E equals Coastline Paradox

Time to spin up the old FTL drive,  put a fresh coat of paint on your time machine, and get your texting fingers ready at the buttons of your subspace ansible or tachyonic antitelephone.  There are time-travellers among us, right now. There are already human colonies on other planets, too. Say goodbye to cause-and-effect, because the speed of light is no longer a barrier!

Seems the good folks at CERN, when not too busy blowing up the Earth of countless parallel dimensions*, have found the time to prove Einstein wrong about a little thing called Relativity.

Particles found to break speed of light

Finding could overturn laws of physics

An international team of scientists said on Thursday they had recorded sub-atomic particles travelling faster than light -- a finding that could overturn one of Einstein's long-accepted fundamental laws of the universe.

Antonio Ereditato, spokesman for the researchers, told Reuters that measurements taken over three years showed neutrinos pumped from CERN near Geneva to Gran Sasso in Italy had arrived 60 nanoseconds quicker than light would have done.

"We have high confidence in our results. We have checked and rechecked for anything that could have distorted our measurements but we found nothing," he said. "We now want colleagues to check them independently."

If confirmed, the discovery would undermine Albert Einstein's 1905 theory of special relativity, which says that the speed of light is a "cosmic constant" and that nothing in the universe can travel faster.

The article simplifies the details a bit, since relativity does make allowances for hypothetical tachyonic particles that can move faster than light, provided they always move faster than light and are impossible to slow down, and might possibly have to be massless (or even have negative mass). Basically, the standard model of physics breaks everything down into three categories: objects with mass which can only travel slower than light, objects without mass which can only travel at the speed of light, and objects that probably don't exist (but which if they did exist would constantly move faster than light and appear to be in multiple places at once). It's all about the mass, really, as the fundamental equations behind relativity just require infinite energy to accellerate anything with mass up to the speed of light. So unless your big booty is made up of exotic matter that repels gravity and zips around the cosmos in two directions at once, you ain't never going anywhere near lightspeed.

But now it turns out the neutrino, a known particle which definitely has mass (though very very little per neutrino) breaks those basic rules, bringing everything else into doubt.

Unless of course it turns out the real problem is something to do with an incredibly tiny error in our maps or the grid of global positioning satellites that tell us how far away CERN is from San Grasso. The article doesn't indicate whether or not they actually shined a beam of light to compare it against. It'd be a real shame if the biggest news in science in our lifetime turned out to be nothing more than instrument malfunction or the coastline paradox. We are, after all, talking about 60 nanoseconds shaved off a 500-mile trip.

But if they're not somehow wrong, then this is the big one. If neutrinos can move faster than light, it's a whole new ballgame.

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*: Why I'm no longer afraid the LHC is going to destroy us all when it gets to full power (1.21 Gigawatts, 55MPH) . I mean, aside from the fact that it hasn't yet, which is also pretty good evidence. 

I came to terms with the LHC thanks to Schroedinger's Cat. I'm sure we all know the experiment, where the cat is put in the box, along with a lethal mechanism that can only be triggered by radioactive decay, and the result is that the cat is simultaneously alive and dead at the same time, and the waveform doesn't resolve into one state or the other until you open the box and observe it. Provided the cat is wearing a blindfold, because otherwise it might, you know, observe whether or not it died. Which, when you think about it, you can probably observe that you're alive even in a blindfold. In fact, odds are good the cat can only observe that it's alive. If it's not alive, then it's not observing that fact, which means there's no one to observe the quantum waveform so it's not dead in the first place. (Though I am thinking vampire kittens in an undead quantum superposition that die if they look at themselves would actually be a great plot device for a really stupid B-movie somebody ought to make.)

After going around in circles for a while, the mind puzzles of the cat in a box settled down into the notion of Quantum Immortality. The idea that you will live forever, but only in your own universe, which is but one out of an infinite number of parallel universes (the Many Worlds Interpretation). Everyone else resides in universes where you do eventually die (but they don't). We are all The Highlander, we just don't figure it out till we hit 150 or so and start setting what are longevity records in our own little universe.  So take care of that body, because you're gonna be in it for a very long time. (Not to mention, you'll need it to be in good shape when The Kurgen shows up to challenge your geriatric self to a duel.)

Which brings me back to the LHC. Pretty much all the doomsday scenarios involving the LHC were in fact doomsday scenarios, not just inconvenience scenarios. Everybody buys it, as the earth turns into a quivering lump of steaming strange matter, breaks apart into a cloud of debris, or collapses into a black hole under the mass of the infinite matter from the future falling through the LHC's gaping time portal. In each of these scenarios, we all die. Which means there'd be nobody left to observe that we died, so therefore we're back to the position where we're not dead, or simultaneously dead and alive at the same time (a state you can avoid by simply unplugging your TV set).  That in turn means that the LHC can't go wrong, because the negative consequences would kill us all, and my consciousness by definition only exists in a universe where I am alive. That the LHC was largely an all-or-nothing apocalypse ensured it could only end happily.

I should be a lot more afraid of experiments (unlike the LHC) that only have the potential to ravage half the earth, or could release a plague that could kill everyone but me.... heck, maybe it's not that we're all The Highlander, maybe we're all I Am Legend. That would really suck. So, barring the slim possibility of the Earth being overrun by blindfolded vampire kittens and I am the only human left to open the canned food for them (a scenario I dread, but refuse to take seriously), I long ago overcame my fears of the LHC.

What to do in the year 2042?

