Pixel Scroll 3/15/24 What Can You Scroll About Chocolate Covered Stepping Disks?

(1) WALDROP TO THE SCREEN. George R.R. Martin tells us, “The Chickens Are Coming” at Not A Blog.

Howard Waldrop is gone, but his work will live on.

…And here’s the latest one, an adaptation of Howard’s most famous story, THE UGLY CHICKENS.  Winner of the Nebula.   Winner of the World Fantasy Award.   Nominee for the Hugo, but, alas, not a winner.   A pity, that.  Howard never won a Hugo, but in some more Waldropian  world he has ten of them lined up on his mantle.

Felicia Day (SUPERNATURAL, THE GUILD, DR. HORRIBLE’S SING ALONG BLOG) stars in our film of “that dodo story.”   Mark Raso (COPENHAGEN, KODACHRONE) directed.   Michael Cassutt (TWILIGHT ZONE, MAX HEADROOM, TV101, EERIE INDIANA, and many more) did the screenplay.

Howard saw a rough cut of the film before he died.   He liked it, which pleases me no end.   I only wish we had been able to screen the final cut for him.

(2) HIGH CALIBER CANON. The Atlantic’s list of“The Great American Novels” includes Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick and a number of other works of genre interest.

(3) INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE LONGLIST. Based on the descriptions of the works at the website, there are no books of genre interest among the 13 that made the International Booker Prize 2024 longlist.

(4) BECOMING THE LIFE ON MARS. Space.com interviews Robert Zubrin about his new book: “’The New World on Mars’ offers a Red Planet settlement guide”.

To say that Dr. Robert Zubrin, the esteemed Colorado-based aerospace engineer, author, lecturer and founding president of the Mars Society, has the Red Planet on his mind is a colossal understatement.   

This pioneering educational voice and influential space authority has written many books on the timely topic of Mars and Mars settlement over the years as interest in humankind’s role in its ultimate development has risen exponentially. Now Zubrin adds to his impressive catalog of visionary volumes about our mysterious planetary neighbor with the recent release of “The New World on Mars” (Diversion Books, 2024), a fascinating and infinitely readable peek into Mars’ inestimably rosy future….

Space.com: One of the most interesting chapters deals with the psychological aspects of leaving Earth and establishing an identifiable Martian culture with its own customs, rites and rituals and the importance of that process. Can you elaborate on that subject more?

Zubrin: The Mars Society over the past couple years held two contests asking people to design a 1,000-person Mars colony and a one-million-person Mars city-state. And by design we meant not just the technology or the economy, but the social system, political system, what kind of sports are likely to be played, as well as the aesthetics. 

Between the two contests, there were something like 300 entries. The ideas proposed spanned a huge range of political systems from socialist, to democratic and libertarian. Rather than attempt to choose my favorite system for a Martian utopia, I took the point of view that there will be many Martian cities founded by different people with very different ideas on what the ideal state should be, and it’s going to be sorted out by natural selection.  

Some of the answers I came up with I like a lot, like human liberty. But this is in contradiction to many visions of science fiction colonies that are totally controlled because no one would immigrate to one. The ones that will outgrow the others will clearly be the ones that are most attractive to immigrants. Freedom is a great attractor. North Korea does not have an illegal immigrant problem. Martian colonies will have to be highly inventive and invention only thrives under freedom. I believe a Mars colony will also require a great deal of social solidarity, so it will not be multi-cultural and will need to have a strong sense of community and common identity….

(5) DOCTOR WHO STARTING TIME.  From Variety we learn “’Doctor Who’ Starring Ncuti Gatwa Reveals May Premiere Date”.

…The new season of “Doctor Who,” starring “Sex Education” breakout Ncuti Gatwa as the Fifteenth Doctor, will premiere on May 10.

The new installment will be the first-ever to launch on Disney+ and release simultaneously worldwide. The premiere will start on May 10 at 7 p.m. ET in the U.S. and internationally (excluding the U.K.) with Christmas special “The Church on Ruby Road” airing before two brand-new episodes. In the U.K., the season will premiere at midnight GMT on May 11 on BBC iPlayer.

