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Prometheus Unbound

Posted by Gwyneth on
Tuesday 12th June, & here in Brighton it's cool to chilly under grey skies, the rain is steady and gentle. My tadpoles, both indoors and out, are showing no signs of developing legs, this is a record for mid-June. Have begun feeding the indoor ones on goldfish food, but I've never fed the outdoor ones in the big tub, they've always managed fine, and temperatures haven't been outrageously under par, so I don't know what's going on.

Sorry, one more Prometheus link, relayed to me by Peter, which I have found irrisistible.

http://digitaldigging.net/prometheus-an-archaeological-perspective/


Re: faster-than-light vs sublight speeds. You know, I'm sure the issue was just as hazy, or muddled, in the previous, or I suppose we should now say subsequent Alien movies... I think you could easily have kind of assumed the good ship Nostromo was running on petroleum based marine fuel, from the steampunky look of things. We cannot get there from here. There is an unbridgeable gulf, the science does not exist. Sixty years of spaceflight, and the most ambitious interplanetary exploration currently on the cards involves getting a small and flimsy object, that couldn't sustain Laika, on a one way trip to the orbit of Jupiter. This is not an optional feature. Sci-fi movies NEED an irrational form of transport from A to B, the way Fantasy needs dragons and/or evil magicians.

Not that this in anyway makes taking the p*** out of a self-satisfied, Big Box Office Success behemoth like Prometheus less justified or less fun.

Last night, I accidentally watched Springwatch, which I had previously dismissed as too gushy and cute to bear. Not so, not any longer. The lapwings, they are all gone. A third of the meagre breeding success in the whole of Wales knocked out in a single storm, and the same story in the wetlands of East Anglia already... Twenty years ago, when I thought I lived in a pretty damned urbanised country, those lovely birds, so beautiful, so acrobatic in flight, were everywhere. Sometimes I can't bear it. The future for the living world, here and everywhere, seems so hopeless. But I'll keep the garden soup kitchens open, and try to grow tadpoles, even so.

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Allan Lloyd on :

I farmed for over forty years in Herefordshire until my retirement four years ago. We had hundreds of lapwings on the farm. In those days all stock farmers grew swedes for sheep, which were planted in late May or June after the ground lay fallow over winter since the previous harvest. Financial pressures meant that fewer farmers grew swedes, or they put a catch crop on the ground between corn and swedes, and as simply as that, goodbye nesting area for lapwings. Conservation policy from the EU has done little to stop this and it has been ages since I have seen any of these beautiful birds. Another modern tragedy.

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