The Oyster’s Garter

All the other drooling Joss Whedon disciples have probably already heard about Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog, but just in case, I needed to post about it. Because when Joss Whedon gets bored during the writers strike, writes a superhero musical, recruits Neil Patrick Harris to play a noble supervillain and Nathan Fillion to play Capt. Tightpants a villanous superhero, and they SING…well, it might simply be the BEST THING EVER.

WordPress won’t let me embed, but
Teaser from Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog on Vimeo.

In Joss’ peculiar words:

Once upon a time, all the writers in the forest got very mad with the Forest Kings and declared a work-stoppage. The forest creatures were all sad; the mushrooms did not dance, the elderberries gave no juice for the festival wines, and the Teamsters were kinda pissed. (They were very polite about it, though.) During this work-stoppage, many writers tried to form partnerships for outside funding to create new work that circumvented the Forest King system.

Frustrated with the lack of movement on that front, I finally decided to do something very ambitious, very exciting, very mid-life-crisisy. Aided only by everyone I had worked with, was related to or had ever met, I single-handedly created this unique little epic. A supervillain musical, of which, as we all know, there are far too few.

And it will be streamed free! Part 1 will be available Tuesday, July 15, with the following segments (each roughly 14 minutes) available July 17 and 19. Don’t miss them, because they’ll only be up until July 20th. But fear not - there are plans for a DVD with a musical commentary track to go with the musical musical.

Broadsheet linked to a Newsweek article on the Nerd Girls, a group of female engineers at Tufts. According to the article, The Nerd Girls are:

challenging the notion of what a geek should look like, either by intentionally sexing up their tech personas, or by simply finding no disconnect between their geeky pursuits and more traditionally girly interests such as fashion, makeup and high heels.

Well, it’s nice that they are trying to recruit more women into engineering, and I hope they have fun building their solar race car. (Cause, dude! Solar race car!) But damn, I think their message sucks. I don’t think nerd girls with dorky glasses are going to think, “Wow! Engineering looks fun, and I can wear 3″ pink heels to work!” I think they’re going to think, “Wow. Engineers look and act just like the popular girls at school who make fun of me, and female engineers seem to be required to be Sex in the City-type hot. And their web site lacks functionality and has no content. *click* Oooh! Ancient Roman D20 up for auction!”

The Nerd Girl message reminds me of that standard movie trope, the hot woman who eats a ton and never exercises yet magically remains thin. (e.g., the Gilmore Girls.) A Sexy Lust for Steak is supposed to demonstrate bold nonconformity while never actually not conforming (by being chubby, for example.) The Nerd Girls seem to be cut from the same cloth - the sexy fashion thing is supposed to demonstrate that they’re different from those Other Really Nerdy Ugly Girls while they still conform to societal expectations to be hot above all else. This is not a nerd revolution, it’s a permutation of “Just be yourself! Ummm…as long as yourself is perky and thin.”

Then again, maybe I’m not being fair. Maybe I should pay more attention to fashion and footwear. After days and days of pondering Vogue and watching Sex in the City, I believe that I’ve hit upon the perfect outfit. Knee-high boots, distressed jeans, fashionably draped coat - soon oceanographic fashion will TAKE PARIS BY STORM! (erm, hopefully not literally.) Can I join the Nerd Girl reality show now?

Jewelry cast from actual octopus tentacles. I’m not sure if these would please or anger Cthulhu - but they sure are fetching. If Kevin Z wore one of these AND the cnidarian skirt to his defense, surely no force, no matter how non-Euclidean, could resist him.

Via Boing Boing

Greg F, quite fairly, called me out for criticizing “The Big Bang Theory” before seeing an episode. Last night, I finally had the time and internet speed to watch two full episodes. In an utterly unsurprising turn of events - DO NOT WANT. The nerds are the standard nerd-stereotypes: there’s a horny nerd, a lovelorn nerd, a socially aloof nerd, and a South Asian nerd. (Notice that the South Asian character needs no actual personality traits other than a funny accent.)

The hot blonde neighbor character is hot! She has boobies! She likes parties and fun! She bribes the horny nerd by telling him how to get into her “easy” friends’ pants. Every girl needs a friend who will sell her insecurities (in the show, the friends were a formerly overweight girl and a girl who hated her father) to the highest bidder!

