Friends
(Recent Entries)
(Archive)
(Friends)
(User Info)
(discordian sky)
Navigate: (Previous 20 Friends)
Jul. 5th, 2009
Suddenly, instead of a situation where any one country can foil efforts to curb global warming, any one country can curb global warming all on its own.
One phrase to consider while reading the more enthusiastic claims: Aral Sea.
Nearly everyone I spoke to agreed that the worst-case scenario would be the rise of what David Victor, a Stanford law professor, calls a “Greenfinger”—a rich madman, as obsessed with the environment as James Bond’s nemesis Auric Goldfinger was with gold. There are now 38 people in the world with $10 billion or more in private assets, according to the latest Forbes list; theoretically, one of these people could reverse climate change all alone. “I don’t think we really want to empower the Richard Bransons of the world to try solutions like this,” says Jay Michaelson, an environmental-law expert, who predicted many of these debates 10 years ago.
You could get an amusing plot out of dueling billionaires trying to alter the climate in incompatible ways. It could be a "The Liberation of Earth" for the 21st Century.
Nicked from Mike Brotherton
What beloved movie classics from, oh, 1978 to 2000 [1] have aged so badly that if I want to keep my fond memories of them, I should avoid ever watching them again?
1: The rough range when I was watching a lot of films.
A historian gripes about the redesigned Smithsonian Museum resembling a "shopping mall". Excerpts:
Whole huge exhibits have disappeared. The first floor used to house an exhibit entitled "Information Age: People, Information and Technology." This was a 14,000 square foot display with over 900 original artifacts: Samuel Morse’s telegraphs, Alexander Bell's telephones, a Hollerith punched card machine, a German ENIGMA encoder, the ENIAC computer, the TELESTAR test satellite, and a selection of early personal computers, among many other artifacts. This has all been crated-up and stored away in a warehouse somewhere and replaced by "Julia Child’s Kitchen."
[...] one hugely popular and impressive exhibit in the “old” museum was the Foucault Pendulum (which was removed prior to the current renovations). The Foucault Pendulum consisted of a 52-foot cable suspended from the ceiling down through a round opening in the second floor, with a 240 lb. brass globe at the end. A row of candles was set up on the first floor, and the motion of the pendulum over the course of the day, as it knocked down the candles one-by-one, demonstrated the earth’s motion. This was a very physical—one is tempted to say, 19th century—way to communicate something fundamental about the physics of our planet. Now this sort of information is conveyed only on touch-screen video monitors.
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/opiummmm/foxies/happy.gif)
calm
Current Music: Weird Al - Couch Potato
I've just finished going over the CDs of photos that I produced in last year's disposable camera era. It's been fun to view these CDs and copy the best pictures over to my laptop I am frustrated that one CD was broken (can anyone familiar with informatics tell me if the data on a broken CD can be recovered?), but the data on the remainder was quite easy to view and transfer over. Expect them to start appearing here in the near future!
One subgenre of photos that I specialized in quite heavily in the last two-thirds of the disposable camera era was that involving pictures of kitten Shakespeare. He was such a young kitten, and such a cute kitten. Accordingly, see more catblogging ahead. For the time being, content yourself with this adorable photo.
Aren't we both handsome?
Xinhua has some good stuff.
Starting July 4, the Independence Day of the Unite States, visitors to the Statue of Liberty will once again be allowed to visit her crown.
This is the first time the statue's crown will be open since the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
However, only 30 visitors will be given access to the crown every hour, and they will need to climb 168 steps on a narrow, spiral staircase to reach it.
The statue sees as many as 15,000 visitors every day, most of whom, if without a crown-access ticket that can be reserved online as early as one year in advance, will have to be content with a circle around the statue's pedestal.
Tickets for the first-day opening sold out within hours, local media reported earlier.
The Statue of Liberty is a monument that was presented by the people of France to the United States of America in 1886 to celebrate its centennial. The crown visit, which provides a broad view of the New York Harbor through 25 windows, was available for the public prior to Sept. 11, 2001.
Happy 233rd!
(Yes, I'm late, but better late then never, and better one cliché than nothing at all.)
Edward Llewellyn died.
I bet most people have no idea who I am talking about....
Simply make it a major felony not to have health insurance. Prisoners get health care and the US is extremely experienced with running prisons.
If the costs get too high, introduce the death penalty for repeat offenders.
It would never have occurred to me that stories selected by Dozois as a result of this workshop for professional publication wouldn't receive professional pay-rates (or what passes for them in the Big Three).
The logic I used was If Pro Publication, Then Usual Payment but a lot of people (and I've asked around without mention who was involved or what organizations) use If No Payment Mentioned, Then No Payment Likely.
In this case I was correct but my approach could well be very flawed.
Jul. 4th, 2009
It's that time of the decade, which means that Discordian Sky has had another makeover. Goodies include a cleaner layout (or at least I think so), some new artwork in the Art section including a raft of 2d stuff, since that's been my focus for a good while, and couple old/new projects in Discordian Sky Press.
