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I saw this one when it first ran back in October of ‘77, but curiously I only remember one scene clearly, and one other seems familiar after I saw it again. I quickly realized the reason: this was a completely pointless story with a beginning, a middle, but no end.

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Mister Schubert is back on an unnamed Polynesian island that seems more Caribbean, frankly. It’s a Caucasians-only community, apparently. He’s in a huge white house, and his scientist/lackey Brent is working on their latest incredibly stupid project. This time they’re transmitting signals that cause a white overscaled replica of the Maltese Falcon to glow. Eventually, for no adequately explained reason, this kills all power within an 80-mile radius. Even batteries won’t work.

The Cetacean goes in to investigate, because, you know, it’s not like they’re doing *research* or anything scientific like that. Power outages in third-world countries are waaaaaay more mysterious than the secrets of the ocean. Power comes back on the island, and Mark goes swimming. Schubert and Brent watch some TRS-80 Lowres graphics which they pretend tell them that the cetacean has arrived, then they watch a random spiral pattern in Lowres, which they pretend tells them he’s entered the cave. Mark climbs out of that same damn 'grotto' (obviously a hot tub) in the cave, and follows a path which eventually lead him to the ancient chamber in which the Maltese Falcon resides. He rolls a 3d6, and nothing happens, so he takes the statue and leaves. Then Shubert orders Brent to reactivate the machine in hopes it’ll kill Mark. Brent rolls a 4d6k3, however, and so the machine explodes instead. Mark makes it back to the sub. Then the director rolls a d20 so he has to cut directly to the next scene, in which Mark is for some reason wandering through a one-room museum on the island.

Schubert has hired a callgirl (Who happens to be Norman Mailer’s future mistress, but that’s not particularly relevant to the plot) to seduce Mark and get da’boid. There’s a brief inference that Schubert made her do all kinds of kinky things with him, but it’s left nebulous. She’s hot, cleavagey, and says “Fascinating” a lot as Mark rattles off nonsense about the “Lost Continent of Lemuria,” and then invites him back to her place. He declines, never really understanding what she was offering. She tells the local sheriff - inexplicably dressed like Foghorn Leghorn, but with less acting chops - that she doesn’t think the ‘seduction’ angle is gonna’ work on Mark.

Mark, meanwhile, is walking along the beach when a Janet Gerber from Fish falls in the water. He saves her. She’s self deprecating, and insists he come home to meet her daddy. Reluctantly, he does, and discovers (A) that they live in the old lobby set the Foundation used in the TV movies the year before, and also that (B) Brent is vacuuming the floor. (And that, my friends, might well be the first time I’ve ever managed to type “Vacuum” or any variation thereof correctly on a first try.) Yup, she’s Schubert’s daughter. Bum-bum-baaaaah!

Mark heads back to the sub, but before he can make it, Janet Gerber from Fish has told Schubert what Mark got away from the cave with. When Mark makes it to the sub, he’s told the authorities found out about it somehow, and have confiscated it. Schubert and Brent visit the museum planning to steal it, while Mark meets up with Janet Gerber from Fish. They sneak into her room, where they’re met by Schubert and The Man Who Would Be Foghorn Leghorn. (or is it Truman Capote?) Schubert pretends that Mark was breaking in to rape his daughter, despite all evidence to the contrary, and the sheriff takes Mark into custody.

Mark isn’t doing well in custody, because he’s got that whole “Water Addiction” thing going on. Schubert visits, asking him to marry his daughter. Mark says ‘no’, and Schubert says he’ll be back in a few hours, probably Mark will be more tractable by then. He tells the Man Who Would Be Foghorn Leghorn Or Possibly Truman Capote *NOT* to get Mark wet. Because, you know, you’ve got to keep an eye on Truman. He’s into some freaky stuff.

Janet Gerber from Fish visits, and explains to him that a conspicuous hose is used to punish bad or violent criminals, so he apologizes and attacks her with a pillow. She screams, Foghorn and Pals come a-runnin’, and turn the hose on Mark. Mark’s superpowers return and he bends open the bars and climbs out. Since the local constabulary have seen The Six Million Dollar Man and The Incredible Hulk, they know what comes next, and run away before Mark can get all bionic on their asses.

Uhm…let’s see…what’s next…uhm…oh, yeah, so Mark goes to Schubert’s house and warns him not to do the poorly-defined experimentation he’s doing, or possibly to *start* doing some poorly defined experimentation. It’s a little vague. The Maltese Falcon comes to life - it's now being played by an actual real-life hawk - and inexplicably attacks Mark. Coincidentally, the fight goes on for whatever length of time this week’s episode happened to be running short, then, when they’ve padded it up to 45 minutes, he notices a little message-holder on the bird’s leg. He rips it off, and tosses it in the water, where it explodes, then bubbles. The bird flies away.

Janet Gerber from Fish runs up, and he explains - get this - “The energy was the bird’s life force, coming from the band on its leg.” We’re told everything is back to normal now, then the two of them make out for a bit. Back on the sub, Mark explains the situation to CW back at the base, then tells the helmsman - who now has a name - to set a course for home.

The End.

OBSERVATIONS

Disappointing.

Disappointing, and I had low expectations to begin with. We're only three episodes into the regular series, and we're already into full-on stupid. Aggresively full-on stupid.

As of this episode, Mister Schubert has stopped being a recurring poorly-drawn foil for Mark, and is instead an overused buffoon. Once again, we have a bad guy who’s supposed to be Southern: The Man Who Would Be Foghorn Leghorn And Truman Capote’s Illegitimate (And Biologically Confusing) Love Child. Odd trend, huh? This is Schubert's fourth appearance overall, and his third apperance since the regular series started. I can't help but think they're overusing him - three appearances in three weeks? This is also Brent's third appearance. His plot this week seems vaguely consistent with his larger goals in "Mudworm."

There is really no plot to this episode whatsoever: Schubert wants a MacGuffin for no adequately explained reason, Mark gets it first, Schubert wants it back, it comes to life, the end. In between, there’s a whole bunch of walking around and a near-drowning and a pretty hot call girl, but even those elements can’t really save a plot that isn’t there.

