Plus ça change...

The other day, I accidentally came up with an idea for a new series of Star Trek. No, really. I am the sort of person who can do that sort of thing by accident. It's always sad when something like that happens, because having come up with the idea, I want to watch this series and it will blatantly never happen. And so, I will write it down here, in the hope that the idea inspires one of you to write an amazing fic serial for me, or something.

This new series would be set about 100-150 years after TNG, DS9, and Voyager's era. Star Trek Online and the various novels of the extended universe will not be taken as canon. Nor will the horrible episode of Voyager where Janeway and Paris went so fast that they turned into lizards. That episode did not exist.

In the Alpha and Beta Quadrants, the Federation has welcomed many new members. Bajorans, Cardassians, Klingons, Ferengi, Breen, and even Romulans have all joined the Federation, which is now far less human-centric. Transwarp is a reality of the galaxy, with travel times far reduced. Anywhere in the galaxy is within easy travelling distance.

There are now three main powers in the galaxy: the Federation, the Dominion, and the Borg. A few non-affiliated cultures do still exist, but they are there on sufferance and have no real bearing on galactic affairs. Both the Federation and the Dominion are in a state of permanent war with the Borg, and both of them are losing. As the series starts, the Federation and Dominion have just recently entered a tentative alliance. They don't entirely trust each other but they both recognise the necessity of the alliance.

The series will focus on the voyages of a new starship Enterprise, which will be the first of a new class of ship designed for travel between galaxies. Pure exploration will be a part of their remit, but they will also be seeking allies and technology which can assist in the fight against the Borg and will, on occasion, have to return to our home galaxy to assist in the war.

The Prime Directive will have been extended by this point. Not only will we be forbidden from interfering with pre-warp planets; we'll also be forbidden from interfering with pre-transwarp galaxies. Transwarp is just too much of a game-changer. Now, since we're newcomers to intergalactic travel, this is going to mean that we are very much the new kids on the block. We're going to be exploring entirely unfamiliar locations, and meeting civilizations who are our technological superiors.

For the first time, we'll have a show with a non-human captain. I'm thinking that a Cardassian woman would work well, but I could be convinced otherwise there. There will also be many non-humans among the ship's crew, and one of the ongoing themes will be that of differing cultures with different perspectives working together for a common goal, and respecting each other and learning to be friends. We will also have a Founder on the ship, serving as an observer for the Dominion, in a way not unlike T'pol in Enterprise. The Founder will also serve the role of the objective outsider which started with Spock.

Now someone go and convince Paramount to make this series for me. Please?

Q. What do Cliff Richard and North Korea?
A. Both would add me to their enemies list if they ever saw this.

To the tune of "The Young Ones" by Cliff Richard.

Kim Jong-un
Leader, you're Kim Jong-un
And Kim Jong-un will not be afraid
To lead us
North Korea's strong
Though we haven't
Had Kim Jong-un very long

Dear Leader
We mourn our Dear Leader
Now Dear Leader
Has sadly passed away
And so, now
We must turn to his son
We salute our brand new leader
Kim Jong-un

Once per generation
Comes a man like this
We need him
And we need him
Oh my comrades, all praise Kim

Korea
Should be reunited
Kim Jong-un
Should now lead us all
And some day
When that time has come
Comrades, then we'll still salute to
Kim Jong-un

As the Steam Great Gift Pile holiday event draws to a close, I find myself with a whole lot of coupons and games that I don't really want. Ideally, I'd like to trade these for things that I do want, but I'm also happy to give them away to people who want them who don't have anything in return. Here's what I have:

Coupons (All valid from Jan 2 through Mar 1)
50%, 33%, and 25% off any Valve game coupons [Eligible games] -- Valve mostly make shooters. I mostly don't play shooters. And even if I did, I wouldn't need three vouchers.
25% off any bitComposer game coupon [Eligible games] -- None of these appeal to me.
50% off AI War: Fleet Command -- Doesn't interest me.
50% off Jamestown -- I have this already. It's a fun little indie bullet-hell shooter.
50% off costume Quest -- I have this already too. I bought it in the Steam Sale before I got this, but haven't had a chance to play it yet.

Games
Operation Flashpoint: Red River -- Seems to be an RPS, which is Not My Genre.
SEGA Classics: Virtua Fighter 2 -- I am now and always have been a Nintendo girl. Sega just doesn't get my nostalgia going.
Anomaly: Warzone Earth -- this looks vaguely interesting, and I might give it a go myself if nobody wants it, but I have so many games that I really really want to play that adding games that merely look vaguely interesting seems like a waste.
Oddworld: The Oddboxx (compilation) -- ditto.

