So I watched Terror of the Vervoids yesterday

[eve11]

A weekend at Chicago TARDIS made me want to watch more old school Who, and interestingly enough, more of the Jon Nat-Turner era. I had been making my way through Trial of a Time Lord, and so I picked it up again and plopped it in the Blu-Ray player. I'd left off with Terror of the Vervoids. It was a perfectly serviceable episode, but there wasn't very much that jumped out at me. I kind of liked Mel, but then my intro to her is the audios so I guess I'm nicer on Bonnie Langford than the usual fans. I liked Six's relationship with Mel; it seemed less adversarial than with Peri. The story was engaging enough... ha, liked the little nod to "Murder on the Orient Express", and there was the usual combination of six different story lines and weird aliens that have interesting outfits that if you cosplayed one at a con, maybe 3 people would get what you are but they would be really appreciative. And the whole "someone's messing with the matrix" side plot that is confusing. And hey, random giant evil plants! Dark episode too; I thought the people were just unconscious but the evil plants did actually kill them. And then the Doctor aged them to death! Because there was no way for them to live in peace and harmony. On a giant spaceliner. Aimed at a black hole. With a vault full of riches. And exploited aliens, an undercover scientist-or-something, a traitor, a feckless and vindictive security officer, power hungry scientists and a gym that pumps 8-bit video game music into your ears until you're ready to scream in horror. Terrifying? Well maybe not. But definitely entertaining.

In other news, I owe you all an epic Chicago TARDIS post with pictures and a day-by-day breakdown... and am secretly hoping auntiemeesh beats me to the punch because I am still tired and haven't gotten the pics off my phone yet. I know, I am lame! But in short we had a lot of fun (and even entered the Masquerade!)

I've managed to write about 200 words on the WIP-o-Doom in the past two months, so I was thinking about picking that up again. I would really like to post it officially some day. I've also been thinking that I should officially write up my "The TARDIS thinks in measure theory" thoughts, possibly with graphs and/or visual aids.

Comments

[a-phoenixdragon.livejournal.com]

I loved Six...definitely need to buckle to and watch Classic again...

*HUGS*

[ladymercury-10.livejournal.com]

We are now in the lull between the last set of midterms and Death by Final Exams, so if there is any WIP-o-Doom proofing that needs to happen, I am less busy again. Until my professors realize how close we are to finals and assign panic homework, anyway. :P

You should write up your TARDIS measure theory thoughts! That would be really cool. But I always think mixing math and Doctor Who should happen, haha.

I think they are taunting us with measure theory in analysis right now? I never took measure theory, I just had smarter friends who did and who gushed about it at me, so I don't really know. But we are doing Riemann integrals now and they keep showing us functions that take different values for rational or irrational inputs and as such are not Riemann integrable, and which look suspiciously like candidates for Lebesgue integration, if I remember all those impromptu gush-lectures correctly. :P

[eve11]

Haha, yes, those would definitely be Lebesgue-integrable! As long as the measure of the discontinuous set is 0. Oh, they are taunting you. Then again, it was kind of torturous to build integrals up piece by piece in probability class. "First we do non-negative and bounded, then unbounded, then negative... etc. it took like 2 weeks! In a grad course! It was painful.

Someone once explained the difference between Riemann and Lebesgue integration to me as the difference between counting coins one by one out of a jar to discover their worth (Riemann), and stacking them all up by their value and counting them by groups (Lebesgue) instead.

[eve11]

I have a fondness for Six. However entertaining he is to watch and listen to, he is loads more fun to write as well! :D In my head-canon, Six may be blustery and bombastic but he is also, at heart, a closet Romantic. More so than any of the other incarnations :)

[ladymercury-10.livejournal.com]

Yah, they've been things like, "the lower sum is 0 and the upper sum is 1; therefore f is not Riemann integrable." I think they will probably do this slowly and torturously, because our integration chapter is really long, and because we have a whole second semester of analysis after the break. I think we are at "non-negative and bounded" right now.

Ohh, that coins thing makes sense! The first time one of my friends tried to explain Lebesgue integrals to me I think he was rather disappointed because I didn't think they were exciting, too. I just thought the whole irrational-rational function was sort of dumb and didn't see why we wanted to integrate it in the first place, let alone make up a new integral that would work on it...adventures in having your math exposure not in a sensical order, I guess. :P

ETA: I have the dumb today, the lower sum being 0 is not the important part. Uh, I am not sure whether they are having discontinuities on sets of measure zero, there were a couple different functions. Hmm.

[thisbluespirit]

\o/ Six! I enjoy Terror of the Vervoids, too. A lot of people don't, but then we have more fun. (For some reason I have a sort of a joke about Janet the Stewardess being the real murderer, but I can't remember why.)

[eve11]

Aha well, Lebesgue integration is buried pretty far into probability; all I know is it generally lets me ignore ratios where the denominator is equal to 0. :)

[eve11]

I like how they took the time out to give Janet the Stewardess and the security guy a bit of a character scene. Though security guy came off as a bit of a jerk to Janet, after she made him coffee, if I recall.

It reminded me of Bang Bang a Boom a little bit, in the fact that Mel was leaping ahead to conclusions or deductions and the Doctor was like, "Well, let's wait and see"... until his hand got forced.

[auntiemeesh.livejournal.com]

I wanted to get a write-up/pic spam done, and I still hope to manage it at some point but this will not be a fannish week, sadly. Seven parent reports (I finished all of one last night) and an article review that I should have all done by the end of the week. If only my brain wasn't consumed with READ ALL THE FIC!!!! instead.

Speaking of fannish, I actually remember Terror of the Vervoids! I think I liked Mel in that one, bullying Six to exercise and such. He was all befuddled, like 'what the hell has happened to my life?!?'

[eve11]

Yeah, and the carrot juice! Poor Six. Eleven's "Carrots? Are you insane?" line from his first episode reminded me of that :)

I'm not in Read all the Fic mode, but kind of in, surf all the webs mode. And trying to get myself back on task for the WIP-o-Doom.

[thisbluespirit]

I'm not surprised about Bang-Bang-a-Boom, because that's partly Gareth Roberts, isn't it? And he's done Mel and Six in this style before (there was a BBC or Virgin short story, I remember that could easily have been something written by Pip and Jane!).