There are few things more annoying than being asked a question that the other person could easily Google the answer for themselves. What am I, your research department?

That’s why the site Let Me Google That For You exists. But sending a LMGTFY link is kind of dick, though it can be hilarious if deployed successfully. (Here’s a good example.)

My approach to this problem calls for a lighter touch.

I’m going to tell everyone I know about Google Talk Guru.

I learned about this intriguing service from the Google Operating System blog. The Guru works in any chat client that supports Google Talk. Most of you are probably familiar with the Gchat software within Gmail, so I will be using that as an example.

To gain access to the Guru, simply invite guru@googlelabs.com to chat:

Soon enough, you should see the Guru online in your chat contacts:

Even if the Guru appears to be offline, he will probably still respond to your queries.

Now that you’re connected to the Guru, there are a variety of services he will provide for you. Most are basic information searches, but he can also perform some calculations.

One quick way to get a rundown on the available services is to type “help” into the chat box:

This list is not exhaustive, however. Click here for more options, or read on…

WEB SEARCH

Google yourself from the comfort of your Gmail tab! This is one of the better options available from the Guru.

If you’re talking with someone and a query arises that only the world’s best search engine can answer, pop open a Guru chat and type “web [search string]“. The Guru will return the highest-ranking result.

There’s also a link that will take you to the full results readout.

WEATHER

This one is pretty straightforward — type in weather and the name of a city and you’ll get the current situation and the forecast for the next couple of days. Great for cubicle-bound office dwellers who haven’t seen the outdoors all day.

The one major drawback for American users is the lack of a Fahrenheit option. Come on, Google! Even Star Wars Weather will give us a Fahrenheit temp!

TRANSLATION

Got a phrase you need translated into another tongue? Someone cussed at you in Spanish and you want to know what they just said? The Guru is happy to provide translation services!

As far as I can tell, the supported languages are restricted to English, Spanish, French and German. Hopefully, this will be expanded so we can tell tales of Putin’s majesty and curse each other out in some Asian and African languages.

DEFINITIONS

Someone just threw a vocab word right by you while you were chatting. Too ashamed to ask what that word means, and too lazy to look it up in the dictionary?

Mo natter. Guru has got you covered. Just ask it to define any word and it’ll spit the meaning right back at you.

CALCULATIONS

Guru does basic calculations for you. Just type in whatever numbers you want added, subtracted, multiplied, divided, or squared and it gives you the result.

He also knows some physical constants, such as pi (seen above), Planck’s constant (h), the speed of light (c), and the elementary charge (e). Mess around and see what other constants you can get him to report.

SPORTS SCORES

Is The Man blocking ESPN, depriving you of your sports fix? Well, the Guru can’t stream the game for you, but he can tell you the score.

Now, it would be nice to know how many minutes/innings are left in the game. Or to be able to pull up standings or other stats. But as a starting point, I will take it.

Google Guru isn’t revolutionary, but it is kinda cool and convenient.

And if it keeps even one person from asking me a question they ought to just look up themselves, I will be satisfied.

This past summer I happened to be in The Standard Hotel in NYC. There’s a lot to peep in that unique building — crazy interior design in the lobby, the well-appointed (if tiny) rooms overlooking the High Line, the shabby-chic hallways, the attractive staff, and the notorious Boom Boom Room. But my favorite part was the elevators, which featured an insanely cool Hieronymous Bosch-like video installation called Civilization.

This work, created by artist Marco Brambilla in collaboration with Toronto production company CRUSH, composites hundreds of images from movie footage, stock footages, and original film clips to create a journey from hell to heaven. You move up and down in this video mural as the elevator rises and descends. It’s frickin’ awesome, trust.

A few screengrabs for the peeps:

Check this bad boy out:

Here’s another link to the video in high-quality glory.

The elevator installations have 3-D layering that makes them especially mind-blowing — here are some interesting comments from the designers of the video that describe the process of its production.

A few images that caught my eye: Ahnuld as Conan the Barbarian, the creepy Oracle from 300, Wonder World from Beverly Hills Cop III, “The World Is Yours” blimp from Scarface, and Marilyn Monroe holding her skirt down in The Seven Year Itch.

In an interview with Interview, Brambilla commented: “I like to play with the idea of visual overload, and use it to ­ create the feeling of spectacle…For Civilization, my inspiration came from the giant murals at the Natural History Museum [in New York].”

Natural History Museum, NYC

Brambilla was later commissioned by Kanye West to do a video for his recent single, “Power,” along the same lines as Civilization.

It’s pretty bad-ass as well. More from Interview:

“It was a dream commission,” says Brambilla. “Working with themes I like to explore with someone like Kanye, who loves to experiment and isn’t afraid to take chances.” Brambilla says the key line to the video was, “No one man should have all that power”: “I’m interpreting that idea as a moment of transition, showing an icon of power at the tipping point. The idea of celebrity, sexuality, and excess… the psychological toll that can take on an individual.” The hyper-saturated result involves 24 layers of imagery combined into a seamless video, to create the effect of “characters, painted in frescoes and come to life.”

This video is packed chock-full of the kind of imagery that makes people think Kanye is in a cult. Beware Masonic wickedness!

Google has been scanning and digitizing books for over five years as part of their massive, controversial Google Books project.

Now researchers from Google and Harvard University have created a tool that tracks the use of words in print over hundreds of years. It’s called the Ngram Viewer, and it’s really freaking cool.

You can search in a variety of languages, but it’s most useful when used in English, and you can further specify American English and British English when drilling down on cultural topics.

An article in the Boston Globe describes the tool:

“This is really the largest data release in the history of the humanities — a fantastic wealth of data,’’ said Jean-Baptiste Michel, a postdoctoral researcher in the program for evolutionary dynamics at Harvard. “In our paper we present our initial investigation — we explore this new terrain, we dig a little bit. It is a very cool feeling to have, but what people will be able to do will far exceed everything we have done.’’

