UPDATE – the sale is over. Star Trek Online is now priced at $39 (still $10 off retail).

Excalibur class starship - looks familiar

Man, though, it looks cool. I haven’t seen a decent space combat sim since the X-Wing days. And they are integrating it into the timeline of the original series/movies and the reboot. The Klingons are at war with the Feds again, the Romulans are creeping around, there’s the Borg and even Species 8472. No mention of Section 31, though, unfortunately…

Sometimes there’s a visible gulf between geekdom and academia, despite the stereotype of these two realms being congruent. I am reminded of this gulf by this odd story about a paper by William Edelstein, a senior and distinguished physicist (in my own field of MRI research), who has calculated the lethality of interstellar travel:

Interstellar space is an empty place. For every cubic centimetre, there are fewer than two hydrogen atoms, on average, compared with 30 billion billion atoms of air here on Earth. But according to William Edelstein of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, that sparse interstellar gas should worry the crew of a spaceship travelling close to the speed of light even more than the Borg decloaking off the starboard bow.

Special relativity describes how space and time are distorted for observers travelling at different speeds. For the crew of a spacecraft ramping up to light speed, interstellar space would appear highly compressed, thereby increasing the number of hydrogen atoms hitting the craft.

Worse is that the atoms’ kinetic energy also increases. For a crew to make the 50,000-light-year journey to the centre of the Milky Way within 10 years, they would have to travel at 99.999998 per cent the speed of light. At these speeds, hydrogen atoms would seem to reach a staggering 7 teraelectron volts – the same energy that protons will eventually reach in the Large Hadron Collider when it runs at full throttle. “For the crew, it would be like standing in front of the LHC beam,” says Edelstein.

The spacecraft’s hull would provide little protection. Edelstein calculates that a 10-centimetre-thick layer of aluminium would absorb less than 1 per cent of the energy. Because hydrogen atoms have a proton for a nucleus, this leaves the crew exposed to dangerous ionising radiation that breaks chemical bonds and damages DNA. “Hydrogen atoms are unavoidable space mines,” says Edelstein.

The fatal dose of radiation for a human is 6 sieverts. Edelstein’s calculations show that the crew would receive a radiation dose of more than 10,000 sieverts within a second. Intense radiation would also weaken the structure of the spacecraft and damage its electronic instruments.

All well and good and I have no reason to doubt Dr. Edelstein’s calculations (we medical physics types do have a professional interest in radiation dose and shielding, after all). But clearly Dr. Edelstein is not a fan of Star Trek, because even the most newbie of Trekkies knows about the Navigational Deflector Array. In addition, Starfleet vessels also have Bussard Collectors on the warp nacelles, which are the sci-fi-ified version of the Bussard ramjet.

My point is, physics geeks and sci fi geeks clearly aren’t as overlapping sets as I had assumed. But where a medical physicist might see errant hydrogen atoms as dose, a different kind of physicist might see them as fuel. In a way we scientists do bring our own biases to the table…

It really looks great. The best part, as with the original animated series, looks to be Zuko (played by Dev Patel, star of Slumdog Millionaire).

(can’t refer to it as Avatar anymore

This is just really, really cool – the crew of Endeavour STS-130 awoke this morning to the Ballad of Serenity.

And NASA announced it on Twitter – and is even hosting the mp3 for download. Though you can also get it from the Firefly Wiki.

funny comment from the thread at Whedon’s site: “and then the Space Shuttle program was cancelled. Coincidence?”

here’s the lyrics:

Take my love, take my land
Take me where I cannot stand
I don’t care, I’m still free
You can’t take the sky from me
Take me out to the black
Tell them I ain’t comin’ back
Burn the land and boil the sea
You can’t take the sky from me
There’s no place I can be
Since I found Serenity
But you can’t take the sky from me…

I am really looking forward to this!

David Twohy — who wrote and directed the first two films in the series, “Pitch Black” and “The Chronicles of Riddick” — will helm from a screenplay he penned.

Plot details are being kept under wraps. But insiders say the third outing will hew closer in tone to the cult hit “Pitch Black” and will focus on the character of Riddick as opposed to the universe he inhabits, which was the case with the critically panned “Chronicles of Riddick.”

(via AICN)

I really loved Pitch Black (and this was before I became a fan of Claudia Black from her SG-1 days) and for some reason it’s been heavily rotated on late night cable TV the past few weeks, and I just never tire of it.

See, J – a trilogy after all

This is really rare – C&H creator Bill Watterson has given an interview for the first time in over 20 years. In it, he firmly puts Calvin and Hobbes in his past – and intriguingly doesn’t see any role for himself in how the strip has affected people.

What are your thoughts about the legacy of your strip?

Well, it’s not a subject that keeps me up at night. Readers will always decide if the work is meaningful and relevant to them, and I can live with whatever conclusion they come to. Again, my part in all this largely ended as the ink dried.

