My other ship's a Thargoid

Happy Birthday Elite. 25 years old, and still arguably one of the best games I ever played. 22k of immersive space-based roleplay. I used to love puttering about on the "Leesti-Diso" run until I'd saved up enough credits for the military lasers, and then go off looking for a Fer-De-Lance to waste, hoping I'd pick up a few extra credits here, or some illicit cargo there. Happy days.

OK so the sound and graphics have got better since then, and the rise of MMORPGs has changed the scene somewhat, but it is still true that games that allow this much free rein, where your success is defined by what you want it to be, where your "character"'s story is created by your actions, rather than the developer's idea for a plot, are few and far between. In fact the modern MMORPG, with its free-form personal storytelling ideas would be nothing without Braben and Bell's little wire frame models.

So I shall raise a toast to the two of them, and hope that Braben gets Elite 4 out in time for the 50th anniversary. See you in Witchspace.

A rose by any other name would be synonomized.

From XKCD- Break-ups are better with junior synonyms.



Brontosaurus excelsus was named in 1879, two years after Apatosaurus ajax. in 1903 Elmer Riggs decided that the two species were close enough to belong to the same genus, and by the laws governing zoological nomenclature Brontosaurus had to be sunk. The "mistaken combination" comes not from work done re-evaluating bones mistakenly assigned to A. excelsus, but the mount at the Peabody Museum that used skull material from the more distantly related Camarasaurus to restore the missing pieces. Later it was realised that Apatosaurus would have had a lower, more delicate skull, similar to that of its relative Diplodocus. But even then the name carried on, although given textbooks (especially children's textbooks) habit of copying from one another, they were still copying Knight's restorations, long after they should have known better.

By this time everyone not involved in actual science was using the name "Brontosaurus". Wikipedia blames the Peabody mount, I can see why, even now it still takes a while to update labels to reflect changes in taxonomy to pick a recent example close to home, Bob Bakker named the plesiosaur genus Attenborosaurus in 1993, but it took several years for the display at the NHM to be updated. I can see the same thing happenning at Yale, and by the time they did change the name on the label, everyone who people listen to (so not the scientists) is calling it "Brontosaurus".