Things that need to change: At some point I need to figure out a way to reduce the footprint on MalWiki and (especially) FenWiki. Setting up a small wikifarm *might* be the answer, but I can't tell 'cause all the documentation on wikifarming goes right over my poor english-major head. :P Research continues, though.
Oh, of some small note, I got paid for a web dev project! It was small and (too) cheap, but what the hell, money's money, yeah? Here's the site if you want to feast on the glory of my cheapass CSS skillz.
Current Music: 65daysofstatic - 23kid
The always-thoughtful blog Castrovalva has a very interesting post up ("Invisible Cities") wherein he links to pieces by China Miéville and Michael Moorcock memorializing London as a fantasy city, describing its complexities both as they were and as they changed.
Says Miéville (in part):
A shoved-together city cobbled from centuries of distinct aesthetics disrespectfully clotted in a magnificent triumph of architectural philistinism. A city of jingoist sculptures, concrete caryatids, ugly ugly ugly financial bombast, reconfiguration. A city full of parks and gardens, which have always been magic places, one of the greenest cities in the world, though it's a very dirty shade of green –and what sort of grimy dryads does London throw up? You tell me.
Says Moorcock (in part):
[There are] the places where London was simply not – a few irregular mounds of grass and weeds with rusted wire sticking through concrete, like broken bones, exposed nerves. These parts of London could very easily be identified because almost nothing survived except the larger 17th- and 18th-century buildings such as Tower Hill, the Customs House, the Mint, the Monument. And, of course, St Paul’s, her dome visible from the river as you came up out of the delicious stink of fresh fish from Billingsgate Market, a snap of cold in the bright morning, and walked between high banks of overgrown debris along lanes trodden to the contour of the land. You had made those paths by choosing the simplest routes through the ruins. Grass and moss and blazing purple fireweed grew in every chink. Sun glinted on Portland stone, and to the west, foggy sunsets turned the river crimson. You never got lost. The surviving buildings themselves were the landmarks you used, like your 18th-century ancestors, to navigate from one place to the other.
That this can be said in the same way about Toronto, simply because the city is so young: A hundred years ago, most of the land area of what is now the city of Toronto was farmland, occasionally a village or a small town. The ongoing project
Imagining Toronto could make the point, I think, that Toronto's starting to acquire this now, achieving a new resonance in literature and music and popular culture generally, as neighbourhoods and entire districts change, but still, we're so young. Give us a century or two to take root, and then we'll catch up to London and Paris and the other great historical cities.
That's Toronto. What about your cities? Are they as dense with history as London (are you
in London?), are they not, is there great change happening and if so what kinds, is there a lot of nostalgia for the old or happiness with the new?
Please, discuss.
Asked in email:
Is there a summary of all the reasons why O'Neill colonies wouldn't
work?
Which editor would it be funniest to see inundated by a flood of stories featuring cat-girls?
Maybe tomorrow? Things got busy.
Here in the U.S., it's Independence Day. DEFINITELY not to be confused with Independence Day. The celebrations usually involve burning meat, sucking down "cold ones", and blowing stuff up. And getting great discount prices on refrigerators.
What are your plans for the day? Mine involve a concert at 11:00 a.m., a Dr. Horrible panel at 2:00, hanging out with folks at the con, a quiet dinner, and then MC'ing a masquerade, followed by a little open filk (if I make it that long).
Jul. 3rd, 2009
I've a post up at Demography Matters, examining Iran's recent demographic trends--some rural areas have TFRs as low as many regions in southern Europe--and their implications on the country's economic and political scene. Go, read.
This post will be fairly superficial, informed by only three Asia Times articles, but what the hell? The only thing that I can say for certain is that the Islamic Republic is currently stifling the people of Iran and that a new regime woujld be wonderful, but how likely is that?
- Pepe Escobar ("Iran's streets are lost, but hopes remain") suggests that the opposition to Ahmadinejad and the religious oligarchy isn't a thing only of the young, but rather includes conservatives and business classes upset by recent economic mismanagement, potentially creating a broad coalition aimed against the Islamic Republic as currently constituted.
- Shahir Shahidsaless' "Miscalculations abound in Iran" also argues that the recent election helped created a broad coalition against the established order, but argues that even if the lowest possible number of Ahmadinejad voters that's still a huge number of people opposed to the anti-government coalition. Culture--and political--wars are ungoing.
- Kaveh L Afrasiabi's "Crunching the numbers" takes a critical look at the criticisms of the election as fraudulent, arguing that many of the claims made by the anti-Ahmadinejad coalition might be inaccurate, and that their nemesis might have won fairly.
So what will happen? If the military remains under the control of the established order, there won't be a revolution now or for some time to come. Maybe there will be a gradual softening; maybe there will be a sharp shock. Who knows? I'd just hope that it would come quickly, for everyone's sake. A stable, prosperous, and hopefully secularizing Iran would be a much better policeman of the Persian Gulf than Saudi Arabia, I'd like to believe.
Navigate: (Previous 20 Friends)
