S. Evan Townsend's Blog

Entertainment gives us all survivor bias. 

Let me explain.

The hero/heroine always survives (except in Titanic but that's a rare exception). Books, movies, television, the protagonist always survives. Think about the movie Independence Day (try not to think too much, it's not a very good movie). Millions die but most of the main characters live.

I'm guilty of this. In my books the protagonist (almost) always survives. I did kill off my main character once in a book.

Because of entertainment, I believe we all secretly think we're going to survive. I think people going into a war have to think they will survive. Otherwise, they wouldn't go. But some don't survive.

But in real life, your odds of surviving disasters are much less. I remember reading years ago (I think in Readers Digest) about a skyscraper fire in Brazil (this might have been the fire). People trying to escape came to the end of a hall. There were two ways out: left or right. The ones that went one way survived. The ones that went the other way, didn't. So you had a 50% chance of making the wrong choice and dying. And that stuck with me. A 50% chance of dying based on a random choice. That's scary.

When I drove on the racetrack, I assumed nothing bad was going to happen to me even though what I was doing was inherently dangerous. (Nothing bad did happen.)

So, we all probably have survivor bias. I think we wouldn't step out of the safety of our houses if we didn't to some degree. 

Do you think people have survivor bias and it's mostly because of popular entertainment? Let me know in the comments below.

I'm not a big fan of the J.J. Abrams Star Trek movies (also known as the Kelvin timeline).  The first one was okay. Then came Star Trek into Darkness and it was downright bad. There was one scene I thought was completely gratuitous when actress Alice Eve (playing Carol Marcus) stood around in her underwear.

Alice Eve is a lovely woman and as a testosterone-poisoned male, I enjoyed the scene, but even then, I thought it was completely unneeded. 

But, sex sells. 

Some women were upset at the Alice Eve scene. But have you looked at romance books lately? Here's an example:

It seems on a lot of romance books there are shirtless men. But sex sells.
In my novel Rock Killer , I had a character named Charlie Jones. After writing less than a paragraph, I changed Charlie from a man to a woman with the same name. And I made her an attractive woman because... sex sells. (I decided her name was Charlene but everyone called her "Charlie.") And, at the beginning of the book, Charlie is in a bathtub. Because... sex sells. In that scene I say:
"She soaped up a washcloth and rubbed it over her dark skin; Frank called it chocolate-cheesecake colored."
Have you noticed other examples of using sex to sell entertainment? Let me know in the comments below.
The above photos are being used under Section 107 of the Copyright Act: fair usage.

The one thing that hasn't gone metric is time. There's still 60 seconds per minute, 60 minutes per hour, 24 hours per day, etc.

And for good reason. Metric time just wouldn't work.

The SI unit of time is the second. It's described as:

The second [...] is defined by taking the fixed numerical value of the caesium frequency, ΔνCs, the unperturbed ground-state hyperfine transition frequency of the caesium 133 atom, to be 9192631770 when expressed in the unit Hz, which is equal to s^−1

Yeah, I don't understand it either.

There is a "metric time" accepted for use with the metric system, minutes, hours, and days which are not considered SI units. French Revolutionary Time divided the day into 10 hours, each with 100 minutes, and each minute with 100 seconds, That resulted in a metric second being a slightly different length than a standard SI second. 

According to Wikipedia:

The [French Revolutionary] calendar consisted of twelve 30-day months, each divided into three 10-day cycles similar to weeks, plus five or six intercalary days at the end to fill out the balance of a solar year. It was designed in part to remove all religious and royalist influences from the calendar, and it was part of a larger attempt at dechristianisation and decimalisation in France.

 I doubt it worked well and the calendar was abolished in 1805 after 12 years of usage.

Our current system of 60 seconds per minute and 60 minutes per hour, 24 hours in a day, etc., is just too ingrained in society. Plus it works, unlike the French Revolutionary Calendar. 

What do you think of "metric time"? Let me know in the comments below.

Side note: I started this blog on September 19, 2012. So tomorrow is the 13th anniversary of it. Since then I have made 1,373 posts including this one.

