'Ender's Game' - (film)

The film of Orson Scott Card's 1985 novel 'Ender's Game' has been advertised and reviewed as 'Harry Potter meets Star Wars'. As much as the anachronism offends,  the comparison does work up to a point.

Card invested much of himself in his large novel which presents sophisticated battle tactics, subtle human relationships and a dialogue between a 'physical force kill the enemy' view of war and the softer approach of winning your enemy to be your friend. The novel never pretends to have a final right answer.

Doing all of this in 114 minutes was always going to be a stretch. The film feels rushed and doesn't give itself time to explore the emotional dilemmas and personal development core to the story, while the obligate space-battles and planet-demolition seem passe no matter how well rendered.

With too little time the director resorts to tell not show: the result is competent enough but too superficial for the viewer to care about characters or issues. I'd say three stars out of five.

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Walking back through central Reading with Alex at 11.15 pm is an 'edgy' experience. There are far too many guys with shabby clothes and slurred voices who are way too keen to be your friend ...

'Why Arabs Lose Wars' - Colonel Norvell B. De Atkine

Interesting article (old but nothing has really changed) on the social-cultural reasons why Arabic societies - militarised and clan-based - do not produce effective armed forces. We see the same thing today in attempts to construct a viable national Afghan army (to a western model).

Here's the background.

"The author, a retired U.S. Army colonel, draws upon many years of first-hand observation of Arabs in training to reach conclusions about the ways in which they go into combat. His findings derive from personal experience with Arab military establishments in the capacity of U.S. military attaché and security assistance officer, observer officer with the British-officered Trucial Oman Scouts (the security force in the emirates prior to the establishment of the UAE), as well as some thirty years of study of the Middle East."

Read the article.

'Captain Phillips' - (film)

From The Telegraph review.

"Hanks plays to his strengths as an average guy, in this case one in extreme circumstances. We first see him driving from his Vermont home with his wife (Catherine Keener) to catch a flight to the Middle East: his cargo ship leaves from Oman, bound for Mombasa in notoriously dangerous waters. Hanks has the air of a reluctant employee handed a distasteful work project; even before it starts it’s clear he wants it over and done with.

"On board the giant Maersk Alabama, manned by an all- American crew, Hanks curtly orders safety procedures and has them double-checked. His worst fears are confirmed when two small motor boats are observed on his radar, bearing down on the Alabama. It seems implausible that the four armed Somalis on these tiny craft could board the slow, hulking ship, but they do.

Somali pirates take the ship

"The suspense gradually increases during this protracted cat-and-mouse game, but Greengrass has merely established a base level of intensity and ratchets it up as the film progresses.

"Gratifyingly, the four pirates are not sketchily drawn and interchangeable; in the tense stand-off on board, all gradually emerge as rounded characters. But it´s been made clear in a short prologue that they’re all fisherman living on the poverty line. There's no mention of al-Qaida or religion: they're in the piracy game for the money.

"As negotiations between Phillips and the pirates falter, he is kidnapped and taken with them aboard a tiny lifeboat in which they optimistically hope to reach the Somali coast. At this point the diverse might of the US military makes its presence felt.

"The film is based on Phillips's subsequent memoir, so an upbeat ending is never in doubt: but it still subjects its audience to a heart-in-mouth ordeal. Hanks's tearful final scenes, portraying a relieved man in deep shock, are very fine: it’s the most raw, emotional acting he`s ever delivered on screen."

The review is correct: Hanks' performance is never less than absolutely excellent - totally convincing. It's also a taut thriller with plenty of excitement all the way through.

This was our first visit to the Vue cinema at Longwell Green. It's situated in a sprawling, concrete, car-friendly, windswept 'leisure complex' with the usual restaurants and coffee bars. The chinese restaurant initially looked promising (although closed for the afternoon) but a peek inside showed Formica tables and what looked like a ceiling collapse in the centre of the dining room.  Broken glass carpeted the pavement outside the pub and small groups of vaguely-feral youths wandered aimlessly.

A shame as it's potentially quite convenient for us distance-wise: another case where 'edgy' and perhaps 'vibrant' doesn't immediately translate into 'appealing'.

'The Magic Flute' - Tobacco Factory Theatre

For what it's worth. Prince Tamino and his Sancho Panza-esque companion, the bird-catcher Papageno, get to meet the 'Queen of the Night' who bids the Prince to rescue her abducted daughter Pamina. The daughter is being held by the High Priest Sarastro and his acolytes at the temple of Isis and Osiris.

