The Clarion Workshop at UCSD

It was just a couple of days ago that I mentioned the link between science fiction and science.  Now Newsweek has an interview with a UCSD Scripps Institution of Oceanography scientist about his research on California’s Lake Mead that includes the following:

It may sound like the plot of an apocalyptic sci-fi flick, but Tim Barnett, a research marine geophysicist and climate expert at Scripps, says there’s a 50 percent chance that the manmade lake, a reservoir created by Hoover Dam located on the Colorado River 30 miles southeast of Las Vegas, will be dry by 2021, or even sooner if climate changes continue as expected and water use is not curtailed.

This just a couple of weeks after Time had an article about the rash of apocalype movies hitting the market, “Apocalypse New,” including the following from Cloverfield’s J.J. Abrams:

One of the cultural aftershocks of the bombing of Hiroshima was the awakening of Godzilla and the Japanese monster movie as a way of reckoning with the nightmare of U.S. atomic weapons. “Stories in which the destruction of society occurs are explorations of social fears,” says J.J. Abrams, creator of Felicity, Alias and Lost and producer of Cloverfield. “When Godzilla came out, the idea of doing a movie about the destruction of a city because of a radioactive man-made thing must have had a similar feeling. On the one hand, it’s a silly man in a rubber suit. On the other hand, it’s a way to process these fears that are mostly bottled up.”

Our real-world tools are enough any more in our search for either meaning, or predictability.  Science fiction works so much better. 

There’s a great piece on MSNBC’s Cosmic Log today about a visit by Doug Liman and Hayden Christensen, director and star of the new sf movie “Jumper,” to MIT to meet with some physicists to discuss the movie.  With teleportation at the core of the film, Liman was waiting to be “shredded,” but found the visit “incredibly inspiring, because the physicists explained how they use movies to make physics more appealing and more magical.”  MIT cosmologist Max Tegmark, who organized the event, found it much more fun and enlightening than he’d expected:

Tegmark said the best thing about science-fiction movies, even movies where the science is especially fictional, is that they spark more interest in science fact.

“As a scientist, often the hardest thing is not finding the right answer, but finding the right question - and science fiction is great for generating the right questions,” Tegmark told me. “It’s like when you’re watching a movie and you say, ‘It’s obvious that that’s impossible.’ Then you realize, it’s not so obvious why it’s impossible. You start asking very basic questions about the nature of space and time.”

That’s how Einstein started along the path that eventually led to E=mc² and more.

He also admitted to being a little surprised by the number of “groupies” scattered among the MIT students, noting that “the affair had a party atmosphere, with some students sporting Darth Vader masks and lightsabers.”  Sounds more like a con.

Today’s Los Angeles Times reports on the efforts of L.A. developer Sonny Astani to bring his memories of “Blade Runner” to life in the city’s Figueroa district.  As shown here, Astani’s seeking approval for a 14-story high ‘billboard’ made up of “of tiny panels embedded with LEDs, or light-emitting diodes — a concept viewed by some at City Hall as the next frontier in outdoor advertising.”  While massive billboards already exist, Astani’s would be the first with moving images — and would face right out onto the 110 Freeway, where drivers so desperately need distractions like this.

Reading through Astani’s comments, one gets the sense that he didn’t notice that Blade Runner’s vision is dystopian, not utopian.  Then again, he’s not alone: the story also focuses heavily on desires among developers in the district to turn Figueroa into Times Square West, like that’s a good thing. 

Good news in the Los Angeles Times this week in the decision from HP and Sony to make Sony’s motion picture library available on demand for DVD purchasers.  This follows up on HP’s Oct. 2007 announcement of an agreement with “30 digital content providers” for on-demand DVD delivery, allowing content with limited market appeal to become available for sale.  The LA Times piece specifically notes the likelihood of “classic science fiction movies” becoming available for the first time in decades.  I’d love to see a list of all those films, ranked by genre and the number of times they been purchased; and then buy three never-purchased sf or fantasy films, just to see how bad they are.  It would make a nice background distraction at a summer lawn party.

What I’m really hoping for, though, is the next stage in this technology, when we’ll be able to build our own DVDs from the digital content.  All my favorite swordfights from classic films: Basil Rathbone and Danny Kaye in The Court Jester; Carey Elwes and Mandy Patinkin in The Princess Bride; Aragorn and Lurtz in LOTR; interspersed with all the light sabre scenes in the Star Wars saga, for example.  Now that would be entertaining.