Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Quote of the day: We live in Zimbabwe here as far as transportation is concerned. –Bill O’Reilly

We have big street plows here in Boston, and also little sidewalk plows. It sounds like an ideal plowing situation; unfortunately there is no treaty between the large and small plows. Any place the sidewalk meets the street is a slushy disaster area. It’s easier for pedestrians to walk in the street.

I’m going to put the transit system to the test tomorrow. The T is just the beginning of the trip. If I make it to New York by midnight, I may blog. Otherwise, this is Jemima, signing off from the third world country of the Northeast…

Lego link of the day: The Brick Apple
Cool link of the day: Do it yourself weather on Slashdot

There’s a winter storm warning this afternoon for Boston - just in case anyone hadn’t noticed that it’s been snowing for two days now. Besides the white stuff falling out of the sky, there’s another clue - fifteen inches of snow on the ground (unless you’re in one of those 30 inch pockets). Although it has to be relatively warm in order to snow (although, obviously, still below freezing), the 14° windchill makes up for the toasty 28° air temperature. For those of you playing the home game on the metric system, 14°F is -10°C in dog years. It’s not 0° yet, but it’s working on it.

Cool RSS feed of the day: MarsNews - the XML version didn’t work for me, but the RDF was fine

I stumbled over The Nemesis Affair while looking for The Case for Mars in the library. The former tells the tale of the 26-million-year cyclic theory of extinctions proposed by David Raup and Jack Sepkoski in the early 80’s. The statistics themselves have never been convincingly disproven; the dinosaurs had an appointment with death and ours is coming up in 15 million years.

Even without Nemesis, the theory was already controversial. It seems that paleo paleontologists preferred a steady-state theory of extinction - the dinosaurs were on their way out anyway. It’s hard for outsiders like us to believe that in a field (paleontology) in which the eons have always been separated by massive extinctions that there would be so much disbelief in mass extinction per se. Setting it to a bouncy 26 m.y. beat did not go over well in the scientific community. Likewise, no one believed in Deep Impact-style meteor impacts twenty years ago; today we take the sky falling for granted.

Despite being largely about that sort of scientific infighting and malingering, The Nemesis Affair was a good, quick read. Given the pretty pictures of extinction cycles (you can see one partway down this science beat page), the question immediately arises, who’s tossing meteors at us?

Three answers were suggested: Nemesis, Planet X, and the galactic plane. The mechanism was more or less the same in each case - every 26 to 30 million years, the menace passes through the Oort Cloud and disturbs the comets, many of which come screeching in towards the sun. On their new orbits, a comet or two may slam into the Earth (or any other innocent bystander planet), punching holes on the order of the 200-km wide Chicxulub crater, blocking out the sun with aerosolized bits of the Yucatan, and killing off the dinosaurs. The stray meteors don’t have to do us on their first pass - the cycle is measured in millions of years. Two out of the last twelve cataclysmic cycles resulted in no appreciable extinctions - ergo, the strays may even miss us all together.

So about the culprits… Our sun passes up and down through the plane of the galaxy like a yo-yo every 30 million years or so (65 million years round-trip), presumably encountering more dust and stuff while in the denser plane than when above or below it. It’s not clear how the dust does its damage or where those space dust bunnies are located. Planet X is the long-lost tenth planet that was supposed to balance the wobbles in the orbits of the outer planets. It’s no longer so clear that those orbits wobble at all. Nemesis is a postulated dim companion star that travels halfway to Alpha Centauri when it’s not busy wiping out Terran life. The failure of the IRAS survey to find a suitable star nearby has put a dent in the Nemesis theory, but at least one scientist still believes.

The Death Star may still be out there…and if it’s not, then who’s tossing those meteors at us?

I keep giving Stephen Baxter more chances. Manifold: Time wasn’t nearly as depressing as Evolution, but I wouldn’t put it up there with Raft. Like Manifold: Origin, Manifold: Space is populated with unsympathetic characters - in fact, the same unsympathetic characters. They’re balanced by cool science, including, as usual, other sentient animals - in this case, squid. All the science is real and annotated at the end.

While the science was good so far as it went, there are nine theories listed on the last page and they don’t mesh together in the plot particularly well. The elements are interesting individually, but it’s not clear how the “probabilistic doomsday prediction” was initially avoided in the main timeline, nor why the climactic event had to come as early in the evolution of the universe as it did. The whole squid thing seemed unnecessary as well, but you can’t really knock squid.

I knew I’d forgotten something when I did my updates list mailing. Liz made me a lovely new button:

Besides the button, there are three new Stargate drabbles up on the Stargate fic page. I wrote Ha’taaka back in October but didn’t put it up because it was supposed to be a companion to the new Harsesis. Things didn’t quite work out that way. The other new one is Brain Cramp - all three are based on Season 2 episodes.

Jade wanted me to show off my hard screenshot work, so here’s the Khan of the Day at a convenient 100×100 size (click to enlarge, download if you want it):

In her blog, Seema praised DS9 for “friction, continuity, war and angst.” DS9 was the least popular of all Trek series before ENT came along to wrestle for the title. Trek fans clearly don’t want continuity or angst - not because cohesion and plot are bad things in and of themselves, but because they’re bad television.

Television has to be episodic to succeed. You can do it without the annoying reset button - Stargate doesn’t suffer from the reset follies that Voyager did - but you can’t show a five year movie in one-hour bits and expect the audience to stick with you. Yes, rabid fangirls will come along for the ride, but rabid fangirls are not a large enough demographic for network TV.

A series is something you can drop into at any point, see an episode, understand more or less what’s going on, and want to see more. A serial requires you to go in order or you’ll miss, not the subtle details, but the main meaning of what’s going on. You see one episode and you’re hopelessly lost; you know you don’t have the time for this. You walk away.

The serial vs. series problem affects virtual seasons as well. I’m not the only one who had the best intentions of reading VS7.5 but fell off the wagon early on. It’s not always clear at the outset which one you’re dealing with - you might think Lois McMaster Bujold is a serial writer, but she writes series. For all I know, VS7.5 is a series - but if it smells like a serial, I run away.

It doesn’t matter whether serials are superior to series on some literary or fan-fodder basis. I’m willing to admit, sight-mostly-unseen, that Babylon 5 and DS9 were far, far better shows than Stargate or Voyager. It’s a purely economic decision on my part to watch the latter. I can miss entire seasons of VOY or SG-1 (and believe me, I have) and still follow the fandom and write fic. The barrier to entry on a show that has five-year plots, or even one-year plots, is too high for me.

This took much less time than I expected: Utah Polygamist Invokes Ruling on Gay Sex. The defendant claims that the state has no compelling interest in what six people do in the privacy of their home. If he had been a Massachusetts polygamist, he could have invoked the ruling on gay marriage; then he and whichever of his wives are of age could go to Cambridge and get married.

Cool Apple link of the day: predictions about the iPod from two years ago

There was a cool article in the December Analog about years without summer. The author didn’t mention 1816, but did go into some detail about 540 C.E. Other really bad weather years included 44 B.C., 207 B.C., 1159 B.C., 1628 B.C., 2354 B.C. (the Flood?), and 3195 B.C. The data came from tree rings.

Word count: 3323

I can’t believe I wrote the whole thing! Many thanks to Jerie for listening to my whining yesterday, and to Seema for writing companionship during the two or three days it took her to write her novel.