Month: March 2009

More AIG Bonuses

On By Norbert HauptIn Commentaries, Political2 Comments

AIG paid bonuses again for employees of the division that caused most of the losses as ‘retention pay’ to keep them around. Now they are whining that they could face lawsuits, and that their hands are tied.

I say let them all leave and sue. I say let the Justice Department fight the legal battle and drag it out for a long time. Are they going to find other jobs? Maybe GM has room for them.

This has disgrace written all over it. Let AIG die and then see where the bonuses are coming from? I use 21st Century (an AIG company) car insurance. I think it’s time I looked for different coverage.

Obama and Geithner are showing a lack of backbone here that is disturbing. Stop the payouts and this will take care of itself very quickly.

Book Review: Into the Deep – by Ken Grimwood

On By Norbert HauptIn Animal Intelligence, Books, Cetaceans, Four StarsLeave a comment

If you read my post about Replay, Ken Grimwood’s time travel novel, you would have seen my reference to Starsea, a movie that takes a central role in the plot of Replay.

Into the Deep is the story of Starsea. Dolphins, and cetaceans in general, are presented as sentient beings with a level of intelligence equaling that of humans. In the book, we get to know four human protagonists, a marine biologist, an investigative journalist, a petroleum engineer and a tuna boat captain. The four become, through the course of the story, interconnected and end up collaborating at the end, as unlikely as it would seem at the beginning. We also get to know many dolphins, with names like Ch*Tril, Qr/Tal, Tk/Lin, etc. The author does a wonderful job telling the story from the point of view of the dolphins, and we start thinking like they do, we view humans like a dolphin would.

We humans can visually look around a room and see a bottle of wine on the coffee table, a painting on the wall, a candle burning in the mantle of the fire place, and the television set on, sending pictures our way, all with a scan of our eyes, taking in object shapes, textures of those objects, colors and opacity of the objects.

Dolphins can see like we do. However, they can also echo locate, sending ultrasound signals out into dark or murky water and hear the echoes coming back like a submarine’s sonar. Using no vision at all, a dolphin can create a picture in its brain with that same level of detail. It can ‘see’ a coin on the bottom of the sea, a lobster crawling, a rock in its way, and it could determine the texture and shape of those objects, as clear as we can do it with vision. But it goes a little further. Since it’s sonar, the dolphin can look right through soft tissue and ‘see’ the skeletal structure underneath, of humans, sharks or other dolphins. If a dolphin were to have a racing heart due to an adrenaline rush from being frightened, another dolphin would clearly see that racing heart. A dolphin can draw conclusion about another dolphin from seeing inside like we humans can when we see somebody blushing, perhaps.

The dolphins call the humans land-walkers. They see them only from a distance, except when they come out to the sea in strange, fragile hulls with large white dorsal fins on top of them. The dolphins observe the humans and think of them as communication handicapped, since they apparently can only communicate by flapping their front-mounted blowholes making crude noises in a narrow frequency band.

Here is an excerpt from the point of view of one dolphin that has swum up to a beach where he is surrounded by a bunch of people delighted about his appearance:

Then he turned his attention to the young ones. They swarmed around him, reaching out to touch him with the squirmy little growths that sprouted from the ends of their upper appendages. He allowed the contact, even enjoyed it when they stroked him gently; but he remained alert, because each of those wriggling growths was tipped with something hard and sharp, like miniature crawler-claws. He’d received a few painful scrapes on his delicate skin during the first few of these encounters, but the young ones seemed more careful now, and usually onely touched him with the soft pads beneath their claws.

One young female, smaller than the others, was standing hesitantly aside from the boisterous group that had rushed to meet and touch him. Tk/Lin scanned her internally and saw that her heart was racing, the muscles around her stomach were tight. An adult male was urging her forward in the water, but she held back, clearly afraid.

Tk/Lin peeled away from the crowed of fearless young ones around him and made his way slowly, ever so slowly, toward the trembling little female. he stopped two beak-to-flukes from her and raised his head above the surface, swaying it to and fro in a gentle rhythm timed to mimic the normal land-walker heartbeat. The young one watched, entranced, but  still she clung to the lower limbs of the long male behind her.

