Category: Theater of the Mind

On Wednesday, June 3rd, The Decemberists performed at the Tabernacle in Atlanta.  It’s taken me about the intervening two weeks to fully digest it all.

My friend and colleague, Tim Price-Williams, is a big fan of the Tabernacle and drew out a diagram for me and my wife on where to sit and how to get those seats.  First, we needed to arrive two hours before the doors opened at 7.  Then we were to sit outside the left (not the right, or the far right VIP entrance) doors.  As the doors opened, we needed to proceed to the left and up the stairs to the first balcony.  Tim drew a map of the second balcony and then pointed out the four seats he deemed acceptable, just to the left and the right of center stage and flushed against the forward railing.  Wait an hour for the opening band.  Then wait another hour for the main show.

We messed up Tim’s well laid plans from the get go when I forgot to pick up the baby sitter on the way home from work.  After that we were stuck in remarkably heavy traffic and didn’t find parking until about 6 o’clock.  As we waited in line I made a quick trip across the street to pick up a chicken sandwich at Ted’s Montana Grill for dinner.  I’ve been habituated to fast-food chicken sandwiches for years and was pleasantly surprised to find that the basic recipe can indeed be improved upon.  The line started moving at 6:45 so Tamara and I had to eat quickly.

This is where Tim’s advice came in very handy.  He recommended that we each have our tickets in our hands to be scanned – if one of us fell along the way the other could continue on to the prized seats on the balcony.  Everyone else apparently wanted to stand in front of the stage, so we had no problem getting to the second balcony (we didn’t even realize that there was a first balcony above us) and managed to get two seats a row back from the ones we had coveted. 

The opening band was Blind Pilot (we joked that they were composed of the injured members of Stone Temple Pilots) but it turned out that they are another band from the pacific northwest with an eclectic instrumentation and a folksy/rock feel.  They were really good.  But we were there to hear The Hazards of Love.

The Hazards of Love is a concept album by The Decemberists.  Based on an apparently original Welsh mythology cycle, it was written by lead singer Colin Meloy while in Paris.  It’s received some mixed reviews while the standout songs have been The Rake’s Song and The Wanting Comes in Waves.  Part of the difficulty follows from trying to understand what the songs are about, which is particularly difficult for me since I generally don’t hear lyrics.  Tamara has made some progress in untangling the characters and the events of the songs, however, and during the break between Blind Pilots and The Decemberists she explained quite a bit of it to me.

The Tabernacle, by the way, is a renovated classic movie theater that looks much better with the lights out than with them on.  It is an amazing venue.  The backdrop for the show – gigantic gauze sheets hanging from the ceiling – along with impressive lighting made it even more so.

We didn’t know exactly what to expect since concept albums are typically something done in a studio.  We thought that this would be a modified presentation of some highlights from the album.  Instead it was a full performance of Hazards of Love straight through and faultless.

As the performance progressed, I came to realize that I had fundamentally misunderstood the relationship between the album and the concert.  Normally a concert tour is meant to reproduce an album for fans.  In this case, I slowly realized, the album is just a memento of the concert itself.  I don’t go to that many rock concerts, so it doesn’t mean much when I say it was the best one I’ve seen.  It was, nevertheless, an event that has left a deep impression on me and still stays with me after these weeks.

The core members of The Decemberists were dressed in formal suits for the performance of Hazards.  Shara Worden and Becky Stark, who sing on the album as the Forest Queen and the heroine Margaret, respectively, were dressed in renaissance fair costumes appropriate to the theme.  Shara Worden has the attitude of Joan Jett and the voice of Grace Slick.  Becky Stark was simply ethereal waving her arms about like Elfine Starkadder the whole time.

Again, I have trouble what actually happened during the performance of Hazards itself.  There are large portions of it I can’t even quite remember, and all I have is the strong impression that something amazing occurred.

