How far, Doctor? Back, back to your beginning...

Back in October, a friend asked my opinion on the best place for someone who hadn't watched Doctor Who before to start. I answered "Rose," the first episode of the 2005 revival of the series. Googling "where to start" and "Doctor Who" suggests that I'm hardly alone in making that recommendation. I'm not sure I'm pleased with the prevalence of potshots taken at the perceived quality of the older seasons of Who, though.

While the vast majority of Doctor Who stories can be enjoyed (or, at least, understood) without any previous exposure to the series—thus, cherry-picking a few of the best episodes is the most obvious way to generate an interest to see more in the uninitiated—the level of connection that a Doctor Who fan achieves with the series can only occur when there is some appreciation of the show's continuity. Watching episodes in order is important, but there are some very good reasons not to start at the very beginning. I've identified seven particularly good possible starting points below and made a few notes that might help the new to Who work out how far back they'd like to go. Obviously, the further back one goes, the more primitive the production methods utilized become. Apart from that, here are some of the other points to consider.

• The Eleventh Hour - Series Five (2010)
  • The place to start if your goal is to get up to speed as quickly as possible.
  • You must go back at least this far. It's only 28 episodes.
• Rose - Series One (2005)
  • The best place for the new to Who to start.
  • Doctor Who's last regular season had aired sixteen years earlier. It was assumed most viewers would be unfamiliar with the show.
  • There are five episodes between Series Four and Series Five, collected on The Specials box set.
  • There are two spin-offs, Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures, to keep track of (or ignore) as well:
    • Torchwood Series One slots in after Doctor Who Series Two.
    • Sarah Jane Series One comes after Who Series Three.
    • Torchwood Series Two is between Sarah Jane Series One and Who Series Four.
    • Sarah Jane Series Two aired between Who Series Four and "The Next Doctor."
    • Torchwood Series Three aired between "Planet of the Dead" and "The Waters of Mars."
    • Sarah Jane Series Three began after Torchwood Series Three and finished shortly after "Waters of Mars."
    • Sarah Jane Series Four aired after Who Series Five
    • Torchwood Series Four aired concurrently with Who Series Six.
    • Sarah Jane Series Five aired after Who Series Six.
  • Actually, there's a third spin-off: K-9, but its relationship with its parent program is not as tight.
• The Leisure Hive - Season Eighteen (1980 - 1981)
  • Classic series episodes are not released as season box sets, making it more difficult to obtain stories in order.
  • Some episodes have yet to be released to DVD at all!
  • The spin-off K-9 and Company aired between Seasons Eighteen and Nineteen.
• The Time Warrior - Season Eleven (1973 - 1974)
  • The first season to feature Elisabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane Smith.
• Spearhead from Space - Season Seven (1970)
  • Though originally shot in color, a number of episodes now exist only in black and white.
• The Dominators - Season Six (1968 - 1969)
  • The first six seasons of Doctor Who were shot in black & white.
  • Seven episodes are missing from Season Six (out of forty-four).
    • The BBC destroyed the master tapes of many programs they thought were no longer of interest in the 1970s.
    • The audio of the missing episodes was preserved in recordings made by fans.
    • Animated versions of two of the missing episodes are available (completing the serial "The Invasion").
    • The other five missing episodes are all from "The Space Pirates." Just skip it, or get the audio or a reconstruction.
    • This is the earliest place you can start without being seriously inconvenienced by missing episodes.
• An Unearthly Child - Season One (1963 - 1964)
  • 106 total episodes are missing from Who's first six seasons (out of 253).
    • Audio versions are available, as well as fan-produced reconstructions.
    • While seasons one and two are relatively intact, seasons three through five barely exist in their original form.

From Wikipedia (you'll want to keep this handy): the List of Doctor Who serials.

This is a Fake—in Felt-tip

I posted a review of Stephen Fry's The Liar on Goodreads. It's a pretty common thing to see Goodreads users complaining about the inability to give half stars when assigning ratings and I'm often torn between giving a book three or four stars; The Liar, however, represents the first time I found it difficult to decide whether to give the book two, three, or four stars—all I felt sure of was that it didn't deserve either one star or five. I had enjoyed reading The Liar quite a bit, but, nonetheless, judged it to be a pretty poor novel.

