The only thoughts '12 Monkeys' provoked for me were "could I choke myself until I pass out and so avoid watching the rest of this awful film?" And I've seen it more than once, now, so it's not like I didn't give it a chance.
If nothing else, though, Joss Whedon made one movie that was below par--George Lucas went and made three that were absolutely horrible.
Which probably shouldn't detract from the goodness of the original trilogy, but seriously, when I think of Darth Vader now I don't think of "it is useless to resist!" but rather "NOOOOOOOOO!"
Not even close...first of all, such a system wouldn't tell you anything about the interaction of the newly transgenic protein with the host species' proteome (i.e., the normal protein background of say, corn); it would only tell you what the protein does by itself. And if you don't know that already, why would you be trying to insert it into food?
Nor is metagenomics all that interesting in pure cultures, where you've got billions of bugs with almost identical genomes. It will be much more useful in an extremely diverse collection of bugs (say, whatever might be growing in a soil sample) where the collection of genomes will be much more diverse. Particularly when you consider that the vast majority of bugs don't lend themselves to sterile culturing, and thus we've had no good way to learn about them so far.
So, to clarify, your tale of woe is that you went in to buy something knowing it would cost more than ordering it. When you found the item at an extravagant price, you tried to get a discount on the basis of the damaged paackage (which probably means the plastic shrink wrap around the spindle in this case) despite no evidence of damage to the item itself. When the manager quite reasonably refused to let you have it for less, you decided to buy them cheaper somewhere else. You then wrote a post about it.
Man, I guess you got pretty boned, huh? Those capitalist running dogs.
Fair enough. Admittedly I'm a newcomer to the show, so I don't really have a lot of context by which to judge. And Tenant isn't bad by any means--just a bit uneven in my view. I, too, look forward to season 3.
Do you follow Torchwood, by any chance? I wasn't thrilled at first, but I have to admit it seems to improve as it goes on, at least through the first half of the season.
Jettisoning Rose in another dimension was a step in the right direction. Now, if we could just find a way for Christopher Eccleston to come back, the show might have a chance to be less annoying.
Tenant has moments ("that's the sort of man I am" from 'The Christmas Invasion') but on the whole he just seems too goofy for a guy who's supposed to exploring the whole of time and space.
In any case, it's nice to know it will be around for a while.
Somewhere high above the planet's surface, Jack Thompson's parachute opens, and he begins his slow descent in another mission to save the world from video game-inspired horror. God speed, you American hero!
So, this is a glove that reduces hand fatigue, huh? Yeah, so, uh, have they tested it to see the effects of getting baby oil or hand lotion on it? And are the palms abrasive at all? I mean, just out of curiosity. Because I like science, and stuff.
That's cool, and obviously the end result was pretty great for him. But what kind of bitch grandma gives her BLIND grandson a video game system for Christmas? What did he get for his birthday, a telescope?
"The next step is to produce a safe, compact storage system for the compound that is both lightweight and affordable."
Oh, so you mean, all we have to do now is figure out a way to store hydrogen that's safe, compact, lightweight, and affordable? Well hell, son, why didn't you say so? Our troubles are over!
I don't think it was based on a book. There's a Robin Cook novel called 'Outbreak' that I believe deals with the Ebola virus, but the plot is completely different, and it was adapted into a made for tv movie called 'Robin Cook's Outbreak' or something like that. Though in the same vein, I'd second 'The Hot Zone,' or the author's second book 'The Cobra Event,' which is a fictional depiction of a bioterrorism attack in NYC.
According to CNN.com, a gas price bump is expected now because people are expected to drive more with the expanded daylight hours.
So wait, Washington passed a law to change DST early...the early DST change is now being used to justify gas price increases? Coincidence? Happenstance?
Sorry all, maybe my TFH is a little tight this morning.
Exactly my point. I'm not saying every religious person should be equated with the nuts who bomb buildings, or brainwash their kids into the faith, but they do believe in things that are largely incompatible with what we know of the world. That's irrational no matter how you try to spin it.
Caveat: slavish dedication to 'rationality' over all else is equally inappropriate: we're human, and doing irrational things is commonly accepted in some circles. Trying to deny this is pointless.
Why should any rational person tolerate any irrational belief system, particularly one that's caused as much grief as organized religion? The religious nuts certainly don't have a problem going after the nonbelievers.
