Archive for July, 2005

The New Battlestar Galactica

by Glenn Vance on July 25, 2005 in Television with No comments
Galactica

I’ve writ­ten a lot about Lost (well, at least some about it.) on this site, and while I gen­er­ally think the show is great, it has it’s bumps and dips in the road on its way to per­fec­tion. When it’s great, it’s really great, but when it’s mediocre, or just plain bad, it’s bad. I like the show mainly for the peo­ple, which is usu­ally what keeps you around for a given length of inter­est, but some­times the writ­ing is just lacking.

I watched “Bat­tlestar Galac­tica” when it was on in 1978. I was high on Star Wars and this was the next best thing to Star Wars that we had on TV, which made sense, since many of the ILM design­ers who worked on Star Wars worked on BsG also. I even watched the crappy “Galac­tica 1980” when I was nine or ten years old. I’d also heard for years that Richard Hatch, he of Apollo fame, was attempt­ing to res­ur­rect the series and have it con­tinue from the stop­ping point of the first series. I thought it sounded lame and like some­thing that a washed up actor would try to do, kind of like how Tom Arnold keeps say­ing that there’s going to be a True Lies 2. Then I started read­ing about Ron Moore’s adap­ta­tion and how it recast many of the orig­i­nal roles and that they’d sex­i­fied the whole thing and it sounded pathetic and lame.

But then I (belat­edly) saw the minis­eries on DVD. And I was hooked.

Gone was the loop­i­ness of the first series. No more casino plan­ets. No more Ovians. No more Dagget or lum­ber­ing Cylons with their hokey swords. The Cylons were bad muthas. The apoc­a­lypse of the 12 colonies of Kobol felt real (nat­u­rally in a post 9/11 world) and imme­di­ate. There were moments where peo­ple had to make deci­sions that would get the entire fleet killed or just half of the fleet. It was gut wrench­ing to watch as the pres­i­dent decides to aban­don half of the fleet to die so that the rest of the fleet can live on to run from the bad guys another day.

And then the SciFi Chan­nel green­lit a first sea­son. And it was great. And then based on the rat­ings of that they green­lit a sec­ond sea­son, some­thing that the first series could never do. And it’s still great.

My favorite char­ac­ters from the new series are Col. Tigh and Gaius Bal­tar, two peo­ple that I never cared about from the first series. Tigh always was the nice gen­teel sec­ond in com­mand (I remem­ber very lit­tle about him) to Adama, and I remem­ber noth­ing of Bal­tar, except that I think he was already a turn­coat to the Cylons when the series began. Michael Hogan and James Cal­lis, who play Tigh and Bal­tar, respec­tively, are great, with Hogan being my favorite of the two. His Tigh is a lowlife drunk scum­bag who Adama sees some sort of value in. He’s crass, gets in fights, and is almost uni­ver­sally hated by the crew, espe­cially Star­buck. Cal­lis, who I remem­bered as the gay guy from Brid­get Jones’s Diary is hillar­i­ous here as the ego­ma­ni­a­cal genius who keeps hav­ing visions of his Cylon girlfriend/handler in his head. That the man who unwit­tingly helped bring the apoc­a­lypse on is able to be ele­vated to the post of vice pres­i­dent of the for­mer 12 colonies makes for great television.

I love the show. I wait weekly now to see what will hap­pen next. I try not to read on the net what will hap­pen the next episode. I don’t do such a good job of that some­times. The sign of great tele­vi­sion is that you will clamor for more and more like this show does. I want to know who else is a Cylon. I want to know what the colonists will find on Kobol. I want to know how Helo and Star­buck are going to get back to the fleet and what will hap­pen to them on the way. I want to know when Bal­tar will finally turn to the Cylon side and either be forced to flee or will stay and be a Fifth Colum­nist for the Cylons. I want to know what is going to hap­pen to Boomer now that she shot Adama. Will Pres­i­dent Roslin die? Will Bal­tar become pres­i­dent at that time or will he have to cam­paign against Tom Zarek? When is Tigh going to attempt to clean up and get rid of his crazy wife Ellen, who con­se­quently lusts for Tigh to have power? What will hap­pen to Chief when he gets back and his sus­pi­cions about Boomer being a Cylon are realized?

Damn! I love this show!

The First Quantum Computer? 2008

by Glenn Vance on July 24, 2005 in Science with No comments
old-computer

A com­pany going by the moniker of D-Wave is let­ting it be known that they will pro­duce the world’s first quan­tum com­puter in 2008. Quan­tum machines, a sci-fi sta­ple along with nan­otech, would not rely on the tra­di­tional bits that today’s com­put­ers oper­ate with, but qubits (quan­tum bits), com­put­ing at the mol­e­c­u­lar level. Take a tea­spoon, fill it with qubits, and you have IBM’s Deep Blue to the tril­lionth power. We’ll see if it hap­pens, but if it turns out to be vapor­ware like Duke Nukem For­ever, don’t be surprised.

