Margot Adler explores the roots of the current craze for vampire stories:

A vampire's near-immortality is probably why I ended up reading 75 vampire novels. I'd been caring for a seriously ill loved one, and as a result, I had been spending a lot of time thinking deeply about issues of mortality. I had also occasionally fantasized what it would be like not to have to think about that.

But what I started noticing as I read all these novels and looked at all the recent television shows featuring vampires is that their near-immortality isn't the most interesting thing about them. Almost all of these current vampires are struggling to be moral. It's conventional to talk about vampires as sexual, with their hypnotic powers and their intimate penetrations and their blood-drinking and so forth. But most of these modern vampires are not talking as much about sex as they are about power.

Take the CBS show Moonlight, which aired for only one season in 2007-2008. Mick St. John is a private investigator who is also a vampire. In one scene, he's trying to reason with a violent rogue vampire by telling him, "We have rules."

The rogue responds, "There are no rules: I'm top of the food chain."

I'm not sure this concern with the rules of living among humans is really such a significant development. If you're going to set your vampire story in an urban locale and you want to tell a series of stories in that setting¹ you're going to have to come up with a way to ensure that a large number of humans and a smaller group of vampires can coexist. The proposition that the vampires are willing to exercise a degree of self-restraint in the interests of remaining invisible to the population at large is the simplest way to achieve that goal.

Reading Adler's article, it struck me that the recent crop of TV vampires has mostly flopped. Admittedly True Blood has done well, but what else has stuck around long enough to make an impression? As Adler mentions, Moonlight got just one season. Blood Ties made it to 26 episodes (two short seasons) before being cancelled, Blade: The Series² lasted just 12 episodes, and The Vampire Diaries is still too new to tell one way or the other. If there's really a renewed interest in stories about vampires, it doesn't seem to extend to TV shows.

[Via Bookninja]

1. As opposed to a single novel documenting the reign of terror when a bloodsucker came to town and proceeded to drain a town's populace – like, say, Salem's Lot. ↩
2. Which I rather liked. ↩

It wasn't that he didn't have the room for a proper table…

[Unhappy Hipsters pointed out by LinkMachineGo!]

Zeldman pointed out a nice CSS3 feature. To set the colour of selected text, try adding this to your style sheet:

::-moz-selection { color: #004080; background: #fffdd7; }
::selection { color: #004080; background: #fffdd7; }

To my knowledge, this feature works in Mozilla-based browsers, Safari and Opera.¹ It doesn't work in Internet Explorer, but it doesn't break anything either.

1. I wouldn't know about Chrome. Google – like quite a few suppliers of Mac OS X software nowadays – don't bother producing a version of their browser for PowerPC-based Macs. However, I'd be very surprised if this feature isn't supported in Chrome, given that it uses the same Webkit rendering engine as Safari. ↩

Once again, it's time for the web-goddess Oscar Contest.

This year's prize is a Sparkly Emo Vampire Sockmonkey Playset¹ – how can you not enter?

1. With added Buffy Anne Summers. Which, let's face it, would be even more fun than this. ↩

Marina Hyde on Max Clifford:

It seems unthinkable now that, back in the mid-90s, this philosopher-publicist would feel obliged to explain that he was miffed about something to do with the NHS in order to justify his brokering of exposés of Tory sleaze. Thankfully, we live in more enlightened times, and not only does Max no longer have to explain why stuff he does is in the public interest, he has slowly but inexorably assumed the role of authority figure in a society searching for heroes it can believe in.

Above all it's the tone of voice – that calm, reasonable, slighty weary ­delivery that allows him to make the most ludicrous moral and logical leaps, only for people to say later "actually Max Clifford was speaking a lot of sense". This week, Max announced that he would be representing the stunningly idiotic Christine Pratt, founder of the confidential bullying helpline who waded into the No 10 row. "She wants to stand up and be counted," explained Max, presumably already counting, "and I've said the only way you're going to change the public and the media's perception is to come up with evidence of what you've been saying." So Christine's currently going through all her emails from victims who contacted her under condition of anonymity, and is going to take them to Max Clifford. Like I say, the guy talks a lot of sense. See also his sighing that the media should give Cheryl Cole some space, in wall-to-wall appearances in said media this week.

