Do science fiction films need to have realistic science?

“An American physicist is calling for Hollywood producers to tone down the fanciful science in movies - and restrict themselves to just one scientific flaw per film.”

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8530405.stm

So – how real should the science in science fiction be?

Discuss.

Personally, as long as the fictional setting is internally consistent, I’m not overly bothered by fanciful ‘science’ in science fiction. I think science fiction should be more about the fiction than the science.

A dilemma for the Traveller collector

Assuming you are prepared to stay within certain tight constraints, it is now possible to legitimately publish your own commercial Traveller products.

On the one hand, that’s fantastic. I must admit, I am sorely tempted to do just that. Self-publishing in downloadable pdf format is easy, and self-publishing using services such as lulu ( http://www.lulu.com/ ) isn’t much harder. I’m not naive enough to think that this would be profitable. But it would allow me to contribute an official Traveller product.

On the other hand, other people (not many, but some) are already doing it. And that means that the completist Traveller collector in me feels the need to buy them.

…and this is why I can’t afford to suddenly spend lots of money updating my collection

I was feeling well off after getting lucky and getting pretty much the car I wanted for quite a lot less than I’d budgeted for.

I’ve now spent or am about to spend slightly more than the difference on a) upgrading the in-car entertainment system in the car and b) bookshelves.

( Read more... )

Windows 7

I upgraded my main PC to Windows 7 64 bit from Windows Vista 32 bit on Saturday afternoon.

Pleased by how simple the upgrade process was (clean install, naturally). 7 doesn’t seem to be radically different from Vista (which I actually quite liked and preferred to XP, even though I know you’re not supposed to), although some of the little things are nicer. The new version of Explorer has got rid of pretty much all of the old ones annoying little niggles. I was particularly impressed that the newly installed operating system was able to set up network access automatically with no input required.

There’s a very nice little blog posting application called Live Writer which I’m using now to write this available as an optional download. It may well work for Vista too.

Mass Effect

Anyone played Mass Effect? What did you think?

I'm thinking of playing it now that I've finished Dragon Age. Mass Effect 2 is supposed to be better, but I'd rather start at the beginning.

Death Awareness update

We passed 100 members yesterday. Yay!