Entry tags:
SGU: eh, it got better, but WAIT QUANTUM
So. The writing, especially first season but also some second season just frustrated me so much... they took what could have been some really interesting situations and characters and just wasted them and/or made them boring (Gloria? Could have been really interesting, and then they just dropped that storyline completely), and then jump back in and demand you care for a character or relationship that they've put no work into, just because they assert that it's been going on this whole time. This is not even to mention the camera work (shaking the camera is not gritty, it just makes me carsick, and same with ten montages in a row), the fail-y bits (um, what you are doing with the communication stones do you not realize that is ethically incredibly skeevy and might in fact be rape? ew ew ew, also whaaaat torture = awesome?) and so on. (I have been told that apparently there was a LOT of cut material; this may have contributed to my perceived problems.)
But occasionally, especially in Season 2 when they seem to have found their feet a little, there are some very good and creepy scenes ("Visitation," while having the most cheesy science ever, was actually quite interesting, as was the whole time-travel arc), good character writing (the women were totally wasted first season but this got a lot better second season), good character-interaction writing -- Rush, for example, is consistently The Most Terrible At Saying Comforting Things Ever starting from the pilot and continuing through the end of SGU's run, it's hilarious -- and the actors are pretty much uniformly awesome, and WAIT WAIT HOLY HECK DID RUSH JUST ASK HIS CLASS ABOUT SHOR'S ALGORITHM?? RUSH WAS A QUANTUM INFORMATION COMPUTER SCIENTIST?? AT BERKELEY??
...Now my backstory headcanon totally has Rush having ADVENTURES at Berkeley with Scott Aaronson as a grad student and possibly psychopathic killer robots.
And then, of course, not twenty minutes later Rush is talking some sort of incredibly nonsensical "proto-encryption" gobbeldy-gook, which rather dampened my enthusiasm, but still. STILL.
(Shor's algorithm is, as they almost-correctly say in the episode "Human," an algorithm to factor a large number N that can run on a quantum computer in polynomial time (in log N). This is important because public-key cryptography schemes such as the widely-used RSA depend on the assumption that factoring large numbers is computationally infeasible (which as far as we know today is the case for classical computers; I am not entirely sure the episode understood that this is not proven. However, kudos to them for bothering to read wikipedia, though I was amused to find that they essentially plagiarized the entry, except for the part they didn't quite get).
This algorithm is important not least because it basically inaugurated the quantum information / quantum computing discipline, in that it gave a practical-ish (and, perhaps more to the point, fundable) reason for quantum computers to exist; Shor's paper is quite possibly cited in half the papers written in quantum information/computing. Also, disclaimer: I am not a computer science person.)
(HEY they just mentioned fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background radiation BE STILL MY HEART.)
...also, one ep into SG-1, I have to say, I prefer SGU (BSG-lite-with-scientists > 80's-camp) but hi MacGyver!
[ETA 7-27-12: Rereading this, it sounds way harsher on SGU than I intended. I really liked it (I would have liked it for Carlyle alone), I thought the second half of Season 2 was quite good, and by the time it ended I was really sorry to see it go; I think it could have been a really good series. And it was put together in such a way as to have about ten thousand hooks for fic, ouch!]
But occasionally, especially in Season 2 when they seem to have found their feet a little, there are some very good and creepy scenes ("Visitation," while having the most cheesy science ever, was actually quite interesting, as was the whole time-travel arc), good character writing (the women were totally wasted first season but this got a lot better second season), good character-interaction writing -- Rush, for example, is consistently The Most Terrible At Saying Comforting Things Ever starting from the pilot and continuing through the end of SGU's run, it's hilarious -- and the actors are pretty much uniformly awesome, and WAIT WAIT HOLY HECK DID RUSH JUST ASK HIS CLASS ABOUT SHOR'S ALGORITHM?? RUSH WAS A QUANTUM INFORMATION COMPUTER SCIENTIST?? AT BERKELEY??
...Now my backstory headcanon totally has Rush having ADVENTURES at Berkeley with Scott Aaronson as a grad student and possibly psychopathic killer robots.
And then, of course, not twenty minutes later Rush is talking some sort of incredibly nonsensical "proto-encryption" gobbeldy-gook, which rather dampened my enthusiasm, but still. STILL.
(Shor's algorithm is, as they almost-correctly say in the episode "Human," an algorithm to factor a large number N that can run on a quantum computer in polynomial time (in log N). This is important because public-key cryptography schemes such as the widely-used RSA depend on the assumption that factoring large numbers is computationally infeasible (which as far as we know today is the case for classical computers; I am not entirely sure the episode understood that this is not proven. However, kudos to them for bothering to read wikipedia, though I was amused to find that they essentially plagiarized the entry, except for the part they didn't quite get).
This algorithm is important not least because it basically inaugurated the quantum information / quantum computing discipline, in that it gave a practical-ish (and, perhaps more to the point, fundable) reason for quantum computers to exist; Shor's paper is quite possibly cited in half the papers written in quantum information/computing. Also, disclaimer: I am not a computer science person.)
(HEY they just mentioned fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background radiation BE STILL MY HEART.)
...also, one ep into SG-1, I have to say, I prefer SGU (BSG-lite-with-scientists > 80's-camp) but hi MacGyver!
[ETA 7-27-12: Rereading this, it sounds way harsher on SGU than I intended. I really liked it (I would have liked it for Carlyle alone), I thought the second half of Season 2 was quite good, and by the time it ended I was really sorry to see it go; I think it could have been a really good series. And it was put together in such a way as to have about ten thousand hooks for fic, ouch!]