Time travel can't stop your kids growing up, in Mr. Peabody and Sherman onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Time travel can't stop your kids growing up, in Mr. Peabody and Sherman

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We haven't had a good time travel movie in ages. I guess Looper was the last one. But Mr. Peabody and Sherman, out today, is a lovely time travel film, that has fun with the conventions of the genre. And it tells a unique story about how mastery over past and present doesn't save you from the heartbreak of your kid growing up.

Some minor spoilers ahead...

Mr. Peabody and Sherman updates and expands a series of cartoon shorts from 50 years ago, that appeared as part of the Rocky and Bullwinkle show. The basic setup is pretty simple: Mr. Peabody is a supergenius talking dog, who's invented a time machine, and he takes a young boy named Sherman on adventures throughout history.

For the movie version, these thumbnail-sketch characters are fleshed out, and their relationship is clarified. Turns out Mr. Peabody was a super-mutant dog who didn't belong with the other dogs, and his accomplishments were nearly limitless until he discovered a human baby and decided to take on the ultimate challenge: fatherhood. Now, the dog is raising a human child, and facing all the normal challenges of taking care of a kid, plus a few extra ones.

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When Sherman goes off to school for the first time, there are two conflicts set in motion simultaneously: Mr. Peabody has a hard time dealing with the fact that his adoptive son is growing up and becoming an independent person. And Sherman gets teased about the fact that his father is a dog, and winds up biting Penny, the school's main "mean girl" — which leads, in turn, to Child Protective Services being called to assess whether Mr. Peabody is really a fit parent to a human child.

To its credit, the movie juggles these two conflicts, which are very different in nature and tend to go in almost opposite directions, without ever losing its balance. In fact, the movie plays the two conflicts (letting go versus proving your worth as a parent) off against each other, in a way that's sometimes quite clever and also emotionally enriching. A lot of animated films barely manage to sustain one conflict for 90 minutes, but Peabody successfully keeps two boiling over. Not only that, but it works these two opposing conflicts into an entertaining, coherent time-travel story. Which is no mean feat.

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And the movie's handling of the time-travel stuff is deft and fun and clearly owes a lot to films like Back to the Future and the Bill and Ted duology. Meddling in history turns out about as well as it usually does, and there are the requisite number of time paradoxes and temporal pratfalls. Fixing the space-time continuum dovetails pretty neatly with fixing both Mr. Peabody's relationship with his son and his tricky status in the eyes of the law.

It all leads up to an emotionally powerful scene that is pretty much guaranteed to make you cry your eyes out, which respects the complexity of the themes this film has been tackling, and packs a clever solution to the film's central time-travel dilemma.

A lot of time travel films are about loss, or the potential for loss — Safety Not Guaranteed does a lot of great stuff with this — but relatively few time-travel stories deal with the inevitable loss that a parent experiences watching a child grow up, along with the fear of losing a child. Mr. Peabody takes a very light-hearted approach to exploring history and dealing with time paradoxes, while giving the full weight to the terrible things that time does to the parent-child relationship.

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Now for the bad news: The humor in this movie mostly falls flat. Not horribly flat, just kind of flat. Most of the jokes are duds. There's an excessive corniness to the puns and verbal jokes — although a lot of the slapstick comedy with our heroes running around the past is highly entertaining, and plays off the bracing visuals in a fun way. Still, most of the jokes and gags in the film are bland and fail to achieve their meager ambitions. It's not as bad as the endless recycled mother-in-law jokes in The Croods, but there may be a certain amount of eye-rolling at the humor in Peabody.

It's weird that a film that's so smart, in so many ways, settles for such dumb, under-achieving humor. Every now and then, a clever gag does sneak through — like a running joke about Leonardo da Vinci's creepy baby automaton, for example. And the meta-joke (which is in all the trailers) where Mr. Peabody brings a mini-Trojan Horse inside the Trojan Horse is pretty brilliant. Plus several moments are cute, even if they're not actually funny. Plus Stephen Colbert and Mel Brooks, among others, lend a welcome zing to the voice cast and it's fun to play "spot that comedian" among the minor characters. And the film seems like it's going to veer into fat-shaming humor at one point, only to zig-zag into something a darn sight better.

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All in all, Mr. Peabody and Sherman is a film you can take your kids to, without being bored or annoyed — it's no Lego Movie, but I'd say it's competitive with Frozen in terms of general watchability. Parents will resonate with the well-thought-out, emotionally honest treatment of the bond between a parent and a child, and all the insecurities that come with it. And time-travel nerds will be amused by the temporal shenanigans.

It all adds up to a film that shows how time travel can be used as a metaphor for nearly universal experiences. In the end, in Peabody and Sherman, the tangled relationship in which a child outgrows a parent, who's striving desperately not to fail at parenting, is the greatest paradox of them all.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Time travel can't stop your kids growing up, in Mr. Peabody and Sherman

Scientists Create Genetically Modified Cells That Protect Against HIV onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Scientists Create Genetically Modified Cells That Protect Against HIV

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The treatment is considered radical, and the results were drawn from a small scale human trial, but for the first time in medical history, researchers have boosted their patients' ability to fight HIV by replacing some of their natural immune cells with genetically modified versions.

This news comes just one day after doctors announced that a second child may have been cured of HIV. This awful disease, which has killed at least 35 million people around the world, is under a full-scale assault by medical researchers. Now, in this separate study, scientists have demonstrated that GM cells can also be used to tackle the problem.

Gene editing is a form of genetic engineering where specific clips of DNA are inserted, replaced, or removed from a genome using artificially engineered zinc finger nucleases, also known as "molecular scissors." It's a process that can introduce "good" genetic mutations.

In this case, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania took advantage of a rather fortuitous and rare mutation that protects certain people from HIV. The resulting study, which now appears in the New England Journal of Medicine, is the first paper to report the modification of an exact segment of human DNA. To this point, researchers have used disabled viruses to carry and dump genes somewhat haphazardly into DNA.

CCR5-delta 32

The rare mutation happens in about 1% of the population and it makes them resistant to the most common strains of HIV (it's rare because both parents have to pass down the mutation for it to work). When this virus attacks a cell, it latches on to proteins that extend from the surface of the cells. But people with this mutation are deficient in a certain kind of protein — called CCR5-delta 32 — such that HIV cannot get inside their immune cells.

For the clinical trial (which began in 2009), researchers took 10 men and two women aged 31 to 54 who were all HIV positive and had been diagnosed between three and 23 years ago. As the researchers themselves admit, this is an exceptionally small sample, but it's a start. And the results were undeniably encouraging.

