Redacted by the Magisterium. Spoilers!

How is Dust a state secret if someone’s daemon dissolves into swirl of golden particles when they die? Be careful with visual leitmotif, folks, lest it makes your movie have an idiot plot.

There was too much “as you know, Bob” in the shooting script. An opening voiceover explains daemons. When Serafina first arrives, she delivers a dissertation on witches. There was a missed opportunity for what would had been a great flashback sequence showing Iorek making his armor from meteorite iron.

But the real problem was the plotting. Weitz’s script reveals that Lyra’s world is one of many parallel worlds in the opening voiceover. In the scene where Lord Azarel requests funding from Jordan college, he says there is a gap between the worlds. (This is not made explicit in the book.) But after all that setup, the movie ends before Lyra tries to rescue Azarel, and more importantly she does not cross into the other world.

This violates squid on the mantelpiece: if you talk about a hole between worlds in act one. Then you damn well better have your protagonist falling through it by act three!

• Pullman opens a can of whup ass on Harry Potter: A friend introduces to me to the book.
• Pullman wins Whitbread Prize
• Interview with Pullman in Thirdway
• Index to articles on Pullman at The Guardian
• BBC Radio adaptation of The Golden Compass
• Expat Selection: The Golden Compass goes in my dessert island selection
• Lyra better not be going to ‘Band Camp’: First rumor that Chris American Pie Weitz to write and direct adaptation.
• Lyra Flees Band Camp: temporary hope that Weitz is off the project.
• Oh god, Lyra is going to band camp: The awful truth revealed, Weitz directing, and Stoppard’s script jettisoned.
• Panserbjørne!: First-look at footage from the movie

There’s also a recent Atlantic Monthly article (subscription required, on how Hollywood eviscerated the book for the movie adaptation. A money quote:

At the [Cannes Film] festival, the studio had delivered a sheet of talking points to the hotel room of at least one cast member, Sam Eilliot, who plays a Texas aeronaut in the film. According to Elliot, the talking points instructed that if the question of Pullman’s religious views came up, the actors should “just avoid it and play stupid.”

I’m planning on seeing the movie, but disappointed that Hollywood caved to the culture war bullies.

Portal may be a spin-off of Half-Life, but the game’s true parent is the 1980′s dice and pencil role playing game Paranoia. In that game, you play characters trapped in a closed society ruled over by a broken AI. Unlike other role playing games of the period, you’re not concerned about surviving, as much as enjoying the comic hell that the Computer and the other players are going to put each other through.

Both of these games are the Book of Job, played for laughs, and if the AI is God, you’re rooting for the devil.

Falwell's machine-instantiated consciousness will spend the next few hundred centuries pursued by an angry walrus demanding to know the whereabouts of a bucket.

kthxbye!

They’ve [biologists] got the science right, but they can be inarticulate and high-handed, torpedoeing their own cause. Their efforts at communication to the public are stiff and a bit arrogant. Meanwhile, intelligent design advocates have hired the PR firm that brought us Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. [Emphasis added.]

Working scientists have to pull triple-duty: teaching, research, and dealing with creationists. The creationists just have to write checks to a consultant.

[It] does not see religious belief as a corruption of rationality, but rather as an over-extension of some of the very mental mechanisms that underlie and make rationality possible. In other words, rather than religion having emerged to serve a social or other purpose, in this view it is seen as an evolutionary accident.

Update: Bitch | Lab points out that dualism is not a new explanation:

The thing is, Mary Douglas, among many others, was already on about this. The whole theory of religion as beginning with the fundamental dualism, and supporting Freudian theoretical frameworks which explore the way this dualism operates and shapes our psyches, this is nothing new. It’s all right there, in anthropological theory, and it’s been developed, too, by feminist theorists.

Yes, but I think what is new and novel here is that Boyer and Bloom are tying this into what we have learned about the structure of the brain:

1. We’ve evolved local optimizations for many behaviors: facial recognition, pattern matching, predicting how animate and inanimate things will behave.
2. But those optimizations bleed over boundaries.

This stark separation of the world into minds and non-minds is what, according to Bloom, makes it eventually possible for us to conceive of minds (or souls) without bodies. This explains beliefs in gods, spirits, an afterlife (we continue without bodies), etc. The other thing that babies are very good at, is ascriptions of intentionality. They are very good at reading desires and intentions in animate objects, and this is necessary for them to function socially. Indeed, they are so sensitive to this that they sometimes overshoot and even ascribe goals and desires to inanimate objects. And it is this tendency which eventually makes us animists and creationists.

It’s a cognitive illusion, one of the same class of effects that make a batter perceive a fastball as rising instead of falling.

If you’re interested in cognitive bias, Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini’s Inevitable Illusions: How Mistakes of Reason Rule Our Minds is a good introduction to the subject.

Though, telling someone that they missed a fastball because of how our brains work may not be as shocking as telling them that their religious beliefs are due to local optimizations in our hominid ancestors’ brains, and that the soul is just another rising fastball.

• Coverville had a special, hour-long show for Elvis Costello’s birthday back at the end of August.

  I like Blur’s version of Oliver’s Army, and the Bangles’ poppy cover of Tear Off Your Own Head.

• Jennifer Pelland has a story on Escape Pod, The Burning Bush: funny, and sacrilegious, but not obscene.

  Jennifer’s a regular at WisCon, and a good friend of Cynthia’s. However, I don’t know if I can forgive her for reading us samples of atrociously bad Fan Fiction.

Can you blame them? After all, Robertson linked Katrina to abortion rights.

The editors at Worldchanging found an admonishment to that sentiment in a series of responses that Spiked got when they asked scientists what would be the one thing they’d like to teach the world. Dr. Phillip Ball says he’d like people to grok that science isn’t a smorgasbord either:

To take one little example, someone who does not believe in relativity will need to come up with another explanation for why gold is yellow rather than silvery, as well as why we cannot then calculate the correct trajectory of the planet Mercury. These deep theories of science form a more-or-less integrated whole, even if the structure gets fuzzy around the edges. Science, unlike art, is not ultimately a matter of taste.

Katha Pollitt’s take comes with considerably more snark:

Under the new plan, creationists could continue their efforts to wreck science education and dumb down their kids–but first, they would pledge to abstain from any real-life benefits of evolutionary theory. Flu vaccines, for example, rely for their effectiveness on yearly reformulation to account for the evolution of the influenza virus. No evolution? Achoo for you!

Gwyneth Jones (WisCon 29 GoH) latches on this in her novel Life. In one section, the protagonist has an overseas gig on a former Malaysian island annexed by an Islamic Indonesian government. The rulers enforce the hejab, ban mobile phones and the web, but are happy to pay her firm for in-vitro fertilization and more exotic reproductive technologies

Daz, a human rights lawyer, sets us straight about all this hypocrisy. It’s nothing to do with Islam. It’s about controlling communication, you dorks.