Just a quick post (made via a BT phone kiosk) to say that due to the effects of a power surge which took out (among other things) my iMac and my DSL modem/router it will be some time before I can post here again, or even have convenient access to the internet to read comments or anyone else's site.
I'll see you all when I see you.
The 2005 Ig® Nobel Prize winners are as much fun as ever. Expecially the Peace Prize laureates, who just happen to have conducted their prize-winning research right up the road from here:
PEACE: Claire Rind and Peter Simmons of Newcastle University, in the U.K., for electrically monitoring the activity of a brain cell in a locust while that locust was watching selected highlights from the movie "Star Wars."
REFERENCE: "Orthopteran DCMD Neuron: A Reevaluation of Responses to Moving Objects. I. Selective Responses to Approaching Objects," F.C. Rind and P.J. Simmons, Journal of Neurophysiology, vol. 68, no. 5, November 1992, pp. 1654-66.
I think Suw Charman had a bad day's commute:
What the tannoy should have said
We regret to inform you that, due to years of chronic underfunding and shameful mismanagement, there will be significant delays on your journey home this evening. When the train does finally turn up it will be overcrowded and hot, and you may well feel ill within moments of boarding. If you do faint, don't worry as you will be so tightly wedged in that you'll be unable to actually hit the floor. London Underground Limited has absolutely no regrets about this whatsoever as we've been creaming off the profits for years now and have a nice little villa out on St Lucia to which we'll be taking early retirement and our golden handshake very soon.
Normal service will not be resumed at any point in your lifetime or ours, as the system is in such a state of terminal collapse that nothing short of a miracle can save it. And we don't mean the sort of 'miracle' that any mere mortal transport 'czar' can achieve, but a full-on deity-driven bells, whistles and chorus of angels miracle. We think you'll agree that that is unlikely to occur. [...]
This video of unusually attentive flora and fauna (NB: 40MB Quicktime movie) is quite hypnotic.
[Via GromBlog]
Last week's UK box office Top 5:
- Serenity
- Pride and Prejudice
- Oliver Twist
- A History of Violence
- Kinky Boots
Considering that Firefly never showed up on terrestrial TV over here, that's pretty good going for Cap'n Tightpants & co.
Bryan Burrough really hated Simon Winchester's latest book, A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906:
WHAT does it mean to write popular history? Must the author spend long years sifting through libraries and obscure collections to unearth new and tantalizing facts about his subject? Do readers in search of an absorbing yarn really care what information is new or where the book's information comes from? And what role should the author play? Humorless academic? Simple reporter? Or modish raconteur?
[...]
This is history as it might be written by Austin Powers. "Crack" is a book that bears the faint whiff of smoking jacket and brandy, as if the author had curled up in some leatherbound study with a few dozen previous books and his memories and banged out this one between puffs of pipe smoke. It appears to be partly the product of a residency Winchester accepted at San Jose State University, a period that seems to have given him plenty of time to sample sublime pinot noir and thumb through earthquake books. Among the sources thanked in the acknowledgments is a history-savvy waiter at a restaurant on Nob Hill. To be fair, Winchester did do independent travel for his research; in Alaska, he finds not only fault lines and caribous but Champagne, "a long bath," Halibut Bay oysters, freshly caught salmon, wine "crisp and cold" and a barmate smoking Gitanes. "It seemed like heaven," he says.
[...]
To be fair, Burrough does admit later in his review that his beef with Winchester's book may derive in part from that subtitle: judging by Burrough's account, Winchester's book is more concerned with the effects of the quake on the local geology than on the political economy of the State, let alone the Union. That obviously wasn't what this particular reviewer wanted from Winchester's book, though I think it's also safe to say that Burrough just took exception to Winchester's authorial voice.
I quite enjoyed Winchester's last book, Krakatoa, another summary in layman's terms of what happened when nature did something spectacular and destructive, leavened with a smattering of social history but making no real attempt to bring the historical characters to life. I don't think I'll rush out to read this latest book but I might just give it a look when it appears in paperback.
From 75° South, a post about a nine day sledge trip.
The photographs of a crevasse as seen from the inside are particularly nice.
I want a squid bear sculpture. Very much.
[Via Dave Langford, commenting at Making Light]
Esquire journalist A J Jacobs was assigned the job of explaining Wikipedia to the magazine's readers. What better approach than to put up a draft of the article on Wikipedia and invite the community to have at it?
I wouldn't say that the edited article reads better, but then Wikipedia isn't meant to be a tool for producing journalism. I do think it's a shame that the editing process ditched the mention of the need to freeze the Bush and Kerry-related pages in 2004, because I think that incident makes a rather important point about the limitations of Wikipedia.
[Via Many 2 Many]
CHUD has posted an image of Peter Jackson's take on the most famous ape in movie history.
I think it's safe to say that we'll all be seeing quite a bit of this picture over the next two months or so.
This Google Advanced Operators Cheat Sheet is tremendously handy.
I already knew quite a lot of the ways to restrict/qualify your search listed in the cheat sheet, but I usually have to employ them by going to the Advanced Search screen because I can't remember the syntax for the various advanced search parameters.
[Via Guardian Onlineblog]
Alligators in the Florida Everglades have a new rival at the top of the food chain. In recent years pet owners have abandoned their pet pythons in the area, and those bitty little snakes are all grown up now.
(Snopes has a larger version of the same picture shown in the CNN article.)
[CNN article via Peace Dividend]
This New York Times article describes the state of the culture wars in the United States very nicely. Not by talking about who's trying to ban which books from libraries, or by talk of the latest attempt to shoehorn Intelligent Design into science classes, but by discussing a trip down a river:
GRAND CANYON NATIONAL PARK, Ariz. – Tom Vail, who has been leading rafting trips down the Colorado River here for 23 years, corralled his charges under a rocky outcrop at Carbon Creek and pointed out the remarkable 90-degree folds in the cliff overhead.