Immunity Transfusion

The first step in the process was to collect the patients' white blood cells, or T-cells. Then, using the gene editing technique, the researchers injected the rare mutation into the immune cells. These GM cells were then replicated into large batches of 10 billion and transplanted back into each patient (only around 20% were successfully modified — it's still a rather hit-and-miss process).

Prior to the procedure, all 10 patients were taking antiretroviral drugs to suppress HIV. But after being infused by the juiced-up cells, six patients were taken off their therapy in the weeks and months following (the other patients had suboptimal T cell counts despite standard drugs, so their treatment was not interrupted). Accordingly, the amount of HIV in their bodies began to rise — but as the new cells began to multiply and propagate, the HIV began to be suppressed.

Remarkably, one of the patients exhibited such an improvement that that HIV levels could no longer be detected; the scientists later realized that he had inherited the mutation from one parent, but not the other, effectively giving his immune system a head start.

In all, four showed improvement, while two had to be put back on their antiretrovirals (while statistically insignificant, that's a 66% success rate if you count the six, or 33% if you consider the original 12). The modified T-cells appeared to protect the patients, and could still be found in the blood several months later.

Interestingly, some of the modified cells were found to concentrate in the patients' guts — which is where HIV tends to build its stockpile. Drugs can only reduce the ability of HIV to reproduce, but it can't wipe out this reservoir.

Safe and Feasible

"This is a first — gene editing has not to date been used in a human trial [for HIV]," Bruce Levine told the BBC. "We've been able to use this technology in HIV and show it is safe and feasible, so it is an evolution in the treatment of HIV from daily antiretroviral therapy." Levine is the director of the Clinical Cell and Vaccine Production Facility at the University of Pennsylvania.

As noted, the study was done on a small scale, and the results were limited. But because of its limited success, and because it was proven safe, the study raises the hope that the gene therapy may someday replace (or at the very least supplement) the need to take daily medication. It's important to note, however, that this procedure should not be considered a cure.

So, it's now officially the dawn of the gene editing era (though it'll be a while before we see this technique used clinically). Eventually, techniques like this one could be used to treat other diseases — and without the use of drugs and their associated costs and side-effects.

Read the entire study at The New England Journal of Medicine: "Gene Editing of CCR5 in Autologous CD4 T Cells of Persons Infected with HIV." Supplementary souces: The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Guardian, BBC.

Image: Shutterstock.

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onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Scientists Create Genetically Modified Cells That Protect Against HIV

We would love a cartoon featuring these theatrical Batman redesigns onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com We would love a cartoon featuring these theatrical Batman redesigns

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Perry Maple has redesigned the denizens of Gotham in playful ways that evoke retro cartoons and classic theater posters. We would love to see an animated version of these character designs—perhaps in a silent DC Nation-style short?

Batman Simple [Perry Maple on deviantART via The Argyle Gargoyle]

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com We would love a cartoon featuring these theatrical Batman redesigns

This Week's TV: Clone Wars' final season! Plus, who is the Yellow King? onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com This Week's TV: Clone Wars' final season! Plus, who is the Yellow King?

This is a week of hellos and farewells, with the premiere of the non-zombie back-to-life series Resurrection, the return of both Once Upon a Time shows, and the season finales of Almost Human and True Detective. Plus, the final 13 episodes of Clone Wars hit Netflix, revealing the secrets of Order 66. Catch the latest clips and details below.

Tonight

Almost Human (8 PM, Fox)

Tonight gives us Almost Human's first season finale (possibly its series finale if it isn't renewed), and sadly, it doesn't sound like we'll be revisiting John Larroquette's character or what he's up to on the other side of the Wall. Instead, we're learning a bit about the Kennex clan:

Det. Kennex (Karl Urban) and Dorian (Michael Ealy) investigate a string of murders by a copycat of a serial killer whom Kennex's father (guest star John Diehl) put in jail. As the investigation unfolds, biotechnology from the future sheds light on crimes of the past. Meanwhile, Dorian receives his performance evaluation since being reactivated.

Star-Crossed (8 PM, The CW)

Human kids spending the day in the Atrian sector? Nothing could possibly go wrong:

It's the tenth anniversary of "Arrival Day" and the town is preparing a commemoration for the fallen soldiers. Gloria (guest star Victoria Platt) selects a small group of human teenagers who will spend some time inside the sector to see what it's like to be an Atrian for a day. In addition, Gloria assigns Emery (Aimee Teegarden) the task of filming the interactions. While Grayson (Grey Damon) offers to help her with the project, Roman (Matt Lanter) strongly objects to Emery going inside the sector. Despite Roman's concern for her safety, Emery decides to move forward with the project. While Sophia (Brina Palencia) is excited to show everyone around her pod, Teri (Chelsea Gilligan) and Drake (Greg Finley) resent the intrusion and decide to have a little fun at the humans' expense. However, when Drake is kidnapped during the tour, he's surprised by who is behind the abduction. Meanwhile, Julia (Malese Jow) confronts Roman with her suspicions about cyper.

Bitten (8 PM, Syfy)

Elena and Clay need to race against time to save a dying Jeremy.

Beauty and the Beast (9 PM, The CW)

We're in love triangle mode on Beauty and the Beast, which doesn't bode well for Cat and Gabe's relationship:

Feeling pulled between her current boyfriend and her ex, Cat (Kristin Kreuk) has to decide between Gabe (Sendhil Ramamurthy) and Vincent (Jay Ryan). While Cat and Vincent work together to save Sam's (guest star Tom Everett Scott) latest victim, Cat's decision gets complicated when she and Vincent find themselves in a compromising situation.

Being Human (9 PM, Syfy)

Sally finds herself trapped in the past and tries to prevent her own death, but her actions cause a ripple through the present-day lives of her roommates.

Archer (10 PM, FX)

Danger Zone! Kenny Loggins is finally going to guest star on Archer, where he'll be forced to sing a duet with Cheryl/Carol/Charlene at Lana's baby shower.

Intelligence (10 PM, CBS)

One of the problems with having a computer chip in your brain is that you're vulnerable to computer viruses—and apparently even the fleshy parts of your brain are at risk:

When Gabriel's memory is wiped clean after CyberCom is attacked by an aggressive virus, he believes Jin Cong is the good guy and helps him locate a top-secret document.

