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#70's exploitation films
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Thriller – A Cruel Picture (1973)
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666frames · 1 month
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Death Game (1977)
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graveyardrabbit · 8 months
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"What do the lines mean, Andrés?" "They show us how many days we have been lost."
Cyclone (1978) dir. René Cardona Jr.
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dinkysdirtcinema · 1 year
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#19 - Deep Red (Profondo Rosso)
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Check out Dinky’s Dirt Cinema for more deep cuts into the bowels of cult cinema.
Bonus Feature:
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Goblin perform Profondo Rosso on Italian TV.
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midnightb-movies · 1 year
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Fiebre (1971, dir: Armando Bó)
Isabel Sarli such a goddess, glad that Armando Bó turned her into a muse of his weird films.
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cleopatrachampagne · 2 years
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vampyres, 1974 (dir. josé ramón larraz)
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iamcinema · 7 months
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Drive-In Massacre (1987)
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beer69 · 1 year
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Switchblade Sisters and She-Devils On Wheels double feature
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decadebattle · 11 days
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Which decade had the better movies?
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The 1970's was the beginning of Hollywood's silver age. Films were becoming more gritty and realistic. This was the birth of the Hollywood blockbuster, and there was also a big market for independent films. Exploitation, grindhouse, Blacksploitation, independent horror and more.
Popular movies of the 70's include: Star Wars. Enter the Dragon, Alien, Jesus Christ Superstar, Up in Smoke, Fantastic Planet, Saturday Night Fever, The Godfather, The Exorcist, Dolemite and Grease.
The 1930's was the beginning of Hollywood's golden age. Silent films were on their way out in the beginning of the decade and talkies soon took over. This was the decade of the studios and big Hollywood stars. When people think of Hollywood, they're often thinking of the 1930's aesthetic.
Popular movies of the 1930's include: The Wizard of Oz, Frankenstein, Dracula, Gone With the Wind, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Modern Times, King Kong, Freaks, The Public Enemy and Bringing Up Baby.
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andmaybegayer · 6 months
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What are some of the coolest computer chips ever, in your opinion?
Hmm. There are a lot of chips, and a lot of different things you could call a Computer Chip. Here's a few that come to mind as "interesting" or "important", or, if I can figure out what that means, "cool".
If your favourite chip is not on here honestly it probably deserves to be and I either forgot or I classified it more under "general IC's" instead of "computer chips" (e.g. 555, LM, 4000, 7000 series chips, those last three each capable of filling a book on their own). The 6502 is not here because I do not know much about the 6502, I was neither an Apple nor a BBC Micro type of kid. I am also not 70 years old so as much as I love the DEC Alphas, I have never so much as breathed on one.
Disclaimer for writing this mostly out of my head and/or ass at one in the morning, do not use any of this as a source in an argument without checking.
Intel 3101
So I mean, obvious shout, the Intel 3101, a 64-bit chip from 1969, and Intel's first ever product. You may look at that, and go, "wow, 64-bit computing in 1969? That's really early" and I will laugh heartily and say no, that's not 64-bit computing, that is 64 bits of SRAM memory.
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This one is cool because it's cute. Look at that. This thing was completely hand-designed by engineers drawing the shapes of transistor gates on sheets of overhead transparency and exposing pieces of crudely spun silicon to light in a """"cleanroom"""" that would cause most modern fab equipment to swoon like a delicate Victorian lady. Semiconductor manufacturing was maturing at this point but a fab still had more in common with a darkroom for film development than with the mega expensive building sized machines we use today.
As that link above notes, these things were really rough and tumble, and designs were being updated on the scale of weeks as Intel learned, well, how to make chips at an industrial scale. They weren't the first company to do this, in the 60's you could run a chip fab out of a sufficiently well sealed garage, but they were busy building the background that would lead to the next sixty years.
Lisp Chips
This is a family of utterly bullshit prototype processors that failed to be born in the whirlwind days of AI research in the 70's and 80's.
Lisps, a very old but exceedingly clever family of functional programming languages, were the language of choice for AI research at the time. Lisp compilers and interpreters had all sorts of tricks for compiling Lisp down to instructions, and also the hardware was frequently being built by the AI researchers themselves with explicit aims to run Lisp better.
The illogical conclusion of this was attempts to implement Lisp right in silicon, no translation layer.
