Prosopopoeia

The final word on Gygax

2008-03-07T18:56:23Z

A Survey

2007-12-11T09:37:53Z

This is inspired by a news item out of the Bush administration, but to give any more details might contaminate the results.
Question 1: How old are you?
Question 2: Do you know what happened during the Cuban Missile Crisis?

Update: This survey was inspired by this (the third story down). The 35-year-old White House press secretary has admitted she didn't know what the Cuban Missile Crisis was. The significance of the ages is that if you're young enough it becomes a failure of research rather than of memory. I have mixed reactions to this. I know about the CMC despite not being an American and not holding any kind of public position, and at first I considered this a fairly shocking display of ignorance. But if she's gone this long without it coming up, you have to wonder how important it really was.

I Have Nothing Against Ron Paul

2007-10-28T07:10:24Z

But whoever's sending campaign spam to New Zealand in his name isn't doing him much good.

Robot Cannon Kills 9, Wounds 14

2007-10-19T08:14:24Z

There's an alarming story here. It's worth noting that most military robots are either unarmed or require a direct command from a person to fire. The only reason the anti-aircraft gun is an exception is that human reflexes aren't quick enough.

My first embedded video

2007-09-28T10:18:59Z

This is "Your Baby" by the Amateur Transplants. Safe for work, but still in extremely poor taste.

Link of the Month

2007-07-28T05:18:14Z

Planetocopia is a series of world building projects by Chris Wayan. Some of the planets he creates, like the ocean world Lyr, are traditional from-scratch alien planets, but some are strange alterations to Earth. For example, Seapole is Earth, tilted so that the poles are off Japan and in the middle of the South Atlantic. From there he extrapolates geography, climates, biology and cultures, in so much detail that he's discovered fictional seafloor geography, inserted into real maps for copyright reasons.
I found Planetocopia via Strange Maps, which does what it says on the tin.

Link of the Month

2007-06-28T09:43:09Z

Television Tropes and Idioms. This is a specialised wiki, concentrating on tropes in the media. A "trope" is something like the Magical Negro or Dressing as the Enemy, an element that occurs again and again in TV, movies, literature, or comic books. There's a formidable collection there, but still lots to add.

Tantalus

2007-06-19T07:55:05Z

You've probably seen this essay by Charlie Stross, on the plausibility of space colonisation. His argument is that it will incredibly difficult and useless. Let's assume he's right. Interstellar colonisation is impractical with today's technology and any new technology doesn't make it significantly easier. This isn't as radical an assumption as it sounds - we've had lots of amazing new technology over the last 50 years, but relatively little that's helped to bring SF predictions any closer to reality. So humanity is confined to Earth. Even manned exploration is ruled out by the same arguments.
Now, let's bring in this article about extrasolar planets, found via james_nicoll. It argues that we're within three years of detecting a planet the same mass as Earth and receiving the same amount of energy as Earth does from the Sun. The mostly likely candidate for the star it will orbit is Proxima Centauri, the same destination Stross uses in his essay.
It goes without saying that an "Earthlike" planet orbiting the closest star will send every science reporter in the world ballistic. Mass and insolation alone don't say much for habitability, the planet could be as sterile as a surgeon's blade. But it's fun to imagine what happens if the planet really is habitable.
The first response will be an enormous effort put into passive observation. We'll say the planet transits Proxima for ease of analysis. A few years of work would show us that the planet has ozone and methane in its atmosphere, unmistakable signs of life. It would also confirm the atmosphere is thick enough to shield against flares and keep the dark side of the tide-locked planet from freezing.
The next step is unmanned exploration. This would be a huge undertaking - the time needed to develop the probe might be even more than the decades it would spend travelling. But eventually signals come back from the planet and the human race has to deal with these facts:
There is a planet only four light years away from us, where human beings could stroll unprotected on the surface, admire the advanced animal and plant life, and maybe even start a colony if they could find a good reason to.
The probe that told us this is the size of Coke can, and the effort to get it there was as costly as Vietnam. Not the war, the whole country.
In the fifty years since the probe launched, technology has made staggering advances, but nothing has made interstellar travel any easier.
Therefore, no human being will ever set foot on the planet.
The planet would quickly become the most frustrating object in the Universe, at least to a certain subset of the population. It wouldn't help that it was only the unmanned exploration that enabled us to accurately calculate how impractical a manned version would be.

