HBO has posted a short featurette about their upcoming Game of Thrones adaptation, in which we can see some of the actors in costume for the first time. Here’s Arya Stark, Tyrion Lannister, and Daenerys Targaryen:

This weekend I attended a really fascinating lecture titled Speaking of Paradoxes which was presented by philosophy professor Graham Priest and hosted by the New York City Skeptics. Priest began by positing the following scenario: “Suppose you have professor Smith, and he’s completely at odds with Professor Brown down the hall. Smith tells all his students not to listen to anything that Brown says, and to emphasize the point he writes on his blackboard ‘Everything written on the blackboard in Room 33 is false!’ But Professor Smith has made a mistake. Actually he’s the one lecturing in Room 33.” So is the statement “Everything written on the board in Room 33 is false” a true or false statement? If it’s true then it’s false in which case it’s true in which case it’s false, etc. This is a classic conundrum called the Liar Paradox which has bedeviled philosophers for thousands of years.

The foundations of logic in Western philosophy were laid by Aristotle, who argued that all propositions must logically be either true or false. If a statement isn’t true then it must be false and if it isn’t false then it must be true. For a statement to be both true and false is a contradiction, and contradictions are impossible in formal logic, therefore if a line of reasoning leads to a contradiction, there must be something wrong with the line of reasoning. But in all the years that philosophers have been arguing about the Liar Paradox, no one’s ever come up with a problem in the line of reasoning, so maybe, Priest argues, what we have to do is question Aristotle’s Law of Non-Contradiction itself. This is apparently a somewhat heretical notion. But despite its long pedigree, Priest argues that Aristotle’s defense of the law is actually pretty flimsy, resting as it does on the presumption that if a statement such as “A and not A” is true, then it follows that anything is true. Priest argues that this is nonsensical.

Instead of dividing all statements into “true” and “false,” he proposes a grid consisting of “true,” “false,” “true and false,” and “neither true nor false.” Apparently some ancient Buddhists played around with this idea for a few centuries before ultimately abandoning it — regrettably, in Priest’s view. No matter how hard you shove, Liar Paradox arguments such as “this statement is false” just aren’t going to fit into either the “true” or “false” categories, but “true and false” seems like a pretty good fit for it (or maybe “neither true nor false”).

He also discussed a number of other classic paradoxes, such as: Are there fewer even numbers than there are numbers total? Common sense would seem to say yes — that there are half as many even numbers as numbers total — but then, aren’t there an infinite number of even numbers and an infinite number of numbers total, and doesn’t infinity = infinity? There’s also Zeno’s Paradox — Before you can get to point A, don’t you first have to pass through a point halfway between where you’re standing and point A? And before you can get halfway to the halfway mark, don’t you first have to pass through a point halfway there? And before that don’t you have to pass through a point halfway there? And isn’t it possible to keep iterating this process infinitely, and so how is it possible to move at all, if there’s an infinitely expanding set of tasks you must accomplish before you can get anywhere? These ones Priest indicated have been settled.

One that hasn’t been settled apparently is this: It seems sensible to say that one nanosecond in a person’s maturation process can never make such a dramatic difference that it would be sensible to call that person a “child” at one instant and then an “adult” one nanosecond later. So take a small child and fast forward time one nanosecond and ask, “Is this person still a child?” Yes, according to the principle established above — one nanosecond just can’t make that much difference. The problem is, you can keep repeating that process and by that same seemingly firm logic the “child” will never become an “adult,” even if the compounded nanoseconds add up to seventy years.

Really cool, thought-provoking stuff. Anyway, these lectures are all recorded and are eventually made available online, if anyone’s interested.

So since I’ll be appearing next month as a putative zombie expert, I figured I should actually sit down and watch some of the zombie movies that have come out in the last few years:

A short interview with me just went live over at the website for The Living Dead 2. Here’s a sample:

Was this story a particularly challenging one to write? If so, how?

