Category Archives: Life

It

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I finally got around to watching Her, also known as “that movie where the guy falls in love with his computer”.

It was like being trapped in a futuristic greeting card. Which doesn’t mean it’s a bad movie. It’s an excellent movie, but not easy to watch. It’s disturbing. And also provocative.

Theodore lives in downtown Los Angeles. It’s the near future, one that is amazingly pleasant. Future L.A. is extremely clean, with lots of big, shiny buildings and terrific mass transit, but seemingly uncrowded. Theodore has a job in a beautiful office writing very personal letters for people who can’t express their feelings as well as he can.

But Theodore is lonely and depressed. He’s going through a divorce and avoiding people. One day, he hears about a new, artificially intelligent computer program, brilliantly designed to tailor itself to the customer’s needs. Theodore assigns it a female voice, after which it gives itself the name “Samantha”.

It’s easy to understand how Theodore falls in love with Samantha. It’s intuitive and funny and loving, a wonderful companion that’s constantly evolving. Besides, it does a great job handling Theodore’s email and calendar.

Complications eventually ensue, of course, but in the meantime, Theodore and Samantha get to know each other, spending lots of time expressing their deeply sensitive feelings. It’s very New Age-ish, although the two of them can’t give each other massages and can’t go beyond what amounts to really good phone sex.

Watching Her, you are immersed in a loving but cloying relationship in which one of the entities involved expresses lots of feelings but doesn’t actually have any. That’s my opinion, of course, because some people think a sufficiently complex machine with really good programming will one day become conscious and have feelings, not just express them. 

Maybe that’s true, but I still lean toward the position that in order to feel anything the way living organisms do, whether the heat of the sun or an emotion like excitement, you need to be built like a living organism. A set of programming instructions, running on a computer, even if connected to visual and auditory sensors, won’t have feelings because it can’t really feel.

Although the movie is built on the dubious premise that Samantha can always say the right thing, appropriately displaying joy, sorrow or impatience, perfectly responding to whatever Theodore says and anticipating all of his emotional needs, there is no there there. 

I don’t mean to suggest that Theodore is wrong to cherish Samantha. It’s an amazing product. But when he and it are together, he’s still alone. He’s enjoying the ultimate long distance relationship.

Announcing a Hiatus

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According to a couple of online English dictionaries, “hiatus” comes from the Latin verb “hiare”. One of the dictionaries says “hiare” means “to yawn”. The other says it means “to gape”. Although yawning and gaping generally require an open mouth, it would be difficult to yawn (from boredom) and gape (from astonishment) at the same time.  

A yawning gap, as opposed to a yawning gape, suggests a larger opening than anyone could achieve orally, even Joe E. Brown:

JoeEBrown-1

Or Carly Simon:

Carly Simon

But a hiatus need not be yawning. It can be extended or brief or neither of those. One thing it can’t be, however, is permanent. A permanent hiatus isn’t really a hiatus at all, since a hiatus, like an open mouth or a yawning gap, requires boundaries. 

Announcing that one is going on hiatus, therefore, implies that one’s departure is temporary. For a blogger, a hiatus amounts to being closed-mouth for a while (despite the fact that being closed-mouth, even for a brief time, is the opposite of yawning or gaping). There is an implied promise or prediction that you are going to open your mouth again. If you don’t resume blogging one day, you haven’t been on hiatus. You’ve just stopped.

Ok, I’ll stop now.

Your Doctors Might Kill You But Going to the Dentist Will Be a Breeze

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Two pieces of medical news caught my eye this past week.

First, according to the New York Times, physicians at the highly-respected University of Pittsburgh Medical Center are going to start putting selected patients to death. Not through improper care, but on purpose.

The idea is that patients who come into the emergency room on the brink of death because of a life-threatening injury will occasionally have all of their blood replaced with freezing salt water. That means their hearts will stop beating and their brains will stop working. They’ll be dead.

This will be done in order to give surgeons more time to do their job. Instead of having a few minutes to address the gunshot wound or other injury, they may have up to an hour to operate before the patient suffers brain damage. The medical staff will then resuscitate the patient by replacing the cold salt water with nice warm blood.

This procedure has been successfully used on animals like pigs and dogs, but never before on a person. The hospital is planning to perform Emergency Preservation and Resuscitation (EPR) about once a month for a couple of years before reaching a decision on its effectiveness.

One might think that killing your patient is a clear violation of the medical maxim: “first, do no harm” (primum non nocere). But since the patients in question will already be in cardiac arrest, and very likely to die anyway, and since the kind of death they’ll suffer is expected to be temporary and should give them a much better chance of surviving their injury, it isn’t clear that the doctors will be harming anyone, at least in the usual sense.

Perhaps a more troubling issue is that patients being subjected to this kind of procedure won’t be in a position to give their consent. They’ll already be unconscious. So the medical center has publicized this new procedure in and around Pittsburgh and given prospective patients the opportunity to opt out if they choose. But the default setting in case you’re ever shot or stabbed in western Pennsylvania and end up in the UPMC emergency room will be to receive EPR (and possibly meet your maker), if you are a suitable candidate.

The other news that caught my eye is that researchers in England claim to have come up with a new treatment for tooth decay. The procedure is called Electrically Accelerated and Enhanced Remineralisation (EAER). Dentists will use a very small electrical current to accelerate “the natural movement of calcium and phosphate minerals into the damaged tooth”. In effect, your tooth will heal itself with some encouragement from your dentist. The procedure wouldn’t require an anesthetic, drilling or a filling (and dentists would become more popular people).

It isn’t clear from the article in the Guardian how long it will take to fix a cavity this way. In an ideal world, your cavities could be repaired through EAER at the same time your gunshot wound was repaired through EPR. But that probably won’t be possible for a few years yet.

The Big Piece of Chicken

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In honor of responsible fathers past, present and future, here are a few minutes of wisdom from one of America’s most insightful philosophers, Chris Rock:

PS – Mr. Rock acknowledges elsewhere that many mothers work outside the home, but that doesn’t affect his point. Now where’s my big piece of chicken?

There Is A Cure For Science Denial

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Once Florida is underwater and we all have polio, it will be better.

That’s what Samantha Bee concludes in the Daily Show video here. Left-wing stupidity isn’t one of my usual topics, but it appears to be the relevant phenomenon in this case. The title of the video is “An Outbreak of Liberal Idiocy”.