Star Wars: The Feminists F**K Up

So I had high hopes for the new Star Wars movie. I avoided any reviews of the movie in order to avoid spoilers. I thought that with the impressive gains in CGI I would be in for epic scenes. I got that. But that was all I got. The rest had me leaving the theatre highly annoyed and glad I paid matinee money.

I knew that there would be some propagandizing when JJ Abrams gave that interview talking about all the white men in the movie and how he purposely went to diversify the Star Wars universe. I have no problem with diversifying a cast so long as it does not detract from the primary business at hand: Telling a coherent and believable story with due exceptions needed for a work of fiction. What happened in Star Wars was that it turned a great epic from the 70's into a propaganda film straight out the feminist re-education camps called "women's studies" and that is on top of EPIC and I mean EPIC fails in concepts. Lets begin.

Finn:

We meet Finn at the beginning of the movie where his fellow trooper (and by his emotional response possibly lover) is killed by the rebel ace pilot. THEN we find out near the climatic battle that Fin was an ex-sanitation worker (who somehow knows about the defense systems...) So when did the Empire/First Order promote sanitation workers to Storm Trooper? Perhaps this explains why Storm Troopers are such poor shots. And am I the only one wondering why and where all the clones went? They paid a whole lot for the clones of Jango Fett. Are we to believe that they all died between episode 3 and 4?

Finn is also in the JJ world where the women are just as bad-ass, well actually MORE badass (we'll get to that) than the men. I mean this guy reported to an Amazon type, special silver uniform female officer. Yet when he gets to Jaku his first instinct is to try and protect Rey and has a look of surprise when she kicks ass? Maybe it's only First Order women who can fend for themselves. This is the real first clue that you've entered the Feminism zone. There will be no "female in need of rescuing" here. Never mind that such rescuing was the major story ark of the original. Nope, the robot needs rescuing.

About the only thing Finn is good for in this film is to get Ace Pilot off the First Order ship. He's next to useless in combat. He can't fly a ship. He is a poor medic, knows nothing about tools or anything mechanical. Was there anyone in the original Star Wars that was that useless? Finn apparently exists to:

1) Be black.
2) White Knight for Rey who can clearly "take care of herself".
3) Rescue Ace Fighter.
Should Finn not reappear in later installments, I will not be sad.

Before I get to Rey, let me get to the Death Planet.

In the original we could imagine a death star. It was a novel concept but at least it was self-powered. I'll admit that the idea that it had enough fire power to destroy an entire planet was far fetched but it worked. In this movie we get the Death Planet. OK. How does this planet get it's power? It sucks up suns.

Really.

On this basis alone you'd think that every planet in the known universe would be against the First Order. In order to power the Death Planet a sun must be destroyed and therefore every living thing on an inhabitable planet in that solar system and the alteration of the orbits of various stellar entities. At least the death star only destroyed a single planet. And these guys are calling for "order"!

Not only that, but the Death Planet apparently just floats up close to a sun with absolutely no impact on the environment and sucks up what seems to be solar flares it causes.

Smh

And does this is in about 15-20 minutes.

Smh

I suppose solar panels were too much to ask for. Hey at least it was green energy!

Rey:

Rey is the badass with the Samori hairdo. She is apparently very nice with a Bo (staff). She's SO bad ass that unlike Luke and Anakin, she's been on her own on Tatooine..I mean Jaku all by herself! Not only do girls not need rescuing, they DONT NEED PARENTS or ANY FAMILY OR FRIENDS!

After rescuing Finn the ex-sanitation worker turned storm trooper, she gets onto the Millennium Falcon which she has not only never flown before and apparently hasn't flown anything other than her land speeder, but not only flies this thing first try but is doing aerial acrobatics! On her first go! Mind you we never saw how Luke Skywalker learned to fly an X-Wing so we could forgive this but this is the first hour of the film! At least Anakin had years of flying and in his space flight debut he was basically lucky when he destroyed the ship.

Not only that though, Rey knows the ins and outs of the Falcon. A ship she's never been on. No really. Diagrams? Rey don't need no stinking diagrams! She's been crawling inside of downed imperial ships!

But the worst part was her fight with Kylo. Lets get this straight. Kylo is no Darth Vader but he has been trained for many years in lightsaber use and in the force. He knows force grip (which according to lore comes after mastery of push and pull) and what appears to be level 3 mind control (in video game parlance). Level one would be the ability to distract.

Remember that Luke and Anakin, both very strong in the Force didn't master any of these powers until way into the trilogies. Rey however can manipulate minds immediately! How? Why? Because vagina apparently.

