D'oh! Had I waited a few minutes, my praise for the anti-spam poetry embedded in the 1000 last comments would have appeared here instead of in thread 102...

Maybe it's just me, but part of that description of the Flash Gordon future sounds about right -- for about 65 years in the future from when it was made. Maybe not the clumsy innocence part, so much.

But then I'm a cynic.

I have to say that, if you're looking for an example of a series wherein you can't distinguish the heroes from the heavies, Dr. Who is about the worst possible choice.

I don't know; when I hear nonsense on Doctor Who it still sounds like nonsense to me.

Maybe I need to watch some more Tom Baker episodes.

I liked the part where the old serial's Zarkhov was forced to keep Vultan's fortress up in the air by literally shovelling radium ore into the furnaces. On the other hand, 1980's version had Ornella Mutti.

Lila @ 3 - Doctors 9 and 10 have certainly muddied the waters much more than previous incarnations. The lines are still clearly demarcated in comparison to something like Battlestar Galactica, however, where the premise is "The humans are good. The Cylons are evil. But if the humans and the Cylons look, act, and think alike, who's on which side of the line?"

I'm sure there's a better example, but I've been watching clear-cut TV recently. Chuck, Torchwood, that sort of thing, where even if the good guys do bad things, they're still very clearly the Good Guys. And then there's Pushing Daisies, where Our Heroes are equivalent to children too innocent to be stained by sin, incapable of doing anything truly bad.

James was not taking into account that Flash Gordon was a projection of the Western, while Doctor Who began in post-War Britain, and involved a kindly old man (at least that's how my seven-year-old mind processed him).

Dave,

I watched all of the Tom Baker episodes, and as time went on I increasingly wanted to strangle him with that stupid scarf. I liked Peter Davidson well enough, but in general I could do quite well without Dr. Who.

But now my husband and kids have gotten me hooked on David Tennant. My all time favorite Dr. Who episode -- from any Doctor -- would have to be "The Girl in the Fireplace."

shadowsong, I liked it better when the Cylons were clearly and absolutely The Bad Guys, because that meant the good guys were polytheists and the bad guys were monotheists, just like the real world which is unusual on American television.

Now it seems like they're going to justify the Cylons' attempted genocide, and have them turn out to be the ancestors of a new human race. With nice monotheistic beliefs. :-P

The 1930s may have seemed like a more innocent age looking at most of its tales of the Future. But what of its tales of the Present? And if you were black of Jewish, or just not a White Anglo-saxon Protestant, did the world seem so innocent?

I am old enough to remember when there were only 103 chemical elements.

I'm a recent Doctor Who convert, but I'm especially a fan of Torchwood, if only for the rather narrow reason that the Captain's bisexual.

It's decidedly few and far between when I get to see a relationship that looks sort of what I want on a sci-fi show.

True, the had to go the route of Everyone is Bi to get there, but I still sort of cried at the penultimate episode of the first series.

The most interesting thing that the quotes above lead me to think about is how we view the future in current fiction.

Perhaps I'm just reading to many dark authors, but we seem to have a rather dim view of the near future. In the popular series, Battlestar Galactica and Heros, we seem to think that we need to go through a period of pain and discord. There might be that hope out there in the future, but it's still a long way off.

In fact, the most hopeful near future work that I've read recently is Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge, and even that has some serious antagonism in it.

I quit watching BSG because the relentless darkness, brutality, and gore were getting to be too much for me. If I want a TV show to bring me down for days, I'll watch the news.

I'm still reading fanfic, though. I especially like a ST:TNG crossover--wait, wait, don't go!--that features excellent characterization and dialogue, lots of neat details that make the quasi-first-contact situation come alive, and a great explanation of the Cylons:

The chrome jobs are really running things. They developed the skin jobs in order to infiltrate and exterminate the last of the human race. Their religion is a construct (but then, so is the Colonies' religion, but that's a whole 'nother subplot). They are actually human; their superhuman abilities and extra lives come from the nanites that are present throughout their tissues. The nanites are supposed to keep them sterile, too; Sharon Agathon's just had a glitch . . .

Lila #3:

So, what are some examples of SF where the identity of the good guys is somewhat ambiguous? I'm finding it hard to think of good examples off the top of my head.

It's not clear that either Mal or the revolution for which he fought qualify as "the good guys" in Firefly. (Note what life looks on most of the back-end-of-nowhere planets they visit.)

It's not clear to me whether the Maquis were good guys or bad guys in the pre-Dominion-war story arc of DS9. (By contrast, it was easy to tell that the Dominion, the Cardassians, the Romulans, and to a lesser extent, the Ferengi and Klingons, were bad guys.) And on DS9, they managed two important characters (Quark and Garrek) who were not obviously good guys or bad guys through the whole show.

The Moties in _The Mote in God's Eye_ and _The Gripping Hand_, as well as the major factions in the Empire, are not bad guys. A major theme in those works is the idea of powerful people pursuing their duty (oybpxnqvat gur Zbgr naq qrfgeblvat nal fuvcf gung gel gb yrnir) despite not seeing their enemies as evil or crazy.

Similarly, in the _Ringworld_ and Known Space stories, Niven portrays the different characters/species as following their nature, without being obviously evil. Puppeteers simply will space their close friends of many years to buy themselves a 1% improvement in survival probability, absent some measure (possibly just a promise) to keep them from doing it. Kzinti simply will respond to insults by trying to kill the insulting person. Nothing personal, this is just what I do.

Similarly, there's loads of gray in _The Watchmen_.

And I find that a lot of my favorite stories have very clear good guys and bad guys, though most of life doesn't really work out that way. Frex, all of Vinge's books I've read so far end up with pretty clear good guys and bad guys, even if specific characters (gur ornhgvshy Crnpr Nhgubevgl fcl/fbyqvre in The Peace War) manage to be morally somewhat ambiguous. Similarly, I enjoy most of Spider Robinson's work, but his books pretty routinely have opposition to the good guys' cause be carried out either by evil people or people who have some tragic flaw that makes them unable to accept the good guys'

The new doctor (Tenant) freely admits to making stuff up, as in The Girl In The Firplace, when he explains that he made up the techno babble because he didn't want to say, Magic Door."

And from 1976, I bet the current Battlestar Galactica series looks like sheer anarchy.

That talk of not telling "the heroes from the heavies" is absolutely reminding me why I like Battlestar Galactica so much.

I've always thought one of the main differences between shows that muddy the line between heroes and villains and those that... don't, is that the latter are usually "return to factory settings" shows. What I mean is, they are often shows where, during the course of an episode or story arc, the characters have adventures and experiences, and maybe learn a few lessons along the way, but get reset into their original moulds as soon as the episode or arc is over. You start with the same hero (or villain) fresh from the factory with each new story, and any muddying that went on before that is more or less wiped clean, so your hero is always essentially a hero.

Shows like Flash Gordon are always going to be more prone to this than Doctor Who (where Doctors and companions changed regularly enough that you at least had new characters from the factory on a regular basis, as well as some growth in the ones that stick around.)

But a show like Battlestar Galactica actually allows you to switch allegiances, over and over, to constantly evaluate what YOU think is right and wrong and interesting and clever and wise, rather than assuming that you'll accept whatever your favourite characters do as being The Right Thing. And even very likeable (and favourably portrayed characters) do terrible things. (A good example of this is President Roslin, who both outlaws abortion and then comes incredibly close to ordering a forced abortion on Athena- and is only stopped by selfish motives. There can't be many audience members who would approve of both decisions, and there probably are many who disapprove of both. But Roslin has a consistant motive: species survival at all costs.)

So the characters don't come out of the box with a "good" or "bad" tag permanantly attached: they evolve, and "good" and "bad" is very much what they're doing, more than what they are. I do love that. Even Baltar has his good points, although he doesn't deserve Caprica Six. (Whose first major action in the show was a baby killing. But that was a long time ago...)

(But I love Doctor Who too.)

there is a beast beneath each human skin

you find that out when you reach that odd ground

where each of us finds out that we could win

a kind of monster whose nerves are most thin

and ready to break out at the least sound

there is a beast beneath each human skin

this is a creature of the dragonkin

moving with haste towards the sacred mound

where each of us finds out that we could win

the sky above us seems with speed to spin

what we have learned is wisdom most profound

there is a beast beneath each human skin

we throw all hesitation in the bin

the past in all its foolishness is drowned

where each of us finds out that we could win

the hero learns to take it on the chin

and let the villain fall before the hound

there is a beast beneath each human skin

where each of us finds out that we could win

I did once see Tom Baker performing Macbeth.

I will take advantage of this open thread to flack my new blog just one (1) time. It's about fringe music and SF/F and it's located here.

Sample topics: The Armageddon Rag, NZ noise musician Antony Milton, Moorcock's album New Worlds Fair, etc.

As far as scientific gobbledygook goes, I don't think it has to do as much with a society's vision of the future as it does with the language that's floating around.

In 1936 the hot science buzzwords were radio, radium, vitamin, and, uhm, that was pretty much it.

In 2008 is there anyone(at least in the SF demographic) who hasn't at least heard the words string theory, antimatter, DNA, neutrino, wormhole, plasma, nuclear, subatomic, hormone, polarity, gigabyte. Our nonsense sounds like science because we have more science words to string together:

"The plasma drive emits a stream of ionized neutrinos that invert the spin of the tachyons in local space..."

"You mean---?"

"Yes. A transmogrifying time machine."

Our time has the equivalent of shoveling radium: how many times have Star Trek captains solved a problem by "reversing the polarity."

"Captain Kirk!"

"What is it, Scottie?"

"The dilithium crystals aren't working anymore."

"Again?"

Since it's come up, I guess this is a good time to put in this request:

Seeing as how the fourth season of BSG is about to start, and the Powers That Be consistently work to ensure that I'm always one season behind on that show--in my world, the occupation just started--can any substantial discussion of it that may arise be rot13ed? I would greatly appreciate it.

I love technobabble! If it's well done, it's like poetry. Like some kind of improvisation over a general idea of what science is and ought to be. And also a play with wonderful and unusual big words.

Ethan @22: I'll do my best. Season 3 comes out of DVD next week, though and Amazon has it 40% off.

And of course there's our old friend BitTorent...

In fairness to Mr James, the most recent Doctor Who story to be shown before he wrote his column (and I think the one from which his quote comes, though I can't be sure) is The Seeds of Doom, a horrific gore-fest in which the Doctor is grim, ruthless, and quite uncharacteristically violent.

RichM @ #11: I remember when there were only 94 elements, and Dr. Zarkov didn't make any sense then, either. But I sure loved me them Jacob's Ladders.

theophylact @ 26... Dr. Zarkov didn't make any sense then

Must be those radium fumes.

I have what seems to be an infallible method of noticing fiction in which there are clear lines between Good and Evil and everyone is at a single place on that line in: I get bored or irritated very quickly.

Of course, it could be that fiction whose implicit moral universes match my own very well don't _appear_ to suffer as much from this, both because I'm lulled into acceptance and because finer-grained distinctions seem more important (I'm sure that to a Randroid the differences between Guilt and D'Ananconda seem major, and it's damned white of Ayn to show that even a relatively evil person can be redeemed.)

In any event, I'd like to see a Readercon panel entitled: "Masking the Sound of a Grinding Axe: making your ideologically-correct fiction palatable to the general public".

As for Dr Who and Battlestar...*, suddenly all I can think of is the Zappa song Cheepnis and the SubGenius admonition to discard mature speculative fiction in favour of "cheezy sci-fi".

*It says a lot about the new series that I can't quite call it Cattlecar Galaxative as a few I know did the older show...to me, the new series would be better if it didn't know how important it was....

Serge @ 27: I hear them new-fangled radio waves can travel through your brain! Any day now we're going to see some scary mutant fellers coming from the "radio station". Probably some government secret installation, you mark my words.

Coming at that statement from my immersion in media fandom, I can only add that fans can always obscure the line between good guys and bad guys. There is a persistant and noisy sector of Buffy fandom which views vampires as an oppressed minority race, for instance.

And let us not even try to summarize the moral ambiguity of what should be a clear cut "Good Terrans and Humans versus Evil Space Vampires" situation on Stargate Atlantis, where there's sufficient intended ambiguity over who's at fault for the current unpleasantness that the fan's metaconcerns with racism, sexism, and the ethics of destroying machines that pass the Turing test are sort of superfluous.

pb #20: I dunno. ISTR some fairly hefty technobabble of the vaguely plausible variety in the Lensman books.

wokka #23: SF writers simply aren't in the big leagues with inventing technobabble. Marketing droids and sales folk in the tech industry have them beat cold. And there is no feeling in the world quite like attending a talk at an industry trade show in which the CEO of a company explains what his product does and how it works, while the techies sit in the back with mouths agape and wide eyes, at the realization that the boss doesn't know what the h-ll the product we're selling even does.

It is also interesting to look at such Science Fiction on tv from the perspective of its ability to reflect on moral and ethical issues of the time. I always see the original Star Trek episodes as a series of elementary moral plays (some of which hardly fit the prevalent morals of the historical period when it was created -- or perhaps are just as ahead of their time from a moral perspective as a technological one). For example, I remember one episode with two aliens both with half white and half black faces that discriminated because one had its white on the left side of the face and the other on the right side (a difference that no one really notices until it is pointed out in the final scene). At a time of discrimination, it is impressive that Gene Roddenberry would take that kind of a risk on tv (or that any station would let him). In a sense, he slipped concepts into the minds of young men and women that helped shape the morals of the next historical period for the better.

Meanwhile, if Star Trek is for kids, BSG takes morality for adults and really shows the number of shades that can exist between a black and white decision. Perhaps people could afford a simple Star Trek morality back when they first come out -- yet in a post-911 world, there are no easy answers and stories are necessarily much more complex.

It makes me sad though for some reason -- I liked that original Star Trek innocence. Yet, I can't imagine a show would even be willing to try and capture it again today.

Ginger @ 29... You need more tinfoil.

Albatross @14,

Ambiguously good / Unreliable narrator SF exists--I recall a conversation about it here within the past few [unit of internet memory time]--but I can't name them because that's a spoiler.

These aren't the "oops, thrff gurl jrer fragvrag nsgre nyy" OSC's Ender's Game type stories, although I suppose that could be a sub-type: the ignorant hero.

One thing has bugged me for a long time with BSG... There's nobody who does gallows humor.

I gotta admit that I enjoy the technobabble as well.

A couple of weeks ago, I bought the first season of Lost in Space, and I've enjoyed revisting the dumb stories and cheesy FX and wondering what Dr. Smith had that prevented them from chucking him out the airlock.

There was never any pretense of adhering to any science at all. But once in a while, the stories had some genuine power.

>And then there's Pushing Daisies, where Our Heroes are equivalent to children too innocent to be stained by sin, incapable of doing anything truly bad.

Really? I disagree--I think, despite its candy-colored visuals, Pushing Daisies asks some interesting moral questions and even has its lead assert at least one morally troubling position.

The main moral issue raised so far has been whether or not Ned had the right to restore someone's life in exchange for someone else's. Ned himself has known the price since childhood, and twenty years later, he's still eaten with guilt about Chuck's dad's death.* But he not only resurrects Chuck, at the cost of someone else's life, he later asserts that, even knowing what would happen, he would make the same choice again. He even tries (lamely) to rationalize his decision, pointing out to Chuck and Emerson that the person who died so Chuck could live was a criminal. Neither Chuck nor Emerson buys this; Emerson in particular responds (rightly) that the man's innocence or guilt doesn't matter a whit, but that Ned is making decisions that he has no right to make. Ned's response seems to be that it's his ability, so it's his call; basically, that he does too have the right to decide who lives and who dies. I think that Ned's position here isn't moral, though I do understand how he arrived at it and how his experiences during his life helped drive him there.

Also note Ned's, Olive's, and Emerson's complicity in keeping Chuck from her aunts; and Olive's role in covering up a crime for personal financial gain.

So: I think that the heroes of Pushing Daisies, far from being children incapable of sin, are in fact making moral decisions in practically every show, and not always defensible ones either.

*Ironically, the death that Ned feels most guilty about is the one I that I think he bears NO moral culpability for, because he didn't know what would happen.

Babylon 5 had both moral ambiguity and people who were clearly on the right and wrong side. (And at least some nods toward Newtonian physics, too :))

"Though no man can draw a line between the confines of night and day, yet on the whole light and darkness are tolerably distinguishable" (Burke)

I'm reminded of Kevin Maroney's description of Stan Lee as someone who improved comics by writing two-dimensional characters at a time when one-dimensional characters were the norm.

I guess if you're used to Flash Gordon, Doctor Who looks pretty sophisticated. His technobabble contains the occasional scientific word. His shoestring special effects are forty years more advanced.

Personally, I grew up as a Buck Rogers fan. With some Brick Bradford thrown in.

Watching some circa 1940 Flash Gordon last year, I had a sudden insight when I realised the big chunky walkie-talkies they were using were (in 1940) actually extremely advanced, highly minaturised radios.

(Or as I put it at the time, think how much work it is to make vacuum tubes that small! I discovered that one of my friends can't take vacuum tubes seriously and keeps laughing whenever we mention them)

Nicole TWN @ #37: Nice take on Pushing Daisies. I knew there was a reason I like that show.

I don't know what your friend will make of this video, which shows the process of making a vacuum tube.

I merely watched in awestruck wonder.

Serge @ #35: My viewing of BSG after early Season 2 is spotty, so I can only offer my early-series observations, but I always found Gaius Baltar hilarious. (He doesn't intentionally crack jokes, of course, so if that's what you mean by having someone who does gallow humor, I have to agree.) And it's almost entirely, I think, due to the actor's take on that character, who could have been purely unpleasant in the hands of another actor.

("I really need...a thermo-nuclear warhead.")

I confess, the reason that I posted this quote is that every time I read the line the technology has made giant strides towards authenticity I get the giggles. Beeb skiffy did many things well, particularly clever dialogue*, but authenticity? Sporfle.

I may be thinking too much of Blakes Seven here, which once featured a ship explosion in space, complete with debris falling and smoke rising. And I wasn't exposed to the stuff till it was 20 years old; sfx has a shorter shelf life than that.

But still.

-----

* Avon: "I'm not stupid, I'm not expendable, and I'm not going." Not till Firefly did I hear that much snappy dialogue per episode again.

Abi... Avon is what made Blake's Seven worth watching. The scripts by Tanith Lee didn't hurt either, but he was it.

abi #45: I blame it on the difficulty of creating actual vacuum* in Shepherd's Bush.

As opposed to actual vacuity, as anyone who remembers 'Pinky and Perky' could tell you.

Sylvia @ 44... That's not quite what I meant by BSG unbelievably lacking in gallows humor. Yes, their situation is very grim. But... Take Law & Order's Lenny Briscoe. He'd seen the worst that humans could do to each other, and yet he kept going, and he handled it with wisecracks.

Serge #46: The interplay between Avon and Vila, and that between Avon and Servalan certainly provided much of the dramatic force of Blake's 7, especially after the departure of Blake himself.

Neil @ 41

You think vacuum tubes are improbable. Back when I was a TA, I found myself attempting to convince a class of undergrads that once upon a time there really had been such a thing as a steam-driven automobile. They were convinced I was pulling their legs. When I mentioned the brand name of Stanley Steamer they knew I'd slipped up beyond redemption because everyone knows Stanley Steamer is a brand of rug cleaning machine.

Of course, I suppose I brought it on myself because I was in the habit of beginning every semester by telling the class that at some random point I would tell them something utterly bogus and that I expected them to notice and call me on it because I considered critical thinking and the challenging of authority to be one of the most important things I could teach them.

Nicole TWN @ 37:

It might just be me, but I get the impression the show wants us to think that no matter what bad things the characters might do, they're still inherently good people, and their bad actions have no lasting negative effects.

Arq nppvqragnyyl xvyyf Puhpx'f qnq? Fubeg grez rssrpgf: fur yvirf jvgu ure njrfbzr nhagf. Ybat grez rssrpgf: Arq naq Puhpx znxr zbba-rlrf ng rnpu bgure. Jura Puhpx svaqf bhg, fur uvqrf sebz Arq sbe - jung, bar rcvfbqr? gjb? - orsber sbetvivat uvz.

(Probably not spoiling anyone, but just in case.)

Hell, even most of the villians aren't really evil, in my opinion. They fall into three categories (sometimes more than one category per villain): didn't really mean to hurt anyone, bug-fuck crazy, not actually a character. The first episode villain isn't actually a character. The fourth episode villain didn't mean to hurt anyone. The ninth episode villian is not right in the head.

Also, the humorous responses of newly-reanimated victims minimize the effect of the crime, since the victims aren't in pain and often don't even seem to be upset about their death.

It's (modern) fairy tale violence. The bad guys are just behaving according to their nature, and their punishment balances our their crimes, leaving everything to come out neutral in the end.

Sian 16: Caprica Six...[w]hose first major action in the show was a baby killing.

I interpreted that as an act of mercy. She knew the world was about to be consumed in flame, and killed the baby quickly and cleanly so it wouldn't have to be burned to death. This interpretation is in line with what we later learn of her character, and I frankly can't think of any other motivation she would have for doing that.

Fragano @ 49... Vila was the thief, right?

Here's a somewhat scary story about a wrong number.

albatross, #14: In Conquest Born and The Wilding by C.S. Friedman are both pretty good examples of "who's the good guy here?" fiction. And she's sneaky about it -- starts out painting things to look like a standard black hat/white hat confrontation, and then muddies the waters severely.

Mike, #32: Even at age 10-12, some of the ClassicTrek episodes (of which Let That Be Your Last Battlefield is definitely one) seemed awfully ham-handed to me. Beating the audience over the head with a Message often comes at the expense of storytelling. OTOH, I do agree that Roddenberry stuck his neck way out there; the symbolism was so blatant that not even the stupidest network exec could possibly have missed it.

What really got me, though, was when NextGen suffered from the same kind of ham-handedness; the episode about the planet of hermaphrodites (where wanting to be het instead of bi was a Major Perversion) and the host-gender-changing Trill episode being the ones that spring to mind.

I doubt everyone here would want to regularly read a web comic about twenty-something indy rock fans, but you all may be able to relate to the last line of this episode.

Xopher @52- Oh, I completely agree that the baby-killing was an act of mercy (at least from Caprica Six's perspective). But after all, she was saving the baby from the chaos and destruction which she had orchestrated. I just love that the baby-killing, world-destroying robot is the one I think deserves a better true love/mind-to-mess-with/boyfriend. (Although Baltar is so far from being a paragon of virtue that it isn't saying much to affirm that Six deserves better, she really, really does.) I like Six. I care about her. I think that her decisions, over time, are becoming (overall) better attempts at moral decisions, whilst the decisions of a lot of the Galactica crew are, overall, becoming worse attempts. It surprises me.

As does the fact that throughout the show, I have been truly astonished by the amount of maternal instinct that all known female Cylons have been ?programmed? with, and the way that this was all signalled by Six's actions in the mini-series. Again, it's just not what you might expect from evil robots out to destroy humanity. And that's good.

Tony@38- WRT Babylon 5 and moral ambiguity, I'll certainly give you Mr Garibaldi. And several other characters, now I come to think about it. But I rarely felt truly shocked by the actions of B5 characters: there was a sort of innocence about it, even when things were dangerous or ambiguous. In a slightly Lord of the Rings way, I think. Most of the characters (although not Mr Garibaldi, and possibly not Londo) felt like they would have played nicely with others in Tolkien's world. Which isn't a criticism, I liked that show a lot. (And the Lord of the Rings, for that matter.)

#22, ethan: don't watch "what the frak" then at the BSG site. It was rather entertaining though and got one ready for the new season.

Serge #53: Right.

Fragano @ 59... That was a good balance of characters. By the way, would it be sacrilegious to say that I found Blake's character rather oh-hum?

Serge #60: No.

Lee #55: Yeah, I think the "lessons" in both old and new Star Trek tended to be delivered with a club. And the "gay rights" episodes in TNG were just bizarre. If they wanted to address gay rights, they could simply have had a few openly gay sideline characters--folks at the Barclay level, say, if they thought it would be too hard on ratings to have Geordi come out of the closet or something. (How could anyone rationally object to, say, Data finding a male lover. Looked at one way, he's just a sentient (and fully functional) vibrator.)

But this raises an issue with Star Trek's universe. We're very far in the future, and yet we essentially never see gay humans. The explanations available appear to be something like:

a. In the 23rd century, they've cured being gay. (It's a standard treatment, in which they reverse polarity on the backward-biased singularity generators.)

b. In the 23rd century, all the gays are closeted out of fear of being subjected to above treatment. (Apparently, having your singularity generators' polarity reversed isn't any fun.)

c. Starfleet still follows a "don't ask, don't tell" policy.

Are there other alternatives, here?

Somehow, this all makes me think of the "War Stories" episode of Firefly. ("I'll be in my bunk!")

We stood on a hill at the Bosworth battlefield. Our guide recounted the numbers of armed men who were supposed to be on it, and I wondered how they all fit on it, let alone fit one another. Down below, puffs of steam marked the path of something nobody could see, and because I didn't know anybody well enough yet, I resisted the temptation to suggest that it was a Stanley Steamer.

Serge @ 33: Tin foil?!? You're not one of them secret government agents, are you? Because we don't hold with them furrin agents around here. We're decent, law-abidin' citizens here. Cheesecloth was good enough for our forefathers, and it's good enough for us.

albatross @ 62... I seem to remember that David Gerrold had written a TNG story that dealt with something not unlike AIDS, but somebody got cold feet, I think.

Ginger @ 64... On the other hand, if tinfoil was good enough for Mel Gibson, it should be... Oh, wait...

Serge: Yeah, I think they had an episode that at least seemed to be sort of about AIDS. But my complaint is that they didn't just have gay characters wandering around, as normal a part of daily life as they are in real life. By contrast, they managed to integrate the crew racially at least a bit more over time, ending up with Sisko as a really powerful, interesting character in DS9. (Though I am still not too clear on why the majority of 23rd century spacefarers are white Americans. Did we nuke the rest of the world?)

albatross @ 67... But the only way for us to have known if this or that character was a homosexual would have been for him/her to have indulged in some Public Display of Affection, and most of the crew of the NCC-1701-D seemed to have evolved beyond any PDA or PDE. Except for Geordi. And O'Bryan. And Keiko.

albatross@14: for ambiguous characters, try A Sorcerer and a Gentleman; one definitely dark but not black, and several that profess good motives but execute less well. Or notice what Mike did with the Klingons in The Final Reflection.

For something at the other end of the spectrum, see almost anything by Dickson. Once, when driven to explain one of his books, I said "If a Dickson hero slips and mentions looking west at the sunrise that morning, the sun will immediately reverse course.

Gays in TNG? Considering that the show premiered over 20 years ago, and ended in 1994, I just don't see that it could have happened.

As much as I enjoyed the show, it (like most SF on TV) was inherently conservative.

