I spent last weekend in Charlotte, at the conference for Rotary International district 7690. Some pretty cool stuff happened there, which I may or may not write about later this month.
In the meantime, amuse yourselves with these ramblings on pop culture, which shade off into actual science / philosophy towards the end.
I have found myself rewatching a lot of stuff recently. Some things I remember very well, like Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, or Babylon 5 — for about the third time, as research for my new weekly Adventures in Middle-Earth game. See, JMS ripped off paid homage to Tolkien for that show, and I thought it would be fun to reverse that process. So Sinclair is the new Master of Lake-Town, Ivanova runs the Watch (which is more concerned about fire than anything else), and Garibaldi bullies people into the archery yards for practice — under more fantastic names, of course. I also made Londo Molari and Vir Kotto into Dwarves, representatives of a fading empire. I’m having a ball with it, but I’m reasonably sure my undergrad players haven’t caught on yet.
The Man from Atlantis (was on Tubi, briefly)
Me memories of The Man from Atlantis were much less clear, and much less accurate. As a kid I thought of it as a straight-ahead adventure show. When I found it on Tubi recently (it just left), I was not that surprised that it emphasized human destruction of the environment, especially the oceans. There was even an episode where the recurring villain, Mr. Schubert, tried melting the ice caps with microwaves. My Bio 111 students spent some time in February reading the Rolling Stone coverage of the crumbling Thwaites glacier in Antarctica.
I did not expect it to be so weirdly and lamely comedic, or to evolve over the course of five episodes (the first two of which were more like made-for-TV movies) into a blatant rip-off of Star Trek, with a multiracial bridge crew running their decidedly uncramped submarine, Cetacean.
Schubert started in an interesting way, as a cardigan-clad junk man, recycling tech from sunken ships, hoping to start World War III in order to save the environment. He was weird, in a pre-Asperger’s kind of way. And you so rarely see anyone in Hollywood who is not perfectly body-sculpted. Watching his oversized hams roll through his khakis as he strolled around his secret underwater base was sort of refreshing. But by his third appearance he had morphed into a scene-chewing Vincent Price type of character, mocking the very idea of a credible villain by exaggerating every single villain trope the writers could think of at the time.
1001 Hollywood Nights
Tubi’s classics section also had The Thief of Bagdad from 1940, which I’d never seen, and all three Harryhausen Sinbad movies, the last of which, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger, came out in 1977, the same year that Star Wars raised the bar for special-effects movies. That’s a span of 37 years, and they look almost the same. Ironically, I’d say the production values go down over time, not up (for everything except the animation). I also caught Jason and the Argonauts, from 1963 (the year my older brother was born), with that famous skeleton battle.
The Secret History
It’s not often I read a fiction book my wife enjoyed. She tends more towards chick-lit romances, true-crime, and Stephen King. So I was surprised when she told me that this WASPish thriller was an old favorite. “I love books set on college campuses,” she said.
The draw for me was the attempt by the protagonist’s clique to re-create the Greek mystery religion as an exercise in experiential education. I’ve read other books that have speculated about it, like The Immortality Key, which placed psychedelics at the center of its lost secret rituals. I love that kind of experimental archaeology, like when they marched a Moai statue from the quarry to the coast on NOVA (or built a glider to escape a Nazi prison, or any number of other similar Mythbusters-type stunts).
That direct experience — the experiment — is important. People have been arguing about how the Greeks saw color for literally centuries now, as in this Aeon piece.
The Greeks were perfectly able to perceive the blue tint, but were not particularly interested in describing the blue tone of sky or sea – at least not in the same way as we are, with our modern sensibility.
But were they? We know that babies can hear distinctions between all sorts of sounds that fully linguistic children and adults have learned to lump together. A classic example is the R/L/W distinction that is important in English but absent in Japanese. English lumps together a bunch of vowels that Swedish distinguishes.
In other words, we literally don’t hear the difference. So maybe the Greeks didn’t perceive the difference, at least not consciously.
If it’s possible to navigate the world using only nonconscious perceptions, then why did humans—and, possibly, other species—evolve to feel such rich and varied sensations?
And this probably extends to basically everything we use language for.
I remember getting the eye patch off after my first cataract surgery. Colors were unbelievably intense for a few days, like I was living in a glowing Technicolor world, at least out of my left eye. But that faded quickly.
A much easier demonstration is a simple exercise I do with my neuro students where they have to find their blind spots, those points where the optic nerve pokes out the back of the eyeball. There are no photoreceptors there, but we never notice it unless the issue is forced, experimentally. It almost always works. Even after you know where they are, you still can’t see what’s not there.
Unless you can? I had an autistic acquaintance once, a grad student in physics, who claimed to be able to access different levels of perceptions simultaneously, but the Defense Department turned down my application to study her. So I didn’t.
I’m so glad that you found *The Secret History*! It’s a favorite of mine, too. I first read it ages ago when I was still in high school, and I listened to the audiobook version (read by Donna Tartt herself) several years ago. It’s an impressive work—especially for a first novel. I also enjoyed her second novel, *The Little Friend*, very much and would recommend it, as well. Of course, much of it is a bit contrived and unrealistic—but she captures the experience of childhood very well, and her young protagonist is a delightful character. (You might know that opinion on her third and still most recent novel, *The Goldfinch*, is very mixed—though people whom I trust most tell me that it’s rather disappointing and that you won’t be missing much if you skip it.)
Just today, after having admitted to playfully hacking Tolkein's canon via Babylon 5, I stumbled across a 2012 documentary
https://caesarsmessiahdoc.com/
based on a 2005 book, described here
https://postflaviana.org/introduction-flavian-origins-theory-christianity/
inspired by the Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in the late 1940s and not released to the public until 1991.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Sea_Scrolls