Gerry Canavan

the smartest kid on earth

Posts Tagged ‘droids

2016 Links!

leave a comment »

20081210* This Man Is Claiming To Be Able To Bring The Dead Back To Life By 2045. That’s good news, because Scientists Say They Can Recreate Living Dinosaurs Within the Next 5 Years. Perhaps relatedly.

* So tragic: These parents cryonically froze their toddler in the hope she might live again.

* Like looking into a mirror.

* More bad news for my particular demographic.

* I’m at MLA this week, giving a paper on Saturday evening on Richard McGuire’s fantastic graphic novel Here for a panel on “The Anthropocene and Deep Time in Literary Studies.”

* The Year of the Imaginary College Student.

Facebook ran experiment to see how long users would wait before giving up and going elsewhere, but people ‘never stopped coming back.’

Can’t Disrupt This: Elsevier and the 25.2 Billion Dollar A Year Academic Publishing Business.

* Keywords for the Age of Austerity 24: Sullen. Also, here’s John Pat’s current syllabus on Innovation: A Cultural History of the Contemporary Concept.

* I think this one is old, but maybe it’s not old to you: Soc 710: Social Theory through Complaining.

This video about the aging pipeline below the Great Lakes should be this summer’s top horror flick.

* That’s when New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman filed an amended lawsuit against the two companies, this time asking for them to give back all the money they made in New York State, to give it back to those who lost money and to pay a fine of up to $5,000 per case.

* In February 1964, then future NS editor Paul Johnson wrote an article attacking the Beatles and all they stood for. It became the most complained-about piece in the Statesman’s history.

I Studied Oregon’s Militia Movement. Here’s 5 Things You Need to Know.

What Writing Shared World Fiction Taught Erin M. Evans About Worldbuilding.

12 reasons to worry about our criminal justice system.

Entire Florida police department busted for laundering millions for international drug cartels.

* David Harvey on Consolidating Power.

No More Statutes of Limitations for Rape.

* Some Last Words on Pessimism.

* I’m finally #ready4hillary.

New Heights (Lows?) in Philosophy Job Application Requirements.

Screen Shot 2016-01-05 at 8.05.41 AM* The Far-Out Sci-Fi Costume Parties of the Bauhaus School in the 1920s.

What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2016?

When a prison closes, what happens to the prison town?

* Four years later, Liss-Riordan is spearheading class-action lawsuits againstUber, Lyft, and nine other apps that provide on-demand services, shaking the pillars of Silicon Valley’s much-hyped sharing economy. In particular, she is challenging how these companies classify their workers. If she can convince judges that these so-called micro-entrepreneurs are in fact employees and not independent contractors, she could do serious damage to a very successful business model—Uber alone was recently valued at $51 billion—which relies on cheap labor and a creative reading of labor laws.

* Tufts in the news! Researchers Teaching Robots How to Best Reject Orders from Humans.

* The novelistic sublime: Joseph Heller’s handwritten outline for Catch-22.

* If Google is a school official, I wonder if it’s a mandatory reporter.

* Tom Lutz and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

* Through the looking glass: Game of Thrones author George RR Martin misses last TV deadline for new book.

* On reading Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. On reading Ten Little Indians.

Debunking “The Big Short”: How Michael Lewis Turned the Real Villains of the Crisis into Heroes.

Is the Drive for Success Making Our Children Sick?

The Sherlock special “The Abominable Bride” was terrible. Has this show completely lost its way? My DVR, in a noble effort to save my sanity, opted not to record it.

* It’s all happening again: Infinite Winter. A flashback.

What I learned not drinking for two years.

Lifting the Veil on the New York Public Library’s Erotica Collection.

Harvard’s Find of a Colonial Map of New Jersey Is a Reminder of Border Wars.

What would a technological society look like that somehow managed to side-step the written word?

U.S. Nuclear Weapons Target List From The Cold War Declassified For The First Time. 

This Asian Time Travel Thriller Could Be Next Year’s Breakout Action Movie.

An Appreciation of Chuck Jones’ ‘One Froggy Evening’ On Its 60th Birthday.

When Gene Roddenberry’s computer died, it took with it the only method of accessing some 200 floppy disks of his unpublished work. Here’s how this tech mystery was solved.

Periodic table’s seventh row finally filled as four new elements are added.

* The rising academic field of David Bowie Studies.

