Category: General

FRONTLINE: nuclear reaction: Why the French Like Nuclear Energy

Say what you like about nuclear power, at this point it would be a lot safer to invest in than to hope against hope the oil doesn’t run out.

Reading this makes me a bit ashamed of the way America deals with energy issues. Not only that but how it deals with communication with its own people about major infrastructure issues that affect the country. For all the controversy about storage of nuclear waste in France, can you imagine how corrupt and deranged that would be if it happened here?

My physics teacher in high school, Mr. Jipping, was very pro-nuclear power. His reasoning was that it’s the only thing that we’ve currently got the technology for that has any chance of providing anything even a little bit close to the energy we demand of oil. So the question is not whether we go nuclear, it’s when. Right now, with planning and forethought and some time to spare, or when the oil runs out, desperately and quickly and with no time to worry about little things like “safety.”

Sounds like the French will be sitting pretty then.

Don’t worry though. We’ll invade and take all their uranium.

If a Republican is still in power… which seems likely, for the forseeable future.

Ursula K. Le Guin: Earthsea:

“I’ve tried very hard to keep from saying anything at all about this production, being well aware that movies must differ in many ways from the books they’re based on, and feeling that I really had no business talking about it, since I was not included in planning it and was given no part in discussions or decisions.

That makes it particularly galling of the director to put words in my mouth.

Mr Lieberman has every right to say what his intentions were in making the film he directed, called “Earthsea.” He has no right at all to state what I intended in writing the Earthsea books.

Had “Miss Le Guin” been honestly asked to be involved in the planning of the film, she might have discussed with the film-makers what the books are about.

When I tried to suggest the unwisdom of making radical changes to characters, events, and relationships which have been familiar to hundreds of thousands of readers all over the world for over thirty years, I was sent a copy of the script and informed that production was already under way.”

Oh man. Note to self: if you decide to make a gigantic epic fantasy movie based on a beloved series of novels, either (a) wait till the author is dead, or (b) do it with her or his approval. Or (c) wait till he or she is too old to make web pages or give interviews.

OUCH.

(Checking out the scifi.com web site, I don’t know how much I’d enjoy the series anyway, because that cheesy-ass hollywood dude does not look like Ged. To start with, he’s all Western European looking.)

TV Preachers: “Be afraid, preachers. Be very afraid. Never forget what you could become, may yet become, may have become.”

Idle hands: “David Pescovitz:
Mark Slouka wrote an amazing essay for the November issue of Harper’s Magazine called ‘Quitting The Paint Factory: On the Virtues of Idleness.’ It’s about the beauty of doing nothing, and the fight against those who would deny us one of life’s greatest pleasures:

Idleness is not just a psychological necessity, req¬uisite to the construction of a complete human being; it constitutes as well a kind of political space, a space as necessary to the workings of an actual democracy as, say, a free press. How does it do this? By allowing us time to figure out who we are, and what we believe; by allowing us time to consider what is unjust, and what we might do about it. By giving the inner life (in whose precincts we are most ourselves) its due. Which is precisely what makes idle¬ness dangerous. All manner of things can grow out of that fallow soil. Not for nothing did our mothers grow suspicious when we had ‘too much time on our hands.’ They knew we might be up to something. And not for nothing did we whisper to each other, when we were up to something, ‘Quick, look busy.’

Mother knew instinctively what the keepers of the castles have always known: that trouble – the kind that might threaten the symmetry of a well-ordered garden – needs time to take root. Take away the time, therefore, and you choke off the problem before it begins. Obedience reigns, the plow stays in the furrow; things proceed as they must. Which raises an uncomfortable question: Could the Church of Work – which today has Americans aspir¬ing to sleep deprivation the way they once aspired to a personal knowledge of God – be, at base, an anti-democratic force? Well, yes. James Russell Lowell, that nineteenth-century workhorse, summed it all up quite neatly: ‘There is no better ballast for keeping the mind steady on its keel, and sav¬ing it from all risk of crankiness, than business.’

Link(Thanks, Terre!)“

(Via Boing Boing Blog.)

UPDATE:

Snappy notes the irony of bloggers of all people geeking out on the awesomeness of idleness.
I confess guiltily that I used this entry to test out the automagical posting powers of MarsEdit and NetNewsWire, which means I posted the entry in like eight seconds, with zero thought! To give myself a little excuse, I was reading the essay in its entirety while doing so. I’m a big fan of idleness, and have very little of it lately. Very little. And likely to be less as time goes on.

Somehow this all ties in with the essay I’m not likely to get around to writing in the near future, about all the big big lies of our culture. The work thing is one of them.

UPDATE:

Oddly, the author, Mark Slouka, says “Aileen Wuornos” when I assume he means “Karla Faye Tucker,” towards the end. Do read to the end.

I don’t remember where I got this link — probably MeFi — but Metamix is way way cool.

It takes an mp3 or other soundfile and makes a strange, mathematically based extended remix of it. You can play with the parameters to give different effects.

Oh, and I do mean “extended.” This is for playing in the background. Over long periods of time. Metamixed songs are potentially infinite, and they progress very slowly back and forth through the original piece.

I’m listening to a Metamixed version of Matt Hyland by Cooper, Nelson & Early right now and it’s oddly repetitive but beautiful.

Some songs work better than others with it. Hard to predict.