I may just be in a crabby mood, but that quote sounds like nonsense to me.

a) In 1936, the ideas like rocketships, cloaks of invisibility, other planets populated by multiple separate species, etc., were possible marvels, not s-f cliches. The charm of Flash Gordon was in the fantasies it spun for kids from dawning pop awareness of new ideas in the infrastructure of science. In 1936 science was just beginning to discover the world of subatomic particles and the difference between particles and waves. In context of that era, maybe all those rays as plot levers might not seem so ridiculous. Crossing a bridge made of light. Far out! ("You first, Earthman.") In Doctor Who, you've got nanites and other biotechnology, addressed with a similar mystical awe.

b) In Dr. Who, it is often possible to tell the heroes from the heavies. (In Flash Gordon, you

you've got Princess Aura: a heroine or a villainess?)

albatross @14: So, what are some examples of SF where the identity of the good guys is somewhat ambiguous?

Nobody's mentioned Lois McMaster Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan books. The father of the men who attacked Cordelia and caused Miles's disabilities ends up supporting Miles in a Council vote. The Cetagandans who invaded Barrayar and killed 5 million people turn out not to be faceless minions of evil. The Betan psychologist sent to "help" Cordelia when she goes home after the war refuses to believe that she is sane and tries to get her brain wiped. The soldier who rapes a terrified prisoner spends the next 20 years trying to make it up to the child she bears. "Ambiguous" is just a word for "really human."

Anyone going to Lunacon and want to meet up?

Today I was accosted by an overly friendly postal worker who wanted to show me her tattoos and give me a bookmark advertising her fantasy novels. Is there something written on my forehead in invisible ink that says "weird fannish chick, bond with me" or what? Is buying a book because one's postal worker brought one FOUR packages (including a bathing suit which hopefully will cover up all surgical scars) more or less likely to produce a good reading experience than other ways of finding books?

Tehanu:

Avoiding spoilers in case someone hasn't read the books, but was Ezar Vorbarra a good guy or a bad guy, given the plans laid down in green silk rooms?

Susan, I seem to give off a very mild 'friendly to pagan lesbians' vibe.

Regarding Ezar... um. It's been too long since I read the books (meaning a year or two; I took my time devouring them) and what I remember is that he did his best, but we did not get to see him enough to know if he felt bad about certain things. A little too smug and low-key gleeful for me to trust him.

One of the many pleasures of BSG is the absence of technobabble. Once in a great while there'll be a bit here and there - Baltar explaining how Cylon blood works, for instance - but for the most part the show seems to operate on the assumption that there's nothing at all mysterious or even very interesting about technology.

And it's right. "Why are the Cylons monotheists?" is a much more interesting question than "How do the Cylons work?" or "What's with the dramatic oscillating red eye?"

Steve C #70: Gays in TNG? Considering that the show premiered over 20 years ago, and ended in 1994, I just don't see that it could have happened.

See, this right here is one of the reasons I have no respect for Star Trek: The Next Generation. Original Star Trek was ahead of its time in these matters, showing American TV's first interracial kiss at a time when interracial marriage was still illegal in many states.

Star Trek: TNG, on the other hand, trailed behind regular TV. Network TV was dealing with occasional homosexual themes as early as 1967, and had out gay recurring characters in the seventies. (Billy Crystal's character on Soap is commonly considered the first, but there were a few others on less well-known shows as early as 1972.) Tony Randall played a gay main character in Love, Sidney, from 1981-83.

LA Law showed two women kissing in 1992. That's the same year Star Trek: TNG showed "The Outcast", which deals metaphorically with the issue of homosexuality and shows Riker kissing an androgynous alien obviously played by a woman. Jonathan Frakes himself complained that the episode wimped out, and the alien should have been more masculine.

I wouldn't call TS:TNG so much conservative as chicken. Not cowardly, just safe . . . bland. And not just for not dealing with homosexuality.

Deep Space 9 took some chances. B5 pushed things much farther. BSG, Mk. II . . . whoa!

I'd add that virtually any SF written by Delany, Iain Banks, Ursula LeGuin, or many other modern writers involves moral ambiguity and often unclarity as to the "heroes" and "villains".

Part of what turned me off DS9 fairly early on was how completely it backed off from what it originally promised. According to early reports, Sisko was supposed to be a crippled, embittered war hero who'd been given command of Deep Space 9 in order to force him to retire: sorry about your severed spinal cord and your dead wife, here's this skeevy backwater post...

The series was supposed to explore the darker side of the Federation: how *did* the Federation maintain such remarkable harmony? What kind of police and spy networks (internal and external) would be required to maintain that system? How disconnected from the Federation ideal were the outposts and frontier worlds? What pain, intentional or accidental, would a massive bureaucracy like that inflict in order to survive?

DS9 promised to swim in deep, murky waters; instead, it wound up splashing around in the kiddie pool, pretending it was, well, boldly going and all that... Was it darker than ST:TNG? Sure - but only by comparison.

albatross @ 14: "It's not clear that either Mal or the revolution for which he fought qualify as "the good guys" in Firefly. (Note what life looks on most of the back-end-of-nowhere planets they visit.)"

I always saw that as fallout from losing the war/the reason for the war in the first place. Far more morally ambiguous in Firefly was Jayne, and the way he reflected the worst in all the rest of them. (There's little that Jayne does that the rest of them haven't considered--yes, including what happens on Ariel.)

I think that TV sf's sophistication tracks better with the sophistication of TV in general than with sf. TV has been getting more sophisticated both morally and conceptually in recent years, and TV sf has reflected that.

Fragano Ledgister @ 17: Amazing. That opening bit is awe-inspiring. Bravo!

Michael Turyn @ 28: "In any event, I'd like to see a Readercon panel ent"itled: "Masking the Sound of a Grinding Axe: making your ideologically-correct fiction palatable to the general public"."

"And then, of course, we return to Heinlein once again..."

Serge @ 35: "One thing has bugged me for a long time with BSG... There's nobody who does gallows humor."

Yes, BSG takes itself way, way too seriously.

China report attacks U.S. human rights record as "tattered and shocking"

"Er, actually, you're quite sooty yourself," said the kettle.

heresiarch @ 81... There is that, yes, but, like I said to Sylvia @ 48, I really was deploring the absence of humor as a coping mechanism. That being said, this is the last season and I wonder what'll happen when the BSG does get to Earth.

"Oops! Sorry for bringing that bunch of nasties to your doorstep."

Susan @ 73... Is there something written on my forehead in invisible ink that says "weird fannish chick, bond with me" or what?

If you had been in a Star Trek episode, the explanation would probably be that there was a leak in the warp core, which reversed polarity, and that led to quantum defects in local pockets of Reality and...

I'm a bit surprised that nobody mentioned SKZB's Vlad Taltos as a contender in the Morally Ambiguous Hero category.

OK, he tries to do good, but he's nonchalantly killing people (well -- Dragaerans...) left and right, at least in the first couple of books.

Clifton @ 79: In general I agree with you, but what's going on with the the Archimandrite in The Algebraist? Here's your unambiguous villain with a slice of gleeful cheese, and then Banks seems to say that for all that dictators are a real part of humananity and horrible, they're ultimately uninteresting. That such a character (or such a conception) falls short of the true horror we're capable of. A sarcastic comment on the banality of evil?

Spherical @ 12: You've read Vonda MacIntyre's Starfarers series? Not great idea SF, but lovely lovely soap opera in space.

It's Vonda McIntyre, sorry. Using Google as a spelling check only helps if you notice the autocorrection.

heresiarch@81

fallout from losing the war/the reason for the war

Fallout, partly, in that the war probably worsened already existing differences in wealth between the various planets.

Reason, indirectly (if I recall correctly). The impetus for the war appears to have been the view of many in the core worlds that the non-core worlds would be better off if the whole system was unified under the "benevolent" guidance of the core worlds.

This was not an entirely ridiculous viewpoint, unfortunately it did not take into account the fact that many of the non-core worlds strongly disagreed with the notion of "reunification".

80: I might actually have watched that one. Sounds good. Especially if they forcefed the writers on John Le Carre and Graham Greene beforehand.

ajay @ 89... f they forcefed the writers on John Le Carre

Hmmm... Wasn't there an episode of DS9 where Doctor Bashir goes to some Peace Conference inside the Romulan Empire? There he meets Romulan Adrienne Barbeau, who's working hard toward detente, but things do not go well because the Romulans have a hardliner who politically destroys it. The surprise about the hardliner isn't a surprise if you ever saw (or read) The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.

Since this is an open thread ... As some of you might know, Pat Cadigan has started a "Match it for Pratchett" campaign to match Pterry's donation of £500k to Alzheimer's research. A friend made a button for people to use if they want to copy it and link to the campaign on their sites. Blogenspiel

Clifton #79: It's interesting--I've only read Banks' Culture stories, but in those, the characters are often drawn in shades of gray, but the Culture mostly isn't. One thing I liked about _Remember Phlebas_ was that it wasn't 100% clear that the Culture were the good guys, though you clearly were supposed to come to that conclusion by the end.

Re Firefly:

I always felt that the historical analogy provided enough moral drag on Mal's side of the war. I could easily see Mal as a "man of honor in a den of thieves" even among his own side.

Absent broader information, I confess that I didn't immediately leap to the idea that the Browncoats were the good guys in the abstract, nor did I expect that we were seeing the best side of the victors.

Peripherally, does anyone else think Mal's family might have been killed by reavers while he was away at war? His reactions to both the reavers and the time Saffron gets him to talk about his mother make me wonder.

abi #93: I never had any intuition for what had happened to Mal's family.

My sense was that the outer planets varied a lot, maybe agreeing on little except that they didn't want to be ruled from the core worlds. So, there were pretty decent planets like Persephone, and awful ones like the one where Jayne is a hero[1].

Firefly seems a bit like The Matrix or Star Wars to me, in the sense that the ideas and images and sense of life in these shows were wonderful, but the plots and world descriptions weren't sewn together quite tightly enough to bear much careful thought. And I kind of wish I hadn't watched the Serenity movie, which I thought kind-of ran the series into the ground.

[1] I'll admit that this was my favorite episode.

abi @ 93... I think that Mal's side of the war was supposed the good guys. The original episode (which was aired last) showed the people under his command wearing the helmets of American troops during WW2. Yes, it's a silly clue.

95: and the Alliance wearing German WW2 coalscuttle helmets! Yes, I noticed that too. But by the time of the series they'd moved on to wearing leftover helmets and body armour from "Starship Troopers", and carrying (poor buggers) British SA80 rifles.

Ahem.

OTOH, the first episode also makes it clear that slavery is a part of the rim worlds - Badger's looking over some woman as a possible buy before he meets Mal. Clearly the Alliance hadn't got round to stamping that out.

#74--Susan: was Ezar Vorbarra a good guy or a bad guy, given the plans laid down in green silk rooms?

I know you didn't ask me, but I think by the time he got around to making those plans in that greeen silk room, Ezar was holding on desperately to the duty he'd taken on years before, during the invasion: To protect his own people as best he could. Which means he gets points for sticking to an important committment at the expense of his own preferences, but that he's a bloody-minded old devil all the same.

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ajay @ 96... And the Alliance Navy looks like the Kaiser's.

Albatross @67 Though I am still not too clear on why the majority of 23rd century spacefarers are white Americans

If this is the darker Federation alluded to in #80, I guess that as a career open to talents, this is one of the few exit routes from the white American ghetto.

While typing that, I then had a second thought - if the utopia of the Federation is still fairly new, but arrived in America first, maybe everyone else is still getting used to it and enjoying their new found freedom and prosperity. The Americans in Starfleet are rebelling against their parents: A life of plenty, freedom and fulfillment? The hell with that. I'm going under (para)military discipline to suffer hardship and deprivation out in space!

After all, utopias are boring*, which is why stories about them take place on the edges (Star Trek, the Culture etc.)

Dave Bell #43 - I'll ask him when he gets back from holiday. I especially like the soundtrack. (I note that that video is longer than an episode of 1940 Flash Gordon).

Thinking about this, there's various levels of implausability. So in Flash Gordon there are pistols where the barrel emerges from under the hand (which makes no sense in any time period, because how do you aim? and is just there to make them look exotic); Mings forces wear full helmets which not only allow intruders to wander around his palace undetected, but don't even stop them getting knocked out in the first place (this is a standard of adventure fiction, but is still somewhat unlikely);then there's various rays and gases** which are only limited by Ming or Zarkov's imaginations (less plausible today than at the time, although contemporary biochemists and physicists were snorting); and things like rocket-planes and minature radios*** which made perfect sense at the time, and do today, but just didn't turn out quite like that.

I have a feeling I had a point when I started typing, but have lost it along the way, as well as missing the moment where I was going to put the link showing when a wall of vacuum tubes was the height of computing.

* Just had a thought - is this why in fictional suburbias, everyone is having an affair? Both the characters and the authors find the utopian suburbia boring.

** There's a scene in which one of Ming's minions has created a gas that only kills people of intelligence; it seems that they're the people who rebel against Ming. Ming takes this in his stride.

*** I keep wondering if some real thought went into the size of the radios. "Hey, what if they have radios that they can talk to anyone on the planet and they can carry them in their hands!" "How small shall we make them? The size of a telephone handset? No, just a bit bigger, to leave room for the little tiny vacuum tubes". Or did they just put them together from whatever was at hand (in the way that Arboria clearly doubles as a Robin Hood set including the costumes).

Neil Willcox @ 99... contemporary biochemists and physicists were snorting

They were then all arrested as part of Mongo's War on Gases.

fidelio:

Well, if I was only talking to one person I'd have used email. :)

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Peripherally, does anyone else think Mal's family might have been killed by reavers while he was away at war?

Shadow, Mal's home planet, was subjected to a scorched-earth policy by the Alliance; everyone who was on-planet at the time is dead and the place is unlivable barring a repeat of the terraforming process. Which is why he literally can't go home.

OTOH, the first episode also makes it clear that slavery is a part of the rim worlds - Badger's looking over some woman as a possible buy before he meets Mal. Clearly the Alliance hadn't got round to stamping that out.

Oh, they call it "bonded"--Inara gets Mal out of hock in "The Train Job" by claiming he's her bonded servant who ran away. And since a high-class lady like a Companion clearly wouldn't lie about such a thing...

heresiarch @ #82:

One of the myriad things that makes me Angry! Angry! Ångry! about the last seven years is that our differences from China have become quantitative rather than qualitative. We don't - I hope - have the same magnitude of human rights problems, but we've lost the moral high ground. "We're sooty but not as sooty as you!" is a weak defense.

Bob 76: Baltar explaining how Cylon blood works, for instance

I only saw that one once, but my impression at the time was that he was saying that Cylons have O– blood. That's all he was saying. And, of course, incluing that no human does, which (if they follow through on it, which they probably won't) could make things interesting on Earth, where O+ is the most common blood type and O– is not rare. If taken to its logical conclusion, that would mean the Fleet would conclude that most Earth people are of partly Cylon descent. I, for example, am A+, but my father is O–; they'd have to conclude that my whole family are Cylon-human hybrids. But I'm betting that won't be a plot point in the final season.

"Why are the Cylons monotheists?" is a much more interesting question than "How do the Cylons work?" or "What's with the dramatic oscillating red eye?"

I agree. My speculation is that "God" is what they call the Cylon who made the humanoid Cylons, and who had a very definite purpose in mind for them. That would be cool, but it's probably wrong, because the series is based on Mormon mythology, so probably they'll conclude that it's the same God worshipped by the CJCLDS on Earth, and that wiping out those durrty polytheists was the right and proper thing to do. In which case they'd still be making the point I liked, which is that monotheism leads to genocide! (Yes, I'm kidding. I don't really think they'll conclude that the attempted genocide of humans was right.)

Stefan 78: BSG is pushing some boundaries, yes, but homosexuality is not one of them. The closest they come is Baltar's implied threesome with Caprica and Biers (or another Three), which was designed to scandalize, not enlighten. Not a single ongoing gay character, not a single gay recurring, not a single gay guest star, not even an implied same-sex adventure in adolescence. Also, note the assumption inherent in making all the Cylon women hot (so I'm told) and all the men skeevy (IMO, pace Leoben fans): in this universe, human men (but not human women) are susceptible to manipulation through sex, and none of them are queer, because there are no Cylon models designed to manipulate people who like men in that way. Otherwise there'd be a male equivalent to Caprica Six, who would look more like Jamie Bamber than Dean Stockwell!

ajay 96: OTOH, the first episode also makes it clear that slavery is a part of the rim worlds - Badger's looking over some woman as a possible buy before he meets Mal. Clearly the Alliance hadn't got round to stamping that out.

I didn't think the Alliance is interested in stamping out slavery. Most of the worlds they go to have some kind of slavery; even in "The Train Job" it's clearly understood that indentured servitude exists. And the identity of the "owner" in that case makes it clear that the inner worlds have it too.

Which is interesting, because if the series is a Western translated into the future, Mal is a former Confederate; I might speculate that one of the things they were fighting against is that the Alliance allows slavery and indentured servitude, and the Independents (or maybe only some of them) didn't like that. If true, it's an interesting reversal. Mal clearly doesn't like people being treated as property, but is that an Independent stance, or his own moral conviction in contrast with both sides?

albatross @ 31

Oh, HELL, yes. I remember one crazy year or so when I was the tech lead on a new product and had to follow the CEO around mopping up after him. Now this guy had a PhD in physics and this was his, I think, third high-tech startup. And he had absolutely no clue what the product did, or why a customer would want it. At one point we met with some highly placed people at Sun, with the tacit understanding that if they liked what they heard, acquisition talks would occur sometime soon. Our CEO's cluelessness completely ended that possibility; all my singing and dancing couldn't overcome that handicap.

Oh, the VP of Marketing, who'd been at Apple durin the first Jobs era, was almost as clueless. He sort of understood what the product was, but thought it would be dangerous to tell the customers.

Serge @ 83: Agreed--the fact that no one on BSG ever notices how funny (in a morbid way) their situation is, is a little peculiar.

Michael I @ 88: "This was not an entirely ridiculous viewpoint, unfortunately it did not take into account the fact that many of the non-core worlds strongly disagreed with the notion of "reunification"."

My readings on the history of the developing world suggest to me that "unification under our benevolent guidance" generally translates into something like "economic exploitation under our tyrannic bootheel." I've gotta say, the idea of being ruled by a futuristic fusion of the Chinese and American governments definitely gives me the wiggins.

abi @ 93: "I always felt that the historical analogy provided enough moral drag on Mal's side of the war."

You mean with the Confederates? I've often wondered if the Browncoats were Joss's attempt to disassociate what was admirable in the Confederates (defending their right to self-determination) from what was despicable (that they had "self-determined" to enslave half their population).

"Peripherally, does anyone else think Mal's family might have been killed by reavers while he was away at war?"

I always figured that the Reavers were very recent phenomenon, and basically entirely post-war. I'm not sure, though.

albatross @ 94: "Firefly seems a bit like The Matrix or Star Wars to me, in the sense that the ideas and images and sense of life in these shows were wonderful, but the plots and world descriptions weren't sewn together quite tightly enough to bear much careful thought."

I hear this pretty regularly, but I never understand why. What part of the world-building didn't work for you? It all fits together pretty well for me, but it's always hard to tell what bits I just assumed into existence.

Also, the Browncoats wearing Allied helmets is the most ham-handed attempt to establish audience loyalty that I totally never even noticed at all. In other words: awesome.

Also, the Browncoats wearing Allied helmets is the most ham-handed attempt to establish audience loyalty that I totally never even noticed at all.

I didn't either, I think because American WWII helmets are just in my mental database as "what modern soldiers' helmets are supposed to look like". Which says something about WWII movies and/or the way my brain works, if you think about it. :)

It might just be me, but I get the impression the show wants us to think that no matter what bad things the characters might do, they're still inherently good people, and their bad actions have no lasting negative effects.

Don't they? Chuck's bad decision at the travel agency was what led to her death. Ned STILL struggles with the consequences of actions he's taken years before. So does Emerson. Olive seems to have quit a profession she liked and was good at, after the events detailed in "Girth".

We've also seen people who, while charming on the surface, aren't very nice people underneath. The Balsam siblings, for instance, react irrationally and poisonously to Ned's overtures of friendship. Nobody in the dogs episode is particularly nice. In the Le Nez / Vibenius rivalry, we're meant to sympathize with Vibenius--but he's still creepy and not entirely trustworthy.

Ned accidentally kills [redacted]? When Chuck finds out, she hides from Ned for - what, one episode? two? - before forgiving him.

Well, I still think that that particular death isn't on Ned. He 1) was nine years old; 2) didn't know what would happen, and 3) it being one of the very first manifestations of his power, he had no reason to suspect what would happen. My thinking is that Chuck must have come to a similar conclusion, which is why she forgave him--but not right away, and not easily.

Also, I don't think that Chuck's aunts, picturesque as they are, were the best people to be raising Chuck. Their social phobias meant that they relied on Chuck to take care of them, knowing that they were preventing her from living her own life. That stunted Chuck's development and contributed to her own intimacy issues (on a show where EVERYBODY has big honkin' intimacy issues, so at least she's not alone). End result: a 28-year-old woman who's so naive that she accepts a too-good-to-be-true offer of a free cruise.

Hell, even most of the villians aren't really evil, in my opinion. They fall into three categories (sometimes more than one category per villain): didn't really mean to hurt anyone, bug-fuck crazy, not actually a character. The first episode villain isn't actually a character. The fourth episode villain didn't mean to hurt anyone. The ninth episode villian is not right in the head.

What about the villain in "Dummy": fb qrgrezvarq gb oevat uvf pne gb znexrg gung ur'f jvyyvat gb fnpevsvpr crbcyr'f yvirf?

Also, the humorous responses of newly-reanimated victims minimize the effect of the crime, since the victims aren't in pain and often don't even seem to be upset about their death.

Well, yeah... but the alternative is the Torchwood approach, where the newly-reanimated spend their entire minute basically freaking out.

It's (modern) fairy tale violence. The bad guys are just behaving according to their nature, and their punishment balances our their crimes, leaving everything to come out neutral in the end.

Is everyone punished? Ned's dad--was he ever punished?

Lee @55: Perhaps I wasn't a very sophisticated 11 year-old, or perhaps it was just a consequence of growing up in a small, mostly mono-ethnic town, but Let That Be Your Last Battlefield was one of the episodes that stuck in my mind for years. The moment at the end of the first act where the police officer points out the difference between him and his quarry with such vehemence was such a mind-opening event for me, both for the anger the two actors portrayed, and for Kirk and Spock's understated "WTF?" reactions. The contrast between the protagonists' high technology and their mutually destructive passionate hatred was another thing. And, of course, the sequence of them seeing their homeworld in ruins, the slow realization, not of a desire to rebuild, but to pursue blind vengence on one another, and the final shots of them running through the ruins -- all in all, I found it a powerful episode.

Yes, perhaps it isn't how we'd do it now, if we felt a need to do it at all, but the past is a foreign country and all that.

ajay @ 89 -

80: I might actually have watched that one. Sounds good. Especially if they forcefed the writers on John Le Carre and Graham Greene beforehand.

I think they got a lot more ambiguity - and smarts about such things - later in the series, (In The Pale Moonlight, Honor Among Thieves, etc.), but even in the beginning, there were distinct differences between DS9 and TNG - Kira Nerys is unequivocally a former terrorist (and not at all ashamed of what she did in the Resistance), Garak was apparently a Cardassian spy (although we later find out his position is much more... interesting... than we are first lead to believe), Quark is a war profiteer, intelligence broker, smuggler, gambling-hall owner, and if he isn't a pimp, it's only because Nerys would string him up by his ears, and so on.

My personal opinion is that DS9 was probably closest in spirit (except maybe season 4 of Enterprise, when Manny Coto became executive producer) to the original series - the main characters are flawed, but still generally good, people, who try - but don't always succeed - in doing the right thing. Humans have changed, and evolved (socially and morally), from what they were three centuries before - but the shadows of what they were remain, and you can see that there is still that struggle in each of them.

[War] is instinctive. But the instinct can be fought. We're human beings with the blood of a million savage years on our hands! But we can stop it. We can admit that we're killers...but we're not going to kill...today. That's all it takes! Knowing that we're not going to kill...today!
-- Captain James T Kirk in 'A Taste Of Armageddon'

Jim Kirk could certainly have empathized with Benjamin Sisko over the outcome of In the Pale Moonlight - I'm not sure that Jean-Luc Picard (pre First Contact, anyways) could have.

Susan @ 103: "One of the myriad things that makes me Angry! Angry! Ångry! about the last seven years is that our differences from China have become quantitative rather than qualitative. We don't - I hope - have the same magnitude of human rights problems, but we've lost the moral high ground. "We're sooty but not as sooty as you!" is a weak defense."

One of the most angering experiences of my adult life has been learning that the difference has always been quantitative. The real change in the last seven years is that we've stopped outsourcing quite as much.

#103--Susan:

I agree with your conclusions about Ezar--I'm interested in how he ended up capable of seeing that choice as his best choice, but I believe your conclusions on the ethics are correct.

I'm not sure what I make of Cordelia in that--I don't know if she indeed agreed, or was so far through the looking glass from her own worldview that she was taking this sort of thing as a given in Lookingglass-land and was just too overwhelmed to react as she would have in a more familiar environment.

Susan @ 103... That's why I get all nostalgic when I watch movies like Bridge on the River Kwai.

So by the standards of 1970 Flash Gordon seemed unsophisticated and Dr Who was great stuff. Today, Dr Who seems unsophisticated and Battlestar Galactica is the good stuff. It's all anecdotal of course, but I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that the average audience in 2040 will find Battlestar Galactica unsophisticated and clumsy compared to what's on then.

Have the decades since its original broadcast made The Outer Limits unsophisticated? Not to me, but others may feel otherwise.

Xopher (104) -

I know the white hats in the original BSG were Space!Mormons, but do you think the non-mormon Moore is going to flip the relationship exactly? I'd love to see a little more mormon-y monotheism from the Cylons.

I have a love/hate relationship with the new BSG almost entirely due to their (on the side of love) willingness to show complex human nature, intelligent scripts and some excellent female characters. On the side of "hate" is the lack of gay (although didn't Razor throw in my favorite "evil lesbian" theme? thanks guys) and the super-hot lady/meh dude dichotomy they have going on with the Cylons. Since that's not much different than anything else on TV, I still look forward to new episodes and will watch them gladly, but I do expect a little more out of sci fi shows in the post-Whedon* era.

* a somewhat disturbing outcome of the writers strike are rumors I'd heard of Whedon and Moore getting together and planning something. Which led me to imagine a possible outcome - a show with SF elements, humor, strong women (some of them OMG! OVER 30! - sorry Joss, this is where you fall down)complex morality and maybe even the acknowledgement that Teh Gay exists. I'm starting the letter writing campaign to save this show now.

NelC #109 - I could help surfing wikipedia on Let That Be Your Last Battlefield and noticed this tidbit (which sheds some color -- no pun intended) on the story:

There is some evidence that this script evolved from Gene Coon's unfilmed first season script A Portrait in Black and White. That particular script also dealt with racial issues, and would have featured Uhura and McCoy trapped on a planet where white people were slaves and black people were the masters. According to David Gerrold, Herbert F. Solow, and the recollections of Gene Coon's widow, Jackie Coon-Fernandez, the Trek production staff worked and reworked the script for nearly three years before it reached its final form.

