Tenser, said the Tensor

Tek Jansen Redux!

I've posted before about the newest sensation in fake-celebrity-authored fake technothriller space opera: Stephen Colbert's Alpha Squad 7: Lady Nocturne: A Tek Jansen Adventure.  Well, thanks to long-time-reader-first-time-emailer Brian White, I have fantastic news to report.  Colbert has apparently decided to do an end run around the elitist bookanistas in the mainstream publishing industry by self-publishing his 100,000 word epic, a chapter at a time, on the new Tek Jansen website.  O happy day!

Tek Jansen!

If you've been waiting for the Next Great Sci-Fi Adventure Novel, you're in luck.  It's already been written, and by a fictional character to boot.  TV news personality "Stephen Colbert" (as opposed to comedian Stephen Colbert) is posting excerpts from his "self-published, currently undistributed" novel Alpha Squad 7: Lady Nocturne: A Tek Jansen Adventure on the website for The Colbert Report.  The first few paragraphs from chapter 26, "Abraxxia's Gambit", are truly exceptional.  More please!

The Paradox of Japan

Perhaps the most hackneyed cliché in travel writing is to describe a foreign country as "a land of contrasts".  But Japan, more than anywhere else in the world, really is such a place.  Everywhere you turn you find a startling mix of the old and the new, the traditional and the novel, the past and the future.  These contrasts are rooted in the tumultuous history of Japan in the 20th century.

From the beginning of the century through the Second World War, Japan's course was not without precedent.  Its industrialization and colonial adventures were, quite consciously, a compressed recapitulation of the recent histories of the European powers.  But everything changed in those two cataclysmic flashes of terrible light in the skies over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Occupation followed, and then reconstruction, although the latter term hardly seems strong enough to capture the thoroughness of the changes to Japanese society at all levels.  As the nation emerged from occupation in the 1950's with its new and unique constitution, in which it forsook the practice of war for all time, it seemed poised to chart a course different from that of any other nation.  Just how different was more surprising than anyone expected.

Size Matters

Check out the coolest web site I've seen in a month: it lets you compare the size of various spacecraft from all sorts of different science fictional universes, including Star Wars, Star Trek, 2001, Farscape, Aliens, Babylon 5, and best of all, Macross.  Ever wanted to know how a Zentraedi Nupetiet-Vergnitzs flagship stacks up against an Imperial Star Destroyer?  (Don't look at me like that—you know you have!)  Now, if you're using IE, you can drag them side-by-side and compare.  I especially enjoyed the 2km-per-pixel scale tab, which includes the Halo, both Death Stars, and Unicron, with the Earth's moon in the background...you know, "for comparison".

The site is pretty comprehensive.  The only absence I noticed was the various ships from Gunbuster.  Buster Machine Number 3 was made out of Jupiter, for example—that's big!  (hat tip: Pious Agnostic)

On Continuity

On my about page (go ahead, I'll wait) I mention an interest in various wife-numbingly geeky subjects, including "the problem of maintaining continuity in long-running multi-author works like comic books and television shows".  I'd always intended to write a long post (or possibly dissertation) on this subject, so I was delighted to read this article by Todd Seavey about continuity in general and Star Wars continuity in particular.  (hat tip: No-sword)

I have one quibble with something Seavey says.  Fair warning: I'm going to geek out here, so either put on your Spock ears with me or bug out now.

Bionic Suit

There was a post on Boing Boing last week about a robot suit called "HAL" being developed at the University of Tsukuba in Japan.  Calling the suit "a mobile suit gundam of sorts", the Boing Boing post goes on to quote this passage from an article in New Scientist:

Two control systems interact to help the wearer stand, walk and climb stairs. A "bio-cybernic" system uses bioelectric sensors attached to the skin on the legs to monitor signals transmitted from the brain to the muscles. It can do this because when someone intends to stand or walk, the nerve signal to the muscles generates a detectable electric current on the skin's surface. These currents are picked up by the sensors and sent to the computer, which translates the nerve signals into signals of its own for controlling electric motors at the hips and knees of the exoskeleton. It takes a fraction of a second for the motors to respond accordingly, and in fact they respond fractionally faster to the original signal from the brain than the wearer's muscles do...

"It's like riding on a robot, rather than wearing one," says (University of Tsukuba researcher Yoshiyuki) Sankai.

Star Wars Poll

Over at Byzantium's Shores, Jaquandor has posted his answers to a long poll about Star Wars.  The quarter is over and I have some free time, so I figured I'd throw in my two cents.  Note that I've left blank some of the questions I don't have strong opinons about and, like Jaq, I've added a couple of questions at the end.

Revenge of the Sith Trailer

Last week, Lucasfilm released the trailer for the final Star Wars movie, Revenge of the Sith.  After watching it a few times, I'm really looking forward to seeing the movie—after The Phantom Menace (capsule review: pretty bad), and Attack of the Clones (capsule review: better, but still disappointing), RotS is his last chance to get it right, and I think he just might be on track.

Fairy Shrimp My Ass!

I was reading the science news over at Yahoo! News, and I came across this article, which says in part:

Biologists with the Idaho National Guard have discovered a new species of fairy shrimp living in the oft-dry lake beds of Idaho's desert.

Though they look delicate enough to match their name, they are strong enough to survive, unhatched, for years in the baking heat of summer and the frozen tundra of winter until enough rain falls and the pools return. Once they awaken they live a few frenzied weeks, mating and leaving behind tiny cyst-like offspring, and die.

This may not seem alarming at first, but that's because you haven't seen the picture...

The Doctor Returns

The new Doctor Who TV show is about to start, on March 26th in the UK, but we poor Americans with our mere Sci-Fi Channel apparently won't be seeing it.  This is annoying, because I'm curious to see if the new series is any good.  (It could hardly be worse than the 1996 TV movie.  Trust me.)  I guess I can understand why the Sci-Fi Channel is reluctant, though.  Can you imagine them trying to bring the (largely Who-ignorant) American audience up to speed?

Previously on Doctor Who...um, there was this old guy and his granddaughter (except forget about her), and he traveled through time and stuff, and then he changed into a different guy (several different guys, actually), and some aliens tried to take over the Earth (several different kinds of aliens, actually, and they succeeded pretty often), and he flies around in a police box.  Uh, a police box is like a British phone booth, except only for police.  It's bigger inside than out, and it's broken, so it can go pretty much anywhere in time and space.  Anyway, he's a Time Lord and he's got a sidekick.  Enjoy!

(hat tip: Boing Boing)