Batman vs. Charles Dickens

Quora posted my answer to the Huffington Post! The nancyhua.com version below has a longer ending than the Huffington/Quora because I feel more free to ramble on my own site (perhaps you’re surprised to discover I show restraint when writing on other sites, or at all. Here’s a way for you to contrast the difference between me writing haphazardly and even more haphazardly). This answer is rife with spoilers of Dickens, Dark Knight, and the meaning of life, so if you don’t want to be initiated into the mysteries of the universe, resist the urge to read on:

What Do You Think of Christopher Nolan Using A Tale of Two Cities for Inspiration for the Script to The Dark Knight Rises?

I didn’t notice Nolan was using A Tale of Two Cities until the Act 5 (or 7?…) burial scene where Gordon quotes directly from it, “‘Tis a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done,” at which point the incongruous stuff such as the scenes of blue collar people tearing fur coats off trophy wives suddenly had an explanation. Those scenes otherwise make zero sense to me: how are the middle class citizens of Gotham suddenly villains staging executions and mock trials?

Anyway, after realizing Nolan was drawing from Dickens, upon closer examination the parallels are pretty tight, right down to the twist ending of A Tale of Two Cities where Madame Defarge turns out to be the daughter of that murdered family paralleling Nolan’s reveal of that billionaire lady turning out to be the daughter of Ra’s Al Ghul. I guess even though Nolan tries to beat you over the head with it, you can’t be heavy handed enough these days, especially with old stuff like Dickens.

Aside from the big reveal in both works turning out to be that the orphaned girl grows up to be the mastermind killer seeking to avenge her family through mass murder, other parallels include:
1. Secret backstory: Batman, billionaire woman, Catwoman vs. Dickens’ Darnay, the DeFarges, the prisoner doctor dad.
2. Secret societies: Legion of shadows and conspiracy among the commoners such as the cement truck people vs. Dickens’ Jacques peasants conspiracy that began the French revolution.
3. “Recalled to life” and inventing a new name from prison: the child, Bane, and Batman escaping from the prison and Catwoman wanting a new identity vs Dickens’ doctor and Darnay each separately escaping the Bastille.
4. Twin or mirror identities in which one dies for the other: Batman and Wayne faking deaths vs Darnay and that drunk guy switching places in the final scene.
5. Faithful, bachelor servant: Alfred vs. Lorry.
6. Incompetent, oblivious leaders or the leaders being lecherous scumbags: that rich guy Catwoman seduces and uses as her cover or the mayor at his football game vs. the monsigniere.
7. Using the rich’s own weapons against them: using Wayne’s armory against Gotham vs imprisoning the rich in the Bastille.
8. The courtroom mock trial scene.
9. Hero returning to save the commoners who cry out for his help: Batman becomes Batman again and somehow goes from the Asiatic prison to Gotham because he can’t stand the sufferings of his citizens on TV. Similarly, Darnay returns to Paris because his old servant writes him pleading for help against injustice.
10. Misunderstood nobleman hero: Wayne and Darnay, both donate their entire fortunes to the poor before the works even begin (Wayne turns out to have invested everything in his nuclear energy project and Darnay forsakes his entire estate and changes his name, hoping the commoners will appreciate taking over his lands).
11. Baleful, brutish servant who executes mastermind mistress’s bidding: Bane and Madame Defarge’s husband.

Both Nolan and Dickens are firmly in the top 1%. Like Nolan, Dickens was a wildly successful celebrity writer in his times, widely acknowledged as a genius. However, Dickens was born into poverty, so while A Tale of Two Cities is strongly critical of the chaos and popular uprising, he was passionately empathetic with the poor and also condemned their abuse and the decadence of the rich. The donation of Wayne Manor to orphan boys would probably be something Dickens would admire.

