Tyson Adams's Blog, page 79
October 15, 2013
Mythtaken: Shark attacks
A while back I wrote a post on how sharks aren’t the deadly monsters attacking people all the time that we think they are. Now I’m not suggesting that we all go and hug sharks, they only like to be touched by cleaning fish, nor that we jump in to swim with them, they play tag far too roughly for delicate humans. What I’m suggesting is that we really need to start worrying about stuff that is actually a concern rather than stuff that is just wild gesticulations in front of a camera for ratings.
So here is a list of things that kill more people than sharks annually:
Picture from: http://themetapicture.com/things-that-kill-more-people-than-sharks/
Tagged: deadly monsters, Death, Facts, Fun, h, Humor, Humour, Kill, Mythtaken, Right What You No, Science, Shark attacks, Sharks, Statistics, Tyson Adams
October 14, 2013
Welcome to Science – from Zen Pencils
I was having a conversation last night with someone who was questioning why science? Doesn’t it get in the way of creativity? I’ve never seen it that way, I think Heinlein, Assimov and the like would agree with me. Zen Pencils did the comic below which encapsulates why science very nicely.
Tagged: Cartoon, Conversation, Right What You No, Science, Tyson Adams, Zen Pencils
October 8, 2013
Reading Interruptions
Of course, the question is: does this constitute a capital offence, punishable by the death penalty?
Tagged: Books, fiction, Fun, Funny, Humor, Humour, Interruptions, Literature, Read, Reading, Relax, Right What You No, Tyson Adams
October 6, 2013
Things they don’t tell you about getting married
1) Mentioning the word ‘wedding’ in a store, restaurant or venue immediately adds 30% to the price.
Don’t believe me? Go into a coffee shop and say you’re getting married when you order a drink – doesn’t even have to be for your wedding – and watch the price rise.
2) Getting married is an excuse for your friends and family to change their topic of conversation.
Before you had a partner the topic of conversation was about who you were dating. Once you have a partner the conversation becomes about when you are getting married. Once you’re married the conversation can finally change to when are you having kids. Once you have a kid the conversation is all about when you are having the next one. I’m assuming that some time after this the conversation switches to what heart medication you’re taking now.
3) Everyone wants to make a big deal about you getting married.
Anyone would think that you only do this two or three times in your life or something.
4) The bride is expected to be bride-zilla, destroyer of kittens and venue staff. The groom is expected to show up. Preferably in a suit.
I’m not sure how this works at LGBT weddings (oh wait, we’re still backward hicks), but having the subjugation of half of the partnership by everyone around you is not exactly the best way to encourage a balanced relationship. Although, I hear that the 1950s were cool in other ways.
5) You will be expected to invite everyone you’ve ever met.
This is despite the fact that you can’t remember half of their names, let alone addresses. Nor the fact that you didn’t particularly want to invite your creepy uncle who will no doubt get drunk and try to feel up your new wife.
6) You will pay for a lot of alcohol you don’t get to drink.
Being the centre of attention means that you will barely have a chance to take a sip of your drink all night, whilst everyone else will be queuing up to throw-up as to make room for more free booze. This doesn’t apply to the bride, who has a shiny white dress that says, “Give me a drink.”
7) Your hens and bucks nights have to involve strippers.
Something to do with the stabilisation of the economy. Remember to tip well.
Tagged: Alcohol, Bride, bride-zilla, Bucks Night, Groom, Hens Night, Husband, Kids, LGBT, Partner, Planning, Relationship, Right What You No, Strippers, Tyson Adams, Wedding, Wedding Day, Wife
October 1, 2013
September 28, 2013
Fast and Furious series
Fast and Furious: Car Porn
The other night I was watching the Fast and Furious 6, which is a great story about how The Rock is proving you don’t need CGI for the next Hulk movie. With the announcement and post-credits scene showing they are making Fast and Furious 7, I thought it was worth re-capping the series so far.
1) The Fast and The Furious
This first instalment is pretty much Point Break with cars.
2) 2 Fast, 2 Furious
Also known as The Curious Case of the Missing Vin Diesel.
3) The Fast and The Furious: Tokyo Drift
Who are these people? Why are they driving sideways? Where are Paul and Vin?
4) Fast and Furious: Career Booster
After realising that people still like seeing cars at the movies but are only so-so about Vin Diesel and Paul Walker’s other films, it was time to film some car porn with the original cast.
5) Fast 5: Bicep Showdown
The Rock and Vin Diesel spend two hours showing off their gym time.
