Day: September 2, 2006

I’ve been experimenting with HDR photography – taking 3 photos exposed differently of the same subject and letting the computer combine them.

As you can see, it gives a more detail in the trees, which not blowing out the strongly backlit sunrise.

Technorati Tags: Blog, Flickr

Doctor Who – Resurrection of the Daleks
by Eric Saward

Story # 134, 1984
Peter Davison as The Doctor
Janet Fielding as Tegan
Mark Strickson as Turlough

There are eras during the long run of the original Doctor Who that could seemingly do no wrong, and then there were others that could do no right. The John Nathan-Turner era fell into the later category. It should hardly come as a surprise that I don’t care much for this story.

This is the third story in the “Davros Saga” which began with the exceptional Genesis of the Daleks, devolved into the pathetic Destiny of the Daleks and now finds itself even more muddled and confused.

The “Plot”
It is now 90 years after the events of Destiny of the Daleks and the Daleks have lost the war with the Movellans. The Movellans developed a virus which proved fatal to Daleks, wiping out the Dalek armies and scattering the remains across the universe. Their forces depleted, the Daleks require armies of human(oid) soldiers who appear to be cloned and/or genetically engineered duplicates of humans they’ve collected on their raids.

For some inadequately explained reason, they’ve established a time corridor to 1984 Earth, the London Docklands, where they’ve stored several cannisters of the Movellan virus.

The TARDIS gets caught in the time corridor and narrowly escapes, but lands nearby.

Meanwhile, in the future, the Dalek ship attacks a prison space station, which is holding Davros, who was captured at the end of Destiny of the Daleks. Davros has been in a state of suspended animation on the station since then. Hopelessly outnumbered the stationis quickly overrun. The few survivors spend their time in repeated failed attempts to destroy Davros before the Daleks can get him.

The Daleks want Davros to find a cure to the virus, and they also want him to think they are serving him. Meanwhile Davros is plotting to gain control over the Daleks, or, failing that, destroying them and building a new race of Daleks, obedient only to him.

Meanwhile, with all these subplots bumbling along, the Doctor wanders rather aimlessly though the story. At one point, he does take it upon himself to finally go kill Davros, but, he fails.

Davros seemingly kills himself when he releases the virus and discovers that he’s also susceptible to the Movellan virus. (Imagine that, he is the last of the Kaleds, the race the Daleks were made from.) In the end, Tegan can’t stand the carnage and leaves the Doctor.

Analysis
So what’s wrong with this story? Well, if it isn’t obvious from that synopsis, the first and foremost problem is the poor story. Eric Saward’s script has far too many subplots, few of them make any sense, and after a while, it becomes ridiculous at how many people have the opportunity to blow Davros up and save the day, but fail to accomplish it.

This episode is near the end of Davison’s era, and at this point they have been setting the stage for his regeneration. Nyssa recently left, Turlough will leave soon and Tegan leaves at the end of this story. Despite that, she spends almost all of her time lying down on a cot doing nothing. It’s hardly a memorable departure for a companion. Turlough gets far more screen time and all he does is skulk around the sets.

Even if you like Daleks, this just isn’t a good story.

It’s frequently pointed out that Resurrection has a higher body count than The Terminator, and I don’t doubt that’s true. This story has a huge cast and all of them are killed, only the Doctor, his companions and three Dalek agents survive. While I suppose this was some attempt to make the Daleks seem menacing again, it actually just makes everyone appear incompetent.

I often lay blame on Doctor Who’s demise on John Nathan-Turner’s poor handling of the series, equal blame probably falls on Saward’s shoulders as he was the script editor during Davison and Colin Baker’s time on the show, and the scripts show a considerable and inexorable decline during that era.

Back in day there were lots of fans who defended JNT and his team and, at the time, I was willing to concede that outside pressures may have been a greater influence, but these DW DVDs, with all their extras, interviews and production documentaries really show how screwed up this production team really was. It’s a testament to the enduring love of Doctor Who that it survived 8 seasons under JNT’s helm.

I haven’t decided if I’ll break down and watch Recombobulation… er… retread… er… rerun… um… reflux… no, no, no, that’s not it… ah yes, Revelation of the Daleks (the fourth and hopefully final Davros story) tomorrow or I’ll wait and buy Inferno in a week and see a classic Doctor Who instead.

Technorati Tags: Blog, Doctor Who, Review, Video

Little Storping-in-the-Swuff => Mouse Update

Simon over at Little Storping-in-the-Swuff has recently been grappling with a mouse invasion.

It looks like the problem has been solved, but his latest update on the progress has given me a terrific idea.

To explain that idea, I’m going to have to take a trip around the subject for a while. Please bear with me for a few minutes.

For some time now, people have been using photo sharing sites like flickr. Flickr allows you to “tag” your photos with user defined… um… tags, that allow you to classify your photos. For example, I tag all my Taiwan photos with a “Taiwan” tag, and often tag them further with the name of the city, whether or not it has my “family”, “animals”, “costco” or “pizza” in it.

This allows people to search flickr by those tags and find related photos of interest to them. (My guess is “nude”, “naked”, “breasts” and “female” will be the most searched for tags on flickr, but I might be being cynical.)

Arising from that was the phenomena of “geotagging”. Posters would include a tag of “Geotag” on their flickr photos, and a tag of the GPS coordinates.

This week, flickr took that quaint hobby one step further by officially introducing a geotag mechanism imbedded in their database.

You can now take your flickr photos and, using a built-in interface to Yahoo! maps (nothing’s perfect), drag the photos onto the location you took them and they are entered into flick’s geotag database. Others can now go to a map of an area they are interested in, and browse photos taken at or near that spot.

Flickr introduced this facility earlier in the week, and within 24 hours had 1.2 million geotagged photos.

The interface needs a lot of work, but it can be fun browsing an area you know and looking at other peoples’ pictures.

When mice are captured humanely – that is, captured and released, rather than captured and drowned, you’re supposed to take them more than 2 miles away or they’ll just come back. (OK, I don’t actually buy that mice act as homing pigeons, by why risk it?)

So, this brings me back to my idea.

Simon’s recent capture update was accompanied by links to Google maps indicating the rough area the mice were released in.

I propose the following:

• People releasing mice should take a picture of the mouse at the point of release.
• Post said photo to flickr
• Enter the photo into the geotag database
• include the following tags “Mouse” “Mouse Release Program”

The practical upstart of this is that if you happen to be looking for a mouse to adopt, you can check your area and find if any previously domestic mice have been released in your area. With a little luck you can find them and give them a good home.

I can see a couple possible unintended consequences to this idea, though.

For example, what if you found a mouse in your home and were able to identify that it had been released by someone else in your area. Could you take legal action against them?

Or, perhaps you don’t like mice, could you use the database to locate released mice and kill them? Perhaps even posting pictures of the kills in the geotagged database?

I can envision all sorts of new games that can be devised using geotagged flickr.

Technorati Tags: Blog, Natural Sciences, Science