 I really like Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (SNW). It reminds me of Star Trek The Original Series (TOS) but without the 1960s cringe and the awful special effect (which have since been updated). The characters are unique and likable. I enjoy that they tie into TOS occasionally (Christine Chapel's boyfriend in SNW is her fiancé in the TOS episode "What are Little Girls Made Of?" for example). I like it more than Star Trek: Discovery which tried too hard to be politically correct.

However, I do have some complaints. 

SPOILERS if you haven't watched the show

First thing is Spock's character. He keeps having romances. First with his betrothed, T'Pring (and they acted very human together), then with Nurse Chapel, and now with Chief of Security La'an Noonien-Singh (who is a descendent of Khan Noonien-Singh which is an interesting little twist). I know Spock is half-human but in TOS he was only interested in romance during the pon farr, which hits only every seven years.

Second is how they handle the Gorn. This is my biggest complaint. I recently watched the "Arena" episode of TOS where the Gorn were first introduced (and then never seen again). Remember, TOS is supposed to take place after Strange New Worlds. In "Arena," Starfleet knew nothing of the Gorn. But in SNW they are not only well known but an aggressive enemy. I liked the episodes with the Gorn, but I feel as if they are violating canon. Also, the Gorn are a little too much like the Alien xenomorphs (incubating young inside humans and probably other species).

Finally, tonight's episode is the last one of season three. I haven't seen it yet. There have been only thirty episodes over three seasons! Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG) would do about 25 episodes per season. And it has to be easier today to do special effects with CGI. Yes, the production values of SNW exceeds TNG, but not by enough to have less than half as many episodes per season. And who knows how long we'll have to wait for seasons four and five (which are the last seasons planned).

Having said all that, I still like SNW. I just wish there were more episodes.

How do you feel about Star Trek: Strange New Worlds? Let me know in the comments below.

P.S.: Monday was the 59th anniversary of TOS premiering on television.  

The above photo is being used under Section 107 of the Copyright Act: fair usage.

IndyCarThis year, Fox Sports is showing IndyCar racing, which is fun to watch. I like IndyCar because it's not boring like NASCAR, not confusing like IMSA, and not quite as precise as Formula 1. Plus the same people/teams don't win the races all the time like in F1. Although Alex Palou won over half this year's IndyCar races and won the championship with two races left in the season. He might be moving to F1.

There's an 23-year-old IndyCar driver named Sting Ray Robb (yes, that's his real name; his parents were Chevrolet fans and named him after the Corvette Sting Ray) and when they introduce him, he says he's from Payette, Idaho. That amazed me because Payette is a small town (about 8,000 souls) near the Oregon border northwest of Boise. It's not too far north of Interstate 84.

And I wondered how someone from such a small town could end up being an IndyCar driver. Payette is about the same size as the small town in Idaho where I mostly grew up. So I googled him. Wikipedia said he started kart racing at age 5. Which means when I decided I wanted to be a race car driver at age 8, I was already too late. 

But where did Robb race karts. Boise is the nearest town of any size and about an hour drive away for Payette. And, yes, there's a kart racing facility in Eagle, ID which is a suburb of Boise. So, probably on weekends his parents would drive the hour plus to get to the kart racing facility where he could learn racing. 

I grew up on the other side of the state, about 250 miles from Boise. Plus, when I was five (or eight), I doubt that kart racing facility was there. So I didn't have the opportunities Robb did. (Plus, I had no idea how to become a race car driver.) This makes me extremely envious of him. 

According to Wikipedia, "Robb started running nationally at age eight, entering Cadet division events from 2010 to 2013. During his first season in the Junior ranks, he finished second in America and raced in Valencia, Spain. Robb won a national championship in Rotax Junior Max karting in 2015." So he had some success in karting.

Robb is not one of the usual winners of IndyCar races. He starts somewhere back in the pack and ends up there. At the end of the season he was in 25th place. But still, to be an IndyCar driver must be a dream come true for him. It would be for me.

My beloved University of Washington Huskies football team starts their 2025 season this coming Saturday, August 30th. The game against Colorado State is at the horrible time of 8:00pm PDT. It'll be shown on B1G Network.

