Federation Commander

A game that evokes Star Fleet Battles while being way simpler. [Link]

On the whole, I am rather impressed with theFederation Commander rules. It actually took me years to get the hang of Star Fleet Battles. (I would read the rules and make notes on everything. I’d have pages and pages of notes, and when I did finally play, my cheat sheets were always several pages long.) The one overriding principle of Federation Commander’s design is to maintain the overall thrust of Star Fleet Battles while eliminating anything related to record keeping or plotting. I think they succeeded admirably.
They realized during development that they could not improve the game by reducing the number of impulses in a turn. Car Wars, for instance went from having 10 phase turns to 5 phases and on down to 3 phases in the last edition. Three phase movement sacrificed a great way too much granularity it’s clear that the designers could not accept that here. On the other hand, iterating through the byzantine impulse sequence 32 times in a turn is downright unworkable in game designed for today’s market. Their solution was to reduce the number of fire opportunities down to a quarter of that. Each “impulse” now has four sub-pulses that consist of just movement. The sub-pulses play out quickly; the overall tempo and feel of the combats are maintained while a lot of extraneous decision making is quietly let go. It works.
It’s the little things that clinch the deal, though. Like not having to strain my eyes finding the ship’s turn mode given a current speed. (With the ship limited to three different “gears”, it’s a lot easier to reference your turn mode on the fly.) Stupid stuff like the Kauffman Retrograde are not possible in this system due to backwards movement being changed to cost twice as much. Mid-turn speed changes (which were a huge headache in Star Fleet Battles and were essential to mastering tournament style play) are now so drop-dead simple to implement that you’ll be teaching the rule for it in your first game. (All you do is pay a point of energy on any impulse to temporarily speed up or slow down.) Anything I had to look up often in the old game is either eliminated or simplified– for instance, if a direct fire weapon cuts directly across a shield boundary, the defender chooses which one is hit.
Some aspects of the classic simulation are gone. You don’t energize phasers anymore. The various weapons status levels seem to be gone. The difference between warp and impulse power is gone. The plethora of refits available on each hull are gone. (Okay, I do miss those… but I will not miss explaining them to new players. The first games of Star Fleet Battles almost always have something go wrong because reviewing which shaded boxes are in play inevitably lead to confusion.) Even the old “impulse of decision” and “impulse of truth” bits are gone.
I admit, I still have this dream to someday play epic games of Star Fleet Battles with scads of fighters, seeking weapons, and PF’s on the board. I actually want to try it as the fleet game it is so obviously intended to be. (The ISC ship designs only really make sense in the context of fleet battles, after all.) Nevertheless, I am gobsmacked when I peruse the Federation Commander rules and see that stuff like Stingers, Cloaks, and ESG’s only take a page or two to explain. Star Fleet Battles still defines the setting for me, but this newer variant is far more likely to see actual play at the table top. It almost makes me sad….

Politics don't belong in science fiction

They may not belong there, but they are elbowing their way in. [Link]

There was a time when science fiction was a place to explore new ideas, free of the conventional wisdom of staid, "mundane" society, a place where speculation replaced group think, and where writers as different as libertarian-leaning Robert Heinlein, and left-leaning Isaac Asimov and Arthur Clarkewould share readers, magazines, and conventions.

But then, there was a time when that sort of openness characterized much of American intellectual life. That time seems to be over, judging by the latest science fiction dust-up. Now, apparently, a writer's politics are the most important thing, and authors with the wrong politics are no longer acceptable, at least to a loud crowd that has apparently colonized much of the world of science fiction fandom.

The Hugo Awards are presented at the World Science Fiction Society's convention ("Worldcon") and nominees and awardees are chosen by attendees and supporters. The Hugo is one of the oldest and most prestigious awards in science fiction, but in recent years critics have accused the award process — and much of science fiction fandom itself — of becoming politicized.

That's certainly been the experience of Larry Correia, who was nominated for a Hugo this year. Correia, the author of numerous highly successful science fiction books likeMonster Hunter Internationaland Hard Magic, is getting a lot of flak because he's a right-leaning libertarian. Makes you wonder if Robert Heinlein could get a Hugo Award today. (Answer: Probably not.)