…A new trailer for the season will debut on March 22.

(6) SHATNER WON’T BE ECLIPSED – FOR LONG, ANYWAY. The Los Angeles Times interviewed “William Shatner on his long career, horses and watch design”. Behind a paywall, unfortunately. Here’s the first paragraph:

A documentary on his life, “You Can Call Me Bill,” directed by Alexandre O. Philippe (“Lynch/Oz”), is scheduled to roll out in theaters March 22 to coincide with his 93rd birthday. He continues to host and narrate the puzzling-phenomena History series “The UnXplained With William Shatner.” A 2022 performance at the Kennedy Center, backed by Ben Folds and the National Symphony Orchestra, is about to be released both as an album, “So Fragile, So Blue,” and a concert film. The title song, says Shatner, “encompasses a lot of my thinking about how we’re savaging the world, and [I’d hope] it’d be a song that people would listen to and perhaps be inspired to do something about global warming.”

And on April 8, for 15 minutes before the shadow of an eclipse falls over Bloomington, Ind., Shatner will address “55, 60,000 people” in the Indiana University football stadium. “So what do you say, what do you write, what do you do? I’m going to have to solve those problems.”…

(7) SIMULTANEOUS TIMES CELEBRATES ANNIVERSARY. Space Cowboy Books presents a special six-year anniversary episode of Simultaneous Times in collaboration with Worlds of IF Magazine bringing you works from the pages of Worlds of If Magazine #177. Listen to the podcast at the link. Story and poetry featured in this episode:

  • “Contact” by Akua Lezli Hope; with music by Fall Precauxions. Read by the author
  • “The Pain Peddlers” by Robert Silverberg; with music by Phog Masheeen. Read by Jean-Paul Garnier
  • “Time Junkies” by Pedro Iniguez; with music by Fall Precauxions. Read by the author

Theme music by Dain Luscombe

(8) RELICS OF WONKY PROMOTION TRANSMUTED TO CHARITY GOLD. “Props from botched Willy Wonka event raise more than £2,000 for Palestinian aid charity” reports the Guardian. The charity is Medical Aid for Palestinians.

Props from a botched Willy Wonka event in Glasgow that went viral after frustrated attenders called the police have raised more than £2,000 at auction for a Palestinian aid charity.

Fabric backdrops from the “immersive experience”, which was cancelled midway, were found in a bin outside the warehouse where it took place.

Monorail Music, a record shop in the city, auctioned the remains on eBay after they were passed on by the finder. The listing said: “Don’t miss out on this rare opportunity to own a piece of history.”

The Wonka event gained online notoriety after images of the sparsely decorated warehouse in Glasgow, staffed by actors dressed as Oompa Loompas and other characters, spread worldwide. On Thursday, the listing had a total of 57 bids and the items were sold for £2,250. Michael Kasparis, online manager of Monorail, described the outcome as “amazing”….

(9) RED FLAGS RAISED ABOUT TCG-CON. Outside the Asylum urges “Don’t Go to TCG-Con”. Here’s the synopsis of a long post with many receipts:

Summary: TCG-con frequently does not pay out its advertised prizes and staff compensation. They currently owe upwards of $50,000 to players, cosplayers, judges, and other staff members for previous conventions, and appear to be in the process of collapsing entirely. I would strongly recommend not purchasing a ticket to their future events, trying to get a refund if you already have, and warning anyone you know away from them as well. If you’re owed money yourself, see the end of this page for information on next steps.

(10) GRANT PAGE (1939-2024). Deadline pays tribute in “Grant Page Dead: Australian Stuntman In ‘Mad Max’ Films & 100-Plus Others Was 85”.

Grant Page, the Australian stunt icon who performed in and coordinating stunts for the original Mad Max,sequel Beyond Thunderdome,the upcoming prequel Furiosa: A Mad Max Sagaand more than 100 other films and TV series, died Thursday in a car crash. He was 85.

