Thursday, December 12, 2019
"Autonomous Regions of Spain"
Geography Now explains the “Autonomous Regions of Spain” (17
minutes).
There are a lot more of them than I realized. The best known are the Basque area (Bilbao
and San Sebastian-Donesta), and Catalonia (Barcelona).
I visited Bilbao in late April 2001 (it’s not on the main
railroad but has its own, as well as bus, from San Sebastian), and saw the
Guggenheim.
Basque is a bizarre language not of Indo-European
origin. Catalan is an amalgam of Spanish
and French.
There are various political designations for the various regions,
which might be thought of as like states in the US. There is even a little piece of North Africa
that belongs to Spain, as well as the Canary Islands.
Spain is less hospitable to free speech, having long had a mandatory
link tax (part of the EU Copyright Directive).
Portugal next door is said to have very fragmented Internet access,
which sometimes consists of packages of social media and cable channels, with
no net neutrality. But when I was in the
hotel in Bilbao (which was both palatial and cheap) my own regular Internet
access was good (from a large business center). There was also a marathon run
that Sunday, and an extensive subway.
Bars were filled with people watching soccer games. San Sebastian has an international film
festival.
Wikipedia attribution of Guggenheim picture:
By PA - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=69348007
The museum appears in a Mission Impossible
movie from the late 1990s/
Wednesday, December 11, 2019
"Why We Have a Snowflake Generation": this speaker feels manliness is being lost
“Why We Have a Snowflake Generation”, from London Real, “People
Worth Watching”, today with Dan Pena. (The other term is “coddled”. My own grandmother used to say “pantywaste”.) The video's strike page calls itself "Generation of Cowards".
This morning we had some snow after a cold front, and it
didn’t stick very well. Pretty good
metaphor.
This generation hasn’t had war, and hardship, like earlier
generations.
Yup, some of the demonstrations at Evergreen State and
Syracuse are really tragic.
This speaker talks about the handshake test. Women have stronger grips than men.
Most of them have had no military service.
Labels:
interviews,
psychiatric issues,
psychological growth,
short
Monday, December 09, 2019
"How to Transfer Your Consciousness to Another Body": store it on Titan where it stays cold
“How to Transfer Your Consciousness to Another Body?”, by Ridddle.
The video (10 min) starts out by defining the Hayfick Limit,
the number of times cells can divide in an organism, which means no organism is
immortal without reproducing. (There may
be a jellyfish that is an exception by playing “Benjamin Button”.)
It’s possible for people to arrange to have their brains
frozen, so they could be awakened millennia in the future when Man has moved to
other planets to escape the billowing Sun (the ultimate climate change). That wouldn’t work for Alzehimer’s. or if a vengeful
assassin shot you in the head to make sure your demise was permanent.
But the storage and computational power to record the entire
brain is beyond our computers (although quantum computers might do it). The memory packs could be cold-stored in a
data center on Titan, which belongs to Avenger’s Thanos (aka Carlos Maza with
his Pride flags).
Scientists have downloaded the brain of a planaria, with
just 370 neurons, and transferred the memory to robots which actually behave like
worms then.
Is a copy of your brain still you? What if there are multiple copies?
Could a virus (maybe containing a micro black hole, which
could evaporate into Hawking radition) encode all of your memory and transfer it to
someone else?
Your consciousness is a composite, as some semi-voluntary
drives (like sex in most people) seem to have their own independent wills.
Enjoy this bonus from “Big Brain Boy” (competition for
Pewdiepie), and I don’t think this 4-hour game is “made for kids”.
Sunday, December 08, 2019
Expected gutting of Paramount Consent Decree by DOJ could allow big movie studios to eliminate smaller distributors as competition
John Campea discusses the likelihood that the DOJ will do
away with the Paramount consent decrees.
He refers to a Nov 19 article by Brent Kendall and Erich
Schwartzel in the Wall Street Journal, which is discussed by Slashfilm, and had
been discussed in Nov. 2018 by James Amos at Forbes.
The speaker fears that large movie studios will require
theaters to show their bad films as well as their blockbusters, and therefore
reduce screen space for smaller indie films, possibly threatening smaller
studios like A24. Changing the rule would stop the FTC from enforcing anti-competitive practices.
It's possible that established guilds want this because "established" writers and actors can make more money in big studio production, and wouldn't face competition from those who work for less. When people work for others in union conditions, the content produced is often less original.
Picture: In Minneapolis, indie filmmakers often meet at Bryant Lake Bowl on Lake Street.
It's possible that established guilds want this because "established" writers and actors can make more money in big studio production, and wouldn't face competition from those who work for less. When people work for others in union conditions, the content produced is often less original.
Picture: In Minneapolis, indie filmmakers often meet at Bryant Lake Bowl on Lake Street.
Saturday, December 07, 2019
"Gay Coded Characters" in movies and TV, as per Council of Geeks
“Council of Geeks” discusses “Gay Coded Characters” in “Gay
Coding in Movies and TV”. It’s a lecture in seven parts.
I’m not sure if the speaker is fluid or trans, but “they”
had a significant video on the COPPA problem recently (the FTC comment period
ends Monday Dec. 9, reminder; here's a similar recent video).
Most of the examples here are for older films and are with
villains, or comics movies or genres.
(Well, Frodo’s relationship with Sam is
gay-coded, more than just male-best-friend coded). The “Joker” gets mentioned. Yes (yeth), the lisp (lithp) can constitute
gay-coding, but that was more pre-Stonewall (Tiny Tim, “OGAB”, as was “thmooth”).
This is not the same as casting diversity. In a particular gay film, it might be
important that the characters be sexually attracted to one another for more old-fashioned
signals of the “external trappings of manhood.”
Labels:
lecture video quasi documentary,
LGBT,
short,
transgender
Thursday, December 05, 2019
Wednesday, December 04, 2019
"5 Reasons to Like Blue Jays": are they smart?
I don’t know if blue jays, which are corvids, are as smart
as crows, but I thought I would share “5 Reasons to Like Blue Jays”. Corvids have evolved problem solving ability
from evolution separately from mammals.
The caterpillar scene is interesting.
Bluejays are common in northern Virginia and conspicuous.
But so are crows. I
had one befriend me in the house, and in the new condo a crow will sit on the
balcony and watch me work at the computer.
On the day of Hurricane Sandy in 2012, the crow “Timo” kept chasing me
back into the garage when I ventured out to test the weather. He knew a storm
was coming and seemed to protect me.
Labels:
animal intelligence,
science documentary,
short
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