People Food

When buying a 30-pound bag of food for my dog, I sometimes wish I could also buy a bag of people food for myself that would last a month.  I love trying new foods, and I usually enjoy cooking, but every so often, I get tired of having to think about food and wish I could just scoop out two cups of kibble for myself twice a day.  This would save me from having to plan meals, buy groceries, prepare meals, and clean up after them. 

Rob Rhinehart feels the same away about food, so he's created people food that he calls Soylent, after the 1973 film "Soylent Green.” He’s the founder of a failed wireless communications company, not a nutritionist, but after researching nutrition and biochemistry for several months, he compiled a list of ingredients that he hoped would provide all the nutrients he needed to survive, blended them together into a milk-like drink, and has spent several months consuming nothing but Soylent.  Regular blood tests confirm that he’s healthy, he now spends $150 on a food a month compared to the $500+ he spent before creating Soylent, and the U.S. military is now interested in potentially using Soylent to feed soldiers.  Some dietitians and nutrients have criticized Soylent, particularly for its “one-size-fits-all approach” to nutrition, and the spokesman for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics tried it and said, “It tastes terrible.”  Despite these criticisms, Rhinehart is planning to mass produce Soylent and hopes to begin selling it soon.

 

I’ll definitely be trying it, and even if it tastes terrible, so does most toothpaste, and I still brush three times a day, so maybe eating could become like brushing one’s teeth.  I suspect that if it’s ever marketed to a wide audience, ways would be found to improve Soylent’s taste.  I doubt, however, that Soylent would be widely adopted, unless, of course, we ran out of food, which is what happens in “Soylent Green.”  Overpopulation and pollution have wiped out most of Earth’s species, so the remaining humans survive on a cakelike substance known as “Soylent Green.”  Officially, it’s made from algae and plankton, but by the end of the movie, we learn that it’s actually made from human bodies.  From a strictly utilitarian perspective, in a world where food is scarce, it makes sense to use dead bodies as food rather than wasting them by burying them in the ground, but it’s very unlikely that the general public would ever accept this, so the substance’s true ingredients are kept secret.

If we ever reach the point where Earth runs out of food, Rhinehart’s creation might save us, but in the meantime, what would it mean for the future of eating for those of us who are receptive to Soylent?  Would we be richer and more productive?  Would we still want snacks?  Would we be healthier?  Would our social lives suffer from not sharing meals with friends, family, and co-workers?  Would we produce white piss and shit?  Unless the mass-produced version of Soylent has an irresistible flavor, I’ll probably continue my current eating habits, and consume Soylent only when I don’t want to think about food.  It’s also possible that after one sip of Soylent, I’ll pour the rest down the drain, be thankful I don’t have to eat like a dog, and order a pizza.    

Obamacare and Part-Time Employees

If the Internet chatter about Obamacare's requirement that large companies provide health insurance to employees working at least 30 hours a week is representative of how Americans feel about the law, our politics are in an even worse state than I thought. Dozens of news articles document examples of employers cutting their workers' hours to avoid having to provide them with insurance, and the tone of many of these articles gives them an implicit criticism of the healthcare law.  Readers’ comments are much more explicit.  There's been an outpouring of sympathy for the workers, but almost all the blame has been placed on the President with little criticism of the employers who are actually cutting the hours.  Yes, having to provide insurance will hurt their profits, but isn't this a price companies should have to pay when their profits depend on the exploitation of their part-time workers?

This, of course, is an oversimplification of the relationship between large companies and  their part-time employees.  In many instances, the part-time status is mutually beneficial.  Businesses like part-time employees because they are cheaper and easier to let go than full-time ones.  Moreover, part-time positions are easier to find than full-time positions, and plenty of employees in part-time status like the flexibility of their positions and aren't looking for full-time work.  However, it's also true that in too many instances large companies rely so heavily on part-time employees that they end up performing the vast majority of the work.  This is especially true in higher education, and particularly in two-year colleges.

It's fairly routine for adjunct (part-time) instructors to teach well over 50% of the courses at a two-year college.  I have worked as an adjunct at several different colleges and universities, and I vividly remember that during the first adjunct orientation I attended, in her welcome comments, a vice-president for academic affairs stated that the college relied on adjuncts for over 70% of its courses.  She proudly provided this statistic as evidence of how integral adjuncts were to the college, but it had the opposite effect on me:  not only did I feel cheated, but I felt the college was cheating its students as well.