I do remember that after The Decemberists, Ms. Worden and Ms. Stark finished with Hazards of Love, and after a half-hour intermission, The Decemberists came back out and performed some songs from their previous four albums.  Then Shara Warden and Becky Stark closed the show with a cover of Heart’s “Crazy On You” which I still can’t get out of my head.  For an encore, Colin Meloy constructed a story about the building of the trans-American railway with audience participation while the rest of The Decemberist led a conga-line through the hall.  I also vaguely recall singing Sixteen Military Wives as a round with the floor, the first balcony and the second balcony performing the parts.  The second balcony was clearly the best.

On the drive home I fell into a melancholic mood; I had the sense that some part of me had been sleeping for a long time and that after waking it up I had left it behind at the Tabernacle.  I now find myself replaying The Hazards of Love again and again on my iPod trying to recapture how that lovely night felt.

The Decemberists are coming out with a new album, The Hazards of Love, later this week.  A preview of the album is available through NPR, which recorded a live performance of the album at Stubb’s Bar-B-Q in Austin, Texas. 

They will also be coming to the Tabernacle in Atlanta on June 3rd.

My wife and I performed a small experiment this weekend when we took our three children to the symphony.  According to Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner’s book, Freakonomics, children who are taken to concerts and art museums are not statistically advantaged by this activity.  However, in an interesting twist on the theological debate between justification by faith and justification by works, the authors claim that children who are parented by the sort of people who take their progeny to cultural events and fill their homes with books are indeed statistically advantaged.  Taking this to mean that good intentions are at least of equal value to good works (and what more can you ask of the parents of three children), we exercised our good intentions at the ASO’s performance with Jennifer Koh.

Sasha, the oldest (10), found the whole performance to be a waste of time.  Paul (8) and Sophia (6) were quite taken with Wagner’s Liebestod from Tristan and Isolde.  They found Jennifer Higdon’s The Singing Rooms to be considerably more challenging, however, as did their father. 

Ms. Koh’s performance was magnificent, of course, but the center of attraction for us was the Stradivarius on which she played.  I’ve never heard one live before.  Paul kept asking why it was so special and all I could think to say was that the ex-General Dupont is almost three hundred years old.  This duly impressed my son.  What speaks more on culture’s behalf, after all, than it’s gray-haired hoariness.

Perhaps it is an indication of my low-tastes, but as I watched this performance I kept thinking about how much I enjoyed the last performance I had seen at Atlanta Symphony Hall, Cirque de la Symphonie.  The music at that concert tended towards the romantic, from Saint-Saëns to Ravel.  While the orchestra performed on their instruments, the acrobats plied their art on their bodies by defying gravity in the air as well as defying basic physiology through acts of contortion.  Two acts stood out especially. 

Jaroslaw Marciniak and Dariusz Wronski entered the stage bald, in loin-cloths, and painted gold from head to toe.  They proceeded to lift, pin and balance off of each other in what I took to be an extended demonstration of Euclid’s 47th proposition, with each brief suspension being a prelude to the final revelation. 

Even more impressive was Elena Tsarkova’s contortion and balancing act.  All of it was remarkable, but at one point she stood on her head with her legs extended upward.  She then spread her legs out to be almost perfectly perpendicular to the rest of her body.  At this point something uncanny happened, but so quickly that I had to ask my wife if she had just seen something.  We couldn’t quite put words to what we had witnessed, and the best I could come up with was “ululation”.  There was an ululation in her legs which looked like the small wave some people can make with their shoulders.  It was breathtaking.

Following the Higdon performance came the intermission.  We took advantage of this natural break to sneak out and hunt for a decent milkshake in Atlanta.  The kids had earned it.  They behaved extremely well at the symphony.

 

According to rumor, Alec Baldwin ad-libbed this scene for the movie adaptation of David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, although I’ve also heard that Mamet created the monologue especially for Baldwin’s character, Blake, who does not appear in the original Pulitzer Prize winning play.  A transcription of the monologue can be found here. 

