Nerdgasm
FIrst, there’s this via Andrew Sullivan via Wired:
Emil Johansson is a Swedish chemical-engineering student who moonlights as a genealogist—of men, elves, hobbits, and dwarfs. Creator of the Lord of the Rings Project, Johansson is on a quest to track every character from Tolkien’s fictional world. He started by creating a massive family tree, and from there he crafted an interactive map of Middle-earth and a timeline of events in Tolkien’s stories. He has even performed statistical analyses on the characters’ race, lifespan, and gender.
~snip~
After laying out the tree, Johansson wanted to see how the number of characters changed over time—something he could do because of Tolkien’s remarkably detailed world. For Wired, Johansson plotted the population of beings for whom Tolkien provided birth and death information. (Elves, as everybody knows, never die.)
And then here’s a Delorean TARDIS, just because:
If I’m not mistaken, the TARDIS performs all the functions of the Delorean flux capacitator. It’s like one of those “a square is a circle but a circle is not a rectangle**” deals. As such, I’m not sure what the point of a TARDIS Delorean would be, other than style. Maybe you’re a time traveler who wants to impress the ladies and a regular old phone box just won’t do.
You’re welcome.
**I told you I’m bad at math. That includes geometry.
[cross-posted at ABLC]
Todd
Wow – this is nerdier than nerdy, and reconfirms my lifetime decisions to never read any LOTR books or watch any LOTR movies. :D
rlrr
@Todd:
Unmutual!
rlrr
Elves, as everybody knows, never die.
They can be killed, in which case they may be reincarnated…
PurpleGirl
Sometimes people with too much time on their hands do give us good/great/wonderful weird things.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Todd: Somehow I managed to read the Bible and become an atheist, and I read LOTR and didn’t shrink or grow, and I watched all of the Matrix movies and didn’t turn into Keanu Reeves.
On the other hand, I would so love to have a conversation with Wintermute.
rlrr
@PurpleGirl:
And other times they gives us the Twilight series…
rlrr
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
The LOTR is a better read than the Bible…
Culture of Truth
As this is an open thread:
WaPo:
Soledad O’Brien engaged with Republican Rep. Peter King whether President Obama has gone about apologizing for the United States and its values.
To strengthen her case, she cites the findings of FactCheck.org, which has looked at the record and reached a no-apology conclusion.
King responds in Newhousian fashion:
“I don’t care what FactCheck — I don’t care what FactCheck says!” Then he said something that was a bit fuzzy because of the cross-talk, but it was something like this: “They’ve become an appendage to the Obama campaign.”
Hunter Gathers
The Blue Box is much sexier than that Delorean. After all, it’s bigger on the inside.
JPL
Since this is an open thread, an incident occurred this morning that bothers me. I live in a burb north of Atlanta and had my septic cleaned and repaired. While I was signing papers, one of the techs mentioned he was pleased with voting restrictions because it would make it difficult for illegals to vote. I chuckled because illegals normally try not to cause attention to their status and he said yeah. Then he mentioned that the new driver license requirements along with the voting ID law might keep the others home.
Anyone who knows me, would think I would respond but I just looked at him because I felt like I was looking at someone who could belong to the K. Is the others a known term?
Yutsano
@Hunter Gathers: How do we know the Delorean isn’t? :)
MikeJ
@rlrr: Do any bears eat children because they laughed at a bald guy?
Culture of Truth
Then he mentioned that the new driver license requirements along with the voting ID law might keep the others home.
Then my dog started running around in circles!
FridayNext
@Hunter Gathers:
I am confused why this shape would not have the same property. It’s just a DeLorean shaped Tardis.
Also ABL said
Technically true, but the opposite is not true. TARDIS can travel in space and time, but the flux capacitor (not capacitator) only travels in time but not space. It always arrives at the same spot (relative to earth) as when it left.
I can see a benefit in this. A nemesis seeing you disappear in this vehicle would think you had to reappear in this same spot but in a different time. They would always look for you at that place (again, relative to the planet you are on) but in a different time. Meanwhile, you are millions light years away laughing hysterically.
Grumpy Code Monkey
@Todd:
The movies (extended cuts) really are worth the time to watch; Jackson did something amazing and basically managed to film the unfilmable. He compressed some timelines, dropped some secondary characters, made the dialog palatable to 21st-century ears, and created some damned effective cinema (I dare you to get past “you bow to no one” without choking up, at least a little bit, just from the visual alone).
The books…are a bit of a slog, and frankly I don’t recommend them as light reading.
rlrr
@MikeJ:
Do any bears eat children because they laughed at a bald guy?
