Daniel Day-Lewis on Playing Abraham Lincoln - NYTimes.com
I'm not overly confident that Spielberg's Lincoln biopic will work: I suspect it will be too "talky" for it's own good. But still, it's interesting reading about Daniel Day Lewis' acting methods.
Carrots Gain Bigger Roles at Some Restaurants - NYTimes.com
If this article is any guide, we might be seeing more new varieties of carrot in our supermarkets soon. I haven't even tried the purple ones yet, though.
In ad 563, more than a century after the Romans gave up control of what is now Geneva, Switzerland, a deadly tsunami on Lake Geneva poured over the city walls. Originating from a rock fall where the River Rhône enters at the opposite end of the lake to Geneva, the tsunami destroyed surrounding villages, people and livestock, according to two known historical accounts.It seems to have been caused by a rock fall, but not involving an earthquake. How odd.
As much as 44 billion tons of nitrogen and 850 billion tons of carbon stored in arctic permafrost, or frozen ground, could be released into the environment as the region begins to thaw over the next century as a result of a warmer planet according to a new study led by the U.S. Geological Survey. This nitrogen and carbon are likely to impact ecosystems, the atmosphere, and water resources including rivers and lakes. For context, this is roughly the amount of carbon stored in the atmosphere today.The article is a bit vague and unclear, but maybe we'll be hearing more about this estimate soon.
The Counter-electronics High-powered Microwave Advanced Missile Project (CHAMP) is an effort to build a missile that flies over -- not into -- a target, be it an entire military base, neighborhood, or a even a lone tank and shuts down all the electronics inside without harming a soul. (Think of it almost as a mini-EMP in a rocket.) On Oct. 16, a CHAMP missile flew an hour-long preprogrammed route low over the Utah desert, "degrading and defeating" the electronics inside seven different targets. In a building along the route packed with computers, the screens all went dark as CHAMP sailed by, emitting a blast of high-power microwaves, according to CHAMP-maker Boeing's Oct. 22 press release announcing the test flight. (The weapon even took out the remotely controlled TV cameras that were monitoring the tests, claimed Boeing.)* Here are two Fukushima stories:
On building rescues, the reactions of onlookers are as varied as the city’s neighborhoods. In Midtown Manhattan or the financial district, for instance, pedestrians are more likely to yell, “Jump!”; in residential areas, like Harlem or Brooklyn, where the would-be jumper might be a familiar face, residents will provide officers with information about the person. They will cheer and applaud officers who make a successful grab, Detective Taylor said.* One of the oddest ideas for a medical test ever:
The medical engineers at Queen Mary used 60 healthy volunteers and 60 patients to test whether self-measurement of the shape of the urine stream could be used to predict maximum urine flow rate. They found that a simple measurement of the characteristic shape of the flow pattern could accurately predict the maximum urine flow rate; important in the diagnosis of urinary problems such as those associated with prostate enlargement.* A study indicating that sea surface temperatures (in at least parts of the ocean) 250 million years ago could have been very hot indeed:
It is also the first study to show water temperatures close to the ocean's surface can reach 40°C – a near-lethal value at which marine life dies and photosynthesis stops. Until now, climate modellers have assumed sea-surface temperatures cannot surpass 30°C. The findings may help us understand future climate change patterns. The dead zone would have been a strange world – very wet in the tropics but with almost nothing growing. No forests grew, only shrubs and ferns. No fish or marine reptiles were to be found in the tropics, only shellfish, and virtually no land animals existed because their high metabolic rate made it impossible to deal with the extreme temperatures. Only the polar regions provided a refuge from the baking heat.* The Babbage blog at the Economist said that its possible that the future zero emission car of the future will be powered by vaporising liquid nitrogen. I had never heard of this idea before...
The Secret of Our Non-Success - NYTimes.com
More testing of blog entries from android tablet....
But which of the major parties was the more suitable?I find the "the Party no longer knows what it stands for" analysis of either Labor or Liberals rather boring, and this story of Abbott's uncertainty as to where to jump just goes to confirm how the lines between both were pretty blurred since the 1980's.
Labor's previous 30 years of hostility to Santamaria weighed against it but Abbott wrote, "our roots and the origins of our political culture are there". But if the ALP was not "dominated" by Santamaria-style ideas, it would succumb to "the grip of the Left or of soulless pragmatists". This was intolerable.
However, the Liberal Party was just as problematic. It was "without soul, direction or inspiring leadership", while its members were divided between "surviving trendies and the more or less simple-minded advocates of the free market".
The Liberal Party's mixture of "hand-wringing indecision or inappropriate economic Ramboism and perhaps their lack of political professionalism" struck Abbott as a fatal combination.
