1
The guy in the speedo was Kane? I guess I need to look at the preview a bit closer, but, honestly, I wasn't looking, haha.
While they might be windsurfing, I don't think we're going to get much in the way of fanservice. Though I said the same thing about Outlaw Star, and that series put every ounce of fanservice in 1 episode, haha.
On the episode:
I think, if you think too hard about the Key-Ring, there's a bit of problem about Marika not noticing it missing for a day. But, at some point, it didn't matter much.
This episode also spent a chunk of time further establishing Ai-chan. She seems to be the surrogate Chiaki "space" character, when she's missing. At some level, it just fills a space for character interaction, but Ai-chan is pretty fun. Shy but spunky type. Plus, it's hilarious watching someone pilot a military craft yet has to stand on a box.
I think the story on Ai is that
she's going to become Kane's protege. They're kindred spirits; he can already tell that just from watching Ai docking the Bentenmaru at the station.
It's not outside the realm of possibility that Courier
will end up with a similar relationship with Lynn. I was thinking this afternoon that during periods when Bentenmaru is idle, because Marika in school, that Courier and Lynn might engage in mock EW battles just for entertainment.
Yeah, I think that was Kane. Who the hell else could it be? It's a bit late to be introducing major new characters in the series. But we do have one coming:
They added a new one to the cast shot at the end of the OP: a little old man, on the left, with a big tall hat. No idea at all yet who he is.
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About that new possibility
He's been there since at least last week; I noticed then how he blocked Show. With that regalia, I suppose he's from Serenity?
Random observation: Needs more Blaster Miko Chiaki.
If you pay attention to the words in the ED, it's about how scary it is to grow up and become an adult. The first picture of the three/five girls walking is in school uniforms. The second picture is of them wearing working clothes. It isn't cosplay.
Mami is wearing the maid clothes she wears at the cafe. Gruier is in her princess dress. Grunhilde is wearing the uniform she wore when she was in command of the Serenity task force. Marika, of course, is wearing her pirate uniform.
Chiaki is wearing the Barbarossa's work uniform. It's completely practical, and it's probably what she wears when she's working on the Barbarossa. Bentenmaru has an equivalent (worn by both men and women) but the color scheme is different. We saw it when
Bentenmaru's marines were preparing for the Golden Ghost ship.
Chiaki isn't going to become a miko when she becomes an adult, so it wouldn't make sense for her to be wearing one in that scene.
11
Couldn't she at least wear the thing on a chain around her neck? Sheesh.
I did get a little suspicious for a second when they talked about Marika's abilities being hereditary, and referenced the princesses. Please don't tell me that space pirates come from a cloning tank too....
Posted by: Mauser at May 12, 2012 11:45 PM (cZPoz)
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I have this strange feeling that the next-episode preview is highly deceptive.
-j
Posted by: J Greely at May 13, 2012 08:44 AM (2XtN5)
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I hope so. Otherwise, it's going to be another filler. A bunch of fillers to end the season is not good.
No, Marika isn't a clone. It's a comment on being like your family. A well established truth, when it comes to personalities.
Marika has both Gozaemon & Ririka's personality traits and many of their abilities. With training and the proper environment, those abilities were going to come to the forefront. That's what they were talking about.
The girl is Melty, apparently a witch. Her ears are pointed, but not as much as the elves. The little black guy is Sorbet, her familiar. And these two are a huge gift to otaku, because of the voices. Melty is Rie Kugimiya, very recognizably. Sorbet is Tomoko Kaneda, and she's hamming it up shamelessly. Which works because it's that kind of character.
This is the first major role I've heard Kaneda in in several years. (I think the last time I heard her in anything, was when she did one of the "Delusion Eu's" in the first season of Zombie. And that was just a couple of lines.) I was afraid she'd retired from the business. It was wonderful to hear her again. She does a great job in this part.
As seems to be usual in this series, it's a gentle story, about making people happy. Melty is engaged in a quest to make the perfect ice cream. To help her, Sorbet visits the bakery and asks them for sweet breads. Over the course of several days, Sorbet shows up just at closing, and the girls eventually follow him (?) home to Melty's mansion, which is on the other side of a graveyard. That they walk through on a cold, foggy night.
Anyway, Melty loves their bread and wonders how they make it so delicious. So Melty and Sorbet don disguises (i.e. Melty puts on dark glasses) and watch Rick and the Girls doing their work. And in the end she learns their secret, which she tells them about at the end. Happy Endo.
