Why Adults Don't Get Star Wars Movies

In 1977 I was nine years old. The country was "going to hell in a handbasket" (according to my grandparents) with stagflation, the specter of nuclear holocaust, ERA, communism knocking on the door of Latin America, and gasoline approaching $1.00 per gallon. My father occasionally taught a weekend seminar at a hotel in my home city and there was a movie theater next door to the hotel. While he led the seminar I would either hang out at the hotel pool with other kids or go watch movies.

At nine, I wasn't too conscious of mass marketing. To be honest, I don't believe I had heard much about the release of the original Star Wars movie before I wandered over to the theater that Saturday. I most likely chose to see it at the time because it was the next film available on the viewing schedule. I sat down and after the previews and then the 20th Century Fox logo, I thought it odd that the movie soundtrack hadn't come on when the text appeared on the screen:

A Long Time Ago In A Galaxy Far Far Away...

I considered, briefly, whether to go out and tell someone that the sound wasn't working, when suddenly

**** BLAST ****

From the instant that John William's score assaulted my ears until the credits rolled 121 minutes later, I was rapturously transported to a world of magic, destiny, adventure, and danger. A world where an insignificant boy from the boondocks of his social order was inexplicably selected by fate to save all that was good and right and beautiful from the terrifying forces of evil. I watched that movie three times straight that day and twice again the next day. From that point on, I wanted to BE Luke Skywalker. I swore to my parents and to anyone else who would listen that I could hear the voice of Obi-Wan Kenobi assuring me that the force would be with me always. Luckily for me, this was before the days that mentioning something like that could get a kid prescribed on Prozac or Ritalin.

More than anything, experiencing Star Wars at that time in my life bought me just a few more precious weeks or months of pure, unadulterated childhood from the ever encroaching onslaught of pressure to grow up and be serious - to become yet another one of the lunatics running the asylum of civilized Western life. I would find other children younger than me and play an unnamed game with them that I guess would be called "Clash of the Superheroes" if we had bothered to name it. I'd always let them go first. "Who do you want to be?" I'd ask. "Batman!" or "Superman!" They'd answer. Then it was my turn. "Who are you going to be?" They'd ask. There was always only one answer. "Luke Skywalker." After looking at me like I was the strangest kid they'd ever met, we would begin. I would ALWAYS win. Batman has a hard time throwing a Batarang at you when his arm has been chopped off. And it's difficult for Superman to fly when he's been separated from his legs.

One of the more infuriating conversations of my life happened a few months later with some young adults. They started talking about the movies. Of course I brought up Star Wars. "What a dumb movie!" One of them exclaimed. I was outraged and demanded an explanation. "My college physics professor tore that movie apart. You wouldn't be able to see laser gun blasts as short cylindrical colored bullets of light. And if something exploded in outer space, there would be no flames since it is a vacuum without any oxygen." I tried in vain to argue, but I had nothing to counter their smug scientific facts with. I was heartbroken. It was almost as if someone had tied up Santa Clause, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy right in front of me and then had shot them there at point blank range. But along with this painful disappointment I had a sense that they had somehow completely missed the point. I couldn't put my finger on what it was, but I felt it very, very strongly.

Time passed and the rest of the original Star Wars movies came and went. 22 years after Episode IV was released, I flew to Austin, Texas to interview with an up-and-coming dot com company called Trilogy. I asked the HR lady about the company's name. "Oh, the founders are big Star Wars fans," she replied. "In fact, the company is going to rent out a movie theater for a special premier of the the new Star Wars prequel that's coming out soon!" Talk about the power of first impressions - I instantly knew this would be a company I'd like to work for. It didn't work out that way for various reasons, however, and Trilogy later became a casualty of the dot com meltdown. When I went to Episode I, though, I became that nine-year old boy once again. I loved everything about it, especially the way young "Ani" was able to destroy the droid control ship by using his instincts to pilot a space fighter for the first time.

Boy was I ever the odd-man out in discussions about the new movie. It seems that Jar-Jar Binks was nearly universally reviled among amateur and professional movie critics. "You can't even understand him!" "Why did he walk in that funny way?" "He didn't even use the English language correctly!" And that same old feeling rose up within me, the one I had felt when the college kids had shot down the original film with the laws of science. Only this time I was far more articulate.

