Yesterday I avoided Jubilee toadying by going to see Ridley Scott's Alien prequel Prometheus. This was a film I had been really looking forward to, and there are precious few of those these days - Hollywood has become a slave to massive, empty, effects-driven machines, generally involving superheroes (which I find too silly - it's the costumes, chiefly). Unfortunately, Prometheus seems to have absorbed some of the same nanite virus and has ended up as Alien cross-bred with <insert mega blocbuster here>. In mythology, Prometheus was the titan who stole fire from the Gods and gave it to mankind, and who was punished by being chained to a rock having his liver pecked out by eagles every day, and a similar fate awaited most of the characters in the film. In Greek, Prometheus means 'forethought'; I ended up feeling that more of that could have gone into the script. Spoilers follow...
I know that sequels have to refer back to the originals, and the odd line of dialogue being repeated is more of a knowing wink from the director, but really: a spaceship with a cold, English android, a slacker captain, some surly blue collar engineers and a feisty brunette (and an icy dominatrix as added optional extra, although you could tell she was always for it). This is just Alien, surely? Alien signal pointing us at distant, windswept planet - check. Evil corporation moving behind the scenes - check. Ship infiltrated by alien biohorrors courtesy of said English android - check. Android's head torn off but keeps talking - check. Feisty heroine last to be eliminated - check. At least there were no cats. Being a prequel, and having watched Alien again the day before, I did briefly wonder how technology ended up going backwards in the intervening years, so that Ripley and co were running a space freighter using DOS, but heck, the Nostromo was the equivalent of a tramp steamer, not the cutting edge research ship that Prometheus is.
And what has changed in the intervening 30 years are the resources at Scott's disposal, and to be fair he deploys them to great effect. The film looks stunning. The 3D computer graphic as the remote drones explore the complex is beautiful, the wide alien vistas and the Nazca Lines meets Alien Hive base complex looks stunning. Being an Alien fanboy I suspect that these latter re-use some design sketches Giger did for the original Alien film which there wasn't enough money to create first time around (but which Scott/Fox presumably still owned the rights to). The scenes within the alien 'Space Jockey' spaceship, and the exterior shots of it in flight (and crashing) are amazing. It is a perfectly rendered version of the one from Alien, but done with modern photorealistic CGI and not just a dimly-lit model in a Pinewood back lot. I would have paid my £5 just for those bits, to be honest.
However, in order to propel the plot the allegedly clever scientists and corporates begin with some schoolboy errors. Anyone who has played in Jim Wallman's Universe campaign (which borrows a lot from the Alien universe) knows that (a) you never take your helmet off in an environment that might have alien bio-contaminants in (in this case an entire alien nano-virus manufacturing facility, apparently), (b) you always bring the Marines with you first time around, rather than waiting for the sequel, because by then you will be dead, and (c) if in doubt, take off and nuke the site from orbit. A few pistols and a flamethrower are not going to cut it against giants and squids and nanite plagues. The scientists also exhibit amazing lack of curiosity to anything not directly concerned with the mission, eg: "It's -12 degrees, so what is this gooey liquid - it can't be water?" "Whatever". "What's this strange black gunk coming out of the vases?" "Dunno. Probably not important."
From there the movie runs predictably into The Thing territory, with alien bio-horrors, a thinly-sketched cast being decapitated one by one, lots of running down corridors (I was amazed Scott had the self-discipline not to include a self-destruct countdown) and much ickiness. There are interesting ideas in there struggling to escape, from the Von Daniken-esque Engineers (Forerunners) and their motives both for creating and apparently wanting to destroy humanity, the old man searching for an alien Elixir of Life, the Christian scientist trying to reconcile her faith and science, the robot being a substitute son for the old man against the daughter (the ice cold blonde) who he is estranged from, etc, but these are drowned out in the running and shouting and explosions bit. Noomi Rapace directing the auto-doc to perform an emergency caesarian is an especially silly as well as gory scene. One of the few interesting points - that the Engineers/Space Jockeys are actually giant humans in space suits and appear to share 99.9% of our DNA - is completely wasted, since when one is finally awakened from cryo-sleep, rather than helping provide plot explanation, it just goes berserk and starts killing things and simply becomes another monster. Ho hum. I was never quite sure where the squids came into it, either.
I guess no movie ever lives up to its own hype. In spite of all, it's an entertaining enough two hours. But you just felt it was a bit... lazy somehow, and it could have so much more.
Monday, 4 June 2012
Monday, 5 March 2012
Oh God...
I suppose nothing should surprise me any more about American Christian fundamentalism, but today was the first time I came across the concept of Providential History - the idea that the history of the United States of America has been divinely guided by God because the nation has a part in His Plan. This apparently includes the US Constitution being Divinely Inspired, in much the same way as the Bible. I was so gobsmacked that I had to sit down for a while and take in the enormity of what that claim would imply. Even the discovery of minerals, oil or other natural resources is divinely guided, apparently. Presumably God therefore has a bit of a downer on Jews but is particularly delighted with Wahhabist Islam, given the relative share of resources that Israel and Saudi Arabia have been given.