I guess they kept rewriting it until it was too subtle for a network executive to understand and veto....

fidelio:

Vs V erpnyy pbeerpgyl, bar bs Pbeqryvn'f ovt pbapreaf va rinqvat Orgna cflpu gerngzrag vf gung vg jbhyq varivgnoyl rkcbfr Rmne'f cybg. Ohg gung chgf ure va gur cbfvgvba bs urycvat pbire hc fbzrguvat yvxr znff zheqre ba gur tebhaqf gung qbar vf qbar naq ng yrnfg gur tbny jnf nppbzcyvfurq. Gur raq whfgvsvrf gur zrnaf nyy gur jnl gb gubhfnaqf bs qrnguf? Gung'f cerggl sne vagb YbbxvatynffYnaq, rfcrpvnyyl sbe n Orgna!

And then there's the whole matter of Bothari, though I guess one can wriggle out of that debate on the grounds that he's clearly mentally ill.

Can't have a much more morally ambiguous character than the central one in Iain M. Banks's Use of Weapons.

For cultures as a whole, I think you have to look to Joe Haldeman.

hereisarch:

Perhaps I'm just poorly informed, but I thought the official removal of the qualitative difference was a function of the current administration. I don't expect previous governments' hands were completely clean, and of course there are always abusive individuals, but I don't recall torture and open-ended detention without charges and rendition and suspension of habeas corpus being official government policy before.

Am I wrong? I don't want to be wrong.

Wanna see some silly/stupid?

Coincidentally, we also happen to own the patent.

A really clever jacket, with LED turn-signals, for cyclists is being shown off. In comes a guy, by complete chance, and says it already exists, and here's the patent number, and "feel free to contact me if you have questions".

This, needless to say, raised some hackles.

But the jacket is way cool. I would love to be able to get one for Maia.

"Naq nyy uvf jneevbe-fnvagf, ohearq hc gbtrgure gb znxr bar fvatyr tybel"

Pbeqryvn vf sne zber svezyl va gung pbzcnal guna fur erfvqrf va nal fbeg bs

Orgna-arff.

Whfg orpnhfr ur'f gur ivrjcbvag, gung qbrfa'g cerirag vg orvat gur pnfr gung

ZVYRF VF JEBAT NOBHG RIRELGUVAT.

Nurz.

Zvyrf ivrjf bs uvf cneragf (naq bgure eryngvirf) ner rkgerzryl vanpphengr va

vzcbegnag jnlf; vs lbh yvxr Zvyrf, guvf vf orpnhfr vg'f rkgerzryl qvssvphyg gb

punyyratr gur nkvbzf lbh erprvirq nf genvavat nf n irel fznyy puvyq, naq uvf

guerr cevznel vasyhraprf (Pbhag Cvbge, Neny, naq Obgunev) ner, havsbezyl,

qrrcyl rzorqqrq va n phygheny pbagrkg gung vf nf njner bs glcvpny Orgna phygher

nf syngjbezf jbg gurz bs nfgebabzl. Vs lbh qba'g yvxr Zvyrf, guvf vf orpnhfr

gur chful yvggyr zhgnag vf rkgerzryl anepvfgvp naq unfa'g obgurerq gb guvax

nobhg whfg ubj abzvanyyl-orgna-abezny uvf zbgure be zngreany tenaqzbgure ner.

Remne, jryy, ab, abg rivy. Uvf erfcbafvovyvgl vf abg zreryl gb cerirag Fretr

sebz orvat n ernyyl onq naq oybbql rzcrebe; uvf erfcbafvovyvgl gb vf gb qb vg

va n jnl gung znvagnvaf gur yrtvgvznpl bs tbireazrag naq gur cbffvovyvgl bs

crnpr.

Ng gung yriry bs erfcbafvovyvgl, gur pevgrevn vf "yrnfg fhssvpvrag zrnaf", abg

"qvq crbcyr qvr", naq va yrnfg-fhssvpvrag-zrnaf grezf, Remne jnf oevyyvnag.

Fbzr gubhfnaqf qrnq -- abgr gung gur nobegvir Ibeqnevna'f Cergraqrefuvc xvyyrq

zber -- naq gur bqqf bs n fgnoyr crnpr tbg _fb_ zhpu orggre va znal jnlf.

Ehguyrffarff pbagrfgf jvgu byq xvatf, rfcrpvnyyl nrgurvfgvp barf, ner abg n

tbbq cyna.

Susan 118: gur rkcbfher bs Rmne'f cybg jbhyq unir pnhfrq n uhtr ahzore bs nqqvgvbany qrnguf, vapyhqvat (rfcrpvnyyl) Neny'f. Vg jbhyq unir gbhpurq bss n eriratr-jne jvgu gur Orgnaf naq Rfpbonenaf, jub cebonoyl jbhyqa'g unir fgbccrq hagvy gurl'q pbzcyrgryl fhowhtngrq gur Oneelnenaf--juvpu zrnaf hagvy rirel Oneenlnena Ibe (naq cbffvoyl bguref nf jryy) jrer qrnq.

V guvax fur funerq Neny'f cbvag bs ivrj, juvpu jnf gung Rmne'f novyvgl gb pbaprvir bs znffvir rivy ceriragrq rira jbefr.

Also, what Graydon said.

Graydon:

I'm not sure why you felt the need to insert a lecture about Miles; I was entirely citing material from Shards of Honor (and possibly Barrayar - not having the books in front of me, I'm not 100% certain what appeared in what book.) Given that Miles was not only not the viewpoint character, he mostly wasn't even born - or even conceived - his opinion of his parents is not especially relevant.

I'm not 100% sure that "least sufficient means" is an accurate description of Ezar's plan. I'm not 100% sure it's not, either. Are you and Xopher seriously arguing that it was not at all morally ambiguous?

Hmmm... Who told Foglio he could put someone who looks like me in the deadly kitchen of Castle Heterodyne?

Oh, let's keep it simple.

War is so totally not nice.

And if you're the sort of person, Betan or Barrayaran, who can go off to war, you might not be all that representative of your culture.

Terry@121: that IS some kind of awesome. I wish I were independently wealthy; I'd buy one for every motorcyclist in L.A.

Pretty much all of the viewpoint that says Cordelia is principally *Betan* in outlook stems from Miles.

It is obviously seriously and possibly completely in error to view Cordelia that way, but this is far and away the most widespread reading of her, including earlier in this thread.

Erzar's objective was "least sufficient means"; he may or may not have achieved this, but we don't have a Culture Mind handy to ask.

I don't see it as morally ambiguous at all.

From one angle, it's unambiguously evil.

From another angle, it's the requirement of his duty, and it would be both evil and sinful to attempt to escape it.

You get to pick which you think ought to have been more important to Erzar, but I don't find this a difficult choice, given the scale of Erzar's responsibility.

re: Abi @ 93 & other Firefly posts...

A new Serenity comic book started it's 3-issue run this week, with Joss Whedon writing. Like the series that preceded the Serenity movie, it takes place between the Firefly shows and the Serenity movie, and is therefore not likely to reveal much about the casts history (though you never know)... HOWEVER: In the letters section, Joss Whedon mentions that he is also planning a series of Shepherd Book comics, with Ron Glass. This may pull in a substantial amount of the backstory of the Firefly setting.

Ben Engelsberg @ 129... I also noticed references to that other Serenity movie. I guess it's not a rumor then. I don't care if it's a D2V release. I want it.

Ertneqvat Pbeqryvn'f nggrzcg gb nibvq yrggvat bhg Rmen'f cyna guebhtu Orgna gurencl - cneg bs ure qvyrzzn vf gung fur jnfa'g gurer ng gur ortvaavat bs gur cyna, gb gel gb svaq n orggre nygreangvir gb gur zrff. Fur fghzoyrq ba vg unysjnl guebhtu. Fur pbhyq abg fgbc gur cyna, fur pbhyq bayl rvgure rkcbfr vg be uvqr vg.

Ng gur cbvag jurer fur vf nibvqvat gurencl, fur svaqf vg n yrffre rivy gb uvqr gur cyna, naq yrnir gur jne ng vgf pheerag pbapyhfvba, guna gb rkcbfr vg naq fgneg n frpbaq, ybatre, oybbqvre jne.

Gurer ner bayl guerr crbcyr jub xarj gur cyna orsber gur jne. Rmen, jub vf qlvat, Artev, naq Neny, jub bccbfrq gur cyna, naq bayl cnegvpvcngrq orpnhfr ur xarj ur pbhyq oevat vg gb gur yrnfg qrfgehpgvir pbapyhfvba. Vs gur cybg jrer gb orpbzr choyvp, Neny'f ebyr jbhyq znxr uvz n cevzr gnetrg, (fbzrguvat juvpu, va ure nqzvggrqyl ovnfrq ivrj, jbhyq or na vawhfgvpr orpnhfr ur (hafhpprffshyyl) bccbfrq gur cyna), Rmen jbhyq yvxryl qvr orsber orvat oebhtug gb whfgvpr, juvpu jbhyq, sebz Pbeqryvn'f ivrj, yrnir cebcre whfgvpr bayl n cbffvovyvgl sbe Artev.

Ohg nabgure vagrecynargnel jne, xvyyvat lrg zber zvyyvbaf nf pnaaba sbqqre naq vaabpragf va gur pebffsver, jbhyq or gur bayl jnl gb oevat nobhg rira gung whfgvpr. Xrrcvat gur frperg vf n sne yrffre rivy guna gevttrevat n jne gb oevat gubfr guerr zra gb whfgvpr.

Susan 124: Of course it was morally ambiguous! Choosing the lesser of two evils always is, especially where the lesser evil is itself a huge one—in this case greater than any (perhaps even all) the evil an average person encounters in a lifetime.

Serge @ 125: If you look anything like Agatha, then I am proud to be your new friend.

Women wearing glasses got to stick together.

Graydon #122:

A whole post rot-13'ed. Before decoding, I wondered if it was encoded spam. For all I know, it could have been. "Schrodinger's Spam"* anyone?

W.R.T. the actual content, my reading was of 'the lesser of evils', but I hope I never have to make that sort of decision.

I'm, currently reading the new Iain M. Banls, "Matter", wherein characters & situations are most definitely not unambiguous.

*This is not encouragement to use rot13 or other encoding as a tactic for getting past spam-filters.

Ginger @ 133... Ahem... My wife says that the bearded guy behind Agatha does look like me, with the same uncombed hair, but she had to be mean so she pointed out that mine hasn't been this black in 15 years.

Serge @ 135: Oh. Darn. I mean, wow! Moloch is cute too! And at least you have hair, even if it isn't the same color anymore...

Ginger @ 136... And there is less of it. Oh well. By the way, when Foglio came on stage to emcee to 2006 worldcon's masquerade, do you know what my wife said?

"OhmyGod! He looks like one of his characters!"

Serge @ 137: Does he look like one of the Jaegers?

;-)

re the sidelight postings on short stories,

I for one like to read short stories partly because I sometimes don't have time for long ones. But I feel that if you have too much emphasis on "you've got to have a quick hook," that can cheapen things. For instance, I sometimes see the poetry slams. I feel they motivate a certain kind of style which assumes the audience has a short attention span and jumps out at them right away. This can turn a person into a sort of a cross between a poet and a sideshow barker. This is not a bad style, but if it's the only way of working that you know, you will be limited as a poet.

Graydon @122 Uvf erfcbafvovyvgl vf abg zreryl gb cerirag Fretr sebz orvat n ernyyl onq naq oybbql rzcrebe

I think you mean Prince Serg, rather than Serge, but it's not anything to Fret about.

Graydon:

Pretty much all of the viewpoint that says Cordelia is principally *Betan* in outlook stems from Miles.

Um...maybe it does for you, but please don't make that assumption about me. I find that the two books told from her viewpoint give a better perspective on her outlook - especially when she was first changing cultures - than her son's secondhand reporting twenty years later does.

Xopher: then I'm not sure how we disagree, except that like Graydon you seem to think I'm taking my ideas from what Miles thinks of his mother, which isn't the case. My original comment was that it was "charcoal gray", which I think is appropriate to a lesser-of-two-great-evils choice, especially one I'm not sure is the lesser of two evils.

Would like to say more, but I have to drop this thread for now as my ride to Lunacon is ringing the doorbell. Sorry!

Is it true that Bujold's Shards of Honor originally was a Star Trek novel, with Cordelia from the Federation, and Miles's dad a Romulan?

A little Open Thread item here:

Is it just me or do all the big bank failures have names that should have been a clue? Bear Stearns has initials BS. Barings might be said to have lost their bearings. Northern Rock puns much too easily to Northern Crock. And in the 80s the UK Midland Bank bought a Californian outfit called Crocker, which was.

Neil Willcox(140) and Graydon(122)... I see myself more as a benevolent dictator who'd see to it that sanguine spillage is kept to a minimum.

@41 Wilcox -- Vacuum tube technology was getting pretty advanced before it (mostly) died. I remember the matchbook sized hearing aids with several tiny vactubes inside, and the plans for little ceramic blocks containing _lots_ of micro-sized vacuum chambers. Then transistors appeared....

BSG -- In the episodes I've seen, when Cylons are dealing with humans they seem creepy and sinister, and way outclassing the humans. But in the scenes where Cylons are talking to each other, they act dopey and clueless. am I missing something here?

Firefly -- the show's universe strikes me as very like the pulp magazine science fiction solar system, but without aliens. And those drew on the pulp western, oriental adventure, airplane adventure, etc. stories. Which drew on historical and news stories of debatable veracity (and, largely, on each other). There were once a lot of people with little boats or old cargo planes moving stuff around South America, Asia, and other edges of the world....

Serge @ 137 -- Foglio _is_ one of his characters.

#121, Terry -

Yeah, if that guy wasn't trying to imply that "you should shut up, you're stealing our idea" he was spectacularly bad at saying, "hey, you can buy one from us!" I notice he's apparently got two posts in the discussion that have been deleted by someone.

Regarding the jacket itself, I'm wondering if a line of LEDs from shoulder to elbow along the back of the arm would be effective/feasable to wire. For some reason I think they'd be more visible that way. Of course, the design as-is could possibly be made to take up more of the back, which would work.

Are you techy at all? They did make it with an Arduino, so theoretically it is something that is DIY.

As someone who is too chicken to bicycle to work but wants to, things like this fascinate me.

A fair amount of golden age science fiction doesn't have real bad guys. In the Foundation trilogy, for example, everything's a psychohistorical force, rather than good and evil. Lots of Heinlein's shorter stuff (The Man Who Travelled in Elephants and Waldo both come to mind), it's more about one person's condition than good vs. evil. In Murray Leinster's First Contact, I think the presumption is that everyone's a good guy.

#144

Crocker was one of the 'old' banks in San Francisco. I'd wondered where they disappeared to: the last I'd noticed, they were 'Crocker Citizens'. (Before that, they'd been 'Crocker Anglo' for a long time.)

I don't think rot-13ing the entire text is a functional way to defeat spam filters, unless I know someone, and expect them to be sending encrypted text, I'll just bin it.

Dave@43: (vacuum tube video)

That is fricken awesome. You realize that you just added two more stalls to my "dream garage" so I have room for a vacuum pump and glass

blowing? (I had dedicated one stall to a mill, so that's already taken care of.)

Various@various: (Firefly morality)

My take on Mal versus the Alliance and their morality is that Mal was a Lawful Good character who found the Law had become Evil with the

Alliance. At which point, he choose Good over Law.

Mal has a clear reading of his moral compass and is bound by that more than anything else. He holds his word, his promises, as a direct

reflection of his integrity. The rest of his crew are more pragmatic than moral (with Jayne being the far extreme of that), but even when Jayne betrays the crew, Mal gets Jayne to glimpse in the mirror, to see his own compass, and Jayne expresses remorse in his own way.

Gah, stupid carriage returns!

R.M. Koske: I could do it myself, but hey, if someone who figured it out is willing to do it, and so avoid the pitfalls of my trying to figure it out...

It seems they have switches to activate, etc. I'll have to go see about the comments, I've not followed up since I made mine.

I remember reading that the first two books, in-chronology, of the Vorkosigans are essentially Cordelia changing-- the books go from her Betan ideals to willing to bend them to willing to break them. Her dilemmas are based on the conflict between Good and Lawful, like Greg London says of Mal's (I am going to steal that a lot, by the way) as well as between Love and Duty to some extent.

I also think it's interesting that a great portion of her problems when coming back to Betan society stem from the Betans' unwillingness to consider her as an *actor*, rather than a victim, and that the only thing she was lauded for doing, she didn't.

Regarding Miles, I can say little; I've read the books only once each, and it wasn't until a while after A Civil Campaign that it occurred to me that he might be lying.

A request for rot13ing: if you must encrypt an entire post, could you put in a subject line, please?

heresiarch@106

According to the movie (at least the shooting script), the settlement of Miranda appears to have been just before the war.

Kaylee: Some years back, before the war. There was call for workers to settle on Miranda, my daddy talked about going.

It isn't entirely clear whether the disaster that created the Reavers (another botched grand scheme) was before or after the war started. My thought is just before the war, with any attempt to solve the problem of the Reavers being postponed by the war.

The Alliance seems to have a habit of trying to implement grand plans without first checking them against reality.

Almost makes one wonder if they resurrected our current president and put him in charge of strategic planning. :-)

Don Simpson @ 147... Foglio _is_ one of his characters

I thought that maybe he was many of them - simultaneously.

#154, Terry -

I understand completely about being willing to pay to avoid the learning curve. :)

@75 and thereabouts: Ezar Vorbarra!! Finally! For days, I've been trying to come up with the source of the quote, "I'm an atheist. It's a simple faith, but a great comfort in my later years."

Ezar -- definitely a Good Guy, but with all the humanity with which Bujold regularly imbues her characters. I love that series.

I had a wacky idea a few months ago, and I'm glad this reminded me -- I wanted to do some pencil drawings of scenes on Barrayar. Nobody has, you see. Wouldn't some pictures of Vorbarr Sultana be cool?

I just heard an absolutely brilliant cover of "I Wanna Hold Your Hand." (Link is to a MySpace Music page; the usual caveats and PITAs apply.) The Beatles did it as a simple pop love song; Children of Glass does it as a lament; the narrator of the song has no real hope of ever holding hir beloved's hand.

Or maybe I'm reading in, because that's how I feel about my own alleged boyfriend right now. Someone want to give it a listen and let me know?

Michael 159: That would be VERY cool.

On the "medieval fanfic" particle: Divine Comedy, anyone? Also the bazillions of Perceval continuations, not to mention the entire Prose Vulgate.

Xopher, 160: Ouch. That's either exactly what I needed, or not what I needed at all. (IOW, jobhunting in my field is like dating, and while I've had some nice dates, nobody wants to marry me. Especially not the dreamboat I fell hard for.)

Xopher @ 160:

That's from the Across the Universe, the musical with Beatles covers that came out last year, and you have the interpretation nailed.

If I remember how the scene was shot, the singer was watching the football team and cheerleaders practice. At first, the audience is supposed to think she's singing to and pining for the quarterback, but slowly the realization comes that she's all in for the cheerleader. Since the movie's set in the 60's, she (the singer) doesn't have a hope of holding her hand (the cheerleader's).

Wasn't Ezar the one who went to his deathbed fervently praying that there might be no deity?

One of the nice touches in the Vorkosigan books is that it's the liberals who are religious, and the conservatives who are the atheists.

US detains 'top al-Qaeda figure'.

I'm not sure whether this one is properly filed under "We have top men working on it now... top men." or "al-Qaeda number three detained".

A question for those who've read James Hilton's Goodbye Mr. Chips, and who might have seen the movie versions... Which rendition of Chipping was closest to the book's? Robert Donat's, or Peter O'Toole's?

Scott 163: So the one I pointed to is a cover of the interpretation from the movie, not a new original interpretation? How disappointing.

Xopher, to me it sounds exactly the same as the version sung by T.V. Carpio in the movie.

Oh, well. At least the girl can sing. She probably never heard the Beatles version. :-(

Why wouldn't she have heard the Beatles version? I know nothing of the actress at all; is there something I am missing? Because if it's youth, we have recordings, and I at least am earwormed like mad. And it's mashing itself into other songs, so I can't even force the last chorus and end it.

No, I mean the girl in Children of Glass who sings it where I linked it. I know it's hard to believe, but some of the under-20 set really have never listened to the Beatles at all. But she may have heard their version; the point is, she clearly got this interpretation from the movie. I had thought Children of Glass was pulling off something amazing by reinterpreting this classic in a way that not only respects it, but adds to its poignancy. But they were just copying someone else who did that instead.

The reason this matters to me is that some of the people in CoG are my friends. I was all ready to be massively impressed.

Don #146: If nobody had invented the transistor, I wonder if we'd have seen *linear* progress in computers/electronics over time--like gasoline engines in OTL, getting more efficient and reliable little by little, but with change happening at a non-revolutionary pace. Bring a pocket calculator from 1985 to that time line, and it will look like alien tech or magic[1].

And *that* makes me wonder what similarly wonderful technological steps we've missed--maybe in the next time line over, they've got clunky, primitive vacuum-tube-based electronics powered by batteries with energy storage densities considerably better than kerosene offers.

[1] I don't know why I'm obsessed with time travel pranks involving calculators. Some people juggle geese....

Graydon (et al) on Cordelia as not-really-Betan: does being Betan exclude being diplomatic? AFAIR, she shows herself most truly (i.e., at a point where she can freely choose instead of having to cope) when she tells the Koudelka parents where to get off and why (in the middle of A Civil Campaign. Are some readers projecting their particular ideas of utopia onto their view of Beta, instead of what Bujold has told us? Do the Betans themselves have an insufficiently broad view of the universe?

Nicole TWN @108:

See, this is why I always got mediocre grades on my term papers in college: I chose theses that were only marginally defensible.

On the topic of bad actions and long-term effects:

While both Ned killing [redacted*] and Chuck going on the cruise did end up having long term effects, I would argue that neither of them are bad actions. Bad DECISIONS, yes, but they were too inspired by naivete to really be a consciously bad act. So, uh, they don't count. Olive's ..indiscretion.. does count, but aside from the pining away she doesn't seem to dislike her new career. Her previous one was way more awesome, though, I'll give you that.

On the evilness of villains:

I would say that the villain in Dummy is bat-shit insane... but you're right on that, he is a truly bad one. And the Balsams and the bitches are definitely not good people either.

Everyone except the Balsam sister ends up with fairy tale retribution to balance their evil, though. (What happens to her is a little harsh to be fairy tale, I think. Or at least her reaction to it makes it so.)

Ned's father doesn't ever seem to get punished, but I would argue that he's in the same category as the villain in the pilot. The person we see through Ned's eyes is characterized primarily by his ABSENSE, and that makes him not actually a character. Just a dad-shaped hole.

On the temperament of reanimated victims:

I dunno, I kinda like that reanimated dead people on Torchwood freak the fuck out until you run out of time. Much less helpful and plot-moving, but more emotionally connecting. I like that on Torchwood, I can see the characters trying to figure out if letting this person die again is mercy or just further torture. Which one is worse: being killed, being dead, being alive again and thinking you're still in the middle of being killed.... or being dead AGAIN?

I guess having Ned be reluctant to waken the dead wouldn't really contribute to the plot at all, so I can see why the mechanics of the thing don't involve inflicting horrible pain and fear on the recently dead, but still... Much less emotional connection for me. Less of a sense that being dead, or being KILLED, is a significant event.

*Although doesn't that show up as part of the premise rather than part of the plot and thus is not a spoiler?

Graydon (et al) on Cordelia as not-really-Betan: does being Betan exclude being diplomatic? AFAIR, she shows herself most truly (i.e., at a point where she can freely choose instead of having to cope) when she tells the Koudelka parents where to get off and why (in the middle of A Civil Campaign. Are some readers projecting their particular ideas of utopia onto their view of Beta, instead of what Bujold has told us? Do the Betans themselves have an insufficiently broad view of the universe?

Being friends with some band members, you're in a better position than I to know about Children of Glass' recording of the song, Xopher, but when I said it sounds exactly like the movie version, I meant exactly. I played my mp3 of the soundtrack song a second or so ahead* of the CoG version and to my ear they're identical, including every bit of the vocals.

I do hope that my ears are playing tricks on me, because if they are, that's an excellent bit of sincere flattery.

__

*I couldn't get them to play synchronously, so I tried to keep them close together and really listen to distinctive elements.

Heresiarch #106:

Well, their technology just flat didn't make sense. Their medicine mostly looks like ours, slightly extrapolated. Similarly, most personal weapons are very limited, which might be some kind of gun control, except that the Browncoats appeared to be shooting guns no better than Vera. There's one use of armor by the crew in the series, despite the fact that they're constantly getting shot at and that armor is available which apparently stops all the available guns' bullets. Even someone as clueless about combat as I am could see how bad their preparation for fights usually was, despite the idea that two of the crew are combat vets who survived in pretty much impossible conditions. Their medical technology looks like ours in about thirty years. Their computers aren't much better than what we have. The worlds were settled by a joint Chinese/American group, and yet I don't recall if we've ever seen any Chinese wandering around. Etc.

Plus, there are godawful plot holes in the movie.

n. Gurl unir erzbgr pbzzhavpngvbaf fhssvpvrag gb pbzzhavpngr ivn ernygvzr ivqrb npebff ybat qvfgnaprf (juvpu vzcyvrf SGY pbzzhavpngvbaf), lrg gurl qba'g genafzvg gur ivqrb pbagragf gurl svaq ba Zvenaqn gb Ze Havirefr be nalbar ryfr. Abe qb gurl yrnir Zvenaqn (gur Nyyvnapr nccrnef abg gb xabj gurl jrer gurer) naq urnq gb fbzr pbzcyrgryl qvssrerag, harkcrpgrq cynpr sebz juvpu gurl pna unaq bhg gur uhaqerq pbcvrf bs gur qvfp gurl znqr, nsgre genafzvggvat vg.

o. Lbh pna vzntvar gur ngzbfcurevp nqqvgvir univat gur rssrpg bs znxvat Erniref, vs vg'f n ener rabhtu rssrpg--gurl zvtug unir gevrq vg ba n pbhcyr gubhfnaq crbcyr, ohg vs bayl 1/10000 vf nssrpgrq gung jnl, gurl zvtug abg unir pnhtug vg. Ohg gurl unir gb unir gevrq gur nqqvgvir ba ng yrnfg n srj fhowrpgf, whfg gb trg gur qbfvat evtug naq svther bhg jung'f tbvat ba. V pna'g frr ubj gurl'q snvy gb erpbtavmr gung gurve grfg fhowrpgf ybfg vagrerfg va yvsr naq dhvrgyl ynl qbja naq jnvgrq gb qvr.

p. Naq znal bguref--Zvenaqn vf hathneqrq, abg rira zvarq, qrfcvgr gur guerng vg cbfrf gb gur Nyyvnapr; Abar bs Freravgl'f perj ybbgf gur uhtr ninvynoyr jrnygu ylvat nebhaq ba Zvenaqn, qrfcvgr orvat cbbe nf puhepu zvpr, arrqvat fcner cnegf, rgp. Cynprf evpu rabhtu gb unir n inhyg shyy bs cnl sbe gur zrepranevrf cebgrpgvat gurz pna'g nssbeq enqne gb tvir gura jneavat bs Ernire envqf (be nagv-nvepensg thaf gb fubbg gurz qbja).

