Category Archives: Rants

The Mulatto Cyborg

Image courtesy of Wikipedia

The things you read about in academia…

As part of my job, I have access to the University of Minnesota library system and all its digital subscriptions to academic research journals.  Mainly I use this library to keep up with what’s latest in the field of plant cell biology, but it does let you stumble across stuff in other fields sometimes.

In 2005, LeiLane Nishime of Sonoma State University published an article in Cinema Journal called “The Mulatto Cyborg: Imagining a Multiracial Future.”  I wish I could share this article with you, but I’m going to have to go over the gist of it instead.  Nishime makes the argument that we use science fiction to tell stories about social issues in our own real life.  Since it’s at one step remove (we’re talking about space aliens, not humans), writers can be more daring than if the story was set in the real world.  So far, so good.  Anybody who’s seen that infamous Star Trek episode where the people are black on one side and white on the other side … yep.  We sure use science fiction to explore our own issues.

The second part of Nishime’s argument is this: if robots are our science-fictiony slaves in the future, then cyborgs are mulattoes.

Okay.  Let’s just never mind that a union between Data and Tasha Yar is not where cyborgs come from, and examine her argument a little more closely.  She says that movies deal with these mulatto cyborgs in one of three ways: they’re bad, good, or truly cyborgean.  Bad cyborgs are more roboty and want to destroy all humans (like the Terminator).  Good cyborgs have a stronger human side and want to become human.  And the truly cyborgean cyborgs come to terms with their half-and-half nature and are not really either.

I’m curious what Nishime would have to say about Inspector Gadget.

There’s just one other problem with this paper.  Robots with high-quality silicone skin aren’t cyborgs.  Nishime argues that Bishop from Aliens and that little kid from A.I. are good cyborgs who are trying to become more human.  But they’re robots.  Whatever these characters are made out of, the other characters treat them like 100% robot, and there’s nothing borderline or half-and-half about them.  That little kid is a robot trying to be a human.

And that’s my nerd rant for the day.

If you want to try to get your hands on “The Mulatto Cyborg: Imagining a Multiracial Future,” here is a link to Cinema Journal’s website.

Reasons to be Hopeful About the Future

It seems like everything on the news has been doom and gloom lately.  But there are a number of reasons to be encouraged:

  • The obesity levels in the United States have leveled off.  News here.  It looks like 33% obese and 33% overweight is about the limit of what desk jobs will do to the population.  We will never wind up looking like the people in Wall-E.

As a corollary to that,

  • We know so much more now than we used to.  Consider how inconceivable it would have been to get protein from vegetable sources in the 1950’s.  Tofu?  You must be a Communist!  And we are slowly, very slowly, beginning to understand that being overweight isn’t a failure of character, it’s a disease.  And we’re racing for a way to deal with it.
  • Population growth is slowing down.  Yes, by most accounts, we just hit the 7 billion mark.  But according to the United Nations, the rate of increase has been constantly declining since the 1960’s.  We still don’t what will happen in the future, but the total number of people could level off around the year 2100, and then slowly drop after that.
  • Violence is way down.  See the book by Stephen Pinker.
  • The United States has a tradition of peaceful protest as a method of first resort.  Yes, the Tea Party and Occupy movements have seen their share of arrests.  But think of what it could have been – riots – or the government could have quashed both movements before they even began.  You can go and tell everybody you think the national parks should be converted into casinos to raise revenue.  I’ll heartily disagree with you, but you can say it.

So happy Christmas, Hannukah, Festivus or what have you, everyone, and keep on trucking.

Foods that you will never, ever convince me to try: Fugu

No.  I don’t care how much money you offer me.  I don’t care about high-minded principles that it’s good for you to try new things.  I won’t.

What brought this rant on?  In Cell Physiology class, we’re learning about how action potentials work.  To do that, we’ve been playing around with a simulated squid axon called Nerve.  Here’s what a normal action potential looks like in the program:

Now, here’s what happens when you add a 4nM concentration – yes, you got that right, that’s nanomolars – of tetrodotoxin into the solution:

Sorry, bud, you don’t get an action potential.

And just FYI, 4nM of tetrodotoxin is 0.00000127676 grams of per liter.  What this stuff does when it gets into your body is it blocks the sodium channels in your nerve cells so you can’t get action potentials.  You need action potentials to do things like breathe.

I think I’ll have the salad, thanks.

The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins

I must be turning into a grouchy old lady.  I read The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins – you know, that hit YA fantasy that’s scheduled to be made into a movie next year – and all I could do was cringe at the diction.