In this analysis, the researchers used the data set to look at changes in grammar and English, finding that about half the words that appear in books are “dark matter’’ that do not appear in dictionaries — words that may be compound constructions or proper nouns, or just are undocumented, like “aridification’’ or “slenthem.’’ English, they found, is growing by about 8,500 words a year.

They have also looked at collective memory — and forgetting. Authors are letting the past go more quickly. The year “1880’’ had dropped to half its maximum frequency of references 32 years later, in books written in 1912. But it took only a decade for “1973’’ to decline to half its prominence.

I spent some time over the last 24 hours messing around on the site, looking up topics of interest.

For each of the following items, click through on the titles or images to see the full-size graph. These images are over 900 pixels wide and won’t fit nicely within our template, so the images you see here are smaller, cropped versions of the full results. I highly recommend checking out the full editions, which will open in a new tab.

Security vs. Freedom. (American English) This chart tracks the fascinating shift in interest in each topic dating back to the 18th century. The significant shift at the right side of the chart is easily attributable to post-9/11 frenzy, but what’s interesting is that the increased emphasis on security at the expense of freedom was already well underway by then.

Genres of Popular Music. (American English) The rise in hip hop, and its accompanying culture, is simply staggering. As the full chart shows, mentions in print of hip hop have risen to the level of rock and roll and country music. It did occur to me that nobody calls modern rock “rock and roll” anymore, but to get an idea of how a rock subgenre would fare in this analysis, I’ve included punk as well.

God vs. War. God had a long way to fall from his standing in the early part of this analysis, but he staged a pretty good rally in the 19th century. War became a much larger preoccupation in the World War eras, but recently, God has become a topic of greater attention. “I’m NOT dead!” – God

Values. What’s of greatest interest to English writers — religion, science, politics, or education? The answer turns out to be, different things at different times. Education tracked pretty closely with science for a long time, but around 1900 became a topic of interest all its own, ultimately overwhelming the others. When this subject is examined using only American sources, politics is consistently last; using all English sources, it stages a temporary rally over religion.

Rights. One thing that I find really cool about these analyses is the ability to pinpoint when a certain concept became propagated in people’s minds. At one point, suffrage (it is implied, for those other than white, landowning males) was the overriding concern, and scarcely anyone had even considered the ideas of feminism and human rights. Nowadays, human rights is mentioned far more often than the others. It’s also interesting to track the rise of privacy concerns, a topic that was once considered almost irrelevant in our culture.

Sports. (American English) I focused on American sources to eliminate the football/soccer mixup. This one is pretty cool, if you ask me. Granted, this tracks mentions of each sport in print, as opposed to attendance or earnings or what have you, but I think it’s a very interesting look at each game’s hold upon the zeitgeist. Baseball fans will be disappointed when they click through to the full chart and see that the game’s 1990s rally over football did not last. And as you can see, soccer is now a far more popular topic for American writers than hockey, while golf maintains a surprisingly strong hold on our imaginations.

One cool thing I found is that you can track not just words, but names as well.

Karl Marx vs. Abraham Lincoln. While they’re not directly related, this is an interesting set of famous names to compare. Honest Abe had a pretty healthy head start, but for a period of about sixty years, interest in the Great Emancipator dwindled while the ideological underpinnings of the Cold War attracted increasing attention. You can see the trend sharply reverse itself around 1980, when Communism began to crumble and interest in Lincoln (coincidentally?) began to grow once again.

Famous Names in Science. I chose notable names from relatively recent times, so we can see each of them burst onto the scene. The challenge here was also to find scientists with sufficient fame to register — even someone as eminent as Niels Bohr would be just a little line down at the bottom of this chart.

Icons. It’s interesting to note that Michael Jackson was basically a niche figure for the first ten years of his fame, while Elvis and Warhol rose much faster, but once Michael hit his stride, mentions of him in print rose rapidly. Warhol was bigger than Elvis for fifteen minutes there. While the King has slipped a little bit from his peak, however, he still remains the celebrity icon by which all others are judged.

Auteurs. I don’t know about you, but I was stunned to see the size of Woody Allen’s impact in this data. He even gives Orson Welles a run for his money. Ingmar Bergman was #2 on the English-speaking world’s auteur countdown for a while there, but lately he has faded a bit. And I guess it’s a good thing for serious cinephiles that Spielberg isn’t quite the presence on this chart that one might expect from looking at box-office receipts. All in all, this is a pretty interesting chart.

American Generals of WWI/WWII/Korea. It took Eisenhower becoming President to even begin to threaten MacArthur’s preeminence in this discussion. Granted, the dude waged war so many times that he’s all over the history books, but I was still surprised to see how thoroughly he ranked the heroes of the European theater in World War II. Another thing I found interesting was that Omar Bradley was more notable than Patton for a time, but as the decades have gone on, he has been eclipsed by his more colorful comrade.

Squillionaires. This is mostly cool for the rapid, late ascendancy of Bill Gates into the front rank of the uber-wealthy, but in the excerpt above, you can see how Morgan became for a time the most notable of the super-rich 19th century barons. I also included Jay Gould, notorious “robber baron” railroad developer who has become far less well known than the others, which is a bit of a shame, because he was a grade-A dick who left behind some entertaining tales.

Global Bad Guys. How pissed would Stalin be if he found out that he never achieved the status of Most Remarked-Upon Villain in the eyes of the English-speaking world? (I went with “Chairman Mao” because the search engine has some trouble with hyphenates, and I think the results look pretty legit.)

Communications Devices. I could go on with this all day, but this seems like a good place to wrap things up for now. It’s interesting how an invention like the telegraph, even when obsolete, can still hang on for a while as an item in the history books. Meanwhile, the Internet, which has absorbed all the communications functions that came before it, has quickly skyrocketed to the top of the charts.