"You're missing the point." I would offer.

"What do you mean? How can you say that to me?" Was the typical response. So I would explain, "Lucas created Jar-Jar's character as a culturally diverse person for a reason. He's showing that people groups with apparently very little in common need to find a way to discover common ground when their mutual interests are threatened. The Naboo and the Gungans were cultures that would not have allied together under normal circumstances." It didn't always endear me to others when I'd point out that the mainstream discomfort at Jar-Jar's dialect and mannerisms could be due to our own Western Caucasian racial hang-ups.

Wait. Stop. Now I had missed the point.

See, I wanted to have a chance to be that kid again and come back with an equally smug and scientific-sounding riposte to the ones who had put down the film I loved in 1977. But in my zeal to do well, I neglected to notice that I had become just like the ones who I felt had wronged me. I was reacting from a position of defensiveness, which (I now understand) typically creates an unintentional feedback loop. By putting out defensiveness, I received defensiveness. These conversations did not usually result in harmony and understanding.

Adults don't get Star Wars movies. They never have. If you were around when the original series came out, think back for a moment. What did your Uncles and older cousins, siblings, and family friends say about them? Nothing encouraging to a child, I'll bet. Even Freddie Mercury sang (in Bicycle Race) "Jaws was never my scene and I don't like Star Wars." It's interesting to be an adult now who was a child back then. Interesting because we don't notice that we are now "them", the ones who put down the original Star Wars movies back in the day. We are no longer nine years old, we are the smug, scientific, socially stratified muckety mucks who want to seem like clever people that can poke holes in other peoples' stories.

The animated feature, "Star Wars: The Clone Wars" was released this weekend. I went and saw it last night. So many kids in the theater. And then the text flashed on the screen. Then the blast. Then the fantasy and adventure, action and thrills. You may read a number of reviews panning the film. It was only rated 27% on rottentomatoes when a co-worker checked there the opening day. Don't you believe it. It's become fashionable to put down George Lucas and claim he has ruined the franchise. But I saw in the faces of the little ones who were filing out of the theater afterward what they must have seen in my face. Wonder, giddiness, and at least one extra day of recovered childhood.

You've Never Seen Anything Happen

Some event happens before you in a lighted environment.

Light bounces off of the entities involved in the event and some of it meets with your eyes. It travels through your cornea, then the aqueous humor, the lens, and the vitreous humor. When it strikes your retina, cells convert the light into electrical energy and route these impulses to the optic nerve. After traveling the distance of the optic nerve, the electrical signals are processed by a special region of the brain into the sensation of seeing. Finally, other parts of the brain generate a storm of electro-chemical activity to recognize and classify the elements of vision that has been generated. Since all of this happens without your awareness, the conscious part of your mind is free to busy itself with rationalizing the classifications and their significance to you.

All of this happens at a rate of speed that is consistent among human beings. This rate of speed roughly corresponds to the 24 - 30 frames per second that film and video technology uses to fool the mind into thinking it is seeing things move on a movie screen or television. (instead of noticing the actual still images which make up each video frame) If activity happens at a speed faster than 30 times per second, all you notice is a blur - such as the beating of a hummingbird's wings or the spinning of the spokes on car wheel rims.

Think of all the processes visual information goes through in order to produce the experience of sight.

• Manipulation: The eye lens focuses the light, flipping it upside down in the process


• Conversion: the light photons are chemically converted to electricity


• Transmission: the electric impulses are routed to the optic nerve which carries them to the brain


• Synthesis: the occipital lobe of the brain processes the impulses at a coherent rate, producing the sensation of vision


• Filtering: the temporal lobe of the brain pre-screens the data to point out elements linked with our emotions (such as a spider if we are afraid of spiders)


• Analysis: the frontal lobe of the brain associates visual elements with memories and produces reasonings about their significance

What a wonderous mechanism! And all you ever do (in your conscious state) is concentrate on the reasonings and interpretations provided by the frontal lobe. The rest of it "just works" (most of the time). Now, all of this processing takes time and there is undoubtedly information lost at all of the junctures of the system. There is no doubt that you see something.

