An excellent movie

March 1, 2011 • 6:45 am

Here at the U of C we have the country’s oldest student-run film organization, Doc Films, which shows a variety of great movies in a nice, large, old-fashioned theater with Dolby sound and plush seats. (I HATE these modern theaters that try to maximize profits by subdividing a large space into tiny, uncongenial cheeseboxes.)  There’s a different “series” movie each day from Sunday to Thursday (this quarter’s Wednesdays, for example, have Scorsese movies), with popular second-run movies screened on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday afternoons.  And it’s a great deal: a $30 pass, which I have, entitles you to see any or all of the 70 movies shown each quarter.

On Sunday afternoon I wandered over to the theater to see a second-run film that came out last year, Never Let Me Go. I didn’t have many expectations; in fact, I barely knew what the movie was about.  It turned out to be one of the best movies I’ve seen in the last couple of years, and I want to give it two thumbs up and a strong recommendation for readers.  I am surprised and dismayed that it was never even mentioned as an Oscar contender.  The reviews are favorable but mixed, though the top critics at Rotten Tomatoes are quite positive.  You’ll either love it or think it’s meh.  I found it a beautiful but profoundly disturbing film, wonderfully photographed and acted. It’s a movie that makes you ponder, and, like Ikiru, may even change your life. Even if you go with someone else you will leave the theater silently, alone with your thoughts.

Never Let Me Go could, I suppose, be considered a science fiction film, but only in the loosest sense.  It’s based on a novel of the same name written by Kazuo Ishiguro, a perennial Booker Prize candidate who won for Remains of the Day, also made into a superb film. (Time Magazine named Never Let Me Go the best book of the decade; I confess that I haven’t yet read it.)

(SPOILER ALERT:  plot summary ahead!)

The movie takes place in Britain between the late 1950s and mid 1980’s.  In 1952, the story goes, scientists discovered a way to make people live more than 100 years.  But the method is based on creating human clones in test tubes, and raising them to be organ donors for the general populace.  As your organs fail with age, a replacement is simply removed from a specially-bred donor.  Donors survive several episodes of “donation”, becoming increasingly feeble with each surgery that removes a part, until, on the third or fourth donation, they finally “complete”—the euphemism for “die.”  The England depicted is seedy and depressing, and the organ-harvesting scenario simply superimposed upon modern history—a rewinding of the tape of life.

The story involves three Donors, superbly played by Carey Mulligan (you’ll remember that I loved her performance in the film An Education), Keira Knightley, and Andrew Garfield.  Their movie names are, respectively, Kathy H. (clones have no last names), Ruth, and Tommy.  You can find the full plot summarized at the Wikipedia link above.  In short, they all attend a special school for Donors, where they’re groomed for their ultimate bit-by-bit demise that begins in their twenties. (They’re also involved in a bioethics experiment: the students produce artwork which the teachers scrutinize to determine whether the clones have “souls.”)  Both women fall in love with Tommy, and Ruth nabs him, but is merely using their relationship as a way to lord it over Kathy, who really loves Tommy.  After they’ve left school, they all repair to a farm cottage where, along with other clones, they await the call to begin their donations.  Kathy H., however, trains to be a “carer,” a Donor whose fate is deferred until she shepherds other Donors through their surgeries until “completion.”

I won’t go into detail lest you want to see the movie, but it ends with Ruth and Tommy having completed, but not until Kathy and Tommy reunite in love, and make a failed attempt to delay his last donation so they can spend some time together.  In the end Kathy is left alone, with her own first donation scheduled in a month’s time.

It’s ineffably sad and beautiful (as I left the movie I saw an old dude blubbering in his seat), but, in a way, life affirming. As Kathy looks over a field at the end, contemplating her inevitable slow death by donation, she wonders if those who survive by using her organs really benefit so much.  After all, she muses, “we all complete,” and perhaps even those who live a hundred years want extra time as desperately as she does.  (Carey Mulligan, will, I think, become one of the great actors of our era.)

