I make two claims here: (1) TV (and movie) scifi reflects the generational culture of the writers and actors; and (2) Star Trek has been unable to get out of its "baby boomer rut".
TV scifi spans the genrations of the WWII generation, inbetweens, baby boomers and GenX. The early shows like Twilight Zone and Outer Limits reflected the militaristic Us vs Them, cold war of the WWII generation. The first Star Trek series was the betweener generation- those who didnt fight in WWII but pre-boomer. It reflects hierarchial military/corporate sturctures of the 1950s/60s and the optimistic futurism of the times.
In contrast, The Next Generation 22 years later could almost be called "yuppies in space". The actors and writers were the successful professionals in space you see in the tech startups of the 1980s. They had a mission and teamwork. This continued through DS9 and Voyager where the main actors were boomers, and the plots along the same lines.
In contrast again, shows like Andromeda (another Roddenberry concept), X Files, FarScape, and Star Gate reflect the creative individualism attributed to GenX culture. And the actors are of that age too.
Star Trek Enterprise still seems stuck in the boomer rut. The lead character is a 50-year old boomer. The plots are too dated for the younger audience. You may guess what generation I'm in. However, if I watch a movie or show from 20 years before I am born, I generally "dont get get it" and am bored.
Why deal with unreliability of mechanical devices when solid state memory prices are getting reasonable. I've seen a gig of flash now advertised for $79- and thats retail.
Many hobbyists experiment with automobile computer settings to increase performance. Some manufactors have coded in inhibitors for emissions and safety which some people try to remove. The codes arent public domain, so there are various web sites with instructions.
I lived some of my life before there were personal computers and the InterNet. I didnt write much then outside of school because the process was tedious. Unless you were "Miss Perfect" you usually had to do two or three handwritten or typed drafts. Word processors changed all that.
Second, the internet has put writers and readers into closer contact through mail, chat rooms, newsgroups and blogs. When you communicate more often electronically, you get more practice getting your point out, whether it is 20 lines or 200. Writing is like any sport. If you dont exercise often enough, you become poor at it.
Art Bell's "Coast to Coast" show last night had one of the real scientists (Sethian?) from the SETI institute say they same thing. This one of the many potentially interesting signals they get time to time, but not a barnburner.
Disney survived Hurricane Charley in August without much destruction other than landscaping. The rest of Orlando had more problems. Disney closed for a couple of days mainly because many employees were cleaning up at home.
What if the alien society followed the principles of modern capitalism: ever-growing production driven by insatiable consumerism driven by ubiquitous advertising? This is not far-fetched looking at human history. 99.9% of the 100,000 years humans have been on earth they contentedly hunted and grew crops. Then came along came captialism which causing population, wealth and knowledge to explode. Might this same drive cause an interstellar culture to take over the galaxy or universe? Would these aliens broadcast advertising to potential new consumers?
The 1995 movie Species was about creating an alien life in the lab using DNA sequences broadcast from outer space. Of the course the alien was maleovalent gorgeous horny chick.
Playlists are valuable entities in themselves. Its like getting the expertise of a DJ or concert arranger who might be familar with good music you havent heard of, and knowledge of how to sequence it. So people who compose interesting playlist will now get commission, along with musicians, and of course, Apple.
I notice MS Research doing lots of basic research that has never been productized. Its rare to see corporations being so liberal with their resources. Even Google's very imaginative projects seem to be directed towards a commercial goal.
This suggests an interesting contradiction in MS product strategy. MS has a long history of "clone and conquer", e.g. Excel copies off VisiCalc and Lotus 123. Just this week MS cloned Apple iTunes.
Yet MS Research is conducting some very interesting basic research. Go figure!
I am somewhat fluent in Chinese. Though syllables in Chinese (and Korean) approximately fit into squares, they share two characteristics with alphabetic word shapes:
First, Chinese characters are often composed of several smaller characters, 500 or so, instead of the 70'ish letters and numerals (including capitals) in English. We say such a character may have a "moon" sub-character on the left, a "white" on the right and so on. The sub-characters can be partial clues to meaning and pronunciation (e.g. a left moon usually signifies part of a body, and the a right moon means its sounds like "bai"), but there are no steadfast rules. Just like in English where the pronunciation can vary from the spelling, and the whole meaning vary from those of the prefix and root.
