Song vs. Story

(Picture from here.)

My father was a musician and my mother was a writer. Apparently, it's harder to teach story than music so I started piano at four and have kept it up ever since. Think of me as a determined and talentless, but enthusiastic, amateur.

But my mother got me in the end.

Over the years I've been thinking over and over how music and narrative are related. I don't mean sound tracks intended to support or tell actual stories or things like opera where stories are performed with music. No, I mean the structure of music itself seems to be strongly related to structure of story telling.

I suppose this shouldn't come as a surprise. Story narrative and music both bind time. Narrative binds time in the form of a list of events-- even if those events are out of sequence. Though the binding in the case of stories is looser. A reader isn't forced to read stories, sentences or even words one after the other. Some (me, included) tend to read blocks of words, skipping forward and back within the block. In comics narrative can float across the page in all sorts of ways.

Music, though, binds time exactly. The note is played at a given time and no other. Even if the performer is improvising, once the note is played it cannot be unplayed. The note is fixed in time.

However, I think the relationship between story and music is even deeper. To prove my thesis I'm going to crawl through a fairly easy pop song I happen to like. It's called The Transient Apple Salesgirl. It's a Japanese song-- I like listening to J-Pop. I'm not distracted by the words. It has something to do with transience. And girls. And apples, I think. Listen to it here.

I mean I could do it with Beethoven but then we'd be here forever.

This song has a number of musical themes that happen at particular points in the song. It begins with a mechanical sound like the winding of a music box. Then a music box plays followed by a little singing. Then the song starts in earnest. It has the following themes.

• music box theme: trifle played on a music box
• descent theme: descending pitch theme that is reminiscent of the music box theme, but descending in tone rather than ascending 
• bridge theme: a broken rhythm theme that ascends sort of like a counter point to the descent theme
• chorus: strong declarative musical line that seems to echo the music box theme 
• crossed lines bridge (up and down): interesting theme where the voices go up and down but the background inverts it at the same time.
• Resolution theme: resolves the tension in the crossed lines bridge

Here are the times for these themes in the song:

0:00 - mechanical introduction (winding up of music box)

0:05 - music box theme

0:19 - music box singing

0:44 - descent theme

1:36 - bridge theme

1:49 - chorus

2:07 - crossed lines bridge (up and down)

2:16 - descent theme

2:40 - bridge theme full

3:07 - chorus

3:25 - crossed lines bridge (up and down)

3:33 - chaotic bridge based on bridge and crossed lines theme

3:45 - crossed lines bridge/bridge theme

4:00 - Resolution theme: inversion of crossed lines

4:28 - chorus based on music box

4:45 - chorus raised key

5:04 - crossed lines bridge

5:12 - instrumental fade based on resolution theme

5:38 - music box fade

Now, if you graph these themes you get the picture of the song visually. (Click to enlarge.)

One of the first things you can see is the repetition pattern. Note two of the themes that are first introduced, the descent theme and the chorus, are big in the beginning and get smaller towards the end of the song. Note also, that some of the small themes in the beginning increase towards the end. Similarly, some of the sections are blended.

It's also clear the sections get smaller and smaller as time goes on.

Some of the themes are constructed to echo previous themes. The chorus has a relationship to the music box. The resolution theme has a relationship to the crossed lines.

Good stories are filled with these textures, resonances and relationships. Often, something in the beginning of a given story might appear unrelated to what comes immediately after but by the end of the story makes perfect sense. 

Some of the sections have more than one theme in them. There's a section at 4:28 where the chorus them is played against the music box. Similarly, there's a section at 3:33 where both the bridge theme and the crossed lines theme are played against one another. At 3:45 this same blend is played frantically, chaotically, in a climax to the song. 

In a story, when the climax is reached, the scene nearly always presents elements that have gone before-- otherwise the climax doesn't make any sense. Would Neo's belief in himself when he faces the agent make any sense if he hadn't gone through a crisis of faith before. Would his saving of Morpheus make any sense if Morpheus hadn't reached out to him before? Would Neo's battle with the agent work if the agent hadn't betrayed a personal antagonism to human beings? All of these little resonances and nuances play out in story.

