The House You Grew Up In

My parents recently moved out of Alaska and back down to Oregon where I was born. The reasons were many, but I think they had lived out the adventure in Alaska enough and were ready to return to a place close to home. That was a few months ago, and now Dad is about to start a new job in Salem, where I have never lived, but is relatively close to other family. That means that mom and dad will be getting a house in Salem and moving there, probably very quickly.

Well, this got me thinking. They'll be living in a house I've never been to, have no memories of and is new to them as well. While growing up, we moved several times. First we lived in apartments, then more apartments, then a duplex, then a move over the mountain to a house, then a mobile home on the farm, then an apartment in Alaska, and then a house where I spent my High School days until I moved out to live on a college campus, only returning for Summers. That's a lot of different buildings. All of which I grew up in.

Compare that with my mom's parents, who have lived in their house for as long as I remember. I think mom spent most of her childhood in that house. If she didn't, I've never heard of the place she did. Dad's parents lived in a house in the same town as mom's parents that dad's brother is living in now, so his family is still growing up in that house. Teresa and I live about a 10 minute drive away from the house her dad grew up in, and the family still owns and uses. We visit her grandparents in South Carolina often enough in the house Teresa's mom grew up in. Even Teresa's parents house is where she spent most of her childhood.

So what I'm getting at is that I don't have that "one house you grew up in." I'm not saying that's a bad thing. It's just something that a lot of other people experienced that I didn't. I have memories of each place we lived. Good ones. But I can't really think of going back to any one of those places and calling it home. The house in Alaska probably is the closest thing to that, but that's probably because I have more recent and vivid memories of that one. It's not even the house I lived in the longest, though it may have been for my parents. I would say it's the same for my sister, but she lived in the Alaska house longer than I did, so she might think of that place as where she grew up. Even so, that house isn't around anymore for us to go back to, like the other examples above.

Even after college, I've been moving around a quite a bit. I lived in a townhouse after college, moved to NC for a few weeks and got married, then trucked it up to Boston to live in an apartment for awhile and then a two family home. Then back to North Carolina for a few months and then finally rented a house all to ourselves. One thing I am sure of, we're tired of moving. Another thing I'm sure of, is that we'll probably move again before we're really settled. And even then, I wonder, will we really settle? It seems I may have inherited some sort of nomadic tendencies from my parents, who still haven't settled to my knowledge.

So if you're reading this, I'm curious. Do you have a house you grew up in? Or do you have several houses? Which one feels the most like home? And can you still go back there if you want to? Out of all of the places we have lived, I think I would most like to go back to the farm. Being young and stupid, I wasted a lot of time living on the farm staying indoors. Now my fondest memories are of playing in the barn, the smell of the hay, and the things I did that were out of the ordinary like training a llama to walk over a bridge. So I'm a bit sad that I didn't do more of that when I had the chance. I wish I could do some of that over, but that being impossible, I might like to find a similar place to settle and finally live in a house I can grow up in.

Mythbusters

Have you heard about Mythbusters?

It's been on the Discovery channel for several years now. I had heard about it awhile back, but we don't get those fancy cable stations, so I had never seen it. That was until we got Netflix and I started watching streaming episodes of Mythbusters online. The show is a blast. Sometimes literally.

As you can tell by the name, the premise of the show is that they take "myths" or sayings, or stories, or historical things and they put to the test whether it could actually be done, or if it was just a tall tale, or a lie. Some of the myths are fairly well known, others more obscure. Some of the ways they come up with to prove or disprove the myths are pretty cool too. The two main mythbusters are Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman. Their backgrounds are in special effects and props for movies, so they have the ability to create very inventive contraptions and things to test all of these myths.

I'm not sure what season of the show I'm watching. It's called the 4th collection. I think in the first few seasons it was just Adam and Jamie, but now they've got another three mythbusters, the build team, that tackles myths separately, sometimes together with, the main two guys. I've watched a few of the episodes where it was just the two main guys and I have to say that I enjoy watching the ones with both teams more. They get to tackle more myths in each episode that way, the personalities and interactions of the different mythbusters is very entertaining.

Adam is the goofy, fun, try anything guy. Jamie is the straight man, rarely laughing and just being very practical about it. But both of them are fairly ingenious at testing all of the myths they come up with. They often start with models and small scale tests before ramping it up to a full scale test.

