melannen | Yes, mom fixed the internet! Yay!

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Yes, mom fixed the internet! Yay!

RE: the current SG-1 episode: why, by Ba'al's balls, aren't they using freaking *Morse code*?

bah bah bah.

On the other hand, m-theory is hot, even if Sam has it completely wrong. I'm sure Rodney would agree with me.

ETA: The SGA episode actually includes less logic than SG1. Bah. If he can design a virus that'll do that, he can design one that'll kill 'em outright and avoid all the sticky moral issues (since we obviously haven't got any qualms about biowarfare and genocide to worry about.)

And why, by the ring-devouring fires of Mount Doom, did they let a Wraith onto Atlantis in the first place? SGA seems to be alternating brilliant episodes with episodes that require every single person to be bloody stupid, and I no longer feel guilty about the fic I'm writing. So there.

ETA 2 ... and now I'm trying to figure out if it's reasonable that the Ancient alphabet is related to the SG Alphabet. (Answer: Heck yes. Clearly descended from the same ancestral forms.)

ETA 3: Ooooh! It's a Six/Baltar 'shipper episode! Now I wish I'd actually been paying enough attention to the show to follow the episode! Oh well. (Because all I care about in nu-BSG is Six/Baltar, and Kara when she gets to play fighter pilot.)

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Morse code: no bloody kidding!

Bah, I say! Bah!

And how exactly do you translate from ancient to english via morse code when you can't read ancient? *ponder*

You get someone to bring in a whiteboard.

On the whiteboard, you write a key, so that every Ancient letter responds to a letter or symbol in Morse code.

You then have Sam type out the message for you in about ... oh, let's be generous and give her plenty of time for looking at the key ... *five whole minutes*.

Being members of an Air Force team which frequently gets stuck in odd situations, you're probably both already fluent in Morse code *anyway* (or actually tap code (http://www.airsoftgent.be/dbase/tapcode.htm) is more likely) so it shouldn't be that hard.

How many letters are in the ancient language? And what if by chance they had new symbols? Or the stuff wasn't useful, i.e. that technical stuff that Daniel couldna really understand.

The ancient alphabet has exactly 25 letters and 10 numerals (http://hometown.aol.de/SGEureka/Ancient_Letters_and_Numbers_Comparison.jpg), due to the fact that all Ancient writing in Stargate is really just English written in the Ancient font, like the Standard Galactic Alphabet (http://www.omniglot.com/writing/sga.htm) in Commander Keen. q-:

But even if we assume that in the 'real' Stargate Universe, actual translation is involved in moving from the Latin alphabet to the Ancient, the tap code can be easily expanded for any number of letters just by changing the dimensions of the grid.

Even if Daniel didn't know tap code already, he does this stuff professionally, he should have been able to figure out a similar system, even if it's just 'one tap for the first letter in this list, two taps for the second, etc ...' - spiritualists use simple systems like that to talk to ghosts during seánces all the time.

Are you sure its only 25 characters long? It looked like more than that on the book Daniel was using (where he asked them to tell him when to stop)

Well, prop canon - that is, the letters they use in the scenery and props and effects (including, as far as I can tell, the display in the current episode) has 25 letters, 10 numbers (and the Stargate symbols, which are a syllabary, but not usually used for standard text.)

Stargate has been known to contradict prop canon before, but I think the Ancient alphabet is pretty well established after showing up consistently, in bits and pieces, for nine seasons.

But like I said, even if there's a hundred letters in the alphabet, improvised tap code would *still* have been quicker than going through it with yes/no questions!

You are forgetting various dialects of Ancients

Several Examples (http://wiki.stargate-sg1-solutions.com/index.php/Ancient_Language_and_Writings#Learning_the_Language)

The only Ancient writing we've ever seen that *wasn't* in the standard 25-letter alphabet was the device from P9X-391, and nobody ever translated that anyway.That doesn't apply in this case, because we know that the writing was standard Ancient lettering (because that's what it looked like, and because Sam wouldn't have recognized it and Daniel couldn't have translated it otherwise.)

There is absolutely no reason a simple tap code wouldn't have worked.

Re: SGA:

I had a brief moment of "Wha?" about the "science," but it kind of got drowned out by "When did my entire show become EVIL?"

. . . it was kind of fun watching Carson's SOUL BURN AWAY, though.

The moral issues in the episode didn't even hold my interest, because ... well, not so much because it was badly done, but because it was obvious that the characters *themselves* weren't interested in them. I could practically see them thinking 'I'm going to put in some lip service because I feel like I ought to be concerned about the morality of what we're doing here, but actually, *he was a Wraith*, I don't *care*. I don't even really care that I don't care.'

