below)

To enjoy this book, you need to understand that it is not the same kind of book as Narnia.

The witch of Endor proves mediums aren't real

Once you know how cold reading works, it's basically impossible to take mediums, astrologers, palm readers, or any other kind of sooth-sayer very seriously.

Cold reading is a technique as old as civilization. From looking at a person and the details about them, you can guess things about their past and present. 

If someone is from Montana, for instance, you can guess they've ridden on a horse. You can even guess someone they knew fell off of a horse.

Orcs are evil

Orcs are a fantasy monster.  While Tolkien may have standardized them as the basic low-level mook hounding the protagonists, the idea of the orc goes back millennia before.  The word "orc" is an Anglicization of the Italian word "orco", which is a kind of monstrous demon of Italian fairy tales that feeds on human flesh.  This is identical to "ogre" in classic French fairy tales, which became its own type of monster in the modern era.

The orco takes its name from Orcus, one of the Roman gods of the underworld.  Orcus was particularly associated with torment and punishment, and therefore also associated with evil and demons.  He was normally depicted as a giant hairy monster.

How I came to DCC and the Old School of Gaming

Smaug, from the only feature-length adaptation of the Hobbit

My dad is a Tolkien nerd who grew up in the 70s.  Therefore my dad played DnD as a teenager.

I also grew up a Tolkien nerd, watching the Rankin/Bass version of the Hobbit (which is still the only movie version of the Hobbit) until I was old enough to read it.

One day, between about 8 and 11 years old, I discovered my dad's copy of Gary Gygax's original DMG for AD&D (the one with the metal-girded demon abducting a maiden), and his copy of Dr. Eric Holmes' Basic Ruleset (the blue cover with the dragon on his hoard of gold).

I was immediately sold.

Cover of Holmes' Basic Rules

The Letter for the King: just adapt the book, not your fanfiction

I recently watched The Letter for the King on Netflix, and thought I'd offer a small thought on the series.

I should preface all of this by stating that I have never read the book.  I had actually never heard of the book.  I looked up the book later on Wikipedia, after watching the first episode.  I might actually read the book.

That out of the way, let me list some positives of the series.  The child actors are great.  I can't say the same about whoever it was playing the puppy-kicking prince, but the others made great performances.  The visual effects were great.  The costumes and props and sets were great.  A lot of people clearly put a lot of effort and thought and care into the series.  It shows through.

But some other people didn't put any effort in.  Namely, the writers.  The writers did not care.  That also shows through.

The Wheel of Time and the Well-Tempered Plot Device

Sometime back in 2011, I was handed a complete (used!) set of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time Series from a friend who saw me reading A Song of Ice and Fire.  For several years it sat on my office desk, because I got caught up in other writers.  Then it sat on my bookshelf for a few years as I got caught up in work and research, before I finally picked up the Eye of the World and decided to read it last fall.

With a TV adaptation proposed to come out sometime in the near future, I figured now was as good a time as any for a post about it.

JK Rowling and Sanderson's 3rd Law

The Harry Potter books succeeded wildly, beyond anyone's imagination.  JK Rowling is the top-selling author of all time.  Not just in fantasy.  Period.  I believe the series did so well largely because of the strength of the characters and their relationships.  Modern people want friendships like we see in Harry Potter and Stranger Things.  So there's a lesson to potential authors. The characters and friendships of Harry Potter are incredible, and I can understand why so many people would love the stories on that basis.

Harry Potter succeeded because of its characters and relationships.  But Harry Potter did not succeed because of its imagination.

I've spoken in depth in the past about why I don't like the Harry Potter books.  All of it can be boiled down to a single statement:

The characters of Harry Potter are unaware of their own universe.

But I stumbled on a more authoritative way to say this, in terms of Brandon Sanderson and his "laws of magic."