There is a brief and actually funny scene with a female grad student (played by Sara Gilbert from “Roseanne”), but all in all the show is indeed about nerdboys drooling awkwardly over unattainably hot women. In other words, having seen the show, I stand by my former opinion. Two episodes (yes, yes, df=1) may not be a good sample size, but I really cannot bear to waste more of my life being mildly irritated and very, very bored. As Ny said on the last post: “I was going to give it a Revise & Rewrite, but no, this is just a Rejection.”

UPDATE: I saw two episodes.

Catching up on my journals, this Science Magazine fluff interview (sorry, subscription only) with experimental particle physicist David Saltzberg caught my eye. Dr. Saltzberg is the science advisor to the TV show The Big Bang Theory, in which *gasp* nerdy male physicists nerdily woo *double gasp* their sexy and unattainble blond bombshell neighbor. He’s pretty defensive about criticism that the show is sexist:

Most of the show’s detractors, he notes, have never seen a whole episode. Prady stresses that The Big Bang Theory means no ill will. “If the scientific community is concerned with how we depict them, be gentle and be patient,” he says. “We are you; we love you.”

Ok, I’ve never seen an episode, but I might just based on this challenge. Still, no matter how he spins it, there’s nothing new about the male-geek-chases-popular-hot-girl trope. And I, for one, am really sick of it. Clearly, Saltzberg does not understand how condescending this is:

Saltzberg views the show as a tool for science education: PBS’s NOVA with rim shots. During an awkward date, Leonard gets an olive to rotate inside a glass–and corrects Penny, and likely most viewers, that centripetal, not centrifugal, force explains the trick.

This may say “physics is cool,” but it also strongly says that “men do the science, women are the pretty.” There’s just as much gender indoctrination as science education in that scene. In the words of the inimitable Zuska, I puke on The Big Bang Theory’s shoes.

I am bit raw on this, having just been accosted by a drunk American tourist who accused me of computing on my vacation. When I explained that I was, in fact, a (baby) marine biologist at work, he laughed uproariously and said, “Yeah, and I’m a NASA rocket scientist!” while walking away.

So many of our problems would be solved (and our lives made more interesting) if people were sequential hermaphrodites. (Much credit to Ursula Le Guin for that idea, of course.)

It’s 90 degrees in this godforsaken desert and I’m stuck in my blistering apartment writing a grant. Isn’t marine science glamorous? To sooth my parched and empty soul, here is an assortment of amusing links that have been kicking around my Google Reader for a while.

Richard Dawkins is going to guest star on Dr. Who! I am pretty apathetic about the atheism issue, but I still get a little nerdgasm at the thought of a scientist getting to be on Dr. Who. Dawkins is married to Lalla Ward, an actress who played one of the Fourth Doctor’s companions in the late 70s-early 80s.

Sciencey crafts: These greeting cards are embedded with viable seeds - read & plant. And scientific embroidery is pretty.

A collection of awesome science toys from Middlesex University in the UK. I especially like the Shape Memory Polymer and the Magic Snow

You might think you know how pregnancy happens, but I bet you haven’t seen it explained by animated anthropomorphized talking genitals!

The Great Invertebrate War seems to be trickling to an indeterminate end. Tunicate-lovers might enjoy JE Byrnes’ mighty salvo. Craig attempted to slander deuterostomes (echinoderm, tunicates, & all things with backbones) by labeling these magnificant creatures as the Invertebrate Axis of Evil (Or, in my interpretation, protostomes = Buffy, deuterostomes = Faith.). And the Circus of the Spineless, up on From Archaea to Zeaxanthol,  offered a snazzy echinoderm-centric roundup, including my rallying cry for tunicates, which is especially cool considering that I never entered it.

I’m pretty happy to be an advocate for the Evil Deuterostome Overlords, as long as I get the secret volcanic lair, the minions, and the attack-tunicates armed with laser beams. Besides, since I’ve read the Evil Overlord List, my plan for world domination will avoid the common pitfalls. There will be no elaborate torture mechanisms for encroaching protostomes (Rules #4 and 7) - they will simply be steamed and eaten in drawn butter.

Besides, Craig is right. A certain bipedal simian deterostome certainly seems to have achieved world domination. At least until the mighty protostome-deuterostome hybrid overlord Cthulhu (shown here in cake form) rises from R’lyeh and makes food or fish-servants of us all. Ia! Ia! Cthulhu fhtagn!

Jaimie Mantzel is building a giant riding-robot. I really can’t do better than SI Rosenbaum’s (my friend from college!) excellent lede:

You’re living in the Vermont woods in a four-story dome you built yourself. Well, the third floor is really a trampoline. You’re not sure if that counts as a floor.

