Nerd Word of the Week: RKV

RKV (n.) - An accepted abbreviation for relativistic kill vehicle, a weapon that moves at near-light speeds in order to inflict maximum impact damage on its target. Also sometimes called a relativistic bomb, an RKV is a kinetic energy weapon taken to its logical extreme, combining the principles of Newtonian and Einsteinian physics.

Newton's second law holds that force equals mass multiplied by rate of acceleration. Thus, even a small mass moving at sufficient acceleration can generate significant force. "Conventional" kinetic weapons apply this law by simply dropping large, inert masses from planetary orbit (like the tungsten rods dropped from satellites in Warren Ellis's Global Frequency), allowing gravity to accelerate the payload to destructive velocity. RKVs go one step further, using vast interstellar distances to accelerate kinetic warheads to near-light speed, multiplying the force of their impact to catastrophic--even planet-killing--extremes.

RKVs are often a favorite plot device for hard sci-fi authors, including Larry Niven in his Known Space series, Charles Stross in Iron Sunrise, Joe Haldeman's in The Forever War, and Vernor Vinge in A Fire Upon the Deep. RKVs don't require that civilizations develop faster-than-light travel or communication, as even known, subluminal propulsion systems can accelerate weapons to relativistic speeds given enough time and distance. Thus, wars fought between planets and stars are an ideal theater of conflict for RKVs, especially if you don't have FTL sensors to see them coming.

I bring it up because: Today is the 54th anniversary of Russell-Einstein Manifesto. On July 9, 1955, Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, and nine other noted intellectuals signed an essay highlighting the unconscionable dangers posed by nuclear weapons and implored world leaders to seek other, non-atomic-armageddon means of guaranteeing security and resolving conflict. Many view the manifesto as Einstein's repudiation of the application of his scientific breakthroughs to martial purposes. Unfortunately for Uncle Al, science has always led the way to new and more efficient weapons. Even setting aside the fission/fusion applications of Einstein's theories, his work on relativity can be applied for mass destruction in numerous ways, including the often overlooked brute-force example of RKVs. Food for thought, and some great science fiction.

How to do social media outreach right - don't use social media

While I was on vacation a couple of weeks ago, I was the recipient of one of the most professionally handled and forward-thinking social media outreach efforts I've yet come across, and considering that I've done social media for a living on more than a few occasions, that's saying something. Even more impressive, the outreach didn't involve LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace or any other buzzword standard-bearer of the overhyped social Web.

The outreach effort was from Tor books (the sci-fi imprint under Macmillan) in relation to their online bookstore. You read that right: A dead-tree book publisher most definitely has a clue of how to play in the digital sandbox, as I'll explain below. The entire communication took place over e-mail, with nary a tweet or friend feed in sight.

I know what you're thinking: Where was the social media? As Chris Brogan and my colleagues at Social Media Explorer (Jason Falls and David Finch in particular) continue to preach but no one seems to hear, social media is about the connections, not the tools. Twitter is a means, not an end, and the Tor group was much better served in reaching their goals through old-school e-mail than overly asynchronous tweetspeak or Wall-to-Wall missives.

What goal, you may ask? Getting an insanely insignificant blogger to give a damn about the new Tor book store. In other words, they wanted me to know about Tor's new project, and went through no minor effort to inform me.

It is no false modesty to say that I am the smallest of small potatoes in the blogosphere. I no longer have my still-not-giant Geekend megaphone, and even my appearances on TechTalk and my tweet exchanges with some moderately well known names in sci-fi and comics don't crank my annual unique visitor levels into the four-figures-a-month range. I'm nobody, and I only barely know a few somebodies, all of whom Tor could much more effectively speak to directly. Using me to ping Mary Robinette Kowal, Lar de Souza or David Gallaher is a pointless effort. Tor has or easily could get all their phone numbers, and they'd all be happy to take the call.

So why waste time with me? Because there is nobody too small in social media. One of my Nerd Words columns made the weekly roundup on Tor's own sci-fi blog, and that was all the validation the digital marketing team at Macmillan needed to consider me worthy of courting as a press source. In the land of Google, every incoming link is worth chasing, and Tor put no small effort into getting some links from little old me.