Back to this fight though. Rey beats Kylo in her very first time using a light saber! Lets understand how much of an epic fail this is:

At the beginning of the movie. Kylo stops blaster fire in mid flight while simultaneously holding Ace Fighter still. He continues to keep blaster shot still while having conversations and giving orders. Only when he leaves does he stop holding the blast. And let us recall that Kylo trained with Luke Skywalker and his new dark master. Yet he cannot defeat Rey who has no knowledge of Force usage (other than "you will release me") and has never used a blade before. I can tell you that one who has mastered the Bo (staff) does not know how to use a blade. Two different types of weapons.

It took almost everything I had in me to not yell out "bullshit" when this scene ended. That's how bad this was. Was it shot well? Yes. But the story was shit. Total shit. At least the original Star Wars had luke learn to use the Force and to develop his skills. He was constantly told by Yoda and Kenobi that he was not prepared to take on Vader. Anakin lost limb to Dooku.

Here's the worst part though. This film made millions and will likely make billions. This is going to be used to "prove" that the story is "good" and therefore we will get more of this nonsense. I suppose the good thing is that now that Rey has met Luke and can get trained, the unbelievable fights will make more sense. I guess the good thing is that we don't have Jar-Jar and Mitochondria, I mean Midichlorians to deal with.

Trump Is Wrong On Carson's "Anger"

So Trump is on the campaign trail trying his best to take down Carson who has passed him in the polls. Rather than stick to the issue that put him out front from the beginning, he has decided to play psychologist and tell us how people with anger issues never get over it. Trump is wrong and I'm going to tell you why.

When I was a kid, I had a hair trigger, nasty temper. I understand this may have been inherited from my late grandfather on my mother's side. I can't say for sure, but I had it. I got into a lot of fights in elementary school and spent a lot of alone time trying avoid other "angry moments". If I could turn green and grow a few feet, I would have. At times I had to be physically restrained from beating the shit out of other students. I was fortunate to have been attending a school at a time where zero tolerance rules were not in effect and an administration that did not assume that because I was angry that I was stupid. I had, like many black boys, impulse control issues. In the 6th grade that came to a end when something in my brain "clicked" and I stopped with the hair trigger part of my temper and became "slow burning fuse" temper.

Slow burning fuse temper has it's own drawbacks. Instead of releasing the beast on the spot, one tends to internalize incidents until one explodes. In essence you keep a mental ledger of every incident a person does to you and then on the last incident, which may or may not be anything large, they hit the magic number of incidents and then it's on!

In my case, when a person on the block who I had a conflict with decided to throw his bike pump at me, he hit his "it's on" moment and I experienced, for the first time in my life, killing rage. Those who have experienced killing rage know the feeling. The best I can explain it is that you want your target dead and there is nothing else in consideration. So I went into my house and picked up a solid aluminum bar and proceeded to return to the scene and bludgeon this person to death.

So why am I not in jail or just getting out on a 25 to life bid? Because the day I would have become a murderer a man was painting the house and saw me rush by ranting on how I was going to kill someone and then he saw me re-emerge with the aluminum bar and he knew I saw serious and stopped me from making a huge mistake. Like Carson, an intervention of fate kept me from doing something very, very bad. Unlike Carson I didn't attribute this to divine intervention or took it as a reason to dedicate my life to God. What it did do is make me very aware of killing rage and that I never wanted to experience that again. You see, unlike what Trump thinks, those of us who have experience killing rage can and most often do get that under control. Does that mean that we cannot get there again? No! It does mean that because we know what it feels like when we are headed in that direction that we know to "get off the road" before we get to killing rage.

Some people get that control from religion. Some get it through athletic endeavors. Some do meditation. But one thing we all have in common is that we know to remove ourselves from situations and people before we get to the point where we want to kill. In fact I would say that those of us who met our inner killer are far better prepared than those who have not. Why? Because we are no longer in denial about the human capacity to kill. You won't catch us saying things like "I would never kill..." because we know that everybody has a breaking point. Everybody. We happened to have found ours and we don't want to revisit that.

So although I have my issues with Carson, the fact that he tried to gut a kid when he was a youth is not one of them. As for Trump, it's looks desperate, really to be going on and on about this particular issue. There are plenty of policy issues that Trump can take Carson to task for and he should spend his time on those.

"Emergency Situations"

From a Road and Track article on a Nissan concept vehicle:

, but it's what it does when you put it in Piloted Drive that's amazing.​ The steering wheel ​retracts into the instrument panel​ and is replaced by a big flat screen . . . like something out of ​Transformers​, just without the guns...

But what if you need the steering wheel in an emergency situation? Maybe I've seen too many movies, but I'm quite certain that there will be at least one situation on the road you encounter that requires some kind of snap-decision making.