A friend of mine sent me a link to an amusing timeline of the future (at XKCD). It's a window into what the future is "supposed" to be like, as predicted by Google searches starting with "in the year".

So, it's really clear to me what I'm gonna be doing in the years 2050, and 2069. Really no doubt in either of those years.  The less said the better.

But what to do in the year 2042?

2042 has no news! It looks likely to be the only boring year before the 2070s, and if I live to the 2070s, I'll be so damn happy to have made it that far I won't mind boredom. 2042, on the other hand, is something many of us can expect to live to see. If you don't want 2042 to be a let down, you should start thinking ahead now.

So, perhaps as a group, we should brainstorm. What would you like to be doing in the year 2042?

I figure by that time I'll be in recovery at the LEGO addicts halfway house. Most of my money will go to repurchasing my entire music and movie collections in 7th and 5th formats I've felt compelled to buy into. I imagine I'll do something stupid and Hitchhikers themed, just because it is '42. When that gets boring, I may just get around to building the Time Machine I've always wanted, or I may just wimp out yet again and leave the machine project to yet another future self. But beyond that, I don't have any real plans for 2042. My calendar is largely open.

Time Travel Degrades Audio

I've come to the inescapable conclusion that traveling through time in any manner other than our pedestrian "carried downstream by the current" method has some form of damaging impact on audio transmissions.

To illustrate, I'll discuss the three* best** Time Travel movies I've ever seen.***

• Primer. The best damn time-travel movie of them all, assuming you're not so ADD that you can't sit through a film without explosions. It's got a totally fresh take on time travel, and manages an amazing amount of complexity and internal consistency, both despite a tiny little budget. The size of the budget, however, manifests in the terrible sound channel in the first scene. The first of the five times I watched the film, I had to rewind the opening sequence again and again testing if my speakers needed replacing.
• Time Crimes. Another incredible little film, with a great plot and oodles of self-consistency. Like Primer, it totally sells you on the idea that this time-travel could actually happen, and this is what it would be like. It's a tiny bit less logical than Primer, but makes up for it with creepiness and car crashes. However, the original language is Spanish, and the English dub that the DVD defaults too is terribly grating ADR in a echo-chamber. Great film, but only if you speak Spanish or don't mind reading subtitles.
• Twelve Monkeys. Okay, it's a much larger budget, and thus doesn't have weird audio problems. But the guys teeth talk to him, and I think that supports my thesis.

*: If I were to extend the above list beyond the top 3 time travel films, the next slots would be filled by Blink (which is actually just an episode of Doctor Who), Memento (which actually has nothing to do with Time Travel), both Bill & Ted films (which are parodies), in that order. Time After Time, The Lake House, the original Back To The Future, and three of the four Terminator films are also worth watching, in no particular order. Beyond that list, you're better off doing just about anything else.

**: As far as I'm concerned, the most important element of any time-travel story is the sensibility of the plotline. You have to believe that the characters (unless they are supposed to be screwballs, like Bill & Ted) actually understand the ramifications of being able to travel in time. In other words, the stupidity of "San Dimas Time" only works if you're telling a comedy - it's a dealbreaker if it shows up in serious Time Travel fiction. I can suspend my disbelief of "You invented a time machine", but I can't suspend my disbelief of "You're supposedly smart enough to invent a time machine, but you're too dumb to figure out the most rudimentary uses of the damn thing." This is of primary importance to Time Travel, and it greatly exceeds all other concerns of plot, story, directing, acting, characterization, etc. Even the rule of cool must take a back seat to this principle. In an action film, I can believe there's moments where you're acting faster than you can think. In sci-fi, I can accept that the interaction between species that evolved on different planets may be unpredictably volatile. Most of the time in most films I can accept that the main characters will make really stupid decisions in regards to thier lovelifes, but it'll somehow all work out in the end (just please put something else into the storyline while you're at it). I just can't accept that someone could invent a time machine, or get promoted to the Time Police, without understanding the implications of the technology. It's like being an auto-mechanic or a professional race-car driver - but not knowing how to use little things like the steering wheel, brakes, or seat belt.

***: I'd prefer to share with you anecdotes from my own Time Travel experiences, but I'm afraid that Further Information Is Not Available Here. The Continuum doesn't like me spoiling secrets Aquarian or Pre-Piscene.

Decent -quels

I recently saw the new Star Trek Prequel and the new Terminator Sequel.

They both have some minor deconstructionist elements that make you a little nervous while you're watching it. It'd be very easy for either of these films to go horribly awry. Thankfully, they didn't. Both are quite enjoyable.

They are both the sort of film that is enhanced by seeing them on the big screen with the big speakers, so that you can be immersed in the sights and sounds. If you haven't already, I'd say go catch them in the theatres.

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The new Star Trek film thrives off judicious application of the Rule of Cool. It has some flaws, but the majority is so enjoyable, you ignore them till the movie is over. Strangely enough, you do spend a lot of time noting things that seem broken, which later turn out to have rational explanations and thus were not worth worrying about.

Early in the film, you feel like they're breaking cannon and totally screwing up continuity. Don't worry about it. If you just sit back and relax, it'll all be explained. Not fretting over the details will make a for a more rewarding experience. Eventually, after the film is done, you'll realize a different plothole, but it's pretty much invisible while the film is going on, and it is not the illusory/imagined/explained-away plothole that you're likely to worry about while the film is rolling. So just chill. It's hard - I'd been told it resolves itself in the end, and I still worried. Maybe that fear is part of it's magic and appeal, maybe it detracted from the experience a little. Can't say for certain till I watch it a second time (now sans fear), which I eventually will.

