24 May 2013

Birthdays
Dash Mihok b. 1974
Greg Berlanti b. 1972
Michael Chabon b. 1963
(won 2008 Hugo and Nebula for The Yiddish Policeman’s Union)
Alfred Molina b. 1953
Jim Broadbent b. 1949
Carmine Infantino b. 1925 died 4 April 2013 

Quite an impressive list of birthday boys today. Mihok is an actor in several genre films including I am Legend and The Day After Tomorrow, Berlanti's work is on the other side of the camera in the Green Lantern movie and the TV show Arrow. Chabon is a writer, of course, and Infantino was a comic book artist. My two favorites are the two actors who are slightly older than I am, and Alfred Molina gets the picture slot for his short role at the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

In the year 2000!

Prediction: Books will be turned into audio (by grinding?) and the students will listen intently. The teacher will not lecture but instead merely choose the book to be turned into lessons.

Predictor: French postcards produced in 1900

Reality: A lot of the French postcards are on the cruel side and I think they are mostly meant to be funny. This one is obviously whimsical, but in its defense as a prediction, there are audio textbooks now and they didn't exist when this was drawn. Moreover, as a teacher I can say that one hell of a lot of my students wear headphones in class. Getting them to take the headphones off is the real trick.

Looking one day ahead... INTO THE FUTURE!

Predictions from Jack London's The Iron Heel about both war and peace a century ago, which is to say about five years in the future from when he wrote the book.
 

Join us then... IN THE FUTURE!

23 May 2013

Birthday
James Blish b. 1921 died 29 July 1975
(won 1959 Hugo for A Case Of Conscience)

Doing a little digging, Mr. Blish also wrote some near future histories and though out of print, they are available at my local public library (yay, socialism!), so his predictions will start showing up on the blog in the next few weeks.

There are several pictures of Blish on the Internet, most of them taken when he was older. He shaved off the pencil thin mustache, which is a damned dirty shame. A man in a sharp suit with a pencil thin mustache is a man who is going places.

 

Prediction: 2010: The Chinese land on Jupiter’s moon Europa with plans to claim it, the first nation to claim part of space as their own, planning to export massive amounts of water from it.

Predictor: Arthur C. Clarke in 2010: Odyssey Two, published 1982

Reality: If Clarke gets any points for this one, it's that he sees China will be a major player about thirty years into the future. Writing in 1982, the shuttle program is boosting interest in space exploration, so he can be somewhat forgiven for assuming things were going to start moving again in a big damned hurry.

Even with excuses, he was wrong about the future of space exploration. And as for the reason, water is still plentiful enough that we don’t have to import it from off-world. Let’s hope it stays that way.

Looking one day ahead... INTO THE FUTURE!

A French postcard foresees the future of education... in the year 2000!

Join us then... IN THE FUTURE!

22 May 2013

Movies released
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull released, 2008
Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian released, 2009  

Prediction: On May 22, 2009, a monster from outer space will attack New York, leaving much of Manhattan in ruins.

Predictor: Cloverfield, released 18 Jan. 2008

Reality: In many cases, predictions with dates from works of fiction are just plot devices. If a story says something is just around the corner, it adds an air of immediacy. More than that, in movies and films it can help hold down production costs, since there is no need to change fashions or design new cars, buildings or fancy gadgets.

And then there's this movie: I really hated this movie. I didn't go to see it in the theater, but I did rent it on DVD and wrote this Big Ugly Stick review with plenty of spoilers. I've seen way too many movies and TV shows where J.J. Abrams is involved that really did stink and I have very little hop that his work with the Star Wars or Star Trek franchises.

Looking one day ahead... INTO THE FUTURE!

Tomorrow, it's another Arthur C. Clarke prediction. I'm just going out on a limb here, but I think it will probably be about space exploration and will be overly optimistic.

Just a guess.

Join us then... IN THE FUTURE!

21 May 2013

Birthdays
Richard Hatch b. 1945

Mr. Hatch is the major link between the original Battlestar Galactica and the re-boot, though he does not play the same role or even an older version. Many happy returns of the day to him.

Movies released
Shrek Forever After released, 2010
Terminator Salvation released, 2009
Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back released, 1980

It's nerd blasphemy to say this, but I am not the biggest Star Wars fan ever. Ewoks sucked the fun out of it for me long before anyone heard of Jar Jar Binks.  That said, The Empire Strikes Back is still one of the greatest sequels ever made, right up there with the second Godfather. If it hadn't been as good as it was, the series could easily have faded away.

Prediction: On May 21, 2011, the righteous will ascend bodily into heaven before the five months of tribulation that proceed the destruction of the planet.

Predictor: Dr. Harold Camping

Reality: I first heard of Camping in the early 1990s. In 1992, he published a book entitled 1994? which postulated that Christ would return in a few years. He gave himself some wiggle room with the question mark and when nothing happened in September 1994, he adjusted his date to March 1995. He did the same in May of 2011, adjusting the date of the Rapture forward five months. The big difference between the prediction last century and the one from two years ago was Camping's advertising budget. It is estimated that over $100 million was spent getting the message out, the vast majority of all the assets the company had. There was also a lot more media attention in 2011 than there was in the 1990s, so his failure was even more humiliating.

Blogger's note: I realize Dr. Camping in no way counts as science fiction, but the same could be said for John Elfreth Watkins. I love a good prediction and if it comes with a date attached, it's gold as far as I'm concerned. Of course, the people who predict the biblical apocalypse suck at it, but regular readers of this blog will realize that science fiction doesn't do all that great a job of predicting exact dates either.  There are some brilliant gems, but in general, science fiction predictions adhere to Sturgeon's Law, Ted Sturgeon's famous answer to a critic who claimed that ninety percent of science fiction was crap.

