Comics Friday: The Fringe Candidates

Hijinks Ensue

It is a golden age for 10 year-old boys

One of the great things about kids, your own or somebody else's, is introducing them to things. Not in a skeezy priest way, I mean things like giving a kid their first lemon wedge or snow cone. It's even better when you have fond memories of the shared experience. The Princess Bride is popular in my house, and sharing that cross-generationally has been great.

All of that is to say, if you know a 10 year-old boy, they would enjoy the A-Team.

A famous person has died

via yepyep

Futurama gets renewed for 26 episodes

Weird, but true, and hopefully awesome.

My baby's fooling around with a satellite

Researchers at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland constructed a computer model to create a synthetic galaxy with billions of stars and planets. They then studied how life evolved under various conditions in this virtual world, using a supercomputer to crunch the results.

In a paper published recently in the International Journal of Astrobiology, the researchers concluded that based on what they saw, at least 361 intelligent civilizations have emerged in the Milky Way since its creation, and as many as 38,000 may have formed. |CNN|

The obvious question is, if intelligent life is so plentiful, why can't we get alien channels on the TV? To clarify my thinking on this question, I did some back of the envelope math, which I'd now like to share with you.

Let's start with some assumptions. The Milky Way is about 10 billion years old, intelligent species are on the galactic scene for about 100,000 years, and civilizations are distributed roughly equally across time.

I can't justify any of those, but I can say something about the last two. Taking the last first, this makes the math easier. With regard to the other, in the current pulp sci-fi I'm reading the assumption is 50,000 years, but that seems parsimonious. My thought is: it took human kind about 100,000 years to get to radio and surely we'll destroy ourselves within the next 100 milennia.

Given all that, and working with the upper bound of 38,000 civilizations, it turns out that you'd expect that there is an intelligent civilization broadcasting about 1/3 of the time.

What does all this mean? In a word, that even in light of this finding it should be no surprise that we remain mired in terrestrial programming.

Friday reviews

Braid (video game)



It's about time travel. It's a moving watercolor painting. It's a poetic reinterpretation of Super Mario.

If you have an xbox, you have to try this game. The demo is free. Go. Do it now.

Burn After Reading (movie by those guys)

It's funny, it's awesome. Unless you feel that they should only be doing the dark movies like Miller's Crossing (my favorite) and No Country for Old Men, you will probably like it.


Fringe (TV show starring Joshua Jackson¹)

I thought this was the promised American version of The 11th Hour. But no, it's just the X-Files with an old-school cranky Doctor Who thrown in (They know it, too. they defensively bring up Doc. Who references just to distance themselves from it.... It's weird.)

Oh, and spoilerz alert. It's pretty clear the Doctor Who guy cloned and/or designed his son, who will of course be the key to the whole "pattern." 

Blech.
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1 -- These days, he wouldn't last one minute on the Creek.

Three cheers for the Big Ten Network

All last year Comcast ran ads telling me how evil the Big Ten Network was. Then, Comcast caved, and now I've got the Big Ten twenty four seven. Tonight it's Drew Brees and Purdue taking on the Kansas State Wildcats of Michael Bishop in 1998's Alamo Bowl.

...the convention? Maybe later. They're watching at the OG.

HBO smackdown

I'd rank the quality of HBO's dramas as follows:

1. The Wire
   
2. Deadwood
   
3. The Sopranos
   
4. Entourage

Agree? Disagree? Where would Weeds fit? Six Feet Under? How many consecutive sentences can end in a question mark?