Star Wars, Episode IV: A New Hope was released on May 25th, 1977. I was 3 years old, so I didn’t see it until much later. But like everyone of my generation, it changed my life.
Today’s Vanity Fair has the ultimate preview of Episode VIII. It is absolutely worth a read, right now.
Here’s our first look –
OK, I understand the idea behind the visual redesign. It’s 2017, not 1967. And the showrunners opted for Prime universe rather than Kelvin to preserve creative independence from whatever the movie franchise is doing. They do, however, want to appeal to the audience that the new movies in the Kelvinverse have recruited. Therefore: lens flares and Apple Stores.
But really, hairless Klingons? With a H.R. Geiger armor aesthetic?
It’s not like we haven’t seen the 60’s aesthetic embraced by modern television. Deep Space Nine went there and did it brilliantly – they arguably made the TOS USS Enterprise look even more gorgeous than any of her successors, and they didn’t change anything about her at all – just lighting and texture. Enterprise itself managed to authentically portray a pre-Kirk technology chic that had a more industrial feel, which was utterly believable as the ancestor to the softened look of the Kirk era. I do not accept that the Kelvinization of the Prime timeline was necessary to modernize the production. After all, the aesthetic of The Expanse and Dark Matter is thoroughly modern but doesn’t have the same Kelvin fascination with chrome and glass. Not that I want any Trek to go the grunge-fi look, but I do at least want Trek to honor it’s own identity. This feels like a rejection – purely a Han shot first decision.
Unless directly contradicted on screen, I think that my own headcanon about First Contact creating Enterprise can be amended here to argue that Discovery is in a Beta timeline. The Prime timeline was TOS/TNH/VOY/DS9, but the events of First Contact created the Beta timeline, and the Kelvinverse is an alternate reality branching from the Beta timeline.
Some may dismiss all this timeline canon angst as pointless, but since time travel and timelines are literally a backbone plot of the Star Trek universe, this is a legitimate area of fan analysis.
Related – great discussion threads at /r/DaystromInstitute that disagree with my headcanon First Contact created the alternate (Beta) timeline and a discussion of whether Enterprise is in Prime or not.
This article makes an important point about the Hyperloop:
America has the means to reduce traffic and connect people to where they want to go in less time — but solving these problems entails politically difficult choices to shift travel away from cars and highways. Any high-tech solution that promises a shortcut around these thorny problems is probably too good to be true.
I can’t help but see an echo of the wishful thinking surrounding the EMDrive in the Hyperloop marketing campaign. Maybe I’ll be proven wrong.
Here’s the original white paper PDF from Elon Musk, and here’s a rather detailed critique by mathematician and transit analyst Alon Levy. Anyone who takes Hyperloop seriously should read both.
Mark has his thoughts on the 2017 Hugo nominees up – and as usual, they are detailed 🙂
My own much briefer take: the Rabids are not very relevant. Ms. Marvel being nominated again is more important than ever given the nonsense going on – about diversity in comics, and using comics for political messaging, Ms. Marvel is basically the rebuttal and antidote.
I enjoyed The Obelisk Gate, and haven’t read Three Body Problem yet so can’t speak to Death’s End. Since I am going crazy over the Expanse (both in TV format as well as devouring the novels), I am excited to see it in the new Best Series category. And Rogue One just wins for me for the Vader sequence alone.
The state of health science in the US today is not weak, but it is under threat. The main problems: 1. p-value hacking. 2. commoditization of adjunct and postdoc labor. 3. disincentives of null value results or replication. All of these things threaten the foundations of the increasingly unsustaiunable edifice that is modern health science, and all of them derive in one way or another from the same root problem: the only source of objective funding, untainted by corporate interests, is the NIH. In essence, health science is a zero-sum game.
This is why the Trump Administration preliminary budget proposal is ominous: it specifies an unprecedented 18% cut to the NIH budget.
As the image above illustrates, grant applications have grown almost twice as competitive over the years as NIH funding stayed constant. An 18% cut in this context is like an amputation.
There is only one possible outcome of this: labs will shrink. Health science research is going to be dramatically curtailed. Maybe there are benefits, in the long run, to this – but in the short run it will only worsen – severely – the problems that health science research currently faces. The question is, how resilient is the health science establishment? We are going to find out.
Even though I left academia, I will be marching for science on Earth Day.
Related: great article at The Atlantic that points out how private funding is a drop in the bucket compared to government support. In my opinion, public science funding is as critical and as irreplaceable as national defense.
We must resist the usurper Pi! Tau is the true constant, the real savior of mathematics. The above image is essentially all the proof you need, but for those indoctrinated by the 2,000 year old cult of Pi, watch this short video:
or visit http://tauday.com/tau-manifesto
Pi is for Pizza, not math.
watch this.
wow. that raises the bar in my imagination for any space battle in any sci fi. I’ll never be quite as enamoured of X-Wing dogfights ever again. The Expanse is true hard sci-fi in the TV era – there’s as much depth in the novels for a Game of Thrones-esque run if they do it right. Having read (most of) the books, I am amazed at how amazed I am at major plot developments in the show, even though I know they are coming – they just have such incredible impact.
Related: the Nauvoo is just… a cathedral of awesome.
What would a guy really be like after 500 years of practicing sword-work? I’m still a stunt guy at heart. You want to reinvent gunfights, how do you do it? You want to reinvent swordfighting, how do you do it? And that’s where we are at now. I love the first Highlander and I think I’m in a pretty good spot. The creative team, the producers and the studio that’s behind it have kind of said, ‘It’s yours to play with.’ The trick would be coming up with an interesting way to introduce it to new audiences without stepping on what’s great about the original property. You don’t want to over complicate it. I think it speaks very simply: ‘There can be only one!’ ‘We’re immortals!’ ‘Don’t get your head chopped off!’ I think we all know what happened with the sequels.”
[…]
“When I came on, the property had already been developed for a couple of years and, as things happen in Hollywood, yeah, there was aliens, meteors, spaceships, uh, DNA mutations, terrorists. I mean, they’d tried to drag every plot into the Immortal world. My personal opinion, I don’t want to see any of that. I’m not interested. I have seen other movies like that. I haven’t seen the Immortal world.”
(grudgingly) fine, do what you want. but there can still only be one.
Still, how do you do an interview with a director for a Highlander movie, reboot or otherwise, and not ask about Queen? SMH
50 years into the future, time has not been kind to Jack. Aku has destroyed all of the time portals, thwarting the journey to travel back in time and stop him. Now, Jack is immortal (as a side effect of the time travel), but broken and lost. Aku, similarly, has everything he could ever want and is equally miserable. It’s a dark vision, not just in terms of the world, but in the personal despair.
more.
