super-structure

I watched Pandorum over the course of a couple of days this past week¹. I really hadn’t seen or read a lot about the film, other than a trailer and a very short interview with Dennis Quaid on Leno (or some evening talk show). I wasn’t really sure what to expect; but whatever I was expecting, this film wasn’t quite it.

Needless to say, this is going to be filled with spoilers. You have been warned.

This poster of Pandorum makes sense. The one with the wiring in the man’s arm does not. The latter perhaps let to some of my misplaced expectations.

The film is really like two scifi films spliced together, with only a minimal attempt and bring the stories back together at the end. This, I think, was where I felt most disappointed in the film. And I mean disappointed. I really wanted to love this movie. The acting is really quite good, I thought. Quaid gave one of his stronger performances in some time². I really liked Ben Foster as Bower. I couldn’t help but think that he reminded of a younger Edward Nortorn; and that is a very good thing. Cam Gigandet was truly un-nerving as Gallo and one of the highlights of the movie. The remainder of the cast were strong and all of the action was believable ³.

As a technical effort, this film truly shows off the German film industry exceedingly well and credit should be given because almost all scenes employ physical sets and real actors & monsters. That’s a rarity in the age of hyper-real CG films like Avatar; and this film looks great. I’ll certainly be watching director Alvart’s other films and would love to see him write/ direct more science fiction. If any were to be set of the planet of Tanis in the 32nd century, all the better.

But at the end of the film, I felt empty. I wanted something more out of this movie that I really wanted to like. It sort of stayed with me for the past few days. Namely, what I think this movie really needed was one strong plot. Instead, it had two weak ones.

In plot A, we have the protagonist who represents sanity and humanity fighting hordes of monsters⁴ with a few survivors to reach a goal and return. It is pretty classic scifi/ horror/ apocalypse/ survival stuff. There’s nothing wrong with that genre and this film does a modest effort at that.

In plot B, we have a physiological thriller as we try and figure out which of two characters truly suffers from Pandorum (aka – space madness), either the good Lt. Payton or the edgy Gallo. We soon find what passes as the story’s one novel twist in this plot line. That is, that they are Tyler Durden.

Some Issues

Pandorum’s treatment of hyper-sleep for sub-light speed space travel is scifi gold and is rightly used to advance the plot (both of them, actually). From the grogginess and “mild” memory loss to the absolute gross cleaning off of hundreds of years worth of shed skin⁵, it all really helped to give Pandorum a bit of its own style right from the beginning. It said to me that the writer and director had thought about this and were going to show us their own vision here. It really helps to set why a lot of these events unfold and was a bit of brilliance; and I really hate to see that not play out in the end.

We see the psychological effects of deep space travel as well, in the form of the film’s namesake illness. We get a school-book explanation from Payton early on as Bower asks about him about it. Later, we seen both men seeming to suffer from some of the symptoms. However, other than some weird looks and what we can only assume are hallucinations on the part of Bower, his issues are never really explored (Payton’s & Gallo’s are pretty well explained in full, bad guy monologue style). The polarity of Bower and Payton/Gallo as humanity versus insanity really could have been better dealt with in the film’s climax. We’re left with a sense of confusion. What caused Bower to be able to overcome the illness? What struggles did he face in doing so? Simply having him shake it off seems a bit weak for the illness which so important the film was named after it. Otherwise, we could have called the movie Space Mutant Hunters.

The biggest failure in terms of story is tying the two protagonists together in some meaningful way: Payton/Gallo and the mutant hunters. Just to say that Gallo slept and the hunters evolved is like trying to assume the butterfly effect as a plot device. Sure there may have been some dominoes from one that resulted in the other, but why not give us a bit more of a concrete relationship? This would have woven the two plot lines together, instead of just licking the back of one and hoping it stays on the other.

Some Suggestions

So, what would I have done differently? I mean, after all, I’m just throwing spitballs if I don’t offer something constructive, right?