Perhaps I’m feeling my own mortality, but the film moved me immensely. We all complete, and no matter how ripe our age, it’s never ripe enough.  Instead of living for a nonexistent afterlife, Kathy and Tommy were living for the things that really matter: love, empathy, and human contact.  We are beings who evolved in a social milieu, and unless we’re pathological we need that empathy—that feeling that someone cares about us and will tell us so.  There’s a reason why solitary confinement is considered such a terrible punishment.  And when we’re near completion, what we’ll remember is not how many papers we’ve published, or how much money we’ve made, but the friends and lovers we’ve had along the way.

What’s new at Biologos?

February 28, 2011 • 1:38 pm

Not much, actually. There are three items of marginal interest.

1.  They’ve stopped arguing about Adam and Eve, and now they’re onto the interpretation of Cain and Abel.

2.  There’s a very short video by MIT physicist Ian Hutchinson on what’s wrong with New Atheism (he redefines it as “militant atheism”).  He beefs that it’s not really “new” (yes, we all know that what’s new is not the arguments, but the Gnu’s willingness to engage religion directly, as well as the widespread public acceptance).  A snippet from the video:

One can analyze lots of reasons why there’s this renewed edge to the criticism of religion.  I think there are many different countervailing forces. One certainly shouldn’t rule out what’s been happening in this decade in the confrontation between, for example, Islam and the West, and those kinds of things. And that’s certainly been one factor in provoking these kinds of reactions.  But, by and large, the arguments that are put forward to justify the viewpoint of the militant atheists—they are not particularly new, even though the situation is perhaps new.  The arguments that they put forward mostly are not terribly new—to say that some of their arguments simply don’t work. They don’t make sense philosophically; they don’t make sense scientifically. The arguments in their favor simply aren’t very strong.

By and large, you don’t make New York Times bestseller lists based on proving that somebody is wrong or putting together careful arguments to show that they’re wrong.  That’s perhaps part of their attraction to a certain segment of the population—that is, that’s what makes it a new kind of phenomenon in that it basically shows no respect for religion whatsoever, because militant atheists think that religion is basically a bad thing and needs to be condemned.

Jealousy!  How often does it come down to the fact that Gnu books have been best sellers, while accommodationist tomes linger, unbought, in the “Religion” section?  The curious thing is that Hutchinson seems to assume that we must have respect for religion, and that the lack of that respect it is a very serious failing.  Sadly, the margins of Dr. Hutchinson’s video were too small to contain the New Atheist arguments that supposedly don’t work.   (And, as you might suspect, he’s also had a ride on the Templeton money train.)

3.   Finally, Uncle Karl and Francis Collins have a new book!  It’s called The Language of Science and Faith (the subtitle is Straight Answers to Genuine Questions), and appears to be based largely on the “frequently asked questions” section of BioLogos.  Now Collins wasn’t supposed to be engaged in this Jebus-proselytizing after he took up the reins of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), but I’ve seen assurances (I can’t find them at the moment) that his contribution to the book preceded his NIH directorship.  I doubt, however, whether the volume will do much for his reputation.

Here’s the list of other books bought by those who viewed Collins et Giberson (LOL!):


h/t: Sigmund

Atheist squabble update

February 28, 2011 • 10:15 am

The latest in the Big Kerfuffle about whether Gnu Athesists are mean, and whether we should STFU about the palpable incompatibility between science and faith:

Jason Streitfeld, Ophelia Benson, and Russell Blackford take issue with the notion that the science/faith conflict is too complicated to discuss in the “public square. ”

Jason Rosenhouse agrees with them.

So does Eric Macdonald, who also posted a picture of the “Look at Her” girl!

Over at his website, Jeremy “Look At Her” Stangroom has started a Big Project: he’s trawling through Gnu Atheist blogs, looking desperately for any signs of incivility.  The latest is his earth-shaking discovery that Richard Dawkins once referred to a woman as having a “stupid face.”  That remark was certainly ill-advised, but does it outweigh the reams of perfectly civil writing that Dawkins has done on atheism?  Who among us is free from never having made an uncivil or mocking remark?  (Indeed, Stangroom himself seems to be mocking my penchant for boots.) The issue at hand is whether Gnu Atheists are guilty of continuous, frequent, and visible incivility of a sort that impedes our message—not whether any of us have occasionally mocked someone else or their views.

