Monday, July 9, 2012

Let Me In: the anti-Twilight

Vampires are evil.  It's easy to forget that simple fact, given the way modern culture looks at vampires:

Vampires aren't evil, they are cool!

They have sarcastic anti-hero personalities, and make witty quips while defying authority.  They are super-sexy and seductive.  They have super strength, and can fly, and make awesome boyfriends.  They can have children, and they can half half-vampire children with mortals.

They're basically a race of superheroes, only they can't go in to the sunlight.

They aren't even necessarily undead, either.  As mentioned, they can give birth to offspring.  When I Am Legend (the book) first came out, it offered a new explanation in terms of a virus, and that has become the stock explanation of not only vampires, but zombies, too.

So it's easy to forget where they came from, and that is medieval notions of the antichrist.

Vampires are evil.

Not the cool, sexy evil.  They are the horrifying, creepy, upsetting evil.  You do not want to be a vampire, or know a vampire, or date a vampire, or have babies with a vampire.

I saw a vampire movie recently that, very subtly, I think showcased this more than anything else.

Friday, July 6, 2012

A Dragon's Psalm

I took this from The Pilgrim's Regress by C.S. Lewis.  It is one of my favorite books by him, as it is just so packed with symbolism you almost need a philosophical encyclopedia with you when you read it.  It is the first book written by Lewis after his conversion, and tells the allegorical struggle of a young man from the town of Puritania as he goes on a quest after a vision of an Island.

At some point, there is a miserly dragon living in a frozen waste, living alone over a hoard of gold, and it sings this song to itself.

Illustration by Michael Hague
Once the worm-laid egg broke in the wood.
I came forth shining into the trembling wood,
The sun was on my scales, dew upon the grasses,
The cool, sweet grasses and the budding leaves.
I wooed my speckled mate.  We played at druery
And sucked warm milk dripping from the goats' teats.

Now I keep watch on the gold in my rock cave
In a country of stones: old, deplorable dragon,
Watching my hoard.  In winter night the gold
Freezes through toughest scales my cold belly.
The jagged crowns and twisted cruel rings
Knobbly and icy are old dragon's bed.

Often I wish I hadn't eaten my wife,
Though worm grows not to dragon till he eat worm.
She could have helped me, watch and watch about,
Guarding the hoard.  Gold would have been safer.
I could uncoil my weariness at times and take
A little sleep, sometimes when she was watching.

Last night under the moonset a fox barked,
Woke me.  Then I knew I had been sleeping.
Often an owl flying over the country of stones
Startles me, and I think I must have slept.
Only a moment.  That very moment a man
Might have come out of the cities, stealing, to get my gold.

They make plots in the towns to steal my gold.
They whisper of me in a low voice, laying plans,
Merciless men.  Have they not ale upon the benches,
Warm wife in bed, singing, and sleep the whole night?
But I leave not the cave but once in winter
To drink of the rock pool: in summer twice.

They feel not pity for the old, lugubrious dragon.
Oh, Lord, that made the dragon, grant me Thy peace!
But ask not that I should give up the gold,
Nor move, nor die; others would get the gold.
Kill, rather, Lord, the men and the other dragons
That I may sleep, go when I will to drink.

I think it is beautiful for its ugliness.  It describes a miserable and wretched creature whose obsession is the source of all its misery.  The dragon yearns for surcease from the cold, hungry loneliness that it has caused itself, yet asks for it on its own terms, in the terms that let it keep the source of all its misery and remain essentially the same pitiful worm it always has been.  It does not want any change, rather that the entire world be bent around it and all the men and dragons slain so that it may have the peace it could have if it would just forget about its silly golden hoard.

I think it is such a complete picture of the fallen state of humans, how our own pride and desires generate all of our misery, and how we reject the insurmountable joy of God, being unwilling to let go of our golden hoards.

That's all I have for today.

Wednesday, July 4, 2012

Kingkiller Chronicles Speculation: the Chandrian and Their Plan

I'm going to continue speculating about the Kingkiller Chronicles.  I have already covered Master Ash and what I think copper is used for.

SPOILERS AHEAD!  Please don't read unless you have read both of the books, and thoroughly at that.

