movies

Worthwhile Reading & Viewing

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Early movies, with remarkable quality, going back to the 1890s.  The Biograph process used 68mm film, which offered much better quality than the 35mm film used in the Edison process.

Ships and trees. Wooden shipbuilding and its dependence on forests.

Chinese agricultural drone pilots and the low-altitude economy.

Empathy is generally thought to be a good thing…but can increased empathy lead to increased political polarization?

Meditation and mindness are also thought of as benign…but can they have a dark side?

Creativity and mate choice.

Movies Featuring Courage

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Ruxandra Teslo wrote an interesting Substack post:  Intellectual Courage as the Scarcest Resource, which sparked a good discussion in comments. Which got me thinking:  What are some good films that feature courage, especially moral and intellectual courage?  Here are a few that I think fit, some of which I’ve seen, some of which I haven’t seen but have heard about, and some suggested by others to whom I asked this question.

The White Rose, 1982 German film about the anti-Nazi resistance group of that name. There have been several other good movies about the group and its members, especially Sophie Scholl, but this film is in a class all its own. It portrays the members of the group not as plaster saints but as the kids they actually were–albeit kids with astonishing levels of moral, intellectual, and physical courage. The film never made it to streaming, but VHS tapes and maybe DVDs are findable.  In German, with English subtitles.

There are several similarly-named films: this is the one with Lena Stolze as Sophie Scholl. Really, very highly recommended.

We The Living, a 1942 Italian movie based on Ayn Rand’s novel of the same name (which IMO was the best of her works from a literary & characterization standpoint).  The film was weirdly approved by the fascist censors but then called back when they belatedly realized it was broadly anti-totalitarian, not only anti-communist.  Very good film, except for the frequent display of white subtitles against a snow background…of course, you don’t need the subtitles if you can understand Italian.

A French Village--a French TV series set in a small town during the years of the Occupation. It does not make all French people out to be heroes, by any means, and portrays the difficulties and ambiguities that can exist in such situations, along with some portraits of genuine heroism.  I reviewed the series here, and Sgt Mom also reviewed it.  (Apologies for the weird and irritating typography, it is a WordPress problem which has recently shown up.)

Fueled–A strange Japanese movie, based on the fictionalized story of a man who built an oil-trading business from scratch, beginning when oil was a minor factor in Japan. The film & the book it is based on are apparently favorites of the militarist Right in Japan, and, indeed, there is no hint of an apology for WWII and its atrocities.  Still, I thought it was a good story about courage and determination in business.

(I saw this movie a few years ago, and was reminded of it by Biden’s policy of drawing down the Strategic Petroleum Reserve–which reminded me of the movie’s image of the Japanese oil people, after the end of the war, going down to the very bottom of the Japanese Navy’s deep storage facility to see what was left.)

Devotion–based on the true story of Jesse Brown, a black man who became a US Navy fighter pilot in 1946…and his (white) wingman, Thomas Hudner, who took incredible risks during the Korean War by landing his Corsair in enemy territory in a rescue attempt.  I reviewed the film last year.

No Highway in the Sky, a 1951 film based on the novel by Neville Shute.  A metallurgist, Theodore Honey, calculates that a new British passenger aircraft, the Rutland Reindeer, will be destroyed by metal fatigue of the tail after exactly 1440 flight hours on any particular airplane.  A vibration test-to-destruction is underway with an experimental model of the tail, in order to determine whether or not the airplane really needs to be removed from service,  but commercially-operated Reindeers are building up hours and some will reach the possibly-deadly number of 1440 before the test can be completed.

A crash occurs with an airplane which has flown 1407 hours, but the pilot is blamed.  Honey, the metallurgist, is sent to Labrador to examine the wreckage–traveling on a Reindeer which already has 1422 hours.  They do arrive safely in Newfoundland for a fuel stop…what, if anything, should Honey do before the airplane departs for the next leg of its flight to Labrador?  Certainly, not be on the flight is one option…but there are others, which will have quite negative consequences for him if he is wrong about the metal fatigue.

The movie was surely inspired by the disasters that hit the first commercial jet transport, the Comet, and has resonance with Boeing and the 737 Max MCAS failures.

