The BLAND Corporation

A warning. This review of The Stars my destination will contain mild spoilers, and since it's usually not considered decent for a review to do this, I must offer a justification. I found out about Bester's work from one of Norman Spinrad's critical essays, "Emperor of Everything". It's one of the pieces collected in Spinrad's Science-Fiction in the Real World , a book I recommend for its insightful analysis, witty writing, and quaint overuse of the word 'puissant'. Seriously, go read it, not just the excerpts here. But it was that essay of Spinrad's that made me very interested in Bester's book, so I'd say that whatever is revealed there is not a spoiler, but a teaser:

While researching for the latest chapter in my Prometheus fanfic I stumbled (well, stumbled again) on the theory of endosymbiosis. Which is that, sometimes, a collaboration between two or more organisms, who may even have been in a predatory race at some point, results in them permanently merging into one single individual. In particular, the structure of the eukariotic cell, which is the type of cell that animals and multicellular plants are made of, appears to be the result of several endosymbiotic events.

I'll freely admit that, when writing biographical details for the characters in my Prometheus fanfic , my approach is "if it's consistent with the movie, then it works (without needing the Alternate Universe warning)". For the most part, the details I invent would easily not need mentioning in the film, and are rarely that pivotal to events, so I think I can get away with this. Besides, I'm not sure which biography is canon after all. I sure hope though, it's not the one on the Alien vs Predator wiki. There we read that Elizabeth Shaw, a woman who doesn't look past thirty, has PhDs in paleontology, archaeology, comparative mythology and memetics. Oooh dear.

Over on fanfiction.net, I have this story set after the ending of Prometheus (the 2012 film). And just because I can, I had one of the main characters, Elizabeth Shaw, do a spacewalk outside the Doughnut of Death 2.0 and using a Colt .45 semiautomatic to propel herself around. I was asked, is any of this even possible? Read on!

Recently a friend of mine showed me, or tried to, the first episode of the new-ish series from Aaron Sorkin, "The Newsroom". Do I need to preface this by saying that the following is my opinion? The show has been renewed for a second season, so obviously quite a lot of people like it (including at least one of my friends), but I can't for the life of me see why. As the first episode reached its halfway point, I took out my decades old mobile phone and started a game of Snake Xenzia in a desperate bid to escape the boredom emanating from the TV screen.

I've been watching The Mindscape of Alan Moore , and I recommend you do too. I love Alan Moore. He's a particular mix of crazy and lucid that's always interesting to watch, even when not entirely agreeing with him, and in The Mindscape, he hints at a kind of philosophical approach to the world that's both infused by magical thinking and materialistic rationality. There will be more on that particular mix in this blog, a kind of ongoing project of the BLAND Corporation, but the inspiration is Moore and it is fitting that one of the first posts here is dedicated to discussing one of the ideas Moore puts forth in that film.

Hello and welcome to the BLAND Corporation. Or BLANDCorporatio, and the missing 'n' is not a typo. Well, not anymore. This will be the place for me to post whatever stuff strikes my fancy. Which will eventually be mostly mathy things, especially since writing about them is one of the ways in which I try to learn. As Feynman said, you only really understand something if you can explain it in an undergraduate course. And most of the things I'll tackle will be fairly non-esoteric, at least if one followed a science/engineering study path. I'll also write about science in general, because I love it. Doing some computer simulations and maybe some simple experiments, pursuing some of my own musings on the thing, time and resources allowing. I'll also write about art and fiction, sometimes my own, sometimes reviews of other people's work. I can't say I read as much as I should/want to. Not fiction anyway. So trying to review some story or novel every week or so...