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I'm not as militant as Phil on this topic -- you can call it a /kil-OM-@-t@r/ if you like, and I'll hardly twitch -- but I'm glad to see someone else making this terribly, terribly important point.

Now, apostrophes are another matter. Get them wrong, I'll happily hold you by the feet and feed you into an industrial chicken mincer. A bat's gotta have standards!

Via Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer, whose blog really ought to be on your RSS feed if you've already got Pharyngula (and vice versa of course).  To set the scene: the episode is Family of Blood.  The Doctor has to hide out from some hunter aliens who are on his scent, although fortunately they've never seen his face.  He decides to use the Chameleon Arch (a bit of TARDIS technobabblery) to transform himself into a human being, one John Smith, who will have no memory of the Doctor and will incidentally not smell like him either, so he can lay low for a while.  Martha Jones will come with him, keeping an eye on him until it's safe to reverse the process, transform back to the Doctor, and take the aliens by surprise.

He leaves some instructions for Martha.  When we see it, we catch the first four or five, and then the sound goes down and we see him talking into the camera for a while before it comes back up again right at the end.  Perhaps, like my homie Phil and me, you've wondered what he was saying during the muted bits. Well here you go:

Hope Eyrie is pretty much the anthem of SF fandom, if there can be such a thing (this one doesn't qualify for the title, in case you wondered). But now I think it has a sequel, and it's this one:

My son and I stand beneath the great night sky
And gaze up in wonder
I tell him the tale of Apollo
And he says "Why did they ever go?"
It may look like some empty gesture
To go all that way just to come back
But don't offer me a place out in cyberspace
Cos where in the hell's that at?

  - The Space Race Is Over, Billy Bragg

That's really the saddest song I've ever heard. The best explanation for why is from a fictional character, Commander Jeffrey Sinclair of Babylon 5:

Ask ten different scientists about the environment, population control, genetics and you'll get ten different answers, but there's one thing every scientist on the planet agrees on. Whether it happens in a hundred years or a thousand years or a million years, eventually our Sun will grow cold and go out. When that happens, it won't just take us. It'll take Marilyn Monroe and Lao-Tzu, and Einstein, and Morobuto, and Buddy Holly, and Aristophanes... and all of this... all of this was for nothing - unless we go to the stars.

That's the thing. If you believe the human race is worth saving — and despite irregular contact with bus passengers and Creationists, I do — then you have to be concerned that, sooner or later, one planet isn't going to be enough. But the problem is that we did our dash: the human race had a chance to build a viable moonbase and go from there to Mars and the asteroids, mining for resources and building space habitats, and maybe getting to work on ark ships with antimatter drives to get us to the stars. But it wasn't as important as one more war or one more political point-scoring match, so it fell in a heap. Now, we're on the verge of a century of eco/eco collapse, resource wars and general failure. The knowledge will be lost, and by the time anyone can stop to think about the stars again, the resources to build rockets won't exist any more. And then a rock will fall out of the sky, or a germ will get ideas above its station, or a flare will reach out to caress the face of the waters, and that will be the end of the story.

Damn.

You can all go outside now. Thank you, that is all.

Vote for this man, or show me a bloody good explanation for how the man you do vote for is any better.

(Via Pharyngula, of course.)

Now the truly terrible thing about this advertisement isn't that Avery Brooks so desperately wanted to be Morpheus, but rather that all that stuff about needing "a different kind of software" was advertising Lotus products. If you go to any reasonably exhaustive pictorial dictionary and open up the page to "Arse Pudding On Toast", you will see a picture of Lotus Notes. Even if IBM was only borrowing the name for some unrelated software, the taint remains. It's the computer equivalent of starting a branch of the RSPCA dedicated to saving kittens and calling it The Nazi Party. Freakish.

But I digress.

"It's the year 2000," Captain Sisko tells us, "but where are the flying cars?" And later: "Because millions of people all over the world can work together on the web twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week: you don't need flying cars..." And that's quite right. And it had better be right! Oil prices are up at the moment because of increased demand and/or increased unrest in those uppity dark-skinned countries that think they've got a right to our Texas Tea, by jingo, by crikey. The unrest won't last forever, gods willing, but the demand will. It will increase. Oil prices aren't coming down.

Unfortunately, people are still looking at this as a matter for the petrol bowser. They're forgetting two things: (1) food transport, and (2) fertilisers. And possibly (3) plastics. Oil is used to produce a hell of a lot more than SUV fuel; a serious oil shortage will mean a serious food shortage in pretty short order. The results will be impressive.

What will happen -- may already be happening, even -- is that people will start thinking locally. In nice civilised countries like Australia and NZ and... ummm, I'm sure there are others... cars and roads will start to be things you deal with on a weekly, not daily, basis. For as long as we have employment and an economy, telecommuting will start to become more common: when it costs $200 to fill your family car's tank, you'll reconsider how desperately you need to attend every meeting face-to-face. People are already curtailing their spending on travel and tourism, preferring to spend at home instead. "Cocooning", they're calling it. That's not going to go away.

A dozen years from now, Daddy won't get up and drive to work every morning. In the best-case scenario, a lot of work will disappear as nations spend more time keeping their populace fed and less time worrying about torch relays and international relations. Canberra's large inter-suburban open spaces, which the more short-sighted of our brethren consider a bad idea because they allegedly make it essential to own a car to live here, will start to be seriously useful: I can imagine a lot of community farming and a fair bit of make-your-own-fun recreation on those "useless" patches. Public transport will actually grow in popularity for a while, then presumably dip again as people realise how utterly useless our bus services are and how unnecessary all that travel is. Neighbourhoods will turn into communities, as people realise that they might as well love the ones they're with.

