Thank you for the link, like a tragic and comedic broadcast from an alien civilization. It's a long article, but well worth the read, fascinating stuff.
While the AC may just be trolling for a reaction, there is something in the general culture, even within science, to what he says.
Some years back, I spent the night as a layman at the UNAM observatory in Baja, with some astrophysicists taking measurements of Cepheid Variables in Andromeda. At some point, I asked one of the team members a question about recent developments in planetary astronomy (probably something to do with Cassini), check out his reply: "No idea, because as astrophysicists, we find small stuff like that boring". My jaw almost hit the floor with that offhanded dismissal coming from a professional astronomer.
Later in the night, I got him, and got him good, by asking him what mechanism allows for the behavior that Cepheid Variables display. He stuttered for a moment, visibly perplexed, and replied "I don't know, let me get back to you on that one". These guys have never asked themselves why the objects they've monitored for years behave the way they do.
That's been an inevitable problem that has plagued the scientific community for a long time - compartmentalization, which leads to a misguided sense of elitism, the equivalent of wearing horse blinders and being proud of it. Whatever happened to the intellectual restlessness that got these people into science in the first place? Where, when and why did they freeze up? Focusing on an academic specialty and sticking to it is the only way to get results in many cases, but not everywhere and/nor all the time.
Score big points for NASA, they've officially recognized and addressed via the situation via the Origins Program, an interdisciplinary network of data in which every area of knowledge is equally important, compelling and can only enrich all other areas.
The most famous case in point, for decades, paleontologists were searching for the source of mass extinctions by looking at the ground, not even contemplating the possibility that astronomical phenomena might have caused these events, as it was beyond their realm of study.
Here's another, anybody attempting to study the dynamics and evolution of spiral galaxies should take a long and hard look at the available data on Saturn's rings.
So basically, NASA's Origins Program is attempting to build bridges between ivory towers, and that can only be a good thing.
If you see groupthink leading in one direction, go the opposite direction!
Gotta be able to recognize it by its' aliases, one of which is conventional wisdom.
Here's another - safety in numbers, even if one is a lemming heading towards an unseen cliff ahead, beyond the horizon from a very limited perspective, in fact all one can see is frantically running lemming biomass all around.
A very superficial example is how a date is supposed to go: dinner and a movie, then hopefully sex afterward, it's how everybody does it. Conventional wisdom.
However, I've figured out the correct model: first sex, then dinner - you've worked up an appetite, you're relaxed, and as an added bonus, you and your date become partners in crime, slyly smiling at tense couples all around you, doing it in the opposite, conventional direction, all wrong.
A more relevant example to the topic is how people complain about the government, how taxes are too high, and elect a candidate accordingly. Unsurprisingly, three years later the same people moan and gripe about the government, because of lower funding for education or infrastructure such as roads. And so it goes.
Then there's another factor called tradition (cue Fiddler On The Roof). I heard a great anecdote recently, about a woman who questioned why the pork dish her mother taught her discarded perfectly good meat. So she asked her mother, who said "Well that's the way my mother taught me to do it". So the woman asked her grandmother, who answered "Frying pans were smaller back then, I couldn't fit all the meat in there!" It took fifty years for somebody to ask the damned question.
My overall point here, I guess, the way to escape common sense and turn it into just plain sense is to exercise the muscle between the ears, the best models (there are probably no "correct" ones) are most often counter-intuitive.
Which is why the Oscars are, in a way, a bit of a joke.
You think??? Within a twenty year time span, from 2000 to 1980, I count eleven so-so films that won the Oscar, contrasted by much better ones that were nominated but did not win.
1999 - Shakespeare In Love instead of The Thin Red Line. 1996 - The English Patient instead of Fargo. 1995 - Braveheart instead of Apollo 13. 1994 - Forrest Gump instead of Pulp Fiction. 1990 - Dances With Wolves instead of Goodfellas. 1988 - Rain Man instead of Mississippi Burning. 1985 - Out Of Africa instead of Kiss Of The Spider Woman. 1983 - Terms Of Endearment instead of The Right Stuff. 1981 - Chariots Of Fire instead of Raiders Of The Lost Ark (or Reds). 1980 - Ordinary People instead of Raging Bull.
Granted, in the same span they occasionally got it right (Silence Of The Lambs, Unforgiven), some years all nominees are weak (1989, when Driving Miss Daisy got the nod), while some years seem to be a matter of personal preference (I thought LA Confidential was a much better film in 1997 than Titanic, for example).
However, any "academy" that fails to even nominate 2001: A Space Odyssey (although Kubrick got a Best Director nomination) or snubs Citizen Kane, is little more than an hermetic scene that celebrates itself and should be taken with a grain of salt.
It should be noted that the great frost was followed over the next few years by a period of rapid temperature increases.
I wonder if the Gulf Stream was disrupted or weakened that year, because that's what keeps the UK relatively toasty at such high latitudes. Consider that London is about as far north as Montreal, then compare the kind of winters both cities get.
Is it plausible that some localized phenomenon, under optimal conditions (such as weather or oceanic currents), could generate a butterfly effect, growing to such a scale that it could negatively impact the Gulf Stream?
Here's another possibility - a major volcanic event somewhere around the world right before the chill. A massive volume of ash spewed into the atmosphere has a way of lowering world temperatures for a couple of years.
Any knowledgeable geologist here on/. know if there was a big volcanic eruption within the time frame in question?
I remember reading about solar shingles a few years ago, how it was supposed to be the next wave of solar power for the home, the price was lower for installation, etc. I did read that they were a bit less efficient, but you were able to cover a much larger area of your roof for the price, thereby more than offsetting the disadvantages.
Fast forward to today, everywhere I look people are still installing solar panels and I haven't seen a single new article, blog or discussion about solar shingles. Was the technology flawed?