The chaos and violence against the rich is something criticized in both Dickens and The Dark Knight Rises- even Catwoman repents and decides that maybe it wasn’t what she wanted after all. A Tale of Two Cities struck me as being about karma and breaking the cycle of evil: Madame Defarge allows vengeance to consume her life so that she’s indifferent between good and evil. As long as you allow this to happen, you’re doomed no matter what your original victimization was because despite coming from a family victimized by the rich, Defarge is clearly the villain in Dickens’ book who ends up pitilessly killing many innocent people. In contrast to Madame Defarge, Darnay tries to break the cycle of careless decadence by forsaking his lands and title. After assuming a new name and occupation, he achieves happiness and love. Darnay’s twin/mirror, the drunk dude whose name I forget, also breaks his cycle of wastrel drunkenness by taking Darnay’s place at the guillotine, finally redeeming himself and gaining a tragic yet noble sort of dignity and heroism.

Like A Tale of Two Cities, The Dark Knight Rises has a lot of ideas about rebirth. The billionaire lady is stuck in the past and loses all likeability- I don’t understand her obsession with her weird quest to redeem her dad to the point that she commits a mass murder-suicide. Alfred is continuously bugging Wayne to finally break out from the past which he ends up successfully doing, which I guess is supposed to be a positive ending. Catwoman is also all about breaking from her past and also finally succeeds, which is supposed to be a victorious note in the movie.

Thematically Nolan and Dickens are both saying that even if stuff sucked a lot in the past (like Mom dying in prison and everyone getting the plague and having to climb out of the pit you were born in with a weird, deformed, masked dude as your only friend), you have to somehow get over it! Life is unfair and it sucks! But there can be heroes (ranging from vigilante billionaires/ French noblemen to petty thieves/ drunken lawyers ) who are self sacrificing enough to try to rescue the community from the injustice they’ve been suffering under for ages. And instead of chaotically turning against said heroes and vilifying them for sticking their necks out, the community should be noble and self sacrificing in turn, the way those policemen finally got out of their homes and senselessly/ admirably rushed into a mob of criminals shooting machine guns… And unlike how Madame Defarge convinced the French Revolutionaries to guillotine Darnay anyway despite first acquitting him- don’t do that.

Even if you got dumped by Maggie Gyllenhaal, or had your family murdered by rich men, or had your family and childhood crush murdered by criminal men, or were forced into a life of crime, or the woman you love will never love you back even though you explicitly told her you LOVED her (she can’t love you bc you’re Batman/ an alcoholic/ not as cool as some blue-eyed, blond politician), or you were wrongfully imprisoned in the Bastille or some horrible pit for 17 years, if you don’t get over it, change, and move on with life, you’ll become a joyless jerk who even the aged family servant finds unbearable and escapes from. Despite initially seeming cool, principled, and focused while you’re menacingly and impassively knitting the names of your enemies into shrouds, eventually everyone will decide you’re actually a relentless psycho that they’re scared to hang out with, chalking up the regrettable night they spent with you to meaningless rainy, dark, mansion sex and living happily ever after with the ex-thief turned do-gooder.

Sure, you killed a lot of people and destroyed a lot of wealth. But after everything your enemies are happy and you end up dead! (Spoiler: Madame Defarge gets shot by a maid. (Other spoiler: Gotham is actually Pittsburgh by the sea! Wow! Go Steelers!)) So even if you have a really good reason and suffered a lot unjustly due to people who don’t deserve the love or money they’re swimming in, don’t turn evil. Instead, be awesome and help others because there are always impoverished orphans who are way worse off. Orphans like Oliver Twist or Josh Gordan-Levitt remind you life is not all about you, and your suffering, and your revengenda. And if you do become really powerful one day, don’t act like those jerks who hurt you. Even though they suck and annoyingly always seem to avoid punishment, just let it go, work on using science or getting rich so you can solve the energy crisis (hopefully in a less obviously WMD way to the extent that Morgan Freeman put a timer on the thing), and enjoy life by falling in love, vacationing in Florence, becoming the celebrity author of David Copperfield whose works inspire blockbusters by celebrity writer-directors like Nolan, etc.

It’s a positive message saying everyone should have some compassion and that any individual can be a hero as long as there’s love. I think the message came out more naturally in A Tale of Two Cities than in The Dark Knight Rises, but it’s there in both.