Here's how Correia, writing on his blog, characterizes what's happened since he was nominated:

The libel and slander over the last few days have been so ridiculous that my wife was contacted by people she hasn't talked to for years, concerned that she was married to such a horrible, awful, hateful, bad person, and that they were worried for her safety. I wish I was exaggerating. Don't take my word for it. My readers have been collecting a lot of them in the comments of the previous Hugo post and on my Facebook page. Plug my name into Google for the last few days. Make sure to read the comments to the various articles, too. They're fantastic. ... I've said for a long time that the awards are biased against authors because of their personal beliefs. Authors can either cheerlead for left-wing causes, or they can keep their mouth shut. Open disagreement is not tolerated and will result in being sabotaged and slandered. Message or identity politics has become far more important than entertainment or quality. I was attacked for saying this. I knew that when an admitted right winger got in they would be maligned and politicked against, not for the quality of their art but rather for their unacceptable beliefs.

SyFy comes crawling back to genre it tried to get away from

More space opera. [Link]

Almost five years after a rebrand that abandoned the Sci-Fi moniker and enraged fans, NBCUniversal brass is aware that its attempt to lure a broader audience might have lost it some clout in the increasingly lucrative genre that shares its former name. Now Syfy president Dave Howe is trying to rectify the perception problem with changes in the executive ranks that will translate to new programming more familiar to its core audience.

"We want to be the best science-fiction channel that we possibly can, and in some respects, that means going back to the more traditional sci-fi/fantasy that fans often say they feel we've exited," Howe tells THR. "We're going to occupy that space in a way we haven't for the past few years."

PHOTOS: 2014's New Broadcast and Cable TV Shows

Indeed, as Syfy attempted to broaden its reach with shows like the short-lived Alphas, the sci-fi genre exploded elsewhere on cable. AMC's The Walking Dead remains the biggest series on TV in the key 18-to-49 demo, FX's American Horror Story regularly scores more Emmy nominations than any series, and Game of Thrones has attracted such a fervent fan base, HBO is filling Brooklyn's Barclays Center for its March 20 premiere. (Nevertheless, Syfy's ratings are among the more consistent on cable -- it remains a top 15 ad-supported network among adults 18-to-49, where it skews male.)

But NBCU brass has higher expectations for the network, and it has not had a celebrated and commercial breakout since Battlestar Galactica wrapped in 2009.

Syfy's new executive vp original content, Bill McGoldrick, who joined in November from corporate sibling USA following the exit of Mark Stern, has two mandates: greenlight a space opera a laBattlestar and usher the network back into the golden age of high-profile, big-budget miniseries now duplicated by so many of its competitors.

McGoldrick's first pull on the scripted trigger is Ascension, a limited series for which Syfy is closing a deal and eyeing for the fourth quarter. Part Battlestar and part Downton Abbey, it follows the 100-year-long space shuttle of colonists fleeing an Earth threatened by the early Cold War. In success, this and other forthcoming Syfy miniseries will have series potential.

STORY: Syfy's 'Sharknado 2' Sets Premiere Date, Cameos

Going forward, Defiance, the $100 million gamble with a video game tie-in, and recent debut Helix(from Battlestar co-creator Ron Moore) are being viewed as steps toward what Syfy wants creatively: provocative, allegory-filled science fiction, unlike Syfy's lighter, more procedural formats of currentStephen King adaptation Haven or exiting Warehouse 13. New York-based Howe joined McGoldrick in Los Angeles during the first week of March to communicate their new wish list for originals to the major talent agencies. (The duo is less clear on unscripted plans, as supernatural fare -- including Syfy's long-running Ghost Hunters -- has been exhausted by competitors.)

Also of interest: more international co-productions (see dystopian Continuum and vampire crime drama Lost Girl) that get exclusive stateside first-runs at a modest cost. Howe considers acquisitions of reruns, once Syfy's bread and butter, to be firmly in the past. Off-net episodes of Lost, which he calls "a disaster," proved to him that the Syfy audience already is up to speed on its competitors' shows.

