Rejiggered Avatar plot

So, the plot of the new version of the movie. Our protagonist arrives - the original plot device of having him drive his dead scientist brother's Avatar is not so plausible anymore, but the idea of having him be a marine rather than a scientist is a good one: let's say he's the first marine to get an Avatar, because the procedure has (for obvious reasons) never been popular with the troops, but the Colonel finally decides he needs a man on the ground and newly paraplegic Jake volunteers and is brought to Pandora. As much of the basic setup (marines and scientists, Avatars seem to slowly drive people crazy) should be conveyed to the viewer in the first section, since the mystery of what is going on? is what will be driving the plot.

Jake arrives and gets put in the science team. The original point of having him be the Colonel's man on the inside can stay - what conflict this plot has is going to be between the humans, since the Planetmind is too big to engage in any visually effective way, and the intrahuman conflict seems perfect for this setup. The marines are not bad people in any sense - certainly not the genocidal maniacs of the original movie - they're just soldiers dealing with a situation they don't understand and which makes their ostensible job very, very hard. They're there to be bodyguards for people who they aren't very similar to to begin with* and who will slowly but inevitably go off the deep end down on the planet. The marines go out in HEV kit and hardsuits; most of them have probably never touched a native Pandoran lifeform with their bare skin, let alone started channeling the Planetmind. The Colonel, in this story, doesn't have to be the bloodthirsty maniac of the original movie, he's just legitimately worried about what is happening down on the planet. The people behind the expedition back home think getting the transferal technology working reliably is worth a little temporary crazy on Pandora, and if all else fails it has been demonstrated the weird can't get off-planet; the Colonel probably agrees with the former but since it's his brains the zombie hordes will be eating if things go south, he's understandably less reassured by the latter. He doesn't start blowing things up in the climax because he's being paid to, or because he likes to do it; he's blowing things up because his first and most vital priority is to defend humanity, and when things speed up in the third act he's honestly afraid that this thing is now able to jump planet, get back to Earth and destroy civilization as we know it. In this context, Jake is not an intel source in the Na'vi - who cares about the Na'vi? they have stone knives and bearskins - but is the Colonel's own personal attempt to feel out what is going on the planet and just how dangerous it is. He's long since stopped trusting the scientists** but a marine, more psychologically distant from the planet to begin with and loyal to the Colonel, not the project, is a perfect tool for this job.

Finally, the real plot of the movie gets started. On his first trip out he gets separated as originally, runs into Neytiri, who thinks "huh, he's a hunter. Sexy", which feedbacks into Jake, who looks at this three-meter critter with secondary eyes and four shoulderblades and also thinks "sexy" as well. When he gets back, this freaks him out a lot, freaks out the scientists not at all (the Na'vi don't think science is sexy in particular, but they've all had similar inexplicable emotional reactions) and the Colonel is worried that Jake is going downhill so fast but also interested in the fact that it happened so fast around the Na'vi specifically. Jake gets sent back out.

Jake comes back with Neytiri to the village and starts acclimatizing as in the original movie. This part can run essentially the same, although we need to get rid of the mobile Avatar lab - that's certainly not happing in this set up - and add some more of Jake having trouble dealing with everyone back at base. The videologs should not just get increasingly sympathetic to the Na'vi - they should get increasingly disjointed and irrational as well. The Colonel, with the "help" of Jake and some figuring about data transmission rates, adds the big trees to his contingency plan of Things To Blow Up When it All Goes To Hell.

Jake gets inducted into the tribe. This involves linking him into the tribe and (since it hasn't been done to an Avatar before) Grace comes along to watch, as do a couple of marines. Jake links in and Gets It: he figures out the whole planetmind thing and, before he goes completely around the bend, manages to convey enough of this to Grace that she gets it, too. Unfortunately for them, the marines and Na'vi are already keying each other up to a ridiculous degree and violence breaks out. Jake and Grace join in because, after all this time in the field and this close to the big tree, neither of them can think of any good reasons not to. The marines are killed. The Colonel hard-unplugs Grace (who's trying to explain things but the Colonel, for obvious reasons, isn't listening) and Jake, who's human body is now braindead. Between the fact that Jake is gone, he's murdered two marines, and Grace's ravings about the planetmind, the Colonel decides it's time to go to Plan Z.

The Hometree gets blown up as in the movie, which causes pretty much all of the scientists to freak, so the Colonel (ostensibly and possibly even actually for their safety) ships them up the Elevator. Grace, the other recent-arrival avatar-driver, and the pilot escape, Grace gets shot, and they all take off to meet up with the Na'vi, who of course (along with everything else) are riding the ragged edge of going absolutely berserk. They try to transfer Grace, fail, and then decide to go on the warpath. (This means we can drop the "Jake rides the giant bird" subplot, and good riddance, too - Mighty Whitey is a pretty sketchy trope to be playing straight these days.) The Na'vi attack, synched up with the giant horde of animals, hits the compound. We have the main climactic battle again, although kind of different - the Pandorans have the giant animal horde but the humans are defending a fortified point, not attacking without electronics. Call it a pyrrhic victory for the natives. At the climax, Sully and the Colonel fight, Sully wins (of course) and then cuts the Cable. There's nobody left down at the bottom, and the cable is slightly unstable now that it's not quite as long as it used to be (the center of gravity is barely above geosynch now, but it is a little), so Sully (although given his state, more probably other-Avatar-driver guy) negotiates with the guys at the top****.

Since the humans have finally figured out what's going on, they (or at least the scientists) have had an aha moment where everything makes sense, and since the military types are in a pretty terrible strategic situation, they negotiate. (It's probably not necessary to actually show the negotiations - just have the Cable get cut, Jake gets on radio, "I think we need to talk", jumpcut.) Then we go to the denouement/epilogue, with Jake's v.o. explaining how things have been patched up with the humans, who still have a small presence here but a lot more careful about not ticking off the Planetmind. Jake runs around happily with the Na'vi, roll credits.

So that's my version of Avatar. As you can see, it drifts a lot in theme and message from the original, and really by the end probably owes as much to Stanislaw Lem's Solaris as to the actual movie Avatar. But I certainly think it would make a good sf movie.

*The marines are jocks, the scientists are nerds. That's not enough to cause movie-worthy conflict between grown adults, but it's enough to start off some baseline tension; these people are from different tribes. Example: the marines probably r&r with typical space-marine movie r&r, drinking and arm-wrestling and whatnot; the scientists mess around with the computers and play games (which has the added bonus that when you start losing badly at chess because you can no longer strategize well, its time to start watching you; when you stop connecting with the concept of "board game", it's time for a brachial full of tranqs and a fast ride into orbit). Another example, even if it would take some good writing to convey it in the movie: the marines are based out of orbit and think of themselves as being on tour on the ground even if they spend weeks at a time down there; the scientists are based out of Base Camp and think of themselves as taking trips into orbit even when their time is distributed the other way around. The scientists driving the Avatars - even before the psychological changes set in - start to think of themselves as living in the woods and occasionally stuffing food into the body back in the prefabs.

** The main problem with this setup is it leaves no room for Grace***. She's not that important plot-wise but is very important in providing exposition for the planet and a voice for the project, and somebody with that much Avatar time in the new setting would have long since been shipped back home. My best guess is that she should be the head of the main science team - the ones who don't use Avatars, since they need some science types to stay stable, run the machines and psych tests and so on. If they treat Avataring like radiation poisoning, she might also just be severely rationing her time out in the field, showing each team of new arrivals around but only briefly.

***As the Calvinist said to the Roman Catholic.

**** Negotiating an ending is important, since otherwise another starship shows up in 12 years and drops depleted uranium rods the size of telephone poles on every large tree on the planet.

Avatar retuning

Or: if you take it apart and then stitch it back together, would it better be called "Frankenstein"?

Let me just say first that despite the fact that this post will dismember the movie, it was very good and very well-realized. The spaceship at the beginning is a rod with spheres and centrifuges -centrifuges!- attached. It drops spaceplanes rather than landing. The marines act like soldiers. There is a hell of a lot of life on Pandora, much of it sort-of implausible but all nicely designed. The bird-things use a unique wing structure, amazingly*. One part that struck me well was that all the vertebrates have a similar structure: two back legs, four front legs, tiny secondary eyes, frontal snouts that kind of fold the jaws into each other, two tentacle-ear things that hold the nerve-bundle endings. The obvious exception is the Na'vi, which are gratuitously humanoid; but early on you see this lemur-like primitive primate, which has vestigial secondary arms, almost nonexistent secondary eyes, and frontal main eyes, a flattening snout and quasi-nose. Even though they couldn't or wouldn't make the Na'vi as inhuman as the local body plan seems to demand, they nevertheless figured out a developmental path for humanoids and even put it in the movie to be seen if you want to bother looking.