Want to see more search results? I highly recommend that you check out the Google Books Ngram Viewer, but I must warn you: make sure you have enough free time to spare before you go down this rabbit hole!

Finally: this is a great little Easter Egg.

America’s oldest brewery, D.G. Yuengling and Son, has completed the purchase of a major bottling plant in Memphis, Tennessee.

The largest 100% domestically owned brewer (according to the Washington Post) is now poised to expand beyond its regional footprint, and maybe even go national.

This is great news for those who love Eastern PA’s finest lager beer, and for college students wherever Yuengling may be sold.

It’s ten times better than the other beers at its very modest price point.

The only question is, where will Yuengling expand?

German immigrant David Gottlob Jüngling founded the brewery in the early 19th century after coming to America and Anglicizing his name to Yuengling.

It’s the oldest brewery in America and remains family-owned.

Major props to the Yuengling clan for successfully steering their brewery for nearly two centuries. Most families would have put a real idiot in charge who’d run the place into the ground at some point along the way.

Instead, Yuengling is one of the better-known beers in America, despite the fact that it isn’t sold west of the Appalachians and north of New York.

Here’s an excerpt from Beer Business Daily’s analysis of a beer market study, as quoted in Jack Curtin’s Liquid Diet:

One thing that jumped out at me regarding national brand awareness was how high Yuengling scored, having only been distributed in a handful of states. In fact, Yuengling scored the highest of the top 30 brands on the percentage of drinkers who are aware of the brand, and who would consider drinking it. Nearly 90% of beer drinkers would try Yuengling who have heard of it, while only 11% would not (on the other end of the scale is Milwaukee’s Best, with 40% of drinkers saying they wouldn’t drink it). On unprompted awareness (or the percent of beer drinkers who [mention] brand/brand family first when asked to name a beer), Yuengling scored eight, which is higher than Busch, Michelob, Dos Equis, Natty, Blue Moon, and PBR.

Understandably, consumers don’t know Yuengling yet. When consumers were asked to select brands they were aware of from a list of 30 brands, Yuengling came in 27th, just shy of 50% awareness. Still, Yuengling is the only brand in the 30 brands listed that is not distributed nationally. And yet 60% of consumers who have tried Yuengling have become at least occasional consumers of the brand. Sixty percent!

As Curtin points out, Yuengling is so entrenched in the markets it serves that you can walk into a bar in eastern PA and call for a “lager,” and they will serve up a Yuengling.

Recent expansions into Appalachia have been massive successes for the brewer. Beer Marketer’s Insights reported in delightful trade paper-ese, “Yuengling off to eye-poppin’ start in WV. Grabbed unreal double-digit share in WV chains in recent 4-wk period. “

For those of you who have never sipped Yuengling, here’s a little information.

Most beer aficionados agree that Yuengling is a solid mass-market beer that rates a B/B+ on the grade scale — not as delicious as the special craft brews that blow minds, but certainly superior to its competition from the other large American breweries.

Beer Advocate gives it a solid B, and the Alström Bros note:

This is the oldest brewery in America and adored by college students all across the Atlantic, from Florida to New York. We are talking cult status, where the Northeast would be a viable market, yet there is still no interest from the brewery. Go figure.

Not much in the head department as it drops down to a very thin ring of lace. Clear and amber in color. Slight hop aroma of citrus and rough herb, malt is a little wet and vaguely toasted in the nose. Big on crispness with a moderate body and slick mouthfeel. Hop bitterness is a little rough around the edges, a trait of Cluster hops and the Cascade hops drop a quick kiss of citrus on the palate. Grainy but sweet and grassy throughout from the malt character. Finishes semi-dry with a pretty clean after taste.

Decent drinking, we look to this beer as a filler to switch things up. All in all, at least a step or two above most mass-produced lagers.

Now, with the purchase of the Hardy Bottling Facility in Memphis, Yuengling has opened the door to a major expansion into new markets.

The former Coors brewery will become the company’s largest, and will give it the capacity to expand its reach without sacrificing quality.

But where will they expand?

An article in the Wall Street Journal notes that an expansion to Ohio is in the works, and the Allentown Morning Call suggests that Texas and Illinois could also be in the mix.

Lew Bryson at Seen Through a Glass expertly analyzes the move and sees another possibility:

Good news for the people who’ve been hankering for Yuengling. The release made no promises on timing: “We can not put a specific timeline on this yet, only to say our company is working very hard to manage our growth in our usual slow and methodical manner.”

Okay. What’s this mean? Well, first, it means New England should finally see Yuengling, along with other parts of the country that are jonesing for an American-made, American-owned light lager beer, a beer with a real history behind it, from America’s oldest brewery. Sounds hokey, but I think it’s real; it’s certainly worked for them in Pennsylvania.

Maybe more importantly, it puts Yuengling on the national radar. Up till now, the big boys could call it a regional brewery. Now they’re going national, in their “slow and methodical manner.” Will they continue to do things “the Yuengling way,” feet on the street, not a lot of reliance on marketing and laptops, leaning on the beer and the story? I believe that’s the way to bet.

The joker in the deck is Dick Yuengling. He’s getting older, his daughters are in the business, things are good…is it time to retire? My guess is no. I think Dick wants to take his shot at a national market, and judging from how he sounded when I interviewed him last November, I think he’s ready for it. I really wonder what will happen when the torch passes, and the daughters are, inevitably, offered a buyout deal from a much, much bigger brewer. Impossible to predict the result. We’ll just have to wait and see.

Fingers crossed here in New England.

No finer beer at that price than frosty cold Yueng-dogs.

This picture may appear to be a collection of color fields without meaning or purpose, but there is a ton of math and evil genius behind this image.

This is a view of Magnasanti, the metropolis that pushes SimCity to its population limits.