Two of the bigger young ones came splashing toward Tk/Lin, eager for more active play, but he warned  them away with a slight thwap! of his flukes against the water. They retreated, and Tk/Lin turned his attention once more the the frightened little female. Keeping his distance from her, he rolled methodically from one side to the other, showing her his dorsal, his pectoral fins, his soft white belly. She watched in silence, her eyes round.

One of the many-colored spherical things filled with air that the young ones often tossed to Tk/Lin was floating nearby. he nudged it with his beak, and it rolled across the placid surface to the young female. She reflexively let go of the adult’s limbs and caught it between her own upper appendages. She stared at the toy for a moment, then at Tk/Lin, and gave the weightless sphere a push back in his direction. He chittered his approval and bounced it back toward her, a little harder this time.

The young one’s face contorted, her mouth curling upward at the sides in the land-walker gesture that Tk/Lin had learned to recognize as indicative of amusement or contentment. She slapped the toy back again, through the air above the surface; her aim was off, but Tk/Lin easity darted to meet it and toss it back to her. The young one squealed and tossed the brightly colored sphere again and again, ignoring the adult behind her. Her muscles were relaxed now, Tk/Lin scanned, her heartbeat steady and normal.

As I stated in my review of Replay, I am fascinated by the concept of cetacean intelligence and I will write some blog entries about that subject alone shortly.

Into the Deep, of course, is a fictional story, with a plot line that stretches a bit beyond where I would have taken it, but it’s wrapped into basic concepts that are fascinating and entertaining.

Book Review: Adrift – by Steven Callahan

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, Four Stars2 Comments

July 9, 2011: Re-publishing this review after just seeing this story featured on TV under “I Shouldn’t Be Alive.”  They did a pretty good job condensing a complex non-fiction book into a one-hour TV show, good enough to stick with through the endless commercials.

Here is the original review:

This is a non-fiction story told by the author about his experience of being shipwrecked in the Atlantic and drifting in a rubber raft for 76 days. The story plays in the early 1980ies. The author is an avid and experienced sailor on his way back to the US, via the Caribbean, from the Canary Islands, in a small sail boat, by himself. A few days into the voyage his boat smashes into something and is completely destroyed. He never actually finds out what happened and he barely escapes with his life. Miraculously, he manages to get the rubber life raft launched and obtain his emergency gear, including a fishing spear gun and a sleeping bag, before his boat sinks and completely disappears.

Given his almost total lack of food and freshwater, you would expect him not to be able to survive beyond a week. Very few people in the history of sailing have been adrift longer than a couple of months and survived to tell about it. He has. The ordeals that he goes through are staggering and beyond anything you can imagine. Since I read his book, I knew that against all odds, he would eventually survive.

This is the book to read if you think you have problems, with your marriage, relationships, children, job, creditors, friends or whatever else you can imagine. Nothing seems like a valid reason for despair after you read Adrift. You have it easy, and you will be grateful for every minute of that easiness. I was tremendously inspired by the courage and indomitable will the author showed in this quest for survival. He succeeded. I wonder if I would have had such strength.

Problems? Do I have problems? Nah!

Nights in Rodanthe – by Nicholas Sparks

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, Movies, One StarLeave a comment

In May 2005 I read the book Nights in Rodanthe – by Nicholas Sparks and this is what I wrote then:

When my daughter saw a Nicholas Sparks book on my nightstand, she actually asked me why I was reading it. I told her I tried to keep an open mind and read a “sensitive” book once in a while. A “chick book” as she would probably call it.

Here is a book that follows a well-tested formula and it is anything but unique. As I was working my way through it I kept thinking of how closely it followed “The Bridges of Madison County.”  Bridges, however, was much more fresh and surprising. Bridges, when I first read it, made me cry out loud, a first when reading a book. Rodanthe made me sniffle a few times at best.

The story was the same one:

A successful surgeon neglects his family all his life for his career. He gets burned out in his fifties, after he loses his wife to illness and his son to neglect. Then he sells his house, his practice and his life, and gets on his way to Ecuador to try to reconcile with his estranged son. He plans to be there for a year.

A housewife and mother of three school-aged children lost her husband to a younger woman and cannot forgive him. She cannot make ends meet, but is dedicated to raising her children to the best of her abilities.

