Posts Tagged ‘James Cameron’
Just a Few Thursday Links!
* Climate change is now a bedtime story.
* Geek temporalities and the spirit of capital.
* Ohio State loses its brazen attempt to trademark the most common word in the English language.
* Hype vs. reality at the MIT Media Lab.
* Sociologists against student evaluations.
* Survival, Daniel believed, was possible with the proper accommodations. “One simply needs something along the lines of a greenhouse with good air filtration to grow plants,” he wrote on 4chan, “and a fallout shelter.” Thanks to his mother’s death, he had the means to build one: She’d left him a trust worth $2.6 million.
So with North Korea’s nuclear arsenal under the direction of a new, fanatical leader, Daniel had the freedom to undertake his most ambitious experiment yet. Alone in the house, he chose a spot in his basement and began to dig.
* Trump’s got a taste for human flesh now.
* Lin-Manuel Miranda and the dialectic.
* In the richest country in human history: 9-year-old student’s hot lunch is taken away over a $9.75 unpaid balance, grandmother says. The Ohio boy was given a cheese sandwich to eat instead. The incident happened on his birthday, his grandmother said.
* And has the world moved past the Avatar franchise? Does it even remember Avatar?
Sunday Links!
* Don’t miss my flash review of The Avengers: Age of Ultron! As I say in the update, thanks to my friend Ryan Vu for priming the pump (and look for his brilliant review of Captain America 2 in a few months in SFFTV).
* Why Avengers: Age of Ultron Fills This Buffy Fan With Despair. Nerd Plus Ultron: There Has to Be More to ‘Avengers: Age of Ultron’ Than Printing More Money.
* Notes on the coming DC disaster: In the early going, some in Hollywood are questioning whether Warners has acted too much in haste without having fleshed out the world on which so much hinges.
* These Imaginative Worlds and Parallel Universes Will Forever Change How You Think About Africa.
* 2030 is set largely in the titular year, 100 kilometers south of Ho Chi Minh City. The initial title card establishes that 80% of the population has been evacuated due to the rising sea level as an effect of global warming.
* Great university boondoggle reporting from Freddie deBoer.
* Late last week, using the hashtag #talkpay, people began tweeting about how much money they make—a radical thing to do in a culture that treats disclosing your salary as the ultimate taboo.
* Dear Superprofessors: The experiment is over.
* I’ve been buried in final book manuscript revisions, and have been noticing that I’m increasingly using the term “management” rather than “administration” in my analyses of university governance. Part of the reason is that my employer, the University of California, uses Senior Management Group as a formal employment classification. But it’s also because the friendlier aspects of the term “administration” seem decreasingly part of everyday academic life. Friendliness was administration as support structure, as collaborator, as partner, as the entity that did not take orders from obnoxious egocentric faculty prima donnas the way that frontline staff often had to do, but that accepted balanced power relations and a certain mutual respect that could make decisions move relatively quickly and equitably. It would avoid command and control of the kind that prevailed in the army and in most corporations, where executive authority consisted of direct rule over subordinates.
* Pay hike at McMaster University for female faculty.
* Lawmakers back away from increased course loads for UNC professors.
* Fewer professors, more managers work on Cal State campuses.
* Horrifying, literally unbelievable story of peer review gone awry. More here.
* Well, I guess that settles it: In 50-49 vote, US Senate says climate change not caused by humans.
* Study: Climate Change Threatens One in Six Species With Extinction.
* Babies born 3 miles apart in New York have a 9-year life expectancy gap. 15 Baltimore neighborhoods have lower life expectancies than North Korea.
* The Forgotten Power of the Vietnam Protest, 1965-1975.
* Rikers Island meatloaf did have rat poison.
* An Empty Stadium in Baltimore. A Brief History of Pro Sports Played in Empty Stadiums.
* Keywords for the Age of Austerity 18: Descending into Violence.
* ‘Rough Rides’ and the Challenges of Improving Police Culture.
* New ACLU Cellphone App Automatically Preserves Video of Police Encounters.
* The particularity of white supremacy.
* It’s hard out there for a gifted kid.
* “No one has walked on the moon in my lifetime,” I told them. “Yet you try to tell me that it’s my generation who has lost their wonder? That it’s the young people of today who have let everything slip and fall into ruin? You don’t understand. You had the dream and the potential and the opportunities, and you messed it all up. You got hope and moon landings and that bright, glorious future. I got only the disasters.”
* In some ways Ex Machina may be considered a feminist film by sheer dint of our low standards, the scarcity of stories that explore female desire beyond the realm of sex and romance.
* Kurt Vonnegut’s ‘Cat’s Cradle’ to Be Developed as TV Series By IM Global.
* The Secret Mountain Our Spies Will Hide In When Washington Is Destroyed.
* A 7-Year-Old Girl Got A New 3D-Printed Left Hand For The Wonderful Price Of $50.
