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The Cookie Monster Problem

Leigh Marie Braswell and Tanya Khovanova

in The Mathematics of Various Entertaining Subjects: Research in Recreational Math

This chapter examines the problem of the “Cookie Monster number.” In 2002, Cookie Monster® appeared in the book The Inquisitive Problem Solver by Vaderlind, Guy, and Larson, where the hungry monster ... More

This chapter examines the problem of the “Cookie Monster number.” In 2002, Cookie Monster® appeared in the book The Inquisitive Problem Solver by Vaderlind, Guy, and Larson, where the hungry monster wants to empty a set of jars filled with various numbers of cookies. The Cookie Monster number is the minimum number of moves Cookie Monster must use to empty all the jars. The chapter analyzes this problem by first introducing known general algorithms and known bounds for the Cookie Monster number. It then explicitly finds the Cookie Monster number for jars containing cookies in the Fibonacci, Tribonacci, n-nacci, and Super-n-nacci sequences. The chapter also constructs sequences of k jars such that their Cookie Monster numbers are asymptotically rk, where r is any real number, 0 ≤ r ≤ 1.Less

The Loch Ness Monster 1933–1934

Jonathan Betts

in Time Restored: The Harrison timekeepers and R.T. Gould, the man who knew (almost) everything

This chapter details Rupert's investigation of the Loch Ness monster. In the Spring of 1933 rumours had begun of sightings of a large creature, apparently of unknown species, living in Loch Ness. ... More

This chapter details Rupert's investigation of the Loch Ness monster. In the Spring of 1933 rumours had begun of sightings of a large creature, apparently of unknown species, living in Loch Ness. Having published The Case for the Sea Serpent just over 2 years before, Gould soon got to hear of this and needless to say was intrigued by the descriptions, sounding, as they did, remarkably ‘Serpentine’. Rupert personally went to Scotland to investigate Loch Ness. The results of his research were summarized in the book entitled, The Loch Ness Monster and Others, released in June 1934.Less

Introduction: Living in Technical Legality

Kieran Tranter

in Living in Technical Legality: Science Fiction and Law as Technology

This chapter introduces the book. It introduces the key concepts of the Frankenstein myth, law as technology and the role of science fiction as the site for the collective dream of technological ... More

This chapter introduces the book. It introduces the key concepts of the Frankenstein myth, law as technology and the role of science fiction as the site for the collective dream of technological culture and society in the West. This chapter also locates the book to come in the emergent field of law and humanities and the existing literature that examines law and legality of science fiction. It also introduces the concepts of the monster and the trickster.Less

From Law and Technology to Law as Technology

Kieran Tranter

in Living in Technical Legality: Science Fiction and Law as Technology

This chapter argues that law can be seen as technological when, ironically, law is called to respond to technological change. Through a focus on the legal responses to cloning, it is shown that the ... More

This chapter argues that law can be seen as technological when, ironically, law is called to respond to technological change. Through a focus on the legal responses to cloning, it is shown that the called-for laws were responding to visions of cloning futures directly sourced from science fiction. Having located these legal acts within science fiction, the essential elements of this future-oriented process – monstrous technology, vulnerable humanity and saving law – can be seen. This will be identified as the ‘Frankenstein myth.’ What is revealed is that science fiction holds the technical and legal together at the level of substantive dreaming and also at the level of basic commitments. The irony intrudes at this point. This saving law that can determine the future has a particular character. It is a species of pure power, manufactured through procedure in the present to determine the future. It appears to have the same characteristics that have been ascribed to technology. With this the categories established by the Frankenstein myth of ‘technology’, ‘humanity’ and ‘law’ seem to be imploded. What is glimpsed is the singularity of technical legality.Less

Dune, Modern Law, and the Alchemy of Death and Time

Kieran Tranter

in Living in Technical Legality: Science Fiction and Law as Technology

This chapter examines technical legality through looking in detail at how modernity allowed law as technology. This is undertaken through a jurisprudential reading of Frank Herbert’s ‘Dune cycle’. ... More