It shouldn't be too surprising I suppose; the temptation if you are at the top is to assume that you deserve it and got there via your own merits, rather than there being any element of chance or circumstance that has led you there, and from there it is only a short step to say that it has been Divinely Ordained and that you are part of His purpose. Trouble is, that kind of teleological reasoning was just as popular in the British Empire ("God is an Englishman"), and probably the Spanish and indeed Roman Empires before it. It also presumably means that God was also pretty keen on slavery and the genocide of native peoples - he must have been in a bit of an Old Testament mood at the time.
Of course, not even the adherents of Providential History would actually claim such a thing. They insist that those were human "mistakes" which were made along the way. It's the usual story of; "if it's good it must be from God, if it's bad it must be human". The trouble with that is that what you attribute to God's Will thus becomes completely subjective; basically whatever confirms your own prejudices is all down to Divine Inspiration, and anything else is the fault of "secular meddlers" messing up the Plan. And hence the context where I came across Providential History today; that of gay marriage.
Now marriage is a whole ballgame all in its own right, and while the Catholic Church gradually muscled in on marriage ceremonies during the Middle Ages, it has always been an essentially secular activity; a civil contract between parties, to do with inheritance and exchange of property (back at a time when women were also property, which is another can of worms I'll leave for the moment). Even today, a Church "wedding" is technically only a "blessing" on the marriage - the actual legal ceremony itself is about declarations in front of witnesses and signing the certificate. Personally I've never been quite sure why people were so keen on marriage anyway; I don't need a certificate to validate my relationship, but that's by the by. Let's just say that this is an area where views have changed throughout history. In a lot of US states, weddings between people of different colours was illegal until very recently, and equally justified at the time by appeals to the Bible. I've recently read an interesting article that I unfortunately can't locate at the moment which showed how US Christians' position on abortion has moved over the past 50 years, from "some for, some against" to "you can't call yourself a Christian if you're in favour of it".
EDIT: Found it!
But which view was Divinely Ordained, and which the result of Secular Medding? God's not telling. I suspect that the adherents of Divine Providence might find He's not really got much to say on the subject of gay weddings either. He's probably too busy working out where the rise of atheist China fits into Providential History.
Yeah, somehow I thought you were going to say "as the Antichrist"...
It shouldn't be too surprising I suppose; the temptation if you are at the top is to assume that you deserve it and got there via your own merits, rather than there being any element of chance or circumstance that has led you there, and from there it is only a short step to say that it has been Divinely Ordained and that you are part of His purpose. Trouble is, that kind of teleological reasoning was just as popular in the British Empire ("God is an Englishman"), and probably the Spanish and indeed Roman Empires before it. It also presumably means that God was also pretty keen on slavery and the genocide of native peoples - he must have been in a bit of an Old Testament mood at the time.
Of course, not even the adherents of Providential History would actually claim such a thing. They insist that those were human "mistakes" which were made along the way. It's the usual story of; "if it's good it must be from God, if it's bad it must be human". The trouble with that is that what you attribute to God's Will thus becomes completely subjective; basically whatever confirms your own prejudices is all down to Divine Inspiration, and anything else is the fault of "secular meddlers" messing up the Plan. And hence the context where I came across Providential History today; that of gay marriage.
Now marriage is a whole ballgame all in its own right, and while the Catholic Church gradually muscled in on marriage ceremonies during the Middle Ages, it has always been an essentially secular activity; a civil contract between parties, to do with inheritance and exchange of property (back at a time when women were also property, which is another can of worms I'll leave for the moment). Even today, a Church "wedding" is technically only a "blessing" on the marriage - the actual legal ceremony itself is about declarations in front of witnesses and signing the certificate. Personally I've never been quite sure why people were so keen on marriage anyway; I don't need a certificate to validate my relationship, but that's by the by. Let's just say that this is an area where views have changed throughout history. In a lot of US states, weddings between people of different colours was illegal until very recently, and equally justified at the time by appeals to the Bible. I've recently read an interesting article that I unfortunately can't locate at the moment which showed how US Christians' position on abortion has moved over the past 50 years, from "some for, some against" to "you can't call yourself a Christian if you're in favour of it".
EDIT: Found it!
But which view was Divinely Ordained, and which the result of Secular Medding? God's not telling. I suspect that the adherents of Divine Providence might find He's not really got much to say on the subject of gay weddings either. He's probably too busy working out where the rise of atheist China fits into Providential History.
Yeah, somehow I thought you were going to say "as the Antichrist"...
