Leeloo and Creating the Perfect Woman

In "The Fifth Element" - one of my favourite films ever, and one that inspired my sister to create an award winning cocktail - Bruce Willis is on the phone to his cab company manager describing the state of his love life after his wife left him.

"I don't want any woman...I want the perfect one" he states, or words to that effect.

Luckily for him, perfection in the form of "Leeloo Dallas Multipass" crashes out of the sky through the roof of his flying taxi, and immediately he has found her. Thus his perfect woman is a tall, orange yellow haired supreme being, created to fight the ultimate evil in the universe, and with a nice line in wearing bandages.

The perfect woman is of course a myth, in fact people's imperfections are far more interesting than what is perfect. I find the idea of perfection to be rather bland and boring - Lucian Freud would have been a very boring artist if all he'd painted were perfect people, and if the universe were perfect, we and nothing else in it would exist.

But should you be that hung up on the idea of having a relationship with "The Perfect Woman", as I see it, you have three options.

1) Accept that perfection is unattainable, and settle for the imperfect woman best suited to you, and enjoy a  happy relationship.

2) Accept that perfection is unattainable, and decide that rather than settle for anything less you will settle for a life of monastic purity untained by fleshy desires.

3) Accept that perfection is unattainable BY NORMAL MEANS, and take up a career following women around, kidnapping them. and surgically harvesting their best bits in a cellar of torment soundproofed to conceal the screams. Thus, in the 19th century gothic novel manner, you can create the perfect woman from lots of bits of others. The drawback to this is the fundamental illegality, and the fact that you never quite know whether you have harvested an abnormal brain or not, turning your Natalie Portman faced, Jennifer Connelly busted creation into a psyschopath with nothing on its mind apart from THE EXTERMINATION OF LIFE!!!!!!

I leave the choice to you.

Copyright Bloody MUlberry 26.06.13

CONCEPT - Oscillations Through the Earth

The most exclusive club on earth is The Polar Parachutist Club. These Polar Parachutists are unique, in that their particular descending-under-silk past-time takes place without any actual parachutes.

Instead, a diamond drill of non-terrestrial design, operating in a high energy oscillating tensor gravitational field, cores the earth like an apple from pole to pole.

Wearing a quantum heat proof suit, they just jump from the north pole, and travel through the earth's core to the south pole, the tips of their heads emerging from Antarctica, before gravity snatches them back the other way.

This continues, a simple harmonic oscillation like a spring until the jumper arrives at equlibirium rest at the centre of the earth, before they are hauled out on carbon nanotube lines, to share a beer and vodka with his or her friends, and reminisce about their amazing adventures, right through the centre of the earth.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 23/06/2013

Under Drone Surveillance

I was out cycling yesterday, a warm, sunny but horrifically muggy day. I was watching the birds and butterflies, taking in the agricultural but still attractive scenery, and looking for kingfishers from my favourite bridge.

I'm used to seeing all manner of small aircraft in summer - we have a lot of training bases near here - and the eerie whine of an AWAC jet is a regular presence in our skies. However, I wasn't prepared to see one of these sort of insectoid entities buzzing 30 feet up over a cornfield...

http://www.aerialtronics.com/en/products

I was half expecting a rocket strike to blast me off the road, or sinister full blown black helicopters to deploy their cattle handling claws and transport me into men-in-black manned sky labs for instant vivisection.

Of course it didn't. It appeared to be under the control of a farmer surveying his crops; one of the primary intended purposes for these devices. I guess they have a lot of use in surveying, engineering and construction too. And they must be a boon to archaeologists as well.

However it's not difficult to envisage darker uses for these drones, especially as the price drops and they fall into the hands of other sort of "adult toy" set. They could hover outside bedroom windows, pointing their inhuman cameras through the gap in your curtains. Imagine their capability as a weapon of annoyance, or even destruction.

Imagine your own personal drone, following you everywhere you go, under the control of malevolent forces; paranoia inducing helicopter forms wielding huge needles dripping toxins, like the Hound of Fahrenheit 451. Jealous exes, angry neighbours, a new sport for the people baiting chav with money.

In short, they give me the creeps a little, fun things no doubt they can be.