The Huskies didn't do too great in 2024 with a 6-6 regular season record under new coach Jedd Fisch. They also lost their bowl game against Louisville (by one point). It was a let-down after the 2023 season when the team went 14-1. The best part of that season was beating Oregon twice.

This season is up in the air. Fisch has a good quarterback, a good running back, a good wide receiver, and other impressive players. He's still trying to rebuild the team after almost every starter left after the 2023 season.

We have some tough games ahead of us. On September 27th, we play Ohio State at home. Ohio State is a leading team in the Big 10. While we beat Michigan at home last year, this season we play them in Ann Arbor on their home turf. Again, a tough game. And on November 29th, we play Oregon at home. Oregon is a consistently tough team thanks to Phil Knight's millions of dollars for top-of-the line coaches and NIL money for good players. Oregon is basically a pro team in the NCAA.

We might, if we're lucky, end up with a 8-4 record. (I saw one sports commentator say 9-2 before the Oregon game.) But we'd have to beat Washington State in Pullman and win other tough games on the road. We'll have to see how much progress Fisch has made in building the Huskies back up again. 

There are some movies that I just enjoy despite the fact they aren't really great movies. They are my guilty pleasures, I guess.

For example, Smokey and the Bandit. It's number 83 on my Top 105 favorite movies. (It used to be 103 until I added Oppenheimer and Dunkirk.) As I said in my Internet Movie Database review: "America needed a hero and Ronald Reagan was three years away. We found it in Burt Reynolds and his black Trans Am." This was the second highest grossing film of 1977 (behind Star Wars). The operative word on this movie was "fun." There's nothing serious or deep. Just fun. There is some cringe, but not a lot. I have this on Blu-Ray in case I want to watch it. It's available on Amazon Prime for $3.79.

Then there's Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story. It's number 89 on my Top 105 favorite movies. Again, this is just a fun movie but with some cringe built in. It mostly just goes for the laughs but it also has a sports element that makes you cheer for the heroes. Parts haven't aged well (Lance Armstrong?) but that's easy to ignore. A group of misfits enters a dodgeball tournament to win money to save their gym. The tournament is supposedly shown on ESPN 8 (The Ocho!). The movie is on television a lot but look for it unedited on Hulu or Amazon Prime Video ($3.79).

And finally, there's xXx. (I was surprised anyone would name a mainstream movie "xXx" when "XXX" means porn.) This movie didn't make my 105 favorite movies but whenever it's on TV, I end up watching it. I recently watched it unedited and without commercials. I don't remember where but I'm sure I didn't pay extra as I would on Amazon Prime. The plot is pretty thin and the "audition" part lasts too long. It's about an extreme sports enthusiast recruited by a government agency to figure out what a group of ex-Soviet military men are doing. The dialogue is cheesy and the action borders on unbelievable. Or, is actually unbelievable. But it's so over the top in almost every way, it's hard to not watch. 

Do you have any guilty pleasure movies? What do you think of my guilty pleasures. Let me know in the comments below. 

Einstein once said, "Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand." 

I'm in the "imagination business." I use my imagination to write fiction books. 

I used to host the Speculative Fiction Cantina on BlogTalkRadio (which I understand is now defunct). On that program, I would ask authors to describe and read from their works. I was often blown away by the creativity and imagination shown. They would have ideas that I would have never thought of. I can't remember any now (the last show was on February 16, 2018) but I do remember the feeling of amazement.

These days I'm playing an online game called Heardle. It's a music guessing game where you try to name the song as quickly as possible. I don't play every game but I plays the ones I think I have a chance of knowing (even so, some of the songs are very esoteric). And the ads get annoying. I still play it every day on my phone, usually while my wife is in the shower. Again, however, I am amazed by the creativity of the people who write music, the instruments and the tunes and everything that goes into a song. Even in the first 2 seconds the differences between songs are staggering. (Of course, musicians have thousands of instruments to choose from, writers only have 26 letters).

My point? Human imagination and creativity are limitless. I don't know the first thing about writing a song but I do know how to write a book. And using creativity and imagination, I can build worlds.