If you're going to try to compete with the memory of Jeremy Brett and Edward Hardwicke, this is probably not a bad approach:

"Sherlock" will present a fast-paced 21st century spin on the classic detective stories set in modern-day London and stars Benedict Cumberbatch ("Atonement,") as Holmes and Martin Freeman ("The Office UK," "Hot Fuzz") as Dr. Watson.

It hadn't struck me until I read this, but I can definitely imagine Benedict Cumberbatch as Holmes. If the modernised script is decent¹ this could be pretty entertaining.

[Via Ghost in the Machine]

1. And with Steven Moffat producing, there's a better-than-even chance that it will be. ↩

Khoi Vinh has posted a players' commentary on last week's Layer Tennis exhibition match between himself and Nicholas Felton.

Just for a change I ended up following last Friday's match live; I usually end up viewing the competition after the event, via the archive. The 'live' experience really drove home just how much time pressure the competitors are under: it would take me fifteen minutes just to figure out what had been done to an image, let alone compose and post a thematically consistent and well-designed response that also posed a problem for my opponent.

Which is one of the (many) reasons why Messrs Vinh and Felton make their living as designers, and I don't…

They really don't make computer manuals like they used to:

My family's first computer was a Franklin Ace 1000. I think we got it in 1983. Franklin Ace computers were clones of Apple II computers, which eventually prompted a lawsuit from Apple and a court ruling that operating systems can be protected by copyright. The computers may have been clones, but the Franklin manuals were definitely original.

[...]

For example, the manual for the Franklin Ace 100 begins with about 40 pages of computer basics (What are they? What can they do? etc). And then, on page 40, two thirds of the way down the page, there is a chapter heading called "The Ancestral Territorial Imperatives of the Trumpeter Swan."

Also, this:

Reading through the Ace 100 manual, I came across a section so shocking that I can’t imagine a modern computer company even considering putting it in a manual. In this section, you are advised to circumvent copy protection to make personal backups of programs you lawfully purchased

If you follow the link, you'll see that they didn't just advise users that it's a good idea to make backups of their software: they discussed the best method of copying a program's disk,¹ and even advised users which bitwise copying programs worked particularly well.

[Via The Morning News]

1. Note for younger computer users: in those days you didn't download programs, you received one or more 5¼" floppy disks that had to be inserted in a disk drive when you wanted to run the program. Not to install the program, to run it. Home computers generally didn't come with a hard disk back then, so if your disk drive couldn't read the program disk you couldn't run that program any more. Hence the importance of being able to make a backup copy of your program disk. ↩

Angela and Jordan, reunited 15 years on.

[Via iamcal]

Genetics, illustrated.

[Via kottke.org]

War! What is it good for?

[Via sippey.com]

The Linkbait Generator is somewhere between evil and brilliant.

On second thoughts, I take that back: it's evil and brilliant.

[Via Qwghlm]

Professor Sidney Perkowitz is a deeply deluded man:

Science fiction movies should be allowed only one major transgression of the laws of physics, according to a US professor who has won backing from a number of his peers after creating a set of guidelines for Hollywood.

[...]

The guidelines are by Sidney Perkowitz, a professor of physics at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia and a member of the Science and Entertainment Exchange, an advisory body run by the US National Academy of Sciences.

[...]

"I am not offended if they make one big scientific blunder in a given film," Perkowitz added. "You can have things move faster than the speed of light if you want. But after that I would like things developed in a coherent way."

"If you violate that you are in trouble. The chances are that the public will pick it up and that is what matters to Hollywood. [...]

In written SF, there's a corner of the genre known as 'hard SF' where writers take great pains to base their stories on extrapolations from the current state of the art in physics/biology/information technology/[insert scientific field of choice here]. Done well, it's a satisfying approach to storytelling. Sometimes, even hard SF writers will allow themselves one big breach of the general principle of scientific plausibility, often (as Perkowitz suggests) permitting some form of FtL travel, the better to allow the action to move around.

