Video mixes with science fiction stars

This is a real video and one of the funniest things I have ever seen so I stuck it in.

Light Bulbs from Fish DNA

Have you ever thought that the process of making a light bulb seemed a little too complicated? Well the people at the University of Connecticut have found an easier way. All you have to do is extract DNA from fish, add fluorescent dyes, spin them out into nanofibers.

This process allows the light to make a material that absorbs ultraviolet light and gives it off as visible light. You can even adjust the color of the light with the amount of dye used, making it brighter or softer. Not only that but these new light bulbs could last far longer than the type you are used to, and they probably don’t smell too much like fish.

You might naturally assume that the scientists who are creating this new type of light bulb have some greater plan in mind, but they aren’t admitting it, so I will reveal how I would use this plan.

These new light bulbs using DNA will be far better than the old ones, slowly over the next years they will replace all other light bulbs, then at the scheduled time the scientists will emit a strong burst of energy to each of the light bulbs that will impart the  fish DNA to anyone nearby, turning us into a half-fish slave race.

On the other hand it could simply be an interesting example of the many things that we are able to do as we learn to understand DNA better.

–Thanks to Tifu from Deviant art for the fishman picture.

see the article about it here

The moon, and why we need to go back

Forty years ago today man took his first steps on another world, but I always feel a bit melancholy when we discussing the trip to the moon. Is it better to have done something great and then stopped or to have never done it at all?

I strongly believe that expansion is vital for humanity as a species. It isn’t just because it is how we protect ourselves from natural disasters and even wars but because it gives those who want true freedom a choice. The freedoms of America largely exist because those who came here were free of the ideas and the rules of Europe.

Yet we haven’t even bothered to go back to the moon in almost a generation and if we don’t move soon those men who can give us their experience on what happened will be gone.

What has happened, I fear, is that we no longer have governments willing to take risks. We’ll spend trillions on bailouts but not on a failed trip to the moon because if the trip to the moon failed everyone would know.

Eventually we will return to the moon and do the other things that Kennedy was talking about in his famous speech because someone, perhaps our children or grandchildren will recognise that the only things really worth doing are difficult.

We need to start thinking big again, to remember that we can accomplish anything, to understand that there is more to life than comfort and that the easy path is rarely the right path.

P.s. Thank you to those who have worked on the space program now and then. You are doing one of the most important things humans have ever done and mostly in obscurity.

Don’t Talk to Robots

Buzz Aldrin- the Rocket Experience — Rap

First Person Shooter Disease

Found this on Slice of Scifi and had to put it up.

Internal Consistency– the unbreakable rule in science fiction and fantasy

I like to find my way around rules and ideas in storytelling and I enjoy it when others do so as well. Often what we call rules are little more than ideas that usually work, but there are a set of rules that you must be very aware of and never break. This are the internal rules of the story that you set up.
This is of course extra important when you are dealing with science fiction and fantasy that have internal rules that often break the rules of the world as we know it, but they aren’t the only one. You can’t write a romance set in the 18th century and then have one of the characters call for help on a cell phone.
An example of a movie that fails to do this as well as it should is “Next”. The main character can see two minutes into the future, except when it is directly connected to a specific woman then he can see farther. As the movie goes on though this rule are more and more ignored. The writers were aware of it of course and attempted to write around it but at least for me they weren’t successful.
Perhaps the most frustrating of internal consistency being tossed out the window is in the end of movies where the heroes have been trying unsuccessfully to stop a plot then at the end something often not as interesting as the first works because it is time for the movie to be over. You knew how long the movie needed to be when you started, why not set up the ending?
For science fiction we run into the collective amnesia syndrome when it comes to technology. Some technology, superpower, or other element is on the show. Perhaps a time machine, or a character who can heal people with her blood, but everyone seems to conveniently forget that when the time comes. They have the time show episode and then no one bothers suggesting that perhaps the solution to the problem this week might be using the time machine from last week, and while I understand you can’t expect the writers to always see this, and you wouldn’t want them to fall back on the same technology to solve every solution why not simply explain why it doesn’t work rather than simply pretending it doesn’t exist?
In the end most of the time people will accept any stretch of logic so long as it is written into the basic premise of the show, but nothing will turn of readers and viewers of a show faster than the writers ignoring the rules that they set up, so while the rules of writing can be ignored, the rules of your writing can’t.