And they play out in music in pretty much the same way. In Apple, the resolution theme is built in part from the crossed lines bridge. The crossed lines bridge echoes the previous descent theme. And, of course, the music box bookends the whole song. In a story, we would expect the resolution to echo and relate the conflicts that came before. Similarly, the conflicts themselves would have resonances to the situation, the character and world of the story. We have expectations of the path of a story. We have similar expectations of the path of a song. Sometimes the story/song fulfills the expectations. Sometimes it confounds them-- to our delight.

It's hard to take apart a story. After all, you must read and understand the internal pieces of the story to make sense of them. And it's hard to keep from being swept away from it.

But you can engineer the experience with music. You can choose a small piece-- this one is only about six minutes long-- that's relatively simple. Choose one where the language doesn't interfere. 

Then, pick apart the piece and get a sense of how the components mesh. That sense of things can then be translated into how a story works: The color palette can reflect something important. (The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover.) The image of scissors. (Dead Again.) The river can tie it together. (Huckleberry Finn.) 

I heard in a lecture years and years ago that music is composed of equal parts surprise and inevitability.

What a wonderful surprise. Stories are, too.

Evolution of the Lung

I'm getting over pneumonia so in a vain attempt to make lemonade out of lemons, I'm going to talk about the evolution of the lung.

The lung one of the major mechanisms-- if not the major mechanism-- that enabled invasion of the land by animals.

The necessity of lungs is based on the vast difference between gaseous oxygen and oxygen dissolved in water. For one thing, when water passes over the gills of a fish (or crab) it one fluid (water) passing next to another fluid (blood) across a thin membrane. This is very similar to what already happens within the body of a complex organism.

In fact, some organisms are so simple that they have no need of circulatory systems at all. It is sufficient that they are in contact with water that contains oxygen. The oxygen crosses the membrane easily.

But there are some downsides.

For one, the amount of oxygen that can be dissolved in water is less than the level of oxygen in air. At 0C, the amount of oxygen in water is 14.6 mg/l. Air weighs 1.2 g/l, of which 21% is oxygen. That works out to about 251 mg/l-- more in the historical past. In addition, the solubility of oxygen in water is temperature dependent. If you bring the temperature up to 37C (human body temperature) the amount of O2 available drops to 6.71 mg/l. (See here.) Biochemical reactions like to take advantage of heat. But there's an obvious tension between the oxygen available for metabolism and the heat loving biochemical reactions.

All through the ocean different organism act out this tension from the smokers down at the sea bottom to the rich green soup of some lakes.

Think of the ancient oxygen atmosphere before organisms invaded the land as a wonderful resource yet to be exploited.

Given the sheer amount of available oxygen in the gaseous atmosphere, why did it take several hundred million years for animals to make it to land?

Well, the lungs were hard to evolve. Different groups of organisms such as insects, vertebrates and scorpions, used different strategies.

All lungs are a mechanism of concentration and distribution-- gills serve the same purpose in water. The idea is to expose a specialized organ used to absorb the oxygen and serve as source to be distributed over the body. It's a compromise between the necessity of oxygn being available to all cells of the organism to oxygen and the engineering problems of exposing the cells to the outside environment. A consequence of this compromise is the contents of lungs (or gills, for that matter) have enormous surface area to volume ratios. The human lung, for example, has about 70 m2 of surface area-- a square about 8 meters and some change on a side. About the floor plan size of a studio apartment.

Arachnids such as spiders and scorpions have something called "book lungs". These are flattened air sacks adjacent to one another, with the intervening space filled with hemolymph-- the equivalent of blood. Air is moved through the sacks allowing gaseous exchange.

Insects do something different. They have entry orifices called spiracles, allowing the air to enter a trachea. The trachea branch smaller and smaller, finally becoming tracheoles-- dead end, water filled compartments. (See here.) The tracheoles deliver oxygen directly to the tissues. In effect, the whole body of the insect-- or at least where necessary-- is riddled with lung like structures.

Vertebrates have more than one strategy but they all have the concept of a central concentrator space where oxygen is absorbed and then distributed via blood and the circulatory system.

If you look at the drawing above, you'll see the evolution of the different vertebrate groups through time. We're all familiar with the different extant vertebrate classes. We'll neglect the fish for the moment. On land, they are birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians.