Here is a closer view:

Vincent Oscala, a 22-year old architecture student from the Philippines, spent years decoding the formula for success in Sim City 3000.

Sounds like lunacy…but his insane investment of effort into “beating” SimCity raises interesting questions about the urban landscapes we inhabit, and the ways in which they can go horribly wrong.

After a massive amount of planning and a great deal of trial and error, he was able to create a city with over six million inhabitants.

Moreover, the city he created was remarkably stable, with no abandoned buildings and no wasted space. There are no roads — all transit is mass transit. An omniscient police force has eliminated all crime in the city. Magnasanti’s water and power needs are supplied by neighboring cities, eliminating the need for much of the related infrastructure.

In SimCity terms, it is a masterpiece.

But at the “street level,” so to speak, it looks like a horrifying dystopia.

Unemployment is high, air pollution is stifling, education is largely absent, medical care and fire response are non-existent. Citizens do not live to reach retirement age. The police state has essentially eliminated free will and allowed the city to maximize its size while reducing quality of life to a minimum — and still maintaining total control over the citizens.

Every person living in Magnasanti spends his life working and residing in one small, massively efficient block of space, until death around age 50.

Here is a video that explains some of the development process for Magnasanti, including two smaller cities that served as development prototypes for Oscala’s final achievement:

As the soundtrack indicates, Oscala was highly influenced by the art film Koyaanisquatsi, or “Life out of Balance,” directed by Godfrey Reggio with music by Philip Glass.

Koyaanisquatsi is a non-narrative work that examines and explores the contrasts between the form and pace of nature and modern human life. Ultimately, the film confronts us with the fact that our species is living a life out of balance with nature, for better or for worse.

It’s a really cool movie that is highly recommended. Here’s a teaser:

Now, you may be asking, what in the world does a game of SimCity — in an obsolete version, no less — have to teach us about a “life out of balance”?

Magnasanti is, first and foremost, a study in how to game SimCity to a maximum-population win condition.

However, I do think it raises some intriguing questions.

Oscala comments:

The film presented the world in a way I never really looked at before and that captivated me. Moments like these compel me to physically express progressions in my thought, I have just happened to do that through the form of creating these cities in SimCity 3000. I could probably have done something similar – depicting the awesome regimentation and brutality of our society – with a series of paintings on a canvas, or through hideous architectural models.

But it wouldn’t be the same as doing it in the game, for the reason that I wanted to magnify the unbelievably sick ambitions of egotistical political dictators, ruling elites and downright insane architects, urban planners and social engineers.

Australian architecture blog Super Colossal discusses some of the issues provoked by Magnasanti (link via):

This is the kind of archiporn that I am a sucker for; gamespace urbanism exploited to its extreme condition. Can you ‘win’ urbanism? Is this even urbanism? If not, can we take anything from its construction? The primary move that the city makes is to remove cars altogether and base transport purely on subways. I suspect this is a method to exploit the space otherwise taken up by roads for real estate allowing for an increased population per tile, however, it is a strategy that many cities—Sydney included—are seriously looking into. Remove motor vehicles, increase public transport. Seems like a sound idea.

It is interesting to see a world in which the lack of cars exists alongside a lack of freedom, and indeed may even be symptomatic of it. Oscala has created a system so “sustainable” that citizens are chained to their city blocks; they’re able to access the rest of the city through mass transit, but in effect have been relieved of the need to do so by the ruthless efficiency of their cookie-cutter “neighborhoods.”

Maybe — all right, probably — this is effective because the game engine is warped. Super Colossal concludes that “Ultimately, Magnasanti has little to do with urban design and everything to do with gaming systems for maximum reward.”

I can’t help but think that Magnasanti represents a semi-realistic dark side of centralized urban planning: the tools of modern construction and city planning as wielded by a despotic madman bent on maximizing population at any cost. Creativity, vibrancy and nature itself are cast away as a focus on efficiency and the bottom line are elevated to a religion and a science.

And of course, the police force are ever-present, just in case disorder begins to stir.

As Oscala explained in an interview with Viceland, Magnasanti represents a “cage” in which he has imprisoned six million “economic slaves”. He utilized the geometry of the Buddhist Wheel of Life and Death as further symbolic comment on the topic.

Technically, no one is leaving or coming into the city. Population growth is stagnant. Sims don’t need to travel long distances, because their workplace is just within walking distance. In fact they do not even need to leave their own block. Wherever they go it’s like going to the same place.

There are a lot of other problems in the city hidden under the illusion of order and greatness: Suffocating air pollution, high unemployment, no fire stations, schools, or hospitals, a regimented lifestyle – this is the price that these sims pay for living in the city with the highest population. It’s a sick and twisted goal to strive towards.

The ironic thing about it is the sims in Magnasanti tolerate it. They don’t rebel, or cause revolutions and social chaos. No one considers challenging the system by physical means since a hyper-efficient police state keeps them in line. They have all been successfully dumbed down, sickened with poor health, enslaved and mind-controlled just enough to keep this system going for thousands of years. 50,000 years to be exact. They are all imprisoned in space and time.

The Mammoth blog calls Magnasanti “An intentionally hellish vision which exploits the game’s internal logic as commentary.”

Oscala adds that “if we make maximizing profits the absolute objective, we fail to take into consideration the social and environmental consequences.”

At the very least, it’s delicious food for thought for would-be urban planners and simulation gamers.

Further reading and sources:

Viceland: The Totalitarian Buddhist Who Beat Sim City
Mammoth: Magnasanti
Super Colossal: Pay to Click Get Rich Quick: Urbanism and the Ideal SimCity
Imperar’s Millionaire Experiment: Who is Imperar?

Mildly related: The Power Broker and The Death and Life of Great American Cities

I recently watched one of the most frightening, thought-provoking films I’ve ever seen.