* This 5-year-old girl knows a lot more about presidents than you do. At this point I say put her in charge.
* If you’re 33 or older, you will never listen to new music again—at least, that’s more or less what a new online study says. The study, which is based mainly on data from U.S. Spotify users, concludes that age 33 is when, on average, people stop discovering new music and begin the official march to the grave.
* How Old Is Old? Centenarians Say It Starts in Your 80s; Kids Say Your 40s.
* “How Does a Stand-Up Comedian Work?”
* Whiteness and the Apple Watch.
* The arc of history is long, but Cheez-Its is finally going to sell a box of just the burned ones.
* The same joke but with this Iceland law allowing anyone to murder any Basque on sight.
* “NASA has trialled an engine that would take us to Mars in 10 weeks.”
* The most racist places in America.
* Daddy, there’s a monster under the bed.
* If you want a vision of the future, imagine James Cameron directing Avatar sequels, forever.
Not a Bad List
The 2012 list of inductees to the Science Fiction Hall of Fame has been announced:
- Joe Haldeman
- James Tiptree, Jr.
- James Cameron
- Virgil Finlay
Saturday Night Links
* Breaking: Right-wing Supreme Court Justices don’t take their jobs seriously. Supreme Court May Be Most Conservative in Modern History. Antonin Scalia, semi-retired crank.
* Jonathan Cohn, Scott Lemieux, and Richard Hansen and ponder the legitimacy of a Supreme Court that has actually gone the full monty and overturned the ACA.
* Of course they say the same thing about us. Judge Strikes Down Key Parts Of Walker’s Anti-Public Employee Union Law.
* Don’t check the date, just believe it: Google Maps QuestView for the NES.
* This collection of more-accurate Dr. Seuss titles is one of my favorite things on the entire Internet.
* James Cameron teases the Avatar sequels.
“The best inspiration I got for ‘Avatar’ 2 and 3 was dealing with the master navigator culture in Micronesia,” Cameron said by phone from Tokyo on Friday, where he attended the Japanese premiere of “Titanic 3D.”
The Micronesians, a seafaring culture who navigated the Pacific for centuries without the aid of compasses or charts, already have a lot in common with the blue Na’vi residents of Pandora — they’re an indigenous, matrilineal culture, colonized by outsiders. And the cerulean and aquamarine tones of “Avatar” and its inhabitants seem drawn from postcards from the watery Micronesian region.
* The New York Times has some fun with towards a quantum theory of Mitt Romney.
* 21st Century as Intergenerational War. More here and here.
* Why are colleges acting as volunteer loan collection agents for the banks?
* In 2011, California spent $9.6 billion on prisons, versus $5.7 billion on higher education. Since 1980, California has built one college campus; it’s built 21 prisons. The state spends $8,667 per student per year. It spends about $50,000 per inmate per year.
* The lottery lie: The educational “bonus” appears to be nonexistent. Miller and Pierce (1997) studied the short- and long-term effect of education lotteries. They found that lottery states did indeed increase per-capita spending on education during the lottery’s early years. However, after some time these states actually decreased their overall spending on education. In contrast, states without lotteries increased education spending over time. In fact, nonlottery states spend, on average, 10 percent more of their budgets on education than lottery states (Gearey 1997).
* The education reform lie: it’s impossible to talk about primary and secondary education in America in any meaningful way if you won’t allow yourself to discuss class.
* Hunger Games commentary watch: Understanding Katniss.
* If you and your board are now determined to show that you in fact have wisdom and maturity when you exercise your powers over the eduction of your young, then you should acknowledge that it was a rotten lesson you taught young people in a free society when you denounced and then burned books–books you hadn’t even read. You should also resolve to expose your children to all sorts of opinions and information, in order that they will be better equipped to make decisions and to survive. Yours sincerely, Kurt Vonnegut.
* Too Smart to Fail: Notes on an Age of Folly.
But the problem goes far beyond politics. We have become a society that can’t self-correct, that can’t address its obvious problems, that can’t pull out of its nosedive. And so to our list of disasters let us add this fourth entry: we have entered an age of folly that—for all our Facebooking and the twittling tweedle-dee-tweets of the twitterati—we can’t wake up from.
* Slate continues to pioneer bold new horizons in fantasy capitalism.
* 3 New Studies Link Bee Decline to Bayer Pesticide. No one could have predicted the widespread implementation of insecticides would kill so many insects!
* The government has put the chances of a magnitude 7.3 quake centered in the north of Tokyo Bay at 70 percent over the next three decades, and has estimated there would be about 11,000 casualties and 850,000 buildings destroyed.
* Cancer research: it’s worse than you think.
* “Military surplus a bonanza for law enforcement.”
* And Canada will stop issuing pennies. Honestly, they’re decades ahead of us. Could be centuries.
Proliferation and the Digital
James Cameron produced over 100 versions of Avatar to fit every possible screen and projection configuration imaginable.