Because your work touched so many people, fans feel a connection to you, like they know you. They want more of your work, more Calvin, another strip, anything. It really is a sort of rock star/fan relationship. Because of your aversion to attention, how do you deal with that even today? And how do you deal with knowing that it’s going to follow you for the rest of your days?

Ah, the life of a newspaper cartoonist — how I miss the groupies, drugs and trashed hotel rooms!

But since my “rock star” days, the public attention has faded a lot. In Pop Culture Time, the 1990s were eons ago. There are occasional flare-ups of weirdness, but mostly I just go about my quiet life and do my best to ignore the rest. I’m proud of the strip, enormously grateful for its success, and truly flattered that people still read it, but I wrote “Calvin and Hobbes” in my 30s, and I’m many miles from there.

An artwork can stay frozen in time, but I stumble through the years like everyone else. I think the deeper fans understand that, and are willing to give me some room to go on with my life.

There’s a bit more worth reading – I find it interesting that he essentially saw C&H as an outlet for him to express himself, and then retired it when there was no more left to say. He didn’t see it as a comic strip, in essence, but a novel. It’s a same that he never really regarded his characters as anything but characters; there’s a lot of narative left in them that others could pick up where he left off.

UPDATE – Shamus gives props to the man. Agreed, especially about how much he looks like Uncle Max.

Brian calls the interview a missed opportunity, providing examples of much better questions the interviewer could have asked. He also links the archive I mentioned earlier of Watterson’s old political cartooning work and an inscrutable fan-driven Q&A he did a long time ago. Does anyone know what Watterson is doing now? He seems to be JD Salingeresque.

I caught the two-hour series pilot of Caprica on On-Demand a few weeks ago and I have been meaning to comment on it. It’s definitely not a replacement for Galactica, but it clearly wasn’t intended to be. Galactica took an ancient science fiction idea, the question of what makes us human, folded it into religious belief, and created a literal mythos. But Galactica never really asked the question itself – what makes us human? – it showed us the answer as a given. The skin job cylons were presented as human from the start, both the original Earth/Kobol variant and the Colonial variant. The idea that they were still fundamentally machines was never really broached, except as “toaster!” epithets – with the exception of Model One, John. He was the only one to rage at his creators for making him merely human.

spoilers –

Caprica is starting earlier and exploring the question at its root. Zoe creates a copy of herself, not by clever algorithms but by using her social network preferences and internet profile to interpolate her personality. This in itself presumes the human sentience to be a limited one – are we really so easily defined? (The actual size of her avatar’s file is later revealed to be a few hundred gigabytes, if I recall. We are by implication Kings of infinite space bounded by a nut indeed!) Then it is that copy which is downloaded to a Cyborg body – which requires an advanced “neural” processor chip (a weak point in the plot – so I’ll ignore. We can hash that out in comments).

Zoe is Eve for the Cylon race – so the entire Cylon race, which Galactica showed to be equivalent to humanity – is based on a copy of a profile, not a true copy. Zoe Grayson never downloaded her own brain, she created a construct and “trained” it to think it was also Zoe Grayson. Think ahead to how Cylons can be “downloaded” by resurrection ships, and it makes a kind of sense. Maybe Cylons were never really alive!

And maybe the humans of Kobol, and the Colonies, never really were either? Starbuck was also downloaded, despite being fully human, and the Cylons were created from human-cyborg hybrids who are utterly devoid of humanity. Caprica seems to want to try and ask the question what makes us human, but instead seems to be ripping humanity away.

I’ve long been a skeptic of AI and the singularity (which reuires AI as a prereq). I think that the closest we will ever get to AI is going to be an illusion of intelligence, if we approach it the way we have been. I make a distinction between “artificial” intelligence and “synthetic” intelligence – we can define the former as not really intelligent but seeming to be so – even to the extent of fooling you via the Turing Test.

Synthetic intelligence (SI) however is genuine intelligence, but synthetically derived. If naturally occurring life is a natural process, either chemical or biological or some other emergent property (sentient suns? Gaia? etc) of complex systems arising out of nature, then synthetic life is life created from natural life. In other words, synthetic life is intelligently-designed (ID) life, not stochastically-arising life. Galactica seemed to argue that Cylons were SI, but Caprica is undermining it by saying that the humans were AI. AFfter all, who says that AI must be ID?

In fact we do not extend human rights to animals for this very reason – animals are not fully intelligent as we are. Therefore animals are stochastically-arising artificial intelligence. The same might be said the Capricans and Colonials in general – automatons, NPCs.

Subversive stuff This is what scifi is supposed to do. Make you think about the big issues and question assumptions. Caprica is doing it with human beings, not blue 7 foot tall aliens, and that makes it more relevant instead of a theoretical.

I like what I am seeing and I think I’m going to be a fan of this show. Lets see.