Lost Girl (10 PM, Syfy)

This week's episode is titled "Groundhog Fae," which means Bo is going to get stuck in a time loop. Meanwhile, a package causes tension between Dyson and Lauren.

Teen Wolf (10 PM, MTV)

Is there a way for Scott to save Stiles? There may be a clue in the story of a World War II internment camp. Meanwhile, Kira discovers that she has unusual abilities.

Tuesday

Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (8 PM, ABC)

Bill Paxton joins S.H.I.E.L.D. for the run of episodes branded "Uprising." We've already uncovered some of the mysteries behind Coulson's resurrection, but what more will we learn in "T.A.H.I.T.I."?

Coulson goes on the attack to save Skye - enlisting the aid of Ward's former S.O. John Garrett (Bill Paxton) — and uncovers shocking truths about his own life and S.H.I.E.L.D.

The Originals (8 PM, The CW)

What will The Originals teach us about life this week? That magical curses will drive people to do desperate things. Go figure.

In a series of flashbacks to 1919, Klaus (Joseph Morgan) opens up to Cami (Leah Pipes) and reveals details of the devastating secret Rebekah (Claire Holt) and Marcel (Charles Michael Davis) were trying to keep from him. Elijah (Daniel Gillies) forms an unlikely alliance with Monique (guest star Yasmine Al Bustami) and asks for her help in locating Sabine (guest star Shannon Kane.) Elsewhere, Thierry (guest star Callard Harris) is reluctant to get involved when Marcel and Rebekah approach him with a plan to take down the witches. Meanwhile, in the bayou, Hayley (Phoebe Tonkin) is at her wits' end and holds Sabine hostage in an attempt to get information that will reverse the curse on Phoebe's werewolf clan.

Supernatural (9 PM, The CW)

It sounds like this week, Supernatural is borrowing from the Internet's creepypasta urban legend, the Slenderman. The good news: the Ghostfacers are back! The bad news: someone felt compelled to add a hashtag to the episode's title, "#Thinman."

A teenage girl (guest star Ali Webb) is killed and the final selfie she took before the attack shows a ghostly figure in the background. Looking for something to keep them busy, Dean (Jensen Ackles) and Sam (Jared Padalecki) head to Washington to find the ghost. While the two interview the girl's mother, Betty (guest star Maria Marlow), they are surprised when she starts talking about cold spots and fritzing. When they ask her about bringing up paranormal signs, Betty replies that the "supernaturalists" who called earlier brought it up. Enter Harry (guest star Ryan Moss) and Ed (guest star A.J. Buckley), the famous supernaturalists.

Person of Interest (10 PM, CBS)

What was Finch's operation like before he teamed up with Reese? We learn this week when present-day events have ties to Finch's past.

Wednesday

Arrow (8 PM, The CW)

Now that Oliver and Slade have come face-to-face again, big things are afoot. We'll witness the first time Oliver put on the green hood and the first time Slade Wilson put on the Deathstroke mask:

Oliver (Stephen Amell) is shocked when he learns that Slade (Manu Bennett) has come to Starling City. Back on the island, as Oliver, Slade and Sara (Caity Lotz) prepare to take over the freighter from Ivo (guest star Dylan Neal), Sara pulls Oliver aside and tells him he needs to kill Ivo to prevent him from telling Slade what happened with Shado. Oliver feels immense guilt over the situation but realizes Slade's growing rage from the Mirakuru makes him unpredictable and he could turn on his friends if he thinks Oliver is to blame. Oliver agrees to kill Ivo and the battle begins.

Revolution (8 PM, NBC)

It sounds like Aaron gets a fantasy episode this week, imagining what his life would have been like if the power hadn't gone off:

Aaron (Zak Orth) awakes to find himself in a world with power, married to Priscilla (Maureen Sebastian) and running his company. As he gets the feeling that something isn't quite right, familiar faces begin to appear.

Thursday

Community (8 PM, NBC)

Professor Hickey may have the right idea when it comes to Greendale's hijinks: go survivalist to avoid the lunacy.

Dean Pelton (Jim Rash) invites two designers to Greendale to beta test their new social networking Application. What starts as a fun social interaction of ranking classmates turns into an all-out class war as Greendale students compete for the highest score. Jeff (Joel McHale) and Shirley (Yvette Nicole Brown) battle for supremacy, while Britta (Gillian Jacobs) rails against the very concept. Meanwhile, Professor Hickey (Jonathan Banks) goes underground - literally - until the whole thing blows over.

Once Upon a Time in Wonderland (8 PM, ABC)

We're headed back down the Rabbit Hole for more Lewis Carroll-inspired fantasy:

The Knave is released from the bottle by Lizard and she is given the opportunity to make her dreams come true with three wishes. Cyrus, and a reluctant Alice, partner with the Red Queen to find and rescue the Knave, while the Red Queen is captured by peasants who want payback for her cruel reign. Meanwhile, Jafar has taken over the Red Queen's castle and learns of a fearful creature called the Jabberwocky who he plans to ally himself with.

The Vampire Diaries (8 PM, The CW)

Required reading before watching this week's episode: Meghan McCarron's interview with Kelly Link about why The Vampire Diaries is so successful in the way it plays with tropes.

While Nadia (guest star Olga Fonda) remembers her centuries-long search for her mother, Stefan (Paul Wesley), Caroline (Candice Accola) and Matt (Zach Roerig) come up with a desperate new plan to save Elena's (Nina Dobrev) life. For the second time, Bonnie (Kat Graham) and Jeremy (Steven R. McQueen) must turn to Liv (guest star Penelope Mitchell) for help. Damon baits Tyler (Michael Trevino) into a nasty confrontation, then takes off to seek revenge on Dr. Wes (guest star Rick Cosnett). Caroline and Tyler come to a new understanding. Finally, Bonnie learns of a terrifying secret that will threaten the lives of all her friends.

Vikings (10 PM, History Channel)

Viking alliances may be good for vikings, but they're bad for the English.

Four peaceful years have since passed with Ragnar as Earl. The time has come for an unlikely alliance to band together in pursuit of a common goal–a new raid on England. A storm pushes the Viking fleet to a new destination, and on the beaches of Wessex, Ragnar and his men may have met their match.

Friday

Star Wars: The Clone Wars: The Lost Missions (Netflix)

The full 13-episode sixth (and final) season of Clone Wars comes to Netflix on Friday, and it answers some of the questions raised by the films. We start off with a Clone Trooper neurological misfire that threatens to reveal Order 66 ahead of schedule, and we'll end with Yoda, whose encounter with a ghostly Qui-Gon Jinn sends him on a quest to understand the nature life after death. This final season is sadly lacking in Ahsoka and Asajj, however.