Don't misunderstand me--I enjoyed the series (more than the movie, alas), but like the Star Trek franchise, they had some pretty big gaps in their world building, occasional truck-shaped plot holes, etc.

Greg #152: Yeah, Mal has the weird thing going on where he basically won't kill anyone unless he has to--even leaving people alive who did pretty nasty stuff to him. I think Inara and Simon have internal moral compasses as strong, and that Book tries to, but is being encouraged to backslide by his environment.

Albatross, #177: oh, yeah. Personally, I like Robin McKinley's take on some of Whedon's material better than the original. And, besides, it may be the only seriously pagan vampire novel ever.

Scott 176: You mean CoG took the mp3 from the soundtrack and passed it off as theirs, or the singer is just doing a note-for-note and expression-for-expression imitation of the original?

Xopher, I'm saying that to me it sounds like they're passing off the work of others as theirs. I'm admitting that I could be wrong or allowing that it could be an exceptional imitation, but I don't believe either to be true.

#74--Susan: was Ezar Vorbarra a good guy or a bad guy, given the plans laid down in green silk rooms?

I was just trying to say that "good guy" and "bad guy" aren't really useful, or even justified, ways of looking at real humans. It's fine in a popcorn movie, or if you're fighting Nazis, but one of the reasons I value the Vorkosigan books so much is that there's very little of that in them. There are people who do bad things and good things, and even if the balance is almost all on one side, the label doesn't always fit.

I don't know how to unscramble the scrambled, by the way, so I couldn't read some of your comments (later).

Tehanu, rot13.com has a de-rot13ing box. You can go either direction, to encrypt or decrypt.

Susan @ 120: "Perhaps I'm just poorly informed, but I thought the official removal of the qualitative difference was a function of the current administration. I don't expect previous governments' hands were completely clean, and of course there are always abusive individuals, but I don't recall torture and open-ended detention without charges and rendition and suspension of habeas corpus being official government policy before."

Official government policy? Well, no. Like I said before: the major change the Bush administration has pushed through has been reducing the amount of outsourcing we do. Back in the day, if we wanted to knock over an uncooperative developing-world government, we'd leave most of the work to locals. Sure, we'd train them in torture interrogation techniques, give them economic advice, and send them military materiel, but the Americans onsite would be limited to a few nameless CIA operatives. We'd give them the manual, but they'd mostly do the torturing interrogating themselves. Much cleaner that way. Denials are much more plausible. And certainly we'd never do it to American citizens. In turning the apparatus of oppression on the U.S., this administration has broken new ground.*

So if the fact that, rather than doing the dirty work ourselves, we supported and trained others to do it, seems like a clear moral distinction to you, then you can say this administration has qualitatively worsened America's behavior. To me, paying others to keep your hands clean is a sign of moral cowardice, not of any sort of grace.

*Though not entirely. Nixon, you know.

OK, I found out what's going on with the song. Someone's kid brother uploaded the song to the wrong page. The group wasn't INTENTIONALLY passing T. V. Carpio's version off as their own. My friend in the band was horrified when I told him, and took it down right away.

My apologies, and you can imagine MY embarrassment.

(comment topics separated by amusement value)

Neil Willcox @ 140: "I think you mean Prince Serg, rather than Serge, but it's not anything to Fret about."

I heart ROT-13 puns.

Serge @ 145: "I see myself more as a benevolent dictator who'd see to it that sanguine spillage is kept to a minimum."

So, a kiddy-pool for you to bathe in, rather than olympic-length?

Isn't one of the regulars here a resident of metro Atlanta? We've had some tornados (mostly downtown, I think), and while it seems to be primarily property damage, there are casualties and it would still be nice to hear that everyone's all right.

Don at #147: Regarding Phil Foglio, Alex Eisenstein once told me "It's amazing how much you resemble your caricature."

I didn't find it amazing, because why else does caricature exist?

Nevertheless, he had a point.

(Phil is indeed literally one of his own characters, in the sense that the guy with the bowler hat has appeared in his cartoons since the earliest ones I have seen, in the mid-Seventies. He is a co-star of the Dragon feature "What's New with Phil and Dixie," now collected into two books.)

albatross @ 177: Hmm. I can think of explanations for most of the things that you see as world-building problems, though your criticisms of the movie are depressingly accurate.

"Their medicine mostly looks like ours, slightly extrapolated."

Well, I thought that some of the tech exhibited on Ariel was pretty sophisticated (the brain scanny thingie). More to the point, though, most of what we see happening is happening in primitive medical environments. We don't know what they're getting injected with, or how different it is from the stuff we have now. Taking a pill doesn't imply much about the technology that went into making that pill. Since what we see is basically emergency medicine with limited supplies, it's hard to make any claims about the medicine in the core worlds--and when we do see it, it is substantially more sophisticated.

"Similarly, most personal weapons are very limited, which might be some kind of gun control, except that the Browncoats appeared to be shooting guns no better than Vera."

Again, what we're talking about isn't the highest tech available; what we're talking about is the stuff that average, poor-ass settlers have. More advanced stuff exists--the laser in Heart of Gold, and the Lassiter they steal seems to indicate that energy weapons do exist; they're just expensive and unreliable. Gunpowder is simple, reliable and inexpensive tech: it's not terribly surprising that it would remain a stand-by, especially in frontier regions.

"Even someone as clueless about combat as I am could see how bad their preparation for fights usually was, despite the idea that two of the crew are combat vets who survived in pretty much impossible conditions."

This isn't as much about world-building as it is about story-telling. The simple fact of the matter is that delivering a clever quip right before bashing your opponent over the head is incredibly stupid, but nonetheless, it's much more fun to watch. So, no, the combat in Firefly isn't super-duper realistic--if it were, it would be confusing and boring. Ditto every movie ever made.

"The worlds were settled by a joint Chinese/American group, and yet I don't recall if we've ever seen any Chinese wandering around."

They're in the background every once in while, but it's true that the cast itself is pretty white for a theoretically half and half population. I suspect this is more a Hollywood thing than a Firefly thing, though.

It's strange, but most of the things you see as crappy world-building are exactly what I like about the show. The future is poorly distributed, and Firefly reflects this: the idea that everyone everywhere uses the very most cutting-edge tech is, really, quite silly. People living on the edge use the tech they need, not the tech they wish they had. Why use difficult-to-maintain and expensive energy weapons when bullets kill just as fast and far more cheaply? They use chopsticks to eat too, you know. Shouldn't they be using future-sticks?

That said, several of the plotholes you point out are pretty heinous.

Bill @ 189: Three volumes, actually; the third is subtitled The Magic Years and collects the strips from The Duelist. For some reason the third volume is not on sale at Studio Foglio's online store.

@ 187... So, a kiddy-pool for you to bathe in, rather than olympic-length?

Yes, of course. One must show restraint. Besides, I can't swim.

BillHiggins @ 189... the guy with the bowler hat

Ah, yes... I remember the comic strips where he had to deal with convention security forces who liked to dress like Dorsai mercenaries.

ROT13 suggestion: Maybe the hosts could add a note to one of the sidebars with a brief explanation (if you see lines of 'gibberish', it is likely encrypted with ROT13 so people who haven't read the book or seen the show/movie won't have plot details spoiled for them), along with links for rot13.com, the leetkey extension for Firefox, and any others that might be useful.

By the way, on another thread someone suggesting setting up a hotkey for leetkey's rot13 encoder/decoder: thanks! That's been very helpful.

heresiarch @ 190... the things you see as crappy world-building are exactly what I like about the show.

Same for me. And here I give a hoot about the characters, who are in the process of building a family.

someone suggesting setting up a hotkey for leetkey's rot13 encoder/decoder: thanks! That's been very helpful.

Slaps forehead... mutters something about getting slow in my old age. And F13 was sitting there doing nothing, too.

Apparently the damage in Atlanta is from only one tornado, and this morning's news said there were no fatalities.

There was one particularly amazing happening, to me - A four-story brick mill building which had been renovated into apartments was one of the buildings hit. The section that was directly hit wasn't completely renovated, so out of about 120 units, only 17 were rented out. The top floor of the building was knocked in on itself by the tornado, and the weight collapsed every floor below it. All the apartments were destroyed, all the way to ground level.

No one was home. Seventeen different people (at least) chose last night to be out. It seems unlikely to me that anyone would have survived if they'd been home, because the traditional "go to safety" advice wouldn't have led residents to head to a safe enough spot. Wow.

Also of interest, the SEC basketball series that is being played in Atlanta may continue in a Georgia Tech facility with no fans allowed for any of the remaining games. I guess the available facility is too small for the numbers they expect, and they don't want to have to run some kind of lottery. I wonder if the lack of fans will change the teams' play enough to affect the outcome?

heresiarch @ 184... if the fact that, rather than doing the dirty work ourselves, we supported and trained others to do it, seems like a clear moral distinction to you, then you can say this administration has qualitatively worsened America's behavior.

What does it say about a people when the stories it defined itself by aren't very believable anymore? What does it say about a people when it's willing to throw those old stories out and replace them with stories that define it as ruthless and without any decency?

albatross@177

Some notes on some of the rot-13d remarks.

1) Nobhg gur nqqvgvir. Zl thrff vf gung bar bs gjb guvatf unccrarq. Rvgure gurl npghnyyl qvq gel bhg gur nqqvgvir jvgubhg fznyy-fpnyr cergrfgvat be ceboyrzf va gur cergrfgvat fvzcyl jrer vtaberq (va rvgure pnfr orpnhfr fbzrbar uvtu hc jnf fher vg jnf tbvat gb jbex). Vqvbgvp, ohg guvatf yvxr gung qb unccra.

(Zl qnq bapr gbyq zr nobhg n pbzzhavpngvbaf flfgrz gung (VVEP) jnf vagraqrq gb uryc pbbeqvangr aniny thasver va fhccbeg bs gebbcf bafuber. Gur cergrfgvat vaqvpngrq gung gur flfgrz jnf synjrq naq zvtug yrnq gb thasver orvat nppvqragnyyl pnyyrq ba bhe bja gebbcf. Gur flfgrz jnf qrcyblrq naljnl naq gur ceboyrzf fhttrfgrq va cergrfgvat npghnyyl unccrarq.)

2) Zvenaqn VF thneqrq. Gurer ner ynetr ahzoref bs Erniref va orgjrra Zvenaqn naq nal vaunovgrq cynargf. Rira n shyyl nezrq Nyyvnapr syrrg jbhyq unir gebhoyr trggvat gb Zvenaqn.

3) Gur cynpr vfa'g evpu. Gur inhyg vf bjarq ol gur frphevgl pbzcnal naq gur zbarl vf gur srr gur Nyyvnapr cnlf gur frphevgl pbzcnal. Cebonoyl nalguvat yvxr enqne naq nagvnvepensg thaf zhfg or nccebirq ol gur ubzr bssvpr bs gur pbzcnal. Naq fvapr gur ubzr bssvpr yvxryl qbrfa'g oryvrir gung Erniref rkvfg, gurl nera'g tbvat gb nccebir rkcraqvgherf vagraqrq gb cebgrpg ntnvafg gurz. Rfcrpvnyyl fvapr fhpu rkcraqvgherf phg vagb cebsvgf.

194: Or maybe, on the sidebar, a link to a comprehensive post about ROT13.

R.M. Koske @ 188:

I'm in Atlanta and I didn't even know there was a tornado until Saturday a.m. However, I think Fragano teaches downtown (GSU?) which is much closer to the drama. Fragano? You out there?

Open-thready:

I went and saw Doomsday last night and it was so good it made my naughty bits tingle. If your favorite things list includes Aliens, Escape From New York or The Road Warrior / MMII then I recommend it unreservedly. The main bad guy (Sol), in particular, is jaw-droppingly great. Also, I had a lot of fun playing spot the homage[1]. It's not for the squeamish though.

[1] "Hey, isn't that John Carpenter's title font?"

heresiarch @ 190: I heard from an insider that River and Simon were originally Chinese characters, having fled from the core worlds, which would have been ethnic Chinese. By implication I guess the Navy would have been Chinese and the war would have had a very different cast. Hollywood, as you guessed, balked.

Bill Higgins -- # 189 --

Hmm, I must be looking at the wrong pictures --

The character in the old-school boys is wearing a straw boater (http://millerhats.com/boater_index/boater.html), as opposed to a "bowler" (http://www.hatsinthebelfry.com/page/H/PROD/derby_bowler_hats/ch20)

At one point I actually owned a white seersucker suit, with thin pinstripes, and on a whim I got shirt garters and a boater to complete the image.



At several conventions it was a running effort to convince people that yes, it really was made of straw, and no, I would not take a bite out of the brim.

Joel @ 202: Summer Glau is at least plausibly mixed race. Sean Maher is, well...not blond!

albatross@178: . I think Inara and Simon have internal moral compasses as strong,

Simon unwaveringly follows his compass, so long as it has anything remotely to do with his sister. The signal seems to get weaker when dealing with other subjects though. On at least one occaision that I can remember, involving some bad guy threatening Simon, I think Simon showed indecisiveness, which I took to mean he wasn't sure if he could trust his own compass or not.

I think Bones from Star Trek is what Simon would look like with certainty of his moral compass. Bones didn't stammer. Simon hasn't gotten there yet.

Inara was sort of the same. She had absolute clarity that her compass pointed in the direction of "Being a Companion is Morally Good." Except, during scenes where Mal would tell her to stop her "whoring", and she'd not know what to say. I took those scenes to mean that she would doubt her own compass at that point. Or she was unable to reconcile that it pointed in two mutually exclusive directions, being a companion and being with Mal.

Inara was a Hooker with a Heart of Gold archetype. She would have achieved the same level of certainty as Mal has when Mal would show up with a limo and sweep her off her Pretty Woman feet. Or if Mal recalibrated his compass and accepted Inara as a Companion.

and that Book tries to, but is being encouraged to backslide by his environment.

I always saw Book as the Penatant Character. Someone with a dark past, who did something that he later came to realize was absolutely morally wrong, and goes to the opposite extreme in an attempt to repent for it.

I was never convinced that Book had ever completely forgiven himself though, that he had ever achieved his form of repentance.

Book would be some sort of Dark Character Reformed to Good archetype, and bring along all the internal conflict stuff that comes from having that dark past that you can never undo, from having a past that would immediately make you an outsider as soon as you revealed it.

A bit of Whorf from Star Trek, except his "past" is immediately obvious as soon as you see him. Or maybe some of Angel from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Hm. Can't think of a really good example right now.

Jayne is a Hired Gun with a Heart of Gold. Pick any Clint Eastwood movie where the mercenary hired gun comes into town and does the right thing. He isn't quite as clear on that Heart of Gold part, but it's there.

Actually, I think the whole crew can be described with a "______ with a heart of gold" label, which, I think, is ultimately what was appealing about the show. You look at the crew and can say "these are fundamentally Good people trying to find their way".

albatross@177: Even someone as clueless about combat as I am could see how bad their preparation for fights usually was, despite the idea that two of the crew are combat vets who survived in pretty much impossible conditions.

I don't think the Firefly universe operates on strict military principles. There is definitely a lot of handwavium going on to make things line up.

The Reavers being the biggest handwave in the story: (rot13 link)

Gur Erniref jrer pnzcrq bhg nebhaq gur bar cynarg gung unq perngrq gurz, rkcnaqvat bire gur gra lrnef sebz gur cbvag jurer Zvenaqn pbyyncfrq naq gur cerfrag cbvag va gvzr va gur fgbel. Jura Erniref fgnegrq, Ernire cbchyngvba jnf fbzrguvat yvxr 10% bs gur cbchyngvba bs n whfg-fgnegvat-gb-or-pbybavmrq cynarg.

Zrnajuvyr, gur Nyyvnapr vf noyr gb znvagnva pbageby bire n uhtr yvfg bs cynargf, jvgu cbchyngvbaf sne bhgahzorevat gur gbgny ahzore bs Erniref.

Lrg, gur Nyyvnapr jnf hanoyr gb xvyy bss gur Erniref, naq vafgrnq unq gb frggyr sbe pbirevat hc jung perngrq gur Erniref va gur svefg cynpr, naq ubcr gung gur Erniref jbhyq erznva fgebat rabhtu gb cerirag nalbar sebz rire trggvat gb gru fhesnpr bs Zvenaqn naq svaqvat gur erpbeqvat sebz gur penfurq fuvc.

Lrg, jura gur Nyyvnapr jnf chefhvat Zny naq uvf perj va na nggrzcg gb xvyy be pncgher/ercebtenz Evire, gur Nyyvnapr frag na neznqn bs fuvcf ynetr rabhtu gb orng onpx gur Erniref nebhaq gur cynarg, sbyybj Zny gb gur fhesnpr, naq ynaq gebbcf gb chefhr Evire naq Zny'f perj.

Vs gur Erniref jrer fhpu n greevoyr frperg, naq gur Nyyvnapr unq gur svercbjre gb pbageby fb znal cynargf, gurl pbhyq unir rnfvyl jvcrq bhg gur Erniref 10 lrnef ntb naq xrcg gur frperg n frperg sberire ol qrfgeblvat gur rivqrapr. Vs gur Nyyvnapr unq gur svercbjre gb crargengr Ernire fcnpr jura chefhvat Zny, gurl fubhyq unir nyfb unq gur svercbjre gb qb gur fnzr 10 lrnef ntb jura gur Ernire cbchyngvba jnf fznyyre naq unq srjre fuvcf.

Abg gb zragvba, gur Nyyvnapr pbhyq unir fcha gur jubyr Ernire nauvyngvba cebwrpg nf fbzr fbeg bs fbpvny cebtenz, n qrzbafgengvba bs ubj xvaqyl gur Nyyvnapr vf gb tbbq, avpr, aba-pnaavonyvfgvp crbcyr.

Craig R. @ 203: The Heterodyne Boys wear boaters; Phil Foglio, as he draws himself, wears a bowler.

Re: technobabble, I don't think it's really gotten better over the years; just that there are so many new Science Buzzwords replacing the old familiar ones. I think that most people know enough to recognize that the old words are misused, but many aren't familiar with the new ones. But when I hear someone babbling on about the force of genetic evolution being accelerated, or a ship flying through a layer of liquid helium in the atmosphere, or "we've detected a planet with a nitrogen sulfide atmosphere" -- ouch. (And in the last example there: kaboom!) Perhaps lately the writers have been more willing to arbitrarily invent a particle ex machina to solve the problème du jour than they used to be, but I don't count that as a plus.

Joel Polowin... The SciFi Channel air a movie called Black Hole last year where scientists create an artificial black hole that of course grows out of control, and people fear that it'll break into smaller black holes that'll then grow into bigger black holes that'll break into... ad infinitum et ad nauseam...

Gays are worse than terrorists? and a nice rebuttal from a teenager.

http://www.daviddemchuk.com/klam/?p=185

Joel @ 202... River and Simon played by Asian actors? That'd have been interesting. Unfortunately, wouldn't that have made Mal's intense dislike of Simon come off as racism?

Turner Classic Movies just showed The Red Pony.

Serge #210: Well, his discomfort with Book's religious comments and advice doesn't seem to leave a taste of racism--it's consistent. In fact, one of the nicer things about Firefly is that it's pretty clear that nobody gives a damn about race as an issue. By contrast, rebel/Alliance, core planet/outer planet, and similar distinctions are very important. And that's what you'd expect, given the history. Probably nobody but serious historians knows much about racial and religious tensions on Earth-that-was. So I don't think that would have left a bad taste in my mouth.

CHip at 175 (and subthread): Cordelia's a Betan, and the only real viewpoint Betan character we've got, but she's a Betan Survey Captain - one of the very few who need to go out, far out, and do things that aren't Beta-centric, and aren't to do with their community expectations and norms.

She gets the absolute, unthinking expectations of equality and social wealth from Beta, but most of what we see is her own sense of self that lets her keep those after encountering Barrayar and reflecting on the differences. Of course, the this-is-all-so-bloody-stupid might be a common Betan attitude. The complete bewilderment at what the Barrayarans consider Really Important certainly seems to be.

Sam Kelly @213:

Of course, the this-is-all-so-bloody-stupid might be a common Betan attitude.

It certainly seems evident in the "Steady Freddie? I didn't vote for him" running gag in Shards of Honor.

Joel - #207 --

as I said, I must have been looking at the wrong pictures -- but one of the Boys does indeed look like Foglio //says he defensively//

albatross @ 172

(coming in late and replying before reading the rest of the thread; apologies if I'm repeating other posts).

It wasn't the transistor per se that replaced the vacuum tube; it was the integrated circuit; i.e. massive arrays of transistors in a small volume with interconnections an integral part. Even if solid state electronics had never advanced to that point, I think we would be well down that same path by now. It turns out that it's easy to build massive arrays of tiny vacuum tubes; the small distances involved allow high gradient fields with low voltage differentials. A few years ago someone proposed an ultraflat screen CRT with no deflection electronics at all, just a few million cathodes, each one the end of a carbon nanotube, and each one aimed at a particular dot of phosphor on the screen, which would be a few hundred microns away. So, Ultra-Large-Scale Integrated vacuum tube electronics.

Fragano's last post on LJ was on the 13th. This is unlike him.

This could mean he's out of town at a conference.

Or it could mean -- the power's down -- and if so, may that be the worst!

I really hope it's the former, and that the tornado and storm didn't affect him, his family or his home.

Love, C

Greg@206

Gur Nyyvnapr syrrg qvq ABG orng gur Erniref onpx sebz nebhaq Zvenaqn naq gurl qvq ABG crargengr Ernire fcnpr. Gur syrrg jnf fgngvbarq nebhaq Ze. Havirefr'f yvggyr jbeyqyrg jnvgvat sbe Zny. Vg JNF ynetr rabhtu gb ercry gur cbegvba bs gur Ernire neznqn gung Zny gevpxrq vagb punfvat uvz. Guvf jnf yvxryl bayl n cbegvba bs gur Erniref, ubjrire. Naq gur pbapragengvba bs gung znal Nyyvnapr jnefuvcf nccrnef gb unir orra hahfhny.

Nf gb jul gur Nyyvnapr qvqa'g qrfgebl gur Erniref rneyvre, vg nccrnef gung gur Erniref jrer svefg perngrq abg ybat orsber gur jne fgnegrq. Gur jne cebonoyl qvfgenpgrq gur Nyyvnapr sebz gelvat gb qb nalguvat nobhg gur Erniref. Naq fvapr gur jne gur Nyyvnapr unf orra gelvat gb nofbeo n uhtr nzbhag bs greevgbel gung vg oneryl pbagebyf. Vg qbrfa'g unir gur fcner erfbheprf gb ynhapu n shyy-fpnyr pnzcnvta ntnvafg gur Erniref.

#214: I saw the Freddie "gag" as another indication of what's really behind the Brave New World Betan culture: "dissenters" like Cordelia being brainwashed back into contentment, and a leader that no one seems to have voted for.

Everyone in NYC OK after the crane fall?

John at #219 -

This is an old chestnut, I know, but I hardly think that Betan culture is as hard-nosed and controlling as that - I always thought that Dr. Mehta - the one that tried to drug Cordelia - was just overzealous.

The rest of what we've seen of Beta - to its enclaves of herms, its advanced scientific and medical schools specializing in things like radical gender re-assignment surgery (cf Lord Dono), the codified earrings that communicate sexual availability and preference to the gosh-darn Orb of Unearthly Delights are all so completely orthogonal to a society that brainwashes dissenters that I can't even understand how people arrive at that idea.

Charles Schulz's The Watchmen.

#121 - Terry

I looked at the patent.

It seems overly broad, and I think that it would be a interesting proposition to see which set of lawyers would be granted payment of fees from the other side.

Especially since the patent claims that the garment is meant as a "novelty, " and not as a workable and utility garment.

One of the problems with the current administration is that they have consistently kept underfunding the patent office, so that items that are overly broad, nebulous, with no working prototype and clearly conflicting with prior art, have been granted patents. The patent office has been constrained to award the patents, and are counting on the courts to actually do the determination of prior claim.

I also seem to recall seeing gimmicked turn signals on bicycle-rider jackets in the 1960s. I also have see a good number of people at MIT who have arranged LEDs into signboards woven into their garments over the years.

There is also the determination that a patent is invalid if the idea is really only .trivially non-obvious.

And I don't think this would patent would pass the smell test.

Now, if the purported patent-holder had actually been marketing a working garment, you might have had a case under trade dress restrictions, if you had bothered to trademark the look-and-feel.

If not, bye bye.

Rich at 221: I don't know, I think there's room for both those. Beta Colony is clearly incredibly open and tolerant in some respects, but that doesn't mean it's immune to toxic, authoritarian politics (cf. the free & open acceptance of sex in Brave new World) - and I suspect one of the last things we'd ever see in a Bujold novel is a perfect utopia.

I'm not sure how much the running gag means (though it's a good demonstration of the rejection of authority when said authority is being bloody stupid) - after all, surprisingly few people these days voted for Tony Blair.

Can I just take a moment to say how incredibly not-scary I found Brave New World? Oh NOES! The world is going to be taken over by well-meaning liberals who just want everyone to be happy!!! TEH HORRORS! Drugs and sex! Sex and Drugs! AHHHHHHHHH--

--not so much.

Alpha Colony, of course, works much harder because they're so frightfully clever.

Can I just take a moment to say how incredibly not-scary I found Brave New World? Oh NOES! The world is going to be taken over by well-meaning liberals who just want everyone to be happy!!! TEH HORRORS! Drugs and sex! Sex and Drugs! AHHHHHHHHH--

--not so much.

Mandatory sleep-teaching of knee-jerk consumption, bigotry, and complacency? The reduction of all relations between human beings to sexual relations--no friendship, no mother-love, no hero-worship? The deliberate mental and/or physical stunting of most of the human race and the training of everybody to like what they've got to do? The callous disposal of the aged? The destruction of joy and individuality in the quest for happiness? The offhand observation by the World Controller that if their lives were any easier, the citizens of the World State would drug themselves to death out of boredom?

Scares the crap out of me.

It's the fact that the World State is so darn nice and happy is what makes it troubling. Not scary. Not even evil. Just a total waste of potential.

I saw 10,000 B.C. today. My intention was to just watch a couple of minutes before skipping over to see what I really intended to watch ("Horton.")

Um. I wouldn't call 10KBC good, but I enjoyed it. I was expecting over-the-top barbarian splendor and lost civilizations thing, but it ended up as a modest popcorn film. It wasn't overly long, had a nice variety of characters, and some nicely integrated CGI.

Mind you, I'll probably never see or think of it again, but it wasn't a waste of my time or money.

I think there are ways in which Beta Colony is very open and flexible indeed, and ways in which it is very narrow and and restrictive. Cordelia observes in A Civil Campaign that the sexual openness has, on its other side, absolutely rigid control of reproduction, because the habitat means that population levels must be strictly limited. The population issue is also the reason the Survey Service exists; the Betans regularly send out colonists.

It would probably be a mistake to assume, based on the Betans' tendency to be relentlessly logical about a lot of things, their strong scientific base, and their sexual habits, that they are not capable of being repressive when it suits them. They have plenty of ambiguity as they are sketched in, and I think one of the things that happens to Cordelia is that she begins to realize this and look more closely at her own culture, in trying to cope with Aral's.

