Antikythera Mechanism No Longer at Children's Museum in NYC

I was about to suggest to a friend that we visit it while we're in Manhattan next Saturday but when I looked it up it turns out the Children's Museum doesn't have it anymore. If you want to see a replica in the US, you should go to the Computing Museum in Bozeman, MT. Alas! Still pretty cool to think that this analog computer was built 2,100 years ago.

A Singularity Christmas

Get one of these cute AI toys and treat it well so they put in a good word with our coming silicon overlords.

A One-Way Trip to Mars Would Be Easier

This has been proposed recently as a way to accelerate a manned visit to Mars. An unexamined question is whether it would be easier politically for the world's large dictatorships, and I'm thinking of one in particular that has the money to do it, one which just passed Japan to become the second-largest economy on the planet. China has no shortage of people with difficult lives who a) would be disposed to going where the central government tells them, and b) might not even complain if they think they'll at least get a place in history, let a lone have a chance at personal independence. One of the costs of life being good in Western democracies is that people don't want to leave it; do you know anyone personally who would want to permanently leave for the Martian Jamestown? The people who came to Jamestown didn't leave England (and Poland) because things were so great back home.

You Wanna Hear About Frickin Supernovas or What

Then listen to this internet radio show featuring celebrated astronomer Ben Weaver from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

Pluto & Methane-Flavored Cupcakes = Delicious

To a certain reader I say: akana mukav, tut le devlesa. Classmate Kadee bet me that Pluto had blue methane snow on it, with the stakes being a cupcake (a tasty one, as it turned out.) It doesn't (look it up) but she wasn't satisfied about this until she had besmirched the name of our institution and medical students in general by bothering noted astronomers with this question. (Really, she really did email and harass these people. Shameful.) But it appears she has learned the hard way that you never go in against a Dutchman, when cupcakes are on the line!

But now that I have tasted blood I call on others who dare think they can match my astro-trivia wit! I will take on all challengers! But my first act will be to unseat the would-be Astro-Geek Boy-King, the one called Yang. I have heard the peasants speak his name in hushed tones, but I am not afraid! Bring him to me, and I will drive his livestock before me and hear the lamentations of the women!


Above: Yang the Terrible. He will not look so impressive once the topic turns to the subtle nuances of Kuiper Belt Objects.

Why Terminators Suck at Their Jobs

Cracked has re-visited this important issue, which I wrote about here slightly more seriously. Money quote: "Let's put aside all the doubts we've raised thus far and just accept that Skynet is a 'special needs' computer and is doing the best it can with what its got, bless its heart."

Alluding strongly to the Singularity, they add: "...not only did this one-sided war 'span over 30 years,' instead of the more expected 'one really shitty afternoon,' but human beings actually won out in the end."

Behold the Progenitors

Science Cheerleaders!

This is excellent. My Google News Alert for "science cheerleaders" finally yielded results, and boy was it worth the wait. These ladies will in all likelihood kick your ass, both intellectually and athletically. How exactly does one make an impression on a patent attorney/ER surgeon/cheerleader?

That Wasn't a Missile You Schmendricks

(If you heard about the supposed rocket seen off the California coast the other evening, you'll know what I'm talking about - otherwise don't waste your time.)

It was pretty unambiguously the contrail of an airplane, seen head-on. How do we know this?

1) If it were a rocket, it would have had to be the slowest rocket ever. Even from twenty miles away the launch at Vandenberg that I saw recently positively hauled ass into the sky.

2) People north and south on the coast from the sighting area didn't report seeing anything strange. Why? Because to them the same cloud would have looked like a normal contrail.

3) There were likely boats (fishing and otherise) closer to it, maybe even under it. Granted, we don't know if any vessels were in the vicinity. However, the fact that there were no reports from any boats (who might even have heard it if it was a rocket - rockets are loud) is another point off the missile hypothesis.

4) Similar things have happened before, and they were contrails also. (See the link at the end of this post.)

