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Tonight was the series premiere of Defying Gravity on ABC, and it shows a lot of promise. Three actors I really like were part of the crew, the spaceship and FX were excellent, and the character development compacted an amazing amount of set up and backstory into a ninety minute presentation. There were a few holes in the actual science of how objects behave in zero-G, and once in the way a highly trained astronaut would react to a specific emergency situation, but even so, the program achieved the primary goal of any movie or TV show; it made me care about the people, and invest some emotional coin in wanting to see how it all works out. I’m giving this one 4 stars out of 5; we’ll see if they can keep up the momentum, and build on it.

Discover Magazine has an excellent interview with Jaime Paglia about the inspiration for a show he produces called Eureka; much of it comes from MIT. The NY Times has a review of Sunday’s ABC SF pilot Defying Gravity that makes it sound even more interesting than I previously suspected. Also in the NY Times, GUILLERMO del TORO and CHUCK HOGAN have an Op-Ed piece on Why Vampires Never Die. Finally, io9 has collected up some of the best last lines from science fiction novels in one place for us.

Graphing real-world data in real time in a 3D virtual world… that is what Glasshouse is all about, and it is pretty amazing. It works in environments like Second Life, or as a stand-alone using the Sun Java JRE6 or JDK6. You can read a good interview and watch some video demo’s over at Maxping, and if you have Java installed try out the Applet environment. This is an excellent tool for making complex arrays of data visually comprehensible, such as genomic progressions, biochemical reactions, or N-body gravity interactions.