Are we exited yet?

Comix
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DC has a Brand New Idea of how to attract more readers to their comics:

Starting next year, DC Comics will unveil SUPERMAN: EARTH ONE and BATMAN: EARTH ONE, two graphic novels spotlighting the most powerful heroes of the DC Universe, with their first years and earliest moments retold in a standalone, original graphic novel format, on a new earth with an all-new continuity.

If that’s not excitign enough, check out who will be the creative teams (if you can call yet another regurgitated origin story creative):

Return to Smallville and experience the journey of Earth’s greatest adopted son, as he grows from boy to Superman in SUPERMAN: EARTH ONE by J. Michael Straczynski and artist Shane Davis.

Watch from the darkest corners of Crime Alley as a young boy is struck by unbelievable tragedy that will forge the greatest crime-fighter to ever stalk the rooftops of Gotham City in BATMAN: EARTH ONE, by writer Geoff Johns and artist Gary Frank.

If there are any characters who don’t need their origins retold it’s those two and to make it worse the writers involved with it seem to have been chosen for their nerd appeal, rather than their ability to attract new comics readers. I’m sure it will be succesful, but for a “major publishing event” it’s rather lame and incredibly conservative.

For an example of how to succesfully retool a flagging series DC should look to what happened to the venerable Spirou, as old as Batman and Superman and immensily succesful for decades (one of the Big Three B.D. series, together with Tintin and Asterix), especially when Franquin was doing it. The series started dragging when he left, but was revived when the team of Tome & Janry took over in the mid-eighties. They did this without feeling the need to establish a new continuity, go back to the roots or revamp the origins, but just by creating good new stories in a slightly more modern style… So much could be done with both Superman and Batman if DC just let go of the idea that everything needs to be an event and live up to the “mythical” stature of the characters.

Your Happening World (8)

Activism, Your Happening World
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Twenty years ago, yesterday: École Polytechnique massacre: 14 women murdered for being women…

He may have magickally given me an ear infection over the intertubes (the day after he blogged over his ear aches my ears were blocked), but I’m still chuffed to see Michel Vuijlsteke get his share of the glory. His picture of the “bathroom fly” (Clogmia albipunctata) from august 2004 was the first documented sighting of this species in Belgium.

Unexamined priviledges on display at Crooked Timber: is it racist to make fun of Cornel West’s new autobiography or are those who see racism in this thread the real racists? Either way it came across as a bit bullying at first as everybody piled on to make fun of West. Not that his writing didn’t “deserve” it perhaps, but in the context of who West is and how he was designated an officially condoned target back in 2001 when Larry summers tried to kick him out of Harvard it looked like a group of school yard bullies picking on the weird kid whom the teacher had already humiliated in front of the class. It may be fun, but it’s too easy and it ignores targets which need mocking much more.

It may be a few years old, but LarryE’s post on not giving in to rightwing pressure to be “serious” and “respectable” should be required reading to all leftwing activists:

The Red Scare years are hard to grasp at this distance. The level of distrust, of paranoia, of fanaticism, certainly and clearly outstrips what we are living with today – which is not to say it could not become that bad, only that it hasn’t yet. But the one lesson that activists should have drawn from that nightmare is that acquiescence is not an answer. Adopting the terminology, the (dare I say it) frame of the enemy – I use the word deliberately – does not protect you against attack. Most of all, slicing away your friends and supporters will not help you. Spending time and energy going “oh, no, no, no, I’m not one of them” only narrows your base, reduces your potential support, and will not satisfy your attackers.

Casual gaming for the lolcat generation.

Vertical farming

Climate change
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With the increasing awareness of climate change not just as a real threat, but as a threat that can’t really be solved by lifestyle adjustments, all kinds of radical ideas have moved into the limelight. One of which is vertical farming. The idea is simple: take industrial scale farming out of the countryside and into the city into proper factories while making it sustainable through control of the environment. The advantages of vertical farm, according to CBC News:

  • Conventional farms waste water. Despommier says irrigation accounts for 70 per cent of worldwide water use, and much of that is wasted as runoff, but because it’s contaminated with silt, pesticides and fertilizers, it can’t be captured and reused. Vertical farms would grow crops hydroponically, in a water-and-nutrient solution, or perhaps aeroponically, using a mist of nutrient-laden water. The approach could grow the same crops with as little as 10 per cent of the water used in traditional agriculture, Despommier argues.
  • Vertical farms would make it easy to grow food without chemicals. There is growing concern about the environmental effects of pesticides and fertilizers used in traditional agriculture. Some see organic farming as the answer, others argue organic farming can’t deliver the yields necessary to feed the world. But vertical farming would virtually eliminate the need for pesticides because air coming in could be filtered to keep pests out, and whatever fertilizers were used could be kept within the system and out of lakes and rivers.
  • Growing fresh produce in cities would make it more accessible to poor city-dwellers. As a public-health professor, this one particularly interests Despommier. “It’s very difficult to find fresh produce in inner cities,” he said, so people who live there tend to eat less nutritious foods. “The data is overwhelming,” he added: If healthier food is available, people will eat it.
  • Growing food close to where it’s eaten would reduce transportation needs, which would cut greenhouse-gas emissions. Reduced use of fossil-fuelled farm machinery would also help cut emissions.
  • Vertical farms would improve air quality in cities by consuming carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen.