No, but there is a resurrection story…
NonyNony
@FridayNext:
Or, more likely, find yourself millions of light years away suddenly surrounded by Daleks and armed only with a sonic screwdriver. The problem with the TARDIS is that it is powered by pure “Drivetheplotopuim”, and it shows up wherever you are most likely to get into a lot of trouble.
(I now have visions of Marty McFly leading a group of Daleks into the rear end of a manure truck on his skateboard…)
redshirt
The greatest cause for death of an Elf is ennui.
Also, Radergast the Brown is the best Wizard!
JPL
@Culture of Truth: He creeped me out. What was interesting, is I shut my mouth and just stared. Maybe I’ve been reading to many mysteries.
He certainly was a notch higher than the normal racist you meet here.
rlrr
@redshirt:
Sylvester McCoy is Radagast in the upcoming Hobbit movies…
redshirt
@rlrr: Awesome. I am SO excited for these flicks, though the news they’ve been spread to a trilogy is a bit unsettling.
I can’t wait to see Radagast unleash his butterfly hordes. Fly, my pretties, fly!
swbarnes2
@NonyNony:
No, the TARDIS is powered by the Doctor’s thanatos. It takes him to places where he should die. But when it comes right down to it, he’d rather help people and solve puzzles then die, so he does that instead, and looks for the next place that should kill him.
redshirt
Also too: Projects like this are why the Internet is not only the best, but revolutionary.
When else in human history could so much earnest effort not only be put forth on such a frivolous topic, but also shared with so many like minded folks?
We are as bored Gods!
Jay C
Well, Elves may not get sick or “die” on schedule like mortals, but they can get killed (in the frequent wars/orc-raids endemic to Middle-Earth); so one would expect the Elvish population – given their apparently equally-slow rate of reproduction – to remain pretty much constant, or growing very slowly.
I was surprised by the relatively short lifespans of Dwarves, though: must be those rough working conditions down in those mines….
Surreal American
@NonyNony:
You could do worse than Marty McFly vs the Daleks:
http://blastr.com/2011/01/image-of-the-day-bill-and.php
redshirt
@Jay C: Given that the Elves for the most part have left or were leaving Middle Earth, I’d think there numbers would have dropped precipitously over the last Age.
Unless these numbers also count the Elves in Valinor.
jibeaux
This isn’t very angry. Come to think of it, it’s not too black or too lady either. More power to you!
low-tech cyclist
@redshirt:
Unleashing chaos on Middle Earth! :D
LanceThruster
Everyone kills Hitler on their first trip.
Mnemosyne
@NonyNony:
Actually, as we found out in “The Doctor’s Wife,” the TARDIS takes the Doctor where he needs to go, not where he wants to go.
ETA: Also, too, the TARDIS is sentient, which automatically makes her cooler than the mere machinery of a flux capacitor.
low-tech cyclist
Just so you know, right now I’m wearing a t-shirt that shows the Back to the Future DeLorean about to crash into the TARDIS phone booth.
RSA
A true LOTR fan knows that the plural of “dwarf” is “dwarves”.
SP
@JPL- They’re the evil undead in Game of Thrones kept out of the lands of man by the 800 foot high Wall defended by the Night’s Watch, maybe your plumber is really Jon Snow.
To the OP, isn’t all the info about life spans, family trees, etc. already included in the appendices of ROTK? I’m not so impressed by assembling those, you’re basically converting it into a database (life span and relations of all characters to each other) from which you can extract basic stats. Could easily do a Six Degrees analysis of all characters as well and find out that Gandalf was sleeping with an elf who was his third cousin.
joel hanes
@Grumpy Code Monkey:
Jackson did something amazing [in making TLOTR movies
Agreed, with the reservation that he completely misunderstood, miscast, and misdirected Faramir, and so lost something important and fine. And I have never liked Hugo Weaving’s Elrond.
But “And my axe!” and “I will take the ring, though I do not know the way”, and Gandalf’s face when Frodo offers him the ring and he conquers his desire to accept it, and Galadriel’s “all will love me and despair” speech ditto, are simply exceptional, better than my fondest hope.
SP
Oh, and a few years ago, of course, they were the baddies on the other side of the island in Lost. And all references to Others probably tie back in some way to some wave of feminism where social structure is informed by a fear of the Other (feminism, racial minorities, etc.)
Corner Stone
@LanceThruster: Wow. I never realized how “miles wide and inch deep” matoko_chan’s penetration of the intertrons actually was.
Linnaeus
@SP:
Winter is coming.