It is called “Threads,” and it’s a 1984 BBC teleplay depicting the after-effects of a massive worldwide nuclear conflict.

The Cold War setting of this film may be a bit dated, and the British lingo may be a bit confusing for the American audience…but neither of these factors detracts from the horror and mind-blowing realism that this film will blast upside your dome.

Pretty much what this film comes down to is that if countries start nuking each other, we are all completely screwed. It doesn’t flinch at showing the effects of megaton blasts, radiation poisoning, and the dark side of human nature as society breaks down. It does not have an ending laden with hope for a brighter future.

The comments on Youtube, where this film has been posted for easy viewing, are filled with British folks talking about how they saw this film as children and were scarred for life.

I warn you, don’t watch this movie if you are a little bitch…you may never recover from the fright.

“Threads” initially focuses on two young lovers, Jimmy and Ruth, who have no idea that their world is about to be ripped apart by geopolitical brinksmanship.

An interesting element of the film is its depiction of civil society’s attempt to manage a post-nuclear crisis event, and the ultimate futility of that enterprise.

As West and East move slowly towards all-out war, some people are closely following the situation, while others just ignore it. Voices of protest are drowned out by patriotic chest-beating. Many people don’t really want to think about what a nuclear war will entail.

The Americans and the Russians begin open combat, and people begin to freak out. Trade unionists are jailed along with other “subversives.” The country braces for nuclear war.

As disaster looms, you may find yourself rooting for the attack to happen: “Let’s DO THIS already!” That’s how I felt, anyway. Trust me, you will regret this emotion soon enough.

(The moment in the previous segment where a woman pees her pants in terror is actually how I came to discover “Threads.” It was recently the subject of a post on The Awl that mentions “the saddest IMDB page in existence.”)

Just in case you thought the worst was over once the nearby RAF base was nuked, the Commies decide to hit Sheffield directly, as 3000 megatons explode worldwide. Bad times.

A Youtube commenter notes that at this point, “Threads” is setting a new standard for disturbing cinema: “This is scary, makes Alien 3 and The Terminator look like Spongebob Squarepants.”

A week after the attack, things have only gotten more effed up. The scene in the hospital in the following clip might be the most brutal part of this entire film.

At this point, all hell has broken loose. Looters raid homes and kill anyone they find. Police summarily execute prisoners. The only valuable goods left are food supplies and the ability to labor. If you can work, you might survive.

This is where it gets incredibly shitty and unfair. Even if your region of the Northern Hemisphere didn’t get nuke or get nuked, you’re still completely screwed because nuclear winter sets in. You’ve heard of “natural childbirth,” but this is as real as shit gets.

The characters we met before the war are almost completely wiped out within a decade after the attack. Language and culture erode to the vanishing point as memories of a time before armageddon are erased.

(I’m pretty sure this segment contains an subtle hint at the mysterious fate of one of the main characters. Listen for a music cue towards the end.)

Ready for a horrifying ending? Here you go.

There’s not a lot to say after watching that, but if you’re like me and enjoy incredibly dark, apocalyptic visions, here’s a high-quality review from DVD Outsider that gives props to the people who created this film. I have excerpted the review here as best I could, there’s so much great info that I didn’t want to cut too much out. Read and be schooled:

Threads takes a very sobering and sometimes harrowing look at the effects of a nuclear war on the people of Sheffield. Though open from the start about its status as drama, it nonetheless utilises many of the codes and conventions of the documentary genre to ground the action in a very persuasive reality. Memorable incidents from Watkins’ film are recreated here – the enforced post-war billeting of homeless survivors with uncooperative house owners, the shooting of looters, the shell-shocked faces of the injured and traumatised, even the extracts from the government’s Protect and Survive information film – but this is hardly surprising given that they were working from largely the same source material and with the same purpose in mind…

The intricate and informed script was by Barry Hines, who writes almost exclusively from a working-class perspective, and this is carried over into the structure and characters of Threads. Those who start the war, who launch the missiles, who attempt to organise what remains in the aftermath are never shown, as Hines concentrates exclusively on the effect events have on ordinary people. The only officials shown are those of the local emergency committee, themselves common folk who quickly discover that they are out of their depth.

This is very effectively illustrated in the build-up, with information of the impending conflict caught in brief glimpses of newspaper headlines and radio and TV broadcasts as a kitchen-sink family drama plays out in the foreground, inevitably recalling Hines’ work with Ken Loach, emphasised by the use of actor Phil Askham, so memorable in The Gamekeeper and Looks and Smiles, in a support role. Like The War Game, Threads also delivers a string of sobering facts and figures through on-screen graphics and voice-over, its ace-in-the-hole here being narrator Paul Vaughan, whose voice was at the time of broadcast familiar to the viewing public through his extensive work on the BBC’s prestigious scientific documentary series Horizon.

Where Threads and The War Game walk hand-in-hand is in their sheer power as persuasive film-making. If Hines provides the structural foundations, then they are built on to extraordinary effect by director Mick Jackson, a man who has since been swallowed up by Hollywood, but who was once one of British TV’s most crucial talents, directing the breezily seductive A Very British Coup in 1988, and what we here at Outsider regard as the very greatest TV movie of all time, Life Story, in 1987. Never wasting a shot, Jackson’s potent but economical use of imagery and sometimes razor-sharp editing (courtesy of Jim Latham and Donna Bickerstaff) communicating the very real horror of the events as much through suggestion as direct exposure.

Individual images linger long after the film has ended – the nuclear explosion seen from the streets of Sheffield, the woman who wets herself in the street in terror, the screaming panic that is cut off halfway by a second blast, the body of a loved one left upstairs to rot, the shell-shocked girl staring directly at the camera cuddling a teddy bear in place of the baby she has presumably lost, the stark gloom of the nuclear winter that follows.

