World Enough and Time

Gotta be the best review of anything I have ever read... A review of Iron Man 3 by Laura Hundson and Jim Rugg. They nailed it. Sequential Stark: Wired Reviews Iron Man 3 — In Comic Book Format.

Especially the parts about identity.

A review almost as clever as the movie.

An article about Captain Jack Harkness: Captain Jack And River Song Met, Decided They Want A 'Doctor Who' Spinoff. Well, of course they do.

I'd like it too, if only because it's not likely to be the dirge to morosity that Torchwood Miracle Day was. And since the loss of Elisabeth Sladen and The Sarah Jane Adventures, there's a gap to be filled.

Now, I was never, and am not, a big fan of River Song, partly because I saw her as playing the role in Doctor Who that Captain Jack ought to have been playing. Replacing him, in other words. What did she do that he couldn't do better? Nothing that I could see.

Putting them together -- well! It would be like two peas in a pod, but why not? They'd be fun. They'd be loads of fun.

Bring it on.

As for the rest of the article: I don't want to know the Doctor's name, and I'm hoping that episode won't tell us, despite its name. And: why is Captain Jack being left out of the Doctor Who special? I had thought that since Steven Moffat was the first writer to write Captain Jack, that he'd want to include him. Perhaps he sees him as a Russell T Davies creation, and doesn't like the character.

The trailer for the Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Special is up: Doctor Who: The First Question.

Wow.

Now I'm excited.

I just watched this scene from Doctor Who, series 4, from "The Doctor's Daughter", which - as I mentioned recently - was one of my favourite episodes.

"Let's find a new world. For her."

What a wonderful scene! Donna really shines in it. I wonder which scene was aired in its place.

An interesting revision of the history of English that makes perfect sense to me: English is a Scandinavian language.

Mark Askwith, on his Facebook page, posted a link to this io9 list: The Most Futuristic Predictions That Came True in 2012. Is it the list I'd have made? Perhaps not... the things that impressed me most in 2012 were not things that were predicted in the past, but new, unexpected discoverings. Like the importance of microbiomes: a word that wasn't even in my vocabulary.

A few comments:

Re #1 - "A Cyborg Competes Against Able-Bodied Athletes at the Olympics". how do they define "cyborg"? Anyone with a prosthesis? Yeah, I joke about being a cyborg because I have a screw in my ankle and a plastic elbow. But... what, these days, is a cyborg? And is that a quibble about language, or a profound question about human identity?

Re #2 - "NASA Starts to Work on a Faster-Than-Light Warp Drive" - this seems to me as speculative as it has ever been. Is it reified because it's NASA that is doing it?

Re #3 - "Scientists Enhance the Intelligence of Primates with a Chip" - Can I have a chip like that? Please? How come you have to be a chimp to get one?

Re #4 - "The Earth Experiences its First True Superstorm". Measured by size alone? Human impact? Are superstorms getting bigger? Are we going to learn from this? Seems to me that we should be studying not "how to prevent this sort of thing" but "how to live with it".

Re #5 - "The World's First Cybernetic Hate Crime Occurs at a McDonalds in France". Not too many details here. Why did they attack the man? Just because he had a weird eyepiece? Why did that upset them? Did it frightening them? If it was freaking people out, why didn't he just take it off? I not trying to blame the victim here, I'm trying to figure out why there was a problem.

Re #6 - "Augmented Reality Goes Mainstream". Yeah, this was only a matter of time. Or cost. How did I ever live without my Blackberry? (Rhetorical question: I know how.)

Re #7 - "Researchers Create a Robot With Legs That Can Run Faster Than any Human". My first reaction was: uh, yeah, so? Cars go faster than any human. There are lots of way machines can go faster. And heck, lots of people can run faster than I can all on their own, like my friend meri_oddities. I guess the point here is that it's an engineering miracle, like Leonardo da Vinci wings that can fly. So you put legs like this on the Cyborg in item #1...

Actually, thinking about it: if these things could be engineered to replace cars, I'd be all for it. If we could all run anywhere we wanted to go, without injury... yeah. I like that idea.

Re #9 - "An Electric Car is the Year's Best". I'm all for electric cars. But I'd rather see something that replaces the car entirely.

Re #10 - "Doctors Communicate With a Man in a Coma". So very cool. Like telepathy.

Re #11 - "The First Large-Scale Geoengineering Project is Detected Off Canada's West Coast". How'd I not hear about this? Amazing.

Re #12 - "A Child Attends School By Sending a Robot in His Place". A new way to avoid being where you're supposed to be? I'm glad this didn't exist when I was a kid. I was home from school so much more than the norm - probably more than everyone here put together. I spent most of my time in bed reading. It was, in its unusual sort of way, a happy childhood. I would not have been happy if I'd had to attend school - so to speak - this way.

Re #13 - "A Paralyzed Woman Controls a Robotic Arm Using Only Her Mind". Is her name Jean Grey? No, really, I love this. See item #10.

Re #16 - " Researchers Create the First Complete Computer Model of a Living Organism", amazing and miraculous, but... but... why pick a tiny veneral disease? Do we really need that? Is it for study purposes? Wouldn't it be better to be getting rid of it?

What a great site! Calm.

A two-minute relaxation.

I've observed this; nice to see people making a study of it. Walking through doorways makes you forget.

All the trouble we'd be saved, if we just eliminated doorways...

There's an annual flash-film festival. Who knew? Anyway, I came across this site: Subway Life, and found it quite fascinating.

I love subway lore. Scenes in movies that take place in subways. People chasing through subways. Scenes like the scenes in the subway in Ghost, with Patrick Swayze moving the penny.

There are no subways in Ottawa - and that's a sore point: something the City promised decades ago, then changed their mind on, as the transit system and the traffic congestion gets worse by the year.

When I was very young, I'd go with my parents to Toronto to visit my grandmother, and loved the Toronto subway system. The Montréal system is terrific. What other subways have I experiences? London, New York, Paris... any others? Not counting the El in Chicago and the Skytrain in Vancouver. Different things altogether.

At last - a webcomic that made me laugh!

Artistic

I liked this one, too: Luke and Han