I think the reactor core should have been related to hunter mutants in a more concrete fashion. There seems to be no rational as to why they all sleep there. It may be a trite scifi convention to claim that exposure to radiation causes rapid (and often horrific, backwards) evolution, but it isn’t so commonplace that it can just be assumed (if that is even what has happened here). So, in very clear terms we should state to the viewers that the ship decided to wake Bower up specifically for his expertise with radiation leaks in reactor cores (most of the flight crew are dead, so the ship has to wake up the one specialist it has left). Unbeknown to the ship and to Bower, some of the passengers closer to the core who were woken by Gallo centuries earlier began to get sick (Pandorum!) never went back to sleep normally. They began to try to use power from the reactor core, but instead damaged it. After generations (and having been given the evolution-enhancing drugs for settlers), they devolved into the hunters we see today. They live near the reactor core as they have learned that it mutates their offspring faster, making them more effective hunters.

As I said, the hunters and Payton/Gallo need a more concrete relationship, as well. Since it is stated that Gallo tried to act like a god, why have the hunters worship him as such. Fear of him and his whims is one of the few human-like thoughts they have passed on. The reactor core room could be strewn with cave markings (as opposed to the cannibal cook’s chamber) telling this story, which serves to tip off Bower⁶. In fact, they could see him as the destroy of Earth since he delivered the message to their ancestors and revere him as a hunter of whole worlds. To whatever extent the hunters revere him, in the final encounter with Payton/Gallo, the hunters can be sneaking in and just when Bower thinks they’ll do in Payton/Gallo for him, they refuse to and begin advancing on Bower. This would ad a huge level of fear for the protagonists as now both the antagonists are working together. Water & ejecting in a sleep pod due to hull breach would still be an acceptable end to stopping these unstoppable villains of the story.

Also, as stated earlier, seeing the difference in how Pandorum affected both Bower and Payton would have been satisfying. It would have made it clear to us the kind of struggles that both went through but only Bower could overcome. I think if Payton (while in his right mind) had given Bower the advice which allows him to overcome bits of anxiety/ Pandorum/ space-madness; but that Payton himself doesn’t/didn’t follow when he is Gallo. This would tie the two characters together while setting their paths apart in the story.

I would also have liked to have seen the symptoms of Pandorum, specifically the vivid hallucinations aspect, play a little more prominently into the story for Bower. Clearly, the hallucinations were a major component of Payton/Gallo’s story. So why should Bower only see one such hallucination for a short period at the climax of the film? Were more of his interactions actually hallucinations; maybe even ones which he and other human survivors shared? Not to go all deus ex machina here, but what if the whole hunter problem is just a shared hallucination brought on by paranoia and hallucinations of waking crew? Perhaps Pandorum isn’t a rare illness at all, but in fact the norm when a human has been in suspended animation for centuries? Just seems like a host of missed opportunities here in terms of ways to leverage what set this story apart; all given up in favor of the mutant attack movie.

Lastly, while I appreciated the hunters, I think the at some level detracted from the strong part of the story. Too much screen time was spent on them when the truly novel elements of the story were left for us to guess at. Though it pains to me to say it, I’d have actually rather had less killer mutant hordes in this film (and I am indeed a huge fan of killer mutant hordes, to be for sure). Instead, I’d rather seen more on the internal and human/human conflicts.

This notion struck me as a laid down to sleep the evening after having finished watching Pandorum. It wasn’t the hunters that made me take that one last glace over my shoulder before going to sleep. It was the thought of Gallo creeping up behind me. That’s a great villain.

And there it is. Some of the reasons of why I felt like this movie garnered three out of five stars. I wanted to really like it, but couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that in the enormous effort to craft such a well-styled film that much of the plot elements got left in the director’s notebook or on the editing room floor. It is a good scifi film and worth the time of any fan of the genre, just the same.

Note: I haven’t done a film review on this site in quite a long time and I sincerely regret doing so. I hope to get back into that and often it is a book or film such as this – where I felt that it fell just short of being great – that motivates me to do so.

