Didn't know what else to title it, other than the previous commentary's tongue-in-cheek jab. I do make a serious point (with Gene again) at the end. 
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Visit my blog where I discuss the white savior syndrome in Hollywood movies and media images at www.blacknerdfilms.blogspot.com
I am working my way through the Mass Effect Trilogy. I know, a bit late to the party. While the story so far is great (i am in the middle of ME2) I am aware that there is some disappointment coming in the form of multiple shady endings in ME3. From what I hear, this has been compounded by Bioware's attempt to correct the problem by asking people to buy a better ending.
Outrage at customer gouging aside, this is all besides the point. Right now, my Shepard, who happens to be black-ish, is having a great time working for the Illusive Man and whipping the Normandy-2 around with Miranda and Jacob. What struck me was that this was the first time I had ever experienced a Space-Opera with Non-white males as the leads. Sure, some Sci-fi (Avery Brooks and DS9 is the gold standard) feature non-white leads. However, that is baritone exception to the rule. Space Opera, as a genera, is consistently homogeneous is its heroes.
However, in ME I am able to change the dynamic. Between myself, Miranda and Jacob; the majority of the speaking roles in ME2 main are taken by non-traditional voices. This would be even more the case if I had decided to play as female Shepard. (Lesbian space commander FTW!). What really struck me was that this situation is not explicitly called for by the game designers. Alternatively, the selection of ethnic identity and gender is not forbidden or frowned upon. There is no downside for a dark-skinned Shepard, Reapers are equal opportunity villains.
This all begs a question. If interactive story telling is the wave of the future, does it matter who is telling the story and what their point of view is? Is it even important to worry about the background of major and minor characters. For instance, there was a dust up with certain fans of the Hunger Games reacting negatively to the character of Rue. While I thought it was clear that she was a person of color (even a bit heavy-handed ) a great number of readers were shocked (and sadly) disappointed when they went to the movie and saw Amandla Stenberg. If the future, authors might try to obscure the ethnicity of their characters so as to avoid the problem altogether. This works even better if your hope is to have a movie made. Let the director decide what the characters look like.
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people got mad I was accurately depicted as I was described in the book |
Alternatively, interactive media reduces, if someone wanted to, these unpleasant circumstances. The writer merely tells a universal story; the hero's journey; the fight against the evil empire; the war against the un-dead, and then lets the recipient pick the look of the character.
This creates a frame work for the user/reader to import their own ideas of the character.
final thoughts at Moorsgate Media
Moorsgate media
Scientists have discovered how to measure greenhouse gases 200,000 times faster as the result research by an award-winning PhD student from The University of Western Australia and a US team.
The discovery - which is already being used by NASA scientists in Space - has major implications for global warming research, breath analysis (to detect illness), explosives detection, chemical process monitoring and a range of other applications, including fundamental quantum theory.
UWA physics graduate Gar-Wing Truong used highly-sensitive rapid laser scanning technology to help lead US scientists from National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Maryland to build new gas measurement equipment with unparalleled speed, accuracy, precision and spectral coverage.
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California has begun using data from Mr Truong's research to calibrate carbon monitoring satellites in orbit around Earth and better understand carbon dioxide molecules.
University of Western Australia:
High-speed discovery helps measure greenhouse gases from space.
Hey everyone I am new to black science fiction society, I am a young black film maker and would love if many of you would support me and my blog where I talk about the lack of black male and black images in Hollywood and the media! Fell free to check it out, leave comments and visit my YouTube channel that goes along with it at https://www.youtube.com/user/AsarFilms!
Star Trek Into Darkness opened this week. My review in a nutshell is that it's essentially alternate-timeline Wrath of Khan, for anyone who has seen it and is familiar with the character of Khan from the Star Trek universe. The main villain is a mysterious super-man named John Harrison, portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch, who then reveals himself to be Khan.
If he really is Khan Noonien Singh, then I am not laughing. Khan, the Khan, is of Sikh/East Indian heritage. In Star Trek: the original series (1966-1969), he's portrayed by Ricardo Montalban, a Spanish-Mexican actor, who also portrayed him in Star Trek 2: Wrath of Khan. Montalban, as talented as he was, was a white actor in brownface.
