It did not win the Academy award for special effects after a 1998 nomination, but the director and screen-writers truly deserve a special award for creating a C- movie out of an A+ science fiction classic. These are the first impression prompted after watching the movie, within a few short weeks of completing the book.

The first fatal error they made is trying to improve on Robert A. Heinlein’s original story. Granted the book about a future militarist/libertarian society at war with an alien civilization itself is extremely controversial and perhaps not the easiest to transfer to the big screen. It is strange that a work held-up as breaking the mold in science fiction, by eschewing “escapist adolescent fantasies” in favor of a very rough and gritty world view, becomes a movie with more flash than substance, shedding the hard philosophy and leaving behind the carefully doctored ultra-violent battles scenes as the  only redeeming virtue.

Some of the plot departures may have been unavoidable. In the book, the identity of Rico’s staff sergeant is hidden from the reader until the end, even as he plays a pivotal role in the final battle against the bugs. Of course it turns out to be familiar character, but in the movie this would have been difficult to hide when the director is obliged to at least include voice-snippets if not actual images of the character. But other substitutions make no sense: Rico’s unit, the “Roughnecks,” is commanded by his civics teacher who is long retired from the military. Rico has not one, but two competing romantic interests. And the most jarring contradiction, far from being an average “grunt” with no special talents– intended to prove that an ordinary solider can accomplish remarkable things, quite inline with Heinlein’s libertarian worldview– Rico starts out as an accomplished athlete,  a dashing, dapper gentleman with a girlfriend also serving for the Federation army.

Hollywood has not been kind to Heinlein. Philip K. Dick inspired a series of more or less successful movie adaptations. Some strayed very far from the original, and not always by choice: after all Minority Report, Paycheck and We can remember it for your wholesale (which inspired Total Recall) were short stories, not exceeding a few dozen pages. Developing that into a blockbuster necessarily calls for some imaginative extrapolation. By contrast Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner was remarkably true to the dark-vision of Do androids dream of electric sheep? and Richard Linklater captured the harrowing drug-induced madness of A Scanner Darkly. Sci-fi fans can only hope that Heinlein also deserves a second chance.

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Very good sign that the tide is turning when a highly influential technology columnist writing in a mainstream publication criticizes the DMCA:

In fact, the DMCA, and other recent laws and regulations passed under pressure from media companies, are pretty hostile when it comes to consumers. They turn essentially innocent actions into unlawful behavior, because they define copyright infringement too broadly. They have given rise to a technology called Digital Rights Management that causes too many hassles for honest people and discriminates against the new digital forms of distribution.

Walt Mossberg writing in the Wall Street Journal.

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SRI mutual funds have always been insistent on saying that following your conscience does not mean compromising on returns. Full page advertisements in magazines such as Utne Reader are designed to drive home the point that screening investments based on criteria of “social impact” does not produce subpar results compared to purely economic selection strategies. (But then again proponents of the efficient-markets hypothesis would say that is because equity valuations are essentially unpredictable. Monkeys throwing darts at the board to pick stocks would do equally well according to this theory, in which case one might as well vote their values.)

An article in CNN/Money is now taking them to task for this claim:

The typical “do good” portfolio has lagged the market of late, causing investors to yank out nearly $1 billion last year, or about 3 percent of the assets in ethical funds.

2 problems are cited. The obvious one is missing out on the recent surge in energy and oil sector, industries which are traditionally very damaging to the environment. Granted not all SRIs screen for environmental friendliness. The extensive index of SRI funds at the Social Investment Forum shows that only 4 funds declared a policy of no-investment in eco-offenders, the majority have “positive screens” intended to encourage directing funds towards eco-friendly technologies and a handful have no screening criteria at all in this category. But considering that precious metals and energy will likely remain strong in spite of retreat in oil prices, the bottom line is not going to improve.

Second reason is more subtle: all that screening for corporate practices is costly and contributes to higher than average expenses. Even passive index funds boast ratios three times that of the industry standard.

What the article hints at is that screening criteria made no sense in the first place. Starbucks, not always successful but by any definition strives for social responsibility, in its employment benefits, trade relations with coffee growers and resource-efficient operations– those coffee-cup sleeves are made of recycled cardboard. But that didn’t stop Pax World Balanced fund from divesting SBUX because they lent their brand to the Starbucks liqueur; alcohol being a deal-breaker for this particular SRI fund. Others take issue with nuclear energy, even though coal-fired power plants and gas guzzler vehicles are much bigger immediate problem than proper disposal of nuclear waste.

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Wondering through the exhibit on Sunday, one begins to wonder if it was designed by the nuclear energy industry itself.

Part of the excellent  museum collection, home to the captured German U-505 submarine and currently hosting the  immensely popular Body Worlds 2 exhibit, the Energy room is meant to explain the concept of energy in its different manifestations and how industrial processes convert between them. Kids are obsessed with the interactive display for electricity generation: spin a wheel as hard as you can, and watch bulbs being to light up as the hand-cranked generator converts work into current.

That’s the fun part. Second half of the room is exclusively devoted to indoctrination on power generation. An entire quarter of the floor is around uranium mining, production and disposal of highly radioactive nuclear waste. Geologists will check that the sealed burial mounds can contain waste and keep-out rainwater at Yucca Mountain, we are told. Otherwise the site will not be used, according to one display that contains sample of actual rock from the area. (“Trust us, we are experts and show due diligence before deciding where to dump the stuff.”)
Even more puzzling are the charts on the wall showing the break-down of power generation by source. They contradict each other: one claims nuclear energy supplying 20%+ of curren wht US capacity, the other has the more reasonable 13% figure. More amusing are the projections for the future. The graph with the more accurate data shows the catch-all category of “other” sources of energy– including renewable sources, which are key to reducing carbon emissions– make up 8% of existing demand “today” (Or at least when the exhibit was installed in 1998.) Projected share in 2010? Exactly zero percent.

