WALL-E

I just saw WALL-E the other day. Amazing movie – Pixar’s still batting 1000. If you haven’t seen it, go for the spork scene, and the 2001 reference. They’re precious. It’s been out for a few weeks, so probably somebody else has already said this, and better than I have, but I can’t help making a few observations.

(And I’m going to discuss the ending, so if you don’t want a spoiler, don’t scroll down.)

• These guys pulled off a movie with almost no dialogue. The first 15 minutes or so were really a classic example of sneakily giving the audience information. The billboards WALL-E passes, the pop-up hologram advertisement, the piles of dead WALL-Es let you figure out what happened without any character telling you anything.
• A rather daring use of live action.
• WALL-E’s eyes. They absolutely carry the character, just like ET’s eyes did. Notice when WALL-E temporarily loses his memory at the end, his eyes stop moving. You can tell there’s nobody home – it’s a zombie version of WALL-E. It seems that no matter how not human a character looks, you can pull if off if they’ve got really great eyes.
• This has got to be the cheeriest post-apocalyptic I have encountered.
• Where did the Axiom people get all those species from that we saw in the ending credits? I suspect they had a gene bank in the hull that nobody was paying attention to. Or maybe they looked that place in Iceland up on the encyclopedia.
• Where do new Axiomites come from? I bet they’re test-tube babies, like in Brave New World. Holding hands was such a strange new experience for John and Mary that I hardly think they’re doing it the old-fashioned way.
• Are they ever going to revive AUTO? They did with HAL (remember 2010?). What if the encyclopedia turns on them?
• WALL-E has spent 700 years intimately acquainted with trash and you expect me to believe he has never encountered a spork before?

Prognostication

So, I was reading Turing’s “Turing Test” essay, and I came across the following passage. Turing has set forth the question, “Can machines think?” and to answer it, he’s trying to come up with a definition of “machine” that would rule out human beings.

One might for instance insist that the team of engineers be all of one sex, but this would not really be satisfactory, for it is probably possible to rear a complete individual from a single cell of the skin (say) of a man. To do so would be a feat of biological technique deserving of the very highest praise, but we would not be inclined to regard it as a case of “constructing a thinking machine.”

Prescient, no? This guy wrote this in 1950, and he wasn’t even a biologist.

Lord of the Rings: Presidential Campaign 2008

The politics on this one is getting a little bit dated. I wrote it for the campus humor magazine back in the fall:

J.R.R. Tolkien once said that his Lord of the Rings Trilogy was not intended to be an allegory. That is, he didn’t intend it to be “about” any particular event in the real world, such as World War Two. Instead, it was supposed to be a story for the ages, whose lessons could apply to the real world no matter what the time and place. Yes, it should even apply to modern U.S. politics. Here goes.

Me: Good morning, Mr. President.
Bush: A new power is rising!
Me: How do you think we’re doing in Iraq?
Bush: Its victory is at hand!
Me: Is there anything you’d like to say to the soldiers who are over there?
Bush: This night, the land will be stained with the blood of Rohan. March to Helm’s Deep!
Me: What are your long-term goals for Iraq?
Bush: Leave none alive! To war!
Me: And what about the children’s health insurance bill?
Bush: You shall not pass!
Me: Al Gore, would you care to comment on that?
Gore: Sounds like Orc mischief to me.
Me: Yes?
Gore: Nobody cares for the woods anymore.
Me: So, now that you’ve tackled global warming, deforestation is next?
Gore: Many of these trees were my friends. Creatures I had known from nut and acorn. They had voices of their own.
Me: You sound rather upset.
Gore: Mrawwwwwr!
Me: What are you going to do about it?
Gore: The Ents are going to war!
Me: As for Alberto Gonzales–
Gonzales: Master’s my friend!
Sen. Leahy: You don’t have any friends! Nobody likes you!
Gonzales: I’m not listening. I’m not listening.
Sen. Leahy: You’re a liar and a thief.
Gonzales: Master looks after us now. We don’t need you.
Me: That’s enough, you two. Mr. Cheney, why won’t you release those documents to the press?
Cheney: Not its business, Precious.
Me: Right. Ms. Clinton, how would the United States be different if you were president?
Clinton: Instead of a Dark Lord, you would have a queen!
Me: I don’t think it’s entirely fair to call Bush a Dark Lord–
Clinton: Beautiful and terrible as the dawn! Treacherous as the sea! Stronger than the foundations of the earth! All shall love me and despair!
Me: Um… that’s nice.
Helpless bystander: Help! Help!
Me: What is it?
Helpless bystander: A Balrog of Morgoth! It’s a hideous, enormous creature that breathes fire and tramples anything that gets in its way!
Me: You mean Michael Moore?

Yikes. Time for me to get out of here.

21 Accents

This lady can speak English in pretty much any accent imaginable.

21 Accents

Hearing her do this is an inspiration. When I read the chapters of Grizelda aloud, I try to “do the voices” for the characters. I know I’m not ready to do accents yet, but when you listen to Ms. Walker do 21 different accents all strung together, you get a sense of how it is people speak differently from each other. It’s got a lot to do with the vowels, and with pacing.

Her California sounds like a lot of people I knew going to high school in the Los Angeles basin. But by no means do we all talk like that there.

Microsoft Office Assistant

ELIZA is a computer program designed by Joseph Weizenbaum in 1966 designed to carry out a conversation with a human being – so realistically, in fact, that people who didn’t know better thought it was really intelligent.

Fast forward about forty years, and computer technology has made great strides. Though computers still aren’t intelligent the way we are, they’re getting closer. Computers now can solve problems without help and anticipate what their users are doing. And Microsoft, in its great wisdom, thought it would put artificial intelligence to use by inventing a little paperclip guy who would help us write our letters.

Recently I decided the time had come to make contact, break through. If ELIZA could carry on a conversation in 1966, surely Paperclip Man could do just as well in 2008. Here is how the conversation started:

ME: Hello.
OFFICE ASSISTANT: Welcome to Microsoft Word Help.

So far this was pretty exciting. I was on the verge of a new era in machine-human interactions! I pressed on.

ME: What’s your name?
OFFICE ASSISTANT: About paragraph alignment, position, and spacing.

What? The conversation went downhill from there.

ME: You can’t really understand what I’m saying, can you?
OFFICE ASSISTANT: I opened a subdocument, but I can’t make changes to it.
ME: Look, an alien!
OFFICE ASSISTANT: Look words up in the thesaurus.
ME: Your mother was an 8-bit.
OFFICE ASSISTANT: Design and build an index.
ME: Bugger off.
OFFICE ASSISTANT: Word keeps asking me to enter something. How do I turn this off?

Sigh.