Notes, Notings, and Common Refrains

(and for anyone else who needs it, too).

Warning: Contains: Doctor Who and earworms.

In 2008 (?), the Webcomic "xkcd" posted this: xkcd Loves the Discovery Channel. I didn't (and still don't) have cable television, so although I enjoyed the strip, I didn't understand the full reference. Didn't take me long to find the original ad on YouTube, though:



And then, someone made a Doctor Who fanvid of it:



Well, the other day, this fanvid showed up in my YouTube recommendations:



I couldn't make out, in vid, whether the lyrics were "I just won't know" or "I just won't go." so I checked out the original music video (I think it's "know" ??). But in any case, I liked that, too, for being pro-fun, and all:



('cause sometimes I need to remember there's more to dreaming than nightmares, and there's more to the "Real World" than news of crisis and catastrophe)

1. I remembered, in replying to raze, yesterday, that I eventually learned react before the scary music cue, and thought that it might be good to make that clear.

2. Much of the language in this poem is self-reflective, adult, and jargony. So I tried to make the two lines where I'm "hiding," at least, sound more like the voice of the two-year old me (cue Eleven's regeneration speech).

3. Question -- Considering the above: Back then, my actual name for the show was "Scare Trek." Should I call it that, in the poem?

A SPASTIC CHILD WATCHES THE T.V.

I learned to tell a story at age two
(At least, the craft of pacing and suspense).
Propped up between my parents on the couch,
With season one of “Star Trek” on the screen,
I could not hide, but quickly learned:
Anticipate the music's minor shift,
Then plug my ears and close my eyes and hum
Until the things that scared me went away.
I never feared the aliens as much
As all the angry shouts and lasers' whine
That always happened – every episode –
As soon as any “monster” came on-screen.

Could I have understood, as young as that:
My difference, too, was something that they feared?

A couple of years ago, on an episode of Nova, I heard/saw one of the clearest explanations of:

a) Why faster motion through Space means slower motion through Time, and vice-versa. And
b) How/Why it's helpful to think of Time as a dimension that runs, in some way, perpendicular to Space.

To summarize: the analogy was made to driving in a car at a fixed speed in a straight line (the example given was 60 mph). If you're traveling due North, then all of your progress will be northerly. But if you turn onto a Northwest direction, your northerly progress will slow down, even though you're still driving at 60 mph. And if you drive due West, your northerly progress will cease. And Time is linked to Space in the same way as North is linked to West.*

Okay. I get that (I think). However (and here comes my question) -- that very same program, during the opening credits, shows the familiar "fabric of space as a rubber sheet warped by the force of gravity" visualization. As I understand it (at least, as that visualization shows it) that warping (also?) occurs in a direction perpendicular to Space...

So is the curvature of Space, by the way of Gravity, synonymous with "time"? Or is "Space," itself, four dimensions, with Time being a fifth dimension? In other words, did Anthony Coburn, in writing the script for An Unearthly Child, express the nature of Spacetime more accurately than 99.99% of all the popular science writers (aiming to be properly educational) in the 50+ years since?

BTW, later in that same episode, they bring up the old saw about time travel back to the past: "If Time can flow in two directions, how come we never see entropy run in reverse?" Well, it's reported in this video that maybe we have, back in 2006.

*(I couldn't find this as a brief clip, but I did find the entire episode online. The explanation/visualization starts here, and runs for about a minute. The full discussion of this phenomenon lasts about four(ish) minutes; the full episode is 56 minutes).

I wanted to double-check the wording of Immanuel Kant's 'second formulation of the categorical imperative,' this morning, and was struck by how much he looked, in this portrait, like William Hartnell, playing a certain iconic television role. Yes/Yes?

That wording, BTW, goes like this:

Act with reference to every rational being (whether yourself or another) so that it is an end in itself in your maxim.

So this morning, I went through my journal archive, and read through the posts tagged "doctor who." That's when I found this response to a Doctor Who meme of yesteryear. And with the fiftieth anniversary, and a whole new regeneration cycle, I thought it was worthy of a polish and a repost:

( *Ten things in my personal Doctor Who Canon* (from 3-11-2007) )

( And three more, in honor of the three most recent Doctor!Actors )

So-- as I said, recently, YouTube has been recommending (after about a year's break) videos related to Chuck... Well, it turns out that the lead actor in the show (Zac Levi) has been, for the last three years, holding charity fundraising events at Comic-Con for Operation Smile called "Conversations for a Cause." He hosts/organizes panels in intimate spaces (rather than massive halls that hold 5,000+ people); entrance to these venues is $20, and the entire panel time is Q & A with the guests.