Lurking in the shadows, of course, is Sharknado. After it scored a huge 9.5 million viewers over six broadcasts last summer, Syfy is eager for the social-media cachet that the July 31 sequel likely will bring. But the cheap B-movies that have frequented its schedule are not a priority. Howe says he plans to cut back on campy tele­pics from the 20 to 24 that Syfy now airs each year (though he admitsSharknado likely will remain an annual event).

Instead, McGoldrick is most concerned with his directive of putting the network back in outer space -- be it with Ascension or another project.

"That's the way to send a message in a big way that we're back and we care about sci-fi," he says. "There is enormous pressure to get that back, because we used to own it. And we're going to own it again."

A 70's version of the future today

Space Station '76. [Link]

South by Southwest Music, Interactive, and Film Festival is in full effect in Austin, Texas. There are many low-budget indie movies that will premiere among smaller studio releases such as Jon Favreau’s Chef and the Veronica Mars movie. The main draw for SXSW’s film slate is the indie films that didn’t make the cut for the Sundance Film Festival a few months ago. Among them is a new science fiction comedy called Space Station 76.

THR reports that Space Station 76 will find its way into theaters soon. Jack Plotnick co-wrote and directed the film, which features a story about “a group of people (and several robots) living on a space station in a 1970’s-version of the future who are forced to confront their darkest secrets when a new Assistant Captain arrives and inadvertently ignites tensions among the crew.” Jennifer Cox, Sam Pancake, Kali Rocha, and Michael Stoyanov also co-wrote Space Station 76. The film premiered on March 8 as part of the Visions section during SXSW.

The Geometry of the Enterprise

Now I have a reason for why I like the TOS Enterprise better than the Next Generation. [Link]

The designer who created the starships for Gene Roddenberry was a guy named Matt Jeffries. His design of the Federation Constitution Class Heavy Cruiser (better known as the Starship Enterprise) is perhaps the most recognized science fiction ship in the history of the genre. Just as the Parthenon was built upon the firm foundations of the golden ratio, so too is Matt Jeffries’ Enterprise.

What is the golden ratio?

The first thing you need to understand is that the golden ratio is represented by two numbers (I suppose all ratios are like that). 1.618033988749895… and it’s inverse 0.618033988749895….If you add both numbers together, you’ll almost reach 2. I say almost because they are both irrational numbers. The decimals go spinning off in a seemingly random order into infinity, similar in the way Pi does. In the early 1900s, an American mathematician assigned these numbers an upper-case and a lower-case greek letter we know as Phi and phi so the golden ratio is also known as ‘The Phi Ratio’.

The Fibonacci sequence

In 1202, an Italian mathematician named Leonardo Fibonacci wrote a book that would revolutionize how we use numbers. Prior to its publication, everyone in the west was using the same I’s, V’s, C’s and X’s the Romans were using. However, Fibonacci thought the Arabs were doing it was much better and he must have been very convincing because soon afterwards everybody was using the now familiar 0 through 9 system we use today.

Fibonacci’s contribution to the golden ratio has to do with something he called “The Fibonacci Sequence”. Actually, Indian mathematicians knew about it for a long time but it goes something like this. Each number is the sum of the previous two numbers, starting with 0 and 1. This sequence begins 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, 610, 987. Doesn’t seem like a big deal, but the neat thing about it is if you divide one number by the previous, you get the golden ratio.

987/610 = 1.61803278688525

Well, not quite, but the higher you go, the more accurate it becomes! The idea that physical beauty is literally embedded within the mathematical equivalent of a ‘party trick’ really baked some peoples brains. Still does, in fact.

Why didn't anyone tell me?

According to Iranian news agency, US controlled by aliens. [Link]

Iran's semi-official news outlets have something of a reputation for taking conspiracy theorism to the next level. They've written on Israel's secret plans to annex Iraq, theconspiracy by Western media to fabricate quotes by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani condemning the Holocaust and the secret Jewishness of the British royal family. You may notice a certain theme here.

