Interesting Links for 19-06-2012
Jun. 19th, 2012 12:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andrewducker- Analysing the language of Mad Men
- No Matter The Decision You Make, It’s Always Wrong.
- What's being done to prevent fish from going extinct?
- What if Prometheus was a Roleplaying Game? (These posts are totally worth the money I paid for the film ticket)
- Why you shouldn't discuss your business loudly in coffee shops.
- 20 Things Fantasy Characters Should Do More Often!
- The Greek Elections Changed ... Nothing
- Road signage that is most definitely not covered by the highway code.
- Behold! Alan Moore! Cliff Richard! Shakin’ Stevens! Alvin Stardust! A Black Dog! TOGETHER AT LAST!
- LEGO 'INCEPTION'. Made me remember how awesome the trailer was. Shame about the film.
- The True Origin of the Lord Of The Rings novels
- When should specifications allow implementation-defined-behaviour?
- Amazing photo shows what happens if you only get sun on one side of your face for decades
- MALES are deeply confused by a new sort of pornography that is both for women and made of words.
- The Great German Energy Experiment - This will be fascinating, if they can make it work.
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no subject
Date: 2012-06-19 11:32 am (UTC)Wasn't that a little bit how the space race went too?
no subject
Date: 2012-06-19 12:02 pm (UTC)For example there are proposals for two subsea interconnectors between Germany and Norway totalling 2.8 GW (about the size of two large coal plants or 400-600 offshore wind turbines)
If I were German energy minister I wouldn’t be switching off the nukes and I can see the decision being reversed as the closure dates get closer and the power prices start to increase. I’m not suggesting they are insincere about their shift to renewables but I think they’ll go back to using nuclear as a baseload generating technology as part of a smoother slower transition.
no subject
Date: 2012-06-19 01:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-19 05:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-20 09:35 am (UTC)I certainly agree with you about the opposition to nukes in Germany.
I think the opposition might soften when some of the implications of the decision start to land in the form of higher electricity bills, job losses and more high-voltage cables running across the country. Whether it softens enough to persuade the Germans to leave the nukes on is a moot point.
no subject
Date: 2012-06-19 02:19 pm (UTC)And everyone else in the world will be better off for it, because it will bring wind and solar to grid parity.
Totally with you on the nukes, too.
no subject
Date: 2012-06-20 09:45 am (UTC)There are lots of opportunities to use interconnectors as back up supply and a demand sink. Essentially you can push the problem of having a grid that has larger than normal short-term fluctuations onto the grids surrounding you (usually in exchange for money).
I’m also intrigued by their work on aggregating small generators into a bank of responsive back-up supply. You could use domestic micro-generation and micro-demand sites like a CERES fuel cell micro-CHP and fridges to balance the grid in the short term.
If they succeed it’s a huge step forward for European industry. Lots of technology to sell abroad, not-crazy-expensive energy for the foreseeable future, and a tasty opportunity to beat up foreigners (and their industrial base) for being carbon intensive.
no subject
Date: 2012-06-20 09:56 am (UTC)I definitely agree about the long-term gains. If only the UK saw it that way!
no subject
Date: 2012-06-20 10:21 am (UTC)But then I think all energy strategies have weak points.
But generally, a more interconnected European grid is a good thing.
We still get the opportunity to do business as part of this German push to find ways to accommodate more renewables on their grid and we get to piggy back on their successes and avoid their mistakes. I think a decent argument could be made for second mover advantage here.
no subject
Date: 2012-06-20 10:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-20 10:44 am (UTC)So opportunities for us to develope patentable technology and saleable skills - but done whilst breaking the German grid, rather than our own.
I'd still rather we were doing what Germany was doing but I don't think it's going to be a entirely German effort.
no subject
Date: 2012-06-20 12:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-20 01:39 pm (UTC)But the smaller older ones first so we have a bit of time to sort ourselves out.
no subject
Date: 2012-06-19 04:22 pm (UTC)The failure of Germany's energy dice-roll would cost a lot more, possibly including permanent damage to the nation's economy and a drop in standard-of-living for the whole country.