But you've never seen anything happen.

Project: Quad-CPU Server (Intro)

I've built my own computers for years, now, and I once set up a client/server lab in my home to research and practice distributed computing. But that was back in the dotcom bubble days and I'm feeling the urge to play with technologies on the bleeding edge again.

The convergence of multi-CPU motherboards, multicore CPUs, and the ability to access gobs of RAM memory (thanks to 64-bit technology) means that it is possible to cram an incredible amount of distributed processing power into a single PC case. (albeit a very large one) Companies are interested in this because it means they can consolidate many separate servers into far fewer physical boxes by using virtualization software. This software lets you boot up several instances of Operating Systems on a single computer. (these instances still seem like separate computers to the outside world but doing it this way saves money by using less space, hardware, power, cooling, etc.)

However, I have bigger fish to fry than playing with virtualization. I'm interested in working on the kinds of problems that only a small army of CPUs can solve by working together. To make this work, I need to create two software systems: the first one divides up the work, sends it out to the army of CPUs, and then receives and collates the answers from them. The the second system is the code that actually runs on the army of CPUs to solve the broken-down problem. Basically I'm talking about creating a small-scale supercomputer. If virtualization means treating one computer as if it were many computers, my research will involve treating many computers as if they were one.

My platform of choice will be the AMD Opteron 8000 series of quad-core server CPUs. This is the only mature "commodity" processor series with an integrated memory controller supporting four (or even eight) CPUs in a single case. Intel's Xeon 7300 platform supports 4 CPUs, but it seems like a bit of a hack to me since it goes through contortions to compensate up for its external memory controller, plus it is much more costly. Intel's new "Core i7" CPUs will have integrated memory controllers, but they won't be available for quad-CPU solutions before some time in 2009.

A reasonable question to ask is, "Why not just buy four (or more) regular PCs that each have a single multicore processor and network them together?" Indeed, it would be far cheaper to do it this way due to the price premium of the processors and motherboards that support quad-CPU configurations. But AMD uses a chip-to-chip interconnect called Hyper Transport that allows messages between processors on a single motherboard to happen at far higher speeds and lower latencies than Ethernet can handle. Also, each multicore CPU on the motherboard has it's own local bank of RAM memory. Accessing that local RAM is much quicker than being sloppy and borrowing some from a neighbor CPU's bank of RAM. (this is referred to as NUMA or non-uniform memory access) So, part of the research I intend to do will involve writing software that is aware of these things and able to organize the rest of the code to make the best use them.

Another good question would be, "Why go to the trouble of building such a complicated computer when you can buy one that just works from an established vendor who offers service and support?" Beyond all of the reasonable-sounding answers I could rationalize for this one, it boils down to the fact that I just like to scrape up my knuckles playing with hardware from time to time. Plus, I just know I'd open up and muck around with a pre-built server anyway, instantly voiding the warranty and ensuring myself a place in phone-system purgatory if I ever hypothetically called for support.

One great feature of these quad-CPU Opteron motherboards is that you can use them with one, two, or four CPUs. Nice! Instead of having bite the bullet and pay for all four processors at once, (as well as four banks of RAM) I'll be able to initially buy just one processor and start using the computer during the time that I'm still upgrading it on the installment plan.

So, lucky you! You get to follow along as I progress along the path of building my quad-CPU server. My plan for purchasing the components is to buy the foundational items first that tend to have stable prices (like the case, the power supply, hard drives) and then add the items later that tend to go down in price over time (the CPUs, the RAM).

The Questionable Value Of Loyalty

Loyalty. Even the sound of the word carries a certain gravitas. Loyalty is comfortably ensconced in a league with other golden virtues such as honor, dignity, and integrity. It is used as a final line of demarcation in character judgments. We've all heard variations on the line, "If there's one thing I will not tolerate, it is disloyalty." Loyalty seems to be the bedrock beneath society's most cherished arrangements: family, friendship, and patriotism.

I say this is all a bunch of nonsense.

