Quotulatiousness

July 22, 2011

“When they opened up the container they said it was like a murder scene, But it smelled phenomenal”

Filed under: Australia, Randomness, Wine — Tags: — Nicholas @ 09:54

Wine disaster caused by a forklift:

More than A$1m ($1.07m; £664,000) of wine has been destroyed in a forklift accident in Australia.

The 2010 Mollydooker Velvet Glove shiraz sells for A$185 a bottle ($199; £122), the AFP news agency said.

Winemaker Sparky Marquis told reporters he was “gut-wrenched” that 462 cases of wine had been smashed while being loaded for export to the United States.

“When they opened up the container they said it was like a murder scene,” he said. “But it smelled phenomenal.”

The wine industry’s nemesis, Phylloxera vastatrix

Filed under: Environment, Europe, France, History, Wine — Tags: — Nicholas @ 09:49

The Economist reviews a new book about the devastation to Europe’s wine makers caused by a tiny American invader:

These varieties are a reminder of the battle against phylloxera, a small, root-munching aphid that did incalculable damage to the wine business in the last 35 years of the 19th century. What George Gale, a philosophy professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, calls “the worst of all known invasive species disasters” swept across the viticultural landscape like a biblical plague. It destroyed vineyards from Rioja to Rheingau, Stellenbosch to Sicily. With good reason, Jules-Emile Planchon, the French botanist who helped to subdue the insect, dubbed it Phylloxera vastatrix.

[. . .]

In Europe, Gale’s research is no less assiduous. His coverage of the war between the largely Parisian scientific establishment, which believed that phylloxera was the effect, rather than the cause, of the devastation, and the so-called Américainistes of Montpellier and Bordeaux, who believed the opposite, is commendably detailed. The squabbling between the two sides stretched on into the 1880s, delaying the search for a solution.

Various remedies were proposed: flooding, planting on sandy soils and the use of carbon disulphide (a flammable, toxic chemical that was costly as well as tricky to apply). Growers then tried planting lower-quality American grapes, including Clinton and Noah, before switching, finally, to grafted vines combining phylloxera-resistant American rootstocks with European scions. This is still the practice in most of the world’s vineyards today.

Has Twitter entered the political sphere?

Filed under: Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:39

There has to be more to the story, but Erick Erickson is quite concerned:

Today, Twitter not only shut down the Empower Texans twitter feed, but it also shut down the twitter feeds of every individual who works for Empower Texans.

Twitter is a private organization. It can do what it wants. But I am very troubled that it did so without explanation and without anyone for Empower Texans to contact.

If this was an orchestrated effort on the part of others to flag Empower Texans as a spam account such that Twitter’s computer system would automatically can it, Twitter has a serious security problem.

It was a man made decision, Twitter has even bigger problems.

Mark Lynas goes from green activist to “denier”

Filed under: Books, Environment, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:28

Ben Pile reviews Mark Lynas’s new book:

Since becoming an advocate of genetic modification (GM) and nuclear power, Mark Lynas has drawn increasingly hostile criticism from his erstwhile comrades in the green movement. In turn, he has sharpened his criticism of environmentalists for their hostility to technological and economic development. In his new book, The God Species: How the Planet Can Survive the Age of Humans, he attempts to reformulate environmentalism to overcome the excesses that have so far prevented it from saving the planet. This book will no doubt provoke debate, but what is this transformation really about, and is it really based on new ideas or merely the revision of old ones?

[. . .]

As a result, there is much to agree with in The God Species. Most importantly, Lynas makes a clean break from deep ecology — the idea that ‘nature’ has intrinsic moral value and a ‘right’ to be protected from our ambitions. He rebukes the environmentalism that imagines a return to a pristine nature, and that shows contempt for development as an attempt to ‘play god’ over nature. We should ‘play god’, he says, for the planet’s sake as well as our own comfort. There is a convincing criticism of green demands for austerity and environmentalists’ unrealistic expectations that people should make do with ‘happiness’ rather than material progress. These are the conceits of well-off, middle-class and self-indulgent whingers, Lynas explains. Some of us have been making similar arguments for a very long time.

