House 6.4: Diagnosis vs. Karma

One fine House 6.4 tonight, with a central story that pits the diagnosis of House against the karma of the cosmos.

A multi-billionaire's son is dying. No one, including House and the team led by Foreman, can come up with the right diagnosis. When House does, it's an incurable malady that leads to imminent death, in about a day.

The father believes that in order for his son to be saved, he has to do something to balance his extraordinary monetary success - set the karmic balance right, by losing all of his money and holdings. No one can ever bear pure, 100% success in everything, he reasons. For his son to live, the billionaire has to lose all of his money.

We've all had that feeling, haven't we. When things are going great, we expect something to go wrong to balance the books. And vice versa. The balanced cosmos can be a source of pessimism or optimism, depending upon your current up or down position.

And, of course, after the billionaire bankrupts himself, House comes up with the right diagnosis. The son recovers. Is this a victory for rational diagnosis versus cosmic karma? Or is House really an instrument of the cosmos? Maybe both are true.

Meanwhile, House is busy protecting his team on all sorts of fronts, doing what he can to keep 13 at the hospital, and giving Chase and therefore Foreman what they need to survive the M & M inquiry about the genocidal dictator Dibala's death last week.

But those situations are far from completely resolved. The plane for a new life is boarding, and 13's walking on it. Chase has still not told Cameron what he did to Dibala.

Karma - or House - still has some work to do...

See also House Reborn in Season Six? ... 6.2: The Gang is Back and Fractured ... 6.3: The Saving Hitler Quandary




6-min podcast review of House

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The Plot to Save Socrates

"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book

more about The Plot to Save Socrates...





Read the first chapter of The Plot to Save Socrates .... FREE!

John from Cincinnati: Episode Six: Time Well Spent on Honey?

"Time well spent" - that was the last line of last night's John from Cincinnati (Episode 6, Day 5 - please, don't ask me why). A part of me was hoping maybe I had misunderstood the count of episodes and "Days" of John's visit on the show even more than I have, and maybe that was the last line of the last episode of the series, which I had somehow just seen On Demand tonight, but ... no such luck ... no, no, I'm only kidding ... well, maybe not completely but at least partially, I think...

Tonight's episode featured: no Mitch (Bruce Greenwood had the Day off), Cissy a little less shrill, Cass looking better than ever in those blue jeans, Tina looking good, too, and everyone else in fine form (though I have to say, Shaun's deadpan character is beginning to wear thin ... though I don't know Greyson Fletcher's acting well enough to say whether it's his fault or the writing and direction ... hmmm... didn't this come up with Hayden Christensen and George Lucas about Star Wars?)

The plot, as usual, can be summarized in two minutes: Cissy feels bad that Shaun hears her badmouthing his mother Tina, and puts Butchie up to getting her back to see Shaunie after all. There are some profound family reveals (but not really surprising for this family) and deep currents of guilt. John also saves another soul - Cissy - in her case, from possibly committing suicide. John tells her to "baptize the pistol," a good line.

And the dialog, as usual, was excellent in parts, and this episode features a brilliant riff-sermon from John, who is finally speaking and not the "human parrot" that Bill says he is (correctly, until last night).

You can read it somewhere over on hbo.com - it's one fine piece of writing. It even has John saying stuff about the Internet - and the "zeroes and ones" in Cass's (digital) camera ...

Gratifying ... I've been saying for years that immortality would be digital code somewhere out there in the cosmos that describes our DNA and our lives.

Actually, there are a bunch of better lines on the show - not in John's riff - but in Butchie talking about Tina sucking ... but I'm trying to take the high, or at least, academic road here, folks ... so good for John for recognizing the digital revolution.

There was also some dead guy that John pulled out of the motel - I'm not sure who he is ... John's father? Maybe it's a good thing this wasn't the finale, so we can find out who this guy is ... Dead, but he delivered a stronger performance than one or two of the others ...

I'm still liking that intro theme song a lot. If you want the honey, don't kill the series....

Wait - maybe the whole Day Six - Episode Seven - next week will be just 60 minutes of silence and black ... and then-


See also reviews of other episodes ... Episode One ... Episode Two ... Episode Three ... Episode Four ... Episode Five ... Episode Seven ... Episode 8 ... Episode 9 ... Episode 10

See also John from Cincinnati: The Meaning in a Sentence or Two

Precarious Atlantis Returns to Earth

The Space Shuttle Atlantis is back home on Earth, safe and sound in California, gliding in like a single, fragile feather from beyond. The space program, and the hopes for humanity as a space-faring, cosmic species, get to live another day.

