Nerd News Roundup

Star Wars

Your rumor of the day involves Jonathan Rhys Meyers being offered a role in Episode VII.

And a new animated series set between Episodes III and IV is set to start in 2014:

Disney’s acquisition of Lucasfilm led to the creation of new films, but it also spelled the end for a bunch of the studio’s other properties. Among those were Star Wars: The Clone Wars, which “wound down” earlier this year after five seasons on the Cartoon Network.

But the galaxy far, far away isn’t staying off the small screen for long. Disney has just announced the start of production on Star Wars Rebels, a new animated show coming to Disney XD in 2014. Get more information and an early behind-the-scenes look after the jump.

The new series chronicles the roughly two-decade period between Episode III: Revenge of the Sith and Episode IV: A New Hope, during which “the Empire is securing its grip on the galaxy and hunting down the last of the Jedi Knights as a fledgling rebellion against the Empire is taking shape.” That’s about as specific as Disney is willing to get with the plotline right now

Avengers 2

Joss Whedon talks about the sequel.

Whedon had previously alluded to a brother/sister duo being in the film, which EW later said was indeed Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch. When I brought up Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch to Whedon, he confirmed they were the characters in question, explaining, “You know, they had a rough beginning. They’re interesting to me because they sort of represent the part of the world that wouldn’t necessarily agree with The Avengers. So they’re not there to make things easier. I’m not putting any characters in the movie that will make things easier.”

 

Movie Reviews for People with Kids: Star Trek into Darkness

For those who came in late, this feature isn’t about finding a family friendly movie, but is about the problem of being a movie geek who used to spend 2-3 nights at the cinema a month dealing with the fact that finding a babysitter is hard and I refuse to be the sod who brings a toddler along to a 2 hour+ long PG-13 movie expecting them to sit still and be quiet, so my nights out to the movies are limited to about 2-3 a year, thus all of my movie reviews are generally of stuff that came out last year because Redbox is my new best friend.

(Though, if they’d like to kick a check my way for the endorsement/advertising I just did, I’d consider them my bestie and totally pass notes with them in class and let them cheat off of my tests. Check Yes or No, Redbox.)

But I got to spend some time with my old man this weekend and we caught this movie because he’s been a hard core Trekker since the 60’s. And while I’ve been a Star Wars nerd since my first viewing as a toddler in 1977, I eventually came to like Star Trek during the 80’s with the movies and the Next Generation. So I’ve been looking forward to this movie as well.

I liked the 2009 reboot of the franchise which introduced us to the old crew again, this time in an alternate timeline, which I found to be a brilliant solution to the conundrum of a reboot to Star Trek, which was how do you keep the obsessive Trekkers on board who love the original series and show them that you respect what came before while introducing something new and in many ways shocking what with (Spoiler alert for a four year old movie here) blowing up Vulcan and all.

So how does this movie stack up against the 2009 reboot and how does it stack up against the old movies in general?

Pretty good and good, respectively. Putting them in order of my preference, I’d say:

1. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
2. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
3. Star Trek: First Contact
4. Star Trek Into Darkness
5. Star Trek (2009)
6. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

There. That’s the spoiler free review. Everyone else, I assume you want to hear my opinions about everything else in the film, so join me after the fold:

This is why we can’t have nice things – Government edition

To highlight what the current level of not sane in which our political realm operates, I present the following from Bloomberg.com:

To refresh your memories, the 3 scandals are:

1. That Susan Rice went on a Sunday morning news show (which has never been sullied with false or misleading information ever in the history of the Republic) and said that some fanatics attacked our consulate and killed four Americans because they were angry about a film instead of some fanatics attacked our consulate and killed four Americans because they were angry about us bombing our way across the Middle East and Northern Africa.

   Also, because President Obama called it an ‘act of terror’ instead of a ‘terrorist attack’. I kid you not.

2. That the Department of Justice to investigate a leak regarding an counter-terrorism operation subpoenaed the phone records of AP reporters. That sounds bad, until you realize that a.) Congress wanted the investigation and b.) thanks to the Patriot Act (passed by Congress and heavily supported by both parties) the FBI and DoJ could have issued a National Security letter and gotten everything they wanted in secret without having to notify anyone of anything.

   So, while I appreciate the newfound concern over surveillance, the horse hasn’t just left the barn, he’s galloped all the way to New York, where he hopped a boat, landed in Europe, crossed that continent and Asia, and is currently on his way back to the US.