Chance has it that the two of them are holed up in a bed and breakfast in a small coastal town in North Carolina by the name of Rodanthe. The woman, Adrienne, is taking care of the B&B for a friend of hers for the weekend. The surgeon, Paul, is the only guest of the B&B. They are there for a long weekend of four nights, during a severe storm that for the benefit of the plot keeps away all visitors and any other guests. Stuff can happen when two lost souls are together in a nice and romantic setting. And stuff does happen indeed.

As the plot goes, the first day together they get to know each other and we get to know the players. On the second day they fall in love and lust. That love gets consummated on the third and forth day, and then they part. Fate has it that they never meet again. Both are desperately in love, and for both there will never be another partner, not to mention a partner of true love and soul-mate-ship as they were to each other.

Bridges was that way, too, but it was a better constructed and more credible novel. Bridges seemed real, while this seemed contrived. Two middle-aged hapless souls meet and mate, and their lives are changed forever. Okay. What else?

In stories like this, there are way too many characters that are just not real. Paul, for instance, is a brilliant doctor, nationally renowned for his skill. But he is also a world-class runner, which helps make his body trim, muscular, and apparently sexy for the females in the story. Not only is he extremely successful, but he also has rugged good looks, a sensitive soul that, of course, is only brought out by the female protagonist, and it even surprises him himself. When he dresses, he just “throws on” a pair of blue jeans and a T-shirt every day. The shirt shows his muscular arms and back, to the enticement of the female. His intense gaze and his humble demeanor round out his attractiveness.

Both characters “throw on” jeans at times in the story. That “throwing on” of clothes reminded me of another fairly weak book I had read a couple of years ago by Sandra Brown: A Kiss Remembered. Those guys also kept throwing on clothes.

My point is, why can’t Paul be a credible and normal character. Yes, he can be a doctor, he can be anything, but it would have been more credible if he had had some flaws, if he had been a real person, not some superhero of the American society in the early 2000’s. Give me a shoe salesman, give me a carpenter, give me a postman, give me anybody that I am likely to run into at the supermarket, and I’ll get into your story. Give me real persons, not cartoon characters of precise drawing and coloring.

I could not quite picture Adrienne in this book. She is in her late forties, somewhat overweight and rounded, and with a few facial flaws, like a hooked nose. Of course, the plastic surgeon eventually tells her she does not need any surgery. Hmmm. We never really find out what’s up with her, and why he is all engrossed by her. She is a “normal person,” not a superhero like he. She works in a library. What exactly attracts Paul to her? Is it her looks, is it her smarts, is it her personality? I don’t know. Perhaps it’s because she is the only woman there in the B&B, and all the women get sexier as closing time comes nearer.

Maybe I will stay away from any more “chick books” for a while. On second thought, perhaps just Nicholas Sparks books.

Today I watched the movie:

Richard Gere plays Paul, Diane Lane plays Adrienne.

The story is the same one, only more watered down. It’s supposed to jerk your tears, and a few do come out.

The best part is the house on the beach. The front porch posts are in the surf, no kidding. It’s supposed to have been there since the owner’s great grandmother lived there, but when we watch it during the hurricane we can’t believe it’s still there the next morning. Who put that house there, and what were they thinking? But it does look good, and the third floor art studio would be my favorite room, if I could live there.

I won’t tell you about the movie. The acting is ok and the actors make it through a  contrived plot. But you read all that above.

Movie Review: Body of Lies

On By Norbert HauptIn Movies1 Comment

Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe star as two hot-shot CIA operatives, Roger Ferris and Ed Hoffman, respectively. Roger risks his life, seemingly daily, in literally explosive situations in Iraq, Jordan and Syria. Ed is home in Virginia, a suburban husband, taking his kids to school, going to soccer games, all the while talking to Roger in the middle-east on the cell phone, making life and death decisions for poor Arab stooges caught in the dragnet of the CIA.  Improbable.

And this is just one of the improbable situations.

Roger speaks Arabic well enough to pass for a local and be able to tell that a woman in Jordan is from Iran from her Arabic accent. As a polyglot myself, I know that it is extremely difficult to speak more than one foreign language accent free.

Roger hooks up with a local nurse, whose family and neighbors must approve of the relationship. So he comes over for dinner and the nurse’s sister’s little kids speak English. I am sure this is done to make the movie easier to watch, but it takes away from the reality of it. Too many Arabs speak flawless English.