Ure hfr bs Obgunev gb rfpncr Ibeehglre jnf abg gur npg bs n anvs, ohg n pyrire cvrpr bs znavchyngvba ol n fuerjq (naq qrfcrengr) jbzna. Bs pbhefr, tvira gur pvephzfgnaprf fur jnf va, V unir qvssvphygl oynzvat ure sbe erfbegvat gb vg, ohg vg jnf qvfgvapgyl nzovthbhf.

I think I do agree with Ulrika; it was a choice of evils there, and chosing to let the damage stop where it did has it merits.

I hope you enjoyed Lunacon, Susan.

Brave New World infuriated me, because it relied on developmentally stunting most people and then conditioning/pressuring everyone into acting just like everyone else in their category.

I was particularly furious because I was pretty sure real SF writers were already talking about robots. Robots knock the supports out from under "we need to brain-damage people so they won't be bored by tedious jobs". Remember how Epsilons were assigned to be elevator operators? Elevators don't require operators these days---you just push the button.

#231: It could be that the World State determined that a hierarchy was necessary; maybe having robots to do the work wouldn't cut it. Or perhaps Huxley just couldn't imagine automation having the potential to replace all those Epsilons.

There are some very telling passages in which Mustapha Mond describes red-pencilling research papers and "labor saving" inventions. He admits that as much as the World State worships science, they don't actually practice it much, beyond a very practical cookbook level. Real science, and the kind of free minds that practice it, are far too disruptive. Mond reveals that he was a physicist whose discoveries were too radical; he was given a choice of going into politics or exile.

Maybe technology was so retarded by this philosophy that replacing the lower castes with automation is impractical.

Craig at #215:

The Heterodyne Boy (classic-style) who resembles Phil Foglio, namely Barry, is based on Professor Barry Gehm.

The other one, Bill, wears the boater. I acquired a boater in 1978 (The Music Man and Pogo were powerful influences in my youth) and I often wore it in Mr. Foglio's presence.

fidelio 230: Ure hfr bs Obgunev gb rfpncr Ibeehglre jnf abg gur npg bs n anvs, ohg n pyrire cvrpr bs znavchyngvba ol n fuerjq (naq qrfcrengr) jbzna. Bs pbhefr, tvira gur pvephzfgnaprf fur jnf va, V unir qvssvphygl oynzvat ure sbe erfbegvat gb vg, ohg vg jnf qvfgvapgyl nzovthbhf.

V qba'g frr gung ng nyy. Xvyyvat Trf Ibeehglre frrzf yvxr n cher haoyrzvfurq tbbq gb zr (rkprcg nf xvyyvat nabgure uhzna orvat vf nyjnlf jebat, gubhtu guvf vf n pynffvp pnfr bs gur tbbq bhgjrvtuvat gur rivy ol n fgryyne znff be gjb). Naq V qba'g frr gung fur znavchyngrq Obgunev gung zhpu, orlbaq znxvat vg nofbyhgryl pregnva gung ur erzrzorerq jub fur jnf. Obgunev qvq gur erfg uvzfrys. Ur qrfreirf perqvg sbe znxvat gur evtug pubvpr ng gur evtug gvzr.

Yngre ba, va Oneenlne, fur hfrf uvz nf n jrncba bapr ntnva (jvgu uvf shyy pbbcrengvba naq va snpg ng uvf erdhrfg). Gur bayl ernfba fur qbrfa'g xvyy Ibeqnevna urefrys vf gung ure nez vfa'g fgebat rabhtu gb ybc uvf urnq bss pyrnayl.

Va trareny, V qba'g frr Pbeqryvn nf nzovthbhf fb zhpu nf jrvtuvat gur zbeny cebf naq pbaf bs inevbhf npgvbaf naq znxvat n pubvpr. Hfhnyyl gur evtug pubvpr, va zl bcvavba, gubhtu V jnf fghaarq ol ure pehrygl gb ure perjzna jub tbg uvg ol n areir qvfehcgbe. V qrsvavgryl funer Neny'f bcvavba ba gung fgngr bs rkvfgrapr.

And we can add Pure/Cher to the list of amusing ROT-13 pairs.

Stefan Jones, #232: When I first read BNW, I thought that the World State had elevator operators so that its citizens could never be alone--except the Epsilons, human placeholders who had been rendered too stupid ever to think dangerous thoughts if left to themselves.

I once toyed with creating a background or world book for BNW, extrapolating from clues in the text. I came up with an interesting global map. If everybody in the World State is supposed to be comfortable and able to play in the countryside and in the city after an easy workday (except those sent to islands for punishment), large parts of the planet are not suitable for what it calls civilization. Even much of Britain would have to be left to go wild after the people who refused to become civilized had been driven out or killed. Other vast swaths of useless land would be strongholds of "savages." The desert towns that John Savage hails from depend on local water sources, so their people are easy to corral and control, but most of the circumpolar North would still be populated by stubborn holdouts living a subsistence lifestyle--the World State having smashed their old industrial infrastructure and gone away. Strong fences (just out of sight of the outlying athletic fields) and management of information--not to mention gas bombs--would keep the happy citizens unaware of just how many millions of savages lurked on reservations of vast size. Over much of the planet, the World State would in fact be a network of enclaves.

I also considered the possibility that--completely unknown to the World State, which doesn't need astronomers--the little colony that was already on Mars (I feign) when Earth's Final War broke out has managed to terraform the planet, albeit a century and a half later than planned, and has spawned a dozen daughter colonies by the time the book begins.

Jon Metlzer @ 222... Charlie Brown as Dr.Manhattan? The mind boggles.

Bill Higgins @ 233... The Music Man and Pogo were powerful influences in my youth

You watch your phraseology!

A link for gamers, and twice over for Xopher: Enemy Chocolatier

I've had Enemy Chocolatier sitting on my game shelf for months, but we've never had a chance to actually break it out yet. Other stuff keeps taking precedence.

Jenny Islander @ 227: "Mandatory sleep-teaching of knee-jerk consumption, bigotry, and complacency? The reduction of all relations between human beings to sexual relations--no friendship, no mother-love, no hero-worship? The deliberate mental and/or physical stunting of most of the human race and the training of everybody to like what they've got to do? The callous disposal of the aged? The destruction of joy and individuality in the quest for happiness? The offhand observation by the World Controller that if their lives were any easier, the citizens of the World State would drug themselves to death out of boredom? Scares the crap out of me."

Well, yeah, but how do we get from here to there? You have to assume that some power-hungry, Machiavellian force will decide that the best way to accomplish its goals is to make all of its pawns really, really happy. When has that ever happened? You then have to further assume that this group of mind-controlled stoners are going to be capable of taking on every other group on the planet--all of whom will have the technological and competitive edge on them.

This is a society that takes its best, its brightest, and gives them the choice of joining the enemy. I'm supposed to be scared of that? It wouldn't last two seconds. Hell, it could never come into being in the first place.

Abi @ 238... "Enemy Chocolatier"?

You’ll take my bars when you pry them from my cold dead fingers!

Another day, another round of "Hi, we've seen your website ...and we love it." Quick, Henry, the Flit!

Or maybe I should let them pay me up to $4800 a month. If we all do that, think how much it would cost them, just for putting ads on a thread that's a year and a half old. It'd be like renting out old copies of AZAPA, only less humiligrating.

Kip W... Oh, you got one of those too?

Bob @76: I always imagined that it would be really annoying to try and have a conversation with a Cylon. "Hey, look at me when I'm talking to you! What, are you watching a tennis match in there?"

Susan @103: For a while, I was trying to promote the phrase, "USA! Now 17% better than Saddam!" but the numbers just kept getting smaller and smaller, and it was too depressing to keep at it. Plus nobody cared, apparently.

Tehanu @182: I use LeetKey to scramble and unscramble ROT-13. Having read subsequent comments above, it now does it with a press of CTRL+F12. Gunaxf, tnat!

(Update: only now that I've invoked it once, spacebar no longer advances me down the page, and if I press it with text highlighted, it ROT13s it. Help?)

Kip W @ 244... Mad Magazine's parody of the original Galactica had one Cylon complain that it's no wonder it can never hit Our Heroes, with an eyeball that keeps pingponging like that.

Bill Higgins — Beam Jockey (#233) … sorry for the pause, one of my typing hands is being used to keep my jaw off the floor, having been introduced to the concept of "Zeusaphone" (aka Thoremin) and its retail availability.

Is this then the source of those mysterious lights and muffled noises from not-quite-well-enough-hidden portions of the Flatiron Tor HQ? The reason for strange fluctuations in the power supply of Boing-Boing's neighbours?

Serge, I'm guessing several of us. Perhaps I should have gone back to the thread the junk was mentioned in before, but I can't... keep... up!

Kip W @ 247... can't... keep... up!

James T. Kirk couldn't have said it better. And there's no need to apologize. My comment wasn't in reference to the batch of a few days ago, but to what appears to be a new mailing of more of the same crap.

Mez @ 246... Do they have a Heramonica?

heresiarch @ 190:

Besides the laser gun in Heart of Gold, there are high-tech weapons in Ariel, maybe an adaptation of controlled gravity technology, maybe superheated helium like the Babylon 5 PPGs, but not as good as projectile weapons for blowing open doors. Plus, the blue hand group has even higher tech weapons.

Technology gradient is still with us. It was very noticable when I was growing up. My dad was born in a sod-roof log cabin lit by karosene lamp, and he ploughed land with a mule-drawn plough. Drinking water was drawn from the well with a cast-iron hand pump. Just after WWII, my parents were in a modern home with electric power, gas stove, running water, and an indoor toilet, but only a few folks in the neighborhood had electric refrigerators; most still had iceboxes, and the wood-bed ice truck would come by weekly with the big block of ice for ours. When we drove back east to my dad's dad's place, the cabin was still there, but the family was living in a frame house with a second cast-iron hand pump indoors by the kitchen sink, and nicer karosene lamps. They were still hand-churning their butter, and making sorgum molasses with a mule-powered cane crusher, and there was no heat in the house except the wood burning stove in the kitchen. They did have a hand-crank wooden telephone, and machine-ground peanut butter from the local Grange peanut mill. My dad's last job, before retiring, was maintaining measuring device accuracy in an aircraft factory.

heresiarch #190:

Well, the medicine we saw in _Ariel_ wasn't that stunningly advanced, as far as I could see. It looked like a normal hospital until they got to the scanner, which looked to me like it had a really good user interface. It wasn't clear to me that it gave him enormously more information than he'd have gotten from a set of different technologies available at a modern hospital, but I'm no expert. (I wonder what Ginger thinks.)

I actually liked the uneven distribution of tech, too. This is a feature of the real world; old and new technology live side by side. (You use your gas stove to boil water for tea in the morning, then lock your door with a very simple and old lock and key system, but also arm the wireless alarm before you leave. Then, you ride your bike to the secure building where you work; after scanning an RFID tag embedded in your picture ID, you go in (past the guard with a gun designed in the 19th century), jog up the stairs, and send an e-mail to ask where you're supposed to fax those forms you filled out yesterday.)

Similarly, you sometimes have jarring incongruities in technology, or high-tech squalor--folks living in mud huts with AK47s and cellphones; the poorest non-homeless people in the US living in awful places, but with refrigerators and TVs; a diabetic retiree living in a cabin on the lake miles from civilization, with a satellite TV and a refrigerator, and also the blood sugar reading gadget, recombinant insulin, and a computer with which to surf the net.

The best technology in Firefly doesn't seem to be good enough, and the technology isn't consistent. But the idea of widespread variation in tech level is interesting. William Gibson's early stories are some of the best examples of the high tech squalor idea.

albatross @ 251... the idea of widespread variation in tech level is interesting.

Come to think of it, isn't it in the original Star Wars that the concept was first shown - in movies if not in written SF?

Kip W at 244: I had the same problem, and solved it by assigning a new shortcut key for rot13 transformations - I use R, because I have no imagination. That reverted the rest of them to standard behaviour. If that doesn't work, I have no idea, I'm afraid.

Xopher wrote:

Va trareny, V qba'g frr Pbeqryvn nf nzovthbhf fb zhpu nf jrvtuvat gur zbeny cebf naq pbaf bs inevbhf npgvbaf naq znxvat n pubvpr. Hfhnyyl gur evtug pubvpr, va zl bcvavba, gubhtu V jnf fghaarq ol ure pehrygl gb ure perjzna jub tbg uvg ol n areir qvfehcgbe. V qrsvavgryl funer Neny'f bcvavba ba gung fgngr bs rkvfgrapr.

Jryy, tvira gung rira "onpxjneqf" Onnenlne jnf noyr gb erfgber Xbhqryxn'f areirf gb n ernfbanoyr yriry bs shpgvba, V pbafvqre vg ernfbanoyr sbe Pbeqvyvn gb vafvfg gung ure pbyyrnthr or tvira n punapr ng zrqvpny gerngzrag, engure guna xvyyrq bhgevtug. Fur cerfhznoyl vfa'g hc gb qngr jvgu gur irel yngrfg va Orgna zrqvpvar (gung abg orvat ure svryq bs rkcregvfr) ohg fur unf rabhtu pbasvqrapr va Orgna zrqvpvar naq fpvrapr gb jnag gb tvir vg n punapr.

Nf vg vf, gur areir-qvfehcgrq zna unq sne zber pncnpvgl guna Neny tnir uvz perqvg sbe, naq zhpu bs gung pncnpvgl jnf qvfpbirerq qhevat gur gerx, nsgre gur cbvag jurer Neny jnagrq gb xvyy uvz. (Ur jnf noyr gb jnyx, rng naq qevax, naq frrzrq gb unir oynqqre naq objry pbageby, fvapr jr qba'g urne bs gurz univat gb gel gb qvncre uvz be pyrna hc nppvqragf, juvpu fhttrfgf rabhtu pbapvbhfarff gb xabj jura vg vf be vfa'g nccebcevngr gb hevangr naq qrsvpngr, naq gb pbageby uvf obql nppbeqvatyl. Ur nyfb pbhyq rkcrevrapr cnva naq srne, naq unq gur fubeg grez zrzbel gb erznva nsenvq nsgre gur cnva raqrq, nf jvgu gur unz-unaqrq jngre-gbegher nggrzcg gb dhrfgvba uvz jura svefg sbhaq.) Ng gur cbvag bs gur qrpvfvba, vg jnf n znggre bs xvyyvat jvgubhg nal rinyhngvba orlbaq ernyvmvat ur jnf areir-qvfehcgrq, irefhf gnxvat gur gvzr gb frr jung pbhyq or qbar.

Va uvaqfvtug, ernyvmvat gung yvggyr pbhyq or qbar, vg vf rnfvre gb ybbx onpx naq qbhog gur jvfqbz bs znxvat gung pubvpr. Ohg va uvaqfvtug, vs fur unq nyybjrq Neny gb xvyy uvz, fur zvtug unir ybbxrq ng Xbhqryxn, fhpprffshy qrfcvgr uvf vawhel naq frpbaq- be guveq- pynff zrqvpny gerngzrag, naq jbaqrerq jurgure ure pbyyrnthr unq orra qrcevirq bs n fhpprffshy (vs qvfnoyrq) yvsr, cnegvphyneyl fvapr ur jbhyq unir npprff gb gur orfg Orgna zrqvpvar, engure guna gur yvggyr Onnenlne unq gb bssre.

I went to see the musical-theatre production of Thoroughly Modern Millie last night. It was enjoyable, but there were a couple of points of weirdness.

The second was a song in the first act. My immediate reaction was that the music seemed eerily familiar, and the lyrics were giving me a strong sense of déjà écouté. Around the end of the first verse, I finally realized that they'd adapted the patter song from G&S's Ruddigore. "It really doesn't matter..."

The first was that the backdrop for the opening scene was a cityscape, but the buildings were seriously non-Euclidean. The stage designer got the perspectives wrong, I suppose, but it left me wondering if something chthonic was going to emerge at some point.

Are there plays that have a... I don't know, diabolus ex machina ending? All the characters get things into a hopeless muddle, then Something Nasty ascends / descends / emerges, and everything is resolved when all the main characters are dead / consumed / helplessly insane? (As far as I know, Shakespeare's plays lack the diabolical aspect. G&S's The Sorcerer loses only one character to Ahrimanes, who doesn't appear.)

#194 - I note that sometimes the gibberish isn't rot13; other varieties include disemvowelled comments, Latin, Anglo-Saxon, extremely technical explanations, Russian, Hebrew, Elvish of various types, lolcat/leet, Spanish and even (yikes!)French.

(Off the top of my head)

I'll just say that, here in 2008, although I feel no special love for vacuum tubes they were (and as Bruce Cohen points out, continue to be) a useful and appropriate piece of technology and I don't find them ridiculous at all. Unlike, for example, Flash Gordon Rocket Ships.

Ursula 254: Hmm. I think you may be right. I need to think about that some more.

Neil Willcox @ 256... sometimes the gibberish isn't rot13; other varieties include (...) even (yikes!)French.

Cette insulte demande réparation.

heresiarch @ 251: "Well, the medicine we saw in _Ariel_ wasn't that stunningly advanced, as far as I could see. It looked like a normal hospital until they got to the scanner, which looked to me like it had a really good user interface. It wasn't clear to me that it gave him enormously more information than he'd have gotten from a set of different technologies available at a modern hospital, but I'm no expert. (I wonder what Ginger thinks.) "

I remember that episode, and thinking much the same -- other than some technology used to transport the "dead" Tams, it didn't seem like much more than a 21st century Earth-that-was hospital. The scanner interface would be totally cool, although I'd like to know what kind of technology the scanner actually used -- it wasn't an MRI, CT, or PET (at least, not as we know them now). The image shown is essentially an animated version of an MRI, which shows soft tissue very well, but doesn't show bone. I'd expect that every provincial hospital and field medic would have access to an MRI in the Firefly universe, and that would give Simon all the information he needed. There must have been other technology that he wanted to use but was thwarted by Jayne's betrayal and the arrival of the Men in Blue Gloves.

Serge @ 258:

::repairs insult::

Voila! Est-ce que c'est que vous demandez?

Ginger @ 259... Elle est toute comme neuve! Merci!

Seeing that video of the Zeusaphone* made me think of other plasma speaker technologies, especially the combustion, or flame, speaker. In sincere flattery of the zeusaphone, I want to call that an Agniphone.

* OMFG! That's bloody impressive. Can't wait to see some low-budget SF flick use that as the special effect for a visiting alien's Universal Translator.

Ginger #259:

What's the expensive part of those technologies? I have this sort of uninformed idea that a lot of the cost is intellectual property of the designers and the use of powerful computers, neither of which should be an issue in the Firefly universe. I mean, a CT scan is basically a set of X-rays taken at different angles around you, with the computer building a kind of 3D model from the images, right? I don't know how hard it is to get the necessary precision control of really powerful magnets to make MRI work, or if there's some other difficulty that I'm missing there--it doesn't *seem* like folks that can maintain a spaceship ought to find it all that hard to do....

Speculation about this stuff is made more fun by my vast ignorance in this area. If I were speculating about something I knew much about, I'd probably have to be much more careful and conservative....

(This has been sitting in the back of my head for the last couple days....)

Statin and fish oil

proton pump inhibitor

Damn, I'm middle-aged!

Xopher @257: Cordelia's decision about Dubauer is (imho) entirely consistent with Bujold's wider moral framework within the Vorkosiverse; cf. Miles' gritted-teeth "No. It's. Not." retort to Dr. Canaba about Taura's long-term prospects, as well as much of Mirror Dance-- not just the main plot of the latter, but also its introductory material about the Dendarii who'd been wounded in the previous mission.

Neil #256: And don't leave out made-up technobabble.

I'd love to explain this, but the armitiphlage used for treckle-lansing[0] on my local network has its backward-biased particle defenestrator[1] munged up by an infusion of antimatter into the core matrix of the nearby chained singularity power source[2]. I'm gonna have to recalibrate the gravity polarizers[3] and hope that doesn't drive the sentient packets on the network into some kind of fugue state, lest they Transcend and become a hegemonizing swarm[4].

[0] Hexapody is the key insight, here.

[1] Yep, throw them particles right out the window.

[2] Certain SF writers use these to provide the energy necessary to write books set in the near future.

[3] These are really useful for avoiding that annoying gravitic glare when driving home at rush hour.

[4] Resistance is futile, unless you're the Zetetic Elench or similar.

Bruce #216:

I'll admit I'm still speculating far outside my competence, but it sure seems hard to imagine getting component densities anywhere close to those of modern electronics.

This raises another kind of interesting issue, though. When you're developing a new technology, there's no way to know whether the path you're following leads to the best (or even an especially good) way of doing whatever you're trying to do. But after ten or fifteen years of development, you have so much infrastructure and expertise with the current way of doing things, you're just not going to shift over for a 10-15% improvement in efficiency. I think you can see this with alternatives to gasoline as a fuel, and also with stuff like Stirling engines. I recall reading that though Stirling engines are theoretically much more efficient than internal combustion engines, the most efficient ones anyone has managed to build are about as efficient as modern Diesel engines. I think this is due to the fact that there is a century of careful design and engineering and manufacturing analysis embedded in the design of the best modern engines. Perhaps we'd have somewhat more efficient engines if we'd gone down the Stirling engine path a century ago. Similarly, perhaps we'd have somewhat better electronics having gone down a fundamentally different path 50 years ago, but it's hard to get onto that path now, given the huge amount of built up expertise we have on our current path.

Joel @ 255: Are there plays that have a... I don't know, diabolus ex machina ending?

Well, there's the legend of Don Juan. Does that not count?

Ginger@259

From what I recall (and from an episode transcript), it looks as if Simon was using the only equipment he had planned to use, although he had hoped for a few more minutes with it.

Scott H #201:

I teach at Clark Atlanta, just over a mile from downtown, and I've no good idea how the campus fared since we were on spring break, and at the time of the tornado my wife and I were in Birmingham, Alabama, at OmegaCon. Power was down, according to the library website, but is up again.

As to our own experiences: we were woken at 3 a.m., by the same storm which bid fair to smash into our hotel room, but had no idea of its ferocity until we got up around 8 in the morning and turned on CNN which was making a great deal of fuss about a major natural disaster quite literally on its doorstep.

Because Gail, my wife, did not feel able to make the drive back and and forth from Atlanta to Birmingham twice in a day (it's complicated, but she had a gig this morning and we'd initially planned for her to drive to Atlanta and then go back to Birmingham to pick me up) we left Birmingham early this morning and came back to Atlanta. Since we live in the suburbs southwest of town we haven't seen much damage, but Gail did see a line of pine trees that had been completely flattened on the northwest side of town (on 285 west near Smyrna) on her way back home after her gig. There are still people without power this afternoon we gather.

My mother-in-law says that there were points when she couldn't see the house across the street because of ferocity of the rain, and it got very windy, but we didn't have much damage down here fortunately. People in town, on the other hand, did get badly hit. I'll find out more in the morning when I go in to work (for a very short work week, since I'm off to San Diego early on Wednesday morning for a conference).

At OmegaCon, we met Lee who presented me with a Fluorosphere button. This was the first time that I've been hailed by name by someone I've never met before, which was a fascinating experience.

An odder experience was Steven Brust insisting that he'd met me twenty years ago at a con in Atlanta. That could have taken place in an alternative universe, I suppose. On the other hand, I've now made my older son's girlfriend very jealous.

albatross @ 262

a CT scan is basically a set of X-rays taken at different angles around you, with the computer building a kind of 3D model from the images, right

That's a good explanation that avoids having to talk about transforms and linear operators. It's a real 3D model too, I've seen 3D displays of CAT or MRI images that you could move around, and cross-section in pretty much arbitrary planes. Incidentally, the math for CAT, MRI, PET, fMRI, etc. is all the same, so there's no reason (other than cost and limits on generation and sensor technology) that you couldn't combine them all into one instrument. I would expect the instrument that Simon used in Firefly to be an advanced scanner-of-all-trades.

don't know how hard it is to get the necessary precision control of really powerful magnets to make MRI work

The current limits, AFAIK, are in field homogeneity and field strength, both of which affect the achievable spatial resolution. Strength also affects temporal resolution, I believe, which somewhat determines how much blur you get from the patients' movements.

One advanced feature of the unit that Simon used is the speed with which the first image was obtained. That argues for both very stable, precision magnetic fields, and for huge amounts of compute power.

The state of the art in MRI magnetics is being installed right now a few miles from here. The Oregon Health Sciences Institute* is installing a huge 8 tesla magnetic for experiments in high resolution MRI scanning. It's so massive they have to reinforce the building it's going in. One of the questions they want to ask is what, if any, effects high intensity fields have on human beings.

* local name: "Pill Hill" because it sits on a height overlooking downtown Portland and the Willamette River.

albatross @ 266

But after ten or fifteen years of development, you have so much infrastructure and expertise with the current way of doing things, you're just not going to shift over for a 10-15% improvement in efficiency.

Absolutely correct, and you just poked me in a fascination of mine: the evolution of technology. Just like biological evolution, technology evolves by satisfying a (very complex) local fitness function. The fact that it's local means it's possible (in fact, easy) to get stuck in local minima which aren't globally optimal. And the cost of jumping to another track may be so large that differences of far more than 15% may be insufficient to justify the change.

What usually happens then is that an entirely new technology is adopted at the leading edge of development, while the old technology continues to be used for high-volume, low-margin products that repay the huge capital investment in the old technology.

The integrated circuit business is a fascinating example because in some ways it's a new technology with brand new capital investment in each generation, or at least every 10 years or so. That's because every few years the current fabrication tech runs up against hard physical limits that have to be gotten around by new techniques: shorter wavelength photolithographic light sources are needed for smaller device features, requiring new mask generation techniques and new photographic chemistries, etc., etc.

It's been really cool to watch as every few years some industry pundits announce the practical limit has been reached, and Moore's Law is over, and then someone comes up with a solution, and the march continues. And that will necessarily continue as long as it's physically possible, because each generation of fabrication requires double the capital investment of the one before. The current cost of a new fab plant was over $4 e 9 in 2007; the next generation that will be started in 2010 or so will cost twice as much. That's a huge incentive to continue developing the technology, since the old generation takes at least 2 generations to pay off.

I'm in SLO, (Maia has some business related to her application to join the Meeting here), and so I don't have time to do much, but I saw the butter sidelight, and wanted to add that I love the Double Devon Cream Butter. It's cultured, and the best thing about it is that it improves.

The cultures keep working. If you don't seal it well the outside gets a little rancid, but a french butter dish, or some other covering (saran wrap has the least oxygen passage I know of), it develops a pleasantly cheese-like flavor.

Wonderful soaking into fresh scones.

Off to take pictures in Morro Bay/Los Osos (yes, abi, I might find some decent landscapes for you).

albatross and Bruce Cohen, STM, various: And then there are the directions that technology can go despite (self-imposed) limitations. Case in point, the Amish.

Some happy news: Wreck of HMAS Sydney found. The discovery of the HK Kormoran (very detailed history) was announced yesterday).