The final third is as dark as any television I can remember, as the population is reduced to medieval numbers and the absolute basics of existence, even language itself mutating into a localised but limited collection of short, monosyllabic survival phrases. A brief flicker of hope towards the end soon fades, grimly upturned in a chillingly suggestive finale that cuts to black just before a scream of horror not just for personal loss, but for the very future of mankind, if indeed it has one. You are left stunned, as you should be, and if the years have distanced us a little from a time when the events described here seemed frighteningly possible, the film contains, tucked away in those half-caught broadcasts in the first half, an all-too pertinent warning. Here the flashpoint for nuclear annihilation is not the Cold War favourite of Berlin, but Iran, the very country that American and British politicians are at this moment issuing guarded warnings to regarding their nuclear programme. The Berlin wall may have fallen, but in too many other respects the world is still too ready for war.

This is why people who play politics in opposition to global nuclear disarmament piss me off…

We should thank our lucky stars that our world isn’t as close to nuclear apocalypse as it used to be, but we are still FAR too close to making “Threads” a reality.

Hippies everywhere are in agony: the skeptics of anthropogenic global warming have loaded their rhetorical quivers with stolen emails from the East Anglia Climate Research Unit.

Many are calling the email evidence “Climate-gate,” but I think people who affix “-gate” to every scandal are part of a scandalous confederacy of dunces that I like to call Watergate-was-not-a-scandal-involving-water-you-idiots!-gate.

The now-notorious emails don’t prove that anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming is a hoax, as some have asserted; but they are extremely bad publicity for the climate-change lobby on the eve of an epic summit in Copenhagen.

With the global economy in shambles, the appetite for a tax on carbon (don’t give me this “cap and trade is a free market” nonsense) has waned in the United States; meanwhile, rising powers like China and India are loath to arrest their growing fossil fuel consumption.

But one country stands to benefit not only from maintaining the global energy status quo, but potentially from global warming itself: Russia, a major purveyor of fossil fuels that would be able to unlock vast fuel deposits in the Arctic Circle if ice melting trends continue apace.

They wouldn’t mind if those notorious Russian winters eased up a little, either.

That’s why it’s really no surprise that the hackers who stole emails from the East Anglia CRU were very likely on the payroll of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB).

Guess who was the first director of the FSB, after it rose from the ashes of the KGB? The same guy who still pulls the strings there and everywhere else in Russia: Vladimir Freaking Putin.

Don’t you get it, people?! Putin masterminded the whole thing to derail the Copenhagen conference and increase his vast oil wealth!

Hippies 0, Putin 1,000,000!

Is the climatology scandal really that big of a deal?

Scientifically: not really. Politically: possibly.

A revved-up James Fallows dissects Page One stories from the NY Times and Washington Post on the topic, noting that the NYT frames the issue in terms of “science vs. ignorance,” while the WaPo is fixated on the “-gate” style scandal and gives equal time to the skeptics.

Fallows thinks this is a case-study-level example of crappy journalism on the part of the WaPo. But as ROTI tipster C. Dave (who forwarded Fallows’ article along) points out, the NYT is addressing the issue to its global audience of intellectual citizens, while the WaPo is reporting from its position as the pre-eminent source for Washington political news.

This issue SHOULD be seen differently through those disparate lenses, because it impacts very differently in each sphere.

As ALWAYS, Jon Stewart and his Daily Show crew delivered one of the more incisive looks at the matter:

Anyone who takes a hard, serious look at the substance of the climate controversy [I don't want to belabor the issue since it's not exactly breaking news, but here is a good overview] can see that the hacked emails don’t debunk anthropogenic global warming. They merely reveal top climate scientists speaking frankly about their efforts to assert their arguments in the intellectual realm. There’s nothing wrong with that.

However, the stolen emails ARE news because they indirectly raise concerns about the anthropogenic global warming consensus that lies behind the Copenhagen conference, the Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill pending before the US Congress, and all other efforts to squelch carbon emissions worldwide.

Some scientists arguing that human-caused global warming presents a threat to human life and civilization have played fast and loose with the facts before. Take the notorious “hockey stick graph,” which received prominent play in the work of Al Gore and the UN International Panel on Climate Change’s influential reports:

The “hockey stick” appeared to show that temperatures were skyrocketing at an unprecedented pace. Unfortunately for the scientists and politicians that promoted it, it turned out to be based on cherry-picked data. Most notably, it denies the existence of the Medieval Warm Period, which is supported by significant evidence (but does not, it’s important to note, disprove anthropogenic warming either).

What I find most bothersome about the hockey stick graph, when taken in concert with the leaked emails, is that scientists who had questions about the graph were given a gigantic runaround by the researchers who promoted it.

Their concerns later turned out to be entirely legitimate.

The emails demonstrate efforts by the East Anglia scientists to not just disprove but effectively crush the opposition, by leading vocal protests against any peer-reviewed publications that dared run skeptical papers, and by elbowing those papers out of consideration in IPCC discussions.

Since the case for marshaling all of humanity’s resources to battle anthropogenic global warming is so often based on a supposedly rock-solid scientific consensus that only a creationist or nincompoop would question, it is somewhat disturbing to note an apparent pattern among some top climatologists to squelch dissenting voices and to refuse to share the data upon which their conclusions are based.

While there is clearly a strong scientific consensus that has coalesced around the argument that man’s carbon contributions to the atmosphere are accelerating a warming effect that threatens the environmental status quo, this is not the same thing as DEFINITIVE PROOF that carbon emissions will kill us all. In this context, treating skeptics as lunatics or charlatans is no way to conduct good science.

I firmly agree with Marc Ambinder’s take on the matter:

Climate change scientists aren’t blameless. The future of planet earth is at stake, and while the evidence is on their side, they’ve also conceived of and executed a public relations campaign to convince the public and policymakers of the urgency of the problem. In doing so, they’ve simplified conclusions, at times, or deliberately pointed to worst case scenarios when the middle of the bell curve would do just fine. The science has remained cumulative and solid, but the selling of this science hasn’t — and that, if anything else, fuels the critics.