I have a little announcement of sorts, which is entirely meta and has no real significance whatsoever other than the purely semantic. I’ve decided to retire my “Fledgling Otaku” nickname and adopt a new pseudonymous persona, “Otaku Kun”. If you’re so inclined, you can abbreviate that as otakun instead of fledge – and my email contact is also updated accordingly to otakun at haibane dot info.

I started this blog almost four years ago almost entirely due to the influence of Steven den Beste, who I consider my anime blogfather and inspiration for embracing anime. It’s Steven who christened me “fledgling otaku” and I’ve been enormously proud of that. However, with 4 years and nearly 900 posts, I think it’s time to stop pretending I’m a newbie and admit that I’m an addict, not just of anime but of all things otaku/geek. The category list at right bears witness to the absurd breadth of my compulsions.

I’ve also resolved to blog more regularly here, because I’ve found that much of what I’ve written has been invaluable as a reference in sharing these works of art and fiction with my friends. I want to try and capture as much of it as I can, and maybe even share it with my kids as they get older. So i will be posting more often, at a minimum.

However, I also want to try and shake things up a little. That means for one thing a fresh look and redesign, which I’ll get around to soon. But also I’d like to build a cadre of peers here to encourage more discussion and participation, because in every case I’ve found that when you folks engage and leave comments, I learn so much more, and am able to derive that much more enjoyment and appreciation from all of this. It’s a value multiplier, and I’d like for it to become the focus. I have some ideas in that regard but I’ll save that for later.

So, at the risk of giving myself multiple personality disorder, this is Fledgling Otaku, signing out. Otakun, the floor is yours!

Apple’s announcement today of it’s new iPad tablet system (alas, not named Newton 2), running iPhone OS and featuring a 10″ multi-touch screen – doesn’t strike me as the Kindle killer that everyone is making it out to be. Yes, it will definitely be an ebook reader and will have licensing agreements with textbook publishers like McGraw-Hill and the behemoth book chain Barnes and Noble. But at a price probably around $1000, it will be four times as expensive as the Kindle, and despite the glorious full color multi-touch screen, will still not be as easy to read as elecctronic ink technology.

The price point matters – iPhone and iPod dominate their respective segments, but only because they provide tremendous functionality and design at the same price point as their competitors. Meanwhile, Mac computers remain relegated to niche market share, because they are such a poor value. The Mac OS operating system is innovative but for fundamental computing tasks – office work and online – most users are OS agnostic at best (Word is Word; Gmail is Gmail) and biased towards what they know (ie, Windows).

For the iPad to compete against Kindle – which has a huge marketshare lead and truly is to books what the iPod was to music, despite e-readers from Sony being around for years – it needs to compete on price and functionality. And there’s no way that the average person is going to be willing to read a 400-page book on an LCD screen.

I think Apple knows this, which is why it is courting the textbook market, the gaming market, and also putting iPhone OS on the device to keep it compatible with the universe of apps from the App Store. These add value to the device in the sense that they keep it a general-task device and not a single-purpose one. But in doing so they are competing against their own products – I bought an iPod Touch myself for less than $200 and I can run any app on it that the iPad will, and most are designed for a small screen so what’s the advantage of 10 inches? And why pay 4x the cost? Conversely why spend $1000 for a iSlate when you can drop a few hundred more and get a full-featured macbook? Or spend the same amount of money and buy a full-featured Windows laptop? Or spend half and get a netbook running Chrome OS, or a new Pine Trail netbook which can play real games like Warcraft?

Textbooks and other digital documents can certainly be made more innovative and hyperlinked and interactive on the iPad, but that media revolution will not be confined to Apple’s garden. And it’s a guarantee that Kindle v3.0 is going to incorporate color e-ink and a touch interface (though probably not multi-touch). Any new innovations in content delivery and integrating media and text will be just as exploitable by laptops and netbooks in particular.

And there are amazing new display technologies coming out – including color e-ink and hybrid CD screens, which will let other manufacturers build devices for ebook reading and media consumption at a fraction of the cost of what Apple can. I think that Apple has learned the wrong lesson from it’s success with iPod and iPhone and will end up doing everything poorly rather than a few things well.

UPDATE: Steve jobs dismisses netbooks, saying a netbook is “not better at anything! It’s just cheaper. But it’s not better at anything.” Shows how little he understands about netbooks. And he claims the iPad’s on-screen virtual keyboard is a “dream to type on” – yeah, right.

The Ring

How come the ring doesn’t make Sauron invisible?

Indeed! Out of the mists of Facebook, a truly awesome discussion ensued. I found this reply the most intriguing and erudite:

The Ring doesn’t actually make someone invisible in the sense we understand the term. It shifts its bearer into the world of the Unseen (which is why it can’t hide Frodo from the Nazgul on Weathertop–they already dwell in the World of the Unseen). As a former Maia, Sauron simultaneously dwells in Middle-earth and the realm of the Unseen–so the Ring would not make him invisible.

Surely we haibane can contribute to this critical topic. What say you all? Agree or disagree with the theory above?