Telepathy, Or the Next Best Thing

Fans of Jean Grey, Charles Xavier or simply talking without moving your mouth (ventriloquists not included), rejoice: telepathic technology has been discovered.

So it’s not as cool as being born with a mutant gift (or curse, depending if you follow the films or the comics…), and it doesn’t include the ability to make your own scifi Hoveround or throw chairs at people at town hall meetings with your brain. But it does prove that communication using only your mind is possible.

Created by a team of British scientists at the University of Southampton, the technology is said to be a system that will “allow people to send thoughts, words and images directly to the minds of others, particularly with a disability.” This includes people who are mute or cannot communicate otherwise.

And as cool as that is, it’s totally going to render Law and Order: Criminal Intent interrogation techniques moot. One blink for yes, two blinks for no just isn’t going to cut it anymore.

The creators also insist that this technology is going to be the future of global communication, allowing people to converse without keyboards, telephones, or texting one another as they swerve to avoid head-on collisions. Hooray!

And though they also concede that their system will allow people to communicate through their minds alone, it will be years before it’s actually developed to that advanced level—so no cheating on Calculus exams by sheer mind sharing yet.

To create this technology, the team used brain-computer interfacing, which is a system that uses computers to decode the signals that a person’s brain creates during communication. These signals are then sent through the computer, via an Internet connection, to another person’s brain.

Let’s face it, if Jean had needed a computer to transmit her thoughts around, Professor X would have been in deep s*** a number of times.

One of the scientists on the team, Dr. James, admits that the process isn’t telepathy—and that the person on the receiving end of the message still isn’t able to know that a message is being sent to him or her in the first place yet. That technology is still being worked on.

Still, you have to admit, computers needed or not it’s no tin can telephone. It’s stories like this that make you wonder if technology like the stuff Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet used in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind will actually ever be available. If so, I’m sure there’s a handful of exes that we’d all be happy to erase.

SG:U Stargate Universe Review

I had some technical problems trying to watch SG:U, but these have since been overcome.  (If you, like me, had the first two episodes expire out of your Hulu queue without warning, you can now find the first four episodes here on the show's static Hulu page.)  I spent the weekend catching up on the first four episodes, and I have to admit I'm impressed.

I had never been much of a Stargate watcher, either of the first show or of Stargate Atlantis.  Although oddly enough I have seen the same episode (which details how the team found Ronan) at least five times.  (in "American Gods," Neil Gaiman mentions this as a rule for television shows you hardly watch.)  Somehow whenever an episode came on television, I found something better to do after about ten minutes.

Nevertheless, I had set myself to watch Stargate Universe after the press it received over the summer.  It is being pitched as a re-imagining, perhaps not quite as severe as the re-imagining which was visited upon Battlestar Galactica, but in a similar vein.  Battlestar Galactica has been Syfy Channel's biggest hit of all time, and now that the series has ended, the channel has been casting around for potential replacements.  SG:U seems to be fitting that bill quite well.

The first thing a science fiction fan will notice about the show is that it is heavy on the science.  (See my previous article, on complaints that science fiction is insufficiently science-y.)  This is done deliberately, and in fact I first heard about the show from John Scalzi's blog.

John Scalzi is the author of a successful (and excellent) series of science fiction novels, as well as the non-fiction astronomy title, The Rough Guide to the Universe.  He has also been hired by the makers of SG:U as a creative consultant, responsible for correcting and proofreading all of the science content in the show.  Spiffy, right?  It's nice to know that a show is at least attempting to get things right.

For example, when the ship's air scrubbers need more scrubbing stuff to get rid of the CO2, our intrepid explorers can't just land on a planet and start shoveling.  There's a lot of talk about what they need (limestone) and where they'll find it (on what used to be the beach, back when this desert planet was under water), and a test kit to see if they've got the right stuff.  And this hunt for lime is what drove the entire plot of the episode, rather than being a little filigree.

