Thursday, May 22, 2008

"He Wants Us to Move the Island"

I hated Season 3 of Lost on ABC. Every episode consisted of someone being brutally beaten, blood everywhere. I don't know how Ben and Sawyer haven't been concussed into total vegetative states at this point.

But this season is thrilling, with it's flash-forwards and flash-backwards, and some of it's strongest epidsodes ever. I was blown away by Episode 7, "Ji-Yeon", when Sun has her baby and Jin is rushing around trying to buy a panda. At the end we realize a flashback has been entwined around a flash-forward, I loved it!

And what about "The Economist", Episode 3, with Sayid in a flash-forward hunting a man for Ben in Berlin. The twists and turns were perfect. Great writing!

This is the first season I've started visiting the various forums about Lost. Check out this site - http://www.timelooptheory.com/the_timeline.htm

I hope the writers don't go for the easy out with time travel. I prefer the notion that the island is actually a sentient being, but not in a gooey Gaia sense.

Look at a tree. It doesn't have sentience in the fashion that humans can understand...if we all had ESP, what would a tree tell you. But they aren't just inert organisms either. The NYT did a story about young birch trees in Alaska that produce a resin disgusting to snow hares, giving the young birch trees a chance to grow. That's pretty nifty, trees fighting back.

Maybe the island is sentient and fighting back, able to shift dimensions, a wormhole-quantuam-pyhsics kind of thing. Much better than overdone time travel.

I'm so going to hate it when this season is over.

Friday, May 2, 2008

Library book, bike, condom, clothesline: What do they have in common?

From seattlepi.com...

It sounds like a weird riddle: What do a bicycle, clothesline, library book, "real" tomato, ceiling fan, microchip and condom all have in common?

My friend and former competitor Eric Sorenson answers the question in a new book he wrote along with the staff of the Sightline Institute entitled "Seven Wonders For a Cool Planet: Everyday Things to Help Solve Global Warming."

The basic idea is that while we have some huge challenges, particuarly related to climate change, we also have some pretty effective technology to deal with those problems. So it's really about transportation, population, energy efficiency, renewable energy, our food supply, resource conservation (the library book) and the information economy. (May 2, 2008)