Ash Clifton, Writer

What I’m (Re-)Reading: “The Emperor’s New Mind”

It was a late-summer day in 1990. I was teaching two sections of English Composition 101 at the University of Arizona, and it was the first day of the semester. My second class was in the afternoon, three o’clock. Being a very young Teaching Assistant, I had dressed in my best slacks, dress-shirt, tie, and loafers in a rather comical effort to earn my students’ respect (or, at least, their forbearance). My outfit was also completely inappropriate to the 100-degree-plus temperatures outside, which I felt even more than usual because my classroom for that section was across campus, so I had to schlep it from the dark, air-conditioned office that I shared with a two-dozen other T.A.’s in the basement of the Modern Languages building.

The first class went well. I liked the students, and they seemed to like me. When class was over, I gathered my things into my backpack and headed out. The moment I stepped outside, though, I knew I wasn’t going anywhere. A late summer rainstorm—monsoons, as they are called out there—had struck. I went back into the building and waited until the rain finally stopped. Unfortunately, Tucson, like every other desert city, is prone to flooding, and I knew the streets and even the sidewalks would be swamped for hours. Not wanting to wait that long, I took off my jacket and put it in my backpack. I did the same with my socks and shoes, then rolled up the cuffs on my slacks. Thus barefoot, I ventured out, sloshing my way across campus and then out into the little urban neighborhood where I had parked my car.

I didn’t mind, in part because I had something to read, a paperback copy of Roger Penrose’s new book The Emperor’s New Mind. Yes, it’s one of those rare books that, even in chapter one, become so engrossing that one will read while walking through the streets after a monsoon, barely noticing the cold water that’s up to your ankles. I held it in front of me as I walked the familiar route, absorbed in the slow, methodical, yet miraculous argument that Penrose was weaving, which is simple yet dumbfounding: There is something non-mechanical (that is, non-algorithmic) about consciousness.

That is, our brains are not merely “machines made of meat,” to paraphrase the words of AI pioneer Marvin Minski. Minksi is, of course, a founding proponent of the “Hard-AI” theory of computer science, which states that the brain is really just a very complicated computer, which, though made of biological parts, is nonetheless executing an algorithm. In the future—the theory goes—when digital computers become sophisticated enough to execute this mysterious algorithm, they will become “conscious,” too. Just like us. At this point in our technological evolution (the vaunted Singularity), machine consciousness and human consciousness will blur together, such that human beings might wish to “upload” their consciousness (i.e., all their thoughts, memories, desires, etc.) to a computer as digital data, and thus achieve immortality in cyberspace.

It’s an idea that would have seemed absurd—if not incomprehensible—a hundred years ago, but which has been gaining traction since the 1960s. Now, in the age of Generative AI—whose power really does seem miraculous, at time—the notion seems almost a given. A fait accompli.

Yet, if you’re like me, you’ve thought to yourself: This is all bullshit. The human mind is not a computer; and computers—as we now understand them—will never be conscious. To suggest otherwise is a category error.

However, you’ve probably kept this thought to yourself (deep inside your consciousness, as it were, heh heh) for fear of being ridiculed by the tech-bros and computer nerds in your office or classroom or wherever. Guys who not only completely subscribe to the Hard-AI theory, they read (and sometimes write) sci-fi novels about it. They not only believe in the Singularity; they look forward to it!

Not me. Whenever I hear one of these bros blathering on about Skynet becoming self-aware or uploading their consciousness to a computer, I just say, “Roger Penrose says it’s impossible.” At which point the bro in question will usually give me a befuddled look, as if to say, Who the fuck is Roger Penrose? Which is, of course, a kind of tragedy in and of itself. I usually answer: “Roger Penrose was Stephen Hawking’s partner in theoretical physics.” That shuts the bro up for a bit. After all, anyone smart enough to hang with Stephen Hawking is surely a force to be reckoned with. You can’t as easily dismiss a theoretical physicist of that stature, even when he is opining on a subject—computers—that might seem a bit outside his field.