But Chinese breaks the rules more often, probably since many of the characters have been around 3000 years- seven times longer than modern English spelling rules. The Korean writing system is totally planned and recent, so it is very logical. The sub-characters represent the beginning, vowel, and end of a syllable, gracefully packed into a square.
Second, you can trace the boundaries of Chinese characters too and see distinguishing characteristics. They might have a gap in one corner, a ragged stroke defining an edge, etc. Just like in English words a learner will move from observing the strokes and sub-characters into the gestalt of the whole character. Just like any other language, chinese characters are contextual. Combinations are sematically constrained to one to four syllable word. And they are grammatically constrained to expect nouns, verbs, modifiers, etc, in certain sequences.
Just like another urban legend that many jobs will go unfilled as the aging boomers retire and insufficent genX and genY follow. Well, boomers are going to hang on forever as their pensions, social security and health insurance disappears as well as everyone elses.
The article doesn't mention the speed.
However if you reduce the feature size sqrt(2)
and maintain the same voltage (questionable),
you double the speed.
At least their drugie hippie older siblings turned into yuppie scum.
technically, just the ArpaNet is 35
on
The Internet At 35
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Until the mid-80s there were several national networks with various qualities of interconnectability-ArpaNet, MilNet, NSFNet, BitNet, etc. The "InterNet" agreed on standardized protocols and funded a trans-continental optical fiber backbone. AL Gore (really) is repsonsible for that legislation.
When Roy Horn was mauled by the lion, they removed a big piece of his skull to prevent brain swelling. Then they kept the skull fragment in his abdomen a couple weeks until the brain was OK. Sounds a bit creepy to move bone around like that, but its the most reliable way to keep the bone alive.
When I first saw it in 1968 as a starry-eyed youngster most of us believed that it was basically possible- except for the aliens and super-smart computer. The moon-landing program was on schedule, except for the fire accident. That appeared to be the first step of a long and glorious space program.
Then everything petered out in the 1970s. Vietnam and the energy crises sapped the national will and bankroll. The last two Apollos were scrapped and reused for joint Russian space exercises. NASA never focused on the strong manned goal since. And then when the year 2001 actually came I cried in sadness.
Since the 1990s MIT undergrads have had a fairly balanced gender ratio. The national average is around 58% female in college undergrad.
MIT grad school is still 70% male. But then too that is similar to comparable science schools like Stanford.
MIT has had females enrolling from the beginning. But wel into the 1970s is was 10% or less. There was an uncomplementary folklore about "MIT coeds" in those days: like Wonder Women with a slide rule and horn-rimmed glasses.
Almost nothing gets a "G" or "NC-17", so most films are "PG-13" and "R". I think the Catholic ternary
system was a little better in distinguishing movies: "A", "B" and "C"- children, adult(not naughty), and condemned.
I thought Fifth Element had the best depiction of a urban flying car-scape. This has been done in many other movies like Blade Runner, Minority Report, several of the Star Wars, perticularly the most recent, the Jetsons and so on.
Both the Jupiter Gallileo and Venus Magellan projects went triple their design lifespans. However, they could have gone even longer, had NASA not canned them. Both were getting "creaky": insufficient propellant to do much, and instruments breaking down. Plus it costs a fair amount of money- up to 30% of the original mission cost per year- for a slice of the Deep Space Network and scientist to run and analyze the data.
We'll probably see this debate about the Mars Rovers if they survive into 2005. Both are already 2.5x their design lifetimes, have some instrument failures (a sick wheel motor, a dead spectrograph), and are tying up a couple hundred engineer and scientists full time.
This method of looking for planetary transits will be tried on 100,000 stars simultaneously by the Kepler space probe in 2007. Kepler points a 95 megapixel camera at the same patch of the sky for several years. They expect to discover about 900 planets, of which 50 may be Earth-size. Their assumptions about planetary size distribution and detectability are given on their website.
Slashdot Mirror
In the old days before video spy satellites, film canisters were recovered by helicopter snatching of parachutes. Its a well-tried technology.