Not that they ever asked for any link love, mind you. Macmillan's digital marketing manager, Ami, wrote a very brief and straightforward initial e-mail (and the only way to get the address she used would be to read all the way through my bio post) which linked to the new store and the press release covering its launch. Totally professional, but friendly and with enough personalized content to prove she knew who I was and demonstrate this wasn't a blind e-mail blast. Top marks so far, but nothing that out of the ordinary, right?

At no point did Ami ask me to buy anything, pimp anything, or link anything. It was a simple "thought you'd like to know" mail, like she was mailing the New York Times and not Mr. Bloggy McSmallTime, along with a promise to answer any questions I had.

Oh, and the pitch? Tor was launching a sci-fi/fantasy-only online bookstore that carried books from every major publisher, not just Tor/Macmillan. They were selling their competitors stuff side-by-sdie with their own. The boldness of the idea was intriguing, and worthy of its own (future) post.

Naturally, the idea of someone taking on Amazon in the book space when B&N, Borders and Books-a-Million are hemorraging cash intrigued me. I'm a sci-fi geek, aspiring author, and once-and-future Web entrepreneur. Books plus Web plus sci-fi was right in my wheelhouse. So I asked Ami a lot of follow-ups, with lots of gotcha specifics.

She answered the same day -- by looping in the store's project manager who would speak to me directly about the site. Pablo got back to me the next day -- asking me to elaborate my questions -- and he answered them a couple days later with some very thorough responses. He then invited me to ping him again, directly, if I had any future questions.

So, to recap, a major book publisher reaches out to a smalltime nobody with a press release about a bold new Web initiative -- with a personal invite, no less -- and then kicks him higher up the chain when he has questions. At no point do they ask for press, cross-linking, or even a simple purchase. There is no quid pro quo. Everything is professional and pitch-perfect. Oh, and they had to do some research to contact me. No direct, immediate or large payoff, just online community goodwill and knowledge dissemination.

That's how you do social media outreach, boys and girls.

And for what it's worth, it worked. From now on, my Nerd Words column will link to store.tor.com instead of Amazon for my book citations, which is a big deal for me, since I'm an Amazon Associate. I'm leaving (a very little) money on the table because the PR efforts impressed me so. The store is pretty good, too, but we'll discuss that later.

Social media is about socialization, not the media. Remember this and you will succeed.

Here endeth the lesson. Discuss.

Nerd Word of the Week: Megacorp

Megacorp (n.) - A business entity that has achieved such a far-reaching level of vertical and horizontal integration that its power rivals that of entire nations, often to the extent of fielding its own military force and enacting its own laws. William Gibson gets credit for coining the parent term megacoporation within his Sprawl Trilogy (which actually includes three novels, Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive, and three short stories, "Burning Chrome," "Johnny Mnemonic" and "New Rose Hotel").

The idea of a superpowerful corporation predates Gibson, of course, with such companies appearing as early as Robert A. Heinlein's Citizen of the Galaxy and Robert Asprin's The Cold Cash War. The megacorp idea continues to reap fertile returns in contemporary science fiction, including the omninationals from Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy, the burbclaves of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, the planet-spanning corporatocracies of Charles Stross's Glasshouse, the ubiquitous Blue Sun from Joss Whedon's Serenity/Firefly universe, and in the government-supplanting megacorp Buy 'N Large from Disney/Pixar's WALL-E. Megacorps are almost always evil, and almost always at odds with the story's protagonist. Capitalism rarely gets a loving nod from sci-fi authors, even in the pro-software-corporation world of David Louis Edelman's Infoquake and Multireal.

I bring it up because: A mere 47 years ago today, the quintessential real-life megacorp was born. Wal-Mart opened its first location in Rogers, Arkansas on July 2, 1962. Wal-mart has neither a standing army nor its own government (yet), but it does wield such remarkable market influence that it inspired the aforementioned Buy 'N Large. This is ironic because the creator of the Buy 'N Large concept, Disney, is itself a much more cogent example of a megacorp, with its staggering multinational diversification and and extraordinary level of legal autonomy within the confines of its Disney World resort outside Orlando, FL. Only Disney employees can own land within Disney World's boundaries, and Disney sets the building codes, establishes utility standards, runs the fire department, and can exercise eminent domain within those borders. And you thought the line for Space Mountain was scary.