Fast forward to this movie, and the same Indian character is being portrayed Cumberbatch, a white, pale-skinned, British actor. We have a classic case of brownface on our hands here. Brownface, for those who don't know, is the brother of Blackface, which involves casting an actor, usually white, to portray a "brown" character (South Asian, Native American, etc).
Why did director J.J. Abrams and his team not cast an Indian actor for the role of Khan? Off the top of my head, I can come up with these Indian actors: Naveen Andrews, formerly Sayeed on ABC's Lost. There's the Maori actor (not South Asian), Cliff Curtis, and even the Pakistani actor, Faran Tahir who played the captain in the first sequence in Star Trek 2009.
On the Star Trek movie board, Damon Lindeloff, the head writer for the movie, left a message saying he'll be back to discuss Khan's race-change, but so far, he's been quiet. I am curious about the bogus excuses he'll use if he ever gets around to addressing the issue. Will he try to say Northern Indians are/were white, like the director of The Prince of Persia, after he was confronted about casting Jake Gyllenhaal? There are too many excuses being passed around already. On IMDb, the excuses range from, "Ricardo Montalban was white, so Khan is white" to "it doesn't matter. Only the actor matters."
The only excuse that's remotely plausible is that it's not the same Khan. He's simply using the title, Khan, as homage to Noonien Singh. Yet, this is without explanation in the movie, as Harrison simply says he's "Khan." It's obvious that we're supposed to accept that he's Khan Noonien Singh of "Space Seed" and "Wrath of Khan." Why would J.J. Abrams and his writing crew of Lindeloff, Kurtzman and Orci purposely mislead people by referring to the character as "Khan"? And why would they use the Spock Prime (Leonard Nimoy) cameo to confirm/discuss Khan?
In this day and age, they still don't care that people don't like brownface or blackface, etc.
Dark matter...dark energy...dark lightning...dark flow: I feel somewhat like a Sith Lord...
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| Credit: Nature |
National Geographic: New Proof Unknown "Structures" Tug at Our Universe
New Scientist: Blow for 'dark flow' in Planck's new view of the cosmos
The zombies are coming—and 13-year old Kendra and her grandpa Joe are in the woods fighting for survival in the midst of an apocalypse. Husband-and-wife team writers and producers: Tananarive Due and Steven Barnes are creators of the horror film, Danger Word. The short is based on the original story The Living Dead 2 written by John Joseph Adams and has snagged veteran actor Frankie Faison and young thespian, Saoirse Scott.
The creative pair raises the question: when is a horror movie more than a horror movie? Is it when a community pulls together to escape, a teenage girl learns her strength, or when the heroes and heroines are black? The aim of the film is to highlight African-Americans in science fiction and fantasy, and to serve as a road map for children and adults who are ready to fulfill their artistic dreams.
A dense sheet of electrons accelerated to close to the speed of light can act as a tuneable mirror that can generate bursts of laser-like radiation in the short wavelength range via reflection. A team of physicists from the Max-Planck-Institute of Quantum Optics (MPQ) in Garching, the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) München, the Queens University Belfast (QUB) and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) near Oxford created such a mirror in a recent experiment. The scientists used an intense laser pulse to accelerate a dense sheet of electrons from a nanometre-thin foil to close to the speed of light and reflected a counter-propagating laser pulse from this relativistic mirror. With this experiment, the physicists managed to carry out a Gedankenexperiment (thought experiment) formulated in 1905 by Albert Einstein stating that the reflection from a mirror moving close to the speed of light could in principle result in bright light pulses in the short wavelength range. The researchers report on their results in Nature Communications, 23. April, 2013.
In everyday life, reflections of light are usually observed from surfaces that are at rest such as the reflection from a piece of glass or a smooth surface of water. But, what happens if one creates a mirror moving incredibly fast, close to the speed of light? This question was answered more than a century ago by Albert Einstein in 1905 in his theory of special relativity. Now, an international team of researchers investigated that question in an experiment.
Max Planck Institute: Light bursts out of a flying mirror
Black Speculative Fiction Contest
RAGAZINE.CC
“Speculative Fiction by People of Color”
COMPETITION
$1000.00 First Prize.
