Rambling Thoughts on Bionicle

I recently learned that Lego will be discontinuing its Bionicle "theme" this year, replacing it with a rather more generic theme called Hero Factory. (Actually, the Hero Factory backstory gives me mild jeebies; it's essentially about a group who builds robotic policemen and teleports them across the entire universe. What.)

This is a shame, because Bionicle's story rocks.



Ahem.

Now, according to what I've read, Greg Farshtey, who is pretty much the main name in Bionicle, will continue cranking out the storyline for an unspecified length of time. So for the time being, anyway, Bionicle is still alive.

Now, why do I like Bionicle?

Well, there's the fact that Bionicle is nearly the only boy's action toyline which dared defy the traditional English-language pun-based naming conventions or "Actionable Man McAction" names (which Hero Factory is using for its robotic [!] characters). Where else will you see names like "Tahu," "Makuta," or "Krekka?" Not in a toyline.

There's the fact that Bionicle has managed, over its mere decade of its own history, to build a mythos and world of impressive and intricate proportions, and it is one of the oddest and most idiosyncratic such I've ever seen. Take the planets that the saga occurs on, which follow the "plane" theory of planets (i.e. the idea of flat planets, yet modified to be spherical-keep in mind that Bionicle physics are magic) in that, when their progenitor was smashed to bits, split into three separate pieces made up of its regions. Or the fact that much of the series actually takes place in what was essentially a pocket universe inside a giant robot.

(Yeah, Bionicle's like that. You get used to it, you go nuts trying, or you give up.)

Then there's the fact that it's essentially about living robots going about their business. Sound familiar?

Really, the parallels between the two series are occasionally uncanny. Mata Nui is very similar to Primus, for instance. Both are presented initially as essentially the central figures in the religions of the beings they are connected to, though for obvious reasons this tended to be toned down in later presentations as they became more regularly used as characters. Mata Nui was apparently "crewed," being a giant robot (despite being a thinking being), and there were discarded plans for one Transformers story where the earliest Transformers were built to crew Primus in a "battle mode." One could also draw parallels between Teridax (formerly known as Makuta, before it was revealed that technically "Makuta" referred to a "species") and the Fallen.

These parallels are something that I find peculiar and entertaining. It's hard to say whether or not it's intentional; I sometimes wonder whether the Fallen's appearance in the second live action Transformers was deliberately intended to look like a Rakshi or similar member of the Bionicle toyline (as seen in the above video) as a subtle jab at the bizarre and irrational complaints by many Transformers fans that movie Megs looked like "a Bionicle." (Maybe a "Bionicle" made of a few hundred thousand pieces... which could be roughly life-sized, actually, and that sounds weirdly cool. Darnit.)

On a final note, there's even one more parallel between Bionicle and Transformers.

In Japan, as Transformers wound down when the '90s rolled around, Takara realized that they needed a new brand for the last few toys they'd designed when they decided to cancel the line. While Transformers returned within just a couple of years, their replacement line, the Yuusha (Brave) Robots series, lasted for the better part of a decade, and were about a somewhat more generic group of heroic space police robots that were otherwise quite similar to Transformers, the genericness coming from the original factions and mythos being purged.

Bionicle is being replaced by a line about a somewhat more generic group of heroic space police robots that are otherwise quite similar to Bionicle characters, the genericness coming from the original factions and mythos being purged.

Hmm... Gotta be coincidence. It's just gotta.

If it's not, I'm looking forward to Bionicle: Generation Tui in 2013.

-Signing off.

Cybertron Takes Sides?

So I was watching the rather cool trailer for the upcoming War for Cybertron Transformers game. (I'm rather unlikely to ever play the game; however, the chances that I'll excessively peruse information on it on the Transformers Wiki is as close to unity [i.e. 100%] as such things get.)



(If you want to watch a bigger version, just look at YouTube. I've stuck far too many widescreen vids on this blog and covered stuff over; it's a bad habit I need to get out of.)

After I got over the various things like Optimus's absurd acrobatics, Omega Supreme's dinky, silly head, and Megatron's rather fourth-rate voice, plus the awesome things like Trypticon, the new Bumblebee design, and, well, everything else, I noticed something rather peculiar.

If you watch closely during the firefight (0:30 to 0:40), the Autobots are ducking behind pop-up shields that are coming out of the ground (most notably Bumblebee). Those could, of course, simply be fortifications belonging to the Autobots.

But then, there's the helpful highway that Optimus rides to the rescue (0:45-0:52). Aside from the fact that it seems to be mildly defying gravity, it turns upwards into a ramp to give ol' Op something to car-jump with. And as near as can be told, Optimus is just coming from nowhere in particular. (Alternately, I suppose this could be related to RID's version of the "space bridge.")

Taken separately, those two artifacts could just be random hardware, and all things considered, they probably are just that. (In fact, it kind of seems that the area is probably an Autobot city, and is probably siding with them because they at least partly built and programmed it.)

But taken together, and added to the fact that both of these look like part of Cybertron's surface, which we must remember is actually a living planet, has a subtle (and probably unintentional) implication.