Thursday, 15 December 2011
The Scribe
Somebody asked me the other day about my avatar. I'll be honest, it was my girlfriend, but it was nice that someone showed an interest! He is supposed to be the 'humble scribe' personified - the workaday hack churning out words to a deadline, as I do in my day job, and he is also obviously supposed to connect with my love of history and specifically the Middle Ages. But the correlation goes a bit deeper than that, because I am an editor and in fact the picture is actually of a medieval proof correction mark.
When I first started work in publishing, 20 years ago, one of the first things I had to learn was BS5261, the industry standard for proof correction marks. A version of them can be seen here. The company I worked for was late in getting into digital publishing, and so in those days we still sent raw text - typed or even hand written - to our printers, where typesetters would then type them into their own composition machines and send us back A1 sheets covered with neatly typset columns ('galley proofs'), which we would then literally cut out and stick down onto page make-up sheets to show where the text was supposed to flow. 'Cut and paste' really did use to mean exactly that. Of course typesetters worked quickly and made frequent mistakes, or couldn't read our terrible handwriting, so we would then have to mark the proofs for correction.
Medieval scribes were often just as much part of a production line, but at least had the option of waiting for the ink to dry and then scraping it off the page if they made a mistake. However, occasionally, when copying, they would miss a word or even an entire line, and only discover it some time later. Parchment being far too valuable to waste, it would almost never be thrown away, so the text would have to be corrected on the page. To insert text they would thus have to write it at the bottom of the page, or in the margin and then indicate where it should go in the body of the text. A whole little game of amusing marginalia surrounds this practice, limited only by the imagination and artistic ability of the monk; I have seen one where several little monks in the margin are using a block and tackle to apparently haul the missed word back into place. The scribe figure I use is pointing to where a missing word should go, and I suspect that he is probably a self-portrait of the overworked monk who has made the error in the first place. The monks who wrote medieval manuscripts are often anonymous, but you can get little glimpses of the real person behind the text on the page, especially at the end of a piece, when the book or scroll will often end with the heartfelt words 'Explicit, Deo gratias' - "It is finished, thanks be to God." I know that feeling all too well! So I don't know who my humble scribe is, but I like to imagine him as me, if I had lived in the 13th century - he gives me a feeling of connection to a tradition of writing and publishing going back hundreds and indeed thousands of years.
When I first started work in publishing, 20 years ago, one of the first things I had to learn was BS5261, the industry standard for proof correction marks. A version of them can be seen here. The company I worked for was late in getting into digital publishing, and so in those days we still sent raw text - typed or even hand written - to our printers, where typesetters would then type them into their own composition machines and send us back A1 sheets covered with neatly typset columns ('galley proofs'), which we would then literally cut out and stick down onto page make-up sheets to show where the text was supposed to flow. 'Cut and paste' really did use to mean exactly that. Of course typesetters worked quickly and made frequent mistakes, or couldn't read our terrible handwriting, so we would then have to mark the proofs for correction.
Medieval scribes were often just as much part of a production line, but at least had the option of waiting for the ink to dry and then scraping it off the page if they made a mistake. However, occasionally, when copying, they would miss a word or even an entire line, and only discover it some time later. Parchment being far too valuable to waste, it would almost never be thrown away, so the text would have to be corrected on the page. To insert text they would thus have to write it at the bottom of the page, or in the margin and then indicate where it should go in the body of the text. A whole little game of amusing marginalia surrounds this practice, limited only by the imagination and artistic ability of the monk; I have seen one where several little monks in the margin are using a block and tackle to apparently haul the missed word back into place. The scribe figure I use is pointing to where a missing word should go, and I suspect that he is probably a self-portrait of the overworked monk who has made the error in the first place. The monks who wrote medieval manuscripts are often anonymous, but you can get little glimpses of the real person behind the text on the page, especially at the end of a piece, when the book or scroll will often end with the heartfelt words 'Explicit, Deo gratias' - "It is finished, thanks be to God." I know that feeling all too well! So I don't know who my humble scribe is, but I like to imagine him as me, if I had lived in the 13th century - he gives me a feeling of connection to a tradition of writing and publishing going back hundreds and indeed thousands of years.
Monday, 12 December 2011
I'M Spartacus!
I've had Spartacus: Blood and Sand on loan from Lovefilm for ages now, and never quite overcame my apathy enough to watch it. The DVD has accompanied me on three foreign trips now, and even in a lonely hotel room it has never quite managed to make me think: you know, I'm bored enough to watch that now. Yesterday I had made lunch and faced a Sunday afternoon with absolutely zero on the TV, so I thought I'd finally give Blood a chance. I'm glad I did.
It's notionally about Spartacus the Thracian slave who led the great slave revolt in late Republican Rome. But it's about as much about history as '300' is about Herodotus. It's a romp, and ups the ante on BBC/HBO's Rome by going for even more blood (well, it is about gladiators, so fair play I guess) and sex. It's pretty ludicrous, although to be honest not especially more ludicrous than the Kirk Douglas film, with its ridiculously cheesy Quo Vadis style Christianity before Christ.
