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Apple iPad meets Star Trek

I swear I saw the new Apple iPad lurking in the background of the most recent Star Trek film. Apple's own advertising even displays the film being viewed on the iPad. Certainly the concept and design of a thin, large-screen computer tablet has been a prop in some science fiction films and TV shows (not that I can name one off the top of my head), so I hope the iPad does well. The pricing is certainly interesting.

I'd be happy to have one sent to me for review.

How Intelligent Design spoiled a good novel

Just when I was beginning to get into Philip Kerr's 1999 science fiction novel The Second Angel, set near the end of the 21st century, I felt he spoiled it on page 19 of the hardcover edition by lecturing on an aspect of biology and attributing his omniscient narrator's explanation to Intelligent Design. Anyone unfamiliar with this discredited ID argument would not even have suspected its author of being less than truthful. The author's blurb on the dustjacket claims he has an "encyclopedic intelligence," but this does not mean that he's 100% right all the time. So what does he say:

"It is certain that the mathematics of blood, the numbers inherent in its complex structure, provide perhaps the best evidence for the existence of some kind of Creator.

Take something like the process of coagulation, which requires the participation of several hemostatic proteins. ... It is hard not to understate the irreducibly complex nature of this system. The ratio of the probability that such a system might come into being by pure chance to the probability that it might not come into being is so enormous that it is almost impossible to find a number large enough to express these odds."

The code words in this explanation that link it to ID are "complex structure", "irreducibly complex", "pure chance" and the linking of this biochemical process to "evidence for the existence of some kind of Creator."

Kerr based his information, though, oddly he did not cite his source despite numerous footnotes throughout the novel, on the work of ID proponents Michael Behe, a biochemist, and William Dembski, a mathematician.

If you want to read more about how scientists and others have thoroughly discredited Intelligent Design and its predecessors Creationism and Creation Science, go to the National Center for Science Education's Web site, a United States organization that promotes the teaching of science in public schools. Use the NCSE site search and look up "blood clotting" to find several examples that debunk the ID claims that blood clotting is evidence of a designer of biological life, that is, a God.

Why spoil good fiction with pseudoscience when there's all kinds of perfectly good science out there?

Royal Ontario Museum headhunting a new CEO

The Globe and Mail ran a story on January 23, 2010 that the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) is looking for a new CEO. I wonder if a certain prominent CEO of a world-class museum in BC's capital will get one of those discreet phone calls from Russell Reynolds Associates, an executive headhunting firm.

Beyond Eden rock musical, setting the record straight

None of the reviews I've read of the Vancouver Playhouse's rock musical Beyond Eden (January 16-February 6, 2010), and that includes those of the Globe and Mail (January 22, 2010) and CBC News, mentioned that the 1957 totem-pole-collecting expedition on which Bruce Ruddell's musical is based, was jointly sponsored by the British Columbia Provincial Museum (now the Royal BC Museum) and the University of British Columbia. Ironically, anthropologist Wilson Duff, on whom the character Lewis Wilson (played by John Mann) is based, worked for the Provincial Museum until 1965 when he became a professor at UBC. The BC Government filmed the expedition, the production is called The Silent Ones, with CBC also filming it and calling their work Totem. You can see a shortened, retitled version of Totem on the CBC Digital Archives ("Bill Reid's rescue mission for Haida art"), originally broadcast on May 21, 1959 in the series Pacific Eight.

British Columbia Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner temporarily closes

The Victoria Times-Colonist lead story for January 23, 2010, based on a leaked document, was about the closure, on the advice of legal counsel, of British Columbia's Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner (OIPC). This followed the appointment of Commissioner David Loukidelis by the BC Government as the new Deputy Attorney General. The OIPC Web site contains a copy of his letter of resignation dated January 19, 2010 to the Office of the Speaker. A committee of the Legislative Assembly is supposed to appoint a new Commissioner, but in the meantime, another special committee is in the process of reviewing the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, the legal authority under which the OIPC operates. Is it unreasonable to think that this all has something to do with the Vancouver Winter Olympics and discouraging FOI requests for information about the Games?

Caprica TV series a keeper

I watched the premiere of Caprica, the TV series that debuted on January 22, 2010 on the Syfy and Space channels in the USA and Canada. It's a keeper. The show, filmed on location in Vancouver, BC, Canada, is the prequel to Battlestar Galactica (2004-2009 and 1978-1979) and is set 50 or so years before the near-total destruction of humanity by the Cylons. The series looks at two families, the Graystones and the Adamas, both living on the planet Caprica. Adama is from the planet Tauron which seems to have reputation for generating a host of nasty people. At the end of the first episode I could see how the backstory and some of the many questions that remained unanswered in the more recent Battlestar Galactica will be dealt with. Daniel Graystone's dead daughter Zoe, whom he resurrects as a Cylon, might just be the progenitor of the Cylon faction that believed in the One True God, whereas the Cylon he produced under a Caprica defense contract will likely become the source of the Cylon horde that almost destroyed humanity.

It was fun seeing the Vancouver landscape transformed through CGI into the urban center of Caprica. A couple of places I recognized were Library Square outside of which Daniel Graystone and Joseph Adama (William Adama's father) first meet and the Georgia Street side of the Vancouver Art Gallery, which used to be the Vancouver Courthouse.

The show will probably not sit well with those who believe in the One True God since it reverses what North American and other audiences hold most dear.