The Hutchison Effect – video

These two have nothing to do with it but I find both of them entertaining and they are relatively short.

What makes video games based on Comic books work

When I play a game based on a comic book character there is only one thing that I really want to get out of that game. I want to feel as if I am that character. It hardly matters who the character is just so that for the few minutes that I am playing the game I can forget who I am and pretend that I have metal claws or can swing from buildings . This is why often games where you play a single hero work better than games where you have far more choices because even when you do a great job of creating a game with twenty different heroes you have no choice but to make many of them play in similar styles. One character may be needed to make it past a certain trap or perhaps another does more damage but the controls and the feel of the characters remain the same.
A great example of a game that was The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction. The story of the game was OK, and I’m not that big of a fan of the hulk, but what it captured perfectly was the feeling of being the hulk. You could pick up and throw tanks, smash cars into shields, jump hundreds of feet and even run up buildings. There were no other characters and though you gained new skills they didn’t truly change things. You could of course destroy buildings and cause chaos but the key was that it was fun from the beginning to the end because it felt like you were the hulk.
This I suspect has been one of the problems for the Superman Games. The most important of superman’s powers is that he is invulnerable, but that doesn’t make for a great game, so they tone down that power so that things hurt him, just not very much. Now though, I don’t really feel like I’m playing superman.
Spiderman is perhaps the most fun though. Having recently played Spiderman: Web of Shadows I discovered that there is a great deal of joy in swinging across the city, and this game does it nearly perfectly. You always feel like you are right on the edge of being out of control as you swing, and often you are only inches above the city streets. You can even swing through crowds of villains knocking them down or use the webs and your agility to make lightning quick strikes and be largely away from the fight before they know what happened.
I have played many video games based on comic books in my life , some work and some don’t but to me the ones that always work the best are the games that make me feel like I really am the hero because if I’m playing a game about spiderman all I really want is the experience of being spiderman.

Picture from Scotty Shoemaker

Mars and Science Fiction

There is something about mars that catches the attention of science fiction writers. Perhaps it is because in so many ways it is like earth. Pictures from the surface of the planet almost feel like pictures of a desert on earth. Because of this nearly every genre of science fiction from short stories to video games and comic books has used Mars as a setting or had characters from mars.
Some of the most famous uses of Mars are in classic science fiction. There are a few reasons for this. Telescope technology had allowed us to begin to glimpses the planet but not enough to know what it was really like. This type of ambiguity is the heart of science fiction.
Perhaps the most famous of these books is “The Martian Chronicles” by Ray Bradbury. This series of short stories tells the story of men coming to mars, meeting Martians, building a civilization and eventually leaving mars. But it is only the tip of the iceburg. Heinlein wrote “Stranger in a Strange Land” about a man raised by Martians returning to earth and Isaac Asimov wrote “The Martian Way”. In fact nearly every great science fiction writer of that Era had at least one story with Martians.
Once television and movies appeared there were even more stories. Invasions from mars were almost common in stories like War of the Worlds but eventually as we grew to understand the planet a little better it became about exploration, though these stories often didn’t work out well, or seeing mars as a new frontier almost always exploited by corporations like in “Total Recall” which mixed ancient mars technology, paranoia and an evil corporation all together into one story.
Comic books had their own share of mars stories and characters. Perhaps the most famous of those was the Martian Manhunter. This character has become a major character and one that came about in large part because of the fascination of mars in the popular culture.
In more recent years video games have also began to use mars as a setting. Often using the same ideas in the other genres. “Red Faction: Guerilla” have you on a mars that has began to be terraformed fighting for Mars freedom. This is reminiscent of the battles for mars in both Total Recall and Babylon 5, including the use of ancient Martian technology.
No matter what media science fiction comes in it remains fascinated by the planet mars and if we are perseverant and willing to take a few risks perhaps someday we can fulfill some of the dreams of these science fiction authors. We can walk and even live on the surface of mars and I believe we will because we are a species who has constantly conquered new environments and we aren’t likely to stop now.

mars, 2580 by ~shardanas on deviantART