Blogs / Science Not Fiction

Last night’s Sexual Tension episode of Knight Rider seemed to be all about spying: Computer techs Billy and Zoe spyied on Mike Traceur and Sarah Graiman while they were “sparring”, Sarah and Mike spied on the bad guys with tiny cameras, and of course, everyone spied on each other with sidelong, furtive looks. It was just that kind of episode.

But let’s focus (pun intended) on the tiny cameras. Sarah and Mike had a needle-in-a-haystack problem. The bad guys’ target was a factory that produces a key oil refining part. Our heroes had to locate the evil-doers on a production floor swarming with white coated technicians. They solved the problem with some of the snazziest ID badges ever created. Each badge held a tiny  camera, which then broadcast video in real time back to KITT. The super car’s more powerful computers separated the faces from the rest of the image and compared them to an NSA face database to locate the villains. The whole device is preposterous, right?

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A few weeks ago, I wrote about 3-D printing in light of a Knight Rider episode in which KITT photographed a key and then used a handy laser cutter to produce the key. But in that post, I never considered the other component of that technology, namely, making a key based on a  photograph. Fortunately, a couple of scientists at the University of California-San Diego got right on that problem and proved that you can, indeed, copy a key from a photograph.

Dr. Stefan Savage, a UCSD computer scientist, and his student, Benajamin Laxton, demonstrated their software on two images of a key. The first was taken from close range with a cellphone camera. The second set of keys was shot using a telephoto lens form a rofotop to capture an image of keys on a cafe table 200 feet away.  Then they wrote an algorithm in Matlab that could normalize the picture of the key depending on distance and the angle of the photo. Once the image has been normalized, it was a relatively simple matter to encode the ridges along the keylength into a numerical pattern, and then render that pattern into a real metal key.

Of course, the unanswered question for this experiment has to be, Why? Here’s what Savage said on the UCSD website: “If you go onto a photo-sharing site such as Flickr, you will find many photos of people’s keys that can be used to easily make duplicates. While people generally blur out the numbers on their credit cards and driver’s licenses before putting those photos on-line, they don’t realize that they should take the same precautions with their keys.”

Well, that’s a good point, and it’s something worth being careful about. But I still say he watched too many police shows.

Maybe it was the success of The Matrix, or maybe it was the age of the Internet that did it, but in the last 10 years, it’s no longer flying cars or fast-talking robots that symbolize the world of the future. No, these days it’s the ability to almost touch piles of data that has become the sine qua non of quality futuristic imaginings.  Case in point, Minority Report. The high point of that film (for me, anyway) had to be when Tom Cruise dons his info gloves and commences a magnificent danse du data, shuffling through the visions of the precogs accompanied by the strains of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony. Down here in small screen land, Knight Rider’s writers make data manipulation a staple of the show.

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My colleague Eliza Strickland over on 80 Beats has a post about researchers who want to build a new world of out of buckypaper, a superstrong material that has applications ranging from an airplane construction material to lightweight display screens.

There’s some online buzz wondering if this material would be strong enough to make the space elevator a reality. If you haven’t heard the term, a space elevator is a cable or ribbon that extends about 100,000 km into space from an anchor point on the equator. Glorified elevators car shuffle cargo and people in and out of orbit, eliminating all that mucking about with dangerous rockets and with the ability to move payloads for a minute fraction of the cost of current boosters. A space elevator could make a lot of big space projects — like orbiting solar power plants — suddenly very doable. The idea was first thought of over a century ago, and most notably popularized by Arthur C. Clarke’s 1979 novel The Fountains of Paradise. In recent years, interest was renewed with a new (and much more practical) elevator design pioneered by Brad Edwards .

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For all the giant exploding Death Stars in SciFi, its really the mundane devices that stay with us for years after. Doctor Who’s sonic screwdriver, Picard’s replicator, and Spock’s tricorder have at least as much resonance for us as any gigantic space laser that ever turned a plot. In Knight Rider, our resident crime fighters rely pretty heavily on KITT’s ability to find people. He accesses a government database — usually the DMV — and then connects to various surveillance cameras in the area (Knight Rider crooks do tend to like Vegas casinos). The ability to access closed-circuit cameras aside, what’s really amazing here is KITT’s ability to digitally match photos to a moving image. For modern law enforcement and software search companies, that’s something of a holy grail.

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Sculptor Christopher Conte combines his artwork and his experience making prosthetics to create mechanical, science fiction–inspired work with a touch of the dark side.

Last night’s midseason finale of Eureka tied up a number of loose ends, and set up a number of new plot points for the second half of the third season, set to air sometime in 2009. (Incidentally, last minute struggles with the script for this episode were responsible for Eureka co-creater Jamie Paglia having to sprint through the San Diego Convention Center to make it on time to DISCOVER’s Comic-Con panel on the Science Behind Science Fiction.) One of the things that Sheriff Carter finds himself contending with is a “nanoparticle syntactic foam” that goes from foam to something harder than concrete in a few seconds—the ideal substance for sealing off the abandoned underground facility that has been featured throughout the season, but not something you’d want to spill on yourself.