The first lungs are thought to derive from the swim bladder of fish. This organ keeps gas under pressure-- usually oxygen-- in order to stabilize swimming. The swam bladder is filled from a gas gland which extracts out gas from the tissue and blood stream and pressurizes it in the bladder. The pressure can be quite high-- even fish deep in the ocean have working swim bladders. Lungfish use the same structure in their air respiration.

The lungs of amphibians are composed of a few septa-- separated sacks-- which contain a few large alveoli-- blind chambers where oxygen transfer takes place. Since amphibians also respire through their skin the lungs are not the sole means of oxygenation.

The first lungs that look familiar to us arose in reptiles. Reptiles have alveoli, as we do. They have complex branched lungs-- though less branched than ours. Reptiles have no diaphragm and move air differently. However, that's more of a description of reptiles in general. Crocodilians have a more complex story to tell. But we'll get to that.

We have mammalian lungs: complex branched structures that terminate in highly vascularized containers called alveoli. Like most vertebrate lungs, air proceeds through the lungs one way at a time. In, then out, in a sort of bellows arrangement caused by the diaphragm.

There are a lot of problems with a bellows system. For one, it means that there's a lot of dead air in the lungs. That makes the lungs inefficient. For another, the termination areas somewhat susceptible to infection. After all, it's just a little cell where air comes in and goes out through a whole. It's easy to close off.

One of the biochemical developments that had to occur for lungs to work was the evolution of pulmonary surfactants: chemicals that manage the surface tension on the wet inner surfaces. In the absence of the surfactants, when segments of the alveolar membranes touch, they stick. This is not a good thing. Surfactants allow them to unstick from one another. The development of these surfactants predates the lungs so they were right there to help early on.

Now, we come to my favorite lung system: that of the birds.

Birds do not have an alveolar system. Instead, their system is tubular. Imaging the bird lung extracted into a long tube. Air comes in one end of the system and comes out the other. Instead of alveoli, they have parabronchii-- small tubes where gas exchange occurs. (See here.)

There are host of advantages to this sort of system. For one thing, there's no dead air. There are reservoirs where little exchange occurs. These appear to have a mechanical purpose and aid in moving the air along. But there is no dead air in the parabronchii while there is considerable unused air in the alveoli. Remember your CPR. You exhale into the patient because there's a lot of oxygen left in your air.

Because the system is flow through, there's the opportunity for counter current exchange. Imagine you have two flowing tubes of water, one hot and one cold, and you want to heat one up with the other. You lay the tubes down against one another, right? What direction should the water flow in the tubes? The same or opposite?

If you thought "opposite" you win the prize. If the flow is in the opposite direction then there is a continued gradient as the fluids flow past one another. While in co-current exchange, the fluids reach equilibrium and exchange stops. The kidney uses this mechanism. An alveolar system can't because the flow is in and out. But the bird system, since its flow is one way, runs the blood supply in the opposite way.

This makes the bird system enormously efficient. Not only does it provide a means to reduce the size of the lungs-- important in a flying animal-- it also is much better at extracting oxygen at lower pressures. Climbers on Everest, wearing oxygen equipment, have reported seeing geese flying high above them.

The flow through system of birds actually may predate their dinosaurian ancestors. Crocodiles and monitor lizards have both been shown to have flow through systems. (See here.) Going back to the drawing above, crocodiles separated from line leading to birds way back when they were both thecodonts. So for crocodiles to have flow through breathing either means they developed it independently or the rudiments were there prior to the evolution of dinosaurs or birds. Which makes sense. Pterosaurs also popped off from thecodonts and there is ample evidence that they had similar respiratory apparatus as birds. Maybe the marine reptiles did, too.

A gentleman named Farmer (See here.) has suggested the alveolar lung evolved in the late paleozoic, a period of relatively high oxygen. However, flow through lungs evolved in the ancestor of crocodiles and birds to support apnea-- the stopping of breathing. Possibly this was an aquatic adaptation as it is in the crocodilians. Or for some other reason. Regardless, it did evolve and it was present in the archeosaurs. Which meant it was there and waiting when the dinosaurs came along. Then, came birds.

So, as I sit here and cough my lungs out, I look outside. The sun is shining. The birds are singing.

God I wish I was a bird.

Making Good Characters Rationally Self Destructive

(Picture from here.)

