Wis[s]e Words

At the Edge of the Solar System — Doressoundiram & Lellouch

Published on April 12, 2012Leave a comment

Cover of At the Edge of the Solar System

At the Edge of the Solar System
Alain Doressoundiram & Emmanuel Lellouch
205 pages including index
published in 2008

In 2006 the International Astronomical Union demoted Pluto, long the ninth and last planet in our Solar System from being a planet into a socalled dwarf planet, a new category not just meant for Pluto, but also a half dozen other planets that had been recently discovered at the edge of the Solar System. With the number of planets rapidly rising and estimates raging from a 200 to 2,000 more to be discovered as well as the general feeling that Pluto, only one fifth the mass of the Moon just did not fit in with the rest of the classical planets, this new categorisation was needed, halfway between true planets and asteroids or comets, now classified as small Solar System bodies.

Surprisingly for such a dry subject, the reclassification of Pluto led to a huge amount of media coverage and some controversy; many people, including myself, saw the argument as somewhat specious or had a sentimental attachment to the idea of the classical nine planets. They now were confronted with the reality of the Solar System being massively more complex than they had suspected, with our knowledge of the very edges of it having expanded massively since even the late seventies. Which is where At the Edge of the Solar System: Icy New Worlds Unveiled comes in: an introductionary text book about these discoveries and how they were made.

Quick tip: get the fun pass

Published on April 11, 2012Leave a comment

So last Summer, nine year old Caine was stuck at his dad’s used car parts shop and bored, so he started making classic arcade games out of cardboard boxes. He got a little bit obsessed with it to tell you the truth, in that way nine year old kids can get obsessed over their hobbies. There was just one little problem: he only had one customer and would’ve liked to see more people play his games. But luckily that solitary customer was geek/film maker Nirvan Mullick and he set out to give Caine the best day of his life.

They can be wearisome sometimes, self congratulatory and up themselves, but sometimes they show that things can get better with geeks. This was a brilliantly sweet thing to do for one lucky nine year old.

Darwyn Cooke should shut his big gob

Published on April 10, 20121 Comment

Via a long chain links, I ended up at Abahy Khosla’ short post about Darwyn Cooke’s Rolling Stone interview:

I guess the first thing I would say is, I understand how you feel. I have certainly felt that way about things. I would say I understand that kind of an emotional response to something that meaningful. I think it’s all fair game. I’ve read some pretty nasty things said about myself, for example. I can deal with that. There are times when I wish some of these guys – because I think some of them know better – I wish they would take a moment and stop and think. And instead of referring to a man like [veteran artist] Joe Kubert as a scab or a disgrace, you might want to stop for a minute and think with this diverse group of talent involved with the project, maybe there is more to the story than they know. Maybe there are reasons people are willing to work on this. Maybe its not as clear cut as a lot of people think. I’m speaking about this from a distance. I was never in the room, while anything went on, but maybe there’s just more to the story than people think.

To be fair, the difference between working on Before Watchmen, where the originally creators were –legally!– screwed out of their rights and the primary creator has strongly stated his disdain for these prequels and working on your average DC or Marvel company owned titles, where said screwing was done decades ago and most of the original creators are safely dead or bought off, is one of degree not kind. And you certainly cannot fault somebody like Joe Kubert for doing any of those Watchmen prequels. He has worked all his life with the constrains of American commercial comics publishing; this is just another assignment for him.

But that doesn’t mean Darwyn Cooke should get away with his passive aggressive complaining here. He is more than just a hired hand on this project, he has been an active propagandist for DC and its actions, happy to be a cog in its machine (as John Byrne once was at Marvel). He’s somebody who has the kind of talent, opportunities and reputation to do anything he wants to do in comics, but choses to be a company man, working on endless revamps (Catwoman), adaptations (Parker and re-imaginations (New Frontier, doing the same thing as Roy Thomas’ The Last Days of the Justice Society and James Robinson’s Golden Age, but in a slicker art style).

He isn’t the first cartoonist to be happier working on other people’s creations of course, but he does combine this lack of creativity with an aggressive public persona as company spokesman, attacking Alan Moore for being annoyed about the Watchmen prequels, lending himself and his prestige to these attacks, revealing himself to be, well, kind of a douche.

Darwyn Cooke is a slick but limited imitator of better artists, somebody who will at best be a footnote in comics history in fifty years time, while Alan Moore is one of the greatest writers working in comics of the past fifty years and certainly one of the most principled ones. His attacks on Moore are as a fly buzzing a giant: harmless, but that doesn’t mean you don’t want to swat the fly anyway.

More proof that climate change is real — as if any was needed

Published on April 9, 2012Leave a comment

Found via Alex, here are two Dutch climate researchers at Realclimate, who found a 1981 climate prediction by denialist bogeyman James Hansen:

To conclude, a projection from 1981 for rising temperatures in a major science journal, at a time that the temperature rise was not yet obvious in the observations, has been found to agree well with the observations since then, underestimating the observed trend by about 30%, and easily beating naive predictions of no-change or a linear continuation of trends. It is also a nice example of a statement based on theory that could be falsified and up to now has withstood the test. The “global warming hypothesis” has been developed according to the principles of sound science.

Which is another indication that even more than thirty years ago the implications for climate change were known or at least suspected. That we’re still talking about the climate change “controversy” is purely due to political machinations by economic interests who have a financial interest in denying climate change. Thirty years onwards the evidence is now undeniable, yet the same well funded “skeptics” are still obstructing progress towards mediating climate change. Unlike with the destruction of the ozone layer, where we did manage –barely– to start reversing the damage just in time (and it will still take decades to completely restore the ozone layer) climate change is too far to be stopped or reversed easily and the best we can do now is just migitate the consequences.

Most of the blame for that has to lie with the skeptics: there was a worldwide consensus at the end of the eighties that climate change was real and needed to be combatted. Yet effective measures have remained rare, due to the lobbying efforts of the industries that would be most affected by such measures. They took the lobying infrastructure set up earlier to help out the tobacco industry and used it to discredit climate change as a concept. The end result is thirty years of wasted time as we had to wait until climate change was undeniably real, even for (some) Republicans. Climate change was in any case unavoidable, as it was already ongoing when we first started to suspect it, but we could’ve used those three decades to make the end point less bad.

Five months

Published on April 8, 20121 Comment

At Easter last year Sandra was home, things were looking up, the weather was nice and we had my parents over, having lunch in the garden. This year not so much. Yesterday was exactly five months since Sandra died: in one way it feels much longer, in another only yesterday that she died. I’ve only begun to miss her more as the months go by, dream of her a lot too. That’s the worst, because even in a dream I know she’s dead, but within the dream she’s still there.

It’s not all doom and gloom of course, but Sandra is always in the back of my mind and doesn’t show any signs of moving out…