I was listening to CBC Radio One yesterday morning to a discussion of the original 1930's King Kong movie, and it was mentioned that an original inspiriation for the movie was when a giant Komodo Dragon was brought to New York and died soon thereafter.
"Elements of the 1933 Kong movie are based on the 1926 real-life expedition of William Douglas Burden, a trustee of the American Museum of Natural History," says Mitman, an expert on how animals are portrayed in popular culture.
"Burden traveled to Indonesia to film and capture the Komodo dragon, which he thought was the closest living relative of dinosaurs," he says. "When Burden brought back two live Komodo specimens and housed them in captivity in the Bronx Zoo, they died. Meridan Cooper, producer of the 1933 film version of Kong, wrote at the time, 'I immediately thought of doing the same thing with a giant gorilla.'"
The same correspondence indicates that Burden attributed the Komodo dragon's death to civilization. "This is why Cooper chose the Empire State Building and modern airplanes to kill off Kong. They were fitting symbols of civilization and the machine age that many feared were destroying nature," Mitman says. He adds that the film's enduring appeal (the current one adds to the 1976 version and the 1933 classic original) might be linked to the restorative properties of an unspoiled, natural landscape.
OK, what's your vote on video game women who are Intellgent, Strong and Powerful?
My vote is for April Ryan, the protagonist from The Longest Journey (1999). I absolutely fell in love with the story. And even more appealing, while April is definately Intelligent, the "Strong and Powerful" (more like "Confidence") grows throught the game. It also rocks because it's European (Norweigan actually), and it has an "M" rating. Not for sex and violence, but for language, which they refused to tone down for the US release. Burns Flipper is my personal hero.
I just replayed the game a few months ago. Absolutely awesome. Beat out Star Control 2 as the best adventure game I've ever played (IMHO! Please no flame wares).
The sequel (Dreamfall) is finally coming out next year. Can't wait.
...it seems no matter how much I vote for the "not french people" we keep getting the fucking French Liberal party in office...
Hmm, perhaps these two things are connected?:)
The Conservatives don't have a chance of forming a majority government until they take on a leader from Quebec. That may sound crazy, but I stand by it. Western alienation can only take you so far. The majority party has to be the party of all of Canada, with strong showings in BOTH Ontario and Quebec. End of story. There's just not enough seats to form a government otherwise.
Unless, of course, we get a runaway greenhouse effect like Venus. If the surface of the Earth is unable to support liquid water, all life on the planet can kiss its ass goodbye. Without a greenhouse effect, Venus should be cool enough to support liquid water. What happened?
I don't think global warming will get this bad, but I don't know. IMHO, all the more reason to study our sister planets, Venus and Mars, to understand climates that, from our perspective, have gone very, very wrong.
Except that *we're* (the 20 and 30 somethings) going to be the old.
It's somewhat frightening to think about a world in which our most liberal ideas will be considered very conservative. Personally, I'm looking forward to it.:)
There's one argument against longevity I've not been able to properly argue against, it's effects on social evolution.
A lot of social change can take place because old people (and more specifically, old people ideas) die. I'm sure many of us feel that our ideas are enlightened and superior to those of our ancestors, but when we're all pushing 70, we really shouldn't be the ones deciding the direction which society goes. In the year 2050, we're all going to be bitter crotchety old people, set in our ideas talking about these young kids and their crazy ideas. I'm concerned what living in that kind of world will be like. It might have a stagnation effect on a culture, with other "non-longevity" cultures overtaking our own.
I'm still 100% for longevity, but it's not going to be great grandmas and grandpas riding roller blades down the sidewalk as healthy as they were when they were 40. There's going to be definate social change the kind the human race has never seen.
Be sure of one more thing. Someone's going to make a FORTUNE if effective anti-aging drugs can be mass produced. Like, hundreds of billions of dollars, hand over fist.
Wake me up when a PVR plugin that allows people to search for and record content on a *network* of PVRs is available. Mass integrated schedule service on a global scale, all accessable via my PVR remote, compressing files to XviD before transmission, and some sort of bandwidth limitation/quota system to make sure that bandwidth isn't abused (recorder only has to transmit file once, downloaders need to re-transmit twice, for example)
I've got a hankering to watch the Australian nightly news, I'm sure someone in Australia has an insane desire to watch Canadian television like "The Beachcombers".
(Let's not mention the Battlestar Galactica posibilities though, OK?)
China may be 50 years behind (let's say 45 to be more accurate), but the US is about 25 years behind (Shuttle) and Russia about 38 years behind.