So: plot holes to fill. We'll do a little one first, before obvious disaster #1: They need an Elevator. They're moving bulk resources, they have spaceships, a Space Elevator is a necessity. Admittedly, they're still out of current materials-science reach, but so are the spaceplanes they use, and people are going to stop laughing at the concept within a decade of them becoming common movies, just like rockets in the 1920s and 30s. I still can't think of a movie with an Elevator in it.

Now, the big one: Unobtanium. Ungh. In The Core, they had unobtanium, but when that movie introduced it, you could hear the writer telling the audience: "Look, for the plot we need a plot device. Here it is. I know it's a plot device. Let's move on quickly." In Avatar, they move on just as quickly, but the implicit admission of MacGuffinhood by this movie gels far less well. Another option we saw might be to just have it be iron or tungsten or something, which would be less jarring at the cost of painting a far grimmer picture of the resource situation on Earth. (I have since found out that the unobtanium is room temperature superconductor, which is why the piece in the main office floats, and why the Hallelujah Mountains over the sacred tree and its big EM field float, and why its so valuable. That, said, I still think my idea is neater.) But there's an even easier solution: biologicals. We're already searching our disintegrating rainforests for chemicals and production methods, an alien jungle world like Pandora would be a goldmine far exceeding any rocks you could haul out. (Not to mention, unique biologicals will always make more sense to go space traveling for than bulk metals.)

The swap of "unobtanium" for alien biologicals tightens up one small but oh-so-glaring flaw in the movie, but if you follow the train of logic it really makes a difference to the movie**. First up: the Avatars. So humanity has this make-a-new-body technology, which (since the original has to still be alive to function, isn't quite immortality) but still seems pretty game-changing to me. David Brin wrote a book, Kiln People, about the effect this one technology alone would have on society. Also, towards the end it becomes clear that the Avataring tech synchs nicely with the preexisting Pandoran neural-interface tech. So why not have them linked? The Avatar technology isn't an unrelated feature, it's the first big dividend the planet has paid and we're trying to find out if it has more.

Form here, in turn, you can tighten (or at least rejigger) the character set a little too. In the original movie, there are three groups of humans: scientist, soldiers, and suits/miners. the last is largely superfluous in the ore plot, and can be dropped entirely in the biologicals one. (The fact that the only speaking suit or miner is Burke, who I've renamed out of laziness after an identical character in a 20+ year old movie says something about their contribution to the plot.) So now we're down to the scientists and soldiers, and instead of a giant industrial base we have (let's say) a little prefab compound at Elevatordown, and that's it. The Na'vi don't have the original reason to fight the humans (although if you want to stop here you could easily splice in something about the Na'vi home-tree secreting or containing something blah blah fight scene.)

All right - here's two more things from the movie to add in. Jake goes native far more than any other Avatared scientist ever has, but he also is linking with the animals (and thereby the Planetmind) far more than anyone ever has. Possibly, if dubiously, he is the first to do it ever. Now, I'm not suggesting he gets brainwashed and reprogrammed (although that makes for one hell of a dark possible interpretation) but he's way more in tune with it than anyone else. So why not take this and run with it? Also - it bugged me how human the Na'vi were. They were biologically weird, but despite this they thought a basically like people - give some New Guineans a holistic nature spirit that responds like the Planetmind does and they'd be indistinguishable, culturally. The most glaring example is Jake's initiation ceremony: it looks pretty generically tribal, despite the fact that they can link minds with stuff and it has been demonstrated linking is not even as personal as sex to these people, and this is obviously the most complete and biologically sensible initiation ceremony, they don't link up with him.

So let's take these points about linking and the Planetmind and go with them. The Na'vi can start to be smart like people without thinking like people because they no longer are people in the complete sense. They are sentient, yes, and individuals, but their culture is literally inhuman because it revolves around things people can't physically do and can barely comprehend on an academic level, once they figure out what's going on at all. And the Na'vi are always in low-level contact with the rest of the ecosystem and the Planetmind - this last is already implied a bit by the movie. Now, when the humans come down, the first encounter-suited guys are going to weird the heck out of the Planetmind***, since they're not connected or related to it at all. The Na'vi, when the humans run into them, are going to be incomprehensible: they sometimes act like reasonably human hunter-gatherers and sometimes are totally alien. One Na'vi will meet a party and be entirely docile. Another will meet the same party and, because one of them stepped on a beetle thirty seconds before and the whole forest has suddenly tensed up, will murderize them unprovoked. The first will agree, on later encounters, that the party were all fine fellows, and at the same time that the second's attack was also entirely fine, on the basis of sub-subconscious feelings that neither can explain or understand why they would have to explain.

As this goes on, some scientist figures out a fraction of the neural connectivity of Pandora and figures out an Avatar-making process. They test it and it works beautifully: they have a human inside a Na'vi body, but it doesn't work on non-Pandorans (they can't do human to human, which is obviously what they would want) and even worse, it doesn't work off-planet. They can gat all the obvious parts set up but without the permeating and enabling Planetmind (which no one knows about or has even really imagined yet) nothing moves. So they now have this Avatar system, which think they only barely understand and don't really understand at all, perfect for exploring the planet and (on encounter with the Na'vi) something the Na'vi trust to a degree that makes no sense (even when the Na'vi know it's really a human they trust it almost implicitly). They start using it.

Now the crazy-fun begins, because once people start wearing the Avatars, they're in contact with the Planetmind too. Because they're not really Na'vi they don't go quite as far as the real Na'vi do in acting on it, but Avatar-drivers start to develop what look like psychological problems after a while: they start getting erratic and emotional - more, they start getting emotional weirdly, having increasingly incomprehensible reactions to regular events. After a very long time, they start losing rational reasoning ability - they still think, but in ways that look schizophrenic to normal humans. Cycling them out, to everyone's great relief, brings quick recovery, but putting them back in an Avatar in turn brings immediate relapse. The people in charge figure out a "safe time" - probably somewhere between weird emotionalism and the complete "schizophrenic breakdown" and start cycling people through. Figuring this out is still obviously valuable enough to cover some temporary psychological disturbance (certainly all the volunteers think so).

At this point, enter hero.

*For reference - each time vertebrates have evolved flight on Earth, they built the wing slightly differently. Bats stretch membranes between the fingers. Birds hang feathers off a simplified arm. Pterosaurs hung membranes off the arm and lengthened fourth finger, with the other fingers a tiny claw halfway down. The Banshees in Avatar use pterosaur-like arm/fifth finger arrangement, except the other four also extend out to form little adjustable surfaces at the outside edge.

**Not least, which is probably why they didn't do this, it shoots the message in the head. The strip-mines, hauler trucks, and industrial plants that show up early on form a pretty impressive visual contrast to the eco-friendly Na'vi, and backs up Cameron's Industry V Nature theme beautifully. My McGuffin doesn't allow this and by the time it graduates to the status of plot point down the article a bit, the theme is more Man and the Alien anyways. Which is a nice theme which (surprisingly few, given their ostensible subject matter) sf films do, but it's not Cameron's point.

***In the movie it's never made clear whether the Planetmind is sentient - you can read the evidence plausibly either way. My personal preference is that it isn't - it's smart in an inhuman fashion, but isn't what we would think of as conscious. The Na'vi are, but as individuals, not as part of a larger conscious entity.

Avatar review

So, I just saw Avatar. It was a fine movie, with a high level of thought put into it, spoiled only by a bit of copout (and a lot of unnecessary violence) at the end. In the hour or two walking home afterwards, my friends and I took it apart to an atomic scale, saw a lot of well-done fine detail we initially missed, and realized that most of its flaws could be removed with a little fine-tuning of the concept (and all of them with a lot).

Summary next - obviously, what follows will be full of 10 kilo Bouncing Betty anti-personnel spoilers. Read at own risk.

So, the plot. In the future*, Earth is undergoing unspecified but vaguely grim environmental concerns. The planet Pandora contains a resource - unobtanium, God help me - which is, if not necessary, at least extraordinarily valuable. So a company - not Weyand-Yutani but "RDA" - come in to extract it from the lush jungle via open-pit mine. The problem is that there are locals (the "Na'vi", the stone-age blue-skinned locals on all the ads) who are vaguely-pantheistic peace-with-nature types and so obviously not impressed. Relations start out OK, at least, with some efforts at diplomacy, but as it becomes clear that the company's interests and the Na'vi's intersect nowhere, things have degenerated into essentially open war, with the anthropologist-scientist types increasingly outweighed by the aggressive and ever-more numerous PMC troops defending the company installations.

