(1) Blastr reports the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum needs photos or film of the original Enterprise model to assist them in replicating what the Enterprise looked like during and after the cult-classic episode “The Trouble With Tribbles.” That apparently was the last time the model was altered while the series was in production.
The National Air and Space Museum is opening its hailing frequencies and asking fans for help. They need original pics or footage of their original Enterprise model — which has already gone through eight different restorations ever since it was built in 1964, by the way — so that they can restore it to all its August 1967 glory. Yep, it’s that specific.
Star Trek fans made first contact with the ship in 1972, when a model was featured at Golden West College in Huntington Beach, Calif., during Space Week (a 10-day gathering of space-related activities). Then, in 1974 through 1975, the ship was put on display in the Smithsonian’s Arts & Industries Building in Washington, D.C., while the National Air and Space Museum’s new home base was being built on Independence Avenue.
(2) And while we’re discussing Classic Trek, should anyone ever ask you how Roddenberry came up with “Sulu” as the character’s name, George Takei explains:
In an interview with the website Big Think, he revealed that his character is based on the Philippine Sulu Sea. According to him, show creator Gene Roddenberry wanted a generic Asian name for the helmsman. He thought that most Asian last names were country-specific, like Tanaka, Wong, and Kim. In 1966, Asia was dealing with issues like warfare, colonization, and rebellion, and Roddenberry didn’t want to reference any of that.
(3) A few days ago I posted about the new BB-8 robot from Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Now someone has dissected a BB-8 with photos and commentary worthy of a medical examiner. You sicko!
(4) And on Force Friday, that glorious excuse to sell toys from the new Star Wars franchise, the rarest collectible was a mis-packaged Kylo Ren action figure – found on the shelves in Glendale, John King Tarpinian’s home town. And specialized collectors are always on the lookout for funny/funky slipups like this.
That’s when eagle-eyed shoppers might have spotted Kylo Ren—the helmeted, crossguard lightsaber-wielding new villain played by Adam Driver in The Force Awakens—being sold as lady storm trooper Captain Phasma after an apparent packaging error placed the new Star Wars villain in the wrong box that got shipped out for the massive retail push.
Misprinted, misshapen, and mis-packaged memorabilia occupy a niche spot in the world of collectibles, particularly in the long history of the Star Wars franchise. And while packaging errors are known to occur “more often than people think,” according to Toy & Comic Heaven’s James Gallo, it’s the production errors and discontinued design variants that yield more highly prized value to collectors….
There’s the infamously naughty 1977 Topps C-3PO #207 trading card, in which the Force appears to be very strong in C-3PO’s chrome junk, an aberration that Topps quickly corrected in subsequent printings. A bizarre yellow-hued discoloration on Kenner’s 1997-era Luke vs. Wampa set made the “incontinent” Hoth beast a curious find for Star Wars collectors. “Yak Face” (never distributed in the U.S.), “Vinyl Cape Jawa (later reconfigured with a cloth cape), “Rocket Firing Boba Fett” (cancelled on the eve of production for fear of a choking hazard) and versions of Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker, and Obi-Wan Kenobi bearing telescoping lightsaber accessories have reportedly sold to hardcore collectors over the years for thousands of dollars.
(5) Amazon says The Man in the High Castle: Season 1 will be available November 20, 2015. The first episode was teased in January. This trailer debuted at the San Diego Comic-Con.
(6) For a limited Warner Bros. Studio Tour Hollywood is offering guests the rare opportunity to see the new Batmobile from Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice before the movie debuts in March. Here’s a video of Batman’s new set of wheels.
(7) “Alien Nuclear Wars Might Be Visible From Earth” writes Ross Andersen in The Atlantic.
A team of astronomers recently tried to determine whether Trinity’s light might be cosmic in a different sense. The Trinity test involved only one explosion. But if there were many more explosions, involving many more nuclear weapons, it might generate enough heat and light to be seen from nearby stars, or from the deeper reaches of our galaxy—so long as someone out there was looking….
