Interesting Links for 16-04-2014

[andrewducker]

• This 1981 Computer Magazine Cover Explains Why We’re So Bad at Tech Predictions
  (tags: technology )
• Germany's green dreams meet harsh reality
  (tags: germany renewables energy coal electricity )
• How a date calculation bug cost hard-up Co-op Bank £110m
  (tags: banking computers errors )
• MEPs approve rules for safer lorry designs in EU
  (tags:

Comments

[bart_calendar]

Noah was going to be screwed on the race issue no matter what. If they made Noah black middle American would have gone nuts. If you make him white and the other characters black then you end up with a story of god killing all black men and letting the white dude live.

[abigail_n]

There are about half a dozen characters on the "good" side of the Noah story, including a daughter-in-law character who was invented for the movie (played by Emma Watson). There's absolutely no reason why some of them couldn't have been PoC, even if you're determined that your lead has to be white.

[bart_calendar]

Note: I haven't seen the movie so I'm basing this on my understanding of how the original noah story plays out - wouldn't the daughter in law character and all characters other than noah get killed by god no matter what?

[erindubitably]

Noah's family went with him on the ark, he wasn't the only human occupant.

[philmophlegm]

How about making him (and all the other characters in the film) mesopotamian looking?

The Noah story in Genesis is basically a rewrite of a couple of earlier Akkadian epics. Makes sense to me therefore that the characters depicted in the film should look middle-eastern. Making them look like Russell Crowe and Emma Watson makes no sense. But making them look like Morgan Freeman and Lupita Nyong'o no sense either.

[bart_calendar]

Also, who the fuck would believe that God would save Russel Crowe?

[philmophlegm]

Quite. I mean if you were an omnipotent superbeing, you'd pick Morgan Freeman wouldn't you?

[bart_calendar]

Or James Spader.

[gonzo21]

The mysterious black ring is almost certainly what happens when somebody puts a squirt of lighter fluid into a round barbecue that hasn't been used all winter, and gets a big cool puff of black smoke ring.

[andrewducker]

Apparently it's from fireworks!

[gonzo21]

Ahh, yes, that would explain it too. The times I've seen them was usually when somebody squirted petrol into an oil barrel to start a fire, and got a big WHOOMP, puffing a dirty great ring up into the sky.

[del_c]

It was the boyfriend of the niece of someone on my LJ friends list, who was the tech in charge of special effects at Warwick Castle testing for an upcoming event. She posted yesterday that he's been getting a ribbing for the last few days for having caused a Daily Mail sensation.

I'm amused that the truth has been posted in the DM comments, and it just sits there looking like all the other theories. It's even been "debunked" for its implausibility! I hope they succeed in doing it again in front of an audience on the day.

[nancylebov]

I haven't seen Noah, so I don't know whether a montage of people drowning all over the world would have fit.

[a_pawson]

Not really. Since Noah is only 10 generations down from Adam & Eve, there aren't that many people on the planet at that time.

[del_c]

I'm prepared to forgive a cover artist who, when asked to depict a "computer on your wrist" in a punchy way for people browsing the magazine rack, paints an actual present-day computer on your wrist. As the article says, it's an amusing way to get the message across. That little floppy says "micro-SIM card" to me.

I'd be interested to see how such illustrations handled the task when the mouse-and-pointer UIs became common knowledge a few years later. Would they show you tapping your wristwatch with a stylus?

I'm surprised the article says people thought the coming iPhone would be like an iPod. I'd have thought people would predict a fusion of a phone with the non-phone PDAs with touch screen that were already around.

[apostle_of_eris]

"You're going to take an iPod and add a radio to it and turn it into a phone? And you're going to charge five hundred dollars for a phone? A phone that plays music? Well, good luck with that. Because that is the number one most crazy idea I've ever heard."
-- Steve Ballmer on the introduction of the iPhone