I take it that this is a review of a new SF series currently underway on American TV. It contains the classic line:

No shit, Sherlock? Colour me as completely unsurprised…  

Her entrance is enough to bring tears to the eyes, but there’s more! Camp and tacky as hell, but strangely wonderful… 

 

(hat tip to Lyn David Thomas over in the haunted wing that is Usenet for the link)

 

 

I’ve mentioned the forthcoming computer game called Spore before. It’s still not available (unfortunately) having been delayed to next year. However, here, to whet your appetite, is Will Wright, the game’s creator, demonstrating Spore at this year’s TED conference.

 

http://static.videoegg.com/ted/flash/loader.swf 

The poet Rives has a lot of fun following coincidences in this talk at TED. He plays into the human brain’s hardwired ability to see connections where none necessarily exist. It’s easy to see how conspiracy theorists power their fantasies from this sort of thing. 

 

http://static.videoegg.com/ted/flash/loader.swf 

Another test, another somewhat expected result…

 

Your Score: Robot

You are 100% Rational, 0% Extroverted, 42% Brutal, and 14% Arrogant.

You are the Robot! You are characterized by your rationality. In fact, this is really ALL you are characterized by. Like a cold, heartless machine, you are so logical and unemotional that you scarcely seem human. For instance, you are very humble and don’t bother thinking of your own interests, you are very gentle and lack emotion, and you are also very introverted and introspective. You may have noticed that these traits are just as applicable to your laptop as they are to a human being. You are not like the robots they show in the movies. Movie robots are make-believe, because they always get all personable and likeable after being struck by lightning, or they are cold, cruel killing machines. In all reality, though, you are much more boring than all that. Real robots just sit there, doing their stupid jobs, and doing little else. If you get struck by lightning, you won’t develop a winning personality and heart of gold. (Robots don’t have hearts, silly, and if they did, they would probably be made of steel, not gold.) You also won’t be likely to terrorize humanity by becoming an ultra-violent killing machine sent into the past to kill the mother of a child who will lead a rebellion against machines, because that movie was dumb as hell, and because real robots don’t kill–they horribly maim at best, and they don’t even do that on purpose. Real robots are boringly kind and all too rarely try to kill people. In all my years, my laptop has only attacked me once, and that was only because my brother threw it at me. In short, your personality defect is that you don’t really HAVE a personality. You are one of those annoying, super-logical people that never gets upset or flustered. Unless, of course, you short circuit. Or if someone throws a pie at you. Pies sure are delicious.

To put it less negatively:

1. You are more RATIONAL than intuitive.

2. You are more INTROVERTED than extroverted.

3. You are more GENTLE than brutal.

4. You are more HUMBLE than arrogant.

Compatibility:

Your exact opposite is the Class Clown.

Other personalities you would probably get along with are the Hand-Raiser, the Emo Kid, and the Haughty Intellectual.

*

*

If you scored near fifty percent for a certain trait (42%-58%), you could very well go either way. For example, someone with 42% Extroversion is slightly leaning towards being an introvert, but is close enough to being an extrovert to be classified that way as well. Below is a list of the other personality types so that you can determine which other possible categories you may fill if you scored near fifty percent for certain traits.

The other personality types:

The Emo Kid: Intuitive, Introverted, Gentle, Humble.

The Starving Artist: Intuitive, Introverted, Gentle, Arrogant.

The Bitch-Slap: Intuitive, Introverted, Brutal, Humble.

The Brute: Intuitive, Introverted, Brutal, Arrogant.

The Hippie: Intuitive, Extroverted, Gentle, Humble.

The Televangelist: Intuitive, Extroverted, Gentle, Arrogant.

The Schoolyard Bully: Intuitive, Extroverted, Brutal, Humble.

The Class Clown: Intuitive, Extroverted, Brutal, Arrogant.

The Robot: Rational, Introverted, Gentle, Humble.

The Haughty Intellectual: Rational, Introverted, Gentle, Arrogant.