At this point enter our hero. Jake Sully, paraplegic USMarine vet, get a free job offer from the company. His twin brother was signed up to go do science on Pandora, but died shortly before the boat left. His brother's DNA had been used to build an "Avatar" - a Na'vi body with some human brain parts that can be remotely meat-puppeted for exploration of the (unbreathable) planet and diplomacy with the Na'vi. Since this was hideously expensive, and since, as his brother's twin, he is the only one who can run the (DNA-specific) Avatar, and the company gives him the chance to join in. He does, delighting the Colonel, the head of the PMC, who now has a man in the science team, even if the scientists hate him for the same reason.

Jake gets enrolled as bodyguard for Grace Augustine, head of the science team, but on his first real trip outside the compound is cut off from the group and nearly killed by a local, Neytiri. She stops when probably about a hundred blooms from their sacred tree land on him, which convinces her to instead take him back to their giant home-tree-village. There she turns out to be the chief's daughter and convinces everyone else to take him in as well**. Grace is ecstatic when he comes out of the Matrix - er, Avatar - and so is the Colonel, who now has the intel source he couldn't even plausibly fantasize about a year before.

Jake acclimatizes. He gets into, if not the good graces of the Na'vi, at least their toleration, and starts picking up Na'vi skills. The Na'vi - and the Avatars - have this funky thing where they splice this nerve-bundle at the end of their hair-braids into a similar bundle on various animals, and can ride horses (or, occasionally, birds) with preternatural skill, since they're not so much riding them as merging with them and hauling their bodies along for the ride. Everyone except Neytiri's intended ends up liking him, and he because he implausibly - if, somewhat squickeningly, accurately - is afraid Jake is stealing her from him.

Then Jake's day job interferes. The Company suit-on-the-ground, whose name I forget and so I will refer to as "Burke", after the identical character in Aliens, has decided the time has come to go after the motherlode, which lies (of course) under the Na'vi village. Jake tries to negotiate their withdrawal from the tree, which was probably going to fail even before he reveals he knew this day was coming from the beginning and turns them all against him. The marines slag the tree with napalm and the Na'vi flee to their sacred tree (the one with the blooms, not the one they live in). Grace, Jake, and a B-scientist and the speaking-role pilot freak at this and take off together to remote and mobile Avataring station from which they can get back to the Na'vi. Grace is shot in the escape. The Na'vi, understandably, want nothing to do with Jake, so he links with an untamable giant bird and rides it in to convince them all he is special***. He rouses the tribe, and their neighbours, to attack the human base camp; he also convinces them to try and use the tree to move Grace's consciousness from her dying human body to her Avatar, which fails, but leads to (the completion of) the movie's big reveal. The whole planet is quasi-linked through the trees; the linking the Na'vi do with the horses and birds is an expression of the fact that the whole planet shares a consciousness (sort of, not really, but a bit). The Na'vi aren't just pissed because the company is blowing up their sacred forest; they're pissed because by blowing up the forest, the company is (in a nebulous but demonstrably real sense) hurting them.

And so but anyways. Here the plot flies off the rails. The Colonel decides to blow the sacred tree and Jake's assembling army off the map before the do it to him; there follows half-an hour of essentially plotless explosions. The marines, to my quasi-amazement, actually massacre most of the Na'vi army, including Neytiri's intended, with their massively superior firepower, but then an enormous frickin' horde of animals, directed to the army by the Planetmind****, arrive and more or less literally stomp them into the dirt. The Colonel, because he is a stupendous Batman-grade badass, is of course the last to go down, fights Jake mano-e-mano (well, mech-e-Avatar) and dies. Jake uses the tree to transfer himself to the Avatar for good, and the surviving humans at the camp are forced offplanet. (In a bit that shows how much Jake has gone native, but also manages to be a bit disturbing as well, Jake v.o.s that "they" are going back to "their dying planet", which implies some rather sketchy inferred holocaust back on Earth when the resource tap from Pandora runs out. Uh, nice job, Jake?)

So that's Avatar. As you can see the plot isn't half bad, but the last half hour cops out on the ideas of the first half for a solve-all-woes-with-fireballs ending. How to fix this? Well, I have some ideas.

*The exact date is understandably hidden, but judging from their relatively low-grade improvements in military design, I would guess it's the "near future", in the science fiction sense - maybe 2050s or 70s. About all they have that's not plausible in the distant soon is (possible) FTL and cryo, both of which are inevitable sf concessions to the plot, and the Avatar system itself, more on which later.

**This is where my friends began whispering "Pocahantas" at each other. This turned out to be largely accurate, only less the truce at the end.

***Yes, it's the "Native tribe, at one with the land, defeats imperialist industrialist white folk. Because of the white guy who leads them." Sigh. The movie isn't as formulaic as those two sentences would indicate, but the trope at its heart is a little dirty.

****Term unashamedly cribbed from Sid Meyer's Alpha Centauri which admittedly greatly resembles this "character".

(4/5 stars; 5 for the first three quarters but the climax drags it down a lot.)

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Republic (Part II)

With the deaths of the Gracchii, the Senate had managed to stonewall reform attempts at the cost of most of its moral authority as a representative of the Republic, and with the even more worrying precedent of introducing legislation-by-mob-violence into the republican system. Troubling, too, was the fact that the Senate was no longer united - most of them, the optimates ("good men") were still in favour of the status quo, but some, the populares ("populists") desired land reform, if only as a safety valve. The optimates' nightmare scenario was a popularis general returning with his army to enforce his troops' demands; there would be little the Senate could do to stop such a combination.

In the actual event, the general was named Gaius Marius. The popularis Consul for 107 BC, he enacted a reform abolishing all land requirements for military service. This eased the manpower shortage that had been tightening around the army for the last half-century, but at the cost of setting up the army in utter opposition to the optimates. The Roman Legions of the fourth and third centuries had been composed of peasant farmers, really a (highly trained) militia. The legionary would go out to fight the Samnites or Epirotes; he would return in time for the harvest. The new army was recruited from the landless underclass springing up in Rome and its colonies, and what it wanted was cheap food for the cities, and land for the returning veterans. The soldiers, recruited direct out of the slums of Rome, would return to nothing if their generals couldn't get them land to retire on; and a general who promised this to his men was guaranteed their support in Republican politics. The Senate could not help but see the dangers of this, but their foreign enemies were on the move again and keeping the army up was vital.

Case in point: Marius' first two Consulships saw him overseas, putting down the Numidians, and then his next four saw him in northern Italy, stopping the invasions of the Cimbri and Teutones*. His unprecedented six terms as Consul, and the popularity he had gained in fending off the Cimbri and Teutones, deeply disturbed the Senate, which henceforth resolved to make the least possible use of his services. They managed to associate the credit for defeating Numidia to one of Marius' more conservative lieutenants, Lucius Cornelius Sulla, and when Rome's Italian allies, looking to get a little more of fruits of empire, revolted in 91 BC, Sulla was put in charge of that too. The causes of the war were pretty straightforward to solve; once the Senate offered to grant all Italian allies Roman citizenship, the war was pretty much over, and the only real result of this "Social War" (apart from the widening of citizenship) was the enhancement of Sulla's reputation.

The same year the Social War ended (88 BC), a new war began in the east. The century of instability in Anatolia that had followed the defeat of Antiochus was coming to an end; the Kingdom of Pontus, under Mithridates VI, had conquered most of the surrounding kingdoms, including a few that had been put under Roman protection. But - distracted by the Social War and its own rapidly mounting social stresses - Rome's warning to him was uncharacteristically soft-spoken. Encouraged, Mithridates invaded the Roman province of Asia** in 89 BC and Greece in 88 BC.

This demanded a Roman response, of course, but the Republic was divided on who to send. The Senate voted for Sulla but the Popular Assembly - still remembering him as the saviour of Italy a decade earlier - voted for Marius. Sulla took matters into his own hands, took command of the army, and - to the horror of everyone, including the optimates - marched it into Rome. Marius attempted briefly to defend the city, failed, and barely managed to escape to Africa while Sulla's troops massacred Marius' supporters. Sulla's command of the army was hastily confirmed, and he marched back out again to Pontus. But, for the first time, Roman troops had fought each other in the field, and even more ominously, a Roman general had used his army to enforce his will on the city. It was all downhill from here for the Republic.

Sulla's war in the East ran smoothly, with Mithridates being pushed out of his new conquests in a couple of short campaigns; but the treaty they signed in 85 BC was again notably lax; Mithridates was required only to disgorge the Roman protectorates he had conquered and was permitted to keep the enlarged Kingdom of Pontus independent. Sulla swung his army around and sailed back to Italy: while he had been off fighting Mithradates, Marius had returned to Rome.