Why a bird? Why does it come to life? What’s this whole ‘life force’ nonsense about? What did this have to do with Lemuria? Why do they say “Mu” in the title, and “Lemuria” in the episode? How much is Alan Fudge getting paid to sit in the Seabase set and talk on the phone for two minutes every week? Is Patrick Duffy getting depressed? Is Belinda Montgomery looking for other work? Was this a left-over Six Million Dollar Man script, gussied up for Man From Atlantis? (“Six Million Dollar Man From Atlantis”) Why the hell is Schubert - who’s tried to start a nuclear war, and flood the world - allowed to run around free, without even his corporation being taken away from him? Why does Schubert have a fake southern accent when his daughter, Janet Gerber from Fish, has a New Joysie accent? These and other questions will fail to be answered in this episode. As Bart Simpson said, “It’s just a bunch of stuff that happened.”

Elizabeth is in full-on Wilma Deering mode this time out. It’s sad to see the marginalization of a character that started out so strong and important. Sadder still to see it happen so quickly. She does a couple “Meanwhile, back at the ranch” scenes on the sub, she exposits, she holds Mark’s coat so to speak, while he’s off Gil Gerrarding about. She does get in a dive scene, I think just to get her some more screen time. It’s supposed to be suspenseful, but ultimately her scene doesn’t matter, it’s just an act-break cliffhanger that’s resolved immediately after the commercial break with no fuss.

Did I mention that Mark can read Lemurian? Because he does it twice in this ep.

Schubert has something on Brent. We don’t know what it is, but whenever Brent protests too loudly or seems to be growing a spine, Schubert says “Oxnard,” and Brent calms right down , apologizes, and goes on to do whatever heinous thing Schubert wants.

The Man Who Would Be…blah blah blah…Love Child is in full on Boss Hogg mode, though he doesn’t have an accent. What’s interesting is that the Dukes of Hazzard wouldn’t air for another year. I guess it was just the zeitgeist.

The helmsman of the Cetacean is named “Chomo.”

There’s a scene where Schubert is rambling on about Lemuria and the ancient forces that built the statues of Easter island which is genuinely pretty funny. After Schubert gets done rambling, an awestruck Brent says “That was almost poetry!” Schubert replies, “Poetry and Science become indistinguishable at some high level.” Then, as Brent beams at him in adoration, he says “Can you remember what I said?” “Yes sir!” “Well then go type it up before you forget it, and put it in the files.” During said rant, Schubert says that "Easter Island isn't far" from where they are. Really? Easter Island is one of the most remote places on earth. The closest island to it - Pitcarn - is 1500 miles away. That strikes me as pretty damn far by anyone's measure. Clearly, whoever wrote this mess didn't have access to an encyclopedia.

Victor Buono seems to me to be vamping a bit in the beginning and ending of all his scenes, improvising little bits of dialog and mumbled asides. To his credit, he’s given a complete turd of a character, and he still manages to pull out lines like this one: “You’ll tell me what he took from the vault.” “No. I won’t tell you. Not ever.” “That’s a good girl, always an open mind.”

Once again, I have no idea what the hell Schubert was trying to accomplish. Did he want the bird? Why? For a bit there, he wanted to knock out all power in the world, though the reason is never clear. Presumably to take over, but details are scant. In any event, this is dropped almost immediately. As with all of his appearances to date, it appears like the writer was toying with two separate plots and couldn’t make up his mind what he wanted the story to be about.

“Lemuria” is a concept that was originated by biologists in the 19th century in order to explain the wide distribution of Lemurs around the Indian and Pacific oceans. You find Lemurs on widely-separated masses of land, far further afield than monkeys can swim. This was a huge consternation to biologists of the day trying to make sense of how this happened. Ultimately they hit on the idea that there must have been - at one time - a “Land Bridge” connecting Asia and South America, Madagascar, and maybe Africa as well. This was the worst kind of circular reasoning: "They can't swim that far, so they must have walked." Where’s the proof? "It sank." Since the scientists in question were only particularly interested in Lemurs, they named their hypothetical networks of land bridges “Lemuria.” The theory was not really taken seriously outside of biological circles, and even there, most people admitted it had a lot of holes in it.

In the 1890s, the Theosophical movement got ahold of the concept and turned “Lemuria” into a full-fledged lost continent, an “Atlantis” of their own devising, free of all that philosophical Greek claptrap. They could make Lemuria anything they wanted it to be to spread their own nonsense, rather than relying on the nonsense of others. Eventually this concept became more-or-less interchangeable with the lost continent of “Mu,” which was cooked up around the same time. For all intents and purposes, “Mu” and “LeMUria” are the same thing, and they’re both equally fictional.

The discovery of continental drift in the 20th century sealed the death knell for these kinds of nouveau myths, as well as the older Atlantean ones, and it simultaneously solved the riddle of the Lemurs themselves: They did indeed walk from one continent to another, back when the land masses were connected as one huge super continent. We know that these fantasylands never existed because there’s simply no room for them to fit if you puzzle all the continents back together in one mass.

So here we are a month into this series about a submarine and a marine biologist and a water-breathing man, and the ocean is more-or-less completely incidental to the stories. Instead we’re doing Star Trekian “Planet of the Week” stories, substituting Islands for planets, and without any sense of adventure, conflict, or even coherence. Seriously: When Space: 1999 is making more sense than your show, you know you’re doing something wrong.

The inherent problem in Submarine-based shows is that the subs can’t do real much: They dive, they surface, the go forward and back, left and right, they get attacked and attack others, and if you’re really damn lucky as a viewer, they have occasional mutinies or subjacking. Pretty much everything you could really hope to logically do with a sub you can do in fifteen episodes. Adding the whole “Research” thing doesn’t buy you all that much latitude: any reasonable sub-related plots will be used up in about a season. This is the problem “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea” had, and then they started repeating themselves. A lot. Nearly any episode of that show feels like a repeat the first time you see it. “Seaquest DSV” had the same problem, and so they were introducing Aliens fairly early on, and once the camel’s nose is in the tent, can Time Travel and other goofball stuff be far behind? (Answer: no.)

What amazes me about Man From Atlantis is that they’re attempting to circumvent this problem mostly by ignoring the sea entirely. It’s really, really, really weird.

We checked in Oscar-nominated writer Terri Tatchell, the day after District 9 picked up four Academy nods. She talked about District 9 director Blomkamp's new project, her next scifi movie, and why this nomination is such a mystery to her.

District 9 is currently in the running for the Academy Award for Film Editing, Visual Effects, Writing [Adapted Screenplay] and the most buzzed about category Best Film. We had to congratulate Tatchell on her Screenplay Adaptation nomination, and tell her to congratulate co-writer, director and spouse Neill Blomkamp as well.