So, let's be clear to begin with; it's not quality television. There's a cartoonish quality to the gore, like something from an 80s Arnie movie. Limbs are hacked off left right and centre, by a gladius of all things (a stabbing weapon). Women go out to pick fruit in the snow (eh?) miles from their village. Muscles are oiled. It's the WWF with stage blood. Breasts are bared, and poor CGI effects march across the screen looking for all the world ripped from a computer game (as they probably were). There is no attempt at continuity of accents, and the international cast speak a mixture of their native Kiwi, Scots, American and cut glass English, although to be honest I barely noticed that most of the time.
The programme goes for the standard 'decadent' view of Roman culture, as though every Roman behaved like Caligula. In fact, even later on, in the Empire, things were probably not quite as debauched as they are in Spartacus, and the Republic was actually for the most part pretty straight laced (a few notorious wayward wives being the exception rather than the rule), especially in a quiet provincial town like Capua, where the first series is set. Still, it's undeniably entertaining. And having complained about its lack of historicity, there are surprisingly many real facts squeezed in. There is some genuine Latin, the Thracians begin - credibly - at war with the Getae (and it's not often you hear the Getae mentioned in a TV programme!), an early sub-plot is based around the Mithridatic wars, and the storyline sticks to the few known facts about the hero - it makes Spartacus as he was (according to Florus) a deserter from a Roman auxiliary unit, and his wife (as she was according to Plutarch) a seeress who is captured with him; his quest to be reunited with her provides his motivation and plot arc. An early rivalry is set up between Spartacus and Gaius Claudius Glaber, a genuine Roman general, who here is the cause of Spartacus' desertion in Thrace. In history Glaber later failed to recapture Spartacus during the slave revolt in 73BC. There are also some gems of casting, such as John Hannah as the struggling lanista (gladiatorial trainer) who buys Spartacus, and Lucy Lawless as his shrewd wife. And after the first couple of scene-setting episodes which set up relationships and storylines, it begins to twist and turn quite nicely, with various levels of rivalries between the gladiators, their owners, and the Roman nobility that employ them. I'm five episodes in now, and really enjoying myself. It's a guilty pleasure, but a pleasure nonetheless.
It's notionally about Spartacus the Thracian slave who led the great slave revolt in late Republican Rome. But it's about as much about history as '300' is about Herodotus. It's a romp, and ups the ante on BBC/HBO's Rome by going for even more blood (well, it is about gladiators, so fair play I guess) and sex. It's pretty ludicrous, although to be honest not especially more ludicrous than the Kirk Douglas film, with its ridiculously cheesy Quo Vadis style Christianity before Christ.
So, let's be clear to begin with; it's not quality television. There's a cartoonish quality to the gore, like something from an 80s Arnie movie. Limbs are hacked off left right and centre, by a gladius of all things (a stabbing weapon). Women go out to pick fruit in the snow (eh?) miles from their village. Muscles are oiled. It's the WWF with stage blood. Breasts are bared, and poor CGI effects march across the screen looking for all the world ripped from a computer game (as they probably were). There is no attempt at continuity of accents, and the international cast speak a mixture of their native Kiwi, Scots, American and cut glass English, although to be honest I barely noticed that most of the time.
The programme goes for the standard 'decadent' view of Roman culture, as though every Roman behaved like Caligula. In fact, even later on, in the Empire, things were probably not quite as debauched as they are in Spartacus, and the Republic was actually for the most part pretty straight laced (a few notorious wayward wives being the exception rather than the rule), especially in a quiet provincial town like Capua, where the first series is set. Still, it's undeniably entertaining. And having complained about its lack of historicity, there are surprisingly many real facts squeezed in. There is some genuine Latin, the Thracians begin - credibly - at war with the Getae (and it's not often you hear the Getae mentioned in a TV programme!), an early sub-plot is based around the Mithridatic wars, and the storyline sticks to the few known facts about the hero - it makes Spartacus as he was (according to Florus) a deserter from a Roman auxiliary unit, and his wife (as she was according to Plutarch) a seeress who is captured with him; his quest to be reunited with her provides his motivation and plot arc. An early rivalry is set up between Spartacus and Gaius Claudius Glaber, a genuine Roman general, who here is the cause of Spartacus' desertion in Thrace. In history Glaber later failed to recapture Spartacus during the slave revolt in 73BC. There are also some gems of casting, such as John Hannah as the struggling lanista (gladiatorial trainer) who buys Spartacus, and Lucy Lawless as his shrewd wife. And after the first couple of scene-setting episodes which set up relationships and storylines, it begins to twist and turn quite nicely, with various levels of rivalries between the gladiators, their owners, and the Roman nobility that employ them. I'm five episodes in now, and really enjoying myself. It's a guilty pleasure, but a pleasure nonetheless.
