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Category: marks
Comments closedParis in the Twentieth Century (French: Paris au xxe siècle) is a science fiction novel by Jules Verne. The book presents Paris in August 1960, 97 years in Verne’s future, when society places value only on business and technology.
Written in 1863,[1] but first published in 1994, the novel follows a young man who struggles unsuccessfully to live in a technologically advanced but culturally backward world. The work paints a grim, dystopian view of a technological civilization.
Many of Verne’s predictions are remarkably on target. However, his publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, did not accept the book because he thought that it was too unbelievable and that its sales prospects would be inferior to those of Verne’s previous work, Five Weeks in a Balloon.
The novel’s main character is 16-year-old Michel Dufrénoy, who graduates with a major in literature and the classics, but finds they have been forgotten in a futuristic world where only business and technology are valued. Michel, whose father was a musician, is a poet born too late.
Michel has been living with his respectable uncle, Monsieur Stanislas Boutardin, and his family. The day after graduation, Boutardin tells Michel that he is to start working at a banking company. Boutardin doubts Michel can do anything in the business world.
The rest of that day, Michel searches for literature by classic 19th-century writers, such as Hugo and Balzac. Nothing but books about technology are available in bookstores.
Comments closedA team of archaeologists affiliated with several institutions in France and one in Germany has found that ritualized human sacrifice was common across Europe during the Neolithic.
googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-1449240174198-2’); });As they report in the journal Science Advances, the group studied the remains of three women found in a tomb in France who appeared to have been ritually brutalized sometime between 4000 and 3500 BCE and compared the remains with others like them found at sites in Europe.
The work began with the study of the remains of three women found in a tomb in Saint-Paul-Trois-Châteaux—two of the bodies showed the women were buried in unusual positions, one on her back with her legs bent upward, the other in a prone position with her neck on the torso of the other woman—characteristics associated with incaprettamento, a murder technique used by organized criminals as a means of intimidation in modern times.
Swamp Notes: Inside Trump’s new inner circle – FT News Briefing |
April 07, 2024 at 07:45PM
Comments closedTaking a moment to look back on my mark-making here recently and pick out the pieces I thought worked better than others, mostly for my own consideration going forward.
- Revisiting FEAR AND LOATHING ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL ’72
- Textual Scars
- The Capacity To Understand Crows
- Web Winter
- On Personal Libraries
- Messages From The Past
- The Phone Holder
- LA ANTENA (2007)
- 24 Images A Year
- SOLO, A Forgotten British Comic
The White House on Tuesday directed NASA to establish a unified standard of time for the moon and other celestial bodies, as the United States aims to set international norms in space amid a growing lunar race among nations and private companies.The head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), according to a memo seen by Reuters, instructed the space agency to work with other parts of the U.S. government to devise a plan by the end of 2026 for setting what it called a Coordinated Lunar Time (LTC).
April 02, 2024 at 08:30PM
Comments closedUS once considered program to reverse-engineer alien spacecraft, Pentagon report reveals – POLITICO
“…DOD’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office did discover a program that was proposed to the Department of Homeland Security in the 2010s, code-named “Kona Blue,” to reverse-engineer any recovered extraterrestrial craft. The effort was eventually rejected by DHS leaders “for lacking merit,” and never actually recovered any other-worldly craft, according to the report.”
March 08, 2024 at 04:51PM
Comments closedWe’re working out how to solve crimes in space—the final frontier of forensic science
“As humanity’s footprint expands beyond the familiar terrains of Earth to the moon and possibly beyond, an intriguing new field emerges from the final frontier: astroforensics.
“This discipline, still in its infancy, is propelled by the inevitability of human nature. Space presents a unique and harsh environment for forensic investigations. Settings that present altered gravity, cosmic radiation, extremes in temperature, and the need for oxygen-providing climate systems provide a few examples of the unearthly variables that are faced by future explorers.
“Unlike Earth, where gravity, a constant force, shapes many aspects of our reality, the significant reduction of gravity in space introduces novel challenges in understanding how evidence behaves. This shift is crucial for forensic sciences like bloodstain pattern analysis, which relies heavily on gravitational effects to determine the circumstances under which blood stains are formed.”
March 08, 2024 at 04:49PM
Comments closedComments closedLess diligent registries are helping to fuel the growth of a “dark fleet”—some 1,400 vessels, according to the Atlantic Council, a think-tank—that operates with little regulatory oversight. They are mostly oil tankers that engage in subterfuge to hide where they are and the origin of their cargo in order to evade sanctions on Russian crude oil. Ownership is often opaque. Mr Meade estimates that 12% of the global tanker fleet is now dark. He notes that Gabon’s registry, now comprising 140 vessels, is the fastest-growing in the world thanks largely to the reflagging of Russian tankers.
An expanding dark fleet poses a danger to itself and other vessels. Dark ships tend to be old and less well maintained, and some may be uninsured. Practices such as turning off or “spoofing” location devices are a danger to other ships. Swapping oil cargoes at sea to obscure their origins poses the danger of a spillage. Mr Meade foresees a worse calamity of a large “dark fleet” tanker sinking in an environmentally sensitive area, with no accountability.
“Eight essential attributes of the short story” · Joy William
February 26, 2024 at 04:49PM
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