Interesting Links for 15-12-2014

• If companies paid, proportionally, as much tax as they did under Thatcher, the country would be £30bn better off.
  (tags: uk tax companies )
• Private companies are no more efficient than the public sector
  (tags: efficiency service companies government )
• George R R Martin is not on Twitter or on Facebook, and is not inspired by Star Wars
  (tags: GeorgeRRMartin starwars Twitter Facebook )
• I want to (a) eat this and (b) know how it's done
  (tags: food animated_gif )
• Earth's most abundant mineral finally has a name
  (tags: science materials space )
• How developers, designers, project managers, QA, and Sysadmins see each other
  (tags: funny true computers work )
• Number 10 intervenes to block humanist marriages
  (tags: humanism marriage uk )
• Where are all the pervy women?
  (tags: women sex society )
• How to avoid eye-contact with strangers
  (tags: funny comic )
• Tibetans inherited a genetic adaptation for living at high altitude - from an extinct branch of humanity!
  (tags: humans evolution genetics )
• Labour to force employers to pay their interns after a month
  (tags: work pay )
• Star Trek Turbolifts will be reality in 2016 with multidirectional elevator
  (tags: StarTrek elevator technology )
• Labour councillor wants to eject cannabis smokers from council housing, in exchange for "decent people"
  (tags: cannabis housing Labour uk )

I was going to link to the AV Club's "20 worst movies of 2014"

But frankly by the time I'd finished reading it I just felt sad, and a little dirty.

Anyone care to suggest some awesome movies from this year instead?

Well, that certainly had a battle in it. And there were definitely five armies. (Tiniest spoilers)

The general reaction coming out of the movie was that it was good fun, and we enjoyed it, but that you could have cut 20 minutes out of it and made a _great_ movie. And that Peter Jackson should not be allowed to put comedy in his films.

Seriously, putting moments of (naff) comedy into scenes that would otherwise be marvellously dramatic? Why would you undercut yourself like that? What did he think he was adding?

Oh, and I'd cut both of the scenes with ( slight spoiler )

. (Other than that, I was absolutely fine with her as a character.)

On the other hand, generations of technical geniuses have pushed forward the boundaries of computer graphics _precisely_ so that Billy Connolly can ( not much of a spoiler )

. And that was awesome.

I feel pretty much how I thought I would - The Hobbit is _definitely_ too slight to carry the narrative weight that's been put onto it, and so the series is not entirely satisfactory on its own terms.

However, as part of a six-part series of films, it works rather well, setting things up for LOTR, and increasing the scope nicely. Frankly, if someone was coming to them fresh, I think that having them do so with the Hobbit trilogy first, and then LOTR, would work better than the other way around.

And now I can now look forward to the extended edition, in about a year's time.

(Oh, and someone taking all three films and making a fan edition that only has the book bits in it. That would make a few friends very happy.)