Blake strikes me as the ur-Father of Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, speaking to the id-driven sales force.  In good times, Blake comes across as a parody of all bad managers with his A-B-C rules — he is Stephen Covey’s evil twin.   In a bad business climate, however, he is the bearer of profound Hobbesean truths, and one feels obliged to internalize him and let him whisper in the back of one’s mind, for his is the voice that drives industry.

My employer disperses interesting technical gifts every Christmas, and this year it was to be the Kindle.  However the endorsement of the Kindle by Ms. Oprah Winfrey had apparently caused a run on the digital reader (thank goodness she did not endorse the American banking system) and so, now in mid-February, we are still not in possession of the item.  Fortunately, the Kindle 2 has been announced and our original order of several hundred Kindles has automatically been upgraded, with a release date at the end of the month.

I enjoy reading and disposing of books, which has led me to be a avid user of the local public library system.  At the same time, I rather enjoying collecting — on a modest budget — titles that I can display on my bookshelves, often unread, sadly.   Browsing my own books, which bring back memories of the periods in my life when I was inclined to peculiar interests — I have a shelf full of Husserl with titles like Ideas I, Ideas V, Ideas VI, etc. ! — is a source of great pleasure. 

Whenever I open one of my books I am uncertain of what will fall out.  Sometimes its orange peels, sometimes the whiff of stale cigarettes from college, sometimes money I thought I had cleverly hidden from robbers.  The other day I opened up a dog-eared paperback copy Benjamin’s Illuminations and naturally came across his essay on unpacking his books. 

My basement is currently filled with crates of Russian books and journals, inherited by my father-in-law from a distant relative and emigre historian of the Russian imperial family living in Prague.  The books this distant relative chose to collect reveal a thoroughly different world in which an interest in the newest theories of evolution existed side-by-side with an interest in how best to uplift one’s serfs.

The digital revolution has made many of these books now generally available, especially with the ubiquity of one-off printing.  But what mind could gather this particular collection together, with its hidden references made through the course of a life, entangling interests into an ultimate statement of a man’s life pursuit.  Absent the fact that a certain man, our distant relative, found something valuable in each of these books, and that by handling each of them we can to some degree reconstruct his life — would any computer program be able to generate this particular collection based on algorithms of selection and indexing?

While I look forward to receiving my Kindle, I find myself secretly believing that books possess an élan vital that Kindles, by their nature, lack.

My friend Mr. Conrad Roth blogged a few months ago about his less ambivalent attitude toward e-books at the Varieties here and here — which I highly recommend to anyone considering the Kindle.  Another friend, Bill Ryan, blogged about his own very positive reaction to the Kindle a few months back, as well as his attitude towards the most common criticisms of the Kindle. 

Always interested in bringing my friends together, I just wanted to take advantage of an opportunity to link both of them in one page.

No college freshman in America is able to escape his courses without encountering Kant’s Categorical Imperative in some form or other.  Drawing on a Medieval moral tradition that held that God has placed in each man’s heart, whether Catholic, pagan, or apostate, the knowledge of right and wrong, Kant held that each person has an inherent rational knowledge of the Moral Law, or the pure form of moral action, which is commonly known as the Golden Rule.  Behind the Golden Rule is, furthermore, an impulse to act according to the Moral Law which Kant dubbed the Categorical Imperative — a concept which Freud later took up and reinterpreted as an irrational force: the Super Ego.

