Author Archives: richard

Maybe the Kessel run in twelve parsecs is actually correct…

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I hate doing expenses – the mindless tedium of it all just kills me. So, I was procrastinating by catching up on Twitter, and found this little gem courtesy of Mark Hamill – Batman if created by Dr Suess at http://www.bitrebels.com/design/batman-the-joker-if-dr-seuss-created-them/. It's great, check it out.

That article links to another Dr Suess mashup, this time Star Wars: http://www.bitrebels.com/design/star-wars-if-dr-seuss-had-created-it/. Also great and worth checking out.

Anyway, the Star Wars one includes a reference to the (in)famous line from Han Solo about making the Kessel run in under twelve parsecs. As all good geeks know a parsec is a measure of distance, not time. (It's defined as the distance from the sun to an astronomical object which has a parallax angle of one arcsecond. Or about 3.26 light years, if that helps. Totally irrelevent to this discussion, but I'm a geek and have an uncontrollable urge to impart information.)

This line in the movie has caused a great deal of angst among geeks, because Han is talking like, "Check out my ship, it's so fast, less than twelve parsecs!" but we all know that it's not a measure of time at all, and so doesn't really make any sense.

Or does it?

The Star Wars universe makes good use of hyperspace as a way of travelling vast distances. Most people just assume it's some way of moving very quickly, an assumption that is aided by the streaky star visual effects.

But what if hyperspace means bending space to reduce the distance you need to actually travel?

Let's assume that the Kessel run is an actual distance of 100 light years. The Millennium Falcon can do it in less than 12 parsecs, or 39.12 light years. Maybe that's the new way to show how fast you are; you take a known distance and show what you can reduce it to. 

Enough of my rambling. Go check out those links.

Posted via email from Richii

NASA close to approving first sci-fi flick shot in space • The Register

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Millionaire game developer Garriott – aka Lord British in Ultima and General British in Tabula Rasa – shot the film during his 10-day tourist jaunt up to the ISS, while performing his other orbital duties. Without giving too much of the plot away, it involves a mysterious passenger who sneaks aboard the ISS for their own reasons, and it contains knowing nods to many of the greats of the science fiction genre. An audience’s-heads-in-frame bootleg can be seen here.

via theregister.co.uk

Pure awesome.

Posted via email from Richii