Iceland

The word Iceland is poetic and mysterious. All Icelandic words sound like they have magical powers, intended to be tossed off in rapid, low mutters by wizards and elves, written only in fancy script on scrolls made from the skins of sea monsters. Let’s play the language game! Guess the recipients of these Icelandic names: Grimsey, Thingveller, Eldfell, Strokkur, Vatnajokull, Gullfoss, Hagkaup, Vik.

Despite having all of Sunday free to get from the Olympic stadium to Gatwick, we almost missed our flight to Iceland. We wanted to buy sleeping bags and hiking shoes, yet ended up spending 2+ hours in some shop in Kensington. British people already have the advantage of sounding professional and smart even if they’re going on about the dumbest things, and this phenomenal Kensington shoe salesman was a case in point. After subtly criticizing our existing shoes and making Sherlock-Holmesian inferences about our lives based on our feet, he explained foot mechanics and had us submit to measurements and experiments wherein he determined my left foot is supinated, thus requiring special shoes! I declined, to his grief for my extremely rare foot problem. In contrast, Dilip almost bought orthopedics from this guy. “Dilip, do not buy those 80 Pound orthopedics from this camping store dude. We came here to get sleeping bags.”

By the time we were back at our host’s place and heading to the train, the automated tube ticket machines were closed and we faced an endless line to buy them from humans. Luckily we found 2 others going towards Gatwick so we all split a cab. We then ran from the Gatwick express to the airline. Sadly we missed the check-in by 5 minutes.

For every normal person who does not read confirmation emails from airlines: Icelandic Air does not allow online check in. There is a 90 minute window 45 minutes before the flight during which you have to be physically lined up at the desk at the airport to check in. We arrived 40 minutes before the flight and the lady hastily escaping said without eye contact, “Everything’s closed, and no more flights tonight.” My powers of seduction failed, as always when I am annoyed. My mother was always good at getting strangers to break the rules for her but, alas, I’m not as consistently immediately charming to stupid people. I blame this on having been an unfashionable nerd in a strange land from ages 10 to 13- this must’ve put in a subtle kink in my mass appeal, whereas my mother never had a moment where she wasn’t universally admired by idiots and geniuses alike.

We ran to another desk and after gasping, “Can we make a run for the flight despite being 5 minutes late for checkin?” the guy’s phone rang, he nodded, and sent us back to the desk from whence we came. We then checked in and got on the flight. My only explanation for this is that it’s the airlines modus operandi to give everyone minor freak outs before allowing them to check in anyway. Maybe it’s their way of teaching everyone the important lesson of reading emails from Iceland Air.

Before arriving in Iceland, I knew little about it. Some seductively simplistic, ultimately nonsense article by Michael Lewis about Iceland had given me nondescript expectations of a place somehow surreal. On top of that, Bjork was so annoying in Dancer in the Dark (maybe bc Gondry wasn’t directing? Gondry was MIT’s cool artist in residence who’d party at Senior House) I swore off her music forever. However Lewis was right about one thing- no one in Iceland listens to Bjork either. Anyway, this is the real deal about Iceland:

At the airport, magazines are $20. Blond, tall people are beautiful, but there are only 300K of them. All people in the service industry look like massive supermodels, with gigantic yet perfectly formed fingers and eyeballs. One Icelandic person could probably give an average person 1.6 whole-body, perfectly poreless, skin grafts (I filed this information with other creepy facts: if I want the best quality skin or probably any body part, Iceland’s the place). The people who served me food and checked out my groceries were all golden gods. On an unrelated note, I bought a lot more whale meat than needed (it’s totally tasteless and deep blood red. May be a scam- who would know?).

In Iceland, there exist several sides of several fluffy goats that are black. The big-headed ponies with stubby legs and feathered bangs stomping around in people’s yards waiting to bounce you around the mountains can also be eaten cooked with thick pony sauces in local restaurants alongside puffins and delicious baby seals. The fish, though fresh, is heavily salted and served with dark, dense bread. Random stores stock gloves made of Arctic foxes and other soft, furry animals.