Nerd Word of the Week: Multiverse

Multiverse (n.) - Simply put, multiple universes that are linked together. More specifically, a set of interrelated parallel realities, usually involving characters that jump between universes to visit and interact with alternate versions of themselves and/or their history. While this term has been extended to any parallel universe story, like that found in The Chronicles of Narnia, it is most often associated with comic book franchises, particularly the DC Comics universe, which had its multiverse grow so expansive and unwieldy that it destroyed it in the seminal Crisis on Infinite Earths (and has since brought it back -- sort of -- in the recent Infinite Crisis).

I bring it up because: June 30 is Superman's 71st birthday -- he first appeared in his modern form in Action Comics #1, which came out on that date in 1938 -- and nobody is a better example of the multiverse than Superman, as he has appeared in more alternate versions than virtually any other character in history. In fact, Grant Morrison turned the joke in on itself, creating a Superman Squad of parallel-universe and time-traveling Men of Steel that regularly team up to battle interdimensional threats. (Just for fun, ask a Supes fanboy whether he prefers the John Byrne Man of Steel origin for Superman, or Mark Waid's Birthright; sparks will fly. Or better yet, ask him which Superman Elseworlds story is his favorite. Not superfan can fail to have an opinion. Personally, I'm a Speeding Bullets guy.)

Nerd Word of the Week: Uplift

Uplift (n.) - The process by which one species genetically engineers another into a more "advanced" state. In most science fiction examples, this involves gene-hacking animals to give them human-level intelligence, and possibly anthropomorphized bodyshapes. This notion was first popularized by H.G. Wells in The Island of Dr. Moreau. In other equally famous stories, uplift by extraterrestrial agents led to the rise of humanity, as was implied by the presence of the monolith in Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey. (The same aliens/gods/unknowable beings would uplift life on Europa in the 2001 sequel, 2010.) The specific term uplift is today most often identified with author David Brin, who wrote a series of novels set in the Uplift Universe, notably including the classics Startide Rising and Sundiver.

I bring it up because: 151 years ago today -- June 18, 1858 -- Alfred Russell Wallace sent a copy of his theory of natural selection to Charles Darwin, one which matched the latter's own ideas to a striking degree, prompting Darwin to finally publish his theory of evolution. Uplift is often mistakenly referred to as "forced evolution" when evolution itself is a natural process with no more a goal than a rainstorm or an earthquake. We aren't "destined" for intelligence or opposable thumbs, it just worked out that way, and playing with the notion of applying our own human-centric ideas of "advanced states" to other species' biology makes for some philosophically intriguing fiction, and often some pretty compelling space opera, too.

Nerd Word of the Week: Psychohistory

Psychohistory (n.) - A field of study that uses advanced mathematics to accurately predict the future. Specifically, it's the use of sociological statistics to predict the collective behavior of large groups of people, like galaxy-spanning empires. Isaac Asimov is credited with coining this connotation of the term in 1951 with his Foundation series, which itself is considered required reading by most traditional sci-fi fans. There is a real field of study called psychohistory, which is about analyzing the psychological motivations behind historical events, but most sci-fi fans are either ignorant of this fact, or simply curse its existence when it muddles up their Asimov-related Google search results.

I bring it up because: A mere 58 years ago this week, the first UNIVAC I was dedicated into service at the U.S. Census Bureau -- June 14, 1951. (1951, coincidentally, was also the first year that Asimov's original Foundation stories were collected into book form.) UNIVAC was America's first successful commercial computer, and it made famous the notion of statistical prediction of major events when the fifth UNIVAC I unit successfully predicted the outcome of 1952 U.S. Presidential election based on early poll returns. This practice is now common, and is in some ways the real-world analogue of Asimov's psychohistorical notions. Asimov, in turn, took the UNIVAC name and ran with it, creating the Multivac series of stories about a perpetually evolving supercomputer. The most famous of these is the short story "The Last Question," which Asimov described as perhaps the favorite of his own works, wherein Multivac is asked to "solve" the heat-death of the universe.

