25x speed breakthrough in solid-state battery manufacturing achieved by US firm
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That's interesting, I wonder what happens if the ceramic cracks.

Would certainly be nice if we could get battery batteries with 2 or more times more capacity to replace our cellphone batteries, like tomorrow.

 

 

A new weapon of mass distraction.

 

The unpredictability of the batteries is the main issue. The Firefighters can easily handle the fire but the normal 'safe/inert' procedures just don't work with point source, self-sustaining hot spots. I'd like to see a battle-short type (self-destruct) mechanism on the large packs that initiates a mainly predictable burn sequence to release the stored energy quickly and completely after the container has been isolated and people are safe.

 

The unpredictability of the batteries is the main issue. The Firefighters can easily handle the fire but the normal 'safe/inert' procedures just don't work with point source, self-sustaining hot spots. I'd like to see a battle-short type (self-destruct) mechanism on the large packs that initiates a mainly predictable burn sequence to release the stored energy quickly and completely after the container has been isolated and people are safe.
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Maybe these should become standard issue for the world's fire departments:

 

Maybe these should become standard issue for the world's fire departments:

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I wish we could say that that was funny, but as we all know, these kinds of fires are the worst of the worst.

Funny too I just saw a movie the other day where the father owned a WWII Sherman tank and used it to rescue his son from a southern "work farm" where he was illegally sent to.

 

I wish we could say that that was funny, but as we all know, these kinds of fires are the worst of the worst.

Funny too I just saw a movie the other day where the father owned a WWII Sherman tank and used it to rescue his son from a southern "work farm" where he was illegally sent to.

I assume you are talking about "Tank" with James Garner.

I saw that when it came out shortly after I graduated high school. As with so many movies, it was riding the coat tails of some other successful movies that established a wave of popularity around a particular theme that lots of other screenwriters, producers, and directors rode instead of putting in the effort to explore their own creative ideas. Just look at all of the wild-animal-run-amok movies that followed "Jaws", the military aviation movies that followed "Top Gun", the space movies that followed "Star Wars". Not to mention the slew of time-travel, vampire, and zombie flicks that flooded the screens after one particularly successful movie in that vein. Some of the coat-riders were decent movies, but most of them weren't and some were almost direct rip-offs of the original with superficial swaps. Swap out a grizzly for a shark and a forest for an ocean, but keep all of the other plot elements almost perfectly in place.

I don't recall where "Tank" fell on that spectrum, but I suspect it was probably a blending of First Blood and The Dukes of Hazzard.

 

I assume you are talking about "Tank" with James Garner.

I saw that when it came out shortly after I graduated high school. As with so many movies, it was riding the coat tails of some other successful movies that established a wave of popularity around a particular theme that lots of other screenwriters, producers, and directors rode instead of putting in the effort to explore their own creative ideas. Just look at all of the wild-animal-run-amok movies that followed "Jaws", the military aviation movies that followed "Top Gun", the space movies that followed "Star Wars". Not to mention the slew of time-travel, vampire, and zombie flicks that flooded the screens after one particularly successful movie in that vein. Some of the coat-riders were decent movies, but most of them weren't and some were almost direct rip-offs of the original with superficial swaps. Swap out a grizzly for a shark and a forest for an ocean, but keep all of the other plot elements almost perfectly in place.

I don't recall where "Tank" fell on that spectrum, but I suspect it was probably a blending of First Blood and The Dukes of Hazzard.

Hi,

Yeah, that's the one

I kind of liked it, but as you know the logic in all of these movies is often very sickening.

I saw one yesterday that was really, really, good, right up to the point where it became really, really, bad. The gal was trying to find her husband who was presumably kidnapped, and when she did a little investigating she found there was one main drug lord guy responsible. She finally found her husband alive along with the drug lord. They were all in a hospital room and she had total control over the drug lord and his two henchmen. After she had been chased by several men with guns and a corrupt police chief, she had no problem shooting one of the henchmen in the room, but never bothered to disable the head drug lord guy who was responsible for her harrowing attempt to find the husband. Instead, she partly carried the husband out of the room and left the two alive and well inside the room, only to be then chased by the same two! If that is not the definition of idiotic, I don't know what is. There were also two parts where she went back to the police chief for help and getting arrested both times for bogus reasons. I mean after one arrest how the heck did she think he was going to help her the second time. She was not stupid otherwise and was very clever the way she did everything except for those things mentioned, which really completely spoiled the entire movie. I almost turned it off several times.

The only conclusion I can think of is that the writers think everyone is completely stupid, and the censors think we are all little kids watching TV even at 2am in the morning.

Maybe we should create a "stupid movie" thread. It would grow pretty fast though ha ha

 

...it was riding the coat tails of some other successful movies that established a wave of popularity around a particular theme that lots of other screenwriters, producers, and directors rode instead of putting in the effort to explore their own creative ideas.

