Lisa Paitz Spindler, Danger Gal

Owen: “Make yourself useful, sweetheart, pass us the big chisel from the toolbox?”
Gwen: “Not sweetheart, Gwen. One syllable, sure you can manage it.”
Owen: “Not sweetcheeks? Freckles? New girl?”
Gwen: “It’s a shame your tool’s not big enough for the job. Darling.”

This week’s Danger Gal Friday profile is of Gwen Cooper from the BBC show and Dr. Who spin-off, Torchwood as portrayed by actress Eve Myles. Cooper comes to Torchwood after her South Wales Police officer investigative skills lead her to discovering the secret Cardiff branch of the Torchwood Institute. While often the “everyday man” member of the team, stand-in for the audience, and her obvious compassion, Cooper never loses her sharp edge and proves to be an asset to the team over and over again. Hathor Legacy sums up Cooper’s character nicely:

Despite being the conscience of the team, Gwen’s not a pushover. She can chase down a suspect with the best of them, is willing to use force, sticks to her convictions even when everybody with far more experience thinks she’s bonkers. Kindness and strength in one person. Kindness as strength. Gwen’s not a perfect person, but she’s a darn near perfect character.

Gwen handles much of the interviewing of witnesses and investigative work due to her previous experience as a police officer. Jack Harkness, head of the Cardiff Torchwood office, regards Cooper as the grounding force of his team, reminding everyone of their ties to humanity. One of the main themes of Cooper’s character is her struggle to maintain this humanity and her inability to reveal to Rhys Williams, her live-in fiance, the true nature of her work.

In dealing with the dangers she faces everyday as part of Torchwood, Cooper temporarily turns intimately to fellow teammember Owen Harper. Harper, an all-around unlikable character, offers Cooper the company of someone who understands what she faces each day, but without any real emotional attachments. While their relationship is ultimately a short-lived mistake, Cooper does not face any Scarlet Letter moments with Rhys afterward. In my opinion, Cooper does lose part of the humanity Jack admires about her when she gives Rhys the amnesia pills after confessing to him, but the secret is hers alone to bear without any kind of global aftereffects. It’s refreshing to see this approach — i.e., in shows of the supranatural type, I’ve often seen female characters engage in some sort of “dishonorable” or “unheroic” behavior to only shortly afterward face some sort of vital personal and global threat, as if the fate of the whole world were somehow tied to their personal honor or to whom they slept with. Not so on this show, in Torchwood Cooper’s indiscretion has only personal repercussions, not global ones. In fact, Cooper took control of the situation and broke off her affair with Harper instead of becoming the stereotypical jilted woman. She’s permitted to be an imperfect person and to make mistakes.

Cooper never stops thinking with both her heart and her head, and we often see her as a formidable debater with Jack and the other members of the team. She stands her ground often and despite being a newbie to the group, continually demonstrates her marked contribution to the team. Cooper is also the first member of the team to learn of Jack’s secret inability to die.

Quote found via the The To Be Human Gwen Cooper Fanlisting.

Lolly, Lolly, Lolly, Get Your Higgs Boson Here. The rap video above comes via Popular Mechanics, whose article shows off “Kate McAlpine and crew, who took to the tunnels under CERN to bring us the most entertaining explanation of physics we’ve seen since Schoolhouse Rock.”

Someone’s got to save our skins! The 9 Most Badass Women of Star Wars

I’ve found Leoben’s reviews of Tauron Morning coffee to be indispensible. Wired finds 11 fake Twitterers ripe for the takedown.

Infinite diversity in infinite combination. Lou Anders blogs about the difference between propaganda and the examination of the diversity of socio/spiritual-economic points of view in science fiction.

Star Wars is dead, long live Star Wars. SFFlare’s Eoghann Irving talks about how the Lucasverse needs to adapt in order to maintain its audience. The article also includes a link to SF Signal blogger JP Frantz’s post on the same topic.

It’s 4:20 somewhere. Scientific American talks about how several substances found in cannabis kill antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

Your Lexus might be killing your sperm. New Scientist writes how heated seats in luxury cars may disrupt the sperm production process.

Put your listening gloves on? IO9 cites new scientific developments where genetically engineered cilia in the ear may help some deaf people hear again. Or maybe we’ll just starting listening with our hands.

