Excuse My Science Nerd Humor Moment

So apparently science has demonstrated that insects have consciousness and egos.

And I can't help but nitpick (at the news site)...

You forgot a few digits there, guys.

I mean yeah, technically it'd be correct to say "more than six hundred years ago," but leaving out the "million" makes it a kind of misleading statement. Even better, that's the correct order of magnitude that if you scaled all of history that way, it'd be legitimate for some grandparents to say "back when I was young during the dinosaur days..."

There's also a joke in there about medieval people not having developed conscious thought yet, I think.

-Signing off.

Not Physics Weirdness, But Brain Weirdness

This is an interesting little thing.



There's actually a tourist attraction (currently closed, as it was part of the same complex as Prehistoric Forest) that is almost certainly a partly artificial (possibly initially accidentally) exploitation of the same effect called Mystery Hill, which, as I've mentioned in the past, is hecka disorienting; my kid brother took an unpleasant fall in the place once when he was little that nearly ruined the trip*.

...Honestly, I think that the long-distance camera shot they use before they reveal the horizon over the water is probably misleading; it'd likely be easier to tell if one was there oneself (I kind of could tell that it must have been a subtle "reversed" gradation from my experience with Mystery Hill).

*My sister was crazy-prepared enough that she had a decent first aid kit in her purse, which helped get the kid calm enough; there's something soothing about having a bandage properly applied, at least among my family. Not that the Mystery Hill section was a big loss; it's just a few minutes spent in a degree of physical discomfort brought on by the sensation that you ought to be falling over. There's also a lame perspective trick that I've never once seen work because the tour group is supposed to have at least two people of the same height, and everyone in my family is of very different heights, so I've never been in a tour group where there's been decent matching. (My mother is of very average height; my sister is on the short side; when my kid brother went with us, he was still tiny because the place closed years ago; and while my dad's nearly as tall as me, that's only a nearly-and he didn't go often anyway** I stand around six foot four. Suffice it to say I've never been in a tour group with someone my own height.

**I suspect Mom actually mostly liked these trips because the place was around when she was a kid-and my uncle on her side, who is incidentally a now-retired Berkeley physicist, seems to have had much the same association-while Dad's family never seems to have had the least interest in such silly pursuits as the rest of us. This might have as much to do with the fact that, while he's in the same age range as the Baby Boomers, Dad's not actually from the same generation as they are because his parents were an older generation, and his upbringing actually reflected that.

-Signing off.

Nitpick Alert (Actually, I Talked About This Once)

Serious flaw with this video's reasoning:



If it were possible to be immortal, you'd probably need extremely good healing as a prerequisite. If your healing processes weren't excellent, eventually you'd shrivel up into an arthritic, forgetful, blind little mess of a human being, and forget being worried about losing all your limbs and eyes to random injuries.

It's kind of what tends to happen already to people that all the regular suspects fail to kill off, to some degree anyway. Disintegration by nearly invisible attrition. (Gee, that's not morbid at all, is it?)

(I wrote a post over here about the subject once, actually.)

-Signing off.

Pterosaur Vs. Cowboy

It seems that the cowboy wins every time.



Of course, it seems the pterosaur wasn't very bright and hurt itself trying to steal a kid...

This scene is almost too realistic for my tastes, actually. (The fact that the pterosaur wasn't strong enough to take off with that load makes sense-even the largest pterosaur weighed only about as much as a grown man despite having a plane-like wingspan-and once it's on the ground, those hollow bones would make it pretty easy to kill.)

-Signing off.

Stupid, Stupid Monsters

One of the things about giant monster movies is that the monsters tend to display radically varying intelligence. Sometimes, they display adaptability and tactics that are admirably clever. Other times, they pull stupid stunts that make it clear why there's only ever one of the darned things.

Stupid behavior: Displaying interest in humans. Why? Despite this clip, we're not exactly ideal prey animals.



Zedus there, from a Gamera film, ought to be looking for better prey. In a fairly literal sense, we're pretty buglike (not to mention bony and full of gristle) next to a monster that size, and we probably shouldn't draw much of its interest except when our tanks and planes start pounding on it. Imagine going around scraping up clusters of ants and shoveling them into your mouth. Does that sound appealing?

