When [It] Strikes Me

Rubicon premieres this Sunday night, August 1st.

From One Pawn To Another.

In television, a viewer might often feel a pawn, not being handed anything by a fellow pawn, but rather shifted from one board to the next. Never long to last in the fight, as the milieu of a series loses its shine and the successive attempts at new shows turn into just another run of short-lived games. Rarely does a pawn cross the board and become the queen, engrossed with and empowered by the board itself.

With a few shows I have felt myself as substantively more than a pawn in the game of television programming; in those handful of shows I have lastingly and fully been engrossed. I can really check them off with the fingers of one hand:

• “The West Wing” for its political acumen. A show that reminded us both of what we most wanted in our leaders and the forces which prevent that ideal from being manifested.
• “Battlestar Galactica” for its social commentary. In an era when America was redefining itself both at home and on the world stage, no television program so boldly captured our internalized national struggles.
• “LOST” for its Joycean depth. Bad Robot’s ambitious efforts to challenge viewers made expecting more of one’s viewers a reality and opened the door to the difficult-to-navigate world of what might aptly be termed televised literature.
• “The Wire” for its simple poetry. It is, after all, this epic, five-part poem about the decline of the American empire that gave us the inspired scene in which D’Angelo explains chess to Bodie and Wallace.

There have been other great shows. “Mad Men” gave us attention to detail and historical fiction as a commercial winner. “The Shield” offers a level of grittiness that is hard to turn from. But with most television, it’s as D’Angelo explained to Bodie, “The pawns, man, in the game, they get capped quick. They be out of the game early.” In most television, it’s easy to just sit back and play dumb. Only in the best shows are the pawns challenged to be “some smart ass pawns.” It’s those shows that challenge the viewer that interest me most. In “Rubicon”, I hope we have one such show.

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MC Escher’s epic print “Relativity” might be my favorite work of modern art. The original appears here:

Well a Spanish artist named Nico Roig (link to his panorama page) in Barcelona who toys with 360 Panoramas has taken general “Relativity” and made it special “Relativity” with a fantastic tribute. Hop through the jump to check it, and another work out. Read more…

They played Official Trailer #2 for Tron Legacy at the Inception IMAX showing last weekend.  It got me even more jazzed than the first; also, any movie with Olivia Wilde is gonna be worth seeing in IMAX.

Over at GeekTyrant, they’ve posted a player for six tracks by Daft Punk for the upcoming Tron Legacy soundtrack. I’ve embedded the tune from the first trailer. It’s got a great vibe to it. Along with the Sunshine soundtrack, I do believe I’ll be buying that one.

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Science + InfoGraphics = Win

Deoxyribonucleic acid is, quite literally, at the core of who and what each and every living thing on the planet is made up of. OK, so viri utilize ribonucleic acid (RNA) instead of DNA, and some theorize that the earliest earth life may have been based on self-replicating RNA instead of DNA, so it’s possible that more than just the common virus uses RNA still.

But that’s besides the point. All known complex life on Earth utilizes the computer-like coding of DNA to program its makeup. Instead of binary code (or, in binary: 01001001 01101110 01110011 01110100 01100101 01100001 01100100 00100000 01101111 01100110 00100000 01100010 01101001 01101110 01100001 01110010 01111001 00100000 01100011 01101111 01100100 01100101) like a computer, living organisms use a combination of adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G) and thymine (T) to program.

OnlineNursingPrograms.net has put together the below infographic to reflect 17 interesting things to know about DNA. Click through to enjoy! Read more…

There are but a few things in pop culture that justifiably are ranked above Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes.  Something I intend to do from time to time is link some of my favorite C&H comics.  This is the second installment in the endeavor.  You can find the first here.

Click on through to see the second set. Read more…

So I hadn’t intended to post any lectures, TED or not, today, but the leak of more than 90,000 documents (at least some of which were classified) relating to American operations in Afghanistan and intelligence relating to Pakistan, the Taliban and the Afghan government at least made this particular lecture topical.

I will note that don’t have an opinion with respect to whether WikiLeaks’ existence is a positive or negative thing and whether the site’s leaks are a net positive or negative for both America’s governmental actions and national security.  I’ve not thought enough on the topic to have an informed opinion.

Most certainly, WikiLeaks has been structured in a very conscientious manner, taking great care to cover their sources.  And they do take legitimate measures to ensure validity of materials.  But should everything be leaked just because it can be — noting, however, that they are quite clear in that they don’t publish everything they get?  On that, I’m not certain.