I'd love some feedback on this, because there's a possibility I might build a home in the foreseeable future, and I'm definitely intending on going solar for both electricity and water, maybe even a heat pump. Proper insulation is a given, energy efficiency appliances, passive solar design. I'd love to shoot the works on this project.
By far, Hale-Bopp has been the absolute highlight of my comet-watching experience.
There's a thought that's haunted me since I read the Nemesis theory, that a brown dwarf companion to the sun (that would be Nemesis) swings in and out of the Oort Cloud in the course of its' highly elliptical orbit, sending a swarm of comets hurtling into the inner Solar System every time it swings towards us. This goes a long way in explaining the apparent regularity of mass extinctions on Earth.
Anyway, picture a sky with dozens of comets all at once. Spectacular? Unimaginably so. The scariest thing ever seen by any living being in Earth's history? That, too. For a few years, they'll just keep on coming, and one of those babies is on a collision course with Earth, sooner rather than later.
Now what would an ELE (Extinction Level Event) caliber comet look like when it's at Moon distance? Visualize the coma filling the sky, enjoy the magnificence of the sight, and BTW, the doomsday clock is just an instant away from midnight for your species. May I suggest a bottle of Laphroaigh that night? Oh, screw it, better pull out all the stops and go for the Caol Ila 25 Year Old.
Yeah it's a morbid thought, but if the cometary extinction theory is correct, as well as the Nemesis one, that is exactly how the skies have looked like in the past, on a regular basis, and will look like again, over and over. Unless, of course, we as a species leave the cradle and embark on a project in the far future to sweep the Oort Cloud clean, and the Kuiper Belt too, for that matter. Maybe the Obama administration can look into the matter? (grins) And please, leave a couple of comets in safe orbits out there, if only for show.
Messner first summitted Everest without oxygen from the Nepalese side - the southeast ridge route.
That was Messner and Peter Habeler in 1978. I should have also mentioned that instead of skipping and going straight for the 1980 solo feat. But I did do it on purpose, though, I guess just thinking about the lack of oxygen clouded my judgement:p
The workforce scales precisely with the load. How does increasing the number of people make it any more difficult? Can you explain further please? I'm interested.
The main points here are the time and logistics needed for climbers to reach pre-supplied spots while slowly working their way up the mountain. A conventional expedition uses a large contingency of Sherpas to haul food and oxygen for many days. It takes several trips from lower to higher camps to haul the supplies, and of course they're consuming food and oxygen while they do it.
Not using exact numbers by any means, consider that canned air has to be used every step of the way from Camp One onward. Let's say it takes the Sherpas four trips to haul two hundred oxygen tanks from Base Camp to Camp One, and here is where they put their masks on and turn on the spigots. Taking three trips and fifty tanks to haul supplies from Camp One to Camp Two, that leaves a hundred and fifty tanks. Two trips and fifty tanks from Camp Two to Camp Three, leaving a hundred tanks for the small group to acclimatize and attempt the summit assault. Now add to this the thousands upon thousands of calories that have to be consumed at those altitudes, imagine the amount of food that has to be transported also, and you begin to see just what a slow and messy process the whole enterprise is.
In fact, the Nepalese side of Everest is for all intents and purposes a dump, littered with torn tents, empty oxygen tanks, food wrappers, human feces and yes, frozen bodies. In fact, a few years ago an expedition went up not to summit the peak, but to clean up the mountain as much as they could.
Anyway, back to the logistics. During his solo trek up Everest, Messner was unencumbered by this gradual process. Exaggerating here, all he needed to take was nine sandwiches, a bowl for melting ice, a sleeping bag and climbing supplies. However, he did spend a month or two right at Base Camp to acclimatize, but that's standard procedure, and involved no logistics on the way up.
Chance of death increases proportional to time without adequate O2.
Reading this, the greatest of all mountain climbers, Reinhold Messner, comes to mind. Back in the early eighties, Messner astonished the mountaneering community by achieving the unthinkable - climbing Everest solo with no oxygen.
The fact that he bypassed Nepal and did it from the far steeper and more difficult northern, Tibetan side, was impressive enough. But whereas basically all expeditions are during the fair weather months of April and May, this crazy, crazy dude did it in August, during the full blast of storm season.
Nobody has even attempted to repeat the feat in the almost thirty years since.
Initially, I thought that the guy had a full fledged death wish, but on second thought, there's a great method to his madness - one of the biggest logistical problems in a conventional climb is to haul enough oxygen tanks up there, for a huge team composed of western climbers and Sherpa guides, then the prolonged time it takes to do that also implies hauling enough food and drink, etcetera, not a pretty sight.
Reinhold Messner was freed from those constraints. His support team consisted of a woman named Nena Olguin... and that was it. All he had to do was haul enough supplies for a few days. As it turned out, he was back at base camp only three days after he set out. He was in the "death zone" for only a day or two, no more.
On an unrelated but fascinating note, Messner, who's climbed the world's top twenty peaks without the aid of oxygen, also acquired a bit of a reputation in mountaneering circles after a Sherpa "introduced him to the pleasures of smoking hashish at extreme altitudes". Take that with a grain of salt and make of it what you will, but like I said, that is one crazy, crazy dude.
Guides take on people who may have done some training, but are not really experienced mountaineers. These guys become "drag-ups" to get to the summit. Their main qualification for the climb is some $30K or so to blow on the trip.
Talking about "Into Thin Air": Remember how the socialite piggybacked on a Sherpa, slowing them both down, therefore the whole group? Not to single her out here, but that is a perfect example of unacceptable behavior in the "death zone", unseen when only true experts climbed the peaks.
The book clearly describes the dilemma for expert climbers who become guns for hire, pressured by his tourists who do not fully grasp the lethality of the place - "I paid you $30K (I think it's more than that) to get me to the summit, and you'd better deliver, buster, or you'll never work in this mountain again".
