Race/sex: Human female, African American/Brazilian

Rank: Ensign

Physical attributes:
- 5’3, slim figure
- Tanned skin
- Long, bundled brown hair

Age: 21

Languages: English, Portuguese (native)

Handedness: Left-handed

Place of Birth: New Orleans, Louisiana, Earth

Bio: Ensign Ester is a very young ensign, fresh out of the Academy at the age of twenty-one. The ensign works the newly designed navigational controls at the helm of the Dragonfly. She is highly skilled, intelligent, emotional, and eager, but she is still very much learning on the job. Sometimes, she appears clumsy and makes mistakes, and tests Captain Seth’s patience at times.

Author’s notes: Developing a young character on a Starfleet crew is always tricky. We can see that there was some struggle when it came to Ensign Crusher and Jake Sisko, both of who seemed to develop awkwardly through the shows. Other youngsters like Ensigns Kim and Mayweather didn’t seem to develop much beyond their intended roles. Believe it or not, I felt the most convincing character we saw grow from child to adult was Ensign Nog (DS9), who had a real and compelling reason to be there: he didn’t want to be like his dad.

Ensign Ester is not so complex (yet!), and when I was writing the story I felt it important to keep her a child. She’s in the midst of figuring things out; all she knows is that she wants to be in Starfleet and that she wants to impress her captain. Aren’t we all like this at this age?

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Illustration by: Anthony Pugh
Coloring by: Adam Pedrone

Notes on Illustration: Anthony got this one on the first try. You might notice on his website that many of his characters have those “bee-stung” lips, and might be a little exaggerated but I think work well here. I really like Ester’s look of youthful determination, which was exactly what I was looking for in the young ensign. The coloring was done by Adam Pedrone, who I think did a good job enhancing her look. The “frosted-blue” color for her lips was really a last minute decision on my part. I wanted a quasi-futuristic look for her, and who is to say that blue lips aren’t fashionable in the 25th century? If there is one thing we are worse at than predicting future tech, it’s predicting future fashion-sense. Speaking of which, you get a glimpse here of how I designed the new uniforms. You’ll get a more complete view when some of the other characters come out. So stay tuned!

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Race/sex: Android male

Rank: None

Physical attributes:
– 6’1, athletic build
– Composed of artificial bone, muscle, and tissue (not complete)

Age: 0

Place of Birth: U.S.S. Dragonfly

Bio: BX-12 is a collaborative project between Lieutenant Commander LeCroy and Dr. Min. But rather than using clunky mechanical parts of current design, nearly all aspects of human physiology are mimicked. BX-12 is therefore is made up of an entirely synthetic musculoskeletal system, composed of complex polymers that can respond to neuroelectrical stimuli. His muscles are arranged in a manner that is nearly identical to that of a human. His ‘brain’ is a collective mass of a hundred billion synthetic neurons, arranged in a way to mimic a real human brain. Abilities are “transcribed” using a real human as a template, and mimicking the neural patterns for that ability.

BX-12 was originally started as an ambitious new research initiative at the Daystrom Institute in an attempt to continue the work of Dr. Noonian Soong. BX-12 is the twelfth effort under this design. At the moment, BX-12 is not yet complete: his musculoskeletal system has not fully been installed, and not all of his organs and tissues have been put in place. As LeCroy puts it, BX-12 is not just some academic exercise; his muscles are nearly three times as strong as a normal human, and his bones are much harder. LeCroy has also bestowed him exceptional mathematical abilities.

Author’s notes: I think Star Trek needs another android, but not one exactly like Data. Since ‘android’ implies a mechanical device that resembles a human, I explored that in the most literal way. But it is true that scientists and engineers today are exploring the idea of ‘artificial muscles,’ and we are already seeing some very real and bizarre applications.

I took it a step further by having BX-12’s brain mimic that of a human’s as well. I find it extremely interesting that even in regards to artificial intelligence, scientists are looking to biology for inspiration (I’ll save for another post), and I think as we move toward the future, the lines that separate the two will blur. So again, I explored the idea literally by making the android’s brain essentially a human’s, made entirely of synthetic neurons.

I really disliked the idea of B4 in Nemesis, because it was essentially a cheap story device to try and bring Data back ‘just in case we want to.’ This was extremely obvious (Dear writers: don’t think we forgot about Star Trek II) and I think really took away from Data’s emotional death scene. So I said screw it, in my universe, I said that B4 never took off the ground. Maybe I’m alone on this, but I prefer it that way.