Here is WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange in a conversation discussing the site just earlier this month at TEDGlobal 2010.

Released this past June, The Passage was a very well deserved "break in" fiction for the Kindle.

So what happens when you turn over to a “legitimate author” the dystopian, post-apocalyptic genre with a mix of vampires and the “fast-zombies” of 28 Days Later?  Well, the long and the short of it (and this will be the last reference to “short”) is 784 pages of frackin’ awesome.

The author is Justin Cronin, whose prior works, “The Summer Guest” and “Mary and O’Neil”, were less mass-marketable titles.  They were, however, popular and well received, with each earning pretty solid reviews and critical acclaim.  In “The Passage”, he breaks out into the world of big, Hollywood-tie-in fiction.  And he does so by journeying into a realm that, to be honest, few “legitimate” modern authors have ventured into.

Yes, Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker became legends with the monster book story, and each did so with sophistication. But the modern face of monster fiction is the drivel that Stephenie Meyer has made a fortune off of.  I’ve not read and have no intention to read Twilight books.  One only needs to understand that they are written for an ADD, tween audience with film in mind.  I imagine her books must be like Dan Brown vomited up a trilogy with no religious underpinnings and a lot more self-cutting.

I’m probably not being fair, as this isn’t really a genre I seek out in books.  I generally read more non-fiction than fiction and I tend to stick with the classics or some Michael Chrichton (who, to be honest, probably actually would qualify as something not far off this genre).  Nevertheless, I imagine most horror fiction is somewhat like a harlequin novel or the Star Wars spin-off books.  Not a lot of thought, but mindless enjoyment.

“The Passage” is so very much more than that.  Click on through for why. Read more…

Yesterday I posted some of the best legitimate Neil de Grasse Tyson videos from the interwebs.  Today, we’re going with pure fun, as in Colbert Report fun.  Linked after the jump are the entirety of NdGT’s world record six appearances on the Colbert Report.

NdGT was the first Threepeat, Fourpeat, Fivepeat and Sixpeat guest on the Report.

Click on through to check it out.

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Any time you get a chance to see NdGT work, you're constantly drawn to make plans to visit the Rose Center.

While most of the time I’m going to embed videos from TED lectures, sometimes I’ll go with non-TED videos that drive home a similar concept of pressing forth knowledge while providing entertainment.  In the field of science and astrophysics, in particular, there’s simply no one better than Neil de Grasse Tyson.

Tyson is the revered host of PBS’s NOVA magazine show and is the director of the Rose Center and Hayden Planetarium at New York’s Museum of Natural History.  He’s also one of the most engaging folks when it comes to conveying enthusiasm for the sciences.  Oh yeah, there’s also the whole Pluto thing (The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America’s Favorite Planet).

I’ve linked a few videos for a reason, appearing after the jump.

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Daybreakers is really nothing close to The Matrix or 28 Days Later, even though it too rests on an interesting an unique idea.

Some movies just have not a whole lot going for them when I’m about to watch them.  Daybreakers is one such movie. I watched it earlier in the week while (i) suffering from a crummy stomach virus which both left me miserable and unable to really appreciate popcorn and (ii) reading “The Passage” by Justin Cronin, which is a book that, quite simply, puts most vampire stories to shame. But this isn’t a review of that brilliant book (which ranks as Amazon’s top book of the first half of 2010), that review will follow shortly when I finish it (it’s “War and Peace” long… well, not really, but darn close).

Anyway, Daybreakers is a movie I should have really liked.  It actually does meld a few different themes to create an interesting back story and milieu.  The basic premise is that a viral outbreak of vampirism (not the neutered “Twilight” kind, but the more Stokerish Blade variety) has led to a shift such that vampires have simply slid into and displaced humans in modern society.  Humans have become farmed for their blood and those that run free are hunted, but never killed.  The story somewhat expands on the idea from Blade of vampires as a back room clan with Catholic Church style resources, but no public face.  This has expanded to vampires fully running the show.  It’s actually a pretty interesting departure from the standard tale of viral apocalypse.  Pretty much every interesting fiction about viral apocalypse (be it “The Passage”, “World War Z“, I Am Legend, 28 Days Later, or even Zombieland) involves a mindless destruction of the world as we know it.  In Daybreakers, humans are really just displaced.

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