Armchair Screenwriter: How I'd pitch the Wonder Woman movie(s)

A while ago, Rich Lovatt over at Comic By Comic wondered whether we hadn't dodged a bullet in not getting a Wonder Woman movie. This week, Graeme McMillan over at io9 asked why Wonder Woman gets no love. Rich answered this first by saying what nobody is ever willing to admit about Wonder Woman, she's the world's most famous superheroine by virtue of seniority, rather than her actually being a great character. 

Wonder Woman's origin is goofy, her powers are all over the map, and she doesn't have any great mission other than being a "warrior for peace," which is such a paradox it became a punchline--from Batman, no less--in Mark Waid's seminal Kingdom Come.

Batman, by the way, is the elephant in the room during this whole "Why can't we get a decent Wonder Woman?" movie conversation. Dark Knight blew the doors off the box office last summer, and in some measure legitimized superhero movies, largely on the basis of its dark, timely, political tones and Heath Ledger's post-humous Oscar buzz. 

Thus, the world is primed for a high-profile, serious, major studio production of Wonder Woman. But, as McMillan pointed out in an earlier post, just because Wonder Woman is popular doesn't mean making a good Wonder Woman film will be easy. Nick Nadel over at Sci-Fi Scanner has 5 tips for making an awesome Wonder Woman movie, and I agree with four of them. Sorry Nick, but I'm keeping the Invisible Jet.

Okay, so enough stalling, what's my take on Wonder Woman? 

In no uncertain terms, Wonder Woman is the ultimate feminist icon. She's strong, she's wise, she's empathetic, she's Superman's equal, but she also embodies some of the more absurd extremities of knee-jerk feminism. Princess Diana of Themyscira literally comes from a world without men, a world which is presumed to be a paradise, to the point it's often called Paradise Island. And yet she walks around in a pin-up silver-gold-and-American-Flag bathing suit that is just this side of a pro wrestler getup.

So let's explore that contradiction. Let's use Wonder Woman as a character to examine some of the more intriguing and provocative notions of feminist ideals. Diana's not just an icon of feminism, she's an experiment in feminism, a road-test for all the "women are equal but different" notions that have been professed for the last century. There's your Joss Whedon ingredient: A kickass pulp heroine as complex psycho-social metaphor. Thanks, Buffy. (Though I'd style Diana as more a mix of Zoe Washburn and Inara Serra, but that's for a later discussion.)

Given the choice, I'd do a Wonder Woman trilogy set in multiple eras, even though producer Joel Silver said he wouldn't go for any period pieces. Still, my dream film Wonder Woman series would be one part Mad Men, one part Warren Ellis, a dash of Joss Whedon, a sprinkle of Dark Knight, two scoops of Y: The Last Man, the tiniest pinch of Boogie Nights (seriously) and a generous frosting of Gail Simone-inspired kickass. For details (and geek-to-normal translation) see below.

I think doing a multi-era Wonder Woman series would best bespeak her feminist iconicism, as feminism is a moving target, and notions of what constitutes women's equality changes. Here's where the Mad Men comes in. Mad Men is a period piece, brilliantly done, that is ingeniously feminist in its portrayal of how unfeminist--and by extension unpleasant--the 1960s business world really was. There are lots of other themes at work in Mad Men, but this is the one I'd borrow. Thus, when I pitch Wonder Woman, I'm not pitching one movie, I'm pitching three--and two are period pieces.

Wonder Woman I - The classic World War II era, which would thrust Diana into a world where women work in factories but can't fight in wars, where Rosie the Riveter is a national icon, and Eleanor Roosevelt might be in charge, but no one can admit it. Also, that whole Nazi ideal of purity and superiority would make for interesting thematic points, too. Baroness Paula von Gunther would be the villain, hoping to get her hands on the Amazonian genetic technology to breed a race of Aryan superhumans.

Wonder Woman II - Set in the 1970s, the go-go period where Wonder Woman gave up her powers and costume, learned karate, and joined the disco set. (Since Diana's "powers" will be different, she need not give them up in this version.) Contrast that with the era when the women's liberation movement, the Equal Rights Amendment, Roe vs. Wade and the Me Generation came into cultural focus. The tiniest Boogie Nights or--if you prefer--Life on Mars verve would do well here. The Cheetah would be the main villain, in all her disco-esque sass. She's a product of genetic manipulation made possible by Amazonian super-science that has crept into the world, but the catch is that she turned herself into a overtly sexualized werecat as a warped form of self-empowerment.