Some of these advantages are a bit dodgy; the problem with getting fresh produce into inner cities has little to do with how and where it is grown and more to do with supermarket policies. It’s the usual overselling of a project that mainly exists on the drawing board; everything positive that concievably could be attributed to the project has been included to make it more attractive. A pity, as vertical farming doesn’t need such obviously wrong arguments to sell itself.

That is, as long as the main disadvantage can be solved:

On his blog, Avent points out that steel-and-concrete buildings, without fancy finishing, cost $300 per square foot or more in large cities. That works out to about $13 million per acre, compared with $3,000 per acre for farmland in Indiana.

Tracing this statement back to the source I couldn’t see what this estimate is based on and whether or not this is a cost per square foot on ground level, or per floor. If the former, the higher you build the lesser the cost per farmer acre, if the latter it wouldn’t matter how high you build. Of course you need not have to build entirely new buildings, but could also adapt existing ones to vertical farming use; plenty of disused office blocks are waiting for a new destiny.

Another problem is light sources. Can a vertical farm actually gather enough light to produce crops on all its floors? Or will it need a lot of artificial lights? In which case of course much of the advantage it might have over “natural” farming might be lost again, not just because of increased cost, but also on environmental impact…

Personally I would love to see the idea of vertical farming as viable, but I’ve learned that personal or aesthetic preferences should not be a guide for these sort of things — we never got our L5 space colony either. So far vertical farming is still very much an experimental technology, with only a few trial setups in existence, including one in Paignton for some reason. More research is needed before it can become a reality.

Ramses Shaffy 1933-2009

Oh Those Crazy Cloggies, video
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His music and art was more of my parents’ generation than my own, but nobody inb the Netherlands could really escape his influence. Born in France in 1933, son of an Egyptian diplomat and a Polish-Russian countess, he moved to the Netherlands when young to live with a Dutch foster family. Studying drama and acting in the fifties, his work from the sixties onwards built a bridge between the older Dutch “kleinkunst” (small arts) and cabaret traditions and pop music. Though he also worked as a movie and theatre actor he was most famous for his singing. It’s astounding how many of his songs I’ve picked up by osmosis, from Sunday afternoon music played by my parents, my dad especially.

How to choose the song to best represent him? My favourite was and still is “Zing Vecht Huil Bid Lach Werk en Bewonder” (Sing, Fight, Cry, Pray, Laugh, Work and Admire), a very Dutch sort of mantra.



His work with Liesbeth List, another of the giants of Dutch music, should not go unmentioned either. This is “Pastorale” which shows them both at their best. It’s theatrical bombast sung with gusto and without embarassement.



“We Zullen Doorgaan”.



And this was always my father’s favourite:



Books read November

books and books review, posts interesting only to me
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Work and other duties keep eating into my reading time, so once again a month with only a few books read. It didn’t help that one of them was a Steven Erikson 1,000+ pager fantasy brick.

The Bonehunters — Steven Erikson
The sixth installment in the Malazan series, this is Epic Fantasy for advanced students, hideously complicated. In lesser hands this would’ve been an awful mess, but Erikson manages to keep all the plotlines tidy.

Buy Jupiter — Isaac Asimov
One of the first ever science fiction books I’ve read. Still a great collection, especially with all the autobiographical notes Asimove put in between the stories.

Will Eisner: A Spirited Life — Bob Andelman
Authorised by Eisner and his estate, this is a reasonable overview of his life, but light on analysis. Andelman tends to skip ahead and back within chapters with little rhyme or reason and rarely delves deep below the surface of Eisner’s life. Useful as a first look at Eisner, but a much better biography still needs to be written. Had Eisner been a straight novelist of the same qualities and importance, half a dozen would’ve already been published.

Earth Is Room Enough — Isaac Asimov
Another Asimov collection, unfortunately without autobiographical notes. As the title indicates, all stories are set on Earth.

The Hubble Wars — Eric J. Chaisson
Soon after the Hubble Space Telescope was launched in orbit in 1990, after a seven year delay, it became clear that all was not well with it. This book is a firsthand account of what happened in the months and years, what went wrong and why, written by one of the people involved. Interesting if only for the insight it gives in how a great science project can come off the rails.

Grunts — Mary Gentle
“And pass me another elf, Sergeant. This one’s split.” A black humoured, dark fantasy in which orcs, those footsoldiers of Evil, take control of their own destiny to become marines…

Spy Story — Len Deighton
A proper Cold War thriller, in which the main character is as befuddled as the reader for most of the book as to what’s going on and what his role is.