How are you doing since the announcements yesterday?

It feels a bit more real today, yesterday it felt more like a dream. I'm not drinking Baileys this morning so I'm not quite as giddy as I was. But I feel like I should still be celebrating. We never ever, ever, ever, ever in a million years thought this was going to happen, ever. We even joked that this wouldn't happen. It's certainly more pay-off than we ever expected. We're just happy people liked the film. That was excitement enough...

I feel like the luckiest person on the face of the Earth. I feel incredibly fortunate, and grateful. I'm so excited to have been nominated for the screenplay, but I'm also excited that it got nominated for Best Picture. Probably more excited about that. There are so many people that worked so hard on this film, and I don't think it would have been as big of a success without them, like Sharlto Copley. He was amazing in it, and I hate that he didn't get a nomination. So I feel like the Best Picture represents everybody.

Why do you think District 9 did so well?

I don't want to say it doesn't deserve it, but if we hadn't gotten it, I don't think I would never have thought, "Damn, they cheated me!" I don't want to say it deserves it, but where I feel proud of it, is that I know how hard we worked on the story. We worked non-stop for a year, and we agonized over it. We agonized over the heart of it, the structure of it. What rules we were breaking, and why we made those choices. We worked really, really, really hard on it. I'm proud of how hard we worked, and I'm proud when I sit in the theater and I hear people laugh at the right times or be horrified at the right times. And you know that it works.

So in that sense I'm proud of it. I feel proud that people have said they leave the theater thinking about things. As opposed to just being entertained. Because there was a fine line when we were writing it, as to how serious and heavy-handed we wanted to get with the thoughts that were in our head. It was the first film, we had satire written on the wall. We just kept saying, "Satire, satire — let's not take ourselves so seriously." I'm really happy with the balance that came out of the film. I don't know if that's to credit the screenplay, or to credit the director. I think maybe Neill gets the credit for that.

You're an important figure in the science-fiction community now. What do you think about all the other genre nods that popped up this year. You mention Sharlto, but were there any other you were disappointed that didn't get nominated?

I was disappointed about Moon. I loved Moon. I thought Sam Rockwell was amazing in Moon. That one I'm definitely disappointed in. Avatar is definitely dominating everything, and it was an incredible film, very visually so. Star Trek was great. The Hurt Locker. I absolutely loved. That's not scifi, but that deserves to be up there. I liked the Hurt Locker so much that I got halfway home from the theater and I realized I left my purse in the theater. That's a compliment, that's when you know you enjoyed a film. But yes, for science fiction specifically, I have to say I was disappointed Moon wasn't included.

Sometimes we feel that science fiction is the red-headed step child of award ceremonies, especially in Best Picture. Do you agree?

It definitely seems that this year it's getting some respect. I'm not sure why that is. I'm still shocked District 9 is. I have no explanation for that, none. Avatar, it's James Cameron, it's huge. It's a film that appeals to everybody, younger kids and families. So I understand why that's in there. But District 9, it's a mystery to me, I really just don't understand it, I'm just really happy that it happened. I hope that it opens up avenues for future scifi films to come, because I think scifi is amazing. Sometimes a lot of people shut their minds to it, because they don't understand what it is.

I was reading an article yesterday that claimed that Dark Knight opened the door for District 9's Best Picture nomination, what do you think about that?

Right, because [as a result of Dark Knight's shutout, there's now room for] 10 pictures, too. There is no question District 9 would not be nominated for Best Picture, if there were only 5. I think I know the article you mean where it said Neill should be calling up Christopher Nolan and thanking him? [Laughs] Yeah I definitely think that's true that yes, we would not have been in the top 5 for sure. So I personally, and I know there's a lot of controversy over making it 10, but even before we were nominated I was still in favor of it. Because it is nice to see different dramas in there. So people can get excited about different films. I've been a die hard Oscar fan since I was a little girl. I was brought up where you ripped the announcement out of the TV Times and every family member would put in who they thought would win, and at the end of the night you totaled it up to see who would win. It's just more fun, if there are other films that people can root for.

District 9 has been called getting praise all year, but what has it been like since yesterday? Are all your projects now getting the green light overnight?

[Laughs] Neill already kind of had that going on so he's covered. The big thing for me with District 9 was getting an agent, because I live in Vancouver, so to get to be a writer represented in LA is really tough. So that was huge, but I actually got that before, writing for Peter Jackson, kind of opened that door. And when it did well people are now willing to read my spec scripts, so that's a good thing. But as for how an Oscar nomination is going to change things, I don't know. I'm not going after paid writing jobs, I'm more into writing at my own pace, and seeing what happens with it. For now at least.

So James Cameron didn't call you and say "It's On!"

[Laughs] No! Gimme a week, we'll see. [Laughs] No. Writing with Neill was great, because I know him so well. I know exactly, exactly what he's after. And I can write for him. I'm writing for another director now who is one of our best friends and know him so well, I know how to write for him. So it kind of stresses me out to think about writing for a known director.

What's next? We know that Neill is currently working on another scifi project, that he wants to keep semi-low budget, are you working on that project with him?

No, aside from the fact I live with him, but apart from passing it back and forth, no he's doing this one on his own. We decided after doing District 9... we have a daughter, it just took over our entire lives. You couldn't have a dinner without talking whether Christopher Johnson should make it home or not. It just took over every minute of our lives. We'd wake up in the middle of the night with "I have an idea!" We decided to try and to preserve the home life and to work separately. He's working on this one on his own, but I think he's getting pretty close to the end. I have to tell you, it's amazing. It's really amazing. It' going to be really good, it's definitely scifi and I think it's going to be a little bit over the budget of District 9, but not too much.

We're excited for more scifi, will it be set in the near future like District 9 or in the now? District 9 was so gritty and dirty, will Neill try a more sterile approach?

I think Neill will always be gritty and dirty with his work. That's very much his style, that's what he likes. So I think even if it were to be in the far future, which I'm not saying it is, but even if it were — in my mind, I think [in the] future everything is slick and clean, [but] I think his far future would still be gritty.

Does he have any idea who he wants to work with him on this film?

For actors and actresses? No, no. I don't think he's made that decision yet. We constantly play that game: "What about them, what about them?" But he hasn't made that decision.