We could be kinder to each country. The US has been upgrading their shuttles with newer materials. The Russians developed a new variant of their Soyuz craft (TMA class) as recently as 2002.
However America is about to go with a new CEV design, which while an upgrade in technology basically puts them back to where they were in 1968.
I'm very impressed with the Shenzhou spacecraft. It's larger than Soyuz by about 10-20%, which itself had significantly more space available than Apollo did on its own (not sure about Apollo-LEM). It's orbital module can operate autonomously, staying in orbit for many months, making the potential for Shenzhou orbital modules to be used as space station components. If its launch safety can be shown to be equivelant to Soyuz, the Shenzhou spacecraft will be the best operating in 2010.
The actual "space race" may be taking place now, in the design stage of the American CEV. Can they build a craft superior to the Chinese?
China has been building a lot of momentum here, while the US has stalled. I'm very curious to know how things will turn out in the next decade.
Warm like Venus? If you perturb a chaotic system enough, it can spiral out of control. If global warming had some true upper bound, things might be awful and catastrophic (Think Katrina, globally, times 10,000) , but probably not the end of life on earth. I worry about a runaway greenhouse effect, where global temperatures rise above 100C. "Life goes on" doesn't apply if there's no liquid water.
I think some of the points made by previous posters are intriguing. If mars is getting warmer, then we lack enough variables to understand the equation. Personally I think this means we should learn as much about the history of Mars and Venus (and for that matter, the Sun) as we can, to find out *what went wrong*.
I hate to be a naysayer, but I tried gb-pvr for about a month, and eventually gave up and went to SageTV. I was having all sorts of stability problems with the system, where recordings recorded 24 hours after the system restart would come up as 0mb files. I think this might have had to do with my PVR-150 card recording at certain resolutions, but a few weeks of discussion on the gbpvr forms didn't seem to solve anything.
Comskip was great, and maybe SageTV isn't as feature rich, but it's rock solid and I'm sticking with what works for now.
I can't play wmv on my DVD player downstairs. I prefer SageTV at the moment because it produces MPG files, which my APEX AD-1200 DVD player downstairs can play. SageTV has been good to me to date, with no performance issues, and it runs nicely in the background of my main computer upstairs.
The poor man's PVR: Hauppauge PVR-150, Burner with DVD+RW media, and a walk down the stairs to the DVD player.
Net cost: $99CDN, plus perhaps $15 for a 25 pack of DVD+RWs.
Before mentioning alternatives, please re-read the "poor man" portion above.:)
Hell, I addicted my then to be future wife by having Civ 1 in my university dorm room. We were married 3 years later and have been happily married for 10 years now.
All these stories of broken relationships and failed courses have to be balanced somehow.
OK, anyone who read this and thought about bringing in a server from home and running it off your company's bandwidth with a static IP address, raise your hand!;)
I will say one thing for Nightlife. I found the original Sims "Hot Date" expansion frustrating and just downright not fun to play. You had no real idea what you were doing right and wrong, and this seems to have been fixed in the latest version. You're able to see your dates wants and fears, and these are changed to stuff that's fairly easy to do on a date (eat out, tickle etc) so keeping your date happy is fairly easy. (Remember you can influence people to do stuff to you, which sometimes they want)
Now if only on real dates we could have a list of four different things that would make our dates happy, updated as the dates progressed...
Just for anyone actually curious, the next expansion is apparently going to be "Sims 2: Open For Business". Looks like a small business/company/investment expansion.
Man, we thought Hot Coffee was bad. Now that Nightlife is installed Sims will gleefully Make Woohoo (have sex) 4 or 5 times on a single date. In the bed, in the car, in the hot tub, in the change booth in the clothing store, in the photo booth... there's no stopping these sims. They're like rabbits.
Now if only I can make it so that my vampire can have sex in his coffin... My new house was too small for both the coffin *and* a double bed...
Maybe next time Bush will authorize a strike against a Category 5 hurricane before it hits the US coast. As we all now know, standing water is a biological weapon, and we can't let the terrorist hurricanes win. (Or something)
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I was listening to CBC Radio One yesterday morning to a discussion of the original 1930's King Kong movie, and it was mentioned that an original inspiriation for the movie was when a giant Komodo Dragon was brought to New York and died soon thereafter.
Let's see if I can find a reference for this. Ah, here we go...
"Elements of the 1933 Kong movie are based on the 1926 real-life expedition of William Douglas Burden, a trustee of the American Museum of Natural History," says Mitman, an expert on how animals are portrayed in popular culture.