It gets sillier, of course, when a truly large monster like Godzilla displays that much interest, though in Godzilla's defense, he seems to be smart enough to draw some form of amusement from stomping things, and he's never wasted time or energy eating them. (That, of course, opens up the question of what he does eat; in a discarded scene from an '80s-era Godzilla film, he killed and ate a smaller monster, and the much-maligned creature of the American film explicitly ate fish, but there's not really an official explanation of how he nourishes himself.)

And here's a clip from a film wherein the monsters just plain stink at fighting (1999's Reptilian, a remake of a film called Yonggary about a monster named Yonggary). Terrible aim, clumsy attacks, and... What the heck is up with Cykor's (the bigger, uglier monster's) not being impeded by losing its head, but exploding when a fireball (which it could produce itself) went down its throat? (Okay, so that's got nothing to do with intelligence, per say, at least not that of the monster...)



I mean, I appreciate that this is an inventive fight (and it is), but it's also just bad (and it really is, as numerous YouTube commenters and a really, really large number of reviewers, critics, and monster fans will attest).

Also, has anyone else noticed that Asian studios are usually really bad at CGI?

-Signing off.

Golden Age Extended Moment of the Day (63)

The most famous character from Fantastic Comics was probably Stardust (I've mentioned him a few times in the past), and in this story from #7, it's demonstrated why:

Because he and his enemies followed a truly special kind of logic.

For the record, while it would be very bad for the world to stop rotating (the H.G. Wells story The Man Who Could Work Miracles has a depiction with at least limited realism in it, though the means through which rotation was stopped didn't even bother with realism, which is just as well), it wouldn't be the sudden cessation of gravity.

Which you should probably be at least vaguely, intuitively aware of, or at least figure out from looking up gravity on Wikipedia.

-Signing off.

Look!

A real home-made magnetic projectile accelerator!



Though it supposedly stands little chance of killing anybody without the help of them fiddling around inside it and getting shocked by its massive electrical charge. Ah, well, it's a start.

-Signing off.

Space Crazy Comics: Dr. Meade's Last War

On Monday, I posted a panel from a story in Space War #2, complaining primarily about narration.

I guess I can further torment educate you on this story, hm?

Dr. Meade's Last War opens on a space battle between Earth and a planet named Talus III.

So a "Dr. Meade, great savant of Talus," tells the Talus...ians that we're evil. Hm.

The following narration strikes me as biased.

Of course, then we learn that something fishy's going on.

Something involving a certain Dr. Meade, of course.

You could go with the mouseover text, but of course the more logical answer to this oddity is that Dr. Meade is a double agent.

He's tryin' to kill everybody.

The Earth commander decides that he has to risk making contact with the Talus...ian commander rather than continue the battle, just in case Dr. Meade was not merely a Talusian spy.

The commander from Talus apparently doesn't take Meade very seriously... (No wonder, he looks exactly the same as when he was spying on Earth. What the heck, guys?)

Meade doesn't take it well, and douses commander Wejus's first mate with ketchup.

I mean, I guess he kills the guy.

Wejus attempts to retaliate with his own ketchup bottle, but Meade pulls his turning transparent act again.

Hey, Meade's rhetoric sounds familiar... Oh, yeah, Great Ag and Ob!

Anyway, Wejus and Cogan get along.

They make a stop at Talus III to resupply, and there's a brief aside trip to the supreme ultimate ruler of Talus III. They ride giant birds to conserve fuel.

I wonder how much energy it takes to take care of thousands upon thousands of giant birds that would be better invested in cheap, low-energy vehicles? Eh, never mind.

The supreme ruler dude, who is basically Wejus with a beard and (if memory serves) eyebrows, tells them that he thinks they're going to win.

The "dark galaxy?" I know I complain a lot about this kind of terminology, and at least it wasn't "universe" again, but dagnabbit do I ever hate that!

Dr. Meade is watching them.