"The most grievous loss suffered by the Royal Australian Navy". 9 November 1941: "Battle with the light cruiser HMAS Sydney at close range off the coast of Western Australia. Kormoran suffers four 6-inch hits, that start a major fire midships. Abandoned with 60 dead, she explodes and capsizes off the Abrolhos Islands. 320 survivors interned for five years in Australian POW camps. The Sydney, after sustaining more than a thousand hits of 152 mm, 75 and 37mm AA, heavy machine gunfire and a torpedo hit, sinks with all 645 officers and men".

OK, this dittohead on a gay site (ever think you'd hear those words together?) made an impassioned plea for me to support John McCain, since I live in New Jersey, which for some reason the dittohead thinks might go red in the fall. Not bloody likely, but I wanted to make my position absolutely clear.

This is a bbcode site, so please imagine the following in large bold Times New Roman, with the second line in slightly smaller type:

Hoboken Man, 48, Trades Head For Cabbage

Will Vote For McCain, He Says After Bizarre Surgery

Oops. Typing error above @274. The date wasn't 9/11, but 19th November.

The AWM site seems to be under heavy pressure today; not unexpectedly.

Just heard the news about HMAS Sydney being announced by the Prime Minister on the radio. Epacris has scooped me. Thanks for the links. I can only add the Finding Sydney Foundation web site. Right now it doesn't have this latest news, but there's some interesting material, including a 'search diary'. They want to set up a virtual memorial (www.sydneymemorial.com), but it's not yet done. This is great news, if sad too, for the families of all those lost on both sides. (Side note: 4 of the Australians were civilian catering crew, not naval personnel.)



I grew up not far from the memorial mast of HMAS Sydney (I), one of the landmarks (watermarks? <g>) of Sydney Harbour. Its main claim to fame is sinking the Emden in WWI — there's a painting of the action on display in Sydney Town Hall. When I visited Bradley's Head more recently, they'd added a memorial to HMAS Sydney (II), the one under discussion, and markers about all the other naval ships named 'Sydney'. Last year, on the 94th anniversary of the commissioning of first HMAS Sydney, the Navy announced that "all Australian and foreign naval vessels proceeding into Sydney Harbour will render ceremonial honours to the HMAS Sydney I Memorial Mast". I suspect there'll be some people visiting and some ceremonial there with this news.

Re Cylon Eyes: Jumping spiders (and some other arthropods) have eyes with a vertical slit, so they can see a great deal in the vertical plane, but as little as 5° in the horizontal. They move the slit from left to right to scan the horizon.

They also have a cluster of them.

Horses (though it's less obvious) have the reverse arrangement. They don't move the slit up and down, but the first time one takes a serious look at a horse's eye, it looks damned odd.

Fragano @ 269...An odder experience was Steven Brust insisting that he'd met me twenty years ago at a con in Atlanta

Years ago, I met Marion Zimmer Bradley who, upon hearing my full name, said that she had heard it somewhere. From the way she said it, it hadn't in an unpleasant context. Not that it could have been otherwise. Of course.

(This is what I get for shutting down Google Reader for a couple days...)

So, back when you guys were discussing Firefly, had no one considered that Joss created a 'verse where the South won? It pinged me a little when it became clear in the series that Alliance worlds do practice forms of slavery, and it hit me REAL hard in "Shindig"; Kaylee's dress was such a visual shoutout to the antebellum South.

Anyway, it came even clearer when I read Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels. Beyond the names Joss chose to use -- a Reynolds on the Union side, Jubal Early on the Confederate -- there's a tension in the novel that I see reflected in the series, between not just two different societies but two different views of destiny. There's a British observer with the Confederate army, and a strong implication that certain parties in England are rooting for the South and see their own society mirrored there, i.e., landed aristocracy, power-by-inheritance. Keeping in mind that this is Shaara's version of the battle and not a straight-up history, I couldn't help but read it as a struggle of man-becomes-what-he-is-bred-to vs. man-becomes-what-he-makes-of-himself. And I see the same struggle in Firefly, with the Alliance imposing an aristocratic heirarchy and the Browncoats as the army of self-made men.

HP @ 267: I'm only slightly familiar with the Don Juan legend, but I don't think it's got quite the flavour of "hopelessly-snarled plot untangled by an arbitrary new element" that I'm looking for.

In English: Uh-oh, there are Francophones in the house. But my French is bad enough that you'd need the entire Ruhr valley in reparations if you had to listen to it.

En Francais: Alors, les non-francophones ne comprendront pas ce paragraphe. Quel horreur!

Wrenlet, an aside about Shaara's book: the film "Gettysburg" adapted it; it seemed almost word-for-word. It's an excellent movie.

Joel @255: diabolus ex machina ending? All the characters get things into a hopeless muddle, then Something Nasty ascends / descends / emerges, and everything is resolved when all the main characters are dead / consumed / helplessly insane?

Moby Dick, maybe? Tolkien's Akallabêth? Sodom and Gomorrah? Titanic?

Or do divine-justice smackdowns and inexorable natural forces not really fit what you had in mind?

#231, etc

IIRC, the Brave New Word society had come about through consumerism and dumbing-down - various corporations had become rich enough to set themselves up as the actual government and it was in their interest to create a race of humans who just wanted to buy stuff (and to work so they can buy stuff) - robots wouldn't drive their economy because they don't spend money. The Alphas, for the most part, don't seem to have been stoners - they just needed everyone beneath them to be...

Neil Willcox @ 282... my French is bad enough that you'd need the entire Ruhr valley in reparations if you had to listen to it

Heck, I survived Wes Studi speaking French in Last of the Mohicans. I seriously doubt your going at it would require some valleyrisation.

#254, et al

Vg frrzf pyrne gb zr gung Zvyrf qbrf abg xabj gur shyy fgbel bs gur raq bs Ibeqnevna. Naq dhvgr cbffvoyl vf va gur qnex nobhg Ibeehglre, nf jryy. Ng bar cbvag Zvyrf erzrzoref gung uvf zbgure "yrq yblny gebbcf va Ibeqnevna'f eroryyvba" - gung'f n snveyl fnavgvmrq irefvba, gb chg vg zvyqyl.

BGBU, Zvyrf unf ivfvgrq Orgn Pbybal rkgrafviryl, uvf Tenaqzbgure Anvfzvgu. Ur pna, nsgre nyy, qb n pbaivapvat Orgna npprag naq vzcrefbangvba, sbe yratgul crevbqf.



(The preview of a rot-13 comment is astoundingly useless.)

Henry @287: OTOH in Komarr, when Ekaterin suggests to Miles that they go shopping, he comments, "That's an offer seldom made to the son of my mother."

Joel @255: diabolus ex machina ending? All the characters get things into a hopeless muddle, then Something Nasty ascends / descends / emerges, and everything is resolved when all the main characters are dead / consumed / helplessly insane?

Cloverfield? Not literature, I know, and largely speculation because I've only read reviews, which convinced me the film might be missable. How about Neville Shute's On the Beach, or any of the other oh-so-cheery nuclear-war works wherein Everybody Dies is both the story and the ending?

albatross @ 262:

"What's the expensive part of those technologies? I have this sort of uninformed idea that a lot of the cost is intellectual property of the designers and the use of powerful computers, neither of which should be an issue in the Firefly universe. I mean, a CT scan is basically a set of X-rays taken at different angles around you, with the computer building a kind of 3D model from the images, right? I don't know how hard it is to get the necessary precision control of really powerful magnets to make MRI work, or if there's some other difficulty that I'm missing there--it doesn't *seem* like folks that can maintain a spaceship ought to find it all that hard to do....

Speculation about this stuff is made more fun by my vast ignorance in this area. If I were speculating about something I knew much about, I'd probably have to be much more careful and conservative...."

The expensive part of the technology is building it.

CT is a rotating x-ray unit; the x-ray producer is on one side of the circle and the receptors are on the other side.

MRI (and fMRI is the same thing; it's the computing that's different) is a magnet that is made essentially with supercooled wires; part of that large instrument is the container for the cryogens (primarily nitrogen).

Both CT and MRI require lots of shielding, against either ionizing radiation or against strong magnetic fields and against radio waves.

MRI basically works by generating radiofrequency signals from the atoms and molecules inside the field; these are picked up by the coils and sent to the computer for resolution into the image. A 3-D image is made by compiling all the slices, and is not standard, although it sure is pretty.

Bruce is right, the device Simon used had to have a very powerful magnet and advanced computing power. Currently, the state-of-art MRI scanners are taking about 7 minutes to acquire localization images (down from about 13 minutes); a big part of this is the software improvements, since the magnet itself hasn't changed lately. The one I'm thinking of is a 4.7T machine, which is a standard "strength" in diagnostic imaging. The stronger fields (7T, soon 8T) are much better images, and as computers get more powerful, the images will also improve.

I'm getting off track. Where was I? Oh, radio waves. Since the signal from the atoms is an RF signal, you don't want any stray waves from outside, so the rooms need to be shielded -- rather like grounding all electrical wires in any area where sensitive electrical recordings are made.

You also need all the safety stuff -- lead for the CT, ventilation for the MRI, lights, bells, and whistles, and so on. While CT is amazingly quiet -- and fast! -- MRI is exceedingly noisy and you'll need sound-proofing too. There's no way to entirely muffle an MRI, which is why I think Simon's machina ex deus is not exactly an MRI. ;-)

Bruce @ 270: Although the 8T is a stronger magnet, I doubt the size is the reason for the reinforcement of the building: we have an 11T magnet, vertical bore, that's much smaller than any of the others. You can make the magnets any size. I suspect all the extra work around the new magnet is related to the increased need for protecting against radio signals, and all the shielding from the magnet (i.e., the extended gauss lines). I don't know how large the OHSI unit is going to be, so there may well be some physical support needed too, but most magnets don't weigh all that much. Field strength will get larger with the big ones, true.

(Digression: the Pill Hill is a lovely campus, and worth visiting if anyone ever gets the chance. Portland OR is a great city; I had only 18 hours to walk around, and I want to go back. )

What high-intensity magnets do to living humans will be interesting to see. I can tell you that moderate intensity magnets, if repeatedly visited (like weekly) will wear out basic (wire-based)electronic technology a little sooner than expected. Magnetic fields -- your invisible friends!

Serge @ 260: De rien. N'importe quoi pour un ami, non?

#285:

There's evidence in Brave New World that the top Alphas are just as thoroughly conditioned as the other castes. At two points, Mustapha Mond quips, about Epsilons and Deltas, "I don't know what we'd do without them." I think that's a sleep-learned reflexive thought. And Bernard's boss chides him for not sleeping around enough.

But good point on the need for a population of consumers. The World State is probably really good at being what it is, and can't imagine any other possible way of being.

I used to do thought experiment / daydreams about how that society would handle an alien invasion. Could be a good set-up for a role playing game.

Ginger @ 29... Oui, oui, say I using my best Charles Boyer impersonation. (My worst one sounds like Pépé le Pew.)

Invoking the openthreadedness of it all: Second Best Beer Ad Ever.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNmjzJh_Yvg

albatross @ 262: One of the things that makes MRI so big an expensive is the lack of computing power. They start with a large, uniform magnetic field and apply orthogonal and carefully linear gradients for imaging, because that makes inverting the radio signals to generate the spatial image easy.

But you can make rare earth magnets with a tesla-level field, and the antenna doesn't have to be much bigger. So in theory at least, it's possible to make a completely hand held MRI scanner, if we could just figure out how to interpret the signals from a curved field. Much like the medical tricorders in the original Star Trek, actually. That little salt shaker Bones used to make diagnoses isn't completely far fetched.

Ginger @ 290

You're right, the mass of the magnet isn't just determined by the field strength; as I understand it, the mass of the OHSU magnet is so large because a) it's heavily shielded*, and b) it's physically larger than it needs to be for the field strength, so has a larger cross-section. B) is because the larger the opening on the inside of the magnet coil, the larger and more uniform the field in the open volume near the center where the highest field homogeneity is.

Of course I'm biased, I've lived here for more than half my life, but I agree with you that Portland is a great city. You're welcome to come back any time you want; drop me a line before you come and we can get a Making Light group together for lunch or something.

Ralph Giles @ 295

Assuming we calibrate the magnetic field, so even if it's not uniform we know the intensity at every point in the scanning volume, and assuming the calibration is highly stable over time, then, by applying lots of compute power we can in theory get high resolution images with small, low intensity fields. You still need a lot of sensors, or some way to move them with high precision, and oodles and oodles of instructions per second.

The number of volume cells to compute goes up as the cube of the linear resolution, and the best Digital Fourier Transform** algorithm currently known is order log n / n for number of points n, and each point costs quite a few instructions*** so high resolution is extremely expensive in computation.

Although I've been wondering for some time if quantum computing couldn't speed that up drastically. The basic algorithm in use in quantum computing is the Digital Fourier Transform (that's the way quantum operations work), and in theory the quantum version is O 1, that is, constant time for any number of points.

* There's a metric shitload of other electronic equipment of all kinds up on the Hill; it's after all primarily a research center.

** The mathematical operator that does the heavy lifting for the image analysis.

*** I'm not current on the detailed implementations in use today, but I would guess each point costs somewhere around 100 multiplications or so.

Wrenlet @280: You're right in picking out The Killer Angels as a formative influence on Firefly -- Joss Whedon mentions it as such in the Serenity script book, IIRC. (He also says explicitly that Mal wasn't fighting for slavery -- not surprising, since slavery is clearly still present under the Alliance.)

Apropos Firefly--- I read through Stephen Brust's Firefly novel, My Kind of Freedom, a week or so ago. Brust didn't sell *all* the plot points as well as I wanted, but he's got a very good sense of the characters' voices and the world, and it's a fun story that explores some interesting complexities in the characters. If you've been hankering for more Firefly, it'll satisfy. :-)

Wrenlet @280: You're right in picking out The Killer Angels as a formative influence on Firefly -- Joss Whedon mentions it as such in the Serenity script book, IIRC. (He also says explicitly that Mal wasn't fighting for slavery -- not surprising, since slavery is clearly still present under the Alliance.)

Apropos Firefly--- I read through Stephen Brust's Firefly novel, My Kind of Freedom, a week or so ago. Brust didn't sell *all* the plot points as well as I wanted, but he's got a very good sense of the characters' voices and the world, and it's a fun story that explores some interesting complexities in the characters. If you've been hankering for more Firefly, it'll satisfy. :-)

Argh blargh damn network outages. Sorry for the double-post.

Henry Troup @ #287: (The preview of a rot-13 comment is astoundingly useless.)

What I usually do is compose and preview the message in cleartext, then rot-13 it just before I hit "POST".

(There is an attendant risk of getting the steps in the wrong order, of course.)

Zombie Feynman, the MythBusters and superstring theorists

(My many thanks to Tania for drawing my attention to this.)

Serge #279: That is an odd experience, but you do have a name that should have doppelgangers.

Of course, if your surname were de Nîmes....

Bruce Cohen (StM) @ 296: Yes, the larger magnets have larger fields and more shielding. With respect to the computational part, one thing we do is scan for longer periods of time -- that leads to increased resolution of the images (from my perspective), and that's most likely because of the increased numbers of transforms/other operations being performed. Faster software leads to increased resolution in a shorter period of time, so a long scan with fast/powerful computers could lead to "instantaneous" scans.

There's already a table-top MRI -- for small rodents and culture dishes -- but it was around $500,000 for the unit, so we didn't get one. When Congress switches back to properly funding research again, then we might be able to afford things like that. ;-)

albatross @ 251: "Well, the medicine we saw in _Ariel_ wasn't that stunningly advanced, as far as I could see. It looked like a normal hospital until they got to the scanner, which looked to me like it had a really good user interface. It wasn't clear to me that it gave him enormously more information than he'd have gotten from a set of different technologies available at a modern hospital, but I'm no expert."

The hospital did look pretty 20th century to me too, but I'm not sure that the scanning machine was as simple as you suggest. Just going by its function and appearance isn't much of a guide--an obsidian blade looks and is used a lot like a watered steel blade, but the level of technology required to produce each is quite different. I can imagine enormously more advanced and sophisticated MRIs that look, to the casual observer, basically the same as ours do.

Also, I'm wondering what your assumptions are on how advanced their tech ought to be. I tend to assume that they've burned up a couple of centuries traveling in generation ships, and maybe another couple boot-strapping an industrial society. With a date of 2517, that gives them maybe a hundred years of relative undistracted technological advancement. Really, there's no evidence at all either way on their travel time--you can assume any number you'd like to make their tech level seem reasonable.

(You can throw in a Singularity event on Earth-that-was preventing them from receiving tech updates enroute for an extra Vingean/Strossian flair.)

Bruce Cohen @ 271: "Absolutely correct, and you just poked me in a fascination of mine: the evolution of technology. Just like biological evolution, technology evolves by satisfying a (very complex) local fitness function. The fact that it's local means it's possible (in fact, easy) to get stuck in local minima which aren't globally optimal. And the cost of jumping to another track may be so large that differences of far more than 15% may be insufficient to justify the change."

I wonder how useful it would be to study the evolution of tech, which moves much faster, as a sort of hothouse version of biological evolution in order to observe in real-time processes that in biological time take millions of years. How well do the two correspond, do you think? Does intelligent design* substantially affect the process?

*On the tech side. Of course.

Wrenlet @ 280: "So, back when you guys were discussing Firefly, had no one considered that Joss created a 'verse where the South won?"

Me @ 106: "You mean with the Confederates? I've often wondered if the Browncoats were Joss's attempt to disassociate what was admirable in the Confederates (defending their right to self-determination) from what was despicable (that they had "self-determined" to enslave half their population)."

So, yeah, that occured to some of us. =) It's funny you mention Killer Angels, though. According to the Wikipedia page, it was a direct inspiration for the series.

Fragano @ 302... you do have a name that should have doppelgangers

Maybe in the Evil Universe.

Serge #279: That is an odd experience, but you do have a name that should have doppelgangers.

Of course, if your surname were de Nîmes....

V jnf fghaarq ol ure pehrygl gb ure perjzna jub tbg uvg ol n areir qvfehcgbe. V qrsvavgryl funer Neny'f bcvavba ba gung fgngr bs rkvfgrapr.

Lbh'yy abgr gung fur unf qbhogf nobhg jurgure fur qvq uvz n snibe jura fur frrf uvz jvgu uvf cneragf; V guvax ure vavgvny ershfny gb rhgunavmr uvz jnf n fubpx ernpgvba, onfvpnyyl "Guvf vf gur bayl bar yrsg naq V nz uvf pncgnva naq V nz ol Tbq tbvat gb xrrc uvz ng yrnfg nyvir." Naq gura fur naq Neny whfg pbnfg ba zbzraghz bapr gur cyna vf frg.

I've often wondered if the Browncoats were Joss's attempt to disassociate what was admirable in the Confederates...

Problem with that analogy is that it's pretty clearly the Alliance who are the Confederates, in all but name. It's the Alliance that allows slavery ("Shindig", called such, and "The Train Job", called "bonded servant") and has big white houses in green lawns (complete with Spanish moss on the trees) and elaborate dresses and pseudo-aristocratic titles ("Shindig" again).

251, 304: Also, maybe the scanner isn't that much more advanced because there isn't really much more advancing to do. Look at (something much on my mind at present) small arms today. There hasn't really been anything revolutionary since the invention of the repeating rifle. There are little improvements in accuracy and reliability, better materials make the weapons lighter and more robust, and there are nice new add-ons like low-light sights and red-dot aiming - the equivalent of better user interfaces - but at their hearts they're pretty much unchanged. And they'll probably go on being unchanged until the switch happens to laser pistols or hand-held railguns or guided missile launchers or whatever.

Also, there's the possibility that his real motive for visiting the hospital wasn't (or wasn't only) to seek help for his sister. Maybe he just wanted a taste of the life he'd given up - the successful, respected, gently-reared hospital doctor.

When I was at university, I used to show people around some of the Shiny Things in our department (Chemistry) - one of them was a high-Tesla NMR machine. (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance - the process Ginger describes in #290, of turning atoms upside-down with a magnetic field and catching the radiofrequency blip when they flip back. MRI, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, uses NMR and happy fun mathematics to deal with complicated targets like people rather than small vials of crud.)

We had to stop outside the door and go through a list of warnings. "If you have a pacemaker, stay outside. If you go beyond the red line on the floor without emptying your pockets, kiss goodbye to your credit cards. When your keys tear their way out of your pockets, don't try to grab them on the way past." (May be slightly exaggerated for comic effect. Slightly.)

Regarding the rotting encryption - can we please say something beforehand about what it's a spoiler for? Trying to read the Bujold discussion and accidentally decrypting Firefly spoilers instead would be rather unpleasant for me, and I'm sure I'm not the only one in that position.

Carrie S #307:

But most of the slavery we see, and all the really brutal, cotton- and sugar-plantation style slavery, is on the outer planets. There's no indication I've ever noticed that this is because the Alliance imposed it; instead, it looks like the Alliance and many (maybe not all) outer planets have slavery, and that (as with literally everything else) it's much more regulated on core worlds.

Julie L. @ 284, vian @ 289: In all of those cases, the disaster-causing agent is a core part of the plot all along. The story comes to a bad end, but it's not an arbitrary surprise out-of-nowhere bad end.

G&S's The Sorcerer has a quite arbitrary resolution, when J. Wellington Wells "yields up his life to Ahrimanes". The story includes the brief appearance of a chorus of fiends while Wells is doing his work, but there's no other diabolism involved, and no mention of their boss. (Asimov noted the weakness of this ending in his "Up-To-Date Sorcerer".) If, instead of Wells disappearing into the stage trap, Ahrimanes had manifested and wiped out all the characters for being such idiots and dabbling in matters wot were best left un-meddled-with... that's more what I had in mind.

I thought everyone here would be interested in the academic Call for Papers I just received, Music in the Whedonverse:

"From bands at The Bronze in Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Angel singing karaoke at Caritas to the traditional-style fiddling and guitar playing in Firefly, music is an integral part of Joss Whedon's universes. This collection seeks essays from both established and emerging scholars on the uses of and contributions made by music in the Whedonverse. Discipline-specific and interdisciplinary views are encouraged to address issues of power, relationships, identity, gender, communication, religion, multiculturalism, sanity and madness, and other topics present in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly, and Serenity. Topics might include, but are not limited to:

* Music and performance

* Gender/identity/race and music (including traditional identity topics as well as those of non-human characters)

* Genre representations

* Scoring for action sequences

* Music and communication

* Musical characterization

* Music and camp

* Music and transformation

* Character vocality

* The use of silence and music in unique ways

* Levels and mixing of diegesis and non-diegesis

The deadline for submissions is August 15, 2008. The collection will be published by Scarecrow Press with an anticipated publication date in 2009.

Essays should be between 7,000 and 9,000 words and follow Chicago Manual of Style format. Only electronic submissions sent in a .doc

(Word) formats will be accepted. Authors are encouraged to include photographs, but will be responsible for acquiring all materials and

permission for use. Please send a cover letter including the title of the essay, an abstract of not more than 200 words, an author c.v, and

author biography of not more than 100 words along with the complete blind essay (author's name should not appear) to Kendra Preston Leonard at caennen_at_gmail.com."

I'm on my way out the door, so I haven't checked to see if anyone else has posted this:

All three links in the "Owl of Letters" particle give me a "you don't have permission to access" error.

heresiarch @304:

I can't claim THAT level of perception, I'd read of the connection between Firefly and Killer Angels :D But I still don't think the Browncoats were Confederates; the South stood for self-determination at the societal level (we get to keep holding slaves because our society is supported by it and we don't want to change), but NOT at the individual level.

Carrie S. @ 307:

Problem with that analogy is that it's pretty clearly the Alliance who are the Confederates, in all but name. It's the Alliance that allows slavery ("Shindig", called such, and "The Train Job", called "bonded servant") and has big white houses in green lawns (complete with Spanish moss on the trees) and elaborate dresses and pseudo-aristocratic titles ("Shindig" again).

Yes, exactly.

albatross @ 310:

But most of the slavery we see, and all the really brutal, cotton- and sugar-plantation style slavery, is on the outer planets. There's no indication I've ever noticed that this is because the Alliance imposed it; instead, it looks like the Alliance and many (maybe not all) outer planets have slavery, and that (as with literally everything else) it's much more regulated on core worlds.

But isn't that precisely what would have happened in the American West if the South had succeeded in spreading slavery to the territories?

Heresiarch #304:

Fair enough. A lot of the outward forms of medical treatment can look similar while the underlying technology is radically different. Frex, I gather than AIDS and cancer treatments in 1980 vs. 2007 are quite different, though they look outwardly rather similar (except that the patients mostly survive longer). OTOH, I guess laproscopic surgery is just radically different from what was available 50 years ago, and that a lot of what used to involve opening you all the way up and reaching inside now involves a small incision or two and some deft use of remote control gadgets. (ISTM that the realtime communications at great distances that happens in Firefly means that remote-control surgery should be available, which might be how reasonably well-off people on outer planets get surgery in an emergency--pay enough to get someone of Simon's caliber to remote-control the surgical instruments.

I find the evolution of technology fascinating, too. I think it's especially interesting to see places where two or three different communities came up with very different approaches to some problem. You often see this in wars and near-wars--the US/USSR space programs seem to have some of this flavor, with each group developing somewhat different approaches to their problems. I guess weapons systems more generally have this property. And historically, poor communications have left a lot of different independent groups inventing/reinventing the same ideas.

The upside of better communications and memory is that you don't have the smartest people in your society redesigning the waterwheel or something. The downside is, it's easier for the first successful approach to some problem to simply take over everywhere, even if it's not all that great a solution. We *all* use Word now, whether it's a decent word processor or not, because everyone uses it.

Did anyone else watch Bunny Lake Is Missing on Turner a few nights ago? I hadn't seen it before, and it was startling to encounter a film that had both Noel Coward (as a dirty old hetero!) and televised glimpses of Sixties UK rock group the Zombies. Not to mention the central psycho going wild.... I can see why it's become a cult classic.

Carrie S. @ 304: "Problem with that analogy is that it's pretty clearly the Alliance who are the Confederates, in all but name."

That's what I mean by disassociating the good aspects of the Confederacy from the bad. You get the plucky underdog fighting for freedom part without the taint of slavery. Conversely, you have the economically powerful and morally corrupt Alliance. Instead of a morally complex tangle, you get a set of nice and simple good guys and bad guys.

Firefly/Serenity spoilers:

V svanyyl fnj gur zbivr. V guvax vg jnf vagraqrq gb svavfu bss gur frevrf, abg gb rkgraq vg. Vg ernyyl ybbxf gb or fnlvat "Ybbx crbcyr, vg'f bire. BIRE! Gung'f nyy. Ab zber va guvf havirefr, be jvgu gurfr punenpgref, urne? Fb fgbc jevgvat zr sna yrggref nyernql, lbh qhzonff trrxf!"

BX, V rknttrengr. Ohg vg ernyyl frrzrq gb or na raqvat jvgu ab cebzvfr bs n arj ortvaavat. N snveyl qrcerffvat raqvat gbb, rira abg pbafvqrevat gung V ernyyl yvxr gubfr punenpgref (zl snibevgr vf Xnlyrr) naq jbhyq ernyyl yvxr gb frr zber bs gurz.