The Spiteful Loner: Rational, Introverted, Brutal, Humble.

The Sociopath: Rational, Introverted, Brutal, Arrogant.

The Hand-Raiser: Rational, Extroverted, Gentle, Humble.

The Braggart: Rational, Extroverted, Gentle, Arrogant.

The Capitalist Pig: Rational, Extroverted, Brutal, Humble.

The Smartass: Rational, Extroverted, Brutal, Arrogant.

Be sure to take my Sublime Philosophical Crap Test if you are interested in taking a slightly more intellectual test that has just as many insane ramblings as this one does!

About Saint_Gasoline

I am a self-proclaimed pseudo-intellectual who loves dashes. I enjoy science, philosophy, and fart jokes and water balloons, not necessarily in that order. I spend 95% of my time online, and the other 5% of my time in the bathroom, longing to get back on the computer. If, God forbid, you somehow find me amusing instead of crass and annoying, be sure to check out my blog and my webcomic at SaintGasoline.com.

It seems as though the fount of Schadenfreude is inexhaustible at the moment. Following on from my skepticism about the return of Steorn, Ben Goldacre, over at Bad Science, rubs salt into the wound. Truly, my cup runneth over.

I see that Steorn are having a spot of technical difficult in demonstrating their "free energy" machine. I can’t say that I’m surprised, and neither is Ben Goldacre, over at his Bad Science blog. It’s led him to posit his first law of bullshit dynamics.

I’m sorry, but I really don’t understand the thinking behind Live Earth. A bunch of hypocrites prancing about on multiple stages ostensibly to raise awareness about global warming while being ferried to and from the event in their private jets, helicopters and limos while guzzling bottled water? Call me Victor Meldrew if you like, but if ever there was something that felt singularly pointless, it would be this. Marina Hyde feels the same way.

 

I think I’ll crack open a good book instead. James Lovelock’s The Revenge of Gaia seems somewhat appropriate, I feel.

 

Update: I did read the book. My thoughts about it are here.

Another little quiz that gave me a totally unsurprising result.

 

You Are Very Skeptical

Your personal motto is: "Prove it." While some ideas, like life after death, may seem nice… You aren’t going to believe them simply because it feels good. You let science and facts be your guide… Even if it means you don’t share the beliefs of those around you. How Skeptical Are You?

 

George Melly has died. From rum, bum and concertina to family man. He’ll be missed.

 

Update: good to read the tributes on the BBC site from folk far and wide. And more here. Double damn.

You may recall that last August, I blogged about an Irish company – Steorn – that claimed it had discovered how to get energy for free. I declared myself unconvinced then, and I still stick to that now.

 

However, the company is now back in the spotlight with a demonstration of their "free energy" (i.e. perpetual motion) machine calld the Orbo. I remain unconvinced since Steorn is apparently still pitching to the media, and the demonstration will take place in an art museum fer gawd’s sake. You would think that if there was anything to this device that reputable scientists would have be screaming for it to be displayed in pride of place at the Science Museum. But no, you’ll have to go to Spitalfields (once a haunt of Jack The Ripper) to see it. Alternatively, you can see it via webcam here. Although if you believe that the device is what it claims to be on the strength of a webcam image, then I have a bridge that you might be interested in.

I’m not sure that this is going to be a good idea. It seems as though it’s calculated to stimulate my fight-or-flight response when viewing the next series of Doctor Who. Tom says it all.

So, this season’s finale of Doctor Who aired over the weekend. I found it strangely unsatisfying – more pyrotechnics than plot drama. And Russell T. Davies’ outrageous plot device – what you might call the Tinkerbell strategem, with the Doctor as Tinkerbell and Martha as Peter Pan – well, I confess I rolled my eyes in derision.

 

Still, John Simm, as The Master, acquitted himself well; playing the role as a bizarre mixture of Pol Pot and pantomime dame. And I did like the throwaway reference to Captain Jack’s probable fate (even if he didn’t get much to do in this week’s episode).

