Gratuitous Space Battles. I heartily applaud the concept also: “Who needs backstory? Who needs resource-gathering? Diplomacy is so last year. Gratuitous Space Battles cuts right to the chase of sci-fi strategy games, and deals with large, completely unjustified space battles between huge opposing space fleets.”
A prohibition-era bowling alley has apparently turned up in a basement in Queens. So cool. History: one of so many reasons I love New York City. (Via Guy Kawasaki.)
French FM [Bernard Kouchner] says Iran's intention to ignore international demands and construct 10 new uranium enrichment plants is "very dangerous"
Ah, but dangerous for who? I’m not seeing a lot of evidence that Ahmadinejad is losing sleep over this. Do the Iranians perceive IAEA censure as a meaningful impediment? Do we think their Russian allies in the Security Council will go along with action against them that is meaningful? I suspect they perceive Western leaders as weak, full of warnings and bluster, but unable to do anything that could impede Iranian intentions. Saddam Hussein made that bet too and lost. What will happen this time?
Kouchner went on to call the Iranian announcement “infantile.” A little name calling here, a little censure there… the West has been playing this game with Iran for more than five years now. Or have we forgotten the “the triumph for European diplomacy” that was the 2004 deal with Iran to freeze all enrichment activity? That certainly turned out well.
Here, by the way, is a 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s nuclear capabilities and intentions, for what it may avail us. You should read it; I’m sure the Iranians have. Perhaps posting it to the Internet is misdirection.
My friend Daniel Kish has been included in UTNE Reader's 2009 list of 50 Visionaries that are Changing the World for his work on blindness and human echolocation through World Access for the Blind, the non-profit he founded nearly ten years ago. I think Dan’s work to date is fantastic, and the recognition well-deserved. (Disclosure: I work with WAFTB as a volunteer, and am a former board member.)
For more about echolocation, you can check him out in the video Seeing with Sound, part of the new Chicago Museum of Science and Industry exhibit, YOU! The Experience.
In a post here a couple of years ago, I said that regardless of whether anthropogenic (man-made) global warming (AGW) is occurring, the consensus on the subject exists in part because of a deliberate attempt to suppress contrary viewpoints. Rip made a similar assertion a couple of months later, when he said, “I'm no global warming denier—I just think there is a lot of reasonable doubt. And the politicization of the issue - complete with a campaign to stifle dissent - is appalling.” Last week, there was a data breach at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU) that seems to illustrate our point in a rather shocking way.
Continue reading "The “ClimateGate” Leak and the Suppression of Dissent" »
For those who like living on the cutting edge of software (you mean there are there people not like that?) Office 2010 Beta is now available for download. So are Visio 2010 Beta and Project 2010 Beta. Spread the word!
I’ve been using the technical preview versions of the Office programs, and really like them, but it’s Project I’m excited about. I haven’t seen it yet, but I have heard this will be a significant update.
In general I have been a supporter of our detaining enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay, and have disagreed that much of the behavior some characterize as “torture” is anything of the sort.
Now, however, that I see this list from Mental Floss magazine of six songs used to torture and intimidate, I take it all back. What was I thinking? I mean, we actually use number SIX? On human beings? And we call ourselves civilized.
Kevin Siegel was at last week’s Adobe Learning Summit, and shares details about the forthcoming Adobe Captivate 5 in this sneak peek. Among other things, it sounds like Adobe has done significant work to make Captivate’s user interface more like those of their other design products.
While no one can know the future, I think we can safely predict that when the end of the world really does arrive, it will be entirely less preposterous than nearly everything you will see in this movie. Of course, you would not go and see a film like this because you were yearning for realism.
I enjoyed 2012 well enough; it has a great cast, and it has all the requisite pieces: the heroic speeches, the sad farewells, the knowing looks between the hero and his wife as he goes off to almost certain doom so that others may live—and of course, incalculable death and destruction, rendered in glorious hi-def with Dolby Digital sound. It could, however, have used a bit less… almost everything. Don’t get me wrong—I enjoy watching scores of people being incinerated, drowned, and crushed under falling buildings as much as anybody. But Emmerich could have easily made this film a third shorter, a third as expensive, and two-thirds better.
