Geeks are, on the whole, stimulated by novelty, and prone to obsessive behaviour. Anime is very different from the animation most of us grew up with, and comes associated with a culture many people associate with cool technology and cute asian girls*. As such, it could have been designed to plug straight into the brains of a lot of geeks. Once there, the obsessive centre of the brain takes over, and appreciation of this motherlode of novelty becomes an important part of one's self image, especially if one is consciously or unconsciously trying to fit into geek culture.
-aiabx
*the asian women I know are seriously creeped out by this aspect of geekdom.
Well, as I recall, there were giant robots in Laputa; the broken one in the castle dungeon, the gardener, and the hundreds waiting to be turned loose to destroy! But I know what you mean...they weren't battlesuits piloted by people with spiky hair.
I'm going to sail against the trend here and pick Spirited Away as my favourite. I find it charming, delightful, fantastic in the proper sense of the word, and beautifully made. Miyazaki clearly knows children well. The kids in Totoro, Kiki and Spirited Away are painfully real. In some ways it's a pity that SA became so popular. Now it gets sneered at by people who need to prove themselves by liking cooler things than the masses. (Not a troll... not liking SA doesn't mean you're a sneerer, but we all know they're out there).
Grave of the Fireflies is too painful for parents to watch. I couldn't get through it. Well made, though. And I have a warm spot for Akira, the film that (along with Road Warrior) inspired me to buy my first motorcycle.
-aiabx
btw, I like your ad hominem attack... astronomers being L. Ron Hubbard fans with no chance of breeding who need you to give us a dose of reality... hee hee. You're so funny.
-aiabx
If you sincerely believe that nobody cares about the discovery of new planets using new technology, then I apologize for calling you a troll. But speaking on behalf of myself and other amateur astronomers/nerds, we do care. Furthermore, if you believe that your so-called "practical astronomy" would have been possible without centuries of pure science done without any hope of practical benefits, then you have a very poor understanding of the way science works. Neither Tycho nor Kepler could ever have prevented a collision with a comet, but their data and calculations made a practical benefit possible 400 years later.
-aiabx
*sigh*. I don't know which astronomy joke fills me with more loathing... the telescope/penis size joke, or the "I can see the rings around Uranus" one.
-aiabx
I care. I want to understand more about the universe. I believe that by understanding the universe better, I can understand my world and myself better. And that doesn't depend on whether I can make money by mining an asteroid. And this is, in my mind, one of the steps that science takes to understand the universe. The idea that we shouldn't do research now because we can do better research in twenty years is a travesty of the scientific method. We do what we can now, because we want to know, and that is how we get to the moon. I know I've been trolled, but it's something I wanted to say.
-aiabx
Jay McNeil discovered McNeil's Nebula http://skyandtelescope.com/news/article_1179_1.asp with a 3-inch refractor. Granted, he had a CCD attached, but it's more evidence that size matters less than the technology using it.
-aiabx
There was, IIRC, a Nike ad at a previous Olympic Games stating something along the lines of "You didn't win the silver...you lost the gold". That's the kind of mean-spirited bad sportsmanship that's ruining the games. The events I enjoy watching the most are the ones where the competitors shake hands and smile after the event. That's when I feel that there is some purpose to the games after all.
-aiabx
I really can't believe even SCO would be stupid enough to astroturf here. More likely, it will be on some business related websites like Forbes or fastcompany, where there are rich but technologically unaware people to be fooled.
-aiabx
We want more women in IT because there are potential brains there that are going to waste. We aren't getting these brains in our business because women are being discouraged from pursuing IT careers. Those jobs that could be filled by brilliant women are being filled by mediocre men, because we can't find anyone better to hire. Result? More bugs, crappier code, lost productivity, unhappier customers. Now do you understand? We need to tap that gold mine of undiscovered geniuses.
And it doesn't matter if the cavemen are right and women aren't as smart at computers and just want to find husbands*. If 1 in 100 men make great programmers, and 1 in 1000 women make great programmers, we would still be cutting our own throats by discouraging them - we still need more brilliant programmers than we have.
Now why does this cause a stink? Did you notice the implied mention of replacing mediocre males with brilliant females? Do you think anyone here is feeling, oh, I don't know, threatened?
-aiabx
*Raw, steaming bullshit, by the way. Both of my daughters can hack with the best of them.
The Hubble was deliberately kept far from the ISS so that the view would not be affected by gasses from the various rockets flying around, leaking window seals, loose nuts and bolts, and all the other crap that can be found around a space station.
-aiabx
Left and Right in the political sense come from the post-revolutionary French National Assembly, where the conservatives sat on the right of the speaker while the radicals sat on the left.
Hey look! A mention of the French on Slashdot without any peurile French-bashing!
-aiabx
Well of course we don't know. But like the drunk searching for his keys under the streetlight, we search the radio bands because we can. It's a reasonable guess that a technologically advanced civilization will use some kind of electromagnetic wave for communication, given that they travel at the speed of light, and because radio is relatively easy to use and detect, it makes a not-bad starting place for the search. So it is a gamble, but it isn't purely random.
