Oppenheimer finally viewed

I'll be kind and first list the good points:  yes, I think the acting is fine, and Cillian Murphy is aged very realistically in the multiple periods in which he appears.  I like the fact that an incredible scientific and engineering undertaking is given attention in a widely watched movie, and that (as far as I can tell, in checking up on various websites since seeing it) the movie is mostly historically accurate.   As a rider to that last point, though, it is a tad annoying to find out that a really important - virtually the pivotal - scene is an invention*.   Still, it seems the truth is almost never palatable enough for dramatic re-creation if it's a bio-pic instead of a documentary.

OK, so for the bad points.  And the first is really bad.   I realised after perhaps 30 or 45 minutes that the orchestral soundtrack was always there, far from subtle, and would simply never shut up so we could have some dialogue experienced as in real life - in silence, or with just some ambient sound.   It felt like there was barely 5 minutes of audio calm (specifically, no orchestra, or the various "jump booms" which happen every now and then) in the entire movie.   At the half way point, I had already decided that it felt like the composer was using a hammer to try to beat me into submission.    

Now, I know, lots of people on line have praised the score.  But there are some on line who agree (and who complain that the audio mixing generally sometimes made dialogue a strain to hear.   Even my son agreed with that.)  Some examples of commentary I agree with:

Everyone talked like they knew they were in an Important Historical Drama and the music was constantly insisting on emotions the film wasn’t doing anything to earn....

The draining score was there to artificially inject superficial tension....

For me the sound was so unnecessarily loud that I literally facepalmed during the movie. The sound mix was so brazen that it made me wish I’d watched this on streaming with subtitles, it’s borderline disrespectful to the audience to make a movie so loud. I’m amazed that Nolan gets away with it. Surprising that the score doesn’t get an acting credit, it’s so blatantly front and centre in so many scenes

And, by the way, given that I am something of a Nolan sceptic (while liking some of his films), I didn't realise that loud and peculiar audio mix that interferes with hearing dialogue has been a repeat feature of many of his films.  There's an entire article about that here, from before Oppenheimer opened.  This film has only confirmed the problem.

On a bigger point, and why I think the movie is interesting but far from great, is it felt more like an exercise in  Nolan showing us how clever he is with his complicated and dense screenplay, rather than making something that could have been much more emotionally affecting.  And from a dramatic structure point of view, while I understand that the back and forth can make for a more interesting way to tell a story, I still didn't understand why it needed to feel exhaustingly frenetic from the start, and to have a sense of urgency during parts of the story that, well, didn't need it.  Arguably, I suppose, you could say that it does become less urgent in the last third - which is the opposite of normal dramatic structure, and does have the odd effect of making you wonder why the narrative has always been about a different character we don't really have any reason to be interested in.

In short, I don't think the dramatic structure works, and the movie would have been much better if it had some breathing spaces ever now and then, and let tension and urgency build more naturally.  The climatic explosion, by the way, felt somewhat "flat" to me, and I was disappointed that one true detail that has fascinated a lot of people (Fermi throwing pieces of paper into the air to see how the blast wave affected them, and using this to come up with a reasonable estimate of the blast yield) didn't make it into the movie.

I see that of the major movie critics in America, Richard Brody in the New Yorker was about the only one who didn't like the film, pretty much on similar grounds that I've outlined:

Nolan cuts his scenes to fit together like a jigsaw puzzle, and details that don’t fit—contradictions, subtleties, even little random peculiarities—get left out, and, with them, the feeling of experience, whether the protagonist’s or the viewer’s. What remains is a movie to be solved rather than lived.       

Brody adds some interesting detail about the real Oppenheimer in this section:

...the film is so intent on making Oppenheimer an icon of conflicted conscience that it pays little attention to his character over all. He was a renowned aesthete with a bearing so charismatic that his students would try to emulate it, but we get little more than a couple of artsy name-drops to suggest that he has any cultural life at all. The “overweening ambition” that Groves saw in Oppenheimer is never in evidence, nor is there any mention of his chilling readiness to go along with a plan (one that was never put into action) to poison German food supplies with radioactive strontium. There’s no glimpse of the ailing Oppenheimer, who was suffering from tuberculosis and joint pain even while running Los Alamos. It doesn’t help that Murphy portrays Oppenheimer as wraithlike and haunted, a cipher, a black hole of experience who bears his burdens blankly as he’s buffeted by his circumstances but gives off no energy of his own. The performance, no less than the script, reduces the protagonist to an abstraction created to be analyzed. “Oppenheimer” reveals itself to be, in essence, a History Channel movie.