Considering there are only seven basic plots from which to choose, this is not surprising.

 

Hi,

Yeah, that's the one

I kind of liked it, but as you know the logic in all of these movies is often very sickening.

I saw one yesterday that was really, really, good, right up to the point where it became really, really, bad. The gal was trying to find her husband who was presumably kidnapped, and when she did a little investigating she found there was one main drug lord guy responsible. She finally found her husband alive along with the drug lord. They were all in a hospital room and she had total control over the drug lord and his two henchmen. After she had been chased by several men with guns and a corrupt police chief, she had no problem shooting one of the henchmen in the room, but never bothered to disable the head drug lord guy who was responsible for her harrowing attempt to find the husband. Instead, she partly carried the husband out of the room and left the two alive and well inside the room, only to be then chased by the same two! If that is not the definition of idiotic, I don't know what is. There were also two parts where she went back to the police chief for help and getting arrested both times for bogus reasons. I mean after one arrest how the heck did she think he was going to help her the second time. She was not stupid otherwise and was very clever the way she did everything except for those things mentioned, which really completely spoiled the entire movie. I almost turned it off several times.

The only conclusion I can think of is that the writers think everyone is completely stupid, and the censors think we are all little kids watching TV even at 2am in the morning.

Maybe we should create a "stupid movie" thread. It would grow pretty fast though ha ha

gee ... thanks for spoiling it for me ...

 

Considering there are only seven basic plots from which to choose, this is not surprising.

The whole "only seven plots" notion is one person's creation of how they have chosen to group things. Others have grouped plots quite differently into different numbers of categories ranging from just three to three dozen.

But that's neither here nor there in this context. The fact that two stories fit into the same general plot category according to someone's taxonomy does not mean that the stories are the same except in the broadest and most abstract terms.

 

The only conclusion I can think of is that the writers think everyone is completely stupid

Yes and no.

At the end of the day, it is not the writer's goal to actually write something good (in the sense of a story with reasonable and plausible plot elements that are entirely self-consistent). It is their goal to write something that will be a commercial success. Unfortunately, these two goals are not at all aligned and, in many respects, are mutually exclusive.

I sat next to an independent film producer on a flight one time and we had a very interesting discussion about this. It started with my asking her why editors can't seem to ever grasp the notion that someone can't stand there and fire a dozen or more shots using a six-shot revolver with the camera never leaving them. It just seemed like such a glaring and oft-seen goof that it should be on a laundry list of things that an editor is looking for when putting a film together. Particularly after all the time they pat themselves on the back about all the minutia they go out of there way to make sure that some broach that someone is wearing is always in the same place on the heroine's dress in a scene that was filmed over a period of several days (I forget which movie that was for when I was watching the "making of" special feature on the DVD), but in that same scene the same heroine fired a dozen shots from a revolver that you could clearly see had a six-round cylinder.

She said that, by-and-large, audiences simply don't notice and don't care and editors know this, so they aren't going to spend time (and money) addressing it. I also asked her about why movies and TV shows continue to use the same over-used gimmicks that are completely absurd. The example I used was the "image enhancement" trope where they take a blurry image of a moving car taken from a low-resolution camera in an ATM machine and are able to digitally enhance the picture to clearly show the fine print on some decal sticker on the windshield. She pointed out something that I hadn't thought of at the time, but that has become glaringly apparent in the last couple of decades. She said that most people's notions of reality are shaped by what they've seen portrayed on film, regardless of how accurate it might or might not be, and that a film that portrays something that goes against their expectations, no matter how rigorously accurate it might be, will be rejected as being completely unrealistic by a huge fraction of the audience. Examples include not only near-infinite ability to enhance photos, but things like people being blown completely off there feet when they get shot by a large-caliber handgun, or the bomb always having a countdown timer that is disabled by cutting the red wire three seconds before zero (and that freezes the still working display at three seconds), or the gravely wounded hero being chased by a car down a street, screeching it's tires and revving it's engine and shifting gears, despite most people not being able to run faster than six to ten miles/hr even if they are in pretty good shape. This list goes on and on and on. It wasn't too long after this flight that I first heard about a growing problems with juries not being willing to convict defendants because the forensic evidence didn't meet the level of certitude and sophistication that they routinely see in CSI and similar shows.

One of things you mentioned is one that I see over and over -- the good guy/gal manages to overcome the killer that has just attacked them and they just walk away so that, very predictably, the same killer gets to attack them again. They usually never bother to take their gun, even though they themselves are unarmed and know that they are still being pursued by a bunch of other killers.

Here's a pretty good synopsis of a lot of these over-used gimmicks.