All the blame for his behavior BELONGS on him. Period. Full stop. It doesn't matter if she beat him raw with a garden hose every day after school: he was the one in the alley, and he was the one who made the decision to do what he did. Unless you think the stepmother, in her 7 years with the kid (and hardly during his formative years) did something that completely deranged his ability to distinguish right and wrong, I think it's completely off-base to suggest she deserves blame for his actions.
As for not believing a killer's relatives, you can make your own choice. I think the kind of situation you describe, where relatives claim the killer couldn't be guilty, have more to do with self-deception and denial than with an intent to deceive others, but that's me. And it seems to me if she really wanted to make herself sound good here, she wouldn't be talking about hating him, and punishing him, and begging the police to bring him in--she'd be emphasizing how they gave him so many chances, and they tried to encourage his positive behaviors, and they were always there no matter what he did, blah blah blah. I suppose she *could* be telling us the less flattering stuff to make her story *sound* more believable, but that's getting a bit convoluted. Take it with as many grains of salt as you need.
It's not a question of intelligence as much as cunning. Many people with sociopathic tendencies are born manipulators--they learn very early on how to push other people's buttons for their own benefit or amusement. He certainly displayed this ability when he manipulated the child welfare system into harassing his parents. So for him to make a sensational claim that attracts media attention is entirely plausible. It won't convince a judge, or a parole board, but it will get him attention and allow him to exert some control over his environment. Even if nothing concrete comes from it, he probably just enjoys jerking people around. Doesn't require a huge amount of brainpower to know that saying something provocative will get you attention.
Of course, keep stressing the potential harm, that way you can hopefully provoke an emotional knee-jerk response, and if you're lucky, you get the added benefit of making the other guy look like a prick who hates cops.
This was a bit bigger than "an hour spent in traffic": closing roads and bridges, shutting down the harbor all have real economic consequences, in terms of business lost, deals foregone, possible tourism diverted, etc. This costs everybody, including those tax-paying bomb technicians. After all, Turner felt it was a big enough deal to warrant $2 million in hush money, so obviously we're talking about more than a few Bostonians being late to work.
Secondly, the possible consequences (dead bomb techs, for one) are only part of determining the response. You also consider the rate of error. In Iraq, it makes sense to treat every strange object by the roadside as a possible IED, because many of them probably are. The probability of an IED in Boston is a bit lower. So the BPD does the safe thing, they close a road, retrieve one of the gadgets, and detonate it. They should see pretty quickly there are no explosive traces, and no anthrax or nerve gas. At this point, they should be able to say that the probably of the rest of the signs reported being bombs is even lower, and so warrant a less dramatic response.
You make it very clear that you support a course of action that minimizes risk to the bomb techs, but why stop there? Why not raise taxes in Boston until there's enough money to encase every single police in a full suit of body armor, and replace all the cars with Bradley fighting vehicles, so as to make policing as safe as is humanly possible?
Oh wait, because that would be a ridiculous and disproportionate response to the threat, and would have negative spillover effects greatly in excess of the possible benefits. Just like their response in the ATHF case. You can keep beating your chest about saving the lives of those brave police officers, but that doesn't change the fact that a certain amount of precaution is healthy, and a certain amount is excessive.
Actually, the benefit of living in a free society is that I'm free to comment pretty much on anything I want, including pent-up windbags such as yourself who beat their chests and think that because they've 'seen the elephant' they alone have anything worthwhile to say about it.
Sure, they have to take reported threats seriously, but after detonating the first one and finding no evidence of explosives or hazardous material, is it really necessary to treat each subsequent one with the same degree of caution?
Maybe in Karbala you need to treat every single out of place item as a potential IED, but traffic aside, I'm not sure Beantown is such a hostile environment.
Unless I'm mistaken, it's a reference to the old sci-fi show 'Sliders' in which boy genius Jerry O'Connell's Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky bridge machine sends him and a bunch of hapless comrades traveling from one parallel world to another with no way to get home.
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The only thoughts '12 Monkeys' provoked for me were "could I choke myself until I pass out and so avoid watching the rest of this awful film?" And I've seen it more than once, now, so it's not like I didn't give it a chance.
