I blame grid-iron. Most major cities in Europe have a radial construction which makes bus and train routes very efficient. With buses converging and diverging ipon the radial routes, and a couple of "circles" intersecting them, you can usually get to most places with just a single change. In smaller cities, you don't even need the circle routes.

Nobody needs SUVs. Some people need true utility vehicles, but SUV was a category invented for posers who want to look like lumberjacks. I loathe SUVs because they eschew many of the principles of car design that are aimed at reducing injury to pedestrians in the case of accidents, and all as some pitiful fashion statement or a selfish (misplaced) feeling of increased personal safety.

Why not single out SUVs? For decades, cars have been designed to minimise the damage to pedestrians by having a low bonnet/hood that would connect with an adult below the pelvis and all major organs and below the centre of gravity, throwing them onto the hood. This allows the kinetic energy to be delivered over time, decreasing injury and improving survival rates.

An SUV, on the other hand, typically has high suspension and a tall vertical grille. I've not seen an SUV that wouldn't shatter my pelvis if it hit me, and I've seen plenty bug enough that they would liquify every vital organ in my body except the brain if they hit me at speed.

The old safety designs also were safer for cyclists, as the same mechanism that throws the pedestrian over the bonnet lifts the cyclist. However, with an SUV, you can get brought down under the vehicle, bringing your head down to the height of the grille.

SUVs need singled out, because driving one is a sign of either ignorance of the safety of others of sheer selfishness.

You're not exactly the target market though, are you? If your entire commute is by major highways, you're not adding to inner-city congestion.

In the UK, no-one will build a supermarket if the local bus company doesn't have a service running past, and quite often they'll divert the service through the car park for the passengers. Both the supermarket and the bus company get more business.

IIRC correctly, the "wrong size of ball" was a common problem prior to metrication, as armies would employ cannons acquired as the spoils of war, and their bore gauges were often fractionally different due to local definitions of the inch, leading to country A's cannonball jamming country B's cannon and ccracking the barrel upon ignition, and country B's cannonball flopping limply out of country A's barrel after all the explosive force leaking round the sides.

Traditional powder cannons are prone to user error. Loading the wrong size of ball, reloading while the barrel's above powder flashpoint etc... these things can damage the cannon and/or the user. Literary canon obviously isn't self-destructive, but it is highly, highly prone to user error.

I agree with you on that. Kasdan wrote good stories... Lucas didn't. That's the main thing. However, I do think using aliens was misjudged, because Indy is Indy, not its source material.

Has the term "neural network" ever been applied to anything other than artificial ones?

Yes, but the point is to enable people to create their own, which involves the training parts. When I was at uni (at the end of the century), I only got to play around with neural nets comprising 10 to 20 nodes, because our Sparqstations couldn't handle anything bigger. With an appropriate toolkit for NNs on standard GPUs, people will be able to run 1000-node nets at home. It won't be research-grade stuff, but it will give the opportunity to add practical NNs into artificial intelligence MOOCs and even high-school curriculums.

And completely disregarding the fact that Leia knew her mother, who we assume married some dude on Alderaan after splitting from Anakin. She was very sad... as well you might be when the love of your life decides he wants to crush the galaxy under his shiny black jackboots.

Is that relly the title of a Han Solo book? When I read it, it's not the Star Wars theme I hear, but a certain other John Williams soundtrack, to a certain other Lucas/Ford film franchise. This makes me very dubious of the writer.

Canon is a big gun for blowing holes in things. Canons often fail and blow themselves to bits. I how this metaphor is self-explanatory.

Lucas was trying to analyse his own writing in a technical way. A New Hope was Hidden Fortress + WWII dogfighting. He tried to make... I don't know, something + Ben Hur chariot racing for EpI. But then he made it very unlike the Ben Hur chariot race. Why was the scene in Ben Hur so powerful? Because it was realistic -- in order to get the riders to take more risks, the stunt director turned it into a real race by offering prize money to the first finisher. Several horses were killed because of that. Yet Lucas went out of his wy to make the pod race entirely unrealistic. All that remained of the chariot theme was the stupid little pods that were tethered in a way vaguely reminiscent of horses. He also managed to tell us that the rebels and the Empire were complete morons for manning their fighter fleets with the species with the worst reactions in the galaxy, a species who can't even win a bloody car race if they're not blessed with a demi-god level of Jedi powers.

The talent that made 4-6 was Kasdan, even though he wasn't there for 4. What was the best Indy film? The only one Kasdan was involved in. Kasdan is back, and that might just save the franchise.

Lucas's defence for Crystal Skull was that viewers didn't understand his source material, and that's true, but in a way irrelevant. Lucas grew up reading adventure comics that mixed magic and aliens and mysticism and everything else on a whim -- the legacy of that lives on in Marvel's current cinematic line-up where the god of thunder works alongside a man in a homemade robotic exoskeleton, a WWII hero on steroids and a bloody archer to fight off a menace from another world who have interbred with humans to create an ancient bloodlne of superpowered beings. Head to the comic world and you could even add in a sorcerer and a genetic mutant, then send them all through time to face off against the grandfather of the devil. I like to think of Crystal Skull as the sequel to Temple of Doom. You remember Temple of Doom, right? Using a life-raft as a parachute/sledge combo, a ridiculously twisty mine shaft booby-trapped with an ugly great boulder etc. That wasn't Kasdan -- that was Lucas. What we all rmmber as Indy is Raiders of the lost Ark, where Kasdan really paid homage to the source material while constructing a genuinely good film. Over-the-top Nazis, wisecracks and character interplay, even the scene with the creepy gestapo guy reaching towards the camera after burning his hand -- all pulled straight from pulp comics, and deftly done. Crucially, it kept all the magic and mysticism to the very end, and Jones cynical to the last, so there was some kind of reveal and change. The Last Crusade was a sequel to Raiders, but somewhat formulaic and slightly overplayed. But again, Nazis, and no magic until the end, after facing all sorts of mechanical pseudo-magic.

So I have some hope for the Star Wars sequels. However, I'm not sure about a Han origin story. Han shot first. Han was rehabilitated by Luke and Leia. So Han should be a bastard, but current Hollywood narratives don't work that way. Now there are goodies and baddies.