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Yeah, that is Sussman himself on this paper.
These never left labs, there have since been dozens of abortive attempts to make Lisp Chips happen because the idea is so extremely attractive to a certain kind of programmer, the most recent big one being a pile of weird designd aimed to run OpenGenera. I bet you there are no less than four members of r/lisp who have bought an Icestick FPGA in the past year with the explicit goal of writing their own Lisp Chip. It will fail, because this is a terrible idea, but damn if it isn't cool.
There were many more chips that bridged this gap, stuff designed by or for Symbolics (like the Ivory series of chips or the 3600) to go into their Lisp machines that exploited the up and coming fields of microcode optimization to improve Lisp performance, but sadly there are no known working true Lisp Chips in the wild.
Zilog Z80
Perhaps the most important chip that ever just kinda hung out. The Z80 was almost, almost the basis of The Future. The Z80 is bizzare. It is a software compatible clone of the Intel 8080, which is to say that it has the same instructions implemented in a completely different way.
This is, a strange choice, but it was the right one somehow because through the 80's and 90's practically every single piece of technology made in Japan contained at least one, maybe two Z80's even if there was no readily apparent reason why it should have one (or two). I will defer to Cathode Ray Dude here: What follows is a joke, but only barely
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The Z80 is the basis of the MSX, the IBM PC of Japan, which was produced through a system of hardware and software licensing to third party manufacturers by Microsoft of Japan which was exactly as confusing as it sounds. The result is that the Z80, originally intended for embedded applications, ended up forming the basis of an entire alternate branch of the PC family tree.
It is important to note that the Z80 is boring. It is a normal-ass chip but it just so happens that it ended up being the focal point of like a dozen different industries all looking for a cheap, easy to program chip they could shove into Appliances.
Effectively everything that happened to the Intel 8080 happened to the Z80 and then some. Black market clones, reverse engineered Soviet compatibles, licensed second party manufacturers, hundreds of semi-compatible bastard half-sisters made by anyone with a fab, used in everything from toys to industrial machinery, still persisting to this day as an embedded processor that is probably powering something near you quietly and without much fuss. If you have one of those old TI-86 calculators, that's a Z80. Oh also a horrible hybrid Z80/8080 from Sharp powered the original Game Boy.
I was going to try and find a picture of a Z80 by just searching for it and look at this mess! There's so many of these things.
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I mean the C/PM computers. The ZX Spectrum, I almost forgot that one! I can keep making this list go! So many bits of the Tech Explosion of the 80's and 90's are powered by the Z80. I was not joking when I said that you sometimes found more than one Z80 in a single computer because you might use one Z80 to run the computer and another Z80 to run a specialty peripheral like a video toaster or music synthesizer. Everyone imaginable has had their hand on the Z80 ball at some point in time or another. Z80 based devices probably launched several dozen hardware companies that persist to this day and I have no idea which ones because there were so goddamn many.
The Z80 eventually got super efficient due to process shrinks so it turns up in weird laptops and handhelds! Zilog and the Z80 persist to this day like some kind of crocodile beast, you can go to RS components and buy a brand new piece of Z80 silicon clocked at 20MHz. There's probably a couple in a car somewhere near you.
Pentium (P5 microarchitecture)
Yeah I am going to bring up the Hackers chip. The Pentium P5 series is currently remembered for being the chip that Acidburn geeks out over in Hackers (1995) instead of making out with her boyfriend, but it is actually noteworthy IMO for being one of the first mainstream chips to start pulling serious tricks on the system running it.
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The P5 comes out swinging with like four or five tricks to get around the numerous problems with x86 and deploys them all at once. It has superscalar pipelining, it has a RISC microcode, it has branch prediction, it has a bunch of zany mathematical optimizations, none of these are new per se but this is the first time you're really seeing them all at once on a chip that was going into PC's.
Without these improvements it's possible Intel would have been beaten out by one of its competitors, maybe Power or SPARC or whatever you call the thing that runs on the Motorola 68k. Hell even MIPS could have beaten the ageing cancerous mistake that was x86. But by discovering the power of lying to the computer, Intel managed to speed up x86 by implementing it in a sensible instruction set in the background, allowing them to do all the same clever pipelining and optimization that was happening with RISC without having to give up their stranglehold on the desktop market. Without the P5 we live in a very, very different world from a computer hardware perspective.