Here are some examples of the things they test:

• Can an airplane achieve lift off from a conveyor belt?
• Can you really build an airplane out of bamboo like MacGuyver did?
• Are the gadgets that Batman uses actually possible?
• Some of the viral videos on the internet are pretty crazy, but are they true?
• Could cockroaches actually survive a nuclear blast?
• Can you really drive a car up in to a semi trailer while both of you are driving 55mph?

And that's just stuff from the 4th collection. There are three other collections to go through, plus some specials. I saw one episode where they went to Arcatraz and reenacted the escape of the only three prisoners ever to escape from the prison.

Anyway, if you're a geek like me, and into science at all, you might like Mythbusters. Check it out on Netflix or watch it on the Discovery channel. You'll be glad you did.

Are You Watching the Olympics?

Last night we watched pairs figure skating at the Vancouver Olympic games. If you didn't watch it yet, and you have it recorded or something, I'm going to spoil it for you so you might want to stop reading this post and come back after you've watched it. Go ahead, you really should.

Sunday night they did the short program, and Monday night they did the free skate, the medal standings determined by the skaters' combined scores. We missed watching the live short program because we were traveling, but we got to see some of it while eating dinner Monday. The story of this Olympics is of the Chinese couple, Shen and Zhao, who have won numerous competitions, but never the Olympic gold medal. They even came out of retirement to compete in Vancouver. Their last chance.

Shen and Zhao Short Program

I don't know much about how they score these things. It doesn't really matter to me either. Teresa and I both were pulling for Shen and Zhao because just watching them skate was a joy. It was noticeably better, more refined, more elegant, than many of the other skaters. Their short program (from Sunday night) was flawless, and it put them at the top of the rankings going into the free skate on Monday. Monday night they skated last, and they had some hiccups, but most of the other competitors were falling all over the place, paving the way for China to win it's first gold in pairs figure skating in a long while. But what was even more exciting was the other Chinese pair, Pang and Tong, who skated a beautiful, error free, program last night and vaulted them to second place.

Pang and Tong Free Skate

So China ended up with the top two places, and they earned it too. Even though I don't really get the scoring system, it appears to work because these two couples did skate the best in my opinion. Of course, I'm probably somewhat influenced by NBC playing up the story of the skaters who were giving it their all for their last shot at Olympic gold, but that's okay. That seems to be what the Olympics are about. It's not just about the competition. It's about the story of the competitors. Sometimes it's frustrating though. They kept mentioning how one of the American skaters was struggling to make ends meet financially in his home life, but came to compete in the Olympics anyway. I'm sure he appreciates them broadcasting his financial situation to the world.

I'm watching the Olympics and I'm enjoying them. It's also fun to watch them with Teresa, who holds her breath every time the skaters do a jump, or the man throws the woman across the ice. You always think they're going to fall, until they do, or they don't. And then you exhale.

My Thoughts on Time Travel

Last night we watched the new Star Trek movie on DVD. We had seen it in the theater, loved it, and I got the DVD for Christmas. We finally had a chance to watch it and so we did. The movie involves time travel a bit, and I had a short discussion Teresa and her parents on how it worked. It got me thinking. I have some pretty strong feelings when it comes to time travel in my science fiction. Sometimes it's done well, and sometimes it's done very poorly. When it's done poorly, it grates on me and takes a lot of the enjoyment out of whatever I'm watching or reading. Since it seems to be something I have such a strong opinion on, I felt it was worth putting on my blog. Before I get into this, be forewarned I'm probably going to talk about books, TV, and movies I've seen that involve time travel, in which case there may be spoilers for those things.

We'll start with the movie. In this case, I think it was done very well, and the plot device itself lends itself to a new franchise of Star Trek that doesn't interfere at all with the previous iterations of Star Trek. Here's how it works. In the movie, people from the future travel through a black hole into the past. At the moment they enter the past, they essentially change history. But they don't change their own history. They have created an alternate reality. Think of it like this. If I go back in time and prevent my parents from meeting. I won't be born. But I was born, since I went back in time to prevent my parents from meeting. So rather that have this paradox, we go with an alternate reality. In the reality I came from, my parents met, I was born, and so forth. In this new reality that I created by prevent my parents from meeting, I will never exist. In this manner, I could travel through time creating any number of realities through my actions without interfering with my own. And when I was tired of messing with things, I could return to my own reality where nothing was different.