A legend of Aussie cinema, Page worked … on the 1979 action classic Mad Max,which introduced the world to Mel Gibson. He performed and served as stunt coordinator on …  its 1985 second sequel Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome… He also worked on … prequel, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, which is on the radar to premiere at Cannes in May, and on his 2022 pic Three Thousand Years of Longing.

(11) COMICS SECTION.

The New Yorker cartoon for the Ides of March gives us Dr. Seuss’ interpretation instead of Shakespeare’s.

(12) I BECAME WHAT I BEHELD. “Grant Morrison Responds to Zack Snyder’s Take on Batman Killing, ‘If Batman Killed His Enemies, He’d Be the Joker’” (comicbook.com) – in a quote at Comicbook.com.

Filmmaker Zack Snyder recently stirred up some controversy when he defended his aggressive version of Batman from Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice who killed, a choice that for many comic book fans runs counter to basic tenets of the character. Now, comic book writer Grant Morrison is weighing in and they don’t agree with Snyder. According to Morrison, “if Batman killed his enemies, he’d be the Joker.”

In their newsletter Xanaduum (via ScreenRant), Morrison — whose own work has been among some of the more definitive takes on Batman — dug into not only the practical aspect of why Batman doesn’t kill (because he’d end up arrested by Commissioner Gordon, in theory) but also the psychological aspect of the character and how Batman’s “no-kill” rule is something locked into him from the time he was a small child and is a part of his mental state having never fully developed, in some respect, out of the child who saw his parents murdered in Crime Alley.

“That Batman puts himself in danger every night but steadfastly refuses to murder is an essential element of the character’s magnificent, horrendous, childlike psychosis,” Morrison wrote.

There’s also the matter of the line between what Batman does and what the villains do. Villains kill; Batman does not. It makes all the difference, at least to Bruce Wayne who, should he ever cross the line, would then become no better than those who killed his parents….

(13) SNOWPIERCER RESCUED. It won’t be frozen out by streaming services after all says Deadline: “’Snowpiercer’: AMC Picks Up Season 4 After TNT Scrapped Sci-Fi Drama”.

The final season of Snowpiercer has finally found a home.

The fourth season of the sci-fi drama will air on AMC after the company acquired the rights to the Tomorrow Studios-produced series. It comes after TNT scrapped the show last year as part of a wider Warner Bros. Discovery content write-down strategy.

Deadline revealed in January 2023 that the fourth season wouldn’t air on its original home, as part of a slew of content cuts that also included the axing of Batgirl, Abrams’ HBO drama Demimonde, and TBS series such as The Big D, Chad and Kill The Orange Bear….

(14) A YELLOWSTONE UNSTUCK IN TIME. Gizmodo assures us “Josh Brolin’s Sci-Fi Hole Show Will Get Even Sci-Fi-er, Holier in Season 2”.

…The central mysteries of Outer Range surround that giant hole, which materializes on property owned by Brolin’s Wyoming rancher character and is eventually established to be a time portal. Along the way, various characters go missing, are revealed to have been born in different centuries, notice odd happenings that seem anachronistic, or are unmasked as characters we’ve already met who happen to be several years older than they should be. In season two, we’ll all take a time leap; the action begins in 1984 with a younger version of Brolin’s character, and Vanity Fair describes the narrative structure as “gamely hopping between different decades (and centuries) with newfound propulsion.”

An astrophysicist called in to help the time-travel stuff make sense—but according to new showrunner Murray, “The biggest part of what time travel meant to me and the writers was: How can this help us expose something that a character’s going through?” We’re very intrigued to see where this wild trail heads next….

(15) DISHING IT UP. A reporter tells BBC that “’Journalists are feeding the AI hype machine’”.

When Melissa Heikkilä looks back on her past four years writing about artificial intelligence (AI), two key things jump out to her, one good, one bad.

