Sunday, November 13, 2011
Friday, November 11, 2011
Old LA
James Lileks has been in Los Angeles and has an interesting post full of photos of the impressive looking, but now unused, grand cinemas of the past in the old centre of town. It is still a seedy sort of area, apparently, but at least the ornate, if slowly decaying, architecture is of interest.
Probably just too many drugs
I'm not the world's biggest Philip K Dick fan: I have enjoyed maybe 5 novels, but started one or two others and found them un-engaging. I don't think he was that great at the short story, either.
I did like the VALIS trilogy, though, with its teasing sense of something important about the universe that might be being revealed if only all these threads could be pulled together. (They never were, really, from what I recall.) I also had read before that Dick had keep lots of notes about his quasi mystical experience that inspired the novels, and called it his Exegesis.
It seems someone has collected all this stuff together and published it, and there is a short extract in the Slate article linked above.
While it would be nice to think that Dick did genuinely have a strange, mystical experience with an other worldly intelligence, and perhaps was getting messages from the dead bishop, the extract still indicates what I decided long ago: no, it's almost certainly just a case of too many drugs.
Dangerous librarianship
Many library collections use special equipment, such as special gloves and climate-controlled rooms, to protect the archival materials from the visitor. For the Pierre and Marie Curie collection at France's Bibliotheque National, it's the other way around.
That's because after more than 100 years, much of Marie Curie's stuff – her papers, her furniture, even her cookbooks – are still radioactive. Those who wish to open the lead-lined boxes containing her manuscripts must do so in protective clothing, and only after signing a waiver of liability.
Huh.
Thursday, November 10, 2011
Good news re fuel efficiency
Airbus and Boeing are in a dogfight (ha ha) over whose new engines are more efficient.
Of course, I would like to see superconducting electric engines some day.
Wednesday, November 09, 2011
Taking on Curry
Tamino is really annoyed with Judith Curry's inaccurate claims which she then refuses to retract or justify.
She is not to be trusted.
I also see that there is something fairly bizarre going on at Curry's blog at the moment. She gave a "guest post" to the authors of a couple of skeptic papers that appear (if my quick scan is right) to argue all 20th century warming is really just a natural fluctuation. Richard Tol has ripped into Curry, saying these are bad papers and she is spreading "disinformation". Curry has a long post arguing about what is "disinformation" and "pseudo critical thinking" and then gives Tol a guest post in which he shows why the papers are bad. She seems to be claiming that she just put the papers up for discussion, and people shouldn't assume that she thinks they are good papers.
Her credibility would take a hit over this, if it weren't for the fact that it's long only been the slightly less rabid escapees from Watts Up With That who think she makes sense in her rambling attempt to cast herself as some sort of "middle man" of reasonable skepticism.
Tuesday, November 08, 2011
You say hello, and I say goodbye...
Yes, how sad. A man with no actual political experience who had a tax plan that benefited the rich at this time of increasing concern about wealth and income disparity in his country, made really ignorant sounding and simplistic statements about how to conduct foreign policy, was denying the significance of the biggest long term environmental issue ever, and made very ostentatious displays of the significance of his faith, has come to grief over women (and men) saying he has a history of conducting himself inappropriately around women.
Yes, everyone knows Democrats have got away with much worse in their private lives, but everyone should also know that if you're going to run with being a really seriously religious guy, and sing Gospel spirituals at the drop of a hat, a pattern of sleazy conduct in the past is likely to bite you hard. Unless, I guess, you're going to play the role of the repentant sinner; but Herman is not having any of that.
The fact that he thought these would not come back to hurt him just shows his poor judgement. But as I say, it's not as if that wasn't already obvious from his actual policy positions. That Tea Partiers were smitten with him just shows what a hopeless bunch they are.
Drying out
Wow. Slate has a whole article about adventures you can have dehydrating food.
For some reason, having a food dehydrator has always appealed to me. But then, there was an episode of Friends in which a weird young man who was staying with one of the characters and had a food drying obsession. Do Hollywood scriptwriters know that it is a sing of potential mental instability?