Suppose you were going to try to do something really big and you needed the help of many other people to pull it off. You've got (basically) two powers of persuasion at your disposal to secure their cooperation: coercion or inspiration. For example, during the space race of the 50s and 60s, John F. Kennedy declared the goal of sending a man to the moon. America was inspired by this vision of scientific progress and made it happen with scant to none evidence of coercion. On the other hand, Kennedy's meddling in Vietnam (out of loyalty to a European ally) precipitated the military draft under President Johnson. Evidently, inspiration was not enough to secure the participation of enough of our citizens for that venture.

Loyalty is a form of moral coercion. It is a tool used by bullies to hoodwink those they perceive to be weak. Think back to your childhood days on the playground or in the neighborhood. Some older kid wants you to do something you know you don't want to do. And what does he or she say to you? "Aw, come on, you're not going to chicken out on me now are you?" So you do this thing that will get you grounded for two weeks because you're afraid of being thought of as a deficient friend. At least you were loyal and not a coward! But what do your parents say to you in these situations? "If he asked you to jump off a cliff, would you?" This is exactly the crux of the matter of loyalty being hogwash.

It is a healthy sign for an adult of the human species to be independent, ambitious, and self-reliant. Indeed, an important part of adolescence and young adulthood is experiencing peer pressure and learning to break free of its grasp. It is not that easy to consciously sever the cords of belonging that lay claim to our individuality. But sever them we must if we are to grow up. We open ourselves up to charges of being disloyal or of feeling superior to others. Yet, where do these charges originate? Why would anyone ever accuse another person of disloyalty?

The root cause is fear. Fear of scarcity. Scarcity of love, of friendship, of a sense of societal safety, of whatever it is that one wishes to have. If I feel that you, and you alone, have the thing I need, I will do whatever is in my power to persuade you to give it to me. (including coerce you) I have to - you've got what I need! If I feel that I can obtain what I want from any number of people, I'm more willing to let the law of averages play out by spreading my persuasive energy among more prospects. Upon discovering that everything I truly need - love, joy, peace, fulfillment - is available within myself, I am finally set free from the illusion that I ever have to coerce anybody for anything. Now I get to propose my intentions and discover, to my delight, that some people are inspired by what I have in mind. You've experienced both coercion and inspiration in your lifetime. To which of these do you respond better?

Do we really need coercive ties to bind us together? Is the cost of such arrangements worth the purported benefits? What would we call loyalty if it were based purely on heart-felt preference instead of duty or obligation?

This is probably enough to chew on for one blog column. It's worth considering the implications of so-called loyalty on religion, socio-economic class, politics, management/labor relations, marriage... oh dear, I've discovered yet another lack of scarcity!

A Test Of The Emergency Disappointment System

This morning I checked on my stock holdings only to discover that Biogen (BIIB) had dropped 25% from yesterday's closing price. Evidently their Multiple Sclerosis drug Tysabri has been found to possibly cause a deadly side effect. There was only one thing to do: sell my position and sell it quickly. Within one minute I had opened a browser window, logged in to my online trading account, and executed the sell order. When the trade cleared, I had lost 26% overall of the money I had spent on this stock.

A few years ago, I would have reacted to a development like this with anger, blame, and lowered self-confidence. I might have felt paralyzed, leading to hesitation about what to do. Yet today, I didn't feel any of these things. On the contrary I was serenely aware that the capacity for stocks to dramatically rise or fall in price is exactly the dynamic that attracts me to trading. It's merely the other side of the same coin that netted me a 25% gain in a short period of time from the market's recent downtrend. (using ultrashort exchange traded funds for real estate and technology)

It certainly helps that I didn't have all my investment eggs in this basket. By the way, I'm not a big believer is diversification as it is commonly practiced. (or "de-worse-ification" as some pundits put it) That can lead to a scattering of focus, especially for the individual investor who has other things to do with his time than keep an eye on the market all day long. I follow William O'Neil's system (outlined in his classic book,How To Make Money In Stocks) which suggests buying a few of the very best growth stocks when the market in general is moving up. (using his rules, it was a judgment call as to whether the stock market had turned around to start heading upward again in the past week - which is when I purchased Biogen)

What happened in my stock account today was only a test. As is everything that ever happens in life. I don't expect to win them all anymore. In fact, it's the building of a foundation of increasingly more enlightened responses to these kinds of events that really matters to me now.