Iceland lacks diversity of flora and fauna, even more so than Ireland. No native trees exist on Iceland so all the trees you see are neatly and meticulously planted by humans. There are no mosquitos! There are no roaches (except as pets??)! Iceland is one of my favorite places so long as the no-pest thing lasts. My love of nature is conditional. I like natural beauty, but nature that’s too vibrant can easily become an overabundance of annoying animals: I like space and I don’t like bugs touching me.

When you leave the giant ring road encircling Iceland, you’re at once lurching on unpaved rocks that’ll lead you to some natural wonder like a spring or waterfall. We saw stinky geysers with boiling water running in rivulets on the steaming ground under our shoes, hiked on a glacier sliced with sky blue crevices (“kull” where my toes froze in my vibrams (I never bought hiking shoes, remember!)), had our hair swept crazily by the wind on a black sand beach, walked behind an icy waterfall (“foss”), and picked up hitchhikers from a silicon mud hot spring to Reykjavik. The phone GPS was wrong regarding several locations so we did a fair bit of grinding over mountains of volcanic rocks.

After trying some airbnb’s in the rest of Europe, in Iceland we roughed it and slept in the car. I love camping in cars- that’s my level of nature loving right there. I like getting out of the house, but I don’t like getting all the way into a tent, so cars are perfect. Also, I often strategize about how to be an efficient homeless person and this was an opportunity to put some ideas to the test.

It drizzled the first day but was sunny after that. The drizzle was benign and light, somehow suiting the landscape and bringing out all the lichens’ colors. The infrastructure is amazing for such a small country- there were Subways, no garbage, and cozy streets patrolled by prim, sedate, fat-tailed cats- probably nicer than most of the places in Europe or America. For a country where in August it’s still light at 11pm and light again starting at 4am, the Hagkaup 24 hour stores are awesome. They have aisles full of everything from American cereal to knitting equipment (there were 2 aisles full of yarn). After cramped, dusty Europe, it’s a relief to find a place that’s more like America. The tiny, closed-in-the-afternoon, closed-after-7pm, charge-you-for-plastic-bags, pharmaceutical-less, 1-type-of-apple European grocery stores become tiresome so fast. Apparently everyone in Italy is so busy enjoying life, drinking wine and coffee, having long, animated conversations while smoking cigarettes and having sex that there are zero enterprising immigrants manning 24 hour pit stops. Outrageous! Italy: not for me. Iceland: 5 stars!

Is Charity Ever Immoral?

What are top Pittsburgh high school students interested in math, science, and computer science doing in the summers?

Many of the smartest math, science, and cs people I knew from the Pittsburgh area when I was in high school during 1999-2003 attended programs like Andrew’s Leap and PGSS. Recently I learned these programs have lost funding and ceased to run and/or degraded significantly in quality/reputation. After devoting resources passionately trying to raise funds, I suddenly questioned if my behavior was optimal- have these programs simply been replaced by superior alternatives? Is my desire to fund these programs based on a personal bias? As silly as it might sound, this question disturbed me greatly and kept me up all night. I’ve decided that I want to do what helps the most students rather than what I remember most fondly because the goal is helping students, not keeping alive institutions I happen to have enjoyed. If there now exist better programs for talented Pittsburgh students, then I’d like to know about them so I can allocate my resources to best help the most students and support those programs instead.

Andrew’s Leap and PGSS are awesome programs that help people. The question is not whether these programs add value but whether they are the best allocation of resources. Suppose there was another program exactly like Leap except it helped 2x as many students and it was named Steven’s Hop. Should I fund Hop or Leap? What if I know about the existence of Hop but decide to fund Leap anyway because I simply feel more attached to Leap, since I happened to have attended Leap (Hop did not exist; Leap was my only option at the time)?