Marius' coup - enforced by an army he had raised in Africa - was surprisingly bloodless; he proscribed*** a few of the more conservative senators but for the most part kept his troops in check. But only a month after his return to Rome, he died of a stroke and without the great general his troops were easily defeated by Sulla's. Sulla's takeover (82 BC) was far bloodier than Marius' had been. Hundreds of Senators and thousands of people in total - anyone of any prominence whatsoever who could plausibly be connected to Marius or his rule - were proscribed and executed. Sulla was made Dictator for life by the cowed Senate****. He extensively revised the government, stripping away most of the reforms that had outlived the Gracchi and greatly reducing the power of the Plebeian Tribunes. With everything the populares had ever accomplished destroyed, along with most of their membership, Sulla retired (79 BC) and then died.

Sulla's retirement (and, even more, his death) restored Senatorial rule. But even compared to the half-century after the Gracchi, it was an unstable, tottering thing. Marius and Sulla had opened the door and now the Republic was a prize for anyone with an army and the ambition to use it. The most the Senate could reasonably do now was appoint conservatives as often as they could and hope none of them got too ambitious anyways.

While Sulla had been conquering the Republic, the situation out overseas had been deteriorating again. There was a general, Quintus Sertorius - not so much popularis as Marian - holding Spain in opposition to the Senate; Mithradates was on the move in Anatolia agian; and there was piracy. The Republic had long since removed any opponents capable of policing the seas but with its attention turned inwards, piracy now ran rampant. This was a particular problem as Italy had long since become insufficient for supplying the food needs of Rome; the city was now fed from Sicily, Africa, and Egypt. For dealing with these, the Senate turned to the competent (and more importantly, loyal) Gnaeus Pompey. Pompey reconquered Spain (helped along quite a bit by Sertorius' convenient assassination) in 71 BC; returned to Italy to mop up the rebellion of Spartacus (along with a man named Marcus Licinius Crassus, more on whom later), then headed east to deal with the pirates. In three months in 67 BC he cleared them out; he was then given command of the army facing down Mithradates. He defeated Mithradates (64 BC) then moved south, conquering what was left of the Seleucid Empire and making a protectorate of the little Jewish Kingdom (63 BC; the Jews had become independent in the chaos following the Syrian War a century before).

Pompey returned to Rome again, having, in his words, "made the center of the Republic what I had found as its frontier". But in the course of the war he had promised his soldiers lands on their return***** and in any event his reputation was now too much for the Senate, who were now as afraid of him as they had been of Sulla. They waited for him to disband his army, then turned down his soldiers' demands and even refused to ratify his settlement of the east. Pompey took this smiling, and then mounted a constitutional coup. He got Crassus on his side for funding: Crassus was the richest man in Rome and more than ambitious enough to side with Pompey. For a front man, he picked a middle-aged playboy Senator named Gaius Julius Caesar, who was in charge of what was left of the populares. Between the three of them, they took the Consulate of 59, handed out offices to their supporters, and generally ran the Republic: much to the surprise of the Senate, which suddenly found itself powerless.

Nobody knew it then, but the Senate had now exercised its authority for the last time; the clock was ticking down fast on the Republic.

*Despite the fact that "Teutonic" has long been a synonym for "German", the Cimbri and Teutones were both Gallic, not Germanic, tribes.

**Consisting of westernmost Asia Minor, this had formerly been the kingdoms of Pergamum and Bithynia.

***Think "Stalinist purge" and you won't be far wrong.

****The Roman constitution actually contained a position for a Dictator (lit "one who speaks", since his every word was law). However, he was explicitly limited to a single term of six months; Sulla's unlimited Dictatorship was essentially a suspension of the constitution and Republican rule. (Just to note, the last Dictatorship had been during the Second Punic War, when it was feared Hannibal would attempt to take Rome.)

*****This rapidly became a necessity for post-Marian generals; even Sulla had done it (and, as dictator, was able to get it for them in the Po Valley).

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Republic (Part I)

Why? Because I wanted to.

As the third century BC came to a close, the Roman Republic was the power to watch in the Mediterranean world. The preceding quarter-century had seen it engaged in a life-and-death struggle with Carthage, the other great power of the Western Mediterranean, and after 17 years of close-run fighting, Rome had emerged absolutely triumphant. Indeed, the Second Punic War* may well be considered the Republic's high point; through crushing defeat after crushing defeat, the Republic had never faltered in its efforts for absolute victory, or in its confidence that it would achieve it. Hannibal, the greatest general Carthage ever produced, could defeat the Romans in the field time after time after time, but the Romans never ceased fielding new armies and by 201 BC they had forced Carthage to a humiliating peace. Rome took all Carthage's overseas empire; Carthage itself was reduced to a dependency.

Rome had acquired by this time a rather patchwork empire. Italy from the Alps to the heel and toe was Roman, or subservient allies; Sicily, Corsica-Sardinia, and Near and Far Spain** were all provinces. In between, the tributary Greek colony of Massilia held Provence; on Africa, the Roman ally of Numidia ruled most of what is now northern Algeria, and Carthage was left with Tunisia. The strange thing was, the Republic had not particularly wanted any of this; Italy had been picked up piecemeal in the process of defending the city itself, and the other provinces had been taken from the Carthaginians during the wars. But the Empire proved so profitable - Sicily alone was almost as rich as Roman Italy - that more expansion suddenly seemed more attractive to the Senate.

The Senate - despite its name, the Roman Republic was a rather oligarchic state. The Senate, an unelected council of the richest and most noble citizens, held the legislative power. The people of Rome, through their popular assemblies, held the power to elect most officials, particularly the executive, the two co-Consuls, but in practice most of these were from the Senatorial class. The one real check the plebeians had was the office of the Plebeian Tribune, a position which held the power of veto (from the Latin veto, "I deny") over the Senate and Consuls; but in the first years of the second century, even they tended to at least passively support the aristocratic program.

However oligarchic it was in effect, though, the Roman Constitution supported the of separation of powers, at least within the Senatorial class. Early on, the Senate held less of the power; the Consulship, with the power to lead armies and the responsibility for the administration of government, was where the real interest lay. But the acquisition of empire changed this; the people might have the ability to elect the magistrates of Rome, but the Proconsular*** military commands and provinces - and the opportunities for wealth and power they provided - were the gift of the Senate. And the Senate suddenly had a plethora of military commands to hand out.

With the western Mediterranean at Rome's beck and call, the direction Rome looked now was east. Right next door to the new Roman empire was the Hellenistic world, the richest and most cultured part of the Earth. In the century or so since the death of Alexander the Great, the Greeks had spread across most of the eastern Mediterreanean, which in turn was now divided amongst a number of Greek principalities of varying size and power. First up on Rome's list was Macedon. The state which had once conquered the known world was now reduced to the confines of Greece, but it was still bar none the most powerful state there. Macedon's king Philip V ruled, more-or-less directly, most of the peninsula; and after a brief war in the 200s, he took most of the Aegean too. The last few states left outside Philip's hegemony - the Ionian city-states of Pergamum and Rhodes, and the mainland Greek Aetolian league - appealed to Rome for help. The Senate, always eager to pick up a new causus belli, agreed; but there was another reason, too. Philip had been an ally of Carthage in the last war; Rome had a score to settle.

The ensuing war was short, sharp, and decisive. The Macedonian phalanx had been a war-winning weapon on its lonesome a century before, but times had changed; the Roman legion was the new military trump card. At the battle of Cynocepahalae in 197 BC the Roman swordsmen got in amongst the tightly packed Greek spearmen and from there the victory was quick. Philip sued for peace, with the end result that he was restricted to Macedon proper (northern Greece) while the rest of the Greek states formerly under Macedonian hegemony were now under Roman. The Aetolians - who hadn't started the war just to trade one set of masters for another - promptly called in the next power over, the Seleucid monarch Antiochus III.

The Seleucid kingdom was the largest - and as a result, the most troubled - of Alexander's successor states. Like the others, it was the creation of one of Alexander's generals, in this case, Seleucus; and its name tells its story. The domain of General Ptolemy, Egypt, is sometines referred to as the Ptolemaic Kingdom; the domain of the Antigonid Dynasty was never called anything but Macedon. By contrast, the Seleucid Kingdom - most of Asia Minor, the Levant, Mesopotamia, the Iranian Plateau - was never called anything but the Seleucid Kingdom, because there was nothing behind it but "that area currently ruled by the descendants of General Seleucus". Its history is nothing but the struggle against the centripetal forces slowly ripping it apart. Antiochus III had, in his 31 years on the throne, proved particularly capable holding it together. When, in 192 BC, he entered Greece at the plea of the Aetolians, he had no doubt he could successfully add Greece to his domains.