Anyone interested?

And while I'm here, if anyone wants to friend me on Steam, I'm lowercaserho there.

[Disclaimer: I am not a professional physicist. I completed 2/3 of a physics degree before dropping out of university; this is my only qualification. I think I know what I'm talking about, but caveat lector.]

Since the Higgs boson has been in the news recently, I thought I'd take the opportunity to talk about it a bit, and answer the question "what is it?"

To understand the significance of the Higgs boson, you first need to know a little about the rest of particle physics. Our current best understanding of particle physics is what is know as the Standard Model. The Standard Model says that all matter is made up of only 12 different types of particles (plus their antiparticles), which are governed by 4 forces, which are mediated by additional particles. The two types of particles are fundamentally different, with the matter particles being called fermions, and the force particles being called bosons.

The Standard Model is phenomenally successful, not only in explaining things that we've seen, but also in predicting things that we hadn't seen. There have been several particles that we hadn't discovered, which the standard model told us should exist, so we went looking for them, and found them exactly where they were meant to be. This is the sign of a powerful and robust theory.

One things physicists are keen to try to do is unify the four different forces that we know of: gravity, electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force, and the weak nuclear force. Back in the 19th century, James Clerk Maxwell did this for electricity and magnetism; he came up with a single elegant set of equations that fully explained both of them. Now, instead of having to remember laws of electricity and laws of magnetism, we just think in terms of Maxwell's equations for electromagnetism instead.

Of the four forces, the ones we've had the most success in combining are the electromagnetic force and the weak nuclear force. We have a pretty good understanding of how these two forces are just aspects of a single underlying unity. Instead of having two things to understand, we now only have one thing to understand, instead. Yay.

One of the problems with this is that the bosons which govern these two forces are quite different. For electromagnetism, we have the photon, which we also know as light. For the weak nuclear force, we have Z and W bosons. These are very different from light, especially in one respect: they have mass. But hold on a minute, if these two forces are just aspects of a single whole, then where did that mass come from? Our best theory so far is something called the Higgs mechanism.

According to this, there's another particle, the Higgs boson, which is involved in making the electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces behave differently. We have good theories of how this should work, and what the results should be, and they agree with what we've observed from reality. Even better, the same theory seems to be able to account for why everything has mass, why mass exists in the first place. This is a pretty powerful theory! What we never have observed, however, is the Higgs boson itself. The reason for this is that in order for it to exist as a particle that we can observe requires very high energies, higher than what we've previously been able to produce.

Enter the large hadron collider, stage left. With the LHC, we can reach these very high energies, so we have a good chance of finding the elusive Higgs boson.

If we find it, then this is good news. It gives us more evidence that our theory is good, and lets us build on it with more confidence. It will also be able to tell us things that we didn't know. For instance, we know that it will take a lot of energy to find it, but we don't know just how much energy. If we find it, then we'll be able to get that information, which is then more information that we can use in crafting further theories and making new advances.

On the other hand, if we look where it ought to be and it isn't there, then that's probably even more exciting. That means that our theory is wrong, and we need to come up with a new theory. As a comparison, late in the 19th century, physicist thought they were close to closing in on knowing everything there was to know about physics. There were just a few experimental niggles that they needed to iron out. One thing, in particular, didn't come out the way the theory said it should, so they had to devise a new theory to explain it. In the process, they accidentally discovered quantum mechanics. Oops. That's given us over a century of research, and important technical discoveries like semiconductors and lasers. New theories are exciting.

Finally, we could end up with inconclusive results. This would be disappointing, but would just mean that we'd carry on looking until we managed to get conclusive results. Whatever happens, it's an exciting time.

Update: The reports coming in from CERN now seem to indicated that it looks as if the Higgs boson has been found. While they are, correctly, remaining cautious and refusing to outright announce a discovery, it's very much looking that way. With experiments like this one, you don't typically get a straight yes or no answer. Instead, you get much vaguer data which needs to be interpreted, and can only be expressed in terms of percentages and probabilities, eg, there is an x% chance that this data was produced by the Higgs boson.

There are two separate, independent experiments at CERN, and both have found what looks to be the Higgs boson, and both have found it in the same place. This isn't conclusive, but it is very suggestive. They'll need to do more research, but at this point, I'd be surprised if it turned out to be anything else.