Synthetic Type O has a weird oaky aftertaste, doesn’t it? Wired covers HBO’s new vampire series, True Blood, about Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse novels.

It’s going to be one long Cure album. Edward James Olmos tells TV Addict just how much of a downer the ending of Battlestar Galactica is going to be.

(#39)

1. And yet it moves. The idea of relativity was discovered, not invented, by Galileo Galilei in 1639 “when he showed that a falling object behaves the same way on a moving ship as it does in a motionless building.”

2. There’s nothing relative about it. Einstein never used the term “relativity,” instead preferring “invariance theory.” Because the laws of physics appears the same to all observers, there’s nothing “relative” about it.

3. And you thought it was Picard. The idea of the space-time continuum was devised by Hermann Minkowski. From Wikipedia: “By 1907 Minkowski realized that the special theory of relativity, introduced by Einstein in 1905 and based on previous work of Lorentz and Poincaré, could be best understood in a four dimensional space, since known as ‘Minkowski spacetime,’ in which the time and space are not separated entities but intermingled in a four dimensional space-time, and in which the Lorentz geometry of special relativity can be nicely represented.”

4. Verdammt! Austrian physicist Friedrich Hasenöhrl published the basic equation E = mc2 a year before Einstein did, but he failed to connect the equation with the principle of relativity.

5. Now der are two of dem. There are two relativities: Special relativity and general relativity. The former applies to objects moving at constant speed and the latter explains acceleration and gravity.

6. OOPSY. The early version of general relativity had a major error, a miscalculation of the amount a light beam would bend due to gravity.

7. But this one goes up to eleven. No physical object can travel at or faster than the speed of light. The speed of light is generally considered to be a physical speed barrier.

8. It’s all relative? Matter determines how space curves. Curved space determines how matter moves.

9. Not over the hill yet. The age of the universe is widely believed to be 12 to 13 billion years old, and still expanding as a result of the ‘big bang’. This produces a type of horizon in space, where light has not yet reached Earth from objects further away than 12 to 13 billion light years.

10. Best. Costume. Ever. The Doppler effect causes objects moving away to have their light spectrum red-shifted while objects approaching have their light blue-shifted. This really means that the wavelengths of light they radiate (or reflect) are moved downward or upward on the frequency spectrum. These measurements were the first clue that the universe is expanding.

11. Happy Earth Rotation Day. One second is exactly 9,192,631,770 beats of a Cesium atom, very close to 1/(24 x 60 x 60) of an ‘earth rotation’ day. An earth rotation day is the varying time it takes for the earth to rotate once relative to the sun.

12. Way more productive than checking your Gmail for the 100th time. Einstein’s full-time job at the Swiss patent office meant he had to hash out relativity during hours when nobody was watching. He would cram his notes into his desk when a supervisor came by.

13. Rules are relative too. According to Einstein, nothing travels faster than light, but space itself has no such speed limit; immediately after the Big Bang, the runaway expansion of the universe apparently left light lagging way behind.

Source: Discover Magazine’s 20 Things You Didn’t Know and Einstein’s Relativity Facts.

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I had some fun with Photoshop this evening, actually the most fun I’ve had all day. SBTB has been discussing the latest in ancient Romance novel covers on books purchased from Ebay and the conversation turned to the hero’s puffy shirt that looks mysteriously like Seinfeld’s (and the marble rye possibly in his pants — hey, I didn’t say it was a clean discussion…)

So, I made use of my mad Photshop skillz:

See the original book cover here.

This week’s Danger Gal Friday post goes to Anna Diaz as portrayed by Rosario Dawson in the new Web series Gemini Division.

Diaz is an NYPD undercover vice cop after the people who murdered her fiance is Nick Corda, an artificial lifeform created by the military as a super-warrior. From the Gemini Division web site:

Determined to bring the people responsible to justice, Anna discovers Nick was not the man she thought – in fact, he wasn’t a man at all. Nick Korda was a “Simulant” – a bio-engineered life form – connected to a global conspiracy involving covert military operations, bizarre genetic experiments… and a mysterious organization known as GEMINI DIVISION.

IO9 isn’t too thrilled with the show so far, but I think it’s premature to pass judgment. I so far like the format and I obviously like that Diaz is the main POV character. I’ve liked Dawson in other roles, so I’ll continue to watch before deciding whether I like it or not.