Wonder Woman III - Set in the modern day, with "I can be anything but can I have everything?" the central concern of the modern American woman. Gay rights--which, for someone who came from an all-female culture would seem a strange distinction--and the sudden possibility of woman president. Here, the villain is Circe, a rogue Amazon out to conquer Man's World and set up a beneficient matriarchal rule--with men as second-class citizens. The notion of some women as more equal than others will inform the action. (This version of Circe will be a blend of the comic Circe, Veronica Cale, and the animated fury Aresia.)

And yes, I do mean there to be action. This won't all be pontificating and prostletyzing about the notion of women's place in the world. Wonder Woman will beat your ass with her Amazonian superpowers. And, so, about those powers...

Backstory and plot outlines:
First the bad news, Olympian fanboys, but we're scrapping the entire mythical overtones of Wonder Woman. This is going to be a sci-fi movie, with a liberal nod to what Warren Ellis hinted at in the Planetary issue "Magic and Loss." The Amazons are a race of matriarchal separatists that broke off from the Ancient Greek civilization during its apex. They never suffered through the Dark Ages, so their science represents largely uninterrupted progress that puts them centuries ahead of the contemporary world.

However, as necessity is the mother of invention, while much Amazonian super-science is powerful to the point of being near-magic, they lack certain other basic technologies we would take for granted. For example, they have highly advance cloning and genetic engineering abilities but have never built aircraft. They have a functioning cloaking device that shields their island from detection but don't have much modern weaponry. 

In past centuries, the Amazons made regular journeys into "Man's World" for supplies and to propagate their race but in the last few hundred years have resorted to cloning and gene manipulation to create a race of self-sufficient super-women. They've sealed themselves off from the world, becoming celibate, insular, and xenophobic. Men have become a near myth amongst them, and their segregation has fed upon itself, creating a culture that not only doesn't need men, but is alternately fearful, hostile, and ignorant of men.

Into this world is born Diana, eldest daughter of Queen Hippolyta--yes, this is a monarchial matriarchy, which still worships the Greek pantheon--who is among the first generation born not just genetically perfect, but genetically enhanced. She is stronger, faster, smarter, and more insightful than any human being, Amazon or otherwise, has ever been, and she is curious about a world beyond the narrow confines of the isle of Themyscira.

Those genetic enhancements include a rough form of telepathy and psychokinetic super-abilities, which as you Golden Age comic guys remember were the main tenates of Wonder Woman's power arsenal back in the day (she could even speak with animals). Put simply, she can apply the force of her will--through training--into feats of super-speed and super-strength. She applies these abilities in pacifistic ways--with indestructible bracelets that let her deflect (through super-reflexes) bullets. The telepathy is focused through the Lariat of Hestia, an unbreakable cord that is reshaped and animated by Wonder Woman's will, and which gives her a telepathic link when anyone else it touches--allowing her to read minds and compel truthful confessions. Again, this is a non-lethal weapon, as she is an ambassador, not a conqueror.

The plot is initiated when World War II pilot Steve Trevor crashes on the "invisible" island after a divebomb run on a German destroyer. Trevor is nursed back to health by Diana just as the destroyer, which tracked Steve's plane to the island, arrives and begins to send out search parties. 

The Amazons fight off the Nazis--barely, as they are unprepared for the ferocity of their modern weapons--but lose several women as prisoners to the German aggressors. Hippolyta subsequently agrees to ally with the American in return for help rescuing her people, and offers Diana as her representative. Diana fashions an "ambassadorial costume" based on the '40s-era pinups Steve has in his possession combined with American iconography, illustrating her naivete and working in the classic Wonder Woman togs. A smaller version of the island cloaking device is fitted into Steve's Amazonian-repaired plane--which is now an invisible jet--and Diana thus enters "Man's World" on a singular mission of rescue, which of course becomes so much more as she sees the level of female inequality firsthand.

By movie's end, the Amazons are rescued and Wonder Woman agrees to remain as an aid to the Allies in exchange for Paradise Island remaining secret. This sets the stage for a Wonder Woman spin-off series on TV/Web/DVD about her WWII adventures.

