Irreproducible Results

In my BBS days (probably in 1992) I stumbled upon an interesting text file. It claimed to contain the instructions to build a nuclear bomb! It was formatted in a sensible manner and written in good English. The content was highly entertaining, though I wasn't sure if smoke detectors' americium is really fissible material.

Alright, the text was from The Journal of Irreproducible Results - I think the text was titled "Let's Build a Nuclear Bomb". At the end of the file, there were teasers of other articles, such as "Let's Build a Solar System" or "Let's Make Contact With an Extra-Terrestrial Civilization" (if I recall correctly). Sounds entertaining but not really reproducible.

Is research supposed to be reproducible? If you read a research paper and take a look at its fancy charts and other visualizations, can you actually reproduce the results? If the paper claims a discovery that enables you to build an atomic bomb out of smoke detectors, can you prove it right or wrong? (Sure, a paper like that would probably not pass peer review phase, but hypothetically...)

Today - 20 years after I found the text about building a nuclear bomb - research often involves huge amounts of data. Often, that data is actually proprietary. The results may be entirely based on secret data that is not available to anyone, and cannot be (easily) generated by anyone else than its owner and generator. Still, the research can be held in great value - actually, that is how different products are certified for use.

As astonished I am about the fact that reproducing results is difficult, I am also about the fact that some have actually acknowledged the problem within the scientific community and developed tools and approaches to alleviate it. Lately, I have been looking at knitr which is an R module for dynamic report generation. Using knitr, there can be a direct link between the document and the original data set(!). Another interesting approach is lightweight markup languages such as Markdown which I evaluated in my bachelor's thesis some years ago. In a way, this is "open source research", where you open up the methods and data to anyone who is interested in them.

As a sidenote: Some years ago, the Finnish-language Master's thesis Kotileikkejä ja lastenkasvatuspuuhia was written by Juhapekka Tolvanen. An important aspect - though in no way related to the topic of this thesis in the field of sociology - was that it was released with the GNU Free Documentation License and the LaTeX source code was (and is) downloadable from the author's homepage, thus making the thesis printable and publishable in different formats. However, plain LaTeX source code is not very readable (though Mr. Tolvanen might disagree) - and most of the formatting of the actual text content could have been done with Markdown.

For smaller projects it is maybe easier to incorporate transparency, distribution of data sets used in the research and demonstrating exactly how the results were produced, but can this approach be more widely adopted by peer-reviewed journals? For that, I don't know the answer, I just know the direction where I would like them to go and where I will go.

My problems with Prometheus

Everyone wants to complain about Ridley Scott's Prometheus. Everyone has their reasons and so do I. I have a blog, so I must write something, right?

Trailer

The problems start with the trailer. What do we know after seeing this?

• Scientists go to find their creator, or ancient humans.
• They find a deserted temple of some kind.
• It turns out that it isn't deserted after all - it is Space Jockeys' base! Space Jockeys are human and they created us for some purpose!
• There are alien eggs (or something) around there.
• Chaos ensues and people (presumably) die one by one.
• Humans' spaceship is destroyed in a collision with some other object (presumably trapping humans on the planet that they found).
• A circular object drops from the sky or is otherwise falling on the ground.

Even before any trailers, the director gave hints that the events in this movie happen in the Alien universe before the time of the first Alien movie, but there are no Xenomorphs in this one. Instead, this movie shall in some way explore what the Space Jockeys are.

It would be disappointing if those observations from the trailer would appear correct, wouldn't it?

Movie

I think the movie was pretty enjoyable with some suspense, though no humor or horror elements. Special effects were relatively entertaining, but they were also quite generic CGI.

Spoiler: All of the above observations from the trailer ended up being totally correct.

I'll list my principal problems with the movie here.

• General lack of motivation or sense of purpose. Things happen but there is no real reason for them to be happening. What triggered them? Ghost in the machine or some real mechanism that is supposed to be contained in the scenario?
• Talk about the lack of aliens. Of course there are aliens here, it was revealed right in the trailer. Maybe there were not exactly the same type of adult Xenomorphs that we saw in the previous movies but aliens anyway.
• Where do the baby aliens get all the biomass? How can they grow to fill a room in a day without eating anything?
• Why do the scientists remove the helmets? It should be in the basic training of field work that you shall not contaminate the place. Also, if the alien planet has the same kind of atmosphere (including pressure) that Earth has, same kind of bacteria can also live there. Why did they not think about this? (Granted, Shaw is pretty cute.)
• Shaw & co. went pretty far before seriously suspecting that there was something sinister in the company's motives behind funding this trip.
• Even though the human entourage is full of scientists, there is no scientific discussion about what is happening. Things are just noted and accepted without questions.
• When the captain notices that the cave forms a circle, he immediately knows that it is a spaceship and announces it. Everyone believes him. Why? In the Alien universe, spaceships do not look like circles. There is no apparent propulsion, crew areas, antigravitation, fuel, sophisticated control surfaces or other mechanisms that a spaceship would probably have.
• Even when this spaceship started to levitate, it should not have been apparent that it was a spaceship. In the Alien universe, spaceships do not levitate - they have motors. 
• When they arrive at this planet, why does the ship accelerate towards the planet? Shouldn't they be decelerating at that point?
• It is difficult to conceive why the crew of Prometheus were so happy to kill themselves.
• Why does David think that he could fly one of those ships? Are they made for children to fly?
• Umm, why was the old guy on the ship?
• Why was this movie released in 3D?!

That's it. A clever science fiction flick that plays with mystery, cool effects and aliens. Extremely predictable, especially after seeing the trailer. Why?