Friday, 2 December 2011
Soylent Green is PEOPLE!!
My attention was drawn to a startling fact today. The global population in classic 60s overpopulation dystopias 'Soylent Green' and John Brunner's 'Stand on Zanzibar' was 7 billion. Exactly the same number of people as currently exist here in 2011. Brunner was even spot on about the year - his book was set in 2010. The film version of Soylent Green was set in 2022, although it was based on Harry Harrison's 1966 novel 'Make Room, Make Room', set in 1999. Either way, in spite of persistent food production problems in some parts of Africa (especially war-torn parts like Somalia), you'll have noticed that people aren't being forced to sleep on fire escapes (or only by poverty, not lack of available accomodation) and we aren't having to eat recycled human bodies. It's worth reflecting a little on why that is.
The books were part of a wave of eco-doom novels that were kicked off by the first beginnings of the environmental movement. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring arguably began the whole thing, in 1962, but by 1968 the concern had moved beyond her focus on very real and widespread pollution and on to the looming population crisis, care of Paul Erlich's neo-Malthusian 'The Population Bomb' - its title designed to mirror then-current concerns about the other Bomb - the hydrogen bomb - and predicting that its effects would be just as devastating. Erlich wrote: "The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate." He said that India might as well be written off - there was no way it could feed more than 200 million people (for the record, its population is currently six times that). We should concentrate on saving ourselves, via mandatory sterilisation and closing our borders against the inevitable tidal wave of famine refugees.
Well, as Niels Bohr supposedly said: "it's difficult to make predictions, especially about the future." The fact that all this didn't come to pass was as a result of what has been called the 'Green Revolution'. A combination of irrigation, increased cropping area, fast-growing strains of wheat and rice, and increased use of fertilizer has tripled world food yields. The godfather of this was an American scientist named Norman Borlaug - a man who deserves to be far more widely known than he is. It is arguable that half of the world's population is alive today thanks to his work, especially in India. Now modern agriculture has many critics, and it's certainly by no means perfect, but we mustn't overlook the almost miraculous way it has saved the world from mass starvation. As Borlaug himself put it: "some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They've never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels... If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things."
We're not out of the woods yet. Global population continues to grow, although the rate of increase is falling rapidly and it will probably peak somewhere above 9 billion in 20 years or so. Water resources are becoming scarce in some parts of the world, and careless use of fertilizer has caused side effects like the seasonal 'dead zone' in the Gulf of Mexico - although it ought to be noted that fertilizer use in the developed world has actually been falling for 30 years. And then... the Green Revolution is still under way. Africa has still yet to benefit from it in the same way that China, India and South America have. Meanwhile more targeted use of fertilizer and new genetic technologies also offer the promise of even more increases in yield. I'd never argue that all in the garden is perfect, and we owe a great debt to the environmental movement for cleaning up our industry and agriculture and making the world around us a much safer and cleaner one. But let's also remember that technology let us dodge this particular bullet (or Bomb), and it's our best hope for keeping pace as population continues to rise.
The books were part of a wave of eco-doom novels that were kicked off by the first beginnings of the environmental movement. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring arguably began the whole thing, in 1962, but by 1968 the concern had moved beyond her focus on very real and widespread pollution and on to the looming population crisis, care of Paul Erlich's neo-Malthusian 'The Population Bomb' - its title designed to mirror then-current concerns about the other Bomb - the hydrogen bomb - and predicting that its effects would be just as devastating. Erlich wrote: "The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate." He said that India might as well be written off - there was no way it could feed more than 200 million people (for the record, its population is currently six times that). We should concentrate on saving ourselves, via mandatory sterilisation and closing our borders against the inevitable tidal wave of famine refugees.
Well, as Niels Bohr supposedly said: "it's difficult to make predictions, especially about the future." The fact that all this didn't come to pass was as a result of what has been called the 'Green Revolution'. A combination of irrigation, increased cropping area, fast-growing strains of wheat and rice, and increased use of fertilizer has tripled world food yields. The godfather of this was an American scientist named Norman Borlaug - a man who deserves to be far more widely known than he is. It is arguable that half of the world's population is alive today thanks to his work, especially in India. Now modern agriculture has many critics, and it's certainly by no means perfect, but we mustn't overlook the almost miraculous way it has saved the world from mass starvation. As Borlaug himself put it: "some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They've never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels... If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things."
