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Primer is not your average time travel movie.

It’s so confusing, so convoluted, it virtually requires a second (or even third) viewing to simply decipher it, much less enjoy it.  That being said, I also found it fascinating, and it filled my head with questions and ideas for weeks after I first saw it.  You should go out and rent it.

But I say again: it’s not your average time travel movie.

Most movies involving time travel are not really about time travel itself; rather, time travel is a nifty plot device used to address some greater issue of fate or destiny.  Just think about it: in most time travel movies, the time device is already invented and perfected, and time travel itself is a breeze — an instantaneous push of a button away, and the mechanics of time travel are simple and straightforward.  Sure, there are some mentions of temporal or causal paradoxes, but in the end the real focus of the movie — its eventual narrative purpose — is to establish some grander notion of fate or causaility, such as

• all important events are pre-destined and cannot be changed in any meaningful way: think Terminator 1 and 3, or 12 Monkeys; or
• all important events should not be changed in any meaningful way, as alterations tend make things ever worse: think Back to the Future 1 and 2, or The Butterfly Effect, or Running Against Time.

In Primer, however, doesn’t play by those rules.

In it, the protagonists, two engineers called Abe and Aaron, discover time travel entirely by accident, a by-product of their otherwise unsuccessful attempt a building a room-temperature superconductor in their garage.  Their time machine isn’t glamorous: it’s neither an ornate brass-and-crystal armchair nor hot-wired into a DeLorean, but rather is an uncomfortable smallish box filled with argon and built of metal and PVC piping. 

Moreover, the mechanics of time travel in Primer isn’t glamorous either: you don’t simply pick a date and zap instaneously to it; rather, you can only back in time, only to the point at which the time machine was first activated, and — and this is the kicker — you have to wait for the time to “unpass.”

That is, if you wanted to go back in time to, say, six hours ago, you’d first have to make sure you actually thought beforehand to power up the time machine six hours previously and, assuming you did that, you’d then have to crawl into the little time machine box and sit in that cramped little thing and wait for those six hours to “rewind” — and assuming to missed the six hour mark, you’d need to stay in the box an additional six hours just to get out of it at the point at which you entered it.  …And of course, if you actually did do everything right, then (oddly enough), the minute you first power up the time machine you’d actually meet your six-hour future self immediately exiting the machine, which explains why the guys in the movie actually set a timer-delay on their time machines.

Confused? 

After my first viewing, so was I, but maybe this will help.

Similarly, whereas most time travel movies usually follow the perspective of the protagonists during their journeys through time — which means that the audience has as much knowledge of events as the main characters themselves — Primer does not do this.  It instead shifts timelines repeatedly and without warning, and the effect is confusing and unsettling.  For example, as  the scene in which Abe explains the functionality of the box to Aaron, it becomes apparent to the audience that the Abe who is talking is actually from the future, and that the events unfolding are in fact from a separate timeline, one from Abe’s past.  Even better, later in the movie, we find that the entire course of events has shifted into a new timeline — the past of a third character — afterwhich we come to realize that the original “explaining the functionality” scene was actually from a third timeline, one in which Aaron, supposed to be from Abe’s past, is in fact from the future, so that the entire scene is actually from Aaron’s past.

Confused?

After my second viewing, so was I, but maybe this will help (although it will does contain lots of spoilers!).

And when all is said and done, when the movie finally ends, it makes no grand point about fate or destiny, nor any assertions about the sanctity or unchanagibility of the past.  In fact, by the end of the movie, Abe and Aaron take away entirely different perspectives on the past and their responsibility to it, leaving the audience to decide who is right and who is wrong… and who is who, too, since the final timeline of the movie is populated by (at least) two Abes and three Aarons.

Confused?

After my third viewing, so was I, but… well… I got used to being confused.

In any event: Primer is an unexpectedly good science fiction movie that skimps on neither the science nor the fiction, and I recommend it if you’ve got time to spare.

No pun intended.

Shaggy Dog Story Archive

I love a good joke, and I love a bad pun, so I am particularly fond of “shaggy dog stories” and “feghoots,” the latter being good jokes based on a narrative punctuated by an exceptionally bad pun.   For example, a well-known (and uncharacteristcally brief) feghoot is the Story of the Separated Twins:

A young mother gave birth to twin boys, but being poor she had to give them up for adoption. One boy went to a family in Egypt, where they named him Ahmul. The other boy went to a family in Spain, where they named him Juan.

When Juan grew up, he decided to send a picture to his birth mother. When the picture arrived, the mother was at first ecstatic, but then suddenly started to cry. When her husband asked what was wrong, she said, “Oh, I wish a had a picture of our other son too!”