In a rarefied environment that weakens judgment, the impatient and headstrong, used to getting their way, just might apply enough pressure for the guide to cave in, plenty of involuntary foolishness to go around. Imagine a tourist's temper tantrum after weeks above 18,000 feet, and a few days inside the "death zone", being told their attempt has been foiled only a few hours from triumph. I shudder at the thought.
Whereas if the guide was only with fellow experts, I imagine his word is final and no questions asked, maybe next year in Annapurna, you know? Not unlike the lieutenant in a combat unit.
Holy cow, I previewed my post and it came out huge, but I can't take anything out, it's my Cliff Notes version of "Into Thin Air", quite relevant to the topic at hand.
Not for anyone who watched "Into thin air".
Although I've never seen the movie, I highly recommend the book by John Krakauer.
A pretty good climber and professional journalist, Krakauer was commissioned by National Geographic to write an article about attempting the summit of Everest, embedded into a group composed of a few world-class climbers, the Sherpa support team and a bunch of wealthy tourists, including a socialite or two.
Krakauer relates some lethally incompetent things that went on up there, try this one on for size - there were three or four teams camping in the North Col, final camp for the summit assault and already above the "death zone". A member of the Taiwanese team came out of his tent wearing nothing but socks, to take a dump on the icy edge of the very high and steep Lhotse Face. Images of shit cascading down a Himalayan ice face aside, it's not only bad form (there can always be climbers making their way up) but also dangerous as hell. Well the dumb bastard slipped and tumbled over a thousand meters to his death, buck-naked except for his socks, on the frozen roof of the world. You can't make stuff like this up, seriously.
Just a couple of hundred meters from the summit via the Lhotse route, there's a small but nasty vertical wall called The Hillary Step, which can only be climbed one person at a time. On the way up, Krakauer saw to his dismay that there was a bottleneck here, taking a few hours for everybody to make it past this final obstacle, time already against them. Once on the summit, the teams lingered in a daze even as the monsoon clouds were looming large.
On the way back, the bottleneck was reversed, now there was a line to climb down the Hillary Step. By the time everybody had passed, it was already too late - the sun was setting, the canned oxygen supply was running out, the storm was already there and temperatures were plummeting, textbook description of a worst-case scenario.
Every breath and step a battle that took every ounce of effort and concentration, Krakauer staggered down in zero-visibility conditions, passing some dying or dead comrades along the way, finally reaching the North Col at around midnight.
Here's the thing - even with optimal visibility and mellow temperatures, severe fatigue (that inner reserve of energy was depleted in the final push for the summit) and lack of oxygen will impair the ability to think, reason, move and react in a place where any misstep can be fatal. Many climbers have passed dead colleagues on the way down and that information does not compute in their brains at the moment, personal survival overrides any other concern, only later do horror and regret coalesce and sink their hooks.
Anyway, Krakauer collapsed in his tent and managed to sleep even while fighting for breath in the "death zone", finally awaking to tragedy unfolding around him, I believe it was eighteen people who died on the mountain that time.
Well that's more or less how I remember "Into Thin Air". Give it a shot, it managed to be gripping even as I already knew the story.
Finally, a great climbing movie and true story, done as a documentary with dramatizations, is "Touching The Void", in which two British guys climb a South American peak. On the way down (surprise surprise), one of them falls to certain death, off a cliff and into a crevasse - only he survives. Alone and with a shattered leg, he must drag his way back down the mountain before his distraught teammate abandons base camp, or be truly left for dead.
As for an Axl "No supper for you until you finish an album" Rose, stop standing up your fans at gigs, leaving behind a wake of riots in arenas across the western world.
It took longer to release Chinese Democracy than it took NASA to send a human to the Moon from scratch. Or for Voyager 2 to conduct a leisurely tour of our solar system's gas giants. Or for light to travel the distance between Earth and Sirius and back again.
Thanks for reminding me about Morrison, but I'd pick Arthur Lee of Love over Morrison any day of the week, cases in point:
- When Lee rented an apartment in Venice Beach, a short while later so did Morrison. - Then Lee got himself a Mustang convertible, and soon enough, Morrison could be seen around town driving one of those. - Finally, Lee adopted a Rottweiler, and a couple of months later, you guessed it, Morrison got himself one.
Those are the three examples that I know of. When asked if he was annoyed at Morrison for co-opting his thing, Lee smiled and replied that he was mostly flattered.
So there you have it, Arthur Lee was The Man in that particular scenario.
Aw sh*t! I just remembered another guy that belongs on the list, George Clinton of Parliament/Funkadelic. And in spaced-out jazz, there's the one and only Sun Ra.
Conversely, some rock stars are shaman-like figures for modern times. I'm picturing guys like Jimi Hendrix, Robert Plant, Iggy Pop, Peter Gabriel while in Genesis, David Byrne while in The Talking Heads (particularly in albums such as Remain In Light and Speaking In Tongues), Ian Astbury while in The Cult, Wayne Coyne of The Flaming Lips, most certainly extreme characters like GG Allin, or Wendy O. Williams of The Plasmatics. I'd even go out on a limb and place Freddie Mercury on my list.
Not Bono, though, there's a difference between being a shaman and a preacher, but I'm not saying that's necessarily a bad thing. Neither Mick Jagger nor Marilyn Manson, there's too much of the cynical multimillionaire businessmen in them. Finally, as for an Axl Rose, no supper for you until you finish that album and stop standing up your fans at gigs.
The Japanese have a man who can bend a leg right back over his head with every step
Then who's the guy that can do a forward aerial half turn with every alternate step?
Re:Both franchise shared the same fate.
on
New Star Trek Trailer
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Both franchises got similarly raped by dubious quality prequels.
