dentists in Beleriand?

Posted on Saturday, 2002 June 01 by Anton

“Jane Galt” (Megan McArdle) remarks in passing that “our bodies aren’t really up to the strain of physical labor for our new, improved lifespans.” Which reminds me of a puzzler: In all those stories where a drug/virus confers immortality, what about wear on teeth? Do Tolkien’s Elves grow a new set every century or so, or are their teeth simply made of stronger stuff?

Posted in futures, prose | 2 Comments

two colors are better than . . more

Posted on Saturday, 2002 June 01 by Anton

Ananova: EU rejects call to change flag. Whew, and yet – Is anyone somehow a bit disappointed?

Posted in heraldry | Leave a comment

toon history

Posted on Saturday, 2002 June 01 by Anton

Am I the only one who remembers a cartoon carnivore saying “And then it’s lunchtime!” as he plotted to catch the innocent rodent or boid? Does anyone remember him less hazily than I do?

Posted in cinema | Leave a comment

sales pitches possibly unclear on the concept

Posted on Saturday, 2002 June 01 by Anton

(from a spam for growth hormone): “As seen on NBC, CBS, CNN, and even Oprah!”

Speaking of spam, I almost wonder whether shiny new “Diplomas from prestigious non-accredited universities based on your present knowledge and life experience” might be more useful than my BS (1981) in a field in which I haven’t worked in fifteen years.

Posted in spam | Leave a comment

does whatever a spider can

Posted on Saturday, 2002 June 01 by Anton

I haven’t read Spider-Man much in the last twenty years, so I forgive myself for needing to have it pointed out to me (in a review whose link I have lost) that the nonentity recently played by Ms Dunst is not the real Mary Jane Watson by any reach. She would have disabled one of the creeps before Peter arrived. (And she’d have better sense than to flee into an alley at night.)

Apart from that, Spider-Man the movie treats the canon honorably.

I have a strong feeling that I’ve met someone who looks and talks like this J Jonah Jameson, but where?

Posted in cartoons, cinema | Leave a comment

I’m a poet and don’t knoet

Posted on Saturday, 2002 June 01 by Anton

Charlie Stross describes the FBI Carnivore email-snooper as “an indiscriminate Hoover”. That’s twice this month he’s made a pun such that I can’t tell whether he was aware of it. (The other was “Genetic Algorithm That Ate Calcutta”.)

Posted in language | 3 Comments

missing energy

Posted on Friday, 2002 May 31 by Anton

Got a spam (three or four times now) from a Christian kook. In the middle of the prophecies about nuclear war and the biochip of the beast is a paragraph about Creation, including:

THE LATEST RESEARCH IN MOLECULAR PHYSICS HAS COME TO THE CONCLUSION THAT 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (APPROXIMATLY 10 TO THE 34th POWER) JEWLS (POWER UNIT) NEEDS TO BE INPUTED INTO THE WHOLE UNVERSE EVERY SECOND TO KEEP IT FROM FALLING COMPLETELY APART. THEY DON’T KNOW WHERE THIS ENERGY COME S FROM BUT (— THIS IS ENOUGH ENERGY TO LIGHT NEW YORK CITY FOR 200 YEARS –) THIS IS PART OF THE WILL OF GOD- PLAIN AND SIMPLE-.

Whee! Where do they find this stuff? Of what is it a distortion?

If my figures are right 10^33 watts is about 3 million suns; negligible in the Galaxy, beneath measure in the Universe. But 10^33 joules is indeed enough to power New York City for two hundred years – assuming 8 million people each using twenty terawatts.

Posted in religion, sciences | Leave a comment