By the way, the music in this episode was notably excellent. And it continues the basic "healing" feeling that this show has had from the very beginning.
The next ep teaser shows Rick in his uniform, practicing with his sword. And there's a catgirl ninja maid. Looks very violent, but I'm sure it won't really be.
1
It's not really going to get violent. They don't have the production budget for that.
This is still one of the weirdest series I've watched in a long time. It's really just about making bread and making people happy. Pretty much all of the characters you'd like to spend an afternoon talking to. It's pleasant.
I still think this is Purgatory-type story. I'd love to spend time on this island. Seems like a great place.
Aside from some mecha-girl randomly nuking your boat....
Posted by: sqa at May 11, 2012 12:48 PM (olIc+)
2
I do think it is deliberately part of the iyashikei genre. And I'm really enjoying it.
By the way, I haven't really seen anything that suggests to me that this show is particularly low-budget. Animation shortcuts -- but you always get those now. This show isn't really any more like that than any other.
If they really were trying to save money, they wouldn't have made the girls' costumes so complicated to draw.
5
But they'd have to scrimp on clothing details to afford the action scenes as well. They know where the BluRay sales are at.
It's not a terribly low budget show, but it's also not got a huge budget, either. Though I expect we'll get a fight scene next episode. They'll just be kind of uncommon. I expect this series to be "Peace through superior Bread-making skills"
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Chizumatic readers are moving the needle to 139 130 now. However, some of the howls of rage in the comments make me a sad panda. The whole excercise is unworthy now that we're taking it too seriously. The A&L is great anime blog and I follow them myself.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at May 11, 2012 10:33 AM (5OBKC)
I saw this over at Newegg and decided I couldn't live without it. So I ordered two of them. Looks like I got in just in time; they're out now.
It's pretty amazing. It's got 11 LEDs and a laser. There's a pushbutton on the back, and every time you push it it switches to another mode.
One of the LEDs, in the center, is high intensity white and that's the first mode. Five of the LEDs are green, and that's the second mode. It's actually a good idea: green is the color of light we're most sensitive to, and so it has the most apparent illumination of any color. That's the second mode.
Five of the LEDs are UV, and that's the third mode. It's kind of fun to point it at things to see if they have UV ink on them. It was also disappointing today; I couldn't find anything that did. The only things I could find that glowed were my laundry detergent, and the stripe in a twenty dollar bill.
Mode 4 is the red laser. I've had those before, but I think this one is brighter than any of those others. The fifth mode is the green LEDs again, only they blink. Why, exactly? Don't ask me.
And mode 6 is off.
So how does that all work? It uses three AAA batteries, and the switch in the back simply breaks the power circuit. It turns out there's some sort of logic in the front part, where the LEDs are, which makes it cycle each time the power breaks for a moment. I tried putting it into like the third mode, and then unscrewed the back part and broke the circuit for several seconds. When I screwed it back in, it reset and was off.
What surprised me the most was just how bright the single white LED was. Probably the reason it can do that is because it's being driven by 4.5 volts (three batteries in series). I used to have a single bulb white LED flashlight, but it ran off a single AAA battery. And I bought it more than ten years ago. I guess the state of the art has improved.
At the same time I also got a single-LED UV flashlight which also ran off a single battery, and it worked but it wasn't very bright. If you wanted to make the stripe in a $20 light up, you had to hold the flashlight a couple of inches away.
3
My home defence guns have Surefire Nitrolon LED lights on them. 1 LED to 120 lumens, which is about 60% brighter than the one you've got. However, I am very impressed the very existence of an UV LED.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at May 10, 2012 07:22 PM (5OBKC)
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The UV LEDs have been around for a while. I bought my first one more than ten years ago.
Then it's blinking "OOO". It's haunted, and you shouldn't be alone with it in a dark place.
Posted by: Mikeski at May 11, 2012 11:35 AM (1bPWv)
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All three sites--NewEgg, Amazon, and Wal-Mart (btw, Steven, I mentioned them earlier simply in case anyone else wanted to order them--obviously you don't need those links)--have what looks like the same text, probably from the manufacturer, and specifically say it blinks Morse Code, so either yours are defective, or they don't know what they're talking about.
