FRINGE: Jeff Pinkner and J.H. Wyman Tease ‘The Day We Died’

May 6, 2011 by Marisa Roffman

FRINGE fans were thrown for a loop last week when upon Peter’s entry into the doomsday machine, he ended up 15 years in the future. Not quite the universe destruction that had been hinted at, but the future Peter woke up in wasn’t so pretty.

Dying to know what happens next? I chatted with FRINGE executive producers Jeff Pinkner and J.H. Wyman about the show’s trip to the future, what it means for season four, why they jumped forward and more…

I think it’s safe to say that the end of “The Last Sam Weiss” — when Peter is transported 15 years into the future — is one of those moments in a show that is actually game-changing.
Jeff Pinkner: If you could allow us to tease for a second, it’s both game-changing watching it and it’s more game-changing when it’s over.

Wow. My friend pointed out to me after last week’s episode that the hour could have very easily have worked as a great season finale, so if you guys had that up your sleeve for the penultimate episode, what the heck do you have planned for us for the finale?
J.H. Wyman: [Laughs] That’s a good position to be in. That’s great.

What can you tease about “The Day We Died”?

JW: Well, we definitely — look, we knew where we were going from the beginning of the season and we had an end in mind that maintained to be our end. Like always, Jeff and I try and recontextualize the end of the season to make it mean something new and make the fans look at the show a different way going into next season. And we feel that’s what we’ve accomplished this year, as well.

JP: I think by way of tease, the notion of jumping forward to the future — I think sometimes, as we’ve always said, our show is a lot about choices and sometimes it’s only by looking back at things from the future can you really tell the consequences certain actions had. And as we said earlier, the point of the episode is to recontextualize everything that’s happened this year. And there are certain events we just wanted to jump past because what’s more interesting is the consequence of those events than the events themselves.

When a science fiction show jumps into the future, the question becomes whether that is the set future or if anything can be done to prevent events from happening. Will that be dealt with in the finale?
JP: That’s absolutely — I think you’re asking the exact right question and that will sort of be the question of the episode: whether or not our characters are successful, that’s the point.

You mentioned jumping forward in time to explore the consequences of events, and it seems like we’ve missed a lot of important things in the meantime — Peter is an agent, Broyles has a freaky weird eye, etc. Will we be getting backstory on some of the more major changes?

JW: There are stories and those things are there for a reason. You know, we know how Broyles got there, we know how Peter got there, we know what they’re referring to in conversations that are kind of vague to the viewer, but specific between themselves. We wanted to use these type of logical and sometimes illogical progressions of characters in the future to expand our audiences’ imagination and allow them to fill in some blanks, you know? “I wonder how that transpired? How did that come about? That’s really interesting.” We always pose questions and we always plant the seed and I think, by now, we try and answer most of them. Maybe someday you’ll understand more.

Well, we have all of season four to find these things out! Will this jump forward in the future alter the way stories are told, much like the flashforward device was introduced in the season three finale of LOST?

JW: I don’t think we’re necessarily introducing a new paradigm.

JP: We’ve told stories out of our timeline before — we’ve gone to the past a couple of times — but as Joel just said, I don’t think we’re introducing literally a new paradigm that we’re going to do frequently. But there are some events in the episode that will dramatically shift the paradigm of the show.

And with the jump forward, I don’t think I spotted Nina or Lincoln in the promos. Are they there in the final hour of the season?

JW: Hm.

JP: Some of them are, some of them aren’t.

JW: Yep.

Some of the people I just mentioned in my question or just in general?

JP: It’s both. In the context of the storytelling, you’ll understand — or at least you’ll have the strong ability to surmise — why the characters that are or are not in the episode…why that is.

It almost seems like we’re going back to the beginning in many ways with Walter, locked up and bearded — yet Walternate is still there. Are fans supposed to be confused at this point how they could both be existing in one universe?

JW: I think you will definitely have the answer to that when you watch the show. You will understand conceptually what has happened — why you’re seeing what you’re seeing.

What about Peter and Olivia? In the present they seemed to doing well, with her declaring her love and him embracing his inner Han Solo and didn’t exactly say the words back. But how are they doing in the future?

JP: I don’t think he said the words out loud, but our intent…he was equaling her statement with his eyes and actions in that moment. I know some people read it that [it wasn't reciprocated], but it wasn’t intended that way.

And the future Peter and Olivia?

JP: [Pause] I think, Marisa, [that answer] falls under the category of spoiling one of the cool moments. And not a wildly significant one, but in the context of the episode, you’ll find that out real quickly.

Is Peter aware of Fauxlivia’s kid in the future? You have teased he would find out before the end of the season…

JP: Um…whether or not he’s aware, it probably won’t play a big role in the episode.

Are we going to be spending the bulk of the hour in the future?

JW: Hm.

JP: Yeah, I think it’s safe to say the majority of the storytelling takes place in the future.

Before I let you go, is there anything else you want to tease for the fans before they watch “The Day We Died”?

JW: We feel it’s set up to — if anyone feels a fraction what you said at the beginning of the call, Marisa, we’ll be happy. If they’re saying, “How could they outdo ['The Last Sam Weiss']?” we’re thrilled with that. We feel anything we give [to spoil] would take away from that experience. [The finale] will definitely change the way you look at the program going forward.


This is it guys…the final episode of season three. Are you ready to have your mind blown?

And if you need a further incentive to watch the episode live tonight, not only do you get the chance to win props if you check into GetGlue, but Pinkner and Wyman will be live tweeting the finale! Make sure to follow @JPFRINGE and @JWFRINGE to see what they have to say about “The Day We Died”!

Source:givememyremote.com

Today's News: Our Take:Fringe Finale Scoop: Producers Tackle Burning Questions (Including "Who's Going to Die?")
May 5, 2011 09:18 PM ET
by Natalie Abrams

The penultimate episode of Fringe saw Peter (Joshua Jackson) enter the machine, which transported him 15 years into a decimated future. As the very fabric of our universe is being ripped apart, Peter will attempt to prevent this grim future from happening. And along the way, lives will be lost (yes, that was plural!) Executive producers Jeff Pinkner and J.H. Wyman answer burning questions about the finale:

How is this flash-forward different from others we've seen on TV before?
J.H. Wyman: The very nature of Fringe is that it's all about choices that we make, so we get to celebrate that authentically. Whatever we see in the future can be adjusted and might be adjusted. We feel like we've actually earned the ability to go backwards and forwards to eliminate and re-contextualize the show for the viewer. There's so much story to tell in the future, in the past, and the present with Fringe. It's kind of like a wheelhouse that we feel comfortable playing in.

Is this a permanent jump or will you decide to jump backwards and forwards next season?
Jeff Pinkner: The ending of the finale sort of answers your question. As the Observers once told us, there are many futures happening simultaneously. Which one will come true is based on, as Joel just said, the choices that we all collectively make. The finale is the future in 2026 that our characters are on a path towards if nothing were to change. By the end of the episode, that change has occurred. So we may continue to tell storytelling that's both in the past, like we've done a couple of times to see Walter's story with Peter, and we may jump to the future again. But it won't be necessarily the same one that we're in in this episode.

The whole season has been building towards the destruction of one universe or the other, but in jumping ahead 15 years, you skipped over that. Will we see what happens or will that be mirrored in the deterioration of our universe in the future?
Wyman: We love to answer questions. There's some great shows that love to ask them and maybe not answer them so quickly. We've always tried to sort of fill in the blanks and get the viewer to feel satisfied that they're watching a story for a reason. We both feel that you'll be satisfied, that you will understand what the future held for each universe and their collective and individual fates.

How have the characters' relationships changed 15 years in the future?
Wyman: Some of them are what you would expect, but some of them are not. We tried to make sure that each one was at least logical, of course, and colorful in its own way; how they grew and what happens to them. But we looked at this as a huge possibility to paint a canvas in the future to allow the viewer to fill in some blanks and take that away with them and go, "Wow, that's really interesting. How did this transpire?"

Thanks to the promos, we've seen glimpses of how bad the future is. Will Peter be able to prevent this future from happening?
Pinkner: It's bad! I think that the question of the episode is: What's to come? And for Peter, Olivia (Anna Torv), Walter (John Noble) and, obviously, the rest of the team — what is their role in trying to prevent what seems to be a pretty awful fate?

What can you tell us about the End-of-Dayers and Walternate's plan to destroy our universe?
Wyman: The concept of End-of-Dayers is an interesting one because it deals with faith and loss of faith. That's kind of a big theme for us; that people are constantly looking for things to believe in. Right now, in society, we feel that there's a breakdown in a lot of different areas in life that people once had great faith in, like politics or religion or whatever. People are looking for something to believe in. So the End-of-Dayers are basically people that have faith, but faith in the end of everything. That it is the end of days that would deliver them into some sort of salvation. It's tough to have faith when the environment is what it is and you're living in conditions that these people are living in. It's pretty dire.

Are the future citizens of the world aware of the cross-universe war?
Pinkner: Yeah. Fifteen years in the future, when the story takes place, everything has become much more public and necessary.
Wyman: Eventually you can't hide it any longer.

We're going to be losing a main character in the finale. What can you tell us about that? Is it permanent?
Wyman: Is this death permanent? You'll see it's not exactly what happens. Maybe the best hint is that there's actually more than one.

Is this a mass casualty situation?
Pinkner: The deaths are actually both in entirely different contexts.

The Fringe finale airs Friday at 9/8c on Fox.
Source:tvguide.com

Well, Fringe 3.21 tonight had everything from Walter doing his best Ben Franklin to Olivia making like Sydney from Alias (with an ancient drawing of Olivia in play), and a promised surprise ending that wasn't about a person or place but a time.

The word about Fringe in its first year was that time travel would not be one of the themes explored.  That expectation was already broken with an excellent, personal time travel story last year - a  pretty much stand alone story- what I called Strangeness on a Train, episode 2.18, with Peter Weller.   But now time travel, to the future no less, has been woven into the central, war-between-the-realities narrative of Fringe, as Peter ends up 15 years into the future in our reality.  

We know this because he's near a September 11, 2001 memorial plaque in New York - this didn't happen on the other side, "over there" - and it's by a plaque dated September 11, 2021.  And there seems to be some horrendous new mass destruction going on in this future.  

How Peter got there is less interesting, I'd say, then the fact that he's now there.  But his journey entailed Walter flying a kite to attract electricity; Olivia making Sam work with her, at gun point; and Sam bowing out as Olivia, at Walter's coaxing, uses telekinesis (one of the original Fringe golden-age science fiction themes from the beginning) to open the doomsday device here on this side by shutting off the device on the other side on Liberty Island through the sheer power of her mind.

One of the great problems with time travel - in additional to the tantalizing, mind-numbing paradoxes - is how, if you've traveled to the future, can you communicate with people back in your own time.  At least when you travel to the past, you can leave a note - or an ad in a newspaper (as Isaac Asimov had his hero do in The End of Eternity, my favorite time travel novel).

And, to make Peter's situation even more interesting, he's not only in the future, he's in his future - that is, he seems to be 15 years older.

Will be fun to see what Peter - and the future versions of our other characters - do about this, and other crises that beset them, next week ...

