easy things like turning our TVs off at the wall rather than putting them on standby
I'll start doing this when I am able to buy an affordable model that doesn't require me to reprogram all the bloody channels and settings every time the thing gets unpowered.
We'll have poor harvests that are three times as big as previous poor harvests? We'll have poor harvests three times as often as we do now? We'll have harvests that yield only one-third as much as we do now? Or something else?
Er... if you read TFA closely, the report doesn't actually say what the headline seems to imply -- i.e., that greenhouse gases have been demonstrated to be more effective in causing global warming than previously thought. It says that the effects of global warming have been modeled to be more drastic than previously thought.
This is a subtle but vitally important distinction that the writers of the article themselves don't seem to grasp. To quote from TFA:
But Miles Allen, a lecturer on atmospheric physics at Oxford University, said assessing a "safe level" of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was "a bit like asking a doctor what's a safe number of cigarettes to smoke per day".
"There isn't one but at the same time people do smoke and live until they're 90," he told Today.
"It's one of those difficult areas where we're talking about changing degrees of risk rather than a very definite number after which we can say with absolute certainty that certain things will happen."
Given that CO2 is naturally found in the atmosphere, and was so long before humanity came on the scene, and is essential for the continuation of plant life on this planet, Allen's comparison of it to an external disease-causing agent is a very odd statement.
I'm waiting to see a study on global warming that actually takes into account the fact that we are still coming out of the last ice age (or out of the Little Ice Age); that the planet (and our species) has survived far more drastic climate change in the past; and that such climate change had nothing to do with human action. When those facts (and they are facts) are taken into account, how much actual evidence is there that the current climate change is due to human causes? Is there any at all?
I don't intend this as a troll. Seriously, if anyone can link to studies that take those facts into account, I'd very much like to read them.
Yeah, the only thing I really disliked about Fantastic Four was the mangling of Doom's whole story almost beyond recognition. That aside (and granted, that's no small flaw), I thought the movie perfectly captured the loopy, angsty, jokey, half-soap-opera-half-cartoon feel of the Lee/Kirby comic from the 1960's (and I'm speaking as someone who read those when they were new). The interplay between Johnny and Ben was spot-on perfect, and the SPFX were quite good. And come on -- it had Willie Lumpkin in it!
And never has a comic book artist's style been so faithfully translated into eye-popping live action as in Sin City. I'm certain that even if I hadn't seen Frank Miller's name over the title, I'd have known two minutes into the movie that it was Miller's work. The whole thing looked like a comic book; you could swear that Miller himself had drawn Mickey Rourke and Elijah Wood and even himself, right up there on the screen.
Granted, if you don't share Miller's almost pornographic fascination with the violent and the grotesque, the movie may not appeal. But that's a question of personal taste, not of quality.
You miss my point, which was that sequels are not a recent invention, and that they were not invented by Hollywood. True, BoF was a Hollywood movie -- but that doesn't invalidate the other examples I cited, and it can hardly be called a "recent" instance except by a geological yardstick.
Yes and no. I stand by my original statement. Yours clarifies and expands on it (and I thank you for that), but does not contradict it.
Yes, "Tolkien wrote parts of what is now The Silmarillion" years before ever committing a word of The Hobbit to paper, yes. But those were written primarily for his own pleasure, not for publication. He submitted them, however, when the publisher -- wanting to cash in on the success of The Hobbit -- asked him if he had any more stuff like it. The publisher rejected them (even those of us who love The Silmarillion must admit that it bears only a distant similarity to The Hobbit), but then encouraged Tolkien to write a more accessible sequel. Tolkien agreed, and began LOTR -- then, being a perfectionist and a procrastinator (the two often go hand in hand), fiddled about with it for 16 years. True, Tolkien wasn't "rushing" (your words, not mine) to cash in -- but it was written, or at least begun, at the prompting of a publisher hoping to cash in (which is what I said originally, albeit perhaps less clearly than I ought to have done). By the time Tolkien was done with LOTR, The Hobbit was no longer a fresh success, and its sequel had vastly outgrown the publisher's expectations as far as size, complexity, and level of difficulty -- this is why the publisher was willing to take it, but not willing to invest much in it.
My source for this: Humphrey Carpenter's bio of Tolkien, as well as various comments of Tolkien's, made in his letters and in interviews.
the exploitation of old stories instead of creating new ones
I don't wholly disagree with you, but this particular canard is one that always gets my goat. There is ample room in art for reusing old stories and still creating valuable art. There is a difference between using old stories and "exploitation" -- but "creating new ones" is not the only possible route to real art.
