Erich Stauffer

Blog

  • Why you should get LOST

    As someone who is laughably prone to hyperbole, it may may seem inconsequential that I laud it as the greatest television show of all time.  You may be asking yourself: “What is so great about it?” or “How can a modern show compare to TV classics from other eras?” or “What kind of a weirdo, fanatical, booger eating, sci-fi dork would care so much about a TV show?”

    These are all fair questions.  I am not sure if I will be able to suitably answer any of them for you (but I don’t eat my boogers, by the way).  It is my hope that this article piques your interest enough to watch the first episode for free online on hulu.com.  If you are not engrossed in the tale of Flight 815 after 8 episodes, then I ask your forgiveness for presuming your interest in the fields philosophy and sociology.  If you find your mind and heart constantly returning to the question of “What is the meaning of life?”, then prepare yourself for a vivid, elaborate, amplified discussion of that very question that IS the show:  LOST.

    What the uninitiated know or (don’t know) about the show varies.  I will presume that you know (or consequentially, inform you of) that

    If something on the show leads you to believe what you are watching is “unrealistic”, take comfort in the fact that you are experiencing a vivid, detailed, highly personal metaphor.  The line between fiction and science fiction is fine, but don’t let crossing it ruin the truth is being illustrated for you within the framework of the show.

  • LOST Recap – Pilot

    The most expensive pilot in television history sets the stage for one of the greatest serialized story lines in any medium.  This article is written with the knowledge of the first five seasons of LOST under my belt.  The mosaic has not been revealed completely, but enough has transpired to produce a sense of nostalgia in me while watching this episode.  Partly because of the production value, and partly because of the timeless locale, the show doesn’t feel five years old.  While some things, like hyper-color t-shirts, don’t age well, it’s a good sign that LOST will.

    One challenge of an ensemble show is to find the balance between individual character development with keeping the audience interested in the fate of the whole group.  With flashback being an integral part of the LOST storytelling process, the pilot episode starts in the middle, with Jack lying in the jungle, seemingly unaware of how he got there.  Soon enough, he emerges from the jungle and sees the wreckage of the plane he was just riding on.  We soon see a flashback with Jack on the plane, having a strong drink just before the turbulence hits.  With his future alcohol struggles, it almost feels like an Easter egg to see Jack drinking just before being brought to the island.

    Charlie is right in the throws of heroin addiction, and it is quickly apparent.  He’s a likable character, but it would be hard to tell if it is his drugs that make him so.  The actor, Dominic Monaghan, was just coming off of a journey through middle earth with the rest of the Hobbits in Return of the King, so there were a fair amount of LOTR fans who tuned in out of a quasi-loyalty to the Trilogy.  Charlie sets up the end title frame perfectly when he asks the group:  “Where are we?”

    LOST

    It’s great to see how quickly Kate and Jack connect with each other based on her finding him in need of a make-shift surgeon.  You wonder if this shared moment is what set the trajectory of their relationship.  What if another attractive female from the plane happened to stumble upon Jack at that time?

  • Waking Up to an EMP

    You wake up in the morning as the sun hits your face.  You check the clock and see that the electricity has gone out and you start to panic, wondering what time it is.  You reach for your cell phone to check the time and call your boss, but it too is off.  Attempts to turn it back on fail so you go to turn on your laptop to check the time there and see what is going on.  When your laptop fails to start you start to wonder what is actually going on so you go outside to your car.  Many of your neighbors are standing outside talking to one another.  That’s odd, you think to yourself, but they’re probably just asking each other about the power outage.  You get in the car to check the time and listen to some news on the radio, but when you turn the key, nothing happens.  That’s when it hits you.  There’s been an EMP and the world has changed overnight.

    Immediately your thoughts switch to survival mode.  The bicycle on your front porch just became one of the most valuable vehicles on the block.  The water in the tower won’t last long once everyone realizes what is going on.  Good thing there are no modes of communication so as long as your mouth shut you can take advantage of other peoples ignorance.  You use your credit card at the gas station to purchase non perishable foods and propane tanks.  Since the electricity is down they have converted to swiping carbon copies.  A lot of good that will do you say to yourself.  Meanwhile you head back and fill your bathtub up with water and wonder how you are going to communicate with your family members to let them know what’s going on.  The very satellites used to detect electromagnetic pulses from the sun or an atomic explosion have been taken out.  All cell phone and land lines are down. The power grid is toast.  Even natural gas has stopped  flowing as electric pumps have failed.

    Welcome to the apocalypse.

  • Turning Problems into Solutions: C02 to Gasoline

    In August, 2007 President Bush created a DARPA for Energy (DARPA stands for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency).  One of it’s goals was to turn carbon dioxide into fuel.  By December, 2007 Sandia National Laboratories, where DARPA is located, announced the Sandia’s “Sunshine to Petrol” project which uses a “Counter Rotating RingReceiver Reactor Recuperator (CR5, for short), to break a carbon-oxygen bond in the carbon dioxide to form carbon monoxide and oxygen in two distinct steps using concentrated solar power. DARPA eventually proved the technology and coupled with sequestered C02 from coal power plants or even your own car, this could be a real industry of C02 to gasoline. Watch this related video on Youtube.