For Kant, however, the Categorical Imperative was always a rational impulse which revealed our transcendent selves.  How, then, to explain the not infrequent impulse to not fulfill one’s duty to the Moral law?  According to Kant:

"We are not, then, to call the depravity of human nature wickedness taking the word in its strict sense as a disposition (the subjective principle of the maxims) to adopt evil as evil into our maxim as our incentives (for that is diabolical); we should rather term it the perversity of the heart, which, then, because of what follows from it, is also called an evil heart. Such a heart may coexist with a will which in general is good: it arises from the frailty of human nature, the lack of sufficient strength to follow out the principles it has chosen for itself…" — Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone

Edgar Allan Poe made a point of exploring that which Kant would rather leave aside as pointless and empty of content.  In an 1850 short story, he wrote:

"Induction, a posteriori, would have brought phrenology to admit, as an innate and primitive principle of human action, a paradoxical something, which we may call perverseness, for want of a more characteristic term. In the sense I intend, it is, in fact, a mobile without motive, a motive not motivirt. Through its promptings we act without comprehensible object; or, if this shall be understood as a contradiction in terms, we may so far modify the proposition as to say, that through its promptings we act, for the reason that we should not.

…

"There lives no man who at some period has not been tormented, for example, by an earnest desire to tantalize a listener by circumlocution. The speaker is aware that he displeases; he has every intention to please, he is usually curt, precise, and clear, the most laconic and luminous language is struggling for utterance upon his tongue, it is only with difficulty that he restrains himself from giving it flow; he dreads and deprecates the anger of him whom he addresses; yet, the thought strikes him, that by certain involutions and parentheses this anger may be engendered. That single thought is enough. The impulse increases to a wish, the wish to a desire, the desire to an uncontrollable longing, and the longing (to the deep regret and mortification of the speaker, and in defiance of all consequences) is indulged.

…

"We have a task before us which must be speedily performed. We know that it will be ruinous to make delay… We glow, we are consumed with eagerness to commence the work, with the anticipation of whose glorious result our whole souls are on fire. It must, it shall be undertaken to-day, and yet we put it off until to-morrow, and why? There is no answer, except that we feel perverse, using the word with no comprehension of the principle." — The Imp of the Perverse

The tendency which Poe calls perversity — the tendency to say the wrong thing, to zig when one should zag, to procrastinate merely to see what will happen next — seems to be more ubiquitous in software programming than in other occupations.  I’ve known programmers who not only say things they shouldn’t, but seem to take a particular joy in doing so.  They do not simply lack an internal censor that would keep them from saying certain things, but seem to actually be possessed by some sort of Socratic daimon who eggs them on.

Yet sometimes I think it is not the programmers who are especially possessed of this imp, but simply they who are not able to mask it behind other, more acceptable, modes of behavior.   We often hear of the disgruntled chef who spits in a difficult customer’s food, or the unhygienic bartender who slips unsanitary items in a customer’s drink.  The same impulse, I think, takes over middle-managers at times.  They, who are forced to do unpleasant tasks by their direct managers, and who in the end are blamed by both the people under them as well as those over them when things go wrong, are always suspected of taking a particular pleasure — dare I say a perverse pleasure — when unpleasant things, such as dressing down an employee or on occasion firing one, must be done.  What is more perverse, after all, than actually taking pleasure in performing unpleasant tasks, and who could blame them if they did?

Similar to Poe’s "mobile without motive," Robert Herrick captured the mood as one of Delight in Disorder (1648):

A SWEET disorder in the dress
Kindles in clothes a wantonness :
A lawn about the shoulders thrown
Into a fine distraction :
An erring lace which here and there
Enthrals the crimson stomacher :
A cuff neglectful, and thereby
Ribbons to flow confusedly :
A winning wave (deserving note)
In the tempestuous petticoat :
A careless shoe-string, in whose tie
I see a wild civility :
Do more bewitch me than when art
Is too precise in every part.

The sexual element that is implicit in Herrick’s understanding of the imp of perversity is remarkably absent from Poe’s, just as the element of danger, pervasive in Poe, is absent in Herrick.  Our contemporary notion of the perverse tends to span both elements, and is generally accessorized with leather where Herrick has petticoats, and piercings where Poe envisions only murder.  Yet even in our own times perversity has started to lose some of its perverse luster.  The Christian Coalition may decry the slipping of moral standards as a slow slouching towards the Rapture, but I see the problem, rather, as one in which we’ve denied ourselves the real pleasures of perversity.  When even leather and piercings have lost their power to outrage as well as titillate, where shall we turn?