Darth Vader would find their lack of faith disturbing. Other sources decline as well: in the bright future, coal loses momentum which is a good thing considering that other displays point to its highly polluting nature. So does nuclear energy. Instead the slack is taken up by natural gas which grows to provide over a quarter of capacity.

All in all, this exhibit may have been a great return on investment for companies investing in nuclear energy and natural-gas. At least in 1998.

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Interesting security problem that Technorati is trying to solve: how do you prove that a blog belongs to you? (In general, how do you prove that a web page belongs to you?) This is an analog of the standard email validation problem. Only email is a “write-only” media– given the email address of a person you can only write to that address. URLs are generally speaking “read-only” in that you can only view the page contents, although the web also allows more interactive content where in principle the viewer could also submit input.

Technorati has 3 options:
1. OpenID. This is natural, because the protocol was motivated by the need for having authenticated comments across blogs and URLs are used as the identifier instead of email addresses. OpenID is supported by a number of significant players including LiveJournal and AOL, and has recently received a boost after MSFT announced a way to leverage CardSpace for stronger authentication. Downside: this only works if your blogging service implements the spec as identity provider.

2. Provide username/password. Technorati signs into your blog on your behalf. Another straightforward proof, only this one requires an awful degree of trust in Technorati: you have to hope they do not publish your credentials on the Internet or use them for posting 100 spam entries. (And you did not use the same password at your bank, did you?) More sophisticated authorization systems would have the notion of “delegation” where Technorati is temporarily granted access without credentials, and may even be restricted to read-only for example. On the web, identity management is very much a V1 concept, with the exception of Windows Live ID.

3. Creating a new post with special link provided by Technorati. This is email validation in reverse: instead of sending users an email containing a link with embedded identifier, URL validation requires the “prover” to put some content with unique ID on their page, the content being chosen by the “verifier.”
And that is the purpose this article serves.

Technorati Profile

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Not the finest hour for Turkey in its continued efforts to defend national identity.

1. Turkish court banned YouTube on Wednesday, March 7th. Turk Telecom, the largest ISP in the country enforced the ban, by  what appears to be at the network level by blocking any traffic to the website.

2. It then lifted the ban two days later on Friday, but not before the story had been picked up widely in the Western press.

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It was an encouraging sign that An Inconvenient Truth won the Academy Award for Best Documentary, which allowed its protagonist to bask in the limelight and re-iterate his message from a forum with unprecedented reach. For all its runaway success, it is likely that more people have tuned in to watch the ceremony than have showed up at the local cineplex to see the movie itself. Granted Hollywood does have a reputation for being on the cutting edge when it comes to environmentally friendly messaging. It was not out of character when Mr. DiCapprio announced that the academy awards web-site would feature tips for greener living.

Unfortunately a quick peek at the recommendations shows how unrealistic expectations can be, compared to the average life-style in America:

Reconsider extra features such as automatic transmission and 4-wheel drive — they are often unnecessary and eat into gas mileage.

True enough, but how many manufacturers today even offer a standard transmission as option? And for that matter how many drivers could drive one? (And this advice is dated: sequential manual-gearboxes are just as efficient but still controlled automatically. Not to be confused with a standard automatic transmission, these use gears but the clutch is not operated by the driver.)

Leave the car at home. Get in the habit of riding buses or trains as often as you can (just think of all the new people you’ll meet!). For short distances, ride a bike or walk whenever possible.

Unfortunately public transportation is dysfunctional in most of the US, owing to suburban sprawl. The architecture of suburbia, predicated on car ownership, is outright hostile to pedestrians. There are no sidewalks and nothing within walking distance, no bike lanes and only inconsiderate drivers to share the road. This would only work in dense urban cores.

In the winter, set your thermostat at 68° in the daytime and 55° at night. In the summer, keep it at 78°.

That one is not going to be a popular measure. Certainly not in retail, considering that in the early 20th century movie theaters used air conditioning to attract crowds and recently New York Times found an inverse correlation between prices and temperature of the store. Homeowners will likely balk and leaving office spaces the only chance for such drastic climate alteration, where it would make for a new Dilbert episode.

Let the sun shine in. The cheapest and most energy-efficient light and heat source is often right outside your window.

Try explaining that one to Seattlites.

If you must water your lawn, water early or late in the day or on cooler days to reduce evaporation.

Cookie-cutter suburban houses with manicured lawns would not be possible without wasting tons of water, a practice helped along by the real-estate bubble which guarantees the better landscape house enjoys a premium, since they are all identical and have no character to distinguish them otherwise.

Not all the suggestions are such exhortations for austere, spartan living. For example, the use of compact fluorescent lamps is a clear winner. But the Academy seems to have forgotten why CFLs have become that unstoppable idea whose time has come: because they provide clear, easily articulated benefits without requiring that consumers give up on something they are used. This is the hallmark of progress in efficiency:  doing more with less. Whether it is measured in watts, lumens or total cost of ownership, CFLs edge out the older generation technology– there is no trade off in giving up one factor to maximize another. Asking people to learn to operate a clutch, not water their lawn and put on more layers at home does not have the same ring.

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