Erik Owomoyela

Thoughts

Stuff I think about.

Our solar system is huge

In 1990, Voyager 1 used its camera for the last time and took a panoramic photo of the solar system, including that famous photo of the Earth as a tiny, pale blue dot caught in a sunbeam. (Or, technically, a lens flare.) At the time, the probe was about six billion kilometers away, or 40 times the distance between the Earth and the sun.

Now, after covering another 12 billion kilometers, it may have become the first human-made object to leave the solar system in early September. And despite moving faster (on average) than any other object we’ve ever built, it took 35 years to get that far.

I was born almost four years after Voyager 1’s flyby of Saturn, when its primary mission ended, so I spent my childhood assuming it was long gone already. The fact that it’s still racking up milestones well into my adulthood is a pretty good example of how hard it is to comprehend the scale of the universe we live in.

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October 9, 2012 Space, Storytelling, Read more >

Cultural imperialism and helmet laws

I don’t generally have a lot of nanny-state moments, but this article about how Seattle’s bike helmet law is holding up efforts to launch the Puget Sound Bike Share program had a couple of discordant notes. Repeatedly, the article makes assertions like this:

We live in a helmet-wearing culture and the PSBS plans to own it. “We are proud to start the [bike share program] in Seattle and be a model for other cities,” Lindmark says.

That’s Ref Lindmark, who happens to be the transportation planner for King County Metro as well as president of the PSBS board. Note that his quote seems to have nothing to do with bike helmets, much less our “helmet-wearing culture.” Possibly because that’s not what we have. What we have is a county regulation stating that anyone riding a bicycle without a helmet can be subject to a $30 fine. So the fact that just about everyone in Seattle wears a helmet isn’t a cultural quirk so much as the result of a deliberate policy choice by our government.

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October 7, 2012 Government, Read more >

The New Format fallacy

Back this summer, as part of his less-than-subtle attempt to tell American journalism how to fix itself, Aaron Sorkin inserted his vision of an idealized debate into last year’s Republican primary. The whole thing turned into a case study in how much better The Newsroom was at identifying the problems in modern journalism than it was at coming up with solutions, and how the show managed to be half-right and yet go horribly wrong. But considering what did and didn’t work in this week’s real presidential debate, it’s worth taking another look.

I mentioned right after the debate that I thought its biggest problem was the disengaged approach from moderater Jim Lehrer. That mattered more than usual because this debate actually did include a kind of revolutionary new format, which mostly did away with the tightly structured response times we’re used to from previous presidential debates. It’s a promising trend, but it means we really do need the moderator to play a more agressive role.

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October 6, 2012 Government, Journalism, , , , , Read more >

Where’s the beef?

When I was in high school, and a little bit in college, I took a few turns in my school’s debate club. It was fun, since I like arguing, but I ended up drifting away from it for a couple of reasons. One, I wasn’t that great at it. Two, it turns out that figuring out an objective way to score an argument ends up taking a lot of the fun out of it.

I’m thinking about this because we’ve reached that time in every presidential campaign where I remember why I hate the debates. It’s not that the debates themselves are bad — they’re not great, but they really are the one of the best chances you get to see the candidates argue for their ideas. What bothers me is that the ideas are generally the farthest thing from anyone’s mind.

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October 3, 2012 Government, , Read more >

Sometimes, remakes are good

I’m not sure why people are so fixated on whether The Amazing Spider-Man needed to be made. Alyssa Rosenberg, for instance, begins a terrifically insightful review by declaring, “The only people The Amazing Spider-Man is remotely necessary to is Columbia Pictures, which decided to reboot the franchise shortly after Tobey Maguire finished up his run in the webslinger’s unitard in order to hold on to its rights to the character.”

Which is fair enough, and the fact that we got a broadly similar version of this movie just ten years ago is obviously something of a curiosity. But making some intrinsic judgment about a movie’s necessity feels a little strange, especially when you’re not taking its actual quality into account.

This matters because The Amazing Spider-Man isn’t just good; it’s practically a case study in how a reboot can improve on the original. Which actually seems like a great reason to exist, and a lesson more movies could stand to learn.