“It’s the best beat… AI is a story about power, and there are so many ways to cover it,” says the senior reporter for magazine MIT Technology Review. “And there are so many interesting, and eccentric people to write about.”

That’s the positive. The negative, she says, is that much of the wider media’s coverage of AI can leave a lot to be desired.

“There is more hype and obfuscation about what the technology can and cannot actually do,” says Ms Heikkilä. “This can lead to embarrassing mistakes, and for journalists to feed into the hype machine, by, for example, anthropomorphizing AI technologies, and mythologizing tech companies.”…

(16) RIGHT TURN, CLYDE. And while we’re on the subject of dud reportage – “Seismic signal that pointed to alien technology was actually a passing truck” says Physics World.

In January 2014 a meteor streaked across the sky above the Western Pacific Ocean. The event was initially linked to a seismic signal that was detected on Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island. This information was used by Harvard University’s Amir Siraj and Avi Loeb to determine where the object likely fell into the ocean. Loeb then led an expedition that recovered spherical objects called spherules from the ocean bottom, which the team claimed to be from the meteor.

Because of the spherule’s unusual elemental composition, the team has suggested that the objects may have come from outside the solar system. What is more, they hinted that the spherules may have an “extraterrestrial technological origin” – that they may have been created by an alien civilization.

Now, however, a study led by scientists at Johns Hopkins University has cast doubt on the connection between the spherules and the 2014 meteor event. They have proposed a very different source for the seismic signal that led Loeb and colleagues to the spherules.

“The signal changed directions over time, exactly matching a road that runs past the seismometer,” says Benjamin Fernando, a planetary seismologist at Johns Hopkins who led this latest research.

“It’s really difficult to take a signal and confirm it is not from something,” explains Fernando. “But what we can do is show that there are lots of signals like this, and show they have all the characteristics we’d expect from a truck and none of the characteristics we’d expect from a meteor.”

That’s right, it was a truck driving past the seismometer, not a meteor….

(17) WAR OF THE WORLD. “Air defense for $13 a shot? How lasers could revolutionize the way militaries counter enemy missiles and drones” at Yahoo!

Britain this week showed off a new laser weapon that its military says could deliver lethal missile or aircraft defense at around $13 a shot, potentially saving tens of millions of dollars over the cost of missile interceptors that do the job now.

Newly released video of a test of what the United Kingdom’s Defense Ministry calls the DragonFire, a laser directed energy weapon (LDEW) system, captured what the ministry says was the successful use of the laser against an aerial target during a January demonstration in Scotland.

“It’s a potential game changer for air defense,” the video says as a bright laser beam pierces the night sky over a firing range in the remote Hebrides archipelago, creating a ball of light as it hits its target.

The Defense Ministry says the DragonFire can precisely hit a target as small as a coin “over long ranges,” but it did not offer specifics. The exact range of the weapon is classified, it said.

The laser beam can cut through metal “leading to structural failure or more impactful results if the warhead is targeted,” a UK Defense Ministry statement said….

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, Sandra Miesel, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Mike Kennedy, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]

How Laser Weapons Stopped Being Science Fiction

By Jeff Hecht. Author of Lasers, Death Rays, and the Long, Strange Quest for the Ultimate Weapon, (Prometheus Books January 2019):

Pulp science fiction invented a host of directed-energy weapons: heat rays, death rays, blasters, ray guns and disintegrator rays. Lasers joined science-fiction arsenals soon after the Pentagon placed a million-dollar bet on the new idea in 1959. The brand-new Advanced Research Projects Agency was desperate for a defense against Soviet nuclear missiles when Gordon Gould walked in the door with a physically plausible plan to make a laser. Gould’s company got a fat contract, but Gould himself couldn’t get a security clearance to work on the laser. It was Theodore Maiman who launched the laser age when he made the first one in May 1960 at Hughes Research Laboratories in California.

