Where Worlds Collide

The Zombie Infection Simulation simply defies description. (Requires Java, Link from Chad Underkoffler)

Jeanne D’Arc’s Body and Soul, a blog I should really read more often, suggests that the Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson style of religions right is waning. While this might sound like a good thing, she suggests that the replacement is something much worse.

BBC NEWS | Technology | When sci-fi forgets the science

Every fan of science fiction film knows that for every genuinely good movie they see, they will have to endure an awful lot of rubbish.

For every innocent gem like Star Wars: A New Hope there is a Phantom Menace. And for every life-affirming classic like The Incredible Shrinking Man there is a soul-destroying Battlefield Earth.

And recently - particularly this summer - there has been an awful lot of rubbish around.

A strange idiocy seems to have over-taken the makers of blockbusters such as The Matrix Reloaded, Star Wars: Attack of the Clones and others who are bolstering their creations with some decidedly dodgy science.

One of the golden rules of good SF is that you can take one implausible concept (Faster-than-light travel, psionic powers, self-aware computers, whatever), but you should then follow the implications of that completely logically. Written SF seems follow that rule, but Hollywood SF doesn’t. Perhaps its because so many Hollywood films seem to be made by committees, or that Hollywood screenwriters are not SF writers, and have little or no background in science.

Of course, when a good SF film gets made, often the mainstream critics don’t understand it and give it poor reviews (much like they did to Peter Jackson’s version of Lord of the Rings)

Being very anoraky today. I’ve been comparing some of the photos I took at Blausee-Mitholz with the BLS railway timetable to work out which workings I’ve actually photographed. In particular, what was this very heterogenious formation? (When did you last see an EW1 in NPZ livery on an Intercity train?) I didn’t record the timings of the photos, so my best guess is this is an additional train running in the path of the late-running Dortmund-Brig EC Lötchberg. The photo of the EC Lötchberg itself, half an hour later seems to support this, it’s hauled by an Re4/4ii rather than the usual Re460.

Can you imagine any British TOC running an additional service because a long-distance working is late nowadays? Sounds unbelievable now, but I have seen it happen in Cornwall in the past - back in 1988 the Dundee-Penzance HST was very late, and they rustled up a 47287 and a scratch formation of four coaches to run in it’s path in Cornwall. Wouldn’t happen today…

An awful lot of PBeM or PBmB games fold after a few moves, but I have to wonder if this is taking things a bit too far?

I seriously want to run a ‘non-game’ where we would have a game we were planning to play, create characters, discuss settings and plotlines, maybe even do a scene or two, but not ever intend to actually play it.

I seems to have sparked quite a lot of interest; I suspect it may well end up spawning an actual game or two.

A few more photos on my fotopic.net site; more narrow-gauge stuff including the Mürren tram, which runs along the top of that waterfall, and is the only link to roadless resort village of Mürren.

politX notes the large-scale rail closures for engineering work during the bank holiday weekend. There are blockades on the West Coast Main Line (again), on the 4-track Great Western Main Line between Slough and Reading, and also on the East Coast line and South Manchester.

You can blame it all on incompetent past or present management or on privofragmentisation, as many commentators are doing. But one villain seems to be ignored by the mainstream press, the Health and Safety Executive

There is a reason I put these guys in the 7th Circle of Hell. It’s largely their rules that mean Notwork Rail have to close all four lines of a four track railway when they’re replacing sometime like a set of points on just one of them. And HSE red tape inflates the cost by a factor of π (as estimated by Roger Ford of Modern Railways)

An example. In the last years of the nationalised railway, British Rail spent a lot of money on bi-directional signalling on the London-Norwich line, and invested in clever high-tech track relaying machines that could relay one track while trains could still use the adjacent one. The idea was that you’d only need to close one track, and allow single-line working on the other. There would be delays, but still preferable to closing the line and shutting people across the blockade on replacement buses.

But HSE won’t allow them to do that; can’t have men working that close to a running line. So there are going to be something like 18 months of weekend closures while they replace worn-out sections of track.

All these temporary speed restrictions during hot weather are their idea too; while there may be some known trouble spots where there’s a risk of rails buckling in the heat, a blanket 60mph speed limit across large parts of the network was never justified. (And I find out that the 60mph was for passenger trains. Freight was limited to 30 mph!). One reason for the severe delays to my a couple of weeks back was that we were stuck behind a freight between Leamington Spa and Banbury.

HSE, like many mindless bureacracies, don’t care about the big picture. The idea that some of their stupid rules might result in more deaths by driving people to use other, less safe transport modes simply doesn’t occur to them.

Excellent post by Matthew Yglesias in which he suggests that those neocon commentators who think that the bombing of the UN in Baghdad was a good thing because it ’shows the bad guys are getting desperate’ are taking a Leninist view of things.

And people take the piss out of train spotters. Pathetic Motorways exposes the motorway equivalents of class 142 ‘Nodding Donkeys’. (Link from Stuii)

This is an excuse that Virgin Trains have yet to use. But I’m sure it’s only a matter of time.

Malignant computer viruses halted CSX Transportation trains and slammed corporate and government e-mail networks across the country Wednesday as security experts scrambled to respond to the second major cyber attack in as many weeks.

CSX stopped its passenger and freight trains, including morning commuter service in the metropolitan Washington, D.C., area, after an unidentified computer virus overwhelmed its telecommunications network.

(Link from Dodgeblogium)