But I'm getting a bit ahead of myself.  In principle, there's nothing wrong with adjunct positions. Many are taught by retired teachers or other professionals who are interested in teaching only a class or two every semester to stay active and supplement their income.  Other adjunct instructors are recent graduates who lack the teaching experience required for full-time positions.  Colleges unwilling to hire them full-time will hire them as adjuncts, and then when full-time positions are available will often hire from their pool of adjuncts.  The low labor costs for adjunct positions also help colleges to offer tuition at affordable rates.

It's not uncommon, however, for adjuncts to teach more classes per semester than full-time instructors.  They still earn less than the full-time instructors and receive no benefits.  They are hired on a course-by-course basis, and their courses can be cancelled due to low enrollment up to a week into the semester, which means that they could teach a class for a week, only to have it cancelled and then receive no compensation for that week of work, not to mention the prep work completed outside of class.  There's little incentive for adjuncts to meet with students outside of class (although I'm sure most of them do) or to spend much time grading assignments or prepping for class.

In the long term, this over reliance on adjuncts benefits no one.  In addition to creating large numbers of second-class instructors who perform most of the teaching, it undermines the quality of education students receive.  Adjuncts simply aren't compensated well enough to spend much time outside of class preparing lessons and grading assignments, so they inevitably take shortcuts.  Moreover, while this model has helped colleges save money, it has enabled them to rely on a business model that is unsustainable.  The implementation of Obamacare next year will force colleges to finally face the problems they have created for themselves by relying too heavily on adjuncts.

Predictably, most schools are planning to cut their adjuncts’ hours to avoid having to provide them insurance.  It's difficult to quantify the amount of work instructors complete, so the formula that applies to adjuncts is that they must receive insurance if they teach at least 75% of the teaching load of full-time faculty.  In two-year colleges, full-time faculty typically teach 5 to 6 classes a semester, so adjuncts teaching at least 5 classes must be provided insurance.  To its credit, Midlands Technical College, where I taught as an adjunct during the last academic year, is offering insurance for its adjuncts, and rather than trying to limit the number of courses individual adjuncts can teach, at least some departments have offered to give adjuncts more classes, so they will be eligible to receive the insurance benefit.  However, Midlands is the exception.  In reading about how colleges will deal with the healthcare requirement, I haven't found any other examples of schools that will offer their adjuncts insurance.

Also predictably, blame for the economic hardship that adjuncts will soon endure from having their courses cut has been placed almost exclusively on President Obama.  Yes, his healthcare law is a reason why colleges are choosing to cut their adjuncts' hours, but it's the colleges, not the President, making the choice.  Criticism should be directed at these colleges, not only for cutting their adjuncts' hours rather than provide them with insurance, but also for relying on a business model that depends on part-time instructors to perform most of their teaching.  I don't pretend to know a better model, but colleges and the lawmakers who make decisions about their budgets should stop pretending that the current one works.

Rather than acting on a gut reaction to criticize everything the President does, I wish more Americans would take a step back and think more about the big picture.  One does not have to support the President or his healthcare law to recognize that rather than hurting part-time workers it is drawing attention to the ways in which they are often exploited by their employers.  Nor does one have to be a crazy liberal to come to the common sense conclusion that when a large company cuts its workers hours to avoid having to provide them with health insurance it is the company hurting the workers and not the President.

Can 3-D Be More Than a Gimmick?

Before buying my ticket for "Pacific Rim" this weekend, I have to make an important decision: 3-D or 2-D?  If I don't see it in 3-D, I'll probably feel like I've missed the full experience, but lately, I've started to think that when I've paid for 3-D in the past, it's because movie studios have convinced me that I wanted something I didn't. It's only a few dollars more, so the easy solution is just to spend the extra money, but I'm a bit of a cheapskate, and I hate paying for special features that aren't particularly special.