How Meade does this stupid stuff is never really explained at all, by the way. There's no explanation for why he's a mile tall or why he can become intangible or why he can travel through space. (And no, none of it is symbolic. He's literally there, as you will see.) Not even half-butted pseudoscientific madness.

Here's where Monday's panel comes in, by the way.

Meade is pretty confident until...

No, I don't know why this would be effective against spaceships particularly... (Although a fun fact about space travel that not many people know is that it's harder to keep a spacecraft cool than it is to keep it warm.) Of course, the fact that they're "semi-liquid" spaceships might be part of it.

Also, "cold ray" is a pretty lame name for this, although I'll give them kudos for not just saying "freeze ray" like everybody else ever.

Then, they notice the gigantic Dr. Meade floating there, and shoot him too.

Wejus and Cogan are happy about this development. Who wouldn't be, I guess?

Of course, their dialogue with each other is total bull. "Don't believe those who lie for their own gain?"

Well, duh, you morons! How can you tell who's lying for their own gain if they're lying?!

Eh, never mind.

The story's not really as bad as I make it out to be, but it's still pretty stupid.

-Signing off.

Game Review: Cellcraft

Cellcraft is an educational game where you control a single lonely cell.

It's an educational game, fun, and appropriate for everyone.

You need to produce cellular structures and maintain the cell, and I must give kudos to the creator for making this fun rather than annoying. It would have been very possible to mess a game like this up royally.

The game has a story, but I'm keeping quiet about it, because it'd kind of ruin it to talk about it. Suffice it to say that it's amusing and actually has rather little to do with cells.

I kind of can't come up with a lot to say about it, because it's a simple premise with self-explanatory game play (the whole thing is a tutorial, for that matter) and a story that I don't want to ruin. (Though you should see it coming yourself pretty easily, not that that's a bad thing. It is a kid-oriented game, after all.)

This is a very good game, and if it sounds even vaguely interesting, you should try it out.

-Signing off.

The Future of Mass Transit? I Hope Not.

I read a fair number of magazines, and have for a long time. In fact, I've read magazines for so long that, about the same time I graduated from high school, I started receiving offers of membership for the AARP. No joke.

My first magazine was National Geographic, followed by Popular Mechanics, then by back issues of Popular Science which then led to a subscription. (I also receive Smithsonian. I used to get a few other science magazines, but those generally annoyed me.)

Popular Science was a more enjoyable magazine in the late '90s than it is now, partly because editorial fiat has pushed it ever further into environmentalism, which I'm tired of seeing covered in the regular media, thank you. (Nothing against environmentalism, but I think people overdo it. And that's the deepest I'm willing to go into politics on this blog, because it's supposed to be fun, dangit.)

Sometimes, in a well-meaning way, no doubt, they manage to totally flub in other ways.

Do you see that concept art? DO YOU SEE IT?

Here it is again-look at that blimp, and those other aircraft.

They have people hanging in pods on what look like lines, and are certainly long and probably flexible. (The other things are some kind of "jet" pods, which don't look too much safer.)

How in the blue... er, heck... is that a good idea? If even a stiff breeze comes along...

My sister has remarked that scientists (and artists working for scientists) often don't seem to know what ergonomics are-ironic, of course, since some scientist presumably invented ergonomics.

I just look at that and shudder, and hope that if that's actually a serious project that somebody beats some sense into them before it gets to the phase where it could kill people.

Greatly Belated Book Review: A Meeting With Medusa

I've never been prone to picking "favorite authors." If I like something, I like it; if I don't, I don't. I decide how I like things on a case by case basis. It takes a lot of consistently good work from someone for me to proclaim that I like "their work."

I mention this merely because I've never really liked Arthur C. Clarke. Sure, he's a giant of science fiction and all that, but his work is generally too cerebral and a bit too arrogant for my own personal tastes. (There's a discussion penned by Clarke on how an alien might look here. It operates under some odd assumptions, the primary one being that intelligent aliens would naturally be more efficient than ourselves. It also insisted that the human hand was good enough that it was okay to anthropomorphize it when designing aliens. That's an odd set of assumptions to play against each other.) If you disagree, that's fine-you get to decide what your tastes are. But Clarke's works aren't quite to mine.