I asked Jill Tarter what she thought of the paper. Tarter is the former director of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute and the inspiration for Ellie Arroway, the heroine of Carl Sagan’s Contact, played by Jodie Foster in the film adaptation. Tarter told me the paper was “getting a bit of buzz” in the SETI community. But she also urged caution. “The problem is the signatures are detectable for cosmically insignificant amounts of time,” she said. Distant stars burn for billions of years, sending a constant stream of light toward Earth, but the flash from a nuclear war may last only a few days. To catch its light, you have to have impeccable timing.
(8) There’s a tad too much science fictional truth here for this cartoon to make a successful motivational poster. “Shoot for the Moon” on The Oatmeal.
(9) Let’s not forget one other award given last weekend at Dragon Con. Larry Correia and “Brando TorgersOn” were the first to win the “super prestigious LaMancha award.” Says Correia —
The fact that the gnome is tilting at that windmill with a nazi tank is just one of the added touches that make the LaMancha so prestigious. It is crafted out of the finest southern bass wood and delicately hand carved with a poignant message.
La Mancha Award
(10) “We Watched That (So You Didn’t Have To): John Cusack and Jackie Chan’s VOD Historical Action Epic, ‘Dragon Blade’” by Shea Serrano on Grantland —
I sit here before you a man, a man who has watched Jackie Chan in any number of films — in a near countless number of films. There was one where he played a man who operated a fast food van and had to become a hero. There was one where he played a man in South Africa with amnesia who had to become a hero. There was one where he teamed up with a white man to become a hero and also one where he teamed up with a black man to become a hero, not once, not twice, but thrice. And now I have seen him wear a very thick wig and a poet’s goatee and a very generous amount of makeup and sing about racial harmony and total peace and then make a deathmobile out of shields and spears and then become a hero. I sit here before you a man, a man who has seen Dragon Blade.
(11) Your reality may vary!
I wonder, if I did a poll to see who thought this was a genuine comment or a parody, how it would turn out. pic.twitter.com/exDoPlW4uu
— John Scalzi (@scalzi) September 9, 2015
Honestly, I can never tell when a File770 comment is parody anymore. :-/ https://t.co/opfyTO08dp
— Serenity “Leap Year Capybara” Dee ???? (@sapphixy) September 9, 2015
(12) An especially good installment of SF Signal’s Mind Meld, curated by Paul Weimer, calls on participants to discuss the best deaths in science fiction and fantasy — T. Frohock, Richard Shealy (sffcopyediting.com) , John Hornor Jacobs, Ramona Wheeler, Richard Parks, Alasdair Stuart, Martha Wells, Tina Connolly, Susan Jane Bigelow, Christian Klaver, Joe Sherry, and Gillian Polack.
(13) While researching today’s scroll I found a few more things I needed to report about Sasquan. Such as – the silly PA announcements.
Just heard over the @sasquansf speakers: "Good morning. The voice of God approves this message."
— shoshoctopus ???????? (@shoshoctopus) August 20, 2015
And photos of the Other Awards winners including David Aronovitz.
Sam moskowitz archive award: David Aronovitz@TheHugoAwards @sasquansf #Sasquan #HugoAwards pic.twitter.com/Mrc1P9MWJa
— Better Living Through Alchemy (@EvanJPeterson) August 23, 2015
John Hertz accepting for Julian May, Danny Kaye, and Dorian Gray@TheHugoAwards @sasquansf #Sasquan #HugoAwards pic.twitter.com/B6NPWFrTU9
— Better Living Through Alchemy (@EvanJPeterson) August 23, 2015
Then, someone recorded Filthy Pierre playing the Superman theme on his Melodica.
And finally, whatever the opposite of comic relief is –
https://twitter.com/XDPaul/status/641467729145233408
(14) Just how scientifically accurate is The Martian? This short video on Yahoo! lets Andy Weir, Matt Damon and others make their case.
