What do you know about zero-degree longitude and the international date line?
January 26th, 2024 by Roger Darlington
The location of zero-degree latitude is obvious (the equator), but the location of zero-degree longitude is a purely political decision. It was variously placed at the Canary & Madeira Islands, the Azores, the Cape Verde Islands, Rome, Copenhagen, Jerusalem, St Petersburg, Pisa, Paris, and Philadelphia (among other places) before it finally settled down in London. No wonder I grew up as a young child thinking that Britain was the centre of the world.
It was in October 1884 that the Greenwich Meridian was selected by 41 delegates representing 25 nations at the International Meridian Conference held in Washington, D.C., United States to be the common zero of longitude and standard of time reckoning throughout the world.
But how did we decide on the international date line (IDL)which is the degree of longitude that determines the date of where you are at any given time?
By universally accepted convention, the IDL is essentially 180 degree longitude, but no international organisation, nor any treaty between nations, has fixed the IDL drawn by cartographers: the 1884 International Meridian Conference explicitly refused to propose or agree to any time zones, stating that they were outside its purview.
Conveniently the line 180 degree longitude runs through the least populated part of the globe – the middle of the Pacific Ocean. In many places, the IDL follows the 180 degree meridian exactly. In other places, however, the IDL deviates east or west away from that meridian. These various deviations generally accommodate the political and/or economic affiliations of the affected areas, usually small islands.
Conventionally, the IDL is not drawn into Antarctica on most maps.
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A review of the new film “Leave The World Behind”
January 25th, 2024 by Roger Darlington
I was attracted to this Netflix offering by the impressive cast list: Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke, Mahershala Ali, Kevin Bacon. At first, it looked promising: an apocalyptic setting full of strange events, discordant sounds, and unusual camera angles.
I kept waiting for the slow pace to pick up, for more dramatic sequences, and for a convincing ending but none of that was forthcoming. The film is too long and says too little. Maybe the story worked better as the novel on which it is was based.
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Have you ever watched ASMR videos? Apparently it’s a thing.
January 24th, 2024 by Roger Darlington
If you follow social media, you may have noticed a few of the more than 13 million ASMR videos online. Many of the videos create ASMR-inducing sounds to play out social situations with actions that may trigger a response. The videos have rapidly gained popularity, but they may still leave you wondering: What is ASMR exactly? How does it work? And, does it help as some people suggest?ASMR stands for autonomous sensory meridian response; a term used to describe a tingling, static-like, or goosebumps sensation in response to specific triggering audio or visual stimuli. These sensations are said to spread across the skull or down the back of the neck and, for some, down the spine or limbs. When experiencing ASMR sensations, some people report pleasant feelings of relaxation, calm, sleepiness or well-being.
Not everyone experiences ASMR. For those who do, the experience seems to be in response to various triggers or situations involving sight, touch or sound. The intensity of specific stimuli may vary, and while one person may respond to the sound of whispering, another person may experience ASMR while talking softly or moving slowly.
Not my thing.
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A review of the new movie “The Holdovers”
January 21st, 2024 by Roger Darlington
The odd title refers to those students and staff at an exclusive boys boarding school in New England who are forced to stay behind at Christmas 1970 when everyone else leaves for family and fun. An accomplished director, a brilliant script and three stand-out performances make this comedy-drama a thoroughly enjoyable film that swings back and forth between humour and pathos with ultimately a message of revelation and redemption.The director is Alexander Payne, a man with a distinctive style who has previously given us such successes as “About Schmidt”, “Sideways” and “The Descendants”, but had not had a hit in a while. A recurrent theme in many of his movies is disappointment and here we have that emotion in spades. The scriptwriter is David Hemingson and this is his first writing for the cinema. There are some wonderful one-line zingers (“I thought all the Nazis were in Argentina”) but it is the subtle integration of comedy and sadness that marks this out as superb storytelling.
The lead actor is the one-off Paul Giametti who worked with Payne in “Sideways”. Here he plays an acerbic and bitter classics teacher who does not care what students and faculty think of him as he holds to his own standards. Dominic Sessa impresses in a sensitive first appearance in film as the last student left as everyone else finds somewhere else to go. To complete the golden trilogy of this cast is Da’Vine Joy Randolph as the bereaved head cook who, in spite of her different class, colour and body, brings teacher and pupil together while finding her own sense of escape from the pain of life.
Along the way in this entertaining and moving winter of discontent, you’ll learn why Father Christmas is a false image for the season and how classical history gave us the word punitive.
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And … we’re back
January 21st, 2024 by Roger Darlington
Sorry we’ve been offline for a few weeks, but the tech problems now seem to be sorted.
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A review of the new art house film “The Eternal Daughter”
November 28th, 2023 by Roger Darlington
Films made by British writer and director Joanna Hogg make for challenging – but ultimately rewarding – viewing. Following the critical success of her autobiographical works “The Souvenir” (2019) [for my review click here] and “The Souvenir Part II” (2021) [for my review click here] – both of which I admired – comes a work influenced by Hogg’s relationship with her mother (who died during the editing process and therefore never saw it). Like the classic art house movie, nothing much happens and it happens slowly and very little is said but every sentence is laden with meaning.The minimal story concerns a stay at a deserted country house hotel in rural Wales where a middle-aged female filmmaker wants to celebrate her elderly mother’s birthday and craft the outline of her next film. Both the daughter Julie and the mother Rosalind are played by Tilda Swinton in a virtuous performance. Swinton is a lifelong friend of Hogg and played the mother figure in the two sections of “The Souvenir”, while daughter and mother in this latest work have the same names as those in “The Souvenir”, although “The Eternal Daughter” works as a standalone film.