   I hear he might arrive sometime in the 22^nd century after all terrorism, everywhere is defeated though, so USA! USA! USA!

3. That the IRS inappropriately focused on conservative would-be non-profit groups and made them answer more questions in their quest to attain tax-exempt status. Not one has been rejected thus far and all reportedly enjoy tax exempt status while their applications are pending.

The last one approaches a scandal because no one wants the Tax Man being used as a political weapon. But there is zero evidence that the White House was involved in doing this or suggesting this policy or making the policy, so even this problem (again, if we were sane) should be dealt with by an investigation, passing laws that better define which groups should be tax-exempt and which shouldn’t (and really… at this point, I’m about ready to say no group should be tax-exempt and be done with it, we’re not feudal Europe), and disciplining/firing those involved. In short, it should take about three months to look into it and fix it and we should be moving on to other little things like the Environment, the Economy, Immigration, the Banking sector, Income Inequality, etc.

But again… sanity has no place in our Republic.

Tragedy of the commons – Water edition

You can add this to Climate Change (which is probably driving some of this), ocean pollution, overfishing, and dying bees to things to be concerned about.

HASKELL COUNTY, Kan. — Forty-nine years ago, Ashley Yost’s grandfather sank a well deep into a half-mile square of rich Kansas farmland. He struck an artery of water so prodigious that he could pump 1,600 gallons to the surface every minute.

Last year, Mr. Yost was coaxing just 300 gallons from the earth, and pumping up sand in order to do it. By harvest time, the grit had robbed him of $20,000 worth of pumps and any hope of returning to the bumper harvests of years past…

And when the groundwater runs out, it is gone for good. Refilling the aquifer would require hundreds, if not thousands, of years of rains.

This is in many ways a slow-motion crisis — decades in the making, imminent for some, years or decades away for others, hitting one farm but leaving an adjacent one untouched. But across the rolling plains and tarmac-flat farmland near the Kansas-Colorado border, the effects of depletion are evident everywhere. Highway bridges span arid stream beds. Most of the creeks and rivers that once veined the land have dried up as 60 years of pumping have pulled groundwater levels down by scores and even hundreds of feet…

What makes this a tragedy of the commons is the response to technology that allowed farmers to get the same results and use less water:

The villain in this story is in fact the farmers’ savior: the center-pivot irrigator, a quarter- or half-mile of pipe that traces a watery circle around a point in the middle of a field. The center pivots helped start a revolution that raised farming from hardscrabble work to a profitable business.

Since the pivots’ debut some six decades ago, the amount of irrigated cropland in Kansas has grown to nearly three million acres, from a mere 250,000 in 1950. But the pivot irrigators’ thirst for water — hundreds and sometimes thousands of gallons a minute — has sent much of the aquifer on a relentless decline. And while the big pivots have become much more efficient, a University of California study earlier this year concluded that Kansas farmers were using some of their water savings to expand irrigation or grow thirstier crops, not to reduce consumption.

Of course, the government shares some of the blame with its rather insane farm subsidies and policies that made ethanol a preferred fuel.

But it’s becoming clearer and clearer that the environmental chickens are coming home to roost for us. That after 120 odd years of naked capitalist exploitation of land in the name of ever increasing profit that we are depleting our environment in an unsustainable fashion that will probably reach a crisis level if not in my lifetime, than in the lifetime of my children.

A sane response to this would be to devise and experiment with regulations and laws that would help us govern how we use our resources to balance profitability with sustainability.

Stop laughing.

I know we don’t live in a sane world, as the nominee to head up the EPA can’t even get a confirmation vote in Congress, because many in our government see no issue with the unlimited exploitation of the land, consequences be damned.

So, I imagine our children in 50-60 years will have a greater reason to hate their parents than the usual ones. I expect to be turned into Soylent Green myself and I can’t say I’d blame ‘em.

Luke 9:51-56

51 When the days were approaching for His ascension, He was determined to go to Jerusalem; 52 and He sent messengers on ahead of Him, and they went and entered a village of the Samaritans to make arrangements for Him. 53 But they did not receive Him, because He was traveling toward Jerusalem. 54 When His disciples James and John saw this, they said, “Lord, do You want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?” 55 But He turned and rebuked them, [and said, “You do not know what kind of spirit you are of; 56 for the Son of Man did not come to destroy men’s lives, but to save them.”] And they went on to another village.

