Why Vulcan School Reunions are So Awkward

A Vulcan school is just like every other school.

Star Trek (2009)

Why Star Trek (Film 2009) is Science Fiction

Because in circa 2243 Nokia still exists as a company/brand.

Archives, Computers And The End of Histroy

Solzhenitsyn is one of the last major writers to leave behind a vast archives of handwritten manuscripts. (His successors will bequeath their hard drives if they dare.)

David Remnick,

 In the Archives: the Widow's Peak,

The New Yorker, June 18, 2012

Computers make it easy to duplicate, manipulate, search, relocate information. At the same time it makes it easier lose stuff down the memory hole either by action, inaction, error, or mechanical failure. But any simple filing cabinet has a solidity that makes it hard to chuck out the window. I have came across several different predictions about our future data storage needs from sci-fi witters and/or futurists.  There is the scenario that we must eventually need to go space so we can find new places to store our records. In Raj Whitehall's world everything was in computer databanks, when computers failed. So all records, history, knowledge is lost. I have read other futurists that suggest this is the likely outcome and that future history will note a "dark age" where there are scattered and fragmentary records in proprietary obsolete formats.

Computers are great for ephemera, but there needs to be hard copies for posterity.

Reality Undramatic

"Generally speaking", Lobsang  pronounced, "reality having little sense of narrative, ancient sites are not heavy with swinging blades that decapitate, or rock panels that fold back to fire darts."

Lobsang, after discovering the enigmatic ruins

 of  a dead civilization in

The Long Earth

Ad for Mayan trap merchants from luvthecubs

 posted at Crack's 16 Unseen Jobs That Must Exist in Movie Universes.

A Kind of Respect/Fear

...the politeness you might observe when dealing with a politician belonging to a country that had nuclear weapons and a carefree approach to their deployment.

How Joshua Valienté

is treated after joining a powerful mega-corporation

 In The Long Earth

Continuum - First Reactions

First reactions to the pilot of Continuum.

Good Things

Tony Amendola,

A TV show that is filmed in Vancouver that is set in Vancouver not Seacouver.

Smoking/Smirking Man

Prison Suit, Prison Shoes, see Escaped Prisoner

Bad

The Genius Teenager

Several problems with this character. First it is Dawson Casting. The other technological and business. The myth of the lone inventor is long in dying. As soon as tech is near practicable, business plans are written, money raised, company floated, patents filed.

Things ARE Getting Better all the Time

As an antidote to easy pessimism here is a UN report, or UNish, about inter and intra state violence, Human Security Report 2009/2010. According to the numbers things are getting better. There is still war but the numbers and severity has decreased. Of course people are still dying. But then things can always be bad as this passage from The General by SM Sterling shows.

Of course, the last battle—his first—had shown him you could get killed very dead indeed in the middle of the most smashing victory. Gharsia's lungs and spine blasted out through his back illustrated quite vividly what could happen to an experienced veteran on the winning end of a one-sided slaughter.

Link to the report from dingbat, in the the thread Star Trek, a New Beginning. at AH.com

Traveller (De)motivational Posters

As I am getting back into the game Traveller a Traveller fellow traveller Timbo sent me a link to this and other motivation posters based on the Traveller role playing system. The above refers to technique of space travel, low berth, that is about the equivalent to riding under a railway car. The odds of survival is a little less then 3 out of 4, with medical assistance 5 out of 6 passengers survive this sci fi steerage. The scary thing is that from reading accounts of the Atlantic slave trade that this, 3/4 and 5/6, was about survival rate most of the time.

The drawing are from a set from clement777's account, Traveller Motivational Posters.

Here is another one of clement777's Traveller drawing that gets appeal of the game.

In Traveller Earth/Terra is "Earth Like"

Following some of the links at Traveller Map I came across a database of Treveller sectors, subsectors and planets, an Interactive Atlas of the Imperium. When I looked at the entry for Earth/Terra I got the above result as well as a completely different solar system. Admittedly this game is set several millennia in the future.

Home Appliances Fed On Rotting Flesh.

Carnivorous Domestic Entertainment Robots from Auger-Loizeau on Vimeo.

Years ago there was a bug zapper ad featuring Vincent Price. As the bugs were consumed he would chortle an evil laugh. Unfortunately I can't find it on Youtube. These innovative designs are part of an experiment in "predatory cyborg furniture". The only design that seems really gross is the coffee table that eats mice.