That very last line is probably unfair - there's no way a History Channel movie would make the telling so complicated and with visual flair - but in terms of how it deals with character, I get his point. 

I'll wrap this up tomorrow... 

Update:   

*  well, as far as I can tell, it's invented.   I'm talking about the "Stauss introduces Oppenheimer to Einstein" scene.  It is clear that the content of the conversation is invented - Oppenheimer had never asked Einstein to check if the bomb would set the atmosphere on fire - but it has been harder to find any site which explains specifically whether or not the meeting with Einstein (while Strauss watched) happened at all.

OK, to finish up a couple of things which provide some interesting context -

a.    an article about his love life, with some amusing details

b.    a pretty good Youtube video showing what modern day Los Alamos is like, including the slightly surprising detail about the way radioactive waste has been buried all around the place:

Update 2:   I'm pleased to see there are quite a few people on Reddit prepared to criticise the film as being underwhelming for them, for similar reasons I outlined.   I haven't even mentioned the oddball scene that was tweeted about (in response to someone who said "see, no one is talking about Oppenheimer any more") as follows:

Ha.  :)

(Quite a few people think the female characters are a bit unfairly treated - there was a lot more to both of them than their flaws, which are pretty much the only aspect that make it into the story.)
 

A vegetarian recipe noted

Eggplants are very cheap at the moment, and I don't know why, but I seem to be enjoying them more and more lately, especially as baking them with a light oil coating has solved the "oil sponge" problem that used to be a bit a pain if frying them.

I made this curry last night, in which they are the key ingredient, and it came out very well.  The technique was just to chop up a big eggplant into 2.5 cm cubes, coat in a bit of olive oil, salt and pepper and bake at about 200 degrees for 30 min.  

The curry is made in the usual way - fry onion, add garlic and ginger, then the curry spices;  add stock, tomatoes, chickpeas and coconut milk and simmer for 20 minutes.  Add the baked eggplant and simmer another 10 minutes.  Garam masala is supposed to go in at the end, but I forgot.  

To stop link rot losing this, here are the ingredients:

• 1¼ pound (20 ounces) eggplant about 1 very large or two small (+ 1½ tbsp olive oil, ½ tsp salt, ¼ tsp black pepper for roasting)
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 1 medium onion chopped
• 2 cloves garlic grated
• 1 teaspoon ginger grated
• 2 teaspoon curry powder
• 1 teaspoon cumin seeds or ground
• ¼ teaspoon red pepper flakes
• 1 teaspoon turmeric powder
• ½ teaspoon ground coriander
• ½ teaspoon black pepper
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 2 – 3 cups vegetable broth based on desired consistency
• 1 can (15 ounces) chickpeas or 1½ cups of cooked chickpeas
• 1 can (15 ounces) crushed tomatoes
• 1 can (14 ounces) coconut milk
• 1 teaspoon garam masala

Now, I did increase the curry powder to three teaspoons, and the red pepper flakes to about a teaspoon.  Instead of a whole can of coconut milk I used about 2/3 one of coconut cream.

The eggplant was the only fresh ingredient I used, but it was still great.  I guess I could try using fresh tomatoes next time, and perhaps add red capsicum too would be good.

I will definitely make again.

A completely unnecessary complication

The (rather dull, but harmless I guess) nerd Lex Fridman was all super excited earlier today about this:

My reaction, which only took about 5 seconds to occur to my sub-genius level brain:   "Oh, so you mean, you experienced something exactly the same as a high quality video call, but using - what? - twenty times the computer power??   Big advance...."

But:  I have scrolled quite a way down in the fanboy comments after this post, and still haven't found anyone making this point.   Instead we get many variations on this:

Excuse the shouting, but:

HOW??   YOU CAN ALREADY DO THIS OVER VIDEO!   IS NOT HAVING TO SHAVE OR COMB YOUR HAIR OR GET OUT OF YOUR PJ'S REALLY THAT BIG AN ADVANCE TO ONLINE MEETINGS?

 

Bones and bananas

Two somewhat surprising videos from Youtube today:

The first - I don't recall seeing this surprising ceremony from Madagascar before - where a huge number of people turn up to carry around the 7 year dead body of a beloved relative, in a very celebratory fashion.  (Although one child in it finds it pretty upsetting). 