Suppose the 2 most talented kids in Pittsburgh are dangling off a cliff and I have my old faithful dog Yeller who has the strength to drag one of them off the edge. But then suppose there exists another dog Lassie who is really strong and can pull BOTH the children off the cliff. Lassie is happily smile-panting next to me, waiting for me to say, “Go save both those kids, boy!” But I don’t even glance at Lassie and instead only have eyes for Yeller because he’s my faithful, old dog who rescued me from a cliff when I was a kid. I tell Yeller, “Go save a kid!” Yeller drags a kid to safety and then lies down, too exhausted to move for the next few hours while the second kid eventually falls to her doom. If you were watching, would you say, “Nancy, you are a hero for saving that kid!” or would you say, “Are you nuts? Why didn’t you use Lassie so you could save both those kids!”

This is a question no one would actually ask in real life because in real life no one sees the 2nd kid dead in the ravine. All they see is the one living kid hugging Yeller.

Maybe that should be good enough! After all, I don’t know what the Lassie would be in the real world (Yeller is PGSS/Leap). But if I did notice Lassie, would I be morally wrong in deciding to allocate my resources to Yeller instead of Lassie? If my goal were to help the most kids then I should use Lassie instead. But if my goal includes using Yeller as much as possible then maybe I can just go ahead and use Yeller.

I did some preliminary googling and didn’t find any other programs. So the theory that these summer programs help kids be successful in life would predict that future Pittsburgh kids will not be as successful. Ways we could measure this: economic decline of Pennsylvania, decline of Pittsburgh kids going to top schools or having good careers or going into science/math/cs. If it seems like none of these things are happening, then it would suggest that these programs didn’t matter as much as I thought and even though I had a good time it doesn’t matter that they don’t exist anymore. Time will tell, I suppose! In this case the painful process of generating data involves waiting and seeing if Pennsylvania declines or not. Is that a process we’re willing to endure? In the meantime, I posted this Quora question and am awaiting data via that forum.

One might ask, “What about saving 5 kids in Asia or something instead of 2 Pittsburgh kids?” I guess the response is, “That’s a question for another analogy. Today we’re not asking about Pittsburgh kids vs other kids, we’re assuming it’s the Pittsburgh kids we’re looking at on the cliff and the question is if we want to use Yeller to do it or Lassie.”

 

Olympic Fencing

Fairness does not exist. Complaining that life isn’t fair is like complaining that the sun doesn’t love you or that Raz Al Ghul’s ninja society shouldn’t engage in vigilante murder: such statements are nonsensical and semantically meaningless. Fairness is a concept that exists in the mind and not in nature. That’s why sports are awesome: they are a bastion of fairness in this cold, cruel world, an opportunity for people to compete within some evolving set of rules ideally designed to eliminate injustice and allow talent to determine the winner- unlike real life. Almost to the exclusion of every other aspect of reality, sportsmanship involves a code of the psychic concept of fairness, and sports become heartbreaking when they break this code, which may be why many prefer the underdog.

I was just in London for the Olympics and watched some foil fencing. In Iceland, I heard about the Shin epee controversy, and I thought, “Epee controversy? That sounds like an oxymoron.”

For the non-fencers out there, epee is the fencing weapon that has the least room for referee interference, involves the most bouncing and simultaneous touches, and is by far the most boring to watch. It is probably the most “fair” of all the weapons, which is part of why this controversy is so surprising and infuriating. In foil and sabre, if both fencers hit something and both lights go off, then the director has to use the rules of “right of way” to decide whose light to listen to. In foil and sabre, there are pretty subjective ranges for the different aspects of right of way, but in epee there is no concept of right of way. In contrast to foil and sabre, if both epeeists hit something and both lights go off, both of them get a point and we move on with our lives. All the epee director has to do is make sure everyone stands where they’re supposed to stand, start and stop fencing when they’re supposed to start and stop, give out cards if people punch each other or do something card-worthy, and make sure everyone listens to the machine.

I couldn’t believe it when I saw the video of the Shin Heidelman epee bout or this video showing the extra second lasting for longer than 1 second. I could believe even less the news articles and ensuing aftermath. The whole event offends me on multiple levels.