What are you working on right now, are you staying with genre work?

The heart and soul thing that I really want to do is write children's novels, always... The film I'm working on now is an adaptation of a short film called Terminus. It's a bit more science fiction, fantasy. It's about a stone creature that follows this stressed-out guy around, just stressing him more and more. It was incredibly well received, and the director that created it, [Trevor Cawood] hasn't done a feature yet, and he's really talented. I approached him about writing a feature script of that. It's been a little more challenging than I expected it to be. I'm probably on my second draft now. I'm not ready to send it off yet, but we'll see.

Here's the short film she's referring to:

So you're interested in writing children's novels or young adult?

Young Adult, the day that I feel like I've really made it is when I can walk into a book store in the YA section and see a novel of mine on the shelves. And something scifi, definitely. The dream of all dreams would be to write a young adult science fiction novel and adapt it to the screen.

Are you ever going to write with Neill again? Maybe on a D9 sequel?

I'm sure we will. If, if District 9 were to have a sequel, we'd work on that together. But who knows. In the meantime we enjoy being each others' helpers.

When is the District 9 video game coming out?

Nobody jumped on that. It was talked about initially and it never happened, I don't think they are going to do it. And the figurines, WETA is doing a Christopher Johnson, little CJ and the exo-suit collectibles. It seems like there was so much stuff that could have been done, but I don't think anybody thought it was going to be such a success, that it was. I guess it didn't get going early enough.

It's gotta be pretty sweet sitting here now after all the Halo fiasco, I'm not sure how close you were to that project. But it was pretty disheartening with Microsoft and everything.

You know Microsoft, they were great through it all. There is no animosity at all towards Microsoft, they were wonderful...it was more Fox. You know what, for me it worked out better. I wasn't on Halo at all. For Neill, at the end of the day, while he would have done an amazing Halo fim, in fact I'm standing in my living room right now and I have all these amazing WETA sculptures of all the Halo characters that they were developing with Neill. It would have been a fabulous movie. But I think it was better for Neill that he created something wholly his own. And District 9 is 100% Neill Blomkamp and Halo wasn't. I think it all worked out for the best.

Famed SF author Connie Willis' first novel in five years, Blackout, returns to a scenario she's explored before: Time-traveling scholars find themselves changing historical events they're only supposed to observe. This sprawling novel veers between historical travelogue and futuristic thriller.

One of Willis' strengths as an author is her attention to detail, both in terms of historical worldbuilding and characters. In Blackout (Bantam Spectra), which mostly takes place in early 1940s England, her main characters are finely observed, prone to fits of pettiness as well as moments of extreme bravery. We never forget that these are fairly ordinary history graduate students, dealing with departmental politics as well as time travel. On their missions, they discover that even in the midst of war, the British continue on with their lives, reading fashion magazines and worrying over their naughty children.

Wills' ability to evoke the sheer ordinariness of horrific situations is what made her black plague novel Doomsday Book one of the most powerful time travel novels I've ever read. And you can see her doing the same thing in Blackout, where Polly goes to London to work in a dress shop during the Blitz; Mike goes to observe "everyday heroes" at the evacuation of Dunkirk; and Eileen goes to the countryside outside London to pose as a maid in the house of a wealthy woman who took in young evacuees during the raids. All of them are tasked with a simple mission, which is to observe what is always lost in grand histories of enormous events: What the ordinary people were doing.

Unfortunately, just as the historians are ready to leave the temporally-unstable "divergence point" of World War II, they discover that "the net," their time-travel tech, isn't working. They return to their pickup points again and again, but find no glowing doorway back to the Oxford History Department. They're stuck, and they have to improvise. Without changing history in any way.

Into this relatively simple and exciting story, Willis pours a wealth of detail about wartime England - such a wealth, in fact, that one begins to feel suffocated by it. An entire chapter is taken up with descriptions of a church; Mike spends three chapters learning to understand British crossword puzzles; and Polly spends just as much time having increasingly tiresome discussions about about the plays of M. Barrie versus Shakespeare with the people sharing her air raid shelter.

Ideally, these kinds of details should pay off, and in other Willis novels they do. Once she's filled out her world, she pushes the action forward into a smart, intense momentum, made all the more poignant because we've lived for so long with these characters. Unfortunately, that doesn't happen in Blackout.

Partly that's because Blackout is just the first half of a two-part story, and it ends literally at the moment when the action begins to get going. This is not a standalone novel in any way, and you'll feel cheated when you get to the end and discover that you made your way through all those crosswords and quaint period details only to be told that you have to wait until fall for the story to get going in the sequel, called All Clear.

But the structure of this unfortunately-divided story isn't all to blame. There is simply too much extraneous and repetitive detail weighing the narrative down. Even fans of historical writing may find themselves growing impatient.

That said, there is much to celebrate about Willis' return to the world of time-traveling historians. She juxtaposes scenes of genuine horror with bits of domestic comedy, creating a tone that perfectly captures the rhythm of war at home. And she conveys the historians' mounting terror nicely, as they find themselves stranded weeks, and then months, after they were due to return.

Lurking in the background of their predicament is something hinted at as the story begins: It's possible that the practice of time traveling is altering the timeline irreparably. There's also a time-warped love story unfolding. The teenage Colin, back in the future, is in love with grad student Polly - and he's hoping to use time travel to catch up to her in age so they can be together. He's promised to rescue her if anything goes wrong, so there's no doubt that we'll be seeing their age-shifted potential romance in All Clear.

Unless you are an absolutely rabid Willis fan - which would be understandable - or you are infinitely patient, I would recommend waiting to buy Blackout until All Clear is also available later this year. It seems obvious to me that they need to be read back-to-back, and it's a shame the publisher didn't offer readers that opportunity.

Blackout hits bookstores this week. Pick it up online from Random House.

If modern civilization collapsed, could the survivors hope to rebuild using our massive stores of data? Unless we can come up with something way more permanent to put them on in the near future, we probably shouldn't bank on it.

A recent article by Tom Simonite and Michael Le Page in New Scientist tackles this question by positing a minor cataclysm: something bad enough to tear apart civilization as we know it, but not quite enough to kill off humans entirely. Candidates include a pandemic, a financial collapse that would make 2008's pale in comparison, a severe natural disaster, or just the slow accumulation of decay in society's foundations.