5) Yes, it glowed even after sunset. No kidding! That doesn't mean the cloud was burning rocket exhaust, it just means it was high up, just after sunset. When you're significantly off the surface of the Earth, you get sunlight after sunset. This is true even at the summits of tall, steep mountains. Ever heard of alpenglow?


Needless to say, "Cloud Not From Missile" isn't a good story, so it's not national news. If you still don't believe me, read this pilot's blog. He's even predicted exactly which flight it is, and a) invited the press to film it at the same time, from the same location, with the same weather conditions, and b) asked the chemtrails/conspiracy nuts to give him other evidence. Just a guess - the fact that people notice it this week might have to do with daylight savings.

So calm down dummies.

Your Daily Dose of Narco-Terrorist Metal

Breaking news: ¿El polvo? ¡Sí!



At press time, Brujeria would only add, "Cien kilos de la blanca", because they were busy matando güeros.

One Apparent Problem With Self Indication Assumption Arguments

At the always interesting Meteuphoric, Katja Grace says:

What the Self Sampling Assumption (SSA), an alternative principle to SIA, says depends on the reference class. If the reference class includes AIs, then we should strongly not anticipate such an AI explosion. If it does not, then we strongly should (by the doomsday argument). These are both basically due to the Doomsday Argument.

The Self Indication Assumption (SIA) is a compelling topic because it's a tool we can use to think about questions like the Fermi Paradox, not to mention our own future.

As a general rule (read: admittedly sloppy heuristic) - when an outcome of a chain of reasoning depends strongly on how we categorize the involved entities, that reasoning is suspect. This would seem to be a general problem for all SIA/SSA reasoning, although since Katja just finished her degree on exactly this topic, I would refer you to her if you want counterarguments to this suspicion.

Science Fiction in Tijuana

By Silvia Moreno-Garcia, in Expanded Horizons magazine, about the city 25 miles from where I'm sitting. I want more Mexican SF.

The Pro-Tools of World-Building

Celebrated science fiction author Marshall Maresca pointed me to online world-building tools. They are here and here. For good measure here's a real star atlas out to 50 LY.

I'm sure I'm not the only whiner, but doesn't such a tool take some of the fun out of inventing a whole new "known space"? There are several practical upshots for authors and maybe that's the appeal: you might have lots of settings you want to keep track of, and you don't want astute readers catching you in plot holes or continuity problems that you could avoid with a more comprehensive visualization of your universe. Or maybe you could build your story inside a world like Eve, and use that as a promotional vehicle. (Who knows which one would make more money and which would just be a funnel for the core revenue source. That would also presence interesting IP problems, and for all I know probably has already come up.) My concern is that such a program does seem like it risks genericizing science fiction writing to some degree.

I like science fiction or I wouldn't write about it all the time on my blog. But of course, we're just Spaniards writing about two-legged dragons in Patagonia and Baja California as an island of Amazons, and cities of gold in the interior. There's a reality out there waiting for us to find it that will (I hope) obviate all this literature one day, like Las Sergas de Esplandian. Let's build probes! Let's send them to exoplanets! Let's put smaller more chemically sophisticated probes down on Titan and Europa! Now now now!

Destroy the Earth

Here.

Good Metal Venues in San Diego?

If you know of any, please email me at mdcblogs@gmail.com. Cast Iron Crow will be playing down here and they're looking for suggestions. Thanks in advance.

Russell and Bashoo Both Hate Me Now

Twelve more syllables
To make this silly haiku
Self-referential

Estimated Earth-Like Exoplanets

F-sub-p is going down all the time, isn't it? If you're interested in this sort of thing, you've a. already read articles like this one and b. you're not that surprised. But then Fermi's question - "Where is everybody?" - becomes more insistent.



Possibilities:

1. They're there, but we don't know what to listen or look for. This is to my mind overwhelmingly the most likely possibility. Sub-possibilities:

1a. Long-distance electromagnetic communication is a temporary local optimum. We're already moving away from it here on Earth. Unless we catch aliens in the middle of their 1920s to 1990s period, we'll miss them.

