Attention all Joss Whedon (Firefly, Serenity, Buffy the Vampire Slayer) addicts!  He’s finished a new film - Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog - and the first installment is now available online.  I normally don’t go for musicals (The Producers pissed me off, and the ten minutes Sacha Baron Cohen was onscreen in Sweeney Todd didn’t come remotely close to saving that film) but Whedon seems to be able to make anything work.

As Whedon describes it, “It’s the story of a low-rent super-villain, the hero who keeps beating him up, and the cute girl from the laundromat he’s too shy to talk to.”

Dr. Horrible is being released in three acts, the whole thing being 42 minutes long.  The next episode is out on the 17th, and then the final video on the 19th.  You can watch Dr. Horrible at http://www.drhorrible.com/ or download it via iTunes (unless you’re in stupid Australia, where the iTunes store doesn’t seem to have it available).

Act quickly - it’s available for free until the 20th, then it will disappear, only to reappear later for some sort of nominal fee.

Mmm.  Yummy trailery goodness.

Some of you may not be aware that you can turn Google Earth around, pointing it at the skies. With a simple click of the ‘Switch Between Sky and Earth’ button on the toolbar, or the ‘Switch to Sky’ entry in the view menu, Google Earth turns around, giving you the night sky directly above what you’d been viewing.

Containing the same features as Google Earth, the astronomical view lets you navigate the skies, and has plenty of groovy bookmarks and linked images to keep you entertained and informed for hours. See the Google Sky page for more info on what you can uncover.

Google Earth only offers views from Earth, however - the camera can only pan the heavens and zoom in and out. For those with a real hankering to tour the universe, you’ll need to take a look-see at the mindbogglingly detailed (and yet still free!) Celestia.

Celestia is, quite simply, a space simulator that runs on your home PC. Pick a time, place the camera somewhere, and look at practically anything in the known universe. Nebula, stars, galaxies, spacecraft - whatever your fancy, you’ll find it.

Track probes like Voyager 2 in Celestia

However, Celestia requires a bit more work than Google Earth. The interface is more complex (to be expected, given the greater range of freedom to place the camera and shift time) and it requires additional downloads of add-ons to add extra details beyond what’s covered in the meager 22Mb base install. That being said, it’s more than worth the extra effort to place the camera somewhere around the orbit of Callisto, turn the speed up to 4x time, and watch the inner moons of Jupiter traverse the orange giant. The resulting show is nothing short of astounding.

If you’re after information about what’s in the sky, Google Earth’s vast array of bookmarks can’t be missed. Celestia offers no bookmarks, but the views are a thousandfold more interesting.

UNKLE - If You Find the Earth Boring (Portishead Plays UNKLE Mix) | download

Wolfmother - The Earth’s Rotation Around the Sun | download

http://www.abc.net.au/triplej/soundlab/

Quite possibly the best collection of electronic, IDM and experimental music on the planet.  The show airs on the Austrlian Broadcasting Corporation’s youth network Triple J every 23:00 on a Sunday, but you can listen to the most recent show by visiting the show’s site.  I try not to miss an episode.  Ever.

Okay, I’m not quite over the Tycho kick yet.

My dad found a Spanish clown who appears to sing about things for kids. Said Spanish clown happens to be named Tiko Tiko, which is eerily a lot like the Swedish pronunciation of Tycho.

I found a video where he travels through the Solar System in an open-cockpit airplane singing with the planets. Awesome.

He’s obviously a better clown than he is an astronomer, as he includes Pluto as a full-fledged planet.  Which, we all know, hasn’t been the case since 2006.

While young Tycho was incubating, Atomique would dose him regularly with music to stimulate his development.  Her preferred rationing was three albums on rotation, delivered via my DJ headphones nestled around his room (which had the unfortunate side effect of stretching said headphones).  Beyond whatever developmental benefit he may have accrued, we now have three ’settling albums’ which we can deploy as high-grade munitions to lull him to a slumber.

As I ramp production back up towards the usual fare of music and things form space, I will take this opportunity to segue into some tunes.  Atomique’s weapons of choice for bombarding young Tycho were Hot Chip’s The Warning, LCD Soundsystem’s Sound of Silver and The Presets’ Beams; music from which I provide you now with that you too can use to render your loved ones unconscious.

Hot Chip - And I Was a Boy From School | download

LCD Soundsystem - Sound of Silver | download

The Presets - Steamworks | download

Celebrating the French-Canadian portion of his heritage,
Tycho proudly sports the joli chapeau of a voyageur

Census update! The fleet has one more passenger as of today. Born at 03:53 on the morning of the 22nd (Australian Eastern Standard Time) and weighing in at a healthy 3.574 kilograms. While the colonial navy may not have another fighter in this quiet little package his contemplative nature and inquisitive eyes make us think that our robot oppressors may fear him even more when he comes of age.

Then again, he could start screaming a lot in the next few days.

