Starslip

I recently ran through the Starslip archives. Totally worth a read. Often funny, but sometimes very touching. I'll show you a taste with bits of the Jovia storyline.

Spoilers ahoy.

Memnon Vanderbeam is in love with Jovia, daughter of the King of Jupiter. He saved them from an assassination attempt.


Later, a critical flaw is discovered in Starslip technology.


Eventually the flaw catches up with them.


Memnon starts the ships computer processing a Starslip path back to a timeline where Jovia lives, a process that will take many years. In the meantime, the storyline moves along. But every once in a great while, you'll get episodes like this:


Much later, the ship's computer tells Memnon that they can use the partially-computed Jovia path to end a war. Jovia would still have died, but the war would be over (or avoided). This would mean starting the calculations over from the beginning. Memnon refuses.

But later, when Deep Time sets a bomb to go off that will eliminate the entire timeline...


Like I said, worth a read.

V

Just watched the First-Look for the V remake (starts tomorrow), and I gotta say: I am underwhelmed.

There are so many problems here, I'm not sure where to begin. Yes, I know a giant spaceship filled with extra-terrestrials is not realistic, but I can suspend my disbelief on that. BUT, nobody is looking up until the thing is over a city? Really? It's presence comes as a huge surprise and nobody is ready?

That was a fine premise when the original V aired. These days, that shit would be all over Twitter before they got through the cloud layer, let alone navigated to the nearest metropolis.

(And of course there is also the problem of the terrible acting from 50+% of the characters we saw, but whatever)

So, bad acting + cheesy dialog + lack of realism? I predict blockbuster hit. And then weep for the state of society.

Bad Sci-Fi Warning

So, one of my classmates recently alerted me to a sale going on. Apparently, there is this robot toy. It's a scaled down version of a robot developed for the military by a defense department subcontractor. There's just one, and it is heavily discounted for some reason.

WHERE have I heard this premise before? Oh, right, EVERY HORROR-SCI-FI MOVIE EVER.

Update: Apparently, the robot is named SENTINEL. Duh duh DUH!

Tuesday's Missing Mug News

Hey Phoenix, why aren't you enjoying a nice hot cup of coffee?

I don't have my coffee mug.

Where's your coffee mug?

I don't know; it disappeared.

Did someone take it?

I don't know! Maybe? I looked everywhere.

Who would take a mug with your name on it from the community kitchen?

I DON'T KNOW!

I bet you're longing for some coffee though, am I right?

YES!

Thieves are awesome!

Snowmageddon

Just got this e-mail from my boss:

Fellas,

Due to the absurd amount of snow (National Guard is in Cheney helping to get rid of it), campus will be closed on Monday 1/5. We're tentatively opening on Tuesday 1/6. Be sure to call the snow line at 359-SNOW or check out the emergency Web site @ http://www.ewu.edu/x4801.xml on Monday to see if we'll be opening Tuesday. Stay safe and see you next week sometime.

J

It's no secret that the Spokane area has gone snow-crazy. Saw this on the national news:

Spokane finished December with 61.5 inches of snow, far eclipsing the previous one-month record of 56.9 inches set in January 1950. Snowfall records in the area have been kept since 1893.

We've gotten more snow in one month than we usually get ALL WINTER.

And finally, if you haven't seen them already, Tycho* has had a couple of great snow-related posts as of late:

First:

Spokane has many faults, chief among them that it is the source of all human woe - a cleft in the wounded crust of the world that grants Satan and his twisted lieutenants easy access. But one thing you do learn there, other than the ability to create a tourniquet from your own intestines, is now to drive properly in the snow. We're snowed in here in Seattle, and not because you couldn't get around out there, but because driving in the snow with Seattle natives is like NASCAR in slow motion. It's not worth exposing yourself to those people, so you stay home. Even the sidewalks aren't safe.

Second:

What I said about the residents of Seattle vis a vis snow was true, but shortly after I said it we received the kind of snow that one might be genuinely skeered of, especially in a town that owns no snowplows. We drove to Spokane after our flight and all others were cancelled, and things are an order of magnitude worse here. The snow is so high that there's no other interpretation: some god (or fraternity of gods) is trying to erase this wicked land.

Happy Everwinter**, everyone.

*Tycho is great, and I am jealous of his way with words.

**Tycho again.

Grad School II

How to tell when you're ready for Grad school: When you realize that you've had all the sleep you're ever going to want to have.

Grad School

Stay Of Execution

The start date for the Large Hadron Collider is now September 10th. Plenty of time to live it up in the meantime! ^_^

1 Day Left

Again, just over a day until the LHC gets turned on and the world possibly comes to an end. ^_^

At least I won't have to pay off these credit card bills...

Large Hadron Collider is coming....

Not that the world is going to end or anything. I mean, probably not. Sure, some crazy people think that this will create microscopic black holes that will fall into Earth's gravity and feed on the core of the planet, growing exponentially fast until everything is part of it.^* How ironic would it be for our evolved intelligence to bring about our very destruction? Ha! But what are the odds that THIS is our Great Filter?

It is not far fetched to suppose that there might be some possible technology which is such that(a) virtually all sufficiently advanced civilizations eventually discover it and (b) its discovery leads almost universally to existential disaster.

• Nick Bostrom (May/June 2008). "Where Are They?". MIT Technology Review.

Have a good night! ^_^

^*The great thing about this idea is that we wouldn't necessarily even know it had happened until shortly before the world ends! Of course, it's unlikely to happen. LHC-like collisions happen all the time in our upper atmosphere. So, if microscopic black holes were going to devour us, they should have done so already, right?<sup>++

++</sup>Of course, matter is much denser here on the hard surface of the planet. The upper atmosphere is mostly empty vacuum, actually. But, that probably won't make a difference. Surely all the scientists have already thought of that, right?<sup>**

**</sup>Right?<sup>][

][</sup>Man, I hope the world doesn't end before PAX.

Cheerful thought for the day

Out there in the Milky Way galaxy there's a lot of stars. Occasionally one goes nova, rarely supernova, as they explode. There is a sphere of very active radiation leaving such stars. If one went off in our vicinity, up to twenty light years away, say, all higher forms on Earth would be sterilised, at least.

More worrying still are gamma-ray bursters. Gamma-rays are very short wavelength electromagnetic radiation, such as x-rays. When astronomers managed to develop instruments that could detect such radiation , and put them in satellites, they discovered that two or three times per day the Earth is illuminated by an intense burst of gamma-rays coming from somewhere out in space.

So far, all the gamma-ray bursters we've seen are a long, long distance away. But one could light up anywhere. If a pair of neutron stars collapsed on to each other within a hundred light years of Earth, life might survive in the deep seas and the deepest rocks, but the rest of our planet would be dead.

And we wouldn't even see it coming.

Asteroids and comets give you a bit of notice. We have the capability, given a year's run-up time, to tackle small Earth-crossing asteroids now. We can see them coming and plot their arrival. But gamma-rays are electromagnetic: they travel at the speed of light. They could be on their way now: we couldn't know. As soon as we did know, we and our technology would be dead.

Terry Pratchett, The Science Of Discworld, p258-9, abridged.

Although the title is "The Science Of Discworld", it's really the science of our world. And it's fascinating. ^_^