Philip Greenspun's Weblog

Enduring Love, by Ian McEwan was a disturbing and painful book to read back in 1998.  I hadn’t caught the movie version until very recently on DVD.  Both book and movie start with an aviation angle.  A botched hot air balloon landing leads to the death of a passerby who tries to help. The main character in the book is a science journalist who is plagued by the attentions of an intense guy whom he meets during the balloon crash.  The filmmakers apparently didn’t think audiences would be sympathetic to a scribbler about nerds.  So the main character has become a college professor spouting off about love to a rapt audience of undergrads.  It could be literature or philosophy course.  We’re not really sure.  But most definitely the character has been stripped of his association with science and math.

I recommend the DVD if you missed the movie in the theaters.  It is almost as disturbing and more painful and intense than the book.  There are good tips in there if you want to stalk a stranger and drive them crazy.  Start by being gay and talking about God’s love.  When you do run into the stalkee say “I think you know what I’m talking about.”

The news today is full of reports that George W. Bush is quietly suggesting that our public schools teach some sort of creationism alongside evolution.  Journalists from big cities love writing about creationism and the hayseeds who believe in it because it reinforces their sense of superiority for having chosen to live in a $1 million two-bedroom apartment choked by smog and surrounded by gridlock.  One problem with these reports is that if one actually travels to small towns and rural areas across North America it is almost impossible to find people who espouse creationism.  On the contrary these areas are in my experience much more likely than cities to contain people who want to bend your ear about local geology, fossils, etc.  If you survey people coming out of a church and ask them “did God create the Earth” they might indeed say “yes” but then if you ask them how old those mountains in the distance are very few indeed would say “5000 years”.

It is unclear why the President of the U.S. saying something about education is news.  Public schools are run at the state or local level, though with an increasing level of federal interference.  And in any case the students don’t seem to believe or remember much of what the teachers say.  A kid who is unfortunate enough to be stuck in public school for 12+ years has more serious problems than a teacher blathering on about “intelligent design” for a few hours out of those 12+ years.

[Darwin was actually grossly wrong about the speed at which evolution occurs.  The Beak of the Finch is an excellent book about year-to-year natural selection and evolution among finches in the Galapagos.  The book also covers more rapid evolution in populations of guppies in aquariums with varying quantities of predators (guppies in a more dangerous environment evolve to be plainer in coloration; guppies in a safe environment evolve to be more attractive to the opposite sex) and, most terrifying, yet more rapid evolution of drug resistance in viruses.]

This New York Times article about the U.S. military trying to get Hollywood to write scripts with sympathetic characters who are engineers or scientists doesn’t seem too realistic about how tought this will be.

Let’s consider a recent work of fine art cinema:  Flight of the Phoenix.  The pilots are fun-loving incompetents who pile all kinds of heavy but worthless industrial equipment into the back of an early 1950s cargo plane (C-119).  They seem to be able to get off the ground with their passengers and all of this junk but somehow don’t bother to climb to a cruising altitude higher than 500′ above the ground for a trip of many hours over the Gobi desert (filmed in Namibia, actually).  A big sandstorm kicks up and they lose one of their two engines and control of the plane and crash in the middle of nowhere.  They were all angry with each other to begin with and spend most of their time squabbling until a peculiar little guy named “Elliott” suggests building a one-engine airplane out of the wreckage of their two-engine airplane.  He claims to be an aeronautical engineer.

Elliott turns out to be a prima donna.  He has a Che Guevara-like desire to be the one who gets to execute prisoners/traitors/etc. and shoots a captive Mongol smuggler in the head.  Elliott is devious and drinks more than his fair share of the limited water.  He generally abuses everyone and reminds them of how screwed they would be without him.

So at the end of the film people would say “Wow, if I actually thought about engineers I’d realize that I needed them for some of the things that make my modern lifestyle possible but on the other hand wouldn’t it be more pleasant never to meet or think about an engineer?”

Can anyone think of a movie where a character could have had any old job but they chose to make him or her an engineer or computer programmer?  And then they showed some of the work in a flattering and/or exciting light?

[Don't see the movie if you're not willing to suspend a lot of disbelief about aviation and physics.  None of the flying bears any relation to a plausible in-flight emergency.  At the end of the movie they are trying to get off the ground while being chased by angry Mongols on horseback.  The horses are able to run nearly as fast as the plane, which is a rather small remnant of the C-119.   So we're asked to believe that the plane, despite its Wright R-3350 engine (over 2000 horsepower), can't go faster than a horse and can't fly even in ground effect.  Yet after it runs off the edge of the cliff it somehow manages to fly and develop a good climb rate in free air.]