A Meeting with Medusa, however, is a Clarke story that plays to his strengths, and is definitely my favorite such.

Why? If nothing else, it's a first contact story that created the entire modern concept of what life on a gas giant would be like. If nothing else, that would be enough to secure it a place in my own personal literary canon.

What really makes it work is that it's a simple voyage of discovery. It's not about bizarre, high-falutin' concepts like ascension to godhood and contact with things we can't understand. In this story, a man goes into space, goes to Jupiter, and then meets some aliens. How smart they are or aren't isn't much gone into, but that's not important-it's just first contact, after all. (And it's hard to hold a conversation with a mile-long sky jelly that's possibly trying to eat you.)

There's an element of transhumanism in the story; that is to say, in a surprise reveal at the end (sorry for the spoilers), we learn that the pilot was a cyborg who was so extensively modified he moved around on wheels. It was his opinion that mankind couldn't own the stars, and that only fully sapient mechanical intelligences could manage to survive and prosper in deep space. (His argument is probably sound, all things considered.) It's a bit of a downer, really, but that's probably the other reason I'm not a huge fan of Clarke's. (Give me Asimov any day.)

A strong story all around, and one I'd recommend reading if you can find it.

On a side note: The cover on Wikipedia is for the same version I own. Ironically, the printing I have, at least, has a printing error that attributes authorship to Kim Stanley Robinson (whose book Green Mars was co-printed as a "double" book with it).

Space Crazy Comics: The Man From Outer Space

Today's entry is from Outer Space #17 (available at Golden Age Comic Downloads, assuming the site is up).

It should be noted that Outer Space was a rather odd comic. Unlike many space/sci-fi oriented comics, it focused most of the time on exploration stories with little action or violence. In fact, the first issue was actually primarily composed of a continuous story about space exploration from an R&D standpoint-no joke. This is the one section that is not part of that story.

(Also note that, as far as I know, this is not a Ditko story, unlike many from Outer Space [though the art isn't bad; it could be Ditko, though I can't seem to find information on it]. Booooo.)

It opens on some guys getting ready to launch a rocket.

The one thing they can't account for scientifically, according to this Dr. Mangan, is the "human equation." (Actually, for a more correct metaphor, that ought to be the "human factor" in your "rocket equation." Just sayin'.)

In a fairly long, boring sequence, we are shown all the training and testing they've put their astronaut through. Eventually, they tell him to give it a rest, because he's headin' out soon.

Dourly, Dr. Mangan wonders if there will be anything left to test when he gets back.

As a "geneticist," Dr. Mangan actually understands evolution to some degree, surprising for a comic book.

Unfortunately for him, he lives in a comic book, so his understanding doesn't matter. Sorry, Dr. Mangan:

The astronaut magically evolved into a higher being while he was in space. Daaaang.

Of course, this is all well and good... but it creeps me out like nothing else.

"He's different now! He's smarter and better! Aw yeah!"

Claiming incredible mental superiority in fiction always drives me nuts, especially if the author doesn't back it up well. Here, we don't even get any indications beyond the transhuman's claims of "seeing clearly."

Even if that wasn't the case, I know I'd be jittery at the idea of space making people into supermen magically. You know, Transhuman Treachery and all that.

-Signing off.

Where's My Exosuit?

The cover of November 1965's Popular Science:

And the cover of May 2008's Popular Science:

I guess it's true what they say-the more things change, the more they stay the same.

-Signing off.

Oops...

Once again, spent enough time working on the other blog's post that I don't have much for you here.

Note than when I talk about "mixing and matching features of animals," that this-



-is not at all what I mean.

-Signing off.

Greatly Belated Book Review: The Science of The X-Men

When my mother showed me this book after coming back from the library, I thought to myself, "Hark! A book, which I might review!"

That was the most positive part of the reading experience.

