Dear pro-life advocates:

I get your opposition to abortion. I don’t agree with it, but I understand where you’re coming from. That said, I don’t recall any pro-choice advocates coming into churches armed with a handgun to assassinate anyone associated with your movement. Rhetoric has consequences.

Ten years ago this month, I signed up as a Seti@home volunteer. I might have mentioned Seti@home before; it’s a distributed computing project in which volunteers donate idle computer power to process chunks of data from radio telescopes to find potential signals from other civilizations. In that time, according to my account page, my various computers have performed 112.32 quadrillion calculations for the project. Multiply that kind of number-crunching by a couple million volunteers and you have one of the biggest computing projects ever undertaken. In an interview with Science Friday commemorating the project’s ten-year anniversary, one of the lead scientists notes that Seti@home is a success whether or not it pinpoints a signal. If we discover evidence of other civilizations, it will be a profound development in human history. If we eventually realize that we are indeed alone, that will be just as profound.

In the meantime, my computer will continue to crunch the numbers, if for no other reason than that it’s marginally more useful than most of the other things I make it do.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog is, from the very beginning, a quintessentially French novel. It contains weighty meditations on philosophy, the aesthetics of Dutch still life paintings, and the absurdity of life. And it contains the most ridiculously effusive praise for the film The Hunt for Red October that you will ever see in print. The book is a glimpse into the interior lives of two characters who inhabit vastly different strata of French society, but have much in common. Renee is a concierge of a tony apartment building in Paris where she tends to the needs of its upper-class residents, most of whom she detests. Renee possesses a brilliant mind and is a self-taught intellectual, but she is determined to keep her fierce intelligence hidden from view and is content to play the part expected of her: that of the lower-class, poorly educated working stiff. Paloma is a 12-year-old girl living in the same building with her well-to-do but dysfunctional family. Like Renee, she’s bright and perceptive, but she’s quite taken with the idea of setting fire to herself and burning down the apartment in the process.

Renee and Paloma are little more than familiar faces to each other when the book begins, living separate lives and thinking dismal thoughts about most of the people around them. Unbeknownst to both of them, they share a love of Japanese culture and art. And when an elegant, charming Japanese businessman moves into the building, they can barely contain their excitement.

Muriel Barbery writes with wit and compassion; her fondness for these sad, lonely characters is evident on every page. As I was reading it, I kept wondering how an American writer would have written the same story. We seem more inclined to view class as a fluid concept rather than a fixed characteristic, when we acknowledge it all. If Hollywood tried adapting this book, it would probably end with Renee and her Japanese neighbor falling in love and Paloma reconciling with her family. The book’s actual ending is much messier and uncertain, which is as it should be. Perhaps this quote of Renee’s best sums up the tone of the book:

Human longing! We cannot cease desiring, and this is our glory, and our
doom. Desire! It carries us and crucifies us, delivers us every new day
to a battlefield where, on the eve, the battle was lost.

My brother lives in the Bay Area, so it was with more than passing interest that I read Paul Krugman’s piece on how California is completely screwed, both economically and politically. California provides a good illustration of the schizophrenic nature of the American body politic. Everybody likes the public and social services that government provides, but nobody wants to pay for them. And so California has deficits that dwarf the actual budgets of many countries. Further complicating matters is the fact that California can’t issue a parking ticket without putting it to a statewide referendum. I’m all for participatory democracy, but we elect state representatives to make decisions about spending and taxes. The people of California need to do some intensive soul-searching about what kind of future they want for themselves and stop looking to former movie stars to solve their problems for them.

A Terminator movie without time travel is a bit like a football game without a touchdown. But this chapter of the 25-year old franchise is a fun ride into the post-apocalyptic future only briefly glimpsed in the previous movies. Those killer robots sure know how to build some badass-looking motorcycles and fighter jets. Christian Bale plays John Connor, who is not yet the leader of the surprisingly well-equipped human resistance (but who is already regarded with a certain amount of reverence for reasons never fully explained). The movie describes how Connor does eventually become that leader, but the story is mostly an excuse for some remarkable chase scenes and plenty of explosions. Sam Worthington, an Australian actor who plays a man with an uncertain past, is quite good and I’m looking forward to seeing him in James Cameron’s Avatar.

I remember reading that this story was supposed to mark the beginning of another trilogy, but I’m not sure audiences are interested in a series of futuristic war movies. Part of the pleasure of Terminator movies is that they offer the spectacle of killer robots wreaking havoc in humdrum present-day society. The movie also suffers from a criminal lack of Summer Glau. As you might guess, I’m still a little bitter that Fox cancelled the Terminator television series.