In fact, thinking about thinking is right up Penrose’s alley, so to speak. He’s not just a theoretical physicist; he’s a mathematical theoretical physicist, which means that he’s is a world-class mathematician whose creations are designed to help us understand cosmology, particle theory, etc. He shared the Wolf Prize in Physics with Stephen Hawking for their work on the Penrose–Hawking singularity theorems, and he is the discoverer of the first known aperiodic tile, the now-famous Penrose Tiling. (Many other aperiodic tiles have been discovered since, at least one of which I have posted about.) His other accomplishments are too numerous to mention.

So, Penrose brings a considerable amount of street cred when he finally makes his main assertion in the book—namely, that there is some as-yet unknown quality about consciousness that computers do not possess, and probably never will. He writes, “…there must be something essentially non-algorithmic about consciousness.” He further writes,

When I assert my own belief that true intelligence requires consciousness, I am implicitly suggesting (since I do not believe the strong-AI contention that the mere enaction of an algorithm would evoke consciousness) that intelligence cannot be properly simulated by algorithmic means, i.e. by a computer, in the sense that we use that term today.

He doesn’t fully come out and say until last few chapters of this (very long) treatise. The bulk of the book is dedicated to the evidence he has for his belief, beginning with discussion of Turing Machines. There are a lot of great videos about Turing Machines on YouTube, but suffice to say that it is a very simple machine imagined by Alan Turing (yeah, Benedict Cumberbatch played him in the movie) in the 1930s. It consists solely of a reading head through which a long—infinitely long, if need be—magnetic tape is run back and forth. A mechanism inside the head is capable of a few simple operations: it can move the tape forward/backward X places; it can read a symbol off the tape in the current position; it can write a symbol to the current position; and it can store the last symbol read in a single variable (called a “state” by Turing).

If this sounds vaguely familiar, it should. A Turing Machine is basically an abstract, idealized version of a modern, programmable computer. If you replace the magnetic tape with a hard drive, you essentially have a modern computer—albeit one with only 1 byte of RAM (or thereabouts) and a very simple CPU. Even so, with a sufficient amount of tape, a Turing Machine could run any computer program in existence, even those used currently by AI networks. (It would, of course, do so very, very slowly.)

With this in mind, Turing set out to determine whether one could, eventually, make a Turing Machine that could solve any math problem. That is, could the science of mathematics ever become so advanced, so perfect, so complete, that one could use it to write an algorithm (which would be encoded on the tape) that could decide if any mathematical statement (also encoded on the tape) were true or false.

If so, then one would never need another, more advanced calculator. It would be a universal computational device.

Sadly (or, rather, happily, in my opinion), Turing was able to prove definitively that this was not possible. One can never—not in a million years—devise an algorithm so smart it can decide the truth or falsity of any math problem. The logic he used to prove this fact is encapsulated in a scenario now called the Halting problem (on which there is at least one excellent video on Youtube here).

Turing’s proof was the final nail in the coffin of David Hilbert’s Entscheidungsproblem, which posed the question of whether it was possible to make a perfect, complete mathematical algorithm. Two-thirds of the question had already been solved (in the negative) by Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness theorems, which rocked the worlds of math and logic in 1931. Penrose also delves into these theorems at great length, demonstrating how Gödel proved that no set of axioms can prove the truth or falsity of any mathematical statement. In other words, no single set of statements (no algorithm), no matter how large or sophisticated, will ever be able to solve every math problem.

Penrose’s main point, however, goes beyond even this revelation. He asserts that Gödel’s theorems, by proving that no single algorithm can solve any problem, could not, themselves, be the product of any algorithm system! In other words, Gödel was not, himself, a computer running some incredibly elaborate, highly-evolved “consciousness algorithm.” Rather, Mr. Gödel, like all conscious beings, was…something else. Penrose writes,

Let us recall the arguments given in Chapter 4 establishing Gödel’s theorem and its relation to computability. It was shown there that whatever (sufficiently extensive) algorithm a mathematician might use to establish mathematical truth – or, what amounts to the same thing,1 whatever formal system he* might adopt as providing his criterion of truth – there will always be mathematical propositions, such as the explicit Gödel proposition Pk (k) of the system…, that his algorithm cannot provide an answer for. If the workings of the mathematician’s mind are entirely algorithmic, then the algorithm (or formal system) that he actually uses to form his judgements is not capable of dealing with the proposition Pk (k) constructed from his personal algorithm. Nevertheless, we can (in principle) see that Pk(k) is actually true! This would seem to provide him with a contradiction, since he ought to be able to see that also. Perhaps this indicates that the mathematician was not using an algorithm at all!