Unfortunately, sticking to the rules of hard SF tends to rule out visually appealing space battles, face to face conversation in real time between humans and aliens, governments capable of extending their writ across multiple star systems, hand-held ray guns and … well … pretty much all the tools of the trade of the modern, CGI-heavy SF blockbuster. I'd love to see more hard SF films, but I find it hard to believe that the moviegoing masses care. Modern Hollywood blockbusters are more space opera than hard SF.

Put it another way: how many of the Best SF films would survive the Perkowitz test? Of those films in the top 20 that I've seen, I reckon Alien,¹ 2001: A Space Odyssey,², Blade Runner³ and The Thing⁴ might pass, but we'd have lost a whole bunch of highly entertaining SF films to a 'one strike and you're out' rule.

1. Allowing for the existence of the xenomorph. ↩
2. Allowing for the presence of aliens that nudged humanity's evolution in the right direction at crucial moments throughout our history. ↩
3. If you'll permit the existence of replicants. ↩
4. Given the existence of a shape-shifting alien. ↩

Life imitates movie publicity:

Fortunately, it turns out that there is a good explanation for why Obama canceled the Constellation program. That explanation has been provided by Richard C. Hoagland. Hoagland, you may remember, is the person who discovered the lost city on Mars, and a bunch of giant invisible structures on the Moon that he asserts are the remains of alien civilizations. They're there, he says, but because they are invisible we have to trust him.

Hoagland has come up with a startling revelation… that Obama canceled the lunar program because (drum roll please): he was warned by Space Nazis. [...]

It's crazy, but it's not quite up there with my favourite Hoagland theory, about Iapetus. Now that's quality crazy.

[Via James Nicoll]

When I posted late last year about the Lolita cover contest I somehow failed to spot one of the very best entries. Happily, earlier today MeFi user nicwolff pointed out Justin Chen's entry.

I wouldn't quite go so far as to say that it's superior to the scrunchie, but it's certainly close.

The latest batch of Ministry of Defence files about past UFO investigations includes a lovely instance of bureaucratic buck-passing:

The person concerned had written to ask about MoD policy on alien abductions and pointed out that if the experience was real, the MoD was failing to maintain the territorial integrity of UK airspace – a core defence mission. After explaining the MoD's role with respect to UFOs, the somewhat sniffy response stated: "Abduction is a criminal offence and as such is a matter for the civil police."

[Via The Browser]

David Maisel's The Mining Project reveals the beauty and grandeur of some of the most visibly polluted places on Earth:

Rather than a condemnation of a specific industry, however, my images are intended as an aesthetic response to such despoiled landscapes. These sites are the contemplative gardens of our time, places that offer the opportunity to reflect on who and what we are collectively, as a society. The photographer Walker Evans spoke of the "enchantment of the aesthetically rejected subject." Similarly, I recognize that strip mines, tailings ponds, cyanide leaching fields, and other such zones form a toxic, yet strangely compelling, terra incognita. I am interested in the cartographic powers of photography, and in making an art of the actual, that renders the uncompromising realities of a flawed, complex world.

[Via kottke.org]

The Mariana Trench To Scale. Impressive.

[Via Lots of Co.]

Coming to the extras disc of the next David Attenborough box set?

Moderator: Before we begin this panel discussion, I'd just like to say that it's always a pleasure to witness great artists collaborating together on film, and with this film in particular, the result was a remarkably profound experience. So without further ado, please welcome the stars of the film: Lion, Wildebeest, and the Hyenas.

[Audience applauds.]

Moderator: Lion, let's start with you. What did you see in this project that made you want to be a part of it?

Lion: When I learned that British Human Who Smells Like Ham was going to direct I immediately knew this was something I wanted to do. Whenever I get an opportunity to participate in what I believe will gratifying work, I leap at the chance.

[...]

Comment of the day (in response to a discussion about The Singularity):

With apologies to DNA, "There's something big and physically binding coming at me, it needs a fancy sounding name, thermo … thermodynamics. I wonder if it wants to be friends."
posted by overyield at 10:47 AM on February 18