The husband smiled.  “Honey, they’re twins. If you’ve seen Juan, you’ve seen Ahmul.”

A very famous (and more traditionally lenghty) example, one invariably told by my friend The Glick at social gatherings involving alcohol, is the Story of Larry Lobster and Sam Clam:

Larry Lobster and Sam Clam where best friends. They did everything together. The only difference between them is that Larry was the nicest Lobster ever and Sam was, well, he was not so good. Larry and Sam did so much together that they even died together. Larry went to heaven and Sam, of course, went to hell.

Larry was doing well in heaven and one day St. Peter came up to him and said, “Larry, you know you are the nicest clam we ever had up here. Everyone likes you but you seem to be a bit depressed. Tell me what is bothering you, maybe I can help.”

Larry said, “Well, don’t get me wrong, sir. I like it up here and everything, but I really miss my good friend Sam Clam. We used to do everything together and I really miss him a lot.”

St. Peter looked at Larry with pity and said to him, “I tell you what, I can arrange it so that you can go down to hell tomorrow and visit Sam all day. How would that sound?”

This made Larry very happy and he got up bright and early the next morning and grabbed his wings, his harp, and his halo and got in the elevator to hell. When the doors opened he was met by Sam. They hugged each other and they were off. You see in Hell Sam owned a disco. The spent the day there together and had a great time. At the end of the day Larry and Sam went back to the elevator together said their goodbyes and Larry got back in the elevator and went up to heaven. He stepped off the elevator and was greeted by St. Peter who blocked the doorway to heaven. He looked at Larry and said, “Larry Lobster, didn’t you forget something?”

Larry looked around him and found his halo and his wings and his… “Oh no!” he gasped. “I left my harp in Sam Clam’s Disco.”

I myself am especially fond of mathematically influenced feghoots (see here and here and here and here, for example), but I love the utter pointlessness of the stories involved to get to the painfully bad punchline that is the hallmark of any good shaggy dog story.

Well, if you’re a fan of feghoots or shaggy dog stories in general, then Tarzan’s Tripes Forever: the Web’s First Shaggy Dog Story Archive is for you.  At last I checked, there are over two thousand of these stories, including the aforementioned Separted Twins (story 115) and a variation on Larry and Sam (story 155).  Let me conclude with story 656, the Story of Nothing:

A man travelling through the Orient passed a small courtyard and heard voices murmuring.  He went in and saw an altar with a large stone O in the middle.  White-robed people were kneeling before the altar, softly chanting “Nil… nil… nil…” while ceremonial priests sang prayers to The Great Nullity and The Blessed Emptiness.

Eventually, the man turned to a white-robed observer beside him and asked “Is Nothing sacred?

One of my friends just returned from two weeks in Germany, a trip taken officially under the auspices of a week-long mathematical conference, but unofficially to drink fantastic beer served glasses roughly the size of a Volkswagon.

Cause and effect

“Those Germans sure have a racket,” she commented on her return.

“How so?” I asked.

“Well, you can buy beer everywhere there — in taverns, in restaurants, in malls, at church, you name it.  Excellent beer in giant glasses.  And cheap, too.”

“How is that a racket?” I asked, thinking that such a description universally applied to the concept heaven might cause one to re-evaluate one’s stance on atheism.

She smiled wryly. “Because in Germany, you have to pay to use the toilet.”

1 Bild = 1 Eintausend-Worter

She also sent me a picture of the sign for a German lingerie shop that translates surprisingly well.

I’m taking a weeklong class on D2L, which is a “course management system” that the South Dakota regential school system is implementing in place of WebCT.  The seminar is populated by other faculty here at Komplexify U that are planning on using D2L in the upcoming semester, partly because it’s a new pedagogical tool they can use to reach students, but mostly because they get paid a summer bonus to do so. 

As a result, the class is chock full of folks who, beyond being unfamiliar with a web-based software interface, in fact seem to have never seen a computer before.  This class is like running a relay in which your teammates have not only failed to stretch and settle down into the starter’s block, but in fact are still learning to tie their laces.  To wit, I submit the following moment from class.

The instructor has just logged everyone into their “sandbox” account, an ardulous task taking almost forty minutes.  Once everyone is logged in, she shows off the welcome page and points out that it is divided into a number of cells that resemble the “windows” of Microsoft Windows.  “In D2L,” she says “these windows — the cells that you interact with to edit the site’s content — are called widgets.”

“Why are they called widgets?” asks a student.

“Well,” the instructor replies helpfully, “a widget refers to anything that adds content to a web page that is not static.  That’s technical mumbo-jumbo, though.  Suffice it for us here for D2L, a widget just refers to any of the windows you see on the page.

“Why not call them windows, then?” another student asks.