But if Gödel’s brain isn’t just a computer, what is it? Where does the magic of consciousness come from?

Well, nobody knows—not even Penrose himself, as he readily admits. Unsurprisingly, he does not reach for some mystical, supernatural answer (as I, ultimately, do). Rather, he argues—very convincingly—that consciousness might have some relationship to quantum mechanics. That is, there might well be some quantum mechanical aspect to minds, both human and animal.

This is not to say, of course, that quantum mechanics (QM) necessarily causes consciousness. Rather, Penrose merely suggests that there is some deep relationship between QM and consciousness. It’s a pretty cool idea, which he spends the last fifth of the book elaborating.

When the book came out, critics immediately howled that Penrose is not a neurologist, nor an expert on the human brain, and that no one has (yet) found a truly quantum mechanical action in the brain. Still, there is something incredibly seductive—even uplifting, I would say—to the idea there really is something “magic” about us, our experience of life, which is still inexplicable to science. Still defensible, that is, from the brutal, deterministic nihilism of the New Atheists and the hard-core scientific materialists.

At least, I think so. Check it out.

Shameless Plug: “West”

I recently decided to gather my best short stories into a collection, which I have entitled West. You can now get it on Amazon! And it’s cheap! (Free, if you have Kindle Unlimited.) The paperback will be coming out soon.

Please check it out!

The Anti-Heroes of American Cinema: A Tribute

Author’s Note: I don’t know if it’s true, but I’ve read that someone is going to remake John’s Carpenter’s class B-Movie action flick Escape from New York. I’m of two minds about this news. On the one hand, I find it repulsive that someone wants to make a new version of already perfect, classic film that hasn’t gone anywhere. (It’s streaming on Amazon Prime right now for cripe’s sake.) On the other hand, I realize that cinema is a popular medium, and young people today deserve a chance to see the tale told anew. (Young actors deserve a shot at it, too.)

At any rate, the news got me thinking about old Snake Plissken, who is one of the greatest anti-heroes in the history of Hollywood. So, I thought I would repost this short essay, which original appeared on my old blog, Bakhtin’s Cigarettes. Enjoy…!

When I was writing my last post about George Lucas’s digital fiddling with the iconic character of Han Solo, I started think about about the role of the anti-hero in American film. Why is it that so many of our cinematic “heroes” are anything but?

An anti-hero is usually defined as a protagonist who exhibits non-heroic traits, such as selfishness and amorality. Han Solo surely qualifies as a classic American anti-hero in that he firmly avows his own self-interest, only to later commit himself to a cause larger than himself. But when I think of an anti-hero, I usually think of Humphrey Bogart. Bogart’s Rick Blaine is perhaps the pinnacle of the American anti-hero, embodying as he does the core of American isolationism in the face of the Second World War. “I stick my neck out for no one,” Blaine says to his friend, the even more corrupt Captain Renault. Blaine seems to epitomize those very American qualities of pragmatism and an apolitical business sense (he runs the the most profitable bar in Casablanca, after all). But of course, he comes around, in the end, finding himself inextricably bound to humanity in the form of Ingrid Bergman’s Ilsa.

Blaine might be the ultimate American anti-hero, but he is by no means the first. If you ask me, the American anti-hero has deep roots in the wild west, with our cultural fixation on cowboys, gunfighters, and the men who tamed them. Wyatt Earp might well be our first, best anti-hero, the saloon keeper, gambler, and occasional pimp who became the most famous lawman in history. America is a nation, after all, of exiles, people always seeking the frontier, and the values of the frontiersman are deeply intertwined with our own.