Grimm (9 PM, NBC)

Is there a baby-stealing Wesen on the loose?

A horrible new predator creeps into Portland with its sight set on a young expectant couple who are close friends of Sgt. Wu (Reggie Lee). Nick (David Giuntoli) and Hank (Russell Hornsby) must figure out how to deal with Wu as the investigation escalates. Meanwhile, Adalind (Claire Coffee) prepares for a special delivery while her enemies are hot on her trail.

Helix (10 PM, Syfy)

Alan and Julia head to a nearby outpost as Jordan's condition deteriorates. But there are in for a surprise when they get there.

Saturday

Space Dandy (11:30 PM, Adult Swim)

This week's episode is "There's Always Tomorrow, Baby." Otherwise, it's a good night to binge-watch Clone Wars.

Sunday

Once Upon a Time (8 PM, ABC)

The midseason return of OUAT shows us the aftermath of the broken curse:

After Rumplestiltskin sacrificed his life to stop Pan from enacting another curse, Regina obliterated her original curse, which erased Storybrooke from existence and whisked its residents back to Fairy Tale Land - leaving Emma and Henry back in our world with no memories of Storybrooke. But all is not well back in the Enchanted Forest when Hook comes calling on Emma in New York City in an attempt to jog her memory so that she can once again help her fairy tale family and friends out of a desperate situation.

Resurrection (9 PM, ABC)

ABC's new TV series has a similar premise to that of the French drama Les Revenants (although the former is based on a book by Jason Mott), in which long-dead people mysteriously reappear, as young and as healthy as they were when they died:

In "The Returned," an 8-year-old American boy (Landon Gimenez) wakes up alone in a rice paddy in a rural Chinese province with no idea how he got there. Details start to emerge when the boy, who calls himself Jacob, recalls that his hometown is Arcadia, and an Immigration agent, J. Martin Bellamy (Omar Epps), takes him there. The home he claims as his own is occupied by a 60-year-old couple, Henry (Kurtwood Smith) and Lucille Langston (Frances Fisher), who lost their son, Jacob, more than 30 years ago.

While they look different, young Jacob recognizes them as his parents. Lucille is overjoyed at the seeming miracle of her son's reappearance. Henry is reluctant to accept that Jacob is back. Those closest to the family want answers, including Sheriff Fred Langston (Matt Craven), whose wife Barbara drowned 30 years ago while trying to save Jacob, and Fred's daughter, Maggie (Devin Kelley), a local doctor. Pastor Tom Hale (Mark Hildreth) seeks a spiritual reason for what's happening in his community. When things take an even more shocking turn, Maggie's life-long friend, Elaine Richards (Samaire Armstrong), finds herself drawn into Arcadia's growing mystery.

The Walking Dead (9 PM, AMC)

One group of survivors finds shelter, while it looks like another group is left in the fog.

True Detective (9 PM, HBO)

In the present, 17 years after first investigating the Dora Lange murder, Hart and Cohle find that an overlooked detail provides them with a new break in the case. Who will be revealed as the Yellow King?

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com This Week's TV: Clone Wars' final season! Plus, who is the Yellow King?

Odd Thomas is the type of feel-good horror movie they made in the 80s onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Odd Thomas is the type of feel-good horror movie they made in the 80s S

Odd Thomas is an adaptation of a successful novel by Dean Koontz. But the actual movie has a breezy, quippy tone and a small-scale storyline that remind me of nothing so much as a low-budget 80s adventure film. It's not a great movie, or even a particularly good movie, but it's fun and cute and doesn't outstay its welcome.

Most of all, it has just enough of the secret sauce that made movies fun in the 80s to let you forgive some extreme clunkiness and way-too-precious storytelling. Odd Thomas is in select theaters today, and it's been out on VOD/iTunes for a while.

Spoilers ahead...

Odd Thomas is actually written and directed by Stephen Sommers, better known as the guy who brought you the Mummy movies, Van Helsing and the first G.I. Joe. With this film, he's clearly trying to do something different than a giant special effects blow-out with larger-than-life action. He's working with a much smaller budget, but also he's trying primarily to make you fall in love with the character of Odd Thomas, with everything else in the film being secondary to that.

So why would you fall in love with Odd Thomas? Well, there's good news and bad news.

The good news is, Anton Yelchin, who plays Odd, is perfect — he's got just the right blend of "harrowed underdog," "scared puppy" and "lovable weirdo" to carry this character. Odd Thomas is basically a fry cook who sees (but doesn't hear) ghosts, and also gets prophetic dreams and sees extradimensional harbingers of bloodshed. He's an all-purpose psychic who helps people.

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The bad news is, this movie often seems to be trying way too hard to make you love Odd Thomas, to the point where you get tired of being reminded how wonderful and quirky he is. In particular, his relationship with his ridiculously perky girlfriend Stormy probably played better on paper, but on screen it's ludicrously cutesy. Stormy has adorable nicknames for Odd, like "Odd One," or "Oddy," and the kind of adorable banter that is great in small doses but not so great in the kind of massive doses this movie wants to force-feed you. If you start a drinking game where you swig every time this movie tries to impress with you what a cute couple Odd and Stormy are, you'll be drunk half an hour in. Which, honestly, is probably the best way to watch this film.

People in this film are either cute and quirky or creepy and evil — and that's sort of the tone this film reaches for in general.

The actual plot of Odd Thomas is pretty simple — Odd can see the aforementioned interdimensional harbingers of bloodshed, called Bodaks. And after an introductory sequence where Odd helps the ghost of a murdered girl find justice, he starts seeing a lot of Bodaks, all around the small town where he lives. The Bodaks are gathering because some kind of terrible mass slaughter is going to happen, and Odd has to stop it.

As part of this movie's "trying too hard to win you over" ethos, it packs in a lot of voice-over, and explains the mythos in extreme detail. Long after you think the "introductory voiceover" part of the film is over, the voiceover comes back and explains stuff again. (One wonders if this was something that resulted from a test screening where a few people in the back row got lost halfway through.) There's probably an equation that explains the steep curve, where a few minutes of voiceover can make your film smarter, but after that every additional minute of voiceover makes it seem dumber and dumber. Certainly, after a while, a voiceover stops conveying information and starts conveying "We don't trust you to understand anything."