This chapter examines technical legality through looking in detail at how modernity allowed law as technology. This is undertaken through a jurisprudential reading of Frank Herbert’s ‘Dune cycle’. The Dune cycle has been read as involving an affirmation of chaos over rationality in public activities — religion, politics and ecology — concluding with the message of self-care and Zen-like calm in coping with an uncertain universe. But these accounts sell Herbert’s imagining short. This chapter re-examines the Dune cycle as a story of tyrants and leviathan sandworms. In this re-reading, Dune can be seen as an account of the metaphysics of law as technology. The themes of the secondary literature on Dune can be rewoven into a critical elaboration of Hobbes’ ‘mortal God’ which exposes the essential commitments of sovereignty and its technical law. These commitments are death and time. Located within the bloody alchemy of modernity, the monstrousness of the law as technology is revealed – the consumption of bare life in time. This brutal realisation seems to end with Schmitt’s representative sovereign deciding to make the world.Less

The liberty of the landscape

Katrina Navickas

in Protest and the Politics of Space and Place, 1789-1848

This chapter examines protesters’ attachment to the landscape. Peterloo reformers became involved in societies for the protection of footpaths in the 1820s. Increasingly unable to hold public ... More

This chapter examines protesters’ attachment to the landscape. Peterloo reformers became involved in societies for the protection of footpaths in the 1820s. Increasingly unable to hold public meetings in town centres, Chartists and Owenite socialists held monster meetings on fields and moors outside urban jurisdiction. Using the sites and rituals of Methodist camp meetings, moorland meetings reflected a sense of place among protesters. The experience of the environment was physical and elemental, particularly the hard rambles of itinerant lecturers and the secret drilling of radicals at night. The popularity of the Chartist Land Plan among northern industrial workers demonstrated how radicals’ utopian visions of a better life lay in the land as well as the vote.Less

Preferisco l’inferno: Early Italian Horror Cinema

Russ Hunter

in Italian Horror Cinema

The precise generic beginnings of horror cinema have the odd status of being both simultaneously clear and opaque. The general trend in studies of horror cinema has been to date the genre’s ... More

The precise generic beginnings of horror cinema have the odd status of being both simultaneously clear and opaque. The general trend in studies of horror cinema has been to date the genre’s beginnings around the release of the series of Universal’s ‘monster movies’ beginning with Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931) and Dracula (Tod Browning, 1931). The desire to search for the antecedents, roots and origins of any genre leads film scholars to identify certain texts as key turning points that effectively lay the ground for what follows. While this view of genre can be overly deterministic, it is nonetheless true that some texts rather than others are given the status of key reference points based upon their perceived historical importance.Less

‘In The Open Country’: Nature and the Environment during the ‘Monster’ Meeting Campaign of 1843

Huston Gilmore

in Nature and the Environment in Nineteenth-Century Ireland

This chapter explores the role of nature and the environment during the series of O’Connellite ‘monster’ meetings demanding the repeal of the Act of Union during the spring and summer of 1843. It ... More

This chapter explores the role of nature and the environment during the series of O’Connellite ‘monster’ meetings demanding the repeal of the Act of Union during the spring and summer of 1843. It considers the nature and extent of popular participation in O’Connell’s extra-parliamentary campaign amidst a charged political atmosphere and within specific environments in which place, identity, and a discourse of nationalist grievance as negotiated through a historicisation of the Irish landscape. It seeks to analyse both the processional nature of O’Connell’s rallies, the politicised culture of conviviality they engendered, and the extent to which the Repeal Association staged these rallies with a view to how they were reported in the popular press. O’Connell’s 1843 campaign is thus seen as a burst of popular participation on a scale hitherto unseen in Ireland. The O’Connellite ‘monster’ meeting is presented as a campaign to dominate public space in both small town and rural environments, based on a symbiotic relationship between the Repeal Association and Catholicism which deployed a nationalist iconography that deployed images of the natural world, and exhorted the Irish peasantry to peacefully demonstrate in favour of Repeal by invoking the natural advantages of Ireland that would be unleashed by self-government.Less

Queer Scottish Gothic

Kate Turner

in Scottish Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion

This chapter’s analysis of queer Scottish Gothic originates from a simple observation: there is a large and coherent scholarship on queer Gothic and Scottish Gothic respectively; however, there is ... More

This chapter’s analysis of queer Scottish Gothic originates from a simple observation: there is a large and coherent scholarship on queer Gothic and Scottish Gothic respectively; however, there is notably little analysis of the way Scottish and queer Gothic may interact. With the exception of one recent article by Fiona McCulloch, queer Scottish Gothic has not yet been given full critical attention. This chapter explores revisions in the treatment of Gothic monsters, traditionally viewed as ‘all that is dangerous and horrible in the human imagination’ (Gilmore 2003: 1), in Louise Welsh’s The Cutting Room (2002), Luke Sutherland’s Venus as a Boy (2004) and Zoë Strachan’s Ever Fallen in Love (2011). More specifically, this analysis considers the dissociation of the monstrous figure from fear and terror in these texts, and suggests that they are repositioned as elusive figures through which the peripheral identities of Scottish and of queer may be simultaneously explored.Less

Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto and the texts of aggression

Kimberly Lamm

in Addressing the other woman: Textual correspondences in feminist art and writing

Focused on the infamous SCUM Manifesto (1967), chapter 4 examines how Valerie Solanas deployed language as a weapon capable of ‘cutting up’ patriarchal authority and demonstrates how her history as a ... More

Focused on the infamous SCUM Manifesto (1967), chapter 4 examines how Valerie Solanas deployed language as a weapon capable of ‘cutting up’ patriarchal authority and demonstrates how her history as a feminist lesbian of the 1960s helps evoke a historical milieu that brings the stakes of Codex Artaud into relief. Solanas wrote at western feminism’s most violent edge – and was perceived to be a monster for doing so. Reading Solanas as both an icon of the feminist lesbian but also the ambitious writer of a tightly crafted manifesto, this chapter traces how Solanas wrote to reject the expectation that women renounce their aggression. An Artaud-like figure who also embodies madness, Solanas’s attempted murder of Andy Warhol demonstrates that this rejection can take a dangerously literal turn. More subtly, her murderous rage reveals the insanity that came from sustaining a protest alone, bereft of feminist collectivities or images that mirror the value of women’s transgressions. Drawing upon Mary Harron’s well-researched film I Shot Andy Warhol (1996), this chapter highlights Solanas’s history as an unruly feminist lesbian who, with connections to Warhol, Pop Art, Marilyn Monroe, and the typewriter, exemplifies the risks and possibilities of refusing to become an image of feminine submission and sexual availability..Less

Monsters and Masks: (Horror and Terror, Part 1)

David Roche

in Making and Remaking Horror in the 1970s and 2000s: Why Don’t They Do It Like They Used To?

This chapter opens with a critical discussion of the notions of horror, terror and dread, which are defined according to a dialectic between the presence and absence of “monstrous” stimuli. The ... More

This chapter opens with a critical discussion of the notions of horror, terror and dread, which are defined according to a dialectic between the presence and absence of “monstrous” stimuli. The analyses show that the 1970s films consistently undermine the opposition between human and monster, revealing that the monster and the “monstrous” are not discrete concepts but shifting values within the films, and surely within the viewers’ cultural frameworks. As for the 2000s remakes, they significantly increase the danger factor by playing up the “monstrous” characters’ superhuman strength and omnipotence. This contemporary trend affects both the politics and the aesthetics of contemporary horror films: first, it somewhat downplays the “monstrous” characters’ status as victims that enabled a progressive subtext in the 1970s films, even though the contemporary films emphasize these characters’ motives on the diegetic level; secondly, it leaves less time to contemplate the “monstrous” stimuli that are, quite simply, too effective.Less

Crane and the Tyranny of Twelve

Michael T. Gilmore

in The War on Words: Slavery, Race, and Free Speech in American Literature

Stephen Crane published his classic novel about the Civil War, The Red Badge of Courage, in 1895, a full three decades after hostilities ended. Crane's tale, a major document of American realism, ... More

Stephen Crane published his classic novel about the Civil War, The Red Badge of Courage, in 1895, a full three decades after hostilities ended. Crane's tale, a major document of American realism, incarnates the ex post facto spirit. Crane's novella of a black stable hand who loses his face while saving a white child alerts us to another element in the postbellum détente that hampered dissent: the modernized reach of the doxa. The Red Badge of Courage and The Monster were both products of the post-Reconstruction depths, a temporal congruity too often overlooked in their usual isolation as narratives about, respectively, the Civil War and small-town parochialism. The Monster (1899) was also the context for his reimagining of the clash between North and South. The tale about the ostracizing of a physician for his allegiance to a damaged black stable hand is a strongest evidence for Crane's alienation from his culture's ideological rigidities.Less

Digital 3-D Cinema Begins

Ray Zone

in 3-D Revolution: The History of Modern Stereoscopic Cinema

The release of Chicken Little 3D on November 4, 2005 marks the beginning of digital 3D cinema. Technology used to deliver digital 3D are examined and comments by Phil McNally, stereographer on ... More