 

But all in all, this finale was not my highlight of this season’s offerings. For me, the episodes of Blink, and Human Nature / The Family of Blood, were definitely the high points, and possibly the best that there ever have been in the entire 40+ years of the show.

Simon Sellars, over at the Ballardian, has an entry on Thirteen To Centaurus, which is both the title of a short story by J.G. Ballard, and also of an adaption of the story shown on BBC in 1965 as part of its Out Of The Unknown series. The TV play has been captured on YouTube, and it’s fascinating to see it. As Simon suspects, the play would very likely have been broadcast live – back in 1965 most drama was.

 

I’m not sure whether I ever saw Thirteen To Centaurus at the time; I don’t have a clear memory of it at all. What I do have a clear memory of, and which caused a frisson when I saw it again was the title sequence which introduced each play in the Out Of The Unknown series. I did see as many of the shows at the time that I could. I certainly remember Andover and the Android, The Machine Stops and The Little Black Bag (which I can clearly remember as being in colour, which means that I must have been at university at the time – we didn’t have a colour TV at home).

 

I hope that some of these other plays will resurface again from the archives, I’d love to see them again.

Charlie Brooker sums up why I never, ever, want to go to an open-air pop festival ever again in my life. Never, ever. Got that? Never.

After 305, here’s another variation on the theme of 300. This is the closest I’m going to get to seeing the actual film.

 

 

(hat tip to Pandagon). Ah, the Weather Girls! I have fond memories of seeing and hearing them live at the Gay Games in Amsterdam back in 1998…

Following on from the last entry on the need for good parenting, I just thought that you should know that this blog is…

 

 

I referred yesterday to two articles that summarised the current state of research into sexual orientation and its manifestations. I was a bit po-faced about a crack from one of the articles: "It is not clear if Hamer and his team found the locus of the genetic code that causes men to memorize lines from A Star Is Born". The trouble is, there is a grain of truth in it. There is something about the Hollywood musical that stirs up the camp in a gay man’s soul, and I am not totally immune to it.

 

When done well, this response to the musical can be very, very funny. By chance, I came across two bloggers today who have got this down to an artform. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Tom and Lorenzo and their Musical Mondays…

Well, it’s true that I did say that I was looking forward to last Saturday’s episode of Doctor Who. And that was indeed the case. It must also be said that Captain Jack and Derek Jacobi did not disappoint in the episode: Utopia. But, I have to also say that I found some of the plot devices (the plot being written by Russell T Davies) somewhat laughable. No, strike that, they were bloody ludicrous.

 

I mean, we’re supposed to be at the end of time – trillions of years into the far future, when the heat death of the universe is practically complete, and yet, here are perfectly recognisable human beings, who have apparently not evolved one jot or tittle from their 21st century selves. And not only that, here’s a wee Scots lassie orphan. Er, excuse me? Did I just have a credibility by-pass or something? And, and, even worse, if such a thing is possible, the baddies appear to have been shipped in en masse from Mad Max II – the Thunderdome. Gawd, but that is really, really lame.

 

You can tell that I found the background setting of the story woefully inadequate. It could have been OK set a few thousand years in the future, but at the end of time? I’m sorry, but that’s stretching it, and the time-space fabric, too far.

 

And then there is also the little niggle of Professor Yana turning out to be The Master in human form, and who then regenerates into the John Saxon character and promptly steals the TARDIS to bugger off back to 21st century Britain. Supposedly, the Master has pulled the same trick as the Doctor by becoming human (Professor Yana) so that the Doctor would not sense the presence of a fellow Time Lord. Er, but as Mrs. Whyte so pertinently asks: "how come he couldn’t detect the presence of Mr Saxon/the Master in the early 21st century"?

 

To which, I suppose, the only real answer – and one that I would do well to heed myself – is: "don’t take it all so seriously, it’s only a story, stupid".  Well, that’s true, but I do like at least a token verisimilitude in my fantasies.