Part of the problem is that my response to 3-D is colored by the fact that I want it to be something it's not.  When I see a 3-D movie, I want to duck to avoid being beheaded by a live chainsaw; dodge so the flying severed head misses me and hits the person behind me; and cover my face so I don't swallow a mouthful of blood, but sadly, none of this ever happens.  When I put on the glasses, I often think back to my first experience of a 3-D movie when 3-D made a brief comeback in the mid-80's and the Jaws, Friday the 13th, and Nightmare on Elm Street franchises each had a part three in 3-D.  I was terrified of horror movies as a kid, so I missed all of these, but I did see "Treasure of the Four Crowns."  I remember nothing about the movie except that in several instances my friend and I screamed, jumped, ducked, dodged, and even knocked off our 3-D glasses to escape spiders, snakes, bats, birds, spears, spikes, and probably several other creatures and weapons that were coming out of the screen to get us. (The YouTube clip gives you some idea of what it was like to see this movie in 3-D.)  Now I often find myself wondering whether the movie is actually in 3-D and taking off the glasses to confirm that the screen is blurry without them.

 

To be fair, "My Bloody Valentine" and "Piranha 3-D" had some good 3-D moments.  During the former, there were several instances when I moved to avoid the killer's pick axe and a shot gun that protruded from the screen, and killer fish jumped out at me during the later.  Although I missed "Shark Week" in the theater, when I later watched it on DVD, I could tell that it, too, would have been worth seeing in 3-D.  But these movies are the exception, and although I don't like it, I understand why: for it to become an integral part of the cinema exprience, 3-D has to be more than a gimmick.  Whereas in the past 3-D was used almost exclusively for cheap shocks--which was why it worked best for horror movies--when filmmakers use it now, it's a tool for adding depth and texture and making the entire experience more immersive for the viewers.  This is why I resist it.  I've never needed 3-D to be fully immersed in the experience.  All this requires is a good story conveyed through engaging 2-D images.

I also understand why movie studios and cinemas have embraced 3-D: as large HDTVs have become more affordable, 3-D results in an experience that viewers can enjoy only in a cinema and thus gives them an incentive to pay ever higher ticket prices rather than waiting for the video release. But I wonder about the future of 3-D.  There hasn't been wide scale adoption of 3-D TV's because viewers aren't convinced that they want them, and I wonder if the same will happen with 3-D movies.  When 3-D is used as a gimmick to create cheap shocks in horror movies, it actually adds something unique to the theater experience.  I'm not convinced that 3-D adds anything when I'm just paying extra for depth and texture that I never felt like I was missing in the first place.  It just makes me feel like a rube at a carnival.

I wish that rather than insisting that every big action, adventure be released in 3-D, studios would stop trying to sell us snake oil and use 3-D where it works best.  I imagine there are millions of viewers who, like me, would gladly pay extra for the experience of squirming to avoid the slashes of a black-gloved killer while also knowing that there's no chance of having their throats slit in the process.

Since it's very unlikely that during the 3-D version of "Pacific Rim" the claw of a giant monster will reach through the screen and try to grab me, I've just resolved not to be a sucker.

Ghost's Disappointing Second Album

The appeal of Ghost is that their costumes and satanic lyrics give them a metal sensibility that makes listening to them a form of escapism while their music straddles the line between metal and rock with its heavy riffs and catchy sing-along choruses resulting in a sound that’s much more pleasing to the ear than one would expect from a band dressed in corpse paint singing about the devil.  After buying Opus Eponymous, their first album, I listened to nothing else for almost a month and still play it quite frequently, and their show I attended in D.C. will remain one of the most memorable experiences I’ve had of live music. 

Infestissumam, their second album, was one of the most anticipated metal releases of the year, and overall, it’s good, but I’ve lost interest pretty quickly.  I think the problem is that it sounds too clean and has too many songs that border on soft rock.  The costumes and lyrical content haven’t changed, so the softer sound results in an odd listening experience.  It feels a bit silly listening to satanic songs that wouldn’t be out of place on an easy-listening compilation if only the lyrics were slightly revised to praise one’s lover, child, or Jesus rather than Lucifer.  This, however, is probably the point: the devil is deceptive and can spread his ideas more easily through pleasant-sounding music.  Regardless, when songs about Satan begin sounding heartfelt, the act has gone too far.  The irony is lost and it becomes laughable.