In spite of some of his accurate criticisms, Lynas fails to get to the substance of environmentalism. We do not find out what takes environmentalists to their bleak view of the world and their low view of humanity. This is a shame, because Lynas is in a unique position to reflect on it, having once thrust a custard pie into Bjorn Lomborg’s face, with the words: ‘That’s for everything you say about the environment which is complete bullshit. That’s for lying about climate change. That’s what you deserve for being smug about everything to do with the environment.’

A decade on, Lynas now emphasises science and pragmatism rather than… erm… pies. It’s worth remembering that Lomborg started out on mission similar to Lynas’s: as an environmentalist, keen to establish the sensible limits of our interaction with the natural world. Before writing The Skeptical Environmentalist, Lomborg aimed to debunk the works of the economist, Julian Simon, but ended up sympathetic to many of his arguments. Lynas, too, now finds himself sympathetic to many of the ideas from the economic right (he calls for the privatisation of all publicly owned water companies, for instance). And like Lynas, Lomborg never ended up ‘denying’ climate change, but instead sought to bring a sense of proportion to the problem, and to put it into context with other problems in the world. That is all it takes to find oneself called a ‘denier’: merely seeking a sense of proportion about environmental problems will put you in the lowest moral category, as Lynas, the ‘Chernobyl death denier’, has now discovered.

“I never, ever, ever want to get involved in anything this complicated again”

Filed under: Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:58

Just in case you don’t already have multiple versions of the Lord of the Rings movies, there’s now the extended Blu-ray version, and Steve May thinks it’s worth getting:

The set is beautifully packaged. Three fat Blu-ray cases sit within a substantial, faux gold-leaf book. Within are elongated versions of each movie. Previously available as DVD special editions, these plump out the trilogy with cutting-room floor detritus. In Fellowship multiple small scene edits and additions increase its running length by around 30 minutes.

The Two Towers is even more substantially altered. With more than 40 minutes of additional footage cut into proceedings, plus some reframing and tweaks, it’s a significantly different beast from the original theatrical release. There’s also a smidgeon more action inserted into the Helm’s Deep battle, which contrary to popular opinion I believe can only be a good thing.

Return of the King tops Towers with nigh-on 50 minutes of extra material. Once again the movie has been substantially re-cut to accommodate the multiple changes and insertions. This engorged version would never play theatrically because of its length, but on disc, where you can watch and take a break at will, it’s a marvellous indulgence. For those that want to spend as much time in Middle Earth as possible, these extended versions are a gift. For the less enthusiastic, they’re more like a marathon.

As I joked when the first extended version of Return of the King came out, they’ve added another half-dozen endings!

On the Silver Anniversary of the publication of the Vorkosigan saga

Filed under: Books, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:09

The members of the Lois McMaster Bujold mailing list were delighted to present a special present to Lois on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the publication of the first book in the series:

A Reader’s Companion to A Civil Campaign (PDF)

As John Lennard, co-editor of ARCACC wrote:

Ladies, Gentlemen, and all other persons, cats, dogs, squirrels, elephants, and butterbugs.

Yestermonth the Vorkosigan Saga turned 25 glorious years old. Yes, despite their own convictions on these matters, and relative fictional aliveness or otherwise, Aral, Cordelia, Konstantin Bothari, Barrayar itself, and even Miles (dating from a twinkle in Lois’s and Cordelia’s eyes) have hit their quarter-century. It also means that Lois has been putting up with our readerly burbles and spats for longer than seems possible.

[Fanfare. Extraordinary and prolonged fireworks spelling out an enormous THANK YOU, LOIS draw admiring oohs and aahs from all present.]

And by way of a less ephemeral thank-you to Lois for thus entertaining, challenging, amusing, delighting, instructing, and generally vivifying us all, I the Birthday Tixie hereby present to her on behalf of everyone who has been, is, or will be a member of this List, A Reader’s Companion to A Civil Campaign. This work of scholarly erudition and critical acumen has been compiled by many members, that they and the hordes of future Bujold readers may better understand the art, craft, wisdom, allusion, quotation, generic engineering, neologisms, and incomparable one-liners that make a Vorkosiverse novel an endless delight ; and it is presented with warm and fuzzy feelings of gratitude laced with admiration, awe, and a beverage of choice now held high in approbation.

Lois, legentes te salutant!

Powered by WordPress