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So before I get carried away complaining about this movie, let's get back to how it's kind of fun and entertaining. It's a small-town adventure in which the stakes are kept purposely low, and (until the somewhat dark ending) it's a feel-good movie about horrific creatures and terrible crimes — which is what reminds me of a low-budget 80s movie. Odd Thomas is a fun underdog, and he seems agreeably out of his depth most of the time as he tries to figure out what's going on in time to stop a major atrocity.

Also — spoiler alert — Odd Thomas is the rare example of a story where the hero is pretty much the only parnormal element. The people Odd Thomas is coping with are not at all supernatural, and neither are the problems he solves. It's interesting to see someone using mystical powers to cope with entirely non-mystical threats and problems — sort of like Asterix, in a way.

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If anything, Odd Thomas is more of an unconventional detective story than a fantasy story — and a lot of the kinks in the story come from Odd's tricky but mostly cozy relationship with the police chief, played by Willem Dafoe. Because the Chief is one of the good guys in this story, he's kind of quirky and zany, but Dafoe keeps him somewhat grounded, and some of the most interesting bits in the story involve the cops finding sneaky ways to justify the evidence that Odd uncovers with his psychic powers.

The stuff I liked about Odd Thomas — its underdog hero, its low stakes, its feelgood horror — reminded me somewhat of the Fright Night remake that came out in 2011 and also starred Anton Yelchin. That said, if you haven't seen the Fright Night remake yet, you should definitely watch that instead of Odd Thomas, since it's a vastly more watchable film.

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Odd Thomas remains sort of alternately breezy and creepy, right up until a dark ending that's affecting even though it's telegraphed from a long way off. The main thing I came away from this movie feeling was that Anton Yelchin really deserves to star in a hit movie franchise (aside from Star Trek, I mean) because he's so good at playing these sorts of characters. Oh, and Jon M. Chu ought to be required by law to make a sequel to every Stephen Sommers movie — if the director of G.I. Joe: Retaliation and Legion of Extraordinary Dancers made a followup to this Odd Thomas film, I bet he'd drill a lot deeper into the hero's vast amounts of joyful anguish, that are barely touched on in a film that tries a bit too hard to be charming.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Odd Thomas is the type of feel-good horror movie they made in the 80s

Massive offshore turbine arrays would help us harness hurricanes onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Massive offshore turbine arrays would help us harness hurricanes

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What would happen if a hurricane were to plough through a wind farm consisting of tens of thousands of individual turbines? A Stanford engineer recently ran a computer simulation to find out — and the results were astonishing.

Given the often devastating impacts of climate change, the need for effective weather control systems has never been more urgent. It may be a while — if ever — before we partake in geoengineering projects that mitigate the effects of rising carbon dioxide levels, so it may be incumbent upon us to develop such schemes. We've already engaged in cloud-seeding to facilitate rain and snow (a technique that would really help drought-stricken regions like California). And looking ahead the future, we could eventually build a weather machine to create a programmable atmosphere.

But as a recent study by Stanford engineer Mark Z. Jacobson shows, we may already have the means to mitigate one of the most powerful forces of nature known to humanity.

How to Tame a Hurricane

With the help of Cristina Archer and Willett Kempton of the University of Delaware, Jacobson set about the task of figuring out what would happen to wind farms when faced by the onslaught of a hurricane. The team was curious to know if the turbines would get wrecked, or if they might be capable of literally sucking the energy out of the storm.

To find out, they developed a computer model that simulated the effects of several hurricanes as they encountered massive arrays of offshore wind farms. And by massive, we're talking about wind farms that stretch for many miles along susceptible coasts and consisting of as many as 78,000 individual turbines. The virtual wind farms were confronted with three simulated hurricanes: Sandy and Isaac, which struck New York and New Orleans, respectively, in 2012, and Katrina, which devastated New Orleans in 2005.

Incredibly, the simulations showed that wind turbines could disrupt a hurricane enough to reduce peak wind speeds by up to 92 mph (148 km/h) and decrease storm surges by up to 79%.

"We found that when wind turbines are present, they slow down the outer rotation winds of a hurricane," noted Jacobson in a statement. "This feeds back to decrease wave height, which reduces movement of air toward the center of the hurricane, increasing the central pressure, which in turn slows the winds of the entire hurricane and dissipates it faster."

According to the simulations, a wind farm placed off the coast of New Orleans could have reduced Hurricane Katrina's wind speed by 36-44 meters per second (between 80-98 mph) while decreasing the storm surge by up to 79%. In the case of Hurricane Sandy, the wind farms would have reduced wind speed by 35-39 meters per second (between 78-87 mph) and the storm surge by as much as 34%.

Image: The London Array as seen from space. NASA Earth Observatory.

Quite obviously, these arrays wouldn't stop the hurricane altogether, but they could significantly diminish their destructive power once they make landfall.

As for the integrity of the wind farms themselves, current turbines can withstand wind speeds up to 112 mph (180 km/h) — the range of category 2 to 3 hurricanes. But Jacobson says that the presence of massive turbine arrays would likely prevent hurricane winds from reaching those speeds.

A Solution That Pays For Itself

Regrettably, there's political resistance in the United States to installing a few hundred offshore wind turbines, let alone tens of thousands. But as Jacobson argues, wind turbines would pay for themselves in the long term by generating normal electricity, while reducing air pollution and global warming.

Moreover, because the turbines would prevent more wide scale damage, they would also reduce the hard costs of cleaning up after a hurricane. For example, Hurricane Sandy cost roughly $82 billion in damage across three states.

Read the entire study at Nature Climate Change: "Taming hurricanes with arrays of offshore wind turbines."

Image: Horns Rev offshore windfarm west of Denmark.

Follow me on Twitter: @dvorsky

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Massive offshore turbine arrays would help us harness hurricanes

What Cold War nuclear weapons can tell us about art fraud onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com What Cold War nuclear weapons can tell us about art fraud

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The identification of fakes and forgeries is a basic issue that has always raised controversy. This is unsurprising, of course – the enormous sums garnered by top paintings would turn to dust as soon as a question as to their authenticity arose.