The question, then, is in the absence of most of the raw materials that powered the construction of our current industrial civilization - there wouldn't be nearly enough fossil fuels to rebuild from scratch, for instance - whether the survivors of this collapse could make use of the one great resource we would leave behind in huge quantities: information. If we could leave behind the equivalent of a cheat sheet for these post-apocalyptic survivors, could they perhaps bypass the trial and error of rebuilding science and jump straight to the achievements of the 21st century?

The problem with that is how we could possibly hope to preserve all that data. The world's estimated stored data runs well into the petabytes (that's millions of gigabytes), and in order to contain so much data information technology has taken a turn for the short-lived and unstable. We still have readable clay tablets from millennia ago and legible paper from centuries in the past, but their modern equivalents could not reasonably hope to survive that long.

Hard drives were never meant for long-term data storage, and so relatively little effort has been putting into determining their maximum possible lifespan. Other common formats, like CDs and magnetic tape, are generally estimated to only last between five and ten years, particularly if poorly preserved, which is a reasonable assumption in most post-apocalyptic scenarios. Flash drives, as well, probably can only be counted on for about a decade.

Very few of the world's data centers - where the internet's workhorse servers are housed - are built to withstand natural disasters, and even fewer are built to be self-sustaining in the event that humans get distracted by the end of the world. Under those conditions, data would likely degrade quickly.

Even the success stories in data retrieval come with a whole lot of qualifications. For instance, a trustee at Great Britain's computing museum was recently able to retrieve all the data from a hard drive that had been switched off since the early 80s. However, that drive was only 456 megabytes, and it's hard to say whether researchers in the late 2030s would have similar success retrieving data from the new terabyte hard drives that are hitting the market.

This is because the storage density on modern hard drives is many, many times that of their 80s predecessors, which makes them more fragile and vulnerable to degradation. The relatively big bits of data on the 456 megabyte drive could weather minor damage that would wipe out the much smaller bits in modern hard drive, so the resilience of the older hard drive isn't necessarily a great indicator of the toughness of its modern counterpart.

Then there's the recent case of Dennis Wingo and Keith Cowing, who have been working at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California to recover data from old magnetic tapes. Although the tapes were themselves perfectly stored, it took months of painstaking work to recover the original high-resolution images. To accomplish even this relatively simple task (imagine trying to do the same with a terabyte hard drive), they needed a ton of funding and had to basically reinvent abandoned retrieval technology. That probably would have been impossible if they had not been able to rely on the assistance of a retired NASA engineer who had worked on the original project in the sixties. Those are a whole lot of resources the survivors of a mild civilization collapse wouldn't have access to. (Then again, you never know.)

There are some options for the long-term preservation of data in ways that would be relatively easily retrievable in the event of catastrophe, but most enterprises in this area have sputtered because of a lack of commercial interest. One promising possibility is the Rosetta disk, which can hold a whopping 13,500 pages on a disk the size of a nickel and would only require future humans to have access to a decently high-powered microscope. Compared to needing a working laptop and charger to plug in a USB hard drive, that really isn't all that much.

[New Scientist]

Figs and fig wasps have lived in symbioses for centuries — wasps lay their eggs in figs, and pollinate the trees as recompense. But it's not all altruism. The trees will fight back if the wasps renege on the deal.

The symbiotic relationship has been in existence for around 80 million years, with the wasps stashing their eggs in the fig fruits where they can develop safely, and pollinating the plants in return for the service. This relationship is so functional that there are over 700 different figs and wasp species pairs that engage in it.

So what's to stop the wasp from reneging on their side of the deal, and leaving the fig to its own devices — effectively shifting from a symbiotic to a parasitic relationship? It turns out the fig trees have a surprisingly effective trick up their branches.

If the wasps don't do their duty, the trees respond by enacting a sanction — aborting their fruit, killing off the teeming mass of baby wasps. A new study of this killer tree phenomenon, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B comes from Cornell University and The Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, shows that negative reinforcement may be an important part of symbiotic relationships.

Pollination by wasp comes in two varieties: passive and active. With passive pollination the wasps carry pollen that happens to stick to their bodies; where with active pollination they collect pollen in special pouches to deliver to the flowers.

With the passive pairings, the fig trees abort their fruit far less often than with active pairs. In the actively pollinating groups, the tree species that tend to enforce sanctions less often have a higher occurrence of freeloader wasps, who take advantage of the figs without doing any of the work. Inversely, by using the sanction option more frequently, some fig species have a lower incidence of non-pollinating insects.

Lead author of the study Charlotte Jandér said:

Sanctions seem to be a necessary force in keeping this and other mutually beneficial relationships on track when being part of a mutualism is costly. In our study, we saw less cheating when sanctions were stronger. Similar results have been found among human societies and social insects. It is very appealing to think that the same general principles could help maintain cooperation both within and among species.

via Proceedings of the Royal Society B [full scientific paper] and Cornell University [release]

Image Copyright Christian Ziegler, via Cornell University

The Federation is trying desperately to maintain peace in a chaotic galaxy shattered by war. Violent Klingons and bizarre alien invaders threaten. Sounds like the earliest days of Star Trek, but this is the galaxy's future in Star Trek Online.

Star Trek Online begins in the year 2409, 30 years after the events of Star Trek: Nemesis. More importantly, it's just over 20 years since Spock traveled back in time after the destruction of the Romulan homeworld. That event destabilized the galaxy, cascading into a chain of events that puts an emphasis on warfare rather than peaceful exploration.

While the game incorporates elements of the J.J. Abrams Star Trek movie as they affect the "prime" Trek timeline, there is no reference to "nu-Kirk" and the other rebooted characters. As soon as Spock went back in time, he created a divergent timeline. The actions of the reboot characters don't affect events in the long-established Trek canon. Still, the Federation is left to deal with the aftermath of Romulus' destruction, which did happen in the prime timeline.

That aftermath includes the Klingons reverting to their old aggressive stance, going to war against both the Romulans and the Gorn. To further complicate matters, the Klingons believe the Federation has been infiltrated by the Undine, a race you probably know better as Species 8472. The Undine have developed some kind of shapeshifting technology, and have probably infiltrated the Klingon Empire as well. That gives the whole situation a nice dose of Cold War paranoia.

The Klingons aren't the only antagonists, however. The tutorial mission takes you through a sudden, bizarre attack by some malfunctioning Borg. The somewhat hilarious conceit that every player gets to captain his or her own ship straight out of Starfleet Academy is played off as, "It's wartime, kid." Fair enough.