Geologists date this sandstone to 550 million years ago and explain the folding as a result of pressure from shifting faults underneath. But to Mr. Vail, the folds suggest the Grand Canyon was carved 4,500 years ago by the great global flood described in Genesis as God's punishment for humanity's sin.
"You see any cracks in that?" he asked. "Instead of bending like that, it should have cracked." The material "had to be soft" to bend, Mr. Vail said, imagining its formation in the flood. When somebody suggested that pressure over time could create plasticity in the rocks, Mr. Vail said, "That's just a theory."
"It's all theory, right?" asked Jack Aiken, 63, an Assemblies of God minister in Alaska who has a master's degree in geology. "Except what's in the Good Book."
For Mr. Vail and 29 guests on his Canyon Ministries trip, this was vacation as religious pilgrimage, an expedition in search of evidence that God created the earth in six days 6,000 years ago, just as Scripture says.
That same week, a few miles upriver, a decidedly different group of 24 rafters surveyed the same rock formations – but through the lens of science rather than what Mr. Vail calls "biblical glasses." Sponsored by the National Center for Science Education, the chief challenger to creationists' influence in public schools, this trip was a floating geology seminar, charting the canyon's evolution through eons of erosion.
"Look at the weathering, look at the size of the pieces," Eugenie C. Scott, the center director, said of markings in Black Tail Canyon. "To a standard geologist, to somebody who actually studies geology, this just shouts out at you: This is really old; this is really gradual."
Two groups examining the same evidence. Traveling nearly identical itineraries, snoozing under the same stars and bathing in the same chocolate-colored river. Yet, standing at opposite ends of the growing creation-evolution debate, they seemed to speak in different tongues. [...]
"It's all theory, right?" Fabulous.
I went to see Serenity again this evening. It stood up well to a second viewing; indeed, some elements – the performances of Nathan Fillion, Gina Torres and Adam Baldwin, and the quality of Whedon's dialogue – were even more impressive this time round. The story still gripped me despite my knowing how it turned out, with one particular moment – if you've seen the film and you're a fan of the TV series, you know which one I'm talking about – somehow even more excruciating this time round when I knew what was coming. I couldn't help thinking as the plot unfolded that this would have been even more fun as 22 episodes of television, but as that wasn't to be I'm happy to take what I can get.
I know the film's opening weekend performance was less than spectacular in the States, failing to top the box office charts and falling somewhat short of the more optimistic estimates, but I think you have to put that performance in perspective. Serenity didn't cost blockbuster money, so the film will break even that much sooner even before you consider profits from the mountain of DVDs the studio is pretty much guaranteed to sell.
Judging by the discussions I overheard, the almost-capacity crowd I saw the film with this evening was made up of fans of the TV show. I still don't know how audiences who have no idea about these characters and their shared history will take to the film, but I certainly wouldn't be afraid to recommend Serenity to anyone who's not actually allergic to science fiction films.
Oh yes, one more thing: I think it's safe to say that next year's Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form) has Joss Whedon's name on it.
MIT scientists observing how small insects walk across water – even up apparently slippery slopes – think they've figured out how it's done. Fascinating stuff. Not only can they move up virtually frictionless slopes, they do so at quite a clip:
[The insects move...] up the slope at speeds of almost 30 body lengths per second (for comparison, an Olympian sprinter moves at about five body lengths per second).
[Via Apothecary's Drawer]
It turns out that those penny stocks the spammers keep sending you details of really aren't a very good investment.
Who knew?
NASA's Earth Observatory site has a very nice image, taken by the Aqua satellite, of the shadow cast by the Moon sweeping across Africa during yesterday's solar eclipse.
Actress Sarah Polley, who took one of the leading roles in Terry Gilliam's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen back when she was nine years old, was prompted by reports that Gilliam was once again working with a Canadian child actress to email Gilliam to discuss her experience of working on his earlier film:
This – contrary to how it may read – is not meant to be a guilt trip. You were always fun and fascinating, and you gave me a ton of confidence. You're a genius and it was a privilege (no matter what my age) to watch you make a great film. I think that film was hell for you, too, and you had enough responsibility just keeping it going without having to be a parent to someone else's child. I believe that you felt that if there was something that was particularly traumatic to me, that my parents would have informed you and pulled the plug. Of course, this is what should have happened on many occasions. I don't think my parents were monsters, by any stretch of the imagination. I do think, though, that you can't underestimate how in awe of you people like them can be. I think they were so shocked and thrilled to have their daughter in a Terry Gilliam movie that they couldn't see past that. They didn't want to be an annoyance or an inconvenience to anyone, and it must have been daunting to imagine holding up 100 people for your kid.
While the tone of Polley's email and Gilliam's reply is admirable civilised, with neither shutting down and going on the defensive about the rights and wrongs of events seventeen years ago, I get a sense that Gilliam didn't quite get that just because the nine year old he was dealing with was safe that didn't mean that she felt safe. I can't help wondering how Polley's parents felt about the whole thing after the event.
[Via MetaFilter]
Wil McCarthy contemplates the vexed question of how exactly Joss Whedon crammed so many seemingly Earthlike planets into one solar system in Firefly and Serenity.
McCarthy's conclusion that the entire system is a Nivenesque artificial construct is most likely correct, but also deeply worrying insofar as it opens up all sorts of possibilities for really horrible crossover fanfic. The last thing Mal Reynolds needs is for Teela Brown to show up anywhere in the vicinity of the Serenity.
[Via Amygdala]