To determine whether a painting is original or not, the expertise of critics and art historians is of course central. They are the only ones who know all the details about the technique of a painter, his or her way of drawing, the colours they used and the typical ideas and subjects represented. But often forgeries are so good that this kind of analysis reaches an insurmountable wall. And here, science plays a major role

Nuclear techniques such as X-ray Fluorescence and Particle Induced X-ray Emission allow us to analyse and reconstruct the exact composition of pigments used by the artist. These methods are non-destructive and non-invasive, and have almost become a routine tool to help art historians and restorers. Analysis of the different pigments used may reveal that one or more are anachronistic to the alleged date of painting. This would suggest that the artwork may be a fake if the investigated areas have not been previously subjected to pictorial retouching. But often it is necessary to date a painting with much more accuracy, something only possible with radiocarbon dating, using an instrument known as electrostatic accelerator.

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The Tandem electrostatic accelerator installed at INFN-LABEC, Florence.

The potential of this is maximised if dating something from the past 70 years or so. This is because there has been an enormous variation in carbon concentration in the atmosphere during this time. Since 1955, the ¹⁴C concentration in the atmosphere started to increase dramatically as a consequence of the many nuclear weapon tests performed in air during the Cold War.

The effect was so significant that the concentration of the substance almost doubled in less than ten years, reaching its maximum in 1963-1965. Then, the Nuclear Ban Treaty signed in 1963 stopped all the nuclear experiments except those performed underground. The ¹⁴C concentration then started to decrease.

Nowadays, the concentration has almost come back to the typical amount seen in the years before 1955. We usually refer to this trend of radiocarbon concentration as the "Bomb Peak." All living organisms from 1955 time will have had a ¹⁴C content higher than all the organisms that lived before, so a cotton plant that grew in that period will have had a higher ¹⁴C content than one that didn't.

And so, if we measure the amount of radiocarbon in a canvas made from that cotton plant we can easily conclude that the canvas was manufactured after 1955. At the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN), we exploited this idea to finally solve an enigma that had remained unresolved for more than 30 years.

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In the late 1960s, Peggy Guggenheim bought a painting on canvas that was supposed to be part of the series Contrastes de Formes, painted in the period 1913-14 by the French artist Fernand Léger. But after some years, the art critic Douglas Cooper questioned the authenticity of the painting. So, even though the artwork was still in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, it was never shown to the public. (At left: The painting thought to belong to the series Contrastes de Formes by F. Léger Guggenheim Venice.)

Thanks to the collaboration with the Guggenheim Museum we dated a small canvas sample taken from the excess fabric around the frame. We measured the radiocarbon concentration, comparing it to the Bomb Peak trend. The result was conclusive: the canvas – or, the cotton plants used to make it – had a high radiocarbon concentration and was dated to 1959 or 1962, at least four years after the death of Léger.

So, nuclear physics proved that the painting was not authentic, nor was it a later copy by Léger himself, as some had suggested. The result of the radiocarbon measurement was unquestionable. This was the first time that the Bomb Peak has been used to discover a forgery of a modern artwork.

Mariaelena Fedi does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article here.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com What Cold War nuclear weapons can tell us about art fraud

Japan's radioactive water is about to reach North American shores onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Japan's radioactive water is about to reach North American shores

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The Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami may have struck three years ago, but radioactive water from Japan's beleaguered Fukushima nuclear power plant is now being detected near Canada's West Coast. Scientists will be monitoring North American shores for the next two months, but projections point to good news.

Minute traces of radionuclides were recently detected off the coast of British Columbia. The contaminated water has yet to reach Washington, California, or Hawaii. According to researchers who met yesterday at the annual American Geophysical Union's Ocean Sciences Meeting in Honolulu, radiation levels will increase as contaminants slowly swell eastwards.

As noted by researchers at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), radioactive contaminants from Fukushima are being pushed across the Pacific Ocean by currents, the strongest of which is the Kuroshio, and spread along the West Coast of North America by complex coastal processes. Their models correctly predicted that radionuclides from Fukushima would begin to arrive on the West Coast in early 2014. At first, these contaminated waters will appear in the north (Alaska and British Columbia) and then move further south in coming years before appearing in Hawaii in small amounts.

WHOI is currently monitoring water in 16 locations:

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Related: Butterflies in the Fukushima region plagued by "genetic damage" and "severe abnormalities" | Now we know why the Japanese tsunami was so huge

Well Below Safety Limits

During the nuclear accident, the Fukushima plant released several radioactive isotopes, including iodine-131, cesium-134, and cesium-137. Cesium-137 has a half-life of 30 years, so it'll stay in the environment for a few more decades (relatedly, some of the Cesium-137 was produced by A-bomb tests during the 1950s and 1960s — but the radionuclides from Fukushima are expected to be very evident). Cesium-134, which has a half-life of just two years, has yet to be detected on North American beaches.

But the concentrations of these contaminants are expected to be well below limits set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA); this is not an environmental or human-health threat. For drinking water, cesium-137 levels can't be above 7,400 Becquerels per cubic meter (Bq/m3), or 10,000 Bq/m3 in Canada. For comparison, waters in the Baltic Sea following the Chernobyl disaster reached 1,000 Bq/m3.

The level of contaminants in the waters that just reached North America are less than 1 Bq/m3 of water. Researchers predict that, at worst, levels for Cesium-137 won't exceed 27 Bq/m3 (which is predicted to happen by mid-2015), and levels for cesium-134 won't exceed 2 Bq/m3.

Sources: WHOI | BBC | Live Science

Images: WHOI.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Japan's radioactive water is about to reach North American shores

This Week's TV: The Ice King goes sane and Arrow faces the Clock King onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com This Week's TV: The Ice King goes sane and Arrow faces the Clock King

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The Olympics have come to a close, and that means scripted television has returned to our sets. Arrow and the Black Canary face off against a classic DC villain while Adventure Time's Ice King gets a second chance as Simon. Plus, Vikings returns, and we learn what's next for The Walking Dead's Daryl and the True Detective duo. Check out clips and details below!

Tonight

Adventure Time (7 PM, Cartoon Network)

Tonight's episode sounds particularly heartbreaking. After a magical spell turns the Ice King back into Simon, he manages to bring his beloved Betty back. Unfortunately, the rules of the Ice King's crown still apply—meaning Simon will die without it.

Almost Human (8 PM, Fox)

Almost Human's first season is in its home stretch, and in its penultimate episode, we have another crime involving the genetically enhanced chromes. Will Detective Stahl get involved?

When Det. Kennex and Dorian investigate the murder of a "chrome," there are no signs of trauma, other than a very small pinprick on the back of his neck. As the investigation unfolds, it's revealed that the murder suspect is tapping into the DNA of his victims in pursuit of perfection.

Bitten (8 PM, Syfy)

Someone in the Pack dies tonight, forcing the Pack to go on the offensive. And they were just considering a truce.

