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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
james_nicoll's LiveJournal:
| Thursday, July 9th, 2009 | |||||||||||
| 2:41 pm | For the record, I have not actually seen Merlin yet Just out of curiosity, what is the single worst Arthurian TV show or movie? Is there a consensus on this? | ||||||||||
| 2:36 pm | Other people must have looked at this Once Moore's Law no longer holds due to inevitable natural limits, what are the logical strategies the computer industry will follow? | ||||||||||
| 10:52 am | Greybeards dream of stars Tibor made a huge and telling point when he looked around the room and asked: “Where are the young people?” Indeed, he himself was one of the youngest in the room and, as he told the crowd, he was almost 50. Tibor's site. Tibor is quite optimistic: “The first true interstellar mission, targeted at the closest star to the Sun or even farther, will be launched before or on December 6, 2025 and will be widely supported by the public.” I'd settle for a nice fleet of outer planet orbiters. Provoked by Doug Muir | ||||||||||
| 9:27 am | This looks vaguely familiar, somehow As a comment on our long-running examinations of English language variations, Richard Murnane offers a much-quoted insight from one James Nicholl, who wrote: "The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." And while my name isn't spelled Nicholl, that's a lot closer to how it is spelled than Booker T. Washington or James T. Kirk. | ||||||||||
| Wednesday, July 8th, 2009 | |||||||||||
| 3:25 pm | |||||||||||
| 10:36 am | Follow-up to the previous post IF you could remove just one school of architectural thought from history, which one would you remove? That gives me an idea for a story: ( Read more... ) | ||||||||||
| 9:53 am | Nakagin Capsule Tower: hideous, squalid and historically interesting Will the 20th century be remembered as the nadir of architecture? The Metabolists: dedicated to making Brutalism look good by comparison. Habitat 67 is a related structure in long-suffering Montreal. Here's a (big, so I will put it behind a cut) picture: ( Read more... ) | ||||||||||
| Tuesday, July 7th, 2009 | |||||||||||
| 2:41 pm | |||||||||||
| 12:42 pm | Not sure what to make of this
but when I did this in 2006, I got this result: james_nicoll's Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 10 Average number of words per sentence: 22.89 Average number of syllables per word: 1.43 Total words in sample: 1419 | ||||||||||
| 9:09 am | These seem related somehow Valentin D. Ivanov's A Statistical Study of Locus Online's "Notable Books" Andrew Wheeler's review of Charles Stross' Wireless, with comments on the New Gloom. And of course people will remember this Kathryn Cramer essay that asserts that So, to answer his question, Does SF have to be so gloomy? I guess my answer is that for now it does because it is in touch with the world we inhabit right now. | ||||||||||
| Monday, July 6th, 2009 | |||||||||||
| 11:44 pm | Prometheus Winners Announced Via Locus: NOVEL Little Brother, Cory Doctorow (Tor) HALL OF FAME The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien Andrew Wheeler has a nicely snarky comment about this. Strangely, the winners get gold rather than the traditional Promethean Award of being chained to a rock while birds peck out one's liver. This non-traditional choice is probably a wise on on the part of the Libertarian Futurist Society. | ||||||||||
| 11:41 pm | I am skeptical that they can top that German Bujold cover Here at Orbit we’re very proud that our books tend to be smart, sophisticated — dare we say, awesome? (yes, we dare) — but there’s still a part of all of us that loves the look and feel of a truly, epically bad SFF book cover. And since we don’t get a chance to publish books that fit that profile we thought we’d call on our readers to help us create one — or at least create the jacket for one. Nicked from Antick Musings | ||||||||||
| 10:20 am | In regard to the post that came and went Really? They beat me to that by how many years? | ||||||||||
| 10:11 am | |||||||||||
| 9:45 am | Yes, I did google this Is it known what the age of the average Analog reader is? What about F&SF and Asimov's readers? | ||||||||||
| 9:40 am | Something for would-be geo-engineers to argue over The rain band near the equator that determines the supply of freshwater to nearly a billion people throughout the tropics and subtropics has been creeping north for more than 300 years, probably because of a warmer world, according to research published in the July issue of Nature Geoscience. If geo-engineering allows the possibility of altering this ongoing change, it allows the possibility of heated arguments over who gets to benefit from it. Nicked from The Dragon's Tales | ||||||||||
| 9:27 am | |||||||||||
| Sunday, July 5th, 2009 | |||||||||||
| 11:00 pm | Geo-engineering as a quick fix to unrequested climate change 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 | ||||||||||
| 10:34 pm | To save myself the pain 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. | ||||||||||
| 12:09 pm | |||||||||||