To my mind, one of the most important qualities necessary to a good novel is truth. Many would hold that fiction, by definition, is composed of untruths—lies, even—but I beg to differ. As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, "Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures." A novel gives us a God's-eye view of an entire universe. We will never, no matter how far our science advances, be able see the whole of our own reality from outside of reality. No mere chronicler of fact will ever have the ability to compose a complete record of any occurrence within our reality. The novelist, however, can show us how things fit together in the world of the novel and this can give us some idea of how things might fit together in our own. In order to do this, it is necessary that the pieces of the novel actually do fit together—the world of the novel must be consistent. The Liar is not consistent; it really is composed of untruths and lies are lies whether they're lies about our reality or an imaginary one.

Some interesting Liar related links:

• Secrets of Cambridge "porn" library revealed
• Splendide Mendax: Fakes and Fakers in the Age of Johnson

I Hated This Book—Please Buy It!

I use the social book recommendation site Goodreads to track what I'm reading. Yesterday, I started a book and added it to the list of books I am "currently reading"; a few minutes later, I deleted it. The reason: the book is one that I am reading for the purpose of producing a professional audiobook. When it's released, the audiobook edition will show up on my Goodreads profile; it is, therefore, redundant to have it listed among the books I've read. Also, it seems odd to rate a book that I have a financial stake in. I'm unlikely to be narrating only five-star masterpieces of literature—indeed, my goal is more along the lines of maintaining a steady work flow—but publicly rating books I'm trying to sell as less than five out of five may not be in my own best interest. Is the best thing just to keep my opinion on the works I'm narrating to myself?

None of this should be taken as suggesting that the book I'm currently narrating is lousy. So far it's pretty good. But if it takes a sudden turn towards crap, I may neglect to mention it.

See also: Goodreads: Authors Self Rating @ Persnickety Snark.

Transcendence

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.

There is another which states that this has already happened.

—Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

It may not even be necessary for anyone to figure the old one out; complexity, it seems, tends to aggregate until sufficient energy is applied to break it down. Thus, a state of nothingness requires enormous (perhaps infinite?) energy to maintain, with the universe undergoing "spontaneous phase transitions to more complex structures of lower energy" as it cools over time. It seems to be part of the natural order of things for something to spontaneously pop into being out of nothing. There is something, rather than nothing, because nothing is inherently unstable, it's ultimate simplicity inevitably becoming cluttered with possibilities.

The universe could not fail to exist if it tried, as, if it were able for a moment to succeed, there would be nothing, and nothing, by definition, would no longer contain anything that could continue striving not to be (or any of the energy that would have been necessary to simplify the structure of everything to the point that there wasn't anything including energy). Except that in no time at all, it continues, or begins again, or begins for the first time (the only time and every time). And when the aggregation of complexity achieves some form of sentience it wonders, "What's it all about? Why am I here? Why is there something rather than nothing?" Accepting that the laws of the universe dictate that simple systems will stabilize as more complex ones doesn't mean that we can't still wonder why there are any laws of the universe dictating anything of any kind.

There is an expectation—possibly one founded on false assumptions, but it doesn't seem particularly unreasonable to expect causality to be maintained—that there must be some sort of first cause, something that acted in some manner to bring the entire system of being into being. Something that dictates the form of the universal laws which cause nothingness to decay into structure. Whatever that first cause is, it would have to be able to transcend the laws of nature: it would have to exist independently of everything and continue to be when there was nothing. That there must be some sort of being outside of being has, historically, been put forward as an argument for the existence of God. It certainly doesn't, however, provide evidence for the existence of the sort of God that any of the world's various religions might expect; it simply states that whatever the first, sustaining cause of creation turns out to be, the word for that cause is God.

