Springy molecules

My friend Lee Tremblay sent me a link to a great database of molecules. Since I was going to be on a long train ride today, I saved 62 of the molecule description files on my computer, and figured out how to see them in my little Springy viewer.

The physics isn’t really right, but they are fun to look at and play with. And very colorful. 🙂

You can see for yourself by clicking on the molecule below (which is one of my favorites — see if you can figure out which one it is after playing with the program):



Then another film

After talking about two films yesterday, I thought I’d continue the theme by talking about another film.

But not just any film. The other night I went with friends to see “The King’s Speech”. This is the small independent flick that is about to roll over and crush the big budget opposition at the Academy Awards like they are so many purple M&Ms in the path of an oncoming Sherman tank.

How can a little independent movie do such a thing? By not playing fair, of course. You see, most respectable Hollywood movies (eg: “The Social Network”) work by pandering to an audience through paper-thin fast talking characters that are little more than cartoons, placed in situations that merely caricature the human condition.

But “The King’s Speech” doesn’t play by those rules. Instead, it takes the extremely radical and unorthodox approach of (gasp!) respecting its audience’s intelligence. Characters are neither good nor evil, but rather complex, layered, conflicted. The acting, writing and directing don’t tell us what to think, but instead force us to think for ourselves about people and relationships that defy easy characterization.

We actually recognize ourselves in the people we see on-screen. We experience their pain and joy as though it is our own. We forget we are watching a movie.

Not bad for an evening’s entertainment.

Two films

You may very well think this is crazy, but in the last week, after having seen Tom Ford’s film “A Single Man” (2009) and then Vincente Minelli’s “Meet Me in St. Louis” (1944) — a film I was revisiting, having seen it years before — I came to the conclusion that, on a thematic level, they are essentially the same film.

Yes, one is an elegaic adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s bittersweet tale of a day in the life of a man contemplating suicide in 1962, and the other a classic uplifting Hollywood musical adapted from a series of short stories by Sally Benson. One would think the two films couldn’t be more different.

Yet to my surprise, I found the underlying message of the two works to be exactly the same. Essentially, both are saying that life is not about the big picture, the grand meaning, the heroic quest. Rather, the only true buttress we have against death, chaos, annihilation, is in the small details, the little connections with each other, the moments of discovered beauty in the ordinary course of a day. These are the things — the things we are often too busy to notice, in our headlong rush for meaning — that fill our lives with grace.

This is of course also the theme of Thorton Wilder’s “Our Town”, and many other works. It’s also a very Buddhist idea. Perhaps my week in Kyoto made me more aware of this dynamic. Perhaps I was drawn to see these two very different (yet oddly similar) films because I had just spent a week in Japan.

Something beautiful and true

In a meeting today with some fellow educators, at one point the conversation took a surprisingly negative tone. I showed an inspirational video from somebody who was clearly delighted by what they were showing and talking about, after which one of the educators in the room said, in effect: “Well, that could just turn most kids off. That person seems to be showing off that they’re good at this.”

The more I thought about this comment, the more horrified I became by the reasoning behind it — it reminded me a bit of Kurt Vonnegut’s story Harrison Bergeron. If someone loves what they are talking about, and is sharing their enthusiasm and joy with an audience, I’ve always thought that this is a good thing. Sure, we can’t all play guitar like Jimmy Paige, or dance like Fred Astaire, or tell a joke like Jerry Seinfeld, but does that mean their performances should not be shown, because we worry that kids might be intimidated?

If we are failing to teach our kids the joy and excitement and beauty in ideas, is the solution to shield our kids from the joy and excitement of others? In my view (and I realize that this is a radical view in some circles) if we are finding our kids systematically failing to learn something we know to be beautiful and true, then the fault is not with our kids, but with ourselves.

Springy skeletons

Instead of making a way to create general springy shapes, another interesting direction is to make a way to create springy characters that walk or fly or hop or crawl or slither.

And one thing that those characters usually have in common is that their limbs don’t change length. Arms, legs, necks, torsos — every part of a skeleton can all be quite flexible in how they bend, but the limbs of your skeleton don’t usually grow or shrink when you move.

Unless of course you are Reed Richards, in which case I am absolutely thrilled and honored that you are reading this. Email me — we’ll have lunch. Bring Susan.

Anyway, it turns out that this “limitation” — limbs not growing or shrinking in length — is really great for puppeteering, since the limbs of such skeletons move more like actual arms and legs.

But why take my word for it? Try it for yourself.

A dog named Ethyl

I was showing some springy applets to my friend Lee Tremblay, who is a biochemist and composer, and Lee said it would be cool if people could construct and play with springy 3D molecules.

Actual molecules have all sorts of forces between their atoms that make them want to take on certain shapes. In an accurate simulation of a molecule, moving one atom would cause the other atoms to move around in very particular ways.

But I didn’t want to take all that on in one evening. So I figured that today I’d just build the computer graphics part of it, and then Lee and I could put in the proper forces later. So today I’ve just added 3D to my little springy ball and stick model, as well as the ability to change size and color of each “atom”.

The frisky little critter below with three legs and two tails is not, appearances to the contrary, a Martian dog. But it is the 3D shape of a molecule of ethyl alcohol — the same alcohol that leads us humans to have unexpected fun and sometimes unexpected babies.

Well, maybe it is a Martian dog, and maybe her name is Ethyl. You can try out the new 3D version of my springy thingy toy by clicking on Ethyl below.


ethanol2

Rewind

Imagine you can rewind time. Perhaps you’ve said something that has foolishly damaged a friendship, or have just barely missed a crucial deadline, or have played the wrong card in poker, or maybe you’ve just stepped out from the curb the wrong way and twisted your ankle. Go back five minutes, or ten, or an hour, and try again.

This would be a super power, giving you vast leverage in the world. Of course there would have to be some rules (there are always rules). The second time around, things might not turn out the same way they did the first time. The universe is an unpredictable place, and reality is always in play. If your next time around puts you in the path of an oncoming bus, then you run out of do-overs.

To make it more interesting, suppose everybody has the same super power. Sure you can buy that stock the day before it suddenly doubles in price, but so can anybody else. What kind of a world would we then live in?

Unfortunately (or, more likely, fortunately) we will never find out. But we can create a game that simulates the experience. Imagine a game world where you can always go back in time and try things differently, but where the game is also simulating other players who have the same power.

To you, it will appear as though those simulated players always make the best choice. After all, if they don’t make the best choice, then they will have just gone back in time and done it again.

I don’t know that anyone has ever made a game like this. It would be fun to try.