You Can Check Out Anytime You Like

When it was in theaters last summer, Hotel Artemis slipped under my radar, which is not particularly difficult to do. It bypassed the attention of many others, too, however, and thereby failed to earn back its fairly modest production costs at the box office. Last week I saw a mention of it as an “overlooked thriller” of 2018 starring Jodie Foster; so, based on that description and without previewing the trailer I gave it a try. I was expecting a neo-noir crime drama, but encountered something rather different. The movie is set in 2028, which is enough to qualify it as science fiction. Near-future Los Angelinos are not happy. As the movie begins, a full-blown riot is in progress that makes the recent Yellow Jacket disturbances in Paris look like pleasant weekend social outings. (The riot was triggered by water rather than fuel, but in the movie as in life it is about more.) The police have lost control of much of the city and are losing more block by block. Hotel Artemis is just outside the expanding riot zone.

The Hotel Artemis is not a hotel but a kind of HMO for criminals. Members get treatment for gunshot wounds, stabbings, and other occupational injuries: no questions asked, no public records, and no notification of the authorities. The facility, while well-equipped and well-fortified, by design occupies an upper floor of an otherwise dilapidated building in a dingy part of town: the kind of building that pedestrians and drivers-by barely notice as they pass. It is run by Nurse (Jodie Foster), an agoraphobic but capable healer whose drinking had cost her a license and any employment in more conventional hospitals. She is assisted by the fiercely loyal orderly/bouncer Everest (Dave Bautista). There are rules, of course, as there must be for this to work: no guns, no police, no killing on the premises, and so on. A colorful set of patients already occupies rooms when Nurse gets a call to expect powerful crime lord The Wolf King (Jeff Goldblum) to arrive with a gunshot wound; he had provided initial financial backing for the Hotel Artemis.

What happens if members stop following the rules of the Hotel Artemis to an extent that Everest can’t handle? Down on the streets we see what happens when people stop following street rules. We learn that one of the patients (Sofia Boutella) plans to violate rule Number 1 by killing The Wolf King; she had self-inflicted her wound to pre-position herself to do just that. The Wolf King assumes rules don’t apply to him anywhere anytime, and one of the other patients stole diamonds from him, which is something he won’t tolerate. Nurse herself violates the “no police” rule by treating a wounded female officer she knew personally. Meantime the riots threaten to engulf the area. The social contract inside and outside looks wobbly.

If the Hotel Artemis in some respects seems something like the Continental Hotel in the John Wick movies, you aren’t alone in noticing this. In truth, there isn’t very much original in the movie taken piece by piece. The riots are reminiscent of The Purge. There is graphic violence of the sort we commonly see in 21^st century action movies. Everest as Nurse’s faithful Achates is a character type we have known know since…well…Achates. We have the amoral crime boss. We even have the more recent (but long past novel) trope of the 90-pound waif-like young lady who when completely unarmed is still able to beat up a herd of hardened 250-pound thugs. Nonetheless the pieces are assembled in an interestingly offbeat way with enough wit to make the movie worth a look.

Thumbs cautiously Up.

Unpretty Little Liars

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz is a data scientist who writes for The New York Times. His NYT bestselling book is Everybody Lies: What the Internet Can Tell Us about Who We Really Are.

A big problem with the traditional ways social scientists have collected information about people’s behaviors, desires, and opinions is that people lie even when there is no rational reason to do so. The irrational reason to do so is that we like to virtue-posture and to present ourselves as better than we are even when polls and surveys are completely anonymous. Somehow that makes us feel better. So we exercise less and we eat more pie than we tell pollsters. On anonymous surveys people underreport alcohol consumption by some 50% (source:  Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration) and underreport tobacco use by a similar percentage. We are able to determine those last two pretty accurately because we collect taxes on alcohol and tobacco, and they tell how much we actually consume – to which we should add whatever amount somehow escapes taxation. (This barely compares to the extent we like to virtue-posture in public and on social media of course.) Search engines and ad clicks on the internet, however, provide vast amounts of unfiltered data about our real interests. We can tell for what people search and what they access. We can tell how billions upon billions of clicks correlate with other online clicks and how they correlate with the characteristics (such as sex and geographical location) of the users. Data mining and analyses that were once time and labor intensive now can be done with ease: most often without any human intervention beyond the original algorithm. The AIs of Google, Amazon, and other major online players never stop doing them.

