The Artist's Signature

More Cosmos than Cosmos?

2011-08-06T13:11:00.001-07:00

'The Artist's Signature' - Pages & Art

2009-11-20T09:00:00.000-08:00

The above image is my title plate/opening shot. And the one below is the beach of the imagination. I often find that my concept art enhances my writing, and vice versa. So I threw in a couple.

TAS Online 01

I have quite a bit more written than this, nearly two-hundred pages of script and around fifty pages of background and tech, not to mention dozens of pieces of concept art. I know two-hundred pages is a pretty long movie, but I tend to write every idea I have, then pare it down later into a useful form. I have a terrific ending that I hope won't leave a dry eye in the house. I just need to flesh out the middle a little more and I've got a movie.

I think a movie should be a unified whole, both verbally and visually. I've worked out the logistics of incorporating the pi message into the alien message, and into the basic design motif of the entire film. And I have surrendered to the notion that in a work of fiction it is perfectly proper to explore the idea of god. Just look at the bible.

My take on a film version of 'Contact' is that the 'download' should constitute the body of the movie. Start with Ellie on the beach, more or less, visualize her unwound memories, and then return to 'reality' about three-quarters the way in. This allows far more freedom than a straight linear telling. I can jump around in time the way a mind at rest naturally meanders from place to place. Of course whatever memories I touch upon must contribute to the larger story.

It occurs to me that Zemeckis may have been trying to do exactly this with the eye 'pull out' and 'push in' at the beginning and end of the '97 film. But subtlety is relative, and in this case was indistinguishable from background noise.

Anyway, I think this material deserves better.

Contact Apologetics: An Open Letter to Whom it May Concern

2009-11-14T17:44:00.000-08:00

To mark the anniversary of Carl Sagan’s 75th birthday, the big man was remembered publicly by those many people who worked with him and knew him best. I especially appreciate the personal remembrances as I have been a great fan of Dr. Sagan’s since first seeing Cosmos in 1980.

But I am less appreciative of, and far more resentful and confused by the glowing references I heard regarding the movie Contact.

So I’d like to ask a few questions…

Is there a cut of this film of which I am unaware?

I’m no slouch when it comes to movies. I love the smart ones. I even love some of the dumb ones. I am aware that film crews typically shoot more scenes than appear in the final release. And owing to the flexibility of the market, director/writer/extended version cuts are often available with the original artistic vision restored. This is especially true of films with a richness of content that exceed the imaginative limitations of a studio.

I’ve seen Contact a few dozen times now and I honestly don’t know what warrants such universal praise among Sagan devotees. Were we in different theaters, on different planets? Are they blind? Am I?

It's been some time now and I have yet to see a re-edit, re-release, special edition, tenth anniversary, redeaux... something that would indicate this movie was anything but a lowest-bidder contract job. There are no deleted scenes, no penetrating commentary, and absolutely no one talks about it some ten years later. It is completely forgettable. No one bothers to deconstruct its hidden meaning, its symbolism, its camera-work, because there is nothing to deconstruct. No one cares because there is nothing to care about.

What Contact lacked in content it made up for in superficiality.

Are there other people ~~out there in the universe~~ down here on Earth?

I was under the distinct impression from episode 13 of Cosmos that ‘We are one planet.' But the radio broadcasts in the opening scene of Contact are from almost exclusively American sources.

Well, are we one planet or not?

Forget for a moment that the scale and position of astronomical objects in the opening scene is all wrong. Never mind the radio/TV signals themselves regress in time too fast compared to the passing astronomical objects. Forget all that. I know America is the greatest nation in the country, but is it also the only country in the world? Is the message actually a person to person call intended just for the American movie going audience? Or, do other people and cultures get to exist? Perhaps are other languages featured in the opening for the foreign film market?

Of course not.

For pity sake, the rushing radio broadcasts in 'Who Speaksfor Earth' were multi-ethnic. You'd think Contact could at least get this one thing right. After all, it had already been done by the same author.

There is a sickening ethnocentrism in this film. The ‘in defense of science accuracy in film’ front might spot the logistical errors, but I've never once heard anyone identify the real problem.

The very first scene ignores Sagan's philosophy of global inclusiveness. They get it wrong from the very first shot.

Are people inspired by this ‘heroine of science?’ Is Ellie Arroway an ideal inspirational figure for rational people everywhere? And… is she a beacon of hope that will steer the youth of our nation toward a career in the sciences?

I sure as hell don’t see how.

This movie teaches potential scientists and skeptics one thing, and one thing only…

If you’re curious about the physical world, if you dare to challenge conventional wisdom, if you’re lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time to make the most profound discovery in human history… you will be thrown to the wolves. And no one, not even the beings who reached out to you will back you up. You’ll end up a paria and a laughing stock to everyone but the most credulous.

It is not poignant to be trampled upon, ignored, marginalized, and made the object of ridicule. It’s just sad. The winner of this conflict between science and irrational vested interests is clearly religion and political opportunism. It pisses me off that Arroway is made a redemptionless martyr in the film because she clearly has the tools to make a difference in the book.

But what does that matter when not even Arroway herself has the courage of her convictions. She's spineless in the face of political opposition, and she's embarrassed by her atheism. As a result she's easily crushed by the inquisition. She's left a slobbering cry baby whose only recourse is to make tearful appeals of personal revelation.

Who wrote this? Where's the thousand yard stare? Where's the Sagan I knew in Cosmos?

And what’s with the shitty dialog?

I’m just spit balling here, but let me give it a shot…

Joss: Do you believe in god, Doctor Arroway?

Ellie: Why? Do I look like an idiot?

Joss: I beg your par...?

Ellie: No, I most certainly do not believe in god. And before you ask I don’t believe in Santa Claus or the magical pink unicorn either. I'm a scientist, not a witchdoctor.

Pause. Blank stare.

Fat Old Brit: Doctor Arroway, ninety-five percent of the world’s population believe in a supreme being of some kind.

Ellie: Are you suggesting that these important matters be decided by a poll in People Magazine?

Shock and dismay, followed by…

Ellie: OK… As a professional scientist I must be agnostic on this point because such a thing can never be absolutely proved or disproved. But as a free thinking woman with a heart and a brain and a mind of her own I can tell you that I am a scarlet capital letter ‘A’-theist… Why? Because magic is for children. Because blasphemy is good for the soul. Because I think automatic deference to nonsensical beliefs is ridiculous. And mostly, mostly, because I find the idea of compulsory love upon the threat of death repulsive…
…Does that answer your question, Reverend?

