Movie Coincidences

In the 1951 movie The Day the Earth Stood Still, a giant robot stepped out of the alien spaceship and zapped all the weapons of the military present with a raygun from it's visor, after one of them fired at the humanoid alien ambassador, injuring him and destroying the gift he'd brought.   The giant robot was played by a giant human actor named Lockard Martin.  The central theme of the movie was that our military power made human existence a threat to other life.

Today, Lockheed Martin is one of the largest military contractors, making jet fighters, UAVs, ballistic missiles, bombers, and much, much more.  It was formed from the merger of several earlier military contractors.  Martin-Marrietta and Lockheed merged in 1995, creating the present corporate entity.  Lockard Martin (who was well over 7 feet tall and played a giant in many movies in the 40s and 50s) died in 1959.

In the movie Dr. Stragelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, one of the navigators on the B52 keeps popping his head up from the downstairs navigation bay to tell the pilots their fuel and other status.  The actor who played that navigator was named Glen Beck.  (the other navigator was played by James Earl Jones in his very first movie appearance) Stanley Kubrick used him in several of his movies, and he's had bit parts in dozens of movies through the years.  Dr Strangelove was also about the consequences of the military-industrial complex and the danger it held for humanity, including the particularly scary possibility of an individual with a lot of power losing their mind and starting a war.

Another actor named Glenn Beck sells gold, controversy and conspiracy theories on TV and the internet.  He has undeniably lost his mind but he had a huge influence for a time and still has a lot of influence.  He was one of the most enthusiastic boosters of an aggressive military posture for the US, especially of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, arguing that doing so would help prevent World War III.   The invasion of Iraq on wholly fraudulent grounds has significantly destabilized the middle east and permanently damaged US credibility, especially in the middle east.  It seems very likely that WWIII, if it happens, will arise out of the long term consequences of this horrific policy blunder.

addenda, april 2022

In an interesting coincidence, Glenn Beck, the conspiracy theorist, was born in Mt Vernon, WA, in 1964.  Glen C Beck, the actor, was born in Cranbrook, BC, in 1935, although he's spent a lot of his career in Britain.   Cranbrook is near the southeast corner of BC, where Mt Vernon is near the northwest corner of neighboring WA.

America's Cup Scoring

The dumb guy non-sailor on this weekend's America's Cup broadcasts kept saying that "the first to win 9, wins the series".  This is not correct.  It's a best of 17 series.  Had both teams started out at zero, it would have been correct, but team Oracle was found to have cheated in an earlier series with illegally positioned corrector weights.  (Even though it's a very different type of boat, we've had a similar problem in the J24 class).  Several sailors are being banned (I assume this is rule 69 but it's the same dumb guy non-sailor doing the reporting, so it's not clear), and Oracle started the series with a 2 point deficit.  The winner of a best of 17 is the first boat to have a lead which cannot be overcome in the number of races remaining.  It turns out, if Emirates Team New Zealand is the first to 8, they win.  Oracle has to win 10 (again, netting 8 points) to win the series.

So what the dumb guy non-sailor should say is: the first to 8 points wins.  Really, not at all the same thing.

As I write this, Oracle just won race 4, giving New Zealand a 3:1 (score 3:-1 a 4 point advantage)

Some examples: Had Team Emirates NZ gone 7:0, they would have a 9 point advantage with 10 races left.  If O won them all, they would win.

Had NZ gone 8:0, they'd have a 10 point advantage with 9 races left.  O could no longer win, so the series would be over.
If NZ goes 8:1, they'd have a 9 point advantage with 8 races left.  O can't win.
If NZ goes 8:2, they'd have an 8 point advantage with 7 races left.  O can't win.
If NZ goes 8:3, they'd have a 7 point advantage with 6 races left.  O can't win.
...
If NZ goes 8:9, they'd have a 1 point advantage with no races left.   O can't win.  (I'm sort of hoping for this particular outcome.   It's the most possible races while still sending the cup somewhere else.  It's a terrific venue and as a native of the Bay Area who spent a lot of time sailing 505s at that very spot, I'm proud of what they came up with.  But I want to get it out of Larry's hands.  The AC72 rule is insanely dangerous and Larry is way too arrogant to change it.  It's already killed one world class sailor and it will surely kill more.)

If O had gone 9:0, they'd have a 7 point advantage with 8 races left.  NZ could still win.
If O had gone 10:0, they'd have an 8 point advantage with 7 races left.  NZ couldn't win.
If O goes 9:3, they'd have a 4 point advantage with 5 races left.  NZ could still win
If O goes 10:3, they'd have a 5 point advantage with 4 races left.  NZ couldn't win.

addenda 14 Sep 2013

There's some evidence that it's not a best of 17 series after all; that it's a first to 9 points series.  If this is the case, it could potentially run to 19 races: NZ wins 8 and O wins 10 would be a tie with 8 points each after 18 races.  The 19th race would thus be the tiebreaker.  The score, after today, is NZ 6 and O 0 (with 2 wins neutralizing the penalty).

The event immediately following day 5's racing is mixed martial arts fighting, and I stupidly left the TV on for a few minutes.  Pretty lame.  The same dumb guy was announcing and he seemed to know a little more.

addenda 20 Sep 2013

 It turns out the way the penalty is applied is odd: the first two wins by the penalized boat do not count in the scoring, and thereafter it's best of 17.  This translates to "first to 9 points wins."   This seems strange and convoluted but as long as it's applied consistently, I suppose it's fair.  It means the number of races sailed could range between 9 and 19.