The Romans, of course, had other plans; and the fact that Antiochus had given refuge to Hannibal after his Roman-enforced exile from Carthage only added fuel to the fire. In the event (Magnesia, 190 BC) Antiochus' phalanxes proved no more able to defeat the legions of Rome than Philip's had; at the treaty in 188 BC he was forced to renounce all interest in the Aegean and hand over most of western Anatolia to Rome's loyal allies Pergamum and Rhodes. The treaty was not unduly harsh - Rome's direct domains expanded not at all**** - but the fact of his defeat undid Antiochus' life-work. The Parthians overthrew his rule in the east and rapidly overran most of the Iranian plateau; Anatolia disintegrated into a mess of principalities, largely Greek but none of them Seleucid. Antiochus was left with merely Mesopotamia and the Levant.

In less than two decades, then, Rome had defeated most of the states of the Mediterranean world and put the fear of the Republic into the rest. Of the fully-independent states remaining, Ptolemaic Egypt was a Roman ally paralyzed under a series of weak kings and regencies, the Seleucids were still trying to salvage what little they could of their humbled Empire, and the Anatolians were too small and unestablished, the Parthians too far away, to pose much of a threat. The next two generations would see mainly peaceful consolidation overseas and violent instability at home.

For the famous partnership between Senate and People, which had handed Rome control of the western Mediterranean world, was coming undone. The backbone of the early Republic had been the yeoman farmers of Latium, who had formed the army in its early wars and whose implacable determination had won them. But as time went on the Senatorial class became more and more powerful, and more and more rich, and began to acquire larger estates, at home and abroad, in the process squeezing out the smaller landholders, who moved discontentedly into the cities. This process also began to erode the army; without the farmers from which it had traditionally recruited, its manpower pool began to slowly dry up.

But for the time being, the process wasn't seen as a threat by the Senators, who were more concerned with their own aggranizement. From the end of the Syrian War with Antiochus, through to the end of the century, there were no major wars either, which helped. In the Third Macedonian War (171-168 BC), the Republic finally reduced Macedon to a province; they did the same to the rest of Greece in 148 BC, Carthage in 146 BC*****, and Pergamum in 133 BC. But for the most part the trouble Rome was going through was internal. The decades of peace in the mid-second century saw the Senatorial classes accumulate more and more land, at the expense of the traditional yeoman farmers that had supported the early Republic. The impoverished and the dispossessed filtered into the cities, where, in 133 BC, they elected a Plebian Tribune in support of them. Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, a member of one of Rome's more prominent families - his grandfather, Scipio Africanus, had been the one to finally defeat Hannibal in 202 BC - started on a program of land reform, breaking up the Senatorial estates and distributing it amongst the landless. The Senate blocked this, Gracchus used his veto to effectively shut down the government, and then was murdered by a senatorial mob. His program was revived a decade later by his brother Gaius; Gaius added cheap food for the rest of the urban poor and tried to bring the middle classes onboard by offering to widen the qualifications for magistracies and provincial positions. But in 122 BC he too was killed in mob violence and most of his reforms were shut down by the Senate.

A crisis was now inevitable.

*Second, because of a first some three decades before; "Punic" is a synonym for Phoenician, from whom the Carthaginians were descended.

**Despite the name, "Far Spain" is not the Atlantic coast or even the interior, but merely the southern half of the Mediterranean coast, roughly the valley of the Guadalquivir. Near Spain is the valley of the Ebro.

***Literally "for the consul"; a military command assigned by the senate to someone who acts in place of the actual consul. As the frontiers moved out, the consuls tended to stay at home more and let the Senate delegate generalships to professionals. More on this later.

****The Senate, despite all the opportunities for personal aggrandizement annexation provided, were never actually that big on it; they always preferred to set up tributary allies. The Republic then tended to squeeze their allies until they revolted, and only then would they set up provincial governments.

*****The defeat of Carthage tells a lot about Roman feelings towards that city. It was the pet project of Marcus Porcius Cato, an early-second century politician best-known for the phrase "Carthago delenda est" ("Carthage must be destroyed") which he famously ended his every speech with, no matter its subject. He pushed for war for most of his career, but it was not until 151 BC that the notoriously legalistic Senate was provided with an excuse. The treaty that ended the Second Punic War held that, amongst other things, Carthage could not go to war without Rome's permission; in 151 BC the Roman ally of Numidia finally upped its raiding of Carthage to the point where the Carthaginians felt obliged to respond. The Senate seized upon this as a breach of the treaty; the ensuing war amounted to a siege of Carthage in which the city held out for three years but the final outcome was never in doubt. In 146 BC the Romans breached the walls, sacked the city, burned it to the ground, sold its surviving inhabitants into slavery, and plowed salt into the ashes.

Some thoughts

OK, so it looks like writing a calc guide, even a quick 'net one, requires more determination than I thought. But I don't want to abandon this just yet, so here's my thoughts on the new Star Trek movie, in order (thanks, wikipedia plot synopsis!).

Some spoilers follow, obviously.

- Credits... but where's the TOS song? It would have been a nice touch.

- This.

- The Vulcan bullies are great.

- How is Kirk getting beaten up? Why isn't he - oh. His shirt hasn't been ripped. My bad.

- The Kobayashi Maru is pretty great. ("I don't suppose we want to fire phasers?" "No, we're good.")

- An Orion female not followed by the words "slave girl"? This is blasphemy, Abrams. This is madness!

- I know the Enterprise has a long and glorious history of being "the only ship in the quadrant", but don't tell me you didn't expect sending the entire fleet to Laurentia or wherever was going to come back and bite you in the ass.

- Oooh, shiny. I like this new design aesthetic.

- It's the galaxy's angriest space elevator!

- They just called them an away team. It's official. The redshirt is dead.

- They just made Chekov the Wesley! Nooooo!

- Oh, now Chekov can't lock onto someone while falling. Right.

- Wait - Spock/Uhura? What?

- Wow, the Romulans sure load their mining ships to bear.

- It's a brain slug! Go Wrath of Khan!

- Dude, marooning went out in the 18th C.

- The pod told you to stay inside, but would you listen? Nooo...

- That's one big supernova.

- And since when were the Romulans so incompetent they had to rely on Starfleet to save their bacon?

- Scotty! I was wondering when they'd get to you!

- "Admiral Archer" - nice hat tip. Pity the chronology means that's the only series they can reference. (Ugh, Enterprise.)

- Right, like they'd actually put Kirk in command after that little outburst. Just give it to Sulu, please.

- You know, even if they have the defense grid codes, you'd figure after they start munching on San Francisco somebody would say "Hey! Maybe - despite the codes - we should turn the defense grid back on!"

- Spock/Uhura, still! What is going on here?

- Why are there no railings!?!?

- "We are at warp." Ok, that's a pretty good one. (Has the Federation ever dumped probes inside a black hole just for kicks?)

- I'm sure dumping the warp core won't, eg, turn off your warp drives, Scotty.

- Chekov recovered from the brain slugs faster... but it gives them an excuse to put Pike in a wheelchair, which I heartily approve.

- There's the theme!

Well, that's a pretty huge list of snark, but really, it was a good movie. I heartily recommend it. (After #10 being crap and now #11 being good... looks like the even-odd rule is pretty sunk.)

4/5 stars.

Calculus I - Historical Background

One of the original uses for math, back at the dawn of mathematics with the Egyptians and Babylonians, was to determine areas. This originally came up for the problem of determining the areas of land for taxation, but by the Classic Greek period there were plenty of other uses for determining areas or volumes, not to mention the abstract interest of just finding solutions to these problems. The Greeks, in particular, found a great number of practical solutions - not just areas of squares or triangles or circles, but the area under parabolas and other, more complicated shapes. But the Greeks never managed a general solution to the problem of finding areas - that would wait until much later, and an important conceptual advance.

The Greek conception of geometry was much like the basic conception of it today: you have a bunch of things - points, lines circles - which you can do a few basic things to, and with this you can prove things about them. This has the advantage of being close to the real-world view of geometry, a sort of "drawing pictures in the sand" where there's nothing deeper to it than the actual lines you draw. But the downside of this is that it is very, very hard to create more complicated shapes. Proving things by this method pretty much requires that you be dealing with straight lines or circles, so more complicated shapes have to be broken down, for instance by taking them as sections of a cone:

And shapes more complicated still - heart shapes, figure-8s, even spirals - are essentially impossible. This wasn't a huge problem for the Greeks, who accomplished quite a lot with what they had already, but eventually people started trying to come up with new ways to deal with geometry. The most successful by far was the invention, around 1640, of analytical geometry by Rene Descartes (1596-1650). In the years since about 1400, the study of arithmetic had developed into a field concerned with equations in a more abstract sense: algebra. While geometry had more or less stagnated since about the time of Archimedes (287-212 BC), algebra had developed numerous new and useful techniques.  So, if the techniques of algebra could somehow be applied to geometry, great strides forward could be made. The obvious problem is that algebra deals with numbers and equations, and geometry... doesn't.