The Star Trek franchise lost me a long time ago, but I'm genuinely intrigued by this new film. At this point in time, a project helmed by JJ Abrams has far more potential than any other overseen by Lucas.
Consider how Abrams has surrounded himself with hardcore trekkies and genuinely takes feedback from them, while Lucas insisted on being the sole "intellectual author" of his prequels, giving us the unsightly spectacles of lil' superboy Anakin, baby Greedo and that infamous Gungan. Another great difference is dialogue and filming itself, Lucas "can write that shit but sure as hell can't say it" and puts acting on a secondary plane, too busy visualizing how to fill the green screen. In contrast, Abrams has a keener eye and ear for these things. Better still, Abrams is aware that he has something to prove here, voluntarily put himself in an uncomfortable position as a creative challenge, and I can respect that.
Bottom line, I'll pay money to see this prequel (as most of us here will) and will reserve criticism for afterward.
Anyone even remotely interested in this should be aware of the novels of David Wishart. He is a Classics scholar who writes pop fiction detective novels set in ancient Rome @30 CE.
Now that is a fascinating idea. Knowing nothing about these novels, I'm visualizing something along the lines of an ancient version of Sherlock Holmes, relying on Aristotelian logic to crack the case, and I'm gonna get a bit silly here, I'm sure the narratives are much more sophisticated:
A much-loved Roman general and nobleman, in charge of the construction of the Pompeii aqueduct, has been found dead in the bath of his villa, with slit wrists. The authorities dismiss it as a suicide, but the grieving widow believes otherwise and hires our intrepid hero. The main suspect is an embittered rival general who was turned down for the aqueduct project by Caesar himself, but the mastermind turns out to be a double-crossing best friend, secretly allied with a Herculaneum consortium, having paid a pound of salt and promising citizenship for the children of a Spartan slave to bribe him into carrying out the dirty deed. The Spartan, of course, was the deceased general's majordomo (butler).
Fourty years later and I get the philosophical stuff but the special effects would seem to indicate Kubrick was on acid.
If Kubrick ever dropped acid, which for some reason I doubt, I could only picture him doing it way before the hippie boom and with Sandoz Labs material.
Actually, a fair amount of the trippy sequence was done in New York City, before Space Odyssey was in full-fledged production. Fascinated for a time with the behavior of "exotic" liquids when they came into contact with each other, Kubrick set up a special rig to film single droplets of various substances of different colors, densities and viscosities interacting with some medium on a petri dish.
Mind you, not all were substances you could find at your local chemist or lava lamp dealer, the whole thing was a painstaking process, which is why I attribute it more to sheer intellectual curiosity than to what Captain Kirk referred to as LDS, I guess nobody gets high in the Federation, except with Romulan ale, but I digress.
Mind-numbingly methodical as dear old Stanley was, he supposedly filmed hundreds of these things and chose a few for the Stargate sequence. The scenes speak for themselves, I can see why Kubrick was fascinated with the utterly alien aesthetic qualities of his experiments, and am still impressed at how these tiny events can be blown up to fill a gigantic film screen.
Did it sing "Bicycle Built for Two", slowing down and getting deeper as it ran out of power?
I thought the tune's name was either "Daisy Daisy" or "Daisy Bell". In any case, it was used in 2001 because it was actually the first tune ever sung by a computer (the IBM 7094), in 1961. Here's an mp3 file link of that historic recording: http://audio.textfiles.com/sounds/daisy.mp3
Alan Greenspan is an admirer of Ayn Rand, and based his economic models on the assumption that the selfish aspect of man must be encouraged, that free and unregulated markets would bring about prosperity and a purer form of democracy than government could ever manage. Greenspan was so convincing that he sold this lemon to Bill Clinton back in 1992. While being questioned by Congress about the housing credit fiasco and the subsequent meltdown, Greenspan confessed that "there was a factor he did not consider in his models". Which one is that, he was asked? "The human factor", he answered.
Ayn Rand's ideas are quaint relics of the Cold War, when the western political climate attempted to counterbalance the ideals of the Soviet system, which instead of liberating the population from tyranny, oppressed them worse than before. Well, now that the Soviet Union has gone the way of the dodo, surely it's time to put away Rand's ideas as overly simplistic.
Yeah, I read and loved Fountainhead and Atlas back in college, now I see the huge gaping holes in the ideas of those books.
Joe the Plumber was investigated more thoroughly than William Ayers, Jeremiah Wright and Tony Rezco, combined.
However, the three subjects (the plumber doesn't count) were brought up by either McCain, Palin or even Hillary back in the primaries. As for the so-called plumber, spare us, please. Who invokes his name every thirty seconds, Obama? No, McCain and Palin. He's also gotten himself an agent and wants to cut a country music album, the asshole wants and seeks all the free publicity he can get. Then he said things so outlandish, that he was smacked down on Faux News, of all places! Once again, please, spare us.
How often did the media bring up McCain's associations with characters like Gordon Liddy, Charles Keating and that Texas megachurch crackpot, who supports Israel so it can be destroyed to bring about the second coming in his lifetime?
Moreover, how often have the press stated the fact that the Bush and Bin Laden families were business partners and have been dear, dear friends for decades now? Much less often than we've heard the names Ayers and Wright.
Y'all quit with the cherry pickin' now, it's become extremely tiresome, leads to nowhere and says more about you than about whatever it is you're talking about.
Slashdot Mirror
I miss the days when /. had its own lame memes, and didn't have to import them from a bunch of adolescents.
Well I, for one, welcome our new 4chan... I can't go through with this, sorry.
OK, there's still a chance to vindicate myself here, how about this one:
In the new ISS Name Contest, where was the CowboyNeal option?