  • Analyst’s Corner: Presidential Nominees and Winners in 2012

    According to my analysis, the following is a list of the Presidential nominees for the Republican Party for the 2012 election.  They are listed by a ranking system that assigns positive points for having similar syllables and number of characters in first and last names compared to past, elected presidents (not ones who inherited the office).  Republicans tend to elect Governors while Democrats tend to elect Senators so this is a list of current Republican  governors (except Sarah Palin who was a governor) who have the most points left over after taking out negative points for being unelectable.  The only woman considered in this analysis is Sarah Palin.  All others were left out because of the backlash against change.

    • Donald  Carcieri        4
    • Sonny   Perdue  3
    • Gary    Herbert 3
    • Sarah   Palin   3
    • Bobby   Jindal  2
    • Haley   Barbour 2
    • John    Hoeven  1
    • Bob     Riley   1
    • Sean    Parnell 1
    • Mitch   Daniels 1
    • Mark    Sanford 1
    • Mike    Rounds  1
    • Rick    Perry   1
    • Bob     McDonnell       1

    Out of the above list, Sarah Palin, Bob Riley (Alabama), Mitch Daniels (Indiana), Mark Sanford (South Carolina), Mike Rounds (South Dakota), Rick Perry (Texas), and Bob McDonnell (Virginia) will emerge as the others drop out or cannot find funding.  The following will survive to debate each other:

    • Sarah Palin
    • Mark Sanford
    • Rick Perry

    Mark Sanford’s office has been surrounded in scandal which leaves Sarah Palin and Rick Perry.  Palin will pick Perry to be her running mate.

  • 5 New Ways BP Could Make Money

    BP has been branded as “beyond petroleum” for about 10 years now and The SDN would like to help them with that goal by brainstorming new ways BP could make money outside of oil:

    1. Harvest nickel, potassium, titanium, and zinc from household dust.
    2. Mine nickel, zinc, iron, aluminum, titanium, and copper from ocean water
    3. Purchase and recycle landfills world-wide, re-purposing steel, copper, plastic, and glass.
    4. Recycle electronic waste, harvesting silver, gold, and copper.
    5. Build desalination and water treatment plants worldwide that are powered by geothermal-powered sterling engines, wave energy, and solar power.

  • The New Normal

    You might have heard the term, “The New Normal” being cast around, but what does it all mean?  I can only assume it means that in this post-war on terror, post-recession era that profit and cash is now more important than credit.  Bankruptcy is normal.  Terms like First, Second, and Third-world countries no longer apply (The Internet, Ireland, China, and Greece have all turned things updside down).  And most importantly, we have had an entire generation grow up fully connected via cell phone, the Internet, and Facebook.  We’ve had our own Great Depression (widely described as The Great Recession), our own Pearl Harbor (9/11), and our own Industrial Revolution (The Information Age).  We are entering into a civic cycle more connected with the world and to each other than we have ever been.  We know who died out of a country with more than a billion people within minutes of its occurrence.  If we want to write Oprah a quick note, we just log onto Twitter and type @Oprah.  Our former president, George W. Bush now has a Facebook account–and so does your parents.  This is the new normal.  Get used to it.

  • LOST

    Last night the show that started on September 22, 2004, nearly 8 months after the birth of my first child, ended it’s run with a finale that is sure to be heralded as one of the top last-episodes of all time. My oldest daughter is now 6, but it’s unclear exactly when she outlived the characters on the show as it was made “clear” in the last 10 minutes of the 2 and a half hour show that the cast in the sideways flashes were actually all dead. There was some slight clarification that the flash sideways were actually flash forwards to the afterlife, the most concrete being Jin and Sun’s remembrance of their death and Hugo and Ben’s references to being good number 1s and 2s respectively. Regarding the flash sideways/forward, what was the point of having such an intricate, separate life with the new and failed relationships, including children? And regarding Christian Shepard’s image, I though he was determined to be the smoke monster? The smoke monster can’t leave the island (Christian appeared to Jack at the hospital after he was rescued by Penny’s boat) and the smoke monster would not have sent the dog to wake Jack up as seen in the web additions on abc.com. Considering all of these facts, I am going to propose three scenarios, all of which could be true:

    1. They all died in the very beginning in the initial plane crash and their collective conscious created the island and their new realities.
    2. They all died in the nuclear blast.
    3. They all died in the island-reality and the other reality (the flash sideways) occurred after the island-reality, not at the same time.

    But how do you fix the problem with the island being underwater during the flash sideways? The only thing that would help this is that the island eventually does get destroyed in the future (either with Hugo or after Hugo). It falls under water. Everyone on earth dies and so everyone is in this alternative reality, where they are all dead, and then they remember each other, and then they meetup and the “Christian Shepard” opens the door to the light and fade to white.

  • Google TV

    Google is now bringing it’s search engine and the Android operating system to televisions.

    In response to this move by Google to TV. Rishi Chandra, one of the product managers at Google, announced at their I/O 2010 conference, Google TV, which will bring the best of the web and TV together, integrating them into one platform. Google touts, “Less time finding, more time watching,” “Control and personalize what you watch,” “Make your TV content more interesting” and “More than just a TV”.