Of course, this is also a show where the castaways are in communication with Earth via the Ancients' body-switching technology, which has something to do with smooth stones.  But hey, who am I to complain.  It's an interesting plot device, and it lends more poignancy to the plight of the castaways, because they can only visit Earth briefly, and then only in someone else's body.

What I admire most about the show so far is that the main characters are interesting, well fleshed out, and frequently contradictory.  A lot of the conflict in the first four episodes come from interpersonal friction between conflicting personalities, rather than OMG SPLOSIONS.  Which isn't to say that I want to watch an entire season of People Bickering In Space, but that a lot of thought has been put into setting the scene for the show.  Which is a promising sign indeed, because sometimes I wonder.

The Science Fiction Complaints Department

"Of course the BBC gave [Russell T.] Davies another show called Torchwood, which is basically "slash fiction" on television"

Dude, you say that like it's a bad thing.

So on the one hand, we have an appalling rant about how women are ruining science fiction for men.  (And also, gay men apparently don't count as "men.")  Entirely unsurprising, given that the rant is published on a self-declared "anti-feminist" website called The Spearhead, and the author's name is "Pro-male/Anti-feminist Tech."  (Honestly I think this dude has gotten enough attention at this point, and I'm not going to link to him.  The last thing he needs is more attention.)

On the other hand we have famed, acclaimed, and (if you ask me) god-like science fiction writer Charles Stross slamming the entire Star Trek oeuvre for being insufficiently science-y.  And you know, dude's got a point, but so what?  

It seemed like an odd thing to take a swing at, if you ask me.  Had anyone been marching around with a banner declaring the collected works of Star Trek to be "THE SCIENCE FICTION TO END ALL SCIENCE FICTION"?  I mean, we all love it, but it's never been a show about the science.  But Charles Stross is one of the hardest hard science fiction writers out there, so I can see where he's coming from.  He's just marking the boundaries of his territory, so to speak.

At any rate, I can't help but be bemused by the workings of a universe where the "anti-feminist" idiot blogger and Charles Stross - a hard sci fi author who writes thoughtfully and intelligently about gender roles and the nature of privilege - somehow end up in complete agreement.  I don't half think that if Stross had known about that other article, he would have scuttled his own.

You can make a case for "science fiction is getting less science-y" without blaming a whole entire gender.  (And poorly, to boot, because who in their right mind would call the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica more girly than the original? ARE YOU KIDDING ME.)  

Science is hard, and it's a lot easier to write about human relationships, and the appeal of the latter is much wider than the appeal of the former.  And "wider appeal" is the stock in trade of a cable channel like Syfy Network.  (I still cringe when I type "Syfy" but I'm sure that will wear off eventually.)  

Furthermore, as we also learned this week, in the article that got Stross hot under the collar, Star Trek script authors just used the word "tech" in their scripts, then relied on someone else to fill in the science-y bits.  Which is only a revelation if you didn't know that years ago, and didn't we all know that years ago?  But I digress.  

Clearly, these "insufficiently science-y" things are popular.  Just ask Joss Whedon, Russell T. Davies, or Ronald D. Moore.  So what's the goal, here?  To convince us that hard science fiction is better than "relationship-heavy" science fiction, by making fun of it?  That's like a Mac user trying to convince a Windows user to switch by making fun of Windows. OH WAIT.

5 Cyberpunk Promises I Wish Had Come True

Cyberpunk is usually seen as one of the science fiction genres which was most accurate in its forecasting.  But we're not quite there yet!


1.    Cyberspace Without Typing

Famously, the concept of cyberspace (particularly as seen in William Gibson's Neuromancer) is said to have come to life as the internet.  Well I'll tell you something, that is just not true.  Except for your parents, who probably feel that anything that happens in a "browser" is exhilarating, and that the mere act of "Googling" a thing is just futuristic beyond belief.

The connectedness is there, yes.  But you know what?  I don't remember anyone typing in any of those cyberpunk novels.  I distinctly remember that the authors took pains to mention that the "decks" didn't have a keyboard of any sort.  Just a plug you stuck into your brain, and maybe a pair of special gloves to wear.