Think of, oh, say, Gone with the Wind or The Wizard of Oz? They were just screen adaptations of bestsellers.
How about James Joyce retelling the Odyssey in Ulysses? Tolkien reusing storylines from the Finnish Kalevala in The Silmarillion? Shakespeare retelling Greek tragedies? Or maybe Chaucer putting folktales in the mouths of his characters? Or how about Ovid reworking the Greek myths? Maybe the story of Noah as a variation on flood myths found in older literature of the cultures surrounding the ancient Jews?
Yeah, the people who wrote those definitely looked washed up. Especially that Noah story;-)
I don't get why so many people seem to think that endless sequels are some phenomenon that Hollywood recently invented.
Lord of the Rings was a sequel that Tolkien was encouraged to write to cash in on the success of The Hobbit.
Ditto Huckleberry Finn as a sequel to Tom Sawyer.
Ditto Bride of Frankenstein as a sequel to Frankenstein.
All of these are pretty widely considered to be superior to their originals.
Then there are the endless Pink Panther series, the "Thin Man" movies, the multiple history plays by Shakespeare, various sequels built into the books of the Hebrew Bible, and even the Aeneid and the Odyssey, both of which are sequels to the Iliad.
Sure, most sequels don't approach the level of artistry of many of the above. But a sequel per se, even one motivated by the desire to cash in on the original, is not a priori a bad thing. The judgment cannot be made till after the sequel is made.
most of the sheeple voters in america care more about whether a woman can terminate an unwanted pregnancy or if two men can have a sexual relationship or what their kids should learn about the formation of the earth and the species that inhabit it than issues that really matter like the loss of civil liberties or the increasing power of Big Media or the various wars their givernment has gotten involved in or even wether someone in india or china will take their job tommorow.
Speaking as a gay man, it's nice to know that my freedom to have a sexual relationship doesn't "really matter" and that I should be more worried about "the increasing power of Big Media" than about whether I spend the rest of my life alone. Thanks so much for clarifying that for me.
I guess with the world going to a cashless society in less than 20 years
I've been hearing about the imminent arrival of a cashless society all my life. I'm now in my mid-40's. While there is a growing use of non-cash means of payment, I have serious doubts that cash will go out of use -- there are far too many circumstances when it's useful. I envision something more like what's happened with print media -- sure, there are many of their older uses that have been co-opted by radio, TV, movies, the Internet, e-books, databases, etc., but the "paperless society" that was predicted when computers began to spread just hasn't happened and, I suspect, never will. Ditto for the "cashless society".
I have read it. Behe starts with an interesting idea, and brings out an impressive array of research, but his arguments don't stand up very well to careful logic.
I have not been all that impressed with Pandora's matching ability. Maybe I just make odd associations, but all too often the things it decides are similar to what I've entered in for a particular station just plain don't fit. Even after telling it dozens of times which ones don't fit, it keeps playing others that -- to me, at least -- sound more like the stuff I tell it not to play than like the stuff I really want.
What's more, my tastes in music are unusually broad. In a given day, I may listen to, say, Brave Combo, John Denver, the Violent Femmes, the Kings College Choir, King Crimson, MC Hammer, the Singing Nun, the cast recording from Zombie Prom, Manowar, Lena Willemark, Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Andrews Sisters, and Venus Envy. How in the world would any matching system figure out what it should put onto my player?
Er... so far at least, it's Europe who's doing this, not the U.S.A. I fail to see what any statements of the American president on the American Constitution (even setting aside for the moment the question of whether they were actually made by him) have to do with a piece of European legislation.
You can view your hotmail on Microsoft's Windows Live beta, displayed pretty similarly to the way that Gmail is displayed on your personalized Google homepage. Not quite the same as Google Desktop's version, but not bad, and much nicer than the bloated, ugly, and badly organized Hotmail.com web page.
Slashdot Mirror
easy things like turning our TVs off at the wall rather than putting them on standby
I'll start doing this when I am able to buy an affordable model that doesn't require me to reprogram all the bloody channels and settings every time the thing gets unpowered.
What exactly is "tripling of poor harvests"?
We'll have poor harvests that are three times as big as previous poor harvests? We'll have poor harvests three times as often as we do now? We'll have harvests that yield only one-third as much as we do now? Or something else?
And how is "poor harvests" defined?