I’ve recently been enjoying pulp novels from the 40’s with a certain amount of furtive excitement that those authors are writing things they would never get away with writing today.  For instance, from Mickey Spillane’s 1948 I, The Jury (for those unfamiliar with the series, Mike Hammer is a tough detective, while Velda is his faithful secretary):

"Here’s one you’ll like, chum," Velda grinned at me.  She pulled out a full-length photo of a gorgeous blonde.  My heart jumped when I saw it.  The picture was taken at a beach, and she stood there tall and languid-looking in a white bathing suit.  Long solid legs.  A little heavier than the movie experts consider good form, but the kind that make you drool to look at.  Under the suit I could see the muscles of her stomach.  Incredibly wide shoulders for a woman, framing breasts that jutted out, seeking freedom from the restraining fabric of the suit.  Her hair looked white in the picture, but I could tell that it was a natural blonde.  Lovely, lovely yellow hair.  But her face was what got me.  I thought Velda was a good looker, but this one was even lovelier.  I felt like whistling.

"Who is she?"

"Maybe I shouldn’t tell you.  That leer on your face could get you into trouble…"

And so on and so forth.  I, The Jury was a runaway bestseller and made Mickey Spillane’s career.  This was due in no small part to the racy writing and tight plot, but something should also be said for the cover art.  Here’s the cover of the original 1948 edition:

And here’s the cover redone for a later edition:

Finally, here’s the poster art for a film version:

Do you notice a common theme?  A man with a gun pointed at a woman undressing.  Is he holding the pistol in order to force her to undress?  Or is she undressing in order to compel him to drop the pistol?  Thousands of readers in the 40’s and 50’s felt compelled to read the book in order to find out what was behind this juxtaposition of sex and violence, drawn by the imp of the perverse. 

We have two in the house.  Passed down through the generations in my wife’s family, they currently sit in our living room as decorations, whispering to us of bygone times.

They once played a central role in the cultural life of the Russian emigre intelligentsia.  Alexandra Kropotkin evokes images of this bygone world in her wonderful book on Russian Cooking:

Among Russians who have gone away to dwell in other countries, it is easy enough to arouse mild attacks of homesick longing for Russian life and Russian flavors.  But to launch the expatriate Russian soul on a really unbridled jag of nostalgia, try mentioning our vechernyi t’chai, our evening tea.

There is the magic phrase that reawakens all out dearest memories of home!

When the samovar goes on the dining-room table, usually about 10 o’clock in the evening, the entire family gathers for the most intimate kind of get-together.  This is the hour of comfortable relaxation, with old and young meeting as equals in talk, drinking innumerable glasses and cups of tea while wandering conversationally into all fields of anecdote and gossip, of thought and speculation.

The babies and younger children are in bed.  The adolescents feel grown up.  The oldsters are sure of an audience.  And guests always drop in.  It is perfectly correct for friends to drop in, uninvited, for evening tea at any time between 10 P.M. and midnight.  The lady of the house is not expected to set out anything special for company.  There is no fuss or formality.  The scene is cozy and homelike.  When you come for evening tea, you take potluck with the family.

The dining-room table is covered with an embroidered tablecloth.  Beside the lady of the house, at her right hand, the steaming samovar stands on a little table of its own.  Or if there is no side table, the samovar will be standing directly on the dining-room table, with the hostess peeking around it to see and take part in whatever is going on.

A small china teapot fits into a metal fixture on top of the samovar.  The hostess herself has measured tea leaves into the china teapot, has brewed the tea with boiling water from the samovar, and has set the pot of tea on top of the samovar to keep on brewing.

The tea is made as strong as household supplies permit.  A few drops of this strong tea from the small china pot will be poured into each cup or glass, which will then be filled with hot water from the samovar.