On Sunday, the hard-line semi-official Fars News dropped one of its biggest bombshells yet: The United States government has been secretly run by a "shadow government" of space aliens since 1945. Yes, space aliens. The alien government is based out of Nevada and had previously run Nazi Germany. It adds, for timeliness, that the controversial NSA programs are actually a tool for the aliens to hide their presence on Earth and their secret agenda for global domination. This is all asserted as incontrovertible fact with no caveats.

There are so many wonderful details here. As proof that aliens were secretly behind the Nazis, the report explains that Germany built hundreds of submarines toward the end of the war, far more than would have been possible with mere human technology. It does not explain why aliens with access to interstellar travel built subs that were so grossly incapable against the British navy, or why all-powerful extraterrestrials were unable to help the Nazis resist an invasion by Allied forces that are mere cavemen relative to their own technology. So far, these are pretty unimpressive aliens.

In any case, after losing the war, the aliens apparently installed themselves as the secret force behind the United States government. President Obama is said to be a tool of the aliens, though anti-alien factions within the U.S. government are fighting to topple him. Their present aim is to install a global surveillance system that will, somehow, allow them to finally impose a one-world government and enslave humanity.

The best part to all this, to me, is the sourcing. Fars News takes us through a veritable hall-of-mirrors of sources "confirming" their scoop. The progenitor of it all, of course, is ostensibly NSA leaker Edward Snowden, who has waited until now to reveal that the real reason for all those NSA programs is aliens. As best I can tell, Fars claims that Snowden gave this information to Russia's Federal Security Service  (FSB). They also say it was independently confirmed by former Canadian defense minister Paul Hellyer. (Hellyer, who is 90, does indeed argue that aliens have visited Earth many times, though I haven't seen him comment on this particular story.) The FSB, they say, put all this information down in a secret report, which was inexplicably obtained by the ultra-fringe conspiracy theory Web site, Whatdoesitmean.com.

The Economics of Star Trek

This is the first time I've believed that it might be able to work. [Link]

I promise this is about Star Trek. Sort of. Bear with me a moment.

I’ve been reading a lot about robots lately. When I read about robots, and the future, I can’t help but think about it in economic terms. And that inevitably turns my mind to the branch of economics called post scarcity economics. Traditional economics, of course, deals with the efficient allocation of inherently scarce materials. Post scarcity economics deals with the economics of economies that are no longer constrained by scarcity of materials — food, energy, shelter, etc.

The thing that never sits quite right with post scarcity economics, though, at least the very little that I’ve read, is that it’s always sort of an all or nothing affair: you either don’t have enough of anything or you have enough of everything. Thinking of this as a mental exercise is kind of fun, I think, but in reality it seems to me that getting from point A — a scarcity economy — to point B — post scarcity — is going to be a long, complicated journey as some things become more abundant in someplaces, while other things are still scarce.

What is needed is some sort of interim-, or proto-post scarcity economics.

DDG 1000 launched

A stealthy, deadly ship. Her fist commander: Captain James A. Kirk. [Link]

The U.S. Navy has unveiled its most ambitious and expensive warship to ever hit the high seas: The Zumwalt DDG 1000.

Launched into the water earlier this week by General Dynamics, a Maine-based shipbuilder, the Zumwalt—named after the former Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Elmo R. “Bud” Zumwalt Jr.—is built for both land and water attacks, and is equipped with some of the world’s most advanced Naval weaponry. Its intended purpose, according to the Navy, is to “provide independent forward presence and deterrence” and to “operate as part of joint and combined expeditionary forces.” In other words: It’s a destroyer ship.

The ship’s appropriately titled “Advanced Gun System,” built by Raytheon, the global defense contractor, is designed to fire rocket-powered missiles at a distance of 63 miles, guided by a system five times more accurate than anything the Navy currently uses. The ship may be big, but it’s stealthy, too. The Zumwalt features a  “tumblehome” hull, which keeps the ship’s location relatively clear from radar screens. And the ship’s propulsion system, designed by the maritime division of Rolls-Royce, can generate 78 megawatts of electricity. That’s enough wattage to power a laser weapon on board the ship’s deck—a much-rumored new feature of the Zumwalt.

