The first milestone for a book I’m writing is approaching rapidly, so I’ll be on blog hiatus till the middle of next week. See y’all then.

Warning: mild spoilers from the movie Cars below. Also, this is my first rant, so the tone is a bit more, well, unhinged than my usual posts.

I love all the Pixar movies, so today I joined several small children (and their parents) to see their newest offering, Cars. On the whole, I enjoyed it very much, though, as with most popular entertainment, the economics sucked. (I am probably the only person in the world who cares about the economics in movies. Pixar is good for the most part, but they’re not perfect: The Incredibles irritated me with their demonization of insurance companies, while Cars missed the boat by blaming an interstate highway for the decline of a small town on Route 66.) But that’s not what this rant is about. It’s about: what the fuck is wrong with you people.

As with A Bug’s Life, one of its Pixar predecessors, Cars was funny all the way through, but the funniest part happened after the credits started to roll. In A Bug’s Life, it was a selection of hilarious “outtakes” that had me rolling in the aisles. With Cars, there were several amusements, but the best by far was a scene showing the cars from the movie (who exist in a world where there are no people, only cars) watching Pixar movies with cars playing the characters in those movies: A Car Toy Story, a Monsters, Inc. parody, and A Bug’s Life starring, of course, a Volkswagen bug. The best part was that the scenes they showed from the previous movies all involved characters voiced by Pixar good-luck charm John Ratzenberger—with the character Ratzenberger voiced in Cars watching, and commenting on how—wait a minute!—they were just using the same voice in all the movies! It was rad, rad, rad, I tells ya.

So what’s wrong? What’s wrong is that people started leaving as soon as the credits started to roll, even though the movie never stopped for even a second. These people had just paid good money to sit through twenty minutes of previews, a cartoon short, and a whole movie—but as soon as the credits started to roll it was as if someone yelled “fire” in, well, a crowded theater. Exactly the same thing happened when I saw A Bug’s Life.

What the fuck is wrong with you people? Apparently, they are so conditioned to associate credits with “the end” that they leave even though the movie is still going on right in front of them.

I should mention, as an aside, that Cars also had an Easter egg, to be found only when the credits were over. I never leave during the credits of any movie, even when it looks like it’s just the credits, because I love Easter eggs, and I love the smug sense of superiority that comes from being the only one in the theater left to see them—recent examples include a tasty little treat at the end of Pirates of the Caribbean (the first one; I don’t know about Dead Man’s Chest yet, but I bet it has one, too), a flipping hilarious wedding at the end of Napoleon Dynamite, and a crucial scene that you are all complete morons for missing at the end of X-Men III.

I sort of understand why people don’t sit around and wait for Easter eggs, though I suspect most people are just ignorant. But leaving when the movie is still going? I just don’t get it. Fire? There’s a fire? Gotta get out of here!

Ah, that feels better. Now, time to take my meds.

To best of my abilities, I maintain an even tone on this blog, especially when addressing particularly contentious and controversial issues (and when am I not?). I find that convincing people of anything is extraordinarily difficult in any case, but it’s virtually impossible if your tone is strident, your writing flippant, or your attitude patronizing or condescending.

I can get worked up with the best of them, though, and even I need to let off some steam from time to time. I therefore introduce this new category. Of course, ranting on blogs is as old as writing on blogs. It would hardly be a blog without a rant or two, right?

Warning: these aren’t your mama’s rants—unless your mama swears a lot.

In my previous post on oil depletion, I claimed that markets are well-equipped to deal with the problem of peak oil. A common objection to this—typically made by those who favor a government solution to the problem—is that markets are not good at long-range thinking. Indeed, this is a common objection to markets in general. The argument with respect to oil goes like this: oil prices might rise as oil becomes scarce, but what if it doesn’t rise fast enough to cause solutions to be invented in time? Since we can see right now that it’s going to be a problem, we can use the government to institute a “Manhattan project” to come up with an appropriate alternative energy source. The central claim, in other words, is that government has better foresight than markets. The secondary claim is that government is better-equipped than markets to discover the solution. Let us examine these claims in turn.

(Part 4 of 4)

Cryonicists aren’t crazy—they’re just really great, sexy optimists!

Gregory Benford, Alcor Conference (2002)

Since physical law allows the possibility of nanotechnology and artificial intelligence, we should take their potential development seriously. One result of their successful realization would be the ability to reverse the damage done to human tissues (including the brain) preserved at very low temperatures—a practice known as cryonics. This means that if nanotechnology and artificial intelligence are developed, cryonics will probably work. Nanotechnology pioneer Eric Drexler realized this early on, and argued forcibly for the likely success of cryonics in Chapter 9 of Engines of Creation. (Whether or not those who espouse this view are sexy, as Greg Benford maintains, we leave to the reader to decide.)

Though cryonics is commonly (and understandably, though lamentably) perceived as a fringe practice, the revival of a cryonics patient would (to apply my favorite litmus test) violate no known physical law—and it seems only a matter of time before the requisite technology is developed. Of course, to proceed scientifically we must conduct an experiment, and it has already started: at least two groups in the United States—the Alcor Life Extension Foundation and the Cryonics Institute—offer cryopreservation services to their members, paid for by a relatively modest annual membership fee and a larger cryopreservation fee (payable upon legal death and typically funded with life insurance). Among others, many scientists and technical types think that cryonics has a legitimate chance of success.