Geek Drivel

Quite interesting…

GoddessJ and I finally managed to see The Dark Knight last night, on our third try (the previous two tries were all sold out by the time we got there, for the entire evening). It’s good — damn good!

After watching the scene where Batman wrecks the Batmobile, and then suddenly takes off in its “ejection system,” GoddessJ (true femme-geek that she is) leaned over and whispered, “I think that’s the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen.” I’ll have to get one of those.

I like most of what Joss Whedon comes up with (the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series and Firefly, for instance), so when I heard that he was involved in this site, I had to check it out. I’m not sure who plays Dr. Horrible, though he looks very familiar (he might be one of the guys who played a pseudo-evil teenage geek in Buffy on occasion), but I instantly recognized “Captain Hammer” as Nathan Fillion (”Captain Mal” from Firefly, as well as the big bad guy from the last season of Buffy).

The first two “acts” are online now, with the third marked as coming tomorrow… very amusing, check it out. But hurry, it’s supposed to stop on Sunday, after that it’s only available on iTunes.

This was apparently an April Fool’s joke that I just saw for the first time. After I stopped laughing, I started thinking… it actually sounds like a good idea, at least to a point.

Sorry, but I don’t buy it.

In my work with compression theory, I learned a lot about probability. If any of these doomsday scenarios were possible, they would have happened somewhere in the universe already — probably a lot of somewheres — and science would have seen some evidence of them.

Like most good scientists, I hesitate to categorically deny that anything is possible, but the extremely remote possibility that any of these scenarios has a grain of truth should not stop people from experimenting.

Before automobiles, I understand that there was a firm and widespread belief that going more than fifty miles an hour would cause your head to spontaneously explode — but we all routinely travel at speeds above that now without a single cranium doing an unprovoked firecracker impersonation. Fear of the unknown is both natural and prudent, but you have to learn to identify and handle unjustified fears if you want to make any progress.

A moment of silence please, to mourn the passing of the creator of a game that defined a generation of young nerds, including yours truly. (Thanks, Joshua.)

In the David Brin SF novel Kiln People, the main character (a detective) follows someone’s movements at one point by tracking them via the public and private webcams that cover nearly every square inch of the city. When the book was first released in 2002, the reader could have been forgiven for thinking that was a little far-fetched, but a couple recent stories suggest that reality is getting closer to that all the time.

Science meets science fiction, and people benefit, once again.

In-eye TV, anyone?

This article interests me. Not for the prurient aspects — sorry, I’m just not all that interested in dolls, even life-sized and anatomically-correct ones — but for what happens when artificial intelligence can make them a lot more real? When you can easily believe that a robotic woman is the real thing, except that she’s never jealous, has headaches, or complains about you leaving the toilet seat up or the toothpaste cap off?

It’ll be interesting to see how things play out.