This doesn't involve eating babies, does it?
For those who aren't English majors (or married to one
I can't tell if the authors of the article we are discussing are alluding to Swift's essay or whether they are thereby flagging their own proposal as similarly ridiculous.
I didn't like it much.
I went to see the movie with my kids last night, and liked it a lot less than I expected to.
SPOILERSSPOILERSSPOILERSSPOILERSSPOILERSSPOILERSSPOILERSSPOILERSSPOILERS
My main gripe was the set up of how the city was held to ransom for an extended period of time, which simply didn't feel credible. We have a situation where the bad guys manage to hold a city of ~12 million people hostage for a period of about 6 months (not completely sure of the numbers here) by threatening to blow them up with the fusion reactor. The bad guys keep control by their initial army of outlaws who have been training in the city's sewers, augmented by the hundreds liberated from the Bastille - sorry, the prison. During this time no one is allowed to escape because of the threat to blow the nuke, a threat which is enforced from the outside, yet somehow the city manages to function after a fashion - food supplies are provided from the outside, and somehow enough order is maintained that the city doesn't simply collapse. I would expect plagues and famine and riots, not to mention fire after all the explosions at the start of the siege.
I found this all rather hard to buy. In terms of the story the extended siege is done to give Bruce Wayne time to heal up in his remote prison, and to make his spiritual journey that allows him to escape from it and return to Gotham. I find it hard to believe that such a siege with so many hostages could be maintained - this is a city after all, and would leak people like a sieve. Similarly, the maintenance of order would be a real problem in such circumstances. Least credible of all, I could not swallow that a thousand or so police offices could be trapped underground for six months, somehow supplied with food & such, then be busted out and run off to battle, fully fit and wearing clean uniforms. Really?
Did anyone else spot all the French Revolution/Tale of Two Cites references? I mean the conflict between aristocracy and underclass, the storming of the prison (the Bastille), the citizens' court against the oppressors, the final sacrifice and Bruce Wayne's epitaph, read from the close of Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities. Interesting to see that put into a modern setting.
I wondered about some of the technology also. I thought the helicopter thing was pretty neat, though it was fortunate that the missiles fired at it were so slow that the copter could keep ahead while it outmanoeuvred them . Did Bane buy them from the lowest bidder, perhaps? I didn't really buy that the fusion core could be (a) so easily turned into a bomb, or (b) be removable from the reactor and still remain deadly without the need to keep it fuelled or maintained.
That said, there was a lot to like. I don't think I'll be in a hurry to watch this one again, though - unlike the first two movies in the series.
Another author you might check out is Charles Williams, whose novels straddle science fiction & Fantasy (though heavily slanted towards the latter). These can be found on Project Gutenberg Australia.
Perhaps there should be a Best Picture category at the Hugos instead.
There already is. The Hugo award for Best Dramatic Presentation has been in operation since 1958. 2001 won the award in 1968, Avatar was nominated in 2010, but lost to Moon (which is arguably a better movie).
I discovered this category a couple of years ago, and have found the list of winners and nominees very instructive. It's alerted me to a lot of good movies which I would otherwise have missed.
Or perhaps why Mrs Little was so keen to adopt him.
The toxic chemicals released from burning all that hardware gave them all cancer.
HA HA.
... which leads straight into the XKCD cartoon about just his phenomenon.
To Rise from Earth is an account of the basic physics of space travel. A few years since I've read it, but as I recall it goes over the basic concepts and destinations quite well.
Robert Zubrin has written two books which would be worth a look - The Case for Mars about a practical scheme for mounting expeditions to Mars in the near term, and Entering Space which takes a wider view within our solar system. Finally, John S Lewis' Mining the Sky gives the rationale and practicalities for mining asteroids - how you might do it, and what sorts of materials you would profitably extract from them.
There are any number of other books out there, but these should get you started. Good luck!
I'm with the CBA, and twice in the last few years I've had my card cancelled and reissued. The first time it was because of a data breach like this one - a card skimmer had been used on one of the ATMs in my area and all people who had used ATMs in the vicinity had cards cancelled & reissued. The more recent time it was just me - someone had skimmed my card and used it to make a purchase in London.
Both times the bank was very efficient, and while there was the inconvenience of waiting for a new card and, in the second instance, waiting for the stolen money to be recovered there was otherwise no problem.
http://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast/inbiz-watch-this-space-21/id73330642?i=93335899
Thanks for the heads up.
The only more certain profession would be an undertaker.
We have the technology. It is just impossible to send humans and their living quarters and their supplies and a research station and a return vehicle and return trip supplies on a SINGLE chemical rocket. Once you start using more than one chemical rocket for this list, even at just two, it becomes possible.
The other thing is to exploit the resources at your destination. This is basically the approach advocated by Robert Zubrin in his Mars Direct mission design. The basic scenario is:
By manufacturing fuel on Mars for the return trip, most of the objections in the original article are dispensed with.
Much more detail is given in the Wikipedia article, and also in Zubrin's book, The Case for Mars (available here). Excellent book.
1 + 1 = 3, for large values of 1.