"Burden traveled to Indonesia to film and capture the Komodo dragon, which he thought was the closest living relative of dinosaurs," he says. "When Burden brought back two live Komodo specimens and housed them in captivity in the Bronx Zoo, they died. Meridan Cooper, producer of the 1933 film version of Kong, wrote at the time, 'I immediately thought of doing the same thing with a giant gorilla.'"
The same correspondence indicates that Burden attributed the Komodo dragon's death to civilization. "This is why Cooper chose the Empire State Building and modern airplanes to kill off Kong. They were fitting symbols of civilization and the machine age that many feared were destroying nature," Mitman says.
He adds that the film's enduring appeal (the current one adds to the 1976 version and the 1933 classic original) might be linked to the restorative properties of an unspoiled, natural landscape.
"It could only work once."
This guy was the first to come up with the idea. No-one is going to be able to repeat it.
Sure it's not a business model, but a quick way to tap a cool million off the planet.
Read "NASA decides to scrap ISS, blame private industry for not picking up the ball."
OK, what's your vote on video game women who are Intellgent, Strong and Powerful?
My vote is for April Ryan, the protagonist from The Longest Journey (1999). I absolutely fell in love with the story. And even more appealing, while April is definately Intelligent, the "Strong and Powerful" (more like "Confidence") grows throught the game. It also rocks because it's European (Norweigan actually), and it has an "M" rating. Not for sex and violence, but for language, which they refused to tone down for the US release. Burns Flipper is my personal hero.
I just replayed the game a few months ago. Absolutely awesome. Beat out Star Control 2 as the best adventure game I've ever played (IMHO! Please no flame wares).
The sequel (Dreamfall) is finally coming out next year. Can't wait.
...it seems no matter how much I vote for the "not french people" we keep getting the fucking French Liberal party in office...
:)
Hmm, perhaps these two things are connected?
The Conservatives don't have a chance of forming a majority government until they take on a leader from Quebec. That may sound crazy, but I stand by it. Western alienation can only take you so far. The majority party has to be the party of all of Canada, with strong showings in BOTH Ontario and Quebec. End of story. There's just not enough seats to form a government otherwise.
Unless, of course, we get a runaway greenhouse effect like Venus. If the surface of the Earth is unable to support liquid water, all life on the planet can kiss its ass goodbye. Without a greenhouse effect, Venus should be cool enough to support liquid water. What happened?
I don't think global warming will get this bad, but I don't know. IMHO, all the more reason to study our sister planets, Venus and Mars, to understand climates that, from our perspective, have gone very, very wrong.
What is the failure rate of Japanese science spacecraft that leave LEO? If memory serves, it seems somewhat high.
(goes off to check for himself...)
Looks like there's not enough data to say. Good luck in their future endeavours...
Except that *we're* (the 20 and 30 somethings) going to be the old.
:)
It's somewhat frightening to think about a world in which our most liberal ideas will be considered very conservative. Personally, I'm looking forward to it.
There's one argument against longevity I've not been able to properly argue against, it's effects on social evolution.
A lot of social change can take place because old people (and more specifically, old people ideas) die. I'm sure many of us feel that our ideas are enlightened and superior to those of our ancestors, but when we're all pushing 70, we really shouldn't be the ones deciding the direction which society goes. In the year 2050, we're all going to be bitter crotchety old people, set in our ideas talking about these young kids and their crazy ideas. I'm concerned what living in that kind of world will be like. It might have a stagnation effect on a culture, with other "non-longevity" cultures overtaking our own.
I'm still 100% for longevity, but it's not going to be great grandmas and grandpas riding roller blades down the sidewalk as healthy as they were when they were 40. There's going to be definate social change the kind the human race has never seen.
Be sure of one more thing. Someone's going to make a FORTUNE if effective anti-aging drugs can be mass produced. Like, hundreds of billions of dollars, hand over fist.
Wake me up when a PVR plugin that allows people to search for and record content on a *network* of PVRs is available. Mass integrated schedule service on a global scale, all accessable via my PVR remote, compressing files to XviD before transmission, and some sort of bandwidth limitation/quota system to make sure that bandwidth isn't abused (recorder only has to transmit file once, downloaders need to re-transmit twice, for example)
I've got a hankering to watch the Australian nightly news, I'm sure someone in Australia has an insane desire to watch Canadian television like "The Beachcombers".
(Let's not mention the Battlestar Galactica posibilities though, OK?)
it wouldn't be without precident.../a.
Alright everyone, admit it, you're trying to waste time reading other game reviews trying to pass the 24 hours for Civilization IV is released...
China may be 50 years behind (let's say 45 to be more accurate), but the US is about 25 years behind (Shuttle) and Russia about 38 years behind.