See also Fringe 3.1: The Other Olivia ... Fringe 3.2: Bad Olivia and Peter ... Fringe 3.3: Our/Their Olivia on the Other Side ... Fringe 3.5: Back from Hiatus, Back from the Amber ... Fringe 3.7: Two Universes Still Nearing Collision ... Fringe 3.8: Long Voyages Home ... Fringe 3.10: The Return of the Eternal Bald Observers ... Flowers for Fringenon in Fringe 3.11 ... Fringe 3.12: The Wrong Coffee  ... Fringe 3.13: Alternate Fringe ... Fringe 3.14: Amber Here ... Fringe 3.15: Young Peter and Olivia ... Fringe 3.16: Walter and Yoko ... Fringe 3.17: Bell, Olivia, Lee, and the Cow ... Fringe 3.18: Clever Walternate ... Fringe 3.19 meets Inception, The Walking Dead, Tron ... Fringe 3.20: Countdown to Season 3 Finale 1 of 3
 
See also reviews of Season 2: Top Notch Return of Fringe Second Season ... Fringe 2.2 and The Mole People ... Fringe 2.3 and the Human Body as Bomb ... Fringe 2.4 Unfolds and Takes Wing ... Fringe 2.5: Peter in Alternate Reality and Wi-Fi for the Mind ... A Different Stripe of Fringe in 2.6 ... The Kid Who Changed Minds in Fringe 2.7 ... Fringe 2.8: The Eternal Bald Observers ... Fringe 2.9: Walter's Journey ... Fringe 2.10: Walter's Brain, Harry Potter, and Flowers for Algernon ...  New Fringe on Monday Night: In Alternate Universe? ... Fringe 2.12: Classic Science Fiction Chiante ... Fringe 2.13: "I Can't Let Peter Die Again" ... Fringe 2.14: Walter's Health, Books, and Father ... Fringe 2.15: I'll Take 'Manhatan' ... Fringe 2.16: Peter's Story ... Fringe 2.17: Will Olivia Tell Peter? ... Fringe 2.18: Strangeness on a Train ... Fringe 2.19: Two Plus Infinity ... Fringe the Noir Musical ... Fringe 2.21: Bring on the Alternates ... Fringe 2.22:  Tin Soldiers and Nixon Coming ... Fringe Season 2 Finale: The Switch

See also reviews of Season One Fringe Begins ... Fringe 2 and 3: The Anthology Tightrope ... 4: The Eternal Bald Observer ... 7: A Bullet Can Scramble a Dead Brain's Transmission ... 8. Heroic Walter and Apple Through Steel ... 9. Razor-Tipped Butterflies of the Mind ... 10. Shattered Pieces Come Together Through Space and Times ... 11. A Traitor, a Crimimal, and a Lunatic ... 12, 13, 14: Fringe and Teleportation ... 15: Fringe is Back with Feral Child, Pheromones, and Bald Men ... 17. Fringe in New York, with Oliva as Her Suspect ... 18. Heroes and Villains across Fringe ... Stephen King, Arthur C. Clarke, and Star Trek in Penultimate Fringe ... Fringe Alternate Reality Finale: Science Fiction At Its Best

---

                 Special Discount Coupons for Angie's List, Avis, Budget Car, Garden.com, eMusic

---

---

The Plot to Save Socrates



"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book

---

First-person shooters are often labelled as shallow thrill rides, but do a slew of recent releases hint at something more?

Bulletstorm is a really stupid game, isn't it? A 'guilty pleasure'. Something proper gamers shouldn't admit to enjoying. In it, the meat-headed mercenary Grayson Hunt spends ten hours blasting his way through a planet of mutants, kicking people into the gaping maws of man-eating plants, while wise-cracking about the smell of sun-baked arseholes. This is a game that glorifies demented slaughter; an orgy of mindless, sadistic pleasure. We can all agree on this, right?

Perhaps. Perhaps not. What if, beneath the symphony of hyper-kinetic gunplay, Bulletstorm is actually a game about guilt and grief? What if it were an immense Jacobean tragedy disguised as a dim-witted hack-'em-up? And what if it were not alone in using the FPS genre to explore mental torment?

Okay, you might have to bear with me on this one.

Hunt, you see, is wracked with remorse. He has just spent the last few years of his career killing innocent people under the orders of General Sarrano, commander of the sinister Dead Echo galactic army. Except Hunt didn't know they were innocent people, he was told they were war criminals. Destroyed by the truth, Hunt seeks a terrible revenge, attacking Serrano's gigantic spacecraft, forcing it to crash land on the devastated pleasure planet where the rest of the game takes place. But this brings Hunt no peace – instead, his friends are killed early on in the escapade, and he's left with their deaths on his conscience too.

Throughout each cutscene, amid the colourful insults, he constantly ruminates on loss. He obsesses over it. His suicidal mission to track down and murder Serrano, who has naturally survived the crash, is a search for redemption; a redemption that can only ever be realised in his own annihilation. Remorse is the emotion that hovers over the entire game. It is there, if you squint hard enough, in the very structure: seven chapters – the seven stages of grief.

And interestingly, Sarrano plays up on this. Toward the end of the game, the twisted Dead Echo chief constantly reminds Hunt about his crimes, about the thousands he's killed. When you enter the stricken spacecraft and start slaughtering its guards, the general mocks Hunt over the ship's PA system –'those are honest men you're killing, they have wives and children.' Did the developer, People Can Fly, just shove that in for a laugh? Or were they querying the disposability of life in the shoot-'em-up universe? It reminds me of the classic scene in Clerks, where Randal dissects the ending of Return of the Jedi, denigrating the rebels for destroying the second Death Star while it is still being built by thousands of innocent construction workers.

And Bulletstorm is not alone as an FPS carrying subtexts of loss and anguish. Dead Space 2 is about post-traumatic stress disorder: Isaac Clarke has become catastrophically unhinged by the horrors he witnessed in the original game – his life is one long hallucination of monstrous threat; the Marker is madness. Call of Duty: Black Ops revolves around paranoid schizophrenia – did Alex Mason kill Kennedy or not? He imagined a Russian ally for much of the game so anything is possible. But the question hangs and is purposely not resolved. There is ambiguity surrounding everything that happens in the game, because the game is a patchwork of cloudy, unstable memories.

In a recent post on the blog The Gwumps, the author talks about Fallout: New Vegas and about how the character Boone, a vengeful sniper looking to wipe out members of The Legion, is as much a victim of endless, pointless violence as he is a perpetrator. He symbolises what's happened to humanity in the wake of the apocalypse – deadened, scarred and unraveled. It looks like Deus Ex: Human Revolution will also explore the loss of humanity, this time through genetic and cybernetic enhancement. And Monolith's first-person horror shooter, Condemned 2: Bloodshot, provides perhaps the most nihilistic commentary on moral death and mental decline, its hero transmogrified from an FBI agent into a violent homeless alcoholic.

Sure, first-person shooters are the death metal of video gaming; they revel in darkness, and the cheap hyperbole of loss and slaughter. But Bulletstorm is interesting in that it comments on and questions the killing while simultaneously encouraging players to revel in it. It exploits the fundamental strength of the genre – the lack of an onscreen lead character (at least during the action). There is a unique hotwire connection between game and player; the psychological gap is narrowed. Without an avatar to blame, we're more complicit, and the motivations become more hazy. Consequently, digital artists have regularly appropriated the FPS format to ask questions about war and consent, from Wafaa Bilal's hugely controversial Virtual Jihadi to Federico Solmi's Douche Bag City.

Bulletstorm actually having meaning is a difficult sell, I know that. But then, of course, intent is only a fraction of meaning. All those silly fifties sci-fi movies about giant irradiated insects spoke volumes about nuclear dread, possibly without intending it. Did Texas Chainsaw Massacre really seek to critique post-Vietnam America or was it an accident? "Everything means something, I guess," one character famously drawls at the start of the movie.

In games, where narrative is usually pushed to the sidelines, players create their own 'reality' – itself an extremely malleable concept in the virtual world. After playing Half-Life for the second or third time, I began to wonder – did the events of the game actually happen? Or did Gordon Freeman die after the resonance cascade? Maybe the whole story was conjured by the character's misfiring synapses, a last wash of complex brain chemicals to help assuage the guilt. The best shooters, like the best horror movies, are about the ambiguity that exists at the extremes of behaviour and motivation. Bulletstorm might want us to ask, "are we doing the right thing here?"

Perhaps I've been playing too long. Or perhaps those who think Bulletstorm is just a shallow production line of gut-splattered set-pieces are not asking the right questions about first-person shooters, or why they enjoy them.

To kick off this wonderful episode of Science Friday (listen here or below), physicist Lawrence M. Krauss suggests that science and art ask the same fundamental question: Who are we, and what is our place in the universe? Over the next hour, Krauss is joined in his exploration of this question by the great filmmaker [...]

Werner Herzog and Cormac McCarthy Talk Science and Culture is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