It’s no accident that the greatest Western ever to come out of Hollywood is John Ford’s The Searchers—a movie in which the “hero”, Ethan Edwards, is a borderline psychopath. Ethan (which means “strong” in Hebrew) exudes physical strength and a cold, practical wisdom. (He takes time to rest his horses even when pursuing the Indians who killed his brother.) Only Ethan has the strength to pursue the renegade Comanches and finally kill their leader, Scar, but Ethan comes perilously close to murdering his own niece in the process. Even in our greatest myths, the dark side of the American anti-hero seems to lurk just beneath the surface.

William Holden played not one but two famous anti-heroes in World War II dramas. Both were POWs: the cold-hearted, viciously entrepreneurial Sefton in Stalag 17, and then the resourceful Commander Shears in Bridge Over the River Kwai. Both films seem to acknowledge a kind of philosophical transition that took place in the post-war environment, a shift in values from the resolute, romantic heroism of the British Empire in favor of the more ambiguous, morally flexible version that Americans seemed to espouse. (It was we, after all, who dropped the atomic bomb and thus finished the war that the Old World started.)

All through the 1960s and 1970s, this new, darker, and perhaps more realistic vision of heroism seemed to thrive in counter-cultural films like Easy Rider, Billy Jack, and Cool Hand Luke. Perhaps the greatest actor to inhabit the anti-heroic mold since Bogie was Jack Nicholson, who in 1974’s Chinatown played the world-weary Jake Gittes, a private detective who specializes in taking compromising photos of cheating spouses, and who confesses to his lover that, when he was a cop, he did “as little as possible.” And yet Gittes is a bona fide American hero. Despite his better judgment, he finds himself unable to condone the corruption and evil that surrounds him.

Perhaps the darkest version of the anti-hero can be found in Francis Coppola’s flawed 1979 masterpiece, Apocalypse Now. Martin Sheen plays the American Army assassin Captain Willard, who is dispatched on a journey through Cambodia to find (and kill) the renegade Colonel Kurz. The movie represents the intersection between our darkest war (Vietnam) and our darkest novel (Conrad’s Heart of Darkness), the result being a kind of cinematic descent into hell

Even the greatest anti-heroes of science fiction like Mad Max and Snake Plissken have their roots in the post-war characters of Holden and Bogart. When Mad Max paces menacingly across the post-nuclear Outback, he seems like the reincarnation of Ethan Edwards, haunting our depopulated future even as John Wayne haunts our sun-scorched past.

Which brings me to my main point about the American anti-hero. For all their faults, there is one quality that Han Solo and Rick Blaine never come up short on: courage. Characters like Sefton and Gittes may profess to be cowards, but they aren’t. Not really. As Americans, we like to believe that we have no Old World illusions of grandeur, but we also want to believe in our own basic decency and moral integrity (despite all evidence to the contrary). Like Jake Gittes, the American anti-hero often fails—and sometimes fails miserably—but by the very act of attempting to do the right thing, he finds a kind of redemption. Americans pride themselves on not being suckers, but in the end, we want to think we are good.

Otherwise, what was all the fighting about, anyway?

Friday Night Rock-Out: “Setting Sun”

If you were a software developer in the late 1990s (which I was), and if you spent many an evening working overtime (which I did), and if you needed some heavy electronic music to go along with your Nth cup coffee to get you going (which I still do), then your go-to groups were probably The Prodigy and The Chemical Brothers.

I still love both bands (and not just when I need waking up). In fact, I love Big Beat in general. Just as the second generation of great grunge bands like Bush and Stone Temple Pilots began to taper-off, the electronic barrage of Big Beat pumped new energy into the music scene. Like, a million volts of energy.

I’ve already devoted one Friday-Night rock out to The Prodigy, so I am overdue to do one on The Chemical Brothers. Here it is, my favorite song of theirs, “Setting Sun.”

Rock on.

Shameless Plug: Spring Edition

Well, it’s been a long, long time since my last Shameless Plug (okay, it’s been six weeks), but my publisher, Crooked Lane Books, is running a sale on the Amazon Kindle edition of my novel, Twice the Trouble. It’s a one-day only sale on Friday, April 17.

If you like this site and want to support me, Ash, your humble author, please consider buying a copy. It’s just two bucks. Cheap!