More importantly, my wife cannot imagine why anyone would be interested in doing this. (It could partly be from my reading a bit about survivalists in the 1980's and how making beef jerky is a good idea if you expect the world to end soon. Which I don't, but if the government told us that an asteroid was only a week away from hitting, I might be happy to have a bag of beef jerky in the cupboard.) Maybe I need a man shed in the backyard, where I can secretly spend my time processing food. (shh)
Anyway, maybe it is how I will spend my retirement.
Monday, November 07, 2011
A welcome return
I'm happy to note that Bryan Appleyard seems to have finished a new book and returned to blogging. Yay. Now stick around, Bryan. Don't go wandering off again.
The mess remains
The Economist publicises the dubious ways that TEPCO, the Japanese utility company, is going about cleaning up its Fukushima reactors.
It notes that 89,000 people have been displaced. I am not sure if some proportion of those are from towns that are capable of cleaning, or not.
Featuring hardly any swearing at all
It's hard to imagine, but Scorsese has made a kid's 3D fantasy film.
Bring back Rex
Wallace and Gromit maker Aardman's head of TV has said the company may have to halt UK production of its famed stop-frame animations because it has become too expensive.According to the report, Shaun the Sheep is the big international hit for Aardman.
Personally, I would much prefer the return of the surreal adventures of Rex the Runt. Speaking of which when you follow the first Google link for a search "rex the runt Aardman" you get to this error page, which is somewhat amusing it's own right. Then follow the link to "Aardman characters" and (apart from Rex), I see there is one for "The Adventures of Jeffrey, the Aussie with no cossie" (!) It does indeed go to some very adult oriented cartoons of a nude Australian character doing strange things in the bush. A somewhat surprising find under the umbrella of the company.
Sunday, November 06, 2011
A hopping education
The relatively recent surge in popularity of boutique beers has meant I have had to pay a bit more attention to what I like and don’t like in that beverage. Previously, this didn’t seem important, if it was just a matter of choosing between one of the major brands on sale at the local liquor barn.
One brand I have never liked is XXXX Bitter. At first, you could put this down to the common tendency of a youthful palette towards sweeter drinks. I hardly drank any beer in my first alcohol drinking days, but if I tried any, I found I particularly disliked XXXX Bitter.
Later, I found some of the Toohey’s range more to my taste. Speaking of which, it’s hard not to be impressed with the apparent effort put into the Extra Dry commercial:
I see there is a video out about how they made it. Interesting:
Anyway, back to beers generally.
A bar which I’ve been going to at West End lately has a huge range of boutique beers available, and recently for some reason they have been pushing Indian Pale Ales. I find these undrinkably bitter, and they reminded me that it was an unusual degree of bitter aftertaste that used to put me off XXXX Bitter. Although I had a vague idea that it was hops that were used as a bittering agent, I’ve had a look around on the internet to confirm this is indeed true.
Good old wikipedia notes that hops have been used in beer since the 11th century. Before that:
People in the old days experimented an awful lot with dubious sounding plants and weed, didn’t they? Interestingly, hops came to be favoured as they helped beer keep better:…..brewers used a wide variety of bitter herbs and flowers, including dandelion, burdock root, marigold, horehound (the German name for horehound means "mountain hops"), ground ivy, and heather.
Hops are used extensively in brewing for their many purported benefits, including balancing the sweetness of the malt with bitterness, contributing a variety of desirable flavors and aromas, and having an antibiotic effect that favors the activity of brewer's yeast over less desirable microorganisms. Historically, it is believed that traditional herb combinations for ales were abandoned when it was noticed that ales made with hops were less prone to spoilage.
Well, that’s a clever feature.
Anyway, intense hoppiness puts me off beer, and I’ve decided I’m particularly fond of the lightly hopped white ales, especially those with the added spice and orange peel flavours.
White Rabbit White Ale is very good, and is on tap at Archives (the West End bar I referred to above.) (White Rabbit Dark Ale is also very nice.) But the ridiculously knowable bar staff last week ago recommended Holgate White Ale (in the bottle) and it was excellent too. This week, they had a (very expensive) white ale from Japan, of all places, and although it wasn’t bad, it wasn’t worth the price. I also tried Whale Ale from Port Stephens, a wheat beer but none of the added spice or citrus, so it was nothing to write home about. Nice label, though, from a brewery that seems to specialise in novelty labels.