However, The Wonder Woman II protagonist will be a second-generation Wonder Woman, Donna Troy, who was raised as a potential ambassador and who is much more world-savvy. Diana is her mother, and Donna is the first Amazon born "naturally" in generations. She will be an outsider in both worlds, and a child of both, making her a prism of ideal versus practical feminism. Plus, 1970s kitsch for the win, and the possibility of yet another spin-off series for this era's Wonder Woman.

The third Wonder Woman will be Donna's daughter, Cassie Sandsmark, who was raised in Man's World and prefers it--for all its faults--to the staid perfection of Paradise Island which, thanks to Circe, is no longer secret. Moreover, 60 years of borrowing from Man's World have allowed the Amazons to ramp up their martial technology and, once revealed, many countries will see them as a threat to be dealt with--a powerful metaphor for both the interdependence of male and female points of view and for the fear of strong women, even in modern, enlightened times.

Recasting Wonder Woman allows us to literally evolve the character, costumes, and methods (and it's cheaper for the studio). The final battle at the end of the trilogy will see all three Wonder Women united in battle against Circe and her aids, with a massive Amazon super-science fleet involved. The result will be a world forced to confront all that Paradise Island and the Amazons represent and, of course, the possibility of yet another spin-off series.

That's my convulted premise, which I think we'll all agree stands no chance of ever getting made.

Nerd Word of the Week: Unobtainium

Unobtainium (n.) - Snarky term for either a scientifically impossible substance that makes some fantastic device or process possible, or an exotic real-world substance that is conferred with implausible or impossible properties for the sake of a story. The classic examples are Cavorite, a metal that creates antigravity fields as first imagined by H. G. Wells in The First Men in the Moon, and scrith, the impossibly strong material from which Larry Niven's Ringworld was built. A more contemporary example would be dilithium, the crystal from Star Trek that regulates matter-antimatter annihilations and makes warp drive possible. 

Science fiction fans (and, more importantly, critics and editors) refer to these blatant wish-granting elements and minerals as unobtainium, as they are unobtainable in the real world. Equivalent phrases include: Unattainium, wishalloy, buzzwordium, handwavium (for technical handwaving), and element 404 (as in Not Found).

I bring it up because: 14 years ago this week, the first pure Bose-Einstein condensate was synthesized. A BEC is an extremely weird state of matter with behaviors that cannot be fully explained by current science--including a propensity to spontaneously crawl out of containment vessels. Bose-Einstein condensates are often used as contemporary stand-ins for classic fictional unobtainium in modern science fiction stories, as it "sounds" more real and the author at least has the flimsy cover of "science doesn't understand it" to explain how BECs can turn raw matter into a Jovian mooncastle using only a souped-up inkjet printer (I'm looking at you, Charles Stross's Accelerando.) Plus, Bose-Einstein condensate is just fun to type, even if it sounds vaguely like the residue from a lightspeed subwoofer.

Geek Lotto Dreams: A 'Serenity' Restaurant

Adding to my increasingly unrealistic blogging workload, I am toying with another column called Geek Lotto Dreams, chronicling what geeky things I would do with an obscene nine-figure lottery payout. First up, I'd start a Serenity-themed restaurant.

I'd call it the Blue Sun Grill, after I'd paid Universal and Fox and Joss Whedon all the necessary royalties for this boondoggle of a saloon to do it up right.

Say what you will about the counter-factual probability of a U.S.-Chinese collaborative entity colonizing a retro-Western terraformed solar system, but an Asian-Western fusion steakhouse with Serenity's frontier-plus-high-tech design sensibility would be fun as all get out to eat at. Rustic decor, polished teak, mahogany, and butcher block tables (some with bench seating, perhaps) surrounded by metal-and-wood walls adorned with flatscreen digital "paintings" and fictional 'Verse travel posters. Digital meets frontier, east meets west, subversive meets sublime.