I hope this isn’t also seen as uncivil, but I fear that Stangroom, in his monomaniacal quest for incivility of even a trivial sort, has lost it.

Why save species?

February 28, 2011 • 6:48 am

Over at the New York Times Opinionator website, writer Richard Conniff has been doing a pretty interesting series of columns on the early naturalists’ search for new animals and plants, “The Species Seekers“.   Yesterday he wrote his final installment, “How species save our lives.”  Conniff makes a good point, and one not widely appreciated:  nearly half of the drugs on pharmacy shelves are derived from naturally occurring species, either directly or via synthesis of compounds identified from nature.  Conniff mentions aspirin (from the willow tree), the cancer drugs vincristine (from the Madagascar periwinkle) and Taxol (from the yew tree), ACE inhibitors for reducing blood pressure (from snake venom), and the immunosuppressant rapamycin (from a soil fungus).

And indeed, it’s worth our trying to publicize these facts, which aren’t widely known, as a powerful argument for conservation.  As Conniff says:

Since this is the final column in this series about how the discovery of species has changed our lives, let me put it as plainly as possible:  Were it not for the work of naturalists, you and I would probably be dead.  Or if alive, we would be far likelier to be crippled, in pain, or otherwise incapacitated.

Who knows how many potential cures lie undiscovered in tropical rain forests, or have already vanished?  And yet I find myself vaguely dissatisifed with “selling” conservation in only this way.  (Medical advance is the only conservation benefit that Conniff mentions in this final column.) Yes, maybe it’s politically expedient to concentrate on the ways that new species could make us healthier and (for the drug companies) wealthier.  But what about the more intangible benefits of nature: the simple fact that it’s there, that it provides us with solace and wonder, and that so much we of what we know about evolution and ecology rests directly on studying animals, plants, and microbes in the wild.  How much poorer we’d be had Darwin not acted as unofficial ship’s naturalist on The Beagle!

As I always tell my classes, humans are wondering animals, and scientists and naturalists help feed that wonder.  But we can’t do it without nature: otherwise we’d be reduced to studying cockroaches and our own intestinal flora.  The study of nature tells us where we come from and to whom we’re related, and provides a myriad of tales—true tales—to feed our imagination.  I’m going to talk about some today in my evolution class. The lecture is on the phenomenon of mimicry, in which animals and plants evolved their appearance, scent, and behavior to resemble something else, either to protect themselves from being eaten or to hide themselves from prey.   Here’s one of my slides—some katydids of the genus Mimetica, from South America, which have evolved to resemble leaves, complete with stems, veins, and even “rotten spots” (click to enlarge):

And here is a jumping spider (on bottom of leaf) that mimics army weaver ants (on top).  Note the astonishing resemblance, with the spider having evolved color, body shape, and fake eyespots to resemble those of the ants.  It even holds up its front pair of legs (notice that the spider has eight legs, in contrast to the ants’ six), to look like antennae.  The spider’s appearance almost certainly evolved via natural selection to give it protection from predators like birds, who avoid the swarms of ants.  It’s amazing what that blind, mindless, and unguided process can do.

Evolution and ecology have given us thousands of tales like this—and they’re not just isolated anecdotes, for they feed into powerful scientific theories.  It was the accretion of anecdotes, after all, that inspired Darwin to propose his theory of evolution by natural selection.  And work on mimicry, in the late 19th century, provided some of the most powerful and telling evidence for natural selection.  Let us not forget that the early naturalists weren’t much interested in the practical or medicinal value of species, but were inspired largely by that driving force of science, simple curiosity.  It is that curiosity, expressed in both author and reader, that has rightly made Richard Dawkins a best-selling author.  His books are about the beauty and marvel of evolution, and barely say a thing about its practical benefits.

So much of our interest in nature is selfish: how can it make us richer or healthier?  And thus the practical appeal of conservation.  But it would have been nice for Conniff to at least mention that nature is a huge and engrossing book of true stories, and a page is ripped from that book every time a species goes extinct. What right do we have to defile nature’s library?  Does our evolved big brain, and our ability to overcome nearly every other species, give us the right to wreak whatever havoc we wish on nature for our own benefit?  What about those defenseless frogs, trees, and beetles?