The first white or wheat beer I tried (some years ago now) was Hoegarrden at the Belgium Beer Cafe in Brisbane. It’s delicious, but now these Australian small breweries are doing this in equal quality. I really the Belgium Beer Cafe, but I am pretty rarely in the city to partake of its pleasures.
Beer with spice and citrus flavours seems more medieval and interesting than your regular lager or other stuff.
But amongst your more routine beers, I have taken to Rogers Beer. A very easy drink.
It’s always good to have a new interest….
Saturday, November 05, 2011
Tintinitis may be incurable…
Unbelievably, The Guardian has a 7th bit of commentary on the Tintin movie, this time in an Arts blog by someone who hasn’t seen the film, and who won’t after “those reviews”. (Actually, all he means is “the Guardian’s reviews.)
I starting to think the paper is deliberately trying to provoke outcries of exasperation about this apparent obsession, because they are wittier and more interesting than the movie commentary itself. Some examples from this latest piece:
I am getting a bit annoyed at the lack of coverage of the new Tintin film.
*
It's a new mandate, every writer at the paper must write, and negatively, about the film. This will lead all the way up to Christmas, as a sort of advent calendar. We have fifty more of these to go, and on Christmas Day we'll get a positive review from Santa.
*
So, the publicist of Tintin REALLY pissed off the Guardian didn't he/she? They must have had a shit in the office coffee or something to warrant all the Tintin hatred.
*
Is Tintin, like, the Guardian's Muhammad?
*
After how many articles do we class this as officially taking the piss?
Friday, November 04, 2011
Work for peanuts, too
You really ought to see the video at the link, and then imagine the reaction such innovative business practices would get from health inspectors in Australia (or, to be fair, virtually any other country apart from Japan.)
Thursday, November 03, 2011
Get a grip
Look, I know that Julian Assange likes playing the martyr almost as much as Andrew Bolt, but I really don’t get the media attention around him. His group has already fractured and has run out of money and is doing nothing new any time soon. Foreign Correspondent a month ago had 30 minutes of damaging material about him and how he was rapidly becoming irrelevant. Any new leaker of secrets isn’t going to pick him to do the job any time soon, even if he has a new way to deliver material.
So why does the media give so much coverage to the guy? Last night on Lateline there seemed to be a tedious 15 minutes devoted to his extradition via an interview with another media tart Geoffrey Robertson. Move on, fellas.
Wednesday, November 02, 2011
Mixed emotions, with added Tintinitis
Akk! My favourite director is posing with my least favourite animal in the lead photo in the above generous article on Steven Spielberg's sudden burst of activity. (He has Tintin and War Horse both out this year, and is finally shooting his long-in-development Lincoln.)
As for War Horse, which was apparently a successful play in England (featuring horses?), an Australian horse trainer featured in an episode of Australian Story recently, and talked about working with Spielberg:
Steven Spielberg was a very difficult director to work for.Cut! Cut! Wait a minute right there. This is the first time ever that I, a person who reads everything that ever crosses his path about Spielberg, has read something like this. In all honesty, he seems to one Hollywood juggernaut who has barely had a friendship go cool, let alone make an enemy. (The New York Times article notes that he is still working with the same editor since Close Encounters; John Williams is still scoring his films at age 79, and heaps of times he has worked with producers Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall.) But this woman does work with horses, so I'll put it down to that. Anyway, it turns out not to be as bad as it might sound:
He has so much in his head, surely, at any one moment but he is a man of few words. One day, Steven took me aside and he briefed me, he said "You know this is a really important sequence in the movie, if this doesn’t come out just right, it’s make or break for the movie" And I was thinking "Could you put any more pressure on me?!" He said, "I want this horse excited. It’s got to be so excited!" To me an excited horse is a horse showing a lot of movement. So I bring the horse in, bring him in hard and fast and stop the horse and make him excited. Throw his head around, get him crazy. "Cut, cut, cut, cut!" OK. Let’s try that again. We must have tried it three or four times, I suppose, before Steven starts getting visually distressed. Steven yells out "Cut cut! It’s a disaster! It’s a complete disaster! " And I just sunk, died a thousand deaths and I thought 'This is the lowest point in my whole career.' Steven called me into his tent "Bring her here, bring her here". And he said "The horse must be happy, the horse must be happy". And I said "Do you mean affectionate? Do you want him to nuzzle? Do you want him to be gentle and warm?" And "Of course that’s what I want!" He said, "Yes, that’s what I want! Now go and do it!" And poor old Abraham had to go from this crazy excited behaviour that I thought Steven was asking for to this beautiful, gentle, soft, loving acting stuff - and he did really, really well and I was very proud of him. And it was a very scary day for Abraham and I....See: it all comes good in the end.
