Interesting Links for 15-06-2015

[andrewducker]

• Vader discovers he has a son (really well done, presumably from a recent comic)
  • (tags: starwars comics )
• Miley Cyrus Mocks Christians Who Believe in Old Testament 'Fairy Tales', Opposes Bigots Making Laws
  • (tags: religion Christianity homophobia )
• Some very good questions about the Sunday Times story on Snowden
  • (tags: spies secrets spying )
• Taking

Comments

[bart_calendar]

It sure seems like dating Joan Jett has been a learning experience for Miley.

[momentsmusicaux]

Argh! I was ok with low-energy lightbulb technology only lasting 30 years or so, as it's now clearly been made obsolete by LED lights. But the LED light bulbs I've just bought claim they're going to last 10 years or something. Could they not be rendered obsolete BEFORE the end of their actual life??! ;)

[andrewducker]

In the future, everything will get 15 minutes of pre-obsolescence.

[asher63]

The new LEDs sound like an exciting development.

I hadn't realized secular weddings were only so recently legal in Scotland.

[andrewducker]

You could always get married in a registry office (well, since 1898, I think). But it wasn't possible to get married in other locations unless you got married in a church, or other wedding venue, by an officiant - and until 2005 in Scotland "officiant" meant "religious" (and still does in the rest of the UK).

[annie_r]

I didn't know this either. So did people do the thing where they have an unofficial wedding wherever they wanted with a unofficial officiant, and then sign the papers in the registry office? I'm also assuming religious officiants included Jewish, Hindu etc clergy, but couldn't those happen outside an official religious building?

[andrewducker]

I've known people do the "sign papers and have an unofficial wedding".

I don't think that Jewish or Hindu weddings could be solemnised outside. But I don't actually know!

[kalimac]

That Star Wars comic is far better than the story, or George Lucas, deserve.

I have a strong preference for reading physical codices over e-readers, but you won't catch me blathering about the physical sensation. It's the reading experience and the ease of the interface that gets me. E-readers are superb for finding known locations in a book, but they're almost impossible to skim adequately or get a larger sense of where you are in the text.

The same problems also come up with scrolls. I've never read a book in one, but I have used reels of microfilm, which are basically a reversion to it, and I dislike those far more than e-readers.

[skington]

Surely your e-reader tells you that you're on e.g. page 74 of 396?

As for skimming, sure, but OTOH an e-reader lets you very easily search - e.g. suddenly this Bob person is mentioned, you can't remember who Bob is, highlight Bob, search, and see when Bob was last / ever mentioned.

[kalimac]

1) That tells you what page you're on. (Which is great in one respect because it means you don't have to remember the page number or hunt for a bookmark when you put the book down - that's one advantage.) But it doesn't tell you where you are in the story.

2) Searching, as in your example, is not the same thing as skimming. Another case where the e-reader has one advantage over the physical book but not another. I don't want to go back and find out who Bob was. What I want is to go forward and find where this boring part of the story, or this digression in the textbook, ends. There's no search function for that, and paging through the reader page by page is far slower than skimming a book.

[skington]

Moore's law will deal with e-reader slowness eventually :-) .

[kalimac]

On the Snowden thing: If Snowden took no documents from Hong Kong to Moscow, what happened to them? Did Greenwald and colleagues take the only copies of the entire trove? Is it possible that the Chinese government could have gotten hold of them somehow and given copies to Russia, totally irrespective of Snowden being physically in Moscow?

[andrewducker]

To be honest, I have no decent answers here, only questions. And largely other people's questions, because I'm painfully aware of my own ignorance.