On the topic of breaks with cannon, I'm going to discuss the spiffy upgrades that come from advances in movie special effects.

• Personally, I like the improved heads-up displays and control panels in the Enterprise bridge, and the cavernous feel of Engineering. It feels like Roddenberry would have included such things if the technology to do so had been there. The parts of the design they changed for this film are things that were dictated by budget and technology in the 60s.
• In contrast to that, I hated the change of phasers going from a continuous beam weapon to a particle / projectile attack. Star Trek already has Torpedoes, Phasers are an intentionally different from them. The original writers chose to have both a beam/ray weapon, and a missile/projectile weapon, as different tools in the starship's arsenal. While I feel some lattitude for updating the imagery should be allowed, I can't help but conclude that the change of a Phaser from beam to pulse is an alteration of the physics and technology of the setting. It's the only part of the film that didn't feel like a respectful reinterpretation of the classic - as though JJ Abrams (and company) just didn't "get" this one part of Trek, which is a shame considering how nostalgic the rest of the film is. It's a minor quibble, to be sure, but it made the combat feel less like Trek combat to me, and that annoyed me a lot more than the one small plothole they didn't resolve.

The film is, first and foremost, a buddy picture. It hides itself in the trappings of sci-fi violence and pseudo-science, but the film is all about the characters and their friendships. On that level, it's great. You already loved the characters, and clearly so do the actors, screenwriter, and director. Karl Urban's channeling of Bones McCoy is pure magic, and the rest of the cast's portrayal of iconic characters range from passable to intriguing to spot on.

Will you like this movie? That depends:

• If you're interest is just for an action-packed sci-fi film, you'll probably enjoy it.
• If you're watching partly because you enjoyed the Kirk-Spock-Bones dynamic in the good ol' days before they all got fat and wrinkly, then this lovable film will make you laugh and weap alternately and at just the right moments.
• If you thought the little exchanges between those characters at the end of every episode was the lamest part of Classic Trek, you're going to detest the latest incarnation.

Me, I loved it.

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Terminator Salvation, on the other hand, is not about feel-good moments with nostalgic characters. Instead, it's a serious and hard-hitting look at the ramifications of the Terminator setting. It's also the ultimate in time-travel self-consistency. Again, all through the film I was worried the plot was going to implode messily, and instead it tied up all the loose ends. Time Travel films are always fun until you get to the ending, when they almost always fall apart. This one not only holds it all together, it also goes a long ways towards buttressing the earlier films.

I realize I just gushed on and on about Star Trek, but I gotta say the new Terminator impressed me even more.

T1 and T2 have always formed a paradox when you consider them together. One says resoundingly that you can't fight fate. The other says there is no fate but what you make, and seems to alter the previously predestined plotline. This latest film clearly (yet subtly) picks one of those two paradigms to be true and then shows you that the other film actually reinforced it as well. It's masterfully done. As a big fan of time travel, I really appreciated the sophisticated and understated way they dealt with that.

The best part of that melding, however, is what they did with T3, the red-headed stepchild of the series. T3 has all kinds of flaws, but to some it's cannon and retcon's are rarely welcomed. This film largely ignores T3, but doesn't actively contradict it. They don't dwell on when Judgement Day happened. The HKs have similarities to those prototypes in T3, but clearly aren't the same models and owe just as much of their design to the sequence in T2. The film does show John with a red-haired spouse, but avoids saying her name prominently or commenting on how or when they met. You can decide for yourself if she's the woman from T3, and if the events of T3 ever happened. Choosing one way or the other won't really impact this film. That was a very clever dodge of a potentially lethal bullet.

As T3 demonstrated, one problem the Terminator scripts have always faced is technology. You're doing a big action film, so you want to use the showiest effects. It's a sci-fi film, so you want to include cutting edge science and tech. It's a sequel, so there's a perception that you have to bring some new twist or outperform the previous films. However, the plot involves time-travel, so you can't really justify introducing new tech without it trickling back to the previous movies. Balancing that paradox is hard. T2 pulled it off fairly well, by implying the liquid metal prototype was sent through time just seconds before humanity captures the time machine. Then T3 forgot that, pumped up the tech level again, and didn't stop to consider the ramifications of being able to remote-control any machine via nanites. So sad.

Luckily, T4 doesn't have that problem. Instead, it feels like a corps of engineers and gamers sat down to brainstorm all the logical implications of what we've seen of enemy technology in the first two films. There's a dozen new Terminator and Hunter-Killer models in this film, and they've clearly been in operation for at least a couple years when the movie starts. They're believable, they're consistent, and they make sense. There's a hierarchy as well, you can eyeball roughly which machines were from which generation of design. Not a single plothole or logic flaw. Yes, there's still the need to outdo the previous films, but you understand why Arnold and the Silver Goo get sent back in time instead of any of the new machines we see later. There's a lot of subtlety, plent of details that click together thinking about it after the film. Genius work.

My only complaint is that Christian Bale doesn't let you in. He's charismatic, but aloof. He's cold and hard, even though his character obviously cares about the human condition. Very intense and barely contained, and yet the camera captures little empathy for him. For John Connor, considering his disturbing past and knowledge of his disturbing future, that makes perfect sense. Yes, John should be embittered and defiant and resigned all at once, and utterly unlike the people around him. My complaint then isn't so much with Bale's performance in this movie, it's with the fact that Bale's performance is so similar in some of his other films. Like he was typecast because of Batman. Just the same, it's better than the weak-willed self-hating John Connor of T3, so perhaps I should quit my bellyaching.