12 Angry Men.  This 1952 movie, which I’ve somehow never seen, is about a jury in a murder trial, in which one member holds out for the acquittal which he believes is the right thing to do, against overwhelming pressure from the other jury members.  An extensive review is here.

The site that the above link goes through is focused entirely on heroism, in fiction, legend, and real life, and the authors have written some books on the subject.  I see that they describe Harry Potter as the ultimate fictional hero….they’re talking about the books, there have also been Harry Potter movies, has anyone seen them?  If so, any opinions?

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Worthwhile Reading

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Academia Versus Civilization, at Quillette

A talk by  Jensen Huang, founder & CEO of NVDIA, at Stanford.   Very, very good.   Related post and discussion.

Ruxandra Teslo  notes that student protestors in the 1960s wanted less bureaucracy and more freedom…today, most of them seem to want less freedom and more bureaucracy.

It’s not the phones, says Marc Andreessen, referring to the psychological dysfunction that seems to afflict so many of today’s young people.   He’s responding to a post by  Jash Dholani, who says “the young aren’t driving, f******, and drinking because high energy activity is fundamentally incompatible with modern ethics. If you’re always told to be harmless (but also guilty!) then your innate will to power withers. You vegetate. Man, the greatest animal, turned to plant.”

Elon Musk  says:

Many movies exist about a lone inventor in a garage having a eureka moment, but almost none about manufacturing, so it’s underappreciated by the public. Compared to the insane pain of reaching high-volume, positive-margin production, prototypes are a piece of cake.

(Not many such movies,   but one that comes to mind is  Valley of Decision, a 1945 film centered around family-owned steel mill in Pittsburgh.   I reviewed the movie, and the book on which it is based,  here.   Also, there’s Executive Suite, a film from 1954 which involves executive succession at a furniture manufacturer…mentioned in a batch of reviews that I posted  here)

In a comment at an earlier version of this post at Ricochet, Gary McVey noted that

“the eastern Europeans (in other words, the Communists, if not always the Soviets) were pretty good about trying to publicize the drama of start-up, the challenges of production. When we mock those days for films “about a couple falling in love at the tractor factory”, we are mocking something that, if you actually see the films, is in fact objectively a good thing. Some of them, by the Poles, Hungarians, and Czechs, were good. The best of them had little or nothing to do with Marxist theories, just the everyday achievements of construction, engineering, and metalwork that sated Western audiences found dull as dishwater.

A tractor factory’s a good thing to have, if you care to eat. There was nothing contemptible about making movies about it.”

Ashwin Varma  argues that the usual narrative about WWII industrial production is defective, in that it does not give sufficient credit to the role of government.

The Department of Education embarked on a project to modernize and simplify the process for applying for student aid.    It is not going well.

The Biden administration  is supporting the reopening of a nuclear plant in Michigan.   As Stephen Green says, it’s the right thing to do, but the Democrats doing it reeks of desperation.

gCaptain  is a good source on the Baltimore bridge disaster and on all matters nautical.

In my post Visit to a Noteworthy Robot, I described a trip to a store equipped with Amazon’s no-check-out system.   Now, Amazon has decided to drop this system in most of the stores in which it is being used…problem is that too much human intervention (1000 people in India reviewing images that the AI can’t reliably interpret) to be cost-effective.

Cultural Theory of Mind and the consequences of not having it, especially the foreign-policy consequences.

Interesting chart: the ratio of commodity prices to the S&P 500.

An argument that the theft of national sovereignty at the Euro level was orchestrated entirely by legal elites – not political, much less economic, ones.

What kind of people tend to block (what they think are) sources of misinformation?

GE’s energy business has now been spun off as a separate corporation, GE Vernova.   They seem to be pretty well-positioned in nuclear; it will be interesting to see how much emphasis they put on this sector vis-a-vis their gas and wind businesses.

Speaking of nuclear, here’s a chart on the temperature ranges required for various industrial processes versus the temperature ranges available from various types of reactors.

Movie Review: WarGames

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I want somebody on the phone before I kill 20 million people.

This 1983 movie is about a potential nuclear war instigated by runaway information technology–a military system inadvertently triggered by a teenage hacker.   I thought it might be interesting to re-watch in the light of today’s concerns about artificial intelligence and the revived fears of nuclear war.