Steven Universe (8 PM, Cartoon Network)

Steven Universe creator Rebecca Sugar sang the song "Giant Woman" at this past summer's San Diego Comic-Con (you can listen to it above accompanied by an Adventure Time fan animation), and it features in tonight's episode, in which Steven tries to convince Pearl and Amethyst to fuse together into a giant woman.

Star-Crossed (8 PM, The CW)

After the tragedy that ended last week's pilot episode, Roman doesn't want to see Emery anymore, but a planned act of vengeance may change his mind:

Roman (Matt Lanter) and Sophia (guest star Brina Palencia) prepare for a funeral. Roman is surprised and suspicious when his Uncle Castor (guest star Johnathon Schaech) shows up in the sector offering to help the family. Meanwhile, Emery (Aimee Teegarden) tries to talk to Roman about what happened, but he doesn't want anything to do with her. Upset, Emery turns to Grayson (Grey Damon). Meanwhile, the Atrian Seven are invited to the school carnival. However, the fun ends after Drake (Greg Finley) is kidnapped and Roman finds out the Trags are preparing a hit on Emery and her family at the carnival.

Being Human (9 PM, Syfy)

In order to save Robbie, Sally summons Donna in order to make a deal. Meanwhile, Aidan ends up in vampire rehab.

Archer (10 PM, FX)

The Archer Vice crew is back this week and headed on a road trip after Malory buys a bus.

Lost Girl (10 PM, Syfy)

Dyson is put on trial for murdering humans and Fae, and the punishment is death. So Lauren and Bo team up to head into his memories.

Intelligence (10 PM, CBS)

So another of Gabriel's pals is accused of dastardly deeds. Is he unlucky or just a terrible judge of character?

While Gabriel and Riley are in Bolivia protecting a presidential candidate from an assassination, Gabriel is stunned to learn his best friend from Delta Force is the suspect.

Teen Wolf (10 PM, MTV)

Stiles checks himself into the mental hospital Eichen House to keep himself from hurting anyone else. Meanwhile, Scott and the others search for an important artifact.

Tuesday

Johnny Test (7:30 PM, Cartoon Network)

Johnny finally decides that he's had enough of being the twins' guinea pig and quits. But when he changes his mind, he discovers that the girls have made a crash test robot.

The Originals (8 PM, The CW)

This week sees a spooky sanatorium added to the show's normal supernatural mix:

When Rebekah (Claire Holt) finds herself locked up in the sanatorium where she worked in 1919, she realizes a witch named Genevieve (guest star Elyse Levesque) is back to seek revenge and to reveal dark secrets that would destroy Rebekah if exposed. A distraught Elijah (Daniel Gillies) turns to Marcel (Charles Michael Davis) and Hayley (Phoebe Tonkin) for help when one of his decisions puts Klaus (Joseph Morgan) and Rebekah's lives in danger. With time working against them, Marcel realizes he may hold valuable information that could lead them to Rebekah and Klaus, but revealing it will almost certainly result in deadly consequences.

Supernatural (9 PM, The CW)

It seems that swanky Men of Letters bunker came with an extra tenant or two:

Sam (Jared Padalecki) and Dean (Jensen Ackles) are stunned to discover the Men of Letters' bunker is haunted. Their investigation leads them to a storage facility where the demons have been keeping a prize possession. Meanwhile, Castiel (Misha Collins) is captured by Bartholomew (guest star Adam Harrington).

Person of Interest (10 PM, CBS)

What happens when the Machine team meets up with a more conventional information center?

Finch goes undercover in an emergency call center to protect a 911 operator, but it soon becomes clear that the threat reaches further than the team could have anticipated.

Also on TV: On Faceoff, the competitors have to create a wizard to match a wand (9 PM, Syfy).

Wednesday

Teen Titans Go! (7:30 PM, Cartoon Network)

After Robin tries to destroy some pesky mockingbirds, they come back "bigger, stronger, and ready to mock."

Arrow (8 PM, The CW)

The Arrow team gets a new member, just in time for Oliver to face a classic Green Arrow villain:

Oliver (Stephen Amell) brings Sara (Caity Lotz) into the Arrow team. Watching Oliver and Diggle (David Ramsey) spar with Sara and talk old scars, Felicity (Emily Bett Rickards) starts to feel left out. The team is investigating a villain named William Tockman, a.k.a. The Clock King (guest star Robert Knepper), who is a brilliant thief armed with technology that can open any bank vault in Starling City. After The Clock King infiltrates the computer systems in the lair, Felicity feels pressure to prove her worth. When she gets a lead on Tockman's whereabouts, she heads out without the team, putting her in peril. Meanwhile, Oliver throws Sara a welcome home party, but Laurel (Katie Cassidy) refuses to attend. After Lance (Paul Blackthrone) makes his case for a family dinner, Laurel acquiesces, but when Oliver shows up with Sara, she loses her temper on both of them.

Dreamworks Dragons: Defenders of Berk (8 PM, Cartoon Network)

Snoutlout is expelled from the Academy for disobeying orders and Alvin comes back to Berk to make amends.

Revolution (8 PM, NBC)

Every time I see a reference to New Vegas, I think of Fallout and ask myself, "Why can't Revolution be more like Fallout?"

With their lives in danger in New Vegas, Monroe (David Lyons) and Connor (Mat Vairo) face a difficult decision in order to survive. Back in Willoughby, Miles (Billy Burke) questions whether he can trust Neville (Giancarlo Esposito) and Jason (JD Pardo) to help take down the Patriots. Meanwhile, Aaron (Zak Orth) and Priscilla (Maureen Sebastian) find themselves at odds over the nano code.

The Tomorrow People (9 PM, The CW)

The night of the Amell cousins continues with Robbie Amell trying to strike a balance between Ultra and the Tomorrow People:

After getting some shocking news, Stephen (Robbie Amell) attempts to restore order in both his worlds by making a deal with Jedikiah (Mark Pellegrino). With a new break-out on the loose, Cara (Peyton List) and Russell (Aaron Yoo) try to lure him in but must contend with a trap from Ultra. Meanwhile, Jedikiah is closer to developing a new secret technology that could change his future.

Thursday

Community (8 PM, NBC)

Ooh, do we get to see Professor Hickey's duck comics in this episode?