Realistically though, spending my entire work day performing the pantomime from "Johnny Mnemonic" would get pretty tedious.  Just imagining how much I'd have to wave my arms around in order to check my bank balance makes me tired.

2.    Nihilism

Oh they are so hard and bitter, the characters in a cyberpunk novel.  (And rightfully so, since the genre hails from the hard boiled detective genre of the 40s and 50s.)  Everyone is hard and bitter, their eyes glistening like some poetically described shiny surface.  

I have to admit, sometimes I get tired of caring about so many things.  Climate change, recycling, bringing my tote bags to the grocery store, I should have changed out of these sweats and into proper pants, does my hair look weird, I hope I remembered to pay my cell phone bill, I need to respond to that email Dad sent before he starts worrying I've gone missing, is there a new episode of "House" tonight or is that tomorrow night?

Cyberpunk characters don't give a rip about anything, certainly not these petty day-to-day concerns of an adult in the year 2009.

3.    Everyone Is Cool

This could actually be considered a sub-set of #2, if you think about it.  But beyond being nihilistic, everyone in cyberpunk novels was irredeemably awesome. 

William Gibson never mentioned your elderly aunt who collects dollar store "Love Is" figurines.  Bruce Sterling's novels didn't have room for Ted in Marketing who just clapped you on the shoulder and offered a hearty "TGIF!" on his way to the break room.  

4.    Efficient, High-Speed Global Travel

Remember when Case took a sub-orbital ballistic flight in order to hop continents?  Where are those, exactly?  Because the last time I checked, we were still flying around in AIRPLANES, for crying out loud.  

5.    Medical Advancements


Doctors can do the craziest things in cyberpunk novels!  Forget the advances in artificial intelligence by the computer sciences - medical technology is definitely the handwavium of the genre.  Nanites that eat cancer cells!  Tiny bombs that clamp onto your arteries and wait for a remote detonation signal!  USB ports bored into your skull!  Okay, so we've managed the complete hand transplant, but that's not cool, that's just creepy.

Night Watch

Since we are getting closer and closer to the release of Unseen Academicals – the brand new book by Sir Terry Pratchett – perhaps it is time for a review of one of his books. And what better book than Night Watch, my all time favorite?

All of you who are fans of Pratchett, especially those who love the Sam Vimes storylines, will be familiar with the Night Watch. Unlike some of his lighthearted ones, this one is more indepth, it makes a lot more social comment (if that is even possible with Pratchett) and it reveals some important details about the beloved Discworld cop.

This is the novel where we learn about Vimes, where we find out why Vimes thinks the way he does. Think of it as a fictional semi-biography of Commander Vimes, if you will.

 

For those who are unaware of Vimes or any of the other Discworld related treasures, do read on. I should start by introducing Sam Vimes. Think of him as a flawed man with his own share of vices. Now imagine him as a cop, a man who always strives to do the right thing. He faces all types of adversities and nasty situations and yet, he always sticks to his code of ethics for guidance. In this day and age when we keep coming across anti-heroes and are provided with various justifications as to why it is alright not to have a strong moral compass, it is refreshing to see a such a strong fictional character.

 Well, now that I have built up Vimes in everyone's eyes, let's dive into the story. Pratchett wrote this book after he had fleshed out Sam Vimes in various other novels. Thus, readers had started viewing him as the lovable, dependable man who could do no wrong. But was it always the case?

Turns out, things could have turned out very differently for young Vimes when he first joined the Watch. He could have ended up corrupt, disdainful and apathetic. What changed all that? Pratchett follows the two timelines in this novel where he kept pace with the older Vimes and slowly jumped over to Vimes youth. There he traces the early influence, particularly that of the mysterious, Sergeant-At-Arms, John Keel. The youthful Vimes is growing up in scary times – civil rights was a joke and torture at the hands of authorities were not uncommon. It is at this crucial time that Keel strides in and starts changing the lives of everyone around him.