Tea glasses in metal or silver holders that have handles, like American ice-cream-soda glasses, are set out for the men.  In Russia the men drink tea from glasses, adn the women drink tea from cups.

…

On our evening tea table are plates of cold cuts and plates of sliced cheese.  We don’t serve fish at evening tea unless the season is Lent, or when times are particularly hard.  The bread basket offers slices of black bread and slices of white.  Unsalted butter is on the table in a pretty dish … Plenty of sweet things will be arrayed in front of us in any case.  There will be homemade preserves, crystallized fruits, fruit confections known as pastilla, and the semi-jellied fruit candies that Russians call marmelade …

At vechernyi t’chai, it seemed that the tea was consumed endlessly, most Russians taking it with thin slices of lemon.  The hostess always sliced the lemon herself with a special silver knife.  After cutting the lemon she always held the knife for a moment in the steam from the samovar to prevent the knife from tarnishing.

Everyone at the tea table had a plate and a small saucer, usually of cut glass.  The saucer was for preserves, which you either ate with a spoon or put into your tea.  Many Russians like preserves better than sugar as a sweetening for their tea.  After years in America it still irks me not to be able to find saucers of the right size for preserves to go with Russian tea.  We call these saucers blewdichki dlia vareniya.  They are about 3 inches across.  Very few Russians take milk or cream in their evening tea.  They take it that way on for breakfast.

The best breakfast in the world, of course, is a hot bowl of pho, which is a part of my cultural heritage.  My mother makes it for us whenever she visits, and I generally have it for lunch at least two or three times a month.  Nevertheless, the best time of day for ph? is the morning.  It includes a strong beef broth for protein, noodles for carbs, and spices to help you wake up as well as a variety of herbs, bean sprouts and citrus. 

Andrea Nguyen has written an excellent series of articles about pho for the Mercury News which covers the history and the rituals surrounding the flavorful soup.  She even provides a recipe, though it is a bit of a lark since few people will have the patience to actually try it out.  It requires some unusual herbs as well as long hours of boiling bones and meat for the broth.  My mother typically boils two chickens (either Vietnamese or Thai chickens, since she says American chickens have no flavor) as well as a large beef bone for about 8 hours until the meat has practically disintegrated into the broth.

Garnishing pho is like putting together your own hamburger — you can have it your way. So, before putting any pho into your mouth, add your own finishing touches. Then dive in with a two-handed approach: chopsticks in one hand to pick up the noodles, the soup spoon in the other to scoop up broth and other goodies.

Your pho ritual may include:

Bean sprouts: Add them raw for crunch or blanch them first.

Chiles: Dip and wiggle thin slices of hot chile in the hot broth to release the oil. Leave them in if you dare. For best fragrance and taste, try Southeast Asian chiles such as Thai bird or dragon rather than jalapeños. Serranos are better than jalapeños.

Herbs: Strip fresh herb leaves from their stems, tear up the leaves and drop them into your bowl. Available at Viet markets, pricey ngo gai (culantro, thorny cilantro, saw-leaf herb) imparts heady cilantro notes. The ubiquitous purple-stemmed Asian/Thai basil (hung que) contributes sweet anise-like flavors. Spearmint (hung lui), popular in the north, adds zip. [For details, see Essential Viet herb page on this site.]

Lime: A squeeze of lime gives the broth a tart edge, especially nice if the broth is too sweet or bland.

Sauces: Many people squirt hoisin (tuong) or Sriracha hot sauce directly into the bowl. I don’t favor this practice because it obliterates a well-prepared, nuanced broth. But I do reach for the hoisin and Sriracha bottles to make a dipping sauce for the beef meatballs (bo vien).

I typically do put both hoisin and Sriracha in my soup because this is the way my mother has always made it for me.  Additionally, I squirt some of each into a dipping bowl, pick out thin slices of rare beef out of my soup bowl with chopsticks and alternate between dipping the slices in the chile sauce and the sweet hoisin.