Maiman was dismayed when newspaper headlines heralded his invention as a “science-fiction death ray.” His real-world laser was orders of magnitude short of the power needed to blast Soviet nukes out of the sky. Classified experiments reached tens of kilowatts in the late 1960s by burning chemical fuels in a gigantic flowing-gas system that acted like a rocket engine, but it couldn’t match the power of Star Trek phasers.

In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” program spent billions trying to make orbital laser battle stations, and managed to get a megawatt out of a building-sized laser for a few seconds at a time. But they never got a big laser off the ground. After the end of the Cold War, the Air Force crammed a rocket-engine laser into a Boeing 747, which got off the ground and bagged a few targets in 2010. But it was billions over budget and many years behind schedule, and was scrapped as useless for zapping nuclear missiles fired by rogue states.

However, tests of a smaller rocket-engine laser on the ground in the late 1990s held out a different hope. A joint U.S.-Israeli project called the Tactical High Energy Laser (THEL) could shoot down terrorist rockets before they could wreak havoc. The powers were only a few hundred kilowatts, but the targets were only in the kilometer range, not the thousands of kilometers needed to stop long-range nuclear missiles. Contractors planned how to repackage the five trailers of equipment used in THEL into a mobile rocket-blaster that could be driven to trouble spots. It seemed like a done deal until field operations experts took a look at the plans around 2000.

Logistics is crucial on the battlefield. Napoleon Bonaparte famously said “an army marches on its stomach,” but modern armies also need fuel and munitions. A laser is an appealing weapon because it fires bolts of energy, not expensive missiles that can run out in mid-battle. But chemically powered lasers need two fuels, one containing hydrogen and the other containing fluorine, and they produce highly toxic hydrogen fluoride. The field ops team gave them a thumbs down, but said they would be happy to have a laser that could run on electrical power from generators powered by the diesel fuel that is the ubiquitous source of energy on the battlefield.

Solid-state lasers that ran on electricity had come a long way in the forty years since Maiman made the first one. Some were used in cutting and welding, but their power was far short of the hundred kilowatt level needed to zap insurgent rockets. Yet Congress and the Pentagon could see their benefits, and in 2000 they created the High Energy Laser Joint Technology Office (HEL-JTO) with a mandate to build bigger and more powerful electric-powered lasers.

They planned to crank up the power in two steps to a laser producing the full hundred kilowatts for five solid minutes. Right on schedule, Northrop Grumman announced success. “We’re doing our part to make gunpowder a twentieth-century technology,” said Dan Wildt, head of the company’s laser weapon program, on a March 18, 2009 press teleconference. The laser reached 105 kilowatts, a shade above the desired output power, but its efficiency was a shade below the desired 20 percent. It was an impressive achievement. However, the laser weighed seven tons and filled a shiny metal box 2 by 2 by 2.7 meters, smaller than a 747, but too hefty and fragile for use on the battlefield. It also required banks of laboratory chillers because it generated over 400 kilowatts of heat as well as the 100 kilowatts of laser beam. So JTO pushed on toward more battle-ready lasers.

Meanwhile, industrial laser companies had made a breakthrough of their own by replacing old-fashioned laser rods and slabs with thin optical fibers loaded with light-emitting atoms. Fiber laser output powers had soared from around 100 watts in 2000 to tens of kilowatts in 2009. They were so powerful that military labs started buying welding lasers, bolting them onto battlefield vehicles, and adding beam-focusing optics and a joystick-based control stick for aiming the laser. Then they started firing.

The easiest targets were improvised explosive devices (IEDs) or unexploded munitions laying on around on a battleground. The drill was simple. Park the vehicle a couple hundred meters away, far enough that the shrapnel wouldn’t hurt anybody. Then turn on the laser and point the beam onto it. The infrared laser beam was invisible to the eye, but infrared viewers revealed it on the screen so the operator could point the beam. When the target was exposed on the surface, after a matter of seconds the explosive inside the shell would detonate with a satisfying BANG, and the driver could move along to the next target. That could be useful for clearing battlefields, although it was harder to deliver enough laser energy to explode well-buried land mines and IEDs.

