A fanboy defends The Hobbit

Anybody who knows me knows of my obsession with John Ronald Reuel Tolkien’s legendarium. This is not the place to enumerate the reasons for my obsession. My goal is far narrower: to explain why I loved Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.

The Critiques
In good Indic fashion, I begin with the pūrvapakṣa, the opponent(s’|’s) view. A number of criticisms have been leveled against Peter Jackson’s Hobbit enterprise. At the root of many of them is his decision to split the original book into three three-hour films, only one of which has been released so far. (His Lord of the Rings runs close to twelve hours, but then it covers nearly a thousand pages of text.) This opened him up to criticism from multiple directions, even before the movie came out:

• that his motivation is purely financial; that, since fanboys of Tolkien are going to watch whatever he serves up, why not make three times as much money by making three movies?
• that the original story is far too thin to support nine hours of film, which will force him to draw out some scenes interminably and possibly to add extra plotlines
• that his intended demographic is no longer the demographic that Tolkien targeted with his original book

I made some of these criticisms myself, while also recognizing (only slightly ruefully) that I fall squarely into Jackson’s target “sucker fanboy” demographic.

Now that “Episode I” is out, critics have duly rehashed all these critiques. They claim that the movie plods along interminably; that it should really have been trimmed down to 100 minutes (which would have the added benefit of making it more accessible to children); that a number of changes have been made to the plotline that simply make no sense other than adding screentime (stone giants! Jar-Jar Binks, I mean, Radagast!), and so on. They have also made two additional critiques:

• that the movie is far more violent than the book, and thus violates Tolkien’s vision (among other things)
• that the story has been changed fundamentally, in ways that are completely unnecessary (in particular, referring to the alteration of the Battle of Azanulbizar and the survival of Azog)

My Response
I loved every minute of the movie. There wasn’t a single instant when I was bored. Part of this is certainly because I’m a fanboy, but I also didn’t go in expecting to love it. Frankly, after having all these criticisms, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I loved it because of Jackson’s decisions, because of what he had added, and because of the changes he had come up with. Part of this post is me trying to reason out why these things matter to me, but not to other critics, fans, and critic-fans. I suspect at least part of this is that I explicitly hold the following view, which some of these critics may reject:

Peter Jackson’s Hobbit is not Tolkien’s Hobbit. And that is an entirely good thing.

Are tangent vectors contravariant or covariant?

Correct but annoying answer I: Neither! They simply are.

Correct but annoying answer II: Both! It depends on the person you ask.

More to come on this once I find the time to write up stuff in LaTeX.

UPDATE:
No, I haven’t found time to write things up in LaTeX yet. But I did come up with a great analogy to explain why CBAA-II says, “it depends.”

The core idea underlying the difference between the two is that of active transformations versus passive transformations. What that means is something I’ll get into later. For now, just the analogy:

If I’m wearing jeans that are too short for my legs, there are two ways to understand why this might be the case (other than the possibility that I have very poor taste in clothing, of course):

1. I may have had a growth spurt overnight. (This would be the active transformation as far as my legs are concerned. It would also be the passive transformation as far as the jeans are concerned.)
2. My jeans might have shrunk after going through the washer-dryer. (This would be the passive transformation, as far as my legs are concerned. It would also be the active transformation as far as the jeans are concerned.)

My legs thus covary with my height (assuming I grow evenly, of course), and contravary with my jeans’ length. Are my legs covariant or contravariant? It depends on whether the transformation is active or passive!

Natural versus artificial, part trois (with maps!)

An awesome piece from Wired, this time with some pretty stellar maps, that further call into question the divide between the natural and the artificial. Titled "How Mankind Remade Nature," the article is a summary of two ecologists' proposal that we're really entering a new era, that the Holocene age has passed and that we're now in the Anthropocene age.

To illustrate their point, they have produced a series of maps that are similar to the biome maps you can find in geography textbooks (that classify the earth into rainforest, grassland, desert, and whatnot)—except that they have classified the earth based on actual land use patterns. Two such maps, one for 1700 and the other for 2000, show how much we have transformed the earth in just three hundred years. South Asia is especially vivid on this map. In 1700, it was covered mostly in semi-natural woodlands, which were certainly being used by humans, but only lightly. By 2000, though, almost all of the region was covered with agricultural land. The ecologists have called these new kinds of land uses "anthromes," because they are anthropological biomes.

Such a profound change in the nature of the vegetation and land use (coupled with the staggering loss of ecological diversity that is natural (no pun intended) when woodland is cut down and converted into monoculture cropland), the authors argue, is just as radical than earlier geological transitional periods.

Maps are awesome

Maps, maps, maps. I've loved them as long as I can remember. Not mathematical ones (well, those too :D) but cartographic ones. Maps tell us so much about our world that would otherwise be hard to dig up or to describe in words. But like any representation of reality, maps distend and distort and conceal much even as they reveal. The classic example is, of course, the Mercator projection, in which Greenland is almost the size of Africa (when in fact Greenland is smaller than India, which itself is about one-tenth the size of Africa).

This set of maps from the 2008 US Presidential election shows this quite neatly (and awesomely). 

• The first set of maps look at data at the state level.

1. The first map is a simple state-by-state blue/red coloring (a choropleth, as James Fallows from the Atlantic tells us) that tells you whether a state voted for Obama or McCain. 
2. The second is a population cartogram that rescales the size of the states according to their population, and then colors them red or blue.
3. The third rescales the size of the states according to the number of votes each state gets on the Electoral College (which is largely, but not exactly, correlated with the state's population).

• The next set takes a more fine-grained approach, looking at election results at the county level

1. As with the first map, there is first is a red/blue county-level choropleth.
2. Next, a population cartogram colored with county-level election results

• The final set of maps does away with the red/blue binary distinction (not everybody in a certain state, or even a certain county, voted the same way!) and uses a red-blue spectrum to depict just what the ratio of red votes to blue votes was.

1. As before, a county-level election results choropleth using the red-blue spectrum.
2. And a population cartogram coloring county-level results using the red-blue spectrum.
3. And finally, a county-level election results choropleth and a population cartogram colored using a non-linear red-blue color spectrum that uses solid colors for election results that exceed 70% (because there's presumably not much difference between 70% Democratic communities and 90%).