Here's one of the panels that streamed live, yesterday: Conversations for a Cause -- Doctor Who (Matt Smith, Jenna Louise Coleman, and Steven Moffat) -- Hosted by Nathan Fillion

~45 minutes

A Fan-Made trailer for Doctor Who's Fiftieth Anniversary. Folks in my circles who are Doctor Who Fans have perhaps already seen this. But whether they have or not, I suspect it would be cheering (also, for folks who don't really know much about D.W., it might be a good intro to the whole ethos... or, it might be utterly confusing. Either one)

One reason it sometimes takes me over an hour to get from my chair into my bed, at the end of my day, is not that I find the effort tiring, so much as boring. And after about the third or fourth attempt, I start to daydream about other stuff, and kinda forget what I'm doing.

*facepalm*

(nb: getting into bed is a lot easier when I'm not wearing flannel footie pajamas that are three sizes too long for me)

_________

I've become fascinated by Shrink-plastic (Shrinky-Dinks). Especially since I've learned that it's just the same number 6 plastic that deli sandwiches and melon chunks are sold in, and that I could "recycle" that stuff into other stuff, intead of just throwing it out. ...Except the stuff I can imagine turning it into? I don't need, either. Like the vid on the website says, though, molecular science is nifty-cool: heat making things shrink, instead of expand.

_________

I sometimes imagine the Doctor as a quasi-historical figure, in the same category as Arthur: Perhaps being real, somewhere, somewhen, in history, around whom we've attached layer upon layer of fantasy because that's what we do, until we've gotten to the point where the fantasy is more important and more "true."

If there were a "real" Doctor, somewhere out there, this is what I imagine the reality to be like:

• He might be bipedal, like us, and blend into a crowd of humans when nobody's looking too closely. But get close enough, and it would be pretty obvious he's alien. Might even give us the creeps, if his face is almost-but-not-quite like ours in terms of its proportions (our brains wanting to make a human face out of his, but somewhere along the way, something would slip out of place in our mind maps).
  
  
• He might, indeed, be a renegade out there trying to nudge the histories of civilizations away from war, and freeing the oppressed. But the reality would be a lot more "boring" with less monsters and running for lives. ... More like the Dayton Peace Accords. As an impenditrible space that exists outside of time and ordinary space, the inside of the TARDIS is the ultimate neutral territory. And as a Timelord, who has access to multiple timestreams, the Doctor could be an effective (if ethically dodgy) ombudsman, who can show the historical consequences of different decisions made by the parties involved. "Have Geneva. Will Travel."
  
  
• Regeneration would be a slow(er), and possibly painful, process; what we see in our fictionalized version is like what we see on televisied cooking show: the unbaked batter goes into one oven, and then a fully baked cake is taken out of another oven in the next beat. ...The reality would be more like the metamorphoses of an insect (butterfly being the boldest example).
  
  
• Daleks are impossible. At least, Daleks who forge through the universe blithely wiping out every other life form. No species can survive in a monoculture like that, and even they would know it. Enslaving every other lifeform, maybe... but not exterminating.

_________

This video made me happy. A) it's illustrated with stick figures (Bwa-ha-ha at "bouncing baby boy"). B) it's "captioned" with the lyrics (mostly). C) the person who made the vid is also the one singing in the vid. D) the person who made it included the historical information that it's based on an essay by Mark Twain (Lit!Geek / Geek!love).


_________

Surfing YouTube, last night, I found MST3K vids, and MST3K-style vids. And they brought back memories. I remember watching it with my dad, back in the days before satelite television was scrambled, and you could pick up every provider with a backyard dish. We stopped watching when all the providers went the way of subscriptions, and I didn't see it again for many years until late in its run, when I was visiting someone who had cable.

I was sorely disappointed. It seemed to me that they were talking over the Whole film, and not just waiting for the long awkward pauses, anymore. And that seemed to ruin the point, if you couldn't hear the original dialog that was being spoofed.

My dad and I loved the show, btw, but my mother hated it, on the principle that people who talk during movies are evil rude, and should never be encouraged, no matter how "bad" the movie is.

For people on my f'list who I Know are Fans.

So, last night, I was watching Craig Ferguson.

And in the closing segment ("What did we learn on the show tonight, Craig?"), he announced that since the "Lost Cold Open" was leaked to the Internets, CBS officials went ahead and got the rights to the song.

And... And... And:

They will use it as the cold open later this week, when Alex Kingston (a.k.a. "River Song") is a guest on the show.

(Cue massive grinning from one capri0mni.)

---
I thought you guys would like to know this.

...
Even if you are not a fan of Moffat, Smith, Kingston, or any of the newest Doctor Who team, and even though Craig Ferguson does not have the audience or exposure of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno or David Letterman, this has got to increase interest in the entire Doctor Who series in the United States (both old and new), and maybe increase the liklihood that we'll get DVD releases in a timely manner.

(It's so cute; Craig has kept a little model TARDIS on his desk, up front, right in camera shot, ever since Matt Smith's appearance. D'awww.)