1b. Once intelligence is achieved, replicators profoundly altering themselves is not far behind. Are you sure you would recognize even your own "descendants" five thousand years from now? Why assume we'll find a species at a similar "level" of development, even assuming such a term can have any meaning outside humans? (Referring to 1a above, it's a little naive to assume the aliens will have 1950s. Don't rely too much on Star Trek episodes of yellow-blooded humanoids which carry the assumption of nearly identical biological and cultural development.)

2. They're there, but we're not seeing them, because they're intentionally hiding. Once introduced into the galactic ecosystem, organisms either try to conceal themselves and effectively disappear, or disappear for real. Unless you happen to catch a newborn intelligence's careless birth cries, you won't hear anything.

3. Maybe replicator chemistry could be common, but intelligence is not. The kind of replicator chemistry that produces representational tissues (experience-generating nervous systems) and therefore tools that allow them to communicate or move across interstellar space might be a fluke. Sharks have been dumbasses for 400 million years and my money is on their not inventing algebra in the next 400 million years. Intelligence is only useful insofar as it helps things reproduce. Or, if intelligence isn't a fluke, a dead end, one solution Fermi did in fact consider. Life on Earth has produced intelligence once, and it's not clear that those organisms which haven't achieved it have any tendency to achieve it.

4. We've only been looking in earnest for a half century. Asking "where are they" is probably like me looking out my window in San Diego in 2010 demanding "if the Earth has glacial cycles, then why don't I see any glaciers in the canyon next to my house? There must not be any glaciers." (Similar idea here.)


In conclusion:

1. We should absolutely not advertise our presence.

2. If designed self-replicating machines are possible, then we should look for those. I predict we will find some in our own asteroid belt and/or Oort cloud. (Shorter version here.)

3. We should be building a fleet of small interstellar probes to explore those exoplanets right now.

Temprano Feliz Dia De Los Muertos

Here's your early 90s metal shot for the day: The Witching, by Meliah Rage, from Solitary Solitude. (Forgive the commercial, if they insert one.) And happy birthday to Chris D. who introduced me to these guys long ago in the Mists of Time, i.e. at the Flying Hills pool on a Walkman.

Star Blazers/Space Battleship Yamato, 30 Years Later

First off: there's a live action movie coming out in December (good). It's only being released in Japan (++ungood). Join this awesome Facebook group and tell your geeky friends if you want to convince a distributor that there's a market for it in the States. For once I want to actually pay to see a movie instead of shamelessly pirating it,* and they're putting obstacles in my way! After all, preparing for this movie is the whole reason I went back and rewatched, nay, studied the series and why I'm inflicting this blog post on you now.

If you don't already know the great Star Blazers/Uchuu Senkyan Yamato, don't waste your time reading this. It's a late 70s/early 80s Japanese cartoon, and although I'm amazed how mature some of its themes are, I think if you didn't like it as a kid, you're not going to start liking it as a grown-up. A friend showed me Buckaroo Banzai at age 33 and his theory about why I hated it, despite liking other extremely dumb things, is that I'd missed the "critical window", i.e. fourth grade. (Perhaps this is why seeing Ministry for the first time at age 34 was also guaranteed to be a bad experience.) As a further example: the same artist who did Yamato also did Galaxy Express 999, which I think is about the stupidest thing ever. I mean, a frickin train going across space? ("But Mike," you might object, ever the astute reader, "doesn't Yamato feature a frickin WWII ocean battleship going across space?" "That's different.") Which is to say, trust nothing that I say here, except for that sentence. All Cretans are liars.

So what do I notice about Star Blazers that I didn't notice as a kid?

1) I remember much of it crystal-clearly - in some cases actual lines of dialogue, or names of planets - but there are whole episodes or scenes which I don't recall at all. Case in point: I remember that they recognized something was strange about the planet Balan because the plants grew toward the ground, indicating no reliance on natural sunlight; I remember Wildstar ridiculing Nova for wishing on a hunk of burning hydrogen and carbon (and thinking that was cool); but I have no memory of Captain Avatar's struggles with his health. The ones I can't remember tend to be character-building sections. It's possible they weren't aired because they were thought by the syndicating networks to be too intense or just too boring, but it's more likely that at five years old I just didn't care about anything that didn't involve the wave motion gun and space fighters.

