Quark Cognition: An analogy explaining my avoidance of Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens.

Sunday, December 21, 2014

An analogy explaining my avoidance of Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens.

The reason why I have decided not to watch the trailer for the upcoming Star Wars movie or even to see the movie itself can be understood by analogy. Imagine for a moment that two new NFL teams will be created to play in the 2015 Super Bowl. The teams will have a few familiar players but will mostly consist of players new to the NFL. The created teams will not have played in the regular season and thus the fans will not have had the opportunity to develop any familiarity. Why would NFL fans even bother to watch the Super Bowl? The creation of two new teams invalidates the season; all the games and moments and plays the fans watched with a mixture of anger and delight are to come to nothing because no team that played during the season will be playing in the grand finale. This is basically the erasure of history and I imagine it would infuriate the fans. People that are indifferent to the NFL might have trouble understanding the problem.

And thus this is the situation with the fictional world of Star Wars. The upcoming movie is not following the story set forth in the Expanded Universe novels; the previously authorized sequence of events following Return of the Jedi is being erased, or I should say – has been erased. This is no different than the NFL erasing a season of play and creating two brand new teams to play in a Super Bowl.

The erasure is not 100% actual since one can still read the Star Wars novels or an NFL fan could still watch previously played games. The continuity, though, is what’s being meddled with – molded – into something new that does not follow what has been set forth. The disruption of continuity affects only those that have taken part in it, so a newcomer to Star Wars would not suspect anything is amiss, nor would a person indifferent to the NFL feel cheated.

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About Me

I am made of particles, known as quarks and electrons, that are at least 13.72 billion years old. Although my body is very young, the constituents are very old and come and go as they please. It's astonishing that individuality exists when each one of us are made of the same basic parts. It's even more astonishing that self-awareness exists, since even objects as simple as paper clips are made of the same parts as human beings.

My body was here before I was born and it will be here after I die.

So while I am in this brief configuration known as life I try to learn as much as possible, since my personality enjoys it. My first fascination in this short life was dinosaurs; I won a Dinosaur Expert Award in kindergarten. For most of my childhood, I read about the Animal Kingdom. I also read more than 100 Choose Your Own Adventure books and numerous other young adult fiction from my school library. Since age 5, I have been reading at a sometimes voracious pace. I didn't start seriously reading science fiction until age 19, though.

My interest in politics is as great as my interest in professional sports and I drink alcohol as often as I get lung surgery. I am heterosexual, but I rarely date women and prefer to read a tale, rather than chase some tail.

Qool Quotes

"The brain, knowing that a person can't live forever in this world, rationalizes a future, or other-dimensional, world in which immortality is possible. In other words, religion is the earliest form of science fiction."
-Philip Jose Farmer (1977)

"Forget Jesus, the stars died so you could be born."
-Lawrence M. Krauss (2009)

"When you ask what are protons and electrons I ought to answer that this question is not a profitable one to ask and does not really have a meaning. The important thing about electrons and protons is not what they are but how they behave - how they move. I can describe the situation by comparing it to a game of chess. In chess, we have various chessmen, kings, knights, pawns and so on. If you ask what a chessmen is, the answer would be that it is a piece of wood, or a piece of ivory, or perhaps just a sign written on a paper, or anything whatever. It does not matter. Each chessmen has a characteristic way of moving and this is all that matters about it. The whole game of chess follows from this way of moving the various chessmen."
-Paul Dirac, Nobel Prize in Physics, 1933

"You will be astonished when I tell you what this curious play of carbon amounts to. A candle will burn some four, five, six, or seven hours. What, then, must be the daily amount of carbon going up into the air in the way of carbonic acid! What a quantity of carbon must go from each of us in respiration! What a wonderful change of carbon must take place under these circumstances of combustion or respiration! A man in twenty-four hours converts as much as seven ounces of carbon into carbonic acid; a milch cow will convert seventy ounces, and a horse seventy-nine ounces, solely by the act of respiration. That is, the horse in twenty-four hours burns seventy-nine ounces of charcoal, or carbon, in his organs of respiration to supply his natural warmth in this way, by the conversion of carbon, not in a free state, but in a state of combination. And what an extraordinary notion this gives us of the alterations going on in our atmosphere. As much as 5,000,000 pounds, or 548 tons, of carbonic acid is formed by respiration in London alone in twenty-four hours. And where does all this go? Up into the air."
-Michael Faraday (1860)

"In modern war, one individual can cause the destruction of hundreds of thousands of men, women and children. He could do so by pushing a button; he may not feel the emotional impact of what he is doing, since he does not see, does not know the people whom he kills; it is almost as if his act of pushing the button and their death had no real connection. The same man would probably be incapable of even slapping, not to speak of killing, a helpless person."
-Eric Fromm (1955)

“Technology is a way of organizing the universe so that people don’t have to experience it."
-Max Frisch

Quark Cognition

I may not seem like it, but I am a human.

Sunday, December 21, 2014

An analogy explaining my avoidance of Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens.

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