Entry Fee just $15.00 per story.
Final judge Sheree Renée Thomas will provide a critique of the 2nd and 3rd place
entries. Honorable mentions will be made to the 4th and 5th place entries.
First prize $1,000.00 for the best piece
of speculative fiction completed
by a person of color in 2013.
Read More: http://ragazine.cc/2013/04/contest/
That I am thankful for, really.
Christopher Emdin, professor of science and education writes "5 Ways to Stop a Black Scientist - Kiera Wilmot's Arrest" and I have to say something not just for clarity, but for sanity. The five ways are thus:
Criminalize curiosity - needed for scientific research.
Sending student to "expulsion schools" - see my comments below.
Stifling innovation.
Putting outdated rules over education.
Prison-type policies.
We keep observing like the proverbial deer in headlights an oncoming global train wreck with the smug arrogance that "America" is somehow a magical chant; an incantation that inoculates us from slipping from preeminence in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Our global competitors do NOT have tax-funded "creation museums"; our global competitors do NOT make political litmus tests involving a litany of science denial (The Big Bang, Climate Change, Evolution, Relativity - the MOON landing!); our global competitors do NOT have draconian standardized tests converting their students into the equivalent of Pavlov's canines: their teachers TEACH, and the profession is rightly revered. Finland, for example has not resorted to for-profit charter schools that will enrich a few and serve no one, and they are whipping our intellectual assets in an academic smackdown across Terra Firma!
We're not a "post-racial" society: if anything, 2008 and 2012 showed the rising political power of so-called minorities and much maligned millennials; their ability to make themselves known at the ballet box. We're still sectioning ourselves into "proper" career pursuits, and societal positions - note the diversity in AP classes at any high school campus; note the celebration of athletic or musical prowess and which groups are targeted in advertising it.
Blocking their wishes, rigging the system, changing "times and laws," making it harder to vote only will encourage them to wait - 5, 10 15 hours or more - to make their desires heard, as they do not have unlimited amounts of monies to pour and and purchase a politician. They/We naively believe democracy was based on Jefferson's trinity of three greatest men, and is worth participating in and preserving. Lessening access to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness and knowledge is the opposite of John Donne's wisdom: it lessens America from chant to sad historical footnote.
This is far beyond Kiera and race: it is what we want to eventually be as a nation going forward, or in the words of the Bard: "not to be!"
The charges have been dropped, thankfully. Kiera is currently at an "expulsion school," waiting to see if she can return to her campus in the fall, hopefully with her scientific curiosity safely intact.
Orlando Sentinel:
Kiera Wilmot, student who caused small explosion won't face charges
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| This artist's concept shows the huge, scorching-hot "Einstein's planet," formally known as Kepler-76b, orbiting its host star, which has been tidally distorted into a slight football shape (exaggerated here for effect). The planet was detected when astronomers spotted brightness changes in the star induced by the planet due to relativistic effects. CREDIT: David A. Aguilar (CfA) |
Einstein's special relativity has proven more useful than ever, as scientists have now used it to discover an alien planet around another star.
The newfound world — nicknamed "Einstein's planet" by the astronomers who discovered it — is the latest of more than 800 planets known to exist beyond our solar system, and the first to be found through this method.
The planet, officially known as Kepler-76b, is 25 percent larger than Jupiter and weighs about twice as much, putting it in a class known as "hot Jupiters." The world orbits a star located about 2,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cygnus.
Note: I reproduced the text verbatim, but I think that General Theory - i.e., gravitational lensing - is probably how the planet was discovered, and it is not a new or unique method. RG
Space.com: 'Einstein's Planet': New Alien World Revealed by Relativity
by Clara Moskowitz, SPACE.com Assistant Managing Editor
George Clinton, musician, actor, sci-fi funk evangelist is known and loved the world over as the front man for Fuck Super Group Parliament - Funkadelic.
Originally a "doo-wap" group founded in the late 50's, Parliament would later be converted by George Clinton to atmospheric funk super-stardom
Around the same time that Parliment was being retrofitted for the glories of the 70's, Clinton also started the band "Funkadelic."