The reason this works so well for Trek is because now the crew of the Enterprise can have their own adventures without having to explain why it's different from the adventures of the original series TV show and movies. The moment Nero entered the past, nothing would be the same for the people in that reality. Kirk's life was changed immediately because his father died that day that the timeline was affected, and by proxy so was everyone on the Enterprise. It also explains why the old Spock can't predict the future for the other Spock and Kirk. Because in this reality, things could turn out very differently.

Another good way to do time travel is how they've done it on the TV show, Lost. In Lost, there is no alternate reality (that we know of...). It's all on one time line. But they stick to the mantra that whatever happened, happened. Essentially what this means is that even if I could go back in time on my same timeline, I couldn't change anything in the past because it's already happened. I may not go back to 1970 until I'm 30, 2 years from now, but my future self has already existed in 1970. If I went back on my same time line to prevent my parents from meeting, I wouldn't be able to. The evidence is that I exist. In Lost, everything that the main characters did in the past had already happened when they first showed up on the island. They didn't know it because they hadn't done it yet, but it had happened. My own personal theory, in keeping in line with what ever happened, happened, is that the end of last season has no effect on what will happen to the main characters. The same thing that happened before they went to the past will still happen.

I think one of the episodes involved a character saying that he was wrong about whatever happened, happened. But I think they used that episode to prove him wrong in his assumption. I read series of books that involved warp portals that led to the past. The premise in the book was that the universe would not allow a paradox, so if you went back in time to shoot someone before their time, the gun would misfire, or the bullet would miss, or something of that nature. You could not change the past, even though you could travel to it.

Essentially all of this is an effort to avoid a paradox. I can't go back in time and kill myself because then I wouldn't be able to grow up, go back in time and kill myself. (Note: Alternate realities allow for this, but I wouldn't be killing me, I'd be killing an alternate me.)

So those are my favored time travel applications. Let's look at some bad ones.

Back to the Future. I love these movies. They're fun, and they're geek movies. But the way they do time travel isn't very well done. Marty fails to get his parents together and he starts to disappear. What the heck? And then when he changes things, he can remember how it used to be, but his parents and friends can't. They have instantly changed to reflect the things that Marty changed in the past. This happened recently on Heroes too when Hiro got Ando and Hiro's sister to fall in love at the carnival. When he got back to the present, it's like Ando and his sister were different people. But Hiro remembered what the old timeline used to be. The reason I don't like this way of time travel is because it's confusing. If Hiro changes the past, then there's nothing to go back and change when he gets to the future. Time lines are being created and destroyed. What happens to the past that was erased? If it didn't happen, then why did it need to be changed?

Star Trek actually uses time travel a lot in the other TV shows and movies. Probably the most frustrating thing with this is that they aren't consistent with the theory of time travel they use. Sometimes they're going to alternate universes. Sometimes they're changing their own past Think Tasha Yar as a Romulan, or the crew of DS9 having dopplegangers in a parallel universe. And then just recently, Teresa and I watched the episodes where they discover Data's head and then go back in time. This time, they follow the whatever happened, happened idea. It's also interesting to note that what caused them to travel back in time, was the discovery of something that they left back in the past. Think about it.

For me, it all stems from how believable it is. Star Trek is fiction, but it's supposed to be believable. We're supposed to think that this stuff could actually happen in the future, even if it is a lot of techno babble and untested theories and out and out fiction. When a show or movie does something that just doesn't even make sense, even in the context of it's own universe, it takes a lot out of the enjoyment for me, and I think it's more confusing for much of the audience.

Lost's final season starts tomorrow, and I'm eager to find out if they stick with the same theory of time travel. If they don't, I'll be disappointed, but I'm fairly certain they well. The producers of Lost also directed and produced Star Trek.

I should note a couple extra things. Nearly all of these examples involve traveling in time to the past. Traveling to the past has the hardest implications for paradoxes and manipulating things. Traveling to the future is less exciting. It's more about seeing what people are like a given number of years from now. If you change something in the future, that doesn't affect anything about the course of the future. It just means a person from the past did the affecting instead of a person from the future-present. Also, as much as I hope we someday have star ships and travel in space, I don't actually think time travel is possible. There are two many complications and chances for paradox. Alternate reality is probably the most likely, and it's still a hard thing to grasp and prove today. Time will tell.