Battle Los Angeles Is the Most Predictable Fight Ever

After a tiresome school week, I went to Goodrich Quality 16 (Ann Arbor, MI) with my classmates to see a movie. Battle Los Angeles features tough marines fighting extraterrestrial invaders who are ugly and they want to kill us. Lots of explosions, destruction and death. The always wonderful and handsome Aaron Eckhart starring. What could possibly go wrong?

It is worth noting that this is not the recipe for success. Take Independence Day and War of the Worlds, for example. Oops, I just spoiled almost everything about Battle Los Angeles. I am sorry... or am I, really?

The idea about making a movie just about a group of marines fighting in an urban environment was good. The whole movie is focused around this small group of men (and a couple of women) who fight an unknown enemy that has already brought down most of the planet's defences. The city of Santa Monica is dirty and in pieces, the biomechanical aliens are tough and the human soldiers are brave and they form a team whose members trust each others. Like professional soldiers that they are. "Remember your training!"

There is a plot. Before a planned air strike (or carpet bombing), the marines are tasked to evacuate a small group of civilians from a police station. This turns out to be difficult and many of the soldiers die. One of the civilians dies as well. They learn something about the aliens. Even though their home base is destroyed, they are able to land an attack on the enemy's control and command center, which (probably) leads to the extraterrestrials' defeat. Just like in Independence Day.

Almost every single element of the plot is executed in the most predictable way possible. It must have been hard for the scriptwriter to put all the well-known cliches of war movies in one script, but I must applaud him for having success in that. I have not seen Platoon, so I can only assume that some of the moments have been borrowed from there, but if I say Independence Day, Aliens, War of the Worlds and Apocalypse Now! came to my mind while sitting in the theater, that covers most of the content. Also the Finnish war classic The Unknown Soldier could be in the list, but I doubt that the American filmmakers ever saw that.

I have a temptation to disassemble the whole script and point out from which movies each scene was taken. I have a temptation to list all the annoying cliches here. Then again, I could make a shorter list and list all the war movie cliches that were not used in this movie.

• The main guy is a veteran, deciding to retire, but drawn into battle one more time, realizing his place is there.
• The main guy is haunted with his past, where the brother of one of his men died.
• The superior of the main guy is a young, inexperienced Lieutenant. You know he will die soon, so that the main guy can take the lead.
• Helicopters mainly explode.
• Aliens are biomechanical.
• Marines have a gung-ho attitude and they make a big deal about it.
• Both of the women in this movie are really beautiful. They do not die.
• The black guy survives and he is a really nice person.
• Some guy loses his mind during the battle and gets killed.
• The civilians have an innocent, about 10-year-old boy with them. This boy is 100 % normal and typical.
• The civilian man dies because that is the only way to get anything sensible for him to do, and it provides a nice emotional moment for his son, who now looks up to the main guy.
• One soldier proves his worth by blowing himself up (wounded, of course).
• When the aliens' control center is destroyed, ALL alien craft stop their movement IMMEDIATELY and drop to the ground and explode, instead of, say, hovering around trying to reestablish connection to some backup command center or flying to San Francisco where the next nearest command center is located. I think this is a deadly sin.
• The marines save the whole planet by doing something entirely trivial.
• The aliens have antigravity (their craft just hover), but they are still using humanoid soldiers to combat humans.
• The aliens are after our water, for no believable reason.
• All TV broadcasts have horizontal lines and analog distortions.
• Aliens cannot just land here, they must have some visually impressive way to arrive.
• Aliens emit horrifying noises.
• Aliens are very ugly.
• Even though it is very noisy in the battlefield, nobody ever says "pardon, can you repeat?".
• Even though they are firing big guns all the time, they never lose their hearing even though they wear no hearing protection!
• Sometimes the grenades and bombs have pressure effect, but mostly none at all.
• You can see that there are tons of shrapnels flying around but they never hurt anybody. Only straight gunshots do.
• There is no blood anywhere, even though people are supposedly blowing apart everywhere.
• Nobody seems to be really worried or sad that their friends just blew up, not even the "sensitive" young guys.
• United States wins, of course. Marines are tough and they know it.
• If you write a letter to your wife, you will be killed.
• The Lieutenant has a loving wife who is pregnant. He will die.
• Did I already mention that helicopters mainly explode? Though not all of them in this movie.

I need to stop. This list serves no purpose. When you watch the movie, you just know what is ought to happen. You know it, because this is how things happen in war movies. No explanations needed. Even without seeing this movie, you could probably come up with a couple more.

Also, sound waves reach you immediately when you see the explosion. But that is the default, of course. All things produce exactly the kind of sound you would expect them to emit.

There were many cool things about this movie. The cliches and general bad drama and dialog just spoiled all the good things that they borrowed from other movies. Aaron Eckhart, as good an actor he is, is not the proper choice for a professional soldier and a war veteran. He is also too handsome for that! This was probably the first film I have seen at the theater where I had difficulty not to burst in laughter while watching it - the absurdity of knowing everything that would happen was just too much.

As a motion picture, Battle Los Angeles was not as bad a The Day After Tomorrow, for example, but it is very difficult to guess what the producer was thinking when he got the script. Did he think that he could produce a good war movie based on that piece of... work? Apparently he did, and secured a hundred million dollar budget for it. He should have donated that money to The Mikko S. Tuomela Graduate Studies Fund (which I just founded for this purpose). Why? Well, I don't know, but it sounded proper and would have served Mr. Eckhart's career better.