-aiabx
This is probably an appropriate place to note that the moon is not absolutely tidally locked as well. Shifts in the earth's centre of gravity due to the ocean tides lead to a slight wobbling known as libration. Mostly libration goes east and west, but there's also a north-south component which will help expose the polar regions.
-aiabx who has been clouded in for 2 weeks now
Thank you. That is extremely cool, and makes up for all the moon-hoax crap I've been wading through. It's fascinating to compare reality to the dramatised versions of the space race I've been glued to on TV all week.
-aiabx
"So why aren't they in the Apollo pictures? Pretend for a moment you are an astronaut on the surface of the Moon. You want to take a picture of your fellow space traveler. The Sun is low off the horizon, since all the lunar landings were done at local morning. How do you set your camera? The lunar landscape is brightly lit by the Sun, of course, and your friend is wearing a white spacesuit also brilliantly lit by the Sun. To take a picture of a bright object with a bright background, you need to set the exposure time to be fast, and close down the aperture setting too; that's like the pupil in your eye constricting to let less light in when you walk outside on a sunny day.
So the picture you take is set for bright objects. Stars are faint objects! In the fast exposure, they simply do not have time to register on the film. It has nothing to do with the sky being black or the lack of air, it's just a matter of exposure time. If you were to go outside here on Earth on the darkest night imaginable and take a picture with the exact same camera settings the astronauts used, you won't see any stars! "
A common misconception. In fact, it will be 2 weeks before they flag needs to be lowered. If you take a look at the moon, you will notice that it goes dark on the side facing us every month.
-aiabx
Maybe that's what we would call 2007, after the 22nd century calendar reform. Or maybe (and this is a really frightening prospect) Spock was wrong. I never saw the episode where he won Space Jeopardy 26 nights in a row, so maybe his knowledge of history is imperfect. Or maybe B & B will put even less thought into the matter than I did.
-aiabx
Does the Disney version have an English language soundtrack? I watched Totoro the way it was meant to be watched - with my child - when she was too young to be able to read subtitles quickly enough and not dorky enough to have to pretend to be an anime purist.
-aiabx
Slashdot Mirror
Geeks are, on the whole, stimulated by novelty, and prone to obsessive behaviour. Anime is very different from the animation most of us grew up with, and comes associated with a culture many people associate with cool technology and cute asian girls*. As such, it could have been designed to plug straight into the brains of a lot of geeks. Once there, the obsessive centre of the brain takes over, and appreciation of this motherlode of novelty becomes an important part of one's self image, especially if one is consciously or unconsciously trying to fit into geek culture.
-aiabx
*the asian women I know are seriously creeped out by this aspect of geekdom.
Well, as I recall, there were giant robots in Laputa; the broken one in the castle dungeon, the gardener, and the hundreds waiting to be turned loose to destroy! But I know what you mean...they weren't battlesuits piloted by people with spiky hair.
I'm going to sail against the trend here and pick Spirited Away as my favourite. I find it charming, delightful, fantastic in the proper sense of the word, and beautifully made. Miyazaki clearly knows children well. The kids in Totoro, Kiki and Spirited Away are painfully real. In some ways it's a pity that SA became so popular. Now it gets sneered at by people who need to prove themselves by liking cooler things than the masses. (Not a troll... not liking SA doesn't mean you're a sneerer, but we all know they're out there).
Grave of the Fireflies is too painful for parents to watch. I couldn't get through it. Well made, though. And I have a warm spot for Akira, the film that (along with Road Warrior) inspired me to buy my first motorcycle.
-aiabx
btw, I like your ad hominem attack... astronomers being L. Ron Hubbard fans with no chance of breeding who need you to give us a dose of reality... hee hee. You're so funny.
-aiabx
If you sincerely believe that nobody cares about the discovery of new planets using new technology, then I apologize for calling you a troll. But speaking on behalf of myself and other amateur astronomers/nerds, we do care. Furthermore, if you believe that your so-called "practical astronomy" would have been possible without centuries of pure science done without any hope of practical benefits, then you have a very poor understanding of the way science works. Neither Tycho nor Kepler could ever have prevented a collision with a comet, but their data and calculations made a practical benefit possible 400 years later.
-aiabx
*sigh*. I don't know which astronomy joke fills me with more loathing... the telescope/penis size joke, or the "I can see the rings around Uranus" one.
-aiabx
I care. I want to understand more about the universe. I believe that by understanding the universe better, I can understand my world and myself better. And that doesn't depend on whether I can make money by mining an asteroid.
And this is, in my mind, one of the steps that science takes to understand the universe. The idea that we shouldn't do research now because we can do better research in twenty years is a travesty of the scientific method. We do what we can now, because we want to know, and that is how we get to the moon.
I know I've been trolled, but it's something I wanted to say.
-aiabx
Jay McNeil discovered McNeil's Nebula http://skyandtelescope.com/news/article_1179_1.asp with a 3-inch refractor. Granted, he had a CCD attached, but it's more evidence that size matters less than the technology using it.