If nothing else, though, Joss Whedon made one movie that was below par--George Lucas went and made three that were absolutely horrible.
Which probably shouldn't detract from the goodness of the original trilogy, but seriously, when I think of Darth Vader now I don't think of "it is useless to resist!" but rather "NOOOOOOOOO!"
Lame, lame, lame.
Not even close...first of all, such a system wouldn't tell you anything about the interaction of the newly transgenic protein with the host species' proteome (i.e., the normal protein background of say, corn); it would only tell you what the protein does by itself. And if you don't know that already, why would you be trying to insert it into food?
Nor is metagenomics all that interesting in pure cultures, where you've got billions of bugs with almost identical genomes. It will be much more useful in an extremely diverse collection of bugs (say, whatever might be growing in a soil sample) where the collection of genomes will be much more diverse. Particularly when you consider that the vast majority of bugs don't lend themselves to sterile culturing, and thus we've had no good way to learn about them so far.
So, to clarify, your tale of woe is that you went in to buy something knowing it would cost more than ordering it. When you found the item at an extravagant price, you tried to get a discount on the basis of the damaged paackage (which probably means the plastic shrink wrap around the spindle in this case) despite no evidence of damage to the item itself. When the manager quite reasonably refused to let you have it for less, you decided to buy them cheaper somewhere else. You then wrote a post about it. Man, I guess you got pretty boned, huh? Those capitalist running dogs.
Fair enough. Admittedly I'm a newcomer to the show, so I don't really have a lot of context by which to judge. And Tenant isn't bad by any means--just a bit uneven in my view. I, too, look forward to season 3.
Do you follow Torchwood, by any chance? I wasn't thrilled at first, but I have to admit it seems to improve as it goes on, at least through the first half of the season.
Jettisoning Rose in another dimension was a step in the right direction. Now, if we could just find a way for Christopher Eccleston to come back, the show might have a chance to be less annoying.
Tenant has moments ("that's the sort of man I am" from 'The Christmas Invasion') but on the whole he just seems too goofy for a guy who's supposed to exploring the whole of time and space.
In any case, it's nice to know it will be around for a while.
Somewhere high above the planet's surface, Jack Thompson's parachute opens, and he begins his slow descent in another mission to save the world from video game-inspired horror. God speed, you American hero!
So, this is a glove that reduces hand fatigue, huh? Yeah, so, uh, have they tested it to see the effects of getting baby oil or hand lotion on it? And are the palms abrasive at all? I mean, just out of curiosity. Because I like science, and stuff.
That's cool, and obviously the end result was pretty great for him. But what kind of bitch grandma gives her BLIND grandson a video game system for Christmas? What did he get for his birthday, a telescope?
"The next step is to produce a safe, compact storage system for the compound that is both lightweight and affordable."
Oh, so you mean, all we have to do now is figure out a way to store hydrogen that's safe, compact, lightweight, and affordable? Well hell, son, why didn't you say so? Our troubles are over!
I don't think it was based on a book. There's a Robin Cook novel called 'Outbreak' that I believe deals with the Ebola virus, but the plot is completely different, and it was adapted into a made for tv movie called 'Robin Cook's Outbreak' or something like that. Though in the same vein, I'd second 'The Hot Zone,' or the author's second book 'The Cobra Event,' which is a fictional depiction of a bioterrorism attack in NYC.
According to CNN.com, a gas price bump is expected now because people are expected to drive more with the expanded daylight hours.
So wait, Washington passed a law to change DST early...the early DST change is now being used to justify gas price increases? Coincidence? Happenstance?
Sorry all, maybe my TFH is a little tight this morning.
So, this whole system is just a series of tubes?
Exactly my point. I'm not saying every religious person should be equated with the nuts who bomb buildings, or brainwash their kids into the faith, but they do believe in things that are largely incompatible with what we know of the world. That's irrational no matter how you try to spin it.
Caveat: slavish dedication to 'rationality' over all else is equally inappropriate: we're human, and doing irrational things is commonly accepted in some circles. Trying to deny this is pointless.
Out of curiosity, what part of not believing in something completely fantastic without a shred of supporting evidence qualifies as "irrational?"
Why should any rational person tolerate any irrational belief system, particularly one that's caused as much grief as organized religion? The religious nuts certainly don't have a problem going after the nonbelievers.