I think it hasn't yet dawned on the author that the almost point of these vehicles is that humans are "bad" at emergency situations and therefore will be replaced by the AI. In other words, the human IS the problem to be solved. This is why Google's car has nothing for the "driver". Everyone in Google's car is a passenger. The future as the industry (both the auto and insurance) is no human driver on public roads. EVER. The automakers and/or tech companies will make the technology available and the insurance companies will bankrupt any but the richest owner who wants to actually drive. That is if the government doesn't pronounce human driving a public health hazard and has it banned first.

Some Ideas About Automated Vehicle Development

What follows are the thoughts of a very much NOT ENGINEER. Just someone curious about it. Personally, I want to drive myself and change my own gears...with a clutch thank you very much.

So having watched the latest video of Tesla's auto-pilot make a dive for the opposite side of the road when it got confused I thought about how engineers are approaching automated driving. What follows is purely speculative as I have no idea what the engineers are actually doing.

The first thing I thought was that the focus that I see is on safety. It seems to me that automated driving, outside of DARPA, is overly concerned with safety. I was watching a test drive of the GLE AMG and the driver was complaining about how the safety equipment was interfering with the track testing. It killed the throttle, tightened the seat belts, etc. The car was being overly cautious because it assumed that the driver was not in control. I think that is a problem. The focus for automated systems should be to emulate an experienced driver. I know we like to ding humans for their multiplicity of accidents but the fact is that humans travel millions of miles without nary an incident. We take in and process, in real time vast amounts of information and do a lot of predictive analysis when we drive. For all our accidents we do a fucking great job….the vast majority of the time.

Lets make automated systems act like humans. First off, lets lower “safety” down a few notches in priorities. The human driver makes a bunch of assumptions when driving. We assume that everyone else on the road will act in a manner that will ensure their own safety. We humans look for a reason to NOT think this is the case. It seems to me that automated systems assume everything is a danger until it is no longer in range. Here's an example. You are driving towards an intersection and a vehicle is approaching it at a particularly high rate of speed but IS slowing down. Most humans would note this behavior but would NOT brake or take any actions to stop or swerve. 99% of the time this is the correct response. We are AWARE of the other car but we do not REACT to the other car. We also calculate, almost instantaneously whether we have enough speed to either cross the intersection before they would hit us or we have enough braking distance to stop if they entered the intersection. We also are aware of how much room we have to maneuver.

We also note that the other vehicle has a threshold to cross, the stop sign. Most of us wouldn't react unless we determined that the other vehicle was carrying to much speed/momentum to stop at the stop sign or the vehicle crossed the imaginary “stop line” demarcated by the stop sign. Automated vehicles need to be able to recognize stop signs from any angle so that it could make such judgment calls and react appropriately.

Following an “unmarked” Road

The two things I saw that bothered me the most was when on curved roads the Tesla simply went off road. The reason for this is that the car needs to “see” white lines to know how to position itself while moving. Who thought that was a good idea? Anyone who has road tripped knows that there are plenty of roads that have very poor or no lane markings. Lets not even begin to talk about snow. So I think the engineers are approaching the positioning question alllll wrong. Again, how do humans know how to position themselves. White lines are taken as cues to the shape of the road but we process more than that. Most of us cue heavily off of the vehicle in front of us. Automated systems should be built to prioritize the vehicle ahead as the cue for vehicle position just as humans do. These cues become even more important in situations like snow and heavy rain where the road is practically invisible.

Secondly the vehicle should do as humans do and establish road boundaries by analyzing the larger environment. Automated vehicles need to be able to know the “hard left” of the road. The “hard left” is the do not cross threshold for any car. It should not cross to the other side of the road unless it is the only option to not crash. Barriers, grass, double lines and oncoming vehicles should be used to determine the “hard right” of any road. In the absence of this an automated vehicle should be able to measure the width of the road, divide it in half and keep the car to the right of the mid point as a minimum requirement. This is what humans do when there are no markings.

Road Arches

There are two scenarios for curved roads. One has a vehicle ahead and one has no vehicle. Lets take the first. If there is a vehicle on a curved road the car should make one assumption..all curved roads are smooth curves. That is there are no corners. With this assumption in place the car should note that the vehicle in front of it is HIGHLY likely to not make an abrupt 90 degree turn. That is the vehicle ahead is following the curve. The automated vehicle should prioritize following the vehicle ahead over road markings because it is MOST likely that the vehicle is following the road. Using this assumption the vehicle should use the “best fit” model for what the road ahead looks like until it can actually “see” the road. Humans do this all the time on “blind curves”. Even though we know the curves on roads we drive daily and have stored it in our biological GPS, whenever we encounter a novel road this is what we do. We assume the curve will be smooth. We assume the car in front of us is following the curve and that we should mimic its actions and we predict what the road ahead looks like until we can see it.