It was, yes. This is the first sequel I’ve written, and it’s hard. I have a lot more perspective now on why movie sequels are often so terrible. A sequel has to make sense and be enjoyable whether or not you’re familiar with the original story, and has to stay true to the established characters without just repeating what came before. For a long time I was stuck, since by the end of “The Skull-Faced Boy” the conflicts and agendas of the characters are all pretty much on the table, and I wasn’t sure how to maintain tension carrying things forward. My big break came when I considered creating a new main character, Park, whose agenda and relationships to the existing characters would be completely fresh. And so as not to repeat myself, I made him completely different from my original protagonist, Jack. Jack is an ordinary young man, sensitive, kind of a doormat type, whereas Park is a very, very dangerous soldier.

A few interesting topics that have appeared lately on the Skeptoid podcast:

Did Stalin secretly attempt to engineer an army of human-ape hybrids? Are such hybrids even possible?

Do certain martial arts masters have the ability to paralyze or kill with the lightest of touches?

Did Jewish slaves build the Egyptian pyramids, as described in the Bible?

Does the Myers-Briggs Personality Test, which assigns ratings such as INFP, have any validity?

Are performances of Macbeth cursed because Shakespeare used actual witches’ incantations that he took from King James’ treatise Demonology?

(We interviewed Brian Dunning of Skeptoid for Episode 5 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast.)

So I just watched this movie I’d never heard of called Pandorum, because it’s a free download on Netflix, despite the fact that it’s only got a 28% approval rating at Rotten Tomatoes, and it actually wasn’t half bad, I thought. It’s basically The Descent in outer space. I don’t know what’s up with all the haters — I’d give this movie at least a 50 or 60 easy, and there are so few decent horror/sf films that come out that you just can’t be that picky.

One of the most fascinating podcasts I’ve discovered in the last few years is The Bible Geek, hosted by Robert M. Price. Price recently mentioned on his show that his family is in some financial difficulty and could use whatever support listeners can provide, so I figured now was as good a time as any to mention his show:

Price was a member of the Jesus Seminar, a group of scholars who convened in order to analyze the Gospels and separate the real history from the mythological gloss. (They received an enormous amount of publicity at the time for their method of voting on the veracity of Bible verses using colored beads.) At the outset of the project, Price had assumed, along with the rest, that there was some strata of historical data in the Gospels, and that all one had to do was strip away all the material that had plainly been lifted from earlier stories or had plainly been added in later, and the reliable history would stand revealed. As the project progressed, the group was stunned to discover just how much material could be shown to be non-historical. At this point, as Price tells it, the more conservative participants became uncomfortable with the whole endeavor and shut the project down. Price now believes that essentially nothing about the life of Jesus can be shown to be historically verifiable — there may have been a historical Jesus, but if so no convincing evidence of this fact remains. This is what has put him on the outs with mainstream scholarship. According to Price, none of the extra-Biblical references to Jesus that have turned up really prove much. Tacitus and Josephus are both writing decades after Jesus would have lived, and Josephus seems to have been tampered with by later authors. (Josephus was a Jew, but the one passage that mentions Jesus — and which seems to have been randomly inserted into the text — seems to have been written by a Christian.) And Tacitus is merely reporting on what the Christians of his day believed to be the story of Jesus — there’s no implication that Tacitus is vouching for the accuracy of those beliefs, or that he would have any way of knowing anyway.

Anyway, regardless of whether you think Price is right or wrong, his ideas are weirdly fascinating, particularly for fantasy fans. One idea he’s talked about on the show is the Gnostic belief that our world was created by an incompetent godlike being called the Demiurge, and that the reason our world is so messed up is because this being botched the job so badly. On this view, Jesus had come as an emissary of the true creator God, to deliver a message along the lines of, “Management is aware of your concerns and is taking steps to remedy the situation.” The Second Coming, in their view, would have been the true creator God coming in to clean up the mess. In the Bible as we know it, Goliath is described as being nine feet tall — truly a giant. But in an earlier version of the story found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, Goliath is described as being merely six feet tall — still unusually large in the ancient world, but a lot more believable. Clearly, sort of like the time your grandfather caught that fish, the story grew with the telling. When early Christians were spreading their religion, they encountered a lot of pushback from pagans who pointed out that the stories and rituals surrounding Jesus were totally ripped off from long-standing stories and rituals surrounding Osiris, Dionysus, etc. Early church fathers like Justin Martyr had an explanation for this: Satan, knowing that Jesus would come, had pre-emptively founded a whole bunch of fake religions with similar stories and rituals in order to confuse people once the real deal came along. I really can’t say what I’m more in awe of there — the ingenuity or the chutzpah.