Guvatf V yvxrq nobhg vg: Gur trareny ybbx bs vg. Evire orpbzvat n fhcreureb. Gur snpg gung vs zl genafyngvba vf pbeerpg 'cnk zvenaqn' zrnaf 'jbaqreshy crnpr', juvpu vf puvyyvatyl vebavp.

Am I the only one who's tempted to start using bits of relatively pronounceable ROT-13 in speech? For example, 'va trareny' means "in general" and is pretty pronounceable.

We'd have to agree on which bits to borrow, so we can memorize them, instead of having to picture the words in our heads and ROT them in order to understand what's being said.

I suggest we pronounce the 'r' as a flip when single and a flutter when double (a very frequent occurrence), which will make it sound more foreign, aid in the pronunciation of certain words, and get rid of the problem that in certain English dialects 'r' is not prounounced after a vowel.

We could call it speaking Guvegrra. Starter set of suggested words:

     (va) trareny

     lrf

     ab

     uryyb

     trrx

     snaf (a favorite word, because it's a Guvegrra palindrome)

     vafnar

For example, I might say "Ab, I don't think he's really vafnar. I think he's the trareny kind of trrx you get among snaf."

Does this sound like it might be ANY fun (as a sort of party game, not to use in everyday life), or am I just a vafnar linguist trrx?

Back from Lunacon (fun and relaxing). Fascinating Hugo gossip percolateth in my brain. Not caught up on this thread, and as this is Match Week I may never manage it.

I spent my brief logins this weekend watching in bemused fascination as my dance blog got linked to at a Jane Austen blog and went absolutely crazy - after about 2000 hits in the first two months, I've had 1000 hits in five days on a little piece of scholarly snark I tossed out in about 90 minutes last week inspired by....well, never mind precisely what inspired it. Utterly bizarre. Now I am trying to figure out how to make them talk to me and how to keep them coming back. (Note to self: blog about something in which I can mention Jane Austen on a weekly basis.)

The Sidelights "The disgusting Danielle Pletka of the New York Times" and "The New York Times Iraq op-eds made simple" have different urls, but appear to go to the same place. The first one is meant to go to a comment, I think, but is linking to the top of the post instead.

My friend-and-apprentice Anne just sent me a link for Jezebel's blog entries LOLcaptioning Vogue fashion pics.

It makes the models much less frightening.

-Barbara

Susan @ 320... blog about something in which I can mention Jane Austen on a weekly basis

"... Today's entry is not about JANE AUSTEN, but about..."

Susan @ 320... Of course, congratulations on your site getting increased attention.

I note that the Dire Legal Notice (right sidebar) is showing its age.

Admirers of coffee and of Agatha Heterodyne... In case you haven't noticed, the Foglio Family has made available a computer wallpaper of the 'Spark Roast' art to those who make a donation to their PayPal tin cup.

Speaking of coffee... Last Thursday, I had to work from home because of a plumbing problem on our floor. The mess was due to people who, after making their own pot of much needed brew, would toss the filter and its contents down the sink. They had been warned against doing this, but they didn't listen. And, yes, things ground to a halt.

Serge @ 326: I hope those miscreants were roasted by the rest of your colleagues. In fact, they should have been pounded by a briki until they were flatte on the floor.

Ginger @ 327... It was quite a dreg.

Serge @ 328: I'll bet it left a bad taste in your mouth. Java-na make some tea instead?

Question for folks who hang out in more of the blogosphere than I do:

Tip jars: acceptable or tacky?

'cause if I am ever going to have one, I really ought to get it up there this week while someone is actually reading. I'm all aboard on the pixel-stained technopeasant thing, but I'm also quite open to the idea of people rewarding my research directly rather than hoping that eventually it leads to them hiring me to do something for pay. But I want to be the sort of technopeasant who is respectably dressed and clean behind the ears, not one who looks like she should be hanging out in the meatpacking district late at night.

The only blog I read (of the, um, two blogs I read) that uses them is Daily Kos. So I don't have a good feel for the concept or its social acceptability. Thoughts/advice?

Susan @ 330... The Girl Genius siteuses the tip jar. So did Diane Duane's LiveJournal site when, after many requests from fans, she started writing a new novel in a series of hers. Sharon Lee & Steve Miller have also set up a tip jar for a serialized novel.

In other words, the answer is: no, not tacky.

#330 ::: Susan,

tip jars are fine by me. I don't use them*, mind you, but I've never minded their existence.

Could you put a link to your site in your "And your URL here" box when you next post? You mentioned people were showing up and reading stuff, but I don't know where that is.

*I buy comic books, t-shirts, jewelry, from the sites that I like that happen to have them. And I go to conventions and buy in person. E.g.: alpha-shade.com, girlgeniusonline.com, megatokyo.com

Susan,

I think tip jars are okay, and I've used them to send a little cash to people whose work I read regularly before.

Okay, totally random post, but I just absolutely had to share this:

one of those things that justifies the entire existence of the internet

Serge at 331: Are you thinking of the subscription link for The Big Meow or did Diane Duane put up a generic tip jar as well? Subscriptions are quite different, and in that particular case I'm rather annoyed that she hasn't finished the book after everyone pitched in.

More generally, I don't mind tip jars either, but canvassing sometimes rubs people the wrong way. I've also heard one rarely gets much money that way, people preferring to buy something tangible. I think it's better to think of a tip jar as an option for those who feel moved to thank you that way, than any kind of transaction or expected support. FWIW.

Xopher @ 319:

I don't know about fun, per se, but a challenging mental exercise, and pretty fannish, to boot.

I ran the 850 words of the Basic English core vocabulary (URL below) through ROT13 translation, and found some fun words.

I posted the translation table here

Personal favorite (though I now recall this being commented on before): green -> terra

Basic English vocabulary list:

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Basic_English_word_list

I spent my brief logins this weekend watching in bemused fascination as my dance blog got linked to at a Jane Austen blog and went absolutely crazy

Yeah, sorry, that was me. I couldn't resist after you specifically mentioned Mr Beveridge's Maggot as being inappropriate; I haven't read Austenfic in years, but I'm still annoyed by how many of the stories use things that were only in the 1996 adaptation as if they were canon, that being among them.

(Now, if only some kind Fluorospheran would post something I could link to that could shoot down the whole Col. Fitzwilliam's father being the Earl of Matlock thing, or if there were some way to discourage people from having Darcy randomly jump in a pond....)

Susan - I just saw the Renaissance Dance Database linked in an LJ post. Is that something you would find interesting? It looked like a site that would want to pick your brain.

Jennifer: gawds, don't apologize. You've done me a huge favor. Allison Thompson (a fellow dance scholar) also put it up on Austenblog yesterday, resulting in another huge wave of hits. This is a completely new experience for me.

I'm already making a list of more Austen-related topics and will try to blog about them on a regular basis. (Oh, noes! An excuse to watch Austen films!) Most of them won't have quite the snarky attraction, but hopefully Austenites will still find them amusing.

Ben 336: That's the entire Basic English vocabulary in ROT-13, right? I think maybe we need to start with the ones that are easily pronounceable...I mean, I can pronounce 'qryvpngr', but some might find it a little difficult! We can save the ones that sound like Kzinti for when we're a little more advanced.

Still, thanks for doing that. The cause of literary Guvegrra has been advanced! And I'm definitely adding 'gehr' and 'snyfr' to my vocabulary list.

Xopher: How are you pronouncing "y", though? So many sounds to choose from...somehow using the English (vowel) value just seems wrong, for this. After all, the rest of it doesn't look much like English--why limit ourselves?

(In looking at those words, I tend to go back and forth between the IPA [y], and interpreting it as if that letter alone were in Cyrillic, for some reason. "Some reason" possibly being because I've never been able to comfortably and consistently pronounce a high front rounded vowel.)

Jennifer 341: I've been using /i/ as in 'bit'. The trouble with using /u/ as in 'flute' is that what do you use for 'u'?

Susan - I don't think there's anything tacky about a "tip jar" donation button. I usually prefer to support webcomics and such that I like by buying merchandise such as T-shirts, but sometimes I just want to kick something in and don't particularly want some object in return. Another option some places use is a public Amazon wishlist set up so that people who want to express appreciation for your posts can just order you something you've been wanting. That doesn't take the Paypal "cut" out of each transaction.

It seems that, ahem, Winnie the Pooh is alive and well, and living in the Balkans. I have no idea if Eeyore, Tigger, Kanga, and Roo have been informed.

I did meet Christopher Robin in Alabama over the weekend, though.

Xopher @ 340

Yep, that's the whole thing. I'm going to add a pronounceability column and start sorting them when I have free moments. I also gave you access in case you want to play with the spreadsheet (and because I want to see how well Google docs handles sharing).

Jennifer 341: I'm sure you've tried a lot of things, but most people try to teach the /ü/ sound by having you "round your lips and say ee" or some such nonsense. I've gotten much better results by the reverse process; say "ee" and sustain it while gradually rounding your lips without moving your tongue. Then sustain that for a bit. Start over again. Repeat this until you can do it easily.

Then and only then, try going directly to the /ü/. If it doesn't work, go back to the "ee-ü" process. Once you can say the vowel in isolation, say it after a consonant (open syllable): pü, tü, kü; bü, dü, gü and so on. Then try it in a closed syllable, and you become Robert's niece.

Jumping right into putting it into a whole word before you get used to how the sound feels in your mouth is a mistake. Let me know if this helps at all, or if it's one of the many things you've tried and I'm just boring the fuvg out of you.

Fragano @ 344... Bears don't like Serbian turbo-folk music?

Serge #347: Apparently not. Stephen Colbert should be informed.

Joel @311: In all of those cases, the disaster-causing agent is a core part of the plot all along. The story comes to a bad end, but it's not an arbitrary surprise out-of-nowhere bad end.

Ditto for The Last Days of Pompeii etc.?

Hmm... how about Sigrid Undset's "Kristin Lavransdatter" trilogy, at the end of which gur Oynpx Cynthr ernpurf Fpnaqvanivn naq rirelobql qvrf? (Bxnl, abg *rirelobql*, ohg ng yrnfg gur znva punenpgre naq n ybg bs crbcyr nebhaq ure.)



Xopher @319: Back in the early 90s when I was hanging around alt.folklore.urban, I'd occasionally mutter "Furrfu" when exasperated. When the situation so required, this sometimes mutated into long drawn-out grumbles of "Furrfubar and grilled cheese sandwich islands (etc.)" in the best traditions of Word Association Football.

Julie L @ #349, "Word Association Football"

Please elucidate.

Carrie S@307

I tend to think that the "feel" of the situation in Firefly is somewhat like if the main states in both the North and South had combined against the Western states/territories.

Or (fittingly?) if current-day U.S. and China decided to combine (along with a few key allies) to conquer the rest of the world.

(Although the existence of long range nuclear weapons complicates the latter situation unless Russia, Britain, and France are among the "few allies").

Carrie S. @ 307 and previous Barrayar discussion (coming in a bit late 'cos we spent the weekend reorganising all our paperback fiction):

V nyjnlf gbbx vg gung vavgvnyyl Pbeqryvn'f ernpgvba jnf nybat gur yvarf bs: ur'f nyvir, vs vawherq; bs pbhefr jr ybbx nsgre uvz, gung'f jung frcnengrf pvivyvmngvba sebz oneonevnaf - ubj jr gerng gur zbfg urycyrff zrzoref bs bhe fbpvrgl.

Yngre, frrvat gung ur jnf rssrpgviryl n irtrgnoyr, jvgu ab erny shgher - gura fur erpbafvqref.

Vg'f nyfb jbegu abvat gung, hayvxr Neny, fur qvqa'g unir cerivbhf svefg-unaq rkcrevrapr bs jung shyy-ba qvfehcgre sver qvq gb fbzrbar. Fu qvqa'g xabj ubj gb qvfgvathvfu orgjrra, fnl, Xbhqryxn'f vawhel (erjvevat bs gur crevcureny areibhf flfgrz erdhverq, ohg gung'f cbffvoyr, va gurve gvzr naq fcnpr, naq guvf cbbe thl'f vawhel (uvture oenva pragerf jvcrq bhg).

Bar bs gur guvatf V yvxr nobhg Ohwbyq'f jevgvat vf gung fur cbvagf bhg lbh unir gb znxr lbhe qrpvfvbaf jvgu gur vasbezngvba lbh unir ninvynoyr ng gur gvzr, naq gung n "evtug" qrpvfvba vfa'g arprffnevyl gur "orfg cbffvoyr" qrpvfvba - ohg gung qbrfa'g zrna vg jnf jebat (frr Neny'f pbzzragf gb Zvyrf nsgre Zvyrf fgevccrq bss gb oernx gur qrnqybpx ng Ynxbjfxv Onfr).

Fragano @ 348... Once again I find myself noticing that Reality is a Mel Brooks comedy.

A propos of #350, and to quote the lovely S. Brust, writer of fine Firefly fanfic to the gentry:

Word association footballs to the wallflower bedroom eyes-

of the world war one by wondering who it is she cries

-streams of salt and pepper hair brain schematic circuit fuse

-(er, something mumblemumble)stream of consicousness blues.

Damn - used to know the whole thing. I can only blame the heat.

Linkmeister @350: This works better as audio, but here's the original transcript.

Linkmeister 350: Word Association Football.

(This is a very strange page. Explaining the joke takes a lot of the humor out of it at first, and then, as it continues, interjects a whole new level of meta-humor which I believe is entirely unintended. Also, our annotator censors out the last line, which he disregards as unnecessary, but is in fact the punch line to the whole joke. Allow me to explain: the narrator, despite his seeming level-head thoughtfulness, is revealed through word association to be a seething mass of anger and resentment. Ha-ha! Comedy. Uncensored version.)

On preview: Pipped by Julie. But the link I found is too bizarre not to share.

Thanks, both of you. I thought I knew most Python skits, but I hadn't heard that one.

At #255 as it's not a play I'm just taking the opportunity to mention one of my favourite books: Barbara Comyns' Who was Changed and Who was Dead. Following a catastrophic flood a village is afflicted with ergot poisoning causing all kinds of shenanigans. From the ingenuous young narrator's point of view the things, including deaths and a miscarriage, that happen to her family and circle of acquaintance have essentially benign effects. A deliciously macabre book,

Serge #353: In which I am never played by either Marty Feldman or Cleavon Little. This is wrong.

Fragano @ 359... How about being played by Peter Boyle?

Xopher @ 319: "Am I the only one who's tempted to start using bits of relatively pronounceable ROT-13 in speech? For example, 'va trareny' means "in general" and is pretty pronounceable."

This sounds like way too much sha. It's gehr, va trareny I'm opposed obscurity simply for the sake of obscurity. Ubjrire, I have a weakness for ROT-13.

I think there might also be a use here for concealing profanity. Can you think of anything more fun than saying, "Okay, jung gur shpx is going on here!?"

heresiarch 361: Or "We're supposed to do WHAT? Shpx gung!"

Sha sha sha!

Ginger@290, OK, I'm wiping drool off my keyboard. Where do you work and are they hiring digital engineers?



moderate intensity magnets, if repeatedly visited (like weekly) will wear out basic (wire-based)electronic technology



Erm, I'm trying to think of a single example of any electronic gizmo that wouldn't have silicon in it and be purely wire based. A simple battery operated flashlight with a glass bulb (not LED) and mechanical switch is all I can think of off the top of my head. I would assume the field messes with semiconductors and permanent magnets (like in power tools), but not copper wires. But I've never played with huge

electromagnets.

Well, actually, it's an electro-nuclear-magnet. It's the next inevitable phase.

Re 312: Whedon's music

Mr. Whedon has in fact, written a musical called "DOCTOR HORRIBLE'S SING-ALONG BLOG" (!):

http://whedonesque.com/comments/15781#216963

(quote)

During the strike I started writing a musical intended as a limited internet series, 3 episodes of approximately 10 minutes each. Writing with me was my brother Jed, his fiancee Maurissa, and my other brother Zack. To my shock and surprise, we finished it. To my greater shock and surprise, we managed (with the help of many people I'll be praising at length soon) to drag it into preproduction (yes, just as DOLLHOUSE was given a start date two months away and all my comics were due.) And today, after a grueling week of writing everything ever while trying to be a producer, I got to start shooting. A musical.

This much I will say: It's the story of a low-rent super-villain, the hero who keeps beating him up, and the cute girl from the laundromat he's too shy to talk to. And I'm having the time of my life.

"DOCTOR HORRIBLE'S SING-ALONG BLOG"

Neil Patrick Harris.....as Dr. Horrible

Nathan Fillion..........as Captain Hammer

Felicia Day.............as Penny

And a cast of Dozens!

(unquote)

I didn't even know NPH (as opposed to PNH) or NF could sing!

NPH had a run in Rent. Presumably he can sing.

Xopher,

That's the sort of news you don't get in the antipodean colonies.

I'm not even sure we have had a run of Rent here (Sydney). If we did, it certainly didn't feature Neil Patrick Harris.

(d'oh, checking Wikipedia I find it was here only last year)

Yeah, I didn't think Sydney was a backwater, not to have had Rent playing at some point. It even ran in Los Angeles, for Dionysos' sake!

Neil Patrick Harris was also in the Broadway revival cast of Sondheim's Assassins

My memory of Brave New World is that the question of automation was explicitly discussed. In fact, my memory is that it was discussed in a very strange way, which I've never quite decided was a blind spot of Huxley's or a clever commentary about a blind spot of the society's.

It's toward the end, when Mond is talking about the true foundations of the society, and describing various experiments. In one experiment, he says, they tried to do without the intellectually stunted lower castes. But, he said, that experiment failed: the Alphas fell apart because they couldn't handle the boring low caste work. In another experiment, they tried using automation. But that experiment failed too: without any work to do, the low caste workers felt useless and unhappy.

The obvious question, at least from my point of view, is why they didn't think to combine those two experiments. But nobody in the book asked that question. I don't know whether Huxley thought it was as obvious as I did. Maybe from his point of view the whole world of that book is so monstrous that even asking whether it could have been better is beside the point.

Susan, tip jars are okay with me, particularly because standard makers don't make t-shirts big enough for me to wear. But a wishlist would be good, too.

The "The Indie Rock Album Cover Generator" side thingy is, indeed, uncanny. If they could figure out a way to automate the photoshop process and make a "generate random album now" button, I might actually freak out a little bit by the uncanniness of the whole thing.

For any Arrogant Worms fans, Cap'n Tightpants makes a fine singing appearance on the Semi-Conducted DVD version of _We Are The Beaver_. Well, on the extras bit, right at the end.

Neil Patrick Harris also played Toby in the SF Opera's 2001 concert version of Sweeney Todd, which is available on DVD; ISTR a claim that Sondheim considers his performance to've been among the best for that role.

Brave New World struck me as a violent reaction against the worship of the god of capitalism going on in the US. Henry Ford is an object of worship in BNW. The people are encouraged to consume, to throw away and consume more. The caste system is an outcome of capitalism allowed to run to its natural conclusion. Family is replaced by assembly-line wombs, no parents to raise children. People are conditioned to be apathetic, to not care about anyone or anything, to not want for anything other than what they were born into and what they already have. Conditioning and drug use are the government's approach to controlling the population by instilling them with a real sense of apathy, a lack of caring. The only time the population is enflamed into action is when The Savage throws their drugs out the window.

I think his portrayal of sex is sort of like what happens when a non-computer-engineer writes about computers. Sometimes they can think of ideas far outside the envelope, and sometimes they can come up with ideas that are just a reflection of their lack of understanding. The sex in BNW seemed to be his way of saying it was yet another aspect of how impersonal the world had become, that sex had lost all meaning, and was nothing more than a hedonistic act. However, one might look at BNW now and sense some century old attitudes coming through the story, maybe he believed in abstinance, save sex for marriage, and then only for procreation, and all that. But i think while he may have done the equivalent of having the moon being made out of cheese, I think his point of sex to the point that it has lost all other meaning is a valid concern.

As far as his representation of drugs, I don't think the issue was the use of drugs, it was that the government was using drugs and other forms of conditioning to train people to be passive, to accept whatever the government, the system, and life, gave them.

He's very much a Nurture instead of Nature sort of guy. It isn't genetic engineering going on, it's conditioning after a person is born that molds them into whatever caste they are destined for.

But mainly, BNW seems to mostly be an essay against capitalism and consumption, and everything bad in BNW's dystopia is an outcome of allowing those two ideas run unchecked until they create the Brave New World we see in the story. Henry Ford becomes a god, and the world is divided into assembly line workers and captains of industry. Conditioning is used to reinforce these castes, and to encourage consumption for all the production going on.

The thing is that BNW was written after the stock market crash that started the depression. It was written in 1932, which would have seen the gods like Henry Ford in the midst of the Great Depression. So I'm not sure what the point was of simply saying "Unchecked Capitalism doesn't work, see?"

Wikipedia says that BNW was written in response to H.G.Wells' utopian story "Men Like Gods". So, maybe BNW was little more than Aldous Huxley looking at HGW and saying "Nyuhuh!"

KateTheLurker @ 364... Nathan Fillion as Captain Hammer?

With 9-inch nails that come out from between his knuckles? Who, besides frequently defeating Neil Patrick Harris, must deal with the giant mutant-destroying robots called the Sentinails?

Xopher @319:

I only use "furrfu", and that only among coworkers and other computer geek types who'd be likely to know it (and where it got "popularized", if you can say that about it). And the problem I'd have with pronouncing rot13-d words is that I'd tend to pronounce a u-less q in Sephardi / Arabic fashion....

Greg London @363:

Core memory, but somehow I don't think that was the intent. Also, while these days ASICs are all the rage, discrete-component electronics still can occasionally be found and designs based on standard ICs wired together are a bit more common.

That said, the real point is that if you have anything (wire, circuit board trace, etc.) which isn't Faraday shielded and is brought too close to a large, changing magnetic field, it will feed quite a bit of current to whatever it's attached to. Even ASIC-based devices tend to have wires or traces to connect power and controls — and there are usually leads inside the ASICs as well. Induction is "fun" stuff.

re: Doctor Horrible - my head almost exploded from an earworm going something like (sing-songy) "Doctor Horrible, Doctor Horrible, telephone call for Doctor Horrible," over and over. Moments away from 'splodey, I finally clicked on They Might Be Giants. I frantically skipped from track to track until I found "Someone Keeps Moving My Chair," and discovered I was substituting "Doctor" for "Mister." *whew* Earworm successfully defused, with minimal loss of life. Experienced posted here as a public service.

Serge @ 353, Fragano @ 359:

Someone's got to be Gene Wilder, though. I will volunteer myself for Cloris Leachman, and I'm sure we can find our Dom Deluise, Madeline Kahn, and other fine people around here.

"Well, it could be worse."

"What do you mean?"

"It could be raining."

Ginger @ 378... I guess I could be Kenneth Mars.

"Vee had better confeerm de fect dat Yunk Frankenshtein iss indeed VALLOWING EEN EES GANDFADDA'S VOOTSHTAPS."

"What?"

Greg London @ 363: I work at NIH, and you can check out the Federal jobs listed at USAJobs. Alas, don't expect anything rapid to happen. Ever since the Upper Echelon decided to centralize all support services (in the name of efficiency), our HR has gotten a lot slower and much less effective.

As geekosaur said, anything not shielded will have induction problems. My hearing aids have wires in them, and the newer digital ones still have circuitry. Too much exposure to magnetic fields and they wear out sooner. Now I let the techs run the scans and keep my head away from those Gaussian lines. ;-)

Serge @ 379:

It's FRAHNKEN-Shteen. Victor Frahnkenshteen.

I am now working with someone named Igor. I have to refrain from calling him "Eye-gor", as I'm sure he wouldn't understand.

Xopher 346: I'm sure you've tried a lot of things, but most people try to teach the /ü/ sound by having you "round your lips and say ee" or some such nonsense. I've gotten much better results by the reverse process

You're right, I had people attempt to teach it the first way. I'll try working on it the way you suggest, and see what happens. I eventually did manage to get ö[1], after all, so there's no logical reason I can't manage ü as well...eventually....

[1] Or close enough to where I've stopped worrying about it, at least.

KateTheLurker 364: I didn't even know NPH (as opposed to PNH) or NF could sing!

Yup. Saw him as the Balladeer in Assassins a few years ago; he's not bad. He's also done Cabaret, I believe, and was Toby in one of the Sweeney Todd concerts.

Suzanne @ 334... Wow. That was an unusual rendition of "Smoke on the Water".

Xopher #319, Ben #336 just to say that while checking out a rot-13 section of a post on another site, I discovered that "Snore naq Snore" means "Faber and Faber". (How exciting to realise that 2008 is 50 years after debutantes stopped being presented at court, and that someone has managed to write a book on't.)

Serge (#246, #302) Well, this MIDI-controlled 'singing Tesla coil' looks like the compact tabletop version (Apple's skunkworks equivalent will be working on a pocket version e'en now, methinks). You can find other small versions demonstrated on YouTube. I wonder if, in the tradition of calling smaller versions the female equivalent, those could be called "Heramonicas". A "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy" link there lead to my finding clips of people playing Ben Franklin's model of a glass (h)armonica. I've heard recordings before, but never seen what it looked like — not at all like I imagined.

And I agree with Zombie Feynman (must finish reading Gleick's biography, 'Genius).

Sam (#309) This brings back a twinge of memory. On my long trip away, a friend wanted to house-sit. He created a few problems in the house, some of which are only being remedied now, about 10 years later. He also used my wristwatch, an exotic mechanical analogue one with many of the features of electronic digital ones – I'd taken a simple cheap Swatch with me in case of damage, loss or theft – no worries if he took care of it. But he visited his girlfriend, who was working with the Sydney Uni Physics Department's NMR machine) &hellip <sigh> … it survived, with some help, but was never quite the same. One can still astonish people by showing off some of its unexpected abilities.

Juli (#313) I find nowhere anything about "Owl of Letters". I have no problems with any of the 3-link-containing entries I've found in recent ones from either Patrick or Teresa. Which are you referring to?

Susan (#330) Tip jars can feel a bit tacky, but I'm working through a very difficult process of getting rid of several households of collected stuff, and trying not to accumulate much more, so having a way of financially helping out or showing my appreciation without adding to my burdensome task is useful, and I'm grateful for the opportunity. Particularly if it's not blatantly shoved in your face, just tucked in a sidebar or suchlike with other elements. (My wishlists are disguised in my blog sidebar listing with a bunch of other things, and called by a different name.)

ethan, thank's for the recommendation for the album Raising Sand. I am enjoying it very much.

Serge #360: Maybe, just maybe. Perhaps even Marcel Marceau....

geekosaur 376: What other way is there to pronounce a u-less q? I assume you mean a pharyngeal stop, yes? (We can let people get away with subtituting /k/, but I think the Uvtu Guvegrra pronunciation should be pharyngeal. Or perhaps with mouth air, like the hooked k in Hausa.)

This is shaping up to be lots of penml* sha!

*I think this word should be pronounced PENmill mostly, and in formal Uvtu Guvegrra with no vowel at all (not even schwa; it's quite possible to go from /m/ to /l/ with no vowel between).

