Monday, February 22, 2016

Funny what turns up

(apologies for the bad language)

I was looking for an image version of the above dialog, minus bad language of course. Didn't find a good one, so I made this:





The funny thing is one image I found when I searched for the phrase "denial is the most predictable of human responses":


The search is accurate.


UPDATE:  Decided I wanted a better image of The Architect with Neo in the background. Also, the Stoat has fun with Heartland attempting to "correct" its wiki page.

There's probably an interesting story to be told about why scientific reality has generally triumphed at website that can be edited by anyone who speaks English, when it's a much closer question among English-speakers in general. I have some guesses, but a deep dive would be interesting.

8 comments:

Brandon R. Gates said...

Nice one, Brian. Just watched this one again recently:

http://www.quickmeme.com/img/b2/b2db405ca8892a2c67992e1529bec1e4f078ef0a79cfdba990f0273998972572.jpg

I wouldn't have thought of making any associations, of course.

barry said...

The white-haired gent is a friend of mine. I played Saturninus to his Titus Andronicus once upon a season. Much nicer in real life than his God-like character. He thought the script for the film was impenetrable dross. I think he'd enjoy that bit of quote-mining, though.

THE CLIMATE WARS said...

"in 1982 a question arose...Could the moral force of Jonathan Schell's... The Fate Of The Earth be transformed into a scientific imperative> Psychological strategists of the peace movement were not content with the fearsome carnage of a nuclear holocaust. They had identified "psychic numbing " and "denial" as impediments to to mass demands for disarmament."

In from the Cold: "Nuclear Winter" Melts Down
The National Interest Fall 1986

Brian said...

barry, do you think he'd be willing to play his character and do something even more directly about climate denial?

Then if we could get Keanu to join.... but even if not I think he could be helpful!

Hank Roberts said...

As I recall the authors of the revised and slightly-less-horrible 'nuclear autumn' scenarios didn't know enough to factor in loss of the Van Allen belts, loss of the ozone layer, and the longterm loss of access to low earth orbit (Kessler syndrome), nor about the aerosols produced by targeting population centers with ground bursts rather than military targets. So that exercise was 'good news bad news'.

I've read that the US Navy is reviving competence in using handheld instruments for celestial navigation, having realized that global positioning systems will likely be lost early in the next war.

But how do they navigate if they also can't see the stars at night for a few years?

THE CLIMATE WARS said...

Sextants or cel tower LORAN handsets , Hank ?

Anonymous said...

Last time I checked inertial navigation and dead reckoning works fairly well. And I'm pretty sure it won't be a sextant, volumes of the nautical almanac, reams of paper, lots of pencils and a good grasp of spherical trigonometry. It will be mapped down to the last tree on the last hill and stored in a crystal. Even the sea bottom.

Kevin O'Neill said...

Several decades ago I was working for a defense contractor that was putting together a global topographical map for missile and long range bomber navigation. The object was to fly as close to the surface as possible to avoid detection, so very accurate topographical maps were needed.

I would find it very unbelievable that these don't already exist in much higher detail than was possible in the 1980's. I'm sure the same exists for ocean bottoms, just take a radar snapshot looking down and have the computer look for a topographical match and figure out exactly where you are.