 I loved this book for a number of reasons. Firstly, I consider this to be one of the writer's best works where social commentary is concerned. It is evident, from a lot of his novels, that Pratchett is passionate about human rights and you can see this feeling guiding the underlying themes of this novel. Secondly, you have to admire the man's knowledge of historical events. The backdrop of Vimes' youth corresponding with historical references to early development of proper police work. History buffs will remember how fear, torture and absolute power of those in high places served unsuccessfully as crime deterrents until folks decided to build a proper system to protect general public.

Her Dress was Made of Stainless Steel

There's a remarkable juxtaposition between old and new, to create a kind of meta-commentary about media and entertainment.

And also, it's just fun.

District 9’s Confusing Hodge-Podge

I loved "Alive in Joburg" so much when it was released.  I'm afraid that filmmaker Neill Blomkamp did more in that original six minute short film than in the whole of "District 9."  Some ideas just don't expand well, I guess.

I had difficulty with "District 9" on two fronts:

1.     Logic.  I know it's churlish to point out logical inconsistencies, but they were SO HUGE.  And so central to the point of the entire movie.  We are told that the aliens' space ship broke down over Johannesburg.  After a few months we broke into the ship and found all the aliens stumbling around half dead from starvation.  We airlifted them down to the ground, where they lived in refugee/concentration camps for twenty years.

Fine.

But... where do all these weapons come from?  The alien weapons are central to the plot.  And yet it is also central to the plot that the aliens have no way to return to their ship.  Did each alien carry five or six giant rail guns in their lap on the original airlift from the ship?  

We are told that only the aliens can use their weapons, because of the DNA lock.  And in 20 years, no one - not the criminal syndicate, nor the greedy corporation - has been able to find a workaround for this problem.  Really?  Really.

2.    The corporate scapegoat.  Now don't get me wrong, I love a good corporate scapegoating.  And heartless multi-national corporations make an excellent bad guy.  And it gives us the opportunity to have a Michael Scott in charge of either saving or destroying the human race, which is pretty awesome.

But in this case, within the confines of a movie that's about racial tension, refugee camps, and/or apartheid (take your pick), corporations simply can't be blamed for any of those problems.  Sad to say, those problems are perpetuated by regular human beings with the best of intentions just like you and me.  (For an excellent example of "evil perpetuated by regular human beings with the best of intentions" see Torchwood: Children of Earth.)

There are so many ways the movie could have been better.  It's a little bit heartbreaking, to tell you the truth.  

For example, the anti-corporate bit could have been excellently handled by saying that MNU decided to "employ" the aliens after they landed.  Everyone has to pay their way on Earth, amirite?  That's why the aliens went to work in MNU's fine, fine sweatshops.  For cat food.  Or perhaps farmed for their eggs (which by the way is a sub-plot I wanted to see explored further on Battlestar Galactica).

As for the weapons, their only purpose within the context of the movie is to give the aliens something that we want.  Something that we are willing to torture and kill to obtain.  Well there are plenty examples of that sort of thing in regular old human history, from precious metals to manual labor.  

After all, the reason white South Africans didn't simply kill all of the black South Africans outright under apartheid is that the black South Africans provided all of the manual labor.  Every day black South Africans would perform a small-scale emigration from the camps out into the white world, work their asses off, then return to the camps.  Apartheid was essentially a recreation of slavery in the American South, except with passports.  

Unfortunately I guess that wasn't explodey enough for the movies.

Also just as a side note, "District 9" has some weird hate on for Nigerians.  Not sure what's up with that, but Nigerians are as much an evil as the MNU.  And they're hardly ever referred to by name, just as "the Nigerians.")

Defying Gravity Falls Flat

The SFnal concept of ABC's Defying Gravity initially seemed very promising. This new show from James Parriott of Grey's Anatomy and Michael Edelstein  of Desperate Housewives, puts an ensemble cast into the pressure-cooker environment of an international spacecraft for a six-year mission in the near future. In Joss Whedon's or Joe Straczynski's hands, this could be an amazing show.