About years ago, back when I was in college and dinosaurs ruled the earth, I ran across Garret Hardin's lovely book, The Tragedy of the Commons. If you want to go out there and read it quickly, go ahead. It's not long. I'll wait.

The metaphor was the British Commons where the townsfolk would share grazing land for their cattle. However, there was an incentive for an individual to sneak in and graze more than the others if he could get away with it. His cattle would get a little more food and he'd do better economically. Of course, if one person could do it, anybody could do it and ultimately the Commons is destroyed.

To summarize the book in a single sentence: short term individual gain trumps long term common good.

It's a beautiful metaphor for a lot of things. For one thing it shows why public space, be it capitalist infrastructure or water and sewer, has to be protected. Once I became aware of the process, it showed up everywhere from food safety enforcement to securities fraud.

It explains why governments are necessary.

But it does not explain irrational behavior.

Adam Smith's "Invisible Hand" is a purely rational construction. It has no moral conscience or presumption of anything other than the iron rules of supply and demand. Prices go up as demand goes up or supply is restricted.

But as we all know we are anything but rational.

Let's be very clear. I am not talking about how people accept and cling to irrational beliefs. That actually makes an odd sort of rational sense. Think of it in terms of our ability to build serviceable models on incomplete data. Whether we're trying to figure out or in-laws or determine if our children love us, we're always building models composed of incomplete data. We then cling to the inherent phenomenology underlying them. It's the end result of our natural selection. After all, the cost of thinking a leopard is under that bush is enormously less than thinking there's no leopard under the bush when their is.

Nor am I talking about addiction, though we may end up talking about that as well. Addiction is a well characterized neurological phenomenon. It's not pleasant or rational but we (sort of) understand it.

No, I'm talking about  people can continue in a given course of action when it clearly, demonstrably, not being successful. You've all seen it. Somebody gets into a sticky situation and instead of stopping the behavior that got them there, they double down on that very same behavior. I'm thinking of this clinically. As a writer. After all, good characters need a healthy dose of self destruction.

How can people continue to do that?

Enter Prospect Theory.

Prospect Theory is the invention of Daniel Kahneman, who won the Nobel Prize for inventing it. It reformulates the decision making process in the form of risk analysis when the probabilities of outcomes were known. People tend to make decisions based on the relative weights of the risks of the wins and losses rather than the wins and losses themselves. The wights do not have to be equal. And they tend to be relative to a reference point where the balance of risk is considered equivalent.

One would think human beings would biased towards chance of gain rather than risk of loss. After all, we are the invisible hand, right?

Actually, it turns out that we are weighted against loss rather than towards gain. Consequently, we often aggressively increase the same behavior in the face of loss. Imagine a gambler who hits a losing streak. Which does he do? Try to break the streak-- in effect, gamble out of the hole-- or accept the loss and walk away from the table? Okay, guess on the count: 1! 2! 3! Go!

We see this all the time. Workers who have embraced a profession have trouble giving it up when the profession is lost or moves overseas. People cling to racial stereotypes ferociously when they think implied privileges or cultural heritage is threatened. People in marriages cling to the trappings representing when things were good. If I just do this, like I used to, the marriage will be saved. It is too terrible to face the risk of loss even though the possibility of gain might be negligible.

We see it in the political arena. One party or the other suffers a defeat and goes through soul searching. Inevitably, they come back to their central message: We must be exactly the same but even more! More conservative! More liberal!

I worked at a Very Large Computer Company back in the 80s. VLCC never really understood why it's products sold. One colleague suggested our salesmen were like cheerleaders around a rocket, saying "Go Rocket! Go!" and the rocket took off and their products sold and everything was right with the world. But when the microcomputer revolution happened, the stock crashed, the products didn't sell and the poor rocket lay shattered and broken in a crater. The salesmen kept trying their old techniques: "Go rocket! Go!"

I had a friend, Phil, when I worked at Small Aircraft Company. One week, when the value of the lottery was a couple of hundred million, there was a movement to buy a bunch of tickets together. It was sort of like a bunch of kids deciding to buy a share in an imaginary airplane. Phil was agonized over this. He was a mathematician. He knew the odds were as close to zero as to be negligible. Why, then, did he feel so compelled to buy a ticket. Eventually, he did buy one. He said to me, "It's not that I think we'll win. We won't. It's because I'd feel so bad if you all did win and I hadn't bought a ticket."