I make two claims here: (1) TV (and movie) scifi reflects the generational culture of the writers and actors; and (2) Star Trek has been unable to get out of its "baby boomer rut".
TV scifi spans the genrations of the WWII generation, inbetweens, baby boomers and GenX. The early shows like Twilight Zone and Outer Limits reflected the militaristic Us vs Them, cold war of the WWII generation. The first Star Trek series was the betweener generation- those who didnt fight in WWII but pre-boomer. It reflects hierarchial military/corporate sturctures of the 1950s/60s and the optimistic futurism of the times.
In contrast, The Next Generation 22 years later could almost be called "yuppies in space". The actors and writers were the successful professionals in space you see in the tech startups of the 1980s. They had a mission and teamwork. This continued through DS9 and Voyager where the main actors were boomers, and the plots along the same lines.
In contrast again, shows like Andromeda (another Roddenberry concept), X Files, FarScape, and Star Gate reflect the creative individualism attributed to GenX culture. And the actors are of that age too.
Star Trek Enterprise still seems stuck in the boomer rut. The lead character is a 50-year old boomer. The plots are too dated for the younger audience. You may guess what generation I'm in. However, if I watch a movie or show from 20 years before I am born, I generally "dont get get it" and am bored.
Why deal with unreliability of mechanical devices when solid state memory prices are getting reasonable. I've seen a gig of flash now advertised for $79- and thats retail.
Many hobbyists experiment with automobile computer settings to increase performance. Some manufactors have coded in inhibitors for emissions and safety which some people try to remove. The codes arent public domain, so there are various web sites with instructions.
I lived some of my life before there were personal computers and the InterNet. I didnt write much then outside of school because the process was tedious. Unless you were "Miss Perfect" you usually had to do two or three handwritten or typed drafts. Word processors changed all that.
Second, the internet has put writers and readers into closer contact through mail, chat rooms, newsgroups and blogs. When you communicate more often electronically, you get more practice getting your point out, whether it is 20 lines or 200. Writing is like any sport. If you dont exercise often enough, you become poor at it.
Art Bell's "Coast to Coast" show last night had one of the real scientists (Sethian?) from the SETI institute say they same thing. This one of the many potentially interesting signals they get time to time, but not a barnburner.
Are we seeing an excessive year, or is Florida just having bad luck? Some global warming pessimists predicted more hurricanes.
Disney survived Hurricane Charley in August without much destruction other than landscaping. The rest of Orlando had more problems. Disney closed for a couple of days mainly because many employees were cleaning up at home.
What if the alien society followed the principles of modern capitalism: ever-growing production driven by insatiable consumerism driven by ubiquitous advertising? This is not far-fetched looking at human history. 99.9% of the 100,000 years humans have been on earth they contentedly hunted and grew crops. Then came along came captialism which causing population, wealth and knowledge to explode. Might this same drive cause an interstellar culture to take over the galaxy or universe? Would these aliens broadcast advertising to potential new consumers?
The 1995 movie Species was about creating an alien life in the lab using DNA sequences broadcast from outer space. Of the course the alien was maleovalent gorgeous horny chick.
Playlists are valuable entities in themselves. Its like getting the expertise of a DJ or concert arranger who might be familar with good music you havent heard of, and knowledge of how to sequence it. So people who compose interesting playlist will now get commission, along with musicians, and of course, Apple.
I notice MS Research doing lots of basic research that has never been productized. Its rare to see corporations being so liberal with their resources. Even Google's very imaginative projects seem to be directed towards a commercial goal.
This suggests an interesting contradiction in MS product strategy. MS has a long history of "clone and conquer", e.g. Excel copies off VisiCalc and Lotus 123. Just this week MS cloned Apple iTunes. Yet MS Research is conducting some very interesting basic research. Go figure!
