THE UNIVERSE IS...ARE YOU READY FOR THIS...FLAT!!!!

That's what physicists are telling us now...that the universe is flat. Twenty years ago  it was considered curved; saddle-shaped, in fact. Man, things are changing fast! It's an exciting time to be a cosmologist, but a confusing time for everybody else.

So where did this idea come from? The answer is contained in the 15 minute video above. Tor Barstad says we have a reliable way to measure the curvature of light from two celestial objects billions of light years away, and that these lines and angles show no bending, as they would if the universe was curved.



Here's (above) a simpler explanation. This six minute video takes a while to get started, so I recommend  beginning at the two minute mark.

It's hard to know where all this is going, and new discoveries could change the picture in unpredictable ways. A couple of weeks ago it was discovered that a neutrino might be able to travel faster than light. If that turns out to be true, that could have a big effect on cosmological calculations, even though the faster speed increment is very slight.

BTW, there's a couple of interesting comments under this YouTube video. One says that "flat" refers only to the relatively even distribution of energy in the universe, but Tor Barstad's video definitely talks about flat in terms of geometry.



This one minute video (above) isn't relevant, but I'll put it up anyway because it's so interesting. It turns out that there's one thing we know for sure that can travel faster than light, and that's space. After The Big Bang space itself expanded faster than the speed of light, and is still expanding that fast. Anything traveling within existing space is limited to the speed of light.

It's strange to think how space is now regarded as a thing with definite properties, and with measurable energy.

MORE GILRAY

Gilray (above) wasn't just the funniest cartoonist of the early Nineteenth Century, he was one of the funniest cartoonists ever. I'm glad to see that nowadays he's getting the critical recognition he deserves.

He's most famous for the etchings he did during the Napoleonic Era (above). They're terrific, but my personal favorites are the caricatures of fashion (at the top) that he did in his later style.

I think this one's called "The Prince." 

Haw! This picture (above) leaves no doubt that if Gilray had been born later, he would have done full justice to the baggy/skateboarder fashions that began in the 1990s.

Man, seeing this (above) makes me want to draw. That's the highest compliment one cartoonist can give another. 

Apparently some people (above) in Gilray's time payed so much attention to their wigs that they neglected certain other things.

Here (above) Gilray celebrates the opening to the public of an art exhibit at one of the downtown museums. Apparently public exhibitions like this were a novelty in Gilray's time.

Interesting, huh?


Hey, why did my sidebar shrink?

THE BEST COMMERCIAL OF 2011: J. G. WENTWORTH

Here, for my money, is the best commercial currently on TV: the operatic bus ad for J. G. Wentworth. I find myself singing it on the street, and I musn't be the only one because YouTube is full of parodies of it. I wish I knew the story behind the making of it. Evidently a lot of trial and error was involved, and I document some of that here.

This is a one minute film that does everything right. Take the music: it's always catchy and to the point, and it's full of opportunities for good soloists to shine. Here a sympathetic director cast a great tenor and a great baritone, and rightly attempted to give them the star treatment.

Incidentally, note that the singers address the viewer most of the time, and not the girl who had the problem. That sounds illogical but, as you can see, it was the right thing to do. And I love the way the baritone in the back nudges his way up to the foreground. That's classic stagecraft. You can tell the director had stage experience, or at least hired a consultant who did.



Here's (above) an earlier version of the same commercial, probably by a different director. What a contrast! It opens on a boring, horizontal long shot where we can't see the performers' faces. When they do go in for a closeup it's on the female lead, who lacks star quality. The male lead is a little better but there's no attempt to make him a star. A great song is getting a frighteningly generic treatment here.

Compare that to the dynamic one-point perspective on the bus (the top video). where we could see the main actor clearly, and where the two primary singers were handled like stars. I love the way the bus version puts a lot of emphasis on the chorus. I LOVE choruses, and Baroque music, which this is, is full of them.



I wish I knew where this film (above) fit in the chronology. Is this earlier or later than the others? It certainly makes a lot of mistakes. The change of venue from shower to basement, to auto accident, to garage, to nursery is jarring.  The guy in the shower has some star quality, but he's not appealing in this role. The only appealing actor in the film is the white-haired mechanic, and he's not in it very long.

I have to admit that if I had directed this version I might have been tempted to change venues just like they did here. Man, that would have been an expensive mistake! We're lucky to have three versions of this film so we can learn without wasting money.



Here's (above) an early Wentworth commercial, which was done on the cheap. It's not a bad idea if you only have a few bucks to spend, but it doesn't work as good as it should because none of the actors has star quality. They're just generic people.

Regarding the first three videos: I love the way Wentworth kept at the problem til they got it right. They knew they had a first-rate song, and were willing to persevere through a lot of trial and error til they got what they wanted.