Our two heroes duly arrive at the temple where they are subjected to three trials (which mostly seem to involve being quiet when people talk to you). After success, Prince Tamino wins the hand of Princess Pamino, and Papageno gets a raucous chick of his own buffoonish persuasion.

It turns out the High Priest Sarastro is the good guy, and the Queen was vengeful and spiteful.

You don't go to opera to enjoy the intricacies of the sophisticated plot.

'The Magic Flute' stage 15 minutes before the start

I kept being distracted by the way performers seemed to be someone else. The bird-catcher clown looked (and behaved) very much liked UKIP leader Nigel Farage on steroids; the director of music was a double for TV cook Nigel Slater (or possibly Louis Theroux); Princess Pamina seemed the reincarnation of Clare's niece Jane; the High Priest Sarastro look like Brian Blessed operating at 30% capacity. I thought the Prince was adequate while extravert-birder Papageno stole the show.

The orchestra warms up

Still, a fine, professional performance and the music of Mozart. The visceral reality of real people doing stuff a few feet away gets to beat hyper-engineered imagery any day, no matter how good film-making gets these days.

"The User Profile Service failed the logon. User profile cannot be loaded."

Not a message you want to see as you try to log-on to your laptop.

Asus Netbook: can't log-in

The offending error message

I looked it up on Google of course. Here's the tip: you have to start in safe-mode, do stuff with a recovery disk (don't have one) and then mess around changing stuff in the Registry.

No way.

When I bought the Netbook, back in April 2011 the PC World sales guy looked at me askance. "You do have another computer as well, don't you?" he asked. He meant - a proper computer.

Fixated as I was on lightness and a long battery life I ignored him, and have been suffering ever since. An example: start Word, go get a coffee, arrive back as the document opens on the screen.

As all of my files are on Dropbox, it doesn't matter that I can't get into the Netbook. So I think this is an opportunity to write it off and get one of those combined tablets cum laptops running Windows 8.1. Something I can work on (MS Office), and also use as a tablet.

Research to come. Meanwhile I've dug my old laptop out of a cupboard. The fan doesn't work but it's superior to the Asus device in all performance aspects. And the weather's getting colder ...

'Summertime' - J. M. Coetzee

Mr Vincent,  an English academic, is writing a biography of J. M. Coetzee, the deceased Nobel prize-winning author. The book covers the mid-seventies when Coetzee had returned to Cape Town from America and was eking out a living as a teacher while caring for his widowed and ailing father.

We start with fragmentary diary entries from the period, which Vincent has manage to obtain from Coetzee's estate. The bulk of the book then consists of interviews between Vincent and various people who knew Coetzee during this period.

A picture emerges of the author as a withdrawn, passive intellectual - a man without presence. The women (and two had affairs - flings - with him) describe a person incapable of warmth, closed-in, almost asexual.  'How can a man be a great writer and yet be so ordinary, even weak, as a person?'  asks one interviewee.

I find the self-referential writing dazzlingly paradoxical. His characters are beautifully-drawn 'conventional people' who think that Coetzee is a solitary, over-intellectual misfit and loser, incapable of competent social interaction.

The Wikipedia article suggests this is not too far from the truth (at least as regards his extreme antisociality) yet it is the author himself who is telling us all this, with consummate skill. Not so much a fictionalised biography as an exploration of how people judge others, especially those unlike themselves.

Solar lights are go

Three days of charging are up and our night-lights have been turned on.

No more bumping into obstacles

...

'Quantum Computing Since Democritus' - Scott Aaronson

If you’re a computational complexity theorist, then everything looks like .. well, a problem in computational complexity. Scott Aaronson is astonishingly bright, on top of his subject and genuinely droll: this book gives you a fly-on-the-wall view of how he engaged with his students at the University of Waterloo.

We start with a tour of prerequisites. Chapter 2 covers axiomatic set theory (ZF); chapter 3 Gödel’s Completeness and Incompleteness Theorems, and Turing Machines. In chapter 4 we apply some of these ideas to artificial intelligence, discuss Turing’s Imitation Game and the state of the art in chatbots, and also Searle’s Chinese Room puzzle. Aaronson invariably provides a fresh perspective on these familiar topics although already we see the ‘lecture note’ character of this book, where details are hand-waved over (because the students already know this stuff, or they can go away and look it up).