To reiterate, this is a type of particle that nobody had ever observed before, that we managed to predict purely by our theories. so we looked, and we found it where we'd said it was going to be. This is the equivalent of Sherlock Holmes walking into a crime scene and announcing that the body would be found in the sewers, just from seeing a spot of ash on the floor and a particular type of quill on the desk. I don't know about you, but I find that pretty amazing.

Yuletide is upon us once again. For anyone not aware, Yuletide is a fan fiction exchange program run along the lines of a secret santa, with a focus on obscure, rare and overlooked fandoms. It is also the one time of the year when I actually engage with the vast multi-headed hydra that is fandom in any real way. [Non-fandom people can probably skip this entry.]

Last year, I wrote Smaller Fleas That Bite 'Em, based on Zodiac by Neal Stephenson (which I think is the single best piece of fiction I've ever written, even if there are a few things I'd change if I was doing it over) and I received two stories based on the They Might Be Giants song, The Mesopotamians: Four Characters In Search Of A Gig and Daydream Believer. The year before, for my first Yuletide, I wrote something which I don't think was terribly good so I don't care to link, but I received a fabulous story based on To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis: Mistaken For Strangers.

This year, I don't yet know what I'm going to offer to write, and I wouldn't tell you even if I did. I do, however, know what I'm going to request, and I'm going to tell you all why they are awesome and why you should go and watch/read/play them.

Exiles (Marvel comics)
The problem that a lot of comics have is one of continuity. Look at something like Spiderman or Batman and you have back stories which stretch back decades, which only 3 people on the planet are entirely familiar with, and which make absolutely no sense. Exiles was one attempt at negating this problem, and did it rather well. The basic premise was that a team of superheroes was plucked from various alternate realities and would then go and right wrongs in still more alternate realities. So it feature, for instance, Sabertooth, but it wasn't the Sabertooth from the main Marvel continuity, so didn't have all the same history and baggage.

The fun thing about this was that it let them come up with all sorts of interesting riffs on their characters that they could never pull in the main series. What if Galactus came to Earth, but he was in a weakened state, and literally every single super-powered being on the planet joined together to fight him? What if Tony Stark was an evil megalomaniac who manipulated global events such that he was elected to be president of the world and nobody even knew he'd been manipulating things? What if, what if, what if?

Towards the end of its run, it was getting somewhat weighed down by its own continuity, but for the most part, it was good and rompy. It wasn't high art, but it was never meant to be.

It's been collected in trade paperbacks, and is also available on Marvel's paid online comics service.

Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri
To my mind, this is still the greatest 4X game that has ever been made. There are a few options from modern offerings that are conspicuous by their absence, but it's still extremely playable, and any shortcomings are made up for by the lore, story and pathos it had.

The different playable factions all felt different and played different, but were still balanced (until the expansion). The world felt properly alien, giving exploration a proper frontier feeling to it. And then there were the alien lifeforms, which become more and more intriguing as we learned more about them. Standard 4X "one more turn" syndrome, combined with the corking SF storyline meant that I lost many nights to this game, back in the day.

I have no clue where or whether this is available these days, which is sad. I live in eternal hope that Firaxis will re-imagine this game using the Civ V engine at some point.

Shimotsuma Monogatari | Kamikaze Girls (2004)
I'm not going to lie, this is a bit of an odd one. It's a Japanese movie, based on a book, and when I watched it, I just thought "yeah, that wasn't bad", but I've been revisiting it in my head ever since.

It's about two young women, who are, on the surface, complete opposites. One is in a motorcycle gang and is a bit of a badass. The other is extremely feminine and obsessed with Rococo France. Then against all odds they end up becoming friends and getting drawn into each other's lives. It sounds trite, and in a way, it is. It's done with a lot of charm though, and that strange quirkiness that only the Japanese seem able to pull off.

It is also a very slashy film. There is no actual context in the movie for thinking that the two of them are anything more than friends, but the subtext was just screaming it at me. Which definitely made the whole thing more fun for me.

This should be available from anywhere that sells or rents DVDs and has a good selection.

Taiyou no Ko Esteban | Les Mystérieuses Cités d'or | The Mysterious Cities of Gold
This is a beloved childhood memory. It was probably my favourite TV show as a kid, and it stands up remarkably well 20 years later.

