Interesting

[burntcopper]

it's a concept that pretty much every new product out there - be it blog, service, column, or toy - has to engage. You can get attention easily. That can be done through recommendation, flash-burning our retinas, whatever. However, interest is what keeps it going. it's what gets us to pick it. Keep watching for more than two seconds. Remember it. Click on it. Pick it up the next time it appears. Tune in again. Seek it out. Interest is what the advertising dollars are really about, and what millions of dollars of market research sometimes so spectacularly fails to do because they mistake attention for interest. Excitement can peter out within a few seconds. Mild interest and the 'hmm' reaction means you've captured their attention to the point that they're going to remember you and they're thinking about it.

Picked up Wired UK magazine on the recommendation of warren_ellis because he's been roped into writing a column for it. Time will tell if they engage enough interest to get people to keep picking it up, or to reach for it on the shelves because they've read or flicked through it before and found it interesting.

Judgement so far is... some stuff's decent. Not much indepth. But varied enough and new enough. And not stupid. Rather amused that all the ads are for men. (male perfume, male clothing, whisky, etc) I almost miss The Face in its heyday because it was a mag that was pitched at both sexes so the ads were all kinds. Got an interesting bit on 'future timeline' (the issue's focus is futurism) - products and events we ought to expect in the next 10 years. IKinda fun because some of them I remember reading about in stuff like 2000 AD, which as a sci-fi focussed object specialises in coming up with weird tech. Some of it utterly ridiculous. And then come the ones like active contact lenses, which I think I first saw in Sinister Dexter, a strip about assassins. Where you get readout across contact lenses, which now looks like it's really not that far off. And I do love that they mention Minority Report, the Tom Cruise future detective/chase/whatever story. Which people cite a lot when it comes to tech. Not the reading minds bit, but the changing billboards and the 'ability to control readouts with a gesture'.

One of the events was flooding in various countries. Flooding and its causes and aftereffects have become *the* major weather event preoccupation of the current era. That which we saw in the Blade Runner film as a glimpse shot. Come the late nineties, we got the Tsunamis. The way it became a certainty to be dealt with in the UK (I still get a tad weirded out how it was once used as an example of climate change in a lecture - because it's treated as as 'one more bloody bit of weather', since we don't have climate, we have weather and is therefore completely fucking unpredictable). New Orleans. Islands in the Pacific that're having to be abandoned because the sea level's rising. I remember it had been talked about as a possible back in the 80s and early 90s as a result of ice cap melting, but now it's a certainty rather than a 'someday' that people could dismiss as an extreme event and therefore ignore. Makes you wonder what the climate preoccupations and fears were way back when they were previously predicting the future. Everyone remembers the gadgets and food pills and so on from the 60s futurist predictions, but what were the climate predictions and preoccupations? I have vague memories of all the apocalyptic stuff describing drought and dustbowls, which was of course influenced by the last major change the US could remember.

oh dear. last.fm's just brought up Patti LuPone's rendition of 'As Long as He Needs Me' from the what I presume is the Broadway rendition of Oliver! Ways to get me to turn off immediately due to snorting in derision : a Nancy who isn't singing in a cockney accent. And then there's something very off about her accent in Sweeney Todd. Mind you, then it brought up Bernadette Peters. ...still not convinced by her voice. I like her acting, though.

Random-arse fact resulting from reading medical papers all days : Suicide stats in the US, 1999-2003, nearly double that of homicide. 11 vs 6 per 100,000.

Comments

[gmh.livejournal.com]

Flooding is pretty much the most destructive natural phenomenon going; it wipes out food and water supplies, homes, infrastructure; you name it; and often so fast that the emergency services are unable to cope.

In the First World, it's generally more of a nuisance than a real threat, but in giant flood plains like Bangladesh, it's a continual danger to the country's existence; and in extreme weather events like Hurricane Gilbert, you've potentially got to cope with tens of thousands of starved and homeless refugees in a country that really can't afford it.

Also: in countries where roads are not so easy to build, settlements and transport links tend to grow up around rivers (all that nice fertile land!) - so when the river goes over the top, it hits the most densely populated areas and the food production zones at once.

(Still got my Planetary Atmospheres lecture notes somewhere!)

Climate predictions way back when: the short answer is that there weren't that many, at least, not to any useful degree; ice cores. tree rings, mud samples et. al. are reasonably good at showing long-term variability in historic patterns, but they really don't give you much idea of the processes involved, and the records for the more unusual climate markers (e.g. sea temperature) are a bit patchy; many of the records only really started to get assessed properly during the Cold War.

Climate science really entered the modern era with remote sensing; the ability to watch the Earth from space and keep the data in electronic form - but the expense of making and launching a 'sat does rather limit how much of it you can do, especially in a subject that was always regarded as a bit 'blue sky'; funding for space science is traditionally pretty lousy unless you can blow things up with your research.

The initial predictions as to climate shift in the 60s and 70s were towards an Ice Age; at least, there was no clear consensus and the fashionable view was towards cooling - thanks largely to the facts that a) the 1940s were globally rather warm and b) the last 50 years in the USA have seen a local cooling trend; the Ice Age theory has been pretty comprehensively defunct since the mid-80s.

[stu-n.livejournal.com]

We've banned ourselves from ever mentioning Minority Report in articles, cos so much of the tech featured in it was taken from active industrial research! The gesture-display is similar tech to the iPhone interface.

[burntcopper.livejournal.com]

well, they did say Spielberg quizzed 'em like mad for tech to use in the film.

[stu-n.livejournal.com]

The swarming robots came from live research, too. As did the responsive billboards, and the cars were all concepts from real automotive design teams.

None of that excuses the dreadful, dreadful end of the film, though.

[andromakie.livejournal.com]

aww, I love Bernadette. She was so fabulous in Annie Get Your Gun. She needs to do another show.