Now honestly... was that so hard?

Who did Zemeckis have to frak to get this gig?

The director of this butchery, Robert Zemeckis, is a whore to special effects. To him every other consideration is secondary. He had absolutely no business getting near this material. Case in point: The mirror trick. Ooo, fancy. And pointless. It in no way contributes to, or advances the story. It's a gimmick. (I swear if you look close enough into the beveled edge of the mirrored glass as it passes, you can see RZ yanking himself off.)

And how did Tom Skerritt, an otherwise fine actor, get away with emphasizing the title of the movie… in the movie? It's the cheapest trick in the book and no director worth his salt would have allowed it.

Is it possible no decent director wanted this job because Saganinsisted on being so close to it? I mean as good as he was, sometimesthe last thing a movie needs is a doting over-protective parent. Maybe, but probably not. This movie needed a Kubrick, or a Gilliam, or perhaps the film's original director, George "Mad Max" Miller; not a faux-Spielberg hack.

Who loves you, baby?

I love Carl Sagan. I love my cat. But Sagan was not so great that he could do no wrong, and my cat often barfs on my bedspread. Praise of Contact by the scientific/skeptical community is misplaced adoration of Sagan himself, and is dishonest.

I have to admit I felt it, too. I wanted to like Contact, badly. And not simply because it's all I'm likely to get. My own treatment of the material will probably never see an audiencebecause I have such a big mouth with regards to my criticism of thefirst. I wanted to like it because Sagan himself supervised the project. I thought... Carl won't let me down. He never has before. And with Foster in the lead, how could it go wrong? Even now I can almost force myself to find some glimmer of meaning, of hope, of...

Nah... Where's the Spray 'n' Wash?

What would Jesus do?

Who cares?

Sagan was too polite to the religitards. This was apparent in the novel and was translated into the most extreme deference to irrational stupidity in the film.

I myself don’t make a distinction between the radical right and their moderate base. They are mutually supportive. I think inflammatory language and devastating satirical attack are very effective communicative tools. If the fundies berate and name call, then why can’t we? Why can’t we use our gift of rhetoric to expose their absurdities with humor and withering, blinding, paralyzing sarcasm?

Hitler used tanks. The allies used tanks. Tanks are not the issue. The issue is the issue. Modernity or barbarism? Take your pick. I know who’s side Sagan was on, but I mean… who’s side was he on!? Get in the game, man!

I know that isn’t fair. Sagan was kind, and kindness is it’s own reward. Kindness really does pay. Delivering food, water and medicine to earthquake victims in Pakistan is a great way to win hearts and perhaps prevent someone from going all jihady in the future. But kindness won't help you when you're staring down a 757 about to slam into your cubicle.

People who are nuts now, are nuts now, and no amount of nicety is going to reach them as well as a good ol' fashioned cutting remark about their stupid, violent, bronze-age desert god. Billions and billions of stars can't touch the visceral reaction of humor or the courageous nature of blasphemy, or the nonnegotiable quality of heresy. Everyone needs a little 'fuck you[r god]' in a relationship. (In the 'Panel Discussion' video below, time index ~45:00, it's too bad that Richard Dawkins wasn't permitted to finish his thought. I would like to have heard what he had to say.)

But in this film Sagan tried to reach with kindness people who can only be reached by insult. The radical elements of religion don’t give a damn about this Earth or the people on it. They want us to either convert to radical whatever… or fucking die. They are people to be fought, forcibly educated, and scorned. They are enemies of democracy, of the First Amendment, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, science, modernity, the future, and on and on and on...

Who cares?

I do.

People ask me why I care so much about this. And it’s usually in a tone of voice as if to say, ‘Who gives a shit,?' followed by 'Why are you wasting your time on this,?' followed by a quick glance at their watch and a desperate search for the nearest exit.

Well, I care because Contact so clearly doesn’t. Movies ARE vehicles by which science and reason can be made exciting and engaging, but only if the movies are exciting and engaging. The mere fact that Sagan wrote it, and Foster starred in it, and Zemeckis directed it, and Druyan supervised it, and the geekoid elite worship it, is not enough to earn my respect... for what it's worth.

I may be acerbic, but that doesn’t mean I’m wrong. This film is bad. This film isn’t important, because it doesn’t make itself important. Science is important because it is an exploratory endeavor which enormously improves human life. Film is important because it reaches people. Put the two together. Viola! Someone put peanut butter on my chocolate!

This film could have stood next to 2001 (especially 2001), Solaris, The Andromeda Strain, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Blade Runner... really important hand-made classics that enrich the human condition and advance our culture. It could have been a film that endures and grows in importance over time. Instead, it's an 'instant classic,' sort of like instant oatmeal; moderately filling, but totally unsatisfying.

You won’t catch me apologizing for this tripe.

Where’s the drama?

If Sagan was going for a Hypatia-like heroine, he should have gone for broke and found a way to kill her off, like I am. If he wanted to create family tension, better known as drama, he should have left the mother and step-father in, like I am. If he wanted to end the film with an ending, he should have written... oh, I don't know... an ending, like I am.

But Ellie can neither die or fade away into 'healthy grant' oblivion because she still has work to do. She has to find a way to redeem both herself, and the planet. The book aliens give her that. The movie aliens hang her out to dry.

Where's the payoff? Where’s the redemption? So what if Joss and the blue-rinse brigade believe her? Big deal. In science, mere belief isn’t what counts, and in movies something actually has to happen.

But there’s no ending, no clincher, no drama, just… see ya, roll credits.

Where’s the science?

Remember that ‘gotcha’ moment when Joss asks Ellie to prove scientifically she loved her father, and Ellie just sits there staring back at him like a dumb little shit? Yeah, I don’t get that. What kind of rationalist can't cut through that? Is this really what counts as an argument stopper in an alleged socially conscious science movie?

Who we love is a matter of opinion. Heliocentrism is not. Simple. Anticipating a counter argument is the writers job. For a polemicist like Sagan this should have been a slam dunk. But he blew it. Why?

It is NOT the most important thing for each of us to search for our own answers to the big questions about the physical world. All answers to such things are not equally valid. By glossing over what is an obvious kick in Joss's balls, Sagan panders to the gullible.

And another thing, there is no such thing as 'technology rights' when the technology is falling from the sky. The opening scene is logistically and ethnocentrically wrong. The first contact scenario is outdated in light of singularity theory. Instead of a cool space-based retirement home for Hadden, we get a rusty tin can; Mir. Instead of a faster than light journey through the galaxy, we get bounced around in a washing-machine spin-cycle.