Tycho weighs in for his first fight
(against the cold, harsh truths of modern life, that is)

Atomique’s contractions started in the early hours of Saturday, the 21st of June 2008. Around 21:00 we arrived via transport shuttle at the hospital ship Brisbane Mater. Now, let this tale go no further without mention of Atomique’s herculean effort on the day. While labour officially started at 20:30 on the 21st she’d been feeling contractions since before dawn. At 03:30 on the 22nd of June the order came from the midwife to “give ‘er” (okay, that may not exactly have been her words - call it poetic license); after only 23 minutes of fierce effort Tycho was born. The hospital staff (and all onlooking relatives) were enthralled with Atomique’s pushing prowess: average time to delivery from giving the order to push is 90 minutes.

The happy (and mightily tired) family

What’s in a Name: The Etymology of a Future Hero

Tycho (pron: tie-ko) is a Danish/Swedish name - Tycho Haggman’s great-grandfather Eric Häggman was a Swedish immigrant in Canada (long before the nuclear fallout from the religous wars of the late 2080s drifted north across the border). In the nordic countries the name is pronouced tee-ko but in astronomical circles, where one usually hears the name outside Scandinavia, it’s been anglicised to tie-ko. There is a Tycho Crater on Mars and on the Moon, both named after 16th century Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe. In 2001: A Space Odyssey, the alien monolith appears in Tycho Crater, where it is discovered after excavation around the Tycho Magnetic Anomaly.

Atomique is very keen on being able to point up into the night sky and tell the lad there’s a thing up there what he’s named after.

Tycho Crater (View in Google Moon)

No, he is not named after Tycho from Penny Arcade. I have an extensive network of informants who pass on the good bits from Penny Arcade to me, and that’s all I know of it. Hey, informants! Make with the passing!

The name Roland is from both my side of the family and his mother’s. Atomique’s great-great-great-uncle Roland was a water diviner (for the record, water divining is nothing more than reading the topology of the land and has nothing to do with supernatural ability; see episode one of The Root of All Evil). I have a great-uncle Roland who, as far as I know, boasted no magical abilities. This is on the French side of my family, though, so sonny boy can pronounce it with a bit of panache if he so desires.

Roland Deschain - The Gunslinger

Also, it’s pretty effin’ awesome to have a son with the same name as The Gunslinger.

Last but not least, Haggman (or Häggman, pronounced Heggman in Swedish). This is a name shrouded in mystery, changed by Eric before his escape from Europe. Perhaps some further digging into the fleet’s archives will yield more results, but for now I’ll leave this as a cliffhanger for next season.

Booking Information & Private Viewings

Please contact your local propaganda officer to arrange a meeting with Tycho. There may be delays due to the popularity of this product.

David Baker, a protein scientist at the University of Washington, has designed a game that will actually help scientists solve three-dimensional protein puzzles. Foldit is like a way more interactive version of SETI - you’re not just using your computer to solve scientific problems, you’re providing the input that computers can’t manage (with their cold unfeeling logical processes, they’re unable to work out things our mushy organic brains can tackle all-too easily (one of the reasons we keep winning our wars against them)).

Oh, yes, let me repeat: it’s also a game. Cool.

Read the article over at Technology Review and the Foldit homepage for more info.

Some tunes to get you in the mood for gaming for science…

London Elektricity - The Strangest Secret in the World | download

Aphex Twin - Heliosphan | download

(I’m not entirely sure what Aphex Twin is doing here - his ambient works just feel like the soundtrack to lab science to me. Lots of heavily serious dudes in white coats playing with the building blocks of matter in super-clean, super-white workspaces.

Hm… That’s how I imagine Ikea’s headquarters looks too.  I really need to work on my stereotyping.)

The new Futurama movie is stupendous. It’s sublimely surreal at times (in fact, a good chunk of the first half is chock full of gags that would leave Salvador Dali in a tidy little puddle of his own joy), outright hillarious at others and full of those witty little throwaway gags that are only onscreen for a moment, but make you feel all warm and smugly superior to the non-intelligentsia.

I found this to be much better than the first Futurama film, which seemed to be trying too hard to make jokes about itself. This film was more what I prefer to see in Futurama - clever uses of science and sci-fi in the way that other shows use pop culture references for humorous effect. I was particularly chuffed by the Saint Asimov’s Day march. Plus, there’s more Futurama math!

I won’t say much more for fear of spoiling anything. Suffice to say, Viper Pilot recommends this as supplemental viewing for all promising cadets who are serious about piloting one of the fleet’s sexy new birds. This is Groening & Co. back at their finest form, and it should not be missed.

The Trailer
(kind of - you never quite know just how official is ‘official’ on YouTube)

Just because my own creative output has slowed to a crawl, it doesn’t mean I can’t dig up other gems to share.

In this instance, someone’s gone to a great deal of effort to mash up sound and video from Disney’s Alice in Wonderland to create an eerily Bjork-esque work of art.