The instructor smiles.  “Because in D2L itself, they’re called widgets…”

A third student quickly interrupts. “Well, can we think of them as windows here instead of widgets?”

“Sure,” says the instructor hesitantly.

“Aha!” he announces triumphantly.  “Then why don’t we just call them windows here instead of widgets too?”  The student sits back with the air of a man who has just determined he can checkmate Gary Kasparov in three moves.

A pained expression brifefly flits accross the instructor’s face.

“I wouldn’t recommend it,” she suggests.  “When you go to set up your class page, you won’t see any options for editing the information in a window in D2L, but there are options to edit the information in different widgets, so…”

The first student blows a disgusted raspberry.  “This makes no sense.  Why not call them windows if they’re windows instead of wedgies or whatever you called them…”

“Wijjitz,” the second student adds helpfully.

“Right,  wijjitz, whatever,” grumbles the first.  “Stupid name for a window.”

“Why widgets?” ponders a fourth student, at which point a fifth student, evidently an economics professor, pontificates for ten minutes on the etymological origins of the term as a generic place-holder for manufactured goods, which in turn engenders a further forty minutes of heated debate on (in this order) the flaws of the capitalist system, the fault for the current state of the economy, the general political listlessness of the university community, and finally gun control, during which, unobserved by most of the class, the instructor hung herself with a makeshift noose fashioned out of her laptop’s power cord.

Tonight’s episode of The Colbert Report was awesome.

Venn-gence

The episode included the following graphic

as a justification for why “America is the best, greatest country God has ever given Man on the face of the Earth,” because all topical humor is that much funnier with Venn diagrams.

Of interest is a relatively nice pair of descriptions of relative complements, including the assertions that

(it’s been coasting for years), and

although I am somewhat interested in knowing what elements exist in the set ( [ Best countries ] U [ Great countries ] ) \ [Earth ], although perhaps that was addressed in 1991 by Star Trek; I’ll have to check my references.

Logic

It’s also worth noting that Colbert asserts that Proof by repitition is an irrefutable fact of logic, which makes a fine contribution to the list of other commonly accepted proof techniques, including

Proof by vigorous handwaving.
Works well in a classroom or seminar setting.

Proof by forward reference.
Reference is usually to a forthcoming paper of the author, which is often not as forthcoming as at first.

Proof by funding.
How could three different government agencies be wrong?

Proof by example.
The author gives only the case n = 2 and suggests that it contains most of the ideas of the general proof.

Proof by omission.
Examples include: “The reader may easily supply the details,” or “The other 253 cases are analogous,” etc.

Proof by deferral.
“We’ll prove this later in the course.”

Proof by picture.
A more convincing form of proof by example. Combines well with proof by omission.

Proof by intimidation.
“Trivial.”

Proof by cumbersome notation.
Best done with access to at least four alphabets and special symbols.

Proof by exhaustion.
An issue or two of a journal devoted to your proof is useful.

Proof by obfuscation.
A long plotless sequence of true and/or meaningless syntactically related statements.

Proof by wishful citation.
The author cites the negation, converse, or generalization of a theorem from the literature to support his claims.

Proof by eminent authority.
“I saw Karp in the elevator and he said it was probably NP-complete.”

Proof by personal communication.
“Eight-dimensional colored cycle stripping is NP-complete [Karp, personal communication].”

Proof by reduction to the wrong problem.
“To see that infinite-dimensional colored cycle stripping is decidable, we reduce it to the halting problem.”

Proof by reference to inaccessible literature.
The author cites a simple corollary of a theorem to be found in a privately circulated memoir of the Slovenian Philological Society, 1883.

Proof by importance.
A large body of useful consequences all follow from the proposition in question.

Proof by accumulated evidence.
Long and diligent search has not revealed a counterexample.

Proof by cosmology.
The negation of the proposition is unimaginable or meaningless. Popular for proofs of the existence of God.

Proof by mutual reference.
In reference A, Theorem 5 is said to follow from Theorem 3 in reference B, which is shown to follow from Corollary 6.2 in reference C, which is an easy consequence of Theorem 5 in reference A.

Proof by metaproof.
A method is given to construct the desired proof. The correctness of the method is proved by any of these techniques.

Proof by vehement assertion.
It is useful to have some kind of authority relation to the audience.

Proof by ghost reference.
Nothing even remotely resembling the cited theorem appears in the reference given.

Proof by semantic shift.
Some of the standard but inconvenient definitions are changed for the statement of the result.

Proof by appeal to intuition.
Cloud-shaped drawings frequently help here.

Cookies!

“Me have crazy times in 70s and 80s.  Me like the Robert Downey Jr. of cookies!” –Cookie Monster

This might possibly be my favorite quote ever.