The film opens in an underground launch control center, where a new crew is just coming on duty…and as just as they are getting themselves settled, they receive a Launch message.   They quickly open the envelope which contains the authentication code…and the message is verified as a valid launch order, originating from proper authority.

To launch, both officers must turn their keys simultaneously. But one balks: unwilling to commit the ultimate violence based solely on a coded message, he wants to talk to a human being who can tell him what’s going on.   But no one outside the underground capsule can be reached by either landline or radio.

But there is no war: it was a drill–an assessment of personnel reliability. The results indicated that about 20% of the missile crews refused   to launch.   A proposal is made: take the men out of the loop–implement technology to provide direct launch of the missiles from headquarters, put the control at the highest level, where it belongs.   Against the advice of the relevant general, the proposal is taken to the President, and the missile crews are replaced by remote-control technology. There will be no more launches cancelled by the qualms of missile officers.

At this point, we meet the Matthew Broderick character, David Lightman.   He is a highly intelligent but not very responsible high school student, whose his first scene involves smarting off in class and getting in trouble. David is an early hacker, with an Imsai computer: he rescues his grades by logging on to the school’s computer system and changing them.   (He does the same for his not-quite-yet girlfriend, Jennifer, played by Ally Sheedy)

Searching for a pre-release bootleg copy of a computer game he wants to play, David happens on what looks like a game site: it has menu items for checkers, chess, tic-tac-toe, and something called Falken’s Maze.   Also, a game called Global Thermonuclear War.

To play that last game, David needs to know the password, and thinks he may be able to guess it if he can learn some personal data about the game’s creator, a researcher named Steven Falken.   Library research shows Falken as a man who appeals to David very much, not only because of his scholarly attainments but also his obvious deep love of his wife and child–both of whom are reported to have been killed in an auto accident.   Research also shows that Falken himself has also died.

Using a very simple clue (the name of Falken’s son), David is able to gain entry to the system, to select which side he wants to play (the Soviet Union), and to start the game.   He launches what he thinks is a simulated attack on the United States…a very large-scale attack. He has no idea that the events of the simulation are somehow bleeding over into the live warning system, and appear at the NORAD center as an actual Soviet attack.

It gets worse.   Although Falken turns out to be still alive and living under an alias…and he and David are able to convince the NORAD officers that what they are seeing on their screen is not real and to cancel any retaliatory stroke, the control computer at NORAD, a system known as WOPR, continues playing its game…and, with humans at the launch sites taken out of the loop, begins trying to initiate a strike at the Soviet Union with live nuclear missiles.

The above is just a basic summary of the action of the movie.   There’s plenty wrong with it from a timeline and a technology viewpoint…for example, WOPR in the movie can launch missiles by repetitively trying launch codes at high speed until it finds one that works–pretty sure no one would have designed such a cryptographic system in such a simplistic way, even in 1983. But the movie works very well as cinema, the characters are interesting and the acting is good–definitely worth seeing.   But how might this movie relate to the current concerns about artificial intelligence?

In discussing the movie, I mentioned that the NORAD staff originally thought that what they saw on their screen was real, even though it was really just a simulation.   Which reminds me of a real-life event that happened to the cruise ship Royal Majesty back in 1995. The crew was navigating using GPS: the screen showed a very convincing portrayal of the ship’s position with surrounding land, water depth, obstacles, and navigational aids such as buoys and markers. But the portrayal was wrong.   The GPS antenna cable had come loose, and the GPS unit had gone into Dead Reckoning mode, simply calculating the current position based on the last known GPS position carried forward based on course and speed. Which was bound to become increasingly inaccurate over time.

Asaf Degani, in his book Taming Hal, describes the scene:

As the gray sky turned black veil, the phosphorus-lit radar map with its neat lines and digital indication seemed clearer and more inviting than the dark world outside. As part of a sophisticated integrated bridge system, the radar map had everythingfrom a crisp radar picture, to ship position, buoy renderings, and up to the last bit of data anyone could wantuntil it seemed that the entire world lived and moved transparently, inside that little green screen. Using this compelling display, the second officer was piloting a phantom ship on an electronic lie, and nobody called the bluff.