The story is nice enough, if not entirely original.  In a dystopian future, the government forces children from each of the twelve Districts to battle each other to death on live television.  When her little sister gets chosen to be this year’s contestant from District Twelve, Katniss Everdeen, warrior girl, volunteers to take her place.  There is also a subplot in which Katniss has difficulty deciding between two boyfriends.

I shouldn’t be sweating the small stuff, but what bothers me the most about this book are the adverbs.  Katniss is forever doing things “quickly” or “slowly.”  Not a semicolon in sight, dozens of places where one should have been.  Collins even goes so far as to word “actually” in a non-ironic fashion.

We are expected to believe that Katniss Everdeen likes dresses.  Katniss the pragmatic survivalist.  Katniss, who is reported to break out of the electrified fence surrounding the compound where she lives to hunt food for her family.  Okay, she’s a kid.  I liked dresses too, briefly.  When I was eight.  But you can’t move around in a dress and you can’t afford to spill rabbit guts all over it.

What is it with kids these days?

Why I love Minnesota

Since I’ve moved to Minnesota, I’ve had to get used to things being done a little bit differently around here.  The Democrats are known as the Democratic-Farmer-Labor party.  You don’t put casserole into a casserole dish, you put hotdish into a casserole.  And for some reason the DMV is called the Department of Vehicle Services.

Last week I needed to go down to the St. Paul DVS to change the address on my driver’s license.  The office is located inside a pleasant building and looks very much like the lobby of a nice orthodontist.  I approached the lady at the front desk and had the following conversation:

Me: I need to change the address on my–

Lady: Oh, here’s the form you need for that.  You can go fill it out over there and your number is B106.

No sooner had I completed the form than the system called up my number and I went to another counter with another nice lady.  We happened to have the same first name, and we made small while she stamped my papers.  Then I paid them $13.50.  Then I was done.

In Minnesota, the DMV works.  How cool is that?

Thank You Very Much, YouTube

I think I was in the fourth grade when I got the best Christmas present ever.  It was a plastic magenta Made-in-China radio.  The only station it could pick up was the 80’s music station for disgruntled Gen-Xers, but man, I loved that thing.

It was 1997 and I was getting my musical education to the likes of Duran Duran and the B52’s.  Remember, kids, we are living in a material world.  Some of them want to hurt you, some of them want to get hurt by you.  Nothing changes on New Year’s Day.  And then there was that one song where the chorus kept going, “Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto.”

Whenever that song came on the radio, I would rush over and try to puzzle out what the lyrics meant.  This was before the days when if you wanted a song, you could just go on the Internet and buy it.  A megabyte was a lot of memory.  As far as I could tell from repeated listenings, the song told the tragic story of Kilroy, who everybody thought was a robot.  But why?  And what was Mr. Roboto?  The scientist who cyborgified Kilroy to save his life?  And why did Kilroy keep saying “I am the maldrin man?”  Was a maldrin some sort of automaton?

Oh, but the plight of poor Kilroy bugged me.  Years passed, the memory faded, but I never really got over it.  I think Kilroy is part of the reason I remain obsessed with robots and androids to this very day.  That and an early brush with Isaac Asmiov.

But in the meanwhile, as I went about graduating from high school and then college, somebody invented this thing called YouTube.  And Wikipedia.  The other day, I idly searched for “domo arigato Mr. roboto.”  Oh!  The song was called “Mr. Roboto” and it was by a band called Styx.  It was released in 1983 on an album with the same name.  And Kilroy was a human.  Who disguised himself as a robot to escape from prison.  Modern Internet, thank you.  You have just laid so many childhood worries to rest.

Now I just have to go figure out what happened to poor Major Tom.

The Year 2021 According to The Year 1968

I just finished reading Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?  Don’t get me wrong – he’s an eerily good science fictionist.  His examination of the blurry line between real life and artificial life is as relevant today as it was forty-three years ago (and anticipates genetic engineering).  But some of the details of life in the year 2021 are hard to predict that far in advance.

According to Androids, ten years from now,

  • We will have flying cars.
  • We will have Skype.  (Yeah!)
  • People with mental disabilities will be referred to as “chickenheads.”
  • There will be no women in positions of power.
  • The Soviet Union will come back.  People will care what the Soviet Union thinks.
  • We will have the technology to produce android brains so sophisticated that they are nearly indistinguishable from human beings.
  • Police investigators will store information about these androids on pieces of paper.