Happy Towel Day, froods.

May 25th, and Towel Day is once again upon us. For the unfortunate few who are reading this without knowing what Towel Day commemorates (sorry to single you out again, Laurie), today is dedicated to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and its author, Douglas Adams. (Who passed away on May 11, 2001 at the age of 49 - Towel Day comes two weeks later, for no good reason that I'm aware of.) In honour of Mr. Adams and his creations, fans around the world* carry a towel throughout the course of the day.

A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value - you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-boggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

A more intelligent planet would probably declare this a work holiday, but sadly we can't claim to be intelligent, just harmless - sorry, mostly harmless.

- Sid

* Towelday.org, the official web site of Towel Day, says "fans around the universe", but they don't seem to have any posts that originate from off-planet.

Life After People

Something there is that does not love a wall.
- Robert Frost

I recently saw a History Channel special called Life After People which dealt with what would happen if every person on the planet vanished - after a day, a year, five years, ten years and so on. This is the "what if" aspect of science fiction at its purest form, unhampered by plot or characters - rather like a science fiction story from the 1930's* - and it beautifully illustrated the impermanent nature of our civilization.

I was impressed by the fact that the show never attempted to come up with any sort of reason why humanity would vanish, because really, that's not what they wanted to talk about. Instead, it was simply treated as a given: no more people.

It was astonishing to see just how temporary our society is, and to how great an extent our current technology contains the seeds of its own destruction. Fuel runs out, and power stops flowing; pumps fail, and subways become underground rivers; iron falls prey to the slow fire of rust, and cities collapse; concrete cracks, and bridges and dams crumble.

Interestingly, our technology is actually more fragile than that of two thousand years ago. For example, Roman concrete from before the birth of Christ is more durable than the modern equivalent, which is less solid, and constructed around a grid of iron rebar, which expands as it rusts and will eventually break apart even the largest structure.

And what would be left of modern civilization ten thousand years after people? Almost nothing - science fiction author David Brin speculates that the only remnant would be Mount Rushmore, carved from solid stone.

The show was originally broadcast in early 2008, and I suspect that the rerun that I saw was intended as an introduction to the new ten episode series of the same name that has just started. If it's as good as the original program, it will make for good viewing - if you spot it while you're channel hopping, give it a look for a few minutes, you may find that you keep watching it.

- Sid

* The non-fans in the crowd will have to trust me - this is a funny joke. And if you don't believe that it has a basis in reality, I can recommend a few things for really dedicated readers.

"Have you tried NOT being a mutant?"

"Over 20 years after the Chernobyl accident, and am I the only one that’s disappointed? Still no superheroes."

British comedian Jimmy Carr

In fact, today marks the 23rd year since the faulty reactor at Chernobyl dumped 400 times the fallout from Hiroshima into the environment. And, as Mr. Carr quite accurately points out, that should be lots of time for a mutant or two to have been born, grown up, ostracized by the rest of humanity, and forced to take refuge at some sort of "school" for gifted youngsters run by a bald guy in a wheelchair. And yet, here we are without even a single mutant superhero, let alone dueling armies of heroes and villains. What went wrong?

Let's start with mutation. A little research reveals that mutation is a "base-pair sequence change" in DNA that results in a new characteristic or trait. (Base pairs are all those combinations of the four nucleotides represented by the letters G, A, T and C which provided the source material for the movie title GATTACA.) A change in certain base pairs might result in a butterfly that's a different colour than its siblings, for example. The human genome contains 3 billion base pairs, and I'm willing to accept that the laws of chance allow for all kinds of things to happen when you're dealing with numbers on that scale. After all, if you were flipping 3 billion quarters, it's not impossible for all of them to come up heads.

To extend the analogy, even if they do all come up heads, we're still flipping only quarters, not pennies or nickels. Some of the X-men have abilities that make no sense in terms of mutation* - how in the world would the necessary genetic information for wings get into someone's DNA? It's one thing to get a butterfly that's a funny colour (or even a person with blue skin), but it seems pretty unlikely that you could get a butterfly with lobster claws or porcupine quills.

But I'm not entirely against the concept of the mutant superhero. How could we possibly predict whether or not some combination of genes might allow for telepathy, telekinesis, or any of the other unproven psionic abilities? And I'm happy to give Wolverine the full seal of mutant approval. There's a tendency to forget that his actual mutant abilities are rapid healing and animal-like senses - sensitive smell, hearing and so on - which although a bit extreme are logical extensions of existing human capabilities. People tend to focus more on the adamantium skeleton and claws, which after all are custom add-ons rather than factory stock.


However, the adamantium skeleton implanted by Stryker's Weapon X programme must lead to problems. The human skeleton isn't just a support system for the muscles. Bone marrow produces blood cells, a crucial part of the body's ability to transfer oxygen and fight disease. Logically, if Logan's skeleton is made out of metal, his rapid healing factor must be in a constant battle to prevent something very much like a combination of anemia and leukemia. I wonder if they're going to talk about that in the new movie?

- Sid

*And even less in terms of physics. The ability to shoot intense powerful beams of energy from your eyes? You've got to think that it would take Mother Nature thousands of generations to build the necessary structures for that. (And I can't imagine that you'd be able to see with the same organs that were able to blast a hole through concrete.) How do you fuel something like that? What possible natural energy source could the human body contain that would allow for that kind of power? For that matter, what are the back of Cyclops' eye sockets made out of in order to make sure that the energy doesn't blast out through the back of his head when his eyes are closed? My god, on that basis what are his eyelids made out of?

And why do Bruce Banner's pants never rip the same way the rest of his clothing does when he turns into the Hulk? I know, I know, they're just comic books.