Random-Interesting-Weird

[Guard Dog]

Climate experts say Wall Street will be underwater

this is one of those instances where the headline is more interesting than the article. I got a laugh out of it thinking this might be the first time that economists and climate experts agree on something!

[Raithe]

Time it does its thing...

[ComradeYellow]

makes sense

[the_dog_days]

Taken out the doorway of my cottage. Messed with the color and contrast a bit to make it more dynamic. I thought about moving the lawn chair or at least putting it upright but I actually like it there. Gives the place a lived in feeling.

[Raithe]

The Times - The man behind Surfers against Sewage took on the (dirty) water brigade

Hugo Tagholm can clear a beach in minutes. He issues a raw sewage alert and everyone races out of the water. Swimmers hate sewage as much as sharks — no one wants to splash about in excrement. But even Tagholm gets it wrong sometimes and finds himself surfing a brown wave. “It’s pretty unpleasant paddling through effluent,” he says. “I avoid it at all costs.”

[Raithe]

All about that perspective...

 

[Raithe]

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/10/lidar-reveals-hundreds-of-long-lost-maya-and-olmec-ceremonial-centers/

[Gromnir]

Dear UC Santa Barbara: Don’t let a petulant billionaire build a prison dorm on your campus

"Munger’s “revolutionary” design is really about jamming as many bodies as possible into as little square footage as possible — well beyond the typically soulless dormitory high-rises on campuses around the country (which at least come with windows)."

HA! Good Fun!

[Gromnir]

This High Schooler Invented Color-Changing Sutures to Detect Infection

Spoiler

 

that is complete brilliant... and so f'ing kewl.

however, we were disappointed to read the following:

"After graduation, Taylor hopes to attend Howard University, study political science and eventually become a lawyer."

oh well. problem solving is an important skill in her chosen field, but somehow this feels like a waste o' talent.

HA! Good Fun!

[Gorth]

2 hours ago, Gromnir said:

Dear UC Santa Barbara: Don’t let a petulant billionaire build a prison dorm on your campus

"Munger’s “revolutionary” design is really about jamming as many bodies as possible into as little square footage as possible — well beyond the typically soulless dormitory high-rises on campuses around the country (which at least come with windows)."

HA! Good Fun!

Sounds a bit like the most scary thing I've seen up close and personal (i.e. not war torn ruins and rubble), when visiting Hong Kong and staying there for a short while. I swear those housing units looked like giant ant hills with a tremendous amount of itty bitty holes where some places inside probably got a bit of daylight. Still, those units can't have been more than few square meters each (exaggeration on my part)

 

Edit: Even the old Soviet legacy buildings in Berlin looked like they would have been sheer luxury by comparison when they were built... (and I lived in one of those old former East German residential areas a few hundred meters south of the old Berlin wall)

[ShadySands]

Real life Taken

Washington dad rescues daughter from sex traffickers, kills boyfriend he believes sold her for $1,000

[Malcador]

https://www.dallasnews.com/news/2021/11/02/qanon-supporters-gather-in-downtown-dallas-expecting-jfk-jr-to-reappear/

"One post from a widely-followed QAnon social media account said that after being reinstated as president, Trump would step down. The post said JFK Jr. would then become president, Michael Flynn would be appointed as his vice president, and Trump would ultimately become the “king of kings,” according to Newsweek."

Some 4channer is laughing now.

[Gromnir]

5 hours ago, ShadySands said:

Real life Taken

Washington dad rescues daughter from sex traffickers, kills boyfriend he believes sold her for $1,000

as usual, the fox comments is frightening.

thus far is no reliable evidence that the daughter was forced to work for sex traffickers or that the deceased had anything whatsoever to do with the daughter's predicament. all we got is the reason mr. eisenman gave the police for murdering nineteen year-old aaron sorenson after he were in police custody and one year following the murder. 

no lawyer for eisenman. would-be folk hero w/o legal representation is odd. am suspecting more than a few high profile criminal lawyers with a penchant for the dramatic would love to represent washington state's real life bryan mills.

might be a real life taken. could just as easily be a real life the ox-bow incident or shutter island. 

as is our typical response, am gonna wait. you never look like a fool by waiting a bit. converse...

HA! Good Fun!