Welcome to a new blogger A warm welcome to Tine Jassens, whose new blog, Musings and Moths, began on Nature Network this week. Tine is a veterinarian student and will be blogging about subjects related to her PhD, including veterinary medicine, pharmaceutical science, oncology, and science communication. Her first post, Can you hear that SOS? considers suicide and suicide survivors:bq. But to survivors of suicide SOS means something entirely different. I find it quite ironic that the abbreviation for suicide survivors is regarded throughout the world as a call for help. Ironic, and suitable. Because survivors of suicide tend to be more prone to committing suicide themselves (Aguirre and Slater, 2010). Which, as a result, can lead to clusters of suicide in families (Qin et al., 2002).h4{color:brown}. Good news for chocoholicsOn a lighter note, Paige Brown’s latest blog post has been enlightening us about The Science of Chocolate.labbench/2011/04/04/the-science-of-chocolate Her post will probably make many people very happy, as she reveals that there are chemicals in chocolate which are good for your heart:bq. How are chocolate and cocoa, ground from the cocoa bean, good for the heart? According to research studies, chocolate in the diet is shown to decrease blood pressure, both diastolic (when the heart is relaxed) and systolic (when the heart is contracting) pressures (Hooper 2008). Maintaining low blood pressure is an important factor in decreasing an individual’s chance of developing cardiovascular disease and heart attacks. h4{color:brown}. EventsSan Francisco blogger Shannon Weiman has put together a calendar of events for San Francisco Scientists. Spring has sprung and its time to get out there and join the science community for some exciting events around the city. The calendar is in its infancy, but will be regularly updated with new postings. Please feel free to suggest other events in the blog comments section.For those in London, we also have a similar calendar geared to those are interested in science communication and publishing events. We’ll regularly update the calendar so that the coming month contains all the events we’re aware of. Do let us know if we are missing any and if you would like to add one to the calendar, do get in touch.h4{color:brown}. Spaced out!This week Barbara Ferreira has been asking, Who’s afraid of the Universe? In her post, she discusses the basic principles of the philosophy of cosmology:bq. I can’t think of a topic more daunting than one that combines cosmology and philosophy. The former has as its object of study ‘the Universe’, something that is defined as all that exists or, better said, everything that exists in a physical sense—a terrible lot to analyze! The latter is no less boggling. It deals with questions relating to existence, knowledge and ethics—oh, vast notions! Philosophy of Cosmology goes beyond focusing on all things that exist in the physical sense; it encompasses the ‘metaphysical sense’ too.Elsewhere, with the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s space flight taking place on the 12th April, Matt Brown, our London blogger has been digging into London’s outer space secrets. In his post, Euston, We Have a Problem, he reveals some of London’s top connections to space, including the UK’s largest refracting telescope, and the Apollo 10 capsule. Continuing with the space themes, NPG’s The Great Beyond Blog has been discussing The National Research Council’s report which was released on the 5th April, outlining the research priorities for NASA’s biological and physical sciences for the next ten years. Getting humans and other organisms into space is hard. Figuring out what kind of worthwhile science to do with them once they’re there may be even harder. The post considers their new decisions. In further space related matters, The Great Beyond Blog has been introducing us to the Falcon Heavy; Space-X’s latest rocket. This heavy lift vehicle follows on from their solo-engine ‘Falcon 1’ and the nine-engine ‘Falcon 9’. With this new design, the rocket could carry 53 tons into low Earth orbit. The company also says it has been designed to NASA’s standards for carrying people, “anticipating potential astronaut transport needs”.h4{color:brown}. What a difference a word makes…..Karen Vancampenhout discovered a typo in a paper with her name on it, one that is so totally ridiculous that it looked like a bad April-fool’s joke:Karen’s colleague, Raf Aerts reveals in his post, that they “had a good laugh” when Karen informed them that her abstract mentioned this infamous tree species “Anus sylvestris.”h4{color:brown}. Q & As"The Spoonful of Medicine Blog’s":http://blogs.nature.com/nm/spoonful/ Q&A this week, was on How to protect research funding from the chopping block.researchfun.html Currently, biomedical researchers in the US are worried that cuts could stifle innovation, drive young scientists away from the field and derail the momentum of promising research. Ahead of the looming 8th April deadline on the budget impasse, Nature Medicine spoke to John Porter, an ex-congressman and vice-chair of the Foundation for the NIH, who is known for fighting battles on behalf of the scientific community. The post asks Porter’s advice on how funding can be protected. Meanwhile NPG staff blog, The Great Beyond, has been regularly updating us with the latest news from Japan. On Wednesday they held a live Q&A with Nature’s Geoff Brumfiel, and Jim Smith, an environmental physicist from the University of Portsmouth. It provided an opportunity for those concerned to ask questions about the devastating events. You can find a summary of the webchat on their post. h4{color:brown}. Application and opportunity"Carlyn Zwarenstein’s":http://network.nature.com/profile/carlyn-zwarenstein latest post, an app a day, discusses a new iPhone app created by the U.S.-based Discovery Channel, that will have you crawling around your garden in search of unusual insects and bizarre flowers. This free citizen scientist app allows you to interact with a whole community of people interested in the flora and fauna surrounding us. It is perfect for those of us curious about nature and wanting to contribute to a better universal understanding of the environment. Her comment thread reveals other examples of useful apps for scientists; feel free to add your own examples. Her second post of the week, Get a second life in citizen science, highlights the benefits associated with the expansion of citizen science into the complex virtual, avatar-mediated world of Second Life. Rachel Bowden, our Nature Jobs blogger, has been discussing the job market for tech-savvy scientists. She reveals in her post that innovators with a flair for technology can find lucrative opportunities in healthcare, according to speakers at this year’s BioVision forum in Lyon, France. You can find out more about the opportunities available, as well as some useful advice, in her summary.. Science educationCongratulations to The Science Talent Project which celebrates its first birthday this week. Author, Eric-Wubbo Lameijer, has compiled a summary of all his blog posts to date; his rundown provides a thorough overview, dividing his posts into topics. He encourages readers to put forward ideas for future posts, with the resulting comment thread in support of future topics on science education. Now onto a post that does focus on science education. Boston blogger, Tinker Ready reveals that Science education in Cambridge gets down, dirty and bilingual. She provides anecdotal evidence (her own son) on the benefits of incredibly enthusiastic science teachers. Meanwhile Scitable blog, Bioscience and eLearning, brought to you by Nature Education_, asks whether spreadsheets are evil. Blogger Nick Morrisevil reveals that:bq. If a spreadsheet is used correctly it can be a wonderful tool as it can speed up work, remove the need for tedious calculations, and increase efficiency. However, most of the spreadsheets I see, and get sent to me, are not used correctly. And it is this incorrect use that makes them evil!h4{color:brown}. Teaching and learning Scitable blogger, Robin McGuire reveals that a Canadian professor, Calvin Kalman, from Concordia University, is taking a rather unusual approach to teaching. He believes that teaching science to undergraduate students needs a holistic approachholisticapproach to be effective. You can read the press release from Concordia University in the InsideEd blog. undergrads to postdocs, the latest question on the Nature Jobs Blog, Are long working hours inevitable for postdocs? bq. More than half of postdocs surveyed work at least 50 hours per week and one quarter work at least 60 hours per week. By comparison, an employee in the United Kingdom works around 37 hours per week on average, while in France this figure is 38 hours (ref). In the United States the average working week of a private, non-farm employee is just over 34 hours long.The post encourages readers to share tips on coping with a heavy workload, or any advice for improving work-life balance. h4{color:brown}. Babies or Survival of the newbornsScitable blogger, Khalil A. Cassimally has been asking a controversial question in his blog LabCoat Life; Should Extremely Preterm Babies Be Saved? He reveals that most infants stay in their mothers’ wombs for around 38 to 41 weeks before birth, but those who are born born at 23 weeks of gestation or less, face a battle for survival. But is this battle doomed from the start? His comment thread sparks an interesting debate with varying opinions.For newborns, the correct neo-natal care is imperative as their immune systems are not yet fully functioning. The Great Beyond Blog reveals some shocking photos which have drawn attention to the disastrous conditions babies are put in within a neonatal unit in an Egyptian Hospital. Tiny babies are packed together in small beds, highlighting the neglect in the healthcare sector. You can see these disturbing pictures in the post.n.html h4{color:brown}. FinallyEnjoy Viktor Poor’s latest comic strip, Casting (not gels). c/2011/04/character actor-thumb-185×428-2290.png" width=“185” height=“428” class=“mt-image-left” style=“float: left; margin: 0 20px 20px 0;” />

The Scottish Parliament elections are if not in full swing, then reaching a certain tempo. This week has seen the launch of the Tory, Lib Dem and Labour manifestos, next week the SNP, and even the notorious Londoncentric media and political classes have twigged that there something is going in Scotland which they don’t like or understand.

Andrew Neil is a talented broadcaster and ‘The Daily Politics’ and ‘This Week’ both good TV and must watches for the Westminster classes. However, Neil comes with significant baggage, and on many occasions, his right wing, populist views of the world slip through: the state is too big, regulation too over-bearing, the public sector needs culling, and free market buccaneers like himself need to be liberated.

So on Sunday’s ‘The Politics Show’ it was both revealing and illuminating when Neil came north to give us his take on the Scottish elections. What it showed is the deep entrenchment of a kind of new establishment commonsense which extends from politicians and policy wonks to renaissance men like Neil (and Niall Ferguson, Andrew Roberts and David Starkey), who all give succour to the black and white thinking of the market order.

This is Neil’s introduction about Scotland as he walks around Edinburgh:

This Parliament doesn’t raise a penny of revenues itself. It all comes from a block grant from London and in the last decade or so it has never been short of cash. A devolved Scotland has now entered a rather different era.

He then pauses for dramatic effect:

When the money flowed freely, the Scots didn’t bother to reform public services. They just used the dosh to say no to university tuition fees, create free care for the elderly, and on Friday as prescription charges went up in England, they were abolished in Scotland.

What is important in this film is Neil’s uncontested take: it is not put forward as one opinion, or with any humility; this is fact. The primacy of Neil is underlined by the short interviews he does with all four party leaders: all of whom are reduced into 30 second soundbites.

Alex Salmond, First Minister, is squashed into talking about ‘government efficiencies’ and ‘public sector reform’. Iain Gray, Scottish Labour leader and potential First Minister, has his worldview summarised as ‘Alex Salmond’s obsession is independence’. Tavish Scott and Annabelle Goldie have even less memorable quotes with Neil’s voiceover telling us that the Lib Dems are more ‘left wing’ in Scotland, and the only cuts Tories talk about are ‘tax cuts’. Why are all these people in denial of the Andrew Neil view of the universe?

Just in case you didn’t get the message, Neil labels Labour and the SNP ‘left wing’, oblivious to the forces of caution and conservatism which shape both. What is ‘left wing’ in Neil’s world is probably the equivalent catch-all to the way some left-wingers throw about the term neo-liberalism.

He concludes his film purposefully walking up Calton Hill and staring over a panoramic view of Edinburgh:

While the rest of the UK tries to come to terms with the age of austerity, Scotland’s politicians are still acting as if the party hasn’t finished. Cut, cut, cut, may be the dominant theme south of the border, but up here it is still spend, spend, spend, which is fine while the party lasts, but you can’t help feel the place is heading for a hell of a hangover.

This is the end of his film, but not his take. Then it is back to London, and Jon Sopel asks Neil in Edinburgh about the forthcoming election. Neil, egged on by the self-obvious logic of his own argument, is now taking no prisoners:

"This is the land of the big state. One think-tank recently suggested the state was more important here than in any other country in the world, bar Cuba, North Korea or Iraq. Now that might be a bit of a stretch, but one in four people here work for the state, and it gets close to one in three if you include those in the private sector who exist on state contracts.

"So you get elected here by promising to look after those in the public sector which is why when we are in an age of cuts, and there will be cuts coming here, they can’t avoid that, the politicians don’t want to talk about that during the election campaign. They still talk about free prescriptions, free health care, free parking at hospitals, free eye tests, and very important here, no compulsory redundancies in the public sector."

This is riveting stuff, and for a man for who prides himself on being erudite, educated and informed, close to ahistorical, economically illiterate ranting. The size of Scotland’s state is relatively much smaller than Wales or Northern Ireland, and smaller than large parts of England. The one report he cites was widely dismissed as a joke, and other research from groups such as the World Competitive League have found no automatic relationship between the size of the state and economic competitiveness; instead it is what you do with public spending which matters. But the new Luddites and believers in the market dogma never let a fact get in the way of their missionary crusade!

Neil concludes his film on the Tory-Lib Dem windfall tax on oil companies, revelling in ‘the delicious prospect here of the left wing Labour and Scottish Nationalist parties attacking a Tory Government in London for being too tough on the oil companies’.

Sadly, this isn’t over, for while Scotland then switches to its own ‘The Politics Show Scotland’, London continues to have its own Scottish-focused conversation between Sopel, Iain Martin of the ‘Daily Mail’, and Mary Ann Sieghart of ‘The Independent’.

Martin, who used to edit ‘The Scotsman’, is asked what he thinks after recently visiting Scotland:

"I am a Scot, but it felt like visiting in political terms a parallel universe in which Lehman Brothers hadn’t collapsed and the world hadn’t changed entirely. But there is, as Andrew said, a reckoning, and the cuts are a year behind those in England. But the parties that are at the moment competing to offer more and more free stuff, whichever one wins, are going to have to cut."

Sopel then turns to Sieghart and asks, ‘It highlights the mismatch between the lives English taxpayers lead and what seems to happen in Scotland’, to which she replies:

"Absolutely. English taxpayers are going to be pretty annoyed if they see the Scots getting more and more free services, while we are losing our libraries and Sure Start services."

The Parallel Universe of the Marketeers

What can one say of this not isolated example, offering 15 minutes of undiluted right wing propaganda straight from the world of the Taxpayers’ Alliance. Let’s leave aside the decline of BBC reporting and broadcasting, and the way in which right wing prejudice and conjecture is now routinely presented as fact.

First, this has become one of the defining accounts of Scotland: ‘the land of milk and honey’, of ‘subsidy junkie Jocks’ and ‘a dependency culture’. There is no need even to specifically mention ‘Barnett’ here, because the inference is that Scotland is enjoying all this largesse at the expense of the English.

Second, there is – as I have written many times – the absence of a pan-British conversation and shared sense of purpose, narrative and stories. Something is going deeply wrong at the heart of the UK project; something is missing in our statecraft and emotional, gut, instinctual stories, which holds a state together.

Finally, and most importantly, the above examples tell us a lot, post-global crash, about the zeal and reach of market fundamentalism. This worldview brooks no time for apology or retreat; instead it is full steam ahead with the forward march of marketising the last parts of the public realm.

You can hear the contempt and disdain in Neil’s voice when he talks of ‘free public services’; no recognition is allowed for the fact ala Milton Friedman that nothing is ‘free’, but we might make political choices to not charge for things. And there is something revealing in his list, for he cites as one of Scotland’s outdated shibboleths ‘free health care’, exactly what the free marketeers are out to destroy!