Few predicted, even in the 1950s, that we'd be walking on the Moon in 1969. Even fewer predicted after that walk on the small world beyond our planet that we would have progressed so little, so slowly, since then.

Richard Nixon saw the space program as JFK's dream, and therefore not worth much support. But he was joined by Democrats such as Walter Mondale, and together the Republicans and the Democrats all but throttled the space program. Like the trampling of the First Amendment, the near-scrapping of the space program has long enjoyed bipartisan support.

The Challenger and Columbia tragedies of course hurt the cause, but even without those disasters, the space program was limping along. The cosmic has had its moments - the images from the Hubble, dots that could be planets around distant suns, some perhaps with life - discovery of conditions for possible life much closer to Earth, on Mars, and elsewhere in our solar system, on the moons of the outer planets - all of those discoveries have been extraordinary.

But in the crucial process of getting people off of this planet, we've barely moved. The age of the shuttle and its modest objectives is coming to an end. That's good. But if it fails before we reach that end, and move on to the next stage, we may never move on at all.



Why is it so important that we get out into space? Not just, I would say, for science, although that is certainly of value. But the most important reasons are almost spiritual - if we don't get off of this planet, we may never learn much more about the meaning of life and intelligence, and what we are doing here on this planet in this galaxy in this universe. We can never learn about our true home and place in the cosmos from this small speck in whatever corner of the universe.

I've been looking up at the stars and wondering what is out there ever since I was a little kid. Let this be the beginning, at last, of an epoch that takes us out there and never looks back.

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Useful link: Sylvia Engdahl's space site

The Night Sky

this is a sponsored post

There's nothing like the night sky. When the sun recedes, a universe is revealed. We go from binoculars to telescopes. It's only at night that we can truly get a glimpse of who really are, and where we stand in this cosmos ... an intelligence looking up and out at a vast realm of stars, and possibilities.

The night sky has no doubt fascinated us throughout the ages, inspiring poets and astronomers, painters and anyone interested in the music of the spheres.

But how do we know what we're looking at? So many stars in the sky. Who knows their names, their distance from Earth?

Astronomers know. But we're not likely to have an astronomer at our shoulder when we look at the stars. Meade MySky is an answer - a multi-media guide, a personal planetarium, that instanly identifies over 30,000 celestial objects.

The future of our species is in the stars. It's good to know what we're looking at, when we look at our future...

Carl Sagan and the Stuff of the Cosmos

Carl Sagan died 10 years ago last week - at the age of 62. He was best known as the voice that humanized science, talking about "billions and billions" of stars in the universe to Johnny Carson and the millions of people who watched the Tonight Show. Fortunately, this was at the dawn of videotaping, and you can see some of Sagan's work on YouTube, where he is as mesmerizing about the human place in the universe as ever.

In 1977, when Sagan was young and in his prime and I was even younger, I was appointed Book Editor of an obscure journal named et cetera. As a way of kicking off my tenure - which turned out to be brief (I've always found editing essentially boring) - I wrote to the people I considered the five greatest thinkers of the day. Sagan was one of them. (Should I tell you my other four choices? OK - Marshall McLuhan, Karl Popper, Arthur Koestler, and Noam Chomsky - for his theories of language, not his politics).

I wrote to each of the authors, told them they had made my Top 5 list and why, and asked them to say a few words about their work. To Sagan, I wrote that it was his work as a philosopher and a popularizer, not his work as a hard scientist, that made me admire him - in particular, his view that, because we come from the cosmos, when we look back out at the cosmos with our telescopes, we are but the stuff of the cosmos looking back at itself. I still find that view thrilling, today.

Happily for me, all five cutting edge thinkers responded with a few paragraphs, mainly thanking me for the honor, etc. But Sagan said something more: he said I shouldn't discount his work as a hard scientist, because that's what he was, and his philosophy and his appearances on television were all a part of that.

And that's stuck with me too. Because, whatever else Sagan may have intended by it, to me it said that, hey, going on the Tonight Show and talking with Johnny may be as much a part of a great cosmologist's work as analyzing the light received from the stars. There's no contradiction, in other words, between the pursuit of fame and the pursuit of knowledge.

And it does make sense, doesn't it? Carl Sagan was a star here on Earth, because of what he saw when he looked at the stars above. The stuff of the cosmos looking back at itself.

A few of Sagan's books:

Billions and Billions

The Dragons of Eden

Pale Blue Dot

And my podcast about Carl Sagan: