wee doors banging

For this UFO: Enemy Unknown fan it’s been a long wait for a sequel. Sixteen years long. So you can imagine how terribly excited I got when I read 2K Games’ announcement that they had a brand new X-COM game in production. I thought my wait was finally over, but then I read on a little. They’re making an X-COM first person shooter?!

Kick-Ass, if you’ve been living under a cinematic rock recently, is an action movie directed by Matthew Vaughan based on the graphic novel series of the same name created by Mark Millar. I’ve seen the movie and make no mistake, it boots bottom. It’s Superbad meets Batman Begins, with a generous sprinkling of Kill Bill. It’s enormously entertaining in an over the top comic book kind of way. Great performances from the young cast and old codger Nicolas Cage, perfect comic timing and a kick-ass soundtrack make it a fun way to spend two hours.

But Christopher Tookey of the Daily Mail disagrees. He thinks it’s child pornography.

Doctor Who returned to the nation’s screens recently for the fifth series of the modern (post 2005) era. A new lead actor, Matt Smith, plays the eleventh incarnation of The Doctor and the appropriately titled first episode, “Eleventh Hour”, has been well received by critics and the series’ many fans alike.

That’s all very nice, but the return of Who has left me wondering, where’s the grown up science fiction on UK television?

I like to keep abreast of new technology, and recently I came across some new research from a group of networking boffins based in Silicone Valley that outlined a relatively simple plan to enlarge the volume of data the internet can carry.

The computing pioneers of the 1940s could not have envisaged the recent surge of bandwidth heavy internet applications such as music and video streaming, online gaming, social networking and so on. The binary systems they invented, while adequate for the requirements of the past, are creaking at the seams under these modern workloads.

The new research describes a plan to break away from the outdated and limiting two-value binary principles, by adopting instead three valued trinary logic.