In that case, all one has to do to find God is to work out what exists when nothing exists. The transcendently simply answer is that mathematics exist independently of any physical forms and that it is possible to model any state of being mathematically. One nothing plus one nothing equals two nothings? Utter drivel, obviously, but the point is that you don't actually need concrete objects—the traditions of mathematical education would dictate apples—to add; numbers don't feel any particular drive to be attached to objects, people just find it easier to think about them after they have been. The tendency is to think of apples as being real while numbers are intangible and abstract, but if you made a complete and accurate mathematical model of an apple—which in order to be really complete would have to include the tree the apple grew in, the orchard containing the tree, the man who picked and ate the apple, and everything else connected in any way to the apple's existence or the existence of anything else in the model (i.e. the entire universe, all of space and time)—the man in the model would enjoy his apple as much as you enjoy yours.

While the laws of physics describe the way our universe has been observed to behave, and could not necessarily be expected to describe the behavior of any other universe, the laws of mathematics could be applied to model any possible universe. If we assume that an intelligence is necessary to form the equations which generate mathematical models of realities then we aren't really any closer to a first cause; however, the laws of mathematics continue to be true even in the absence of anyone who understands them. It is not really possible to create a mathematical equation, as that would imply that the two sides of the equation had not been equal until the mathematician defined them to be so. We can only discover equations. Whether or not anyone is aware of it, there is an equation or set of equations that accurately models the whole of our universe. Those equations would be true—and, thus, could be said to be, to exist—in the absence of any concrete reality. As part of the system described by the equations, we would never be able to perceive anything outside of the equations. Since we exist inside the equations and the equations must exist because they are mathematically true, we exist because we logically must and God is ultimate truth, the essence of pure mathematics.

Mountain Mellow Massacre

I saw this in a soda machine at the grocery store the other day. I decided just to stick with a cream soda.

Dinosaurian Formality

At the last meeting of my book club, this question was posed: why does Tyrannosaurus Rex have two names when other dinosaurs get only one? (No, our book had not been about dinosaurs; we read The Tiger's Wife). Turns out the other dinosaurs have two names too, but T.'s Rex is the only one we know about due to a scattershot education overseen by the popular media.

Tyrannosaurus Rex is a binomial name. All species known to science are known by their own binomial name; if you're reading this blog you are most likely a member of the species Homo sapiens. Note that sapiens is not capitalized; neither should rex be, so I'll do my best to present it correctly from here on. The genus Homo also includes several other species, including erectus and neanderthalensis. If one imagines an individual to represent a species, that individual's family would be its genus. So rex is the only dinosaur—correct capitalization does nothing for this analogy—with whom we are on first name terms. The ever popular king of dinosaurs is as familiar as Elvis. It's dinosaurian subjects, on the other hand, are known only by their family names: a Mrs. Triceratops here, a Mr. Iguanodon there, et cetera. Armatus, stenops, and longispinus are all seen by the wider world as three matching stegosaurians.

Fame of the magnitude of rex's can distance a lizard from his roots. At one time, Aublysodon laid claim to him, and other genera have and will likely in future challenge his position in the dinosaurian hierarchy. Rex's stature is such, however, that his is a nomen conservandum; if the Aublysodon story had held up, they would have won the right to be known as Tyrannosaurus, rather than forcing rex to reveal himself as rex Dwight.

See also: some posts on the Straight Dope message board.

In Search of Lost Tim

Last night, while working myself up to the point at which I could begin banging something out for this blog, I tried to locate all the entries I wiped from its original version when I decided rolling around in the muck wasn't making me feel any cleaner. I was sure that I had kept copies of everything, but I can't find any of it. Actually, it's possible I found all of it, but I can't tell what may be missing because it's all such a mess. I'm definitely missing some comments. As one might expect, I found the bits that most prompted me to start again by searching around online.

About a year after I wiped everything, I decided I ought to start putting stuff back. Not just stuff that had originally been here, either, but stuff from the various blogs I had maintained around the internet pre-Blogger. There's a school of thought that holds it best to maintain multiple separate blogs with strong themes linking all the content so that readers know what to expect and can begin to find your blog valuable. I tend to think there's something to this, but the theme around here has always been me and whatever may be on my mind at the time.

I found a song last night called "Why Were You Wearing the Moon?" by the group Family Fodder. Have a listen:

Why were you wearing the moon? by The state51 Conspiracy