Bite of Reality
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Happy Towel Day

May 25th, 2009 | by Tovias

Happy Towel Day!

In celebration of Towel Day, and in memory of Mr. Douglas Adams, I have compiled a list of forty-two facts about 42. I have tried to use as many pre-Hitchhiker’s Guide references as possible and relied heavily on Wikipedia as a sole-source as every good internet researcher should.

  1. It is the jersey number of Jackie Robinson, and the only number retired by all Major League Baseball teams.
  2. There are 42 laws of cricket.
  3. It was the jersey number of Pat Tillman.
  4. In Judaism there is a Forty-Two Lettered Name given to God and it is only entrusted to “him who is pious, meek, middle-aged, free from bad temper, sober, and not insistent on his rights”.
  5. In Christianity, there are 42 Generations listed in the Gospel of Matthew’s version of the Genealogy of Jesus.
  6. In the book of Revelations it is prophesied that the “Beast” will hold dominion over the Earth for 42 months.
  7. The angle at which light reflects off water to create a rainbow is 42 degrees.
  8. Two physical constants in the universe are the speed of light and the diameter of a proton. It takes light 10 to the minus 42nd power seconds to travel across the diameter of a proton.
  9. The atomic number of molybdenum is 42.
  10. In 1965, mathematician Paul Cooper theorized that the fastest, most efficient way to travel across continents would be to bore a straight hollow tube directly through the Earth, connecting a set of antipodes, evacuate it (remove the air), and then just fall through. The first half of the journey consists of free-fall acceleration, while the second half consists of an exactly equal deceleration. The time for such a journey works out to be 42 minutes. Remarkably, even if the tube does not pass through the exact center of the Earth, the time for a journey powered entirely by gravity always works out to be 42 minutes, as long as the tube remains friction-free, as while gravity’s force would be lessened, so would the distance traveled at an equal rate. The same idea was proposed by Lewis Carroll in “Sylvie and Bruno”, volume 2, chapter 7, without calculation.
  11. The perfect score on the USA Math Olympiad and International Mathematical Olympiad is 42.
  12. The eight digits of pi beginning from 242,422 places after the decimal point are 42424242.
  13. According to Kabalistic tradition “42” is the number with which God creates the universe.
  14. Given 27 same-size cubes whose nominal values progress from 1 to 27, a 3×3×3 “magic cube” can be constructed such that every row, column, and corridor, and every diagonal passing through the center, comprises 3 cubes whose sum of values is 42.
  15. The original printing of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” contained 42 illustrations.
  16. The first book to be printed with movable type, the Gutenberg Bible, is also known as the “42-Line Bible” as each page contains 42 lines of print.
  17. A “40 Gallon” barrel of crude oil contains 42 gallons.
  18. Elvis Presely died at age 42.
  19. In a standard deck of cards there are 42 eyes.
  20. In Super Bowl XLII (42) the New York Giants, in one of the most significant upsets in Super Bowl history, defeated the New England Patriots, becoming the first NFC wild card team to win a Super Bowl.
  21. William Jefferson Clinton was the 42nd President of the United States, but George W. Bush was the 42nd person to hold the office.
  22. Famed actress Glenn Close can fit 42 baby carrots in her mouth at the same time.
  23. The 42nd episode of the original Star Trek series to be broadcast was titled “Obsession”.
  24. February 11th is the 42nd day of the year. It was on this day in 1794 that the first time a session of the United States Senate was opened to the public.
  25. There are 42 possible positions in the game “Connect Four”
  26. In “Romeo and Juliet”, Juliet was to drink a potion which would make her appear dead for 42 hours.
  27. Approximately every 42 months there is a solar eclipse.
  28. Michael J. Fox’s character in “Teen Wolf” wears jersey number 42.
  29. 042 occurs at the digit stream ending at the 50 billionth decimal place in each of pi and 1/pi.
  30. In the TIFF image file format, the second 16-bit word of every file is 42, which is used together with the first word to indicate byte order.
  31. In the reiser4 file system, 42 is the inode number of the root directory.
  32. In the ASCII character code and other codes based on it, 42 represents the asterisk character (*).
  33. In the GNU C Library, a set of standard routines available for use in computer programing, contains a function–memfrob() –which performs an XOR combination of a given variable and the binary pattern 00101010 (42) as an XOR cipher.
  34. I really couldn’t find forty-two things, so I just gave up at 34.

Star Trek: I Stand Alone

May 16th, 2009 | by Tovias

****Warning There are a couple major SPOILERS in this entry. If you haven’t seen the new Star Trek movie, you have been warned****

May 8th I met a couple friends at the local IMAX theater and watched the new J.J. Abrams Film that shares a name with several television series and films that I have enjoyed in the past. Two hours and six minutes later I was standing back in front of the theater with these same two friends trying to explain why I didn’t like the movie. Over the weekend reading various Twitter posts and blog entries (and worst of all e-mails from trusted friends) I began to realize that I stood alone in not liking the new film.

