Interesting Links for 31-12-2018

[andrewducker]

Why Microsoft Windows filesystem access is much slower than Unix.

(tags: windows linux unix speed )

Why you are all wrong about Susan Pevensie from The Chronicles of Narnia.

(tags: Narnia women religion )

Trump issues executive order cancelling 2% federal workers' pay raise

(tags: pay usa republicans )

Mining company says first autonomous freight train network is fully operational

(tags: mining automation trains )

Asking God about the fundamental forces of the universe

(tags: physics religion comic )

No-deal Brexit ferry company owns no ships and has never run Channel service

(tags: UK europe doom transport )

‘For 30 years I’ve been obsessed by why children get leukaemia. Now we have an answer’

(tags: cancer children inflammation immune_system microbiome )

Comments

[calimac]

Tweetstormer is entirely correct about Narnia, and deserves extra credit for finding premonitory material in the earlier Narnian chronicles that foretell Susan acting this way.

Though the same general argument has been made on the web before, by Andrew Rilstone among others.

Tweetstormer is also correct that Lewis encouraged fanfic, though it's worth noting that the fanfic he had in mind was children scrawling stories on paper for their own amusement, not publishing it or distributing it to the public on something like the web. I daresay that most of the authors now currently objecting to fanfic mean that they're objecting to such distribution, and wouldn't mind if the writers just kept it to themselves.

[jack]

I'm really torn by the Susan Pevensie response because all that she said is what I originally thought when I heard I heard how people had been let down by her plot, but the people making the criticism point out that a young woman being to obsessed with fashion things is a harmful stereotype even if Lewis had it happen for other reasons

[andrewducker]

I agree that it's a negative stereotype, and while he clearly means it as a stand in for "being obsessed with surface rather than godly things", it would have been better to show that in other ways.

[calimac]

Really? This is the first time I've ever seen anyone make that point. Every criticism of the treatment of Susan I've previously seen - and I've seen it lots and lots of times - treats the fashion as purely a code for sex.