Interesting Links for 05-02-2014

[andrewducker]

• Neil Gaiman's American Gods to become TV drama
  (tags: NeilGaiman tv )
• Hitachi are selling badges that can tell your manager where you are, who you're talking to, and how much.
  (tags: surveillance work technology )
• Who wants to see Middle-Earth from space?
  (tags: visualisation lotr )
• The law isn't there to protect us from Dieudonné's odious views
  (

Comments

[bart_calendar]

Want to become rich?

Start writing code for a hack for that Hitachi thing right now.

[gonzo21]

Oh dear, sounds like American Gods is going to be mired in pre-production hell for the forseeable future then. And held by a company that... does not exactly have a strong basis in drama production.

(In fact as best I can tell no basis in drama production, they're entirely a reality tv producer.)

But I suppose that means they'll have very deep pockets at least. And might well want to really prove themselves as creators of quality drama if they decide to go for it.

[swisstone]

Oh dear, sounds like American Gods is going to be mired in pre-production hell for the forseeable future then.

Indeed. "American Gods no nearer to being a tv series than the last time anything was said about it" is probably a more accurate headline.

[gonzo21]

For some reason I had the opinion that it was further along at HBO than apparently it was.

I expect they have probably hundreds of shows on the books being developed, and only a fraction of a percent will ever actually get made.

[swisstone]

My first version of the headline was "American Gods further away from being a TV series than it used to be."

[benicek]

I suppose the order picker tracking systems they use at the Amazon warehouse in Wales are pretty close to this surveillance stuff. My grandfather told me they had a low-tech system for monitoring toilet breaks on the shop floor at Rolls-Royce, where he worked. You had to sign out a metal 'toilet token' and then return it when you had finished. When he retired they gave him one of the tokens as a joke. He was now free to spend as long on the bog as he wanted.

[del_c]

The history of worker surveillance suggests that as the tech gets cheaper and more detailed, the surveillance creeps up the social scale. First they keep the lazy lower classes from goofing off, then they start checking on the respectable office staff.

(the alternative view is that in the technology/service society, white collar work is sliding down the social scale. I think this is a face/vase visual effect: it's the same thing, but how you see it depends on your perspective)

[benicek]

The white-blue collar divide is a dated and confusing idea. Where do call centre operators and specialist graduate nurses fit in? I agree that surveillance creeps upwards though. At higher levels employees are almost invisible, even when theoretically accountable to owners.

[skington]

‘Yes,’ said O’Brien, ‘we can turn it off. We have that privilege.’

[drdoug]

That early life in the universe paper is awesome. It's one of those ideas that's so blindingly obvious in retrospect (cosmic background radiation was really hot at the Big Bang, is really cold now, so must've been at habitable temperature for a period of time in between, so life could've shown up then) that once you've heard it, you can't quite believe that you hadn't thought of it before yourself. The actual paper [PDF] fills in the details nicely too.

I came across it by another source, thought: "That's really cool. Ooh, bet andrewducker will want that for his Interesting Links." And it turns out you did.

[andrewducker]

:->

Interesting that there's a period of around 6 million years for life to form (If I'm reading this correctly). Doesn't seem that long - certainly not long enough for anything really complex to form.

There have been a fair few sci-fi series that deal with The First Ones, and I guess these would be the ultimate version of that!

[cartesiandaemon]

Although it seems a disservice for the article not to start with a quote from another article, "His new theory has some logical flaws, though, which he readily admits. Most astrobiologists think that life couldn’t emerge during the first few billion years of the universe because it lacked the rocky planets and heavier elements that life (as we know it) requires."

Which I thought was a problem, but I don't know if I'm missing something.

(I mean, this is mostly a problem with the way it's reported, not the way it was written, since it's still really interesting to think that if there WERE some way to have matter, it could have formed water, and life, and we don't know enough either way, but the best guess is still "life didn't evolve then")

[ajr]

Neil Gaiman's American Gods to become TV drama

*clicks link, reads*

"...French vampire drama The Returned"…"

*head explodes*

(How the hell did no-one catch that?)

But yeah. American Gods has a hell of a long way to go before it actually becomes a TV series. They still have to put a package together; get a script written, a director attached, cast it, film a pilot - and it might not get picked up after all that! I don't know why, in recent years, news outlets appear to have gotten so excited over options being picked up.