 

And secondly - turns out that the bite of a spider in South America known as a "banana spider" was well known for causing priapism, and now the molecule derived from it is well on the way to being used in a ointment for erectile dysfunction (!):

Fanciful suggestion

As reported in The Guardian, Noel Pearson claims this:

Government ministers have spoken about the voice’s potential to bring together advice on complex, multi-disciplinary problems such as rheumatic heart disease, a little-known condition that the health minister, Mark Butler, described as “a disease of grinding poverty, poor environmental conditions, and not something the health portfolio can manage alone”.

Pearson called it “a problem only a voice can overcome”.

“It is a disease of the unlistened to. It is the disease of a people who have spoken, but have not been heard,” he said.

“No gets us nowhere when it comes to confronting rheumatic heart disease. Yes makes it possible.”

A Google search shows in fact a plethora of articles in medical journals and websites discussing the problem.   There are many recent articles, and to take one example from 2021:

A community-based program to reduce acute rheumatic fever and rheumatic heart disease in northern Australia

And by refining the Google search, you can see how much the problem was discussed, say, a decade ago.

Here's a screenshot of the first page when the topic is restricted to 2010 to 2012 search results:

 OK, so you might say "well, you are just proving that the problem was known, but the government wasn't listening to the aboriginal community about it."

The problem with that line is that Googling up the evidence of active government engagement to address the problem is also easy.  For example, here's a 32 page booklet from the Queensland government n 2018 with the title:

Here's some material from the Federal government National Indigenous Australians Agency (not sure the date, but it's after 2018):

The National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Plan 2021–2031 (the Health Plan), released in December 2021, includes priority 5: Early Intervention; which emphasises place-based approaches that are locally determined such as preventing ARF from becoming RHD where needed, and promotes enhancing access to culturally safe and responsive, best practice early intervention (Objective 5.3). The Health Plan also supports community driven housing and infrastructure solutions (Objective 7.2) to consider targeted primordial intervention for housing-related medical conditions that are common to Indigenous Australian households, such as ARF and RHD, trachoma, and otitis media.

The Champions4Change Program has worked in partnership with RHD Australia since 2018 to meet a clear need for an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander-specific program that had self-determination and culture at its heart. The program is supported by nearly 60 Indigenous Australians with lived experience of ARF and RHD from 27 communities across Australia. The program was designed to privilege and promote the voices of its champions, to support them in their lives and work, and to put culture, Country and community at the centre of responses to RHD.

Gee, the bit in bold sounds quite a lot like "listening" to me. 

Some more material from the Feds:

The Australian Government is committed to ending RHD as a public health issue by 2030. To achieve this, the Australian Government is making significant investments to address ARF and RHD through:

• the Rheumatic Fever Strategy
• developing a vaccine against Strep A (funded through the Indigenous Health Research Fund).

The Rheumatic Fever Strategy includes:

• state-based register and control programs in the NT, WA, SA and QLD, to improve detection, monitoring and management of ARF and RHD
• developing clinical guidelines to prevent, diagnose and manage ARF and RHD
• developing resources and providing education and training for healthcare professionals, communities, and for individuals with these conditions and their carers
• piloting activities in high-risk communities to help prevent new cases of ARF
• national analysis and reporting on the data from state-based registers.

I could go on.

The point is, of course, that Pearson is engaging in pure rhetorical hyperbole when he says this is one example of a problem that "only a voice can overcome" because the indigenous are not being "listened to".

The truth, which it really doesn't suit him to acknowledge, is that the problem has been well recognized for well over a decade, governments have been actively working on programs to deal with it, and have been engaging directly with aboriginal organisations and advocates.

There is really no reason to believe that having another layer of indigenous representatives who say "you're not doing enough!" is going to achieve anything better.   

Antimatter not as exotic as it might have been

At the New York Times, a report on a physics experiment that shows antimatter is affected by gravity the same way as normal matter: 

In science fiction, antiparticles provide the power for warp drives. Some physicists have speculated that antiparticles are being repelled by gravity or even traveling backward in time.

A new experiment at CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research, brings some of that speculation back down to Earth. In a gravitational field, it turns out, antiparticles fall just like the rest of us. “The bottom line is that there’s no free lunch, and we’re not going to be able to levitate using antimatter,” said Joel Fajans of the University of California, Berkeley.

And:

Few physicists were surprised by the result. According to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, all forms of matter and energy respond equally to gravity.

“If you walk down the halls of this department and ask the physicists, they would all say that this result is not the least bit surprising,” Jonathan Wurtele, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, said in an announcement issued by the university. It was he who first suggested the experiment to Dr. Fajans a decade ago. “That’s the reality,” Dr. Wurtele said.