2) The music has aged very well, even beyond the ubiquitous theme song. (Click here and scroll down for awesome version of it.) Some of it sounds very 70s (the use of guitar wah-pedal and echo effects for creepy or mysterious things, for example) but most of it stands the test of time.

3) I was being funny in my post where I claimed all of the Star Blazers characters were meant to be white. For example: characters sit cross-legged when socializing, unlike Westerners. Cars drive on the left. "Great Island" and "dormant volcano on Great Island" could not more obviously be Honshu and Fuji (and when they show Earth, they zoom in on the northwestern Pacific). In the flashback where the young Derek Wildstar is talking to his brother Alex at the Academy, a clumsy dub leads them to declare their mother made them chocolate cake when it was clearly maki. This I can understand. 1979 America might not have appreciated that a mother could express her love for her oldest son love by sending him raw fish.

However - it says something about anime in general that a Westerner can watch these cartoons and not have the characters' appearance seem foreign to him. My contention is that this style of drawing minimizes differences between Asians and Caucasians, deliberately or otherwise. Note that Nova is blonde. Yamato was made before Japanese women were lightening their hair.

As an aside, I do concede that Sandor is Japanese. He's the smartest and most dedicated guy on the ship, he's extremely cautious and conservative, AND his eyes are noticeably smaller. Wait, you're offended? I'm sorry you lack the nuanced cultural understanding that I have evolved in my travels, and I refer you to Eddie Murphy, who (as in all topics) is a recognized authority on this matter. But in all seriousness, I can't tell you how many times some anime idiot has started lecturing me about some aspect of Japanese culture that according to him (always a him!) I would have trouble understanding as a white person. Living in New Jersey or the San Fernando Valley and being sixteen apparently provides a better education in this regard than one might have expected!


Dessler got himself elected governor of a prefecture. Good for him!
4) Derek Wildstar is an asshole in the first series. I don't mean he has a rebel streak, I mean he's actively a self-centered dick, particularly to his crew-mate Venture, particularly in light of the fact that he's willing to let his pettiness get in the way of saving all life on Earth. Again I never picked up on this as a kid. Watching the series as an adult, the focus on Wildstar makes it seem that Yamato is partially a bildungsroman about him, as he gradually takes on the Captain's role and grows as a leader and moral person despite his doubts about himself.

5) The obvious: much of Japanese film and anime has had to do with the after-effect of getting A-bombed and conquered. And this is not unreasonable; one might expect that your country getting hit with atomic weapons might later effect its psyche and artistic output. Star Blazers clearly fits this pattern, but with more revenge-fantasy than most such works. The Star Force builds an amazingly uber-phallic weapon which, after a great build-up, fires out a stream of irresistible white energy from the great meatus on the bow of the ship, destroying all in its path (the trigger pulled no less by Wildstar himself.) They install this weapon in the flagship of the Imperial Japanese fleet (!), given the ancestral name of Japan, and proceed to island-hop across the galaxy, the whole way fighting the barbarians with strange hair colors** who had attacked the sacred homeland of Earth. Fantasy re-fighting of WWII emerging from the subconscious, anyone? Much like the S on Superman's chest, you would think eventually the Gamilons would eventually resist the urge to engage the Yamato head-on. But then there would have been no wave motion ejaculations to set five year-old kids jumping up and down with excitement during the build-up, as opposed to the 36 year old medical student not wanting to admit to the same jumping up and down. Me? No, of course not, what a ridiculous thing to think!

Once they get to Iskandar, they blow up Gamilon, which it turns out they were going toward the whole time, in a Campbellian twist to the whole affair. One could think of the Comet Empire*** as the Russians, the new enemy to fear after the homeland has been rebuilt. This kind of national-historical allegory is most often done for Star Trek with the Klingons as Russians, the Romulans as Japanese, etc. The Romulans are more interesting as pseudo-Japanese than the Neemoidians of Star Wars, who just sound Japanese. Someone should do a table. Who else have Americans been besides Gamilons?

