CapitalistImperialistPig

  Westworld is the story of a theme park in which rich tourists can inflict their most depraved fantasies on extremely humanoid robots.  In an age when sexbots and virtual reality glasses are about to be mainstreamed, this is a prescient topic.  My old news review is based on Season 1, the only one I've seen. What's good: rather sophisticated meditations on the nature of consciousness and the implications of artificial intelligence, gorgeous scenery at all scales, excellent music, lots of apt and penetrating Shakespearean quotations delivered by talented actors, and those talented actors, including Anthony Hopkins, Ed Harris, and others that I did not recognize.  This series can suck you in. What's not good:  A bloated and barely coherent plot that relies entirely too much on ugly Deus ex Machina .  For example, Harris plays a monstrously bloody sociopath in the early episodes, but the effort to give him meaningful motivation and backstory collapses in...

I have written a lot about Prof Harari's lectures in his course A Brief History of Humankind , but having completed the course, I thought I would add a few thoughts on my takeaways. (1)There a lots of open questions about the relations between the various human variants that existed before H. sapiens replaced all the others, and about the biological basis of the developments that propelled our increasingly rapid technological progress. (2)Technological advance has not always been our friend. The central development of our history, the agriculture, allowed us to proliferate, but left us in many ways less healthy, more disease ridden, more subject to violence and oppression, and quite possibly, less happy. It also made us one of the most important players in the global ecology. Much of this was not new to me, but some was. (3)I had drastically underestimated the role of empires in creating the world of today. Almost everyone in the world today lives in a culture that was sh...

Overall, a pretty good movie. Naturally not terribly historically accurate says Christopher Hitchens - Edward VIII was a far more egregious Hitler loving facist than the movie's vague hints suggest, Churchill was his guy all the way, and George VI was another appeaser. The family is a bunch of Germans, after all. Facts be damned, Bellatrix Lestrange was a surprisingly hot Queen Elisabeth (mum, not monarch - Helena Bonham Carter), Dumbledore was a pretty steady George V (Michael Gambon) but Peter Pettigrew was a scary Winston Churchill (Timothy Spall). There were some other actors in it too. A couple of them were pretty good - I missed their names, but they might show up at the Academy Awards.

I saw Michael Frayn's play Copenhagen (John Ziman's Physics World review here ) last night, and I was very impressed. The principal subject is Heisenberg's September 1941 visit with Bohr in Copenhagen. At that time, the Bohr-Heisenberg collaboration that was so fundamental to the discovery of quantum mechanics was a decade and and a half in the past, Denmark was occupied by Nazi Germany, and Heisenberg was already at work on a German fission bomb. Heisenberg's visit was risky - he and Bohr were both being watched by the Gestapo, and Bohr, who was half-Jewish as well the world's most prominent nuclear physicist, was also under watch. What Heisenberg apparently said to Bohr "is it moral for a physicist to work on applications of fission" would have gotten them both shot if the Gestapo had heard. In any case, Bohr apparently reacted with intense anger, but no answer. Bohr was smuggled out of Denmark just before the arrest of all Danish Jews (who were ti...