Sturgeon's reply: Ninety percent of everything is crap.

Looking one day ahead... INTO THE FUTURE!


My man crush John Elfreth Watkins gets a week off because we have yet another exact date that came and went, this one from one of my least favorite films of this century, if not of all time.

 
Join us then... IN THE FUTURE!

 

20 May 2013

Birthdays
Jack Gleeson b. 1992
Tahmoh Penikett b. 1975
Timothy Olyphant b. 1968
John Billingsley b. 1960
Anthony Zerbe b. 1936

From oldest to youngest, Zerbe was in The Omega Man, two of the Matrix films and one Star Trek  movie. Billingsley was Dr. Phlox on Enterprise. Olyphant is best known for Deadwood and Justified, but he was also in I Am Number Four. Penikett was on the reboot of Battlestar Galactica and Dollhouse.

I chose Jack Gleeson for the Picture Slot because I feel sorry for the lad. Now 21, his role as Joffrey on Game of Thrones is the biggest role of his short career so far by a country mile, and people hate the character with a white hot hate, as all right thinking human beings should. I worry that he might get typecast, but his current plans are to go back to school and study with hopes of entering academia. I hope this works for him. 

And as always, I wish all our birthday boys many more happy returns of the day. 

Movies released
Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides released, 2011  

Prediction: "This simple, practical, foolproof personal helicopter coupe is big enough to carry two people and small enough to land on your lawn. It has no carburetor to ice up, no ignition system to fall apart or misfire: instead, quiet, efficient ramjets keep the rotors moving, burning any kind of fuel from dime-a-gallon stove oil or kerosene to aviation gasoline."

Predictor: Popular Mechanics magazine, 1951

Reality: Usually I ask for an exact date on a prediction, but I liked the history provided by Gregory Benford in the book that collected these pictures and texts The Wonderful Future That Never Was. Benford relates that helicopter commuting was relatively popular for a few decades, though not in personal copters, instead in short hop heli-buses. There were several crashes, many in Los Angeles and in the San Francisco Bay Area, but the most spectacular was in New York City on May 16, 1977, when a helicopter tipped over while landing on the Pan Am building, the rotors chopping people lined up to board, and then the helicopter hung from the side of the building and one of the rotors fell to the street below.

Looking one day ahead... INTO THE FUTURE!

Tomorrow's prediction is not from science or science fiction, but it is an exact date for the end of the world, so it gets a place on the blog.


(Spoiler alert: The date has already passed and we are still here.)

 
Join us then... IN THE FUTURE!

19 May 2013

Birthdays
Geraldine Somerville b. 1967
Peter Mayhew b. 1944

Ms. Somerville played Lilly Potter in the Harry Potter series and the standard rule of Picture Slot = Cute Girl should mean we'd be looking at her now, but I am going to invoke an older rule.

Let the wookie win.

Many happy returns to them both.

p.s. The other tall guy in the glasses is David Prowse, the man who wore Darth Vader's costume, though the voice is done by James Earl Jones.


Movies released
Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith released, 2005
Shrek 2 released 2004
Star Wars: The One That Must Never Be Named Again released, 1999

Another good reason for the picture above is to remind us about when Star Wars movies were actually fun to watch.

Prediction: By 2017, the highest point in the village of Newtok, Alaska could be underwater.

Predictor: Army Corps of Engineers, quoted in this article in The Guardian.

Reality: Here's the thing. I don't know the reality of this and I'm not sure who does.

Here's what I do know based on math work I did myself from the data set provided by Berkeley Earth.  Climate change is real. On average, the Earth is getting warmer and in some places, it is warming at an alarming rate. While temperature and other climate data has massive variation, the level of carbon dioxide in the environment shows an increasing trend that easily overwhelms the minor natural fluctuations. If it continues, and in fact even the trend of how much increase we see in a year is increasing slightly, the general warming trend will increase as well.

But still, this is a specific statement about a specific village in Alaska that can be tested to be true or false in four years. This hypothesis is falsifiable and that's what you need to do science.

Looking one day ahead... INTO THE FUTURE!

Back to the weekly schedule and this Monday it's time to see what Popular Mechanics thought the world would look like.

 
Join us then... IN THE FUTURE!

18 May 2013

Birthday
Andreas Katsulas b. 1946 died 2 February 2006

Katsulas is best known in genre as G'Kar on Babylon 5 and the Romulan commander Tomalak on Star Trek. He died at the age of 59 from lung cancer. Best wishes to his family and friends, from a fan.

Movies released 
Shrek the Third released, 2007
Battleship released, 2012

The less said about the movies released on this date, the better.

 

Prediction: The strength of the socialist vote grows rapidly in the United States. (Numbers with asterisks are predictions.)

1888: 2,068
1902: 127,713
1904: 435,040
1908*: 1,108,427
1910*: 1,688,211

Predictor: Jack London in The Iron Heel, published 1907

Reality:  The socialist vote was on the rise, but not quite as quickly as London had hoped. 1912 saw an election where four parties brought in significant votes in the race for president, with Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist standard bearer, picked up 900,000 votes for about 6% of the vote. Debs would get roughly the same number, 914,000, in 1920 running from jail due to his anti-war activities, but because of growth in the electorate due to women's suffrage, this was only about 3% of the vote in this contest.

Looking one day ahead... INTO THE FUTURE!

A prediction about 2017 from the Army Corps of Engineers.

 
Join us then... IN THE FUTURE!