The release of Chicken Little 3D on November 4, 2005 marks the beginning of digital 3D cinema. Technology used to deliver digital 3D are examined and comments by Phil McNally, stereographer on Chicken Little are included. Also analysed is the subsequent digital 3D cinema release, Monster House 3D, in 2006.Less

An Interview with Rob Engle

Ray Zone

in 3-D Revolution: The History of Modern Stereoscopic Cinema

A survey of the eight 3D productions he supervised (up to 2009) is given with an extensive interview with Rob Engle, Stereoscopic Supervisor at Sony Imageworks.

Killer Books: The Representations and Politics of Violence in Gang Memoirs

Josephine Metcalf

in The Culture and Politics of Contemporary Street Gang Memoirs

This chapter presents four decades in the history of street gang violence — the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s — in order to map the setting in which the narrators of street gang memoirs describe and ... More

This chapter presents four decades in the history of street gang violence — the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s — in order to map the setting in which the narrators of street gang memoirs describe and justify their violent pasts. It explains that the main narrative action of the memoirs Always Running, Blue Rage, and Monster, revolves around tales of violence: the narrators’ violence toward other gang members and the violence committed against them by the authorities. The chapter further describes how, in 1960s California, violence was already embedded in the culture of the state, but it became more oppressive in Los Angeles in the succeeding decades. In the discussions of state power in Always Running, it notes that police brutality in the 1960s was not exclusively toward street gangs, but also toward Mexican political demonstrators.Less

‘An object of indecipherable bastardry – a true monster’: Homosociality, Homoeroticism and Generic Hybridity in Dead Man's Shoes

Clair Schwarz

in Shane Meadows: Critical Essays

This chapter explores Shane Meadows's approaches to genre, arguing that hybrid forms of film type are employed in order to underscore the elements of myth which are evident in his work. In ... More

This chapter explores Shane Meadows's approaches to genre, arguing that hybrid forms of film type are employed in order to underscore the elements of myth which are evident in his work. In particular, it looks at how evocations of the monster weave through the homosocial romances of the male characters and the way in which they exchange women, or their images, as a means to sure up those relationships. Drawing upon Sedgwick's notion of the erotic triangle and its homosocial dynamic, the chapter looks closely at the vengeance narrative of Dead Man's Shoes, arguing how tropes drawn from Jacobean theatre and genres such as the horror and the western, are particularly employed to question existing models of relationships, whether fraternal, paternal or the modern construct of the nuclear family. Through an examination of the different manifestation of violence in Meadows's work, the chapter suggests that rape, assault and murder are acts which make explicit the underlying homoerotophobia of the texts, with the figure of the monster as a liminal bridge between unconscious desire and physical action. It concludes that Meadows eventually abandons his generic conceits, offering instead a deliberate equivocation which dissolves any fixed notions of style.Less

Let the Games Begin: Hybrid Horror in Trilogy

Emily L. Hiltz

in Reading in the Dark: Horror in Children's Literature and Culture

This essay examines Suzanne Collins’s monstrous “mutts” in her phenomenally popular series The Hunger Games. Hiltz is especially interested in Collins’s characterization of human-animal hybrids, ... More

This essay examines Suzanne Collins’s monstrous “mutts” in her phenomenally popular series The Hunger Games. Hiltz is especially interested in Collins’s characterization of human-animal hybrids, investigating the relationship between the political commentary at work in the novels and these “monsters,” from the half-wolf, half-humans that nearly overtake Katniss at the Cornucopia in the first novel to the lizard-humans whispering her name throughout the viaducts beneath the city in the last. Hiltz focuses on the mutts as abject creatures, demonstrating the ways in which these uncanny monsters, quite literally making the familiar strange, are at once metaphors for the political control exerted by the Capitol, the rebels’ resistance to the Capitol’s power, and the disruption of natural order. She also concentrates on Katniss and Peeta muttations, each of them reformed by warring entities in service of “the greater good.” Most importantly, Hiltz emphasizes that Collins’s mutts are designed to demonstrate the fine and wavering line between good and evil, calling into question the nature of monstrosity, especially as it relates to human behavior. Her location of monstrosity in the protagonists themselves especially offers a new way of thinking about teen dystopic novels that engage horror as a means of conveying identities assaulted by external forces.Less