So you’re living in your dome, working on all your little robots — the one like a slug, and the one like a turtle, the one that swims and the one that climbs walls — and you decide it would be cool to have a giant robot, big enough to ride around in.

And because you’re Jaimie Mantzel, you know right away you can build it.

More info & videos of his giant robot progress on Mantzel’s webpage. His smaller robots, from slugs to spiders, are also awesome. And I admit to some dome envy - after all, his third floor is a trampoline.

If you still haven’t had enough robots, consider entering the Scifi Channel’s “Make A Cylon” contest. It will be judged by Number 6 and Boomer/Athena - played in real life by Tricia Helfer and Grace Park. Entries can be either classic toasters or “OMG! They look like us!” newer models.

The Department of Homeland Security has a crack team of highly trained…science fiction writers. They’re called SIGMA, and according to National Defense Magazine, they are a “fixture at Department of Homeland Security science and technology conferences.”

My first thought was - great! Who knew that DHS was so concerned about avoiding the perils of a techno-dystopia? In my fevered imaginings, the panel included China Mieville, Neal Stephenson, Ursula Le Guin, and perhaps even Octavia Butler from beyond the grave.

Hah. Beneath my crusty exterior, I am apparently a foolish idealist. Because the members of SIGMA don’t want to avoid  a 1984-esque scenario - they aspire to it. Here’s Larry Niven on health care:

Niven said a good way to help hospitals stem financial losses is to spread rumors in Spanish within the Latino community that emergency rooms are killing patients in order to harvest their organs for transplants.

“The problem [of hospitals going broke] is hugely exaggerated by illegal aliens who aren’t going to pay for anything anyway,” Niven said.

Or how about Jerry Pournelle (who I’ve never heard of) on the joys of mob rule?

Pournelle said that once mobile phone technology and the devices tacked on them to take pictures and record video become more ubiquitous, then ordinary citizens will be empowered to take security into their own hands — a prediction some have said already has come to pass.

Fortunately, it seems like these Big-Brother-loving sycophants are their own worst enemy.

The 45-minute panel discussion quickly deteriorated as federal, local and state homeland security officials, and at least one congressional aid, attempted to ask questions, which were largely ignored.

Instead the writers used their time to pontificate on a variety of tangentially related topics, including their past roles advising the government, predictions in their stories that have come to pass, the demise of the paperback book market, and low-cost launch into space.

David Brin, keeping on the topic of empowering citizens with mobile phone technology, delivered a self-described “rant” on the lack of funds being spent to support citizen reservists to back up the military, homeland security officials and first responders in times of crisis.

“It is impossible for you to succeed without us!” he shouted at the assembled officials, while banging his fist on the table and at one point jumping off his chair to wave a mobile phone in their faces.

Let’s hope that the Feds don’t consult Orson Scott Card on gay issues or Dave Sim on women.

Via Boing Boing

Arthur C. Clarke died today, a lively old geezer at the age of 90. I was never as heavy a reader of Clarke as I was of Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov (The Big Three early SciFi writers), but there’s no questioning his influence. His paper on geosynchronous orbit of satellites in 1945 eventually inspired some engineers to actually go out and invent satellites (He said he only clarified already extant ideas) so we can maybe thank him for our modern telecom world. His fiction gave Gene Roddenberry the courage to create Star Trek, which in turn lead to Star Wars, and, eventually, Firefly.

I do rather hope this “Dying in Threes” rule doesn’t stay in genres, because now we’ve lost Gary Gygax and Clarke in relatively quick succession. Bradbury may want to go get a medical checkup.

In the meantime, a couple of choice quotes from the New York Times obituary, which I thought the best.

But as a science fiction writer, he couldn’t resist drawing up timelines for what he called “possible futures.” Far from displaying uncanny prescience, these conjectures mainly demonstrated his lifelong, and often disappointed, optimism about the peaceful uses of technology — from his calculation in 1945 that atomic-fueled rockets could be no more than 20 years away to his conviction in 1999 that “clean, safe power” from “cold fusion” would be commercially available in the first years of the new millennium.

Mr. Clarke reveled in his fame. One whole room in his house — which he referred to as the Ego Chamber — was filled with photos and other memorabilia of his career, including pictures of him with Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, and Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon.

Mr. Clarke’s standard answer when journalists asked him outright if he was gay was, “No, merely mildly cheerful.”