 

Infestissumam does, however, contain several songs that preserve the sound of the first album.  Two stand-outs are “Secular Haze” and “Yero Zero,” both of which have the eeriness I had grown to expect from a Ghost song.  The deluxe version also contains a haunting cover of Abba’s “I’m a Marionette.”  Despite my disappointment in Infestissumam, Ghost remain a very interesting band.  Their identities are still secret, and I’m curious to see how they’ll preserve the mystique as their popularity grows.  In interviews, they claim to want to play stadiums, and they are definitely developing an arena-friendly sound, but I’m having trouble imagining a packed-stadium of fans holding up lighters and singing along to, “Come together, together as one. Come together, for Lucifer’s son.”  If they succeed, they will have realized many-a-parent’s worst fears about the corrupting influence of rock music.

CNN's Hero of the Year: The Oklahoma Atheist

Religion can result in awkward situations for nonbelievers.  If asked, I suspect that most Americans would say religion is a personal choice, but in too many instances, "none" is a choice they wouldn’t accept.  I've never been religious, and in most circumstances, I'm comfortable acknowledging this, but there are instances, around certain family members for example, when I convince myself that it's best just passively to pretend that I'm a Christian because telling the truth wouldn't accomplish anything productive.  Afterwards, of course, I berate myself for not politely stating that I don't share their religious beliefs, consequences be damned.  But religious beliefs are so deeply held by many Americans that it's often perceived as an affront when one professes not to share them.  Two basic reactions result: horror and a desire to save the misguided atheist's soul.  Acceptance that it's just one legitimate choice among many, not a cause for horror or pity, is much rarer.  I wonder, however, how religious Americans responded when an Oklahoma woman who lost her home to a tornado told CNN's Wolf Blitzer that she's an atheist.

 

Most people in her situation, myself included, would probably take the easy way out and just pretend that they had thanked the Lord.  This woman, however, admitted on national television that she did not  because she's an atheist.  I applaud her not only for her courage in owning what is still a very unpopular position in American, but in the way she did it.  When Blitzer asked if she had thanked the Lord for saving her, she giggled nervously and said she's an atheist and then, rather than launching into an anti-religious tirade, which most in her position would have been tempted to do, she added that she didn't blame people for thanking God.  I hope that if there was any horror or pity among religious Americans watching the broadcast these were reactions to what the woman endured from the natural disaster and not to her lack of religious beliefs.

 

What I can say with confidence is that she's a much better ambassador for atheists than most nonbelievers who have publicly expressed their views about religion.  She was non-threatening.  She was not speaking as a polemical academic or an evolutionary biologist trying to convince Christians of the illogic of their beliefs.  She was speaking as a wife, a mother, and an American who had lost her home.  It's normal people like this woman who will make atheism acceptable, not writers like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins with their reasoned critiques of religion.  One reason commonly cited for the rapidly growing acceptance of homosexuality among a majority of Americans is increased exposure to homosexuals in their daily lives:  their friends, neighbors, co-workers, and family members.  I'm not attempting to equate the situation of atheist Americans--who are living with the consequences of a choice--with the civil rights struggle faced by gay Americans--who are persecuted for their biological differences--but I do believe that what has made homosexuality more acceptable for Americans can work in the same way for atheists.

This exposure, however, must be the right kind of exposure.  It must come from people like the Oklahoma atheist--outing myself as an atheist to my extended family would be counterproductive because they already think I'm a bit odd.  I'm hoping that the Oklahoma atheist's courage will inspire other Americans to profess their atheism in non-threatening ways.  She has my vote for CNN's hero of the year.

Prometheus Mapping Balls Soon to be a Reality

I'm always interested to learn about examples of sci-fi technology becoming real.  Remember the balls used in Prometheus to map the cave containing the decapitated Engineer and the alien eggs?  Referred to as "pups," they fly around the cave emitting red light and the data they send to a computer on the Prometheus is used to create a 3-D map.  An inventor named Francisco Aguilar has created something very similar.  Known as the Bounce Imaging Explorer, the device is a baseball-sized throwable probe containing several cameras and other data collecting instruments.  Aguilar designed it for use in disaster zones where rescue workers can throw the high-tech balls, which will take pictures and measure the presence of poison gases and send the data to a synched phone or tablet that will generate a panorama of the area with environmental warnings.  He hopes the device will make the jobs of first responders a bit safer. 