What is the Christian response to rejection?

Do we assert our rights? Do we complain about other people? Do we retreat into ourselves and over-analyze and criticize ourselves looking for ways in which we have failed? Do we become depressed thinking we are worthless?

Or do we become angry at the rejection? Do we smile internally and fantasize about our rejecter trembling in fear at an angry God on Judgment Day and begging for mercy only to be denied and cast into eternal torture while we look on with a smug, serene “I told you so” expression?

Are we angry at the rejection? Or are we angry because the other person is not responding to us in the way in which we expected of them? Is our self-esteem or pride hurt because we believe ourselves to be smart, worthwhile, good people, and their response to us offends that self-image?

Samaritans and Jews did not get along well. The Samaritans were the descendants of the northern kingdom of Israel and immigrants that the Assyrian Empire brought into the land when they conquered the northern tribes. Jewish people were the descendants of the kingdom of Judah which outlasted Israel, but was later conquered by Babylon. Those who returned from Babylon were led by pious leaders who took the Mosaic law and its prohibitions against interracial marriage strictly to the point where Jews who had married non-Jewish women were ordered to divorce them. (Ezra 9 and 10)

So there were racial, social, religious, and political differences between Jews and Samaritans that made them highly antagonistic to one another. Pious Jews of the day would travel out of their way to avoid walking through Samaria. Not Jesus. Jesus walked right on through.

James and John probably thought this one of Jesus’ many oddities that they accepted. They were Jews, so it is likely that they held the common prejudices of the day, and viewed the Samaritans with disdain. So I think they were expecting gratitude from the Samaritans that James and John (and their Lord, of course) would stay in the Samaritan village at all.

So when the village did not meet their expectation, they were angry. Didn’t these people know they were dealing with James and John? The number one and number two man in the coming kingdom… well, if they had their way, they would be #1 and #2. Oh, and Jesus, of course. But how dare those ungrateful heathens not allow us into their village.

So they want to bring the fire. Literally. They want those ungrateful Samaritans to die in a fire. One that they would bring. And then how sorry they’d be. MUHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!

I think our response to the world is similar. When we meet people who reject us or reject our churches or reject our religion or reject the existence of God; when we meet people who embrace different political or social values than we do, we encounter someone who shakes our world view, our expectations. They challenge the way we perceive things to be, and in response, a lot of times, I think we embrace anger. Maybe not a deliberate anger, but a slow, deep seated, low burning anger that lets us see them as enemies. Maybe we do harbor that little vengeance fantasy of imagining them cowering before us (and Jesus, of course, always Jesus) realizing how wrong they were (and conversely how right we are) before they are irrevocably given punishment for their foolishness in rejecting us (and Jesus, right? This is all about Jesus, we say.)

What is Jesus’ response to rejection?

He goes to the next village and leaves them in peace. He accepts the situation for what it is and He moves on with His life and His plans. He doesn’t respond with anger, except to the two disciples who wanted to murder an entire village with hellfire for not letting them spend the night.

Jesus chooses to respond with peace. Later, He would respond to the ultimate rejection of His person by praying for humanity for not knowing what it was doing.

Later manuscripts add the words attributed to Jesus here, but even if they are a pious fiction, they capture a good message for us. In our responses to people, ponder why we feel the way we do and remember what Spirit dwells within us. And remember how Jesus responded to rejection.

John eventually did come around, because in Acts 8, we find this footnote in the narrative:

²⁵ After they had further proclaimed the word of the Lord and testified about Jesus, Peter and John returned to Jerusalem, preaching the gospel in many Samaritan villages.

Let us repent of our own pride and choose to respond to others (including those who reject us or oppose us) in the Charity, compassion, and Spirit of our Lord. And let us not allow our wounded pride or failed expectations to drive us to anger, bitterness, and a callous attitude towards our fellow man.

Austerity Explained

Reblogged from Schroedinger's Cat:

Austerity Cat is looking out for you

LoL by: two_kittehs (Picture by: Deebrio)

Your internet cat picture and your political cartoon of the day.

Comic for the day

It’s the yellow pages one that seriously annoys me. Why do you keep delivering a stack of dead trees and ink to my doorway when I have Google?