1. It’s really not Angela’s sort of movie, so I watched it over the course of two lunch breaks. One of the perks of working from home, I suppose.↵
2. Though, given that this film came out around the same time as G.I. Joe, that’s a really low personal bar. I haven’t seen Legion, but I’m also not hearing anything positive there, either.↵
3. Nothing ruins fight scenes like bad wire work for me. This film has some aerial, Hong Kong style fighting and it is all done well and blends into the film.↵
4. The monsters are essentially the Reavers from Firefly/Serenity with a bit of orcs from Lord of the Rings thrown in to make them seem a bit more alien. That being said, they are creepy as hell and work well.↵
5. Not that I’m wanting to be overly picky here, but how could Bower have had a thick sheet of skin to pull off and only the kind of beard I grow in a few weeks. I’d have gone with a crazy beard and hair.↵
6. Instead, we have Payton’s wife. A memory of a character who is never explained, nor – for that matter – is Payton. Why is Gallo in his chamber? He sort of has to be for the story and yet I don’t recall any explanation of who Payton was or why Gallo would end up there.↵

A couple of months ago, Google announced that Android 2.0 (their mobile operating system) will include a maps navigation service which will provide turn-by-turn driving directions. This news was credited for driving down the stock price of navigation device manufacturers Magellen and Garmin.

But really, this should really come as no surprise. GPS was once so bulky and expensive of a technology that it’s inclusion warranted an entire device be built around it. Now, I get GPS along with WiFi and gigyabytes of storage in something the size of a quarter in my EyeFi camera card¹. As the cost of a technology like GPS, accelerometers, cameras, or WiFi approaches free, the uses for it will increase exponentially. Where it once was odd to include WiFi in a stationary device (an iMac or the Wii, for instance) which could be hardwired, cheap WiFi hardware does away with the need to run wires. Bluetooth does essentially the same thing, only with far less range and bandwidth. But, I think that the single best thing about this sort of device consolidation is the new uses that having essentially free hardware allows. Uses that we really can’t quite grasp until the tech is cheap enough to unleash them.

Even now, it may seem odd to think of GPS being included in to what is essentially a stationary device — like a desktop PC — but it once the cost of GPS is nearly zero, then it’s inclusion is inevitable. Including GPS allows a device to suddenly know where it is and that can be handy information; even if that doesn’t change very often. Why should it be easier to pull out your phone quickly get a map of what lunch places are around the office when you’re sitting at a desktop computer? Or insert the need for location for any other website of program you use on any given day² Data storage is cheap. GPS is cheap. The reasons for having a dedicated GPS device are rapidly approaching zero, which is what both my wife and I have tried to explain to anyone who mentioned we should get a car GPS.

So, I posit the following: When the cost of the technology behind a device drops below a certain threshold, that device will become obsolete in favor or other common devices which can co-op that technology to greater effect. Let’s call it Coleman’s law until someone else shows me someone else previously said it or something similar³.

You might argue: what about a device like the Kindle that uses cellular networks to communicate? E-readers surely won’t replace cell phones, will they? No, but I can’t help but shake the feeling that cell phones are destined to replace e-readers. And this coming from a guy who would love to have an e-ink display reader, himself.

Another argument against device consolidation is that general purpose devices (like a cell phone⁴) just can’t do any one of those things as well as a special purpose device; and surely that’s true. However, I never hear anyone complain that their low-budget GPS device doesn’t work as well as a high-end mapping system by Trimble used for construction. Nor do I really think most people care that the quality of video on YouTube doesn’t rival that shot on a RED camera. As a matter of fact, I doubt most people even know who Trimble or RED are. So does it really matter if your cell phone doesn’t shoot the same kind of photos or video as a fancy DSLR? My answer is no. The enthusiasts who really want that kind of quality will continue to use those device but the majority of people are taking photos for high-quality but rather because any photo is better than losing the moment.

1. Truly, the EyeFi card is simply amazing. It is the first bit of tech I’ve had in a long time that really seems closer to magic than to science.↵
2. Of course, cell tower triangulation or IP addresses can be used as reasonable substitutes for GPS technology, but the falling cost of GPS with respect to its accuracy makes it the logical option in almost any device, now.↵
3. Though possibly an extension of Moore’s law, they are not really the same thing.↵
4. I’m not using the phrase "smart phone" here as I simply now consider non-smart phones to simply be last-generation phones.↵

Well, it has been a really rough past couple of months. We’ve been passing around who-knows-how-many viruses. We had several holiday get-together with friends and family here at our house (not including tonight’s NYE party¹. Wyatt has learned to crawl, so our lives have only become that much more insane as we attempt to keep him out of trouble. I’ve also been in a beard-growing contest and while you might think not shaving would only save me some trouble, the efforts to do some creative photo documentation have taken up a not-so-small chunk of my dwindling free time. To top it all off, of the four products² I’m writing for at work, all of them attempted to have releases in the same week (immediately before Christmas).

So, excuses aside, I really wanted to look back on the goals I set out back in January on this site to see just how far I got, in terms of my plan.

• Write More In terms of blogging, this is already looking bad. I think I had even fewer blog posts here and for Bentley than I did last year. I still wrote a lot (did I mention all those work projects?), but I can only say I’m disappointed in the lack of online writings.

• Take More Photographs and Video – This one fared a good bit better. I don’t know that I took many more general photos than last year, but I will say that between a new baby boy and doing Whiskerino, I’ve spent a lot more time trying to take better photos.

  Given that the amount of video I shot in previous years amounted to almost nothing, this was a pretty low hurdle to clear. I did shoot a good bit more video and even shared some clips this year. I managed to capture some very wonderful moments with both kids and even with some family members. Most special to me was that I got to record one of my Grandfather’s stories during his visit back at the beginning of November. I certainly want to share that with my family and children (who are far too young to appreciate that sort of thing). I only regret not doing some more of that.

  If nothing else, though, I very proud of this video birth announcement we did for Wyatt:

  The Birth of Wyatt Paul from Jason Coleman on Vimeo.

• Learn an Object Oriented Programming Language – This one stalled out pretty early on, I must confess. It was always something of a low priority and this simply wasn’t a year to get around to anything that didn’t have flashing sirens and flames shooting out of its openings. It is certainly still something I’d love to pick up again and my O’Reilly book isn’t going anywhere.

• Learn to use Regular Expressions- I really did get into the meat of this one, though. Two of my work projects involved taking a lot of legacy content and updating or integrating it into new documentation of my own. I simply couldn’t have done the amount of work I accomplished without a tool like RegEx and the utility software I used to learn/apply³ it.

  In the coming year, I’m going to be getting into structuring legacy content (both my own and that from others) even more. I’ll be forging a lot of my own path in developing document conversions with RegEx and spending some hours learning even the fundamentals is going to pay off.

• Take Ainsley Swimming – We did take Ainsley swimming in our neighborhood a few times. What’s more, we dedicated a large portion of time this summer to taking to a swim safety course. The results were nothing short of amazing and I recommend this to anyone with small children. We fully plan on taking Wyatt in the next year.

  Ainsley’s Swim Class from Jason Coleman on Vimeo.

• Finally Get Something Out of Twitter – I really ramped up using Twitter this year. I purchased Tweetie for both the mac and the iPhone and began to follow loads of folks, both near and far. Twitter also went entirely mainstream this past year, which didn’t hurt in finding people of interest to follow.

  However, Twitter has become a double-edged sword. It makes finding and following so much easier, it has supplanted blogging and feed-reading a great deal. It seems I’m not the only person who has noticed this, too. Were blogs used to be filled with comments and trackbacks, now we just get shortened links via Twitter. Link blogs are all but dead now (though fortunately some are still strong, such as Gruber or Kottke, and other old-timers) as we constantly are fed a diet of bit.ly links inside of 140 character chunks. I’m not arguing that one is really better than the other and certainly blogging can be a time consuming hobby. But it is important to acknowledge that the way we use Twitter can actually diminish other activities.

• Run One Short Road Race Per Month – Oh, God, no. That just didn’t happen. I barely ran at all. That’s not to say I’ve not at least made some effort into getting a bit healthier (I’m already down about 12 pounds from just three months ago). I ran a couple of races, true, but nothing like one a month.

So, there you have it. I’m not disappointed in how things went this year on the whole. I do think I came closer my family, friends, and colleagues; which as I said back in January, was really the ultimate goal here. Two-thousand nine was a tough year, but in a far better way that its immediate predecessor. It was difficult because of the new challenges of a second baby, new work projects, learning to use (or get more out of) the tools I have. In fact, looking back, those are best kind of challenges I think anyone can hope to be up against.

Happy New Year and may twenty ten be a wonderful year for all of us.

1. Tonight’s party is actually going to be kind of a early event, as we’re getting together to watch Virginia Tech play and, hopefully beat, the Univ. of Tennessee. There will be food and drink, but I suspect we won’t last much past midnight.↵
2. I inherited a huge responsibility in the form of STAAD.Pro’s documentation. I made some great strides in updating it over the past three months but I still have a long road ahead of me. Other than that, I worked on the documentation for our soon-to-be released structural modeling integration toolset as well as the two STAAD(X) Tower products.↵
3. I purchased RegEx Buddy about 6 months ago. Even though it was at my own expense, it saved my bacon ten times over and was worth every penny.↵

I’ve been watching some of the events around Wolfram Alpha lately with some interest. I had a copy of Wolfram Mathematica in grad. school¹ and have always felt somewhat in awe of the sense of raw power one gets from using their software. It’s so open and endless; it is really more like a framework or even an operating system than most one-trick pony applications we know and use. So, this morning I see that Wolfram has priced their iPhone app for Alpha at $50. Stephen Wolfram thinks pretty highly of himself and his company also thinks quite highly of their software, right?

I agree with John Gruber that this a good idea and good for the app store, in general. And based on my experience with Wolfram, they’re just the company to do this and won’t be bothered if they never break the top of the app charts. Given the relatively high price² of their desktop applications, it actually seems quite cheap. It’s not as though Mathematica ever broke any sales records compared to other desktop software. Most folks have never even heard of it, I suspect. Alpha is a nice interface for a handy service, but I never got the impression this is meant to be a Wikipedia competitor for the average user; it’s a professional application for people who want distilled, unbiased data at their fingertips.

I think part of the issue with the sticker shock at $50 is that that is probably the average that most folks spend on desktop applications. That’s even high if you don’t ever buy anything from Microsoft, Adobe, or Apple, frankly. But when it comes to mobile platforms³ — and the iTunes App Store, in particular — that seems to be way above the average. But here’s the catch: Wolfram doesn’t intend for this to an application for the average user. It is meant to be an app for professionals who need access to data.

As I work for a company which also produces professional software for a fairly limited audience (infrastructure engineering), I can attest that high prices are the norm for professional software which is solely intended for professional settings. In the structural group at Bentley, I think the lowest priced application we sell is about $1,800⁴. Just ask any amateur photograph who bought what they thought was a fancy camera only to learn that Photoshop cost even more than their camera! There are generally alternatives for folks who just want to tool around. Professional software isn’t for them and it is going to priced accordingly.

There are plenty of precedences for professional software on mobile platforms costing much more than $5 or even $50. My wife’s pharmaceutical database — Lexi-Comp Complete — is about $300, for example. I imagine that’s more than most iPhone users spend on all of their apps and their phone, combined! But that’s the point. The phone here is a platform to have this sort of data handy, not the end in of itself, which just has the capability for fancy widgets. And this is the real power of such a device as a platform; much like when a computer was just seen as a fancy typewriter instead of what all it can actually be.

If the iPhone is to be taken seriously as a mobile platform, then we need to get away from some notion that all applications should be cheap widgets.

1. Hell, I had the t-shirt.↵
2. A new copy of Mathematica 7 is about $2,500. Though it is only fair to note that Alpha is not just some mobile version of Mathematica; it is a completely different application.↵
3. Oh, the irony. This is the same platform where folks routinely pay 50% more for a 30-second, low quality version of a song they already own just for the privilege of using it as a ring tone.↵
4. And it goes way up from there. This past weekend, at BarCamp, I must have been the only person in the room who didn’t so much as blink when someone mentioned a software price which included as much as five zeros.↵

I’m anxiously awaiting the release of Tweetie 2 by Atebits. I purchased Tweetie for my iPhone back in January and the desktop app in April. I think they are both amazing applications and I use them almost exclusively to interact with Twitter (particularly given the Twitter web interface’s scripting vulnerabilities). They are both simple and wonderful apps which deserve the design awards which they have been given. I was surprised to see some criticism of Atebit’s plan for charging for the new versions; mostly brought to my attention by following Gruber. One paragraph from this rather long post just floored me:

The whole ‘it’s a completely new app’ argument seems like utter bullshit to me. It is still a Twitter app for **** sake. A slew of new features and functionality does not, to me, make it a different app. I don’t see anything that says this is not just a very much beefed-up, improved version of an existing app – it has the exact same ultimate purpose of making it easy and effective to use Twitter on the iPhone.