“But most of them will also say that the experiment had to be done because you never can be sure,” he added. “The opposite result would have had big implications.”

A bit of a pity, really.  Anomalous results are more fun.

Panpsychism discussed

There's not much worth reading at Scientific American, I reckon, but I did enjoy this column about a recent meeting of science-y types debating panpsychism:

Is Consciousness Part of the Fabric of the Universe?

Physicists and philosophers recently met to debate a theory of consciousness called panpsychism 

As it happens, I agree that the basic criticisms are pretty strong:

Some point out that it doesn’t explain how small bits of consciousness come together to form more substantive conscious entities. Detractors say that this puzzle, known as the “combination problem,” amounts to panpsychism’s own version of the hard problem. The combination problem “is the serious challenge for the panpsychist position,” Goff admits. “And it’s where most of our energies are going.”

Others question panpsychism’s explanatory power. In his 2021 book Being You, neuroscientist Anil Seth wrote that the main problems with panpsychism are that “it doesn’t really explain anything and that it doesn’t lead to testable hypotheses. It’s an easy get-out to the apparent mystery posed by the hard problem.”

Perhaps I find these ideas more appealing:

Other ideas were batted around. The idea of cosmopsychism was floated—roughly, the notion that the universe itself is conscious. And Paul Draper, a philosopher at Purdue University who participated via Zoom, talked about a subtly different idea known as “psychological ether theory”—essentially that brains don’t produce consciousness but rather make use of consciousness. In this view, consciousness was already there before brains existed, like an all-pervasive ether. If the idea is correct, he writes, “then (in all likelihood) God exists.”

On cosmopsychism, it seems I missed this essay at AEON about it.  

All good fun to think about...

Update:  surprisingly, if you have Twitter and search it, there are a lot of comments being made about the article.  I liked this one, for example:

 

Unexpected news day

First, Dan Andrews resigns.  The guy drove Right wingers absolutely nuts - maybe it was his air of general unflappability - but it was kind of funny reading some of the conspiracies spun about him.  For my part, I don't generally spend much time thinking about politics at State level, and don't really have any strong opinion about Andrews as a person one way or another.   But it's hard to deny that he has been electorally (perhaps culturally?) very successful, and a significant part of turning his State around from a Liberal stronghold to a Labor one.

Secondly:  it's rare to read a news story of aberrant behaviour so appalling that it makes you feel queasy contemplating that there are people in the world who do this.  But this is one of those stories.   

I admit, I did google to learn some more background of the guy, who I hadn't heard of before.  I thought maybe he was a damaged incel all his life, but no, he has (had?) a wife.   No mention of children on line, though, which is undoubtedly a blessing, given that it is impossible to imagine how damaging it would be to learn this about your father.

  

Noted

 I don't really know this person - seems to be a relatively centrist farmer and rural advocate?   Seems to have put many tweets against the Voice on basically these grounds - lots of rural/remote Aboriginal people don't think a Canberra level Voice is actually the right way to get their concerns heard. 

Given that I have noted at least three ABC stories where the reporter has talked to rural/remote Aboriginal groups and found this same distrust and lack of support for the Voice, it seems to be true, and something simply not addressed by the creators of the Uluru statement, who just insist that it was the result of years of consultation, etc.

Onion humour

I don't feel the need to comment on Russell Brand - a search of the blog will show I've been disliking him for many years.  But this is funny:

 

Bad polls, for some...

Interesting couple of tweets:

 

Let's admire Singapore, again

I'm pretty sure Australia pioneered this mosquito control technique, and Singapore has taken it on board in a major way. Their mosquito breeding and release program is shown in this video from CNA, and it's more interesting than you might think.  Once again, Singapore looks so - competent - in the way they operate:   

So my Pezzullo cynicism was well founded

In a rare change for a Sunday night, I actually watched 60 Minutes because I saw on X Twitter that a major story about Pezzullo actively trying to influence Liberal Party internal politics was coming out.  

The major online articles about it are behind a paywall (that'll change by the morning), so I only have this one to link to at the moment.  It is a major scandal, and I can't see how Pezzullo could credibly last until the end of the week.   He ought to fall on his sword by midday tomorrow - or perhaps I should say "metaphorical sword", because he strikes me as the sort of person who would have a real one in his office with a Home Affairs logo on it.

I have long questioned his strange sway over both sides of politics - and have noted before that Bernard Keane has muttered darkly about him for years.  Good riddance.

