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  What's in a Mer?May 18, 2011 5:01 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Congrats to @elephande and a little detective work for figuring out where I got Selenis' cover name for this episode, "Mer Sidereus" (this was going on over at A*'s Twitter feed thingy, by the way!). "Sidereus" came from the name of Galileo's treatise containing his early observations of heavenly bodies through his telescope: the Sidereus Nuncius was the first scientific treatise based on telescopic observations, in fact! I think I got to it from just eh poking around through star names on Wikipedia.
 
And I got "Mer" from "mare," which is of course Latin for "sea," and the first part of the names of craters on the Moon--in keeping with Selenis' lunar name scheme. "Mer" is also the exact French word for "sea," but I don't think I noticed that until later. And if you're wondering, I think of it--in her name here in the episode, I mean--as rhyming with "her," rather than "hair," as it would be in the Latin or French; besides, that would sound exactly like the French word for "mother," which would be *totally* confusing, since that's what Selenis calls her primary computer program. Probably nobody in A*'s society speaks those languages anyway, except maybe some weird academics somewhere who might know bits. Why that might be is...something I won't tell you until later. :P
 
Anyway, "Mer" is already confusing enough, what with being one letter away from the last name of everyone's favorite paranoid Core Sys despot, Solvan Mar, who Selenis did something painful to a few episodes back. How clever is that? Only the best hack writers make that kind of name goof-up! ;) :P
 
"Sidereus" could translate to "sidereal" in English, which more or less means "starry," so I suppose her cover name could mean "Starry Sea" if you were being generous. Which would be quite the hippy (why doesn't Firefox's spell checker know that word? :P) name! But I mostly just liked the sound of it.
 
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This AP article claimed thirteen seconds of the Space Shuttle Endeavour rising above the clouds, as filmed by a woman with her cell phone on a commuter flight, "went viral"; I dunno about that, but it *is* an unusual viewing angle of a Shuttle launch (and this is the second to last one, so I guess it's good someone caught it!):
 
video on Youtube
 
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"The Game Archaeologist" and the friendly folks at Massively were kind enough to dig me up and ask me some questions about the gig I quit to do A*, namely being lead designer (by default! :D) on the now-defunct massively multiplayer game "The Matrix Online." They've put the resulting interview up on their site here.
 
 
 
 
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