...And what the hell's going on with her face?

You'd think a movie about big science might include a few big science ideas. Where's the cool stuff the aliens share about slowing down the expansion of the local universe. Where's the bit about the message embedded in Pi that would give the film a proper ending and a reason for being and reveal a larger mystery that really challenges our way of thinking and creates drama? Where are the geological and stellar-evolutionary timescales, the astro-engineering, the cosmic perspectives? Where's Hadden's great escape? And why don't the aliens tell us anything that we don't already know? Because in this hack job they're not aliens, they're gods. And gods never tell you anything that you couldn't have figured out all by yourself.

'When we're alone, we get lonely.' Really? That's what a billion years of evolved intelligence taught you?

And why is Ellie left, like so many alien abductees, with nothing but a fanciful story? Do extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence? Not in this movie they don't. We get the claims all right, but no evidence to back them up besides eighteen hours of static that get buried in bureaucracy. Static begets static. Ellie isn't Hypatia, she's Betty Hill.

Sagan has turned his wonderful story about real contact with extra-earthly beings into an elaborate alien abduction hoax. Cover-up, suppression, conspiracy theory... Class, we can do better than this.

Where’s the rest?

That’s exactly what I thought the first time I left the theater, and I still think it. Were so many of the more interesting concepts in the book so cerebral as to be unfilmable? I don't think so. But maybe Sagan did. I think he actually tried very hard to pick an aspect of the book that would be most accessible and deliver the greatest punch. He just picked the wrong one.

'Do science and faith share common ground?'

No.

Next.

For Carl, or for us?

In my view Carl Sagan’s best legacy is honesty; scientific, historical, even religious and political honesty. I gather he had a tremendous ego but I doubt he ever considered himself above criticism. Sagan is the last person for whom I wish to express feelings of anger and disappointment. But this movie appeals to our worst instincts of baseless belief and suppression of ideas. In the end Ellie is not ennobled, but defeated.

I hate this movie and am astounded by self-styled film critics, none of whom seem able to grasp that a good movie has to contain genuine human emotion and an actual plot, who applaud Contact as an example of scientific realism... as if that were the only measure of success.

So Sagan only wrote one novel before he left us. Sorry, but that’s all we get. That novel was made into only one movie, so far. And that too, is all we get. Is that sufficient reason to coddle it and pretend it is what it isn’t? I feel the very people who ought to know better are here suspending too much disbelief. Carl Sagan gave us so much. What do we owe him in return?

How about a little honesty?

Happy Carl Sagan Day!

2009-11-07T06:38:00.000-08:00

Today marks the First Annual Carl Sagan Day... observed two days before what would have been his 75th birthday. Official observations will be held in Florida.

The novel CONTACT aside, COSMOS is to me the best of his public works. So nerd up, gather some friends, and watch your favorite episode to celebrate the life of this very important person.

Apparent Brightness

2009-10-25T14:54:00.000-07:00

So as not to be accused of being all ass kissy about Kubrick, let me point out a longstanding peeve. The aperture of a camera must be wide open to capture faintly visible objects like background stars. But when a bright object like the moon, and particularly the sun, is in frame, the aperture is nearly closed and the chance of those very dim and distant background stars registering is nil.

SNAP! Are you listening, you idiot moon hoax 'I can't see stars in the Apollo footage' ass hats?

For as long as there's been celluloid, there has been an assumption of audience stupidity by film and television studios that wrongly perpetuates the convention that stars are always visible in space. But in space, light is not just relative, it's very relative. It's ironic that this Hollywood falsehood lead to such a monumental misunderstanding of real life.

'I know the real footage of the moon landings I saw was faked, because the faked footage of the moon landings I saw looked so real... obviously.'

Stupid begets stupid.

In 2001, Kubrick either didn't know he was doing anything wrong, or went along with it for the sake of his little movie.

It's a minor detail and not really worth mentioning. But I went ahead anyway and made these illustrations to show how 2001's opening shot should have looked... so here.

The background stars would be visible behind the eclipse of the moon until the instant the sun breaches the horizon. At that moment the stars would vanish, owing to the new camera setting which requires a smaller aperture so that details on the moon can be seen. Otherwise the moon would be washed out and the sun too bright. Think of exiting a darkened movie theater on a bright sunny afternoon. The eye constantly adjusts to differing degrees of light. So must a film camera. And as my old band instructor Ted Pucinski(sp) said, 'Volume is relative.'

Also, a crescent would advance along the top of the moon as it descends out of frame. Same goes for the Earth...

Life... in Pictures

2009-10-20T18:38:00.000-07:00

I don't think I can ever adequately express the feeling I had the first time I saw '2001: A Space Odyssey.'

Tenth grade, 1982. My English Lit teacher, Mr. Kachargo(sp), showed us a horrid, non-letter boxed, pan&scan version of the film on a twenty-four inch, 4x3 TV, to kill the last few days before Christmas break. Despite the lousy format, I was floored.

I remember having seen a few photo stills of 2001 in my various scifi/special effects genre books, but was never engaged by them, flat as they were. Without music, and motion, they had no depth.

Kachargo couldn't stuff the whole film into a fifty minute class. But on first viewing he managed to get to the Great Transition before the lunch buzzer rang; that four million year giant leap where the flying bone turns into a space weapon. That was it... I was hooked. I couldn't wait to get to school the next day, a rarity for me.

I've seen it a zillion times since. But strangely, when thinking back on my first few viewings, I had the distinct impression of having seen the film in black and white. Maybe my brain misinterpreting its starkness, and desaturated my memory. When I watch it now I am often surprised by the amount of color it contains.

I don't ever remember feeling empathy for a Kubrick character. (Spartacus aside: which was more a contract job and vehicle for advancement) Kubrick doesn't do that. I am always very intensely interested in who they are and what they're doing. But I never subsume their emotions, ever. I felt as strong an emotion as I could feel at the end of 2001, but it wasn't the kind of emotion one could properly call... affection, or compassion, or sympathy. It was more akin to vertigo, the kind I get when I look at those amazing Hubble images; human insignificance in the face of enormity. It's a cold lonely feeling that I warmly relate to the emptiness of the void.

There's an imaginary narrative at the beginning of each chapter of the book 'Galaxies,' by Timothy Ferris. It describes a relativistic, near-light speed spaceship journey across the universe. The explorers outlive the Earth and Sun, not to mention their loved ones, by trillions for years as they plow through intergalactic space toward the edge of the ever expanding visible universe which by then will be so close that its featureless blackness will negate and mask the beauty of the universe for which they set off.