A decade ago neuroscientists Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam analyzed 55 million sexually oriented searches terms compiled by Dogpile, broke them down into categories, and tried to see what these searches tell us about human sexuality. They published the creepy but intriguing answers in their 2011 book A Billion Wicked Thoughts. Searches both by men and women were fiercely un-PC and offered many surprises. (I reviewed this book back on November 7, 2017.) Everybody Lies is an updated and thematically less constrained look at what can be gleaned from online data (not just personal searches and postings) and how online behavior relates to real world behavior.

The title of the book is misleading. To be sure, there some attention to giving the lie to public posturing. For example, the data show us that the more a borrower says how trustworthy he is, the less likely he is to pay you back. (Many of us have been warned of this anecdotally, but an analysis of words used on loan applications and subsequent default rates proves the warning is well-founded.) Most of the book, though, is dedicated not to lying per se but to data correlations that sometimes defy and sometimes confirm expectations. He also tells us of the ways businesses and political groups learn to manipulate us with those correlations. As a real but minor example, Google tested differing responses to otherwise identical ads depending on what shade of blue was used in them. Big Data can be exploited in ways large and small to make online sites for any purpose ever more addictive and persuasive.

For social scientists, online Big Data are a vast resource. Says Stephens-Davidowitz, “If a violent movie comes to a city does crime go up or down? If more people are exposed to an ad, do more people use the product? If a baseball team wins when a boy is twenty, will he be more likely to root for them when he is forty? These are all clear questions with clear yes or no answers. And in the mountains of honest data we can find them.” He warns us that correlation is not causation. For example, moderate drinkers are healthier than either teetotalers or heavy drinkers, but that doesn’t necessarily mean moderate drinking is healthful. It could be the other way around: healthy people might be more inclined to drink moderately. Or there might be some third factor (such as socializing) at work. From the correlation alone we cannot tell. Nonetheless, it does tell us where to look, and with enough other Big Data, we might well be able to tease out causation. Big Data results also can mislead depending on what questions are asked. A non-controversial example in our hyper-political age: in the matter of the dispute between Lilliput and Blefuscu, if one searches the data for pirates who break eggs at the small end and philanthropists who break eggs at the big end, you will get real and fairly reliable answers, but the questions themselves are biased and therefore so are the answers. They really don’t tell us much about the characters of ordinary non-pirate non-philanthropist egg-crackers; the answers are merely fodder for propaganda. However, properly done Big Data analyses are ideal for discovering how effective that propaganda is.

The book has flaws. In many ways it is oversimplified, though I think that comes from the habit of writing for The New York Times, which is written to a 10^th grade (15-year-old) reading level. (This is high for a newspaper: most are written to an 8^th grade level or lower.) Nonetheless, if only as a warning to make an extra effort to think for oneself at a time when so many tools are available to those who would prefer to think for us, the book is still very much worth a read. Once again, though, don’t rely entirely on the title.

Bo Diddley - You Can't Judge a Book by Its Cover

Fanning Flames on Mars

I spent much of last weekend on Mars – well…in two novels set on Mars. I have little to say about Thin Air by Richard Morgan beyond that it is serviceable scifi/detective-noir. On a Mars roughly terraformed just enough to be livable in spots, there are corrupt politicians, corrupt police, corrupt corporations, and outright gangsters, as well as sincere ideologues of both the authoritarian and anti-authoritarian variety who are more dangerous than any of the corrupt folk. If you like the scifi-noir combination (there is more than enough of it out there to constitute a genre), you’ll like this one well enough. The more interesting of the two novels, however, was, oddly enough, by far the more poorly written one. What made it interesting was the context, which requires a brief detour.