CINEMA - Krell Wonders - The Forbidden Planet

At one point in this classic, vivid piece of science fiction film making, the id-ally challenged Doctor Morbius asks of strong chinned space captain Leslie Neilson "Would you like to see some more Krell Wonders?"

"Hell yes!" he replies, or words to that effect, and off they go to explore more chambers of inconceivable alien other wordliness.

"Hell yes!" I always say too, whenever I see the film.

Promo Poster that doesn't at all reflect the real atmosphere of the film

The child in me never gets to see enough of the Krell; their enormous, mysterious city with its electronically burbling  giant resistors and massive pill shaped "things" moving up and down for no apparent purpose; and the Krell themselves, entities we never know anything about other than the fact they need great broad pentagonal doors and were destroyed utterly by the same psycho-physical terror that Morbius is manifesting.

Yes I know that in terms of the purity of cinema, less is more, and don't reveal your monster blah blah, but my inner child always feels cheated by the lack of actual Krell. And as for their city, well, what else was there apart from the eye searing power source and the great echoing caverns of electricial switching mechanisms? Where did they live? What were their transport systems? Leisure? Agriculture?

The "electronic tonalities" of Louis and Bebe Barron, the first time a film had had such a score, add to the futuristic gloss of the whole production, and leaves you wanting so much more. I love the movie, and I still wonder what the krell world was still concealing from us, when it finally detonated its monsters of the id for good.

BOOKS - Charles Stross - "Singularity Sky"

I've been meaning to write up my thoughts on this sci fi work for a couple of weeks; a book that kept me happily entertained as I sat reading it in a pub with a couple of excellent pints of Reverend James.

The work, although like so much I read seeming to owe a little or lot to Banks' Culture novels - the "Gods in the Machine" characters seem to bear a resemblance to Culture sublimed races perhaps, and the grossly inhuman yet fully sentient and realised alien species reminded me of the fauna found in Banks - throws in Steampunk and retrotech elements to create a universe very much of its own devising.

The main thrust of the novel is the effect, 200 years in the future, of a non-incorporeal seemingly vastly superior race called The Festival on a planet where a sort of Tsarist elite rule over the peasant society. In return for entertaining anecdotes, the Festival offer the peasantry cornucopia technology that can create absoloutely anything, thus triggering an accelerated communist revolution that goes from village Soviets to a techono-overkill situation in a matter of days.

Meanwhile, the regime in charge of the planet, send out a battlefleet that although with a structure like that that fought in the Battle of Tsushima in 1905, is equipped with faster than light technology with the potential to affect the past. This attracts the interest of a number of parties, who send out agents to "monitor" these efforts...

I enjoyed the novel. It doesn't have the complexity or richness of a Culture novel, but is correspondingly more human and a lot easier to get into. Stross is also exploring our contemporary issues in this work, like freedom of information, the problems and benefits of high techonlogy, and the nature of tyranny, benign or otherwise. There is a follow up I'd like to read, and I would recommend the book to the fan of intelligent sci fi. Especially in the pub with a beer!

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 09/06/13

Superheavy and Exotic

At the base of the existence, are the quarks, and the particles you create when you stick them together with the strong nuclear force. Mesons and baryons, hadrons all. Two quarks for a meson, three for a baryon like a proton or neutron. Up, down, strange and charmed.

That's in our tediously three dimensional universe anyway.

But there are places where this is not always the case. When a supermassive star goes not mere supernova, but hypernova, then the massive energies produced by the explosion fuse these particles into far more exotic and superheavy combinations, that are blasted through holes ripped in space time into dimensions that are rugged enough to take their weight.

For example, take 6 up quarks and 6 down quarks, and you get a tetrahadron. Tetrahadron matter is more solid that diamond, yet you can put your hand through it. In our universe, it appears as ghosts and spectres, which are actually the impression of lifeforms in dimensions 4,6 and 9 who's fantastic mass creates human like bumps in our space time, like pushing your hand underneath a drumskin.

Sometimes the particles and matter created from them are so huge, they rip through our space time surface whenever they merely brush up against it. Archamesons, they make up the living creatures of these dimensions, and in their own environment they work as accountants and bus-drivers, but we see them as Loch Ness Monsters, Yetis, and Giant Octopus a thousand feet long. Our glimpses are fleeting, because they immediately rip again through our dimensional structure and land in another one, like Indiana Jones falling through the canopies in Temple of Doom.