That feeling. I love that feeling.

After we finished the movie I went straight to the school library and found the book upon which it was based. I tore through it, and everything else I could find by Arthur C. Clarke. I didn't realize it at the time, but while Clarke certainly contributed, he wasn't actually the person responsible for the visual mind trip that was the movie. It was Stanley Kubrick who made this thing possible. I can't say how much I enjoy his films any better than the people who knew him, and won't try. I invite the reader to watch, 'A Life in Pictures,' which beautifully details his technique and works.

Symphony of Science

2009-10-20T14:44:00.001-07:00

In the tradition of Sagan...

The Persistence of Memory

2009-10-19T18:47:00.000-07:00

Nick Sagan remembers his father.

Celebrating Sagan: Carl Sagan ten years on - Contact film/book differences

2009-10-13T07:39:00.000-07:00

I love this guy.

pbd

2009-10-11T08:31:00.000-07:00

...exhale...

To Catch a Phrase...

2009-10-05T20:24:00.000-07:00

I don't get it...

Sagan could turn a phrase better than anyone; witness Cosmos. He had an economy of speech, no doubt honed by years of classroom lecture, that communicated, and endeared, and endures... and simply made you want more.

And yet there isn't a single memorable quote in the entirety of Contact... except for one.

'Seems like an awful waste of space.'

Someone, someone low, actually had to write this sentence down... on paper... and unfortunately for us, it did not spontaneously burst into flames.

Not only that... it smacks of being furiously written down on a post-it-note in a boardroom (bored room?) after some fucking disinterested suit with a brainstorm chimed in with an off the cuff remark before a committee of terrified underlings to the effect, 'We need a snappy catch-phrase in this flick. A zinger! Think deodorant commercial, people! Johnson, wake up!'

'Yessir,' Johnson yawped in agony!

'There's a catch-phrase here, damnit. Find it!'

And Johnson blurted, 'Blue-flake cocaine!'

Withering glower, followed by, 'You're fired! Johnson Two, wake up!'

Thirteen studio grunts, and almost five whole minutes later, someone shat out... you guessed it...

'...an awful waste of space.'

And then no one, and I mean no one, either read the damnable thing again, nor had guts enough to state the blatantly obvious.

'...awful ...waste ...of space.'

Isn't life just like a box of chocolates?

Nice Guy Carl

2009-10-05T11:47:00.001-07:00

Sunrise, Mars

2007-11-10T16:27:00.001-08:00

I'm not sure why I made this... I guess I was inspired by this Spirit photo of a Martian sunset. And I always liked those early twentieth century 'cigar' shaped rocket ship designs so often used on pulp space novel covers and in Bugs Bunny cartoons.

They were clean, iconic, beautiful and totally impractical.

The Muck Knows

2007-10-02T10:27:00.000-07:00

When the mind becomes preoccupied with deeply held convictions, anything that supports that conviction gets filtered in... and everything else gets filtered out.

The mind has its own mechanisms for judging the validity of exterior input. But sometimes these mechanisms competitively trip over themselves, becoming mired in metaphor. This type of reasoning happens everywhere, even in science (just ask Percival Lowell), but it is comparatively strong in religion.

The faithful are especially prone to placing the solution not at the end of the equation where it belongs, but at the beginning. For them, answers always precede questions. They first declare god exists, and second look for evidence of the same... if at all. For them variables are a matter of opinion. Only the foregone conclusion matters.

But the universe does not care what we want of it. It just is. We must guard against projecting our desires and wishes upon it, because by doing so we run the risk of getting it all wrong. The universe is so vast and so old that to personify it with ones pre-technical, metaphorical, origin myth is to dishonor the physicality of it. There is far more power in the real than in our dearest illusions. Those feelings of happiness for a beautiful day come from within, not from without. Good and bad things happen, but only as affect, not as judgment.

Knowledge flows up from the muck, not down from on high. We know what we know because we earned it. Not because it was whispered in our ears by angels. We earned what we know individually and collectively. Before us came our human ancestors, then our primate ancestors, then shrews, lizards, amphibians, fish, plants, muck, chemicals, atoms... and finally the raw pure energy of the big bang.

The complexity of our lives was payed for first by the interaction of material forces in nature, then by the sweat and pain of living things, and finally by experiment and the scientific method. Everything given to us individually was payed for by someone or something that came before us. Each generation was built upon the accumulated wisdom and information content of that which preceded it.

Science has reduced religion to a kind of 'insert god here' proposition whenever the remaining faithful are confronted with a scientific mystery. And since science has effectively pushed that insertion point back to the beginning of the universe, the only remaining place a believer can put god is behind the big bang itself.

But even now scientists are generating models that reach beyond the singularity at the beginning of the universe. They're asking rational questions about what happened 'before,' and are finding good, honest answers. And they are doing it with tools that have a billion times the exploratory resolution than do some ancient nomadic parables.

The universe is a neutral substrate, a platform upon which our emotions can exist; a foundation only. Evolutionary theory ultimately means the god hypothesis must be abandoned. The one naturally follows the other. How we react to pleasure or pain says much more about ourselves than it does about the world, because the world is a superset of our minds. A reasonable person must concede only two categories of knowledge; things we know, and things we do not yet know.There is nothing that is unknowable.

Own the good you do. And own the bad also. Stop giving them away to a fairy tale.

Wormholes

2007-09-21T15:55:00.000-07:00

The wormhole journey as portrayed in Contact is a cheap thrill ride unworthy of the material.

OK... So the pod drops through the center of the popcorn machine and into a wormhole aperture. Great, with you so far (sort of)... But the red flashy-crap, followed by a star-field, followed by being sucked into some kind of funnel/vortex/tunnel thingy doesn't work.

Through a wormhole one can travel to distant parts of the universe instantly, avoiding all the fuss of relativity. More importantly wormhole nozzles do not look like funnels. Watch Cosmos again (The Edge of Forever, Episode X). A funnel in 4D space is a sphere in 3D space.

Here's how it should have gone... The machine should have been more like the one in the book where a stationary pod is surrounded by a device that generates a pucker in spacetime to which an awaiting wormhole nozzle can attach. The wormhole itself is an invasive sphere which envelopes a local area of spacetime; the space enclosing the pod when the machine reaches full power. A passenger would see her surroundings instantly change from departure point to destination without ever experiencing a tunnel. Whatever tunnel there is that connects these two points in space exists outside our three dimensional universe and is therefore invisible to us.