The next step was moving targets. The Army Space and Missile Defense Command in Huntsville installed a five-kilowatt laser atop in a tank-like Stryker in place of the usual heavy gun. It zapped over 150 drones of various sizes before Boeing replaced it with a 10-kilowatt laser. The Navy targeted small boats. A video of one early test showed a boat with a large red outboard motor bobbing quietly on shallow water. Nothing seemed to happen as an invisible infrared laser beam from elsewhere locked onto the motor, but as the beam dwelled on the motor, it began igniting wisps of gasoline fumes, and the motor eventually went up in flames.

The Navy was the first service to officially “deploy” a laser weapon, installed on the aging warship the USS Ponce in 2014 before it went on duty the Persian Gulf. They bought five 5.5-kilowatt industrial lasers from IPG Photonics, the world’s biggest maker of fiber lasers, and hooked them up to a beam-focusing telescope. The laser wasn’t used in combat, but it did zap test drones and small boats, with impressive success.

Laser weapon system aboard USS Ponce in 2014.

Tests are continuing with more powerful lasers taking on more difficult targets. The Army installed a 60-kilowatt state-of-the-art fiber laser from Lockheed Martin in the High-Energy Laser Mobile Demonstrator, a standard military battlefield truck that Boeing has equipped with laser focusing optics and a command and control systems for use by soldiers.

The Navy is buying a pair of similar Lockheed advanced fiber lasers for a new system it calls HELIOS, for High Energy Laser and Integrated Optical-dazzler with Surveillance. In addition to zapping unfriendly small boats and drones, HELIOS will use its optical system to gather intelligence on its environment. It also will include a lower-power visible laser as the equivalent of the “stun” setting on a Star Trek phaser; it will shine so brightly that enemy troops won’t be able to look at it, making it hard for them to attack. One HELIOS will be sent to the Navy by 2020 for integration with the electrical and control systems of a new destroyer. The other will undergo extensive tests at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.

Artist’s rendering of Lockheed Martins HELIOS system. Credit: Lockheed Martin (PRNewsfoto/Lockheed Martin)

The Air Force wants lasers for its top-gun fighter pilots, so it’s developing a laser weapon called SHiELD (for Self-protect High-Energy Laser Demonstrator). A cutting-edge Lockheed fiber laser will be mounted in a pod attached to fighter jets to defend against ground-to-air and air-to-air weapons. Initial tests are to start by 2021.

Meanwhile, tests are continuing on a radically different laser design called HELLADS, developed by General Atomic. One big attraction is a remarkably compact and light-weight structure made possible by cooling the laser solid with a flowing liquid with optical properties that match those of the solid so well that it doesn’t disturb the laser beam at all. Another attraction is a modular structure that can double the power by adding a second module, and potentially scale to much higher powers by adding more modules.

After decades of disappointment, this time looks different. Lasers that are more compact, more efficient and more powerful are only part of the story. It’s also focusing on targets that are much closer, so the beam has to go through less air, which isn’t as clear as we think. Look across a sunny blacktop parking lot at mid-day and you can see how air currents can bend light back and forth. Another difference is that drones and short-range rockets are much more vulnerable to laser attack than ballistic missiles hardened for re-entry into the atmosphere.

Nobody’s talking ray guns or phasers yet. A hand-held laser can’t pack lethal energy, although one could burn a blind spot on your retina. Think of these lasers as defensive artillery that can pinpoint enemy rockets, shells, drones and small boats.

Don’t expect these laser weapons to be standard combat equipment next year. The new generation of tests are needed to evaluate the lasers strengths and weaknesses, and to assess their lethality on real-world targets. If lasers pass those tests, they must be ruggedized to withstand battlefield conditions, which are far more harsh than a well-run factory floor. Then they must run a bureaucratic gauntlet to gain approval to move beyond research and development and become a “program of record” that spends buckets of money to produce hardware. That’s a real-world challenge Buck Rogers never had to face.