That's why it's such a pity that the muddled, confused, banal story and mediocre script manages to be both didactic and trite all at once, and the characters are so poorly developed that you don't actually care who sleeps with whom, or whether the engineer guy succeeds when he paints his face and exits the spacecraft to put his space-suited body into orbit as a means of suicide. It's not the actors' faults. They do the best they can with the material they're given. The writing is so lackluster and the actual plot points so glaringly dumb and full of holes, though, that there's only so much a talented and earnest cast can do with this clunker of a new show.

Defying Gravity follows the journey of eight astronauts, through their selection and training, all the way (hypothetically) through their six-year mission on the Antares to visit seven of Sol's planets.

It's the year 2052. Abortion is illegal, apparently due to an overwhelmingly anti-choice majority on the Supreme Court—one character makes a reference to "a couple of new justices" could change that. In fact, you can't buy over-the-counter pregnancy tests anymore, either. Or contraception, apparently, because in spite of the oft-expressed desperate importance of and brutal competition for a spot on the crew of the Antares, one of the characters manages to get pregnant within the first hour because she's had drunken, unprotected sex with one of her instructors. She's not only stupid, but as it turns out, perhaps is insane as well—apparently after her illegal abortion, she starts hearing her unborn baby crying. Because, you know, having an abortion makes women go mad. Nice bit of anti-choice propaganda, dropped in there. Not heavy-handed, at all. *eyeroll*

It's okay, though, because she's predestined to have a spot on this crew, no matter how much smarter, harder-working, saner, and better-qualified most of the other applicants might actually be. Of the other crew members, one of them goes nuts and tries to suicide in space, one of them is apparently an alcoholic, and I've completely lost track of who is screwing whom and who is married to whom. Oh, and unbeknownst to anyone but Mission Control and the on-board Mission Commander, the Antares is carrying some sort of Sooper-Sekrit Stowaway with metaphysical powers. They're calling this reconstituted Kosh character the "Beta."

You see, the mysterious Beta is really responsible for picking the crew. In fact, after they're already aboard the Antares, the Beta magically gives heart problems to two of the crew members it decides it dislikes, which forces them to return to earth to be replaced by their two alternates—one of whom is Defying Gravity's leading man, so you see why it was so important to actually get the guy onto the ship . . . Even though he's a burn-out screw up who really shouldn't be in space.

There's a name for that particular device to solve plot problems. Writers usually pull a deus ex machina out of their butts when they're too dumb, lazy, or inept to write themselves back out of a corner. So it's emphatically not a good sign to me that Defying Gravity entirely revolves around this device. If stuff in a story only happens because an off-stage character is arbitrarily waving a magic wand to make that stuff happen, it's awfully hard to invest any actual energy into engaging with the characters and their predicaments. Defying Gravity's creators and writers better be hoping that the mysterious Beta can wave its magic wand and make the viewers care enough to tune in for more of this contrived drek.

Transparent Aluminum: Scotty was right!

Scientists at Oxford University have reportedly created a new kind of aluminum by bombarding ordinary aluminum with emissions from the world's most powerful "soft" x-ray laser.

An international team led by Oxford University scientists Professor Justin Wark, Dr Bob Nagler, Dr Gianluca Gregori, William Murphy, Sam Vinko and Thomas Whitcher have created a transparent form of aluminium by bombarding the metal with the world’s most powerful soft X-ray laser. 'Transparent aluminium' previously only existed in science fiction, featuring in the movie Star Trek IV, but the real material is an exotic new state of matter with implications for planetary science and nuclear fusion. According to the journal Nature Physics, the emmisions eliminated a cored electron from each aluminum atom (remember, aluminum is an element), without altering the element's essential crystalline structure. Consequently, the bombarded aluminum is almost invisible to extreme degrees of ultraviolet radiation, but only for exceedingly brief amounts of time—so brief that it's not human perceivable in ordinary ways.

The research is still very much a matter of a small step in a very long journey, but it suggests all sorts of possibilities in terms of understanding basic atomic structures. The research was reported in the journal Nature Physics. There's a brief summary in laymen's language here.

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