Thank you for the link, like a tragic and comedic broadcast from an alien civilization. It's a long article, but well worth the read, fascinating stuff.
While the AC may just be trolling for a reaction, there is something in the general culture, even within science, to what he says.
Some years back, I spent the night as a layman at the UNAM observatory in Baja, with some astrophysicists taking measurements of Cepheid Variables in Andromeda. At some point, I asked one of the team members a question about recent developments in planetary astronomy (probably something to do with Cassini), check out his reply: "No idea, because as astrophysicists, we find small stuff like that boring". My jaw almost hit the floor with that offhanded dismissal coming from a professional astronomer.
Later in the night, I got him, and got him good, by asking him what mechanism allows for the behavior that Cepheid Variables display. He stuttered for a moment, visibly perplexed, and replied "I don't know, let me get back to you on that one". These guys have never asked themselves why the objects they've monitored for years behave the way they do.
That's been an inevitable problem that has plagued the scientific community for a long time - compartmentalization, which leads to a misguided sense of elitism, the equivalent of wearing horse blinders and being proud of it. Whatever happened to the intellectual restlessness that got these people into science in the first place? Where, when and why did they freeze up? Focusing on an academic specialty and sticking to it is the only way to get results in many cases, but not everywhere and/nor all the time.
Score big points for NASA, they've officially recognized and addressed via the situation via the Origins Program, an interdisciplinary network of data in which every area of knowledge is equally important, compelling and can only enrich all other areas.
The most famous case in point, for decades, paleontologists were searching for the source of mass extinctions by looking at the ground, not even contemplating the possibility that astronomical phenomena might have caused these events, as it was beyond their realm of study.
Here's another, anybody attempting to study the dynamics and evolution of spiral galaxies should take a long and hard look at the available data on Saturn's rings.
So basically, NASA's Origins Program is attempting to build bridges between ivory towers, and that can only be a good thing.
If you see groupthink leading in one direction, go the opposite direction!
Gotta be able to recognize it by its' aliases, one of which is conventional wisdom.
Here's another - safety in numbers, even if one is a lemming heading towards an unseen cliff ahead, beyond the horizon from a very limited perspective, in fact all one can see is frantically running lemming biomass all around.
A very superficial example is how a date is supposed to go: dinner and a movie, then hopefully sex afterward, it's how everybody does it. Conventional wisdom.
However, I've figured out the correct model: first sex, then dinner - you've worked up an appetite, you're relaxed, and as an added bonus, you and your date become partners in crime, slyly smiling at tense couples all around you, doing it in the opposite, conventional direction, all wrong.
A more relevant example to the topic is how people complain about the government, how taxes are too high, and elect a candidate accordingly. Unsurprisingly, three years later the same people moan and gripe about the government, because of lower funding for education or infrastructure such as roads. And so it goes.
Then there's another factor called tradition (cue Fiddler On The Roof). I heard a great anecdote recently, about a woman who questioned why the pork dish her mother taught her discarded perfectly good meat. So she asked her mother, who said "Well that's the way my mother taught me to do it". So the woman asked her grandmother, who answered "Frying pans were smaller back then, I couldn't fit all the meat in there!" It took fifty years for somebody to ask the damned question.
My overall point here, I guess, the way to escape common sense and turn it into just plain sense is to exercise the muscle between the ears, the best models (there are probably no "correct" ones) are most often counter-intuitive.
Which is why the Oscars are, in a way, a bit of a joke.
You think??? Within a twenty year time span, from 2000 to 1980, I count eleven so-so films that won the Oscar, contrasted by much better ones that were nominated but did not win.
1999 - Shakespeare In Love instead of The Thin Red Line.
1996 - The English Patient instead of Fargo.
1995 - Braveheart instead of Apollo 13.
1994 - Forrest Gump instead of Pulp Fiction.
1990 - Dances With Wolves instead of Goodfellas.
1988 - Rain Man instead of Mississippi Burning.
1985 - Out Of Africa instead of Kiss Of The Spider Woman.
1983 - Terms Of Endearment instead of The Right Stuff.
1981 - Chariots Of Fire instead of Raiders Of The Lost Ark (or Reds).
1980 - Ordinary People instead of Raging Bull.
Granted, in the same span they occasionally got it right (Silence Of The Lambs, Unforgiven), some years all nominees are weak (1989, when Driving Miss Daisy got the nod), while some years seem to be a matter of personal preference (I thought LA Confidential was a much better film in 1997 than Titanic, for example).
However, any "academy" that fails to even nominate 2001: A Space Odyssey (although Kubrick got a Best Director nomination) or snubs Citizen Kane, is little more than an hermetic scene that celebrates itself and should be taken with a grain of salt.
It should be noted that the great frost was followed over the next few years by a period of rapid temperature increases.
I wonder if the Gulf Stream was disrupted or weakened that year, because that's what keeps the UK relatively toasty at such high latitudes. Consider that London is about as far north as Montreal, then compare the kind of winters both cities get.
Is it plausible that some localized phenomenon, under optimal conditions (such as weather or oceanic currents), could generate a butterfly effect, growing to such a scale that it could negatively impact the Gulf Stream?
Here's another possibility - a major volcanic event somewhere around the world right before the chill. A massive volume of ash spewed into the atmosphere has a way of lowering world temperatures for a couple of years.
Any knowledgeable geologist here on /. know if there was a big volcanic eruption within the time frame in question?
I remember reading about solar shingles a few years ago, how it was supposed to be the next wave of solar power for the home, the price was lower for installation, etc. I did read that they were a bit less efficient, but you were able to cover a much larger area of your roof for the price, thereby more than offsetting the disadvantages.
Fast forward to today, everywhere I look people are still installing solar panels and I haven't seen a single new article, blog or discussion about solar shingles. Was the technology flawed?