The Bible Geek is particularly interesting for writers because you’re talking about extremely close readings of stories that have been rewritten and rewritten and rewritten by countless hands over centuries. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such detailed analysis of how and why a story might be edited, and how you can take a close look at a story and make reasonable inferences about what the previous drafts must have looked like, and what got moved where, and what’s clearly a piece of an earlier version that just doesn’t fit anymore. One thing that happens a lot in the Bible is that communities will get separated and their versions of a particular story will start to diverge, and then when those peoples unite again they feel obligated to maintain both versions as separate events, which is why you’ll often see the same basic sequence of events repeating itself. (One example is that there are two slightly different versions of the loaves and the fishes miracle. The second time, the apostles are just as confused and astounded as they were the first time, which doesn’t make sense. Obviously it’s two different versions of the same story.)

Here’s an interesting interview with Jonathan Gottschall, adjunct assistant professor at Washington and Jefferson College, about his book Literature, Science, and a New Humanities, in which he argues for taking a more scientific approach to literary studies. On the problems with current methodology he says:

The idea you just identified — that what literary scholars do is go and hunt and peck around through texts for evidence that confirms their idea, no matter how far out their idea is — is the problem. If you do that, you will find evidence for your idea, no matter how weak your idea is. I say in the book that the problem with literary methodology is it’s never wrong … no determined literary critic has ever failed to find evidence for his preferred idea, so that’s a huge problem. If nothing can be wrong then nothing can be right.

And:

There’s this crippling reliance on the authority of gurus — on Freud and Lacan, Derrida, and so on. That is a bit of a scandal. It used to be that I would read papers, when I was in graduate school especially, and the first couple sentences would start with, “Jacques Derrida said, ‘There is nothing outside the text,’” and from that premise the whole argument is based, just upon what this guy said.

As an example of a more evidence-based approach, he cites his chapter The Heroine with a Thousand Faces, about using statistical analysis to evaluate claims about literature:

Feminist fairy tale scholars argue that there’s a lot of emphasis put on women’s beauty in Western fairy tales compared to men’s beauty, and little girls get the message — and it’s a damaging message — that in order to be valuable, in order to be the heroine in the story, you have to be beautiful. And they argue that that’s a cultural construct, it’s just made up, there’s no basis in human nature for that, it just comes out of certain historical elements of Western culture. Well, that’s an easy thing to test. What you do is you go and look at references to beauty in other folk and fairy tale traditions, and that’s what we did — we go all around the world, across centuries, across very, very diverse sorts of cultures … and you see it’s the same patterns pop up, and if the same patterns of gender and so forth keep popping up around the world, then it seems quite unlikely that all these different societies just happen to be culturally conditioning in the exact same way. If you find regularity across cultures in these variables then probably it has a basis in shared elements of human psychology. So for the beauty question we found that the feminists were right about Western culture — there are a lot more references to female attractiveness than male attractiveness in Western fairy tale collections, about 6 to 1 … but then if you look all around the world you find exactly the same pattern … and we’re able to check in female-edited collections versus male-edited collections and the patterns are still there. This does not seem to be a product of cultural conditioning.

Here are two pretty good songs that iTunes Genius turned up for me:

“Sweet Sweet Heartkiller” by Say Hi To Your Mom

 

“Lolita” by Elefant (NSFW)

Ha. Love this T-shirt. Words to live by.

It’s a little hard for me to believe that anyone reading this hasn’t already seen or isn’t already planning to see Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, but just in case … go see Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. And don’t take my word for it. Simon Pegg, a man of impeccable taste, also urges you attend.