-- Steve certainly wouldn't want to be the one rolling dice for those stakes.
no subject
Date: 2012-06-19 12:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-19 12:14 pm (UTC)I also hated the last half hour, when all of the earlier "Look how awesome the things we can do in dreams are!" setup turned into a sub-James-Bond gunfight.
no subject
Date: 2012-06-19 01:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-19 02:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-19 03:12 pm (UTC)Fight Club _almost_ got me, I worked that one out about three seconds before the reveal and said "Fuck" very loudly in a crowded cinema.
no subject
Date: 2012-06-19 09:11 pm (UTC)It's probably related to people who can easily track variables across a series of nested function calls. Just about everyone who writes code can do this, no problem, but being able to do that is not a feature of all human brains.
There's a similar thing going on with time travel - again, many people (probably the majority on your journal!) have no particular difficulty with this. So, for instance, the timey-wimey stuff on NuWho is hardly brain-bending by general sf standards, but for some people it's completely mindblowing. The Time Traveller's Wife (book and film) is another example - few fannish/geeky people would have found the time travel aspect there particularly challenging, but many other readers did.
20 Things Fantasy Characters Should Do More Often!
Date: 2012-06-19 12:41 pm (UTC)Although to be fair, it's really hard to write convincingly about characters forgetting things: even when it's realistic, it's hard to make it LOOK realistic, rather than "artificially dragging things out" or "covering up a plot twist" :)
Re: 20 Things Fantasy Characters Should Do More Often!
Date: 2012-06-19 02:57 pm (UTC)Re: 20 Things Fantasy Characters Should Do More Often!
Date: 2012-06-19 05:48 pm (UTC)MALES are deeply confused by a new sort of pornography that is both for women and made of words.
Date: 2012-06-19 12:45 pm (UTC)Although it bugs me that descriptions of the book seem to always say "college graduate"? Surely it's not unlikely that the businessman is also a college graduate? That's a bit of a vapid summary of someone. If they mean "young and intelligent", why don't they say so?
no subject
Date: 2012-06-19 12:46 pm (UTC)These posts are totally worth the money I paid for the film ticket
Date: 2012-06-19 02:15 pm (UTC)A slightly more serious side to the question is that I think people are interested in prometheus because raises interesting questions about where humanity and aliens come from, even though the way it deals with them is generally dumb. Someone pointed out it may make somewhat more sense when we see a director's cut (I hope so, though I'm not sure how original it will be).
So does it deserve praise for raising any philosophical questions in a big blockbuster? Or scorn for being kind of dumb with them? On balance, probably both... :)
Re: These posts are totally worth the money I paid for the film ticket
Date: 2012-06-19 02:20 pm (UTC)Re: These posts are totally worth the money I paid for the film ticket
Date: 2012-06-19 03:00 pm (UTC)Hanging a film on how people deal with there being no creator and no purpose is, and can be, supremely interesting - however that's what Prometheus just didn't do....
Re: These posts are totally worth the money I paid for the film ticket
Date: 2012-06-19 08:29 pm (UTC)Re: These posts are totally worth the money I paid for the film ticket
Date: 2012-06-20 08:39 am (UTC)Re: These posts are totally worth the money I paid for the film ticket
Date: 2012-06-20 10:52 am (UTC)Re: These posts are totally worth the money I paid for the film ticket
Date: 2012-06-20 09:00 pm (UTC)Re: These posts are totally worth the money I paid for the film ticket
Date: 2012-06-21 11:16 am (UTC)We wouldn't want our aliens to be different now.
Re: These posts are totally worth the money I paid for the film ticket
Date: 2012-06-21 12:05 pm (UTC)And if we're supposed to be evolving towards them, then are they saying that white people are more evolved than black people?
I can just imagine the outrage if all of the engineers we saw had been black. That would have been _fantastic_.