Well, that's the best case anyhow. The worst case is resource wars, Christofascist governments, excesses that make the Rome of the vomitorium era look like a medieval monastery, and the total meltdown of any civilisation that isn't centrally controlled and probably speaking Mandarin.

I'm hoping for the former. Humanity needs to grow up a little, and part of that involves getting its priorities right. We have to get off this planet and out into the stars sometime in the next several centuries, or we're dead as the dinosaurs. So we'd better start getting some things right now.

If you've seen the most recent episode of Battlestar Galactica, there's a song you'll have noticed.

By "noticed" in this context, I mean "been utterly gobsmacked and amazed by".

The person who sings it was trained in opera, apparently, and it shows. It's an original, written by Bear McCreary. Here's the story of how it got worked in with the episode right from the start, and here's the song itself, on paper and in YouTube.

Glorious, glorious stuff. Someone said that this episode was the best since 33, the knock-it-out-of-the-ballpark first episode of the first season. I'd have to agree that it's certainly up there.

Oh, and if you still haven't seen the episode and don't even know why everyone was asking "so is this another Bob Dylan song?" then don't follow those links. Watch the show instead; it's the best SF on television.

A bit YouTube heavy lately. Ah well; Lurgi.

I found this while I was looking for "night time songs" for the BatPup. She's very firm in her definitions: some songs are day time songs, some are night time songs. Night time is for night time songs, and there shall be no variation from the theme.

This is Hide and Seek, from Howard Jones's Human's Lib, one of my favourite albums in my teenage years. Lyrics here because he's not the clearest of enunciators, and the first time I heard it I had No. Fracking. Idea. what he was singing. What he is singing, as it happens, is the best description of a Deity that I've seen (in the first verse) and also the best description of how religion gets it wrong (in the second verse). This, right here, is why I believe it's possible to believe in the existence of some sort of God without having to throw out your brain and become a Creationist into the bargain. The best people, Christian or Muslim or Pastafarian or whatever, who have any concept of God at all beyond the knee-jerkery of standard memetic religion, have a concept very much like this.

The Boy Wonder is inordinately fond of Flanders' and Swann's song The Sloth, so I went looking for it on YouTube. What I found was a bunch of versions of Have Some Madeira M'Dear (which always reminds me of an old chorister who used to love singing it at Revues, never realising that the rest of us were quietly advising all the underage fresher girlies that it should be considered more of a warning than an entertainment) and also this: The Gasman Cometh, in Lego:

If not for that damned swimming rabbit, Carter might have got his second term and the world might have been saved.



Ah well, too late now. Learn how to farm organically and get ready for fascist governments everywhere, because that's what happens when a standard of living becomes unsustainable.

(Transcript here, if you prefer your depression in a textual form.)

The Batpup has wildly eclectic tastes in music and videos. Here's a selection.

I heard Gotye's Heart's A Mess on a shop's muzak system one time, and remembered enough of the words to google it and find this video. I like it because of the Alan Parsons Project-like harmonies; I think the BatPup likes it for the animation, which is quite hypnotic.



( Clicky-clicky for more tubey-tubey )

Now what I really need is more suggestions for quiet bedtime songs that I can sing and silly song videos that I can show her. My repertoire is running low...

Two BBC documentaries with something in common: they're hosted by men who are best known for being comedians:


This is the documentary The Machine That Made Us (in six 10-minute chunks: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6). It's about Johannes Gutenberg, the chap who ruined professional calligraphy for good and did more for the pornography industry than anything before or since. The clever bit is that our man Fry gets involved in building a replica of Gutenberg's original machine, or something like it. (Via Kottke).

And the second was apparently broadcast 18 days ago, which should tell you all you need to know about this breakthrough in the natural sciences (via The Bad Astronomer):

I'm with Stilgherrian in this: the black and white woman on the screens of Westpac ATMs is one of the most annoying non-human interactions I'm likely to encounter in a typical week.  "Here's your money (and your receipt, if you asked for one)."  What?  Don't you remember that I asked for a receipt?  It was only ten seconds ago, you stupidly minimalist piece of software!


Now don't get me started on the way NAB ATMs don't beep when you press the button to select an amount to withdraw, after they've beeped (bept?  Should be bept.)... after they've bept for every other button-press.  What is that?  Poor testing?  A management fiat?  Ooh, we don't want muggers to know they've chosen an amount -- maybe they're just standing near the ATM to keep out of the rain, but as soon as the muggers hear the distinctive beep of "twenty bucks", which is indistinguishable from every other identical beep, they'll dive in for the kill!  Suppress the beep!

ATMs: may contain traces of stupid.  That is all.

I seem to have missed this one when it came out, but it's good ("I'm fluent in JavaScript as well as Klingon." Heh.)

I really need to complete my collection of Weird Al CDs. Did you know he did a parody of Peter and the Wolf? Neither did I!

My hero...

I'm sure the cantankerous and fussy lauredhel will enjoy this video - well, unless it's That Time again, in which case you can't take anything she says seriously...

(Via MightyGodKing.)

Via jwz, but all over the tubes generally by now:



It's interesting to note that, until you press the final letter, my phone interprets the letters in "daughter" as "fatigue". Maybe there's something in that.

Ah, The <insert integer here> Doctors, how I've missed you. Now hurry up and give us Doctor Who: The Lost Years, with Paul McGann!

So it's possible. Who'd'a thunk it? I figured level 70 of Frozen Bubble was put in there deliberately to make people suffer.


I may still be right, of course.

I skipped over #70 after I got sufficiently sick of it, and have successfully completed all the other levels, even the fiendish level #100. But I've never managed #70. At least now I know it can be done!

Via MetaFilter, a documentary about the making of The Muppet Show:


All six fragments: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6.