This kind of driving works 99.9% of the time and that's a great rate!

Now with curved roads that have no other vehicle in front of us means that we cannot use the “mimic that” algorithm. Instead we fall back to road analysis. The vehicle should determine the hard right (and probably “hard left”) and place the car dead center of it's side of the road. In cases where the road is barely wider than the vehicle (relative to a wide two way road), the car would put itself dead center.

This idea of “hard right” and “hard left” cannot be stressed enough. The reliance on road markers is IMO a dangerous assumption. Perhaps engineers can start with the assumption that there are no markers on the road. There is only road and “not road”. Once you can get the automated system to determine the difference between the two, without lines, then a lined road is that much easier to handle. I realize this may be counter to the idea that we tackle the easiest problem first, but I think that by tackling the hard problem first (which is really a matter of dealing with perception) we can have automated systems that won't fail..and not try to cross the divider.

HitchBOT Killed in Philly.

For those who haven't followed, A "robot" was hitching a ride across the US and met its demise in Philly. The stated purpose of the experiment was to see if robots could trust humans. I would say that it was actually a social experiment on high and low trust societies.

The HitchBOT made its way clear across Canada without incident. Hitchbot went through parts of Europe unmolested. Hitchbot was stuck in Boston for weeks and somehow made it to Philly where it was dismembered. A glance at city data for Philly says a lot. In 2013 thefts represented 53 percent of all crime meaning that HitchBOT had a roughly 50-50 chance of making it through that city. If you added robberies and burglaries to the theft as representing taking stuff that doesn't belong to you, then the odds of HitchBOT meeting an untimely end in Philly skyrockets to 79%.

Perhaps the real lesson is that you don't leave valuable items in relatively high theft incident cities.

A Failure Of Leadership

Robert Gates, the head of the Boy Scouts of America said this during his speech calling for the Boy Scouts to allow Homosexual male leaders:

"We must deal with the world as it is, not as we might wish it to be,” Gates said

It was the unwillingness to "deal with the world as it is" that got us things like The Golden Gate bridge

Every advance in science, medicine, architecture was made because someone decided to NOT deal with the world as it "is" and rather to make it as they want it to be.

Currently ISIS is having a field day in the Middle East because they do not accept the world "as it is". Not that I support ISIS, but at least they understand that the future belongs to those willing to shape it. What Gates is saying about his organization is that it is beholden to the whims and wishes of those largely outside it's organization rather than those who are in the organization.

The same can be said for the nation.

Rewatching Elysium

So I was rewatching Elysium last night. As someone acutely aware of the implications of automation, watching Elysium is pretty hard on the suspension of belief mental state that one needs to be in to take such a movie in. Some of the major problems with Elysium:

1) The driods are apparently good enough to act as police and on screen were very elegant in their movements. Since that is the case why are humans building these robots? Any robotic technology good enough to be that elegant is good enough to put a robot together without human intervention. Yes, I know that the accident needs to happen to move the plot forward but still, it may have been more interesting to see the struggling to make ends meet character try to make those ends meet while competing with robots rather than just being policed by them. This is a problem that Total Recall had as well, though there appeared to be far less automation in that particular future.

2) Speaking of accidents. What the hell was that? Again, I understand that the plot needed to be moved forward but a door that cannot be opened? Seriously? In this high tech future no designer decided on a button that re-opens a door if it is blocked? I mean c'mon now. Sunroofs, power windows and garage door openers have had this feature for decades now. They don't have this for factory equipment? Ok. You COULD assume that the business was so into being profitable that they ordered the model without the open-door-if-blocked feature. BUt if they really wanted to be profitable there would be NO HUMANS working there anyway!

Lastly how are the rich people inhabiting Elysium making money? As the US will soon find out, if you decimate the spending class (that's middle class to you) then you have no one who can buy your goods and services. No one buys your goods and services means there's no money to be made. The entire economic model (since we saw no "middle class" earthbound people) of Elysium is built on quicksand, the entire movie makes no sense.

On a side note, I'm compelled to discuss the parallels between the recent news that the Chinese have gotten into genetically engineering embryos. One of the comments I've read about it is the difference in ethics between The West and the Chinese. Generally speaking the Chinese will do it if it can be done while The West, with it's history of slavery, Final Solutions and the like, have ethical qualms with doing these things. This brings us to the new RoboCop movie in which all the work done on RoboCop was done in what is clearly China. RoboCop is heavy on ethics and is watchable for that alone.