They’re just rumors, so far, because the Navy hasn’t yet finished building the ship. Though General Dynamics launched the Zumwalt into water this week, the Navy won’t actually receive it until early 2014. At that point, Navy engineers will finish building out its weaponry system and activate the ship’s combat systems. The Navy predicts the Zumwalt will be ready for battle by 2016.

And yesterday, the Navy announced the ship’s commander-to-be: Captain James A. Kirk, a navy veteran. Yes, that’s right. Captain Kirk will pilot this futuristic vessel. (Hear that? That’s the sound of Star Trek fans high-fiving around the globe.)

Star Trek Economics

Interesting, and part of why it always rang false for me. I buy Babylon 5's view of us as more realistic where people are still people. To achieve a working Star Trek world requires the same thing Communism would require to work: beings who may look like people but do not react like people. [Link]

The notion that eliminating material scarcity will lead people to live lives of self-improvement is psychological, not economic. Even back in the 1960s, people were familiar with Maslow’s famous “hierarchy of needs”: the theory that people have different “levels” of needs, and that a person must fulfil one level of needs before he or she can move on to addressing the next level.

According to the hierarchy of needs, a person must first deal with meeting physiological needs, such as hunger, thirst, and sleep. Once those are met, the next most pressing set of needs are safety needs: shelter, health, family, and property. Once those are met, a person can move on to love, self-esteem and finally “self-actualisation”: the enriching of the self.

Maslow’s hierarchy has long been a favorite of pop-psychologists and has been used and abused in both fiction and journalism since the 1940s. But it is fairly clear, even just from the language that he uses, that Roddenberry is inspired by conceptual framework of the hierarchy. If human endeavours are seen as advancing up this noble ladder of advancement, then any society where all of the basic low-level needs are bet would obviously be left to while away their time exclusively on love, self-esteem, and self-actualisation.

We can even speculate about how this might have happened. From the very beginning, the Star Trek universe had the “transporter”: a machine that could turn any physical object into energy, and transmit that energy (or at least information about the original pattern) across space so that energy could then be converted into that same physical form at the destination.

A natural extension of this technology is the “replicator”, which essentially is nothing more than the receiving end of a transporter. This object simply has patterns for different types of physical objects stored in memory, and can create, on demand, any physical object from energy based on these patterns.

If you can make anything you want out of energy, and you have all of the energy in the universe at your disposal, then presumably you can have any physical thing that you want.

There are details, of course. Manual labor hasn’t been eliminated, because presumably someone has to operate the replicators, and move their products from place to place. One can only assume that large objects would have to be created in parts, and then human labor would be needed to assemble those parts.

We can also assume that these people would not need to be paid to perform this labour, because they already are having all of their physical needs met. Why do they perform this labour, then? Clearly they are motivated to assemble the large object – whatever it is – out of their sense of duty and their desire to improve humanity.

It’s all very tidy. But is that how people really work?

Artificial womb

Welcome to the future. This is a common feature of many sci-fi stories, particularly those of Lois McMaster Bujold. Her stories quite often involve reproductive technology as major plot elements. [Link]

The artificial womb exists. In Tokyo, researchers have developed a technique called EUFI — extrauterine fetal incubation. They have taken goat fetuses, threaded catheters through the large vessels in the umbilical cord and supplied the fetuses with oxygenated blood while suspending them in incubators that contain artificial amniotic fluid heated to body temperature.

Yoshinori Kuwabara, chairman of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Juntendo University in Tokyo, has been working on artificial placentas for a decade. His interest grew out of his clinical experience with premature infants, and as he writes in a recent abstract, ”It goes without saying that the ideal situation for the immature fetus is growth within the normal environment of the maternal organism.”

Kuwabara and his associates have kept the goat fetuses in this environment for as long as three weeks. But the doctor’s team ran into problems with circulatory failure, along with many other technical difficulties. Pressed to speculate on the future, Kuwabara cautiously predicts that ”it should be possible to extend the length” and, ultimately, ”this can be applied to human beings.”