Descartes' solution was to lay two lines at right angles, run numbers down each of them, producing the Cartesian plane, and then express the points and lines of regular geometry as pairs of numbers:

So a line might include the points (0,0), (1, 1), (2, 2), and (as a continuous line) also a number of other points (1.00001, 1.00001), (3.14159, 3.14159), and so on. This at first glance might seem a step backward: we've replaced the intuitive definition of a line with an infinite collection of pairs of numbers. But all of the pairs are pairs (x, y) where x and y are solutions to the equation x = y, and Descartes realized that if you treat the equation as the line, you can do anything to it you could do to the regular geometric line. You can find intersections by solving equations together - one of the oldest and best understood fields of algebra - and most simple shapes, conveniently, have simple analytic expressions: lines are of the form ax + by = c for some numbers a, b, c; circles are x^2 + y^2 = r^2 for some number r; figure-eights are (x^2 + y^2)^2 = 2(a^2)(x^2 - y^2) for some number a; and so on. Most importantly for our purposes, it reduces the problem of finding areas to an algebra problem - an algebra problem Descartes didn't know how to solve, admittedly, but he had more techniques to throw at it now. Over the next couple of decades, he and a few others began making progress with analytical geometry.

Analytic geometry also has wide applications to the sciences: pretty much any physical activity that can be expressed as two numbers can be graphed on the Cartesian plane. A particularly common use is measuring distance traveled vs time, for instance for a bouncing ball:

This opens up a new avenue of investigation. It turns out that if you measure the slope of the line just touching to the graph at any given point, that provides the rate of change at that point: on a distance-time graph, this is the speed the object graphed is traveling at. So now we can find instantaneous velocities just by using a graph! The problem now is that finding a line just touching the graph - a tangent line - turns out to be a nontrivial problem as well. In classical geometry, finding a tangent is trivially easy for a few shapes (straight lines, circles, a few conic sections) and effectively impossible for anything else. So Descartes and his successors set to work on that problem too.

In the 1670s and 80s, two men - Isaac Newton (1643-1727) and Gottfried Liebniz (1646-1716) - independently came up with a method for solving both problems. Newton began by trying to find a general method for finding tangents; Liebniz, for finding areas. Both of them discovered in the process that the two problems are related in a surprisingly intimate way, and used this to develop an amazingly powerful tool, the infinitesimal calculus (nowadays so prominent it is usually simply referred to as the calculus). The two of them then promptly got into an amazingly bitter and lengthy fight over which one plagiarized the other (it is generally believed now that they developed it independently).

We've reached the calculus itself now, so we might as well get into the mathematical details. For reasons of simplicity, most calculus courses usually start with the differential half of calculus (the section devoted to tangents), so the meat of our tour will begin there.

So does this count as a Meta-Meme?

Metablogging was originally intended to be the personal category ("I broke my leg/am getting wisdom teeth extracted/just don't care today, so no blog for you") but this will be my fourth post (of five total) in metablogging and all but one of them have been about metablogging, not personal stuff. Ah well. The best laid plans of mice and men, and all that.

In the interests of having something personal to justify this category, though, I'll start with a personal anecdote: Jehovah's Witnesses came by this morning shortly before my hiatus. Not terribly notable in and of itself, of course, but it was actually the first time I've seen them go door-to-door, so kinda exciting. But it got me thinking on the subject of memes.

A little background first: in the mid-19th century, the idea of evolution, in a broad sense - that is, that life used to take different forms than it does now, and that it has somehow developed from those forms into the ones it has now - was generally accepted. But the mechanism behind it was not really known. The most widely accepted theories were those proposed by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck at the beginning of the century: first, that creatures developed certain aspects of their physiologies over the course of their lives and passed them on to their offspring (so a proto-giraffe, stretching its neck to reach leaves, would have children with slightly longer necks than the parents were born with); or, alternately, that there was simply some élan vital that made animals develop and complexify (so successive generations of giraffes would simply have longer necks because, well, that is how their élan tells them to develop). The problem was that the first option (inheritance of acquired characteristics) had a lack of evidence - the children of blacksmiths being born not particularly more muscly then their peers, for instance - and the second (generally just called Lamarckian Evolution) was really just a way of passing the buck into philosophical realms where science couldn't meaningfully argue with it.

In 1859 Charles Darwin, an English naturalist, published a book titled On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (now generally just called On the Origin of Species) in which he proposed a third theory. All creatures, he argued, produce far more offspring than could ever survive to adulthood. Some of them will live long enough to produce the new generation; most will die. Which ones survive? Well, those best adapted to the environment; proto-giraffes with longer necks will have access to more food than their shorter compatriots, be healthier and get more mates (who will also tend to be longer-necked) and their kids, although still having a variety of neck lengths, will on average have necks ever so slightly longer than their parents' generation. Darwin's theory ("Natural Selection") was so eminently testable, was presented with so much evidence (Darwin held off publication for the better part of two decades, never feeling that his increasingly mountainous pile of evidence was enough, until the possibility of being scooped by a colleague* finally prompted him to publish) and above all made so much sense, that it almost immediately became the dominant paradigm of biology, a position it has held ever since.

Then, in the 1970s, a man named Richard Dawkins had an interesting thought about natural selection. Who said it only applies to living things? After all, ideas behave much like animals do: they spread, reproduce, mutate, survive at different rates based on their adaptation to the environment. Dawkins formalized this into the idea of memes (by analogy to genes; it's pronounced "meem"). Perhaps the quintessential example of a meme is a chain-letter or -email. A meme is born, or develops out of an old one: somebody creates a joke and forwards it to some friends. It spreads, passing from person to person, mutating along the way; mutations occur as people change or add or misinterpret or do whatever to the meme. Those mutations that help pass it on (to a chain-letter, perhaps polishing the joke at the core or adding a plea to forward it) are propagated more and faster, and thus take up more and more space relative to the original; mutations that harm its propagation (say, accidentally snipping the joke out entirely) occur as well but die off quickly. As time goes on, natural selection pushes the meme in the direction of better and better reproduction, just like it does to living things; and this is good, because there is a limit to how many chain letters you can forward in a day, so the joke has to not only be good but also be better than any other joke you could be telling in order to get passed on.

But of course memes aren't just limited to chain letters, even if they provide the most clear-cut example. Dawkins pointed out that pretty much anything that might be loosely qualified as an "idea" could be considered as a meme. Fashions are memes: they are created, spread, mutate, and eventually are replaced by other fashions, which (in some hard-to-define way) are better adapted to the environment of people's fashion choices. So are, say, phrases: the "best laid plans" quote towards the top of the post is an example of a meme, spreading through writing and conversation; at one point it lost the Scots dialect ending ("gang aft a-gley") and the new version, despite the weakness of making its ending implicit, outcompeted its progenitor. Philosophical concepts are memes too, as are political ones: communism, for example, mutated out of socialism into a more aggressively expansionist version; developed secondary characteristics (Soviet state education, the Comintern) to help keep up propagation; mutated into new varieties, some of which flourished (eg, Marxism-Leninism), some of which failed due to an inability to reproduce fast enough to stay competitive (Anarcho-Communism), and some of which failed due to changing environmental conditions outside their control (Trotskyism); and finally, the whole environment changed rapidly, outpacing the mutability of the family of communist memes to keep up, replacing them en masse with other memes (largely various species of libertarian capitalism and light authoritarianism). Finally, to take this post back to the opening anecdote, religions can be treated as memes too**; Jehovah's Witnesses (Jehovah's Witnessing? Jehovah's Witnessism?), for example, is a competitive religious meme not least because of its explicit commands to evangelism.

Finally, the internet turns out to be a great breeding ground for memes. People on the internet tend to have plenty of free time, plenty of desire to converse, and with practically real-time connectivity can spread memes around very quickly. The intro to the video game Zero Wing, for instance, was so badly translated that people began referencing it all over the internet, the phrase "All your base are belong to us" in particular becoming a fast spreading meme. After a while, the phrase became seen as boring or old, and mainly died off. There are dozens - probably hundreds - of other memes floating around the internet: rickrolling (innocuous-seeming or downright misleadingly-labelled links to the music video of "Never Going To Give You Up" by Rick Astley), lolcats (weirdly labelled pictures of cats), de-motivational posters (long since mutated to include pretty much anything in the "picture, black frame, label" model), and many, many more.