It's an intriguing set-up, and directs the Star Trek mythos in a more action-oriented direction (although it begins to feel like the extended Star Wars universe, with the endless cycles of benevolent Republic becoming corrupt Empire being overthrown by plucky Rebels who form a benevolent Republic). Are the events in Star Trek Online official canon? Really, nothing beyond TV episodes and films is "official," and even then there are contradictions that cause some fans to argue against certain episodes counting toward canon. It is best to consider the game "soft canon," like the novels and comic books.

Of course, you can't actually end the storyline in an online game; there can never be any true cathartic climax that gives you any sense of resolution. As one player with a lot of experience playing in Star Trek Online's open beta put it:

I got the sense that the story is moving to where they can almost-but-not-quite seamlessly introduce two paid expansion packs letting you play Romulans and Cardassians and/or Changelings. The Borg are going to be bogeymen to be pulled out for end-game content whenever they have a hole that needs to be plugged.

So the status quo of the Trek universe was shifted drastically prior to the game's launch, but don't expect things to change much as long as people are paying their monthly subscription fees.

The story is interesting, if a bit open-ended, but is it any fun to play? At times it feels like the culmination of every Trek fans' ultimate dream, to walk around the halls of Earth Spacedock interacting with Federation officials, meeting Sulu's awkwardly named great-grandson, actually being in Starfleet. When you look out the observation deck window and see the limitless gulfs of space, it's pretty cool. When you're warping across the galaxy and receive a hail from the admiral asking you to check out a spacial anomaly in the Paulson Nebula, that's pretty cool. Also cool: the ability to customize your character, including creating your own alien race; customizing your ship's design, including the lighting on your bridge; developing a specialized set of skills within your chosen discipline (science, engineering or tactical).

Less cool is the clunky ground combat on away missions, which all seem to devolve into a basic shoot-em-up that feels very un-Trekky. The lack of full three-dimensional space combat is also a drag. Starships maneuver like underpowered airplanes, unable to loop, roll or deviate from the arbitrary flat "plane" of space by more than 45 degrees. Ultimately, grinding through space combats to increase rank got boring very quickly. My Vulcan science officer (T'Rell…and it took a major act of willpower to not name her T'Pain) felt utterly outmatched in combat, both on the ground and in space. Since that seems to be the game's major focus, most missions left me frustrated.

If you love Star Trek, or just the idea of captaining your own starship, Star Trek Online is worth a look. At its core, it offers a way to interact with a beloved mythos in a way we've never really had before. Will the thrill of shifting power to the forward shields, firing salvos of photon torpedos at a Bird of Prey and clicking your engineer's "emergency shield power" button while yelling, "I'm givin' 'er all she's got!" make up for the mechanical frustrations? I guess it depends on how much those rank pips on your Starfleet uniform mean to you.

Sign up to play on the official Star Trek Online site.

Science fiction has long played with the idea of projecting unified personalities/minds/"souls" into different bodies. The premise is baked into the plots of stories like Avatar and Caprica. But how would it work in the real world?

That's what the science of "embodied cognition" is all about. The basic idea in this new(ish) research area (which overlaps with cognitive psychology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, robotics, and others) is this: Your mind is defined by your physical form. Not just in terms of "the mind is what the brain does"-we all are pretty down with that already. This takes it further to encompass the whole enchilada: your mind-your "I"-is a function of a cephalized, bipedal, plantigrade, bilaterally symmetrical body between 1.5 and 2 meters tall with two arms terminating in five-fingered hands with opposable thumbs, two lungs, a warm-blooded vascular system, mostly hairless skin, two front-focused eyes, etc. etc. Change any aspects of that physical configuration-in subtle or radical ways-and the mind will inevitably change too.

That might sound a bit "no shit, Sherlock" at first blush, but it's actually got profound implications about what it means to be recognizably human "on the inside." In fact, that very phrase might not even make sense. After all, there's no "little you" inside your body "looking out", Terminator-style. Your perceptions, actions and thoughts all feel direct, integrated, and grounded. You don't "drive" your body, you ARE it. So why do we still assume that we might take that "little man" out and plop him into a different body to "look out of", without any consequences?

Take Avatar. James Cameron stacked the deck by making the Na'Vi basically humanoid with a few cosmetic changes thrown in. Then again, the Na'Vi are twice as tall as humans, have longer arms, fewer fingers, have bigger, wider-set eyes, and ears that can move independently. Not to mention their prehensile plug-in-brain-tails, which add a major perceptual (and explicitly cognitive, given how the Na'Vi "jack in" to the mass Eywa consciousness) modality that has absolutely no analogue in the human body. What would all of that feel like? What would that think like? (Not human, that's for sure.) The point is that through the lens of embodied cognition, those questions are just two sides to the same coin.

Of course, Avatar doesn't go into any of that interesting territory; it sticks with the "Jake Sully can effortlessly interchange between bodies on the fly" approach. Granted, there is one minor scene showing Jake clumsily acclimating to his Na'Vi body-which makes sense, given that all his proprioperceptive expectations and instincts no longer apply. But it's more likely that the disorientation would be much more profound, and he probably would have needed some serious physical therapy before bounding off into the forest in his hospital gown. His mind, his literal sense of self, would need time to retune and retrofit itself to his new body. And the same thing would happen every time he jacked out of his Avatar body back into his human one. What kind of unpredictable effects would that stress have on his mind, his "I"?

OK-interesting to ponder, but maybe not the stuff of kickass action movies. But still, it does point the way toward a much more interesting angle on Avatar's "going native" plotline. If you spent most of your waking hours embodied as a Na'Vi, how could you NOT be increasingly at risk of going native? Your essential psychological human-ness would inevitably drift and deform-Hell, without some kind of mitigating mechanism, Sigourney Weaver's character should have gone off the reservation long before Sully even showed up. (At the very least, this could have provided a more intriguing reason for how and why Jake went turncoat against his own species so damn fast.)

And what if your "avatar" wasn't something blue and sexy, but much less humanoid? District 9 went a little deeper to this territory in depicting Wikus's metamorphosis into a Prawn. The ideas of embodied cognition also enable a much more bittersweet interpretation of the movie's ending: By the time Christopher comes back to Earth, years later, with the means to fully "re-humanify" Wikus, that very procedure would be meaningless: Wikus will have spent so long embodied as a Prawn that he would no longer BE human "on the inside."