That being that Cybertron has taken a side.

Now, I don't particularly think that this implication will have anything to do with the game, or anything like that. (Though it wouldn't be the first time that Cybertron/Primus took sides.) It's just an amusing little idea that struck me.

And if it were true, it would certainly explain one thing-why Autobots are ground pounders and Decepticons are air warriors. The Autobots want to benefit from the protection of Cybertron's machinery, while the Decepticons want to avoid attacks from it.

Like I said, it's an interesting idea, even if it's not official or has anything to do with anything. But I like it.

-Signing off.

Cool, The Hypotheticals...

It should be clear by now that I really like weird and alien critters. So when I see something that is some form of "hypothetical" exploration of what life might be like on other planets or in the future, I pretty much have to take a look. (And if you're wondering what brings it on, I've been looking around in preparation for the logical sequel to this article.)

Take this ancestral counterpart to the speculative documentary, made by Disney in 1957(!):



I cannot emphasize how much I love this footage. Since I found it on YouTube the other day, I've watched it at least half a dozen times. (I may have seen it once years ago, but I can't be sure.) It's just so imaginative, so rich, so weird. Sure, it's total nonsense, but speculation on what Mars could be like if it had life could easily be applied to virtually any other planet, real or imaginary.

Also, an awful lot of those critters have a weird, inexplicable ability to eat things merely by wrapping around them, don't they? (My favorite example of that is the flying magnifying glass creature; where are its guts if its central body is the lens?)

I'm more familiar with the works of Dougal Dixon, who has pretty much made a name doing this sort of thing. Perhaps his biggest and most ambitious project was The Future Is Wild!, which was about future ecosystems if there weren't humans to worry about.



Basically, he asked the simple question of "what could these animals turn into?" And his answers were often unconventional. (In this case, he had help-it was obviously a reasonably high-budget project. It wasn't the first time he was a driving force behind a project made for television, though-1997's little-known Natural History of an Alien appears to have been heavily driven by Dixon's work.)

Of course, one can take the ideas further, and few take them further than Wayne Barlowe, one of the world's most famous science fiction illustrators. To get an idea of just what kind of guidelines he had for his work for Expedition, the book upon which the Alien Planet "specumentary" was based, he remarked that he decided early on that there would be no eyes or ears.



I need to find my Barlowe's Guide, darnit.

There are other, lesser-known efforts at specumentaries, as well, such as this one, known in the US as Extraterrestrial.



Great stuff, if you're ever short for ideas, or even if you just dig that sort of thing.

-Signing off.

The Other Invertebrate Intelligence

I won't beat around the bush in getting to what I think the second-likeliest candidate (as mentioned and discussed on Friday) for developing something resembling what we call "intelligence" is. It's spiders, hands down.

Yes, spiders, darnit.

More specifically, a large, diverse, and above all clever group called jumping spiders. Even more particularly, a genus called Portia.

But I'm getting a little ahead of myself.

Assuming that cephalopods are incapable of prolonged life on land, and that life on land is necessary to develop civilization (those are some major assumptions), we must turn to the rest of the invertebrate families.

The other molluscs? No, they're far too soft-bodied to ever achieve the kind of size they'd need for a decent brain, and far too slow-moving (mostly) to ever have the kind of lifestyle that would lead to the necessary type of brain. (The kinds that have proven able to live on land, anyway, and we're a little more concerned with them, aren't we? Nudibranchs are always surprisingly active and clever, though, compared to any mollusc but a cephalopod.) The various worms, echinoderms (starfish, sea urchins, etc.), and jellies all are rather unlikely to prove able to reach large sizes on land or to develop even a brain at all, much less a big effective one.

That leaves arthropods, who sadly have all the brains of kiwi fruit. Or do they?

The first mark in the arthropod's favor is that it's a highly mobile and active creature, as anyone who's ever had to deal with any will know. Certainly, plenty have lower-energy lifestyles, but they can easily adapt to all walks of life. And this speaks favorably for arthropods possibly developing that ephemeral trait we call intelligence.

Speaking even better for them are those most industrious and active little beasts, ants. Ants do a lot of the things we do-delegate tasks, specialize parts of their workforce (indeed, their methods of doing so are lightyears ahead of ours in terms of efficiency-they're born for their jobs), build huge mass dwellings, and more. Everything that's true of ants is also true to a lesser degree of termites (except dwellings, which they are a match for ants in the building of), and most of these are true of bees and some wasps.

But it's not really intelligence. Even if you came up with a really clever method of trying to, you could never find an ant, or even an ant colony, that could communicate with you. On an individual basis, ants are among the dumbest brained critters on Earth, and their capacity for organization is entirely on an instinctual level. (This doesn't mean that ants couldn't eventually, even following their current course, develop something frighteningly comparable to civilization that would compete with civilization of other species. I could see that happening.)