Iain Martin is revealing when he comments that the Scots are behaving as if they lived in ‘a parallel universe in which Lehman Brothers hadn’t collapsed’. This I think inadvertently hits the nail on the head from the market fundamentalist view. At its ultimate such a take on humanity values no set of principles other than buying, selling, acting as consumers, and viewing things as commodities. This is the age of one-dimensional man and woman, with no room for caring, empathy, love and non-economic values.

Martin’s aside pinpoints that the crisis of the current economic system and market fundamentalism has been used by the new revolutionaries to tear down the old social model and attitudes. In this, the crisis of neo-liberalism is also a crisis of the traditional left; it is also true that both are modernist, economic determinist projects. How dare Scots not understand that ‘the world has changed’? I am not arguing that there are not deep seated problems, evasions and challenges in Scottish society and politics, merely stating that this simplistic, cliché ridden view of the world is hardly accurate or helpful.

What kind of politics and resistance do we offer in the face of such an assault? I think we need to operate on many levels – organising, building new alliances and ways of working, direct action, all the usual, but I want to add one more: the politics of humour and fun.

The neo-liberal project and the world of ‘the official future’ is an earnest, over-zealous one, and it doesn’t have a sense of humour. Once upon a time the zealous, serious left revolutionaries of post-68 had the wind taken out of their sails by humour. People created caricatures of the new left radicals and self-appointed tribunes; Private Eye ran ‘Dave Spart’ and it had such resonance it still has reach today.

So my small suggestion for subversion is that we create a panoply of characters and caricatures to describe the new revolutionaries, who if we are not careful will carry all before them and create a world where everything has a price and is for sale. Maybe we could call one of them – a charming, slightly seedy Scot in his 60s who is an aging lothario – Andrew McCliche? Any other suggestions?

An early stage technology entrepreneur recently told me that it was very difficult to get venture capital unless your innovation had a social networking connection. Does this suggest that we may be over investing in social networking and underinvesting in other parts of the technology industry?

Of course social networking is very important and another chapter in the growth of our information economy, but is it the buzz or the substance that draws us in?

The last time we had this much enthusiasm for technology stocks it was the dotcom era and as we know that ended in tears. This time it is different. There are fewer companies than before and many of them are generating substantial revenues.

There is no doubting the popularity of social networking sites. But while membership may be high for a few to what extent are we willing to participate in several? Also while social networking may be popular now, is it likely to continue or will another evolution in technology take its place?

Also what do we use social networking for? Certainly connecting with friends, sharing experiences and downloading photographs are popular activities. Some sites like LinkedIn are dedicated to a specific purpose and are widely used for that reason.

But once contact is established does communication continue through the social network site or is there a transition to other types of dialogue? Also are most of the people we communicate with regularly inside or outside our social networking universe?

Certainly social network has made it easier to make connections that otherwise might never have happened. Also, to some extent, digital communication may have become a substitute for other forms of communication such as letters, phone calls and face-to-face conversations.

Some have suggested that 60-70 percent of all communication is body language not words. And digital words do not make allowances for handwriting or intonation where further messaging can be found. Additionally we are living through a huge sea change in natural user interfaces where technology can replicate some human interaction. Many social networking sites make very little if any use of this advanced technology.

So it seems more realistic to think of social networks as one part of the communication process - a very important part, but certainly not the whole enchilada.

This is not an argument against social networking. It has played a hugely important role in spreading ideas, connecting communities and promoting the ideals of freedom.

But its success could be threatened if our enthusiasm for it ignores others ways of communication and collaboration which ultimately lead to deeper relationships rather than just multiple connections.

"Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe." -Frank Zappa

Oh yeah, Zappa? Well, let me show you what hydrogen can do!

With just one proton and one electron, hydrogen is not only the simplest of all the atoms in the Universe, it's also the most abundant: over 90% of all the atoms in the Universe are hydrogen atoms!

How could such a small thing possibly have anything interesting to tell us about the entire Universe?

Well, for starters, hydrogen has very specific energy levels where its electron is allowed to live. Hit it with just the right amount of energy, and it will absorb it, and the electron will jump up to a higher energy level.

Or, if you let it sit there in a higher energy state, it'll look at those lower -- and more stable -- energy levels, and spontaneously jump down there.

And when they do, they emit radiation! If you jump down to the first energy level, you emit ultraviolet light and belong to the Lyman series; if you jump down to the second energy level, you emit (mostly) visible light and belong to the Balmer series; while if you jump down to the third, you give off infrared light and belong to the Paschen series.

In fact, the jump from the third to the second -- the Balmer alpha line -- is so strong that if you look through a telescope at a galaxy that's forming stars:

it's that line that causes the galaxy to glow red! In the case of the Whirlpool Galaxy, above, you can see exactly where along its great spiral arms it's presently forming stars, just from this red glow of the hydrogen!

But most of the hydrogen in the Universe isn't in some exciting, star-forming region. Most of it's in the cool, boring depths of space, sitting around in its lowest energy state.

And if you're hydrogen in its ground state, you're just waiting for some light of just the right energy to come along and -- ever so briefly -- to give you a ride up to the next exciting energy level!

(Image credit: Joanne Cohn.)

What's hydrogen's best friend in this case? Ultraviolet light of a wavelength 1216 Angstroms, known as the Lyman-alpha line, or the right amount of energy to kick it up from the ground state to the first excited state! Of course, there are other excited states, and they make absorption lines too, but the Lyman-alpha line is the strongest one.

So why should I care? And moreover, how can something as mundane as this super-simple atom emitting and absorbing light teach me anything about dark matter?!

Well, we know where light comes from in the Universe: from stars and galaxies!

(Image credit: R. Windhorst, S. Driver, W. Keel, and NASA.)

Well, my Universe isn't just empty; there ought to be clumps of this hydrogen gas all over the place! And wherever my light from these distant galaxies passes through these clumps of gas, that neutral hydrogen will leave its mark by absorbing that 1216 Angstrom light.

(Image credit: Ned Wright.)

But because of the expansion of the Universe, this light gets redshifted! In other words, you place cold, neutral hydrogen gas at different distances away from us, in between us and a distant galaxy, and it will leave absorption lines at different wavelengths!

What we basically do is take a spectrum of distant galaxies using a super-powerful telescope (like Hubble), and see where we have clumps of hydrogen gas along the way.

If you look at something nearby, you'll only have a few clumps of gas in between you and the object you're observing. But if you look at something very far away, you're likely to get a whole slew of absorption lines! For very distant objects, there are so many clumps of gas that the lines we see are known as the Lyman-alpha forest!

(Image credit: Bob Carswell.)

Now, here's where it gets interesting! Because when we look at things that are farther away, we're also looking back in time! And if we want to get these big, deep absorption lines happening far away, we need to have dense, collapsed clouds of gas.

Guess what? That tells you something about your dark matter! Because if you want to make something that's dense and collapsed, it can't be moving too quickly. In astrophysics, if you're moving quickly, we call you hot, and if you're moving slowly, we call you cold.

For dark matter, the cosmic microwave background doesn't care whether you're hot or cold. But structure does, and the Lyman-alpha forest is very sensitive to it! If dark matter were hot (or even if it were too warm), the forest would be too shallow; in other words, hot dark matter makes it too hard to form small-scale structure at early times.

But we see the evidence of this small-scale structure directly in the Lyman-alpha forest! What does this tell us?

(Image credit: Benedetta Ciardi.)

It tells us that dark matter can be WIMPs (like from supersymmetry), because they're too massive to move quickly, or they can be particles that are born cold, like axions or (some) sterile neutrinos, because they started off moving slowly. But they can't be regular neutrinos or hot sterile neutrinos, among others, because this small-scale structure -- and hence the hydrogen lines that we see -- would get washed out at early times!

So just like that, from looking at hydrogen, we can tell how cold our Universe's dark matter has to be. And that's how hydrogen teaches us the temperature of dark matter! Read the comments on this post...

When we last left Clown Shoes beer spokeselephant Peter King, he was yelling a lot in the NBC viewing room, unleashing his beernerditry on you all, and letting Newsweek editors know just what he thinks about their font selection. Light: BROUGHTED.

So what about this week? Did Tim Tebow take another Ambien? Will he become a prescription drug addict who ends up breaking records and retiring and unretiring and sending pictures of his dick to people? Because Peter’s gonna need another one of those guys real soon. READ ON.

Actually, before we get to the column, there’s something I’ve noticed about Peter King of late. He starts of EVERY column by telling you he was in the NBC viewing room. Never fails. “I’m Peter King, and I AM ON THE INSIDE.” Let’s see if he does it again.

ICE STATION ZEBRA –

Humorous dateline alert!

On Sunday, in the warmth of the NBC Studios…

And there it is. Right in the first sentence. Do you know where Peter was last night? Oh, just a little place by the name of ROCK CENTER. At the very heart of the NFL universe. TONY DUNGY AND RODNEY HARRISON ARE THERE, TOO! PETER WILL POINT THIS OUT TO YOU!

I found it absurd the NFL called the Eagles-Vikings game because of snow and wind in Philadelphia.

As did I. The NFL is full of pussies.

Then, at about the time it would have been in the middle of the second quarter of the Eagles game, I stepped outside. It was a four-block walk to my hotel in a city, New York, 90 miles northeast of Philadelphia, in the throes of the same storm Vickville was getting.

I don’t know where Vickville is, but Central Park actually got eight more inches of snow than any part of Philly did.

And on an eight-minute trudge to my hotel, I began to change my mind. Maybe it was the way the snow was wind-turbining sideways, either at my back or in my face.

Sideways precipitation? OUTSIDE OF BOSTON? The heavens are collapsing upon us all!

I don’t mind that the game was called. For the 20 million of you longing for a game to watch last night, I’m sorry. For the 65,000 who might have tried to get to the game (I think maybe 20,000 would have made it), it wouldn’t have been worth it. Yes, I have the same concern Collinsworth has, and I still think the New Jersey Super Bowl is a harebrained idea…

Oh, he just had to get that in there, didn’t he? Man, it was cold last night. HOW COULD THE NFL FORCE REPORTERS TO COVER A SUPER BOWL OUTSIDE IN FEBRUARY THREE YEARS FROM NOW?!

The Vikings are on the best travel roller coaster in NFL history.

It’s almost semi-Bob Papaesque!

Let’s go through their itinerary one step at a time.

WEEK 14: Travel to Detroit
WEEK 15: No travel, game at TCF Stadium
WEEK 16: Travel to Philly, stay two extra days

That’s craziness! You’d think they were Secretary of State with that schedule!

The Seahawks have lost by 19, 16 and 23 in the past 16 days. They’re 6-9. And they’ll be playing at home for a division title Sunday night. Is this a great country or what?

Kudos to you, America. You gave the Seahawks and Tommy Wiseau and a chance to flourish when no other country would.

Cincinnati’s Marvin Lewis will see his contract expire after next week, he’s been lobbying hard for an indoor practice facility.

Seriously? The Bengals don’t have an indoor practice facility? Holy shit.

MARVIN LEWIS: I’d like an indoor practice facility.

MIKE BROWN: Not on my watch, Skippy. You fellers will practice out on the horse lot! It was good enough for my pappy, and it’s good enough for you! Is that a team hat you’re wearing? THAT’S COMIN’ OUT OF YOUR CHECK!

Tebowmania. Given a chance to see what he could do, Tim Tebow made his first start in Denver, came back from a 17-0 deficit and beat the Texans 24-23.

And he did against the worst pass defense the NFL has ever seen. WHAT FORTITUDE.