I am somewhat fluent in Chinese. Though syllables in Chinese (and Korean) approximately fit into squares, they share two characteristics with alphabetic word shapes:
First, Chinese characters are often composed of several smaller characters, 500 or so, instead of the 70'ish letters and numerals (including capitals) in English. We say such a character may have a "moon" sub-character on the left, a "white" on the right and so on. The sub-characters can be partial clues to meaning and pronunciation (e.g. a left moon usually signifies part of a body, and the a right moon means its sounds like "bai"), but there are no steadfast rules. Just like in English where the pronunciation can vary from the spelling, and the whole meaning vary from those of the prefix and root. But Chinese breaks the rules more often, probably since many of the characters have been around 3000 years- seven times longer than modern English spelling rules. The Korean writing system is totally planned and recent, so it is very logical. The sub-characters represent the beginning, vowel, and end of a syllable, gracefully packed into a square.
Second, you can trace the boundaries of Chinese characters too and see distinguishing characteristics. They might have a gap in one corner, a ragged stroke defining an edge, etc. Just like in English words a learner will move from observing the strokes and sub-characters into the gestalt of the whole character. Just like any other language, chinese characters are contextual. Combinations are sematically constrained to one to four syllable word. And they are grammatically constrained to expect nouns, verbs, modifiers, etc, in certain sequences.
Just like another urban legend that many jobs will go unfilled as the aging boomers retire and insufficent genX and genY follow. Well, boomers are going to hang on forever as their pensions, social security and health insurance disappears as well as everyone elses.
You pay through gazoo if you have a low deductable, especially for computer gear. These days you get a low end laptop for the price of the deductable.
The article doesn't mention the speed. However if you reduce the feature size sqrt(2) and maintain the same voltage (questionable), you double the speed.
At least their drugie hippie older siblings turned into yuppie scum.
Until the mid-80s there were several national networks with various qualities of interconnectability-ArpaNet, MilNet, NSFNet, BitNet, etc. The "InterNet" agreed on standardized protocols and funded a trans-continental optical fiber backbone. AL Gore (really) is repsonsible for that legislation.
When Roy Horn was mauled by the lion, they removed a big piece of his skull to prevent brain swelling. Then they kept the skull fragment in his abdomen a couple weeks until the brain was OK. Sounds a bit creepy to move bone around like that, but its the most reliable way to keep the bone alive.
When I first saw it in 1968 as a starry-eyed youngster most of us believed that it was basically possible- except for the aliens and super-smart computer. The moon-landing program was on schedule, except for the fire accident. That appeared to be the first step of a long and glorious space program.
Then everything petered out in the 1970s. Vietnam and the energy crises sapped the national will and bankroll. The last two Apollos were scrapped and reused for joint Russian space exercises. NASA never focused on the strong manned goal since. And then when the year 2001 actually came I cried in sadness.
Since the 1990s MIT undergrads have had a fairly balanced gender ratio. The national average is around 58% female in college undergrad.
MIT grad school is still 70% male. But then too that is similar to comparable science schools like Stanford.
MIT has had females enrolling from the beginning. But wel into the 1970s is was 10% or less. There was an uncomplementary folklore about "MIT coeds" in those days: like Wonder Women with a slide rule and horn-rimmed glasses.
Almost nothing gets a "G" or "NC-17", so most films are "PG-13" and "R". I think the Catholic ternary system was a little better in distinguishing movies: "A", "B" and "C"- children, adult(not naughty), and condemned.
I thought Fifth Element had the best depiction of a urban flying car-scape. This has been done in many other movies like Blade Runner, Minority Report, several of the Star Wars, perticularly the most recent, the Jetsons and so on.
Both the Jupiter Gallileo and Venus Magellan projects went triple their design lifespans. However, they could have gone even longer, had NASA not canned them. Both were getting "creaky": insufficient propellant to do much, and instruments breaking down. Plus it costs a fair amount of money- up to 30% of the original mission cost per year- for a slice of the Deep Space Network and scientist to run and analyze the data.
We'll probably see this debate about the Mars Rovers if they survive into 2005. Both are already 2.5x their design lifetimes, have some instrument failures (a sick wheel motor, a dead spectrograph), and are tying up a couple hundred engineer and scientists full time.
This method of looking for planetary transits will be tried on 100,000 stars simultaneously by the Kepler space probe in 2007. Kepler points a 95 megapixel camera at the same patch of the sky for several years. They expect to discover about 900 planets, of which 50 may be Earth-size. Their assumptions about planetary size distribution and detectability are given on their website.