Roger sits in a cafe in the afternoon in Iraq, talking on the cell phone to Ed in Virginia, who is at a soccer match. What happened to the 12-hour time difference? It seems like these two guys were on the cell phone through half of the movie, and there might have been a few plausible time differences, but for the most part I was suspicious. I have traveled in Europe and my cell phones never work. These guys must have special CIA / Startrek cell phones that work everywhere, even in the Jordanian desert.

There are spy planes that can see a man in a crowded market and watch what he picks up with his hands, all on live video by guys in a dark room somewhere, who also are talking live on the phone, tapping into the cell phone conversations of the objects, the guys on the ground. This I cannot confirm or deny. I do not know if that is possible, but if it is, it’s  scary. If the government has it in for you, there is no escaping it. This is especially important in an age where the president of the United States can declare any of us an ‘enemy combatant’ and then come and arrest us in the middle of the night,  put us into some prison, without a lawyer, without a phone call, without charges, indefinitely. They have been doing that in real life — just not to you and me yet.

Roger risks his own life seemingly every day several times. What does a CIA operative get paid? Military pay scale? Must be. What would motivate a person to take on such a job? I can see that Ed does not have it so hard ambling about his suburban soap opera life style in Virginia. But Roger is in deep and dangerous trouble all the time, near bombs, bullets and murderous terrorists that think nothing of crushing your fingers with a hammer just to accentuate one of their points. You have got to love this stuff to keep doing it day after day. It just makes me wonder what  the real lives of CIA operatives in dangerous foreign countries are like? Are they one-man war machines a la James Bond, as Roger is depicted? Or do they have safety nets and backup? I guess you and I will never know, and we are stuck with novels and movies.

Body of Lies keeps you watching at the edge of your seat. Leonardo does a great job acting in this role. It’s good entertainment, notwithstanding that there are so many improbabilities and unbelievable scenarios that it makes it hard to swallow sometimes. I counted myself lucky to be living in security and comfort in Southern California and I wasn’t going to have to go out into those markets just to get my groceries. And that I have a very boring desk job.

Rating: ***

Man on Wire – the Movie

On By Norbert HauptIn MoviesLeave a comment

In the morning of August 7, 1974, Philippe Petit, a French high-wire acrobat, stepped out into the void between the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York on a cable. In the 45 minutes that followed, he stayed out on the wire, traversing it eight times, dancing, laying down, standing up, while police watched from both towers, and the public stared up in disbelief.

This is a documentary on Philippe’s life leading up to this. He was possessed by the towers before they were even built. He had to visit New York several times to plan the incredible feat. Just imagine what it takes to string a steel cable stretching 200 feet between two 1,350 foot buildings without being detected and anchoring it on both sides.

And then stepping out. Of course, for a high-wire artist, whether the wire is 20 feet high or 1,000 feet high, it probably does not make a difference. If you fall, you die. You just have more flying experience in the latter situation. The documentary didn’t spend much time on this part of his act. He just became a focused machine when he stepped on the wire, no matter where he was, and he did his thing.

This movie could be boring for some people. There is little action. There is a lot of dialog in French with subtitles, since most of the participants do not speak any English. For me, this was a meaningful movie. I enjoyed listening to the French, I always do, even though I understand little anymore, despite my three years of college French. I am also fascinated by the twin towers. I was there in 1975, but I never went into them or up into the observation decks. Of course, I didn’t know that this would no longer be possible after 2001. There was a lot of footage of the towers being built, of the staircases, the upper decks, and photographs from the top of one over to the other, a very fascinating environment to see.

Finally, August 7, 1974 was my 18 birthday. Of course, I remember the day well. I was still a kid in Germany, and it was the day I got my driver’s license. I was also in the middle of preparations to depart for the United States for the first time as an exchange student a couple of weeks after that. So the time of the documentary, and the parallel events in my life, were closely aligned and meaningful to me. I enjoyed it very much.

Rating: ***

Book Review: Old Twentieth – by Joe Haldeman

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, Generation Ships, Science Fiction, Three StarsLeave a comment

It’s several hundred years in the future on earth. Humans have figured out how to become immortal by using a drug. It has been hundreds of years that anyone has died. Of course, as a result, procreation is strictly controlled.