New England’s a steamroller; seven weeks in a row they’ve scored between 31 and 45 points, and they’ve done it in domes and in Antarctica.

But can they do it in Wichita? That’s the question.

I don’t know who Coach of the Year is.

Welcome to my column! I don’t know anything.

Todd Haley, Kansas City. Wisely handed off play-calling to Charlie Weis in the offseason and become the kind of overlord a head coach should be.

So true. All head coaches should be overlords.

/watches Haley sprout black demon wings

“He changed our culture,” says Tamba Hali.

“We used to be losers. Now we beat horrible teams and act like pricks. I love it!”

Mike McCarthy, Packers.

Just noting that the Beav is on Peter’s best coaches list.

Obvious disclaimer: I work for NBC

Do you? I never would gave guessed, unless I read the first sentence of your column each week.

…so if you think that’s going to so color my opinion on the game that’s being aired in Week 17 Football Night in America, move along. Your call.

/moves on

During Weeks 11 through 16, when NBC flexes games, there’s no question that viewership has something to do with it. This weekend’s choice of Philadelphia-Minnesota was obviously influenced by the raging success of Michael Vick as a TV draw, with the possibility that Brett Favre might play in the game. But in Week 17, all ratings concerns take a back seat to the game that mean the most to the playoff picture.

DICK EBERSOL: Hey guys! Let’s only show important playoff matchups the one week of the year when most playoff slots have already been decided! Is there any way Brett Favre and Michael Vick could be melded into some sort of hybrid dogslinger person?

New stars get cycled into the mix every year. Will Sam Bradford ever be a Manning? Who knows?

Will Bradford ever become a great? I don’t know. Does he have curly hair? MAYBE. Does he have stigmata on his hands that bleed pure mineral water? POSSIBLY.

The other day, I got into a Twitter spat with Minnesota punter Chris Kluwe (@ChrisWarcraft on Twitter). Kluwe defended Giants punter Matt Dodge for not being able to punt the ball out of bounds; Dodge’s inbounds punt eight days ago against Philadelphia resulted in DeSean Jackson returning it for the winning touchdown in the Giants’ stunning loss. I criticized Dodge for not being able to do something so elementary, and I defended Tom Coughlin’s right to ream the kid out immediately, which he did in full view of the FOX cameras.

Anyway, Kluwe and I went at it, and I ended up calling him and offering him a chance to rebut me in MMQB. Not in a name-calling way, but in a way where he’d be able to explain why, in his mind, it’s harder to punt it out of bounds than it looks. Here what Kluwe wrote:

Go and read what Kluwe wrote. He absolutely destroys Peter’s shit. It’s easily the best thing to ever appear in King’s column and King, of course, didn’t write it.

Think of the Chiefs winning the AFC West title. That’s amazing to me. Just amazing.

/thinks

WHOA.

the Colts are starting to look like a team you don’t want to play in the playoffs.

They were the Colts of old. Then they became the Colts of new. Now they are the NEW Colts of old! Part 2!

Imagine going two-thirds of a season without throwing a pick — even though (Tom Brady has) had three or four of them dropped.

Imagine it! Think of it! DREAM of this! You see, people. That’s the magic of MMQB. Peter wants you to think and imagine things that have actually occurred, just so your mind is extra blown. THINKMAGINE IT.

Special Teams Player of the Week

Ted Ginn, PR, San Francisco.

The same Ted Ginn who failed to run out of bounds at the end of the game? CROWN THAT YOUNG MAN.

Sunday night, 9:30, in my midtown Manhattan hotel room. The phone rings. It’s Mike Florio, Mr. Profootballtalk.com and my Sunday NBC partner in crime.

“You OK?” he said. “I’m just checking in on you. Wanted to make sure you got back OK.”

I thought: What are you? My mother?

PFT HEADLINE: “Peter King: Dead?!”

But this was one of those “you had to be there” things. It’s a four-block walk from NBC studios to my hotel. Florio stays at a different hotel, about five blocks from the studio; he walked to his hotel with Rodney Harrison and Tony Dungy.

And the snow! And the wind! My God! SHACKLETON HAS NOTHING ON WHAT WE SUFFERED THROUGH! I NEARLY ATE MY OWN BLUBBER!

f. Throw it away, Jay Cutler! Come on.

g. Show up, Tennessee! Come on.

h. Keep running, Braylon Edwards! Come on.

i. More coffee, Willie Cornblatt! COME ON.
j. No more bedbugs, Westin! COME ON.
k. Respect the snow, America! COME ON.

j. NFL scouts and GMs. How is it possible that Danny Woodhead was not drafted?

Because he’s extremely small and could only possibly flourish on a team that has a Hall of Fame QB and the best line in the universe? And because pretty much any back can put up Woodhead’s numbers (which really aren’t all that impressive) in that system, something Woodhead himself has proven?

Eli Manning, who now has five more interceptions than any other quarterback in football. Four picks in a game with major playoff implications … not good. Some of the throws he makes, it’s almost like he’s too confident.

Doesn’t Eli Manning strike you as the exact OPPOSITE of overconfident? Whoa whoa, Eli! Looks like someone’s got an awful lot of swagger out there! Look at him drink so cavalierly from that sippy cup! Look at how firmly he holds his Bunkie!

I think, from what Brett Favre told Andrea Kremer at the Vikings hotel in Philly over the weekend, it sounds like he’s finished and won’t play either of the last two games.

I think. Maybe. Possibly. Probably not.

Finally saw Invictus, on Christmas night.

Oh, thank God.

Never was much of an NBA fan, as most of you know. But in moving to Boston, I’ve gained an appreciation for the Celtics because of how hard they play.

I AM NOW A CAHHHD-CARRYING MEMBAH OF CELTICS NATION JUST LIKE THE REST OF THE DIE-HAHHHHDS! WE AHHH DIFFERENT! WE AHHH FIGHTAHS!

You know you’re getting hooked on the eggnog latte when twice in the last week you hear, “We’re out of eggnog, sir,” and you immediately think of who you can scold for having such a dastardly thing happen.

Even worse: Peter wasn’t even at a Starbucks either or these times. He was just harassing people at the Apple store.

Beernerdness… I’m not normally a Stout guy

You are when you’ve got that much egg nog in you. ZING!

.

The massive gush of oil that started on April 20 and ran for 86 days was a disaster, obviously, but it was also a grimly informative experiment. In its wake we are learning all kinds of lessons about deep-drilling technology, about the environment and ecology of the Gulf of Mexico, and about the future direction of our energy supply.
It may be hard to appreciate now, but 2010 started as a banner year for oil. The world’s energy giants were on the move, dispatching their sharpest petroleum engineers, sophisticated seismic probes, and huge rigs to some of the most forbidding places on the planet, from the Gulf of Mexico to Greenland. Corporate boardrooms gushed with confidence. “BP operates at the frontiers of the energy industry,” the company announced in its 2009 annual report. “We are exceptionally well placed to sustain our success in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico over the long term.”
The economic message from all of this exploration still holds true: The world is not running out of oil—it is running out of easy oil. By using the new technology, remote stashes of oil long dismissed as too difficult or expensive to plumb (in the 30- to 65-million-year-oldLower Tertiary crust below the Gulf, or in the even more ancient Cretaceous sedimentary rocks off the coasts of Ghana and Brazil) are within reach. Innovative prospecting techniques like three-dimensional sonar, which emits sound waves from multiple angles, help discovery crews see through opaque and shifting layers of geological salt to pinpoint oil hidden four miles or more beneath the Gulf of Mexico and off the Atlantic coasts of South America and Africa. Ultra-strong flexible pipes, remote flow-control valves, and vibration-resistant drill rigs can protect the prospecting equipment against corrosion, thermal shock, and crushing water pressure at the ocean floor.
The environmental message of the worst offshore oil spill on record (4.4 million barrels) is less clear and still unfolding...

"What makes the universe so hard to comprehend is that there's nothing to compare it with." -Anonymous

If I were brand new to theoretical cosmology, I might be skeptical of a whole bunch of "dark" things that I'd heard of. "Dark matter?" "Dark energy?" Come on; you've got to be kidding me! You're telling me that 95% of the Universe is not made of protons, neutrons, and electrons, like all the matter we know?

After all, I look out at the Universe, and this is what I see.

Stars, galaxies, gas and dust... normal matter, all of it. Yet all I need to do is start with two very well-supported assumptions, and you can demonstrate to yourself that the matter in the Universe must be mostly, but not completely, made up of dark matter.

The first assumption is that the Universe follows Einstein's General Relativity as its law of gravity.

The second assumption is that the Big Bang picture of the Universe works.

(And yes, you astute ones, it is unfair to place the Big Bang before inflation, as this graphic does.)

You give me these two things, and I can, unambiguously, give you dark matter.

How's that?

Because that's what the laws of physics let us do!

We start with a hot, dense, nearly (but not perfectly) uniform Universe that's expanding, and it unequivocally follows (among others) the following steps:

1. It expands and cools down,
2. It forms the light elements through nucleosynthesis,
3. Matter starts to collapse under its own gravity, while radiation (like photons) push back against it,
4. Neutral atoms form, leaving a snapshot of the Universe at that time (the CMB), and
5. Gravity pulls the neutral matter together into stars and planets on small scales, and globular clusters, galaxies, galaxy clusters and superclusters on large scales.

The big distinction, of course, is that radiation doesn't push back against dark matter, but does against normal matter (i.e., protons, neutrons, and electrons).

So what does this mean for what's in our Universe?

It means that when we look out at the temperature fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background (above), we can figure out whether our Universe is full of normal matter, dark matter, or both, and how much of each of them. In fact, there's an online calculator here that lets you put in your own parameters for how much normal matter, dark matter, and dark energy you want, and gives you the spectrum of CMB fluctuations. (Try it if you like!) Here are the observations that you need to match:

And can you do it with practically no normal matter?

Nope. But try it with all normal matter (and no dark matter), and guess what?

You can't do it either! If you want to make it work:

You need a mix of about 20-25% dark matter, about 4-5% normal matter, and let the rest (for a total of 100%) be dark energy.

But that's not the only large-scale piece of evidence we can test like this. There's also the large-scale-structure we find in the Universe!

(Image credit: 2dF galaxy redshift survey.)

And what we can do with this map is ask, if I look a certain distance away from a galaxy, how likely am I to find another galaxy? The result is known as the Matter Power Spectrum of the Universe, and it looks something like this.

Here's the thing: if the Universe were only full of normal matter (and not dark matter), the spectrum wouldn't look smooth like this! It would have certain regions where the spectrum dropped out to zero, corresponding to scales where normal matter were "pushed away" by the radiation in the early Universe.

But dark matter doesn't get pushed by radiation, and so if the Power Spectrum doesn't have these features, the Universe must have more dark matter than normal matter!

But -- and here's the most convincing part -- if you design your Universe with about 70-75% dark energy, 20-25% dark matter, and about 4-5% normal matter, you get predictions that match up perfectly with our observations!

And remember, all I needed to do this? General Relativity + the Big Bang. And the rest I figured out from the physics: by computing my predictions and comparing them with the data. And that's how we know there's dark matter! You want a Universe without dark matter, and -- at the very least -- you have to throw out General Relativity.

And trust me, you don't want to make Einstein angry... Read the comments on this post...

"Really, the fundamental, ultimate mystery -- the only thing you need to know to understand the deepest metaphysical secrets -- is this: that for every outside there is an inside and for every inside there is an outside, and although they are different, they go together." -Alan Watts

We've talked, recently, about the scale of the Universe, and trust me, it's huge.

Filled with hundreds of billions of giant, Milky Way-sized galaxies,

each of which contains nearly a trillion stars,

the whole thing is really, really big. And, after nearly 14 billion years of expansion since the big bang, the part of the Universe we can see -- the observable Universe -- is 93 billion light years across!