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Nautical Book Review: To the Last Salute, by Georg von Trapp (rerun)

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If you’ve seen  The Sound of Musicand who hasn’t?you’ll remember Captain von Trapp.  The real Captain’s real-life children were not thrilled with the way he was portrayed in the movieaccording to them, he was by no means that rigid disciplinarian who summoned the children with a bosun’s whistle and required them to line up in military formation.  (The bosun’s whistle was real, but only for communication purposes on the large estate…no lining-up involved.)

The movie was indeed correct that Captain von Trapp was a former naval officer whose services were much desired by the Nazis after their takeover of Germany and, later, Austria…and that he wanted absolutely nothing to do with them. His memoir,  To the Last Salute, was originally published in German in 1935 and later translated into French; an English translation is now also available   This post is a rerun of my earlier review, inspired by a WSJ article about the movie and its continuing large fanbase.

Captain von Trapp could not be called a brilliant writer, but he does achieve some nice descriptive and reflective passages. Here, he is returning from a patrol very early in the First World War, when he was commanding a torpedo boat:

We had been out all night searching for enemy ships that had been reported, but once again, had found nothing.  Far out in the Adriatic we had investigated, looked, and looked, and again came back disappointed through the “Incoronate,” the rocky, barren island,s that extend in front of the harbor at Sebenico…These islands look bleak; nevertheless, years ago people found them and still live there…It is a heavenly trip there between the islands with the many large and small inlets swarming with fish. But it is most beautiful in the wind still nights, which are uniquely animated.

From one place or another, red and white lights flash on and off. They are the beacons that flash their warnings to the ships. Out of the many inlets merge innumerable fishermen’s boats. Some are under sail, hauling big nets; others, sculled about almost silently by heavy steering rudders, search the water with strong lanterns…As they put out to sea, the people always sing their ancient folk songs: ballads with countless verses, wild war cries, soft, wistful love songs…

The war broke into this peaceful world. Traveling between the islands changed overnight…The singing has become silent, for fishing is forbidden, and the men are fighting in the war…Mines lie between the islands.  At any moment an enemy periscope, or a plane with bombs, could appear, and the nights have become exceptionally interesting; there are no more beacons. The war has extinguished them.

Soon, Captain von Trapp was reassigned to command of a submarine,the U-5.  This boat was one of a type that was extremely primitive, even by WWI standards. Propulsion for running on the surface was not a diesel but a gasoline engine, and gasoline fumes were a constant headache, often in a very literal sense.

The Captain seems not to have thought a great deal about the rights and wrongs of the war.  As a professional, at this stage he also felt no animus toward the men it was his duty to attack; quite the contrary. Here, after sinking a French cruiser:

I quickly scan the horizon. Is there absolutely no escort ship? Did they let the ship travel all alone? Without a destroyer? WIthout a torpedo boat? No, there is nothing in sight, only five lifeboats adrift in the water.

After discussing the matter with his exec and determining that there was no feasible way to take the survivors on board:

With a heavy heart, I order the engines to be turned on, and I set a course for the Gulf of Cattaro. “They let our men from the Zenta drown, too,” I hear one of the men say.  The man is right, but I cannot bear to hear that yet.  With a sudden movement I turn away. I feel a choking in my throat. I want to be alone.

I feel as if something were strangling me…So that’s what war looks like! There behind me hundreds of seamen have drowned, men who have done me no harm, men who did their duty as I myself have done, against whom I have nothing personally; with whom, on the contrary, I have felt a bond through sharing the same profession. Approximately seven hundred men must have sunk with the ship!

On returning to base, von Trapp found numerous letters of congratulation waiting for him, one from an eighth-grade Viennese schoolgirl.  To thank her for the letter, he arranged to have a  Pruegelkrapfen  from a noted confectioner to be delivered to her.  “The outcome of all this is unexpected. Suddenly it seems all the Viennese schoolgirls have gotten the writing bug because it rains little letters from schoolgirls who are sooo happy and so on.  But such a  Pruegelgrapfen  is expensive and, at the moment, I don’t have time to open a bakery myself.”

On one patrol, U-5 met up with an allied German U-boat, and von Trapp had an opportunity to go on board.  He was quite impressed with the diesel engine, compartmentalization of the boat, the electrically-adjustable periscopes, and even creature comforts like tables for dining.  “It’s like being in Wonderland…”  The German commander’s comment, on visiting U-5, was “I would refuse to travel in this crate.”

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