The Science of The X-Men (The Official Guide to The Scientific Reality of The Mutant World!) is a terrible, terrible book.

It starts out promisingly enough, with claims by the authors of connections with people with huge comic collections, Dark Horse, and Robert Silverberg, but it goes downhill at a steady, easily measurable pace. As far as I know and am concerned, this is all true enough... but quality doesn't show.

For starters, there are audacious and bizarre claims. The book talks about the events of the comic books as though they are real. This is a workable way to write it, but they didn't do it well enough.

The "science" of the book is frequently absurd. They fall back on the ancient notion common among "science fiction writers" of the old days, that things from places we haven't been are necessarily incomprehensible. While in old quasi-SF, this tended to be bull along the lines of "different elements from different planets/galaxies/parts of the universe," modern writers don't fall back on this in serious science fiction. Yet this book claims that any mysterious energies that don't obey the laws of physics as we know them must in fact simply come from another, "non-Einsteinian" dimension. If you don't know why this is absurd, I'm afraid that your science education is beyond my meager abilities to repair.

Even worse, while some principles discussed (especially with relation to biology and evolution) have some degree of insight, the understanding that the writers seem to actually possess of some of these subjects seems laughable at best and fatally flawed at worst. While the discussion of Nightcrawler's momentum is an interesting tackling of the subject of teleporting around on the surface of a planet, other parts make me shake my head in ridicule or seethe with anger. Also, while they discuss Occam's razor, they tend to come up with radically complex explanations for relatively simple phenomena.

These might be somewhat acceptable, were it not for the fact that the editors clearly cared less and less as the book progressed, gradually allowing an ever increasing number of typos and incomprehensible non sequiturs. Let's see if I can dig a few up:

"Storm makes every effort to keep here motions under control, but she's not always successful." ("Her emotions.")

"Wind can also move soil and shaping sand dunes, which, at its most extreme, can turn farmland into a dessert in a few years." (Yum.)

"Like radar and sonar, the ultrasound bounces back off objects and a sensing device then translates that information into detailed images." (I'll just point out that "the ultrasound" is an odd way to phrase it, and also that sonar generally is ultrasonic.)

"He could survive a head-on collision with a bus traveling at a hundred miles an hour. Such a meteorite would weigh more than half a million tons and would be super-heated from its atmospheric descent." (I totally did not mess with this passage at all; this is exactly how it appears in the book.)

"Beast exhibits characteristics that are considered 'neotonous.' Neotony is an evolutionary phenomenon that explains why Beast has a big modern head and a muscular hairy body." (Technically, "neotonous" is apparently an acceptable spelling of neotenous, but it drives me bonkers every time I read it. Also, yeah, sure, all babies I've ever seen have muscular, hairy bodies. Okay, maybe I'm taking the statement out of context, but it drives me nuts.)

"Like the electric eel, he might have a biological mechanism that generates and manipulates energy, in his case producing cold." (Cold is not a form of energy. It is a lack of energy.)

"The way things stand now; particle beams don't seem particularly useful as weapons." (Learn how to use semicolons before you write a book. Also, it's ironic that the authors are critical of particle beam realism when they're trying to justify the workings of mutant powers.)

I'm sure there were more than that, but I can't recall them at the moment.

Anyway, I actually make it sound worse than it is (there are some interesting and insightful bits here and there), but it's got problems. If you read it, be careful-there's a lot of junky stuff in it. It's works like these that make me prefer to read unofficial materials.

-Signing off.

Space Western Comics: Meet the Menace of Comet X

Today's vict-er, subject is the Spurs Jackson (and his Space Vigilantes) feature of Space Western Comics #44, "meet the menace of Comet X." (Give or take a bit on the title.)

We open on Palomar observatory (again?), watching a "Planet X."

...Wait a minute...

Oh, okay, since it's gone flying off course, it's now Comet X. I get it. (Although that doesn't make it less dumb.)

Why is he on Mars?

Because there, he's Prime Minister. I am so not making this up.

He's not a very responsible prime minister, though. Though I suppose that might be okay-Winston Churchill was quite the rascal in his youth...