This relationship movie takes the form of a kind of ghost story and many of the tropes of the ghost genre can be found here: whistling wind, creaking windows, swirling mists, empty corridors and unsettling sound. But it is not a scary film, rather a sad one in which a daughter is seen as endlessly trying to please her mother – an all too common affectation.
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A review of the film “Cold Pursuit”
November 27th, 2023 by Roger Darlington
A 2019 film starring Liam Neeson as a character seeking revenge for the death of his son – sounds like something along the well-trodden path of the “Taken” franchise (2008-2014), right? Well, no. This is actually a remake of a Norwegian film “In Order Of Disappearance” (2014) with the same director, Hans Petter Moland.It’s a thriller as a kind of black comedy, but I didn’t find it either thrilling or comedic. Leeson is wasted in the role of a snowplough driver called Nels Coxman (in the original the character was named Nils Dickman) and Laura Dern is massively underutilised as his wife.
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A review of “The Future Of Geography” by Tim Marshall
November 26th, 2023 by Roger Darlington
Marshall has had outstanding success with two huge bestsellers: “Prisoners Of Geography” (2015) and “The Power Of Geography” (2021). Like the last chapter of the last book, this work is not really about geography but all about space. In his acknowledgements to this latest book, he thanks his publishers “for the freedom to write what I want”, but clearly the marketing guys insisted that he had to have the word ‘geography’ in the title.Marshall attempts to justify the title: “Outer space is not featureless – it has regions of intense radiation to be navigated, oceans of distance to cross, superhighways where a planet’s gravity can accelerate spaceships, strategic corridors in which to place military and commercial equipment, and land rich in natural resources.” This is really an exaggeration of the analogy. As he admits towards the end of the book: “Space is very, very big. Take the area between low Earth orbit (starting at 160 kilometres above us) and geostationary orbit (35,786 km up). The volume between the two orbits is 190 times larger than the volume of Earth.”)
And how much of this work is really about the future? The first two chapters provide a neat history of the space race between the USA and the USSR. The next six chapters look at the present situation with detailed examination of the space programmes of the USA, Russia and China. Only the final two chapters deal with the future – the one entitled Space Wars’ concedes that “For this decade at least, a war in in space would primarily be about a war on Earth.”
Notwithstanding my quibbles about the title, this latest ‘geography’ work by Marshall is, like his earlier two books, immensely informative and attractively written. So, if you want to know the best place and manner to launch a satellite (near the equator and eastwards), the number of satellites currently up there (over 8,000), or the last time humans walked on the moon (14 December 1972) and if you are inquisitive about the position of the five Lagrange points of the Earth-Sun system, the risk of the Kessler Syndrome, or the reasons why we should go to the Moon and Mars, this is the text for you. I thoroughly enjoyed it.
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A review of the new blockbuster movie “Napoleon”
November 26th, 2023 by Roger Darlington
Veteran British director Ridley Scott is now 85 and “Napoleon”, his 29th work, is a fine addition to a wonderful canon that stretches in time-setting from “Gladiator” to “Alien”.This is a hugely ambitious production, stretching from the execution of Marie Antoinette in 1793 to the death of Napoleon in i821. In that time period, he fought some 70 battles (winning about 60 of them) and this film concentrates on just four: Toulon, Austerlitz, Borodino, and of course Waterloo. The story is seen through the prism of his relationship and correspondence with wife and then ex-wife Josephine. This is a good deal to cover in just over two and a half ours (we are promised a four hour version on Apple TV+) – and that is without any significant coverage of Napoleon’s statecraft which still underpins the France of today.
The battle sequences are simply stunning and I was pleased that I chose to see the movie in IMAX on Britain’s biggest screen (the BFI in London). The sex is hurried and selfish – like his battle victories – but there is no doubt that Josephine had a genuine hold over his emotions. The French couple are portrayed by the American Joaquin Phoenix (a masterly and brooding performance) and the English Vanessa Kirby (coquettish and captivating). The costumes and sets are splendid and the locations (mainly England and Malta) glorious.
Some historians and the French have criticised the film for its inaccuracies, of which there are plenty (for instance, Napoleon and Wellington never met), but this is a work of entertainment, not a documentary, and a degree of artistic licence is permissible. “Napoleon” may not have have the emotional tug and memorable tunes of “Gladiator”, but it is a magnificent epic, the like of which we see very rarely these days.
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Trump could be back in the White House
November 22nd, 2023 by Roger Darlington
“Public opinion polls in the United States are the stuff of nightmares. The website RealClearPolitics aggregates all the major polls. The eight most recent polls regarding the 2024 elections — from respected pollsters including NBC News, the Economist, Reuters and others — all show the same thing. Trump defeats Biden.In one of those polls, Trump has a 53 – 47 lead, which could mean a landslide — and the Republicans capturing both houses of Congress. Thanks to Trump’s previous term in office, the Republicans already control one branch of the federal government (the judiciary). If Trump wins decisively, they could control all three.”
This is an extract from a thoughtful, but scary, blog posting by my American friend Eric Lee.
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