This is also got a mention on NPR, Meat-Eating Furniture, and slashdot, Designers Create Meat Eating Furniture.

Where Polar Bears Come Fromm

Many people looks at myths as explanations for how things have happened. However in my view myths are less explanation than explanation within in a world view, culture and religion. They more stories that stress the importance of a culture's world view, gods and heroes, than flat and culture free science and history. The story of creation is more a story of why "the heavens and the earth" were created, Genesis (1.1), then an explanation of how.

This short flash animation, Drunk Science, explains where polar bears come from.

R Crumb Predicts the Future

In Zap #0 in a segment title City of the Future R Crumb has this prediction of future. The problem of absorbing the "facts & fancies" of the internet is that the direct neural input has not been perfected. People sometimes miss the biggest stories because of the sheer volume of information on the internet.

On one history program that presenter was explaining how the first renaissance men came about and why they were not generations of them. These were people a wide range of expertise. They were also part of the first generation of printing when to become an expert in a field was to read a couple books. Soon there was too much knowledge printed for some people to be experts in multiple fields.

Web Comic Based on Warhammer 40K - Servants of the Imperium

Warhammer 40K is an exceedingly grim RPG from Games Workshop, see Darker and Edgier at TV Tropes. To provide "some" lightness a devoted fan Rob Leigh has created the webcomic Servants of the Imperium. The webcomic is still pretty grim and finds dark humor in the violent weirdness of the Warhammer 40K universe.

A Talking Cat Might Not Be So Great

A cat might talk but well we listen.

Also, remember the story Tobermory by Saki. In the short story about a man teaches the cat Tobermory to speak the cat then tells everyone secret and is found dead the next day.

To read the spoiler after "In the short story about a", highlight.

30th Anniversary of the Movie Alien

Jon Stewart Fails a Nerd Test

On tonight's episode, 9/27/09, Jon Stewart had on Bruce Bueno de Mesquita to discuss his book The Predictioneer's Game: Using the Logic of Brazen Self-Interest to See and Shape the Future. He is political scientist who developed methods to predict near term events with amazing accuracy. When Jon asks Bruce if he can predict anything Bruce denies he "is any Hari Seldon". The reference flies over the head Jon.

Hari Seldon is the Asimov character who creates The Foundation in The Foundation series.

Bad nerd. Bad nerd.

Comic Book Guy would be disappointed.

Alien versus Predator in a Pool Room

Man on the Moon - As It Would Be Reported Today

How To Get Ahead in Politics and Publishing

In an AH.com there was an argument over SM Sterling, My opinion of Stirling's ISOT and Emberverse Series. Sterling is contentious figure who has been banned from AH.com after getting into an discussion about containing moslem terrorism. On the other hand he is very influential on the entire genre of alternate history. Many topics discussed on AH.com are derived from concepts and scenarios that Sterling first developed. When the the entwined concerns of literary and commercial merit came up, with the usual slagging anything that is popular,the conversation deadened until Tom Kalbfus brought up too subtle slagging of a successful politico/author.

I think time and only time is the true test of a classic work. If someone writes a book and many copies are sold and 50 years later people are still buying many copies of that book, that may be a classic.

There are of course other reasons people might buy many copies of a book, for instance the writer happens to be a politician, maybe a Senator for instance. The Senator does one of his constituents a favor, but he doesn't want to be seen accepting kickbacks, so what does he do? He writes a book, not a particularly well written book, but somehow it still sells lots of copies, imagine that, in fact the author makes $6,000,000 from the sales of his book, and then just as mysteriously the book sales plumment, but the Senator is still happy, he deposits his money in his bank account, and then asks other wealthy and influential constituents if there is anything he can do for them, and then he mentions the book he has written.

I have no one in particular in mind, its just a hypothetical example of how someone may well many books without being a good writer.

Free DNA

Today at Mininova one of the featured torrents is human DNA, Homo.sapiens.DNA.NCBI36.53.Fasta.Gzip-Ensembl-OpenSci. Download and be the first on your block with human DNA. It is quite amusing that what is now available for free right now a generation ago or so was out of reach of evil geniuses, James Bond villians and the KGB. It was only possible for ET, Dr Who and the Federation to mess around with genetics.