Well, this is interesting. All these years I’ve thought the demise of the dinosaurs was occasioned by the impact of an asteroid that struck Earth sixty-six million years ago. That may be still the case, but some scientists believe relentless volcanic activity, spanning more than a million years before and after the strike, may have been the real culprit.
At first, the Deccan Traps, an enormous shield volcano located in what is present day India, began releasing small quantities of carbon dioxide and sulphur into Earth’s atmosphere. As time went on these emissions increased, until, about three hundred thousand years before the asteroid strike, furious volcanic eruptions commenced. After several hundred thousand years of the atmosphere being filled with toxic gases, Earth must have been all but uninhabitable anyway.
In short, the asteroid is blamed for the mass extinctions that marked the end of the Cretaceous era, simply because it arrived at the time it did. All of this is the subject matter of the latest Kurzgesagt video, and even if that’s not happened, there’s much to marvel over. One being the reign of the dinosaurs lasted one hundred and fifty million years.
Humanity, or at least Homo sapiens, have been present, perhaps a mere three hundred thousand years so far. And then there’s Earth itself. Towards the end of the Cretaceous era, the planet was far warmer, and humid, than presently. Forests flourished in polar regions, and despite the long polar nights, life went on in what have seemed like a short sleeve like environment. Fascinating.
Pretty much anything British/American film maker Christopher Nolan touches, turns to gold. The Batman saga, Inception, Interstellar, Oppenheimer, Tenet, Dunkirk, The Prestige (which I wrote about way back in 2006), Memento. You name it, they’re all winners. Then consider how well Nolan can go from one genre to another, almost seamlessly, be it action, sci-fi, period, war, whatever.
That’s because making a good horror film is a lot like making a good comedy film: difficult. Gore and jump scenes have limited currency because they’re so common. What drives a great horror movie is suspense. “There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it,” as Alfred Hitchcock once quipped. The really exceptional idea would therefore need an abundance of suspense. And a layered, labyrinthine story, but that’s something Nolan already excels at.
But horror is not my thing, even though I have a few horror titles in my old DVD library. Even if Nolan made a truly Nolan-esque horror film, I’m not exactly sure I’d go and see it.
The great thing about the Star Wars universe is the way it can move up down left right forwards and backwards. Like any good fiction franchise, the potential to create new stories, new universes within a universe even, are virtually limitless. This even though I’m way behind on anything Star Wars beyond most of the movies (mainly the Skywalker Saga films) released to date.
But since Disney bought the Star Wars franchise from creator George Lucas, it has been in overdrive expanding exponentially. The Acolyte is the latest offering from this exponentially expanding universe, and is set about one hundred years before events of The Phantom Menace, in what is referred to as the High Republic era.
The trailer looks impressive, and the new show begins streaming on Tuesday 4 June 2024.
Long time readers of Kottke have doubtless seen his semi-regular media diet posts, where he writes about the movies and TV shows he’s seen, plus books he’s been reading. Kottke is a voracious consumer of media if those posts are anything to go by.
In comparison, my consumption is far more modest. Maybe it’s because I have a minimum of two to three hours away from screens daily, and/or I spend too much time daydreaming.
Still, dimming the lights during the quiet remains of the day, and taking in a movie or TV show, and afterwards, a book, is always something to look forward to.
The Miseducation of Cameron Post is a 2018 film directed by Desiree Akhavan, starring Chloë Grace Moretz, as the titular character. After learning Cameron has a girlfriend, her conservative aunt and guardian sends her away for gay “conversion” therapy at a religious institution. I watched this twice, as I found the first viewing unsettling to say the least.
Also unsettling and confronting is Nitram, by Justin Kurzel, which delves into the mind of the person responsible for Australia’s largest mass-shooting in 1996, at Port Arthur, in Tasmania.
Tully, directed by Jason Reitman in 2018, stars Charlize Theron as Marlo, who is struggling to raise a family after the birth of her third child. Reluctantly she hires a night nanny named Tully. Despite some early misgivings about Tully, the two quickly develop a close bond.
Knives Out, made in 2019 by Rian Johnson, sees Daniel Craig playing a James Bond like role that not the least bit James Bond (thankfully). Craig portrays Benoit Blanc, a private investigator, who tries to piece together the apparent suicide of a wealthy family patriarch. If whodunits are your thing, this is not to be missed.
I’ve also found time to look at Nemesis, a documentary produced by the ABC, which looks at the last three Coalition party Prime Ministers of Australia. What can I say? Once a politician, always a politician? And, we may wear the same stripes, but that doesn’t mean we like each other. Even if politics isn’t your thing, this is still fascinating viewing.
I’ve also been tuning into Universe, a documentary by British physicist Brian Cox. There’s no missing the similarities to Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, made by Carl Sagan in the early 1980’s. Compared to Cosmos, Universe does plod a little, but Cox’s enthusiasm, indeed joy, for the gargantuan entity we reside in, is nothing short of infectious.