With Star Trek, I wasn't sure if the uncertainty of whether they'd resolve the plotholes and cannonical breaks was a bonus or detriment. With T4, that worry clearly detracted from the experience, yet it was still awesome. Watching it again later, knowing that it all makes sense, will be more enjoyable. At the moment, I'm trying to decide whether it's the best or second best film in the Terminator franchise. Guess I'm gonna have to buy the DVD so I can watch them in sequence and compare. Which is okay - this setting left me wanting to GM in it, so I'll need the DVD for campaign reference.

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Which to watch? If you've got a one-ticket budget, and are trying to decide between the two films, I have some advice.

If you're looking for internally-consistent, tactically-sound, visually impressive sci-fi action, watch Terminator Salvation. It's got the tighter script, and a grittier feel.

If you're looking for a warm film with nostalgia and a touch of humor, go to Star Trek. It's got a couple minor plotholes, but it's fun and has enjoyable characters.

Every Series Should Have An Exit Plan

I've been meaning to write this since last Thursday. Honestly, I've been meaning to write it for several months, but until late last week I kept holding off because I feared they were going to screw it up. Even if I'd told you, there'd be no way you could have gotten up to speed to catch it while it was on the air.

Season 5 of Lost freakin' rocked like nothing else I've ever watched.
The four seasons before it were awesome, too, but the fifth was something special. I love the way the show reinvents itself every season. Spoilers in white text.

• 1st Season is about being a castaway on a haunted, monster-infested island full of psychopaths and con men, spiced with flashbacks about how everyone's life sucked before they crashed on the island.
• 2nd Season is about mad science experiments on the haunted island.
• 3rd Season is about the mysterious and creepy fanatics who run the island.
  
• 4th Season is about a war and rescue, and the flash-backs become flash-forwards.
  
• 5th Season is about time-traveling to the freakin' garden of Eden so you can murder God.
  

I kid you not about that 5th Season plotline. It just blew me away. It's a show known for it's bizarre mythology and surprise twists*, yet the 5th Season went way above and beyond even that reputation.

Plus we're getting answers. Every season of Lost raises about 100 questions, so at this point, 500 questions have been asked. Even sharing the questions here would be a spoiler. What's the Monster? Where'd the Polar Bear come from? Are they all dead? What's in The Hatch? What do The Numbers mean? How'd that Pirate Ship end up on the mountain? What happened to the Dharma Initiative? How come food keeps being dropped? What's with the giant foot? Who or what is Jacob? Charles Widmore? Why doesn't Richard age? What did Kate do with Aaron? Are Bernard and Rose going to be Adam and Eve? Are they the two corpses in the cave way back in Season 1? etc., etc., etc. The list goes on.

In season one, we got like 2 answers. In season two, we got about 6 new answers. season three about 18 answers, and I was starting to dispair that they'd never resolve anything, because I hadn't noticed the math of what was happening. Season four gave about 54 answers, which is when I noticed it trippled every season. And yes, season five answered more questions than any single season had asked, about 162 questions answered this season.

My faith has been resored. By my math, season six will answer 486 questions, for a grand total of 728 questions answered, but only 600 asked. The Age of Aquarius is upon us, my friends, and the path to true enlightenment lies with Lost. Watch the show all the way through, and 128 questions about your life and the nature of the universe will be made transparent to you. This is not some silly joke. It makes sense, because they fucking time traveled to the garden of eden and killed God! It's my new religion. In fact, I'm going to speak what once was blasphemy - I predict that by the end of the sixth season, I'll even prefer Lost to Twin Peaks.**

What makes all this possible is that a couple seasons ago, they got the network to sign a contract, giving them a guaranteed run of six seasons. Prior to that, the writers kept building up the mysteries, dragging their feet, and avoiding giving any answers. They didn't want the wind to escape their sales, or to jump the shark. Once they had that contract, they were able to work out an exit plan, and fine tune the rate of plot revelation. They were even free to resolve the entangled love triangles, and ditch the usual network-mandated-tropes. Season five could have just been more regurgitated Sawyer-Kate-Jack-Juliette angst, with everyone cheating on everyone else, because some jerk in a suit thinks that's what put butts on couches week after week. Instead, this season just made a nod in passing to the complicated back story between them, and then said loudly "they've grown past that". Thank you, JJ Abrams and company.***

Of course, one can only imagine what Twin Peaks would have been like if the network had signed a 6-season contract with David Lynch and Mark Frost and just left them to work their magic. Every serious series drama should be allowed to follow this model.

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*: In Zack And Miri Make A Porno, there's a scene where the cast is distracted. They should be watching sex, but instead they say something to the affect of: "I missed it this week. What happened?" "They're off the island. Then they're on the island again. I don't know what the fuck's going on." "I think they're in Hell." They're discussing Lost, and that's a pretty good summary of the 4th season, which was airing while Zack and Miri was being filmed. The first several seasons you spend a lot of time just wondering what the heck you're watching. Eventually it all comes together.