Yes, Sagan used tunnels in the book. But I think he included the tunnel adventure more for entertainment than scientific value. Since the entertainment value was negligible and misleading he would have done better to leave it out.

In the book the pod is completely encased, which conveniently doesn't allow an outside observer to see anything. The popcorn machine simply leaves out any telling spacial effects (aside form a cheap fireworks display). Both of these theatrical devices serve to reinforce the assumption of the flat-earth powers-that-be that the pod went nowhere and the bitch made it up. That's drama and it's good. But it only works to a point. The book answers the doubters, but the movie does not. The movie's only rebuttal is the usual, typical, predictable appeal to faith. 'I experienced a vision of the universe, a revelation if you will, that only I was allowed to see... Trust me.'

*barf*

So the term 'wormhole,' is a kind of misnomer. What's a better nomer? Oh hell, I don't know. Let me think...

How about 'Independently Spacial Relativity-not! Focusing Aperture,' or 'ISRFA' for short. No, too complicated, too abstract, and too removed from everyday life. Not to mention being far too inaccessible to the general public (from whom science funding ultimately originates, like it or not).

And besides, it lends itself to so many unflattering acronym extensions:

ISuRFloridA
ISuRFAholes
ISRaeliFatwA
ISReFerAddictive?

ImSuReFloyddidn'tsAythat
InlawsareSometimesReallyFuckingAnnoying

When generating a wormhole one connects two places that are not connected otherwise, forcing them to occupy the same location at the same time. A wormhole, therefore, can be understood as being like a screenplay... where the novel is the entrance, and the movie an exit.

But in the case of the popcorn machine, the wormhole is more akin to a digestive tract. Fillet mignon in... shit out.

The 'Popcorn' Machine

2007-09-21T13:20:00.001-07:00

I’ll give the producers credit for one thing... representing the Machine as a large open air device was a good idea. It was visually interesting, and it implies a technology that was extra-worldly. But the details are all wrong and it is too complicated.

The novel states that the Machine is not a wormhole generator, and obviously, it doesn't have to be. The Aliens already have wormhole generators. They can fashion a hole through to us easier than transmitting the means for us to go to them. All they need from us is the destination, a specific time and place through which they can enter our space. All they need from us is a 'now.'

Thus the Machine represents the last piece of the wormhole puzzle, the final and simplest link in the functionality of the wormhole network. Its only purpose is to make a small dent in spacetime to which an awaiting wormhole nozzle can attach. The Machine is only a spacetime marker.

It could have been anything, but for proper dramatic reasons Sagan chose a device that has 'weighty energy' for his novel. And because international cooperation was a major theme in his life he also made it hard to build, forcing humanity to work together, more or less. The movie Machine satisfies these goals in some ways, but not in others.

I like the rings. They have power through shear size, and I like the way they resemble an electron shell. But the other more dangerous elements of the Machine are a transparent effort to manipulate the audience. For example, the fireworks display when the Machine fully activates is just a lot of noise. Maybe it's there to distract us from the complete lack of interesting dialog or a satisfying ending.

The drop/catch mechanism, the needless conflict over the inclusion of a chair, the goofy thing where Ellie's face peals itself off her head, the pod becoming transparent in her line of site and the child-Ellie face substitution have no intellectual justification. They are a discontinuous assemblage of unrelated nonsensicals.

Why have her drop through the machine at all? It's not dramatic as much as it is a thrill ride. This movie should be smarter than that. Couldn't she be somehow suspended in the center, thus avoiding the need for a drop/catch mechanism?

The special effects for the machine/wormhole journey are very good, technically. But how good are they really without a strong foundation in logic and storytelling?

I beg of you, make sense.

Scriptology

2007-09-20T10:05:00.000-07:00

I've discovered a version of the Contact script dated September 8, 1995, credited to Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan, among others. This script is essentially what appeared on film.

So… I guess I can no longer pin all my dislike on the director/producers. It pains me to say this, but my problem with this movie is Carl Sagan.

Many artists have difficulty translating their work from one medium into another. If you enjoy reading Sagan’s books you know this guy simply could not touch lightly on any subject. It just wasn’t in him. He had to explore everything inside and out and three days from backwards. Of course he had to make certain concessions for the popular media, but he always managed to do so with clarity and effectiveness. In the bookish freedom from practical constraints on length he could be concise in message. In book form Sagan was finite, yet unbounded.

Film, however, is a very different animal. Extraordinary films require extraordinary screenplays. The screenplay format forces you to do one of two things: write a condensed book, or write a movie. A screenplay is its own species, related to a book in DNA only. Where the book is the fossil, the screenplay is its living, animated descendant.

I think the screenplay, as a process, was fundamentally at odds with Carl Sagan. The physical limitation of a hundred and twenty pages must have felt suffocating to him. He couldn’t fit that big brain of his into that small a space. So instead of translating his work into film by penetrating its internal bureaucracy, Sagan simply gutted it.

He touched on the religion v. science conflict too lightly and with no rebuttal. He removed most of the dramatic potential by simplifying Ellie’s family structure. He took out all the good stuff: the wit, the skepticism, the cosmic perspective, and worst of all, the conclusion.

The inescapable irony is that Sagan probably would have been much more comfortable writing Contact as a television mini-series as it was originally conceived by he and Francis Ford Coppola. It could have been ten hours long. It could have been another Cosmos, and me and a hundred million other people would have loved every minute of it. (This in no way condones Coppola’s despicable attempt to halt production on Contact immediately after Sagan’s death.)

Of course Sagan was not a filmmaker. The filmmakers, however, are filmmakers, and they should have known better. They made a film based not upon Sagan’s wonderful book, but on his wholly inadequate screenplay, which in my view amounts to culpable negligence.

I doubt Foster (didn't have to), or Zemeckis (did have to) ever read the book.

The God of Hollywood

2007-09-19T14:02:00.000-07:00

Contact, the movie, is a thing where the only standard of evidence worth noting is human emotion. Contact, the movie, is a courtroom drama, where ones embarrassing moments count as empirical evidence. Contact, the movie, is a place on a flat Earth where mental defects are messages from the hereafter to be hailed as indisputable fact. Contact, the movie, is a place where anecdotal evidence and conjecture will get you laid... Not necessarily a bad thing in itself, but it shouldn’t be the end product of this story.

Contact, the movie, is a bouquet of pretty flowers, that smell bad.