From this falls many of the bizzare microcode execution bugs that plague modern computers, because when you're doing your optimization on the fly in chip with a second, smaller unix hidden inside your processor eventually you're not going to be cryptographically secure.
RISC is very clearly better for, most things. You can find papers stating this as far back as the 70's, when they start doing pipelining for the first time and are like "you know pipelining is a lot easier if you have a few small instructions instead of ten thousand massive ones.
x86 only persists to this day because Intel cemented their lead and they happened to use x86. True RISC cuts out the middleman of hyperoptimizing microcode on the chip, but if you can't do that because you've girlbossed too close to the sun as Intel had in the late 80's you have to do something.
The Future
This gets us to like the year 2000. I have more chips I find interesting or cool, although from here it's mostly microcontrollers in part because from here it gets pretty monotonous because Intel basically wins for a while. I might pick that up later. Also if this post gets any longer it'll be annoying to scroll past. Here is a sample from a post I have in my drafts since May:
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I have some notes on the weirdo PowerPC stuff that shows up here it's mostly interesting because of where it goes, not what it is. A lot of it ends up in games consoles. Some of it goes into mainframes. There is some of it in space. Really got around, PowerPC did.
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thinkingimages · 1 month
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A Derek Jarman film with music by Throbbing Gristle Derek Jarman used some of his 70s home movie footage to produce this wonderful piece of exploitational avantgarde cinema. Actually the original material has been slowed down to a speed of 3-6 frames, then Jarman added colour effects and the pulsating, menacing score by Industrial supergroup Throbbing Gristle The result is a piece of art not to dissimilar to Jarman’s painting work in using found footage as elements of memory and mind that resemble ideas reflected in the Cabala and in C.G. Jung`s writings about an archetypical past that is hidden in everyone of us. The first, In the Shadow of the Sun (1974-80), was originally put together by Jarman himself in 1974 from re-shot Super-8 material including footage from The Art of Mirrors and Journey to Avebury, amongst several others. The film was eventually blown-up to 35mm and premiered at the 1981 Berlin Film Festival. The focus on ritual, mysticism and obscure alchemical symbolism links it with the work of Anger. However, Jarman’s preference for the work of Carl Jung and the “white” magician John Dee, is quite distinct from Anger’s invocations of the “black” magician Alistair Crowley. – Jon Behrens
Extending the recent pagan theme, Ubuweb posts Derek Jarman’s determinedly occult and oneiric film, In the Shadow of the Sun (1980), notable for its soundtrack by Throbbing Gristle. This was the longest of Jarman’s films derived from Super-8 which he made throughout the 1970s between work as a production designer and his feature films. He never saw the low resolution, grain and scratches of Super-8 as a deficiency; on the contrary, for a painter it was a means to achieve with film stock some of the texture of painting. Michael O’Pray described the process and intent behind the film in Afterimage 12 (1985):
In 1973, Jarman shot the central sequences for his first lengthy film, and most ambitious to date, In the Shadow of the Sun, which in fact was not shown publicly until 1980, at the Berlin Film Festival. In the film he incorporated two early films, A Journey to Avebury a romantic landscape film, and The Magician (a.k.a. Tarot). The final sequences were shot on Fire Island in the following year. Fire Island survives as a separate film. In this period, Jarman had begun to express a mythology which he felt underpinned the film. He writes in Dancing Ledge of discovering “the key to the imagery that I had created quite unconsciously in the preceding months”, namely Jung’s Alchemical Studies and Seven Sermons to the Dead. He also states that these books “gave me the confidence to allow my dream-images to drift and collide at random”. The themes and ideas found in Jubilee, The Angelic Conversation, The Tempest and to some extent in Imagining October are powerfully distilled in In the Shadow of the Sun. Jarman’s obsession with the sun, fire and gold (which spilled over in the paintings he exhibited at the ICA in 1984) and an ancient mythology and poetics are compressed in In the Shadow of the Sun with its rich superimposition and painterly textures achieved through the degeneration “caused by the refilming of multiple images”. Jarman describes some of the ideas behind In the Shadow of the Sun:
“This is the way the Super-8s are structured from writing: the buried word-signs emphasize the fact that they convey a language. There is the image and the word, and the image of the word. The ‘poetry of fire’ relies on a treatment of word and object as equivalent: both are signs; both are luminous and opaque. The pleasure of Super-8 is the pleasure of seeing language put through the magic lantern.” Dancing Ledge p.129
John Coulthart
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666frames · 1 month
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Death Game (1977)
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whoiwanttoday · 2 months
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So the internet, or at least my parts of the internet, were abuzz with a new trailer for a Sydney Sweeney horror movie yesterday. We'll see how it goes. My hope is for something along the lines of the Pope's Exorcist, which is somehow played straight but very silly and just good trashy fun. My fear is it might take itself too seriously and just end up being bad. Watching the trailer it looks like it wants to be good but it does not look good. We'll see. I mean, either why I am down for Sydney Sweeney as a pregnant nun with demons and evil nuns and stuff. Well, probably I am. That's the thing that has me a little iffy, the entire exorcise played like a 70's Nunsploitation film but the high brow version for people too good for exploitation films. That I probably won't enjoy. If it's just trash I probably will. I won't prejudge it, I just think about these things and most people reading this probably haven't so you're welcome I guess. Today I want to fuck Sydney Sweeney.