Peter's Evil Overlord List

Another aspect that, for me personally, makes it hard to watch what many consider to be the "really clever" shows is how in most of them the main character is only clever enough to find the subtle clue because the person that wrote the script wrote it that way. I get so tired of some obscure clue, like a picture on the wall being at a slight angle when all of the other pictures appear straight) leading the hero down some impeccable chain of reasoning that unerringly unravels the entire mystery, especially when there are clearly completely mundane and much more likely explanations for whatever the clue is (like someone bumped the damn picture).

 

The whole "only seven plots" notion is one person's creation of how they have chosen to group things. Others have grouped plots quite differently into different numbers of categories ranging from just three to three dozen.

But that's neither here nor there in this context. The fact that two stories fit into the same general plot category according to someone's taxonomy does not mean that the stories are the same except in the broadest and most abstract terms.

Seems to me that everything "pop" is derivative and manufactured -- assembly line fashion (me: "hey kids, get off my lawn!").

Same as in Western music. There are only 7 notes (five in most pop music). All the good ones have been used; only repetition is possible.

 

That's why I'm far more interested in live music. The perfection of music perfectly timed, pitched and even composed on computers delivers a sterile, soulless product. It might be catchy at first but quickly becomes tiresome.

Real music played by real musicians contains volumes of information in the ... errors. "The notes not played". The slightly ahead-of-the-beat guitar solo, the quiver in a singer's voice, the bending of strings, fingers squeaking as they move from fret to fret. All the stuff that differentiates a merely great musician from a star, the ability to communicate deep emotion through performance. Real music.

Sorry, an off-topic rant!

 

Same as in Western music. There are only 7 notes (five in most pop music). All the good ones have been used; only repetition is possible.

Don’t know much about music, do you?

 

Seems to me that everything "pop" is derivative and manufactured -- assembly line fashion (me: "hey kids, get off my lawn!").

Same as in Western music. There are only 7 notes (five in most pop music). All the good ones have been used; only repetition is possible.

That's like saying that since there are only 26 letters in the English alphabet, there's only a few things that can be said and everything else is repetition. Which I'm sure you will now insist is the case, but everyone knows is rubbish.

 

That's like saying that since there are only 26 letters in the English alphabet...

Exactly.

 

That's why I'm far more interested in live music. The perfection of music perfectly timed, pitched and even composed on computers delivers a sterile, soulless product. It might be catchy at first but quickly becomes tiresome.

Real music played by real musicians contains volumes of information in the ... errors. "The notes not played". The slightly ahead-of-the-beat guitar solo, the quiver in a singer's voice, the bending of strings, fingers squeaking as they move from fret to fret. All the stuff that differentiates a merely great musician from a star, the ability to communicate deep emotion through performance. Real music.

Sorry, an off-topic rant!

That's something that I've become a lot more aware of as my daughter has become increasingly accomplished as a violinist. A few months ago, after her Spring recital, I asked her if she had chosen the piece she was going to play for the Young Artists Solo Competition next January (she is considered my many to be a strong contender to win, though one other person is generally considered the favorite). She said it was the piece she had played in the recital, but that she was struggling with it (could have fooled me!) because she was having difficulty discovering its character. When I played in the band in school, music didn't go much beyond being notes on a page -- a bit more than that, but not much. She has long since reached the point where the notes on the page are just the skeleton and it is what she brings to the performance as an artist that brings it alive in ways that even I can sense. That was really driven home last summer when her string quartet performed in the Sydney Opera House -- those four played like they just belonged there. It literally brought tears to my eyes, and when I went over to my wife, she was crying, too.

 

That's why I'm far more interested in live music. The perfection of music perfectly timed, pitched and even composed on computers delivers a sterile, soulless product. It might be catchy at first but quickly becomes tiresome.

Real music played by real musicians contains volumes of information in the ... errors. "The notes not played". The slightly ahead-of-the-beat guitar solo, the quiver in a singer's voice, the bending of strings, fingers squeaking as they move from fret to fret. All the stuff that differentiates a merely great musician from a star, the ability to communicate deep emotion through performance. Real music.

Sorry, an off-topic rant!

I was going to mention this, but it seemed unnecessary. There are only 7 perfect notes, and they've all been used to death.

 

I was going to mention this, but it seemed unnecessary. There are only 7 perfect notes, and they've all been used to death.

Your ignorance is showing, even more than before.

The is no such thing as a “perfect note”. There are perfect intervals, 4 of them:

Unison (the same exact note)
Fourth
Fifth
Octave

There ar 12 distinct notes used in western music.

A
A# / bB
B
C
C# / bD
D
D# / bE
E
F
F# / bG
G
G# / bA

That is on piano, On fretless strings like violin, the sharp and their enharmonic flats listed above are played differently, so there are 17.

The song I am learning right now, “Chattanooga Choo Choo”, is a pop song from the forties. It uses 11 of 12 the distinct tones in an octave. (no C# / bD)

And need I mention that they are played in combinations know as chords, which sound quite different than single notes?

I feel very sorry for you if that is your level of music comprehension.