Like Tolkien himself would count as an excellent architect. But he worked primarily in a single strategic medium, the text. Closer to mathematics than epic cinema. On balance, I'd say making the films was a greater achievement than writing the books.
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Speaking of Tolkien, I recall an interview where he said he was often asked why the eagles couldn't just drop the ringbearer into mordor, and he said his response was "oh... shut up!" (good humoredly). Elegant architecture can get away with logic fails in a way movies can't.
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I wonder what the most full-spectrum complex thing humans do that is driven by a single individual. I think it's a three-way dead heat between bleeding edge space missions, complex movies, and computer hardware (bottom half of stack from silicon to low-level system software)
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Top-half-stack software is more sprawling complexity of course, but it's not a singular vision and doesn't need to be.
So the 3 wonders of the modern world are:
1. JWST or Perseverance
2. Recent chip like say Zen3 or Apple M2
3. LOTR
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I might add a modern aircraft carrier to the mix. A floating nuclear-powered city that's the closest thing we have to a deathstar.
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Hehe
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Just learned that most of the Riders of Rohan were women. Some comments are saying that a couple of the Nazgul riders were high school girls. Seems like 90% of horses are owned by women...?
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Something like LIGO I think belongs in a different event at the civilizational olympics. It's the 100m dash where the kind of complexity I'm talking about is probably the Decathalon...
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Replying to @vgr
LIGO achieves a strain sensitivity of better than 1 part in 10^22. In some ways it's the greatest achievement of humanity. It really ought to be impossible.
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DOh!
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Replying to @vgr
Turns out it was a satirical impersonation of Tolkien ! scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/2632
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Okay I stand corrected re eagles plot hole. I not a true tolkien nerd, and like the movies way more than the books, which I've only read through twice and not in recent decades polygon.com/platform/amp/l
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Ah, didn't know this either. Still, I think even in the best case, no way the Hobbit can be stretched to 3 movies while staying true to the text. It would be 2/3 a different new story. Like say Cumberbatch version of Sherlock vs. Jeremy Brett
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Replying to @vgr
New Line fucked Jackson over on backend profit sharing for LoTR. Classic movie industry mob accounting where they made the profit disappear on paper. He fought them with lawyers for years and refused to sign on to Hobbit as leverage. So he had way too little time to prep.
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I still think LIGO is fundamentally a different sort of civ boundary than the set I'm sorta constructing here, but no question it's an equally demanding one... perhaps distinction is "surface area" of outcome.
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Replying to @vgr
You need the best lasers, the best squeezed light, the best vibrational isolation along about 17 zillion axes, the best simulations and modelling, the best large vacuum, the best [etc etc etc]. Decathlon is a monofocus by comparison...
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With apologies to A. N. Whitehead, Civilization advances by pushing the limit of the number of important operations which we can perform while actively thinking about them.
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Jackson etc represent a sort of hyper-Whitehead mode of advancement. The highest bandwidth (volume x velocity x variety) unautomated thinking you can do on top of the most mature automation available
Raising the ceiling, as opposed to the floor or a single pointy spire
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V-V-V was a phrase used to describe big data. Here I’m using it to characterize hypercomplexity
Classic complexity: simple rules lead to complex behavior
Hypercomplexity: hold my beer
Complex rules (showrunner bible, carrier operations manuals) lead to hypercomplex behavior
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Definition: a system is hypercomplex if you can imagine a fat Robert Caro book existing about it
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A system is merely complex if you can only imagine a James Gleick book about it
A system is pseudo-complex or not-even-a-system if you can only imagine a Malcom Gladwell book about it
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