In reality, the two groups were always related. Funkadelic was mainly a vehicle for showcasing artists of Parliament. At the time, Clinton was involved in a contractual dispute that left him without the use of the name Parliament." Over time, both groups were marketed as displaying variations on the theme of Funk, even though the same musicians were rotating between the two.
Eventually, Clinton combined the groups into the Afro-futurist super group Parliament-Funkadelic, or as it is more commonly known, "P-Funk."
What follows is the solid gold awesome which are some Parliament / Funkadelic Album covers.
See more at The Moorsgate Media Blog
"Applying such a commodity approach to education, just as in applying it to art or science, or classics or history, or poetry or math or love or joy, defeats the whole point of living and learning and turns universities into trade schools whose sole purpose is to supply the skills that enable one to get a job to earn money to buy things. Our primary asset is not our money. It is the quality of our time on earth. It is the vast misunderstanding by a generation that has lost touch with--or perhaps never really knew--what education should do: open us up to wonder and the great meaning and aesthetic beauty of life."
Fool Me Twice: Fighting The Assault on Science in America, Shawn Lawrence Otto
"Teaching should be such that what is offered is perceived as a valuable gift and not as a hard duty."
"Example isn't another way to teach, it is the only way to teach."
"Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the life-long attempt to acquire it."
Albert Einstein
The follow-up to Lightweightz: The Anthology Part One is here! Inspired by 1 Corinthians 12:7 (“Now to each one the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good”), Lightweightz: The Anthology Part Two introduces the remaining four California teenagers, their abilities, and how they are struggling to make sense of them. Join Ayden the pusher, Qasim the revealer, Emi the adapter, and Gabriel the inscriber as they begin carving out paths that will forever change their lives. With four unique stories providing a closer look into the Lightweightz universe, plus tons of bonus art, Lightweightz: The Anthology Part Two has something for everyone!
Writer & Creator: Justin Martin
Artist & Letterer: Przemyslaw R. Dedelis
Colorist: Lya
Check out the super-cool trailer featuring spoken word artist Micah Bournes (www.micahbournes.com):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uz7gYfoAa-s
http://vimeo.com/64289705
So grab your copy, and tell your friends!
Hey BlackScienceFictionSociety members...
Check out my author page on Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Radford-Lee/e/B00BB6ICAC/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1?qid=1368502379&sr=8-1
The zombies are coming—and 13-year old Kendra and her grandpa Joe are in the woods fighting for survival in the midst of an apocalypse. Husband-and-wife team writers and producers: Tananarive Due and Steven Barnes are creators of the horror film, Danger Word. The short is based on the original story The Living Dead 2 written by John Joseph Adams and has snagged veteran actor Frankie Faison and young thespian, Saoirse Scott.
The creative pair raises the question: when is a horror movie more than a horror movie? Is it when a community pulls together to escape, a teenage girl learns her strength, or when the heroes and heroines are black? The aim of the film is to highlight African-Americans in science fiction and fantasy, and to serve as a road map for children and adults who are ready to fulfill their artistic dreams.
For more infomation about the film: http://dangerwordfilm.wordpress.com/link
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| View of the main solenoid of the CMS detector at CERN: is new physics lurking in the vast amounts of data acquired by the experiment? (Courtesy: CERN/Samuel Morier-Genoud) |
After discovering the Higgs boson last year, researchers at the Large Hadron Collider are now trawling through the data as the collider undergoes an 18-month shutdown for repairs and upgrades. The goal is to discover hints of physics beyond the Standard Model of particle physics – but tantalizing glimpses of new physics have been harder to spot than many physicists had expected.
But while the public has largely taken the discovery of the Higgs boson as mission accomplished for the €3.8bn collider, many particle physicists have been shaking their heads in disappointment. Since it started collecting data, the LHC has exposed few – if any – traces of physics beyond the Standard Model, a framework that is now some 40 years old. There has been no solid evidence for dark matter, supersymmetry, miniature black holes, extra dimensions or any of the other exotic phenomena that theorists excitedly talked about prior to the machine's switch-on. If there is new physics still waiting to be found, the question is: where? And will it turn up in the current shutdown period from an analysis of existing data or in the next, higher energy run?
Physics World: Higgs hunters look beyond the Standard Model