We're not out of the woods yet. Global population continues to grow, although the rate of increase is falling rapidly and it will probably peak somewhere above 9 billion in 20 years or so. Water resources are becoming scarce in some parts of the world, and careless use of fertilizer has caused side effects like the seasonal 'dead zone' in the Gulf of Mexico - although it ought to be noted that fertilizer use in the developed world has actually been falling for 30 years. And then... the Green Revolution is still under way. Africa has still yet to benefit from it in the same way that China, India and South America have. Meanwhile more targeted use of fertilizer and new genetic technologies also offer the promise of even more increases in yield. I'd never argue that all in the garden is perfect, and we owe a great debt to the environmental movement for cleaning up our industry and agriculture and making the world around us a much safer and cleaner one. But let's also remember that technology let us dodge this particular bullet (or Bomb), and it's our best hope for keeping pace as population continues to rise.
Thursday, 3 November 2011
Small earthquake in Blackpool: not many dead
In case you'd missed the news, Britain's natural gas reserves have just more than doubled. In a world where people are worried about declining North Sea production and imports of natural gas from Russia, high energy bills, and carbon emissions from all of our coal-burning power stations, you would think that this news would have been greeted with dancing in the streets. But as it is, we're enduring a bout of navel-gazing and a lot of guff being talked by the kind of commentators who wouldn't know a methane molecule if it came out of their backside.
The latest iteration of this story is focusing on the deadly peril to the valuable infrastructure of the Lancashire coast posed by earthquakes. Yes, earthquakes. Fifty of them in all, all caused by some test drilling conducted by UK shale gas pioneers Cuadrilla Resources. At first sight, a worrying development for sure, until you realise that the largest of these "earthquakes" was actually magnitude 2.3 on the Richter scale. For comparison, that's about the same as a car going past you when you're on the pavement, or next door's washing machine entering its spin cycle. It won't rattle your teacup. It certainly won't cause your house to collapse. There are millions of such micro-tremors every year - tens of thousands every day. They are not recorded by any earthquake monitoring body because they are so common and unremarkable. It speaks volumes about a country that is unused to seismic activity in any form, rather than any level of danger. New Zealanders, Californians and Italians, who ignore tremors thousands of times more powerful every single day of the year, are surely laughing up their sleeves at our panicked response.
It is symptomatic, however, of the kind of exaggerated panic that shale gas seems to bring. Shale gas extraction involves pumping an emulsion of 99.9% water and sand into a hole in the ground to cause tiny cracks in gas-bearing rocks, so that the gas de-sorbs and can be collected. Some people also use detergent as a surfactant. Some in the past have used diesel fuel, although this practice is now largely discarded. This happens a kilometre underground, in non-porous rocks. If they weren't non-porous the gas wouldn't have collected there. There are concerns about possible contamination of water tables from leaks as you pump the stuff down. These concerns are valid, but usually overstated. The United States produces half of its natural gas from shale gas, tight gas or coalbed methane, all of which involve some degree of pressure manipulation underground. Of the tens of thousands of wells drilled, there have been two recorded instances of small, localised contamination, caused by shoddy practice. Compare this with the kind of damage that has been done by oil or coal extraction (anyone remember Deepwater Horizon?). Yes, you saw that scene from Gasland on YouTube, where they set light to the water coming from the tap. What the documentary (which makes Michael Moore look like a balanced and nuanced reporter) doesn't tell you is that they could do that long before shale gas drilling came to the area.
I'm not saying that there is no risk, or that there shouldn't be appropriate environmental safeguards in place. Of course there should. Shale gas needs a lot of rigs, which look unsightly for the 18 months or so that they need to be in position. There are some potential concerns about aquifers (although unlike in bits of the US, no British tapwater at all comes from ground aquifers - it all falls from the sky), and surface issues left by careless disposal of waste etc. These can all be regulated. But compare this to open cast coal mines, nuclear power stations, Alberta tar sands, oil spillages from tankers and deep well blowouts, and even the nimbies who don't like the sight of wind turbines (which I happen to think are quite beautiful, but I guess I'm weird). We are talking about enough gas to power the UK for the next 40 or 50 years, and displacing all of that coal, oil and nuclear that we worry so much about. That's surely worth the tiniest bit of risk, isn't it? Isn't it?
The latest iteration of this story is focusing on the deadly peril to the valuable infrastructure of the Lancashire coast posed by earthquakes. Yes, earthquakes. Fifty of them in all, all caused by some test drilling conducted by UK shale gas pioneers Cuadrilla Resources. At first sight, a worrying development for sure, until you realise that the largest of these "earthquakes" was actually magnitude 2.3 on the Richter scale. For comparison, that's about the same as a car going past you when you're on the pavement, or next door's washing machine entering its spin cycle. It won't rattle your teacup. It certainly won't cause your house to collapse. There are millions of such micro-tremors every year - tens of thousands every day. They are not recorded by any earthquake monitoring body because they are so common and unremarkable. It speaks volumes about a country that is unused to seismic activity in any form, rather than any level of danger. New Zealanders, Californians and Italians, who ignore tremors thousands of times more powerful every single day of the year, are surely laughing up their sleeves at our panicked response.