22 strange and charmed quarks form meta-theons – the true god particles, they can only exist in dimension eleven. These are angels to us, cherubim and seraphim, although they have long since passed the stage of mere thought and drift through the multiverse uncaring, each wing of six comprising galactic superclusters that don't have to break through any intradimensional barriers, they just are!!!

There are petrons, sarcatrons, polyorthagonal-dynameons, and matter that is simultaneously larger than every universe put together, and smaller than nothingness. But my favourite is made of 7 charmed quarks, and one anti-strange quark, less paradoxical than sum. It is the hope particle, and it exists in the 5^th dimension, just beyond ours, and only science has the will to find it.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 08/06/2013

The Sartorial Revenge of Whales

Whales are sick of humanity persecuting them, and who can blame them? They get angry at the endless senseless deaths and wasted lives; the harpoon in the flesh indicating the commencement of yet another “research programme”; blubber going down the neck of another overfed consumer who doesn't really need to eat a whale to have a healthy diet.

Sperm, Humpback, Pilot and Mike alike, they all realised that something had to give. They had balanced beach balls on their noses in acquatic parks for too long – it was time to make a statement.

And so their immensely powerful and creative brains plotted and planned beneath the waves.

Not long after, reports started coming in from around the world. Whaling vessels began to disappear, with no trace of them ever seen again and all hands lost. Tens of incidents. And then hundreds. More bizarrely, any burlesque or fetish photoshoot within spitting distance of water got disrupted, the models disappearing in a cloud of spray.

Ghostly tales came in of horrific sounds drifting onshore from banks of fog just out to sea. Screams, the sound of scraping, skin being peeled from flesh, near twitching skeletons being boiled.

After a year of this, a mass stranding of whales took place off our greatest cities. New York, London, Rio, and Tokyo. Cetaceans of every species from the smallest porpoise to the mighty blue whale. All were alive, and all very much wanted the world to see what they had done.

Every whale was clad in an enormous corset, made of human bones, tanned manskin stretched across them. The largest whales wore necklaces of skulls and thighbones adorned their tail fins like a pirate ship.

This time they didn't die quietly. Their point proved, they rolled their glistening, adorned forms back into the water, and nobody bothered them ever again.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 05/06/2013

How to Breathe Forever

Long term deep sea divers do not breathe in  pure oxygen or air when operating at great depth - the oxygen becomes toxic at high pressure, and the nitrogen causes nitrogen narcosis. Instead, Helium is added, in a mixture known either as trimix or heliox depending on whether nitrogen is present in the mix.

This is what causes deep sea divers to have squeaky voices, and film-makers a problem if they don't want their cast to sound like chipmunks. In "Sphere" they invented some sort of "voice adaptor", whereas in The Abyss they merely ignored the issue altogether.

What the world doesn't know that in the 70s, a pioneering group of swiss led divers discovered that if you breathe pure Neon at a depth below 2000 metres, not only does it become possible to dive at great depth for an unlimited time, the inhalation of pure noble gas meant that biolgically, they had become immortal, and indeed if they switched to an Argon-Neon mix, aging was actually reversed very slightly.

Sadly this is only possible 2000 metres below sea level, and indeed the effects seem to be magnified the deeper you go. So this was immortality was only available to a very elite few, and the news of this discovery was greatly supressed. However, those in the elite diving community continued to be in the know, and since the early 1990s, greater and greater numbers of them have decided that the surface world is in such a state that they have migrated to the great depths of the abyssal plane, to join the colossal squid and oarfish in forging a new society.

In their small habitats, they glow green and blue like street signs as they live a life of oceanic contemplation while harvesting protein from sources unknown to us ignorant surface dwellers. They don't need to know about us, their society is impregnable and infinite. They will barely even care as we kill ourselves off up here. They create art out of lava flowing out of the sea bed, and smoke cigarettes made of kelp. They make an alcoholic drink out of distilled squid ink, and play chess with pieces sculpted from feathery starfish and creatures unknown to our science.

They need nothing we can offer them. I envy them.