(15) Sometimes a battle between a giant space jaybird and the Enterprise is just a battle between a giant space jaybird and the Enterprise.
[Thanks to Susan de Guardiola, Martin Morse Wooster, Mark, Will R., Colin Kuskie, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Soon Lee.]
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My one (scientific) issue with The Martian, which I enjoyed very much, was the initial incident that left Watney stranded there in the first place — while I understand that Martian dust storms can be bad news for a whole host of reasons, and that the winds can move at quite impressive speeds, I had trouble believing the storm could’ve actually picked up an antenna and used it to puncture Watney like a javelin — I thought the Martian atmosphere was too relatively thin to allow it to generate that kind of force?
(I also had some issues with the bits where he shifted to third-person — I understand the need for it from a narrative sense, but the execution felt a bit … clumsy? Still, I’ll give him a pass on it, not least because I can’t think of a better way to handle it myself.)
Very much looking forward to the movie.
Hypnotozov
In fairness, the Amazon bio describes her as a ‘transplanted Australian’, so who knows where the ‘common usages’ she says she grew up with were situated?
Australia is, I’m told, a very big place, and, since I’m a total coward when it comes to lethal spiders and homicidal snakes, I can’t see myself venturing to investigate in person…
The marching band is funny . I can see it both ways.
I love the Man of La Mancha award At least they can laugh at themselves because the result was tilting against windmills. Dragon con sounds like fun. People want to have fun and do not take themselves seriously. Like GRRM did with the Alfies A good party.
I saw a trailer for the Martian and thought it looked good. Any one else have any thoughts
@Hypnotosov
Huh. I was about to post “I can tell who wrote that before I even click through” …. and I was wrong!
@Lorcan Nagle, someone stole your TBR pile?!? I can’t think of any other reason it would vanish. Other than earthquakes. You didn’t have a catastrophic earthquake, did you? I mean, maybe the lowest levels might spontaneously compost, or something…. <contemplating vast TBR pile dubiously> Maybe I should rotate it, or something….
What was the Robert Heinlein story where an earthquake caused a house to “collapse” into a tessaract? Maybe that’s what happened to the TBR pile?
It just seems to have shrunk away to nothingness. I suspect nomes.
It was “And, he built a crooked house” – which I always remember without the ‘And’.
“Generic Asian name” makes about as much sense as “generic European name” or “generic African name”… though I bet plenty of people don’t think twice about that last either, sigh.
You could try for a “generic” East Asian name due to the massive influence of Chinese hegemony, but in that case it’s not *really* “generic East Asian” so much as it is “Chinese that has percolated to a lot of places”. Some variant of Li/Lee/Yee/Le/Ly/Rhee/Ri, etc., could possibly be found in China, Vietnam, and Korean; possibly Japan but I think less likely.
I watch cooking-contest shows (is there a shorter name for these?) as brain anaesthetic, and only once have I seen anyone ever called on their BS when they say something like “so yeah I cook Asian style”. Only one time did anyone — a judge in this case — respond with “well Asia is a big continent with lots of cuisines, you’re saying you can cook all of them?”
Given (7) in the blogroll, has anyone done the math on whether the destruction of Alderan would be visible from earth? blowing up a planet’s got to be more energetic than a nuclear war.
I watched the pilot for Man in the High Castle and I am really looking forward to the series. I’m a huge PKD fan and I spent a year in college reading the majority of his novels and short fiction. It’s been a few years since I read Man in the High Castle but I still noticed a bunch of changes in the series pilot. But it’s an adaptation and so changes are necessary. I only care that the end result is good, not that it slavishly recreates one of my favorite books. And based on the pilot, I think they’re doing a pretty good job.
Lydy, so sorry. The very young ones are always fragile.
Hey, I’m a gardener. There’s a difference! You won’t catch me mucking about with cows and cereal crops!
@Simon Butcher-Jones:
Alderaan exploded one long time ago, but in a galaxy two fars away. So the light won’t reach Earth for another long.
@Simon Bucher-Jones
I suspect being in a galaxy far, far away would make it hard to see.