Classic Sci-Fi Book Cover: “The Fountains of Paradise”

I’m no expert on the subject, but when I think of The History of Science Fiction, I imagine it in three big chunks. First came the “Golden Age” of the 1920s and 1930s, when pulp magazines like Astounding and Amazing Stories became enormously popular. Second was the era during and after World War II, when the so-called “Big Three” superstar authors—Issac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and Authur C. Clarke—emerged. Then came science fiction’s “New Wave,” when literary writers like Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin, Harlan Ellison, Samuel R. Delany, and J. G. Ballard transformed the genre.

Over my reading lifetime, I have mostly explored this third era—the New Wave—mainly because, frankly, it’s the only one where you can find some genuinely great novels. But in middle school and high school, I read some of the post-WWII writers, too, especially Clarke. I read Childhood’s End, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Earthlight, and Rendezvous with Rama. I loved all of them, particularly Childhood’s End, which is probably his best book.

Clarke was, by far, my favorite of the Big Three, even though he was far from a great writer. (Heinlein was probably the best, from a stylistic sense, but I disliked his books for other reasons.) Almost invariably, Clarke’s characters fall into a two-dimensional, generic type—the stalwart (male) hero, the honorable scientist, the devoted wife, the curious child, etc. etc.—but he was such a good story teller that no one cared. Essentially, his books are like extended Astounding magazine short stories, beginning with a fascinating, nerdy premise and weaving a cerebral-yet-exciting adventure tale around it.

I read one of his later novels, The Fountains of Paradise, when I was in college and enjoyed it immensely. Set in the near-future, it focuses on a stalwart scientist-hero—a civil engineer, in this case, named Vannevar Morgan—who is determined to build the world’s first space elevator, a literal railway to the stars. He needs to build it somewhere on the earth’s equator and chooses a mountain on the fictional island of Taprobane (a thinly veiled Sri Lanka, which was Clarke’s home for the latter half of his life). Naturally, he immediately faces challenges, beginning with the intractable head-monk of a Buddhist monastery that happens to be smack in the middle of the site Morgan has chosen. The rest of the story follows Morgan’s struggle to build the elevator. Technical problems abound, and several mini-crisis intrude on the elevator’s progress.

One element that The Fountains of Paradise stand-out from the rest of his novels is a clever narrative trick he pulls off. The 21^st Century story Morgan is interwoven with a 5^th Century tale of a local monarch, King Kalidasa, who tried to build a heaven-like palace on the exact same mountain top. The parallels between the two men are obvious but interesting—each is driven, almost to the point of madness, to see his dream come to reality. But while Kalidasa is a ruthless dictator who amputates the hands off his craftsmen after they finish their task (so they can never reproduce the work for another king), Morgan is a deeply moral, modern, scientific visionary whose goal is the betterment of humanity. He also cares about his workers. In the books final act, an accident occurs that requires Morgan to risk his own life to get oxygen to the workers who are stranded high-up on the elevator’s monofilament cable. It’s a great sequence. (I won’t spoil the ending, of course.)

I really like this cover (by veteran illustrator Terry Oakes) from the 1979 Del Rey edition. I like the juxtaposition of the monks in the foreground with the ghost of King Kalidasa hovering over the mountain (albeit in a high-tech reincarnation, wearing a pressure suit) and the space-elevator cable shooting up into the sky. It’s a crazy cover, in some ways, but it captures the clever dichotomy of the book.

Synchronicity for Bookworms: Koo Stark and George Lucas

There is a great moment in David Lynch’s film Wild at Heart when Nicholas Cage’s character, Sailor, says to his girlfriend, Lula, “The way your head works is God’s own private mystery.” Sometimes, I feel the same thing could be said about me. About my brain, that is.

A case in point: When Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor—yes, The-Andrew-formally-known-as-Prince—was arrested by British authorities last February, my mind went on a very strange tangent. He was arrested, it is believed, for crimes he might have committed while in the company of Jeffrey Epstein, who has become the most famous sexual predator and pimp in the history of the world. As soon as I heard the news of Mountbatten-Windsor’s arrest, my mind went back to the early 1980s, when he was dubbed “Randy Andy” by the U.K. tabloid press for his playboy lifestyle and many affairs with attractive women.