Edited November 2, 2021 by Gromnir
repeat word fails

[Raithe]

AtlasObscura - The Perils and Pleasure of Bartendering in the Antarctica

 

 

[Gorth]

11 minutes ago, Raithe said:

AtlasObscura - The Perils and Pleasure of Bartendering in the Antarctica

 

 

A good example of the educational benefits of reading Playboy

[Hurlshort]

1 hour ago, Gromnir said:

as is our typical response, am gonna wait. you never look like a fool by waiting a bit. converse...

HA! Good Fun!

[Gromnir]

Fingers Crossed! QAnon Faithful Await the Return of JFK Jr. on the Grassy Knoll in Dallas

"On Monday night, independent reporter Steven Monacelli tweeted he had just encountered a crowd of QAnon supporters in the city’s AT&T Discovery Plaza, apparently in anticipation of the late Kennedy—who they believe faked his own death. The attendees believe the deceased son of the assassinated president will give a speech in which he will ordain Donald J. Trump as the “king of kings.”"

...

we would like to "thank" @Raithe for this story 'cause we followed one o' his rando links to gizmodo where we discovered this latest installment o'  batcrap "prove it can't happen" crazy from q-followers. 

edit:

On the Ground With the QAnon Believers Who Flocked to Dallas for the Grand Return of JFK Jr.

HA! Good Fun!

Edited November 3, 2021 by Gromnir

[Gorth]

Just an interesting take on the current entertainment industry (movies/tv). I don't remember giving it much conscious thought, why I don't watch movies or tv these days or if I for some reason  do end up starting watching something (mostly by accident), I switch off/lose interest really quickly. While not necessarily 100% correct, I think this guy hit at least a handful of nails on their heads as far as I'm concerned...

 

[Gromnir]

1 hour ago, Gorth said:

Just an interesting take on the current entertainment industry (movies/tv). I don't remember giving it much conscious thought, why I don't watch movies or tv these days or if I for some reason  do end up starting watching something (mostly by accident), I switch off/lose interest really quickly. While not necessarily 100% correct, I think this guy hit at least a handful of nails on their heads as far as I'm concerned...

when we think o' movies from 1982, the year wrath of khan were released, we cannot think o' a single film which pandered to lowest common denominator and seemed willing to have a cast o' young people with impulse control issues behaving even more immature than their chronological ages.

https://www.the-numbers.com/market/1982/top-grossing-movies

porky's and best little whorehouse in texas both made the top ten?

...

well, there goes that theory.

however, we will note, 2013 doesn't have on golden pond or chariots of fire kinda films anywhere near the top 10. 

can you imagine the following being a scene from a 2021 blockbuster?

well, you could likely imagine it, but then you might also have to simultaneous imagine that the events o' the movie V for vendetta had occurred for reals, with much o' the world population having been obliterated and that england had survived relative unscathed thus resulting in situation wherein a small number o' poncy englismen were deciding what was constituting a blockbuster.

am indeed a bit sadden by the fact it requires us to imagine an apocalypse to somehow conjure up a 2021 chariots o' fire making top ten.

HA! Good Fun!

[Gorth]

2 hours ago, Gromnir said:

when we think o' movies from 1982, the year wrath of khan were released, we cannot think o' a single film which pandered to lowest common denominator and seemed willing to have a cast o' young people with impulse control issues behaving even more immature than their chronological ages.

https://www.the-numbers.com/market/1982/top-grossing-movies

porky's and best little whorehouse in texas both made the top ten?

I can't really claim to know a lot of the movies on that top ten... mostly familiar with what public tv (Danish and German) as well as Danish cinemas showed. Some nostalgia though when checking the top 30. No idea what Porkys is and I don't remember hearing anything bad about best little whorehouse as far as musicals go, but movies like Blade Runner, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Conan the Barbarian and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back are movies my teenage self remembers as "good entertainment" at the time. It probably took an older me to appreciate a number of the other titles, including Chariots of Fire.

 

Edit: Not sure if/how much something like Wrath of Khan even showed in the cinemas locally or only became available a decade or two later on public tv

Edit2: Nvm me... just rambling a bit, straining my memory trying to remember what life was like in 1982 (it was *not* entertainment that was a priority at the time)

[Maedhros]

 

[Amentep]

7 hours ago, Gorth said:

Just an interesting take on the current entertainment industry (movies/tv). I don't remember giving it much conscious thought, why I don't watch movies or tv these days or if I for some reason  do end up starting watching something (mostly by accident), I switch off/lose interest really quickly. While not necessarily 100% correct, I think this guy hit at least a handful of nails on their heads as far as I'm concerned...