But there's more Universe outside of what we see. Based on our best theories of how our Universe got here -- the theory of inflation -- we might be inclined to ask just how big the entire thing is!

After all, inflation takes some initial region of space, and regardless of its initial shape, size, or conditions, stretches it, and causes it to expand at an exponential rate!

This takes any initial Universe and makes it huge! Not just billions of times larger than it was initially, but googols upon googols of times larger! It stretches it flat, it makes it uniform, and even sows the seeds of what will someday grow into the stars and galaxies that fill our Universe today!

Well, let's think about what inflation does. This super-rapid, exponential expansion causes the spacetime of the Universe to stretch flat, but also to expand to a much larger volume than it previously occupied.

(Image credit: Ned Wright's cosmology tutorial.)

That's what inflation is. But how does inflation happen? To the best of our (admittedly limited, and highly theoretical) knowledge, the Universe inflates when it's full of what we call vacuum energy.

But being full of vacuum energy is unstable, and the when the Universe slips down into a more stable state (like sliding down this hill in the picture above), that energy gets transformed into matter, antimatter and radiation, and gives us the hot big bang, and our modern Universe.

But there's something else we need to think about here. The Universe, at a fundamental level, does all the weird things that quantum mechanics lets it do. And one of the most bizarre things about quantum mechanics is that if you take something like, say, an electron, and you put it somewhere (like in an orbit, below), when you look again at a later time, it isn't going to be in the same place!

In physics language, we say that the quantum state spreads out over time! Now, here's where it gets really bizarre. We're going to put all three of these things together.

1. The Universe is inflating, or expanding exponentially. This means we're making "new space" at an ever-increasing rate. After one unit of time (t), we have one unit of space (V). After 2t, we have 4V. After 3t, we have 16V, and after 4t, we have 256V. In other words, we are making lots and lots of new space very quickly, at an ever increasing rate.
2. The average vacuum energy is decreasing as we "slide down the hill."
3. But, the actual vacuum energy in any volume of space, V, has to deal with the fact that the wave-packet is spreading out!

So we've got a race happening: the average energy is trying to slide down the hill, but in some of these areas of space, the spreading of this wave-packet pushes us up the hill instead of down it!

When we put all three of these things together, what we get is the concept known as eternal inflation. The big idea is that what we call "our Universe" is just one place -- which we can only see a part of -- where we've successfully slid down the hill. But the vast majority of the "true" Universe, outside of our little pocket, is still inflating, and still expanding exponentially!

Based on what we currently think about inflation, this means that the Universe is at least 10^(10³⁰) times the size of our observable Universe! And good luck living long enough to even write that number down. Thanks to Rob Knop for making me think about this, and isn't that a mind-blowing thing to think about? All that we know, see, and observe is just one tiny region that slid down that hill fast enough to end inflation, but most of it just keeps on inflating forever and ever. Aren't we the lucky ones?! Read the comments on this post...

22 March, GTC dome, La Palma

The Starmus Festival is proud to present the round table discussion "108 Minutes", moderated by Leslie Sage, in the dome of the 10.4 meter GTC on La Palma. Starmus participants at Magma can watch the webcast of the '108 Minutes' round table discussion live on a big screen.

Topics discussed will include:

* Why do we want to go to space?
* Why do we need to study the Universe?
* What are the relative merits of manned versus robotic space missions?
* Where do we go next?

The round table will also discuss a broader range of topics relevant to our place in the Cosmos:

* Is there other intelligent life in the Universe?
* Given the vast distances involved, will we be able detect intelligent life or a biosphere on extrasolar planets?

A distinguished panel of guests with very diverse backgrounds – among them Jack Szostak, Brian May, Richard Dawkins, Kip Thorne, George Smoot, Jill Tarter, Alexei Leonov and Buzz Aldrin – will consider and debate these and other questions.
... continue to website

I recently read an article about Vancouver in The Walrus which I've been meaning to write about for awhile, but every time I began, I just didn't know how to approach it. If you have a bit of time, go read A Tale of Two Cities: The Vancouver you see, and the one you don't by Gary Stephen Ross. Essentially the piece is one long Vancouver-bashing session with the occasional nod to our successes (while simultaneously belittling them). It makes reference to the hugely disparate divide between rich and poor, the somewhat fledgling cultural landscape, the silly 'world class city' title, the image of the 'green city' and various other clichés about Vancouver without really attempting to examine them. While Vancouver does have a lot of problems, which we are the first to admit, I am a little offended by the snarky tone toward the people of my city and the total lack of compassion or understanding displayed. Here are some excerpts:

"Vancouver, even more than most places, lends itself to spoof. The melodramatic views, the dependable wackiness of local (and provincial) politics, the green roofs and sustainably harvested spot prawns and Critical Mass cycling rallies, and, especially, the alternating smugness and insecurity of the citizenry: what’s not to parody?Everything’s in 3-D. You want drug addiction and wrenching, in-your-face psychosis the likes of which you’ll find nowhere else? Stroll through the Downtown Eastside, a twenty-square-block human zoo. Want to visit an Asian enclave that’s a cyberlike parallel universe? Check out the Aberdeen mall in Richmond, south of the city proper: two solitudes, Pacific variety."

"Amid the stereotypes, of course, obscured by them, Vancouverites live substantial, complicated, inaccessible lives. Newcomers say folks here are quick to engage you in a friendly chat but slow to invite you over for dinner. There may be a flaky, hippie vibe to the lineup at Trout Lake Farmers Market on Saturday mornings, but there is a seriousness of purpose as well, an act-on-it conviction that organic tomatoes from the Okanagan are in every way superior to industrial tomatoes from Mexico."

I am used to the clichés about Vancouver. I did my undergrad in Ontario where it was often demanded of me by new friends and acquaintances that I explain my reasons for being vegetarian, for being left-wing, for buying organic vegetables or for being a 'BC hippie' (we take that as a compliment, by the way) and whatever characteristics that particular person had assigned to me based on their opinions of where I am from. It often seemed as though it was very important to them that I justify my life choices to them. Why exactly this was, I still haven't quite figured out. It often felt as if they saw me as a rare bird, a person with conviction. Someone who possibly made them feel embarrassed for their own lack of ethical decision-making.

I would like to point out that this article was written by a Toronto-transplant to Vancouver. The only local source he speaks with in this article is a billionaire, no regular folks, and the rest are from Toronto. Referring to his first experience visiting Vancouver as a kid he says that, "to us highly sophisticated easterners, the place felt like a frontier town." I am hoping this comment was tongue-in-cheek. While Vancouver is a young city, it is certainly as 'sophisticated' as anywhere else in Canada. This is Canada! We don't try to be sophisticated, we are a land of beer and hockey.

Here is the thing, there is this belief that everyone hates Toronto. There was even a documentary made on the subject (which I've heard was carefully edited to bolster this myth). From my experiences, I'd say I think a lot more people hate Vancouver. I don't think many Canadians, certainly not Vancouverites, hate Toronto. I like Toronto, I wouldn't live there because my family is here, but it is pretty fun and it's size offers the kind of social and cultural pace Vancouver lacks. The major difference between Vancouver and Toronto, to me, is that in Vancouver you have to make your own fun. You go hiking, you go biking, you go to the beach and generally just revel in the scenery. But, in Toronto, the fun is laid out for you like a noisy, all-night buffet.

So, to Mr. Ross and those who feel the way he does, I say... Maybe if you didn't paint us with your clichés so readily, without getting to know who we are or what we are about first, you might find that Vancouverites are a lot more than the labels you are so quick to put on us. Or that those things we do that you find so unnecessarily 'serious' actually have a lot of reasoning behind them. We don't actually think we're the 'best place on earth' (some marketing team did) but we do love living here, and if you can so easily label the downtown eastside as a "human zoo" (seriously? How did the editors let that by?) without any compassion, maybe Vancouver is not the place for you.

A monthly roundup of our favorite nonprofit tech resources and other goodies.

1. 5 Trends Shaping the Future of Social Good. As it turns out, we'd already found examples of each (making us either prescient or easily distracted):
   1. Radiohead crowdsourced a concert video. This wouldn't be too hard to replicate at your own events, even if you don't have a drum machine and/or angst.
   2. A lot of smart people say mobile apps are the future, but it's been hard to find nonprofit examples -- until Tap-n-Give.
   3. Ben Rigby, from the Extraordinaries, touched on mobilizing actions in his piece for us this month.
   4. Cause marketing? What about cause shopping? Would Carrie Bradshaw approve? Can you reference both Radiohead and Sex in the City in the same bullet list without upsetting the order of the universe?
   5. The example of cooperation between nonprofits and individuals Beth Kanter gives in the article came from the 2010 Nonprofit Technology Conference. (Yep, we're leaning toward prescient. And next month's NTEN Connect looks at "The Future of Nonprofit Technology"!)
2. Notice that Facebook wasn't on that list? They've upset a few activists of late with their apparently selective interpretation of the opaque rules governing Pages -- and by opaque, we mean darker than a cup of cowboy coffee on a moonless prairie night. The lesson here: don't depend on a single social media presence.
3. But you can depend on the ability of the market to recycle ideas and still, somehow, keep them fresh. To wit: Social Media Monopoly. Instead of going to jail, "Go to MySpace. Go Directly to MySpace. Do Not Pass Wi-Fi. Do Not Collect $200." Poor MySpace, everybody's favorite whipping site. Well, most everybody's, anyway.
4. It's good to see that changing things up a little bit can make a difference.
5. But Google's new Instant Search might be a big change. At least it probably won't make us stupider, er, more stupid.
6. VolunteerMatch came up with a great campaign in challenging Stephen Colbert's beloved ice cream flavor. "Any time. Any place. Any tongue." Nice tagline!
7. And then you have what seems like the exact opposite of a good marketing campaign, but may actually work. Who'd have thunk?
8. In the end, I guess all we can say is: we wish we could dance as well as this dog.

[In this editorial, our own Leigh Alexander takes in the backlash against Ninja Theory's DmC trailer to see what really defines a sequel in a long console cycle alongside the Westernization of Japanese publishers.]

On the whole, the extended life cycle for the current generation of consoles has been good for innovation. By the looks of things, it will continue to be good for at least a few years more.

More time with platforms naturally gives developers more opportunity to learn how to maximize the hardware. At the same time, new devices like Kinect and Move promise to offer a new world of possibilities on these platforms, not just by bringing in new audiences, but by presenting brand-new design forms to traditional audiences.

However, the extended cycle presents some challenges, as well. As the traditional console market becomes increasingly hit-driven and digital and mobile models become more prominent, many publishers are falling back on their tried-and-true franchises.

A new console cycle is normally the frontier for fresh brands, and next-gen-ization often offers enough of a reboot of existing franchises to drive sales. But now as the cycle protracts, some familiar brands are on their fourth and fifth outings with little change.

While story-driven games with massive universes present appealing opportunities for continuation through sequels and offshoots, how many times will players want to return to a single universe in the action genre? Giving developers the time to refine and polish defining game mechanics and nail down the laws of their game worlds is surely a boon for gamers, but it can become a steep challenge for developers. Can Call of Duty's multiplayer really get any better? Can God of War's melee combat feel any more precise?

In franchises with particularly distinctive mechanics, it can be even harder to iterate further. Developers can expand on the game mechanics, but those predecessors were hits for a reason: Gamers liked them, the way they were. So what else can be done?

One option is to reconsider the game's narrative and universe. Set it somewhere else, as BioShock plans to do with upcoming Infinite. Focus it on someone else, as Metal Gear Solid will do with Rising. Revisit the brand in a far more expanded fashion, as Valve's doing with Portal 2 or as Rockstar did with Red Dead Redemption. Or re-imagine the universe completely, as Ninja Theory looks to be doing with its new stewardship of Capcom's Devil May Cry.