Posted by: Mark A. Flacy at May 09, 2012 10:52 PM (Zdi7L)
2
It's not just the tower, though that's probably the most obvious. But if the front of the front hull's in sunlight, so should be the front of the back horizontal hull.
3
Worse than the position of the shadows--that's just not the way light and shadows look in a vacuum. Without atmospheric diffusion things tend to be either all lit up or completely dark.
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It was in fact stock footage. The same image was used a couple of episodes before, when it actually made sense. The "clue" above was in that earlier episode.
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Wow, I thought that little purple thing was an image defect, but in fact it's the main pirate ship, name of which escapes me now. This station is HUGE.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at May 10, 2012 11:28 AM (5OBKC)
The Bentenmaru has reserved docking as long as the crew are in quarantine, and the hospital ship is projecting a hologram at that docking point to hold its place. Just standard procedure.
My question is: Why don't we see anything of the rest of the crew in quarantine? The deputies for the main bridge crew, the engine room guys, Schnitzer's marines - aren't they in any contact at all with the bridge crew? Are they being told anything about what's going on?
I assume that they're not in on everything, but I'd be surprised if Kane or Misa weren't checking on them and telling them Marika has the ship and is conducting some form of piracy, else they'd worry about losing their jobs because of the Letter of Marque, the terms of which don't seem to be any big secret.
Posted by: jcm3 at May 10, 2012 11:31 AM (OU30d)
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Remembering that the crew is under medical observation and quarantine, it's logical to assume that mingling is somewhat discouraging. There is no doubt some communication by phone, etc. And the plot doesn't need for us to see that, so we don't.
I sometimes see google searches in my refer that I think are noteworthy. Here's one that makes me a bit sad:
who+were+we+fighting+in+world+war+1
Whoever this is, why didn't they learn about that in school history class? Unfortunately, that's a rhetorical question. I already know the answer.
For the record: once things settled down and everyone was involved, on one side the major players were Imperial Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Ottomans (Turkey). On the other side the big teams were Britain, France, Italy, Imperial Russia, and eventually, the United States. There were a lot of other countries involved (e.g. Belgium, Canada) to a greater or lesser extent on one side or the other but few of them made much difference at all.
Imperial Russia was knocked out of the war by the Russian Revolution, about the same time that the US began sending significant forces to France.
And who won? Well, pretty much no one. Austria lost the worst, Germany probably second worst. The US lost 117,000 dead and didn't really gain anything out of the war, but among the big players that was the best outcome. So I guess it would be fair to say that the US was the best loser, if that makes any sense. Maybe, we could say the US lost the least.
The war formally ended with the Treaty of Versailles, which in my opinion is the most misbegotten, ill-conceived "peace treaty" in all of history. It pretty much guaranteed another war, and starting in 1939 we got it. "World War II" really should have been called "World War I, the next generation" or "WWI part 2" or maybe "Son of WWI", because that's what it was.
1
It goes without saying that this is a simplistic explanation, though it could be too complex for your googler.
If we were cruel, it could be fun to explain that Japan fought on one side in WWI and on the other in WWII, just to watch the resulting brain explosion.
Posted by: Wonderduck at May 09, 2012 05:08 PM (6CHh4)
I had a mention of Japan's involvement in WWI but took it out.
Besides, Italy was on three sides in the two wars, just to make things even more confusing. For that matter, France was on three sides in just WWII, depending on how you count. (A different way to put it, and perhaps more fair, is that Italy changed sides in WWII and France changed sides twice.)
WWI certainly is morally ambiguous, because it's really difficult to explain just why in hell it even happened. That assassination in Serbia was the spark that set off the first powder keg, but it didn't build the stack of powder kegs which eventually exploded. And if that assassination hadn't happened, eventually something else would have set it all off.
I suppose that it could be argued that it was the last manifestation of the Sport of Kings. There were a lot of leaders who, deep down, wanted a war (most notably Kaiser Wilhelm II). Of course, they expected to win easily; no one really understood just how terrible it was going to end up being.
7
Another ambiguity: the history books are pretty dry on the subject, but American opinion was significantly divided on the war. The number of people jailed in the U.S. for sedition because they stated their opposition to "President Wilson's war" was around 1,000.
The Espionage and Sedition acts were passed in 1917 and 1918, theoretically to address mob violence against opponents of the war.
That's right, the government decided it needed the power to keep domestic order by shutting up the dissenters.