Before I get to the boring emotional portion of this post let me go ahead and say a few things about the “technical” aspects of this film. The acting was on point, the script was excellent. The story moved forward and never seemed to bog down or come close to even slowing down. The action kept me on the edge of my seat and the special effects are of some of the best that ILM have ever produced. I think a better job of casting could not have been done. The actors chosen to fill these iconic parts were excellent in their roles.

That being said, here’s my problem.

The year was 1976. On a small, remote farm in Alabama my Grandmother had just bought a new color TV for us. Until this time we had used the same old black-and-white set that my mother and uncles had grown up watching. That same year, I became fascinated with these strange show with people dressed in brightly colored uniforms. My earliest memory of “Star Trek” from this time is watching the episode “Assignment: Earth” featuring Gary Seven, his cat Isis and Ms. Roberta Lincoln as the Enterprise crew traveled  back to 1968 to save the future yet again.

I remember watching most episodes with my Grandmother sitting with me on our big old couch in the living room looking at whichever episode happened to be airing that weekend. Many years later I would discover that this period in the mid-70s was the peak of the great reawakening for “Star Trek”. This was a time when “Star Trek” was starting it’s great explosion in popularity that would soon lead to movies and new series.

Over the years I amassed a large collection of blueprints, technical manuals and reference guides that made this science fiction world as real as it could be for me. Other than my two best friends, I didn’t really have that many friends growing up. With our farm being so far from town, the only time I really had to interact with other kids my age was a school. Any free time that I had at home was generally spent alone. So I filled that time with my other friends, Spock, Jim and Bones. I would spend hours poring over notebooks full of my scribbled notes about each episode. I would take an old cassette recorder and record episodes on audio tape so that I could go back and listen to them later and make more notes.

For the most part, I did not have a very happy childhood, so I would seek refuge in the 23rd Century onboard starships and on alien planets. I really felt a connection to Spock from early on in watching the show. He was like me, different and alone. He was smarter than everyone around him, just like I was on the farm. And he had to bury great pain and never let anyone see how he really felt inside, just like me.

Flash forward to 2009 and the new movie. In just two hours and six minutes J.J. Abrams voided all of those years. All of the adventures that I had gone on with my friends, all of the schematics I had memorized all of the stardates that I knew by heart, all of that was now null and void. Over thirty years of my life was changed. It never happened the way I remembered it. It would never be the same.

Over the years I have seen many movies and television programs about time travel and alternate realities. Two of these stories stand out as a means to describe how I feel. In  some stories there are one or two individuals who are aware of the timeline being changed. Think of Doc Brown and Marty McFly in “Back to the Future II. They come back to 1985 to find that Biff Tannen has taken over the town and is rich and out of control. This is not the world that they remember. They know something has happened and they have to find a way to return things to normal.

There was an episode of “Journeyman” where the main character made a change during one of his trips to the past and when he returns to his present he now has a daughter instead of a son. He is horrified that his son is gone because in his timeline he and his wife have a son. That is his reality. His wife, however, is horrified that he might try to change things because in this timeline, her reality, she has always had a daughter. When he fixes time, he gets his son back and his wife is fine because she has always had a son in this timeline.

Well that is where I am now. I remember, vividly, the other timeline. I can recite dates and events from forty-three years of “Star Trek” spanning over two centuries of future history. I have spent so much time in that universe that it may as well be my “reality”. And now Mr. Abrams comes along and <poof> it never happened and all of that is gone.  Now we have a new future to look forward too.  Whatever their lives might have been if the time continuum wasn’t disrupted, their destinies have changed.

As a life long “Star Trek” fan this does fill me with a little hope for the future. With new adventures and new challenges an entire new generation of “Star Trek” fans will join the fold. I’m a little depressed thinking that someday I will have arguments with a twelve year old that only knows this new Trek and who holds no respect for the real one, but I guess I’ll have to wait and burn that bridge when I get to it.

So now, a week later, I don’t totally hate this new movie as much as I originally did that first night. That’s just how awesome this movie is, that it can make me like it after all these years.

Is it worth seeing in the theater? By all means yes.  And if you have time to catch it in IMAX before it’s gone, do that. It is definitely worth the extra couple bucks.

But before I go, here is the SPOILER that I warned you about. I do not understand the need for Vulcan to be destroyed nor do I see the need for Amanda (Spock’s mother) to die. But then again maybe I do. Remember how I said that I always identified with Spock? How I wanted to be like him? I honestly had an emotional reaction when these two events happened. I almost stood up and walked out of the theater. If not for the fact that I was concerned about ruining the evening for the friends I saw the movie with I think I would have. I felt myself grip the armrests and lean forward as if to leave. But I sat there, in shock, and watched in horror.

I guess it was a cheap way for Abrams to get a response from us, but I haven’t felt this way since I sat and watched Spock sacrifice his life to save the crew of the Enterprise after the Khan incident in the Mutara Nebula.

Final analysis? Three out of Four stars. It is an excellent movie and I hope in the sequel the writers take a little more time and look at Trek Science and real science and have someone other than a kid that gets astronomy and astrology confused to look over the script.