...And of course, the idea of internet memes (like the concept of memes itself) is a meme in its own right: spreading from person to person, via things like this blog post, and continuing to occupy a niche in the mental environment as long as people continue to pass it on. Memetics never really turned into a science in the sense Dawkins probably imagined back in 1976, but it remains a pretty neat concept to think about and throw around occasionally.

*Alfred Russell Wallace.

**Dawkins has since become an outspoken and frankly irritatingly evangelistic atheist; his reductionistic view of religions as memes only is probably related to this.

Going off the grid

The blog will be not updating for the next week; I'm going out into the Ontario backwoods to hew some wood and draw some water.

Fun IT Blog, with footnotes

II've just discovered The Daily WTF. Currently reading through the back archives (because, well, that's what you do on the internet; why miss the back-issues just because you arrived late?*). My favorite so far is the VB-turned-C programmer who realized that with macros, you can pretend to be programing in anything.

*There's an interesting case to be made that this - not even free access or flash animations or anything else - is the big difference between traditional comics and webcomics. Scott McCloud, in Reinventing Comics (sequel to the excellent Understanding Comics) argues that internet-based comics will have a host of advantages over conventual paper-based ones: they have none of the space limitations of conventional paper, they can include visual effects not possible in print, they can take advantage of the internet's abilities to create branching plots, and so forth. But in the nine years since publication, essentially none of that came off. Most webcomics creators - even the professional ones - don't have the time to create more than one plot, or fill out more than one conventional strip worth of artwork, or add anything more programmatically intricate than a .gif file. 

What was different - and the fact that this was missed is kind of surprising, since it's a property of the medium of webcomics itself, not any one comic in particular - was that internet archiving means that any individual comic is available to anyone at any time. Print comics can't do this: if you pick up your newspaper one morning and haven't read the funnies a three weeks, you still want to be able to laugh at Garfield's antics; so everything - plot, setting, characterization, even the jokes themselves - has to be as broadly set out and as static as possible. Even relatively story-based comics (such as Doonesbury) tend to simply throw the cast in various situations and let the jokes fend for themselves**.

The webcomics paradigm is different. Readers can come and go as they choose, but - thanks to the miracles of archiving - they never have to miss a strip. Indeed, most webcomics creators take advantage of this to get rid of all the "Gilligan's Island" plotting and endless recapping that plagues print comics. Instead, webcomics can be highly decompressed, and have long-running story arcs and much larger, better-developed casts, albeit at the cost of making reading all the back archives necessary, even for established readers, and making the front-end comics absolutely incomprehensible to new readers. Fortunately, these new readers can simply trawl through the backstory, although with some of the longer-running comics starting to approach 10 years of 7-comics-a-week updating, this can become a daunting task. Not all webcomics do this (the excellent xkcd comes to mind as a well-made gag-a-day strip) but many do, and, even without showy visuals or funky web effects, it opens up vast new storytelling areas long denied to comics. Probably the best example of this is Narbonic, which is a couple of years long and changes a great deal in the process: you can see the creator realizing she doesn't need to make every strip funny on its own, right in front of your eyes, and it improves greatly for it.

So check out Narbonic and see what I'm talking about. It's a good read.

**Although, if you really really want the backissues of Doonesbury, they're here. Just increment the url.

English - older than you think

So, when we left off, we'd just discovered that despite the use of Lorem Ipsum elsewhere, the full-size style preview on Blogger is actually filled with, well, regular English.

Specifically, the first couple of lines of Book II of John Milton's Paradise Lost (Satan vowing to wage eternal war on Heaven) and the start of Belial's speech on the same subject from a bit later in. (For no reason I can tell, Belial's speech is the second sample post, followed by the rest of Satan's speech. My best guess is they initially wanted to have a series of posts with one of each of the demons'  speeches from Book II per post, got two posts in, and then decided to just copy the text in sequence out of the start of the book.) This works in the narrow sense that the text is fairly arbitrary and so not particularly distracting, but in the more general sense of adding in spacefiller gibberish it is an utter failure: the text is recognizable and readable English.

High on a Throne of Royal State, which far

Outshon the wealth of ORMUS and of IND,

Or where the gorgeous East with richest hand

Showrs on her Kings BARBARIC Pearl and Gold,

Satan exalted sat, by merit rais'd

To that bad eminence; and from despair

Thus high uplifted beyond hope, aspires

Beyond thus high, insatiate to pursue

Vain Warr with Heav'n, and by success untaught

His proud imaginations thus diplaid.

It's not quite modern English but it's comprehensible. ("Satan sits on his shiny throne, and, despite the fact that he can't win, is planning to go on fighting Heaven.") Paradise Lost was published (in its final form) in 1674, which means it falls into a century-long slot of not-quite-modern English most popularly exemplified by Shakespeare and the King James Bible. Despite complaints about it, Shakespeare is eminently readable. It is, after all, written at the same time as the KJV (there are even some - unsubstantiated - theories that Shakespeare contributed to the 1611 KJV) and most people nowadays can still fake a passable King James. Taking (for example) the opening lines of the Book of Esther:

Now it came to pass in the days of Ahasuerus, (this is Ahasuerus which reigned, from India even unto Ethiopia, over an hundred and seven and twenty provinces:)

That in those days, which the king Ahasuerus sat on the throne of his kingdom, which was in Shushan the palace,

In the third year of his reign, he made a feast unto all his princes and his servants; the power of Persia and Media, the nobles and princes of the provinces, being before him:

When he shewed the riches of his glorious kingdom and the honour of his excellent majesty many days, even an hundred and fourscore days.

Comparing this to the New International Version of 1978, we have

This is what happened in the time of Xerxes, the Xerxes who ruled over 127 provinces stretching from India to Cush:

At that time King Xerxes reigned from his royal throne in the citadel of Susa,

And in the third year of his reign he gave a banquet for all his nobles and officials. The military leaders of Persia and Media, the princes, and the nobles of the provinces were present.

For a full 180 days he displayed the vast wealth of his kingdom and the splendor and glory of his majesty.

There's not a terribly great difference. Apart from the occasional out-of-order phrasings and the even more occasional archaic vocabulary (the only real example above being the use of "power" for "generals") it's just about as readable. Shakespeare is a little more flowery than the KJV in general, since he's not restricted to translating a preexisting text, but even then reading it (or better still, listening to it) you can understand what is being said.

Going back eighty years or so to the Coverdale bible of 1535 (Tyndale is the more popular version, but he was executed before getting around to the book of Esther) we find that the spelling takes a sudden hard hit but it still remains understandable, especially read aloud:

In the tyme of Ahasuerus, which reigned from India unto Ethiopia, over an hundreth and seven and twentye londes,
What tyme as he sat on his seate roiall in the castell of Susa
In the thirde yeare of his reigne, he made a feast unto all his prynces and servauntes, namely unto the mighty men of Persia and Media, to the Debites and rulers of his countrees,
That he mighte shewe the noble riches of his kingdome, and the glorious worshippe of his greatnesse, many dayes longe, even an hundreth and foure score dayes.

The phrasing is a little strange but spellcheck it and drop the occasional very weird word ("debites"?) and it's pretty much the same as the KJV. But Coverdale wasn't even the first English translation of the Bible: that credit goes to Wycliffe, around 1380.

In the daies of kyng Assuerus, that regnede fro Ynde til to Ethiope, on an hundrid and sevene and twenti provynces, whanne he sat in the seete of his rewme,

The citee Susa was the bigynnyng of his rewme.

Therefor in the thridde yeer of his empire he he made a greete feeste to alle hise princes and children, the strongeste men of Persis, and to the noble men of Medeis, and to the prefectis of provynces, bifor him silf,

To schewe the richessis of the glorie of his rewme, and the gretnesse, and boost of his power in myche tyme, that is, an hundrid and foure scoor daies.

The spelling is terrible, and the language falls into what is generally called Middle English, but if you read it out loud it is still legible. ("In the days of king Assuerus, that reigned fro' Ind 'til to Ethiop, on an 'undred and seven and twenty provinces, when he sat in the seat of his rewme [realm]...") It's not until you hit Old English, pre-Norman invasion, and more than a thousand years ago, that the language becomes sufficiently different to be incomprehensible (not Esther but the Lord's Prayer, c. 1000, due to lack of a complete Old English Bible):

Fæder ure þu þe eart on heofonum, Si þin nama gehalgod. to becume þin rice, gewurþe ðin willa, on eorðan swa swa on heofonum. urne gedæghwamlican hlaf syle us todæg, and forgyf us ure gyltas, swa swa we forgyfað urum gyltendum. and ne gelæd þu us on costnunge, ac alys us of yfele. soþlice.