For a moment, as you contemplate those fetal goats, it may seem a short hop to the Central Hatchery of Aldous Huxley’s imagination. In fact, in recent decades, as medicine has focused on the beginning and end stages of pregnancy, the essential time inside the woman’s body has been reduced. We are, however, still a long way from connecting those two points, from creating a completely artificial gestation. But we are at a moment when the fetus, during its obligatory time in the womb, is no longer inaccessible, no longer locked away from medical interventions.

The future of human reproductive medicine lies along the speeding trajectories of several different technologies. There is neonatology, accomplishing its miracles at the too-abrupt end of gestation. There is fetal surgery, intervening dramatically during pregnancy to avert the anomalies that kill and cripple newborns. There is the technology of assisted reproduction, the in-vitro fertilization and gamete retrieval-and-transfer fireworks of the last 20 years. And then, inevitably, there is genetics. All these technologies are essentially new, and with them come ethical questions so potent that the very inventors of these miracles seem half-afraid of where we may be heading.

Miami International Science Fiction Film Festival

Neat. January 17^th - 19^th, 2014. [Link]

New Old Who Found

New old episodes of Doctor Who, previously thought lost appear to have been found. [Link]

BBC Worldwide is expected to confirm the find at a press screening in London later this week.

It follows weeks of speculation that some lost episodes had been located.

A total of 106 episodes featuring the first two actors to play the Doctor, William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton, are currently missing.

The BBC destroyed many of the sci-fi drama's original transmission tapes in the 1960s and 1970s.

However, the majority of the episodes had been transferred on to film for foreign broadcasters. It is often these prints found in other countries that are the source of retrieved episodes.

A survey about SFF fandom

Interesting survey. [Link]

So there’s this really good conversation going on in Twitter about encouraging Diversity in SFF. The hashtag is #DiversityInSFF and I highly encourage checking it out. Anyway, reading that and thinking about the other conversations, I started wondering who the fans of speculative fiction are? I mean, I know who goes to conventions, but what about everyone else?

So I figured I’d just ask and made a survey.

Pass it around? The more people who fill it out, the better the sample.

Edited to add: I updated some of the questions and added some to address concerns people raised. If you go back to the same link, you can change your response.

The results are here, if you are curious.

Jedi Mind Meld

I guess the President needs to turn in his badge as the First Nerd President. He mixed the oil and water of Star Trek and Star Wars in a mixed metaphor over averting the sequester. [Link]

President Obama tried to drop a gratuitous nerd culture reference in a press conference about serious business, and blew it. He said earlier today he couldn't perform a “Jedi mind meld” on the GOP, an amalgam of “Jedi mind trick” and “Vulcan mind meld.” Regarding negotiations with Congress over issues like averting the sequester, Obama drew further Twitter mockery with the line, “I am not a dictator. I’m the president.”

To scan the stormy horizon of nerdrage, skim the #ObamaSciFiQuotes hashtag results on Twitter.

They found a great image, and here's some more.

I really like this one

Noooo!

A classic

Three mixed franchises. Can we do better?

Yes. Four franchises mixed

Teletubbies as Wells' Eloi

Teletubbies as utopia. [Link]

It seems clear from the world of the Teletubbies that, whether alien or posthuman, they come from a technologically advanced culture. Like the Borg they have assimilated technological devices into their own bodies, but unlike the wholly technological/artificial worlds of the Borg they have chosen to inhabit an environment shaped largely by the aesthetics of the natural world. We have, then, a disparity between (on the one hand) the high degree of intelligence and technological know-how needed to build the ’tubbies home, their automated toasters and vacuum-cleaners, the periscopes, the broadcasting tower and all that; and (on the other) the evident puerility and immaturity of the Teletubbies themselves. Rather that reading this in terms of parental abandonment, I suggest a reading more in keeping with the traditions of SF.

The Teletubbies, I’d suggest, are contemporary versions of Wells’s Eloi, those indolent foppish creatures from The Time Machine. Indeed, they are a more thoroughly-worked through rendering of the Eloi mode of life. Where Wells saw his Eloi as adults, still capable despite their degeneracy of adult pastimes (so that Wells’s time traveller is for instance able to have sex with the Eloi Weena), the Teletubbies inhabit a more self-consistent vision of complete degeneracy.