I'd love some feedback on this, because there's a possibility I might build a home in the foreseeable future, and I'm definitely intending on going solar for both electricity and water, maybe even a heat pump. Proper insulation is a given, energy efficiency appliances, passive solar design. I'd love to shoot the works on this project.
By far, Hale-Bopp has been the absolute highlight of my comet-watching experience.
There's a thought that's haunted me since I read the Nemesis theory, that a brown dwarf companion to the sun (that would be Nemesis) swings in and out of the Oort Cloud in the course of its' highly elliptical orbit, sending a swarm of comets hurtling into the inner Solar System every time it swings towards us. This goes a long way in explaining the apparent regularity of mass extinctions on Earth.
Anyway, picture a sky with dozens of comets all at once. Spectacular? Unimaginably so. The scariest thing ever seen by any living being in Earth's history? That, too. For a few years, they'll just keep on coming, and one of those babies is on a collision course with Earth, sooner rather than later.
Now what would an ELE (Extinction Level Event) caliber comet look like when it's at Moon distance? Visualize the coma filling the sky, enjoy the magnificence of the sight, and BTW, the doomsday clock is just an instant away from midnight for your species. May I suggest a bottle of Laphroaigh that night? Oh, screw it, better pull out all the stops and go for the Caol Ila 25 Year Old.
Yeah it's a morbid thought, but if the cometary extinction theory is correct, as well as the Nemesis one, that is exactly how the skies have looked like in the past, on a regular basis, and will look like again, over and over. Unless, of course, we as a species leave the cradle and embark on a project in the far future to sweep the Oort Cloud clean, and the Kuiper Belt too, for that matter. Maybe the Obama administration can look into the matter? (grins) And please, leave a couple of comets in safe orbits out there, if only for show.
Messner first summitted Everest without oxygen from the Nepalese side - the southeast ridge route.
That was Messner and Peter Habeler in 1978. I should have also mentioned that instead of skipping and going straight for the 1980 solo feat. But I did do it on purpose, though, I guess just thinking about the lack of oxygen clouded my judgement :p
The workforce scales precisely with the load. How does increasing the number of people make it any more difficult? Can you explain further please? I'm interested.
The main points here are the time and logistics needed for climbers to reach pre-supplied spots while slowly working their way up the mountain. A conventional expedition uses a large contingency of Sherpas to haul food and oxygen for many days. It takes several trips from lower to higher camps to haul the supplies, and of course they're consuming food and oxygen while they do it.
Not using exact numbers by any means, consider that canned air has to be used every step of the way from Camp One onward. Let's say it takes the Sherpas four trips to haul two hundred oxygen tanks from Base Camp to Camp One, and here is where they put their masks on and turn on the spigots.
Taking three trips and fifty tanks to haul supplies from Camp One to Camp Two, that leaves a hundred and fifty tanks. Two trips and fifty tanks from Camp Two to Camp Three, leaving a hundred tanks for the small group to acclimatize and attempt the summit assault.
Now add to this the thousands upon thousands of calories that have to be consumed at those altitudes, imagine the amount of food that has to be transported also, and you begin to see just what a slow and messy process the whole enterprise is.
In fact, the Nepalese side of Everest is for all intents and purposes a dump, littered with torn tents, empty oxygen tanks, food wrappers, human feces and yes, frozen bodies. In fact, a few years ago an expedition went up not to summit the peak, but to clean up the mountain as much as they could.
Anyway, back to the logistics. During his solo trek up Everest, Messner was unencumbered by this gradual process. Exaggerating here, all he needed to take was nine sandwiches, a bowl for melting ice, a sleeping bag and climbing supplies. However, he did spend a month or two right at Base Camp to acclimatize, but that's standard procedure, and involved no logistics on the way up.
Chance of death increases proportional to time without adequate O2.
Reading this, the greatest of all mountain climbers, Reinhold Messner, comes to mind. Back in the early eighties, Messner astonished the mountaneering community by achieving the unthinkable - climbing Everest solo with no oxygen.
The fact that he bypassed Nepal and did it from the far steeper and more difficult northern, Tibetan side, was impressive enough.
But whereas basically all expeditions are during the fair weather months of April and May, this crazy, crazy dude did it in August, during the full blast of storm season.
Nobody has even attempted to repeat the feat in the almost thirty years since.
Initially, I thought that the guy had a full fledged death wish, but on second thought, there's a great method to his madness - one of the biggest logistical problems in a conventional climb is to haul enough oxygen tanks up there, for a huge team composed of western climbers and Sherpa guides, then the prolonged time it takes to do that also implies hauling enough food and drink, etcetera, not a pretty sight.
Reinhold Messner was freed from those constraints. His support team consisted of a woman named Nena Olguin... and that was it. All he had to do was haul enough supplies for a few days. As it turned out, he was back at base camp only three days after he set out. He was in the "death zone" for only a day or two, no more.
On an unrelated but fascinating note, Messner, who's climbed the world's top twenty peaks without the aid of oxygen, also acquired a bit of a reputation in mountaneering circles after a Sherpa "introduced him to the pleasures of smoking hashish at extreme altitudes". Take that with a grain of salt and make of it what you will, but like I said, that is one crazy, crazy dude.
Guides take on people who may have done some training, but are not really experienced mountaineers. These guys become "drag-ups" to get to the summit. Their main qualification for the climb is some $30K or so to blow on the trip.
Talking about "Into Thin Air":
Remember how the socialite piggybacked on a Sherpa, slowing them both down, therefore the whole group? Not to single her out here, but that is a perfect example of unacceptable behavior in the "death zone", unseen when only true experts climbed the peaks.
The book clearly describes the dilemma for expert climbers who become guns for hire, pressured by his tourists who do not fully grasp the lethality of the place - "I paid you $30K (I think it's more than that) to get me to the summit, and you'd better deliver, buster, or you'll never work in this mountain again".