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There’s a scene in the movie Babylon A.D., which opened Friday, where Mélanie Thierry’s character, Aurora, escapes from her guardians through a crowded post-apocalyptic marketplace and is suddenly confronted by two cloth-covered cages. She stares at the cages and as the camera zooms in, the audience realizes that something big is prowling about inside. The cage-porters whip the cloth off (Don’t ask why. This movie does not answer well to “Why?”) , and we see a pair of Siberian tigers pacing angrily and growling at the crowd. Aurora was raised in a convent, and the sight of the tigers awes her, not least because she knows (somehow) that tigers had been extinct for decades.

The plot of the film is set in some indeterminate future, and it centers on Aurora’s journey from Russia to America in the company of Sister Rebeka (Michelle Yeoh as a badass nun) and Toorop, the hard hard-bitten, badass mercenary (Vin Diesel, who plays no other kind of mercenary, right Riddick fans?).

Anyway, there’s the market place, there’s the tigers, there’s Aurora as Toorop and Sister Rebeka come up behind her. Toorop is not so impressed, later dismissing the beasts as “copies. Clones of clones. Fakes.”

But why so dismissive, Toorop? (more…)

On the TV series Stargate Atlantis, the current installment from the Stargate franchise, a device small enough to be held in your hands provides the energy for an entire city. Called a Zero Point Module, the device glows with golden light and produces an almost unlimited supply of clean energy. But it seems that the ZPM is an unrealistic little gizmo because it somehow creates energy from… well, nothing, and therefore, the thing belongs in a prop room shelved somewhere between the Flux Capacitor and the One Ring. But what if it was real?

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Friday night’s episode of Stargate Atlantis featured the computers of Atlantis being besieged by a group of entities seeking to move onto a higher plane of existence (warning, mild spoilers below!).

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Most planets featured in science fiction tend to be rather generic. These planets are usually convenient celestial bodies upon which to pitch a narrative tent for a few scenes before the plot moves on. Generic planets also tend to be one-note, reflecting some particular environment on Earth. You have your ice-worlds, desert worlds, lava worlds, jungle worlds, water worlds, city worlds, forest worlds (in particular, forests that look like those near the city of Vancouver), earthquake worlds, and so on.

But sometimes an author will create a world whose presence has a weight and ring of truth, a world that feels like it could happily go on existing on its own terms, with or without a protagonist or antagonist strolling around on its surface. Setting aside obviously artificial habitats like ring words or hollowed out asteroids, here are my top ten best science fiction planets, in chronological order:

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Despite the huge hype, The Dark Knight was definitely not overrated. The movie has heft and complexity, while never letting its momentum flag. And while everyone is raving about Heath Ledger’s (admittedly brilliant) turn as The Joker, spare some props for Aaron Eckhart, whose performance as Harvey Dent/Two Face brought a convincing depth to this tragic character.

Batman, being a regular (if insanely fit and wealthy) human, rather than a mutant or an alien, has always had to rely on a collection of gadgets and other machines when battling his foes. In The Dark Knight, Batman relies on a distributed sensor network to track The Joker, an idea which is rapidly becoming science fact. In fact, within just a few hours of watching the movie, I found myself enmeshed in a location tracking network at the HOPE hacker conference hosted by 2600 magazine over the weekend in New York City. (The word “hacker” is sometimes taken to be synonymous with “computer criminal,” but it was hackers who, for example, built large parts of the digital infrastructure of the Internet and the World Wide Web and brought personal computing to the masses.)

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I blame the Independence Day holiday for not seeing this fantastically good news sooner: most of the lost footage of Fritz Lang’s 1927 masterpiece Metropolis has been found in Argentina. For decades, audiences have had to make do with the cut down version that distributers produced to make the film more accessible (Lang’s original version ran about three-and-a-half hours long.) Unfortunately, some things about the movie don’t really make sense in the distributors version. Devotees helped by creating versions with title cards sprinkled throughout that told viewers the best guess as to what happened in the deleted scenes, but now guesses can be replaced with the truth of Lang’s vision.

Metropolis spins a tale of class warfare in a futuristic city that was the forerunner of Judge Dredd’s Megacity One, Bladrunner’s Los Angeles, DC Comic’s Gotham, and many other science fiction cities.

Metropolis is an important movie, not least for creating the character of Maria, a beautiful robot that can be considered the direct ancestor of Battlestar Galactica’s Six. But the movie’s most significant influence was on real world architecture: Lang was inspired by the rash of skyscrapers going up in places like New York City, and extrapolated the new skylines for his sets. In turn, architects, planners and futurists were inspired by his movie and brought elements of Lang’s fictional city into designs for real urban developments in a classic feedback loop between science fiction and science fact.

- A bad case of the earbleeds. [Polite Dissent]

- Attention Jaron Lanier: FOX Virtuality pilot casting. [Hollywood Reporter via io9]

- Note to Discover Corporate: Time to order Japanese high tech brainstorming room. [Pink Tentacle]

- Ingeniously designed keg stand. [DVICE]

It slides into view, slowly filling the frame: a giant spaceship, bristling with nacelles, antennas and other devices of unknown purpose. A deep rumbling pushes your sound system’s bass response to the limit. After a length of time, as determined by a complex interplay between how much awe or menace the director is trying to convey and the size of the special effects budget, a collection of glowing engines finally passes into view.

Whether it’s an interstellar freight transport, a Colonial Battlestar, or even a Star Destroyer, one thing is for sure: it’s honkin huge!

By comparison, Earth’s current mega-space project, the International Space Station, is puny. (more…)