(no subject)

Sorry about yesterday.

Several people have raved in my hearing about the "Scientists create life" story that's come up, in which a Doctor Craig Venter and his team have designed a synthetic genome and implanted it into a host cell. I have read the Guardian article, but as you all know I'm a fuzzy-minded arts person, so could someone clarify for me: was the host cell already living when the genome was implanted into it? That's certainly the impression I'm getting. Which, if true, means that, while the scientists have in fact created an artificial living thing, they've actually done it by modifying an existing living thing. This is not, if I'm right, your actual "life out of lifeless tissue" or "life out of primordial soup" or "life out of nothing" jobbie. The life was there already. They just modded the software.

I'm going very gently here, because I don't want to push anyone's buttons the way mine got pushed. Am I right about this or am I wrong?

EDIT: looks as if I'm wrong--they're calling the host a "dead" cell in another article. So, life out of lifeless tissue. Two more steps to go, and then I'll have to start falling back to "well, all right, life may be entirely physical, but what about intelligence, eh? eh?" And then they'll do that as well, and then I'll know that everything is exactly as it seems, and that will be that.

Or maybe they'll find there's something they can't do at this stage of our development, and I shall rejoice, because it isn't meant to be that simple.

Housework. I shall arise and go now and do housework. We have company coming in a week's time.

3D

I don't like it. *checks demon meter, needle doesn't twitch* Phew.

Pictures are for looking at, and the best way to do that is when they're all there, in the frame, in front of you. If the story happens to be interactive, then I'm perfectly capable of imagining myself into an avatar. If it isn't, then I'll happily watch and believe for the duration. I can see perspective, thanks. I don't need things flying out of the screen and poking me in the nose every five minutes. It's a distraction, not a help.

I don't know how this new 3D tech works, if you need to wear cardboard glasses or whatever, but I'd just as soon have the option of doing without, and when I thought I heard last night that some film or other that I was interested in was "only in 3D" my heart sank, because one thing I remember about the old style of 3D was that if you didn't wear the stupid glasses the thing was unwatchable.

Can anyone reassure me that either (a) you can watch 3D movies without the 3D, or that (b) the flat option is not going to go away, at least till we have proper holographic tanks like what you see on Star Trek?

(no subject)

Part of the Myst story, which as you know Bob involves the Writing of books that contain worlds (Ages), involves a character named Gehn. He was the father of Atrus and the son of Aitrus (confused? you will be) and his education in the Art of Writing was cut short by the collapse of the D'ni civilisation and the death of just about everybody who might have taught him, but being a can-do type he went away and taught himself. When he came back and fetched his son to teach him, Atrus was horrified to discover that Gehn's idea of Writing an Age was to go through other people's Ages, extract the bits he thought looked interesting and cobble them together. (This used to be a perfectly acceptable way of writing poetry, the result being called a "cento," from a Latin word for a cloak made of patches.)

The resultant Ages, to which Gehn gave numbers rather than names, were often unstable, though not always, but Gehn believed he had mastered all there was to know about Age Writing and that Atrus' through-composed efforts were wasteful and over-elaborate. He also thought his having Written the Age gave him the right to play god to its people and deal with them as he saw fit...

I don't know what made me think of that.

Anyone feel like trying their hand at a cento? I may do one later on.

Back to work. Here, Dyson Dyson Dyson...heeere boy...

(no subject)

I'm debating this 30 days of television meme thingy. Can I do it without mentioning either That Show or its predecessor? Maybe. Watch this space.

EDIT: no, on the whole best not risk it, apparently.