This sounds ripe for satire, but no one would be game to try

This lengthy article in The Guardian about a huge amount of infighting going on at Melbourne University on the issue of aboriginal studies and who gets appointed to positions would clearly be grounds for some good satirical fictionalised treatment.   I'm casting my mind back to A Very Peculiar Practice, from the late 1980's, as the kind of thing I would like.  (I wonder how that would play now, if I rewatched it; I do remember enjoying it at the time.)   But the problem is, no one would be game to try this now.  Not unless it was very, very sympathetic to the Aboriginal characters.

Dare I say, I don't have any doubt at all that there are many positions in indigenous academia which deserve to be cut.   I mean, I read Sandy O'Sullivan's twitter feed just to aggravate myself, where I learn about all sort of esoteric talks and projects and overseas travel that are useful for keeping indigenous  academics talking amongst themselves about how important their work is, rather than engaging with he rest of us, which is (I suppose) some sort of benefit to society.  At what cost to more useful funding, though?

Here are some extracts:

The University of Melbourne has come under fire for appointing non-Indigenous academics to senior roles focused on Aboriginal studies, at the same time as acknowledging it is “ill-equipped” to handle allegations of institutional racism.

The fresh criticism follows the resignation of Dr Eddie Cubillo – a Larrakia, Wadjigan and Central Arrernte man – from his role as part-time associate dean and senior fellow at the university’s prestigious Melbourne Law School (MLS).

Cubillo continues to lead the university’s Indigenous Law and Justice Hub but alleged the law school was “the most culturally unsafe place” he’d worked.

In an email sent to staff last week, the deputy vice-chancellor (Indigenous), Barry Judd, said Cubillo’s experiences showed current processes were “ill-equipped” to deal with “the complex issues raised by allegations of racism in the workplace”.

“As an organisation we have to do better,” he wrote.

And:

The Indigenous Knowledge Institute, founded in late 2020 to advance Indigenous research and education, is headed by Aaron Corn, who is a “long-term collaborator” with Indigenous leaders.

A University of Melbourne (UoM) academic who wanted to remain anonymous said the appointment of a non-Indigenous academic as the inaugural head of a department wholly dedicated to Indigenous knowledge was “one of the big catalysts” for the recent exits of First Nations staff.

“There was no shortage of [Indigenous] talent and it wasn’t a one-off,” they said.

Zena Cumpston, a Barkandji woman and former research fellow at the university, said it was common for non-Indigenous “experts” rather than Indigenous academics to be placed in senior roles advising on community and teaching Indigenous subjects.

Cumpston quit in August last year. She said she experienced significant mental distress linked to her treatment at the university and said she felt that anyone who spoke out against hiring policies was “carved off as an individual problem”.

While she was in the science faculty, Cumpston was asked to join its Indigenous advisory body for no extra pay. She was shocked to find the advisory panel was mostly comprised of non-Indigenous academics.

“Our elders and communities have fought for these upper-level positions for decades – the fundamental basics of self-determination – and here’s a trend for positions with the word ‘Indigenous’ to be filled by ‘experts’, taking us back decades,” Cumpston said.

And:

Nic Radoll worked for seven months at the University of Melbourne as its Indigenous engagement and outreach coordinator before resigning late in 2022.

Radoll, a non-binary and queer Anaiwan person, said it was the “worst experience” of their career. They sent an email when resigning arguing Indigenous staff were under-appreciated and subjects were labelled as being “Indigenous-run” despite key decisions being made by non-Indigenous staff.

“When I raised issues … I was told that I ‘don’t exhibit any leadership qualities and will never go anywhere’ at the university,” they said.

“I was told to ‘reduce my expectations’ and that ‘it takes time to make change’ so I should just do what I get told to do. It’s a killer for mental health.”

Nic is interviewed on this Youtube video.  I feel mean in saying it, but yeah, "leadership qualities" are a bit hard to detect when you speak with that upwards inflection at the end of every second or third sentence.  

Now, to be fair, it's not only this area of academia I would cut back if I were Benevolent Dictator of Australia.

RMIT's Blockchain Innovation Hub is the Right wing equivalent of Indigenous academia - keeps them off the street, developing arcane terminology with which to convince themselves it's a field worth pursuing, and (thankfully) off the TV or anywhere else.

Update:  I note that Aaron Corn, who gets a mention in one of the extracts above, had a book out earlier this year co-authored with Marcia Langton.   That would indicate that she doesn't have a big problem with his being appointed to head the Indigenous Knowledge Institute.    

Update 2:   Oh good.  The professor is about to go on another junket, having just returned from a trip that took her to American and England:

Funny, tragic, or both?

 Or, as Charlie Pickering says: