The Brunch Table

I suppose that it’s the way of the world, but one thing that really irks me is news articles that don’t really tell the whole story. Case in point: High-speed trains: Going nowhere fast?. Despite its dour title, the story is about an entrepreneur trying to push Bombardier’s JetTrain equipment for “high-speed” service between Las Vegas and L.A.

“The economics favor the jet train,” Johns said. “Laying conventional railroad track is fast and cheap. We’ve been laying track for 200 years. The jet train has a huge advantage — it’s in and operating, and it’s just an expansion of what’s been running since 1959. The propulsion system is a jet engine, and they’ve been around since the ’40s.”

While it’s true that basic railroad tracks are somewhat cheaper to build and maintain than track with overhead power wiring, the article doesn’t talk about the operating costs of the JetTrain. Several companies experimented with turbine locomotives in the 60’s and 70’s, but they eventually abandoned them because of their high operating costs. Turbine engines aren’t very energy-efficient (particularly when they’re not operating at full power), and they require frequent, careful maintenance. (ref: 1 2) Even worse, while Bombardier claims that the JetTrain can operate at 150 miles per hour, their bid for the moribund Florida “high-speed” rail project proposes JetTrain service at a paltry 125 miles per hour. By comparison, non-Acela “Regional” service on the North-East Corridor routinely runs at 115mph, and high-speed electric trains in Europe often cruise along at 175-185mph. Maglevs can easily run at 260mph (though like turbine-based trains, they have a very high energy cost).

So, while the JetTrain may cost less to start up, it’s not a very satisfying solution in the long run. For more information on the topic (and some dispiriting talk about the prospects for decent intercity rail service in the U.S.), check out this discussion thread.

This was a Plastic response to a debate over whether it’s appropriate to make a Holocaust-themed video game. I liked my response so much I thought I’d put it up here:

Yeah, but the technologies and languages behind film are far more developed (I was about to say “mature,” but that might give the wrong idea) than those for video games. For now, that gives artists working in film a far wider choice of emotional possibilities.

I mean, photography, the technological ancestor of all cinema, was invented in 1827; true motion picture film dates from 1895; the language of modern film (in terms of editing decisions, a mix of different camera angles, and so on) didn’t emerge until 1926, with Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin. So that’s a full hundred years from the invention of the core technologies to an approximation of the movies we know today.

In contrast, computer graphics are still in their “man doing a backflip” phase. We start off with a U.S. military demonstration in 1958; video games themselves follow in 1962, with MIT’s Spacewar. In comparison to film, video games today are stuck in the year 1872 (coincidentally, the year that Muybridge began taking pictures of running horses).

So I think comparisons to film are kind of unfair. Subtlety, emotional sophistication–in cinema, these things require equally subtle and sophisticated technology. Demanding a complex and moving Holocaust video game in 2003 would be like asking Spielberg to make Schindler’s List in 1862. Give it some time…

From Fernand Braudel’s 1963 A History of Civilizations:

“But the immortality sought by the [early] Taoists was not only the salvation of the soul: it was also physical immortality, thanks to a series of recipes for long life…above all cinnabar (red mercuric sulphide) when it had nine times been transformed into mercury and back again so as to make ‘the red pill of immortality’…which carries the adept, now immortal, to the abode of the gods. To avoid troubling the world of the living, he pretends to die…leaving behind him a stick or a sword which he has made look exactly like a corpse.”

Nothing yet about a blue pill.

I just finished reading Not Out of Africa…you will notice that a hardcover copy sells for one shiny dollar on at half.com. Which is more than it’s worth (and I didn’t pay for my copy)…it’s a tame early-nineties forerunner of today’s spunky, chatty right-wing opinion book…on the back, it promises to be a ruthless critical ass-whooping of the Afrocentric history movement.

What this works out to, though, is the author spends most of her time saying nasty things about Egypt. Egypt! After a couple of chapters of this, you suddenly get this vaguely Biblical feeling. I mean, hating Egypt, really passionately not liking it, feels so…how do I put this…B.C. It sounds like it’s a Hittite talking or something.

The author’s main point, which she repeats quite a bit, is that Greece conquered Egypt back in the day, so ancient Egyptian culture must therefore not be any good. And that made me think…Rome conquered Greece, and ended up with Greek culture. So why shouldn’t Greece have conquered Egypt, and ended up with some Egyptian culture? And then the Greeks also conquered the Judeans, so maybe they ended up with some Judean culture too. (The Greek alphabet comes from the Judean, or Hebrew…aleph/alpha, bet/beta, gimel/gamma, dalet/delta…and the Hebrew comes from the Egyptian alphabet, the world’s first.)

But then–I’m totally stepping away from alphabets here–isn’t it odd that the historical Jesus came out of Judea, and the mythological Jesus came out of Egypt (the story of the god Horus is too close a match…virgin birth, murder, resurrection, triumph over evil, establish the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, althought not in that order). Both of Egypt and Judea were conquered by Greece, and Greece is where Christianity as we know it was born (it’s where the earliest complete Christian bibles come from).

I think that’s pretty interesting…and it would’ve never occurred to me if I hadn’t read part of this petty, borderline-racist little book.