It should be a massive hit.
No, I’m not turning this into a car blog, honest. But can you blame if I spotted some interesting cars during my recent time in New Hampshire?
No. Of course you can’t.
Anyway, this specimen I spotted it on the way to lunch one day. It is, if my eyes do not deceive me, a Triumph Spitfire. You don’t see too many of these on the road these days; the last one rolled off the assembly line in 1980, making this piece of rolling automotive history close to thirty at minimum. (The chrome bumper might suggest the car was older still—no later than a ‘78—but of course, there’s no way to know if it’s the original bumper.)
“Your inability to see your own bad argument does not mean there are flaws in my logic when I point them out to you.” —John Scalzi via Twitter
It is irrelevant in nearly every way how much I like or dislike the design of the latest Ferrari. But I’ll still toss out there that I think the 458 Italia (seen here in the wild back in August via Autoblog) looks pretty hot, particularly compared to the F430 it replaces, which never really did much for me.
Side note: I enjoy that Ferrari’s promo site for the Italia lets you play sounds clips of the car starting, accelerating, passing at the track etc. Ferrari clearly understands their target demographic, which essentially = me + a whole boat load of money. And yes, the car sounds fantastic.
Sequels, especially to classics, are tricky things. Hopefully this won’t be a terrible, horrible mistake:
Andrew Lloyd Weber has announced a sequel to his massively successful "Phantom of the Opera" that will be set at Coney Island.
Weber's new production, "Love Never Dies," is due to open in London in March of next year.
An article in the Telegraph this morning about a boy in England taught to echolocate by my friend Dan.
I'm a fan of zombie films, and zombie comedies are even better! (Okay, I liked "Shaun of the Dead". That's the only one I can think of at the moment.)
This very tongue-in-cheek riff on the well-worn tropes of zombies is one of the least socially resonant I can remember seeing. Yes, once again, zombies illustrate a social force in our society. But this time around, they're a stand-in for our technology-based alienation from each other. And it takes the the destruction of our civilization for our heroes to realize they really do need each other. (Yawn.)
The jokes, on the other hand, are pretty good. Jesse Eisenberg ("Adventureland") is our narrator, giving us his backstory along with several Max-Brooks-ish rules for surviving in the post-apocalyptic Zombieland, such as "Check the back seat" and "Don't be a hero". His mentor in zombie killing is a suprisingly likeable Woody Harrelson. (I say "surprisingly", because I haven't liked the guy in anything since Cheers.) Joining these two are a pair of sisters played by Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin.
There are a few too many reversals which seem to have irretrievably broken our little foursome up... but since you're a movie viewer, you know they won't be broken up for long. An extended celebrity cameo is a great deal of fun. And the finale surprised me a little.
All in all, it was enjoyable, but nothing very earth-shatteringly original.
Dan Gillmor has 22 ideas for changing how news is produced. It may not be a perfect list, but the product he describes sounds a lot more compelling than most of what comes out of today's newsrooms.
Yes, it’s more bad economic news on President Obama’s watch: it appears the universe may be closer to its eventual end than previously thought:
An analysis by Chas Egan of the Australian National University in Canberra and Charles Lineweaver of the University of New South Wales in Sydney indicates that the collective entropy of all the supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies is about 100 times higher than previously calculated.
Entropy quantifies the number of different microscopic states that a physical system can have while looking the same on a large scale. For instance, an omelet has higher entropy than an egg because there are more ways for the molecules of an omelet to rearrange themselves and still remain an omelet than for an egg
Egan and Lineweaver’s new value for the entropy of the universe is still a billionth of a billionth the maximum possible entropy that researchers have estimated…
Please plan your vacation time accordingly
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