But the way developers are tackling sequels during this extended console cycle is raising some interesting questions about what defines a franchise: how much can be changed before a sequel doesn't feel like part of its predecessors' universe?

Why Infinite Is Still BioShock

The unveiling of Irrational's BioShock Infinite was a bit more controversial than might have been expected for a title with such an appealing visual style and with the promise of Ken Levine's marquee. But the absence of Rapture -- the underwater city that is as much a "character" within the BioShock universe as any other in the canon -- and important elements like Big Daddies, ADAM and Little Sisters led fans to be initially skeptical: How is this BioShock, then?

Infinite very much belongs beneath the same banner as its predecessors, though. Gamers bought into the existence of Rapture hook, line and sinker, to use an undersea pun. Despite the game's eerie, nostalgic, 1960's-era tone, the detail of the world somehow made it easy to believe there had actually been a fully-realized city beneath the sea, rife with the kind of genetic experiments that seem part of a far-flung and nightmarish future even in the present day.

Similarly, Infinite will ask players to believe in a thriving city in the sky at the turn of the 20th century. It seems unlikely that the experience will be any less plausible in its detail, given Irrational's continued stewardship. Both titles appear to share a masterful knitting of historical tone with environment-based decision making, in lockstep with the moral philosophies of their settings.

While Infinite doesn't look anything like BioShock, the common threads are definitely there. It's something intangible; a feel, a "vibe" that unifies them, as if they were songs on the same compilation, stories in the same themed anthology. It's a re-imagining that keeps the franchise's core tone, theme and style intact.

The similarities also extend to the abstractions of Infinite's gameplay, which looks like it will mimic the original BioShock in pitting the player against adversaries that live and respond naturalistically in the game world. Even if the old wrench-and-Plasmid combo isn't being reproduced, the overall feel of the gameplay is.

Perhaps because of these unifying elements, or perhaps because the property's original progenitor is taking its reins once again, fan concern appears to have quickly given way to, at worst, cautious anticipation. On the other hand, Capcom faces what looks to be a much tougher uphill battle in selling Devil May Cry franchise loyalists on Ninja Theory's reimagining of the monster-melee series. Why?

...And DmC Is Not Still Devil May Cry?

DmC Fans have so far only seen one cinematic trailer for the next game in the series, unveiled at the Tokyo Game Show this week. Many core elements of the franchise are immediately recognizable: hero-cum-badass Dante's swagger; the red leather coat he's worn through four successive session of mercenary demon-slaying; and the signature combo of gunplay and swordplay that's defined the brand.

But others aren't. To date, Dante's had the look of a character made in Japan, with the sort of white hair young men only sport in anime and, despite his attitude and heroics, a certain prettiness. Fan art of the character and his twin brother has always rather predictably bordered on the homoerotic, although Devil May Cry 4 presented a swarthier incarnation of the hero as a foil to the smoother, more boyish new character Nero.

Ninja Theory's Dante is different. Less fussily adorned, leaner and more raw, with a regrettable shock of black hair that looks like it's been styled with lawn clippers, he's distinctively un-handsome -- but also much more tangible, more plausible. Although the character still mimics Dante's dual-weapon feats and absurd stunting (enough so that, were this not a Devil May Cry game, fans would surely have cried "ripoff!"), even Ninja Theory must know he's not too recognizable. After all, the trailer ends with the character stating his name before the DmC logo-splash. Y'know, just to make sure you know.

Fan reaction has been instantaneous and partially visibly negative. This YouTube user isn't the only one to have felt so incensed by the trailer's premiere less than 48 hours ago that he took the time to upload a rant against it. The cries of these users are gaining any number of comments from fellows who staunchly declare that they hate the franchise's new direction and that the series didn't need a reboot in the first place.

"Capcom, Whyyyyyyyyyy?!?!?!?!"

The man in the video loudly begs to know what prompted this reboot. He may not know his question has a fairly plain answer. The widespread perception appears to be that Japanese design and aesthetics are no longer fashionable and have limited reach in Western markets. Major Japanese software publishers (with the exception, as always, of Nintendo) have been almost universally posting significant sales declines and losses in recent fiscal quarters as they fail again and again to achieve much global appeal.

Amid this struggle to Westernize, Capcom itself has been especially hard-hit, with profits down 73 percent at the close of 2009, and down another 90 percent year-over-year in the first fiscal quarter of 2010. (Although one could also attribute these declines to lack of quality in a game and a strong Japanese yen.)

Almost to the last, the stalwarts of the East have been looking to Western studios to revitalize their brands and help them appeal to a wider audience. Square Enix looks to be on a strong track since its acquisition of Eidos, Sega is busy reorganizing its Western operations for maximum efficiency, and Konami has the next editions of two of its flagship properties -- Castlevania and Silent Hill -- being developed in Europe.

Meanwhile, Konami's biggest franchise, embodied in Metal Gear Rising, remains in Japan under director Hideo Kojima's studio -- but even that title, an Xbox 360 release with more action-oriented gameplay, looks to be making concessions to the needs of the Western market.

Among its peer organizations, Capcom has been the most vocal about its need to Westernize, clearly stating that bringing its key properties to developers outside Japan is a pillar of its strategy for returning to success. Unfortunately for the publisher, however, Devil May Cry is one of those franchises at high risk of losing something in the translation.

It's true that the physicality and combat style of Devil May Cry's characters are key identifiers of the property -- it's why Sega and Platinum Games' Bayonetta, which took a similar approach, seemed a spiritual sister to the property (that, and having the same "father" in Hideki Kamiya). In a franchise known for its distinctive combat, anchoring to that element seems a perfectly logical approach.

But as BioShock Infinite shows, moment-to-moment gameplay does not a property make. Infinite belongs in its franchise's universe because of its tone and style, and Devil May Cry has remained distinctive for its own style, just as much as its gameplay.

It's That Je Ne Sais Quoi

It's a franchise that never wanted to be grounded. In Devil May Cry 4, a lothario Dante destroys a large gate structure by reciting a suggestive poem and assaulting it with weaponized roses flung into a heart shape. In Devil May Cry 3, which presents a young-punk incarnation of the hero, Dante destroys monsters who have taken over his humble office by skateboarding around on a pizza box (and continuing to eat the pizza). Dante faces off against his love-hate twin Vergil while the two fling casual trash-talk banter back and forth and effortlessly perform impossible acrobatic feats.

It's camp, so absurd as to be almost horrible, but plenty of fans clearly liked it -- even if that absurdity probably helps explain why other audiences might have felt alienated from the brand. And, despite its more realistic palette, Ninja Theory's DmC doesn't look to have abandoned it: The studio's new trailer features Dante casually smirking as he plummets backward off a high building, and finishes with him effortlessly enjoying a cigarette while draped across a high structure against a full moon. Ninja Theory's Dante seems, in short, to act like Dante, even if reflexive response to the way he looks might make that hard for some to pick up on.

Although he only worked directly on the founding installment of the franchise, Kamiya established its haunting tone. The very first Devil May Cry, an early PlayStation 2 title, had subtle undertones of another brand Kamiya established: Resident Evil, with its haunting elements of creepy environmental exploration and effectively vague, almost eloquent allusions to the undead. Although the Devil May Cry franchise moved away from environmental play and more toward in-your-face action in the following years -- another trend generally associated with Japanese design bidding for Western appeal -- it retained that grunge-gothic vibe.

Despite its hyper-stylized absurdity, Devil May Cry continued to hold on to its undertone of subtle grace; Devil May Cry 4 was indisputably beautiful, with luminous, lacy stained glass, glittering bronze patinas and degenerating stone monoliths. Although Dante's base of demon-hunting operations, with which the franchise shares its title, has always been housed in the same sort of sulfur-tinged neo-urban wasteland depicted in Ninja Theory's trailer, the game was about looking elegant, not looking "gritty," a term frequently used as a defining descriptor of what's considered the Western aesthetic.

Look what's happened to the Resident Evil franchise. It continues to delight fans, but it no longer scares them the way it once did. Obscure puzzles in a haunted mansion once made players fear the unseen; now, in Resident Evil 5, Chris Redfield and his newly-upsized biceps are mowing down fast-moving herds of zombies in an action shooter that clings to its third-person perspective as if to a last bastion of its old definition.

Fans love the new Resident Evil and the fourth installment's stellar numbers attest to a new audience for the much more accessible game (that the fifth installment's numbers are less impressive is likely attributable to poor co-op AI and not to a tonal change). But just as many old-school fans feel a loss as that series' tone has shifted. Eastern horror prizes the slow build, the unknown and the unaddressed, which for many holds more intriguing narrative prospects than the Western format, which prefers to exhilarate with in-your-face adrenaline challenges.

Of course, neither Resident Evil nor Devil May Cry are reputed for their spectacular storytelling, to say the least. But what Ninja Theory's trailer most notably lacks is that intangible, hard-to-pin Japanese tone, which companies like Capcom appear eager to divest themselves of their hurry to attain global audiences.

If it's tone and theme that make Infinite a true BioShock, is it this shift in tone and theme what makes DmC seem not to be a true Devil May Cry to its franchise's devotees? Is that a sacrifice those fans need to make to assure the continued survival of Dante's beloved, distinctive melee gameplay?

Of course, with no details regarding the gameplay for the franchise's upcoming reimagining, it's far too early to make a determination to that end. The more interesting question is this: For Japanese developers, does Western appeal mean sacrificing their unique and long-standing creative identity?

Halo: Reach kicked off gaming's busy holiday season, had massive launch day sales, and will have millions of gamers killing one another this weekend. But for Bungie, it is a bittersweet success, as they release their final contribution to the Halo franchise. Fast Company spoke to Marcus Leto, the Creative Lead on Halo: Reach, about creating the war epic and bidding farewell to the Halo universe.

Kevin Ohannessian: What was behind the decision to go from the lone superheroic Master Chief to a squad of more flawed soldiers?

Marcus Leto: The setting of the game is just prior to the events of Halo 1. It was a great opportunity to cut that tie between the Master Chief's story and start anew with a whole new cast of characters. As we began to develop Noble Team, this group of Spartans, what we really want to push forward was the campaign's connection to the multiplayer. We didn't want them to be two separate independent-feeling games. We wanted to tie them together in as many ways as we possibly could. One of those ways, of course, is that in multiplayer Teamwork is essential. Teamwork is pretty useful in campaign. While you can definitely go alone and can definitely finish the campaign by yourself, without too much help from your Spartans. If you stick back, if you play team tactics with your Spartans, the way in which you can progress within the campaign is entirely different than any other campaign we have created so far.

Why Reach as a setting? Why not go further back in time in the Halo universe? Or tell a future story with new characters (not Master Chief)?

We discussed a lot of scenarios and a lot of those came as possibilities for us to connect with. When we first began the game three years ago, our pre-production phase was all of this research and gathering, pulling in data from our studio, pulling in data from our fans, and understanding what our fans might what to see next. A lot of opportunities presented themselves at that time. Going far into the future or far back in time, we felt would require so much set-up in order to really engage or appreciate how it connected with the Halo story and we really wanted a really powerful ending to our contribution to the Halo universe. And we felt the events just prior to Halo 1 presented themselves with all kinds of great opportunities. Reach, the planet itself, is a fantastic setting. It has all kinds of great places to explore; it's the home and birthplace of the Spartan program; and it's also the setting of one of the biggest battles in the Halo universe. It was a great area for us to tackle. It quickly became the thing we were focusing on.

Why did you choose the name Noble?