At the end of the job and Steven threw his arms out for a big hug and he said "All of the love that you put into your animals has come out on screen, on my screen, and it will be there forever." It meant a lot to me, and to Craig too.
But still, this means I have to see a horse movie. I will if it gets good reviews.
As for Tintin, I meant to post last week about the highly amusing, if extremely strange, obsession The Guardian has had with publishing derogatory, high brow complaints about the film, which has garnered good reviews in England and America. I thought it was probably old news by now, but instead, I find that The Guardian was at it again yesterday.
I do believe there have now been 6 (yes, count them, 6) different people dissing the film one way or another featured over the last fortnight on their website. The criticism has not just been in their Film section, but also in Books and (I think) Culture sections, as if the upset over what appears destined to be a big hit for a young-ish audience simply could not be contained.
This obsession with being the one outlet determined to keep telling the public that the film is some kind of aesthetic outrage has not gone unnoticed by the site's readership, and the comments about the articles have become increasingly funny. For example, following an article yesterday which broadened the attack on Tintin to one on Spielberg generally:
A seriously bizarre vendetta against an enjoyable romp of a kid's flick.and
Every day I think the Guardian must have got tired of attacking the Tintin film, only to find yet another article exploring just why it's so rubbish from a slightly different angle.and
The film currently has an 85% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, so it's not really true that critics are hating it.
I've got no desire to see this film myself, but I've got to add to the chorus of confused voices: What IS the Guardian's problem with this film?
But I did like this one, perhaps after Anti-Tintin (movie version) rant Number 4, or was it 5?:
This is the second Grauniad article about Tintin I've read in the space of a week that disappears entirely up its own arsehole within the first three paragraphs. Is it possible, perhaps, to get someone who's actually going to talk about the content of the film rather than making thoroughly pretentious remarks about the aesthetical qualities of Herge's art? I mean seriously. I know this is in the books section, but Jesus H. Christ.Or, to put it more simply:
The Guardian has a very weird vendetta against this movie.But the true explanation for this is possibly here:
Nice middle-class children were always given TinTin to read by their parents as this made them feel they were doing somthing vaguely continental and therefore "sophisticated" ( This is the Seventies we're talking about, after all).
The Guardian is largely populated by those children who now feel Nasty Commercialism is besmirching their childhood dreams.
You'd get the same reaction at the Mail if George Lucas did a Famous Five movie.
Good landing
Good photo at the article of a big plane landing on its belly. Was it on the news this morning? I didn't see...
Lots of science
There seem to be an unusually large number of interesting science stories on phys.org today.
* the most important one is buried as a one liner near the bottom. The paper which I am sure I have noted before about observational evidence for the laws of the universe not being the same across the universe has been published. I see this is given more prominence at a Physics World blog, where it is noted that peer review having taken a year is an indication of how controversial the work is.
* urine for electricity? Yes, make up your own “pee” jokes as you read about Microbial Fuel Cells which work well with the addition of fresh urine. It would be nice if they would explain what size these MFCs are to produce useful electricity, but you have to admire the optimism:
Lead researcher Ioannis Ieropoulos said: "With an annual global production rate of trillions of litres, this is a technology that could help change the world. The impact from this could be enormous, not only for the wastewater treatment industry, but also for people as a paradigm shift in the way of thinking about waste."
* We'll be hearing more soon about a IPCC paper saying more extreme weather is on the way due to AGW. Attribution of weather events being what it is, though, you get things like claims that the unusual snowstorm in the US is not climate change related; wait a few months and you will probably get another scientist who says it is. This seems to have happened with the Russian heat wave, if I understand a new paper that is discussed at Real Climate recently.
There’s more, including sonic shock therapy to help with impotence, but I have run out of time.