Morality is evolving over time, so that many people now see it as immoral to cause needless pain in animals.  We don’t use chimps in medical research if macaques will do, and won’t use macaques if mice will do.  People are rising up against battery chickens.  It would be nice if we could extend that morality to ecosystems as well, recognizing that they have a right to exist simply because their species are precisely as evolved as we are.

We have a winner

February 28, 2011 • 5:45 am

But just one, thank goodness.  Here are the Oscar winners:

Best picture: The King’s Speech

Best director: Tom Hooper, The King’s Speech

Best actress: Natalie Portman, Black Swan

Best actor:  Colin Firth, The King’s Speech

Best actress, supporting role: Melissa Leo, The Fighter

Best actor, supporting role:  Christian Bale, The Fighter

Tie breaker; Cinematography:  Inception, Wally Pfister

Fortunately, I didn’t have to resort to tie-breakers, as reader Lee Phelan got all of them right, including “Cinematography”.   Esra Resnick got all six winners, but lost on the tie-breaker.

Lee, contact me at my email (easily found on the internet) to receive your prize.   And if I’ve missed some winners (not hard since it’s 6 a.m. and I haven’t had coffee), do correct me.

So many of the guesses were nearly identical, but fell down in two categories, Best Director, and, especially, Best Actress in a Supporting Role (many people guessed Helena Bonham Carter from The King’s Speech or Haille Steinfeld from True Grit). The winner, Melissa Leo from The Fighter, was notable for dropping the f-bomb in her acceptance speech.

Here’s an Oscar for Lee, more on this one later:


Oscar contest

February 27, 2011 • 6:15 am

UPDATE: Because there are so many obvious front-runners, I’ve added one more choice to break any ties.  Please choose a winner for “cinematography” (see list at bottom).   You don’t need to guess this one correctly to win, but if several people hit the six other categories correctly, ties will be broken by correct guesses in cinematography.  If you’ve already voted, please make another post adding your choice for this category.  If you haven’t, you can always choose the same slate of six that a previous poster has chosen, but add a cinematography choice.

_________

The Oscars will be awarded tonight.  This is the first year that I haven’t seen any of the movies nominated for best picture.  Instead of tendering my opinion, then, I’ll let you give yours.

For an autographed copy of WEIT, you must correctly guess the Oscar winners in all six categories below. In case of a tie, the first correct answer wins.  The contest closes at 8 pm EST, and members of my family (that includes you, Steven!) are ineligible.

Opinions about the movies and actors are, of course, welcome.

Best Picture
“Black Swan,” Mike Medavoy, Brian Oliver and Scott Franklin, Producers
“The Fighter” David Hoberman, Todd Lieberman and Mark Wahlberg, Producers
“Inception,” Emma Thomas and Christopher Nolan, Producers
“The Kids Are All Right,” Gary Gilbert, Jeffrey Levy-Hinte and Celine Rattray, Producers
“The King’s Speech,” Iain Canning, Emile Sherman and Gareth Unwin, Producers
“127 Hours,” Christian Colson, Danny Boyle and John Smithson, Producers
“The Social Network,” Scott Rudin, Dana Brunetti, Michael De Luca and Ceán, Producers
“Toy Story 3” Darla K. Anderson, Producer
“True Grit” Scott Rudin, Ethan Coen and Joel Coen, Producers
“Winter’s Bone” Anne Rosellini and Alix Madigan-Yorkin, Producers

Actor in a Leading Role
Javier Bardem in “Biutiful”
Jeff Bridges in “True Grit”
Jesse Eisenberg in “The Social Network”
Colin Firth in “The King’s Speech”
James Franco in “127 Hours”

Actor in a Supporting Role
Christian Bale in “The Fighter”
John Hawkes in “Winter’s Bone”
Jeremy Renner in “The Town”
Mark Ruffalo in “The Kids Are All Right”
Geoffrey Rush in “The King’s Speech”

