Stardate 20021003.1441

(Captain's log): Allen writes:

I'm a great admirer of your site and genuinely enjoy the articles you pen. I may not always agree with you (Though I often do), but I've rarely seen someone who takes the kind of time you do to back up your assertions with both facts, citations and logic.

That's why I was a little disturbed by the Stardate 20021002.1224 post - the one in which you proceed to rip apart on scientific grounds, the image from Disney's Treasure Planet. Now I'm not from Disney, nor have I seen the film, but from what I do know of it, it seems to be a fantasy/sci-fi update of Treasure Island. To expect any sort of scientific accuracy from what is essentially a fairy tale, and then to rip it apart on the basis of scientific flubs as old as the motion picture form itself strikes me as being a bit picayune for someone with your intellectual gifts.

I'm curious - based on this posting and the one about the film in which dragons toast London - do you as an engineer have this kind of problem with all stories that contain elements of magic? Did it bother you that the One Ring apparently had the ability to change it's size to fit the hand of whoever wore it AND that a hunk of gold was apparently semi-sentient? Did it bother you that the Flying Monkeys that attacked Dorothy and her friends clearly didn't have the wing span to support their bulk in flight?

No.

But I, as an engineer, have a sense of humor and it sometimes tends to run in channels that non-engineers won't necessarily savvy. It's just one of those things.

In the movie GhostBusters, there's a throwaway sight gag at one point. There's a sign on the wall that says, "Danger! 10,000 Ohms!" Most engineers found that uproariously funny; but I've had layfolk ask me why and I couldn't explain it to them. I can explain what an Ohm is, if they don't know, but I can't explain why the sign is funny to me, even though it still gives me a giggle after all this time.

It's part of why the chapter where Alice encounters the White Knight is my favorite in the two Alice books. Dogdson had that same kind of sensibility, and that chapter is loaded with jokes intended for mathematicians and the technically minded. (In fact, some of the jokes are actually engineering jokes, like how the Knight doesn't notice that the box he'd invented was mounted upside down and everything in it had fallen out.)

From the volume of mail I received over the course of a few days when I first posted that initial article about using the modern military to fight dragons, it was clear to me that a lot of my readers also got the joke, and understood that the entire sequence was a big exercise in being silly.

Silly is good. I like silly. It's nice to take a break from serious once in a while, and part of what you're seeing is my silly side. Of course, my humor tends to be dry and subtle, and I've noticed more than once that sometimes it goes right over the heads of some people. (Alas.)

It's also a form of mental exercise, a discipline if you will. It's an attempt to see if it's possible to think rationally about things which are not rational and not even intended to be rational, such as trying to estimate the airspeed of a flying dragon. (Is that the African Dragon or the European Dragon?) Or trying to decide if they could be detected with radar, as opposed to dragons somehow being naturally "stealthy".

I like kids. I like talking to them. I like watching really little kids getting soaked in the computerized fountain we've got at the local mall, one of the ones where the pattern of water shooting out changes with time in complicated patterns. A little kid's emotions are pure colors. When they get mad, they're all the way mad; when they're sad they're all the way sad. And when they're delighted and happy, they can reach degrees of that I can only experience through the contact high I get from kids.

With kids who are somewhat older, Sometimes I like to tease them. When I'm talking to a six year old, sometimes I'll make some sort of preposterous claim such as "I'm a dog" or "You're older than I am" which the kid knows is wrong (and usually responds as such immediately with a bit of annoyance, "You're not a dog, you're a human being!") and then I'll try to make an argument to prove that I'm a dog. A dog has hair and I have hair, right? A dog barks and I bark (make barking noises). A dog has eyes and I have eyes. A dog's got a tail, and I've got a tail, (wiggle my butt and pretend). Can't you see my tail? What do you mean, you can't see my tail? It's right there. A dog wears glasses and I wear glasses. See my glasses? Well, you couldn't see my tail but you can see my glasses, right?

This is good on several levels. It's fun, and that alone is sufficient. It also teaches a kid that they can't trust everything an adult tells them, and gets them started with the process of critically evaluating what they're told instead of just accepting it because an adult told them. And for me, it's actually hard because I have to come up with arguments that are at least somewhat plausible to support a statement which is false on its face, which demands that I be mentally quick on my mental feet. And though that kid may know that I'm not a dog, they will discover that it isn't all that easy to prove it (to me, at least, when I'm being uncooperatively silly about it).

But ultimately, it's fun. That's enough. I enjoy it, and they do too. (If they don't, I stop.)

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