Unlike the Russian tea ritual, the Vietnamese pho ritual is no time to talk about politics or religion.  Eating soup is a serious business, and involves the constant motion of chewing on noodles and preparing carefully for the moment when one swallows one’s noodles by synchronized hand motions, with the chopstick hand picking out pieces of meat from the bowl and dipping them in the sauce dish, while the soup spoon hand gathers more noodles to chase the slices of beef.

Talking generally resumes after the meal, as all participants look with satisfaction at the empty soup bowls and the pieces of discarded herbs and sprouts strewn across the table.

The Vietnamese are a coffee rather than a tea people, having been colonized by the French rather than the English.  For breakfast I like a strong cup of coffee with my pho, and I like to sweeten it with condensed milk.  A meal like this generally leaves me full well into the dinner hour.

By way of Slashdot, here is a paper from Newcastle University suggesting that big cash prizes can drive technological breakthroughs.  Among successful examples of cash prizes driving innovation are the X-Prize Foundation’s fomenting of research into space rockets, space elevators, and moon landers.   Other competitions have driven innovations from breakthroughs in designing intelligent cars that navigate complex terrains to the successful construction of a half-scale model of an X-Wing that can actually take down a half-scale model of the Death Star.  In the same vein, the James Randy Educational Foundation has a standing one million dollar prize for anyone who can demonstrate, under "proper observing conditions", any paranormal or occult powers (restrictions may apply).

The notion that money can be a motivator is certainly an interesting one.   I myself once wrote an article on software interoperability in order to win an XBOX 360, and can testify to the power of electronics as a motivator for great endeavors.  Is it such a great leap from there to the idea that greenbacks can inspire similar feats of mental strength?

According to the synopsis for the article on cash prizes, the purpose of cash prizes is to drive "revolutionary" scientific breakthroughs, rather than typical scientific breakthroughs, for which the admiration of one’s peers is often sufficient compensation:

Given that revolutionary science is a high risk endeavor which usually fails; it is likely to thrive only when the incentives rewarding the rare instances of success are greater than for normal science. Therefore we would argue that it is insufficient for successful revolutionary scientists merely to get the usual rewards of prestigious professorships, respect from within the scientific profession, and a modestly high level of reasonably secure income. Something more is needed: lots of money.

The pluripotent possibilities boggle the mind.  Here are some of my own humble suggestions for achievable scientific goals and the cash prizes, in today’s dollars, that should be assigned to them.  Feel free to add your own prize suggestions in the comments.

• A mass-producible flying car — $2 million
• Pills that have the taste and nutritional qualities of real food — $3 million
• A rocket to Mars — $5 million
• A rocket to Saturn — $5.5 million
• A rocket to Pluto — $1 million
• Trained apes who will take over our menial tasks, freeing humans to live the good life — $5.5 million
• Flying monkeys — $6 million
• Disposable rocket packs (for daily commutes) – $6.5 million
• Successful cloning of great thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, and Lincoln — $7.5 million
• Successful cloning of B, C and D-list thinkers like Suetonius, Duns Scotus, and Ayn Rand — $1.5 million
• Successful cloning of deceased pets — $2.5 million
• Universal cure for cancer — $10 million
• Teleportation devices — $11 million
• Time Travel — $13 million
• Worm Hole technology — $15 million
• Hyperspace engines — $25 million
• Mind-reading devices — $15 million
• Robot sex-slaves — YMMV
• Holodecks — $25 million
• A computer that can defeat all chess grand masters — $1 million
• Skynet — YMMV
• A self-aware computer intelligence that will defend us against ape-slave uprisings — $25 million
• Star Trek Replicators — $26 million
• A working lightsaber — $27 million

As the paper suggests, if we haven’t achieved any of these goals so far, it may be because we have yet to offer the right incentives.