Actress in a Leading Role
Annette Bening in “The Kids Are All Right”
Nicole Kidman in “Rabbit Hole”
Jennifer Lawrence in “Winter’s Bone”
Natalie Portman in “Black Swan”
Michelle Williams in “Blue Valentine”

Actress in a Supporting Role
Amy Adams in “The Fighter”
Helena Bonham Carter in “The King’s Speech”
Melissa Leo in “The Fighter”
Hailee Steinfeld in “True Grit”
Jacki Weaver in “Animal Kingdom”

Director
“Black Swan,” Darren Aronofsky
“The Fighter,” David O. Russell
“The King’s Speech,” Tom Hooper
“The Social Network,” David Fincher
“True Grit,” Joel Coen and Ethan Coen

TIEBREAKER:

Cinematography

“Black Swan” Matthew Libatique
“Inception” Wally Pfister
“The King’s Speech” Danny Cohen
“The Social Network” Jeff Cronenweth
“True Grit” Roger Deakins

(And for winners of the kitteh contest, my apologies for being dilatory about posting your autographed books; they’ll be in the mail Monday.)

The last voyage of Discovery

February 27, 2011 • 6:06 am

The space shuttle Discovery is on its last (and 39th) mission, ferrying supplies and a robotic astronaut to the International Space Station (ISS).  Not many of us are following it intently—certainly not I!—but we might pause to reflect on how amazing it is that an evolved primate can do something like this.  I am still staggered at the thought that humans constructed vehicles, from the materials of the Earth, to take us to the moon and back.

I still remember the first American in space: Alan Shepherd, who flew for only 15 minutes in 1961.  The country went wild, and even wilder when John Glenn did three orbits the next year.  Now we’re jaded, hardly giving a thought to the notion that there’s a pack of humans continuously orbiting the Earth,  who are sporadically visited and brought supplies by other people in a reusable rocket.

They say that the ISS hasn’t yielded many tangible results, yet I still mourn its demise.  I still remember John Kennedy’s speech at Rice University in 1962, and these words, which gave us chills but stiffened our spines:

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. . .

The Atlantic has a page with lots of nice NASA photos of the shuttle, its preparation, and the astronauts. I’ll put up three.

Here’s the shuttle last October, being moved to the Vehicle Assembly building to be joined to its rocket boosters (click this and other photos to enlarge):

A mockup Discovery cockpit, used for training the astronauts:

A view of the shuttle from the ISS after undocking on April 17 of last year.  The island below is the Isla de Providencia, off of Nicaragua.

“nickg_uk” posted this twitpic of the shuttle about to dock with the ISS—it was taken in the UK with a regular Canon camera and a 500 mm lens:

Over in Manchester, England, Matthew Cobb, his family, and his cat Ollie watched the shuttle without binocs or a telescope; Matthew files this report:

We watched it an hour later (after docking) from the garden – slowly moving dot, just like an ordinary satellite, except this one has people in it! Ollie was v confused about us being out in the dark at night so hared up the cherry tree to join in. Girls were more interested in speculating about what he might be thinking (how could you tell?) than gazing in wonder at ISS…

This is about as good as it gets these days – after all we haven’t been able to look at the moon and say there were men up there since 1972! That’s just crap. I want my money back. 21st century is not what it was supposed to be!

Photographer Mark Humpage took this photograph of the space shuttle and ISS travelling together over the UK; it’s the large streak to the left.  This photo (reproduced with permission) is obviously a time-lapse, and was taken with an 8mm fisheye lens.


Here’s a frame from the ISS, showing Discovery when it’s docked.  The docking took place yesterday at 2:15 EST.

What’s it like inside the ISS? Here’s a 7-minute video tour (warning: the first 2.5 minutes include annoying music):

You can see a cool video of where the ISS is right now and what the astronauts would see if the weather were clear.  NASA’s also has an official site that keeps you up to date about the shuttle mission.

And here’s a 21-second video of the aurora borealis taken from the ISS.  Fantastic!

Finally, what would a space station be these days without Twitter?  ISS commander Scott Kelly has a Twitter feed; he often posts pictures of Earth taken from the Station, asking viewers to identify the location.

h/t: Matthew Cobb