Of course, these com­put­ers would have some phys­i­cal draw­backs in the begin­ning, such as hav­ing at its heart an ana­logue chip which would have to be cooled with liq­uid helium to – 269 °C — just 4 °C shy of absolute zero. And it’s not like you’ll be play­ing BF2 any­time soon on one of these mofos. D-Wave expects to sell com­pu­ta­tional ser­vices, not quan­tum hard­ware, which I’m guess­ing in the short term would help them make back some of that R&D budget.

Clotting Battlefield Wounds with Shrimp

by Glenn Vance on July 18, 2005 in Science with No comments
Shrimp and Zucchini with Bowties in Light Tomato Sauce probably won't heal your battlefield wounds, but it'll taste great while you're bleeding out.

Sci­en­tists have devel­oped a ban­dage that can clot a bul­let wound in one minute or less. The magic ingre­di­ent? Ground shrimp shells and vine­gar, a con­coc­tion that has been found to clot blood instantly. The key ingre­di­ent in the shrimp shells is called chitosan.

The ban­dages were devel­oped by Hem­Con, Inc., which devel­ops and mar­kets tech­nolo­gies to con­trol severe bleed­ing for trau­matic skin and organ injuries. Gre­gory, who co-founded Hem­Con, says chi­tosan inter­acts with our blood cells because its mol­e­cules carry a pos­i­tive charge. “The outer mem­brane of a red blood cell has a neg­a­tive charge,” he explains, “and oppo­site charges attract. The red cell is attracted to the positively-charged chi­tosan, and when it touches, it fuses and forms a blood clot.” When a clot forms, the bleed­ing stops. And unlike a reg­u­lar ban­dage, which slips off when wet, the Hem­Con ban­dage becomes adhe­sive and sticks to the wet wound site, seal­ing and sta­bi­liz­ing it.“Bleeding is the sin­gle largest cause of death on the bat­tle­field,” says Jim Hensel, Pres­i­dent and CEO of Hem­Con. “The tech­nol­ogy that exists today prior to the Hem­Con ban­dage is a com­pres­sion ban­dage and a tourni­quet, which is the same thing used in the Civil War, the Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Way, and frankly, the Tro­jan War.”

Neato bur­rito!

The U.N. and the Internet

by Glenn Vance on July 13, 2005 in The Internet with No comments
UN

Smaller, less devel­oped coun­tries are start­ing to gripe to the U.N. (also known as “Your Future One World Gov­ern­ment”) about the influ­ence that the USA has over how the Inter­net is run worldwide.

Key issues range from adding new top-level domains, assign­ing blocks of IP addresses, and oper­at­ing the root servers that direct all Inter­net traf­fic. Other respon­si­bil­i­ties that would fall under the umbrella of this new orga­ni­za­tion would include Inter­net sur­veil­lance, “con­sumer pro­tec­tion,” and per­haps even the power to tax domain names to pay for “uni­ver­sal access.” “Uni­ver­sal access”, accord­ing to U.N. doc­u­ments, sounds like the phone tax that you pay to pro­vide Inter­net ser­vice to schools.

Some of the com­plaints are on their face, patently silly –

Syria: “There’s more and more spam every day. Who are the vic­tims? Devel­op­ing and least-developed coun­tries, too. There is no seri­ous inten­tion to stop this spam by those who are the trans­porters of the spam, because they benefit…The only solu­tion is for us to buy equip­ment from the coun­tries which send this spam in order to deal with spam. How­ever, this, we believe, is not acceptable.”

Yes, we should have to take direc­tions from Syria, lover of ter­ror­ists, on how to com­bat spam. Spam doesn’t just affect devel­op­ing nations. It affects every­body. Please.

Part of the Bush Administration’s response to this call for inter­na­tion­al­iza­tion included their stat­ing that the Root servers would remain under U.S. con­trol no mat­ter what was decided.

Beyond the usual levers of diplo­matic pres­sure and pub­lic kvetch­ing, Brazil and China could choose what amounts to the nuclear option: a frag­mented root. That means a new top-level domain would not be approved by ICANN—but would be rec­og­nized and used by large por­tions of the rest of the world. The down­side, of course, is that the nuclear option could cre­ate a Balka­nized Inter­net where two com­put­ers find dif­fer­ent Web sites at the same address.

“It wasn’t until now” that a frag­mented root was being talked about, says Mil­ton Mueller, a pro­fes­sor at Syra­cuse Uni­ver­sity and par­tic­i­pant in the Inter­net Gov­er­nance Project. “China and other coun­tries might be pur­su­ing responses that lead to fragmentation.”

Such an out­come remains remote, but it could hap­pen. That pos­si­bil­ity means an obscure debate about Inter­net gov­er­nance has sud­denly become sur­pris­ingly important.

Know this – the U.N. wants con­trol of the Inter­net. They may do what­ever they feel they have to do to wrest con­trol of it from the United States.

shud­der

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