It had to do with the Spartans themselves. Our tagline has been, "From the beginning, you know the end." The story is a tragedy. It's about the fall of the planet Reach due to the Covenant. What we wanted to tell was the story of the fall of the soldiers, the noble ones. Noble Team was just a natural when it came to that. To follow Noble Team, in the trenches of battle, throughout the campaign, and to witness firsthand the sacrifice that they make in order to insure one thing makes it off the planet, the hope of humanity.

As the Halo series has been made, we've had two wars start. How has the Iraq and Afghanistan wars informed Halo, and Reach specifically?

It's something that influences us--it can't not affect anybody in the world. We definitely look at that. What I think it's done, more than anything else, made us be a lot more sensitive to what we do put in the game, making sure we don't make any kind of inflammatory statements or actions within the game. We have the utmost respect for our troops. I think we do a pretty good job of representing the military forces in the game, both male and female. And the kinds of things they are up against in the midst of battle.

I thought Reach was the most war-like of the series: civilians running scared in the building, seeing skirmishes when you are being transported by air.

That was a critical part. In bringing the planet Reach to life, we needed to make sure that the user has some view of what's at stake. Bringing the civilians in, especially in the city missions--we see them peppered throughout the campaign--to understand that they are the voice of Reach, that they are the thing we are fighting for. Part of your missions is search and rescue, it's get as many civilians off the planet as you possibly can, before the Covenant can began their massive onslaught.

From the very beginning, when we began preproduction, we had this desire to tell a global battle. We wanted to depict more than what was happening beyond just the player's immediate battleground. We had a very difficult time in doing that in the past--partly, it was due to tech, what we could actually pull off in our engine. For Reach, we actually had the desire to really show the greater battle beyond the player, on the horizon; those huge battles--like in the Big Push mission, where you're out in the desert planes and there are hundreds of vehicles out there fighting. That is something that acquired us to retool our engine in pretty significant ways, in order to create the vision we wanted. And it's something we wanted to integrate throughout, into almost every single mission in the game.

[Spoiler] The survival mission after the credits was unique, the player enduring as long as he can as the last survivor of the war. What was behind the decision to include that?

We debated including that quite a bit. Ultimately the thing I really wanted to push in that moment, was that you're part of Noble Team and you are willing to fight until the very bitter end. And while you have succeeded in your mission of getting the "package" off the planet, your job is to fight to the end. And we didn't want to cop out on that one, have some backdoor for the player to escape. We wanted to bring this thing to a final, closing end for our players.

What have you learned from making the Halo games over all these years?

I've been working on Halo since 1997. It was just me and a few other people working on the game in our South Halsted office in Chicago. And we really had no idea what it was going to become. After Halo 1 shipped, we were astounded by its success. We were super excited about it, and humbled by it as well. What we learned over the last decade is just to never expect that you are going to hit another one out of the park. Always expect the next game you are going to make is going to be your next biggest challenge. I think as long as we keep moving through with that mentality at Bungie, I hope we connect with our fans and I hope that they see what we are doing is making games that we like, and that we hope they like as well. That we are not doing for some corporation; we are not doing it for some other need; we are doing it because we really have a true love for making games. That being said, we have no idea if they are going to be successful or not.

What is it about the Halo's setting and characters that has made it popular?

Halo ultimately became a universe. It became a familiar place for our plans to visit and the characters that inhabit it became something they kind of fell in love with over time. The more our fans glommed on to this, we began to expand the Halo universe. We had novels, and comic books, and the short films. These things that expanded the Halo universe beyond the games, it became something that permeated more of the pop culture. But that kind of connection with the setting, with the characters, and with the overall story within the Halo universe is something that fans really enjoy. We're excited to tackle Reach and bring some of that part of Reach to reality--things we already touched upon in the fiction, with The Fall of Reach. We give the fans a little clearer picture of what happened during that time.

Any last thoughts about Halo and Halo: Reach?

I'm glad we had this opportunity with Reach. We definitely looked back at Halo 1, 2, 3, and ODST, and we look back at what we had done really well and some things that might have gotten lost over the series, or that had altered, and some things that we thought needed to change. We had to put all of those great things into Reach, and improve upon them all, and add new features that we wanted to add over the years, and pack it all into this one final game. We put every bit of effort into it that we possibly could, in order to make sure that our fans would really remember Halo: Reach by Bungie as being the final, most definitive Halo game ever. We're super proud of what we ultimately created.

By Dr. Mark R. Showalter
Planetary astronomer at the Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe, SETI Institute

It was just a few months ago that Stephen Hawking was making headlines with his bold assertion that extraterrestrial beings, if they exist, are best avoided. His argument was based in part upon the fact that the arrival of Christopher Columbus to the "New World" didn't work out so well for the Native Americans who were already here. However, upon closer inspection, Hawking's ideas fell apart. Even if nomadic tribes of ETs are really out there looking for a handy source of protein, the probability that they would crave Earth's particular blend of amino acids is essentially nil. If they are just looking for energy, then our own meager Sun is an unlikely pit-stop. And besides, we cannot exactly hide from them; I Love Lucy re-runs have already been propagating outward through the Universe for 59 years.

I work at the SETI Institute, which is surely Ground Zero in the flight plan of those hungry extraterrestrials. Nevertheless, I take great comfort in Stephen Hawking's words. Not because I believe them---far from it, in this case---but because they provide a welcome reminder that even profoundly brilliant people can have really silly ideas. Especially when they veer out of their own fields of expertise.

Stephen Hawking has been in the news again recently. His latest book, The Grand Design, is a brief and (relatively) readable treatise about the M-theory. What the "M" stands for is under debate, but this is a description of recent ideas about how the Universe came to exist. For Dr. Hawking to present the latest ideas from the most advanced fields of modern physics in such a readable form is remarkable. He and his co-author, Dr. Leonard Mlodinow, rightfully deserve our praise for making such difficult material so accessible.

However, the M-theory itself is not what is making the news. As an astronomer, I can only dream of a day when scientific ideas would reach the headlines based upon their own merit. Instead, the news reports center around Hawking's most provocative assertions, which are that Philosophy is obsolete and that God is unnecessary.

I'm just a rings guy. I study the dynamics of planetary systems. The laws of physics that arise in my day-to-day research harken back to Newton, not even Einstein. If you want to know the latest news from Jupiter or Uranus, I'm your guy, but black holes and the Origin of the Known Universe? Not so much. Astrophysicists sometimes deride us planetary astronomers as the ones who merely study "rocks." So perhaps I should heed my own advice and not veer out of my own field of expertise.

(Perhaps this is also a good time for me to note that I am speaking for myself, not the SETI Institute or any of its diverse research scientists.)

Think back for a moment to recent history. It is February 2002, the war in Iraq is raging, and Donald Rumsfeld is Secretary of State. In a speech, he describes the situation there as one involving "known unknowns" and "unknown unknowns". For this painful contortion of the English Language, Rumsfeld is excoriated by the press. With so many lives at stake, no wonder. However, as a scientist, I understood exactly what Rumsfeld meant. Many times during my career as an astronomer have I seen the most elegant scientific explanation collapse, not because the math was wrong, but because a theorist overlooked one obscure physical process that rendered the whole exercise irrelevant. I could cite many examples of these unknown unknowns. I have been on the losing end of several such scientific debates myself; it is a humbling place to be.

This brings me back to Dr. Hawking. It would be silly for me to challenge him on the subtleties of the latest version of M-theory. If our Universe is but one of an infinitude within the broader "Multiverse," so be it. If the Universe exists merely because "nothing" and/or the laws of gravity require it, fine. Nevertheless, one of the things I have learned from my studies of rocks is that even painfully simple Newtonian physics continues to hold surprises. We should never be too bold in our claims when we live in a Universe (let alone a Multiverse) where the unknown unknowns abound. How lucky we are that they do.

Read the comments on this post...

Today on the list: How human beings could have made the Universe, the movement to move Tony Blair’s memoirs to the crime section, the social security con and the Bollywood movie ... about Jesus.

On a regular basis, Truthdig brings you the news items and odds and ends that found their way to Larry Gross, director of the USC Annenberg School for Communication. A specialist in media and culture, art and communication, visual communication and media portrayals of minorities, Gross helped found the field of gay and lesbian studies.

The links below open in a new window. Newer ones are on top.

Marijuana’s true potency and why the law should change
The U.S. war against marijuana has failed and actually threatens public safety and rests on false medical assumptions. Guest columnist John McKay, Seattle’s former U.S. attorney, argues why the laws against marijuana should be changed.

Doomed banks
Nouriel Roubini, aka Dr. Doom, has been making headlines arguing that one of the consequences of the ongoing crises of capitalism is that more than 400 banks on the “critical list” may go bust this year.

Looking for Tony Blair’s memoir? Try the crime section
Facebook protest group takes time to ‘reclassify’ the former prime minister’s memoirs in British book shops.

Bringing the war home
Both Bush and Obama have attempted to minimize or ignore the costs of the war in Iraq. But Americans, a majority of whom now oppose the war, are no longer allowing themselves to be fooled. At long last.

We’re Being Conned on Social Security—How We Could Easily Raise Benefits or Allow People to Retire Earlier
They just want to steal our money.

The first printed books came with a question: What do you do with these things?
The first printed books came with a question: What do you do with these things?

The Post-Modern Ear
Towards the end of the 19th century, and in the wake of Wagner’s achievement in Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal, the musical language which had been common property of Western composers since the Renaissance, underwent a crisis.

Bollywood film of Christ’s life
Production costing $30m to be filmed in Israel and Palestinian Territories with all-Indian cast of mainly children.

Revalorizing the Trades
For the 10th-anniversary issue of The Chronicle Review, we asked scholars and illustrators to answer this question: What will be the defining idea of the coming decade, and why?

American Universities in a Global Market
The status of the United States in the international higher education ecosystem—and, particularly, whether it is losing its longstanding place atop the global pecking order—is a topic of escalating discussion and, in some circles, hand-wringing.

Are we living in a designer universe?
The creators of the world were closer to men than to gods, argues John Gribbin.

Related Entries

• September 6, 2010 Our ‘Dumb Wars’ Will Go On
• September 6, 2010 Builder Barack Wants a Mini Stimulus (Update)

Marvel's movie universe is getting bigger and bigger, leading up to the possible train wreck that fans are praying The Avengers won't be. With Two Iron Man movies and a Hulk film under their belt, Marvel's next films introducing Thor and Captain America will be the last two Marvel flicks before The Avengers comes out.So far all of the movies have ties to one another. Downey Jr. appearing at the end of Hulk, Thor's hammer at the end of Iron Man 2, etc. But what about Captain America? Since it's a period piece, how will it tie in to the Marvel movies?Well, let's take a look at two tie-ins:1. The Super-Soldier serum will be introduced in Captain America. We saw a bastardized version used in The Hulk to create The Abomination. Remember, nobody has ever been able to successfully recreate the original Super-Soldier serum. (Unless that's changed in the comics. I'm not up to date on Captain America comics)2. Cap's ass will be frozen in ice and thawed out in the future. Something we already know just from Cap's history and the little Easter egg found in The Incredible Hulk.So when Captain America director Joe Johnston answers Comicbookmovie.com's question about Marvel tie-ins with his movie, the answer is pretty obvious:JOE JOHNSTON: There are links between all the MARVEL films, mostly ones that only the fans will pick up on. We have several subtle references to certain elements in THOR, but since CAPTAIN AMERICA is a period picture taking place in the 40's, there are fewer opportunities for contemporary links to the rest of the MARVEL universe. We can, however, create events in our story that will be paid off in AVENGERS and other MARVEL pictures. Captain America fans, anything else you can think of that would tie Cap in with the rest of the Marvel movie universe? Super soldier your hard drive when youSource: comicbookmovie