Contact, the movie, is a one-hundred and fifty-three minute long version of 'The Price Is Right.' This film is a sellout to butter and sugar, popcorn and Coca-Cola.

OK, that was a cheap shot. Let's class it up a little bit. Why not 'Carl Sagan's Contact ~ The Fragrance?'

Bzzz, wrong. How about something in between... 'Carl Sagan's Contact ~ The Musical?'

(October, 2009: Yeah, they really did it.)

This movie, so called, is a slave to the industry. Its only redeeming quality may be as studio fodder. Revenue from Contact could possibly have greased the wheels of some more worthy film.

The book is filled with intrigue, history, genuine human emotion and grand motives by inscrutable, yet entirely real higher powers. It soars. It has a social conscience and a reason for being. It releases energy and comes to more than the sum of its parts.

This movie, on the other hand, comes to nothing. It’s as if the demolition crew showed up a day early and struck the set before an ending was put in the can.

The most glaring absence is of course the wonderful book ending where Ellie finds scientific proof that god exists. One might argue that this is too complicated for a movie. And I agree, but only insofar as it is too mathematical in nature. This concept only needed to be translated into the more visual medium. But instead it was simply dropped. And I do not think this is merely a case of expedient story telling. There is a more insidious force at work here, namely religion.

The faithful hijacked this film and made it theirs. This movie celebrates the peculiar religious notion that the unknowable is a form of pure knowledge. What is wrong with this film is what is wrong with religion, where the meaningless question becomes an argument from authority. ‘The bible says God exists, because God says so in the bible, doesn’t he?’ - that sort of thing. For these folks God is the irresistible force and the bible is the immovable object.

So instead of discovering proof of a higher level of existence our impotent heroine, Ellie (a.k.a., the poor little atheist girl), is left floundering in self-doubt. This is because religious people hate proof. They hate it to such a degree as to disallow evidence of their own argument. To prove god exists negates faith.

In the end the protagonist becomes a thinly veiled TV evangelist complete with very public and tearful appeals to belief. She might as well be wearing a pink, cotton-candy wig and Spackle makeup. The producers of this film have cloaked ignorance in sentiment.

And that's not all they did. Crimes against art have here been committed. In the hands of these filmmakers the term 'science fiction' has taken on a completely unintended, and loathsome meaning. It has become an oxymoronic, grotesque parody of itself. One might as well classify this movie as 'religious fact.'

'The world is what we make of it.'

Yes, it is. When we are children. But adults are not permitted the childish luxury of making it up as they go. To paraphrase Sagan, at some point we must abandon our most heartfelt beliefs in favor of cold hard reality. The universe is no fairy tale. Sagan never pandered to children the way this film panders to the childish adults who still believe the universe is just a metaphor for a struggle between quarreling super beings. He gave it to us straight without appeals to mysticism.

Science and religion are not equal partners. There is no common ground between them, with the possible exception of using science to deconstruct the evolutionary imperative for religious belief. Beyond that science destroys religion. It kicks its ass. Sagan knew it, although he hedged his bets in public. But this rotten 'movie' gives the same weight to miracles as it does physics, perhaps more. It panders to the mob in the name of Jesus and candy bars.

I often hear people say that a movie can never be as good as the book. Boloney. Kubrick, among others, could do it because he knew the formula. Here's the formula: a movie is not a book. It doesn't have to be and it shouldn't ever be. What it does have to be is original to its own unique medium. Find an element of visual interest within the story and let that be your guide to translate the entire work.

In this regard Sagan handed the producers the key to this particular enterprise on a silver platter, and still they missed it entirely. Within the last chapter of the book lay the movie. And again, the reason they left out this proof is because the truly faithful despise proof.

The subtitle, instead of 'A Journey to the Heart of the Universe,' should have read, 'Don't Confuse Me with Facts.' This film is terrible. It is a complete surrender to abject unthink.

It abandons science.

It embraces religion.

It's a betrayal.

2 is yellow

2007-09-13T22:06:00.001-07:00

Writing this thing is kind of a pain. It takes a long time for me to turn a thought into words. I don't think in words. I think in shapes (mostly shapes), colors, faces, sounds... And I can't not tweak a sentence or a paragraph to death. I surrender to fatigue faster than satisfaction.

Blogger is good for me because the text field where I write and the preview window where I preview and the actual blog where I actually blog all look different from one another. It's great. It overrides the 'auto-correct' feature in my brain. On Word I'll skim right over a dropped letter or missing/wrong word a dozen times before I see a mistake, if ever.

The Brave One

2007-09-13T16:26:00.000-07:00

Jodie Foster is a fine actor. She is not responsible for her performance in Contact. She was given a terrible script and worse direction. She was stifled, cloistered, caged.

Foster was handed a character who apparently has undiagnosed multiple personality disorder, completely unfitting for the story. One minute she's a powerful, independent feminist, the next she's wallowing in self-pity and pandering to the stupidity of the mob.

And why the hell is this bitch crying?

Did you see the 'final statement' scene in the wonderful film, 'The Contender?' Senator Laine Hanson (Joan Allen) wins because she is unyielding in her principles. Hanson's statement should have been Ellie's statement, practically verbatim, before the machine selection committee in Contact. Instead... whimper.

Instead Ellie is embarrassed by her atheism. Why? Because the last thing this movie wants is a strong nonbeliever with the courage of her convictions. The point of this movie is not science, or even skepticism; it is to buttress the weird religious idea that doubt and uncertainty are where god live.

He's there. He's waiting for you. You just have to concede his unknowability, and you'll be just as right as rain. At the end of this fucking movie reason and evidence and truth are suppressed by the inquisition. The bad guys win. And we lose.

Extraordinary movies require extraordinary screenplays.

What's a fine actor to do with a screenplay that isn't worth the paper it's written on? Answer: Cash your check and move on to something better.

Who are we?

2007-09-13T13:19:00.000-07:00

Within the story of Contact is a framework for understanding our place in the scheme of evolution. But in this particular work I don't think Sagan took some of his previously established ideas far enough. I'm talking specifically about our impending 'singularity.'

The term singularity is borrowed from astrophysics, where it defines the center of a black hole; a point between relativity and quantum mechanics where our understanding of physics breaks down. But the newer definition I refer to is in the context of the evolution of intelligence.

Singularity is a massive discontinuity in history, a point in our near future where prediction breaks down due to the acceleration of change in our world. In other words, as evolution accelerates to infinity our ability to predict the future drops to zero. Super intelligence is one possible result. Death is another.