The Logo Solution

2007-06-09T00:24:19Z

The image above is the logo for the 2012 London Olympics. It has attracted a far amount of criticism, and one of the printable descriptions of it is a "broken swastika". But it's already cost a large amount of money to design, and taxpayers might balk at the cost of redesigning it. So I suggest they switch to the other 2012 London Olympics logo, that was also professionally designed by a British company. See below the cut, and click on the image to enlarge it.

Please Stop Sending Us Nuts

2007-06-07T11:51:03Z

I'm not a fan of Jericho, but this is still an interesting story of fan feedback.

Power it down!

2007-06-03T19:44:10Z

Not quite a Star Wars video. Via a blog commentator only known as "bloopy".

Link of the Month

2007-05-28T06:08:47Z

The Underwear Drawer. This is engrossing journal of Dr Au, a medical resident with a young child in New York. She's an anesthesiologist, and yes, she has heard that joke. Ignore the silly title and have fun. Check back in a month for the next installment.

A Terrestrial Planet in the Habitable Zone

2007-04-24T20:44:59Z

Here. It's a tide-locked planet of a red dwarf, only five times more massive than Earth. The article describes it as "habitable", which might be generous for a planet with 2.2g surface gravity.

I've made a huge mistake.

2007-04-06T08:37:32Z

Writing 7,009 words of background material has persuaded me that writing 50,000 words of it would only be useful if I was planning a ten-season TV series, or a Neal Stephenson-sized oligology, so I'm bringing this writing exercise to a close, a nail-biting 25 days short of the finish. I've now got material on 16 different star systems, if you count both near-future Earth and far-future Earth, and a clear idea of how my characters encounter each one. The basic idea is Starfarers meets Ocean's 11. I'll now spend some time revising the background and adding some numbers, so in the next 30-day month I'll be able to start writing the story itself.

InBaWriMo

2007-04-01T06:27:57Z

I'm currently fascinated by National Novel Writing Month, where people pledge to write 50,000 words in a month, presumably at a constant rate of 1667 words a day. This usually doesn't produce a full, publishable novel but usually represents considerable progress towards one, or at least gives valuable practice in writing. I'd participate myself, but none of my ideas are quite ready to be put into novel form yet. Plus the month is the November of each year, and I may well have lost interest by then. So I've decided to carry out a different challenge. I have the rough background for a story about exploring interstellar colonies with a lightspeed ship, originally inspired by a post by james_nicoll. I need considerably more detail on the colonies the characters visit, plus the culture they come from themselves. Therefore, every day from the first to the 30th of April, I will write at least 1667 words of background for the story, reaching 50,000 words by the 30th. I won't post all of the background here - it'll be far too long and not polished enough for public consumption. But from time to time I'll mention what I've been writing, and I'll post edited highlights if there's any interest.
Today, for example, I wrote 1672 words about Afis. This is an American colony, founded to preserve American values until the end of time, that runs into a serious problem that the United States itself has never faced. Although some of its major rivals have...

Stirling at a Glance

2007-03-23T04:11:32Z

If you've never read S.M. Stirling and are wondering whether his books might interest you, take a look at this map. It illustrates a particular book, but is representative of much of his fiction, for good or for ill.

Huge Star Trek Spoiler

2007-03-09T07:03:17Z

Here. It's not a spoiler for the characters, plot, or casting of the new Star Trek movie, but for something much bigger. Via, oddly enough, The Corner at National Review Online.
ETA: Spoilers are openly discussed in the comments.

Alpha Centauri

2007-02-20T09:43:09Z

One of the biggest cliches in SF is a habitable terrestrial planet orbiting one (or more) of the stars of Alpha Centauri. It's a cliche, not a mistake, because it's quite possible from a astronomical point of view. But the chance that any particular star has a planet conveniently in the habitable zone has to be pretty small. So what is likely to be there? The orbit of the two big stars seems to rule out Solar System type gas giants. Planet searches haven't found anything, which just means there's nothing bigger than Neptune in the inner system. So, if you were writing about exploration of Alpha Centauri and didn't have to tweak the probabilities to get a habitable planet, what would you put there?