While I think the guy has a point, he also kind of messes his point up (totally losing the plot IMO when he brings in that ****ing army recruitment video that all the people who get military hard-ons have been bitching about that wasn't made to appeal to the average recruit types) and I think misses the causes.

Blockbuster films are so expensive these days that, yes, as he says they have to bring in a big audience.  But the studios handicap this as well - they don't want to spend 100 million to make 250 million, they want to spend 500 million to make 3 billion worldwide.  The increasing pressure on films to rake in ridiculous amounts of cash is a huge problem and the reason why mid-tier projects (including what used to be the 'Oscar-bait' films) are being pushed to cable or, more prominently these days, streaming and why low budget horror films and super-budget effects blockbusters are increasingly what find its ways into cinema.

But its also a problem to use Star Trek (notice he conveniently DOESN'T look at the TNG films because Nemesis, at least, would invalidate his comparison between 'classic' Trek and 'new' Trek, as would, frankly, a number of episodes of TOS and TNG) because the people behind the Star Trek properties of recent years (Abrams and Kurtzman particularly) have, very basically said, they want to make Star Trek more like Star Wars, which is where their SF interests lie.  This is the reason you get the weak Chain-of-Command on the ship stuff - because Luke used to be able to mouth off to Han, or Chewie could bitch about Han's driving or any of the other things because Star Wars didn't have a hard coded military structure in its heroes (and where it did have structure, like in the Jedi Order, it didn't have a strict one that would forbid the junior member questioning the senior).  Its also the reason you get weak story-arcs for the characters in the new Trek movies (to the point that making nods to the old movies is character development) because they can't figure out how to make Captain Kirk fits the Hero of 1000 faces model if he's also in a strict command structure (and sadly, I kinda think "Beyond" is the best of the three reboot films even with its lame "i'm aging at 30-something" bit) because they can't crack the motivation of the characters to exist in that structure (because, sticking it to the man is cool and you can't do that when you work for the man).  Star Trek's problems (and this goes back to TNG) is that it has increasingly been led by people who not only dislike SF (most of the TNG production, as I recall) but actually don't like Star Trek.  So rather than trying to figure out why Star Trek works on its own terms, the increasing tendency is to make it something it isn't.

[Raithe]

No Time for Bullies: Baboons Retool Their Culture - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

or for the actual science article on it:

Emergence of a Peaceful Culture in Wild Baboons (nih.gov)

Troop of Kenyan baboons experiences temperament shift after all dominant adult males die in accident;

[Malcador]

8 hours ago, Gorth said:

Just an interesting take on the current entertainment industry (movies/tv). I don't remember giving it much conscious thought, why I don't watch movies or tv these days or if I for some reason  do end up starting watching something (mostly by accident), I switch off/lose interest really quickly. While not necessarily 100% correct, I think this guy hit at least a handful of nails on their heads as far as I'm concerned...

 

Well, surprised he didn't start blaming THE SJWs at the start. 

[Raithe]

The Evolution of the Mad Scientist - JSTOR Daily

With a flash of lightning and a crash of thunder, a mad cackle rings out from a dark laboratory. Inside, a frail, large-lobed scientist hunches over his latest abomination. The archetype of the mad genius—a malevolent, weak-bodied creature with an oversized head—didn’t come out of nowhere. It was set in place by early science fiction authors—most notably H.G. Wells, in books like The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) and War of the Worlds (1897–98). And, according to humanities scholar Anne Stiles, writers like Wells were taking inspiration from one form of evolutionary theory.

Stiles argues that “the now-familiar trope of the mad scientist…traces its roots to the clinical association between genius and insanity that developed in the mid-nineteenth century.” In the early 1800s, the Romantics saw the condition as a “mystical phenomenon beyond the reach of scientific investigation.” The Victorians took a more detached and critical approach. “Rather than glorifying creative powers, Victorians pathologized genius and upheld the mediocre man as an evolutionary ideal,” Stiles writes. “All aberrations from the norm could be seen as pathological, including extreme intelligence.”