* A Brief History of Farting for Money. (via)

* Hybrids. Uncanny Valley. And then there’s the weirdest, most unbelievable SF short film I’ve ever seen.

* Barbasol presents Disney’s James Cameron’s Avatarland.

* And of course there’s always more Star Wars links: The Feminist Frequency Review. Editing The Force Awakens. Listening to Star Wars. The Original Star Wars Concept Art Is Amazing. A Not-So-Brief History of George Lucas Talking Shit About Disney’s Star Wars. Is Han Solo Force-Sensitive? The Bigger Luke Hypothesis. Cross Sections of TFA Spaceships and Vehicles. Most Citizens of the Star Wars Galaxy are Probably Totally Illiterate. Are droids slaves? Rey & BB8. Reading Anakin Skywalker after Jessica Jones. If you want a vision of the future.

heller

Written by gerrycanavan

January 5, 2016 at 9:00 am

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Weekend Links!

leave a comment »

* Coming round again soon: The Marquette/UWM Graduate Student Humanities Conference.

* June 18, 1947.

NIH to Cease Use of Chimpanzees in Research. SeaWorld to end orca shows in San Diego.

Is it Ethical to Colonize Mars? And more!

* People have been claiming to own the moon for 250 years.

* The New Utopians.

Kim Stanley Robinson – Rethinking Our Relationship to the Biosphere. Our Generation Ships Will Sink.

Translating Gender: Ancillary Justice in Five Languages.

* The 7 deadly sins of world-building.

5 Must See Sci-Fi Films From Indigenous Filmmakers.

World Fantasy Award To Abandon Lovecraft Bust.

* Conor Friedersdorf close-reads the videos from Mizzou. The power of the strike. Tressie McMillan Cottam vs. David Simon.

UNC Fires Two More in Scandal Over Sham Courses.

In a major shift for California community colleges, the system’s Board of Governors voted Monday to oust the controversial accrediting commission that has overseen campus quality for half a century and is threatening to shut down City College of San Francisco.

Justice Department could do two-year review of Milwaukee police.

Many Say High Deductibles Make Their Health Law Insurance All but Useless.

Working with the conservative estimate that vampires only need to feed once a month, Efthimiou and Gandhi looked at population stats and concluded that vampires would eliminate humans within three years.

Explaining Your Math: Unnecessary at Best, Encumbering at Worst.

Michael Bérubé on Humans, Superheroes, Mutants, and People with Disabilities at TEDxPSU.

A Six-Figure Settlement on Campus Free Speech. What’s Salaita’s Six-Figure Settlement Really Worth? And while I don’t have a crystal ball, I’d be surprised if any university ever tried to pull this kind of stunt again. I’ll take that bet, alas.

What Open-Access Publishing Actually Costs.

White People Explain Why They Feel Oppressed.

The University of Nowhere: The False Promise of “Disruption.”

* I suppose musicalization comes for all of us in its time.

Parents Have Been Requesting Star Wars Toys for Their Daughters For Decades.

* Kierna Shipka ranks the Bobby Drapers.

* Tolkien criticism today. A reply.

Earth’s climate entering new ‘permanent reality’ as CO2 hits new high.

* Goodbye, Phobos.

* Maglev! Maglev! Maglev!

* Can the Muppet speak? Jim Henson’s Newly Discovered Journal Reveals The Muppets’ Fascinating Backstory.

* You won’t live to see the final Star Wars movie.

* Teach the controversy: Is BB-8 a boy or a girl?

An Oral History of the Nerdier Half of Freaks and Geeks.

John Malkovich and Robert Rodriguez Have Made A Movie No One Will See For 100 Years.

Now that New Jersey’s law has been signed, there are still ten states in which bestiality has not been outlawed.

Anne Frank Foundation claims father was “co-author,” extends copyright by decades.

The Last Child Soldier: “Beasts of No Nation” and the Child-Soldier Narrative.

* Ready for Hillary! The Clintons’ so-called charitable enterprise has served as a vehicle to launder money and to enrich family friends.

Watch Elmo give Julia Louis-Dreyfus a hard time for cursing on Sesame Street.

* This is a serious political debate that actually happened: Ben Carson would not abort baby Hitler. Jeb Bush: ‘Hell Yeah, I Would’ Kill Baby Hitler.

* And some bad news for my particular demographic: Warped sense of humour ‘can be early sign of dementia.’

Written by gerrycanavan

November 19, 2015 at 8:47 am

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Thursday Links!

with 6 comments

* I’ll be speaking next Thursday at “Between Activism and Apocalypse: The Work of Margaret Atwood” at Indiana University. The schedule for the symposium is here.

* CFP: Stage The Future 2: The Second International Conference on Science Fiction Theatre.

* SF short-short of the day: Isaac Asimov’s “Silly Asses.”

* Here’s the calendar of events for C21 this semester.

* Cheryl Abbate has a blog post on the vicious hate mail she’s received after being thrust into the media spotlight.

* “Things like computer vision are starting to work; speech recognition is starting to work There’s quite a bit of acceleration in the development of AI systems,” says Bart Selman, a Cornell professor and AI ethicist who was at the event with Musk. “And that’s making it more urgent to look at this issue.” AI Has Arrived, and That Really Worries the World’s Brightest Minds.

* Of course it’s already worse than you think.

* Elsewhere in mad billionaire news: Internet! in! Spaaaaaaaaaaaaace!

* Gender Differences in the Road to the Doctoral Degree. Less support, more debt, more time to degree.

* Forbidden Planet reviews Richard McGuire’s incredible graphic novel Here.

* Hours After State Of The Union, Senate Targets National Parks. Once again, it’s always worse than you think.

* Saul Goodman, the last difficult man.

* A smart observation from Peter Paik: “Common Core teaches students that there is only one way to read a text (to glean information) but there are many ways to solve a math problem (the target of much outrage on social media).”

* Some Colleges Are Moving Past Eve Ensler’s “Cisnormative” ‘Vagina Monologues’ — And That’s OK.

* Occupy the Syllabus.

* Milestone Media rides again.

* How ‘Harry Potter’ fans won a four-year fight against child slavery.

* English professors combine areas of study for new specialization.

The department, known for its expertise in disability and LGBT studies, is looking to newer faculty to blend the two topics into a common subject area.Robert McRuer, who chairs the English department, said he was the first scholar to combine LGBT studies with disability studies and call it “crip theory.” The theory looks at the histories of and issues within the LGBT and disabled communities, which have both faced marginalization. “Crip” is a term that people with disabilities have “reclaimed,” he said.

Personally I’d send that name back for another round of workshopping, but what do I know.

* Oregon Was Founded As a Racist Utopia.

* I actually always thought Joss should have had a David Boreanaz cameo in the background of the Firefly pilot and then never mention it again.

* Marvel is teasing a big Crisis-on-Infinite-Earths-style reboot, for the first time in its history.

* Simon Pegg is co-writing Star Trek 3. [raises one eyebrow]

* And great news for KSR fans: J. Michael Straczynski To Write Spike TV’s ‘Red Mars’ Drama Series Project.

This is a supercut of all the moments in A New Hope where characters interacted with machines, doors, screens, levers, knobs and buttons.

* Violent crime on college campuses is decreasing, but the number of sworn and armed police officers on campuses continues to rise, according to a new report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics… Nearly 70 percent of colleges and universities operated full law-enforcement agencies in 2012, and 94 percent of those officers are authorized to use a firearm.

* Meanwhile, on the town and gown beat: NYU decided not to report an attempted murder to the police.

* Abolish college sports watch: Before Gary Andersen goes on, he wants to make one thing clear. A part of his surprising departure from Wisconsin had to do with admission standards.

* When choosing between doing good and doing evil, don’t forget there’s always a third option.

* Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys.

* And a reminder that SFFTV is looking for your submission for its Star Trek at 50″ special issue.

tumblr_nijmcs0AWD1romv9co1_1280
https://gerrycanavan.wordpress.com/tag/droids/
gerrycanavan.wordpress.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2020-29
153928
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:CQJWKGEJ5WA6TQTL4OP7FOQFRODN26PW
<urn:uuid:9779abfe-184a-4156-9fbb-cc7f92ef6685>
2020-07-11T05:06:02Z
192.0.78.13
application/xhtml+xml
sha1:5GZCVSI5VNYJV3NLM4PQSB62MLBN7QFV
<urn:uuid:53c5370b-5406-44f5-88d3-14c44169cf94>
https://gerrycanavan.wordpress.com/tag/droids/
response
<urn:uuid:78965d47-63d6-49d0-b898-798f1f95f72a>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2020-29
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for July 2020
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-234.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.17 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.2-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/