All the blame for his behavior BELONGS on him. Period. Full stop. It doesn't matter if she beat him raw with a garden hose every day after school: he was the one in the alley, and he was the one who made the decision to do what he did. Unless you think the stepmother, in her 7 years with the kid (and hardly during his formative years) did something that completely deranged his ability to distinguish right and wrong, I think it's completely off-base to suggest she deserves blame for his actions. As for not believing a killer's relatives, you can make your own choice. I think the kind of situation you describe, where relatives claim the killer couldn't be guilty, have more to do with self-deception and denial than with an intent to deceive others, but that's me. And it seems to me if she really wanted to make herself sound good here, she wouldn't be talking about hating him, and punishing him, and begging the police to bring him in--she'd be emphasizing how they gave him so many chances, and they tried to encourage his positive behaviors, and they were always there no matter what he did, blah blah blah. I suppose she *could* be telling us the less flattering stuff to make her story *sound* more believable, but that's getting a bit convoluted. Take it with as many grains of salt as you need.
It's not a question of intelligence as much as cunning. Many people with sociopathic tendencies are born manipulators--they learn very early on how to push other people's buttons for their own benefit or amusement. He certainly displayed this ability when he manipulated the child welfare system into harassing his parents. So for him to make a sensational claim that attracts media attention is entirely plausible. It won't convince a judge, or a parole board, but it will get him attention and allow him to exert some control over his environment. Even if nothing concrete comes from it, he probably just enjoys jerking people around. Doesn't require a huge amount of brainpower to know that saying something provocative will get you attention.
...and yet still moded informative. ;)
Of course, keep stressing the potential harm, that way you can hopefully provoke an emotional knee-jerk response, and if you're lucky, you get the added benefit of making the other guy look like a prick who hates cops.
This was a bit bigger than "an hour spent in traffic": closing roads and bridges, shutting down the harbor all have real economic consequences, in terms of business lost, deals foregone, possible tourism diverted, etc. This costs everybody, including those tax-paying bomb technicians. After all, Turner felt it was a big enough deal to warrant $2 million in hush money, so obviously we're talking about more than a few Bostonians being late to work.
Secondly, the possible consequences (dead bomb techs, for one) are only part of determining the response. You also consider the rate of error. In Iraq, it makes sense to treat every strange object by the roadside as a possible IED, because many of them probably are. The probability of an IED in Boston is a bit lower. So the BPD does the safe thing, they close a road, retrieve one of the gadgets, and detonate it. They should see pretty quickly there are no explosive traces, and no anthrax or nerve gas. At this point, they should be able to say that the probably of the rest of the signs reported being bombs is even lower, and so warrant a less dramatic response.
You make it very clear that you support a course of action that minimizes risk to the bomb techs, but why stop there? Why not raise taxes in Boston until there's enough money to encase every single police in a full suit of body armor, and replace all the cars with Bradley fighting vehicles, so as to make policing as safe as is humanly possible?
Oh wait, because that would be a ridiculous and disproportionate response to the threat, and would have negative spillover effects greatly in excess of the possible benefits. Just like their response in the ATHF case. You can keep beating your chest about saving the lives of those brave police officers, but that doesn't change the fact that a certain amount of precaution is healthy, and a certain amount is excessive.
Actually, the benefit of living in a free society is that I'm free to comment pretty much on anything I want, including pent-up windbags such as yourself who beat their chests and think that because they've 'seen the elephant' they alone have anything worthwhile to say about it.
Sure, they have to take reported threats seriously, but after detonating the first one and finding no evidence of explosives or hazardous material, is it really necessary to treat each subsequent one with the same degree of caution?
Maybe in Karbala you need to treat every single out of place item as a potential IED, but traffic aside, I'm not sure Beantown is such a hostile environment.
You just have to make sure to kill the logs on InterNIC so they can't trace back to your gateway.
Unless I'm mistaken, it's a reference to the old sci-fi show 'Sliders' in which boy genius Jerry O'Connell's Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky bridge machine sends him and a bunch of hapless comrades traveling from one parallel world to another with no way to get home.
Ah, that's all right. The way we're running things here, all those sensors would just end up producing the solar system's first planetary snuff film.
Did you guys here that? Somewhere, a browncoat just blew a load.