Pepper the traditional steaks and stir-fry menu with experimental soy-and-gelatin experiments derived from the works of Homaru Cantu or Wylie Dufresne, just like colonists had to do with their multicolored protein rations. Every meal would be served with forks and chopsticks, and just for kicks, only sliced apples would be allowed inside the doors, lest they contain grenades. (The fact that said grenades are called Grizwalds is amusing, if only for the implied association with Clark W. Griswold of National Lampoon's Vacation fame. Perhaps a Grizwald Crumble would be a hard apple-cider cocktail.)

Dishes would be named for the planets upon which they "originated," and as those planets were all given symbolic or referential names in Firefly, the dishs would all be gastronomic entendres. The fact that Heinlein was a gas giant planet in the series is a joke not lost on many, so a Heinlein souffle would be no small or simple dish.

This isn't a Planet Hollywood amusement-park parody of Serenity we're talking about, but a serious bistro with legitimately complex and inspired fare and a sublimated snarkiness to its sci-fi verve. I'd wager lots of folk would eat there, not just the out-of-the-closet Browncoats. In fact, if the vision is executed correctly, non-fans won't even know this is a theme joint; it'll just be a somewhat off fusion restaurant. And if not, I'll be imaginarily rich, so I can keep it going as a vanity concern whether it's profitable or not.

That's one Geek Lotto Dream. What's yours?

Nerd Word of the Week: Light cone

Light cone (n.) - A simplified diagram for explaining causality, brought to us from relativistic physics. The diagram on the left (blatantly stolen from Wikipedia) is a light cone based on Minkowski spacetime, which is a fancy term for a uber-simplified diagram of the universe as a flat, two-dimensional plane; no Einsteinian curving to confuse us. Time is the vertical axis, so everything below the center is the past and everything above it is the future. At the very center is an event--typically, a flash of light, which gives us the term light cone. The lower cone represents all the possible events that could have caused the flash of light to happen at the exact time and place it actually occurred. The upper cone is all the events that could be influenced by the flash of light after it happened. 

As you get closer to the event in time, fewer and fewer other events could have caused it, as the particular circumstances surrounding the event get more specific. For example, if the flash of light is caused by an LED in my office, any LED that existed in the world a year ago could go on to create the flash of light, so long as in the intervening year any of those LEDs found their way to my office. As we approach the time of the event, the vast majority of those LEDs are ruled out, as they are destroyed or simply stationed too far away to reach my office in time to emit the flash, even if they move there at the fastest possible speed. Finally, only one LED is in the exact right place at the exact right time to emit the flash--the one at the center of the light cone.

At the moment of the flash, I may be the only person in my office, so for simplicty's sake, I am the only observer of the flash (though in reality the exact electrons used to generate the flash, the heat produced, the bacteria incinerated or mutated, and so on all are influenced by the flash in some fashion). I note the flash, and remember it. For every subsequent moment of my life, I could potentially mention the flash of light to someone else, thus passing on the flash's influence. Each person I mention it to could mention it to someone else, and every one they tell could mention the flash to someone else, and so on exponentially until the end of time. Thus, the flash's light cone--its potential realm of influence--expands as we move forward in time.

That said, there were innumerable objects in the past that could never have emitted the flash of light no matter how their circumstances progress, and there are incalculable persons, places, things and events in the future that can never be influenced by the flash of light, if only because all the non-causers and the un-effectables exist so distantly in the universe that they could neither reach my office at any point in the universe's past, nor could lightspeed information from my office reach them before the heat death of the universe. All of these events and objects outside the flash of light's realm of influence exist outside its light cone. Sci-fi writers occasionally invoke the light cone when discussing time-travel and its myriad consequences.

I bring it up because: Because, quoth Wikipedia, 90 years ago tomorrow (May 29, 1919), "Einstein's theory of general relativity is tested (later confirmed) by Arthur Eddington's observation of a total solar eclipse in Principe and by Andrew Crommelin in Sobral, Ceará, Brazil." Any excuse to discuss spacetime relativity and its sci-fi applications is a good one.

Further reading: Author Charles Stross makes light cones somewhat central to the plot in his Timelike Diplomacy series, Singularity Sky and Iron Sunrise. In the series, there is a godlike artificial intelligence called the Eschaton that forbids any time travel that intersects with its own light cone because it doesn't want humans erasing it from history. This leads to a great deal of political and technical intrigue when humans tried to use time travel to conduct interstellar war. Fun stuff.