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Republicans clueless as to why they don't have the youth vote . . .
climate protection reproductive health student debt gun safety affordable healthcare LGBTQ+ rights interracial marriage contraception voting rights marijuana money in politics police standards workers’ rights teaching accurate history, science and biology strong public schools support of teachers immigration issues
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The Summer of Climate Collapse
[That's Another Fine Mess :: TCinLA]
Fifty years ago, I decided that a Master of Public Administration degree would be useful in my expected career in government. In 1975, I obtained on of the first MPA degrees in the field of “Environmental Management.”
One of the books we read was “The Limits to Growth,” published by the Club of Rome, which detailed current enviornmental problems and forecast where they would be in 30 years of no action was taken, some action was taken, or effective action was taken. I rediscovered that book in a box in my garage 25 years ago and re-read it with the benefit of hindsight, since their 30 year period had just ended. In every case, no action had been taken, and in every case the current situation had been accurately forecast by the contributors to the book.
In 1967, historian Lynn White Jr.'s prescient "The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis" was published in "Science" magazine. His thesis was:
"In Antiquity every tree, every spring, every stream, every hill had its own genius loci, its guardian spirit. These spirits were accessible to men, but were very unlike men; centaurs, fauns, and mermaids show their ambivalence. Before one cut a tree, mined a mountain, or dammed a brook, it was important to placate the spirit in charge of that particular situation, and to keep it placated. By destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects."
Perhaps it’s fitting that during this summer of climate collapse - and if you think it’s something other than that, consider that June was Earth’s hottest month on record since the Permian Collapse - the event that brought on the Age of Dinosaurs after killing off 70% ofr species in the ocean and 80% of those on land - until the end of this month when the record will be broken by July, a record that will likely last another 31 days to the end of August. The atmosphere is warmer now than it’s been in 125,000 years, when our species was a few thousand individuals living a precarious existence on the edge of extinction in what is now South Africa .
That we are all transfixed not by this news but rather by the prospect of the United States falling to the machinations of a tenth-rate failed circus clown demonstrates the problem.
The initial success of Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” suggests Hollywood is finally ready to portray the American development and use of atomic weapons during World War II as something other than an absolute necessity. Unlike past movies, Nolan’s film points out that J. Robert Oppenheimer and many of his contemporaries knew they were ushering in an era where eradicating civilization had never been so easy
The parallels to climate change may not be obvious to people who don’t sit around pondering the end of the world, but I see them. Both climate change and ever-looming nuclear catastrophe are willful human creations driven by “progress” - one by scientific theory and research turbocharged by limitless wartime government resources, the other by oil-fueled industrialization. Both rationalized as necessary evils; climate change as a consequence of endless convenience for the human species, and nukes as guarantor of fragile world peace via “mutual assured destruction.”
It only took nearly 80 years to get to the point that National Mythology can be questioned in a commercially-successful film In all the time scientists have tried to focus our attention on climate change, they’ve had nothing as visually arresting as a single bomb instantly wiping out a city.
That has changed this summer.
We now have a global heat wave few could have envisioned even ten years ago, while the fossil fuel companies driving this destruction are coming off a year of record profits.
I wonder how this will be portrayed on screen 80 years from now.