It amazes me that even before there was a word for it, Dr Sagan sensed intuitively what we now call the singularity. The term was coined (applied?) in 1981 by retired San Diego State University professor Vernor Vinge.

"Here I had tried a straightforward extrapolation of technology, and found myself precipitated over an abyss. It's a problem we face every time we consider the creation of intelligences greater than our own. When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity - a place where extrapolation breaks down and new models must be applied - and the world will pass beyond our understanding."

-- Vernor Vinge, True Names and Other Dangers, p. 47.

Sagan touched upon the notion of the emergence of a global consciousness in The Persistence of Memory (Cosmos, episode XI). So he was certainly aware of this idea when he wrote Contact. But he left it out. The concept of ultimate life v. death was a recurring theme in his public work, especially in the context of nuclear war. But maybe the specific idea of singularity hadn't quite congealed in his mind, and so he couldn't connect it to his story. At any rate, I think this is a loss that can be corrected postmortem. Singularity theory provides a motive for the aliens to contact us. (More later...)

For a far better explanation of the singularity I refer you to Staring Into the Singularity 1.2.5 by Eliezer Yudkowsky, and The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, (click on Overview). These folks are hellbent on making it happen as soon as possible. Give them money!

OK, back to us...

If you consider singularity theory carefully you will understand that humans are the end product of natural selection, but not of evolution as a whole. Natural selection (NS) has taken life as far as it can, namely to us. We can surely evolve farther through NS, but the point is we don't have to wait that long. Where before we were riding on a donkey's back, now we're ocean hopping in a Concorde.

Agent Smith from The Matrix was right in comparing us to a virus. But this demeaning insult doesn't take into account our macroscopic (compared to a virus) brains. Sure we reproduce like crazy and run riot over our environment, just like a virus. But our brains, not our sex drive allowed this to happen.

Because our brains give us a huge advantage, other large organisms simply cannot compete with us on a global level. Micro-organisms are still a legitimate threat, but we're gaining on them fast. A virulent outbreak of Ebola may yet have a chance to get us, but not a pack of wolves. (In fact the only large animal we still have to fear is ourselves.)

So we are not in equilibrium with the rest of life on Earth. We kill other species and whole environments on a par with the greatest mass extinctions of the prehistoric past. And any means we posses of destroying ourselves will almost certainly take a big chunk of the biosphere with us. NS would never, by itself, allow a species to proliferate to the point of endangering all life. So what did?

Right now on Earth 'Externally Self-Optimizing Selection' is the name of the game. Through the power of our large brains, eSOS created a global civilization. Our brain and its ability to manipulate the world outside our bodies has extended our power over matter to a point that has no equal. Wagon wheels, fishin' poles, computers (especially computers), cars, airplanes, frozen foods, nukes, mousetraps; all are evolving at a previously unheard of rate. The key point being that none of them are having sex.

Of course eSOS begs the question... What happens when 'external' becomes 'internal?' When Internal Self-Optimizing Selection, iSOS, begins to recursively self-improve our genes and our very minds (or the surrogate minds we create), singularity will be knocking on our door.

In the real world, as in the fictional world of Contact, we humans occupy an extremely narrow, and highly volatile zone between the invention of radio astronomy and super-intelligence. The way I see it there are only two possible outcomes... Give me singularity or give me death.

Does anyone else see the potential for a really great movie here?

The God of Contact

2007-09-07T09:15:00.000-07:00

Let's face it, uber-atheist Carl Sagan's only novel contains a god.

There's nothing wrong with exploring this idea in a work of fiction; look at the Bible. And as much as the fundies of the world want it to be, this doesn't make him a true believer in his heart of hearts. It's not an admission of anything except that he wanted to consider how such a being, if she/he/it exists, might reveal themselves to us. It's a thought experiment, nothing more.

But the good scientist must also ask the obvious question... Where did god come from? In Contact, Carl Sagan, more the writer than the scientist, finds an answer. Between 'god always existed' and 'god never existed' is a vast middle ground that is ripe with story potential.

Some religions produce works of surpassing beauty. Contact, as an origin myth of it's own, can be one of them.

At first glance, the god of Contact seems more a god of Einstein in that he's the disinterested, non-interfering initiator of the universe. He set up the parameters, the perimeters and the speed limits. And then he said... so long, see you later. But Sagan added an element of true revelation to his story. Before god took off for parts unknown, he left a clear, unambiguous sign of himself; an artist's signature. He hid it in the very simplest form in nature, the circle, where it waited to be discovered. God knew that someday someone would be here to find it. Or maybe he didn't know. Maybe he's preforming an experiment of his own.

This entity, whatever he is, must reside completely outside the substrate of the universe as we know it, in a place where the most ubiquitous forms in what we call 'nature' are constructs. We can't imagine such a place. But to paraphrase Sagan, why should we expect our experience to have any relevance in this area. Our senses evolved in here, not out there. We just need to recognize the signature as a unique, nonrandom sign of intelligence. And to do that all we need is a moderately large brain and an imagination; the clear tools of our future upward mobility.

The god of Contact poses some interesting questions. Sagan stated in the book that the circle is not merely a signature, but the beginning of a message from the same extra-universal being. So I ask... if he can communicate with us, may we someday be able to communicate with him?

The Vegans sent a message down to us. In doing so they pointed the way up to a higher level of being. They gave us access to the larger universe, and a way out of our selfish fatalism. The entity who wrote the message in pi did something similar to the Vegans it seems to me. He sent a message down to them pointing the way up and out of the universe into an even higher level of reality. So as information flows down, evolution simultaneously flows up.

This is a form of revelation of the teacher.

Truth is sometimes best revealed through a veil of lies. If humans can evolve up to the level of the Vegans, and then up again to the level of the pi-being, do we not then become that which created us? In this fictional universe, do we create ourselves every time we contemplate the circle?

Through paradox one can make two mutually exclusive statements and have them mean exactly the same thing:

1) God created us, we are his children. He exists in our past.
2) We will create god, he is our child. He exists in our future.

When discussing religion I think the only useful way to approach god is to embrace paradox; but only as art, never as science. The truth is our existence is not owed to paradox. This god is no more real than any of the others.

Carl Sagan wrote a work of fiction. In fiction he could roam the universe and imprint whatever conjectures he wished upon it. His manuscript was submitted to a publisher for sale to the public for the purposes of entertainment. It was not submitted to a scientific journal for peer review. In Contact, Sagan could answer the question of where god came from in a very circular way. He combined both western and eastern religious motifs with a very original flare.