Support for the bills broke mostly along party lines, with the Republicans in opposition, but they were passed by wide margins.
8
European empires of the age were badly screwed up. Kaiser was somewhat crazy or at least quite eccentric, if memoirs of Von Brullow and the like are to be believed. Emeror was a chickenhead - consequences of royal family inbreeding gone bad. Tzar wasn't that daft, but he was just as insulated from reality like the rest of them. French, I think, had a republic at the time, although I am not sure. They used to change their government styles like socks. Britain was probably the sanest of the bunch, but managed to build defensive treaties with France. So it all had to collapse sooner or later. I am quite annoyed that they didn't learn the lesson first time around though.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at May 09, 2012 07:47 PM (5OBKC)
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The French were indeed a republic at the time, but their constitution gave their military leadership a rather astonishing level of independence. Among other things, they concealed from the civilian government evidence of how badly things were going in the first few weeks of the war, until the flood of refugees was utterly obvious, as well as the audibility of guns from the outskirts of Paris.
Wilhelm is a little complicated, historians are still arguing over his intentions and capabilities. He seemed to be playing diplomatic chicken, and appeared to be quite surprised when the war did break out. He also simply did not understand why he couldn't rearrange the alliances of Europe to be democracies versus monarchies.
And even at the time, the idiocy of the Treaty of Versailles was widely recognized, but ignored. (Sort of like how hundreds of economists were pointing out the bubble in housing prices?) The French commander who was perhaps most famous at the end of the war, Marshal Foch, called the treaty "a truce for twenty years" and he was almost exactly accurate as to the timing.
Posted by: Boviate at May 09, 2012 08:09 PM (63JPq)
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Another notable event that most people haven't heard of is the mutiny of the French army.
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Sadly, almost everything I know about the Great War comes from Soviet sources. Obviously, nobody there cared much about the French mutiny, the serial defeats that Russians received in Poland received a muted coverage, but Brusilov's victory over Austians was written up as an astonishing military genius (so when Germans cut up Soviet defences in 1941, they were considered students of Brusilov's doctrine). I heard that Big Berta existed, however.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at May 09, 2012 08:31 PM (5OBKC)
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I think it makes more sense as a continuation of the Great Game, with some elements dating back to the late 19th-century wars, some to the colonization/imperialism scramble, and some old grudges dating back to the 30-Years' War and beyond. The various leaderships lost control of the strategic situation and almost seemed to mulishly sit there like a pair of Zax.
I have a hard time grokking the feelings and sensibilities of the time, both among the public and their rulers/representatives, but I can kinda maybe see it if I squint just right. I find things like Civ and Total War to actually be rather helpful in getting into the mindset, especially when backed by lots of Wikipedia. It's just so alien if you don't grow up steeped in that feudal history and mindset.
I do remember one rather good piece that Rev. Sensing wrote some years ago, about how French taxis were indirectly responsible for a hundred million murders, or somesuch; it was a counter-factual that posited that if Germany had won in 1914, it would have taken a province that they'd been squabbling over for decades, and that probably would have been that. Without the destruction of an entire generation (between the war and the flu), and the malaise that accompanied it, would the radical collectivist utopians still have succeeded? Could we possibly been worse off with kings and princes than with Fuhrers and commissars?
Posted by: BigD at May 09, 2012 09:23 PM (qLkdZ)
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Even I didn't learn much about the first war in school. Had to go hunt down books on my own. (We did read "All Quiet" in English class at one point, though.) Picked up Keegan's book on it, quite a good survey. It's WAY easier to find material about WW2 (though, well, WW1 was not always interesting, hm?)
Basically it all came down to the Franco-Prussian War and the impact of mobilization of conscript infantry. If your potential enemy mobilized, then you had to mobilize too; to delay even a week risked losing a war by default.
Germany's position between two hostile powers meant they had to either go to war aggressively, or not go at all - they couldn't afford to fully commit against Russia with France at their back, or vice versa. They had a plan for a quick defeat of France, and it almost worked, but in the end it couldn't have - there just wasn't the road density to move enough troops where they needed them to go, and nobody had built out any significant quantities of non-train motor transport. But they came a lot closer than they had any right to...
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at May 09, 2012 10:32 PM (GJQTS)
I think that Arcturus, my torrent machine, is dying. Ten days ago Deneb, the Windows Home Server, complained that it couldn't back up Arcturus because of disk problems.
At the time I assumed it was just a file that was busy, so I deactivated the error, assuming it would get fixed the next day. But this afternoon I was logged into Deneb, and it said that it had been ten days since it had been able to back up Arcturus.
So per its recommendation, I tried doing a disk check. And it told me it couldn't be completed. I did some messing around and finally figured out how to get it into safe mode, but even there the disk check couldn't completely. Finally I figured out that after it fails, if you tell it again to do one, it will schedule a disk check during the next boot.
Well, it found some bad sectors. And fixed some things. And then it rebooted, so I tried another disk check from within WinXP -- which failed again. Another reboot and disk check there, it fixed some other stuff. And after XP came up, disk check still failed.
As I write this it's trying yet again. This time, though, I told it to look for bad sectors.
This isn't a catastrophe. There isn't anything on that computer I care about -- except my torrent program, and all the records about which torrents it is currently supporting. I don't have the slightest idea where uTorrent puts that. (For all I know it's in the registry.)
But it probably means that the HD is dying, and I'm going to have to get a replacement.
Or maybe not: this check isn't over yet, but it hasn't found anything wrong so far. Maybe, just maybe, this time it'll get it right.
UPDATE: Man, a bad-block scan sure does take along time. 72% and still going. But it's stage 4 of 5, and it hasn't complained about anything yet, so that's a good thing.
UPDATE: Four hours it took to complete an absolutely full disk check. And after the reboot, the XP disk check said the drive was fine.
So I tried the backup again, and it failed again. Looks like I need to get a new computer.
UPDATE: This isn't really a disaster. If I was going to pick one piece of equipment around here to be the one to die, that's the one I'd choose.
1
I had a drive die slowly once. It was in TiVo. Symptoms were pretty similar, although by the time I caught it overran replacement lists and the bad blocks became visible. Rescuing it was next to impossible due to any kind of read causing too many parasitic reads for remapped sectors and recalibrations. Took a day to read a gigabyte.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at May 08, 2012 05:59 PM (5OBKC)
Well, there's nothing on it that I care about, and in any case it was fully backed up ten days ago. The only things that have changed since then are uTorrent's records, and big deal.
It doesn't even store the files I download or the ones I'm seeding. Those are all on Deneb, the WHS.
If it outright dies, all that it means is that I don't have the ability to seed for a while.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at May 08, 2012 08:37 PM (5OBKC)
4
I've been looking at getting a $500 HP notebook just to have a spare. They deliver more than you would have got for three times the price three years ago.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at May 08, 2012 09:45 PM (PiXy!)
As soon as I saw this one and read the specs, I didn't really read much further. It's not like this is a very challenging assignment.
The existing machine is a single-CPU, something called a "Turion", running about 1.6 GHz, with 900 megabytes of RAM. The new machine will be very pleasant by comparison.
But I need to come up with a name for it. Maybe another star from the Pleiades...
6
Replacing the whole machine? Why not just reformat the drive and restore from backup?
Posted by: Mauser at May 08, 2012 11:08 PM (cZPoz)
7
uTorrent puts all your stats into some .dat files in its own folder. If you copy the entire uTorrent folder and all your torrent files it should have no problem running on your new machine.
I just received a shipment from RACS consisting of the BD versions of AsoIku and Infinite Stratos. I actually already have AsoIku on BD, because I bought the Japanese BDs for the whole series, including the OVA. So I'll look at that one later.
But I thought I'd try watching Infinite Stratos again, just to see if my attitude towards it might have changed since I watched it the first time.
But after two episodes, my opinion remains the same: the battles are really cool and well handled, but the characters are all one dimensional, if not even less dimensional than that. Chifuyu is still a bitch, who badly needs to get the crap kicked out of her. If Houki could get an IS which was powered by angst, she'd never run out of juice. (In fact, she might overload the damned thing.)
Ichika is about as reasonable a protagonist as I could reasonably ask for in a harem show, at least. He's a nice guy, and he's trying pretty hard, and he isn't a lech. He's got guts. He doesn't have a lot of brains, though, which is a pity.
But as a character -- well, he isn't one. He's a situation. He's completely determined by the situation he's in. His shape is determined by the plot hole he sits in.
I vaguely remember that things get better once Charlotte shows up. I don't honestly remember how long that takes. Sure hope it's soon. In the mean time, I recall hating Cecilia the most, and as of the second episode I still do.
Well, not the most. I hate Chifuyu the most. Cecilia comes in second.
My memory was that the high point of the series was the battle where
Ichika and Charlotte as a team took on Houki and Laura. The biggest pleasure was the way Charlotte and Ichika cooperated so well, and were able to leverage their abilities in order to defeat IS's more advanced than their own. Or Charles? maybe that was when Charlotte was still in drag.
But that was only about half way through the series. Then things picked up again, a bit anyway, once Tabane showed up.
I bought this North American BD release for guilt, but I really feel as if I should use them, having paid for them, and that's part of why I'm watching it.
On another note: I really wish they would fix one thing in MPC-64. That's become my regular player program, but for these I have to use Zoom Player.
Neither of them understands the BD's menu format, but that's not really very important. All the episodes are separate files, and it's obvious which ones they are. I can drag-and-drop them individually into the player program. The problem is that they have both English and Japanese sound tracks, and MPC only sees the English one.
Zoom Player sees them both, so I can switch to Japanese. so that's why I have to use it. Which screws me up, because the keyboard shortcuts are all different.
UPDATE: Oh, there was another thing. The internal drive on my computer won't register the first BD of Infinite Stratos. I had to use the external drive to play it. (I've had this happen before. The Plextor USB drive is a lot more forgiving than the internal drive on my notebook computer.)
UPDATE: Ubu got the same thing I did, only he wanted to watch the DVD rather than the BD. And he says the DVD is 4:3. (I haven't looked at it, but I will later.)
1
Not "want." "Have." And I did some experimenting with other DVDs; sure enough it's Sentai. Crazy -- Demon King was 16:9. Clearly they regard the DVD market as an afterthought now.
Maybe I'll invest in a BD player instead of a new computer. Definitely I'll scratch Sentai off my buy list.
2
An external USB BD drive is quite cheap. For instance, this one is only $70. (And Plextor is a good brand. They made my USB BD drive, which has served me well for several years.)
3
I've been mulling an entire new system build to replace Lyar, but haven't been motivated to pull the trigger. Remarked to Dr.Heinous that I'd spend $200 on the latest MTG expansion instead, only to be told, "Your priorities are amuck."
4
One thing I've run into with MPC-HC when playing DVD's is the inability to mimic the arrow keys of a remote. Sure, you can mouse-click on menu items, but certain image gallery features won't work. Unless I'm missing something.
Posted by: Mauser at May 08, 2012 11:12 PM (cZPoz)
5
Charlotte shows up in ep.5.
She's outed to Ichika in ep. 6, and to the rest of the school in 7 or 8.
The question is, just how advanced is Byasuhki (Ichika's mech). Ayako translated an early comment to make it sound like it was somewhere between 2nd and 3rd generation, but later, Tabane is referring to it as if it's better than most 3rd gen mechs. From later in the novels, it's referred to as being a hybrid 3rd/4th.
And the major key seems to be that Byaushki is powered by "Core #001" which only Tabane and Chifuyu know. It appears to be unique, so I'm assuming that Tabane has somehow obtained alien technology and reverse engineered it to produce the IS cores.
But here's what got me when I re-watched it. During the reveal in episode 12, Tabane and Chifuyu discuss the "White Knight incident" from ten years ago. It's been previously established that, ten years ago, over two thousand ballistic missiles were simultaneously launched from multiple countries at Japan for no known reason. Out of nowhere, a white mech shows up, destroys every single missile... and then disappears. The superiority of the IS as a strategic weapon was pretty thoroughly established by this. And Tabane as much as said the White Knight was Chifuyu.
When Chifuyu was having her "hypothetical" conversation with Tabane, after the Gospel incident, she said something to the effect of "hypothetically, this would be child's play for a genius who hacked military computers in 12 countries..." I had an Ichika moment; I thought, "why past tense, and why would she need to hack so many computers to make Silvario Gospel (the U.S.-Israeli mech) go beserk?" Then today, as I re-watched it again, it dawned on me what she was talking about.
Holy insane risks, Batman. Tabane is truly psychopathic, but my question is, did Chifuyu know it was a setup at the time?
I read a minor rant one time by Larry Niven, that went something like this: "How the hell are we supposed to write SF about the Solar System when you astronomers keep changing everything?"
I think it was a comment about his story "The Coldest Place", which assumed that Mercury was tide locked, and its dark side was eternally dark and very cold. It actually turns out that Mercury is tide-locked, but it's in a 3:2 resonance. Basically, a Mercury day is 1.5 Mercury years long. But it means that all parts of the surface are exposed to the sun about half the time.
I'm rereading Heinlein's novel "Space Cadet", which is subject to a bit of that. I just encountered a scene where Pete, from Ganymede, mentions that the surface gravity there is 32% of Earth. And it occurred to me that this might have been subject to revision.
I was right. The current estimate is that the surface gravity is 14.6%. The earlier estimate was based on guesses about the moon's internal composition, which assumed it was about like Earth: rock and metal. We now know that there's a hundreds-of-miles-thick layer of ice, which is a lot less dense.
The mass of Ganymede was calculated based on how it affected Galileo's flybys, so it's very accurate. The earlier number was little better than an educated guess.
The last third or so of this book is where things really changed the most, though. It was written back when the orthodoxy (at least in SF) was that the surface of Venus was a jungle. Of course we now know it ain't so. The surface of Venus is the closest approximation in the Solar System of traditional Hell. There is no life on Venus and there never will be. The temperature on the surface of Venus is hot enough to melt lead.
None of which takes away from enjoying the story, of course. But it's interesting to think about just how much the Solar System has changed during my lifetime -- or at least, how much our conception of it has changed.
When I was a kid, there were nine planets. Now there are only eight.
UPDATE: They changed things on me again. Now the orthodoxy is that Mercury's day is two Mercury years.
1
I write science fiction. I have a pretty elaborate "universe" set up, too.
...I'm just waiting for Kepler to discover planets in the "wrong" places around nearby stars....
Posted by: atomic_fungus at May 07, 2012 06:23 PM (E1y9u)
2
What would you consider to be wrong? The planetary search so far has found planets in all kinds of strange orbits, like planets larger than Jupiter in orbits closer than Mercury.
3
So clearly the inhabitants of Mercury are nomadic, taking two years to migrate around the planet.
Posted by: Mauser at May 08, 2012 12:01 AM (cZPoz)
4
Including gas giants in the blue zone, IIRC, one of the more friendly configurations for sci-fi writing.
As for Venus, writers haven't totally written it off. There's still the potential for extremophiles and/or high altitude microorganisms. Certainly you aren't going to find jungles and natives, though.
Posted by: metaphysician at May 08, 2012 05:26 AM (3GCAl)
5
Apparently, at about 50 km above Venus' surface, the environment is the "most Earthlike in the solar system" (whatever that means). And because the atmosphere is very dense, breathable air will rise, giving rise to lots of absurd speculation about floating cities on Venus. There's even an article on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_city_%28science_fiction%29#Venus
The notion of living there would still be pretty terrifying.
6
"Wrong" would be anything that invalidates my setting. Meaning, "wrong for me".
Okay, if I say--in my story--that Gliese 691 has an Earthlike planet just close enough that it gives it kind of a cool and drizzly climate, and Kepler finds one of those superhot superjovian planets less than 50,000,000 miles from the star and nothing else: that's an example of finding a planet in the "wrong" place.
And it'd be an example of astronomers invalidating SF with an ugly reality....
Worse, if they go ahead and discover that none of the close-by (within 60 light years) G- and F-class stars have Earthlike planets? Then I'm really screwed, because I either have to totally change the colonial expansion of Man into the stars, or else ignore the latest science and say, "I don't care! There's an Earthlike world orbiting Pollux!"
(I do admit that I lean towards the latter. "Never let the facts get in the way of good fiction!")
Posted by: atomic_fungus at May 08, 2012 06:42 AM (E1y9u)
7
So things like "Tau Ceti seems to have a large disc of dust and rocks, but there is no evidence yet that there are any planets." Right?
I think it is time for the MST3K mantra or variation thereof, to be applied to science-fiction. Or a load of handwavium. Though even those two are not enough to fix Joss Whedon's efforts.
C.T.
Posted by: cxt217 at May 08, 2012 12:05 PM (QzVZ+)
9
Yes, exactly like that. *sigh* There isn't supposed to be a "large disk of dust and rocks" there until after about 2130 AD....
Posted by: atomic_fungus at May 08, 2012 01:09 PM (E1y9u)