(Even without the timing issue Laertes mentioned)
@Stevie
All too true; but it has been a year that demonstrates that just because your story is blatantly untrue doesn’t mean you can’t insert yourself into the conversation. And seeing a polished work that is very much an Un-Mixon Report pop up so soon after it’s thesis won a Hugo followed by several talking stans makes me wonder if there isn’t another push at a wide-scale fiction coming from some quarters, again with just enough support to be toxic.
Cat on September 10, 2015 at 5:59 am said:
Not really. Fannish legend.
… that gnome achievement in Halflife 2 Episode 2, weren’t you? ?
Oh my, thanks for reminding me of that. I tried but never got far. Damn gnome kept falling out of the dune buggy. Excellent video game achievement though. I wish more studios would include such creative (and aspirational) achievements.
@Simon Bucher-Jones
It was first spotted in 1977, but there was a later controversy when Dr G Lucas was found to have enhanced his findings in his “Special Edition” presentations of the late 90s.
The arguments about this are eclipsed only by the wranglings about “Who Published First.”
has anyone done the math on whether the destruction of Alderan would be visible from earth?
Within the next 12 parsecs, according to my math.
@Simon Bucher-Jones: The key question (with current observatories) is whether the destruction emits in the right band.
The paper notes the link between nuclear weapons and gamma ray flashes. For short duration events you’ll really want the emission to be in gamma or X rays to get good observations, and most X-ray satellites are a bit creaky by now.
Optical and radio won’t do you much good for short lived and very far away. Neutrinos might give you something, but the count number will probably be too small – hard enough even with galactic supernovae.
If the claim that “the beam, which upon contact with the planet pushed a large portion of Alderaan’s mass into hyperspace” is correct, then there will be limited matter to energy conversion. The binding energy of a planet (as compared to a star) isn’t that big in the first place, so I’d guess you’re out of luck.
I find Sigil quite useful for converting RTF and Web pages to EPUB in a quick and dirty way.
Whether or not it can do a really good job if you actually learn how to use it properly I can’t say (because I am lazy and have been ignoring the learning thing).
Sigil is freeware (but donations are encouraged).
I was thinking a small, slightly damaged egg glued to a much larger egg.
And re timezones: I’m GMT+7, which frequently puts me well into the next day by the time any given scroll is posted, and means I miss reams of discussion through my night time and am forced to catch up every morning.
Other than recent immigrants, I don’t think ? is a common surname character in Japan at all. Most Japanese people only started using surnames in the 19th-century — they’re written with Chinese characters, but the common choices of name are fairly different (also, Japanese surnames are very often compounds, which doesn’t seem to be common with Chinese ones at all).
@TheYoungPretender on September 10, 2015 at 4:20 am said:
I assume it’s the Laura Mixon Hugo win that has got them jumping. I have a question — what does “stans” mean? I’ve had a hard time doing the Google on it. Too many people named Stan.
@Lydy — I feel for you. Many years ago, we worked with someone to do a catch/spay/release program to control the suddenly exploding alley cat population in our — well, a literal alley. College neighborhood. One season it went abruptly from five to twenty-five, and we really hoped to capture the kittens and give them good homes. This was successful for many of the kittens. But some of the kittens had, it turns out, a congenital disorder that was preventing them from digesting food properly, and they died before we successfully caught most of them. (One died after capture, which is how we figured out what was probably killing the others.) These were the most adorable fluffy little kittens you ever saw, too. It was heartbreaking. There was this lost, hopeless look they would give you, right before they ran under the porch to die.
That look still haunts me.
@James Moar: Yeah, Japanese names are so long, and I’m pretty sure they use their native Japanese pronunciation for them on top of that. I actually don’t have any idea what the majority of immigrants to Japan from nearby countries do WRT their names — keep them in their entirety? Adopt Japanese pronunciations? Choose new names altogether?
—
@RedWombat: It seems to me every big university in the state has got an arboretum. Have you visited any? Do you have a favorite among them if so?