HOW I RAISED MY KID

This post is an answer to Brian who wrote to see if I had any ideas on the subject of early education. Brian has a young son, so his interest in the subject is more than academic. I answered briefly on the comments page, but I did a horrible job. I'll try again, and maybe I'll do better this time.

Well, let's see...I think it helps if you know what virtues you're trying to teach. In my case I wanted my son to be smart, skilled, manly, kind, honest, articulate, hard working and idealistic (Today I'd add other qualities, but this was what was on my mind at the time). The hardest of all these qualities to transmit turned out to be skill. I only have skills that are relevant to the entertainment industry, and my kid wasn't interested in that. That meant general man skills, like learning how to fix a car, had to be learned outside the home, if at all.

Geez, how do you arrange for that? School wasn't set up to teach things like that, and I didn't personally know anyone who did man jobs for a living, not anybody who lived nearby, anyway. My biggest regret is that my kid didn't learn some of that stuff. If he had he might have grown up to be an engineer, which I think is a terrific thing to be. What he is now is also pretty good, so I have no complaints, but...building a bridge...now that's a real job (if you're not lucky enough to be a cartoonist, that is)!

My biggest fear for my kid was that he would grow up not fitting anywhere, not fitting into a specific niche that he has a clear and intense passion for. With the best of intentions school has turned out a generation of generalists...a big mistake, which is already leading to all sorts of problems.

But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe that's me thinking like a parent. Parents like their kids to pick careers that have clear benchmarks, the kind of thing where you get the right schooling and the right certificates and you're all set. Another term for it is ticket punching. It's the kind of security that all parents want for their kids, and that all kids hate.

Anyway, what I did do right in my opinion, was to make lots of heroic books and films available, and to talk about them frequently, and with enthusiasm. I had lots of traditional boys books by Henty and Horatio Alger, Dumas, Rafael Sabitini, Karl May, Jules Verne, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle,  and lots of sci fi, war strategy, history (kid firendly history like Defoe's "Journal of the Plague Years") and biography (kid friendly stuff like Ben Franklin's autobiography). We also had comics and comic reprints of Carl Barks, Stanley, Classics Illustrated, EC horror and sci-fi, DC, and Marvel.

Films we watched on tape in those days included Jason and the Argonauts, Sinbad, Davy Crockett, Zulu, Excalibur, And Then There Were None, The Four Feathers, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, Murder in the Rue Morgue, Sergio Leone, Hitchcock, Star Trek, The Twilight Zone TV show, Indiana Jones, Star Wars, etc., etc. We also had lots of taped comedy: Sid Caesar, Kovacs, Gleason, Clampett, Avery, Jones, Disney, Betty Boop, etc.

The guiding star of my parenting philosophy was John Stuart Mill's dad. Mill senior used to take his son on long walks where he would talk about subjects most kids never even hear about. I would have loved it if my dad had done that for me, but I'm afraid my own talks were sometimes monologues rather than dialogues.

The toys around the house were mostly war toys...the most politically incorrect plastic war toys I could find...but also building blocks, cars and sports stuff. I'm not a militarist, but war toys like swords and flintlocks are a fun way to connect with history.

My kid liked all these things until he was about ten or so, when he started to be influenced by what other kids were reading and watching. We only had one of every media appliance, and they were all in the living room, where parents had some influence on what was watched. It was bliss from a parent's point of view, but it all ended when a friend gave my kid a radio of his own when he was ten. After that everything changed drastically, and my kid enthusiastically entered the modern world.

Things I thought my kid would like and he definitely didn't: a classic chemistry set, an Erector Set from the 1930s, and the film "Forbidden Planet," which he hated. He loved the Brothers Grimm when he was very young, but after 7 or 8 or so he lost interest. Me, I never lost my taste for those stories.

So that's the kind of media my kid was exposed to for the first ten years. He turned out okay, so it couldn't have hurt him much.

HALLOWEEN 2011

Wow! Rubber skeletons are cheap this year! Better stock up!

I wonder if we'll see interesting plastic masks this year? 

I love witch faces with human realistic human detail. This one (above) looks like William Gainnes, the former publisher of Mad.

I love homemade masks, and some of my favorites (above) are made out of paper bags. The problem with bags is that they make a huge racket when you turn your head. 

Here's (above) some artsy paper bag masks (above) combined with cardboard bikini parts. This looks like it could be a B52s cover.

Niiiice! This would make a terrific mass market plaster Halloween sculpture. The site I got it from called it a Whitman death mask. You don't suppose they meant Walt Whitman? But he didn't look like this.

I wonder why nobody ever made a mask out of Anthony Perkins' mom (above) in "Psycho." Come to think of it, why are there no Hitchcock masks?

