I forgot to mention during my last post that part of what impressed me about the script was Susan’s accuracy in predicting future events. She’s ridiculed by her class for thinking that the British monetary system was decimal; she said it hadn’t happened yet. She says there’s a fifth dimension of space; okay, so she’s a few dimensions short according to current thinking, but so far as I know, nobody in 1963 was conversant in string theory.

The opening of The Cave of Skulls is a bit disappointing in comparison (synopsis). The TARDIS arrives in the past, presumably the 100,000 BC of the title of the story arc, and we’re treated to a bunch of cavemen who look about as prehistoric as 1960s Klingons look alien. A caveman named Za is trying to recreate fire by rolling a bone in his hands; apparently his father discovered fire but didn’t bother to share the recipe. I’m thinking more that fire was discovered by taking it from a lightning strike, and that once people came up with the Tom Hanks methods of baking coconuts, this became part of the cultural heritage fairly damn quickly. But Tom shouldn’t feel bad, as the Doctor has also forgotten that fire can be made without matches.

We’re introduced to the friendly old trope of the TARDIS not quite working properly; according to the characters, this is the first time that it gets stuck looking like a police box, and I wonder how much of the audience looked forward to the story line where it gets fixed. They’d have a long wait.

Unfortunately, Susan sort of loses it when the Doctor gets surprised by a caveman with an axe, which is fairly un-Doctorlike for that matter. This is the first time that the Doctor’s been in any trouble? You’d think Susan would be used to this by now, and she’d trust the Doctor to take care of himself. I don’t know how far along the Doctor is supposed to be in his first incarnation by the time the story begins, but unless he’s very fresh from his zeroth incarnation (or whatever the hell Time Lords are doing when they’re growing up), this seems like a rather silly way to be put in danger.

We then go back into caveman society for a tiresome expository scene, and a plot point that should give Mark Twain a screenwriter credit. It is perhaps notable that both sides of the Cro-Magnon political struggle sound awfully similar to Republican talking points; just insert “tiger” for “al-Qaeda,” and “fire” for “millimeter backscatter X-rays at every airport.”

Rating system: 5 stars: a classic 4 stars: still worth watching 3 stars: alright, nothing special 2 stars: checking my watch 1 star: Jesus, when will it end?

Moral of the story: a guy will put up with a lot if his wife wears a gold bikini.

Season 6 of Doctor Who is the first season I’ll be keeping up with as it airs, and I’m fully expecting to hate the BBC in between shows for making me wait a week for the next one. So I’m embarking on a longtime plan to watch the original series, which I’m expecting will take me roughly as long to watch as it took the BBC to make.

Tonight’s episode: Season 1, Episode 1, Doctor 1: “An Unearthly Child.” Original airdate: 11/23/1963, which makes this only one day younger than the Kennedy assassination. I approached this episode—and really all of the first few seasons—with a great deal of trepidation, as I’m not particularly fond of out-of-date science fiction. I can get through the Star Trek original series thanks to a fond nostalgia, but not much else.

Surprise! This episode is actually still pretty damned good. Turns out that I can’t write a synopsis to save my life, so feel free to check out the one here.

Opening credits remind me of the worse effects of The Outer Limits, but the Who theme more than makes up for it; I wasn’t aware how much of what I love about the current theme was actually nearly fifty years old.

We’re introduced to the first two grownup companions, schoolteachers of the Doctor’s granddaughter, whose names escape me at the moment but will probably become ingrained shortly. Their repartee could have been a dated, muddled mess; instead, these are two smart people who treat each other as peers and generally comport themselves well onscreen. They appear to be more than a little dense when they first walk into the TARDIS—personally, if I walked into a room larger than its outside, I’d be less sure of myself—but they haven’t had the benefit of watching the last few decades of science fiction.

Likewise for the Doctor’s granddaughter; I’m always afraid of the teen interest element, but Susan isn’t 10% as annoying as I feared she might be. There’s a bit more shrill and foolishly headstrong than seems likely in her character, but again, that might just be the culture gap.

Which brings me to William Hartnell’s Doctor. This makes the episode. I don’t know how this played in 1963, but in 2011 he enters on screen like the classic creepy villain; you half-expect Susan to be chained up as his sex slave in the back of the phone booth. He’s a complete dick to both of her teachers and not much better to Susan herself; the bastard nature of recent Doctors is on full display here from the get-go.

Other points of note: the TARDIS sound is just as old as the theme; Hartnell’s teeth prove that those old jokes about British dentistry aren’t entirely untrue; I’m not sure what knocked out the passengers when they travelled through time, but that wide-eyed look on the Doctor’s face when they got there was a great touch—he’s so certain of himself until then, but that one moment shows the character isn’t omniscient.

I’m looking forward to what’s coming next.

Rating system: 5 stars: a classic 4 stars: still worth watching 3 stars: alright, nothing special 2 stars: checking my watch 1 star: Jesus, when will it end?

Did you know Pla-Doh conducts electricity? I didn’t.

IMF chief tried to fuck maid after mistaking her for a small financially crippled country

IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn has claimed he only tried to fuck a New York maid because he thought she was a small Caribbean island in financial difficulty.

Hat tip: Carl Nyberg.

Don’t know if this is real. Don’t much care, either.

Actually, this explains a lot.

Fascinating overview of some of the Frankensteinian ways science is progressing:

I disagree with the basic premise, though, that we need to “question” the directions this is going. Throw this to the political process, and it’ll be decided by the ignorant, the fearful, and the Bible bangers. Some of this stuff gave me pause—although I’m much more troubled by robotic cockroaches than mice with ears growing out of their backs—but this is science that will likely not get a fair hearing in the general public. I don’t think we’re mature enough to handle the questions that Wolpe wants to raise… which means that nations with more intelligent and educated political systems, or dictatorial ones, will eat our lunch in biotech if we let this become a political football.

Nuclear Crisis at Fukushima

This power failure resulted in one of the most serious conditions that can affect a nuclear plant—a “station blackout”—during which off-site power and on-site emergency alternating current (AC) power is lost. Nuclear plants generally need AC power to operate the motors, valves and instruments that control the systems that provide cooling water to the radioactive core. If all AC power is lost, the options to cool the core are limited….

The containment building’s purpose is to keep radioactivity from being released into the environment. A meltdown would build up pressure in the containment building. At this point we do not know if the earthquake damaged the containment building enough to undermine its ability to contain the pressure and allow radioactivity to leak out.

We’re No. 5 … and Phoenix can pound sand

Via Glenn Greenwald. US waterboarding: not torture. Nazi waterboarding: torture. So sayeth the New York Times.

This president and this attorney general say waterboarding is torture, but the previous president and attorney general said it is not. On what basis should a newspaper render its own verdict, short of charges being filed or a legal judgment rendered? …

Stéphane Hessel was in exile with Charles de Gaulle in London, imprisoned in concentration camps, waterboarded in Nazi torture sessions and saved from hanging by swapping identities with an inmate who had died of typhus.

Bay City Luv (no, really), live in concert, Geary & Mason.

Sure, the green design groups will hate it, but it’s the first MacBook to break the $9.99 price point. (via Laughing Squid)

If you needed further proof that Japan is very very weird. Also, relaxed laws concerning restaurant hygiene and animal cruelty.

I’ve had a running joke for over 20 years that when I travel internationally, I have to bring along a Canadian to translate what I’m saying into English. Turns out, it’s not my fault. It’s my parents’ fault for not getting the hell out of Philadelphia.

Hard to do this with a USB thumb drive. Hat tip: Mike Worth.

If you happen to have watched the original Tron recently (like I did), then you’ll realize how completely brilliant this is:

I had fun trying to keep up with this. I’ll be checking out the rest of her videos.

This picture is from a National Geographic article titled “Fire Tornado Pictures.”

I repeat: Fire. Tornado.

Forthofer studies fire tornadoes with the aim of protecting firefighters. “If we can identify conditions that are conducive to fire whirls, that would be a heads-up for firefighters, because there have been some [people] that have been burned by them,” he said.

Fire tornadoes are dangerous? I never would have thought.

A short movie giving a sense of scale to the solar system.

Scale from Brad Goodspeed on Vimeo.