—
@McJulie: It just means a really staunch fan. I think someone told me it was an amalgamation of “stalker” and “fan”, but the way I see people use it (“stanning for [fictional character]”, meaning to vociferously demonstrate your fannishness and support for that character) makes me think that if this is a true etymology, it is no longer relevant to many who use it.
re Japanese surnames, it seems to me (based on limited experience) are generally kun’yomi readings for the given kanji (or generally, native Japanese readings), so they typically sound very different to what you might expect coming from a background in Chinese.
I’m sure there are a bunch of exceptions and any of the Vile Wretches who speak better Japanese than me or are more familiar with Japanese naming conventions than I am will likely correct me here.
Meanwhile everyone’s favorite genius, has decided that there’s a vast conspiracy in place for not releasing Sasquan nomination data, nevermind that we already know that someone gamed the system as the Hugo shortlists showed that well. I look forward to seeing that campaign end succesfully as the “Fire Gallo” and “Boycott Tor” campaigns have ended.
Meanwhile, I’m about 10 percent into Sorcerer to the Crown, but unfortunately have to put it aside for a bit to study for my quiz today. Stupid real job.
@Zil — I’ve generally seen Chinese names written in Japanese with their original characters, and a close-as-possible transliteration of the original pronunciation into syllabic characters alongside. I also know of a Korean-Japanese voice actress, Romi Park, who’s sometimes called Romi Paku — another close-as-possible transliteration (it’s very rare for Japanese words to start with P unless they’re taken from another language).
I’m curious to see how The Martian does. Traditionally the period from September to October is something of a dead zone for movies – between the summer blockbusters and the start of the Christmas and Oscar movies. It used to be this was the slot for smaller movies or movies that the studio didn’t have much confidence in.
I’ve seen a fair amount of promotion for The Martian so it’s not like Fox are just pushing it out to die. It’s a Ridley Scott movie, so if I ignore Prometheus, I have generally high expectation. Really good cast. Not much in the way of SFF competition until the Hunger Games. It could do well if it gets good reviews.
Sigil is great! I have never encountered an epub from any source that can’t be improved by two minutes of tinkering with it in Sigil. There is one SF publisher whose ebooks don’t even meet the epub 2 standard and epub 3 has been the standard for a few years already.
The “edit ebook” function in Calibre is good too, and has the option to autocorrect some errors.
The wiki-etymology for stan is stalker + fan from the Eminem song of the same name in 2000.
Didn’t Nuke reference some usage of “stan” at the end of Bull Durham? Some sort of Mötley Crüe lyric.
Weir is on record (but please don’t ask me to try to find it) that Martian dust storms are the one place he intentionally screwed up the science. Martian dust storms would barely feel like a breeze, but he needed them to be dangerous to man and machine alike.
There was at least one other place where he unintentionally messed up, but I don’t remember the details, as the chemistry has fallen out of my head.
Thanks for the info on “stan”!
Joe H. said:
Drag goes linearly with density and quadratically with velocity. Given that Martian air pressure is about 0.6% of earth’s, you’d need ~12 times the wind speed for the same force. Not totally out of the question given martian conditions.
Zil said:
To take Japanese citizenship you need to take a Japanese name, written in Japanese characters on the approved name-Kanji list and pronounced in Japanese fashion. Full stop, no questions asked.
If you’re not becoming a citizen, you keep your name except insofar as they can’t say it. I’m ??? here, which is something like ‘deben’, which is as close as the phonemes here allow. “Smith”, the canonical white-person name in textbooks here, is rendered something like ‘sumiss’, etc. My Chinese co-worker’s name is pretty badly butchered as well…
___
Apparently Japanese characters don’t render on this site. Apologies for the question marks above. Not sure what’s going on there, it’s standard unicode.
> “… has anyone done the math on whether the destruction of Alderaan would be visible from earth?”
Visible? Absolutely not.
Detectable? Highly unlikely, but given the EXACT RIGHT CIRCUMSTANCES, it might be theoretically possible.
(I can double-check my spouse the astrophysicist-specializing-in-exoplanets if you really want, but I’m pretty sure that’s basically the answer.)
So, somewhere in the next 40 lightyears?
@Joe H ,@Cally:
Andy Weir specifically mentions the dust storms as one issue where he deliberately fudged the science – both on this video after the commercial publication of the book and in this one in the build-up to the movie.
McJulie –
My understanding is that it’s a mashup of stalker/fan. (ah beaten)
As for the scroll:
I like that Batmobile more than the ugly tank-tumbler version. Seems like it’s in-between of the Burton and Nolan versions.
I like the La Mancha award. Further into the blog post related to that there’s a nifty cosplay of a Monster Hunter along with news that Correia is collaborating with Hoyt to make a Julie Shackleford MHI book. I think the better books in that series are when he plays around with the other characters, and using the popularity of it to help gain exposure for other authors is great. That’s building within your community positively instead of just whining.
The ‘I sit here before you…’ might be an in movie reference to a speech or something, but I found it really annoying to read as an article. I’ve seen Jackie Chan turn into Chun Li, I don’t know that the movie can hold many surprises for me.
I didn’t see genitals in the video. Whoever saw genitals in that must have seen some really strange genitals in their life.
@McJulie (and maybe Zil)
“Stan” is also the name of an Eminem song about a fan named, well, Stan. Not entirely sure if that’s the source of the term, but it’s certainly why it became popular.
@Devin: you can use this site to make Japanese render here: https://mothereff.in/html-entities
It’s a bit of a faff, but it works. My name, incidentally, is ピータ in Japanese. I’ve had to train the guys at honbu to say it that way instead of elongating the last syllable as it just sounds bizarre to me the way they want to say it. They can now no longer forget how to pronounce my name either, as it’s hanging on the wall there 🙂
I really like the NC Botanical Garden in Chapel Hill. The Rawlston Arboretum is okay, but they do the thing where they try to make various kinds of gardens that aren’t always particularly well suited to the climate, whereas the Botanic does a lot with natives and shows you how to grow things without requiring a legion of gardeners for life support. I feel like it fits better with the landscape. Great carnivorous plant collection, and they also have a massive collection of various unusual Rosemary that they keep up.
Their poison garden could use some love, though.
@Lorcan Nagle, someone stole your TBR pile?!? I can’t think of any other reason it would vanish.
Collapsed into a singularity under its own gravity?
I’m worried he’s been stranded on Mars with his book supply running low.
Earth’s binding energy is, iirc, about equal to a week’s Solar output, so not nothing.
In the version of Atlantis I have (1.6.6.5), you can create a cover image during Save as eBook either by including images in the file (in which case the default is to use the first image in the file but you can choose among all the images in the file or choose no cover image) or else choose an image from file. (This applies both starting from RTF or from a Word document.) What it doesn’t do is save the cover image as a separate file outside of the EPUB, as Calibre does. The eBook template for “create from template” includes a cover image.
Lorcan Nagle said:
…how do you DO that? I read on a daily basis and I think it’s been over a decade since I haven’t had any unread books in my house.
@McJulie
Stan’s pop-culture meaning covers a few things, but it’s way to say supporter with an implication of fanaticism that makes them immune to information that does not match their image of the person being supported.
Edit: Well, I was beaten to it. Thank you all.
@Christian, Devin & Cally — Thanks for the info re: Weir and Martian dust storms. The only reason I even thought about it was because I remembered reading an old Larry Niven story (Known Space, I believe — maybe the Martian bicycle story?) — that talked about Mars’ relatively wimpy winds.
And @Simon Bucher-Jones — Yep, “And He Built a Crooked House”. Which story I think I first encountered in Clifton Fadiman’s Fantasia Mathematica. Now that was a great anthology …
I keep thinking about featuring Blish’s Welcome to Mars in my Because My Tears Are Delicious to You reviews….