Swamp Thing Lives!

From Wired:

Green Sea Slug Is Part Animal, Part Plant

SEATTLE — It’s easy being green for a sea slug that has stolen enough genes to become the first animal shown to make chlorophyll like a plant.

Shaped like a leaf itself, the slug Elysia chlorotica already has a reputation for kidnapping the photosynthesizing organelles and some genes from algae. Now it turns out that the slug has acquired enough stolen goods to make an entire plant chemical-making pathway work inside an animal body, says Sidney K. Pierce of the University of South Florida in Tampa.

The slugs can manufacture the most common form of chlorophyll, the green pigment in plants that captures energy from sunlight, Pierce reported January 7 at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology. Pierce used a radioactive tracer to show that the slugs were making the pigment, called chlorophyll a, themselves and not simply relying on chlorophyll reserves stolen from the algae the slugs dine on.

“This could be a fusion of a plant and an animal — that’s just cool,” said invertebrate zoologist John Zardus of The Citadel in Charleston, S.C.

Well, cool and sort of creepy.

The Long Way Home

I went hunting through the used bookstores the other day, and came out with Poul Anderson's 1958 novel The Long Way Home. It's about a group of explorer-astronauts who are trying out an experimental new spacedrive- by taking a trip several thousand light-years away.

Their experiments in the solar system seemed to indicate that the drive was instantaneous, so they're shocked and appalled when they get home and discover that 5000 years have passed. In retrospect, they realized that puzzling errors of measurement meant that the trip was only instantaneous for them.

You really have to take this with a grain of salt- it's the same kind of pulp-sf assumption that lets the Fantastic Four fly out into space solely on Reed Richard's smartness, rather than an organized mission plan with ground support from NASA. But if you can get past that, it's pretty good escapist fun.

The future, incidentally, is a stulified caste society with a computer overlord. Needless to say, Anderson's hero gets over his future shock and makes short work of everyone around him.

Are Short Stories Scientific?

I was at the bookstore today, in the SF/Fantasy section as usual, looking at the anthologies that are lined up between "New Books" and the A's. They were all science fiction.

As I thought about that, it occurred to me that almost all the sf/f short story anthologies I'd seen were science fiction rather than fantasy. Fantasy, on the other hand, seems to have all the super-long Jordan/Goodkind epics.

Why is that? Is it just a quirk of publishing history- i.e. if Jordan had been an SF writer, we'd have a lot of encyclopedia-length science fiction imitators? Or is there something in the vaguely-defined difference between the two that selects for story length?

Did I Know, Did I? No.

Yet another youtube link! This one is to a presentation called "Do You Know," full of statistics about the accelerating pace of things. It's pretty interesting.

But- perhaps it's a sign that I'm getting old- it does not inspire me with a sense of wonder so much as a sense of dread. A sense that "This cannot last."

"We are living in exponential times," it says: and that is true enough. But there are several exponential curves in human experience; none of them last forever, and most of them end in crashes. To cite the most obvious example, we're in the middle of an economic crash following what seemed like endless exponential growth.

It cites examples of the massive increase in information flow, which is undeniably impressive; but past a point, you have to wonder what is the point? We're already at the stage where information filtering is a big deal; an exponential information increase won't help that at all. It'll simply be wasted, for the most part.

Oh, well. Like I said, I'm probably just getting old. Or maybe it's the atmosphere of the times, which is so much more pessimistic than it was a few months ago.

The Monotone With a Million Eyes!

Here's the opening sequence to Roger Corman's epic The Beast With a Million Eyes. It's Roger Corman, really, which tells you everything you need to know.

But I love the matter-of-factness of it. "I feed on fear; live on human hatred," he intones, in the almost-cheerful tones of a school documentary film about the wonders of natural science.

The Disappointing Lexcorp Bailout

Lex Luthor's bailout application, here!

It starts off strong; regrettably, it doesn't stay that way. I wonder why not?

Hmm. The initial joke is the idea that Luthor is a standard corporate CEO. In that context his various anti-Superman plots are pretty funny to listen to, since they're so convoluted and, well, comic-bookish. The humor lies in Luthor's own deadpan lack of awareness; he doesn't seem to realize how absurd it all sounds.

But then the skit suddenly turns metatextual: "I'm Lex Luthor, that's what I do," which doesn't work at all. The shift of tone loses the thread of humor, especially since there doesn't seem to be any real joke involved.

It's a shame, as it starts out pretty strongly. But the ending joke is good!

The Exoplanet Catalog

I've followed with interest the discoveries of planets outside the solar system; but I had no idea that astronomers had discovered quite so many.

The Exoplanet Catalog is a helpful listing (complete with details and animations!) of all the planets so far discovered. And there are a lot.

I get a real geeky pleasure of the thought that, at last, there are enough planets that we need a guidebook to keep them straight.