In many ways, I see this as something as a trailblazer for Avatar: The Last Airbender. It isn't AtLA, and anyone who goes into it thinking it is will be disappointed, but they have a lot of commonalities. Children actually voiced by children! Most of the characters aren't white! A combination of eastern and western animation traditions! Morally ambiguous characters who are neither wholly good nor wholly bad! An ongoing arc rather than having everything reset at the end of each episode! The absolute best method of transportation ever!

This was pretty revolutionary stuff for an 80s kids show and I loved it.

This was released on DVD a few years ago in at least regions 1 and 2 (I don't know about any other reasons, I'm afraid), though I'm not sure how its availability is now. I'm told it's also available on Netflix, for those of you who live in Netflix-enabled countries.

I have been thinking about the borg. To be specific, I have been thinking about the life cycle and reproduction of the borg.

At it's simplest level it goes something like this: You start with a borg. The borg creates nanoprobes, which it injects into some other humanoid. The nanoprobes turn this humanoid into a new borg. This borg creates its own nanoprobes, and the cycle begins anew.

In short, the nanoprobes are the borg's way of creating more borg. Or to put it another way, nanoprobes serve the equivalent function for borg that sperm and ova do for humans.

Thinking about it, though, I don't think that's the right way of looking at it.

While all borg are similar, there are definite differences between, for instance, a borg assimilated from a klingon and a borg assimilated from a human. If a human-borg assimilates a klingon, the result will be a klingon-borg and not another human-borg. The original species of the "parent" borg is irrelevant in determining what the "child" borg will end up as.

I think the better way to look at it is to consider the nanoprobes to be the primary life form, and to think about the borg as being the nanoprobes' way of making more nanoprobes.

There are numerous parasitic species on earth that will alter the behaviour of their host to their own benefit. Rabies is an obvious example. The behaviour of a rabid animal doesn't benefit the animal but it does benefit the rabies virus by helping to spread the disease.

Another example popular among biologists is that of Ophiocordyceps unilateralis and related fungi. These parasitic fungi will begin life as a spore embedded into the soft tissue of an ant. From there, they will spread throughout the ant, eating its tissues, but leaving sufficient intact for the ant to survive. Eventually, they will reach the ant's brain and by eating some parts of the brain and releasing certain chemicals, they will cause a dramatic alteration of the ant's behaviour.

At this point in the infection, the ant will climb up trees as high as it can, clamp its jaws around a leaf or stem, and then die. The fungus will then sprout its fruiting body out of the back of the ant's head, and release its own spores. Due to their elevated location, these spores are able to spread over a wide area, infecting more ants, and beginning the cycle anew. The ant's behaviour here is very bad for the ant, but very bad for the parasite.

That's how I see the borg. The borg are nothing more than those beings infected by a species of parasitic nanotechnology. The nanoprobes alter the neurochemistry of those they assimilate, causing them to act in a manner which is highly detremental to themselves, but highly beneficial to the nanoprobes.

One of the implications of this is that the borg are impossible to reason with because their brain functions are controlled by a non-sentient life form. Another would be that every time we've seen someone in the show trying to fight the borg by attacking individual drones, or even the collective as a whole, they've been going about it entirely the wrong way. What they should be doing is going after the nanoprobes.

(If anyone feels like writing a story based on this premise, I would be utterly thrilled. I have no plans of doing so myself.)

I cannot remember the last time I have been trying to play so many video games at once. Often when I'm in a gaming sort of mood, there'll be one or two things at most that I want to play. At the moment, I'm spoiled for choice. I am currently playing:

Glitch

Massively multiplayer online game with a Minecraft meets Animal Crossing sensibility. Web based, and requiring flash. Free to play, with some premium content available for paid subscribers, but nothing that's required to enjoy the game. I decided to give the money because I liked what they were doing rather than because I wanted any of the perks.

The game takes place in a world created by the imaginations of god-like giants, and as a player you roam the world, explore its secrets, learn skills to help you survive, then thrive, and eventually help shape the world around you. I'm having a lot of fun with it. That one of its pantheon is a transgender maths nerd certainly helps.

I have invites available if people want. And I can be friended there as lowercaserho.

Dwarfs!?

Imagine a game that's like a cross between Dwarf Fortress and Lemmings. This game is nothing like that. However, it is more like that than anything else I can think to compare it to. You control a dwarven mine, and have to direct your dwarves to mine, explore, find treasures, fight monsters, and so on. The challenge comes from the fact that your dwarves are complete numpties and will tend to wander around at random and dig into caves full of water or lava or zombies if left to their own devices. The player's job is to save them from themselves, which gets trickier and trickier the more you expand and the more dwarves you have.