Er ... if you read TFA closely, the report doesn't actually say what the headline seems to imply -- i.e., that greenhouse gases have been demonstrated to be more effective in causing global warming than previously thought. It says that the effects of global warming have been modeled to be more drastic than previously thought.
This is a subtle but vitally important distinction that the writers of the article themselves don't seem to grasp. To quote from TFA:
But Miles Allen, a lecturer on atmospheric physics at Oxford University, said assessing a "safe level" of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was "a bit like asking a doctor what's a safe number of cigarettes to smoke per day".
"There isn't one but at the same time people do smoke and live until they're 90," he told Today.
"It's one of those difficult areas where we're talking about changing degrees of risk rather than a very definite number after which we can say with absolute certainty that certain things will happen."
Given that CO2 is naturally found in the atmosphere, and was so long before humanity came on the scene, and is essential for the continuation of plant life on this planet, Allen's comparison of it to an external disease-causing agent is a very odd statement.
I'm waiting to see a study on global warming that actually takes into account the fact that we are still coming out of the last ice age (or out of the Little Ice Age); that the planet (and our species) has survived far more drastic climate change in the past; and that such climate change had nothing to do with human action. When those facts (and they are facts) are taken into account, how much actual evidence is there that the current climate change is due to human causes? Is there any at all?
I don't intend this as a troll. Seriously, if anyone can link to studies that take those facts into account, I'd very much like to read them.
Yeah, the only thing I really disliked about Fantastic Four was the mangling of Doom's whole story almost beyond recognition. That aside (and granted, that's no small flaw), I thought the movie perfectly captured the loopy, angsty, jokey, half-soap-opera-half-cartoon feel of the Lee/Kirby comic from the 1960's (and I'm speaking as someone who read those when they were new). The interplay between Johnny and Ben was spot-on perfect, and the SPFX were quite good. And come on -- it had Willie Lumpkin in it!
And never has a comic book artist's style been so faithfully translated into eye-popping live action as in Sin City. I'm certain that even if I hadn't seen Frank Miller's name over the title, I'd have known two minutes into the movie that it was Miller's work. The whole thing looked like a comic book; you could swear that Miller himself had drawn Mickey Rourke and Elijah Wood and even himself, right up there on the screen.
Granted, if you don't share Miller's almost pornographic fascination with the violent and the grotesque, the movie may not appeal. But that's a question of personal taste, not of quality.
You miss my point, which was that sequels are not a recent invention, and that they were not invented by Hollywood. True, BoF was a Hollywood movie -- but that doesn't invalidate the other examples I cited, and it can hardly be called a "recent" instance except by a geological yardstick.
Yes and no. I stand by my original statement. Yours clarifies and expands on it (and I thank you for that), but does not contradict it.
Yes, "Tolkien wrote parts of what is now The Silmarillion" years before ever committing a word of The Hobbit to paper, yes. But those were written primarily for his own pleasure, not for publication. He submitted them, however, when the publisher -- wanting to cash in on the success of The Hobbit -- asked him if he had any more stuff like it. The publisher rejected them (even those of us who love The Silmarillion must admit that it bears only a distant similarity to The Hobbit), but then encouraged Tolkien to write a more accessible sequel. Tolkien agreed, and began LOTR -- then, being a perfectionist and a procrastinator (the two often go hand in hand), fiddled about with it for 16 years. True, Tolkien wasn't "rushing" (your words, not mine) to cash in -- but it was written, or at least begun, at the prompting of a publisher hoping to cash in (which is what I said originally, albeit perhaps less clearly than I ought to have done). By the time Tolkien was done with LOTR, The Hobbit was no longer a fresh success, and its sequel had vastly outgrown the publisher's expectations as far as size, complexity, and level of difficulty -- this is why the publisher was willing to take it, but not willing to invest much in it.
My source for this: Humphrey Carpenter's bio of Tolkien, as well as various comments of Tolkien's, made in his letters and in interviews.
I repeat:
I refer you to Sturgeon's Law(more accurately called Sturgeon's Revelation).
the exploitation of old stories instead of creating new ones
;-)
I don't wholly disagree with you, but this particular canard is one that always gets my goat. There is ample room in art for reusing old stories and still creating valuable art. There is a difference between using old stories and "exploitation" -- but "creating new ones" is not the only possible route to real art.
Think of, oh, say, Gone with the Wind or The Wizard of Oz? They were just screen adaptations of bestsellers.