Joel
Here’s a 6000 SUX, from the greatest Paul Veerhoeven movie of all time.
Rando
When the Chinese take over, it’ll be because of scum like this guy, who prefer to spend their time reading children’s novels and “gaming” rather than be productive citizens.
joel hanes
@rlrr:
The LOTR is a better read than the Bible…
Well, the bad parts of TLOTR are better than the bad parts of the Bible, I’ll give you that.
But from the standpoint of the civilized Caananites, the book of Joshua looks a lot like Helm’s Deep, except that the besieged populace loses their cities to the murderous horde of God-besotted barbarians one by one, and are butchered and enslaved. That’s pretty epic, if horrifying. (Our conventional view is distorted because the victorious Orcs got to write the history.)
Ecclesiates is some of the finest writing available anywhere. The Song of Songs is beautiful straightforward eroticism. Proverbs and Psalms have many fine moments.
And some of Jesus’ speeches are gorgeous, and more morally challenging than anything spoken by anyone in Middle Earth.
My favorite take on the Bible as literature is by novelist John Gardner:
Cassidy
@LanceThruster: That was amazing.
VincentN
@Rando:
Wow, really? First, I’ve never heard of LOTR described as a children’s novel so that’s just a stupid statement in itself. And second, this guy’s scum because he has a hobby? And you glean that he’s not a productive citizen, how? You also realize that he’s Swedish and is unlikely to have any effect on the American economy, right?
It seems to me that if the Chinese take over (a laughable proposition in itself) it’d be more likely because of rich idiots who drove our economy into the ground.
ABL
@LanceThruster: I love the “kill Hitler” episode of the Misfits.
ABL
@Mnemosyne: I just rewatched The Doctor’s Wife. Such an amazing episode.
LanceThruster
@ABL:
Will have to look for it. Think I may have seen an episode ot two IIRC.
LanceThruster
@ABL:
Watched a lot of Matt Smith’s Doctor Who on OnDemand on cable this weekned. Lots of fun. Will go back and view a second time (and see if my closed caption works better on a different TV – I am slowly going deaf, or more accurately, hearing impaired).
Brachiator
@ABL:
Yep. Heard it won one of those Hugo Award thingies.
jheartney
@NonyNony:
Sorry to be pedantic, but the word you are looking for is “Phlebotinum,”
Michael James
Actually, to be really pedantic, the whole point about the TARDIS looking like a UK Police Box fron the early 1960s is that that it normally disguises itself according to where it lands, but that part of the machinery got stuck when it landed in 1963 (When the show started).
A TARDIS DeLorean (assuming the camouflage circuit actually started working again, thus ruining the TV’s shows branding.) would look just like a DeLorean.
McJulie
@Grumpy Code Monkey:
De gustibus and all that, but I would say the enormous popularity of the books — especially among adolescents who weren’t assigned to read it in school or anything — argues against them being in fact difficult. But Jackson did do something amazing, which is that he made the story accessible to people who never really got into the books. My husband loved The Fellowship of the Ring (movie) as much as I had always loved the book, even though the book failed to move him at all. Not everything Jackson did paid off, but I really appreciated that his changes from the source seemed carefully considered with regard to making the story more cinematic.
(Obligatory Hobbit excitement bounce.)
Herbal Infusion Bagger
Well, given Elrond was driving around the Australian outback doing ghey drag shows, it’s not surprising he didn’t reproduce much.
Herbal Infusion Bagger
Yup, those Chemical Engineering students are well-known for being lazy unmotivated goof-offs.
Roger Moore
@rlrr:
Although there is a certain similarity between the begats and some of the appendices to LOTR. 1 Chronicles 1-9 would be much more readable if it were rendered as a set of family trees rather than a long prose description.
IowaOldLady
@JPL: Hm. The Others? Maybe he’s a George R. R. Martin reader.
IowaOldLady
Also too, Tolkien rocks. Some people are even inspired to write fanfiction set in Middle Earth. But that would be more than a little nerdy to admit, so…whatever.
Roger Moore
@Herbal Infusion Bagger:
I see you’ve blanked out the later Matrix movies. Probably a good move, when you get down to it.
bryan
Since the Doctor’s Tardis only looks like a Policeman’s phone box due to a malfunction in its camouflaging mechanisms, a Tardis that did not have this malfunction could, as the need arose, look like a DeLorean. It could then also be bigger on the inside.
wanders off, sniffing disapprovingly at the low levels of nerdery on exhibit.
slippy
@JPL:
My only comment would have been “don’t expect to ever work on my home again you racist prick.”