Embodied cognition also gives realistic credence to a scenario like that in Ender's Game, which depicts humanity in an accidental war to the death with a species of insectile "buggers." The buggers are clearly sapient and/or sentient, but utterly, opaquely alien-so much that their most basic assumptions about neutral communication with another species (us) come off as murderously hostile. Situated in an entirely different morphology, emerging from an entirely evolutionary heritage (more akin to stigmergic insects than autonomous mammals), the buggers' "hive mind" was not even recognizable or meaningful to humans as such.

But wait, there's more: Embodied cognition also gives a somewhat ominous real-world context to Orson Scott Card's ingenious "hierarchy of alien-ness" (which he invented to categorize the various intelligences in his Ender saga). If psychology and consciousness are defined by the body, it may very well be that any species we might consider "ramen" (ie, Card's term for "capable of meaningful communication," not instant noodles) would necessarily have to be very, very close to humanoid in physical form-and that the further any species diverges from that, the more likely they are to be "varelse"-intelligent, but completely opaque to communication or human understanding (an extreme example being the sentient planet in Solaris).

In any case, I want to read/see/watch more science fiction that takes these powerful ideas into account. I've seen bits here and there. Asimov's "Bicentennial Man" goes there, sort of, in presenting a robot that becomes more and more "phenomenally human" as his physical body is gradually upgraded to match real human anatomy. And Peter Watts's Rifters trilogy (especially the first book, Starfish) touches on this intelligently as well: the characters are physically modified to be able to breathe seawater at the bottom of the ocean, and, not surprisingly, "going native" (essentially becoming more fishlike, mentally, than human) is an ongoing concern in the plot.

An earlier version of this post appeared here, and you can learn more about the author here.

NOTE: This blog post is in response to the near real-time critique of The Phantom Menace that swept the 'net (available here , among other places)

 -RB2

What adult Star Wars fans who hate episodes 1-3 with a kind of religious fervor have forgotten is that they fell in love with the original trilogy when they were kids. All the adult critics of their day kept talking about how bad Star Wars was. Isaac Asimov ripped it to shreds. The fans loved those movies as kids. Kids today love the new trilogy. What everyone seems to be missing is that every movie in the series has some major flaw that’s laughable. I mean how bad a shot can a storm trooper be (episode IV)? Or how can a space worm with no food resources available to it ever have teeth, need to eat, or even be alive? Or how could a bunch of ewoks with stone age weapons possibly defeat a legion of storm troopers? In the end, true Star Wars fans just need to make the choice to like the movies—all of them—or stop being fans. The ones who say the original trilogy is wonderful and the new trilogy terrible are fooling themselves. All of the movies are good. All of them are flawed. Some are better than others. And that’s my official word on the matter. All who disagree are welcome not to respond to this entry in any way shape or form.

Sincerely,

A guy who thinks he's totally right about this one.

I was feeling terrible last night, just full-on sick terrible. One of those flu-days where you just want to go to bed at 7, and lapse into a coma for a couple days until you’re feeling better. I really didn’t feel like staying up for two hours of Lost, and I didn’t feel like I’d have been able to do it even if I wanted to. I try to put the needs of you, the readers, before my own, however, and I figured I’d give it a shot.

I’m really glad I did. The episode hooked me and held on tight for two hours. Just as I think things can’t get any stranger, they turn up the convolution factor again, and manage to re-ignite my waning interest. (As opposed to, say, the RDM Galactica, where my interest was long since spent, but I held on to the bitter end in hopes the show would redeem itself in some way. It didn’t, of course.)

PLAY BY PLAY

We start out with a recap of the bomb and Juliet’s sacrifice from the season finale last year. Everything goes white - which most of us presumed was the bomb going off - and the next thing you know, we’re back on the original plane trip, with jack being snarky about his drink to the stewardess, and them hitting air pockets. Everything calms down, however, and they continue to fly on their way without incident. We then get a quick shot of The Island sunken beneath the ocean.

We then have *another* recap of the bomb and Juliet’s sacrifice, after which everything goes white, and then we find Kate in a tree. She gets out of the tree, finds Miles, then finds the blast crater created when the Swan Hatch blew up at the end of the second season. “It didn’t work,” she says.

That’s right, kids, we now have two timelines running divergently! To avoid taxing your patience, I’ll detail them separately:

In The Rebooted Timeline:

The Transoceanic flight heads towards LA, and Desmond - who’s inexplicably on board - sits next to Jack and reads a book. but someone notes that Charlie isn’t coming out of the bathroom. They ask Jack for help. Sayid busts open the bathroom door, and Jack finds that the washed-up rock star isn’t breathing. He fixes that, but of course they find he was choking on a bag full o’ cocaine. He’s none too thrilled about being rescued. Charlie is restrained and sent back to his seat. When Jack gets back to his own, Desmond is gone. Meanwhile, Locke and Boone strike up a conversation, but Boone’s sister, Shannon, is inexplicably not on the flight.

They land at LAX without further incident, but Jack finds out they’ve lost his father’s corpse. Locke explains that they didn’t loose Jack’s dad, just his dad’s body. Moved by this, he offers to try and fix Locke’s spine, free of charge. Kate, meanwhile, manages to escape form her guard/escort, and carjacks a cab with a very pregnant Clair Littleton in it. Sun and Jin never make it through customs - the officials find a big wad of cash in his suitcase that wasn’t declared, but since he speaks no English they take him into custody until the matter can be straightened out. Sun speaks English, but can’t blow her cover about that, so she plays dumb.

In The Business As Usual Timeline:

Meanwhile, everyone connected with the bomb fiasco. Sawyer beats hell out of Jack for being wrong and killing Juliet. They hear Juliet screaming from the shaft, so Sawyer heads down to rescue her. She has a breakdown when she realizes her sacrifice accomplished nothing, then she starts doing that same Billy Pilgrim “Unstuck in Time” thing that Charlotte was doing, where she’s speaking her half of a conversation from the past, unaware of the present. This clears, and she tries to tell Sawyer something really important, but dies.

Jacob’s ghost appears to Hurley, and tells him to take the briefcase and Sayid to “The Temple.” Jin will know where it is. After some uncomfortable milling around, team Jack goes, leaving Sawyer and Miles behind to burry Juliet.

Sawyer forces Miles to read Juliet’s dead mind: the message she was trying to impart was, “It worked.” Neither of them know what this means.