To create new living space, humanity has outfitted an expedition to another star, Beta Hydrii, about 20 light years away, where a planet that seems very earth-like has been identified. A starship is designed that can accelerate to about one fiftieth the speed of light, a speed at which an object traverses the United States from Los Angeles to New York in one second. Even at that mind-boggling speed, the trip to Beta Hydrii takes 1,000 years.

How do you build a ship, an enclosed eco system, that lasts 1,000 years without some critical component failing? They end up with building five identical ships, basically large cylindrical objects with a diameter equal to the length of a football field or larger. Four of the ships are for habitats for about 200 people each, and the fifth as a tool ship with extra supplies, spare parts and anything else that might fail in the other four. If any of the ships fail, the population of that ship can be moved to another.

Each ship has the rough shape of a soda can and it rotates along the longitudinal axis to generate about one earth gravity in the outermost deck. Gravity decreases as you ascend toward the center. The five ships are arranged in a pentagonal pattern, with about a kilometer on edge. Now try to picture five giant rotating soda cans in a pentagonal pattern only a mile or so apart hurtling away from the sun at a speed that traverses the United States in a second, and doing that for 1,000 years. The ships are connected by shuttles that travel back and forth between them, allowing the occupants to move around.

The ships contain plants, livestock, including goats, chickens, ducks and fish, so in addition to vegetables, there is some animal diet.

The 800 people that embark on the 1,000 year journey certainly don’t think of ever coming back, no matter their immortality. But first, they are stuck in the cans for a long time.

To spend the time, they have a virtual reality machine with them. The machine allows them to immerse themselves in some other environment. Once inside, the occupant or player has no idea things are not real. The machine is connected directly to the brain and it creates an interactive “movie” involving all five senses, basically making the experience indistinguishable from reality.

The protagonist is the engineer in charge of the machine. He discovers some oddities that make him suspicious. Needless to say, some things start going wrong. Eventually it becomes clear that we, the reader, don’t really know what is real and actual, and what is virtual, and neither do the occupants. As  it turns out, the machine has put the majority of the humans to sleep using a drug that basically arrests all body functions. Time stands still while the bodies hang in weightlessness, sleeping the decades and centuries away, waiting for their eventual awakening.

And while most of the “old ones” are sleeping, some of the occupants are allowed to procreate. We get a glimpse of the journey about 100 years into the schedule. The grass and the trees are dead. The livestock gone. The ponds evaporated. There are generations of mothers walking around the ship with children in tow. Many of the newlings have never seen earth. Their entire existence has been inside the pentagon of ships in the interstellar void.

And the thing is all controlled by an apparently sentient virtual reality machine.

I enjoyed reading this book, as you may be able to tell. Haldeman tells a good story. The segments of the story when we observe travelers in the machine to the distant past, in the twentieth century (hence the title) were too long for my taste and I found myself skipping over some of the descriptions. I wanted to go on with the story. But I can handle that in a paperback just shy of 300 pages anytime.

Changeling – the Movie

On By Norbert HauptIn MoviesLeave a comment

Sometimes I watch a movie and when I start I know nothing about it. This was one of those times. I didn’t know the story, the actors and the director.

Funny, I didn’t recognize Angelina Jolie all movie long. I think of her as an action hero type actress,  not a demure yet righteous mother of an abducted boy.

I also didn’t know it was directed by Clint Eastwood, until I read the credits after the movie.

Only John Malkovich was obvious.

The story, supposedly based on true events, tells of a mother who loses her child while she is at work one day. The story starts in March of 1928 and ends around fall of 1933, spanning the great depression, in Los Angeles. The police department and much of the city administration is hopelessly corrupt. We follow her struggle to find her lost sun and try to bring the perpetrators and enablers to justice.

Here is a film without special effects, no gun fights, fireballs or explosions of any type, just people with motives and people with pain. Yet the story is so well told that it draws you in right away and keeps you there, all 2 hours and 20 minutes, a comparatively long movie. The cinematography is fascinating. Where do they find all those 1920ies cars, streetcars and locales to make such a movie.

Eastwood does it again; he is a master director. He proves to me that he can make a movie that I can watch, without knowing a thing about it beforehand, without knowing  the actors, and still get a great deal of entertainment and awe out of it.

Rating: ***