One of the reasons I find Prospect Theory so compelling is that it sounds so rational. But what it is really doing is evolving a mathematical model around irrationality. While the theory itself is perfectly rational, the weighting of risk found in observation is not. We tend to overvalue low probabilities and undervalue high probabilities. Which is another way of saying the lottery is designed for the mathematically challenged.

It gives an interesting development to character development in fiction. Writers always have to decide what the character wants and will risk to get it-- the princess must overcome obstacles to save the prince and the nature of the obstacles show the depth her bravery and strength of her commitment. Now, we need to look at this more closely. Now we also want to know if the loss or failure of not going might outweigh the risk of failure of going.

After all, Gimli said: "Certainty of death, Small chance of success... What are we waiting for?"

More on Prospect Theory:
Putin and the Crimea
Kahneman's original paper
Applications of Prospect Theory to Political Science
Evolutionary Origin of Prospect Theory

Topics of Interest

(Picture from here.)

A lot of good stuff coming over the transom from Io9 lately. The picture left was derived from Googles partnership with organizations to create a deforestation monitoring tool: Global Forest Watch. The blue tends towards reforestation. Red tends towards deforestation. Norway, status quo. Sweden, much change.

Here's the first ever geological map of Ganymede.

These tunnels are beautiful. I especially want to visit the Guoliang Tunnel in China. I wonder what the accident rate is.

There's a good discussion here on how Kepler has changed our view of the universe. Just a few years ago there was no evidence for any other planets other than hope and optimism. But Kepler has given us an estimate there are on average 1.6 planets around every star in our galaxy-- or 160 billion planets. And that doesn't include free moving planetary objects.

Kepler also suggests that 22% of the sunlike stars in the Milky Way are Earth sized. That's about 2 billion possible planets.

There's company out there. We just haven't met them yet.

Original articles here, here and here.

Finally, here's a really good article on the similarity between the brains of dogs and humans. First, the study examined the area of the brain in both humans and dogs that responds to the human voice. Turns out they are the same. Emotionally charged sounds such as whimpering dogs or crying children caused similar responses in both species.

The study suggests that dogs are as conscious as human children. (Original NYTimes article here.)

There are two distinct possibilities, both of which are discussed by the authors. The first is that in the 100k years we've been associated with dogs and the 20k years we've been actively working with them, we've modified their brains to respond to us. This is, no doubt true. However, the authors think the data shows something different. They believe that these associations are much, much older. They speculate that the structures are common between humans and dogs and existed when primates and canids ancestry split-- about 100 million years ago.

If this is true and dogs are as conscious as children then it brings right to the forefront the whole "is conscious necessary?" argument. This discussion centers around is consciousness an artifact of general cognition, an unnecessary emergent property of the mammalian brain or a positive attribute selected for by evolution? The cons of consciousness are its metabolic expense and relative slowness to unconscious activities. The pros of consciousness selection are exactly the same: if it's so counter productive why do we have it? Natural selection would select against such extravagant expense if it wasn't useful.

But if it shows up all over in vertebrates the discussion narrows to: it's either a necessary but useless byproduct of mammalian brain or it has positive attributes that outweigh its expense. It seems that some of the bird studies of intelligence might be able to at least broaden argument to byproducts of vertebrate brains.

Which, to my mind, makes the argument fairly thin. I suspect that though some birds might have a cognitive level sufficient to support consciousness, I suspect that many do not. Whereas I suspect that there are many more mammalian species that can support consciousness. This is not purely chauvinism on my part. Birds and mammals parted ways long before the evolution of the neocortex and its equivalent in avians. The neural mechanism used for intelligence in the two groups is markedly different.

Add to that the tremendous limitations imposed by flight. Whatever birds have to do in their brains it must be in a small package. The expense of cognition and conscious must be justified by its utility and the expense for birds is much, much higher than for mammals. So if crows, parrots, etc., are conscious it must be advantageous for them.

Original article here.

Consideration of Works Past: Immortality, Inc

(Picture from here.)

I just spent the weekend at Boskone. Great fun. But after one of the panels I was asked who were my significant influences.