He brings some backup, although they're never named and they disappear.

I don't know what's up with that.

Moving on.

I guess the guy who wrote this must have read somewhere that comets break into clumps, but this is not at all how it works.

As usual, they've got it about as wrong as could be. And it also looks kinda unsettling.

Then, confusing things happen. I guess maybe those nameless Space Vigilantes might be dying?

They're forced down to the surface, and then ushered into the tower they noticed, where they meet guys they've seen before, but we haven't! (Unless you've been reading other issues of Space Western Comics without me. Shame on you.)

I love Vodor's design, by the way. Nothing says goofy alien like a cyclops cactus man.

Anyway, they're planning on using Comet X to destroy Earth. Sounds dangerous.

And then, these two seemingly unarmed men whisk off a tough cowboy to a jail cell. (Well, there actually are guards around, it just looks that way.)

The guard is hilarious, by the way.

Yes, they are fools IN SPACE.

Anyhow, Spurs wasn't completely disarmed, and he uses a whip to grab the guard's pistol. No, that's not what I meant, despite, well, what we can kinda see in the image.

Anyways, he's got the gun, and when the guard asks for it back...

...he gives it to him.

Now here's a bit of major stupidity:

Guys, you don't even need the stupid keys. You can vaporize the doors! Why are you bothering paying attention to them?

Also, if you're running a prison, and you have access to an indestructible metal, why are you making a set of keys out of it instead of the parts that, you know, hold people in?

Anyway, then Spurs makes lots of trouble for the baddies. He releases the badguys' supply of "hydrogen gas," which ought to be invisible and all but undetectable (until you light a match and die), but isn't.

They just didn't do the research, that's all, I'm sure...

Also, I only realized right here that Thola's jacket is, well, kinda seasonal.

Fascinating that I'd pick this one for the first day of December by accident.

Anyhow, they can't find their own ship, so they get into some old thing they find on the surface.

That ship sure is orange.

Also, this panel disillusioned me severely.

How come Vodor so consistently appeared at such an angle that we could only see one eye, and that one eye looked bigger and more central before? I miss the "cyclops cactus man" descriptor; that was catchy. (Also, this way, he resembles either Swamp Thing or Cobra Commander. Weird.)

Anyway, they take their attack ships out to chase down Spurs and Thola in the little slow ship.

Spurs is able to escape by retreating to Earth; Korok and Vodor incorrectly conclude that he's planning on luring them to the doomed Earth, and let them be.

Just for reference, based on this statement, and on the statement in the next panel that Comet X will "catch up in half an hour," Comet X is traveling at 100,000 miles an hour, or 27 (point seven repeating) miles per second, or almost 45 km/s. For reference, this is considerably faster than the speed of the impact that created the Chicxulub crater, AKA the meteor impact that (may or may not have) killed the dinosaurs. When one also considers that Comet X is visible in the sky already, that puts it at about the size of the Moon. (Incidentally, these figures also suggest that Space Western rocket ships are absurdly fast.)

Which is a somewhat fancy way of saying that Earth is in some deeeeeep trouble.

Thola's petty statement here cracks me up.

"Yes, Spurs, let us hide on the other side of the planet, where we will be somewhat safer!"

Then, for some reason, the comet starts making noise.

Then it blows up.

Aside from odd choice of sound effect word, what is going on here?

Okay, okay, I suppose that's a relatively honest mistake compared to some of these...

Well, a series of relatively honest mistakes.

First off, hydrogen burns. Sure, it would burn once it hit atmosphere at that speed. But burning does not equal hydrogen bombs.

Second, Comet X is the size of the Moon, give or take some. A hydrogen bomb can't destroy it.

Third, even if Comet X was miraculously vaporized by a simple hydrogen bomb, it would still cause catastrophic harm to the planet-a huge cloud of rather hot gases would descend on the Earth, blocking out sunlight for a protracted length of time and just generally causing trouble.

Ah, well.

Korok's and Vodor's reaction is amusing.

Vodor is definitely more of a Cobra Commander than a Swamp Thing.

-Signing off.