In a rarefied environment that weakens judgment, the impatient and headstrong, used to getting their way, just might apply enough pressure for the guide to cave in, plenty of involuntary foolishness to go around. Imagine a tourist's temper tantrum after weeks above 18,000 feet, and a few days inside the "death zone", being told their attempt has been foiled only a few hours from triumph. I shudder at the thought.
Whereas if the guide was only with fellow experts, I imagine his word is final and no questions asked, maybe next year in Annapurna, you know? Not unlike the lieutenant in a combat unit.
Holy cow, I previewed my post and it came out huge, but I can't take anything out, it's my Cliff Notes version of "Into Thin Air", quite relevant to the topic at hand.
Not for anyone who watched "Into thin air".
Although I've never seen the movie, I highly recommend the book by John Krakauer.
A pretty good climber and professional journalist, Krakauer was commissioned by National Geographic to write an article about attempting the summit of Everest, embedded into a group composed of a few world-class climbers, the Sherpa support team and a bunch of wealthy tourists, including a socialite or two.
Krakauer relates some lethally incompetent things that went on up there, try this one on for size - there were three or four teams camping in the North Col, final camp for the summit assault and already above the "death zone". A member of the Taiwanese team came out of his tent wearing nothing but socks, to take a dump on the icy edge of the very high and steep Lhotse Face. Images of shit cascading down a Himalayan ice face aside, it's not only bad form (there can always be climbers making their way up) but also dangerous as hell. Well the dumb bastard slipped and tumbled over a thousand meters to his death, buck-naked except for his socks, on the frozen roof of the world. You can't make stuff like this up, seriously.
Just a couple of hundred meters from the summit via the Lhotse route, there's a small but nasty vertical wall called The Hillary Step, which can only be climbed one person at a time. On the way up, Krakauer saw to his dismay that there was a bottleneck here, taking a few hours for everybody to make it past this final obstacle, time already against them. Once on the summit, the teams lingered in a daze even as the monsoon clouds were looming large.
On the way back, the bottleneck was reversed, now there was a line to climb down the Hillary Step. By the time everybody had passed, it was already too late - the sun was setting, the canned oxygen supply was running out, the storm was already there and temperatures were plummeting, textbook description of a worst-case scenario.
Every breath and step a battle that took every ounce of effort and concentration, Krakauer staggered down in zero-visibility conditions, passing some dying or dead comrades along the way, finally reaching the North Col at around midnight.
Here's the thing - even with optimal visibility and mellow temperatures, severe fatigue (that inner reserve of energy was depleted in the final push for the summit) and lack of oxygen will impair the ability to think, reason, move and react in a place where any misstep can be fatal. Many climbers have passed dead colleagues on the way down and that information does not compute in their brains at the moment, personal survival overrides any other concern, only later do horror and regret coalesce and sink their hooks.
Anyway, Krakauer collapsed in his tent and managed to sleep even while fighting for breath in the "death zone", finally awaking to tragedy unfolding around him, I believe it was eighteen people who died on the mountain that time.
Well that's more or less how I remember "Into Thin Air". Give it a shot, it managed to be gripping even as I already knew the story.
Finally, a great climbing movie and true story, done as a documentary with dramatizations, is "Touching The Void", in which two British guys climb a South American peak. On the way down (surprise surprise), one of them falls to certain death, off a cliff and into a crevasse - only he survives. Alone and with a shattered leg, he must drag his way back down the mountain before his distraught teammate abandons base camp, or be truly left for dead.
My bad, maybe I should have written it thusly:
As for an Axl "No supper for you until you finish an album" Rose, stop standing up your fans at gigs, leaving behind a wake of riots in arenas across the western world.
It took longer to release Chinese Democracy than it took NASA to send a human to the Moon from scratch. Or for Voyager 2 to conduct a leisurely tour of our solar system's gas giants. Or for light to travel the distance between Earth and Sirius and back again.
Thanks for reminding me about Morrison, but I'd pick Arthur Lee of Love over Morrison any day of the week, cases in point:
- When Lee rented an apartment in Venice Beach, a short while later so did Morrison.
- Then Lee got himself a Mustang convertible, and soon enough, Morrison could be seen around town driving one of those.
- Finally, Lee adopted a Rottweiler, and a couple of months later, you guessed it, Morrison got himself one.
Those are the three examples that I know of. When asked if he was annoyed at Morrison for co-opting his thing, Lee smiled and replied that he was mostly flattered.
So there you have it, Arthur Lee was The Man in that particular scenario.
Aw sh*t! I just remembered another guy that belongs on the list, George Clinton of Parliament/Funkadelic. And in spaced-out jazz, there's the one and only Sun Ra.
Shamans were the rock stars of the day.
Conversely, some rock stars are shaman-like figures for modern times. I'm picturing guys like Jimi Hendrix, Robert Plant, Iggy Pop, Peter Gabriel while in Genesis, David Byrne while in The Talking Heads (particularly in albums such as Remain In Light and Speaking In Tongues), Ian Astbury while in The Cult, Wayne Coyne of The Flaming Lips, most certainly extreme characters like GG Allin, or Wendy O. Williams of The Plasmatics. I'd even go out on a limb and place Freddie Mercury on my list.
Not Bono, though, there's a difference between being a shaman and a preacher, but I'm not saying that's necessarily a bad thing.
Neither Mick Jagger nor Marilyn Manson, there's too much of the cynical multimillionaire businessmen in them.
Finally, as for an Axl Rose, no supper for you until you finish that album and stop standing up your fans at gigs.
The Japanese have a man who can bend a leg right back over his head with every step
Then who's the guy that can do a forward aerial half turn with every alternate step?