I quickly rattled of my personal mantra: Robert Heinlein, Clifford Simak, Cordwainer Smith, Mark Twain, John Dos Passos, Phillip K Dick, Alfred Bester. Anybody who's discussed writing with me more than five minutes will get that particular list.

Then, later, I was down in the dealer's room and looking over NESFA's table.

I've been looking for a particular work from my childhood. A book that I barely remembered that, somehow, involved life after death of a yacht designer. It had suicide booths in it. And there, on the NESFA table, I found in the short novels of Robert Sheckly, Immortality, Inc.

It looks like I have to add Robert Sheckley to the list.

BTW: If any of you are interested in classic works by Roger Zelazny or Hal Clement or Zenna Henderson or, really, almost anybody that has fallen out of print or cries out to be collected, check out the fine people of NESFA Press. This is a small press publisher that is bringing together reprints of works in hardcover. They have, for example, three very good books by my special hero, Cordwainer Smith: Norstrilia, The Complete Short Fiction of Cordwainer Smith and the Concordance to Cordwainer Smith. I keep them in my office and hold them close, whispering "my precious." Go look at their catalog here.

Sheckley had a truly skewed view of the world. In terms of sensibility he was more over in the Phillip K Dick side of SF. SF was a mechanism to open up the clockworks of life and examine them. Immortality, Inc is, in part, an examination of our fascination with death.

The plot is straightforward. Tom Blaine is a Junior Yacht Designer in a New York Firm. On the way home from his vacation cabin he has a car accident and dies. He awakes to find himself in a new body in the year 150 years in the future. In this world, life after death is well known and scientifically verified. Anyone who can afford it can get a treatment guaranteed to let them live after death. Most don't survive the "death trauma"-- a lovely wink towards Freud's "birth trauma."

But the plot is just a means by which Sheckley can use this new world as a means to skewer the one where he lives. I'm reluctant to start listing all of the lovely things in the book for fear I'll spoil it for people who have not read it. But here's a couple.

There's "transplanting": the means by which you can share or operate someone else's body. Initially, as normal science fiction uses the idea, it's mostly sold as titillation. But later it is presented as a force for revolution. As the freedom to be anyone you want to be-- held down by those that would oppress us. And there are suicide booths-- I have no doubt the suicide booths in Futurama are a direct homage to Sheckley.

The book is more absurdist than funny. More thought than laugh provoking. It is a satire-- a subgroup of SF that is sadly underrepresented. All good satires are intended to twist your head a bit. Sheckley managed that in all of his work. Immortality, Inc is no exception.

Most of the writers I consider seminal I read everything they wrote. For whatever reason, though he had a strong effect on me, I didn't do that with Sheckley. It might be that there were just too few opportunities to read him. The period I ripped through most of the books is started when I was eleven and went on through college. I was in Alabama for much of that time. No SF bookstores. No conventions I knew of. The SF book club was available-- indeed, that's where I got Sheckley's Mindswap-- but I had to husband my money. Most of my reading came from the library. Unlike Heinlein prior to 1960 or Asimov or other, like, writers, Sheckley was always a bit subversive. Possibly beyond the tastes of those southern librarians.

Imagine my delight when I looked at the NESFA Sheckley collection and found not one. Not two. But three books by Sheckley I'd never managed to read.

Sheckley novels to read:

• Dimension of Miracles
• Immortality, Inc.
• Journey Beyond Tomorrow (AKA The Journey of Joenes)
• Mindswap
• The Status Civilization

Other good SF satires

• Bill, the Galactic Hero, Harry Harrison
• The Müller-Fokker Effect, John Sladek
• Wildsmith, Ron Goulart

Best moment to come out of the olympics

David Attenborough narrates curling here.

Sherlock vs. Sherlock

Left: Johnny Lee Miller, Elementary
Right: Benedict Cumberbatch, Sherlock
Middle: Sherlock Holmes

I'll say up front: I'm not a Sherlock fundamentalist. I like the original series fine but it's not written in stone or anything. I've enjoyed many of the Sherlock adaptations, the further from the original the better-- They Might Be Giants, for example.

So I've been watching the BBC's Sherlock and NBC's Elementary. I've been struck by a couple of interesting things. I call this the Batman vs. Superman effect.

For those who have been living under a rock, Superman was born on Krypton and once reaching Earth developed god like powers intrinsic to his nature. This is important. He is born with the capacity for these powers. It only takes the power of Earth's yellow sun to bring them out.

