The trailer for Where The Wild Things Are is up on the Apple site. I’m not 100% sure what to make of it, I’ve been uncertain about a live action adaptation from the start and, depending how it’s done, expanding the story to make it feature length could go wrong.
The Wild Things have a certain Henson-like quality to them which I think I’ll like, and Wild Things voiced by Tony Soprano and Ghost Dog can only be a good thing.
From a New Scientist article about déjà vu:
Mr P, an 80-year-old Polish émigré and former engineer, knew he had memory problems, but it was his wife who described it as a permanent sense of déjà vu. He refused to watch TV or read a newspaper, as he claimed to have seen everything before. When he went out walking he said the same birds sang in the same trees and the same cars drove past at the same time every day. His doctor said he should see a memory specialist, but Mr P refused. He was convinced that he had already been.
Whilst it doesn’t provide a definitive answer to what déjà vu is and why/how it happens it does have some interesting ideas, as well as quite an amusing coda:
One anecdotal finding that came to light while working on this article is that people who think a lot about déjà vu are more prone to it. I had déjà vu about reading about déjà vu, and researchers have had déjà vu about having déjà vu…Just reading this article could give you déjà vu.
I’ve just got the book and am about a third of the way through, getting quite excited about the film:
The animation looks great and from what I’ve read (both book and reviews) it’s shaping up to be quite a scary treat.
I remember a few weeks ago the ‘How many of these books have you read?’ note was doing the rounds on Facebook (with lots of, “OMG, you have to read such-and-such…”). I think the best response to the study that appears to have kickstarted this particular round has to be Charlie Brooker’s:
Apparently people lie about having read all these books because they think it’ll make them appear sexier. Which begs the question: who the hell earnestly believes that claiming to have read the Bible from beginning to end is going to get them laid?
The full article is well worth a read.
Also tomorrow night Charlie’s new series Newswipe starts on BBC Four.
New Scientist has an article about a recent NASA-funded report into plasma ejections from the Sun that could potentially wipe out our power grids with fairly chilling consequences:
The incursion of the plasma into our atmosphere causes rapid changes in the configuration of Earth’s magnetic field which, in turn, induce currents in the long wires of the power grids. The grids were not built to handle this sort of direct current electricity. The greatest danger is at the step-up and step-down transformers used to convert power from its transport voltage to domestically useful voltage. The increased DC current creates strong magnetic fields that saturate a transformer’s magnetic core. The result is runaway current in the transformer’s copper wiring, which rapidly heats up and melts.
Given that pretty much everything we do relies on electricity (water, food and heat are fairly important not to mention the world’s financial markets, healthcare, communications, the Internet) the simultaneous destruction of transformers would leave us severaly impaired.
According to the NAS [National Academy of Sciences] report, the impact of what it terms a “severe geomagnetic storm scenario” could be as high as $2 trillion [for the US alone]. And that’s just the first year after the storm. The NAS puts the recovery time at four to 10 years.