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Illustration and Coloring By: Anthony Pugh

Notes on illustration: This character was difficult; not just for Anthony to draw, but for me to describe to him. We went through several iterations of the android before getting it right. BX-12 is an artificial ‘machine,’ and yet it mimics human beings in almost every literal way – that was very difficult to convey to Anthony. So one iteration looked like something from The Terminator, and the next like a flesh-eating zombie, and then back again (I will release earlier iterations once all of the characters are out). Finally, no thanks to me, Anthony got it just right. Maybe a little more sinister than I originally intended (and he’s missing his eyes), but I love it.

Character Bio and commentary coming Thursday, Oct. 6!

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I realize that I’ve once again been very quiet, but I’m happy to announce that I’ll be releasing the drawings and character bios of 2 characters starting Mon. Oct. 3! The 2 characters will be released one week apart, starting with the drawing, then the bio, and then my commentary on the character. I apologize for the extremely long delay, but Anthony Pugh has been very busy. He has done an amazing job though, and I’m excited to post them up on this blog. I hope to get 2 more characters released in early December.

In related news, Anthony and I have decided to part ways. Anthony’s schedule is incredibly packed for the fall and will unfortunately not be able to complete all of the characters. Not to worry, I have hired another talented artist to do the rest. In fact, I’m excited to have slightly different flavors for each of the characters. On that note, I wish Anthony Pugh the best in his career efforts as a comic book artist.

More news to come, but check back on Monday Oct. 3!

Sincerely,
Hugo Calvin

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Nassim Taleb was a Wallstreet option trader at one time (known as a ‘quant’), who was able to design a successful investment strategy based on his philosophies. He popularized the idea of a ‘black swan,’ a rare, but highly consequential event that is generally unpredictable before the event but becomes entirely plausible afterwards. For example, if someone said to you on September 10, 2001, that radical extremists were going to hijack our airplanes and blow up our buildings, you would have said that person was completely ridiculous, even insane. However, if that same person were to say that to you now, then it no longer seems silly. Such an event becomes plausible after the fact.

Similarly, there is no way to predict ahead of time many of the life-changing events that happen to us. This becomes particularly true as our societies become more interdependent, which at the same time, makes us more vulnerable to particular events (see my Math vs. HIV post). Taleb argues that the probabilities of these rare events (‘tail events’) are not computable. With respect to 9/11, unless you were working for the government and part of the Middle East relations, then there was no way for you or anyone to predict ahead of time the tragic event of that day. This is why Taleb gets extremely annoyed when people ask him what the next ‘black swan’ will be. The point is not to predict black swans; the point is to be robust to them.

This is where Taleb looks to nature as a model. He uses the example of shooting the largest animal or mammal in the world, and while it would be bad, how it would not at all affect the survival of the species or life in general. I would take it one step further. When the asteroid hit the Earth 65 million years ago, it was not the biggest and strongest of the species, i.e. the dinosaurs, that survived. It was the small mammals that later allowed us to inherit the Earth. Robustness to black swans does not mean being the biggest or the strongest; it means being small and adaptable. This is why Taleb is so vehemently against companies that are ‘too big to fail’ and get large bailouts when things go bad. Nature does not do bailouts.

As it applies to our economy, applying Taleb’s philosophies requires a fundamental shift in the way we structure our society. I believe that there is a human psychological reason why we allow few, but very large and very vulnerable companies to exist (under the guise of ‘optimization’ and ‘efficiency’ to use business jargon). Taleb argues that we need to go the opposite way: we need to build redundancies as a way to deal with the unexpected.

Overall, I thought The Black Swan was very enlightening. Will we change? I seriously doubt it. We can’t even get ourselves to make simple changes (I always joke that if we can’t even get ourselves to switch to the metric system, then there is no hope for us to make any substantial changes whatsoever). Only a massive crisis will force us to make that change. That arguably should have been the 2008 crisis, but instead our government did its best to smooth out the problem by going deeper into debt. Now it’s 2011, three years later, and here we are: debt crisis.

To see a lecture by Nassim Taleb and Daniel Kahneman on the recent financial crisis, which draws on studies of human psychology, click here.