Man, that red mask (above) is great! You could paint your face like that, but it would be a lot of work.

Above, an angular kid costume.

This gangster costume (above) isn't bad, either. Wouldn't it be great to have a real, well-made suit like this (minus the mask)? You could wear it all year round.

Ha! NOW we're talking! THIS (above) is a Halloween costume...or if it isn't, it doesn't matter.

Hmmmm...or maybe it's this one (above). Geez...decisions, decisions!

I don't know what this is (above), but it's interesting.

I love "art" masks. Maybe these are just for decoration.

_________________________________________________ 

I'll end on a sad note: I just learned that Steve Jobs died. What a loss to us all! 

KEN BURNS' "PROHIBITION"

I just saw the second installment of Ken Burns' documentary about prohibition. There was a lot in there that I didn't know before, and it raised some interesting questions. For example, whatever happened to neighborhood bars?

When I was a kid they were all over the place. In some neighborhoods you could find a bar on almost every corner.  They weren't especially rowdy, in fact they were sort of "family" bars, but singing and shouting would spill out into the streets on some nights, and occasionally you'd see falling down drunks trying to make their way home at night.

If you lived in the neighborhood saloon era, that institution would have seemed as permanent as motherhood, but the saloons are mostly gone now, as are cigarettes and men's hats. Things change. Drunkenness was once seen as romantic and funny. Drunks were known as jovial philosophers and truth tellers, and were on the cutting edge of the jazz era. Nowadays they're considered so....so yesterday.

Burns' documentary probably wants us to draw comparisons with today's War on Drugs. I don't smoke marijuana but I wish it would be made legal so we could put to rest all the fuss that's made about it. More serious drugs are another matter, though. If they become widespread we'll have a permanent underclass in this country, and nobody wants that.

The philosopher inside me says that on principal people have a right to destroy themselves, and that I should just mind my own business. The practical side of me says that numbers matter. A few people taking serious drugs is just an expression of an alternative lifestyle: a lot of people doing the same thing is a major threat to the stability of society.

My own philosophy about the War on Drugs (hard drugs, that is) is that it's worth fighting, even if it ultimately can't be won. Sometimes a long fight is necessary just to prevent things from getting worse than they are, and winning or losing isn't the point.

Will this problem ever be resolved? My guess is that it will, probably within a few decades.  The time will come when serious drugs just aren't considered fashionable anymore. When hard rock and hippies recede into the past, the drugs and the romantic view of them that came out of that culture will recede with them. Hard drugs will diminish, just like saloons and cigarettes did.

Maybe the real menace of this type lies in the future. Imagine an electronic brain stimulator that, at the push of a button, floods the pleasure centers of the brain with the absolute ultimate sensation of pleasure. If you think about it, nothing could ever induce you to stop pushing a button like that. No alternative could offer a higher reward. You'd push it til you starved to death.

CHINESE CARTOONS!

Michael Sporn just blogged about "Modern Sketch," a Chinese cartoon magazine originating in Shanghai in the years 1934 - 1937. I followed his link and was amazed to find a graphically sophisticated magazine, one that I'd consider subscribing to if it was still being published today. I had no idea that China, or at least the Chinese artists in Shanghai, were so hip to the trends in Europe and America.

By the way, is that bucktoothed guy on the cover...me? It could be a Chinese caricature of of what they regard as the typical pickle-nose Westerner. Or maybe I'm a strange physical type that appears again and again in every generation.

Northern China was invaded by Japan while the magazine was still being published in the South. Some of the references to the war are heart-rending. I don't know what the couple above are saying, but the thought of love and charm in the midst of chaos is interesting. Are these people crazy, or did they make a zen decision to enjoy what may be their last hours on Earth?

What a nice page (above) of line drawings!

Wow! I love sketches like this one (above).

I wish I knew what was going on here (above). Maybe it's an end of the world scenario with Japan murdering ordinary people in the street while decadent entertainment prevails in the rooms of the well-to-do. 'Just guessing. 

What the heck is happening here (above)? These fascinating pictures almost look like Tarot cards. Click to enlarge.

This magazine is a glimpse into what might have been if China had continued contact with the wider world after the thirties. Instead the country fell under the boot of Japan, then was delivered into the xenophobic hands of Mao, who I regard as a madman. 

Haw! A nice, Rapidograph-style drawing of a formal dinner...a nice reminder of what can be achieved with pen and paper.

Here's (below) the site that Michael referenced for his blog. Thanks to Greg Kelly for finding it!

http://ocw.mit.edu/ans7870/21f/21f.027/modern_sketch/ms_essay01.html

Michael's site:

http://www.michaelspornanimation.com/splog/