Obsidian Wings

First. Second.

by von (retired)

First, read Dr. Science's post about SOPA/PIPA, and act!  I ain't saying that piracy's good, but these bills take a sledgehammer to a porcelain doll.  And the doll's worth saving.

Called your Rep and Senator?  Good.  This second one is even more important.

They've made a Star Blazers live action film.  Behold the trailer:

 

I realize that I'm speaking to a very specific demographic here, but damn.  I remember waking up at 6 a.m.  just to watch Star Blazers on old WGN 9, setting an alarm and everything.  I can't say I welcome this version -- there's plenty of fear and trepidation for a George Lucas remake -- but at least it seems that they got the visuals right.   And that's something.

Anyone know if it's coming to the States?  If not, here's your open thread.

UPDATE:  OK, fine, it came out in 2010.  I'm late to this party.  But still:  anyone seen it?  Any good?

Save the Internet, Kick a Senator. Figuratively only, of course.

by Doctor Science

I first heard about SOPA (the Stop Internet Privacy Piracy Act, H.R.3261) and PIPA (the Protect Intellectual Property Act, S968) several weeks ago from Sprog the Younger, who said Tumblr was up in arms about it. I figured the kids were getting overexcited -- no-one *really* could want to throttle the Internet like that.

But she was right. They really are that bad, and they really do have a good chance of being passed.

A Dew Drop Falling from a Bird's Wing Wakes Rosalie, who Has Been Asleep in the Shadow of a Spider's Web, by Joan Miro. Wake up!

When even A List Apart, a low-key, techie, web design industry site best-known for articles like CSS Sprites: Image Slicing’s Kiss of Death (it was a game-changer! really!) or Dark Patterns: Deception vs. Honesty in UI Design -- made a political statement about it, I got scared and got real.

Question for someone who knows Russian history

by Doctor Science

-- especially economic history of the 19th century and earlier.

As I mentioned before, I'm currently reading Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom by Peter Kolchin. On pp334-35, he's talking about market-oriented activities: of pomeshchiki (nobles, serf-owners), unfree serfs, and comparatively free "state peasants":

By the late eighteenth century serfs and state peasants were selling more grain on the domestic market than were pomeshchiki, and peasants had a virtual monopoly on sales of specialized agricultural products such as hemp, flax, and tobacco.

[Google books link; bold mine.] This really surprises me. In the New World, slaves were mostly used to grow specialized, non-staple or non-food products: sugar, indigo, tobacco, cotton. Why didn't the Russian nobles direct more of their serf resources toward non-food crops? I would think that the economies of scale would have been very much to their advantage, especially for crops like flax that take a lot of industrial-type processing.

The corroborative detail in the footnotes (not available via Google; use Look Inside! on Amazon, search for "53 Rubinshtein") is all in Russian, so it's not much help to me. Does anyone here or passing through know what was going on? It's very counter my American-trained intuition.

The Abolition of Serfdom in Russia by Mucha, part of his Slav Epic -- which I'd never heard of before, I only knew him for Art Nouveau posters.

Investment versus speculation

by Doctor Science

William Holbrook Beard, The Bulls and Bears in the Market. I can't figure out if the bears in this close-up:

are looking for more money inside the bull they've eviscerated, or are angry because it turned out to be a hollow, bubble-y sort of bull.

In July Bill Domhoff, sociologist at UC Santa Cruz, posted An Investment Manager's View on the Top 1%, written by a long-time acquaintance who works in the business (and who wants to stay anonymous, not surprisingly). He emphasizes that there are two distinct sets in the "top 1%":

The Labor of the Harvest

by Doctor Science

Still Life with Turkey Pie, by Pieter Claesz.

As far as I'm concerned, Thanksgiving is a harvest festival[1], where we acknowledge how grateful we are that there was enough to eat this year, and that we'll have enough to eat this winter. We've been members of a CSA for almost 20 years now, and one of the things it's done has been to give us an old-fashioned gut sense of how fragile food production is.

Even Japanese do it Friday open thread

by liberal japonicus

On the 23rd here in Japan, we had Thanksgiving. However, the one here is called Labor Thanksgiving Day (勤労感謝の日)

The modern holiday was established after World War II in 1948 as a day to mark some of the changes of the postwar constitution of Japan, including fundamental human rights and the expansion of workers rights. 

Other than that, I got nuthin'. Have at it.

Hamlet's Father at Penn State

by Doctor Science

I've been poking at a follow-up to my first post about Hamlet's Father, Orson Scott Card, and child abuse for a while now, but the revelations out of Penn State last week make it all too hideously relevant.

Basically, I think Hamlet's Father is about precisely the kind of abuse there was at Penn State. It's not a very good story because OSC only put in the abuse, not the cover-up and complicity of people around the abuser. IMHO he left out the cover-up because he didn't let himself explore the true nature of the situation he was describing, and he did *that* because he can't let himself acknowledge the truth about the abuse that scarred his own life. But there *is* a really good story in there, asking to be told.

Stained glass from the Elsinore Theatre, Salem, Oregon.

I am cutting here for:

TRIGGER WARNING: discussion of fictional and real-life child abuse, emotional and sexual. Survivors take care.

SPOILER WARNING: post and comments may contain spoilers for any work by Orson Scott Card.

protests to the left of me, protests to the right, here I am

by liberal japonicus

Some interesting things about the Oakland OWS protests and the events at UC-Davis that many of you may have already read.

This article, about Jean Quan, mayor of Oakland, via Erik Loomis at LGM, is quite interesting, and gives some other links (here, here and here) about the renaming of Frank Ogawa plaza to Oscar Grant plaza. Oscar Grant was shot and killed by a BART police officer while Frank Ogawa is a name that was familiar to me, but I couldn't figure out why until I read the last link, and saw that he was responsible for the Oakland-Fukuoka sister city relationship.

The Edge of the American West blog, recently revived, has two professors from UC Davis and has several posts about the situation there. One post in particular picks up a video that is out there, where Chancellor Katehi leaves her office though a large number of silent students and also has the letter from the person who walked Katehi to her car, Reverend Kristin Stoneking, describing what led up to the video. I found this paragraph one that sticks in my mind:

What was clear to me was that once again, the students’ willingness to show restraint kept us from spiraling into a cycle of violence upon violence. There was no credible threat to the Chancellor, only a perceived one. The situation was not hostile. And what was also clear to me is that whether they admit it or not, the administrators that were inside the building are afraid. And exhausted. And human. And the suffering that has been inflicted is real. The pain present as the three of us watched the video of students being pepper sprayed was palpable. A society is only truly free when all persons take responsibility for their actions; it is only upon taking responsibility that healing can come.

"There was no credible threat, only a perceived one." That seems to describe a lot of has been happening recently.

 

(corrected the misspelling of Erik, thx,b is b!)

Grimm adventures with Google Translate

by Doctor Science

Apparently this is the year for TV shows based on fairy tales. I know a bunch of people who are following Once Upon a Time but only few who are following Grimm. Among the latter, though, are a number of German-speaking fans who are watching mostly to mock mercilessly.

The premise of Grimm is that "a cop discovers he is descended from an elite line of criminal profilers known as "Grimms," charged with keeping balance between humanity and the mythological creatures of the world". The Brothers Grimm were of course the first (or best-known) of this line, so, very unusually (uniquely?) for American TV, the show uses German names for supernatural creatures and phenomena.

Gustaf Tenggren 1923 illustration for Grimm's Fairy Tales. In the 1930's Tenggren was one of Disney's top illustrators, working on Snow White, Pinocchio, Fantasia, and Bambi. He knew it was important for fairy-tale heroes to be weak and desperate, not big and bad-ass.
Image via.

Your circular breathing Friday open thread

by liberal japonicus

I happened to come across this youtube vid, nice funky song.

Trombone Shorty, according to his wikipedia page, either started playing trombone at the age of 6 or started fronting a band at that age, though I suppose, given the way he plays, both are possible. But below the fold is the jaw dropping stuff