Update 9.18.11: Taleb made a really interesting point about the recent earthquake in Japan. In 2003, the Japanese Nuclear Commission had the following goal: ”The mean value of acute fatality risk by radiation exposure resultant from an accident of a nuclear installation to individuals of the public, who live in the vicinity of the site boundary of the nuclear installation, should not exceed the probability of about 1×10^6 per year (that is, at least 1 per million years).” It took only 8 years for ‘their one in a million-year accident’ to occur.

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Oddly, HF is classified as a weak acid, but that’s only by definition in that it doesn’t ionize as readily in water compared to other acids (that is, dissociate into H+ and F- ions), like its more familiar cousin, hydrochloric acid (HCl). But the fact that it doesn’t ionize readily just makes it easier to absorb through the skin, where it can cause extreme tissue damage by reacting with Ca2+ ions to form insoluble calcium fluoride. Just think of insoluble precipitates forming underneath your skin. I’ll spare you some nasty photos of HF burns (of course, if you’re brave enough you can find a few in the New England Journal of Medicine), needless to say, don’t go near it!

If you want to see a neat video of hydrofluoric acid eating through glass, click here.

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I don’t presume to know anything about random matrix theory, and the fact that this region of the genome is highly conserved has actually been known for some time, but it is useful to see the target validated by other branches of science. The HIV capsid protein is capable of self-assembling to form a hexamer (requiring six units); each end of the hexamer is capable of assembling with other hexamers. Even though the individual interaction is very weak, the fact that the proteins can all “interlock” allows them to form a beautiful “honeycomb-like” network that keeps all of the virus parts together. All of this comes from many copies of a single protein.

This strategy allows HIV to minimize the size of its genome so that it can create the bare amount of components to survive. But the same strategy that allows the virus to create this network also has a vulnerability – a drug that is able to disrupt the interactions between the proteins can completely prevent the network from forming. Studies show that an HIV that is denied the ability to properly form the network from single point mutations has greatly reduced infectivity. This is the benefit and downfall of cooperativity: you can build seemingly impossible “superstructures” from relatively simple components, but if something were to happen to the interaction between the components, you’re in trouble.

The new advance in the fight against HIV has a special place in my heart because I proposed this as a target for my independent research proposal during my graduate training. It is a way to corner the virus: if it tries to mutate, it can’t form the network; if it doesn’t, it is vulnerable to the drug or vaccine. I suspect that the road remains long and difficult for scientists; it is not an easy protein surface to recognize, and, as one of my professors on my advisory committee criticized, once the network is formed it may be “locked” in place, making the binding site difficult to access. Thus, this strategy may require attacking the target early in the HIV formation process.

To see a visual representation of the hexamer network, visit the WSJ article. It can be found here.

The PNAS article can be found here.

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Well, it’s finally here: an official App from CBS Interactive that turns your iPad into a PADD! I downloaded mine earlier today. It doesn’t actually do anything, but it is very fun to navigate around hearing the little bleeps and the computer voice we’ve all grown to love. And there is a strange satisfaction out of seeing the PADD come to life in a device that was originally inspired by the PADD in the first place. In terms of content, it’s basically a Star Trek encyclopedia (as if anyone downloading the App didn’t know all of this in the first place). Still, it’s worth living out the boyhood fantasy. The App costs $4.99. Check it out!

Photo belongs to Paramount Pictures/CBS Interactive

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I realize I’ve been very quiet over the past few months. I’ve been diligently working on my next project, but it has been a slow process. I hesitate to say too much about it until it’s completed; all I can really say is that it will be a project that stands on its own (away from Star Trek), will deal with some aspect of biotechnology gone awry, and will take place in the future a little closer to today than the 25th century. I’m going to put up a few more posts in July on various topics, but after that I will probably go into another “quiet period” until some more of my projects are completed. We are still targeting to roll out the character bios for Reemergence with full illustrations in mid-September.

In the absence of any Star Trek series on the air (or any other good science-fiction for that matter), I’ve become deeply engrossed in Breaking Bad, a science-drama on AMC about a chemistry teacher who turns to making drugs to make ends meet after he discovers that he has cancer. It’s very dark (a warning to any younger followers), but overall it’s truly an amazing drama series – once I started on the first season, I couldn’t stop watching. The first three seasons are available on DVD and BlueRay. If nothing more, if you watch the second season, it’s a chance to see John de Lancie! (if you don’t know who that is, you don’t belong on this website).

Anyway, the season premiere of the fourth season begins July 17th on AMC at 10pm ET. You can see the trailer here.

Happy July 4th!

Hugo Calvin

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