Let’s put it this way: imagine a culture that develops such sophisticated technical prostheses that its inhabitants no longer need to work, to worry, to strive in any way. Imagine those inhabitants, through choice or through evolutionary pressure, losing all stress-related functions of adult consciousness: work-ethic, conscience, guilt, lust, anger, avarice. Imagine them, in other words, regressing back wholly to a toddler’s existence, finding in that simplicity a maximum fit between existence and stress-free-satisfaction, like those German 40-something businessmen who like dressing in nappies and rolling around on the carpets of speciality brothels. Or, in fact, not like those men, because (unlike the Eloi) the Teletubbies have discarded the sex impulse as well, abandoning with it the dangerously fretful anxiety-gratification ratio of adult sexual life.

The machines in Teletubbyland, in other words, are the devices necessary to free mankind from its attachment to the adult world of necessity, provision and work. And once freed from those constraints, the show suggests, evolution or choice leads life back into the calm, bright satisfactions of toddlerdom. The Teletubbies are purer Eloi than the Eloi, a more complete rendering of the old SF convention about degeneration. Wells characterised his Eloi as child-like in some respect, but adult-like in others (physical appearance, sexual appetite). Huxley’s Brave New World also posited human global happiness upon an infantilisation of the human animal, although his future humans are also adult in appearance and physical appetite.

Bryan Singer’s H+

Looks pretty cool. Not having the episodes in a set order seems a little gimmicky, but still neat. [Link]

We've been excited about Bryan Singer's new webseries H+ for a while now, based on the cool premise: Tons of people get a chip called H+ implanted, which connects their brains to the Internet. And then a virus strikes, and a third of the world population dies instantly. And Angel's Alexis Denisof stars!

H+ is debuting on Youtube on August 8, but Comic Con attendees will get a sneak peek on Friday — and there's already been a screening in L.A. Io9 reader (and independent filmmaker) John V. Knowles was there, and he sent us this report. Spoilers ahead...

Lego 2001

Discovery and Leonev. [Link]

That's a six-foot-long, 3,873-piece, 1:60 scale model of the Discovery One spaceship above, and check out a cheerful "Dawn of Man" diorama that consists primarily of monkeys, black plastic bricks, and bones.

Allemann also built a 3,670-brick model of the Leonov vessel from 2010: The Year We Make Contact. For those of you have six feet of floor space to spare, he's drafted a construction guide for the Discovery One (PDF), so put on some Richard Strauss and get cracking.

The Leonev is one of my favorite fictional spaceships and is a very direct inspiration for the Omega class destroyer from Babylon 5.

Star Wars Comparison

1977 vs. 1997 vs. 2004.

So cute

Darth Vader and Son. [Link]

Well if this isn’t the most adorable thing I’ve seen all week…

We all know the traditional story of Luke and Vader. A long lost father chops off his kids hand then asks him if they want to conquer the galaxy together. But what if they’d met earlier in life? What if Vader actually got to be the father he wanted to be?

This series of illustrations is from Jeffrey Brown, and are a part of a book that’s available for pre-order on Amazon. “Darth Vader and Son” shows various scenes from a young Skywalker’s childhood, and shows Vader trying to be the best single dad he can.

See the rest of the gallery below, and I’m betting it just might melt your heart.

The important questions that need answering

Could you build a minifig scale Death Star? [Link]

Just when you thought everything was over, it keeps going. What if this Lego set were indeed in orbit around the Earth? Low Earth orbit (with an altitude of 300 km). What would it look like? Well, first let me say that the angular size of the the moon is about 0.53 degrees. If this 3.52 km diameter radius object was in orbit, it would have an angular size of:

So, it would appear bigger than the actual real moon. You know I am going to make a diagram showing that. Here it is.

How cool would that be? People would mistake it for a moon, just like Han Solo did.  Well, it look just like the moon except that it would just take a couple of minutes to pass across the sky where the moon doesn’t really seem to change its position.

That's no moon. It's bigger.