Notices by allan (allan@mastodon.club), page 4

I...actually prefer this version of Ghost Rider. Everything is better with more Nicholas Cage, cgi-ing out his head was always a mistake.
https://www.jwz.org/blog/2019/07/dont-forget-to-burn-dont-forget-to-burn/

@mpjgregoire I didn't realize they had a paywall. Maybe one of my adblockers/tracking blockers? 🤷

On the one one hand a near miss, reminding us of our limitations and fragility adrift in a vast uncaring universe. On the other hand it would have been entirely fitting to be wiped out by asteroid 2019 OK

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/07/26/it-snuck-up-us-city-killer-asteroid-just-missed-earth-scientists-almost-didnt-detect-it-time/

I love this essay on partying like an existentialist https://aeon.co/ideas/being-and-drunkenness-how-to-party-like-an-existentialist

This is the best description of a good party: "existence is a process of spending ourselves, and sometimes requires leaving our former selves behind to create ourselves anew"

@kai yeah, it's interesting to think that when this map was made people still largely got around by river boat in the north and west of Canada.

Broadly speaking, that wasn't that long ago.

I do love just what places were on the map and what places were not. For example: Ft. Providence is on the map but Yellowknife, the capital of the NWT today, is not. Because Yellowknife wasn't incorporated as a town until the 1930s.

Battleford is there but Saskatoon, the largest city in Saskatchewan, is not. Saskatoon has been around since the 1880s, it was settled by the Temperance Colonization Society to be a dry town, but didn't incorporate as a city until 1906.

Also: Rat Portage

Staring at this, blown up on my computer screen, I think it *does* show Labrador, there is a pink smudge along the coast of Labrador. This is about 3.5"x6" original size and it is not at all obvious.

Also by labelling the Dominion of Canada thusly but not the Newfoundland _Colony_, it implies (wrongly) that Newfoundland was a part of Canada.

@kai I wonder if maybe the confusion was simply because Canada is huge. The idea that the districts of the NWT were just administrative sub-units of a continent spanning territory largely devoid of settlers would be pretty unbelievable to a European. Maybe they literally didn't believe it, or didn't really understand the distinction?

@kai the book is an antique (ish), it was printed in 1904, so it is contemporary to what people in England thought of Canadian geography in 1904.

Consider, for example, this map from Canadian Geographic of the divisions circa 1905, the next year, in which Alberta and Saskatchewan have turned from districts in the NWT into full-fledged provinces, absorbing the districts of Assiniboia and Athabasca along the way
http://web.ncf.ca/ex591/CG/1905.html

I have a book, published in England in 1904, that has this map of Canada in it and it has always struck me as completely bizarre.

It pre-dates the final expansion of Ontario and Quebec, in 1912 I think, when what is now the north of those provinces were the NWT. But in 1904 so was what is now Alberta and Saskatchewan.

It just wildly confuses provinces, territories, and districts within the NWT. Also it doesn't acknowledge Labrador, which is odd.

@keithzg I think the mini-series was light-years better than the show itself. But I think you're right, BSG was ultimately a political drama in space, so the character driven drama made a lot of sense.

In a classic SF mission to aliens story line, on the other hand, it makes less than no sense.

I mean contrast this with actual astronauts and man, wouldn't it be great if we had SF with competent people who know how to work together to problem solve?

iirc there's a chapter in Chris Hadfield's "An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth" where he talks about inter-personal conflicts, there are people he just doesn't like. His solution is to put aside his feelings and do the work. He does not, for example, scream in their faces about how they are not fit to be an astronaut.

I tried watching this but I didn't even make it halfway through ep1.

There is this thing with sci-fi, I'm going to say since the BSG reboot, of crewing a ship with awful people who are incapable of working together on even the smallest of tasks so everything turns into a big screaming fight and most of their problems are, ultimately, their fault.

Another Life has this in spades in episode 1. The only reason to shoot these people into space is to get them away from the rest of us.

@kai hey Steve.

@ink_slinger not that I'm deeply cynical about the UNFCCC or anything

@ink_slinger these are really talking about two very different things: 12 years to enact actual significant reductions in emissions versus 18 months for countries to propose plans for reductions for the elaborately bureaucratic sequence of international meetings.

Only the most slavishly devoted technocrat thinks those are equivalent.

@thurloat @ink_slinger I'm kind of surprised this doesn't exist as a dataset if only for finance/accounting reasons. I mean it seems like the kind of thing someone building a pricing model for cars would want, which isn't exactly a rare thing to do (they are depreciable assets after all)