WordPress is taking over our lives. At least it’s taking over my blogs, one by one. Recently I migrated my daily astronomy blog “Koppernigk” to WordPress from Thingamablog standalone software. WordPress is quite fast compared to a program using FTP to upload newly generated pages.
And some time ago I upgraded this blog with one decimal point, from 3.0 to 3.0.1. That means I should write a message. So here it is.
But this is a blog about books and DVD’s and movies, so I won’t leave you without that content. Up to reading some free science fiction stories? Here’s a page with some interesting opportunities to read electronically.
It’s a boring world. My WordPress installation is up to date with version 3.0 and my plugins and themes are up to date well. Now all I have to do is take care the content of my blog is up to date as well. Hmmm, last entry, February this year. That’s not okay.
In my last post I discussed an episode of the SF series Star Trek Enterprise. Will a black hole make you act weird? I concluded it might only fry your cells, but I also concluded that visualizing the starship closing in on the black hole needed some adaptation. I pointed to an APOD (Astronomy Picture Of the Day) post which showed you what would happen upon nearing a black hole.
Now it has been done even better on the New Scientist Space website with a video demonstrating the utter weirdness of closing in on a black hole (or simply safely passing it, as our intrepid albeit slightly stupid Enterprise crew did).
I know I’ve not always been as courteous about the quality of the now defunct series Star Trek Enterprise. It doesn’t mean the quality was sub par. For Star Trek it was overall way too mediocre. But it still had some great episodes. One of my favorites is Singularity. It has been done to death in other Star Trek series, like the original version where helmsman Sulu jumps around the ship fencing his way along the corridors. But the episode Singularity is humorous nevertheless.
The starship Enterprise passes a black hole and the crew starts acting weird, obviously due to some weird radiation from the trinary system it belongs to. You can see that actors are really into their jobs with lots of fun. My favorite is the galley scene where the captain wants a meal and starts wrestling with the linguist over her “odeng” and the pride of here family. Then a tactical alert starts howling, set in motion by the resident military maniac. The linguist doesn’t even look up what’s going wrong, but looks accusingly to her captain tampering with her kettle of soup (I guess the base where the odeng swims in). The following scene on the bridge is hilarious as well where the characters basically talk to another instead of with another. “It wouldn’t be much of a tactical drill if everybody knew about it…..”sir”"”, snickers the resident military maniac. The science officer tells she’s unaffected by the radiation, but maybe that’s not quite true. She might not faint from the radiation, but might well be obsessed with her search for the radiation in the first place. Whatever.
Would radiation make you start showing compulsive behavior? I doubt it, but there has to be an explanation to make a fun episode. Another question is: would you be able to pass within a few million kilometers from a black hole without extensive damage? Would it be possible that there are such large chunks of rock close to the star as the episode shows us? The latter question was indeed answered by the writers of the episode, who conclude that this debris would indeed turn into dust quite rapidly under the heavy gravity – bouncing and colliding until nothing but pulverized rock is left -as is to be expected.
I’ve been looking for blog software for my pictures. As you can see I occasionally post pictures here, but WordPress isn’t the ideal solution. I also use(d) blogspot, but that’s not quite what I want either, as it’s WordPressy as well. I use Zenphoto as album software, which is great but it’s no blogging software either and mixes family pictures with other work.
So I went hunting and stumbled upon Pixelpost, which seems to work well. So I created a photoblog here, Digital Eye.
And so the year comes to an end again. A random and arbitrary border is to be crossed in a few days. I could wish you all the best yesterday, tomorrrow or any day I like, but I choose the end of the year in this 50th post on this blog.
It’s not quite 2010, it’s not even December 31, but what the heck. Feel good and be good during 2010. We’ll talk again in December 2010.
For Star Trek fans 2009 was the year of restarting the franchise. Director J.J.Abrams has been responsible for that restart.
By the time I was able to see it in the theater, the movie wasn’t running anymore save for 200 km’s of my home town. So I waited for the DVD to hit the market.
After viewing the movie, for me the result is a mixed bag, with the negative in the lead.