Professor Duncan (guest star John Oliver, "The Daily Show") decides it's time to seduce Britta (Gillian Jacobs) and Jeff (Joel McHale) counsels him on how to close the deal. Meanwhile, Britta runs into some old friends and realizes that they have moved on from their shared anarchist views of the past. Abed (Danny Pudi) runs afoul of Professor Hickey (Jonathan Banks) when he accidentally damages some drawings Hickey has been laboring over. When Hickey restrains Abed as punishment, the two wind up spending some meaningful time together. Meanwhile, Chang (Ken Jeong) finds himself performing an impromptu one-man show for a ghostly audience.

The Vampire Diaries (8 PM, The CW)

The Damon/Enzo bromance is headed for another hurdle:

As Damon's (Ian Somerhalder) behavior escalates from destructive to deadly, Stefan (Paul Wesley) begins to regret their last conversation and decides to track Damon down and intervene. For reasons of her own, Elena (Nina Dobrev) volunteers to come along. Dr. Wes (guest star Rick Cosnett) enlists the Travelers to set a trap that will once again test Damon's friendship with Enzo (guest star Michael Malarkey). After a heart-to-heart talk with Nadia (guest star Olga Fonda), Matt (Zach Roerig) enlists Caroline (Candice Accola) and Tyler's (Michael Trevino) help to protect Elena, leading to a violent confrontation. Later, when Stefan tries to comfort a dejected Caroline, their conversation leads to a horrifying realization.

Vikings (10 PM, History Channel)

Vikings is back! Season Two kicks off, appropriately, with a battle:

The battle begins between Ragnar and King Horik's forces against Jarl Borg. Borg is joined by Rollo, and this Viking clash pits brother against brother. There can only be one victor. Meanwhile, Princess Aslaug makes her way to Kattegat and brings with her a surprise that leaves Ragnar in a difficult predicament.

Friday

Grimm (9 PM, NBC)

Even Wesen have to deal with parental disapproval:

Monroe (Silas Weir Mitchell) fights an impossible battle to convince his parents (guest stars Dee Wallace and Chris Mulkey) to embrace the life choices he's made. Meanwhile, Nick (David Giuntoli) turns to Juliette (Bitsie Tulloch) to help him figure out the Wesen aspect of his cop-killing scalper investigation. On the Royal Baby front, Captain Renard (Sasha Roiz) learns new information that forces him to contact Adalind (Claire Coffee) in the interest of keeping her and the baby safe from Viktor (guest star Alexis Denisof).

Helix (10 PM, Syfy)

Hatake reveals why the CDC is really on the base, prompting startling alliances.

Saturday

MythBusters (8 PM, Discovery)

The team performs another round of ballistics experiments, seeing if they can get a ping pong ball to travel at supersonic speeds and if they can build a functional canon out of ice.

Space Dandy (11:30 PM, Adult Swim)

This week's episode is titled, "Plants Are Living Things, Too, Baby."

Sunday

True Detective (9 PM, HBO)

In the present, Hart and Cohle call a truce in order to investigate a string of disappearances that seem tied to the symbology of the Dora Lange murder and the Tuttle family.

The Walking Dead (9 PM, AMC)

We're back to spending time with Beth and Daryl this episode, but Daryl's once-trusty crossbow bolts are starting to see some wear and tear.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com This Week's TV: The Ice King goes sane and Arrow faces the Clock King

Do Want: Math and Science Cutting Boards onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Do Want: Math and Science Cutting Boards

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Via Gerald and Summer of Elysium Woodworks comes a fetching series of laser-etched math- and science-themed cutting boards.

The pair's Etsy store is, understandably, pretty slammed with demand, so orders are taking about 5–6 weeks to ship at the moment – but at 35 bucks a pop, these seem like a pretty foolproof and affordable geek gift. We're especially fond of the pi-board:

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[Elysium Woodworks via Wil Wheaton]

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Do Want: Math and Science Cutting Boards

This Centuries-Old Musical Instrument Sounds Exactly Like Super Mario onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com This Centuries-Old Musical Instrument Sounds Exactly Like Super Mario

Listen to this young girl playing her sheng, a Chinese instrument invented thousands of years ago. The woodwind may be ancient, but the sound is pure 1980s nostalgia—it's the Super Mario Brothers theme, right down to the sounds of Mario collecting coins and mushrooms. Amazing!

Music was a big part of the old school Nintendo experience, and it's eerie how the notes coming out of an instrument you probably never heard of sound so shockingly familiar. This young musician has certainly put in a ton of practice—clearly, all those hours playing Super Mario have paid off. [YouTube via TastefullyOffensive]

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com This Centuries-Old Musical Instrument Sounds Exactly Like Super Mario

How Wrong is Your Time Zone? onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com How Wrong is Your Time Zone?

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In an ideal world, everyone's clocks would strike 12 noon just as the Sun reached the highest point in its path across the sky. But clock- (aka "standard-") time and solar time rarely overlap, with one generally leading or lagging behind the other – a fact this map by math blogger and Google engineer Stefano Maggiolo clearly illustrates. [Click here to enlarge.]

Why do these discrepancies exist? Maggiolo offers two important reasons:

One is that (solar) days do not all have the same length: the modern calendar compensates by letting midday oscillate a bit around the year: for example, midday in Naples goes from 11:47 in early November to 12:17 in early February... More importantly, each city at a slightly different longitude would have a slightly different time. It seems strange that time systems with such a huge problem had ever been practical, but in the pre-industrial-revolution world, travels were so uncommon and slow that this problem was no more than a minor annoyance.

The transition from apparent solar time, where all days have different lengths, to solar mean time, where midday wanders around 12:00, was caused by the proliferation of mechanical clocks in the early 19th century. The change to a time zone system, to solve the second problem, was caused instead by the telegraph and even more by the spreading of railway networks in the second half of that century; it's not a coincidence that the first country moving to a common time was Great Britain.

Indeed, if we acknowledge that the two problems must be solved, the natural result is the current time zone system. The immediate consequence is that in the western part of the time zone the sun rises and sets later than in the eastern part. Normally, these differences amount to at most half an hour in either direction, but human geography sometime forces greater differences.

Other explanations for major solar/standard time-discrepancies are often political in nature. In China, for example, all clocks are set to Beijing time; in the country's westernmost reaches, solar noon happens at around 3 in the afternoon. The opposite is true in India (which also adheres to a single time zone), where a summer sunrise in the far-eastern state of Assam begins at 4:30 a.m. And don't even get us started on Antarctica.

[Stefano Maggiolo via Slate]

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com How Wrong is Your Time Zone?