We could be kinder to each country. The US has been upgrading their shuttles with newer materials. The Russians developed a new variant of their Soyuz craft (TMA class) as recently as 2002.
However America is about to go with a new CEV design, which while an upgrade in technology basically puts them back to where they were in 1968.
I'm very impressed with the Shenzhou spacecraft. It's larger than Soyuz by about 10-20%, which itself had significantly more space available than Apollo did on its own (not sure about Apollo-LEM). It's orbital module can operate autonomously, staying in orbit for many months, making the potential for Shenzhou orbital modules to be used as space station components. If its launch safety can be shown to be equivelant to Soyuz, the Shenzhou spacecraft will be the best operating in 2010.
The actual "space race" may be taking place now, in the design stage of the American CEV. Can they build a craft superior to the Chinese?
China has been building a lot of momentum here, while the US has stalled. I'm very curious to know how things will turn out in the next decade.
I'd rather have it be more warm and cold.
Warm like Venus? If you perturb a chaotic system enough, it can spiral out of control. If global warming had some true upper bound, things might be awful and catastrophic (Think Katrina, globally, times 10,000) , but probably not the end of life on earth. I worry about a runaway greenhouse effect, where global temperatures rise above 100C. "Life goes on" doesn't apply if there's no liquid water.
I think some of the points made by previous posters are intriguing. If mars is getting warmer, then we lack enough variables to understand the equation. Personally I think this means we should learn as much about the history of Mars and Venus (and for that matter, the Sun) as we can, to find out *what went wrong*.
I hate to be a naysayer, but I tried gb-pvr for about a month, and eventually gave up and went to SageTV. I was having all sorts of stability problems with the system, where recordings recorded 24 hours after the system restart would come up as 0mb files. I think this might have had to do with my PVR-150 card recording at certain resolutions, but a few weeks of discussion on the gbpvr forms didn't seem to solve anything.
Comskip was great, and maybe SageTV isn't as feature rich, but it's rock solid and I'm sticking with what works for now.
I can't play wmv on my DVD player downstairs. I prefer SageTV at the moment because it produces MPG files, which my APEX AD-1200 DVD player downstairs can play. SageTV has been good to me to date, with no performance issues, and it runs nicely in the background of my main computer upstairs.
:)
The poor man's PVR: Hauppauge PVR-150, Burner with DVD+RW media, and a walk down the stairs to the DVD player.
Net cost: $99CDN, plus perhaps $15 for a 25 pack of DVD+RWs.
Before mentioning alternatives, please re-read the "poor man" portion above.
That's somewhat like saying you prefer the look of Martha Stewart's home to your own. *No-one*'s home looks like that.
The bridge of the Enterprise doesn't look like a spaceship, it reeks of "sound-stage". Or perhaps "multi-millionaire arcology".
Hell, I addicted my then to be future wife by having Civ 1 in my university dorm room. We were married 3 years later and have been happily married for 10 years now.
All these stories of broken relationships and failed courses have to be balanced somehow.
OK, anyone who read this and thought about bringing in a server from home and running it off your company's bandwidth with a static IP address, raise your hand! ;)
... at least the author wasn't shot and killed.
I'd be scared to be wearing my mp3 player + headphones in the Underground. What if someone yelled "STOP!" and I didn't hear them?
I will say one thing for Nightlife. I found the original Sims "Hot Date" expansion frustrating and just downright not fun to play. You had no real idea what you were doing right and wrong, and this seems to have been fixed in the latest version. You're able to see your dates wants and fears, and these are changed to stuff that's fairly easy to do on a date (eat out, tickle etc) so keeping your date happy is fairly easy. (Remember you can influence people to do stuff to you, which sometimes they want)
Now if only on real dates we could have a list of four different things that would make our dates happy, updated as the dates progressed...
Just for anyone actually curious, the next expansion is apparently going to be "Sims 2: Open For Business". Looks like a small business/company/investment expansion.
Source: GameSpot
Man, we thought Hot Coffee was bad. Now that Nightlife is installed Sims will gleefully Make Woohoo (have sex) 4 or 5 times on a single date. In the bed, in the car, in the hot tub, in the change booth in the clothing store, in the photo booth... there's no stopping these sims. They're like rabbits.
Now if only I can make it so that my vampire can have sex in his coffin... My new house was too small for both the coffin *and* a double bed...
All that new CSS and no superscripts?
Maybe next time Bush will authorize a strike against a Category 5 hurricane before it hits the US coast. As we all now know, standing water is a biological weapon, and we can't let the terrorist hurricanes win. (Or something)