Ultimately, the East Anglia email controversy is significant because it reveals that top climate scientists are not perfect, and that their arguments should not be accepted with unthinking obeisance.

More importantly, though, it has lit a fire under those who want to see the Copenhagen talks fail. That’s why the East Anglia computers were hacked, and that’s why certain emails were cherry-picked to cause a maximum firestorm.

Passing laws in the United States to combat global warming will not be an easy task…to say nothing of convincing still-developing superpowers like China and India to scale back their emissions. Scientific consensus does not equate with political consensus, even at a time when there is significant evidence for anthropogenic warming. The leaked emails go right for the soft spot of the political case.

Ambinder, again:

Domestically, it is going to be difficult for the administration to convince Congress to take another vote on climate change legislation in 2010. In mounting a campaign against the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill in the House, the business lobby was very successful in scaring the bejeezus out of moderate Democrats. Today, they argue that cap-and-trade legislation amounts to a “tax” and that India or China — which won’t have to curb its emissions by the same magnitude — will steal hundreds of thousands of U.S. jobs.

Dealing in probabilities here, is it preferable to accept a short-term anchor on economic growth in order to improve the health of the commons? Is this a political sustainable vote? It is not clear whether, in 2010, there are enough Democrats who will say yes. That’s one reason why Congress will probably wait until the economy improves.

If the leaked emails turn just a few “yes”es to “no”es, it’s a big win for the status quo.

This is what happens when the liberal West tries to take on Czar Vladimir and his army of digital ninjas...

The UN’s IPCC is obviously reeling from this PR firestorm at what they hoped to be their finest hour.

Putin’s cyber spies stuck it to them when they least expected it; Russia had supposedly taken a more accepting stance on global warming in recent months.

They have wasted no time fingering a suspect for the hacking mischief that has distracted the world from the effort to cut carbon emissions:

The computer hack, said a senior member of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change, was not an amateur job, but a highly sophisticated, politically motivated operation. And others went further. The guiding hand behind the leaks, the allegation went, was that of the Russian secret services.

The leaked emails, which claimed to provide evidence that the unit’s head, Professor Phil Jones, colluded with colleagues to manipulate data and hide “unhelpful” research from critics of climate change science, were originally posted on a server in the Siberian city of Tomsk, at a firm called Tomcity, an internet security business.

The FSB security services, descendants of the KGB, are believed to invest significant resources in hackers, and the Tomsk office has a record of issuing statements congratulating local students on hacks aimed at anti-Russian voices, deeming them “an expression of their position as citizens, and one worthy of respect”. The Kremlin has also been accused of running co-ordinated cyber attacks against websites in neighbouring countries such as Estonia, with which the Kremlin has frosty relations, although the allegations were never proved.

“It’s very common for hackers in Russia to be paid for their services,” Professor Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, the vice chairman of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change, said in Copenhagen at the weekend. “It’s a carefully made selection of emails and documents that’s not random. This is 13 years of data, and it’s not a job of amateurs.”

While the world warms, Russia hopes to reap the profits, both now and in the future.

Quoth Putin, “an increase of two or three degrees wouldn’t be so bad for a northern country like Russia. We could spend less on fur coats, and the grain harvest would go up.”

More importantly, he could unlock more black gold in the frozen tundra:

Much of Russia’s vast oil and gas reserves lie in difficult-to-access areas of the far North. One school of thought is that Russia, unlike most countries, would have little to fear from global warming, because these deposits would suddenly become much easier and cheaper to access.

It is this, goes the theory, that underlies the Kremlin’s ambivalent attitudes towards global warming; they remain lukewarm on the science underpinning climate change, knowing full well that if global warming does change the world’s climate, billions of dollars of natural resources will become accessible. Another motivating factor could be that Russia simply does not want to spend the vast sums of money that would be required to modernise and “greenify” Russia’s ageing factories.

Putin is a sly devil.

While we all drown in a horrific Waterworld dystopia, he will reap massive profits and build a giant yacht fueled by the tears of Chechens. He’ll sail the seas, listening to ABBA, cuddling with nubile models and occasionally nuking any interloper who comes near.

Global warming may destroy civilization, but rest assured, Putin will still triumph.

GIZMODO put out a post yesterday about this amazing creation.

It’s a robot made out of Legos that can read and solve Sudoku puzzles.

The really cool things about this robot are (a) it’s made out of Legos (b) it writes numbers with an awesome script (c) it solves the puzzle in approximately 2 seconds…most of the work is just scanning the paper (d) when it’s done, it says, “Game ovah” in a cheeky British accent.

It’s the work of Swedish hacker Hans Andersson.

It was originally set up for people who operate popular channels on the site, but every so often Google has reached out to people like the dad who recorded “David After Dentist” to share the wealth.

Now, they’re making it an official policy. From now on, the creators of  extremely popular YouTube videos will be invited to set up AdSense accounts and profit off of the advertising from the millions of views they’re racking up.

According to the Google Blog, “These individual video partnerships recognize the role popular “one-off” videos play on YouTube, and have helped many people earn thousands of dollars a month as their videos went viral and endured over time.”

We decided it was time to spread the wealth. Today we’re excited to announce that we’re extending the YouTube Partnership Program to include individual popular videos on our site. Now, when you upload a video to YouTube that accumulates lots of views, we may invite you to monetize that video and start earning revenue from it. To determine whether a particular video is eligible for monetization, we look at factors like the number of views, the video’s virality and compliance with the YouTube Terms of Service. If your video is eligible for monetization, you will receive an email and see an “Enable Revenue Sharing” message next to your video on the watch page, as well as in other places in your account.

This is a cool move by Google.