At the statue, “John” talks to Ben about killing Jacob. He tells Ben to go outside and bring in Richard. He attempts to do this, but Richard grabs Ben and shows him Locke’s corpse. The mysterious soldier-type-guys who appeared last season, and were carrying Locke’s coffin around storm the statue and shoot Evil Locke, but he transforms into the Black Smoke Monster (!) and kills them all. One of them buys some time by making himself a circle of ashes from a sacred flame, and the monster can’t get past that, but he collapses part of the ceiling, causing the soldier to jump out of the way, and then, once he’s out of the circle, he kills him.

Ben realizes that Evil Locke had been using him, and is pretty upset. Locke declares to all the followers outside - including Sun and Frank -how disappointed in them all he is, then beats the crap out of Richard.

Attempting to enter the temple, Team Jack is ambushed by others and captured. The kinda’ cool Japanese guy who runs the temple - a priest, perhaps? - is going to kill them until Hurley opens his guitar case and they find a large ankh in it. The Japanese guy breaks it open, and there’s a note inside. This changes his mind, and they bring them all inside the temple, to put Sayid in the spring. The water is a different color now, which confounds them, but they try anyway. Sayid dies. Jack tries to bring him back, but to no avail.

Sawyer and Miles are captured by the priestly Others as well, then Hurley lets it slip that Jacob is dead. Everyone in the temple freaks the hell out and starts preparing for an attack, launching fireworks into the sky, and laying down a perimeter of sacred ash.

Sayid comes back to life…

The End

OBSERVATIONS

So now we’ve got two diverging timelines, one in which the accident happened, another in which the Island apparently sank. How and why? Well, in the “No Crash” timeline, the Bomb must have gone off, in which case possibly it destroyed the island, or maybe not. In the “Crash” timeline, however, everyone appears to be in the same time again, and events progressed exactly as they always had, with our main characters evidently causing “The Incident” at The Swan, as they were predestined to do.

Juliet’s postmortem final words were interesting, suggesting that the plan worked, but not in the way they intended, obviously. Given that all last season was about Fate vs. Free Will, I found myself wondering if we’re actually looking at a “Fate” timeline and a “Free Will” one. Fate is obviously the folks on the island, Free will would be the folks in the “No Crash” timeline.

Of course this is all just a wild surmise, but that’s what I took from it. What did you folks think?

So Charlie was suicidal *before* they crashed on the island?

With Desmond being on the plane and Shannon *not* being on the plane, it would appear this new timeline diverged slightly *before* the flight took place.

Jack says that “The funeral is in two hours” and Jin says that he has a business meeting in two hours. Given how interconnected the Lostiverse is, could Jin’s meeting be *at* Christian Shepherd’s funeral?

How did Juliet know that they’d created a new timeline?

Presumably, the waters went muddy when Jacob died.

Evil Locke/The Black Smoke Monster wants to go home. Why, and where is home?

Man, we had a lot of cameos in this episode, didn’t we? The science teacher - annoying as ever - Boone, Charlie, the stewardess lady, the two little kids with the teddy bear nabbed by the Others, even the same Captain’s Voice over the PA, but reading new lines.

That said, it’s hard to pretend these people look like they did six years ago: Jack’s got a different haircut and he’s got some grey in his sideburns, Sawyers got just a dash of grey in his beard, Boone’s quite a bit denser than he used to be, Charlie looks wirier and kind of pugnacious (More like his character from Flash Forward than the Charlie we know), and of course the Stewardess Lady had way long hair now. Remember, these folks crashed on the island before George W. Bush’s second term, so the actors are all considerably older now, and some of them are definitely starting to look it.

For the record, Desmond and Juliet are off the cast this season, but Claire is back on the cast. I presume that in the “Business as Usual” timeline, this means Des and Penny had their happy ending, and sailed off into the sunset with their little boy. In the “No Crash” universe, obviously, this must not have happened.

Regardless of the philosophical underpinnings of the dual timelines, it’s obvious purpose is to show us what the Lostaways’ lives would have been like if the crash had never happened. Well, duh. Will it be a happy ending, or a sad one for them? Well, Evil Locke gives what might be a clue when he says “John was the only one who didn’t want to leave, the only one who realized how pathetic his life off the island was.” This hints that the folks in the “No Crash” universe will probably have a pretty miserable time, being killed off or otherwise ruined ten-little-Indians style, while the folks on the island will step up and save the world.

Of course I could be completely wrong on this, conversely, the “No Crash” universe could be all about giving our characters a happy ending while the ones on the island get ruined and/or killed. I suspect this isn’t the case, however, since Rose has terminal cancer, and without the island there to save her, she doesn’t have long to live. And Charlie’s in jail for possession. And Kate’s on the lam, again. Sun and Jin's marriage is all-but-dead, and so on.

So: a lot of neat stuff going on here, and I’m not being hypercritical, but here at the start of the endgame, I found some things kind of nagging at me:

1) We never really found out what The Swan Hatch was for, though the plot has been weaving in and out of it for five years now.

2) I’m not entirely sure that Evil Locke being The Black Smoke Monster entirely makes sense. Don’t get me wrong, it’s cool and all, but it feels a little bit retconned. I mean, at different times, the monster has appeared to be mindless and beastial, at others it’s been reasonably benevolent, on others it’s appeared to be Ben’s pet attack dog. So I’m not sure if it’s being The Devil entirely tracks. It is sorta’ neat, though, so I’m not complaining too much.

3) You know, there’s a lot of dead ends and blind alleys in this show. Aside from Rose and her husband, you could cut out the entire second season and not really loose anything of consequence. The entire Mister Eko plot was particularly frustrating, since it came to nothing and ate up a hell of a lot of screen time.

That’s all regarding the Series as a whole, of course. Objections to this specific episode: It felt a little bit padded out, like they had too much story for one episode, and not enough story for two. It felt a bit talky for a season opener, particularly for a season as important as this one. I didn’t really think that Juliet needed a death scene, I felt it was time consuming, kind of slow, and it robbed her season-ending sacrifice of a lot of its impact. I realize they needed to get that message to Sawyer, but there’s a zillion other ways they could have done that. I also felt the episode was a bit over-scored, you know? Normally the soundtrack is rather sparse, but there was a lot of music going on here, even in scenes that didn’t really call for it. In one or two moments, I found it rather distracting.