Nerdism
sb admin | July 2, 2007Chad notes, in response to PZ's rather absurd assertion that biology is the only Dumped Upon science, and that physics is so well treated in movies and TV, that "Most of the SF movies I see are lucky if they can get Newton's Laws right, let alone any of the finer points of astrophysics."
Indeed, this was the topic of one of the two talks I gave at Hypericon a couple of weeks ago.
Let me try to explain one aspect of this: specifically, the motion of space fighters.
Don't get me wrong. Star Wars is a great movie, one of my all-time favorites. It's even still a pretty good movie if Han doesn't…
sb admin | June 17, 2007I'm just back from Hypericon, the Nashville area science fiction convention where, as I mentioned previously, I gave a couple of talks about science stuff— although one was about science in science fiction movies.
I was also on a panel with two other guys, Jim Messer and Fred Grimm, where we each constructed a list of our top-10 favorite science fiction movies. We presented that list and said something about why they were on our list, and compared the lists with each other... and sometimes made fun of each other for having such bad ideas. We also talked with others in the room about why…
sb admin | June 14, 2007This weekend I will be hanging out at Hypericon, a small Nashville science-fiction convention that is in its third years. I've met a number of people and made local friends there. I have also managed to finagle myself free admission by doing work in kind....
I'll be giving two talks:
Why "Was Einstein Wrong?" Is the Wrong Question
Newtonian Physics in Science Fiction Movies and TV: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
I"m also going to be on a panel where the panelists each list their top 10 favorite science fiction movies (excluding the Star Wars, Star Trek, and Matrix movies), and an argument…
sb admin | May 27, 2007
Second Life (SL) is a 3d virtual world (some would call it an online game, but it's not really that; for one thing, it kind of sucks as a game, and for another thing, it's much more than that). You can do modeling and building entirely online. People have created buildings, vehicles, sculptures, animals, hairdos, and any number of other things using SL's relatively easy to learn modeling tools.
Builds in SL are made out of "prims," short for primitives. There are a relatively small number of primitives; a block (cube), a sphere, a cylindar, a torus, a ring, that sort of thing. You can…
sb admin | May 23, 2007To heck with bubble sort, selection sort, insertion sort, and all the rest. Yes, all of those algorithms were intelligently design, but none of them follow the precepts of Intelligent Design.
And, now, David Morgan-Mar gives us Intelligent Design Sort.
(found via Steve Jackson Games)
sb admin | May 17, 2007It's all the rage to post pictures of your mug. (A mug mug, as it were.) I have lots of mugs, but I figured that this is the one that best fits the theme. This is one painted by... me. My wife and I, several months ago, went to one of those "paint your own" pottery places, and this was what I produced.
On the left, you see the cartoon model of an AGN (active galactic nucleus). There's the black hole and accretion disk at the center, from which are launched relativistic jets. Around the black hole is a dusty, obscuring torus. The same cartoon made by me on a computer can be seen on…
sb admin | March 20, 2007There is a loud and painful screech of microphone feedback. As it fades out, there is a series of loud, reverberating thumping noises, followed by:
ANNOUNCER: ....um, hello? Is this on?
The announcer, a small, hunched, elderly old man, continues to speak timidly into the microphone.
ANNOUNCER: Um, hello, well, er, yes, um, hello, everybody. Welcome to the, er, second round results of the Orbit Bracket of the, um...
The announcer pats down his jacket pockets, pulls out a small calendar, glances at it through the bottom of his bi-focals, and puts it away.
ANNOUNCER: 2007, yes, 2007 Spring…
sb admin | March 11, 2007Honestly, I'm not sure where this list originated, but somebody came up with this list of "the most significant Science Fiction and Fantasy books of the last 50 years". I was having breakfast with some friends a couple of months ago, and we were musing about what should be in the "SF Canon". This is one person's list, and I suspect others would have other lists.
The in thing to do around here (based, at this writing, on the actions of Orac, PZ, John, Joseph, and Bora, is to post the list, posting in bold the ones that I've read.
Let's see how my nerd cred does:
1. The Lord of the Rings,…