-aiabx
There was, IIRC, a Nike ad at a previous Olympic Games stating something along the lines of "You didn't win the silver...you lost the gold". That's the kind of mean-spirited bad sportsmanship that's ruining the games. The events I enjoy watching the most are the ones where the competitors shake hands and smile after the event. That's when I feel that there is some purpose to the games after all.
-aiabx
All your astroturf are belong to SCO!
I really can't believe even SCO would be stupid enough to astroturf here. More likely, it will be on some business related websites like Forbes or fastcompany, where there are rich but technologically unaware people to be fooled.
-aiabx
We want more women in IT because there are potential brains there that are going to waste. We aren't getting these brains in our business because women are being discouraged from pursuing IT careers. Those jobs that could be filled by brilliant women are being filled by mediocre men, because we can't find anyone better to hire. Result? More bugs, crappier code, lost productivity, unhappier customers. Now do you understand? We need to tap that gold mine of undiscovered geniuses.
And it doesn't matter if the cavemen are right and women aren't as smart at computers and just want to find husbands*. If 1 in 100 men make great programmers, and 1 in 1000 women make great programmers, we would still be cutting our own throats by discouraging them - we still need more brilliant programmers than we have.
Now why does this cause a stink? Did you notice the implied mention of replacing mediocre males with brilliant females? Do you think anyone here is feeling, oh, I don't know, threatened?
-aiabx
*Raw, steaming bullshit, by the way. Both of my daughters can hack with the best of them.
The Hubble was deliberately kept far from the ISS so that the view would not be affected by gasses from the various rockets flying around, leaking window seals, loose nuts and bolts, and all the other crap that can be found around a space station.
-aiabx
Left and Right in the political sense come from the post-revolutionary French National Assembly, where the conservatives sat on the right of the speaker while the radicals sat on the left.
Hey look! A mention of the French on Slashdot without any peurile French-bashing!
-aiabx
Well of course we don't know. But like the drunk searching for his keys under the streetlight, we search the radio bands because we can. It's a reasonable guess that a technologically advanced civilization will use some kind of electromagnetic wave for communication, given that they travel at the speed of light, and because radio is relatively easy to use and detect, it makes a not-bad starting place for the search. So it is a gamble, but it isn't purely random.
-aiabx
This is probably an appropriate place to note that the moon is not absolutely tidally locked as well. Shifts in the earth's centre of gravity due to the ocean tides lead to a slight wobbling known as libration. Mostly libration goes east and west, but there's also a north-south component which will help expose the polar regions.
-aiabx who has been clouded in for 2 weeks now
I have two words too. Dick Cheney knows what they are.
-aiabx
Thank you. That is extremely cool, and makes up for all the moon-hoax crap I've been wading through. It's fascinating to compare reality to the dramatised versions of the space race I've been glued to on TV all week.
-aiabx
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. The "earthrise" pictures were taken from the orbiting Command Module.
-aiabx
You are correct. The "earthrise" pictures were taken from the orbiting Command Module.
-aiabx
Goddamnit, didn't I tell you to read badastronomy.com? http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/tv/foxapollo.html# stars/ is the link to the stars question.
"So why aren't they in the Apollo pictures? Pretend for a moment you are an astronaut on the surface of the Moon. You want to take a picture of your fellow space traveler. The Sun is low off the horizon, since all the lunar landings were done at local morning. How do you set your camera? The lunar landscape is brightly lit by the Sun, of course, and your friend is wearing a white spacesuit also brilliantly lit by the Sun. To take a picture of a bright object with a bright background, you need to set the exposure time to be fast, and close down the aperture setting too; that's like the pupil in your eye constricting to let less light in when you walk outside on a sunny day.
So the picture you take is set for bright objects. Stars are faint objects! In the fast exposure, they simply do not have time to register on the film. It has nothing to do with the sky being black or the lack of air, it's just a matter of exposure time. If you were to go outside here on Earth on the darkest night imaginable and take a picture with the exact same camera settings the astronauts used, you won't see any stars! "
Yeesh.
-aiabx
A common misconception. In fact, it will be 2 weeks before they flag needs to be lowered. If you take a look at the moon, you will notice that it goes dark on the side facing us every month.
-aiabx
Please go to http://www.badastronomy.com/ before you waste our time and bandwidth with your moon-hoax crap.
-aiabx
Maybe that's what we would call 2007, after the 22nd century calendar reform. Or maybe (and this is a really frightening prospect) Spock was wrong. I never saw the episode where he won Space Jeopardy 26 nights in a row, so maybe his knowledge of history is imperfect.
Or maybe B & B will put even less thought into the matter than I did.
-aiabx
Good try, but it doesn't hold water. If he has radiation-induced superpowers, how come he isn't green or made of bricks?
-aiabx
Does the Disney version have an English language soundtrack? I watched Totoro the way it was meant to be watched - with my child - when she was too young to be able to read subtitles quickly enough and not dorky enough to have to pretend to be an anime purist.
-aiabx
This is funny, but subtle. Well done.
-aiabx