6) Fast and Furious 6: The Rock and some cars
The Rock dwarfs everyone on screen and no-one can see the cars clearly.
7) Fast and Furious 7: Back to Tokyo
We quickly forget that Paul Walker has been a main cast member of the series as Jason Statham, Tony Jaa, Rhonda Rousey, Vin Diesel and The Rock beat the crap out of each other near some cars.
8) Fast and Furious 8: Reasonably Priced Car
Having realised that with all the protein and creatine the stars have been eating they can no longer afford fancy cars, Vin’s crew now rebuild some small hybrid cars to make them capable of a 20 second quarter mile.
9) Fast and Reasonably Furious 9: Repossession
Despite having downgraded to cheaper vehicles, the sheer weight of the bloated continuation of the series leads to the repo-men arriving and taking all the cars. When Vin and his crew confront the repo-men, the repo’s say “This is what we do.”
10) Fast and Not Really Furious 10: Nursing Home Drift
Now confined to wheelchairs and with rapidly deflating biceps, Vin’s crew trick out some wheelchairs and mobility scooters to pass the time between naps.
Tagged: Blockbuster, Car porn, Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson, Dwayne Johnson, fancy cars, Fast 5, Fast and Furious, Fast and Furious 6, Funny, Hulk, Humor, Humour, Jason Statham, Movies, Paul Walker, Point Break, Right What You No, Series, Stupid movies, The Fast and The Furious, The Rock, tony jaa, Tyson Adams, Vin Diesel
September 25, 2013
How Copyright Made Mid-Century Books Vanish
Now this is an interesting study and article. I have actually noticed this phenomenon myself when looking for crime and thriller authors and books from various generations. Everyone knows Robert Howard, Raymond Chandler and Donald E Westlake, they’ve pretty much stayed in print since they were released. But what about the other authors from the 1920s to the mid 1980s? On various writer forums you will find writers re-releasing their novels from the 80s as ebooks. This is the downside of copyright. Read for this article I stole am re-blogging from The Atlantic.
by REBECCA J. ROSEN
A book published during the presidency of Chester A. Arthur has a greater chance of being in print today than one published during the time of Reagan.
Last year I wrote about some very interesting research being done by Paul J. Heald at the University of Illinois, based on software that crawled Amazon for a random selection of books. At the time, his results were only preliminary, but they were nevertheless startling: There were as many books available from the 1910s as there were from the 2000s. The number of books from the 1850s was double the number available from the 1950s. Why? Copyright protections (which cover titles published in 1923 and after) had squashed the market for books from the middle of the 20th century, keeping those titles off shelves and out of the hands of the reading public. Heald has now finalized his research and the picture, though more detailed, is largely the same: “Copyright correlates significantly with the disappearance of works rather than with their availability,” Heald writes. “Shortly after works are created and proprietized, they tend to disappear from public view only to reappear in significantly increased numbers when they fall into the public domain and lose their owners.” The graph above shows the simplest interpretation of the data. It reveals, shockingly, that there are substantially more new editions available of books from the 1910s than from the 2000s. Editions of books that fall under copyright are available in about the same quantities as those from the first half of the 19th century.
Publishers are simply not publishing copyrighted titles unless they are very recent. But this isn’t a totally honest portrait of how many different books are available, because for books that are in the public domain, often many different editions exist, and the random sample is likely to overrepresent them. “After all,” Heald explains, “if one feeds a random ISBN number [into] Amazon, one is more likely to retrieve Milton’s Paradise Lost (with 401 editions and 401 ISBN numbers) than Lorimer’s A Wife out of Egypt (1 edition and 1 ISBN).” He found that on average the public domain titles had a median of four editions per title. (The mean was 16, but highly distorted by the presence of a small number of books with hundreds of editions. For this reason, statisticians whom Heald consulted recommended using the median.) Heald divided the number of public-domain editions by four, providing a graph that compares the number of titles available. 