Very early in the first book, before we even know who the silent innkeeper is, we hear about the Chandrian.  From the story, we quickly pick up that they are some sort of evil sorcerers with eery powers.  We learn some weird stuff, like fires going blue and metal rusting, but most importantly is the children's rhyme:

Sunday, July 1, 2012

The Physics of a Chess Board


In Through the Looking Glass by the Reverend Lewis Carol, Alice walks through a mirror in her living room and finds the chessboard that normally resides there to be teeming with little chess pieces running around.  Leaving her mirror-house, the entire country around it has been transformed in to a chessboard.  Alice starts as a pawn and has to walk forward one step at a time to the end, when she will become a queen and be able to run as fast as she wants across the country.

While Carol's story is whimsical and fun, what would be the implications of living in a chess board?  What are the "physical laws" experienced by a given chess piece?

So imagine all the universe to be a discrete 8X8 grid, alternately tiled with black and white, and conceive of a chess piece as being a kind of elementary particle in this bizarre chess world.  We will look mostly at the free dynamics of such a chess particle - that is, how it behaves dynamically in the absence of other pieces.

Friday, June 29, 2012

"Magic Isn't Supposed to Make Sense!"

I wrote a post a while ago that, really, was supposed to be about the plausible impossibility of interacting with any sort of "parallel universe", if one were to exist and going there were possible.  So if you found a passage in to Narnia in some old professor's mansion, likely you'd find Narnia very much the way Digory and Polly found it - empty, lightless, and with nothing in it (not even the singing Lion).

However, while going there, I stopped to comment on fantasy fiction, which is how the thought struck me.  Parallel worlds are pretty common, after all.  Sort of in the vein if The Gods Themselves by Asimov (or more like it The Ring of Truth by Lake) I tried to think of a parallel universe that had an entirely different set of physical laws.  Where things behaved totally differently.  I guess it would have been a sort of partial ingress into Level IV multiverse theory?  I don't assert such a universe would actually exist, just that modeling one would be neat.  The goal was that the emergent behavior of these laws would make magic work.  Or something so totally different that we would see it as magic... whereas the inhabitants therein would look at a light bulb from our world and cross themselves to ward off evil spirits.

So contained therein was this idea of "hard magic", analogous to "hard science" fiction.

Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Kingkiller Chronicles Speculation: Copper


SPOILERS AHEAD!  Please don't read if you haven't read both Name of the Wind and Wise Man's Fear.

I am going to continue posting my own speculation about the Kingkiller Chronicles.  In a spasm of fanboy insanity, I had written up some twenty or so pages detailing everything I think I had deduced from the text.  Recently, in his own blog, Patrick Rothfuss brought up a totally awesome copper knife a fan had made him, noting that it would be good in a fight against a Namer.  Rothfuss said this showed the fans had been paying attention.  I was glad to see that apparently I had been paying attention too, and that others (in the comments) had noted things similar to me on the use and possible function of copper in the books.

Monday, June 25, 2012

Zeno's Paradox and Why It Annoys Me


I have always been greatly annoyed by Zeno's paradoxes.

The reason why is due mostly to my stubborn pride at being ignored when I'm right.  When I was in 10th grade trig, we learned Zeno's paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise.  The problem so presented is an extremely simple algebraic equation, immediately solvable to anyone who has finished high school.

So in grade school, when I was taught this "paradox", I did solve it algebraically, almost before my teacher had finished reading it from the book, and I told her the answer, and she sort of gave me this exasperated smile and said "Yes, I know, but don't think about it that way."  And ever since, mention of this paradox as anything other than an ancient Greek misunderstanding of mathematics has infuriated me.

Basically, Zeno's paradox amounts to asserting that the geometric series cannot be summed.  Which is absurd; Archimedes was quite proficient at it, even in terms that Greeks would accept.  Some examples are below.  In terms of modern algebra, let $S$ be the sum of a geometric series; then
$$S = \sum_{n=0}^\infty a^n = 1+a+a^2+\cdots = 1+a\left(1+a+a^2+\cdots\right)=1+aS,$$
and rearranging, $S = \frac{1}{1-a},$ the formula you hopefully learned in high school.