Both franchises got similarly raped by dubious quality prequels.
The Star Trek franchise lost me a long time ago, but I'm genuinely intrigued by this new film. At this point in time, a project helmed by JJ Abrams has far more potential than any other overseen by Lucas.
Consider how Abrams has surrounded himself with hardcore trekkies and genuinely takes feedback from them, while Lucas insisted on being the sole "intellectual author" of his prequels, giving us the unsightly spectacles of lil' superboy Anakin, baby Greedo and that infamous Gungan.
Another great difference is dialogue and filming itself, Lucas "can write that shit but sure as hell can't say it" and puts acting on a secondary plane, too busy visualizing how to fill the green screen. In contrast, Abrams has a keener eye and ear for these things.
Better still, Abrams is aware that he has something to prove here, voluntarily put himself in an uncomfortable position as a creative challenge, and I can respect that.
Bottom line, I'll pay money to see this prequel (as most of us here will) and will reserve criticism for afterward.
The idea that the universe was made just for us â" known as the anthropic principle â" debuted in 1973 when Brandon Carter...
That's not the way I've always heard it, it's more along the lines of:
Question: Why is the universe the way it is?
Answer: Because if it were any other way, we wouldn't be here to observe it and pose the question.
Sort of like Descartes' "Cogito ergo sum" on a cosmic level.
Anyone even remotely interested in this should be aware of the novels of David Wishart. He is a Classics scholar who writes pop fiction detective novels set in ancient Rome @30 CE.
Now that is a fascinating idea. Knowing nothing about these novels, I'm visualizing something along the lines of an ancient version of Sherlock Holmes, relying on Aristotelian logic to crack the case, and I'm gonna get a bit silly here, I'm sure the narratives are much more sophisticated:
A much-loved Roman general and nobleman, in charge of the construction of the Pompeii aqueduct, has been found dead in the bath of his villa, with slit wrists. The authorities dismiss it as a suicide, but the grieving widow believes otherwise and hires our intrepid hero. The main suspect is an embittered rival general who was turned down for the aqueduct project by Caesar himself, but the mastermind turns out to be a double-crossing best friend, secretly allied with a Herculaneum consortium, having paid a pound of salt and promising citizenship for the children of a Spartan slave to bribe him into carrying out the dirty deed. The Spartan, of course, was the deceased general's majordomo (butler).
Fourty years later and I get the philosophical stuff but the special effects would seem to indicate Kubrick was on acid.
If Kubrick ever dropped acid, which for some reason I doubt, I could only picture him doing it way before the hippie boom and with Sandoz Labs material.
Actually, a fair amount of the trippy sequence was done in New York City, before Space Odyssey was in full-fledged production. Fascinated for a time with the behavior of "exotic" liquids when they came into contact with each other, Kubrick set up a special rig to film single droplets of various substances of different colors, densities and viscosities interacting with some medium on a petri dish.
Mind you, not all were substances you could find at your local chemist or lava lamp dealer, the whole thing was a painstaking process, which is why I attribute it more to sheer intellectual curiosity than to what Captain Kirk referred to as LDS, I guess nobody gets high in the Federation, except with Romulan ale, but I digress.
Mind-numbingly methodical as dear old Stanley was, he supposedly filmed hundreds of these things and chose a few for the Stargate sequence. The scenes speak for themselves, I can see why Kubrick was fascinated with the utterly alien aesthetic qualities of his experiments, and am still impressed at how these tiny events can be blown up to fill a gigantic film screen.
Did it sing "Bicycle Built for Two", slowing down and getting deeper as it ran out of power?
I thought the tune's name was either "Daisy Daisy" or "Daisy Bell". In any case, it was used in 2001 because it was actually the first tune ever sung by a computer (the IBM 7094), in 1961. Here's an mp3 file link of that historic recording: http://audio.textfiles.com/sounds/daisy.mp3
Alan Greenspan is an admirer of Ayn Rand, and based his economic models on the assumption that the selfish aspect of man must be encouraged, that free and unregulated markets would bring about prosperity and a purer form of democracy than government could ever manage. Greenspan was so convincing that he sold this lemon to Bill Clinton back in 1992. While being questioned by Congress about the housing credit fiasco and the subsequent meltdown, Greenspan confessed that "there was a factor he did not consider in his models". Which one is that, he was asked? "The human factor", he answered.
Ayn Rand's ideas are quaint relics of the Cold War, when the western political climate attempted to counterbalance the ideals of the Soviet system, which instead of liberating the population from tyranny, oppressed them worse than before. Well, now that the Soviet Union has gone the way of the dodo, surely it's time to put away Rand's ideas as overly simplistic.
Yeah, I read and loved Fountainhead and Atlas back in college, now I see the huge gaping holes in the ideas of those books.
Joe the Plumber was investigated more thoroughly than William Ayers, Jeremiah Wright and Tony Rezco, combined.
However, the three subjects (the plumber doesn't count) were brought up by either McCain, Palin or even Hillary back in the primaries.
As for the so-called plumber, spare us, please. Who invokes his name every thirty seconds, Obama? No, McCain and Palin. He's also gotten himself an agent and wants to cut a country music album, the asshole wants and seeks all the free publicity he can get. Then he said things so outlandish, that he was smacked down on Faux News, of all places! Once again, please, spare us.
How often did the media bring up McCain's associations with characters like Gordon Liddy, Charles Keating and that Texas megachurch crackpot, who supports Israel so it can be destroyed to bring about the second coming in his lifetime?
Moreover, how often have the press stated the fact that the Bush and Bin Laden families were business partners and have been dear, dear friends for decades now? Much less often than we've heard the names Ayers and Wright.
Y'all quit with the cherry pickin' now, it's become extremely tiresome, leads to nowhere and says more about you than about whatever it is you're talking about.