The World Meteorological Organization expects temperatures in North America, Asia, North Africa and the Mediterranean to be above 40 Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) "for a prolonged number of days this summer." It also expects more frequent heatwaves, spread across the seasons.
The ocean around Florida hit a record temperature of 101 degrees this week. Warm water like that will produce a hurricane that could wipe Miami off the map, the equivalent of a nuclear bomb.
While the Southwest swelters under a heat dome, Vermont saw its second 100-year rainstorm in roughly a decade. Early July brought the hottest day globally since records began, a milestone surpassed the following day. Yesterday there was flooding across the northeast from Wisconsin to Maine.
As these temperature and weather records fall, Earth may be nearing so-called tipping points. A “tipping point” is where incremental steps along the same trajectory could push Earth’s systems into abrupt or irreversible change, leading to transformations that cannot be stopped even if emissions were suddenly halted.
If these tipping points are passed, some effects such as permafrost thawing or the world’s coral reefs dying - both are already happening in Siberia and the Central Pacific - will happen more quickly than expected. We don’t really know when or how fast things will fall apart.
Some natural systems, if upended, could herald a restructuring of the world. Take the Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica: It’s about the size of Florida, with a protruding ice shelf impeding the glacier’s flow into the ocean. Although the overall melt is slower than originally predicted, warm water is eating away at it from below, causing deep cracks. At a certain point, that melt may progress to become self-sustaining, which would guarantee the glacier’s eventual collapse. That will affect how much sea levels will rise; 80% of humans live near the ocean.
When melt from Greenland’s glaciers enters the ocean, it alters an important system of currents called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. The AMOC is a conveyor belt, drawing warm water from the tropics north. The water’s salinity increases as it evaporates, which, among other factors, makes it sink and return south along the ocean floor. As more glacial fresh water enters the system, that conveyor belt will weaken. Right now it’s the weakest it’s been in more than 1,000 years.
The Atlantic Ocean’s sensitive circulation system has become slower and less resilient, according to a new analysis of 150 years of temperature data — raising the possibility that this crucial element of the climate system could collapse within the next few decades.
Consider that: Paris and London are at the same latitude as Hudson’s Bay, yet Europe has the climate it does because of the AMOC - we commonly call it the Gulf Stream - which brings warm water in contact with cold air, resulting in the clouds and rain that provide for all living things there. If that collapses, life in Europe could soon resemble that of northern Canada. Right now, Europe can grow enough food to feed its 740+ million people; if the AMOC was to die, the continent could be plunged into famine in a matter of years.
The study published this last Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications suggests that continued warming will push the AMOC over its “tipping point” around 2050-2080. The shift would be as abrupt and irreversible as turning off a light switch, and it could lead to dramatic changes in weather on both sides of the Atlantic, leading to a drop in temperatures in northern Europe and elevated warming in the tropics, as well as stronger storms on the east coast of North America.
If the temperature of the sea surface changes, precipitation over the Amazon might too, contributing to deforestation, which in turn is linked to snowfall on the Tibetan plateau.
A new study published in Nature Communications last week titled “Warning of a Forthcoming Collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation” reports global warming forced by all the CO2 and methane in our atmosphere - if we action is not taken immediately - could shut down the AMOC as early as 2025 and almost certainly before 2095.
We may not even realize when we start passing points of no return—or if we already have.
James Hansen, one of the early voices on climate and the founder of 350.org, says measures to mitigate the crisis may ironically now contribute to it. A working paper he published this spring suggests that reduction in sulfate aerosol particles—the air pollution associated with burning coal and the global shipping industry—has contributed to warmer temperatures because these particles cause water droplets to multiply, brightening clouds and reflecting solar heat away from the planet’s surface. Hansen predicts that environmentally minded policies to reduce these pollutants will likely cause temperatures to rise 2 degrees Celsius by 2050.
This adds to a growing body of alarming climate science, like the one published last year in the Journal of Climate titled “Sixfold Increase in Historical Northern Hemisphere Concurrent Large Heatwaves Driven by Warming and Changing Atmospheric Circulations,” which indicates we’re much farther down the path of dangerous climate change than even most scientists realized.
That study essentially predicted this year’s shocking Northern Hemisphere heat waves. The lead researcher’s first name is Cassandra.