It is symptomatic, however, of the kind of exaggerated panic that shale gas seems to bring. Shale gas extraction involves pumping an emulsion of 99.9% water and sand into a hole in the ground to cause tiny cracks in gas-bearing rocks, so that the gas de-sorbs and can be collected. Some people also use detergent as a surfactant. Some in the past have used diesel fuel, although this practice is now largely discarded. This happens a kilometre underground, in non-porous rocks. If they weren't non-porous the gas wouldn't have collected there. There are concerns about possible contamination of water tables from leaks as you pump the stuff down. These concerns are valid, but usually overstated. The United States produces half of its natural gas from shale gas, tight gas or coalbed methane, all of which involve some degree of pressure manipulation underground. Of the tens of thousands of wells drilled, there have been two recorded instances of small, localised contamination, caused by shoddy practice. Compare this with the kind of damage that has been done by oil or coal extraction (anyone remember Deepwater Horizon?). Yes, you saw that scene from Gasland on YouTube, where they set light to the water coming from the tap. What the documentary (which makes Michael Moore look like a balanced and nuanced reporter) doesn't tell you is that they could do that long before shale gas drilling came to the area.
I'm not saying that there is no risk, or that there shouldn't be appropriate environmental safeguards in place. Of course there should. Shale gas needs a lot of rigs, which look unsightly for the 18 months or so that they need to be in position. There are some potential concerns about aquifers (although unlike in bits of the US, no British tapwater at all comes from ground aquifers - it all falls from the sky), and surface issues left by careless disposal of waste etc. These can all be regulated. But compare this to open cast coal mines, nuclear power stations, Alberta tar sands, oil spillages from tankers and deep well blowouts, and even the nimbies who don't like the sight of wind turbines (which I happen to think are quite beautiful, but I guess I'm weird). We are talking about enough gas to power the UK for the next 40 or 50 years, and displacing all of that coal, oil and nuclear that we worry so much about. That's surely worth the tiniest bit of risk, isn't it? Isn't it?
Tuesday, 11 October 2011
My Struggle
Yahoo are trying to force me to do things their way. They've been trying for a couple of years now, but this month it got serious. We'll see who wins.
I'm a Yahoo! Mail user. I have been since 1997, when there wasn't much else around, Google didn't exist and everyone searched using Yahoo, and they were much better than AOL, and supported free personal web space (Geocities) and all kinds of cool things. I originally created half a dozen Yahoo IDs to play online games. Some of the IDs still have the names of characters I played in those games, and I look back on them fondly. In those days Yahoo used to have a searchable member directory, and if someone else had a Yahoo ID you could look up who they were (or at least who they said they were - there was no obligation to tell the truth). All of that vanished a couple of years ago when they started trying to produce a Facebook-lite, but most people had gone ex-directory by then anyway. Ah well.
Over the years I've developed a pattern - one ID I use for pretty much all non-work related stuff (it is still named after an Ars Magica character, which does confuse people occasionally). Two I use mainly for online games; one for MMORPGs, and the other for play by email (PBEM) games. Another is an aggregator for new game requests. One I use for signing up to things online, so that marketers can spam it to their heart's content (it gets a couple of hundred spam mails a day now). There are a couple that are dormant, and I just sign into every couple of months so that Yahoo don't shut them down. You get the picture.
Apparently I've been using Yahoo Mail Classic, and now there is a new version, which has all kinds of bells and whistles. In fact it's been around a few years now. I had a look when it first came out, decided I found the layout offputting and the number of ads and java scripts and the like even greater (which slowed down page refreshes) and gave up on it. But Yahoo have become steadily more insistent over the years. So insistent, that last year I decided to give it a trial, just on one of my accounts. Unfortunately I found this locks up my computer at work. Specifically Firefox goes into a login loop from which it can't escape (yes, Firefox is the latest version, but the OS is Windows XP, and that's presumably the problem. Well we use XP - so sue us). So, I tried to opt back out of the new Yahoo. But there was no way to! Yahoo have become so insistent that all users must stop using the legacy system that they no longer provide a "no thanks, I'd rather go back to Classic" button (apparently this has now been restored, just in an out of the way place). In the end I had to resort to a hack I found online. Phew, problem solved.
But they weren't going to let it go at that. Oh no. The new system is becoming "mandatory" (except it's not - they just keep trying to pretend it is). Now whenever I login I have to put up with a screen saying THE COUNTDOWN HAS BEGUN - PLEASE UPGRADE TO THE NEW VERSION OF YAHOO MAIL BY 31-10-11. This also crashes my Firefox at work, and now I have to type: http://us.mg1.mail.yahoo.com/dc/optout?script=no into the browser to even get the COUNTDOWN screen, with a picture of a stopwatch and all kinds of images of "time running out". Apparently I don't actually *have* to switch, just that I'll get this browser-disabling screen every time I logon until the end of October, after which they'll presumably give up on me as irredeemably backward. I have several Yahoo accounts, and I do check them several times a day. It's becoming quite a pain in the arse. But they're not going to beat me.