The name of one of these women leapt into my mind—that of Koo Stark, a beautiful actress from the 70s, with whom Mountbatten-Windsor had a long, heavily publicized romance. Stark contributed significantly to the “Randy Andy” mystique because she had (unwisely) appeared in a soft-core porn film called The Awakening of Emily, which I and millions of other teenaged boys watched (and re-watched) on late-night cable.

I must confess that as soon as I remembered her name—Koo Stark!—I was instantly transported back to that long ago time. What a great name it is, too, and even more so back then. Perfect for a hot young actress in swinging London! Yeah, baby! KOO STARK! “Koo,” as in the sound a dove makes right before it achieves orgasm; “Stark” as in stark naked! STARKERS!

I must also confess, however, that after the thrill of remembering Ms. Stark’s name wore off, I didn’t give her, or Mountbatten-Windsor, a second thought. UNTIL, just one day later, I was reading a great book about the great American film directors of the 1970s entitled The Last Kings of Hollywood: Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg—and the Battle for the Soul of American Cinema by Paul Fischer. The book documents the history of all three men as they created their early, iconic films including The Godfather, Jaws, and (of course), Star Wars. My jaw dropped when I read this passage describing Geoge Lucas’s quest to find the perfect actress for the role of Princess Leia…

George considered fourteen-year-old Terri Nunn, soon to be lead vocalist of the pop band Berlin, before whittling his list down to two nineteen-year-olds: Koo Stark and Fisher. They were strikingly similar: bright, funny, and gorgeous, both from show business families—Stark’s father, Wilbur, had produced film and television since the 1940s—and each with limited screen acting experience. Koo had appeared in one of her father’s smaller pictures and popped up, uncredited, as a bridesmaid in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Carrie had stolen a couple of scenes earlier that year in Warren Beatty’s Shampoo.

I was thus flabbergasted to learn that Koo Stark, rather than becoming famous for one stupid Cinemax-After-Dark movie and for her relationship with Randy Andy, might have become PRINCESS FRIGGIN LEIA instead! Ye Gods! How the Wheel of Fortune doth turn!

Mr. Fischer’s book got me thinking that Ms. Stark probably had a much more interesting history and character than I suspected, so I immediately did a web search on her. Sure enough, her Wikipedia page confirmed that she has had a pretty amazing life. Besides having been in contention for the role of Leia, she appeared in several “real” movies from the 1970s, and she was the understudy for a role in the National Theater’s production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? In the decades since, she became a successful and respected stage actress, as well as an accomplished professional photographer. Also, it turns out that she is American (I always thought she was English), and she is three years older than Mountbatten-Windsor, which suggests she might be one of the few beautiful women in England at the time whom he did not (obviously) exploit.

I was even more amazed to learn that, in fact, she did ultimately land a small part in Star Wars, that of Camie Marstrap, a friend of Luke Skywalker’s. (Her scenes were, alas, cut from the final film.)

And so, in true Synchronicity-for-Bookworms fashion, I discovered a tenuous karmic link between Jeffrey Epstein and Star Wars, conducted through the being of Ms. Koo Stark (and my own imagination, of course).

Or maybe it’s not so tenuous. At the risk of seeming a bit precious, I would suggest that Koo Stark was a victim of the same exploitative, male-controlled world of acting and model that men like Epstein, Harvey Weinstein, and countless others have abused for a century. After all, if she had not appeared in that “erotic” film when she was a kid, she might have found more success in films later. Of course, I have no idea if her appearance in an exploitation film had any impact on Lucas’s decision not to cast her as Princess Leia (I doubt that it did). But I do know that the stigma followed for years.

Fortunately, she overcame it. She has successfully sued several newspapers for libel, including a 2022 case against The Daily Mail, which referred to her (unfairly) as a “soft-core porn actress.”

To which I say, good for her!

The Scientist Hero: Our Newest Cinematic Archetype (Repost)

Author’s Note: I’m told that Project Hail Mary is doing boffo b.o. in the American cinema currently. It looks like a really good movie, and I look forward to seeing it. It’s also based on an Andy Weir book, and I am a big fan of the film adaptation of his first book, The Martian. It’s not only a great movie, it’s culturally signficant.

