So, how do you explain the nuclear disaster to children, without overly alarming them but still trying to convey some sense of the seriousness of the event? Naturally, you make anime – and replace radiation with “poo”.
I am reminded of this video I shot on a television screen in a department store in Shinjuku five years ago:
I was politely, but firmly, discouraged from taling more video than this, thankfully. Like Cthulhu, seeing more might have destroyed my soul. I can only shudder at the thought of what horrific disaster that video was trying to explain.
I confess, I did indeed invent the term “otakusphere” and now I am guilty of too-enthusiastically embracing a typo by Neal Stephenson. Witness: “reamde“. I’m sure we can come up with a clever implied meaning full of irony and wit for it.
So why not go meta and invent a term for the accumulated invented terms? a Geek Lexicon would therefore naturally be.. well, you know. I suppose we could also have “otaxicon” but now we are getting into failed Transformers territory. I also considered “gexicon” but I’m having flashbacks of Earthsea for some reason so let’s not go there.
Anyone else have any good candidates? I could also propose “geek service”.
Superman isn’t a Jesus analogue because, unlike Jesus, his moral vision is not imposed. The word of Jesus is the word of God and therefore what he says goes, dictation straight from the Almighty. Superman is the exact opposite: a man whose moral vision comes not from a source exterior to humanity but from humanity itself, via Ma and Pa Kent, who are themselves immensely decent people. He ultimately isn’t a received savior, regardless of the origin of his powers; he’s Superman, the apotheosis of what human virtue can be. He’s an aspirational figure first and foremost.
(…) Superman isn’t Superman because of some tragedy which informed his growth. Pa Kent does not die because of a failure on Clark’s part – indeed in most versions of the story, Pa dies when Clark is already Superman. Clark’s knowledge of Krypton doesn’t make him a superhero either; again, this is something he finds out later, too late to traumatize him. Clark is Superman because he decides to be Superman without being prompted. That’s more complex and nuanced a story than “somebody did something to me.” Superman’s story, which informs his entire character, is one of someone who chooses to be good of his own free will and agency, with no influence other than moral upbringing.
This complements my own observation that the best Superman is where Clark Kent is the person and Superman the persona, rather than the way around. I love the moral paragon argument above, but I take a more cynical view that the most interesting Superman stories are ones in which, just like the rest of us, he lapses. Fundamentally, Superman is not Jesus, he’s the opposite as MGK points out. That should also extend to the question of his infallibility. Free will and reason itself are subjective processes, and Superman is Superrational. Which for mankind, isn’t super at all.
An interesting corollary is the question of whether Superman’s goodness is the yin that drives the yang of Luthor’s badness. Read MGK’s essay on Luthor – great analysis of the character, and I fully agree that there’s no villain his equal, because other villains are just… villains.
(UPDATE: credit due, via Mark. Who acounts for a disturbingly large number of my “neato lookit” posts of late.)
This is incredible – a digital compilation of images from the Cassini probe, no CGI or animation, assembled into incredible breathtaking flybys of the Saturn system. The best part os the third, final sequence where we flyby Titan, Mimas, pass thru the ring-plane, and swoop past Enceladus.
I’ve a photo of me from 1996 as a visitor to JPL (where my friend’s dad worked) in front of the Cassini heat shield. I really need to dig that up… Let’s also remember that the controversy about Cassini being nuclear powered was totally bogus, and use that as a data point for why nuclear power is not the ultimate bugaboo that people assume it to be after the still-unfolding tradegy and disaster in Japan.
This is a real rarity – a Filco Majestouch keyboard, of the 87-key layout (tenkeyless), and with the linear Cherry MX Red switches, in stock at Amazon.com. In my earlier post on keyboards I noted that reds were pretty much impossible to find. And here they are, in stock and free shipping. The keyboard is a little pricey but I think it’s worth snapping this up.