Perhaps most alarming was a paper published eleven months ago in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) titled “Evidence for Massive Methane Hydrate Destabilization During the Penultimate Interglacial Warming.”
It brings up the topic of the “Clathrate Gun Hypothesis,”which is the absolute worst case scenario for humanity’s future.
Across the planet there are an estimated 1.4 trillion tons of methane gas frozen into a snowcone-like slurry called clathrates or methane hydrates laying on the sea floor off the various continents. When they suddenly melt, that’s the “firing of the gun.” An explosion - in the context of geologic time - of atmospheric gas that’s over 70 times as potent a greenhouse gas as CO2. The Clathrate Gun.
The PNAS paper mentioned above concludes that 126,000 years ago there was an event that caused a small amount of these clathrates to warm enough to turn to gas and bubble up out of the seas. The resulting spike in methane gas led to a major warming event worldwide:
“Our results identify an exceptionally large warming of the equatorial Atlantic intermediate waters and strong evidence of methane release and oxidation almost certainly due to massive methane hydrate destabilization during the early part of the penultimate warm episode (126,000 to 125,000 y ago). This major warming was caused by … a brief episode of meltwater-induced weakening of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) and amplified by a warm mean climate.”
The researchers warn we may be looking at a similar event in our time:
“This week, sea surface temperatures along the coasts of Southern Spain and North Africa were 2-4C (3.6-7.2F) higher than they would normally be at this time of year, with some spots 5C (9F) above the long-term average.”
This has never happened before while humans have existed.
The least likely but most dangerous outcome scenario is that the warming ocean might begin a massive melting of those methane hydrate slurries into gas, producing a “burp” of that greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, further adding to global warming, which would then melt even more of the clathrates.
At the end of the Permian, 250 million years ago, this runaway process led to such a violent warming of the planet that it killed over 90 percent of all life in the oceans and 70 percent of all life on land, paving the way for the rise of the dinosaurs, as cold-blooded lizards were among the few survivors. That period is referred to as the Permian Mass Extinction, or, simply, “The Great Dying.” It was the most destructive mass extinction event in Earth’s history.
As the scientists writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences noted:
“The key findings of our study add to a growing body of observational findings strongly supporting the ‘clathrate gun hypothesis.’ … Importantly, the interval we have studied is marked by a mean climate state comparable to future projections of transient global climate warming of 1.3 °C to 3.0 °C.”
We just this year passed 1.3 degrees Celsius of planetary warming: we are now in the territory of the Clathrate Gun Hypothesis if these researchers are right
The last time our planet saw CO2 levels at their current 422 parts-per-million, sea levels were 60 feet higher and forests grew in Antarctica.
Meanwhile, we’re pouring more CO2 into the atmosphere right now than at any time in human history.
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lankybrunettepartdeux · 5 months
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As SAG-AFTRA continues to strike in support of actors' right to keep terrible AI-generated look-alikes out of Hollywood, one performer is taking the fight against unauthorized artificial intelligence deep fakes somewhere totally new: to Congress.
Actor Clark Gregg, who's best-known for his portrayal of S.H.I.E.L.D. Agent Phil Coulson throughout the Marvel Cinematic Universe, testified yesterday in front of the U.S. Congress as it mulls over the new NO FAKES Act. According to language put forth by Senator Chris Coons (D-Delaware), the act is "a bipartisan proposal that would protect the voice and visual likeness of all individuals from unauthorized recreations from generative artificial intelligence." Gregg spoke to Congress for over five minutes about the problems with unauthorized AI and the need for stronger data privacy protections in a world where a person's voice or image can be repurposed for any means without consent.
"Actors, like anyone else, deserve to have their biometric information protected from unauthorized access and use," Gregg said in his statement to Congress (shared via Twitter), noting that the practice of unauthorized AI reproductions is deceptive and an invasion of privacy — plus, a threat to the job market for artists of all kinds. The actor cited recent high-profile examples of rogue AI projects, including a fake Tom Hanks selling insurance and a hit song that apparently used the voices of The Weeknd and Drake without their consent. Gregg also got personal, noting with good humor that though he never worked in adult entertainment, he recently saw Ai-generated clips of his likeness used in porn. "I was recently sent very lifelike images of myself engaged in acrobatic pornography with, I will admit, abs that I would kill for. It's funny but it's also terrifying."