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July 22, 2012 Storytelling Read more >

The only reason to care about Final Fantasy Versus XIII

By the time I got around to caring about Final Fantasy Versus XIII — sometime after Final Fantasy XIII came out, and I was lamenting how linear the franchise was becoming — it was already pretty clear that the game was probably stuck in development limbo. So I’m not exactly shocked to hear Kotaku reporting that Square Enix has probably decided to just kill the game.

There were plenty of reasons not to be excited about it anyway. What little the developers revealed made it sound like the game would have something very close to a real-world setting, and the main characters were explicitly compared to yakuza. I was mildly interested to see how they pulled that off, but didn’t really expect to like it.

On the other hand, everything else they said about Versus XIII made it sound like it could be a real game-changer.

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July 22, 2012 Games Read more >

“Because God put a Texan in charge.”

The best line in Matt Ruff’s The Mirage comes near the end, and it feels kind of shoehorned in. “Arabia in a state of nature, untouched by the dreams of the West,” one character muses. “Now that would be an alternate reality…” It’s an acknowledgement that, even though the world portrayed in the novel is the result of an arbitrary set of guidelines imposed on its inhabitants by an outside force, much the same can be said for the real Middle East.

It’s a particularly self-aware approach to alternate history. I wasn’t sure I’d like it at first, or through most of the book, but I think it paid off in the end. The story knows that it’s set in a fantasy world that was created by an intelligence with a sense of irony, rather than any kind of historical what-if. But even so, it spent a lot of time exploring what a modern Arab superstate might look like, and that tension between realism and irony led to most of my problems with the book.

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July 19, 2012 Storytelling, Read more >

Aaron Sorkin is telling us yesterday’s news

HBO, "The Newsroom"

I thought about going with “Aaron Sorkin is yesterday’s news,” but that seemed excessively mean. And probably inaccurate.

A recurring subplot in Sorkin’s previous worst show, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, dealt with a character who was developing a TV show about the United Nations, which he was planning to put on HBO because it was too highbrow for the network TV audience — an idea that Amanda Peet’s fake programming director tried to dissuade him of. So it’s probably telling that now, after Studio 60 collapsed under its own baggage and Sorkin himself got to put a show on HBO, his big idea was apparently to make Studio 60 again.

The Newsroom works considerably better than Studio 60 did, largely because it doesn’t have to sell the idea that a fake version of Saturday Night Live is somehow central to the soul of American society. Unfortunately, the show doesn’t seem to have advanced its analysis of the news industry much beyond a few wistful lines about how much better America was when a bunch of old white men told us what to think every night.

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July 3, 2012 Journalism, Storytelling, Read more >

Consoles are over (not really)

Ages ago, when Sony released the original, PlayStation 3, I remarked on the snowballing size of their consoles by suggesting that the PlayStation 9 would end up being the size (and shape) of the Jupiter monolith from 2001. Then, because I was on a roll, I predicted that Sony would only build one, and that it would beam the games directly into users’ minds.

All of which means I can claim that I totally called this: Sony Computer Entertainment is buying the cloud gaming provider Gaikai, which might allow it to stream next-gen games to current-gen consoles. I just wish I could decide if I was happy about it.

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July 2, 2012 Games, Read more >

John Roberts just saved the Supreme Court, maybe

Part of me thinks that if Bush v. Gore didn’t destroy the court’s reputation as an impartial arbiter of the law — as no less an authority than Justice John Paul Stevens warned it might — then probably nothing will. But public approval of the Court has been dropping over the last few years, and a party-line, 5-4 vote against the biggest, most politically charged issue of President Obama’s presidency probably wouldn’t have helped.

And, apparently, that almost happened. The Court’s ruling on the Affordable Care Act came so close to striking down the law’s individual mandate that both CNN and Fox initailly reported that it had. It established a more radical reading of the Commerce Clause — the idea that Congress can regulate industries that do business across state lines — than even the law’s opponents expected a year ago. And yet some deft maneuvering by Chief Justice Roberts managed to soft-pedal the impact of the ruling and turned him into a hero of judicial restraint.

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June 30, 2012 Government, Read more >