Day Two Hundred and Twenty-five - Prophets of Science Fiction: Phillip K. Dick, "Why on EARTH did they make those 'dramatizations?'"

As a writer, myself, and a big fan of Science Fiction in general, seeing this Science Channel documentary show up as a recommendation by the mysterious Algorithms, I have to admit that my interest was a little piqued.

Having watched the episode covering Phillip K. Dick, though, I must say that I was very disappointed.

To its credit, the doc gets a fairly wide spread of authors, filmmakers, and actual engineers, scientists, and theoreticians to comment on the man and his body of work. Attention is given to his mental stresses in addition to his far-seeing predictions concerning robotics, memory, technology, and alternate realities.

That part is just fine. Well, for the most part, I think.

What is really annoying, though, are the cheap dramatizations of him both as a child and as an adult, particularly as a paranoid stoner living in Southern California.

You can kind of choke back the laughter in the early bits that cover the possible invasion and ransacking of his home, but the moment they get to the "he opened his house to miscreants" bits and the fake beards and terrible wardrobes (not to mention the horribly melodramatic acting) come into play, I honestly couldn't take the doc seriously anymore.

I guess, going into the documentary, I was really hoping for an examination of his methods and messages in terms of the practical process of his writing... something that I probably shouldn't have expected. Really, the only mention of his writing process comes in the form of the wacky I Ching device he apparently used to work in his "alternate universe" stories, which makes him seem more like a loon than a creative writer.

Maybe it's my own fault for expecting more than a bare bones analysis that was played for sensationalism instead of insight. I mean, it's not like the doc was directed by Ken Burns or anything, but still.

Disappointment was definitely the theme for my feelings concerning this episode of Prophets of Science Fiction. I think that I'll hang on for one more (in particular, the one that focuses on Robert Heinlein), but after that I have a feeling that I'm going to wash my hands of the series.

Until tomorrow, Potatoes~

Day Sixty - TEDTalks: Space Trek, Episode 2, or "65 Million Years Ago... the Dinosaurs had a Bad Day."

Wow... two months done already.

In many ways, it feels longer than that, but it also feels like the briefest time ever. In that conceptual haze of my memory of time, I remember watching Wild Target and Hardware just a few days ago as opposed to a few dozen days ago... or several dozen.

I wonder if March will go just as fast?

Anyway, on to today's entry.

Yesterday and today have been very busy days, so I needed small bites of Netflix to nosh on. Luckily, there are plenty of TEDTalks in my queue, so I decided to swing over to the Space Trek compilation (which holds 20 or so lectures on, you guessed it, SPACE) and watched Phil Plait's entry on the dangers of asteroids/meteors hitting the earth and wrecking our millenium.

If you didn't already know this about me, one of my major fears is that we'll never get off this Pale Blue Dot, instead becoming just an afterthought in the life cycle of the universe because either we will manage to kill ourselves off by war or pollution... or we'll face some natural catastrophe like a planet killer asteroid.

I'm glad I watched Phil's talk as it actually does mention the asteroid Apophis and, even though it was recorded a few years ago and most of the bleak reports I hear about Apophis nowadays don't go into much detail (like Michio Kaku's recent appearance on The Colbert Report), Phil Plait's quantifying of the odds that Apophis will fall through the keyhole that will guarantee an eventual hit gave me a bit more peace of mind.

I also like that he goes over several historical asteroid events, like Tunguska and the Meteor Crater in Arizona in addition to the Yucatan event that killed the dinosaurs.

No one ever really gives any scale or context to those impacts and explosions beyond the barest of facts and impressive CGI recreations meant to frighten us, but Phil does. He even goes so far as to tell what scientists think the composition of the meteors were and how that affected their impacts, craters, and overall damage to the surrounding areas.

My favorite part, though, had to be his solutions section. I really love the idea that, with a enough time and the tiniest of tugs, a two-ton satellite that we could send out to these asteroids could nudge them just far enough so that they'd miss us. He even mentions the possibility of using the gravity tether method to put asteroids that might have been on course to destroy us into a parking orbit so that we could mine them hollow and get so rich doing so!

Dangerous, but funny.

It's a short lecture, only clocking in at fifteen minutes, but, like most TEDTalks, it was both entertaining and informative. Always good to watch and enjoy!

Until tomorrow, Potatoes~