Deepfakes impact everyone, not just actors:
If passed, the NO FAKES Act, which has the full title "Nurture Originals, Foster Art, and Keep Entertainment Safe Act of 2023," would create a federal law giving performers the right to control over digital likeness of their own names, faces, and voices. If deep-fake porn, advertisements, or other works were created without the consent of an actor or artist, it would be illegal. Similar to other copyright laws, the NO FAKES Act includes exceptions for fair use parody, satire, or criticism, and will no longer apply 70 years after a performer's death (per The Verge).
It's especially fitting to see Gregg speaking with Congress, given that his TV series "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." included several plotlines about sinister doubles, plus one in which AI was used in a Life-Model Decoy program that basically made clones to be used as body doubles. On the stand yesterday, Gregg embodied his Marvel character's heroism by outlining the threat of these technologies not just to actors, but to the whole world. "Biometric information — even something as routine as a voice print or a facial map — can be exploited in ways that pose a danger not just to the broader public, but to national security." You tell 'em, Agent Coulson!
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THE BURIAL (2023)
Starring Jamie Foxx, Tommy Lee Jones, Jurnee Smollett, Alan Ruck, Mamoudou Athie, Pamela Reed, Bill Camp, Dorian Missick, Amanda Warren, Jim Klock, Billy Slaughter, Lance E. Nichols, Tywayne Wheatt, Keith Jefferson, B.J. Clinkscales, Doug Spearman, Gralen Bryant Banks, Olivia Brody, Dave Maldonado, Billy Slaughter and Christopher Winchester.
Screenplay by Doug Wright and Maggie Betts.
Directed by Maggie Betts.
Distributed by Amazon Studios. 126 minutes. Rated R.
You never know what kind of story will work on film. For example, you may not expect to really get drawn into a movie that essentially revolves around funeral homes and contract law in the 1990s. Yet, The Burial turns out to be a pretty terrific feel-good Davey vs. Goliath legal drama.
And it has the added benefit of being mostly true.
It is based on the 1995 court case of Jeremiah O’Keefe (Tommy Lee Jones) vs. the Loewen Funeral Group.
O’Keefe is the head of his over-hundred-year-old family business, a group of three funeral O'Keefe Funeral Homes. (He was also a decorated soldier and the former mayor of Biloxi, MS.) Hitting some hard times in business, he made some questionable choices and quickly found the business hemorrhaging money. In desperation, he had his lawyer Mike Allred (Alan Ruck) reach out to the Loewen conglomerate to potentially buy the business.
What they didn’t know was that Loewen was systematically swallowing up many (if not most of) the independent funeral homes. And by the time that O’Keefe realized that he was being ripped off, he had to sue the huge conglomerate to keep his own family business.
O’Keefe is not a perfect man, nor a businessman, and to be honest some… if not many… of his problems were of his own making. However, he is a prideful, principled man who is determined to be able to pass down the business to the next generations. (And he had 13 children and over 70 grandchildren and great-grandchildren!)
He was also not afraid to color outside of the lines. On the suggestion of legal clerk and friend Hal Dockins (Mamoudou Athie), O’Keefe decides to take a chance and hire flashy celebrity lawyer (and reverend!) Willie E. Gary (Jamie Foxx). The guy has fire, has flare. The only problem is that he’s a personal injury lawyer. He’s never handled contract law.
This odd couple gets together to expose Loewen’s corruption, which revolves around race, class, and exploitation.
Recognizing that the other side is going to make this case at least somewhat a referendum on the corporation’s racial and class qualities – and having deep, deep pockets – they hire a dream team of Black attorneys to handle their side.
Thus starts a fascinating legal procedural featuring some fascinating characters. There is some fine acting here, but it is Foxx and Jones’ film, and it rides on their fine work. (This is probably Foxx’ best film work in years.)
None of The Burial is overly surprising, but it is surprisingly satisfying to see the little man take on the huge corporation. Occasionally the film plays things a bit too broadly – I find it hard to believe that Ray Loewen was really as cartoonishly evil as portrayed here by Bill Camp – but way more often than not the film connects.
So, don’t just write off The Burial when you read it is about a legal case between funeral homes. There is so much more to it than that.
Jay S. Jacobs
Copyright ©2023 PopEntertainment.com. All rights reserved. Posted: October 13, 2023.
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