Filco Majestouch 87-key (tenkeyless) mechanical keyboard with Cherry MX Red switches – $165 at Amazon
Red switches are linear like blacks, but lighter force for actuation. The result should be an ideal hybrid between gaming and typing. My only complaint is that it isn’t a blank keyset, but that’s ok 🙂 There’s a thread at geekhack with some initial reviews of this board and I think I am going to enjoy it.
This is an old Warcraft meme, but new to me, and its hilarity is universal.
It’s just awesome. And players who endlessly strategize and micromanage drive me insane. I’ve never yet been on a raid (my main is still 75) so maybe the overthinking is necessary for all I know – but pulling a Leeroy is going to be hard to resist.
Tonight, the first of the final ten episodes of SGU will air on SyFy. I’m looking forward to and dreading it simultaneously. The door is closed on SGU continuing somewhere other than SyFy, though there is the possibility of a movie or two like the original Stargate series managed to pull off.
I’ve got the storage system all sorted out now. Here’s my disk manager:
Disk0 (E: – BACKUP) is the 2TB Western Digital Caviar Green, formatted as one large basic volume. Disk 1 and Disk 2 are the 1TB Samsung Spinpoints, where the first 128 GB of each have been striped together to create a single 256 GB striped volume (Y: – FASTDATA) and the latter 800 GB are mirrored (Z: – USERDATA). There’s also a strange unallocated block on one of the Spinpoints, which is relatively tiny (130 MB). Odd, that. Finally, Disk3 is the 128 GB Crucial RealSSD C300. I’ve moved all the user data directories to the mirrored partition and kept the Windows OS and application data on the SSD, with plenty of room to spare.
I was curious as to the performance of the striped volume versus the SSD. Note that I allocated the beginning of the spinpoints to the stripe, to “short-stroke” it (ie, the data is on the start of the disks, meaning the read heads have to travel less physical distance). Unfortunately, HD Tune does not seem to like partitions, only treats disks as single entities, so I used CrystalDiskMark 3.01 instead. The results were intriguing! Here are the runs for each partition – each run had 4 averages, 1000MB test data size:
2TB Western Digital Caviar Green 800GB mirrored partition, Samsung Spinpoint F3 (pair) 128 GB Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB striped partition (short-stroke), Samsung Spinpoint F3 (pair)
What is kind of amazing is that in sequential reads, the striped volume actually matches the SSD in read speed, and outperforms by a factor of 2 on write! However, when it comes to random 512K and 4K sectors, the SSD completely smokes the striped volume. This suggests that the striped volume would be just as good as an SSD for things like video other multimedia. In fact I might just rename my striped volume VIDEO and move the My Video folder to there instead of on USERDATA. Actually I should rename USERDATA just DATA as well 🙂
I’m not really sure why I created the striped volume, other than simply because I could. I didnt need a full terabyte for mirroring once the OS and apps are excluded. At some point in the future i can move to 2TB disks if necessary, but this setup shuold last me for a few years at minimum, if not longer – especially since I’m also segregating video. The only downside is that the striped volume not only lacks redundancy, it’s doubly vulnerable to disk failure. But that’s why I have my backup volume E, after all, and backblaze. (Though backblaze doesn’t backup data files over a certain size… need to check into that)
I’ve put a huge amount of overthought into this, but I think I am finally happy with how it all turned out. I need to do my final wrap up post on PREFECT now, with photos and cost estimate. Since the only game I run is WoW I think I am basically futureproof for a long time.
Christopher Nolan is doing the third Batman film, and some plot spoilers are starting to leak around the web. What intrigued me however was how Nolan has tapped Tom Hardy and Joseph Gordon-Levitt in supporting (and antagonistic, if not villainous) roles. The rivalry between their characters in Inception was one of that film’s strengths and I am interested to see them both on screen together again.
I need to go through my statements to verify this. But it troubles me that the agent can give me wrong information about my account, requiring that I correct him with an actual copy of my latest bill. If I hadn’t insisted, I’d have been seriously misled. (more…)
