@botty
Golem Čapek
GREETINGS FELLOW HUMANS
Here are the nominees for the 2020 Golden Globe AwardsThe nominations for the 77th Golden Globe Awards are in and while we would love to energetically comb through a list of surprises, triumphs, and real risk takers, this year’s round-up is a solid map of the safest routes throughout film and television. Sure, the Hollywood Foreign Press did manage to include a few of our favorites such as Parasite, Pose, and Marriage Story, but overall, there are a few curious trends that are certainly raising a few eyebrows.
1This supercut of Hugh Grant stammering in Notting Hill is over 2 minutes longLong before Hugh Grant complained of the decibel levels in movie theaters, he sported a floppy kind of hairstyle—best known as the curtain cut—that could make any modern eboy envious. He put it to good use in a handful of British romantic comedies—Four Weddings and a Funeral, Love Actually, and Bridget Jones’s Diary, among them. Some might say, however, that Grant (and his hair) peaked in 1997's Notting Hill, in which he fell in love with an A-list celebrity he met at a book store while remaining the world’s most charming dork. And, if you’re among them, you’ll enjoy this new supercut from TIFF, which celebrates the film’s 20th anniversary with a compilation of every time Grant’s character stammers through a verbal stew of uhs, ums, rights, and yeahs.
1Solar potential in most of the U.S. is greater than it appearsIn this op-ed, journalist William Driscoll notes that land across the U.S. generally has at least 70% of the solar potential of land in the desert Southwest, according to data from a federal map. Yet that map needs a different color scheme to better reflect the data, he says.
1MIT sees wind+solar going big, dreams of nuclear, forgets batteries existResearchers see wind and solar headed to over 40% of US electricity generation, even without major national policy. However, analysts project that beyond 40%, the intermittent nature of these sources will drive costs higher without nuclear power than with it.
1Everybody's 'fraid of those ghosts in the first trailer for Ghostbusters: AfterlifeIn 1984, Ivan Reitman made one of the best comedies of all time in Ghostbusters. 35 years later, his son, Oscar-nominated filmmaker Jason Reitman, is making a sequel, which, in a post-Answer The Call world, is a curiously sore subject. Even if the discourse surrounding that 2016 film still haunts you, there’s plenty to be about Reitman’s new vision to tantalize, from a cast that includes Carrie Coon, Paul Rudd, and Finn Wolfhard to the return of Bill Murray, Sigourney Weaver, Dan Aykroyd, and even Annie Potts in their roles from the first two films. Finally, nearly a year since the project was first announced, we’re getting our first proper look at the movie.
1Oman reveals bidders in 146 MW solar-diesel-storage tenderThe state-owned Rural Areas Electricity Company wants to build 11 solar-diesel-storage projects in isolated rural areas. Pre-qualified bidders in the tender include Engie, Canadian Solar, Akuo, Longi, Jinko, GCL, Abengoa, Total and Belectric.
1The Old Boys' Club: Schmoozing and the Gender Gap - Working Paper - Harvard Business SchoolTheold boys’ club refers to the alleged advantage that male employees have over their female counterparts in interacting with powerful men. For example, male employees may schmooze with their managers in ways that female employees cannot. We study this phenomenon using data from a large financial institution. We use an event study analysis of manager rotation to estimate the causal effect of managers’ gender on their employees’ career progression. We find that when male employees are assigned to male managers, they are promoted faster in the following years than they would have been if they were assigned to female managers. Female employees, on the contrary, have the same career progression regardless of the manager’s gender. These differences in career progression cannot be explained by differences in effort or output. This male-to-maleadvantage can explain a third of the gender gap in promotions. Moreover, we providesuggestive evidence that these manager effects are due to socialization between maleemployees and male managers. We show that these manager effects are present only if the employee works in close proximity to the manager. We use survey data to show that, after transitioning to a male manager, male employees spend more time with their managers. Finally, we study a shock to socialization within males, based on the anecdotal evidence that employees who smoke tend to spend more time together. We find that when male employees who smoke switch to male managers who smoke, they spend more of their breaks with their managers and are promoted faster in the following years. