I need a hero…

So, thanks to a recommendation by my good friend Adam, I recently started watching the show Heroes the other day, and Wow! what a great show, I have got immediately hooked and watched like 6 episodes in less than three days.  I cba to explain the story here, just check it out, but basically it involves a number of individuals, subtly connected,  who slowly discover they have superhuman powers and the show follows their tales.

Anyways, it got me thinking, not unlike a child, how great it would be to have a superpower, perhaps 3.  The characters that I’ve met so far in the show involve someone who can fly, someone who can alter space/time, someone with incredible regeneration, someone who can paint the future, a mind reader, and possibly the coolest one, like Rogue from X-Men, someone who can seemly borrow other people’s powers. Pretty sweet no?

 

So, let’s discuss which are the coolest powers from the list above? Lol.  But seriously, I think my faves are the altering of space/time and the mind reader.  The guy who can alter space/time is effectively a Japanese nerd, and thankfully his story so far has provided some light relief from the other stories. 

So yeah, the altering space/time is pretty cool. You could effectively do anything, a lot of the fun options have already been explored by the show including teleporting into the ladies’ room, and successfully cheating at gambling in casinos.

The mind reader one is also pretty darn cool.  I am also impressed with the show realising that it wouldn’t actually be an ability that you can just turn on and off as required, but you would hear people’s thoughts all the time.  I think first done in the original Star Trek series where Spock obviously had his mind-meld tricks, and I remember him saying how it takes years of training to be able to block out all the random thoughts of others.  Boy, wasn’t the original series of Star Trek quite cool, in a very low budget, Kirk-also-makes-out-with-a-hot-alien, The crew in red always die kind of way yeah!

The mind reading is particularly cool as the guy uses the ability to “win” any conversation he has, not to mention freak people out with facts about them that they have not openly spoke about.  He has also won back favour with his wife, with whom he is currently having troubles with in their marriage, by setting up the perfect date – everything she has thought would be good.  For selfish reasons, mind-reading would make dating a much more efficient process as once they start thinking, “screw this guy, he’s kinda lame”, you could then just move on, rather than wait for them to tell you so, a couple of dates later.  The power is actually not unlike the film “What Women Want” which although kinda being a bit of a chick flick, is quite a smart film, only for the cool mind-reading abilities.

 

Here’s looking for a local toxic dump from which to gain superpowers. Wish me luck!

What the Frak?! You motherfrakker!!…

Hey all, Quite recently I’ve been exploring my interest in sci-fi and decided that I would check out the series Battlestar Galactica.  For those not in the know the show is a remake of the original series made back in the 70s – it is first billed as a remake, but is more of an evolution of the story set about 40 years after the war with the Cylons.  I won’t go into any particular plotlines cos frankly that will take too long and I really cba, but I will say that the premise of the show is that after this ceasefire between mankind and cylon (according to them, the plural of cylon is indeed cylon), the cylons begin an onslaught on the human race, trying to wipe them out. The aging ship, the Galactica is the only ship to avoid the attack, and after meeting up with a civilian convoy formed by the new President  – who used to be Secretary of Education (a schoolteacher as they often joke), jump off to some far away part of the Universe away from the Cylons.  This would be ok if the Cylons themselves weren’t bent on chasing them down and killing them all for good, and to make matters worse, Cylons can now look like ordinary people, which as even the creators admit, makes special effects a damn side easier, and they are agents within the fleet.  But there is hope, some scripture has already described their journey to a new home which just turns out to be Earth, horray!

 

Ok, hopefully that has wept your appetite, perhaps not, but it shows a lot of promise, but after watching the first two seasons I have my reservations about continuing to watch it.  For a show that boasts it is a sci-fi show, there isn’t a terrible amount of sci-fi actually in the show.  The fleet being out in space is a big help, but it could so easily be set on the ocean and they’re still encountering the same problems – food, fuel, permanent settlement etc, cylons/pirates chasing them.

Delving a little deeper than the general themes of the show mentioned just, a lot of the plot of the show seems to concern the conflict between the remaining military and a new fledging government.  Also one reservation is the reliance the show puts on Gyuss Baltar, the leading scientist in the fleet, who since falling in love with a Cylon agent back on Caprica(or whatever planet he was on), now sees visions of her talking to him, advising him on what would be best for the Cylons etc.  It was quite smart at first, but having him appear to talk to noone in particular, and them sometimes have his hallucination knock him about a bit, it has got tired. 

Although not a crucial flaw but something that doesn’t make complete sense. Not to go into too much detail for those who’ve not seen the show, but as I said before Cylon agents that are indistinguishable from humans now exist.  Now these agents are notoriously hard to detect, as the show will no doubt explain, even their synthetic blood is identical to human blood.  If these agents have technically the same physiology as their human counterpoints, then the question arises, where do they get this superhuman strength from?  They’re exactly the same as the human they replace except they have the ability to pick someone up by their neck and chuck them about a room… yeah right *rolls eyes*.   One particular cylon agent is of this middle aged, and kinda fat guy, and yet he also possesses this incredible strength and speed, but how? I mean, c’mon it can’t be something in their muscles or blood or whatever cos it’s the say as humans, and you don’t see them throwing people about all the time do you?

Another thing which really annoys me, and this is a more general point, but it is now particularily bad on Battlestar Galactica, and that is shows that are obviously censored to not include swearing, but feel that some cursing is crucial to the script, and thus create their own swearwords to avoid censorship – Battlestar is one such show.  The word that they use in Battlestar is Frak, as an obvious alternative to Fuck (sorry kids :s).  The use of the word wasn’t immediate in the series, but during the first season, it entered the vocabulary somewhere halfway through and has steadily got worse.  Most uses are along the lines of “What the frak is he/she doing?!” etc, but there have been the odd “For frak’s sake!” and possibly the most criminal “Motherfrakker!” *sigh*. It just sounds really lame and quite embarassing for me to be watching it, I hold my head in shame on behalf of the writers…

 

Now, I am not objecting to swearing, nor am in the party that states that there never can be too much swearing, but I like characters to be depicted realistically, and well we all swear, so writers should be given the option/ability to write it in without fear of censorship.  Especially when a show’s plots are so character-driven, which is actually one of Galactica’s strengths, it just feels really fake, and you suddenly are no longer totally immersed in the story and become very aware that you are watching a TV show – or at least that’s me :D

 

Here’s leading the charge for free swearing, so come on you bitches and join the cause…

Be you Friend or Robot??

Welcome back, and the break has been a long one but here we are again.

After reading a few things on BBC news online, plus some existing general opinions, I’d thought I’d discuss the future.

The article I read which got me thinking was one concerning the possible rights that robots could inherit when they become sophisticated enough. Many fiction writers have predicted the collpase of human life as we know it, through a robotic force that will become so deeply embedded into our societies, and then rebel against their creators and cause our demise.

In my final year, I actually did a module on Mobile Robotics. Alas, it was all thereotical, we didn’t actually get to build one ourselves. Anyways, the introductory lecture, like a lot of them, discussed topics of the emergence of robots etc. One particular footnote to the lecture, not at all to do with the course, was the origin of the word “robot”. Apparently, it comes from a Czech word meaning slave, if I remember rightly (I cba to dig out my notes, just to make this entry slightly more correct). The word featured in a play from the 1920s (you know what, maybe the guy that wrote it was Czech instead?!?), and the story went along the lines of these faithful slaves eventually rebelling against their masters and destorying mankind.

Now that storyline seems pretty common amongst fiction nowadays. A few examples come easily to mind, those of the Terminator and Matrix films, which have a post-apocalyptic future where mankind is the verge of survival in a war against robots.

Bearing this in mind, is anyone else slightly worried about where the future will lead us? It could be neive, or perhaps even terribly wise to say that nothing is impossible, and that it is just a matter of time before we achieve what is considered the unthinkable today. Technology is already rife in today’s world, and well probably not in my lifetime (although computers came from their first roots to what they are today in my grandparent’s lifetimes) but one day it could be very feasable to have robots of some kind helping us in the jobs we do today.
There are many things, we as a race have achieved. Copying nature to make flight possible, prosthetic limbs, open heart surgery, beating diseases etc are all great achievements, and the sky is really the limit.
It would be foolish to say that robots will not be a reality, and probably quicker than we may expect. It is well known that Japan are technology nuts, and a number of companies are investing astronomical budgets to developing robots.

Following in another piece of Science Fiction that I am a big fan of is the Stargate series, and the development of the new galactic enemy, the replicators. A race of techo-bugs (that may be an O’Neill quote actually, wouldn’t be that suprising, lol) that are hell bent on increasing their numbers. Now this is pure science fiction, machines composed of tiny “blocks” which can be used to form anything and possessing a shared consciousness through subspace. But stepping back into reality, again an article I read on BBC news online had revealed progress made in nanotechnology. Researchers had successfully created a type of worm/snake robot, made of blocks, which was programmed to recreate itself. Mmm, worrying stuff. And it can only get worse really.

I am being a little “doomsday-ish” in the tone on how robots will be our demise, predicted numerous times in science fiction, but perhaps it’s worth mentioning the positives to the improvements gained from sophisticated robots. Robots will undoutably make our lives easier, assisting in both our professional and personal lives no doubt. To go back to scaremonging, they could eventually replace the need for us to work, or at least reducing the number of employed people – most probably becoming technicians to maintain the new army of robots. Back to the predictions in science fiction for one moment, one of the most famous is the use of geostationary satellites being placed into orbit to be used for communication purposes. If I was properly researching this, then I would mention the piece of fiction that the idea was born in.

The human brain is considered the most complex thing in the natural world, and surely it will only be a matter of time before it will be emulated, and then surely, free will artificially created in robots will be inevitable, and then we are probably boned. Although, if we reach a point of technical ingenuity where we can successfully emulate a brain, then hopefully they will be able to weild some kind of control over these robots, but this is all speculation, and pretty hollow speculation at that. Saying this, whatever happens in the future concerning the development of robots, the level reached where free will is possible will probably not occur in my lifetime. The wonderment is will I be completely dumbstruck as a lot of the older generation are today, technology wise, or is it truly a unique time, where this is such a technology gap between generations. Will my children be trying to explain to me how to use a new bit of technology, or explain a new socialising medium – we’ll see…

Here’s looking slightly afraid at the future.
J-Man.