I Love the Silurians!

The Horror Channel's Doctor Who repeats have been an absolute godsend for me; wallpaper TV I can write to without ever. having to concentrate too hard. All of the Pertwee and Baker era storylines knock the modern era into one of those "cocked hat" things - whatever is a cocked hat FFS - and the fact that most episodes appear to have been dug out of a bog make it easier to ignore, or indeed enjoy, the daft costumes, sets, and rubber suited monsters.

So. Doctor Who and the Silurians. I knew what the Siluruans were, roughly (things to get confused with the Sea Devils) and I knew they were among the best loved monsters. But I had never seen their 1970 story until now.

It is, or rather they are, fantastic.

The thing is with these Silurians is that they are not really monsters at all. They may be up to no good, but it is only initially in reasonable self preservation...their leader even has a sense of burbling charm...no mere evil green blobs on wheels, these fellows. Their high intelligence shines through.

Achh, who am I trying to fool? The charm is in the daft turd brown rubber suits; the fluttering eyelashes; the aforementioned burbly voices that make them sound like "The Fifth Element" Mondushawan on acid; they have a funny stumbling walk as if their arms have been strapped by their sides while their amphiboid heads bob back and forth; they have a light in their foreheads which have a duel purpose of killing people and moving coffin like hibernacula around; their faces are silly, and as ever when they do have a plan to hatch for the usual earthling killing purposes, it is far too long winded and complicated for it ever to work, especially when they set it out to the Doctor beforeheand in the tradition of every movie bad guy.

I love them, for every single on of those reasons, and more.

Helloooooo Mr Dalek

You are Katy Manning, a very attractive woman who played John Pertwee's assistant Jo Yates in Doctor Who for a few years. How best to advance your career afterwards?

The answer is, of course, to do a really unsubtle Doctor Who themed photo shoot!

The Space Time Trampoline

It occurs to me that when people try to explain the concept of Space-Time they always use an analogy of a foam mattress or the surface of a trampoline to illustrate it. Gravity is then shown to be what happens to Space-Time you sit a mass in it - it creates a dip, or hole, in the surface of space, that objects - usually rolling marbles! - fall in towards.

"So, if Space-Time really is like a trampoline" I wondered to myself, "would this form of space travel work?"

What I had in mind was a sort of bounce effect.

If you were to take a large mass, and then thrust it into the surface of Space-Time using some sort of exotic energy or field source, you could drive it into its surface like an acrobat, and then harvest the spring back effect to lift it out of Space-Time.

I would imagine, to observer's in the 4 dimensional universe, you would disappear in a shower of energetic relativistic particles to mark where the object "took off" from.

And then it would travel out of time, either straight up or down, or perhaps in a non-existent curve, and arrive back in our Space-Time in another shower of energy as its energy is absorbed by the 4 dimensinal universe. It may stay in place if enough energy is scrubbed off, or it may "bounce off again" somewhere else.

I wonder what there would be to see outside of Space-Time? Where gravity bleeds into our world, and where light perchance bends back on itself.