However, I am seriously annoyed that their Flash video player crashed my Firefox twice. If they’re expecting people to actually watch these videos online, then that just can’t happen. I was also unable to grab the code to embed the Flash video here, hence the You Tube version of the second trailer.

FYI, I’ve fixed the categories issue associated with the upgrade I had to do after what shall heretofore be known as The Hacking Incident. There are fewer categories now and over the next few days I’ll be tidying up some stray posts that may have ended up in the wrong categories. I appreciate your patience.

Back to our regularly scheduled programming.

more graph humor and song chart memes

–Red is so your color. Stargate producer Joseph Mallozzi is entertaining the idea of a “Red Shirt Diaries” episode of Stargate: Atlantis.

– What color is a chameleon in a mirror? In my next story, I might have to write about Chameleon class spaceships that use this technology. A color-changing skin could help spacecraft maintain “comfortable temperatures without the bulk and expense of normal cooling equipment.” The less than half a millimeter thick silicon-coated skin is “an electrolyte sandwiched between two gold-coated polymer sheets” that reflect a large proportion of the sun’s visible and ultraviolet radiation. When charged, the skin turns from transparent to green.

–No more free orange juice. The first red blood cells have been grown in the lab, potentially eliminating the need for blood donations with an inexhaustible Type-O supply.

–A stellar river runs through it. Astronomers have discovered nearly a dozen new stellar rivers—strings of moving stars—over the disk of the Milky Way. By the way, the original title of my novel AVATAR was RIVER OF STARS.

–Not quite the Vitruvian Man. What makes Michael Phelps such a good swimmer?

–We can rebuild him. How to write a better Science Fiction villain. IO9’s Charlie Jane Anders talks about how, in Science Fiction movies at least, we don’t want shades of gray villains, but instead baddies we can conquer, the real world being just the opposite.

–Help! I’ve plummeted to my death, and I can’t get up! Five funniest episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

–”Steampunk is the new black.” Galaxy Express’ Heather is a guest commenter over at Grasping for the Wind discussing Urban Fantasy and the Next Big Subgenre. She talks about the emergence of everything Steampunk these days, and highlights how Romance has been creeping into Science Fiction:

[T]he current trend from romance publishers is toward more SF elements and grittier stories and characters. These aren’t your momma’s futuristic romances anymore…there’s a trend for many SF books these days to routinely include a romantic subplot, even if it doesn’t follow the structure of a typical romance novel (what many folks refer to as “romantic SF”). Because there’s such a range of types and definitions of these stories, I expect more people are reading this blended genre than we’ll ever know.

–Lou Anders’ Pyr Books blog is now a group blog including David Louis Edelman, Kay Kenyon, and Mike Resnick among other Pyr authors.

–What a novel idea. The world’s weirdest vending machines. Yes, Virginia, there is one for books.

–Where does the 8-track tape go? Sit in Captain Kirk’s Chair for a measly $2K.

(#38)

1. Just about every astronaut experiences some space sickness.

2. Because fluids shift upward in zero G, living in space means sinus congestion, kidney stones, constipation, and a shrunken heart.

3. Less pressure on the spine in zero G will make you two inches taller.

4. No humans have yet to be conceived in space.

5. You might suffer from insomnia living in space: 16 sunrises a day throws a major wrench into astronauts’ circadian rhythms.

6. If exposed to the vacuum of space without a suit on, don’t hold your breath: Sudden decompression would cause your lungs to rupture.

7. Breast implants might explode in a vacuum.

8. Today’s astronauts can spice up their meals with liquid salt and pepper since sprinkled grains would float away, tickling noses and clogging vents.

9. “The shuttle commode requires that astronauts align themselves precisely in the dead center of the seat. A mock-up of the shuttle toilet, complete with built-in camera, is used to train them how to position themselves.”

10. Landing back on Earth is called “the second birth” because returning astronauts report extreme difficulty moving their arms and legs right after touchdown.

11. “Eighteen people have died on space missions, but never in space—always on the way up or the way down.”

12. “Early astronauts relied on aluminum tubes of semiliquid mush, food cubes, and dehydrated meals.”

13. “A 2001 study showed that astronauts who snored on Earth snoozed silently in space.”

Source: Discovery Magazine

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more graph humor and song chart memes