       

Oblivion: Flawed but Enjoyable Near-Future Sci-Fi

 

Although I love most science fiction, my favorite is near-future sci-fi set on a recognizable Earth, so I eagerly anticipated the release of Oblivion.  It has received a lot of attention from science fiction fans because it's a rare instance of an original sci-fi movie that wasn't adapted from a novel, comic, or video game or an entry in a famous franchise. Unfortunately, it wasn't as good as I'd hoped, but I still left the theater happy.

 

It's set in 2077, after a war between humans and a race of aliens.  The aliens first softened up the humans by destroying the moon and letting natural disasters wreck the planet.  Then they invaded. Humans were ultimately able to defeat them, but only by using nuclear weapons, leaving Earth uninhabitable.  Most of the population has moved either to a space station or a colony on Saturn's moon Titan, but small teams have stayed behind to oversee the harvesting of Earth's remaining water. The story revolves around Jack Harper who works as a technician servicing the drones that protect the harvesting machines from the remaining aliens, referred to as "Scavs."  While he's out on a mission to locate missing drones, a space ship crashes, and he's able to save one member of the crew, a woman named Julia, who had been appearing in his recurring dream and who causes him to question everything he knows about Earth's recent history and his own identity.

 

Oblivion tells an engaging story, and the settings alone made the viewing experience worthwhile for me.  Most of the action occurs in post-apocalypse New York, so we get to watch Harper riding his motorcycle over the remains of the Brooklyn Bridge and flying his ship over the ruins of Manhattan. He explores sunken buildings looking for missing drones and wanders through a ruined football stadium. Outside the city, he even finds a fully-furnished lake house surrounded by lush greenery where he goes to relax.

 

Although Harper enjoys his work as a drone tech, his nights are made restless by dreams of meeting Julia at a set of coin-operated binoculars on top of the Empire State Building.  All of his pre-invasion memories have been erased as a matter of national security, and the dreams lead him to wonder about his lost memories.  When he finds Julia amid the wreckage of the space ship, he realizes he has been dreaming of an event that actually occurred.  Predictably, Harper and Julia were romantically involved in the past, and their story is the movie's biggest flaw: it's overplayed.  Director Joseph Kosinski doesn't trust that viewers will remember the coin-operated binoculars, so he shows them what seems like a dozen times. He sends Harper and Julia to the ruins of the Empire State Building to reveal the exact nature of their relationship and then they fly off to the lake house for an overnight getaway.  All of this might have worked in a longer movie where everything was more developed, but it just left me annoyed and wanting Kosinski to get on to the good stuff.  

 

Because he wastes so much time on the love story, more interesting aspects of Oblivion are left underdeveloped.  While searching for a missing drone, Harper and Julia meet a large group of humans who have been living underground since the invasion, but although they end up playing a central role in the film's plot, Kosinski reveals very little about these people or how they have been surviving underground.  Moreover, the plot is also unnecessarily convoluted.  Kosinski reveals the truth about Harper's missing memories in a way that leaves viewers confused for most of the movie's second act.

 

Despite these problems, however, it is worth bearing with the muddled narrative.  When it finally begins to make sense, what initially seems like a fairly pedestrian humans vs. aliens scenario becomes a much more interesting story about humanity's struggle to survive a confrontation with an advanced alien race that uses its superior technology in devious ways. Moreover, despite a final cheesy scene in the lake house, Kosinski does bring Oblivion to a satisfying conclusion. 

 

At times, it had me thinking of Len Wiseman's Total Recall remake, which, despite its many flaws, handles its love story much more effectively by developing it in the brief pauses between action sequences.  Granted, Wiseman is also too busy having his characters being chased to slow down and reveal anything about them, and like, Kosinski, leaves his film's most interestings elements underdeveloped.  Cheesy love stories and endless chase sequences are equally nauseating, but Wiseman left me feeling a bit sicker than Kosinski, who at least tried something original and made an effort to develop his characters.  I'm hoping, however, that this summer's other big sci-fi movies will be much lighter on the chases and romance.