I think the way the wind speed limit is defined is correct (add the current and wind vectors and if it exceeds the threshold, it's too much to sail, period.)     The threshold speed (23 knots) is also about right for the boats involved.  Since the wind exceeds that threshold basically every day on an ebb at the chosen venue, they probably should have shortened the wing a few percent.

As today's first race made clear, the time limit is waaaaay too short. 40 minutes for a 10 nautical mile course is 15 knots average vmg.  The boats can't do that in less than about 9 knots of wind and it turns out that windspeed of 7-10 knots is close to optimal for getting the best match racing.  This is true of most sailboats and these things are no exception.  Match racing delays the race.   Time limits are for putting a stupidly slow race out of its misery--basically when there's a long period of insufficient wind to move the boats at all.  A time limit of 70-90 minutes would make a lot better sense.  So would something more adaptive: neither boat moving relative to the water for 15 minutes.

The King's English

In 1614, Queen Anne died without heir.  The powers that were in Britain, namely Parliament, had decided that after three terrible kings who were Catholic, that they didn't want a Catholic King again.  So they banned Catholics from the throne.  The nearest non-Catholic heir was George, Elector of Hanover, Anne's 4th cousin.  George wasn't really interested in being King of England and he spent very little time there, and probably never learned to speak much English.  But his court, and many of his new English subjects, tried to please him.  Among the many small gestures was mimicking his thick German accent.  This became known as speaking "The King's English" and portions of it remain in the English accent to this day. ("Elector" is a title similar to Duke, but in the Holy Roman Empire, was part of the process of "electing" the new Emperor)

For example, the German "R" sound is rolled, where prior to George, the English "R" had been hard, what is called "rhotic", like today's mainstream American accent.  George was apparently able to stop rolling his Rs but never quite make a true hard one, so Rs were dropped.   There is no "S" sound in German, but there is a double S, so many speakers of the Kings English have over-sibilant Ss.   The sound that Germans spell "Sch" is spelled in English "Sh".  So George confused the two, and words which had been pronounced "Sk" but spelled "Sch", such as "Schedule", came to be pronounced "Shedyule".  There's no "Th" sound in German but they spell what an English speaker would spell with a "T" with a Th.  Thus the river that runs through London became the "Tems", while retaining it's spelling "Thames".  (Interestingly, this seems to be a case of the sound being switched twice:  Rivers in the new world that were named for it, such as the one in Connecticut, are pronounced with a Th sound, but it appears that before the renaissance and the spelling firmed up, it had been pronounced "Tems".  But during the time the English were colonizing America, it was pronounced "Thames")

It became fashionable for a time in the New World to mimic the King's English, so things like R dropping became popular in a number of the more fashionable coastal cities.  But when the Americans rebelled against George's great grandson, George III, this became less fashionable.  But pieces of it remained in some American dialects.   The inland American dialect continued to move in it's own direction.   And much of England didn't really adopt it.

Conveniently for historians of American English, a great deal of research has been done on the "correct" way to pronounce Shakespeare. (Shakespeare and the earliest American colonies were contemporaneous) An English "RP" or "Public School" accent is quite wrong, and many of the rhymes and puns just don't work.  An American accent is still wrong, but less so.  I've always thought it really funny to hear an American doing Shakespeare, aping an RP accent. The modern accent that sounds nearest, to my ear, is Cornwall, where they still pronounce a lot of R, but even that is not right.

No Deposit, No Return

Prior to about 1965, when you bought a bottle of soda pop, beer, or whatever, the price included a deposit

for the bottle.  The bottles were made of fairly thick glass.  You'd return the bottle to the store and they'd return the deposit and collect the bottles in the same wooden or wire trays they'd been delivered in.  The delivery truck from the bottling company would pick up the tray, and the bottles would be washed, sterilized and refilled.  Many of the companies had an agreement that they'd use interchangeable bottles...most beer, for example, came in a familiar brown bottle that was identical, no matter which American brewery had produced it.    I got to take a tour of one of these plants and the washing process was very interesting and impressive, and a big part of the bottling process.

Around 1965, somebody came up with the bright idea to make bottles that used a lot less material.  Initially they were still glass, but they were much thinner.  This reduced the weight to be delivered, and eliminated the washing process for the bottler, as well as giving consumers a small price break.  It was promoted as "No Deposit, No Return."  Most people did the suggested right thing and threw it into the trash, but plenty did not, and there was an immediate and shocking increase in litter--in parks, in parking lots, by the side of the road.  By 1970, a lot of people were realizing a mistake had been made.  The growing realization of the limits of the earth and it's resources added to this--which got a big boost from the 1968 Christmas visit to the moon by Apollo 8.

It took a while, but many states now force vendors to recycle again.  New technologies have been developed:  Instead of being washed, the glass bottles are now sorted by color, crushed, melted and made into new bottles.  Plastic is sorted by type and a few types are melted and turned into new bottles, although most is turned into non-food-safe objects.  One of my favorites is polar fleece.  Cans in the 1960s had been steel, and to drink a beer or soda pop you needed a can or bottle opener.  The "pull tab" was invented about the same time as No Deposit and immediately millions of pull tabs began filling the landscape, as well as being accidentally consumed by animals, and a few people.  The aluminum can came along at about the same time as the non-separating pull tab, fairly late in the 1970s.  Aluminum is extremely easy to recycle (it floats on top of other metals when melted) and a design that used very little was soon developed.   If you were born after about 1963, you probably never knew anything else.