Try re-reading that sentence replacing Twitter with your favorite desktop application’s name and iPhone with computer. It starts to hold a lot less water. He goes on to argue that there should be a upgrade price for existing users, which I agree would be great. However, I’m not sure that upgrade pricing is possible in the crazy world of Apple’s App store (certainly not straight-forward, at any rate, for either the developer or the consumer). Atebits feels that this represents enough work on their part to warrant full price for anyone who wishes to use the product. Though no examples come to mind, I doubt this is unprecedented in the world of computer applications and thinking that an iPhone is so different ignores the full-featured platform this device is (which is becoming true of all mobile devices, really).

Time will tell if charging full price for (what appears to be) a significant upgrade is the right choice. Further, we’d be kidding ourselves if we ignored the relative costs here. At a full price of $2.99, a reduced upgrade price couldn’t really save much. You’ve only got a few price points between $3 and free, none of which represent much of a different economic hurdle (though, it could be argued there is a large chasm between free and $0.01).

It appears to me that the author of this post really values Tweetie at nothing and, if that is the case, that is exactly what he should pay for it. Tweetie 1.x will continue to work just fine for the foreseeable future.

For my part — as you have already no doubt guessed — I’ll be happy to pay $2.99 for the upgrade. I’m amazed every time I view the list of apps on my phone which have new versions for downloading to see that none of them charge upgrade prices. I’m astounded that this is the case and it seems unsustainable for me, at least for indie developers. The app store has a lot of growing pains yet to be worked out and this will ripple into the larger, future market of mobile applications sales.

In the meantime, let’s be happy to reward months of hard work with the same amount we tip the waitstaff at a burger joint. Remember Mr. Pink’s diatribe about not wanting to spend a buck or two on that in Reservoir Dogs? He might have a point on principle, but he looked like a cheap jerk, too.

It’s been eight years today since the coordinated attack on New York and Washington D.C. in which almost 3,000 people perished. Most of us have gone on with our lives; I know that feels like a lifetime ago when I recall where I was and what I was doing. However, for many of the first responders and residents in lower Manhattan, life hasn’t gone on. I watched the documentary Dust to Dust: The Health Effects of 9/11 earlier today after thinking about these people. I suppose I had the impression that ill health effects from the recovery and clean-up efforts were limited to a few individuals. If this documentary is even half true¹ (and it does seem legit based on some additional reading I did today), the effects were far worse than I imagined.

It is tragic how the people that the nation — and indeed the world — lined up to thank as heroes have been treated since. The documentary lays the blame at the EPA and the Bush administration for mishandling the health issues and rushing back to a sense of normalcy (something which was not without reason; though doesn’t justify the lack of safety precautions). Once we learn about the treatment of these people who ran toward danger and worked tirelessly to help, we all get to shoulder some of that blame, too. We cannot allow people who serve the public to be treated as throw-away tools. It is entirely disrespectful to their sacrifice and it ensures that no one will step up to fill these roles for future generations. I’ve not found anything that suggest these individuals are asking for handouts. They want to be treated with the respect deserved them, those responsible for placing them in unsafe conditions to be held responsible, and to get the care they need. That’s really not asking for much, in my opinion.

So, if you can find an hour to spare, I highly recommend watching this documentary. This isn’t some left- or right-wing political agenda film. It is a intimate look at how modern America, in her rush to get back to our normal way of living, has indeed forgotten about some of those we swore we never would forget.

Incidentally, he documentary is narrated by actor Steve Buscemi. Buscemi, as it turns out, was a former New York City firefighter and returned to New York on Sept. 12 to help aid in recovery efforts for a week. Though no mention is made of this in the documentary (nor if Buscemi himself suffered in ill health effects), he clearly is in a position to help speak out about such an issue.

1. It is sad in light of such a tragedy that I feel the need to have to include this but I want to be clear that I am not some conspiracy theorist nor am I looking for something to complain about the Bush administration. This just strikes me as a very real and ongoing problem associated with the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.↵