Fan fiction – unauthorized stories with a setting and/or with characters created by another author – took off in a big way with Star Trek. It was by no means limited to Star Trek – Dr. Who was another franchise that inspired a lot of amateur writers – but Star Trek was the big one in the 1970s. Manuscripts were swapped at conventions and at fan clubs; numerous stories were published in fan magazines. Paramount decided that fan fiction didn’t hurt the value of their Star Trek franchise, and in the 70s allowed a number of fan-written non-canon paperback novels to be sold. The key word is “allowed.” The legal status of “fanfic” is murky. U.S. copyright law has a number of “fair use” exceptions for imitators. Satire is broadly permitted on 1^st Amendment grounds. In non-satirical works, the courts take account of factors such as whether or not the fanfic is commercial and whether it harms the value of the copyright holder’s intellectual property. In general, though, if a copyright-holder objects to the publication of fan fiction and asks for an injunction, a court will issue one. The courts blocked, for example, publication of an unauthorized sequel to Catcher in the Rye featuring Holden Caulfield 60 years after the events in Salinger’s novel. Original authors vary a lot in attitude toward fan imitators. Anne Rice objected to all fan fiction based on her work at first, though she has mellowed somewhat over time. J.K. Rowling has objected to some fanfic: particularly Harry Potter stories with sexual themes. Joss Whedon has been tolerant – even supportive – of Buffy fanfic even though it competes to some degree with his Buffy the Vampire Slayer comic books. Most fan fiction has been online since the mid-90s, of course, and a number of authors honed their skills on online fanfic sites. Fifty Shades of Grey began as fan fiction for the Twilight series; E.L. James removed the Twilight setting and characters in her rewrite for publication as a novel.

Fan fiction as a widespread pop-cultural phenomenon may be dated to Star Trek, but it existed in pockets long before then. Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and all the writings of Jane Austen inspired fan fiction in the 19^th century as they still do today. One peculiar example of early scifi fanfic is Edison’s Conquest of Mars, which was serialized in the Boston Post in 1898. It is an unauthorized sequel to H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, which in 1897 had been serialized in Pearson’s Magazine in the UK and Cosmopolitan in the US prior to its release as a novel. Edison’s Conquest of Mars by Garrett P. Serviss was my second visit to Mars last weekend. The novel is a steampunk Starship Troopers written by an actual Victorian. Serviss was an astronomer who also wrote popular science articles for newspapers. I don’t think there is much doubt Wells or Cosmopolitan could have halted the publication of Serviss’ serial had they chosen, but they didn’t bother. I suspect Wells simply wasn’t aware of it. For all his avowed socialism, Wells was notoriously protective of his intellectual property: asserting that the idea for the tank in World War 1 had come from one of his pre-war science fiction stories, for example, he even (unsuccessfully) sued the British government.

Cover depicts rescue of
human captive from Martians

Edison’s Conquest of Mars is set shortly after the failure of the Martian invasion described by Wells. As the reader doubtless remembers, the Martians in Wells’ novel had laid waste to the planet while scarcely being inconvenienced by the futile efforts of earth’s militaries. The Martians were defeated in the end not by humans but by the microorganisms of earth to which they had no resistance. In Serviss’ sequel, human authorities are convinced the Martians will return to finish their conquest as soon as they devise a means to resist earth’s diseases. They believe the only hope is to strike first. A team led by Thomas Edison – yes, that Thomas Edison – reverse engineers the Martian machines and does them better. He develops “electrical” spaceships: not ion drives, but anti-gravity drives using electromagnetic fields. The Martian spaceships, by contrast, are simply launched toward their targets and freefall there; they don’t maneuver in space the way Edison’s ships can. (The atmosphere of Mars itself is defended by fleets of powerfully armed airships however.) Edison improves on the Martian weapons as well. 100 electrical spaceships are built and an international force sets out in them to attack Mars. Along with the military personnel on board are a number of leading scientists including Professor Sylvanus P. Thompson, Lord Kelvin, Dr. Mossian, and Professor Roentgen.

A surprising number of elements in this book became scifi tropes in the 20^th century. There are ray guns, accurately described spacesuits, and an evil Martian king. The Martians, we learn, have (apparently disease-free) human captives. There is a scene presaging Princess Leia and Jabba the Hutt where a raiding party rescues a human slave girl (whose ancestors were from Kashmir) from Martians. She speaks to a Heidelberg linguist professor on Edison’s flagship and helps with Martian translations. The linguist like Yoda speaks, putting his verbs at the end in German fashion. We learn that thousands of years ago the Martians visited the earth, influenced ancient civilizations, and built the pyramids. The war with the Martians is touch and go; the humans have technical superiority but are vastly outnumbered. The humans express regret at the damage they do to the Martians (attacks on the canals cause mass civilian casualties) but feel they must demonstrate to the Martians that they shouldn’t mess with earth. Until then a peace settlement can’t be trusted.

I’m making this book sound better than it is. Make no mistake: the writing is terrible, the characters are badly drawn, the plotting is absurd, and it is full of 19^th century presuppositions and prejudices. If you just accept that, however, it is great fun.

While I do dabble in fiction (see Richard’s Mirror and Richard’s Novel Ideas) I’ve never attempted fan fiction. I can see the draw of it. One can like characters so much as to want to be part of their world – or even to shape their world. Some fictional universes have been created specifically to be shared with other authors: notably Larry Niven’s Known Space universe. But while I can see the draw, I haven’t felt it – at least not enough to choose it over fictional worlds of my own. However, for those who do enjoy redecorating the worlds of their favorite authors, have fun – and say hello to Emma, Sherlock, and Buffy for me.

Sammy Hagar - Marching To Mars

The Rodent inside Me

The large majority of my friends, ranging from millennials to seniors, are single whether never-married, divorced, or widowed. Not all, but most. Some of the reason is probably the tendency for married people to hang out with other married people and thereby select themselves out of the mix, but that doesn’t account for all of it. A lot of the reason is simply that there are more single adults than there used to be.

When I was a kid, nearly all of my parents’ friends at picnics and parties were married. I use the word “nearly” because there might have been an exception, but right now I can’t think of one. I didn’t think much about it back then. Marriage just seemed to be something that happened to adults like dry skin and worsening vision: as inevitable as birthdays themselves. This wasn’t true, of course. There always have been advocates for and practitioners of the single life in all times and places. Note the 1942 Kay Kyser hit Jingle Jangle Jingle. A century earlier Charles Darwin waveringly contemplated the costs and benefits of marriage, weighing "terrible loss of time" and "less money for books" against a "constant companion and a friend in old age ... better than a dog anyhow." (Charles decided against the dog and married his cousin Emma.) In 1872 Victoria Woodhull ran for President of the United States in part on an anti-marriage Free Love platform: “to change that love every day if I please, and with that right neither you nor any law you can frame have any right to interfere." (This wasn’t a vote-winner in 1872.) Sumerian proverb etched in a 4000-year-old clay tablet: “Marriage for pleasure, divorce to regain it.” In the 20 years after World War 2, however, it was as close to being true as it ever has been before or since.

The current median age for first marriage (for those who get married at all) is 29 for men and 28 for women. In 1960 the median age for first marriage in the U.S. was 22 for men and 20 for women, meaning almost half the brides were teenagers. In 1960 72% of those between 18 and 35 years old were married with the bulk of the singles at the lowest end of that range. Today according to the Pew Research Center 61% of Americans 18 to 35 are “unpartnered”; the study includes unmarried couples as “partnered,” which means most younger people don’t become couples with or without the formality of marriage. Many never will. For the first time since records have been kept a majority of all adults are single. There is one segment of the population that so far still features ample ambulation down the aisle: marriage rates are holding up surprisingly well for those in the top 20% income level – the group that dominates the culture and the traditional media. They have fallen off a cliff for everyone else. The birth rate is way down, too. In the top 20% income level the majority of births are still to married couples. In the rest of the population they are not, but across the board the fertility rate is down to 1.7. The replacement rate is 2.1, so the population would decline were it not for immigration. In several of the advanced nations in Europe and Asia the populations are already declining. (Global population continues to rise however with the poorest nations growing the fastest.)

There are endless articles on the subject in newspapers, popular magazines, journals, and publications such as Psychology Today. Predictably, most contain spin for one side or other of the gender war, which, like all aspects of life that are remotely political, has grown more choleric in recent years. Authors with opposite spins (overwhelmingly members of that upper 20% either way, one must remember) tend to agree the fading of marriage is a problem however. I’m not so sure that it is. Single parenthood is extra hard to be sure both for the parent and the child, but that is a separate issue from singlehood per se.

The numbers do, however, bring to mind a series of experiments that got quite a bit of news coverage and commentary when I was in high school and college. Every now and then a spate of articles still will appear about them, but they don’t get the traction they did 50 years ago when folks worried more about overpopulation than they do today, even though there are 120,000,000 more people in the U.S. now than there were then.

Dr. John Bumpass Calhoun of the NIH originally studied rats for insights about rodent control in cities, but his studies eventually led him in a different direction. In 1947 his efforts to breed rats on a quarter acre seemed to hit a natural limit when the population hit 150. Despite plentiful food and ideal living conditions they started acting strangely and stopped breeding after reaching that number. Repeating the experiment produced the same result. With support from the NIMH (National Institute of Mental Health) in the 1950s he built ever larger and more elaborate rat utopias, again with the same result: the population would soar, level off at well below an enclosure’s capacity, and then crash despite abundant food and resources for the rats. Shortly before and during the crash, the rodents exhibited bizarre and unsocial behaviors, which he dubbed a behavioral sink. In the 1960s he switched from rats to mice for practical reasons including their smaller size and short life cycles (they live about 2 years and can have 10 litters per year), but the results were the same as with the rats.

Universe 25

The most elaborate mouse facility was “Universe 25” in 1968: a mouse utopia abounding with tunnels, nests, and nesting materials. There were ideal temperatures, plentiful food for all, and no predators. Universe 25 should have been able to accommodate 3000 mice easily, but it never got there. From a handful of breeding pairs the population doubled every 55 days in the “exploit period” until it reached 620 on day 315. The birthrate then began a long decline though at this point it still exceeded the replacement rate. Apparently stressed by the inescapable presence of other mice (again, there was no shortage of food or resources), the mice acted ever more oddly as the population grew. They crowded in some nests while leaving others nearly empty. The females grew aggressive (even toward their own young) while the males became either passive or violent. There were bursts of hypersexuality. By day 560 a generation of mice that hadn’t experienced normal murine upbringing showed diminished interest in mating, competing, or raising young. A few showed enough energy to take possession of some upper nests (mouse penthouses) exclusively for themselves and a few of their favorites – Calhoun dubbed them the “beautiful ones” – but they didn’t reproduce much and avoided interactions with the common mice. Population peaked at 2,200 on day 920. Mouse social behavior by then had become weirdly detached for the most part, but there were outbursts of extreme violence unrelated to the usual competition for status and mates. There even was occasional cannibalism. The birthrate plunged below replacement level and the population began to fall. The birthrate kept falling even when population dropped back below 620; once the social decay set in, it was irreversible. The last baby mouse was born in 1973. The remaining population grew old and died to the last mouse. Every similar experiment ended exactly the same way with 100% mortality.

Calhoun wasn’t shy about suggesting parallels to human societies. To the rejoinder that we aren’t mice, he would answer that in many ways we kind-of are. (See Death Squared: The Explosive Growth and Demise of a Mouse Population [1973] by John Calhoun, which begins “I shall largely speak of mice, but my thoughts are on man.”) However we rationalize our behavior with ideology and philosophy, he suggests, our responses actually may be rooted in biology as much as they are for the rodents. In addition to just the stresses of crowding, he comments, part of the problem for the rodents was precisely the lack of struggle for resources that keeps urban street rats in their brutal environments socially healthy and relentlessly fecund.

Was he right? If so, are the resource-rich nations on day 315 or even 920? I don’t know. But I’m happy being a childless single even if that’s a rationalization and even though I don’t qualify as a “beautiful one” in a penthouse.

Maria Muldaur – Ain’t Gonna Marry

Wordiness

Unlike some languages (notably French, which is governed by L'Académie française), English does not have an official grammar or vocabulary. Since the dominant opinion among Anglophone lexicologists is that there ought not to be an official standard – that language evolves organically and their role is simply to report on the evolution – we aren’t likely to get one. The closest thing we have to an official source is the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), which tracks but does not dictate usage. It adds and subtracts words and definitions every year as they come into and fall out of use. It always adds more than it drops, expanding in recent decades by about 2000 words per year, but the publishers never claimed to list all English words, and much scientific terminology is deliberately excluded. Accordingly, there is no definitive number of English words. (One author on the OED website guestimates, “If distinct senses were counted, the total would probably approach three quarters of a million.”) Graeme Diamond, a member of the OED team, explains, “A rule of thumb is that any word can be included [in the OED] which appears five times, in five different printed sources, over a period of five years.”

It is doubtful that any one person has a 750,000 word vocabulary, of course. The average adult English-speaker has an active vocabulary of between 10,000 and 20,000 and a combined active and passive vocabulary of 40,000. A passive vocabulary is the words we recognize when we see them but don’t use ourselves. Shakespeare had an active vocabulary of 31,534 words (that’s how many distinct words appear in his plays – yes, someone counted) but I think we can agree he was a tad more literary than most of us. 10-20,000 still sounds pretty impressive but there is less to the number than meets the ear. According to The Reading Teachers Book of Lists, the 1000 most common words comprise 89% of everyday writing, and we generally write with a larger vocabulary than we use in speech.

Given the state of civil society at present, it is no surprise that 2018’s additions to the dictionary include derogatory terms such “mansplain” and “snowflake.” Snowflake is an old word in its literal sense, of course, but its metaphorical definition is a new addition. Among the added words less intended to irk the hearer (though the things they describe may be irksome) are “deglobalization,” “ransomware,” “nothingburger,” “idiocracy,” and “prepper.” There is by design a lag time between a word being coined and its inclusion (if it ever is included) in the OED. More revealing, therefore, are trending words and expressions whether old or new, which is to say those words with a significant recent rise in use. Fortunately, the OED keeps track of these, too. On the shortlist for the trendiest word for 2018 were the following (a couple of which haven’t as yet jumped the pond):

Cakeism – (primarily UK) a belief one can have two mutually exclusive alternatives at once.

Gammon – (primarily UK) derogatory term for an angry red-faced white man.

Big Dick Energy (BDE) – understated casual confidence.

Orbiting – a step short of “ghosting,” orbiting is abruptly stopping direct communication with someone while still lightly interacting on social media.

Overtourism – the ruination of the desirability of a tourist destination from too many tourists.

Gaslighting – Making someone appear or feel paranoid while truly surreptitiously undermining him or her.

Techlash – a backlash against tech companies for perceived manipulative behavior.

Finally, the winner trending Word of the Year: Toxic. This is another old word, but the trendiness comes from its metaphorical use as in toxic masculinity, toxic relationships, toxic culture, etc.

That "toxic" was the trendiest word of 2018 says much – perhaps too much. Maybe something more hopeful such as “medicinal” will be trendy instead in 2019, though there is always a chance it will be paired with a comeback of “snake oil.”

Aimee Mann – I Know There's A Word