6) And speaking of that, the influence of Star Trek is obvious now - the ship as a character in its own right, the uniforms - but I'll credit Yamato with having more character development than Star Trek. The fact that the technology wasn't always 100% reliable made it more interesting too (which is also why I liked Enterprise better than any of the other series. That and T'Pol.)

7) The first series sorta kinda passes the Bechdel Test. For a science fiction cartoon in 1979, you have to admit that's not bad. Nova and Starsha have a conversation alone, a few lines of which involve Starsha's future on Iskandar and whether she'll come back to Earth with the Yamato - but that's right before they shade into talking about her love for Alex Wildstar, hence the qualifier. I do have to admit I find it strange that there are really only two female characters in the series, and they bear a strong resemblance to each other - on which fact the characters themselves comment.

8) In one episode the Yamato captures a Gamilon pilot. As Doctor Sane examines him, he reads off vitals and hematology statistics, declaring that they're identical to a healthy human's data. I had just finished taking hematology when I re-watched it and wouldn't have understood the information without looking it up before, so I found it funny (and impressive) that they included such technical information in a program mostly watched by kids.****


View Larger Map
The real resting place of the Yamato.

All in all, positive or negative, it's still the best cartoon ever made. I noticed how many of what I'd thought were at least unique combinations of science fiction ideas in my own stories (not yet published of course) were directly inspired by Star Blazers. The moving planet at the center of an empire destroying everything in its path, for example. Even the spaceships I drew all over my notes in junior high were really just Yamato rip-offs, whether or not I realized it.

Returning to nostalgia-media like this is often instructive, because we can compare our reactions then and now to see how we've changed. (The best beer I ever tasted was at the finish line of the Big Sur Marathon. It was a Sierra Nevada IPA, which I hate, but my body was thrilled with anything made of carbs and liquid. Experience is an interaction of self and environmental input, and sometimes when the experience changes, it's not because input changed, it's because self changed.) But when the comparison is done from childhood to adulthood, the modern experience is usually disappointing - watching the old Transformers sure was - the psychological equivalent of going back to an old playground and seeing how much smaller everything is, and how actually, it wasn't the most inherently wonderful place in the world. Visiting the Reagan Museum will have the same effect on an 80s kid who has gradually become less sympathetic with the social conservative agenda. That said, I still liked watching Star Blazers again.

Admittedly doing this kind of auto-system-restore on yourself is also a bit masturbatory. In the long run, who cares? Now that we're swimming in media, those of us so inclined can also drown ourselves in nostalgia. Only in the modern era do we have enough time off from running from tigers to sit around pointlessly trying to tie back together obscure fleeting bits of our temporal lobes, as if trying to stave off some eventual cognitive Big Rip.


*It's amazing how fast my moral position on intellectual property changed when I left consulting and went back to being a thrifty student. Once I'm practicing medicine a similar reverse-shift is no doubt in store.

**By the way, why do the Gamilons only become blue a few episodes in? Will there be a how-the-Klingons-got-their-ridges continuity-fixer in the live action movie?

***When I get old I want to grow my eyebrows into my hairline, like the Comet Empire guy.

****I don't like the implication from Dr. Sane's character that all doctors all bumbling alcoholics. I'm not bumbling. I'm never so drunk on the job that I can't complete a procedure.

Play D&D, Meet Fast Women, Go to Hell

Jack Chick does it again with another hilarious comic - this time about Dungeons and Dragons!


The full tract in all its goofiness can be found here.

There are problems with Mr. Chick's tract, not least of which that in his fantasy world a) there seem to be many females involved with playing D&D, and b) that players of paper-based RPGs is not exactly an exploding demographic in 2010. If this is how Satan is tempting children, then he's stuck in the 80s. Also, please tell me where the hot witch ladies are who are playing D&D so I can go play D&D with them right now. They certainly weren't around in my middle school. Unless you count TGP's mom. ZING!

Also: when the bad deity has Peter Cullen's voice, he can't be that bad.