**: Unless they drop the ball. Time-travel is generally problematic in film and television, full of plot-holes and fridge-logic, so there's some tiny fear that some glaring flaw in the sixth season could still marr all that went before it. But if they keep it on the course that Miles (one of the characters) thinks it's on (namely, that the A-Bomb fulfils destiny and creates the time loop), they'll dodge that bullet. And even if they screw that up, they can still save it by just showing us a Richard flashback episode (that reveals his origin story to be Captain of the Black Rock ) and explicitly revealing that Jacob and that guy who played Adams in Deadwood are the smoke-monsters, or God and Lucifer, or Anubis and Set, or some combination of the three. And if they get all of this right, then, with tears in my eyes, I'll say that yes, it's better even than Twin Peaks.


***: Which means now I'll probably have to go catch his version of Star Trek on the big screen. Which, by the way, everyone tells me is much better than they expected.

CD-ROMs in the Ancient World

If I'm understanding his website correctly, this researcher in Australia claims to have proof that time-travelers from roughly the modern era went back to the ancient Mediterranean and (probably inadvertently) inspired the major modern religions.

This is the 1995 Ancient Civilizations of the Mediterranean multimedia CD-Rom produced and packaged by the French company Acta/Scala/E.M.M.E.

He makes a very interesting (not necessarily the same thing as convincing) argument that the listed CD-ROM, taken back in time, was actually not only the sun-disk of Ra, but also Moses's divine tablets. He further claims that the intro screens of that CD-ROM are accurately described in the first chapter of genesis, and shows pictures of CD-drives in ancient hieroglyphics. He even puts them in Joseph Smith's hands in the 1800s. Those pesky time-travelers!

I make no claims to the accuracy of his research or the conclusions he drew from it, but I thought surely I'm not the only one who would find it worth a couple minutes of poking around. Personally, I think he's stretching, but it makes for a heck of a read and an interesting line of thought. This is my favorite page of his site (so far).

The Greatest Earthquake Ever Known

With all due respect to Brad, he's wrong: Land of the Lost does not suck. Just gotta get that out there.

For that statement, as well as what follows, I'm only talking about the 70's classic Land of the Lost, not the 90s (?) remake version (of which I've only seen one episode). The classic is just that: a classic. The newer versions, I haven't seen enough of to judge.

Dissing Land of the Lost is like dissing Metropolis or Citizen Kane or Wizard Of Oz or Gone With The Wind or Casablanca or BladeRunner.

They all have faults, and seem almost cliche because of how often they've been aped. There's even one on that list that I don't personally care for. But if you're focusing on those faults, you're missing the point (as I no doubt did the one time I saw Gone With The Wind).

It's like dissing Warhol because the internet and the latest Photoshop filter lets us crank out similar work in under 5 minutes. (No, I've never met the people in the photo to the left, they came up in a google search. Presumably, it's not really a long-lost Warhol original like they sarcastically claim. No offense intended.)

Dissing Land of the Lost is like dissing Rocky Horror because Tim Curry and Susan Sarandon are capable of much more believable and emotionally gripping performances.

I will admit, the child actors in Land of the Lost do suck from time to time. But considering that they were frequently acting in front of a bluescreen, reacting to monsters that didn't exist (in an era where that was no yet the norm for TV or movies), they actually didn't do as badly as they could have. It was the 70s, after all, complete with bad hairdos, cheesy slang, and social dynamics that no longer resonate - the performances could have been much worse, all things considered. When's the last time a 12-year old convinced you they had a broken leg while limping around for two whole episodes? Despite 30+ years of progress, child actors still suck in most movies and TV shows.

Compared to modern technical expectations, the effects leave something to be desired. But the effects were revolutionary in their day, and pretty damn good for a weekly half-hour kids show in the 70s. Remember, this was before the era of CGI, motion capture, and digital color timing. It was all puppets, clay, and bluescreen superimposing.

On a related note - they only had three Sleestack suits. There's some incredible editing where they give you the feeling that the Marshalls are fighting off dozens of Sleestacks. I had to read it online to catch it - if it weren't for wikipedia, I'd still be assuming they must have made at least a dozen Sleestack suits. But if you watch carefully, it's all done with never more than 3 on screen. It's genius that they managed to present a community of hundreds just 3 at a time.

The concepts / ideas in Land of the Lost have never sucked. (Well, the "goodbye Rick, hello Uncle Jack" transition could have been handled better - but that was a problem of lawyers and agents, not screenwriters and directors.) The vast majority of the plots and concepts were and remain awesome. They were written by scifi luminaries such as Larry Niven, David Gerrold, DC Fontana, Norman Spinrad, Ben Bova, and Theodore Sturgeon.

Bonus: Here's a very thorough review of the DVD release by someone else who finds much to love about it.

Land of the Lost is also one of the seminal works of genre-crossing fiction, drawing on numerous disparate sources for reference and blending them into a single coherent universe. It was a product of the same thought-space that where Lucas dreamt up Star Wars and Scott discovered Aliens. Without Land of the Lost (and the "influence stew" style it embodied) we might not have Firefly or Lost. Sure, it was a lot less subtle (and less polished) than most of what followed it, but that's to be expected as time and technology progress and the state of the art improves with it.

In closing: To each their own - Brad will likely disagree with most of what I've said. :) To that, I offer one final defense: Whatever else you can say about Land of the Lost, at least the Sleestack's spines don't glow inexplicably when they get some. To me, that's important.