It's a very simple game in terms of mechanics, but it tends to self-regulate its difficulty level amazingly well. The better you are, the faster you can expand, so the harder the game becomes, meaning you're always pushing at the boundaries of your own skill. When you've expanded enough, it becomes extremely tense as you try to deal with your hapless dwarves stumbling into multiple catastrophes at once.

This is, sadly, Windows only, and I believe is only available on Steam. It's cheap, though, and there's a demo available, so it's well worth checking out.

Beyond Good And Evil

This is a game that I've been meaning to get around to playing for ages, but somehow have never got around to. It's an RPG, and the main player character, Jade, is much beloved as one of gaming's few Female Characters Done Right. It's still too early for me to tell whether I'd really recommend this, but it certainly shows promise, and I definitely want to play more of it.

Mass Effect 2

Another game that I'd been meaning to play for ages, and only recently got around to. Partly, I was worried that it wouldn't make any sense to me, since I've not played ME1 (I tried, but I didn't like it), but that proved unfounded. To my mind, this is the best game Bioware have ever done. They normally make games with excellent characterisation, decent stories, and absolutely lousy combat. Uniquely amongst all Bioware games I've played, the combat in ME2 is actually fun.

I played through this once in an absolute splurge over a few days, and am now playing through it again at a much more relaxed pace to take in more side quests and what have you. Only thing that I disliked about this was the lack of options for same-sex romances. Hopefully they'll do better on that front in ME3.

Guild Wars

I go through phases with this, and even in my on phases, like now, I'm not playing it a tenth as much as I used to. But that I'm still playing at all after over 6 years is a testament to how good this game is.

Civilization V

I started playing this again when a bunch of friends were talking about it after they bought it on sale on Steam. And while I still think it isn't as good as Civ IV, it is better than I remembered it, and is worthy of occasional play. I do have a theory, though: Civ games are like Star Trek movies: all the best ones have even numbers.

World of Warcraft

Does anyone not know about this? Is there anything I could say about it that hasn't been said a million times before. Unlikely. So I'll just say this: I'm glad I gave it another try after the release of Cataclysm, because it is unbelievably better now than it used to be.

What would happen if Adblock (or some other popular ad blocking add-on) were modified such that as well as stopping any ads it encountered from being shown to the end user, it also silently followed any link in the ad? The page wouldn't be shown in the browser, no images or scripts would be loaded, but an http request for the page would be sent.

This would massively inflate the number of clicks that each ad would generate. I understand that the number of people who block ads is much larger than the number who actually follow them (though both numbers are dwarfed by the number of people who just ignore them). However, these additional "clicks" would generate absolutely no increased custom or awareness for the site being advertised. In fact, if anything, they would actually be to the site's detriment, due to increased bandwidth use.

The end result of this is that selling ads based on number of clicks would no longer be viable. Ad providers would have to find a new model or die.

What would happen then?

A lot has been said about the riots across England in the past few days, so I'm going to limit my thoughts to one that I haven't seen anywhere else. This doesn't mean nobody else has made it; it just means I haven't seen it.

The people who are rioting are not a monolithic group and not everyone is rioting for the same reason.

At one end of the scale, we have pure unadulterated criminals. These are the people who have seen the civil disorder and seen it as an opportunity for profit. These are the looters that are already fencing their stolen goods. These people are scum, and deserve whatever the law can throw at them.

At the other end of the spectrum are people who are lost, angry and confused. Their lives are falling apart around them as their job prospects shrink and their debts increase, and they feel hopeless and powerless and don't know what to do, and so they lash out. They are the people who are in such a fucked up head-space that throwing a brick through a McDonalds window actually seems like a good idea and the best way they can make themselves heard.

These people have still done wrong, there's no doubt about that, but it's a vastly different type of wrong to the first set of people. Personally, I have sympathy with the second group and am interested in the question of what we, as a society, did to put people in that sort of a position, and how we can avoid doing it again.

There are also, of course, a whole spectrum of people in between the two extremes. There could hardly not be. I just think it's important that when we see people saying "the rioters are scum and must be punished!" or "the rioters are from the underclasses and should have our sympathy!" we should remember that not all the rioters are like that. The picture is, as always, a lot greyer than a lot of people would have you believe.