First, it offends me technologically. In an extremely technologically advanced sport where stuff that happens within fractions of a second (the weapon tips have to be depressed for 15 milliseconds to register a foil touch. It used to be 2 milliseconds but a semi-recent ruling extended the time to eliminate “flicking,” requiring everyone to patch their scoring machines. In epee, touches scored up to 45 milliseconds apart can be considered “simultaneous”), not having a clock that displays this level of precision is an abomination.

If we went back and looked at videos of old fencing records we might observe many errors due to their inferior technologies, but that doesn’t make me feel better. Do people who get the wrong kidney operation due to hospital errors feel better that in the distant past a barber would’ve been butchering them using liquor as anesthetic instead? No, because why did you operate on my left kidney instead of the right?! I’m going to extend the analogy because doctors are supposed to do no harm, and in epee, by far the easiest to direct of any of the fencing weapons, the referee is supposed to ensure the fencers don’t get unfair advantages and allow the machines to do the job, not generate unfair situations.

Why was there 1 second added to the clock after time had expired? No explanation. Why was the clock measuring out more than 1 second after the extra second had been added? No explanation.

Second, the news surrounding the event offends me as a citizen of the world supposedly relying on the free press and lately unwillingly bombarded by the excreta of said press. Long ago I had stopped reading most non-science news (except hacker news and occasionally the Economist; I mainly rely on blogs of people whose judgment I trust to read, analyze, cross check, and pass on news information to me) because the news mill runs on sensationalism and does not inform me of anything. Accuracy is probably not even in the top 3 principal components of whether a news article generates money, and may even be anticorrelated because controversy and offensiveness may spawn subsequent articles that then generate more money.

With such twisted incentives, does one wonder that the articles suggest that Shin “dramatically refused” to leave the stage? The main offensive part about this is that it’s suggesting she’s the one being unsportsmanlike when in fact it is everyone else. She’s trying to follow the rules, which states she’s not allowed to leave the strip during an appeal, even though she probably wanted to so she could cry in private instead of in front of many people. Trust me, Asians do not like to show uncontrolled emotions in public. Our parents do not kiss even in the presence of their kids, and perhaps do not ever kiss: how I was even conceived may be one of the great scientific mysteries that will probably remain unknowable for all time, like the mating habits of giant squids.

Third, I’m offended as a female fencer. What do people think of the news fixation on her crying? Does crying mean you’re being a baby or unsportsmanlike? She is a professional athlete who kicks ass and I take offense to her portrayal as some crybaby girl. I would’ve cried too, inside my mask. A non-Asian man may have punched something or snapped his weapon and gotten disqualified. The situation is angering and frustrating!

Shin, I am sorry this unfair thing has happened to you. Out of benevolence towards the Olympic committee, I hope that this injustice was simply due to stupidity and incompetence rather than bias. You should have gotten a gold or a silver Olympic medal but instead you didn’t get anything other than ridicule from the news for trying to follow the rules. The FIE admitted the Olympic clock sucked and that the director was wrong but they can’t do anything about it. I don’t know what the deal is with the consolation prize for sportsmanship: is it sportsmanlike to abide by injustice?

In sports, as in life, these kinds of injustices happen all the time. In the Errigo vs. Vezzali womens foil semifinals, the director made 2 very questionable calls in favor of Errigo which put Vezzali in the situation of having only 1 more point before she would lose, at which point the director felt the heat of getting blamed for taking away Vezzali’s potentially 4th Olympic individual gold and abstained from calling the next point, which would’ve given Errigo the win. Lucky for him, his prayers for a point that wouldn’t require him to decide anything were answered, not in Vezzali’s favor. This upset resulted in an anticlimactic gold medal bout (except what were those Italians arguing about while everyone shushed them during the final point?).

Is it showing my MIT-ness that I view everything as a technological problem? When we used to not have replays, electric equipment, metal strips, etc, cheating and errors were much more rampant and less easy to argue factually. In the past, epeeists probably just hit the ground or their own foot and the ref would call it their point. Now that we have video evidence, it’s actually more painful when the injustice does occur. Maybe one day our clocks will be good enough to be able to handle these scenarios (oh wait, that’s today…) and we’ll have a impartial computerized referees that don’t make erroneous calls.