Note that the language, for the first time, is completely incomprehensible even read aloud: "Fader ure thu the eart on hyofonum, si thin nama gehalgod..." (The þ and ð are called thorn and eth respectively, and both pronounced more-or-less "th".)

Jumping back to the 17th century, Paradise Lost - being in verse - is in fact even less legible than most writing of the time. The Pilgrim's Progress, written only four years later (1678), is in practically everything but style completely modern:

As I walk'd through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place, where was a Denn; And I laid me down in that place to sleep: And as I slept I dreamed a Dream. I dreamed, and behold I saw a Man cloathed with Raggs, standing in a certain place, with his face from his own House, a Book in his hand, and a great burden upon his Back. I looked and saw him open the Book, and Read therein; and as he read, he wept and trembled: and not being able longer to contain, he brake out with a lamentable cry; saying, what shall I do?

And fifty years after that Gulliver's Travels (1726) is, in effect, a rather formally-written piece of modern English:

My father had a small estate in Nottinghamshire: I was the third of five sons. He sent me to Emanuel College in Cambridge at fourteen years old, where I resided three years, and applied myself close to my studies; but the charge of maintaining me, although I had a very scanty allowance, being too great for a narrow fortune, I was bound apprentice to Mr. James Bates, an eminent surgeon in London, with whom I continued four years.

So what do we know about English? Well, definitely modern English goes back a long time - at least three hundred years, with another hundred of iffy-but-comprehensible modern English before that. Then there's another three or four hundred years of very strangely spelled but still recognizable English before that. You need to get back before Piers Plowman in the mid-14th century - that's six and a half centuries and it's still on the good side of legibility. You have to go back the better part of a millennia, to a time when English hadn't even really come together out of Norman French and Anglo-Saxon, when even the alphabet wasn't the same (thorn and eth were both dropped around 1300) before you genuinely run out of English. And despite the rapid changes in spelling and style (especially in the 16th and 17th centuries respectively) English has been surprisingly stable for a long period of time. If you want Lorem Ipsum text that's illegible to a modern English-speaker, you need to go a lot further back than John Milton.

And, incidentally: try Paradise Lost. It's interesting both historically, culturally, and in and of itself, entertaining, and if you weren't convinced by my claims of legibility ("High on a throne of royal state which far. Outshon the wealth of ormus and of ind... what is this stuff?") Isaac Asimov's Annotated Paradise Lost provides helpful vocabulary and metaphor references, as well as the rather interesting story behind its writing (short version: 2008 was not the first time a government changeover caused the religious right to flame out, although Milton was a far, far better writer than Rush Limbaugh is). 

A friend of mine from university called it "biblical fanfic", which is just about right, but it's very very good fanfic. Give Paradise Lost a try.

Saturday Night Live no longer exists

I was going to continue my Lorem Ipsum post but this struck me just recently.

Saturday Night Live no longer exists (on the Canadian internet).

See, back in the heady days of 2008, I got into Saturday Night Live, largely because of the American election that year, and even more so because of the internet. 2300 to 0100 on Saturday night (technically, it's mostly on Sunday morning) is not really a time I watch TV. At home I usually don't stay up that late, and at university I don't have a TV. Also, the few times Ihad seen it it was... well, live comedy, good when they hit it but with a high proportion of just painful sketches that went on too long. I preferred Whose Line Is It Anyways, which tended towards the consistently brilliant and even better was on at a reasonable time. But in the fall of 2008 I kept getting link after link to SNL, especially Tina Fey's dead-on impression of Sarah Palin. So I watched it online at the NBC site, found it pretty funny, and kept watching on and off for a couple of months.

Cut to yesterday. I decide for various reasons that I want to see the SNL vice-presidential debate ("I would throw myself on a live grenade for John McCain! But for the sake of every man, woman, and child on Earth, we must never allow him to become President!") So I look up "SNL Vice President Debate" on youtube and get... nothing. A couple of brief clips and some longer clips that look like they used to contain the whole skit but currently consist of a single still and a textbox directing you to the NBC site. Apparently NBC has run amuck on youtube taking down all the SNL clips and replacing them with redirects to their website. All right, so I go to the NBC page...

Well, that's annoying. And pretty much every hit for the video, and every other SNL video, is either down or a direct link-through to NBC or the similarly geographically restricted hulu. So essentially, SNL no longer exists on the internet for Canadians.

The particularly hilarious bit - apart from the fact that a little judicious proxying can get you around it anyways - is that it seems so, well, pointless. NBC broadcasts in Canada. SNL goes on the air in Ottawa at the same time that it does in New York, on the same channel (it also goes on the air on Canada-based Global, although the video section of the Global website is pretty sad). The whole point of web-based videos is to expand your audience - you can sell ads on the net just as well as TV spots, and because you're no longer limited to watching the show once at 2330 on a Saturday night six months ago, you'll get more viewers in total. So why stick geographical restrictions on it? Hulu I can see, maybe, because they're working with other people's content and are probably trying hard to stay on the very conservative side of copyright laws. But NBC owns SNL. They can publish it anywhere they like. So why don't they?

Lorem Ipsum

This is my blog, with which I hope to entertain and edify the world. The current blog subjects are"whatever I feel like" and the schedule is "whenever I have time". Which of course makes it no different from half the other blogs on the internet, but with any luck it should prove to be interesting. For lack of a better first subject, I'm going to write about... blogging, which probably sets some kind of a fourth-wall-busting speed record.

One of the things involved in making a blog on this site (Blogger) is creating a "theme" (eg, shape and colour scheme of the page). You can make your own if you have the html skills, but it also conveniently provides a couple of premade themes that you can choose from if you're too unskilled and/or lazy to bother making one yourself. (The fact that pretty much any randomly chose blog will use one of the out-of-the-box themes probably says... something.) Anyways, here's the choose-a-sample page:

The theme options are all illustrated, with some sample posts and text. What sample posts and text? Well, if we blow the Sand Dollar theme (the one I'm currently using) up really large, we get

Sample Blog, My Profile, and some posts consisting of... gibberish. Latin gibberish. Actually, if you know Latin, you'll realize it's gibberish there too: it's a couple of posts full of pseudo-Latin gibberish (with a little Pig Latin thrown in). Which is... pretty weird, when you think about it. Why the nonsense?

Well, the answer is a couple of centuries old. Back in the day - the day, in this case, being "since the invention of typography" - a popular way of showing off new typefaces was with sample sentences: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ being a popular one, of course, but others - like the famous "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog" - were used as well. The obvious benefit of these is that, since the hypothetical typeface customer is interested only in what the font looks like and not what any particular piece of text looks like in it, you can get away with using nonsense text like the above to show it off. (The quick brown fox has the slight advantage that it looks a little more like actual text than the alphabet, and so demonstrates the legibility of the font a little more.)

Related to this problem is the problem of page design. If you want to show off your typesetting skills, you can make a similar sample page with your headings and columns and paragraphs and so forth. The problem with this is you need something a little more text-like than just the alphabet or the quick brown fox. (Look at the famous "all work and no play" scene from The Shining - even before you can read it, the weird repetitive patterns in the text give away that it's not real writing.) But at the same time you don't want the reader to be distracted reading actual text - you want him concentrating on your layout. So back around 1500 or so, someone took a chunk of Cicero's finibus bonorum et malorum, grabbed about every every third syllable, and created a piece of pseudo-text, beginning "lorem ipsum dolores sit amet" that resembled real text pretty closely but made no sense whatsoever, even to people who knew Latin. (Insert Alan Sokal joke here.)

This sample text hung around for a couple of hundred years as exactly that: a spacefiller text used for typsetting examples, or occasionally just for filling space.

In the 1960s and 70s, as computer typesetting came into its own, lorem ipsum remained popular - just because you're typesetting by computer rather than by hand doesn't change its marketing needs - and then in the 1990s it got another big boost with the arrival of web design companies. Selling your web design skills is, at some level, a lot like selling your typesetting: you have to show off the design without distracting the user with, well, actual text.

So lorem ipsum moved smoothly into the net age and has remained there to this day. (See also.) Which is why the layout for the blog themes on Blogger are full of pseudo-Latin.

Well, probably. The thumbnails are a little small to make out more than the titles and a very little of the text, but fortunately you can look at the actual preview and see...

Something entirely different: English. More on this next time.