"He said 'Shiny beer, eh?' so I assumed he was a Canadian Firefly fan and started talking to him about the gorram beer, but he didn't understand a word I said."

"You dummy! He's a Guvegrrare.* He was saying he was having a good time, that there's 'fun all over'."

*goo-veg-RRAH-reh

Mez @ 384... agree with Zombie Feynman

...about string theorists, or about the MythBusters?

Do finish Feynman's biography. I myself did so 12 years ago. By the way, did you ever see the movie infinity? Flawed, but I liked it.

As for your musical links, I'm on a conference call right now and the rest of the team might not appreciate strange sounds emanating from my phone.

Me 387: On second thought, I'd better pronounce that PENmull, with a schwa, and similarly when a word is unpronounceable without an added vowel. I want 'y' to be /i/ ("ih") as in 'fit', 'bit', 'if', and using /i/ as a consonant separator might cause confusion.

Ginger #378: I certainly volunteer to be played by Dom DeLuise.

Mez @ 384

The Owl Letters Particle has vanished. It's possible that others had the same issue, and Teresa removed it. It's possible that the site-owner contacted Teresa and asked her to take it down, and she did. It's possible that I hallucinated the whole thing as a part of my ongoing mental breakdown, orchestrated by the Forces of Mischief, who are bored.

In any case, it's no longer there.

http://crookedtimber.org/2008/03/18/the-brick-moon/#comments

Discussion of the 1860s SF novella "The Brick Moon" - about launching an artificial satellite made of bricks, using water-driven flywheel power. Just plain weird. With a free PDF of the novella itself.

Hey, fellow midwesterners, Sarah Vowell is making an appearance in the Chicago area on Friday Night.

Serge (#389) Somehow mysteriously my addition in the comments box of "about Mythbusters" upon preview was lost. Need sleep. But first the preventative protective drugs.

Had third double dose of chemotherapy drugs over several hours earlier on, and need to get a few important things done before the reaction cuts in — usually it takes between 24 and 36 hours to start the worst effects, but then it lasts for quite a while.

Sad news about Anthony Minghella. I hadn't heard he had health problems.

Mez @ 395... My best wishes to you.

Mez @ 384... About the glass harmonica, I had the pleasure of listening to a live performance in 2006 at LA's worldcon. Neat.

The Singing Tesla Coil was awesome, going thru quotes from various pieces like Devo's Whip It Good and ending with the Charlie Brown theme. I am blinded by Science. Science!

Dang, I just hopped over here hoping to catch up on about 100 messages worth of prime grade ML illuminated discussion on Obama's speech today*

My first impression afterwards was that this was one of the most powerful speeches on race in America I've heard in my lifetime.

My second thought was realizing I continue to be amazed at how powerful his oratory can be. I knew going in to expect a moving speech and yet I was _still_ caught up in it. I like to think I'm a pretty rational, hard to bullshit geek, but he has this uncanny ability to disarm me intellectually with convincing, non-debatable positions while revving my emotional drama-o-meter.

Text and Video**

-------

* Yes, I was irrationally dismayed to discover my fellow Luminaries don't actually anticipate and then cater to my every intellectual whim. Hmph.

**No, I'm not an HP shill or regular reader even; it was the first site I thought of that would have both the text and video.

I just got an email from MoveOn.org, titled "Tomorrow: Vigil to end the war in Weehawken."

I didn't know there was a war in Weehawken.

Lance, I read the text of it and was impressed. I understand he wrote it himself.

Mez -- best wishes for good results and a speedy recovery!

mary dell,

Hey, fellow midwesterners, Sarah Vowell is making an appearance in the Chicago area on Friday Night.

ooh, lucky. i saw her in seattle last year & it was so much fun. man, i wonder when her new book is coming out. then i wonder when the audiobook of her new book is coming out.

Lance @ 398 -

Here's what I posted in another blog about Obama and Wright:

"Religion, and the overwhelming importance a segment of the voting public places on it, is the real issue here."

"While the constitution says there shall be no religious test for political office, we've long had a de facto one - you must demonstrate a measure of pious church-goin' before you can become president in our fair land. Thus, the off-the-wall meanderings of a pastor become faux important because, by God, if he's a "spiritual advisor", then that kind of claptrap must inform how the candidate will govern."

"Unmitigated BS! Obama, if he should be elected, is not going to govern according to the dictates or philosophy of Reverend Wright, and only a fool would believe that he would."

Xopher @399: The forces of all that is right and good in the universe declared War on Weehawken after seeing these morons.

Ethan,

and other musically-inspiringly-knowledgeable fluorosophers,

Could you help me make up a Play List for Someone About to Organize her office?

This could be songs, or bands, or online radio stations*, recent discoveries filled with win and shine, or a recovered example of long-lost arts.

Because I haven't been listening to enough music recently, and I'm going to be spending a few hours (realistically a day or three) Organizing Stuff in my office.

I'm thinking: Why not listen to nothing but new to me music, instead of my old CDs and predictable radio stations**, while organizing?

Of course, since I don't know any, if I try to research "the past 5 years of interesting music" that'll just be a time sink of procrastination.

If instead I listen to the music of the 'spheres, that will be filling my mind with niftiness as I box up my office chaos.

--------------

* To be played via my computer, which has ordinary quality speakers.

**1820s-1920s classical, 80s to early 90s once-was-indie rock. The local college radio station is not clear-channel, but even they're predictably unpredictable.

Kathryn @405 -

How about "In the Hall of the Mountain King"?

Peer Gynt

You'll be moving pretty fast at the end. :)

CNN has a banner saying that Arthur C. Clarke has died. No other information as yet.

Kathryn @ #405, I've found that Fred Clark's commenters on his music posts are quite eclectic and quite receptive to newer music. You might get some hints there.

The Beeb just added Clarke's death to its ticker too.

Joann at #407:

There's an Associated Press story on Sir Arthur Clarke:

Rohan De Silva says Clarke died early Wednesday after suffering from breathing problems. He was 90.

He was my favorite science fiction writer, and a huge influence on me. I will miss him.

Damn! Clarke was one of the best.

"One by one, the stars were going out."

the LA Times has it up

I see others were ahead of me; I just saw on a mailing list. Sad news.

Kathryn from Sunnyvale: "Morning becomes Eclectic", weekday mornings from nine to noon on KCRW.

NPR is reporting that Arthur C. Clarke has died.

R.I.P. Arthur C. Clarke.

Here's the Australian's article on Clarke's death.

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,23401053-23109,00.html

Bugger.

The 10am ABC radio news has also just announced the news of Arthur C Clarke's death.

Wikipedia is reporting his death as March 19, so for you in America, he has both lived and died in the future.

Rest him, and comfort to we who grieve.

The only fitting memorial to Sir Arthur will require an adamantine slab of proportions 1:4:9 interred deep beneath Tycho crater.

Stefan Jones #420: Either that or naming a space station in his honour.

The appreciation of Clarke's life.

NY Times obituary (Childhood's End spoiler warning)

At #423, Jon Meltzer points out:

NY Times obituary (Childhood's End spoiler warning)

("Otto Stapledon?")

Given Sir Arthur's age, I suppose this is one of those obituaries that has lain in the files for a long, long time.

The old-time fan in me finds some satisfaction in seeing that this is a very big story. It's in the top three on Google News as I write this. Science fiction has come quite a distance since young ACC entered fandom in the 1930s.

Here's Clarke's speech on the occasion of his 90th birthday.

Otto Stapledon?

Author of "Don't Forget the Middle Men" ...

heresiarch @ 304

I wonder how useful it would be to study the evolution of tech, which moves much faster, as a sort of hothouse version of biological evolution in order to observe in real-time processes that in biological time take millions of years. How well do the two correspond, do you think? Does intelligent design* substantially affect the process?



*On the tech side. Of course.

I'm interested in this conversation, but my schedule these days is weird and subject to abrupt change, so my replies are likely to be sporadic.

I think the analogy between biological and technical evolution is a useful one, but it's not a homeomorphism. The big differences are in the nature of the replicator (DNA for biology, and designs for the technical), and in the source of variation (recombination and mutation for biology, and innovation for technical). So it's hard to make a formal mapping between the two realms. But I think the histories of the two show fascinating similarities.

I think you can ignore the issue of intelligence in design by subsuming it into a black box that provides variation. It may not be random, but then genetic variation may be stochastic, but it isn't purely random. There are so many factors affecting the fitness of a design that don't have much to do with how good, technically, the design is, that I think intelligence doesn't need to be treated as some sort of "X" factor that breaks the evolutionary process. If you think about it, the only way that "Intelligent Design" breaks evolution is that the religious ranters who espouse it assume that the intelligence involved is omniscient and all fore-knowing. Short of that, unforeseen consequences will always make an "intelligent design" less than globally optimal.

ajay @ 308

I would argue that the invention of caseless ammunition, allowing a 2 to 4-fold increase in the number of rounds per clip for a given caliber round, and allowing a substantial increase in cyclic fire rate* is more than a small increment in capability. If someone were to come up with a practical small-caliber explosive caseless round, I'd call that a massive increase in firepower.

* Which are already pretty high with modern full-automatic weapons. Fifty years ago 60 rounds per minute was standard; today 1000 is not uncommon.

I note from the literary divination thread (which I am resisting playing as I'm snowed under) that an ebobg is a Guvegrrare artificial servitor.

(I expect that when I get back to that thread in a couple of days time rot13 will look like gibberish again, rather than being semi-readable as I'm finding it at the moment)

Fragano writes in #420:

Stefan Jones #420: Either that or naming a space station in his honour.

He'll have to get in line. Fifty years of Space Age passed, and only now has someone launched a spacecraft named for Jules Verne.

Clarke wrote some big and glorious stuff, but my favorite story if his is still The Star.

Xopher @387:

Yes, pharyngeal stop. I'd also argue that, while there might not be an English schwa there, there is definitely a Hebrew sh'va.

Stefan Jones @420:

Or better, at the center of that odd patch on Iapetus.

Via the sidelight, I went and made an indie CD cover. I wish I knew something about typography, and that I had Illustrator on this machine.

I counted almost 30 pieces of spam from him.

It always amuses me, in a sad way, that people can get away with it, generally. It's not happening in my Lj, because I have to approve non-Lj comments, and I get sent copies of all new comments.

But if all people let it sink uwept, unhonored and unsung, then it wouldn't happen.

Oh, well.

Bruce Cohen @ 426: "But I think the histories of the two show fascinating similarities.

One of the most fascinating similarities, I think, is that they both seem to go through periods of turmoil and equilibrium. In both, a relatively successful strategy is discovered which overwhelms the competition, then is tinkered with over multiple generations with increasingly minor improvements. A relative stasis is achieved, until yet another breakthrough occurs. The theory of punctuated equilbrium holds for both. In fact, the idea of punctuated equilibrium illuminates fields as diverse as politics and basketball. I like ideas like that, that seem to have an almost fractal applicability--no matter what subject or sub-subject you home in on, there it is again.

"There are so many factors affecting the fitness of a design that don't have much to do with how good, technically, the design is, that I think intelligence doesn't need to be treated as some sort of "X" factor that breaks the evolutionary process."

No, it certainly doesn't break evolution, but I wouldn't want to put it in a black box--rather, it's exactly what I'd want to study. For instance: are there more or less brilliant leaps in technological development than in biological development? Does the ability to conceptualize the problem allow for more flexibility, or does assigning meta-meaning to particular structures cause rigidity in design? One of the most amazing things about biological evolution is how limbs created for one function end up serving a completely different one. Would an 'intelligent' designer ever turn fins into fingers, or fingers into wings?

Open thread dump since I know there are LJ users here and more widely the "how to manage online groups, especially content generating ones" topic pops up frequently and is quite relevant to ML.

LJ aka SUP these days has been screwing up again. They're stopping letting people create non-paid ads-free accounts and also had a go at censoring the most popular interest list (taking out stuff like bisexuality and depression) although the interests are back now in the most popular lists.

As a response to all this there is a boycott planned on LJ for next Friday. I.e lets not create any content for a day kind of thing. I have no idea how many people will be taking part in that but the % might go up if this interview with Anton Nosik circulates widly enough.

The interview in Russian

A Translation

The contempt he has for the LJ customer base is just mind boggling.

Every damn time LJ does this sort of thing, I plan to migrate to another platform, and every damn time my inertia stops me. I really want to do it this time.

Anyone have any opinions about options? There are about three or four similar platforms that are heavily fannish, or I could migrate to something more like Blogspot. I don't really participate much in the conversations that the LJ clones do so well, so even though there are several choices out there, I'm not sure that's my best plan. I've been using the thing mainly as a journal*, going back and re-reading posts to remember when I did what, so tags are a must-have.

Easy import of old LJ entries would be nice, and integration with Flickr even more so. I might be able to host something on my own server space, but I'm not positive what space, if any, I have. We probably have some included free with our internet plan, but I'm not sure.

*Imagine that.

I'm impatient and went searching in Google on leaving LJ - I think I'm gonna go with a Wordpress blog unless someone has a compelling argument in favor of another choice. Sorry for the "please do my work for me!" post.

Bruce Cohen @#426, Heresiarch @#435

Yet another demonstration of why I love this place.... I agree with both of you, in that "intelligence" as an agent of change can indeed be either black-boxed, or analyzed in itself... depending on exactly what issues you're concerned with.

To me, the most striking difference between "engineering evolution" and the natural sort is the question of scale in time and space.

Human design represents a rapid "computational" analysis of both the problem and the context -- what do we want this to do, and what constraints do we have in making it do that? The transition from "old" to "new" designs may well include incremental changes, but the special feature of engineering is the ability to shove the whole problem through the "gray box" of intelligence, and come out "immediately" with something whose new features can be taken from any aspect of human knowledge.

In contrast, evolution is "everywhere local" in both time and space, but also "everywhere parallel", likewise in both time and space. Every new change needs to emerge from some individual point, but there are an awful lot of such points available.... and they add up. Likewise, the individual changes involve small changes on the genetic level... but those can yield large results, because non-linear effects rule not only development, but "life in general". Those changes add up too, over both space and time, and they accumulate into a "green box" that looks almost computational, at least from a distance.

Picked up a great SF short story from Boing Boing this morning titled WikiHistory. Given our fondest regards for the subject, I thought it'd be appropriate to share the link.

Re: Engineering vs Evolution

I do a lot of software design/architecture work and the most striking similarity for me between engineering and evolution is the pervasive and constant struggle to maximize survivability in a changing environment by positioning along two axes: adaptability vs stability and generalization vs specialization.

(Sorry for any incoherence; I'm in the middle of my coffee and newsreader ritual and really just meant to post about the ha-ha funny I just read)

Xopher @ #387, geekosaur @ #431:

Pharyngeal stop? You're sure you don't mean the uvular stop, [q]? Pharyngeal plosives are incredibly rare, & don't even have their own IPA symbol. (There's a recording here; just sounds like a glottal stop to me.)

(I won't be joining you in trying to pronounce ROT13'd English. It's exactly the kind of thing I'd normally enjoy, but it seems like the first step on the road to reading it without a converter, which would defeat the entire point.)

Tim 441: My understanding was that the stop in question was pharyngeal. I'm talking about the Classical Arabic sound that begins the word "Qur'an", not the glottal stop in the middle of it. There is no pharyngeal stop in any Indo-European language, which may explain its omission from IPA, but I believe it exists in Arabic. Perhaps in modern colloquial (as opposed to liturgical) Arabic it has become a uvular stop?

I don't know enough about Semitic languages to speak with authority on this; could someone who does please clarify?

In any case, either pharyngeal or uvular should be acceptable even in Uvtu Guvegrra (which is not, despite some resemblances, a Semitic language), and in informal Guvegrra even /k/ can be substituted.

There is no pharyngeal stop in any Indo-European language, which may explain its omission from IPA, but I believe it exists in Arabic. Perhaps in modern colloquial (as opposed to liturgical) Arabic it has become a uvular stop?

According to Wikipedia (yeah, I know, but on the "boring" sciences it's pretty good), the sound at the beginning of "Qur'an" is a voiceless uvular stop/plosive*.

Poking around a bit appears to verify this, but I don't speak Arabic.

*: I note that I remember this because only yesterday I was looking for examples of various sounds to use on the Glossotechnia cards I've been putting together, suitable for printing on make-your-own business cards. :) When I have the challenge deck done, I'll put it all together as a PDF; in the meantime, sentence suggestions for the challenge deck (or rather subject and predicate suggestions) are welcomed.

Carrie: It's a data point, though as you observe, "authority" and "Wikipedia" aren't usually in the same sentence unless disjoined.

This "Phonetics of Arabic" (PDF) lists q as uvular. Can't vouch for accuracy, but at least it's not Wikipedia.

I wonder where I got the idea it was pharyngeal? OK, uvular it is. In Guvegrra, I mean.

Wooooo-hooooo! I got my tor.com beta-tester email! It's from somebody called "torbeta smith." Check your spamtraps!

When I got the email, my first thought was that Torbeta Smith would be a great character in Resnick's Frontier series.

Particles: "One Can Only Imagine."

The fact that all the occurrences of the word "Yama" are highlighted causes me to suspect this is what you're referring to. In that case, there's no need to imagine. Here comes The Yama Yama Man, which has been in my iPod for a year or so. It's even in the CDs I made to listen to while I wait for the iPod to come back from Best Buy's shop. Admittedly, it's not as great as That Mysterious Rag or Gasoline Gus and his Jitney Bus, but it's still good.

(Holy cow! There's a third side by Geeshie Wiley in here! I wonder if Crumb knows about it?)

Is it better to be a "Summer Girl/Boo Hoo Tee Hee Girl" or a "Boating Boy/Yama Yama Girl." I'm guessing the latter, but that's not based on much.

Geez, "Yama Yama Man" has words? I had no idea. How frightening. We were just dancing to an instrumental version of it Monday night, it being indelibly associated with Irene Castle and the Castle Schottische.

Come to think of it, though, I can only imagine what all the other Yama Yamas in the show are. And what the plot is, if there is one.

Cuidado, cuidado, cuidado, cuidado...

Looking at the description, I finally noticed that the show is based on "Incog" by Mrs. Pacheco. Googling on those two names gets me a number of very tangential references. One that seems like it should have been pay dirt actually reads like this:

12 THE SUNDAY HERALD: SYRACUSE. SUNDAY MORNING, APRIL 10. 1898. PO ml will bo offered will he something never seen :it tliat house or in this city. ON THE RIALTO anah" and ''A Virginia she tli3 Stock Company Will Produce''INCOG." A Bright in Comic Opera Hold Sway at the Grand the Entire General Theatrical News. In the death of America loses i--r v I that thai word j facelio'.i-ily. but it i that Mi-

I will bet a silk pajama

There is no yama yama llama.

My job currently requires me to watch lots of video clips. Advertising, bits of movies, movie trailers. Over and over, on different cable set top boxes.

Worse by far than the same old movies and old advertising: Recently encoded pieces of CNN Headline News.

Another damn missing college student. Exotic dancer sued over eye injury. Disabled boy's wheelchair stolen.

I swear, if there was a wood chipper in my cube I'd consider cranial insertion.

I prefer imagining it was an earlier version of Danielle Dax's "Yummer Yummer Man" (a creepy little gem.)

Stefan #454:

And the same old movies can be pretty bad. Or in my case, pretty same-old. I once spent a grad school summer testing circuit boards, including a magic video controller thingy that required me to test the LaserVision input/outputs. The only disk available was "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" and I must have watched it about 100 times, none of it in bits more than 15 seconds long. Could have been a lot worse, but still ... probably the best example of "familiarity breeds just plain boredom" that I've ever endured.

Kip W.: Come to think of it, though, I can only imagine what all the other Yama Yamas in the show are. And what the plot is, if there is one.

According to a June 16, 1908 review in the New York Times (PDF), it is a "merry and tuneful summer show" about three men who coincidentally look exactly alike (though one only does so because he is wearing a false mustache, in an attempt to evade an arranged marriage). The second man is engaged to a "laughing damsel," while the third is married to a "tearful woman" - presumably these are the "boo hoo tee hee" girls, respectively. Many cases of mistaken identity and wacky hijinks ensue.

I've got no idea who the Yama Yama girls are, though.

David Harmon @ 439: Very interesting.

Lance Weber @ 440: I do a lot of software design/architecture work and the most striking similarity for me between engineering and evolution is the pervasive and constant struggle to maximize survivability in a changing environment by positioning along two axes: adaptability vs stability and generalization vs specialization."

It seems to me that it's pretty easy to figure out short-term optimalities, and that it's also pretty easy to determine long-term optimalities. What's really tricky, it seems, is deciding how to balance the two. After all, long-term optimalities don't matter much if you don't make it through the next couple of days. Conversely, if you make it through the next few day, but permanently damage your long-term optimality, then you're still in trouble. It's an interesting problem, and one that tends to depend heavily on local conditions.

broundy, thanks! My persistence in looking up the plot lasted for about one Google page, and after that I began to question my commitment to the task. There's where the "three twins" comes in.

Hm. An equally cursory search on "Yama Yama Man" shows that I'm not the only one who liked the 78, that the sheet music is at Indiana University (the same place, I think, that has the piano-vocal score of the Fred Rogers LP "Tomorrow on the Children's Show" that I linked in my LJ today), and that a harmonica record was re-re-re-released as being by a mythical "Yama Yama Man" in the 50s.

David #439: Yeah, I'd say that evolutionary processes are one way of getting intelligent-looking, purposeful-looking behavior to arise spontaneously. Think about markets, or the immune system.

One reason I'd say some of the same conceptual tools of biological evolution can work for technological evolution is because designers normally can't see all that far ahead into what will be needed. When I'm designing something, I'm typically responding to a pretty transient set of constraints, in a very specific environment. In twenty years, most likely my design will be long forgotten. But if it's not, it will be in a completely different environment, with completely different constraints. That isn't quite the same as the blind mutation and drift of evolution of genes, but it's got something in common with it.

One thing that's very different is how often a good solution in one area of technology just gets ported everywhere. Bruce was talking earlier about MRI and CAT scanners using discrete Fourier transforms. Efficient FFT algorithms are so amazingly useful that they've been ported all over the place. Similarly, microprocessors are so useful that we've redesigned stuff like car engines and air conditioners to use them. And there are a lot of similar examples. Technology still has a certain amount of inherited decisions from the past, but human engineers often just do the equivalent of saying "Okay, so these bats are pretty cool with their sonar and all, but these critters would work better with some feathers. And these primates need bigger brains, but that's causing them to give birth to babies before they're done otherwise. Hey, how about a pouch?"

joann @ 456... You think that a movie made in 1986 is old? I now feel positively ancient.

FYI:

The MSF (Medecins Sans Frontieres) has a program in Amman, Jordan, to operate on Iraqi kids with facial disfigurement and similar problems.

Read more here.

Donate here.

Addendum: The MSF donation page has a 'give anonymously' option, which hopefully will prevent a deluge of junkmail seeking more money.

I had a longish post with a whole bunch of responses, and my browser ate it. :-( Not even going to try to recreate it; I'll just continue from where I'd gotten to in the thread.

Greg, #371: I was mightily amused that one of the band names on the sample covers was "Ryman Auditorium" -- because I've been in that building!

I not only got my Tor beta tester email today, I also got one from Amazon.com telling me that my long-delayed copy of Teach Yourself Old English has shipped. Yay!

Lance Weber @ 398: It was a great speech, both reassuring and inspiring. While its ostensible purpose was to address the question of race, it was also a much broader discussion of Obama's theory of change--it was targeted at his critics on the left as much as those on the right.

It's been a running debate on the left what the hell Obama's rhetoric about unity and change really means. There's been a large amount of disagreement over how much of it springs from genuine liberal beliefs, and how much is senseless, feel-good Washingtonian blabble. This speech should end the debate. With this speech, Obama has placed himself firmly within the context of progressive and liberal politics. Unity, to Obama, isn't figuring out where the majority lies and running towards it. Rather, it making the case for what he believes in as widely and persuasively as possible in order to create a new unity, centered around progressive principles. When Obama talks about change, it is this leftward shift of the American conversation that he is referring to. While one can disagree over how effective his strategy will be, one can no longer in good faith question his commitment to liberal principles.

Addendum: Interesting article on Obama's speech and communitarianism

Albatross @#460:

Agreed on the "total redesign option" and somewhat on the "limited view" aspect of engineering. (Engineers have much better memories than evolution does!)

One thing that's very different is how often a good solution in one area of technology just gets ported everywhere.

Not completely different.... Even in biology, certain themes (eyes, wings) get reinvented over and over again, while others got invented early and "locked in". And of course, individual species can certainly run wild! (Kudzu, rabbits, humans, etc.)

There may be an analogy there, between invasive exotics, and "disruptive" technologies that change the playing field. In any case, there's one category of biological innovation that does get "ported" easily: Symbiotic bacteria, such as those providing cellulose digestion or nitrogen fixing! For that matter, biologists have been finding surprising amounts of lateral gene transfer among plants and insects, courtesy of viral and bacterial hijinks.

Kip @ #459:

The sheet music for "Yama Yama Man" is all over the place; take a look here. The recording I use is fairly recent - maybe 1980s. I can ya-da-da-dah the tune in my sleep, I've heard it so often.

The scary thing, of course, is watching Ginger Rogers perform it...

heresiarch @458: It seems to me that it's pretty easy to figure out short-term optimalities, and that it's also pretty easy to determine long-term optimalities. What's really tricky, it seems, is deciding how to balance the two.

I'd challenge that it's much more difficult to make good (ie survivable) long-term/strategic decisions because they often can only be made once, while short-term/tactical decisions can usually benefit from course corrections and do-overs. Of course, bad decision making on either front can spell disaster, no question.

@466-467: Ah-hah moment. I don't have a lot of insight into the left-farleft sides of the discussions, thanks!

And AGAIN I miss something by one day! I bought a TV from Best Buy last night. It was a floor model, so at least I know it wasn't a box of shower tiles.

Lance #470:

One problem with designing for the future is that you often don't really know what the future will look like, what uses the future will find for your gadget or service. I wonder if the guy who founded FedEx had any idea how many people would use it to get birthday, anniversary, and Christmas presents to family members "just in time." It's clear that the late Gary Gygax[1] didn't think he was inventing a general way for people to interact with computers/online. I don't think K&R ever expected C to become a general-purpose development language.

Cryptographic hash functions were designed, originally, with a specific set of properties (collision-resistance and preimage-resistance[3]), but wound up used in wildly varying places, often in places where finding collisions isn't a big deal, but other weird properties of the hash function are.

And like biological evolution, often something adapted well to one environment gets loose in a new environment, and takes it by storm. For all its opportunities for a programmer to hang himself, C is a really nice tool for writing programs.

Another problem with designing for the future is that even when you vaguely know what direction the future is heading, you often don't have a sense that your mechanism will still be around when that future arrives.



Think about Y2K problems, which were the result of lots of people knowing the two-digit date would be a problem someday, but not expecting that their code would ever be running anywhere by 2000. Think about the programming convention that made it hard to give programs on System/360 derived computers more than 2GB of memory. (The standard way to pass parameters to a function involved a list of pointers to the parameters; you recognized the last pointer in the list because its high bit was set; when this convention was established, there probably wasn't 2GB of RAM on Earth.)