Guess what I've been watching

2007-02-13T05:51:29Z

I'm now investigating how to have my TV automatically switch to mute when someone says "evolution".

Visitor Map

2007-02-05T20:57:58Z

Create your own visitor map!

Her and Barack, I suppose

2007-01-20T21:07:33Z

I've just been reading about Hillary Clinton's annoucement that she's running for President, and I've realised something that should have been obvious. She's the first presidential candidate I can think of who can campaign under her first name alone, with her campaign buttons all reading "Hillary for President", and not get confused with anyone else.

Adventures in Socialised Medicine

2007-01-19T07:50:57Z

I caught an odd story on the radio today - part medical, part political, and part linguistic. A bit of background first: New Zealand has an NHS-style public health system, including a pharmaceutical purchasing body called Pharmac that's infamous for driving hard bargains. This has now gotten into some trouble over adrenaline, the drug of choice for nasty allergic reactions, heart attacks, and so forth. The lowest bidder on the adrenaline contract had some manufacturing problems, so Pharmac have switched to an American supplier to prevent a shortage. Fine so far. Except that "adrenaline" is the British (and Commonwealth) term. If an allergy patient comes into the emergency department (not the "ER"), the staff will have to look for "epinephrine", the American name, instead. That it's just a change from Latin to Greek roots may not reassure them. To prevent possibly fatal delays, I propose that every New Zealand doctor should watch Grey's Anatomy each week, so as to become familiar with the US terminology. This problem is actually minor, compared to the potential problem that the British have with their diamorphine. This drug is used in the UK for pain relief in heart attacks, and might be difficult to get hold of under the American name, "heroin"...
ETA: I suppose I should provide a link.

We're not special - we're Japanese

2007-01-16T07:37:43Z

Heroes is full of annoying characters, pompous pseudoscience, and musty old action cliches. And, God help me, I love it.

The Controversial Redesign of Betty and Veronica

2007-01-01T08:26:56Z

I was skeptical about changing the appearance of such iconic characters as the Archie gang, but this picture has convinced me it's for the better. Via Beaucoup Kevin.

ETA: That was a joke. The new Archie characters (which will be confined to a miniseries) actually look like this, which I find much less interesting.

Guide for the Perplexed NZ TV viewer

2006-12-30T00:25:41Z

The fate of television shows created in the US this year and about to be shown on New Zealand TV. May also be useful for other countries as far behind as us. Thanks to the NZ TV guide and The Futon Critic.

3 lbs
What's it about? The neurosurgeon version of House.
What happened? Outright cancelled after three episodes.
What we'll see: Eight episodes produced, we'll probably see all of them due to the less ferocious ratings battle down here.

Men in Trees
What's it about? Ally McNorthern Exposure.
What happened? Still airing.
What we'll see: Everything.

Ugly Betty
What's it about? US adaptation of Colombian fashion-industry soap opera.
What happened? As popular as the other Colombian export to the US, and will last just as long.
What we'll see: Everything.

Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip
What's it about? Alan Sorkin's million-dollar weekly therapy sessions.
What happened? Feeble ratings, but kept alive but cabal of Sorkinists at the network.
What we'll see: At least a season.

Justice
What's it about? The evil defense lawyers from all the cop shows get their own series.
What happened? Even feebler ratings, but in limbo rather than cancelled.
What we'll see: 13 episodes.

The Nine
What's it about? Lost without the island scenes.
What happened? In limbo.
What we'll see: 10 episodes.

The Black Donnellys
What's it about? The Sopranos with better beer.
What happened? Hasn't actually aired yet.
What we'll see: Who knows?

Shark
What's it about? The lawyer version of House.
What happened? Still airing, and disappointingly popular.
What we'll see: Everything.

Heroes
What's it about? People get comic-book powers, don't become spandex-clad vigilantes.
What happened? Massive hit. Will last for years and get Broadway adaptation.
What we'll see: Everything.

Jericho
What's it about? Nuclear war mildly inconveniences several annoying characters.
What happened? Forehead-thumpingly successful.
What we'll see: As much as we can stand.