So Guillermo Del Toro is going to do a film version of H. P. Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness”. There’s been a steady stream of awful Lovecraft adaptations, but this will be the biggest version yet. I’ve long been a fan of HPL, and even own a Miskatonic University Antarctic Expedition hoodie, courtesy of [...]
Archive for October 2010
Lovecraft news
October 24, 2010Made in MA, Bought by CA (E.g. “Get Lamp”)
October 21, 2010One of the depressing things about the Massachusetts economy is how many startups here get bought up by firms from other states, particularly California. Lots of good ideas start here, but move elsewhere before they scale up to significant size, or disappear altogether. The most egregious recent example is Facebook, which began at Harvard but [...]
Russians Get It Done
October 14, 2010The Sep 2010 issue of IEEE Spectrum has a nice example of how determination beats technology. The article is “A Digital Soyuz” by James Oberg, and discusses how the Russians have upgraded their main manned spacecraft. They’ve replaced the main flight computer, the Argon-16, and five analog monitoring and telemetry systems with a single digital [...]
More Making, Less Financeering
October 10, 2010There’s a nice profile (abstract here) of the British inventor James Dyson in the Sep 20, ’10 issue of the New Yorker. His eponymous vacuum cleaner has made him vastly wealthy (~$1.5B) for a refreshing reason – it’s a better product. Or at least that’s what people say; I haven’t used one myself. I can [...]
Asimov Called It
October 2, 2010So I happened to be leafing through Fact and Fancy, a collection of Isaac Asimov’s science columns from 1958 to 1961, when I came across one called “No More Ice Ages?”. With his usual brio he elucidates an arcane subject – the flow of carbon dioxide in and out of the atmosphere. When I saw [...]