Since ants are the "smartest" insects, that doesn't leave many options. In the ocean, there's the mantis shrimp, which strikes me as being more like a housecat or a dog than possibly any other aquatic animal, if for no other reason than the ones you see in videos like the ones I've linked seem to indicate that they have a capacity for boredom, hence the sheer savagery they can exhibit in attacking their aquarium-mates. But mantis shrimps are still marine animals, and show no particular inclination towards changing that. So they're out.

But what about other crustaceans? Many live on land in various moist places. Unfortunately, they've never developed quite the same capacity for dry living as insects, so they'd always have limited ranges.

There's still the group I posited as my candidates, of course: spiders.

Why spiders?

Well, spiders (with some extrapolation from their closest relatives, scorpions) have proven to be a long-lived and versatile group. There are wandering spiders and the ever clever and tricky web builders. Web builders have poor eyesight and their lifestyles are not terribly mobile or active, mostly consisting of repeated instinctual behaviors, so despite their apparent cleverness, they do not seem to be top candidates. Wandering spiders have roving, active lifestyles, which puts them higher.

Of these, some achieve considerable sizes, such as everyone's favorite, the tarantula. While the tarantula itself does not exhibit exceptional intelligence for an arthropod, its size (and that of a scorpion from the distant past who could reach a whopping three feet in length) suggest that the size necessary for intelligence is perhaps not hopelessly distant.

Ironically, the group who shows the greatest potential in my mind are one that is invariably small-the jumping spiders. Jumpers (for whom the green jumping spider of Australia is a large variety at a whopping 12 mm) are highly mobile, have very good eyesight (only an order of magnitude less sophisticated than that of vertebrates, and better than that of dragonflies, who have the best vision of any insects), and, as their name suggests, the ability to jump.

They're the cats of the insect world. (Here, I use "insect world" in a sense that it's the world of fast, highly mobile arthropods primarily but not exclusively made up of insects. Spiders in general, by the way, are a little like the Carnivora of the insect world in my mind, although such a comparison demeans the diversity and ancient history of the spider families.) And as the insect world has no monkeys, ravens, elephants, or other similar creatures, I rate cats high.

And highest of the jumping spiders would seem to be the Portia spider. These spiders, despite brains that fit in animals that could live in houses the size of a stegosaur's infamously inadequate thought-box, show a capacity for actual learning. And not simple stimulus/response learning, either.

Portias strategize.

While many clever behaviors exhibited by these spiders are instinctual-they don't attack the spitting spider (one of the top natural enemies of jumping spiders in general) head on, for instance-many of their behaviors are devised or adapted. They are "relatively slow" learners, but map out their tactics through trial and error.

They pluck at the webs of other spiders in various ways in order to attract the spiders' attention-they may draw the spider towards what seems to be a struggling, helpless fly, only to attack the other viciously when it incautiously draws near. Or they might, in some instances, tailor their lures very narrowly: A species of Nephila spider, for instance, has a prey-sized male member. The male lives in the female's web for protection, because the female is sometimes big enough to eat small birds, and obviously is out of the prey range for even the wiliest, most vicious Portia spider that ever lived. So the Portia imitates a very small prey creature that the lady Nephila wouldn't be interested in, and the male comes running. Alone.

Somewhere, I have a National Geographic with tons of pictures and examples, but sadly all my favorite issues mysteriously disappear. Hmm...

I'll also note that the need of group behavior is no barrier to spiders either-some species build huge communal webs and swarms, and can cooperatively kill their prey and rear young.

Basically, the only relative shortcoming of spiders as potential candidates, once you get past the fact that the smartest ones are the smallest (and the general weakness of arthropods being possibly too small for good brains), is that they don't have real hands, but since they have so many other clever tools, maybe they can make up for that.

Who knows?

-Signing off.

Trick Question

So, the other day, I see this ad over someone's shoulder, one of those "quiz ads."

Which is heavier?

• A ton of cookies.
• A ton of feathers.
• Neither; they both weigh a ton.

Generally, the obvious answer is "neither." A ton is a ton, yes?

But there's a little bit too little information here to be sure.

For instance, if you're shipping them, "neither" may not be the correct answer. (Bear with me-I know that there's no particular reason this is important, it just amuses me.)

I would hold that, during shipping, a ton of feathers would in fact weigh more. Why? Because it's less dense, it would require more packaging to ship.

Unless, of course, we're talking cookies that are being packaged for immediate sale. (Which we probably are.) If they're individually packed cookies, especially, there's going to be a heck of a lot of packaging involved there.

So... too little information. Really.

-Signing off.

Strong Kid

One one of the various blogs I read, I was pointed at an article about one strong kid.

Turns out this kid is one of the very few (perhaps 100 at most) human beings who have a rare condition which involves a lack or inhibited state of the protein myostatin. It is far more common in animals, to the point where there is a sub-breed of whippet known for the mutation. (Look at the pictures on both pages-it's kind of eye-opening.)

There's an eight-year-old in Germany with a similar condition.

This kind of stuff makes stories like this one a little more plausible. The fact that Grutte Pier apparently died of natural causes at a young age also suggests he had something a little bit "off" about him. (Not to mention various other stories.)

Random speculation ahoy.