The Pitch for The Lesser Of Two Evils

I've got a new idea for a series. It's a little bit West Wing, a little bit The Prisoner, and a touch of Lovecraft. For the moment I'll call it "The Lesser Of Two Evils". I'll make it open-source as well (like The Gods Of Troy), in case any Hollywood producers stumble across this blog. All I ask for is acknowledgement in the credits. Here's the concept in a nutshell:

1st Season: A young idealistic person runs for the big office and against all odds becomes President of the United States. The season starts with the last couple hurdles of his campaign, and he's sworn in mid-season. We see him fight the good fight, a rockin' first 100 days in office. But eventually, he gets worn down and loses his defiant rebel spark. Not just the result of washington politics as usual, but for more sinister reasons. Much like Twin Peaks, the story starts out looking like a mundane drama but eventually pans open to reveal terrible inhuman monstrosities. Lovecraftian demons inhabit the hallowed halls of congress and the white house, and he must battle for the fate of his very soul, as evil can be so seductive. He lies (to congress!), he cheats, he bombs random nations, he sins terribly because the ends justifies the means, or so he tells himself. Plans even cross his desk to fake a terrorist attack upon the US to justify declaring martial law. The last episode of the season ends with him realizing his many mistakes and atoning by sacrificing himself to prevent the veil between worlds ripping open and unleashing the hordes of hell upon a largely unsuspecting populace. He dies a true hero.

2nd Season: Much to the viewer's surprise, we open to a shot of the President who gave his life in the previous season. He's much older now, wiser, more weathered. Somehow he survived his ordeal, and the world doesn't know how close it came to destruction. He's no longer in office. Instead, a close friend and confidant, perhaps his best friend, or even his wife, is running for office, and he's stumping for them on the campaign trail. We expect a similar set-up, as the first episode of the season parallels that of the first of the previous season. But instead, the campaign section just drags on. It never transitions to the white house - this season takes a noneuclidean path, as the same footage gets used again and again with only minor variation. It's like a timeloop has swallowed reality. Eventually, near the end of the Season, we learn it's not really the President we loved from Season One. It's not really the First Lady who stood by his side regardless of the supernatural entities that threatened him, nor the drastic measures he took to fight them. Both have been replaced by bloodthirsty Simulacra, horrible soul-less false-humans, designed to distract and divert the nation from the coming apocalypse. They've been completely co-opted by the very forces they tried to battle in Season 1. This season has no hero, and the ending is just a bitter tragedy.

Problem is, I'm not sure whether this plays better as horror-fiction, or just a documentary.

Help Me Grok Einstein

So, I get this much, no problem...

Time dilation itself is not the problem for me. It makes perfect sense to me 9 days out of 10. The other 10% of days I suspect it's an illusion, not an actual change in the rate of time flow, but I can suspend my disbelief and take it on faith. Not sure that's the healthy thing to do, but I can and do do it.



What really buggers me, however, is the Twin Paradox. If Adam hangs out at home while Brad travels far far away, why is it that they should age at different rates. Relativity seems to be saying to me that they both perceive the time dilation happening to the other, and thus it balances itself out for no net differential. Adam sees Brad aging faster. Brad sees Adam aging faster. End result, both people are actually aging at the same rate. Shouldn't that make sense?

But I gather that's not how it really works. If instead one of the observers in truth ages faster than the other, wouldn't that mean you have a way of verifying whether you are at rest or in motion at a constant velocity? If so, it violates one of the postulates of special relativity.

But all the explanations I can find involve rather complicated math or someone saying "it just does" with no attempt at explaining why at all. I don't want to spend 100 hours just trying to grasp the math. Yet I want to know why it stops being relative for both frames of reference. I gather it has to do with the Doppler effect, but no one wants to just say that - there's no simple summaries on the web, just stupidly dense jargon and math. If you can find something that explains (simply) why Adam and Brad don't actually age at the same rate despite both thinking the other is dilating, please share.



Animaniacs to the rescue. Oh, well now it makes perfect freakin' sense to me. Should have just watched that in the first place.

Free ≠ Free. (Edited/Expanded)

First a free summary/background... Jake on Free. Seth on Free. Wired on Free.

I find, personally, that I've been burned by so much freeness that really isn't, that I've grown skeptical of that word. Everything free comes with strings attached. The few things that don't have strings, generally don't advertise the fact they are free. Like, when Jake invited me to this here blog, he didn't say "Hey, I've got a FREE blog you could join..." Had he said that, I'd a gotten worried.

It's like free doesn't mean free anymore, it means "for the small price of a tiny piece of your soul you probably weren't using anyway" which goes doubly so since we live in the Land of the Free, and self-righteous center of the Free World.

From that Wired article:

At the age of 40, King Gillette was a frustrated inventor, a bitter anticapitalist, and a salesman of cork-lined bottle caps. It was 1895, and despite ideas, energy, and wealthy parents, he had little to show for his work. He blamed the evils of market competition. Indeed, the previous year he had published a book, The Human Drift, which argued that all industry should be taken over by a single corporation owned by the public and that millions of Americans should live in a giant city called Metropolis powered by Niagara Falls. His boss at the bottle cap company, meanwhile, had just one piece of advice: Invent something people use and throw away.

Disposable, like their freedom.

A few years of metallurgy experimentation later, the disposable-blade safety razor was born. But it didn't take off immediately. In its first year, 1903, Gillette sold a total of 51 razors and 168 blades. Over the next two decades, he tried every marketing gimmick he could think of. He put his own face on the package, making him both legendary and, some people believed, fictional. He sold millions of razors to the Army at a steep discount, hoping the habits soldiers developed at war would carry over to peacetime. He sold razors in bulk to banks so they could give them away with new deposits ("shave and save" campaigns). Razors were bundled with everything from Wrigley's gum to packets of coffee, tea, spices, and marshmallows. The freebies helped to sell those products, but the tactic helped Gillette even more. By giving away the razors, which were useless by themselves, he was creating demand for disposable blades. A few billion blades later, this business model is now the foundation of entire industries: Give away the cell phone, sell the monthly plan; make the videogame console cheap and sell expensive games; install fancy coffeemakers in offices at no charge so you can sell managers expensive coffee sachets.