Do you use imagination and creativity in your work or hobby? If so, let me know how in the comments below.

From What's Opera DocWhen I was a kid in the 60s (yes, I'm that old), Saturday morning cartoons were a ritual. And my favorite cartoon show was The Bugs Bunny Show (it had several name changes over the years). You know, The Bugs Bunny Show that started with this. 

According to the autobiography of Chuck Jones (Chuck Amuck), the minimum length of a "short" for theaters was six minutes. So the Loony Tunes shorts were exactly six minutes to the frame. Because each frame cost money. When they were shown in the Bugs Bunny Show, they cut off the title cards and the credits so they were shorter then six minutes. (However, according to Wikipedia, What's Opera Doc is 6:53).

Looney Tunes cartoons were initially produced by Leon Schlesinger, who, according to Jones, had no sense of humor. Later, Schlesinger sold out to Warner Bros. studios.

Not all the Looney Tunes are great. Most are funny but some are only amusing. Some of my favorites are (in no particular order): What's Opera Doc, The Rabbit of Seville, Duck Amuck, Duck Dodgers is the 24th 1/2 Century (which has teleportation a decade before Star Trek did), Bully for Bugs, and pretty much any Road Runner/Wile E. Coyote cartoon. There's others I'm probably not remembering. Some of the "rabbit season/duck season" cartoons were hilarious but I don't remember their names.

I am a huge fan of hand-drawn animation, an art form that is going away thanks to computer animation. Chuck Jones called it the only truly American art form.

I don't think there's anywhere to see those cartoons online. I have four DVD sets of four DVDs each with a lot of cartoons on them. Unfortunately, they mixed in the mediocre ones with the brilliant ones. I still watch them occasionally.

I still like animation. I watched the animated movie Mars Express not too long ago. It looked hand-animated. I watched The Simpsons for twenty years. When I'm bored, I'll watch reruns of Family Guy. I have to warn you away from The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Loony Tunes Movie. It was okay, but unless you really like Daffy Duck and Porky Pig, it's not really worth your time.

Do you like hand-drawn animation? Let me know in the comments below.

The above photo is being used under Section 107 of the Copyright Act: fair usage.

Maybe this isn't true where you live, but it seems to me that a lot of drivers around here in Washington State pick their speed by feel.

Let me explain.

There's a road here that's two lanes (one in each direction) but with occasional passing lanes. It needs to be a four lane road but that's another subject.

People will drive less than the speed limit on the two-lane parts and then, when another lane opens up such as a passing lane, they'll speed up making it harder for you to pass them. My only thought is, now they feel more comfortable with an extra lane. When the road goes back to only two lanes, they slow down again. Apparently they don't know how to use cruise control, either.

Or, even during the best weather, the Washington State DOT lowers the speed limit on Snoqualmie Pass

by 5 mph (65 versus 70). (There's "variable speed limits" on Snoqualmie Pass. The lowest I've seen is 35 mph on a very snowy night.) So, when the speed limit is 65, I'll slow down by 5 mph (from 75 to 70). And people I passed going 75 mph will start passing me at 70 mph. Because they aren't paying attention to the speed limit. They are driving by feel.

(I used to think they lowered the speed limit on Snoqualmie Pass because the road was narrow and windy. But they widened and straightened a long section and the speed limit is still 65 on that part.)

Now I follow the speed limit (at least) if conditions permit. This means I have to be aware of the speed limit. But I think a lot of drivers (at least around here) drive by feel. They'll be perfectly happy doing 45 mph in a 50 mph zone blissfully unaware of the line of cars behind them.

And this is in a way dangerous because it may cause someone to pass unsafely. I know it makes me see red mist. I always try to pass legally and safely. But not everyone does. I wrote about how driving too slow is dangerous here.

Driving by feel might be a common occurrence in the U.S. The Federal Highway Administration Research and Technology (part of the Federal Highway Administration) did a study and found that, despite the speed limit, people drive as fast or slow as they want to.

Do you have people who drive by feel where you live? Do they annoy you as much as they annoy me? Let me know in the comments below.