How about James Joyce retelling the Odyssey in Ulysses? Tolkien reusing storylines from the Finnish Kalevala in The Silmarillion? Shakespeare retelling Greek tragedies? Or maybe Chaucer putting folktales in the mouths of his characters? Or how about Ovid reworking the Greek myths? Maybe the story of Noah as a variation on flood myths found in older literature of the cultures surrounding the ancient Jews?
Yeah, the people who wrote those definitely looked washed up. Especially that Noah story
I don't get why so many people seem to think that endless sequels are some phenomenon that Hollywood recently invented.
Lord of the Rings was a sequel that Tolkien was encouraged to write to cash in on the success of The Hobbit.
Ditto Huckleberry Finn as a sequel to Tom Sawyer.
Ditto Bride of Frankenstein as a sequel to Frankenstein.
All of these are pretty widely considered to be superior to their originals.
Then there are the endless Pink Panther series, the "Thin Man" movies, the multiple history plays by Shakespeare, various sequels built into the books of the Hebrew Bible, and even the Aeneid and the Odyssey, both of which are sequels to the Iliad.
Sure, most sequels don't approach the level of artistry of many of the above. But a sequel per se, even one motivated by the desire to cash in on the original, is not a priori a bad thing. The judgment cannot be made till after the sequel is made.
I refer you to Sturgeon's Law (more accurately called Sturgeon's Revelation).
we're all well educated athiests Did that education include spelling, now? ;-)
You are aware that Universities are also state-funded throughout the civilised world?
Not all of them.
I'm a novelist. How do I sell my art "face-to-face"?
most of the sheeple voters in america care more about whether a woman can terminate an unwanted pregnancy or if two men can have a sexual relationship or what their kids should learn about the formation of the earth and the species that inhabit it than issues that really matter like the loss of civil liberties or the increasing power of Big Media or the various wars their givernment has gotten involved in or even wether someone in india or china will take their job tommorow.
Speaking as a gay man, it's nice to know that my freedom to have a sexual relationship doesn't "really matter" and that I should be more worried about "the increasing power of Big Media" than about whether I spend the rest of my life alone. Thanks so much for clarifying that for me.
Off topic, I know, but:
I guess with the world going to a cashless society in less than 20 years
I've been hearing about the imminent arrival of a cashless society all my life. I'm now in my mid-40's. While there is a growing use of non-cash means of payment, I have serious doubts that cash will go out of use -- there are far too many circumstances when it's useful. I envision something more like what's happened with print media -- sure, there are many of their older uses that have been co-opted by radio, TV, movies, the Internet, e-books, databases, etc., but the "paperless society" that was predicted when computers began to spread just hasn't happened and, I suspect, never will. Ditto for the "cashless society".
I have read it. Behe starts with an interesting idea, and brings out an impressive array of research, but his arguments don't stand up very well to careful logic.
For a pretty thorough drubbing of Behe's flawed premise, see Tower of Babel: The Evidence Against the New Creationism by Robert T. Pennock.
Got any other suggestions?
I have not been all that impressed with Pandora's matching ability. Maybe I just make odd associations, but all too often the things it decides are similar to what I've entered in for a particular station just plain don't fit. Even after telling it dozens of times which ones don't fit, it keeps playing others that -- to me, at least -- sound more like the stuff I tell it not to play than like the stuff I really want.
What's more, my tastes in music are unusually broad. In a given day, I may listen to, say, Brave Combo, John Denver, the Violent Femmes, the Kings College Choir, King Crimson, MC Hammer, the Singing Nun, the cast recording from Zombie Prom, Manowar, Lena Willemark, Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Andrews Sisters, and Venus Envy. How in the world would any matching system figure out what it should put onto my player?
Er ... so far at least, it's Europe who's doing this, not the U.S.A. I fail to see what any statements of the American president on the American Constitution (even setting aside for the moment the question of whether they were actually made by him) have to do with a piece of European legislation.
You can view your hotmail on Microsoft's Windows Live beta, displayed pretty similarly to the way that Gmail is displayed on your personalized Google homepage. Not quite the same as Google Desktop's version, but not bad, and much nicer than the bloated, ugly, and badly organized Hotmail.com web page.
... universal health care for narwhals!
What's wrong with "much else"? What would you have preferred? "A bunch of other junk"?
Is that why she keeps punching you in the mouth? Now I get it!
That's just what they want you to think...
Actually, Fowler prefers "different to".
... but I'm definitely putting "Google user" down on my next loan application.
You'd think an omniscient Deity would know about UPSes ...