No idea how much money you could actually make off a viral video, but hopefully it was enough to buy David an ice cream or something for his brilliant performance.

“Over near Chancellorsville, where the whipporwills began calling plaintively soon after sunset, now as then, the mood was much the same. The fighting had been heaviest around here last year, and there still were many signs of it, including skeletons in rotted blue, washed partly out of their shallow graves by the rains of the past winter. No one but the devil himself would choose such ground for a field of battle, veterans said; the devil and old man Lee.

In an artillery park near the ruin of the Chancellor mansion, which had burned to its brick foundations on the second day of conflict, a visiting infantryman looked glumly at a weathered skull that stared back with empty sockets, grinning a lipless grin. He prodded it with his boot, then turned to his comrades – saying “you and “you, ” not “we and “us,” for every soldier is superstitious about foretelling his own death, having seen such words come true too many times – and delivered himself a prediction. “This is what you are all coming to,” he told them, “and some of you will start toward it tomorrow.” Shelby Foote, The Civil War

The Battle of the Wilderness was the first confrontation between Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee.

It was the beginning of a grueling campaign that lasted six weeks. Instead of confronting Lee directly, as his predecessors had attempted with disastrous results, Grant began a series of side-steps to force Lee to defend Petersburg, Richmond’s main supply base.

This strategy required an iron will. Lee first forced Grant to fight in the tangled woods of the Wilderness, treacherous terrain that favored the defenders. It was the place where Lee had inflicted huge casualties on the Union army one year earlier, in the Battle of Chancellorsville. Grant did not back down: “If any opportunity presents itself for pitching into a part of Lee’s army, do so without giving time for disposition,” he told his subordinates.

The battle began with Union General Hancock attacking from the right and whipping up on Confederate Gen. A.P. Hill’s forces, but a devastating counterattack led by General Longstreet seriously damaged Hancock’s men and forced them to retreat. All the while, a bloody stalemate raged on the Union left.

At one point during the battle, General Lee attempted to lead a charge into the fray but was held back by his men. The battle was mayhem, with no clear front or rear, and desperate fighting in the tangled wilderness, and great volumes of blood shed. In the confusion, Longstreet was shot and seriously wounded by his own troops; on the Union side, General Sedgwick was sniped by Conferate sharpshooters after claiming, “They couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance.”

When the fighting finally died down, a great brush fire raged through the forest, burning hundreds of wounded soldiers alive while the two armies witnessed their horrible fate.

7,500 Confederate soldiers were lost. Over 15,000 Union troops were killed or wounded. The fighting ended in a virtual draw; a tactical victory for the Confederates, but ultimately part of a strategically victorious campaign by the Army of the Potomac.

Grant was not deterred by the losses, as every Union General had been before, and continued his bloody assault on the Confederate army, steadily moving to the left. With each move, Lee inflicted massive casualties, but Grant ignored his growing reputation as a “butcher” and proceeded stubbornly towards the Virginia cities that Lee could not fail to defend. When he began to threaten Petersburg, Lee had no choice but to occupy it.

Grant then besieged Lee in Petersburg and ultimately forced his capitulation after forcing him out of the city and on the run.

The Battle of the Wilderness is a vital chapter in the Civil War, and marked the beginning of a bloody campaign that the Union required three brutal years to steel itself for. Attempts to defeat Lee and his brilliant subordinates with a frontal assaults on their own terrain was a strategy that had repeatedly failed. An entrenched pattern of backing off after serious bloodshed was ruinous to Union war aims and morale. The only way to win the Civil War was to break Lee’s supply lines, while being able to stomach the massive casualties this task would require.

Grant was the first leader of the Army of the Potomac with the stones to defeat the Army of Northern Virginia, and he announced his intentions to do so in the Wilderness.

The battlefield is a monument to the most merciless fighting of the war; a place where the bitterest determination of both sides was put to a test.

With all that said, doesn’t the battlefield sound like an awesome place to put a Walmart?

Historian James McPherson (“Battle Cry of Freedom”) was unrestrained in his criticism of the plan:

To commemorate the bloody struggle, portions of the Wilderness — which is near Locust Grove, Va., in Orange County — were set aside as a national military park. However, just 21 percent of the battlefield is permanently protected; other key areas are privately held and vulnerable to development.

This vulnerability became apparent when Wal-Mart Stores Inc. announced plans to build a 138,000-square-foot superstore on historically sensitive land directly across the road from the national park. The store would sit on a hill overlooking key parts of the battlefield, looming over a national treasure.

Preservationists are not opposed to Wal-Mart opening a superstore in the region. A coalition of national and local conservation groups has merely asked Wal-Mart to choose a different location. Together with more than 250 other historians, I signed a letter to the company in support of that idea. We wrote that “the Wilderness is an indelible part of our history, its very ground hallowed by the American blood spilled there, and it cannot be moved. Surely Wal-Mart can identify a site that would meet its needs without changing the very character of the battlefield.”

“Wilderness Wal-Mart” supporters argue that because the proposed store site lies just beyond the park, it lacks historic significance, a profound misunderstanding of the nature of history. In the heat of battle, no unseen hand kept soldiers inside what would one day be a national park. Such boundaries are artificial, modern constructions shaped by external factors, and they have little bearing on what is or is not historic. To assume the park boundary at the Wilderness encompasses every acre of significant ground is to believe that the landscape beyond the borders of Yosemite National Park instantly ceases to be majestic.

Many Civil War buffs and preservation supporters protested the development plans, including Virginia Governor Tim Kaine and the great Robert Duvall.

To no avail, as the Orange County Board of Supervisors approved the permit for the Walmart on Tuesday, by a 4-1 vote.

Coming soon, the Gettysburg Battlefield Home Depot.

“Walmart doesn’t care about American history,” sneered the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, and pointed out that after all, these are the same people who willingly decorate cakes for Nazis.