So that's the dude to blame. Noted. Odd that a utopian anticapitalist would revolutionize the way big businesses fool / trick / addict the public. Consider him on my time-machine hitlist: King Gillete, feel the Frag.

57% Right Brain

I'm challenging myself here, because I generally hate these sorts of pigeon-holing tests. Some of you may recall my vocal (almost violent) outcry against that four-digit INFP temperment sorter crap in high school.

EDIT: Added the spinning girl picture. If you see it spin clockwise, you're right brained, anti-clockwise means left brained (or British), ante-clockwise means you're a spanner.

Oh well. I took the test that Brad linked to.

It said 57% right brain. That didn't surprise me - I would have guessed that I lean to the right side of the brain, but am overall fairly integrated and capable of using tools and processes from either hemisphere.

It was really weird though, in that the things it said about me in regards to logical, holistic, and random processing strongly contradicted me.

It claimed I'm terrible at spelling, which I'm not. I do make the same half dozen mistakes repeatedly. However, it's very clear reading emails, forums and blogs that I type and spell better than at least 95% of the internet. I note that my spelling has improved slightly in the past 6 months, and significantly over the past 10 years.

It also said I find geometry hard, especially geometric proofs. However, I aced every geometry class I've ever had.

It claimed I get the big picture, but am scared off by the details. While I am a big-picture visionary, I also believe the devil's in the details, and am quite capable of dissecting systems to hunt for the flaws of the mechanical minutia.

It put my logic as the lowest of my left-brain categories, yet I'm way more analytical than most people I know.

The test told me to trust my instincts, 'cause my hunches are usually correct but that I rarely understand the logic behind my intuitive leaps. In response, my gut tells me the test is a bunch of hooey. Maybe I haven't changed since leaving high school, after all.

You're not The Master of me

WARNING: Spoilers. If you haven't seen all of Season 3 of Dr. Who, stop reading.

Picking up from where I left off last post: last night we watched Utopia, an episode of the new Dr. Who that ended with The Master. The phone rang, and while Sarah answered it, I ran to the computer and started blogging. It was going to be a lengthy post about how happy I was, for I had squealed repeatedly during the scenes immediately leading to his big reveal. But the phone call ended up being short, and there was no way we'd not be watching those last two episodes right that moment. The interruption saved me from gushing in ways I'd soon regret.

Suffice it to say, I was a bit disappointed with this incarnation of The Master. He wasn't sinister or fierce, he was just slapstick. He wasn't suave or manipulative, he just had a machine. His insanity was visible from the surface, not churning deep inside and threatening to boil over at any moment. I guess they went too far in trying to make him a reflection of the current (and most recent previous) Doctor.

What I thought would be cool about bringing The Master back would be the subtlety of character interactions, and the possibility to end a Season with an all-too-human duel of wits, as opposed to yet another army of millions of cyborgs. I'd dared to dream that perhaps "Blink" was set-up to accommodate our brains to the way only timelords can battle. The revelation of Saxon as Master at the beginning of Sound of the Drums seemed to confirm that.

Instead, we got over-acting from a cartoon villain and his army of billions of cyborgs. The struggle was totally level, not a genuine time combat. The Master seemed a parody of himself. (Thankfully the injector gun, and the implications that the little torture droids were new-model Daleks, both proved to be red herrings.) The episodes were still good, but not nearly what I'd built them up to be. All in all, several missed opportunities on the part of the writers.

---

Oh well, at least I still have to be in awe of what a great job they do with foreshadowing. I love how clues to the big bad are scattered through each season, but it's never quite enough to really figure out what's going to happen. In that regards, their arc structure is terribly formulaic, yet it's beat me 3 times out of 3. Even going into the 3rd Season with my eyes open and looking for the clues, I didn't get it. I knew Saxon was evil from the second time they mentioned him (must have been episode 3 or 4 of the season), but I didn't honestly think The Master was actually on screen until about a minute before he produced the pocketwatch.

As much as I loved Buffy, I must say the Dr. Who method is superior to having 15 out of 22 episodes (per season) feature the same villain. Of course, what made Buffy so fresh was it's innovation. This "surprise! we foreshadowed it!" method will also grow stale if too many shows start emulating it.

Words in your Yet.

These are words you already know, but only your elders have used them all...

Frag (Noun): What you feel when the world you live in is no longer the world you remember. Left untreated it can lead to insanity, death and/or everyone else forgetting you ever existed.

Frag (Verb): To go back in time and change some aspect of a person's life so as to cause them Frag.
As in "So I hopped in my time machine, prevented their first date, and Fragged them both!"

Spanner (Noun): 1. A time-traveller, specifically one capable of moving through time without an external time-machine. 2. A member of the Continuum. 3. A wrench.

Chrony or Chronie (Noun): A friend or ally, especially one who is a spanner.

Gemini (Noun): 1. In incident or event in which you meet your self. 2. Your junior or elder self.