Which I find in-character, really, and is probably where I'd be after a year in Pegasus, too. Because, well, they're *Wraith*. It just isn't much to hang a whole episode on, at least not the way they tried to do it there.

You know, I think that's what creeped me out. If they had just picked one or the other--either you're trying to be compassionate, or you just don't care--it would have been okay.

Like when Caldwell was advocating torturing Kavanagh, he didn't pretend that it was ethically the best thing to do, he was just all, "Yup, it sucks, but we don't really have any other options."

It's the lying (okay, maybe it's less the lying than that they're so incompetent at it). And maybe if they had just said to Michael, "Yeah, we're at war, and our other option is dying horribly," I'd just be like, "Okay, we're evil now. I can work with that."

Argh.

See, I wouldn't even say 'we're at war' as evil, necessarily, because the Wraith *are* the Wraith, they're alien in a way that none of the other races (except the replicators, and note how little angst was involved in wiping *them* out) that the SGC has interacted with have been, to the extent that I'm not convinced that they *should* count as 'people.' Do we even know to what extent the average not-queen Wraith has a sense of self?

There's some really interesting issues there. It's just that SGA keeps coming close to them, and then shying away at the last minute. I wonder if it isn't that there's pressure from above to keep the show from going to the places that the writers want it to go.

The Kavanaugh situation bothered me a lot more than any of the crap they've been doing to captured Wraith since about the third episode. (Has treating human-shaped Wraith as non-people made it easier for them to classify other humans as non-people, or was it just the high-pressure situation? Good question, too bad that at this rate the show's never going to address it.)

And actually, the science didn't bother me that much, because for *any* of the 'genetics' in SGA to work, you have to assume that Wraith genetic material is different than human-standard DNA, that their genes have an innate tendency to hybridize and agressively transform, that the Wraith genes can do to an entire macro-organism what Earth viruses do to single cells, able to hijack them and alter them for its own purposes.

Which, given what we know of the origin of the Wraith and the Iratus bug, is actually reasonably consistent. It's wacky, yes, but they did evolve in a whole different galaxy and have magic soul-sucking powers, so it doesn't ping my 'bad science' radar so much as my 'hmm, interesting' radar.

tonight's BSG just broke my brain. Apparently the Six that has the memories of the one who was with Baltar when the bombs started falling on Caprica...

...is hallucinating a Baltar.

I know! Aren't they sweet together? They're *adorable*.

Also, bonus: Xena Warrior Princess is a Cylon. And the tedious pregnancy storyline finally ends!

Oh dear, I can see a ficlet coming on (I skipped SGA because the premise looked ludicrous):

Sharon wakes up. "Where am I?"
Dr. McKay: "You're onboard Atlantis. You were a Cylon in another universe, but we gave you a drug that stops that."
Sharon: "You gave me a drug from another universe?"
Dr. McKay: "We have sufficiently dense technobabble to allow us to do that."
Sharon: "What's technobabble?"

Is this the same story where Dr. McKay starts hallucinating Sam coming on to him again? Only he eventually realizes that he's actually hallucinating Replicator!Sam?

Because I would be all *about* that.

McKay: "So I'm hallucinating you because in another universe I'm an evil traitor and you're a robot somehow lodged in my consciousness."
RepSamHal: "That, or somehow you got your mind scrambled while playing nethack and have taken a potion of hallucination."
McKay: "And how am I supposed to tell the difference?"
RepSamHal: "Does it matter"
At this point a man with an H on his forehead walks into view.
Rimmer: "What in the name of bloody smeg is going on here?"
McKay: "Oh great, another hallucination"
Rimmer: "Who said that?"
RepSamHal: "he did"
Rimmer: "you're not making any smegging sense"
RepSamHal: "He's hallucinating me for reasons that are best left up to the imagination of the reader."
Rimmer: "And I suppose that I'm hallucinating you too?"
RepSamHal: "No, as a matter of fact, for even more reasons that are best left up to the imagination of the reader, I happen to not be a hallucination to you"
Rimmer: "What the hell does that mean?"
RepSamHal: "That I can do this"
metal thing extends from RepSamHal and pins Rimmer against the wall
McKay: "What the hell are you doing?"
RepSamHal: "restraining a gimboid"
McKay: "Great, now my hallucinations are hallucinating"
RepSamHal: "call out to John."
McKay, not being able to cope, loses consciousness, and with that, RepSamHal
vanishes
Rimmer messages Starbug: "get me out of here now, I think I took some holographic hallucinogens!"

... see, and to think I could have lived my whole life without visualizing Rimmer as Lister's version of Six.

Ow. That hurt.

Go read the Blackadderlon (http://morpho.dar.net/~northrup/scripts/ba/) scripts.

Oh no. What if House started hallucinating Black Adder?

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