Chapters 5 and 6 introduce us to the elementary computation complexity classes and explain the famous P not = NP conjecture. This is not a first introduction – you are assumed to already understand formal logic and concepts such as clauses, validity and unsatisfiability. Chapters 7 and 8 introduce, by way of a discussion on randomness and probabilistic computation, a slew of new complexity classes and the hypothesised relations between them, applying some of these ideas to cryptanalysis.

Chapter 9 brings us to quantum theory. Six pages in we’re talking about qubits, norms and unitary matrices so a first course on quantum mechanics under your belt would help here. The author’s computer science take on all this does bring in some refreshing new insights. We’re now equipped, in chapter 10, to talk about quantum computing. Typically this is not architecture or engineering discussion; Aaronson is a theorist, and for his community, quantum computing means a new set of complexity classes with conjectural relationships to those of classical computation.

We now go off at a tangent as the author critiques Sir Roger Penrose’s views on consciousness as a quantum gravity phenomenon. I think it’s fair to say that no-one in AI takes this idea seriously, but the author has the intellectual resources to engage Penrose on his own ground here.

In chapter 12 we crank up the technical level to talk about decoherence and hidden variable theories. This is one of the most interesting chapters but is too discursive – really important concepts are touched on and then abandoned; for example the discussion of decoherence and the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics  is set against a model of the multiverse, but it’s never quite clear whether Aaronson is assuming the reality of the Everett Interpretation or whether he has some other, more purely mathematical model in mind.

Chapter 12 reminds us that a computational complexity theorist’s idea of proof is a long way from that of a logician. We plunge into stochastic proofs, zero-knowledge proofs and probabilistically checkable proofs, all framed by a complexity analysis.

The next few chapters cover a series of topics in similar vein: quantum proofs (and their complexity classes), rebuttals of sceptical arguments against quantum computing (interesting and convincing), some technically demanding material on learning algorithms, and concepts of interactive proof.

The final few chapters are more philosophical: Aaronson applies his toolkit to topics such as the Anthropic Principle (via Bayesian reasoning); free will (he’s in favour but has a highly-idiosyncratic view of what free will is); time travel (how closed timelike curves impact on classical and quantum computation); and cosmology (black holes, the information paradox, with firewalls bringing us up-to-date).

I have to say that I did finish this book – it didn’t just sit on my coffee table, abandoned after the first few chapters, as the author rather fears in his preface. However, it has to be said that despite the author’s undeniable enthusiasm, complexity theory remains a minority taste. There are plenty of insights and novel observations even for those of us less enthralled but I hope it’s clear what kind of background the reader needs to get anything out of this volume.

To be fair, the book is already 362 pages long and to make the material less a write-up of post-graduate lecture notes and more a self-contained and smoothly-developed presentation of Aaronson’s many original insights would seem to require an inordinate amount of time and effort, without substantially increasing the likely readership. I enjoyed it, but not without a degree of frustration.

Solar is go! (Just kidding)

I already mentioned our thoughts about 'going solar'. The recent rise in fuel prices has refocused our minds on IKEA, and its planned solar panel roll-out in the South-West. Can't wait to see the electricity meter running backwards!

Four solar-power units charging up

We do, however, have a pilot project! The four solar-powered lights shown above will illuminate our back-door path - impenetrably dark at night. The solar cells (top) charge a triple-A battery in the compartment. At dusk a photocell triggers and the battery powers a small LED which shines onto a mirror-cone, reflecting the light horizontally through the transparent plastic.

At least that's what the instructions say: three days of sun-charging stand between now and first-light; the big switch-on will be Saturday night.

After the debacle of our non-fluorescent fluorescent paint, all our hopes hang on this!

Ploughed-field vs. green grass - colours sadly washed-out here

This afternoon on the Mendip hills: tee-shirt weather, no wind and the views very autumnal.

"The name is Bond ... " - er, no actually.

The intermittent 5:2 fasting and gym work have made my old suits (40 inch waist) something only a clown could love.

The author: M&S-clad

At the Clarks Village in Street last week I was able to pick up a new suit from the M&S outlet there. I wanted to say "The name is Bond - Nigel Bond" but I am reliably informed he's a snooker player.