Most people probably know Cox played keyboards in British dance/electronica act D:Ream, and their 1993 track Things can only get better, perhaps remains one of the band’s best known tracks. But you may not know that Cox later conceded the song was misleading and scientifically inaccurate. The universe, despite being a mere baby, is already in an inexorable, albeit protracted, decline. Things are certainly not getting better…
Likewise, Funny Ethnics by Shirley Li, set across the west and inner west of Sydney, which I wrote about here last year. I’m currently reading Before You Knew My Name, by Jacqueline Bublitz, a story about two women, one alive, one dead, whose fates become intertwined in New York.
Tangentially related to my previous post… product designer and technologist Matt Webb has created an app, named Galactic Compass (link to Apple app store), that points to the centre of the galaxy.
When on the (far less light polluted) NSW Central Coast, I can kind of look down from the tail of the constellation Scorpius (the scorpion), and be observing the right patch of the night sky.
When back amongst the super bright lights of Sydney though, that can be a little trickier. Like, find a star, any star, let alone the Scorpius constellation.
One of the computers on NASA’s deep space probe Voyager 1 is experiencing some sort of malfunction, with recent signals from the probe containing no usable data. Mission engineers are apparently confident the problem can be resolved, even though Voyager 1 is almost a light-day distant, meaning it’ll take time to apply a fix:
Because Voyager 1 is more than 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, it takes 22.5 hours for a radio signal to reach the spacecraft and another 22.5 hours for the probe’s response to reach antennas on the ground. So the team received the results of the command on March 3. On March 7, engineers began working to decode the data, and on March 10, they determined that it contains a memory readout.
Although Voyager 1, and deep space counterpart Voyager 2, have left the solar system and are in interstellar space, it is estimated it will take Voyager 1 another three hundred years to reach the Oort cloud. The vastly scattered debris, rocky remnants of the formation of the solar system, that constitutes the Oort cloud, may extend more than two light years from the Sun. That’s about half way to the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri.
So to be truly beyond the solar system, I imagine the Voyager probes will need to clear the Oort cloud first. We might be waiting sometime for that to happen. It’s incredible the way mission controllers can keep tabs on deep space missions though, and trouble shoot, and perhaps remedy problems, despite their distance from the Sun.
About twenty years ago, scientists were puzzled by changes in the trajectories of deep space probes Pioneers 10 and 11. Somehow both craft, then located in the Kuiper belt, which is situated beyond the orbit of Neptune, appeared to have slowed down slightly. All sorts of theories were advanced to account for the anomaly, including the idea that gravity may be behaving in ways not seen before.
After analysing gargantuan quantities of data, mission engineers determined that heat loss was having a subtle influence on the movements of the probes, in that it was acting a little like a brake. Contact with both vessels had been lost by that stage, so even if a fix could have been devised, it unfortunately could not have been applied.
German animation and design studio Kurzgesagt have been producing excellent informative and educational videos for what seems like half the lifespan of the universe. Let’s hope Peak-Kurzgesagt is a situation that never comes to pass.
Their latest video, the Paradox of an Infinite Universe, covers some heady ground; the concept of a physical edge, or boundary, to the universe. If we could somehow reach such a region, could we press our hand against it, as we can a garden wall? Hmm…
Sydney based Australian author Kerri Sackville, writing for The Sydney Morning Herald, on the subject of stalkerware, insidious apps that track the activities of a person you want to keep tabs on:
But I had nothing to gain from spying on him because I already knew what to do. In intimate partnerships, the desire to spy can only mean one of two things: that something is terribly wrong in your relationship, or that something is terribly wrong with you. If it’s the former, the solution is not to dig up answers; the solution is to get out of the relationship.
But trust, or lack thereof, isn’t necessarily why people use stalkerware apps. They sometimes also seek to control and coerce those they are monitoring. To them, it has little to do with trust. It’s more about rampant entitlement. They somehow feel as if they have every right to spy on someone, and as such are completely oblivious to the wrong they are doing.
Something is indeed terribly wrong with such people.
Four day weather forecasts are now as accurate as one day forecasts from thirty years ago. That’s good news. Access to accurate weather information is perhaps more vital than many of us can appreciate.
Weather forecasting has come a long way. In 650 B.C. the Babylonians would try to predict weather patterns based on cloud patterns and movements. Three centuries later, Aristotle wrote Meteorologica, discussing how phenomena such as rain, hail, hurricanes, and lightning formed. Much of it turned out to be wrong, but it represents one of the first attempts to explain how the weather works in detail.
But more of this data needs to be ported through to the weather apps on our smartphones. I don’t know if it’s me, but the number of times I’m caught outside somewhere, in what I call “off-app” rain — that is, where no rain whatsoever is predicted for hours, if not days — seems to be increasing.