There are probably people out there thinking: "FFS, just switch to gmail" or something similar. Except I don't want to. All of my old emails are archived on Yahoo. I know that there are probably clever ways of shuffling them across, but I can't be arsed to research them, and anyway Google are pretty sinister themselves as regards privacy these days, and Hotmail are run by Microsoft - which is almost as bad. So it will take more than this campaign by Yahoo to make me switch.
It feels quite sad to have such a battle as a loyal - certainly by internet standards - user of a service. I'm sure that focus groups and stock analysts tell them that this is the way to compete with Google and Hotmail. But often it feels like things are "upgraded" with no concern for the user. Facebook do this all the time. Yahoo ditched Geocities, and a whole swathe of amateur web content was eliminated at a stroke. I've no problem with embracing the new if I can see it's better, but a mail service that crashes my browser is not an improved experience.
So fuck Yahoo. Lay on, Macduff. And damned be him that first cries: "hold, enough!"
I'm a Yahoo! Mail user. I have been since 1997, when there wasn't much else around, Google didn't exist and everyone searched using Yahoo, and they were much better than AOL, and supported free personal web space (Geocities) and all kinds of cool things. I originally created half a dozen Yahoo IDs to play online games. Some of the IDs still have the names of characters I played in those games, and I look back on them fondly. In those days Yahoo used to have a searchable member directory, and if someone else had a Yahoo ID you could look up who they were (or at least who they said they were - there was no obligation to tell the truth). All of that vanished a couple of years ago when they started trying to produce a Facebook-lite, but most people had gone ex-directory by then anyway. Ah well.
Over the years I've developed a pattern - one ID I use for pretty much all non-work related stuff (it is still named after an Ars Magica character, which does confuse people occasionally). Two I use mainly for online games; one for MMORPGs, and the other for play by email (PBEM) games. Another is an aggregator for new game requests. One I use for signing up to things online, so that marketers can spam it to their heart's content (it gets a couple of hundred spam mails a day now). There are a couple that are dormant, and I just sign into every couple of months so that Yahoo don't shut them down. You get the picture.
Apparently I've been using Yahoo Mail Classic, and now there is a new version, which has all kinds of bells and whistles. In fact it's been around a few years now. I had a look when it first came out, decided I found the layout offputting and the number of ads and java scripts and the like even greater (which slowed down page refreshes) and gave up on it. But Yahoo have become steadily more insistent over the years. So insistent, that last year I decided to give it a trial, just on one of my accounts. Unfortunately I found this locks up my computer at work. Specifically Firefox goes into a login loop from which it can't escape (yes, Firefox is the latest version, but the OS is Windows XP, and that's presumably the problem. Well we use XP - so sue us). So, I tried to opt back out of the new Yahoo. But there was no way to! Yahoo have become so insistent that all users must stop using the legacy system that they no longer provide a "no thanks, I'd rather go back to Classic" button (apparently this has now been restored, just in an out of the way place). In the end I had to resort to a hack I found online. Phew, problem solved.
But they weren't going to let it go at that. Oh no. The new system is becoming "mandatory" (except it's not - they just keep trying to pretend it is). Now whenever I login I have to put up with a screen saying THE COUNTDOWN HAS BEGUN - PLEASE UPGRADE TO THE NEW VERSION OF YAHOO MAIL BY 31-10-11. This also crashes my Firefox at work, and now I have to type: http://us.mg1.mail.yahoo.com/dc/optout?script=no into the browser to even get the COUNTDOWN screen, with a picture of a stopwatch and all kinds of images of "time running out". Apparently I don't actually *have* to switch, just that I'll get this browser-disabling screen every time I logon until the end of October, after which they'll presumably give up on me as irredeemably backward. I have several Yahoo accounts, and I do check them several times a day. It's becoming quite a pain in the arse. But they're not going to beat me.
There are probably people out there thinking: "FFS, just switch to gmail" or something similar. Except I don't want to. All of my old emails are archived on Yahoo. I know that there are probably clever ways of shuffling them across, but I can't be arsed to research them, and anyway Google are pretty sinister themselves as regards privacy these days, and Hotmail are run by Microsoft - which is almost as bad. So it will take more than this campaign by Yahoo to make me switch.
It feels quite sad to have such a battle as a loyal - certainly by internet standards - user of a service. I'm sure that focus groups and stock analysts tell them that this is the way to compete with Google and Hotmail. But often it feels like things are "upgraded" with no concern for the user. Facebook do this all the time. Yahoo ditched Geocities, and a whole swathe of amateur web content was eliminated at a stroke. I've no problem with embracing the new if I can see it's better, but a mail service that crashes my browser is not an improved experience.
So fuck Yahoo. Lay on, Macduff. And damned be him that first cries: "hold, enough!"
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