Ted Chiang’s Asian American Amusement at Alien Arrival

In the 2016 movie Arrival, aliens with advanced technology appear on Earth in spaceships reminiscent of the black obelisk in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The film presents this arrival as a serious problem to be solved, with the future of human life and interplanetary relationships in the balance. The short story, “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang, on which the film was based, takes a different, amusing route that essentially depicts an ideal vision of the era of colonialism. To articulate this reading, this article will compare Chiang’s science fiction (SF) to the genre in general and will take Isiah Lavender III’s positionality of otherhood to reveal how Chiang’s work expresses a Chinese American secular faith in a moral universe. It will analyze the narrative form in Chiang’s collection, Stories of Your Life and Others, and will use it to compare the prose and film versions of “Story of Your Life.” It will also explain how Chiang may be using a nonlinear orthography and variational principles of physics to frame multileveled humor. It utilizes theories of humor by John Morreall and analyses of Chinese American secularity by Russell Jeung and concludes that Chiang’s work reflects concerns and trends of Asian Americans’ secularized religions.

Linear theory for the mechanics of third-gradient continua reinforced with fibers resistance to flexure

A linear model, framed in the setting of the second strain gradient theory, is presented for the mechanics of an elastic solid reinforced with fibers resistant to flexure. The kinematics and bending resistance of the fibers are formulated via the second and third gradient of the continuum deformation. The corresponding Euler equations and admissible boundary conditions are then obtained by means of iterated integration by parts and variational principles arising in the third gradient of virtual displacement. In particular, within the prescription of superposed incremental deformations, we derive a compatible linear model from which a complete analytical solution describing the deformations of fiber composites is obtained. The proposed linear model predicts smooth and dilatational shear angle distributions over the domain of interest, which are also aligned with the results obtained from the corresponding nonlinear theory.

Analysis on Calculated Length for Buckling Stability of Steel Pipe Pile Based on Energy Method

According to the Winkler assumption, the form of the pile constraint could be simplified as bottom fixing and top free. Considering the influence from resistance of soil around pile, the equations on calculated length for buckling stability of steel pipe pile when the portions along the pile length were constrained in the uniform foundation and the layered foundation were respectively derived based on energy method and variational principles. And the application of the formulas was explained through examples. The equations are successfully applied in similar projects.

Maximality, fixed points and variational principles for mappings on quasi-uniform spaces

By making use of maximality on some appropriate preorderings, some classical results stated in the context of metric spaces are extended to spaces endowed with quasi-uniform structures. Indeed, various results on fixed point theory and variational principles have been proved by arguments using order relations in metric spaces. In this work, some of the mentioned results are extended to spaces having a quasi-uniform structure, by means of appropriate preorderings. The concept of w-distance is used to this purpose. Moreover, equivalences of maximality are stated for general preorderings.