Back in 2005, Star Trek seemed to have ended. After almost 40 years the formula – and especially the writers – went stale. The last installment, (Star Trek) Enterprise, was a collection of rehashed old Trek stories in a slightly newer wrapping with new faces occupying the TV screen. Lazy and uninspired writers and producers are almost always a result and hardly ever a cause, but for the general public the “lazy and uninspired” is mostly what sticks, together with “overpaid”. Enterprise producers Braga and Berman have found that out already. In the end it was their own fault. They presented the series as a “restart” and about “firsts”, about pioneering and trial and error, but the only thing that was restarted was the Star Trek plot generator.
The first and second season episodes came straight out of the Star Trek Plot Recycling Machine Read the rest of this entry »
On Saturday I went to the museum Catharijneconvent in Utrecht. There was an exhibition about Sinterklaas, a saint originally from Myra in Turkey in the third century AD. In Anglo-saxon countries he was “translated” to Santa Claus, in the Netherlands (and recently Belgium) he has become Sinterklaas, handing out presents to the small kids, putting the gifts in a shoe placed somewhere in the house, preferably at the fireplace. The Sinterklaas festivities are on December 5th.
One of the pieces on exhibit showed a grain merchant from the Middle Ages with Saint Nicholas standing behind him. Here you see the hand of Saint Nicholas, wearing two rings at the little and index finger, but also a gemstone on the back of his hands! How is that attached? Zooming in on the picture (click on it) you might see a hint towards blood to the left of the jewel. This looks like an SM job to me. Although I’m a medieval historian by education, I’ve never seen this before. Someone to shed light on this mystery?
Imagine your local bookstore sells you a book. No, they pretend to sell you a book.You can only read the book with their permission. The day the bookstore is closed for good you can’t finish reading your book. You feel you’ve been ripped of. You paid full price yet get nothing in the end.
The stupidity of online selling of music and eBooks was already hard to believe. It has lead to a situation where the legal buyer, putting up with such customer hostile schemes like DRM, has more trouble reading or listening to what they paid for than the illegal user listening to music or reading ebooks stripped of this degenerated protection. It’s hard to believe that there are still people legally buying the stuff.
Given the aggressive campaigns against illegal downloading you’d suspect that these (re)sellers are glad that there are still honest and loyal customers around. They might even pamper them. After all, those customers are paying for your daily bread. Everywhere on the world. Without boundaries.
However, with the entertainment industry and the publishers world stupidity knows no boundaries. These industries are able to boggle the mind of loyal customers over and over again. Once you’ve thought their stupidity has maxed out, they find a way to stretch sheer idiocy a little bit farther. SNAFU is their middle name.
What’s up? If you’re shopping for eBooks online outside your own country, there’s a big chance you can’t buy the eBook you like. It is due to something called “geographical restrictions”. Book sellers will tell you it’s a publishers thing. Because if you buy a hardcopy from an online reseller, you buy the book in the country of the reseller, and the local publisher benefits from the sell. But if you buy an eBook at the same reseller, publishers suddenly decided you buy the book in your own country, at your computer’s location. And so – the twisted reasoning goes – the local publisher doesn’t get the benefit from the sell. It means that for them the adage has become: if we don’t benefit, no one will benefit.
We have been put up with lots of stupidity – from the hostile DRM schemes to some twisted interpretations of copyright law. Despite that, we spent money on eBooks. We told people not to steal from others by reading illegally downloaded material. We tried to reason with illegal downloaders about theft and the right of everyone to get paid for their work. And as a reward we get “geographical restrictions” as the next big thank you.
Nothing is left undone to kill off all our arguments against illegal downloading – one by one. No method goes unused to alienate decent customers, the more harmful the better.
Today I went for a stroll to the inner city of Utrecht. In summer I took a picture of this house with an all green cover to its white plaster. In the mean time it’s autumn and the colors have adapted accordingly. This picture was taken in the Brigittenstraat between the Nieuwegracht and the Lepelenburg park.
At the end of my photo session the blue skies rapidly made place for a thick fog. Within fifteen minutes the sun was gone and the fog took over to make it what it is – a cold, damp and foggy November day.
Hurray. What better to do when it’s rainy and stormy outside than to move your blog to your paid host. So here we are. And these autumn leaves were pictured close to home, near Bilthoven in the Ridderoordse Bossen.