Batman is completely different. He is traumatized by a childhood event and through his own determination and endurance trains himself up to near superhuman physical and mental abilities.

If Superman is one end of the scale and Batman is the other, where does Holmes fall?

Well, of course, that depends on the work describing him.

I'd say Doyle's original Holmes, and many of the adaptations, fall towards the Batman side of the scale though not terribly far. Holmes had trained himself to be who he was, to the exclusion of all else.. Things such as human pleasantries, the state of astronomy and possibly bathing were considered superfluous unless it was in the service of fighting crime.

(As a side note, the obsession with fighting "crime" has always seemed an odd preoccupation. I mean, didn't Superman and Batman want to fix the world? Crime's a small part of that.The original Superman comics did but then he got into more interesting material. I suppose that's the reason for all those super villains. Nothing else to do on a Saturday night but get drunk.)

Later adaptations, like that of Basil Rathbone and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (also BBC) seemed to stay more or less in the same range. Though very intelligent, Holmes is not Superman-- though, in some material, when contrasted with Watson he seemed to be.

Fast forward to Sherlock and Elementary.

Sherlock seems to fall squarely on the Superman side of the equation. There's all the fun lettering over things to show us what Sherlock sees or thinks-- at its level best when he's drunk. Chair: soft sqiggly thing. There's even been a couple of conversations between Sherlock and his brother Mycroft about their difficult childhood trying to fit in with normal, ungifted, people. This is contrasted to normal Watson. A nice guy who's almost always at sea with Sherlock but pursues him out of plucky friendship.

Elementary falls solidly towards Batman. The cops are a varied bunch. Some stupid. Some definitely not stupid. They recognize Holmes' "gift" for what it is-- a useful tool in police work. And Watson, though lacking training and monomaniacal dedication of Holmes, is every bit as smart-- a fact Holmes readily and repeatedly acknowledges.

Smarter, in fact. Consider Sherlock. Could Holmes and Watson ever change places? I submit that in the context of the show, Sherlock could have become as good a physician as Watson but Watson can never be the detective Holmes is.

In Elementary it's a very different game. Watson was a cardiologist-- pretty much one of the top medical professions in the country. Further, she was one of the best cardiologists. That she messed it up and left the profession is not important. She messed it up for personal, not professional, reasons. The intellectual demands on a cardiac surgeon are every bit as rigorous as being a detective-- even the best of the best, like Holmes. She left that to become a sober companion. She's left that to become a detective. A very good detective. A detective so good that she's outguessed Holmes a few times.

Contrast this with Holmes. He's a monomaniac in detection. He's very very good at that. And he has some other skills that are quite good. Yet, Watson is coming up close behind him. I suggest that Holmes could not become the cardiologist Watson was. Yet, Watson is in the process of becoming as good a detective as Holmes.

The difference between the two approaches is quite stark. It's the difference between avatar and buddha. Between attaining divinity by birth or by effort. Between aristocracy and meritocracy. Between Star Wars and Star Trek.

Hero stories often fall along this same path. As in Young Frankenstein:

Destiny!
Destiny!
No escaping that for me!
No escaping that for me!
(cue dancing girls)

Okay. You caught me. There were no dancing girls in Young Frankenstein. But the image of a can-can being performed by Terry Garr and Madeleine Kahn still haunts me.

Anakin Skywalker is "destined" to bring balance to the force. Prophecies. Oracles. Etc. Or, you can have people of strength that are brought to greatness not by destiny but by their own efforts.

Or you can blend them. Then, it gets interesting.

Parzifal is destined to be great. His heritage is greatness. His strength is unmatched. His courage indomitable. His skill without peer. But he fails. Fails miserably. Fails spectacularly. Fails because he is controlled by rules instead of his compassion.

Destiny shuts him out. You only get one chance.

Parzifal refuses to accept that. And by his efforts creates a second chance where he is redeemed.

In The Stars My Destination, Gully Foyle has strength and intelligence and isn't the least bit interested in advancing himself. But then he is left for dead and the urge for payback transforms him.

It will be interesting how these two shows proceed. People seem to like the ubermensch. For my own part, I like Elementary better than Sherlock.

I've always been more fond of Batman than Superman.