Wednesday, 30 December, 2009. Tagged with: movies, entertainment
With 2009 at a close, an update to an earlier post about the Ambassador Entertainment season pass. As with 2008, we closed the year with 27 films. The break-even was initially calculated at 15 films.
- Gran Torino
- Taken
- Watchmen
- The Reader
- Sunshine Cleaning
- Fast and Furious
- Star Trek
- The Soloist
- X-Men Origins: Wolverine
- Up
- Anvil!
- Brothers Bloom
- Moon
- Food, Inc
- The Hurt Locker
- 500 Days of Summer
- Ponyo
- Adam
- It Might Get Loud
- Thirst
- Zombieland
- Capitalism: A Love Story
- Where the Wild Things Are
- A Serious Man
- Amelia
- 2012
- The Road
My favorites from the year were Moon, The Hurt Locker, Zombieland, Gran Torino and The Reader. I deeply enjoyed the vast majority of the films on the list. 2012 was laughably bad, Thirst got tedious, but Fast and Furious was the only unredeemable film here.
The cost for 2010 is $230 and the break-even is 15 films for two people. If you’re a Raleigh-area movie fan, it’s a fantastic deal and a great way to support an independent theatre. As with the past two years, I look forward to the new year in movies.
Monday, 28 December, 2009. Tagged with: environment, unintendedconsequences, energy
Keith Bradsher, for the New York Times:
Some of the greenest technologies of the age, from electric cars to efficient light bulbs to very large wind turbines, are made possible by an unusual group of elements called rare earths. The world’s dependence on these substances is rising fast.
Just one problem: These elements come almost entirely from China, from some of the most environmentally damaging mines in the country, in an industry dominated by criminal gangs.
Western capitals have suddenly grown worried over China’s near monopoly, which gives it a potential stranglehold on technologies of the future.
Weaning ourselves off of petroleum is still a worthwhile goal, but the political and diplomatic environments of having to abide repressive Middle East regimes or appearing to abide don’t improve if we substitute China. Not only does it increase our strategic dependence on China (as does the national debt), but China has stability issues of its own.
There’s also no way for an outside company to figure out if the rare earth elements it’s purchasing from China are mined responsibly.
Sunday, 27 December, 2009. Tagged with: technological failure, travel, terrorism, tsa
This was written before a Nigerian man became ill on the Dec. 27, 2009 Flight 253, triggering another turnout of police/TSA
I’ve been seeing a bit of reaction on Twitter and on blogs about the TSA failing to keep Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab off of Northwest Flight 253.
Andrew Sullivan’s reaction is typical:
Who was the government official who was warned? Why was this loon allowed on a flight to the US? Here’s a simple test for the Obama administration: find the people responsible for this negligence and fire them.
Other commenters on Twitter talk about TSA failing to screen adequately. I’m not sure if they mean physical screening or passenger manifest screening, but let’s look at both.
First, TSA is reliant on other airports and countries to screen passengers from physically getting on planes. Abdulmutallab should have had to have been screened twice. Once in Lagos, his initial departure and again in Amsterdam. There are at least two possibilities here. First, he had the explosive underwear on the entire time and both physical screenings failed to find anything. Second, the syringe/detonator-laden tighty-whities were salted on the plane by someone else.
Either seems plausible.
From sheer volume of passengers, it seems probable that someone will make it through security with contraband. It also seems possible that with the enhanced focus on passenger screening that someone might focus on getting contraband onto a plane in a different fashion. Could be someone with flight-line clearance. Could be someone who just jumps a fence and walks onto a plane. Something like that wouldn’t have to take place in Amsterdam.
But what about the watch list screening? His dad spoke up and warned the U.S. embassy in Nigeria. Unlike Cat Stevens, Abdulmutallab was cleared to land in the U.S. Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano indicated there wasn’t enough information to put him on the no-fly list:
Speaking on ABC’s “This Week,” she replied that placing him on the no-fly list “required specific derogatory information that was not available to the law enforcement community.” Questioned again about the body check, she said her department was “ going backward” and reviewing what was and was not done in his case.
When there have been upwards of 1,000,000 people1 — some duplicated — on a watch list, how many resources is it worth devoting to looking at each and every person on it? What are the criteria for identifying people that would be of more interest than others? I don’t know. Remember, while passenger awareness of what was going on saved Flight 253, “See Something, Say Something” generates a lot of noise that has to be sorted through. It’s very possible for that noise to be hidden in. Still, Marc Ambinder asks a relevant question:
If watch list folks are on flights inbound for the U.S., the TSA is supposed to figure this out and notify the FBI and the National Counterterrorism Center. That’s the procedure, and it’s been used successfully to prevent a number of nefarious chaps from entering the U.S.
So – if secondary screening in Amsterdam and a validated watch list hit can’t keep someone from trying to blow up an airplane, what can?
Except the “watch list” and the “no-fly list” are not, strictly speaking, the same thing. There is the big consolidated list that has the big number. Then, there are the no-fly and selectee lists the TSA uses which are much smaller, but still around 16,000 people. Interpreting Napolitano’s statement and other data, Abdulmutallab was on the larger list, but not on either the two smaller lists. It seems, from TSA’s information, that they would not see a hit from the larger list against a passenger manifest.
Saturday, 12 December, 2009. Tagged with: technological failure, environment, unintendedconsequences, energy
The New York Times has two pieces, both by James Glanz, talking about geothermal projects in Switzerland and California being shutdown.
The Swiss project was shutdown over concerns that it would generate millions of dollars in earthquake damage annually.
The California project was getting Dept. of Energy funding. The company’s rationale isn’t known, but several issues are mentioned, including the earthquakes caused in Basel, Switzerland:
Geothermal enthusiasts asserted that drilling miles into hard rock, as required by the technique, could be done quickly and economically with small improvements in existing methods, Professor Schrag said. “What we’ve discovered is that it’s harder to make those improvements than some people believed,” he added.
In fact, AltaRock immediately ran into snags with its drilling, repeatedly snapping off bits in shallow formations called caprock. The project’s safety was also under review at the Energy Department after federal officials said the company had not been entirely forthcoming about the earthquakes produced in Basel in making the case for the Geysers project.
Other projects at the California site have also caused earthquakes. Back in June, Scientific American looked into why geothermal drilling causes earthquakes:
About a million years ago, there was a magmatic intrusion (protovolcano) that didn’t make it to the surface. Under the surface is a rock called felsite—you can think of it like granite; it’s the heat source for the sandstone.
The new project is going to exploit the felsite directly. But there’s no water in the felsite, so they drill, then they pipe water under strong pressure and flow rate, to fracture the rock. They’ll be using earthquake-monitoring equipment and will send cameras down the hole to see which direction the fractures were occurring. Then they drill a second hole to intersect the new fracture.
So the potential is to extract much more heat, but you have to create your own fractures and you have to introduce water.
That bit of creating fractures? That creates the earthquake.
Sunday, 06 December, 2009. Tagged with: links, money, environment, education, unintendedconsequences
NYT piece on plasma centers in Texas and the economic attraction of plasma donation, particularly to Mexican factory workers.
Interesting figure: The average $30 donation payment results in $300 worth of product. Also, a Michigan blood center is seeing some whole-blood volunteer donors shifting to being paid for plasma elsewhere.
With some college texts running over $200, and tuition costs increasing, there’s a bit of curiosity about the future of textbooks and how they might live on ebook readers like the Kindle or Nook. The Atlantic Wire collects some links. (Disclosure: My daytime employer, WebAssign, does business with universities and college textbook publishers)
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof looks into whether what we cook with and store our food in impacts our health.