If Sagan had written a subtitle for his book it might well read...

'Contact: Or, God Willed Himself Into Being, And This is How He Did It.'

The Invasion

2007-08-30T08:59:00.001-07:00

Nicole Kidman is very pretty and certainly talented, but I think I like her mostly because she was in a Kubrick film. That always rates special appreciation for me. Then again I'd give Slim Pickens a foot massage for the same reason.

I'll give Kidman this, she's a whole person in this movie. And that makes her completely unlike the split personality, spineless panderer portrayed by Jodie Foster in Contact. I think Foster's a fine actor, too. The fault in Contact lay in its writing and direction...

The use of all that current news footage of Bush, Iraq and whatnot in The Invasion didn't bother me nearly as much as the use of President Clinton in Contact. There's a huge difference between a relevant real life addition and a gimmick. The moment Zemeckis saw real-life Clinton's Mars microbe news conference he just had to have it in his movie. Don't bother asking whether it actually enhances the story! Who cares? It's newsworthy. It steals importance, and lends credibility through association with some other important event. Use it!

The Invasion added a suitable, current events background that enhanced the story. This is global invasion after all. We need a sense of the before and after. The use of current media creates a viable alternative history within the film. In Contact, Clinton is more like a sight gag, or an inside joke. Wink wink. It's just so much Gump.

I do wish this movie had taken the time to slow down a little. They started out fast, and that's fine. But I needed more breaks, a little more emotional closeness between the principles. The dinner table conversation foreshadowing the conflict felt very fresh and smart. It definitely helped the ending and the film as a whole. But I think the period right before Dr. Bennell pulls the trigger should have been longer, more reflective. The entire movie was logistically set up for that scene, but it felt too rushed to me. More emphasis was placed on the following chase scene. A proper rest will always naturally enhance a crescendo. It just didn't have quite the emotional climax I needed.

I have an idea. In the final chase scene Bennell could have plowed through a city block long mob of changelings. It would have been a better contrast to the lone woman in the tunnel and would have emphasized her cross-over to the darker side of raw animal instinct. It could have been an admission of guilt, as it were.

And please, more Law&Order, and less CSI. If they'd left those stupidass red corpuscle close-ups out I might have been happier with the happy ending. Maybe include a track without the showoffy CG blood vessel crap on the DVD release?

The Invasion did get under my skin a little. I found myself looking over my shoulder even more than usual on the walk home last night. And my natural facial resting state has never been so stoic.

And regarding the dismay I hear on those horrible, vapid morning talk shows over how serious it is... it's serious... it is. It's the serious, smart side of scifi. What's your problem? You mentally retarded, fucking hairdos on 'Good Morning Ameriduh' didn't complain about the much darker 28 Weeks Later being 'too serious' for a summer flick. Did ya? Huh? No!

Think of this movie as summer school. OK, bad example.

Try this: go see Transformers, then turn your brain back on and see The Invasion. Then go home, drink a six-pack and take a dip in the pool to get you back in summer vacation mode.

Orange

2007-08-28T11:41:00.001-07:00

I got one fairly decent, low-res photo out of last nights light show.

Eclipse

2007-08-28T05:15:00.000-07:00

We had a great view of the lunar eclipse from Denver this morning.

It was raining around eleven when I walked home from work, thinking I might miss it. But the night turned out cool and clear a few hours later, just in time for the show. I even woke up without an alarm. I got out my camera and snapped a few pictures.

After totality there wasn't much to do but wait for the moon to reemerge, so I opened Photoshop and started playing. Thinking earth might look even more bazaar than the moon during a total eclipse I imagined this series of pictures.

Ambient light during such an event is the name of the game. The earth is much larger than the moon, and so will completely obscure the sun. I think the solar corona would also be blotted out if one were dead center of the shadow, but I'm not sure.

I think the most interesting feature would be a bright ring caused by the bending of sunlight through our thick, movable feast of an atmosphere, into the shadow zone. Unlike the rough, airless horizon of the moon the atmospheric ring around earth would be like a smooth reddish halo.

During such an eclipse one could observe every sunrise and every sunset on our tiny little planet, simultaneously.

I think the stars and city lights might still be visible, depending on the relative brightness of the ring. And the background stars might be very bright as well, or not. I've never been shot into space, so I don't know.

I modeled this fake picture, minus the rings, after this amazing photograph taken by our collective robot, the Cassini space probe, in the shadow of Saturn.

As the sun reemerges, a 'diamond ring,' similar to that seen during a solar eclipse on Earth, would appear.

The solar corona would rise first...

...followed by the ultra-bright disk of the Sun.

Contact Movie Review: Ten Years...

2007-08-24T17:24:00.002-07:00

It has been ten years now since Carl Sagan’s death and the release of the movie Contact, and I remain unhappy about both.

It's some kind of Greek tragedy that Sagan died right before his message was about to reach the largest possible audience. But worse is that the message itself was distorted, diluted and made minor.

I first became aware of Dr. Sagan on public television, Channel 39 in Fort Wayne, Indiana; that weird science/puppet show channel from beyond the moon. I loved the way his multi layered teaching style put physical science into historical and social context. Before Sagan, at least on television, the stars were separate from the earth; removed from everyday life. But after Sagan everything got connected and became interrelated in the most intimate way. In the very first episode of Cosmos, in contrast to our usual earth-centric way of thinking, he starts his cosmic journey not down here, but out there, at the edge of the universe. He better showed us our place in the scheme of things by putting us between immensity and eternity, and then showed exactly what those limits ought to mean to us.

Sagan opened my eyes to a much larger world, and changed me for the better. We need people like him to appear among us poor dumb apes more often. And as an atheist I will say this much 'for Carl'… In Cosmos, Carl Sagan elevated my soul.

That said… There is something seriously wrong with this movie.

I watched a few episodes of Cosmos again the other day and was amazed how relevant it remains, nearly thirty years after it’s initial release. But I am sorry to say that Contact has not improved with age. In fact it is now painfully dated.

The most glaring absence for me is of course the wonderful book ending where Ellie finds, hiding in the infinite permutations of pi, scientific proof that there is an intelligence which predates the universe. This proof is represented as a simple, elegant signature, a circle of ones written out on a field of zeros. It is an unambiguous sign that on some higher level our universe is somebody else's construct.

The key to this fine film that never was lay in the last chapter of the novel.

For this reason I have entitled my blog... The Artist’s Signature