Heald says the picture is still “quite dramatic.” The most recent decade looks better by comparison, but the depression of the 20th century is still notable, followed by a little boom for the most recent decades when works fall into the public domain. Presumably, as Heald writes, in a market with no copyright distortion, these graphs would show “a fairly smoothly doward sloping curve from the decade 2000-20010 to the decade of 1800-1810 based on the assumption that works generally become less popular as they age (and therefore are less desirable to market).” But that’s not at all what we see. “Instead,” he continues, “the curve declines sharply and quickly, and then rebounds significantly for books currently in the public domain initially published before 1923.” Heald’s conclusion? Copyright “makes books disappear”; its expiration brings them back to life. The books that are the worst affected by this are those from pretty recent decades, such as the 80s and 90s, for which there is presumably the largest gap between what would satisfy some abstract notion of people’s interest and what is actually available. As Heald writes:
This is not a gently sloping downward curve! Publishers seem unwilling to sell their books on Amazon for more than a few years after their initial publication. The data suggest that publishing business models make books disappear fairly shortly after their publication and long before they are scheduled to fall into the public domain. Copyright law then deters their reappearance as long as they are owned. On the left side of the graph before 1920, the decline presents a more gentle time-sensitive downward sloping curve.
But even this chart may understate the effects of copyright, since the comparison assumes that the same quantity of books has been published every decade. This is of course not the case: Increasing literacy coupled with technological efficiencies mean that far more titles are published per year in the 21st century than in the 19th. The exact number per year for the last 200 years is unknown, but Heald and his assistants were able to arrive at a pretty good approximation by relying on the number of titles available for each year in WorldCat, a library catalog that contains the complete listings of 72,000 libraries around the world. He then normalized his graph to the decade of the 1990s, which saw the greatest number of titles published. 
By this calculation, the effect of copyright appears extreme. Heald says that the WorldCat research showed, for example, that there were eight times as many books published in the 1980s as in the 1880s, but there are roughly as many titles available on Amazon for the two decades. A book published during the presidency of Chester A. Arthur has a greater chance of being in print today than one published during the time of Reagan. Copyright advocates have long (and successfully) argued that keeping books copyrighted assures that owners can make a profit off their intellectual property, and that that profit incentive will “assure [the books'] availability and adequate distribution.” The evidence, it appears, says otherwise.
Tagged: Authors, Copyright, Donald Westlake, Paul J Heald, Publishing, Publishing industry, Raymond Chandler, Rebecca J Rosen, Richard Stark, Right What You No, Rights, Robert E Howard, The Atlantic, Tyson Adams, Writing
September 24, 2013
Book Reviews: Velocity by Steve Worland
Velocity by Steve Worland
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Whenever there is a new thriller author on the block, especially if they are Australian, there is always someone drawing a comparison to Matthew Reilly. You can just about guarantee that this comparison will be drawn by someone who hasn’t read Matthew Reilly’s books or hasn’t read the new author’s book/s. Finally there is an author with whom this comparison is valid.
Well worth the read.
Tagged: Australia, Australian, Book review, Book reviews, Books, Matthew Reilly, NASA, Reading, Right What You No, Steve Worland, Thriller, Tyson Adams, Velocity
September 22, 2013
Song Dedications
Radio and Wedding DJs like to dedicate songs, but rarely do they get past the “This one goes out to all the ladies.” or “This one’s for all the lovers.” It seems odd to me that DJs don’t mix it up a bit and play some songs for more specific groups of people. For example:
This one is for everyone who loves kids.
Michael Jackson – Beat It – because Michael Jackson loved kids too.
This one is for anyone at home playing with rope.
Joy Division – Love Will Tear Us Apart – because rope lovers identify with the Joy Division front man.
This one is for those who are having a good day.
Dimmu Borgir – Burn In Hell (Twisted Sister cover) – because a DJ is never having a good day.
This one is for everyone arguing on the comments of Youtube.
Jackson 5 – ABC – because clearly no one commenting there have learnt them.
This one is for everyone driving slow.
The Beatles – Can’t Buy Me Love – because you aren’t buying love on the street.
This one is for the Westboro Baptist Church.
AC/DC – Highway to Hell – because that is exactly where this church belongs.
This one is for all the politicians.
Guns ‘n’ Roses – Get in the Ring – seriously, one round, no holds barred, no tap outs.
Tagged: AC/DC, Dedications, Dimmu Borgir, DJ, DJs, Funny, Guns 'n' Roses, Humor, Humour, Irony, Jackson 5, Joy Division, Michael Jackson, Music, Requests, Right What You No, The Beatles, Twisted Sister, Tyson Adams, Westboro Baptist Church, Youtube
September 18, 2013
Science Fiction Follies
8. Robots must be super strong and unstoppable until they come to a flimsy wooden door.
9. Robots must be compatible with all computers, even Windows.
Tagged: Asimov, Funny, Humor, Humour, Isaac Asimov, Laws of Robotics, Right What You No, Robot, Robotics, robots, Science, science fiction, Tyson Adams