So, it seemed like a good time to ~~do a shameless rerun~~ repost my thoughts on The Martian and on the new Hollywood archetype that, I think, it helped foster.

Enjoy…

One of my favorite movies of the last twenty years is Ridley Scott’s The Martian. It’s a science-fiction/adventure movie about an astronaut (Matt Damon) who becomes stranded on Mars after his comrades leave him for dead. Marooned on a barren, hostile world, he has to use his brains and ingenuity to survive until his friends come back to rescue him. By the end of the movie, he has survived dust storms, explosions, freezing temperatures, and starvation.

How does he overcome all these challenges?

Science.

The story is familiar, of course. It has many antecedents, including with the original stranded-on-an-island novel, Robinson Crusoe, and also (more directly) to a great B-movie Robinson Crusoe on Mars. In that classic 1964 cheese-fest, the hero survives by finding a Martian cave full of air where plants still grow, water still flows, and there’s a steady source of light (which is never explained). He even befriends an alien who is also trapped on the planet.

Friday Night Rock-Out: “Ship of Fools”

Unless you’re over forty, or from the U.K., you’ve probably never heard of the great 80s/90s band World Party. It was the creation of a Welsh dude named Kurt Wallinger, who, like many other musical geniuses (Lindsey Buckingham springs to mind) wrote all his own songs, and made demo tapes by playing every instrument. Pretty cool, huh?

Back in 1986, this little gem came out. It had a bluesy, funky feel that was different from anything else on the radio at the time. Like a lot of great songs, it seems to exist on many levels. That is, it’s a warning about the future. More importantly, it’s just a great song.

Strangely, it did better in the U.S. than the U.K., where the band’s biggest hit was a haunting gem called “She’s the One.”

Rock on…

Nerds in the News

A lot of movies have been made about a so-called eco-apocalyse, in which catastrophic climate change, or pollution, or crop-failure, or overpopulation, or some mixture of all-of-the-above wipes out big swathes of humanity. And some of those scenarios might yet play-out if we keep sleepwalking (make that speed-walking) into the future.

Right now, however, environmental issues are manifesting in unexpected and almost mundane ways. Take house insurance. Here in Florida, frequent and more-powerful hurricanes are driving up premiums to insane levels. It’s the same along the gulf coast of Mississippi and Alabama. And a friend of mine from Texas told me the same thing is happening there (flooding is the disaster-de-jour, in his neck-of-the-woods). And then we have electric bills. Each year, increased demand for electricity (for air-conditioning and, now, frickin data centers) is driving up the cost of utilities. And what about clean drinking water? Near-constant drought (punctuated by hurricanes) makes it difficult to provide clean drinking water to growing populations in some parts of the country. This leads more people to buy bottled water. In parts of Mississippi, you will see everyone buying huge flats of the stuff from Wal-Mart, leading me to believe that bottled water is the primary of hydration for many rural Southerners.

So, whenever I run across a news story like this one about a small, ingenious invention of the sort that might—just might—help get us out of this mess, it warms my heart. And even more so when the inventors are young people. In this case, seventeen-year-old Virginian Mia Heller came up with a new, cheap, reliable way to filter microplastics from water. Her system is based on a type of nanoparticle-infused oil called a ferrofluid, which basically pulls the microplastics out of the water like a magnet. The oil is reusable and easy to make.

Will this invention take off? Will it scale? I don’t know, but it gives me hope. I often think of how the great Nazi Wehrmacht was defeated, in part, by clever G.I.s from America, some of whom came up with the clever idea of mounting a phone on the back of their tanks. With this phone, a ground-trooper could speak directly with the guys inside the tank and tell them where to shoot and move. It was the kind of simple, “no-brainer” innovation that the Germans, with their rigid class system and demoralized population, never came up with. And it helped win the war.

Climate change and pollution are Ms. Heller’s generation’s World War II. And I’m really hoping that smart people like her can figure out a way to save my generation’s collective butt.