Slipshank (Verb): 1. To declare that you will one day do something, and thereby cause it to have already happened. 2. To bring something from your own future into your own past by force of will. 3. To get yourself an item by means of Slipshank.
As in "I needed a gun, so I slipshanked one, duct-taped to the bottom of my chair"
Warning: Slipshank causes Frag. It's easily cured Frag, but it's still Frag.

Yet (Noun): 1. Your destiny. 2. Events you know happen(ed) to you sometime, but you haven't experienced them.
As in "I slipshanked myself that gun, so going back and taping it to the chair in the first place is in my Yet."
Warning: Failure to complete events in your Yet causes Frag.

Frune (Verb): 1. To gather information by talking to other Spanners. 2. To gather information by traveling up the time stream and researching the historical records available there.

Cobweb (Verb): 1. To falsely plant information about an event or person, so as to create the appearance of them existing at a particular time, for the specific purpose of deceiving time-travellers or preventing a Frune. 2. To manufacture an event that never occurred for the express purpose of sewing confusion.
As in: "I didn't want them to know I was responsible for all the Freebirding, so I cobwebbed it."

Iron Man (Verb): 1. A dangerous attempt to Frune 2. To determine whether (and how) you survive the current dilemma by means of traveling into the future and checking to see if you're still alive then. 3. A desperate gambit in Time Combat.
As in: "After the cobwebbing, I did a quick Iron Man to make sure I lived through their retaliation - thankfully they don't kill me. For this."
Warning: Iron Manning does not cause Frag, but denying the items in your Yet that were revealed by means of an Iron Man gambit may. Many find it deeply disturbing to know the manner of their own demise.

Deus Ex Chronomachina

My friends can attest, I have a strong love for time-travel. And yet, a badly botched time-travel story can hurt the brain like few other things in fiction. And so I squealed, half with mind-numbing fear, half with delicious anticipation, when I saw the ad two nights ago for this -->


And it lead to a google search, with a few interesting results...

The Big List - links to 670 different time-travel movies and tv episodes. I got some giggles out of their harsh (and accurate) single-sentence reviews of Enterprise. Check out their 12-clock video review system. This is hosted, FYI, by the company that makes the Continuum RPG.

A year old BBC News article about The Antikythera Mechanism an intricate device found in an ancient roman shipwreck for tracking the movements of the planets and the moon. It's an out of place artifact, this technology shouldn't have existed for 1,000 years. Yet there it is. What else has been lost to the sands of time?

Spoiler Alert Wikipedia entry about the Terminator show in question. Says it was filmed in Albuquerque. Makes me wonder if that's the production that kept screwing up traffic so bad downtown back in January. I remember riding very slowly past some film crew several times at the beginning of the year.

Drying Tyme

I'm afraid I've got no pictures today. The canvas needs to dry. Yes, it's acrylic, and they pretty much dry in like an hour, but not this time. I'll be doing oils and oil-pastel over them, because I like it wet. I mean, I like the wet-on-wet effect of oils. (Free Bird!) And I like how forgiving they are. They let me fiddle. Tweak and modify. You can really play with them, (Freebird!) changing things up over time. Going back in and altering something you did the week before. But I want those strong background colors, and I don't want the foreground details to melt and muddy into them. (Freeberd!) So, I have to let it dry for at least 24 to 36 hours. That way the acrylic will have completely set up, and the linseed oil won't make it peel. The stiffer brushes won't scratch at the acrylic then, either, and (Play FREEBERD, man!) that'll let me really build up the... (FREEBERD! FREEBERD! FREEBERD!) ...build up the... something building... surface building... Will you please quit shouting "Free Bird"?! I'm trying to paint here, you freakin' artless tools of the mainstream! I'm trying to emote! And all you can do is drown me out with your slurry southern-fried mainstream jokequest! It's old already! It's freakin' old already! Leave me alone!!! You cannot fuck with this canvas! This canvas takes all it's equipment on the bus! (Play FREEBURD, MAN!!! FREE!!! BURD!!! FREE!!! BURD!!!) *Sigh* ...Only one way to make this crap stop.



...If I leave here tomorrow
Would you still remember me?
For I must be travelling on, now,
'Cause there's too many places I've got to see.
But, if I stayed here with you, girl,
Things just couldn't be the same.
'Cause I'm as free as a bird now,
And this bird you can not change.
Lord knows, I can't change.
Bye, bye, its been a sweet love.
Though this feeling I can't change.
But please don't take it badly,
'Cause Lord knows I'm to blame.
But, if I stayed here with you girl,
Things just couldn't be the same.
Cause I'm as free as a bird now,
How 'bout you?
And this bird you'll never change.
And this bird you can not change.
Lord knows, I can't change.
Lord help me, I can't change.
I can't cha-a-a-an-a-ange.
Lord, I can't change.
Lord, I can't change.
Gonna fly high,
Wanna free bird, yeah.
Free bird, yeah.
do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do
4 x 4 x 4
And we're climbing a stairway to heaven!
When I Say "Dance",
Inagodadavida, Baby.
This one goes to 11.
I'd like to say thank you on behalf of the group and myself,
And I hope we passed the audition.

It's Karma. My poor grandmother. We were in Sweden, summer of '90. Long hours driving through the Fjords. I was in the back seat. I had a walkman, with about 3 tapes. One of them had "Free Bird" on it. It was perfect music for just staring out the Diesel-Volvo's window. And I sang along. Softly, to myself, or so I thought. Until about 9 minutes into the 3rd consecutive rewind & replay, my Grandma turns around in her seat and says very sternly "I'll change you!"