The choice on offer was bleak. "To join either existing party involves holding one's nose," he wrote. "Either way would upset some. But to do nothing dooms us to extinction." For a while, the choice for Abbott seemed to be the ALP. The NSW Labor government led by right-wing stalwart Barrie Unsworth was due to fight an election in March 1988 and this was surely "a window of opportunity" to be exploited.
In a careful but forceful reply, Santamaria rejected the suggestion of the NCC "going back to our Labor origins in an organised way, as our central strategy".
Santamaria noted that Catholics had largely run the NSW ALP since the 1950s but that the only result of Catholic influence in Labor governments, both in NSW and federally, had been "jobs for the boys".
Santamaria also was dismissive of "the reptilian Liberals", who lacked the capacity to win or wield power.
So perhaps Abbott was not so wrong after all. Santamaria did not doubt that, in the person of young Tony, there was an opportunity for "a real apostolate in Labor ranks".
I just think there've been so many books on the subject "What's wrong with Labor?," it's become like other - it's just become another genre, it's like vampire fiction. I've dug out a quote because I knew you were going to raise Lindsay's book with me. The earliest book written analysing the experience of Labor in government is called How Labor Governs, by Vere Gordon Childe. It came out in 1923. And here's one sentence from it: quote: "The Labor Party, starting with a band of inspired socialists, degenerated into a vast machine for capturing political power, but did not know how to use that power when attained except for the profit of individuals," unquote. Now, this line of indictment has been used against every Labor government, against Ben Chifley's government, against John Curtin's, against Gough Whitlam's, against Hawke and Keating, until years after the government has passed, it's seen as being a champion of Labor values. The tradition of writing books lamenting the decline of real Labor is almost as old as the party itself.Clever Carr.
Another favoured policy response has been to urge remote communities to establish licensed clubs (as the Bjelke-Petersen government did in Cape York in the 1980s), in the belief that communities with clubs will export fewer drinkers to towns. The limited evidence available to test this proposition does not support it, but its plausibility to urban voters is obvious. The real problem for NT governments, however, has been that most communities have repeatedly made it clear that they do not want clubs. Out of more than 100 Aboriginal communities in the NT, just seven currently operate licensed clubs, and one has a licensed store. All of these are located in the Top End.I think the Liberal Party's approach on this is quite cynical, and more about capturing the aboriginal vote than caring about the cost.
A few other communities have run clubs in the past, only to abandon them as too much trouble. In two or three other communities, discussions are currently under way that may or may not lead to those communities applying to the NT Licensing Commission for club licenses.
Observable consequences of the hypothesis that the observed universe is a numerical simulation performed on a cubic space-time lattice or grid are explored. The simulation scenario is first motivated by extrapolating current trends in computational resource requirements for lattice QCD into the future. Using the historical development of lattice gauge theory technology as a guide, we assume that our universe is an early numerical simulation with unimproved Wilson fermion discretization and investigate potentially-observable consequences. Among the observables that are considered are the muon g-2 and the current differences between determinations of alpha, but the most stringent bound on the inverse lattice spacing of the universe, b^(-1) >~ 10^(11) GeV, is derived from the high-energy cut off of the cosmic ray spectrum. The numerical simulation scenario could reveal itself in the distributions of the highest energy cosmic rays exhibiting a degree of rotational symmetry breaking that reflects the structure of the underlying lattice.Update: here's a more detailed explanation, from the arXiv blog.
At some point, when observed reality keeps differing from predicted reality, it makes sense to examine your predictions. That is not what’s happening. This particular Republican argument continues to rest on a prediction—and because the test of any prediction lies somewhere out there in the awesome future, it can never be refuted. Lower income taxes and the economy will grow: It’s a unicorn of an idea, always feeding in the next meadow.And if you want more loads of links to economists who have said there is no clear connection between past tax cuts and growth (or, at the very least, you have to look at what tax cuts achieved in the context of everything else that was going on economically at the time) have a look at this lengthy post at MediaMatters.
Like the of thousands of pilgrims that have turned up this night to Gunung Kemukus, Sarimah is here to seek her fortune. According to local belief, the ritual here can guarantee success in business, usually for those at or near the bottom of the ladder – bus drivers, rice farmers, market stall traders and the like. Pilgrims mostly come from Indonesia’s Javanese-speaking core, but some travel days across the massive archipelago to get here.Read the whole thing; if you are like me, you had no idea that animism/Islam/Hindu/whatever mix had such practices.
But the ritual needs to be done right. First, prayers and offerings must be made at the grave of Pangeran Samodro and Nyai Ontrowulan. At some stage, pilgrims must wash themselves at either one or two of the sacred springs on the hill. Then they must find a sex partner who meets two conditions. First, your mate for the night must be of the opposite sex; and second, they cannot be your spouse. Many people believe the ritual only works if you return at seven consecutive, 35-day intervals, either the night before Friday intersects with Pon, or when it crosses with another Javanese day, Kliwon.
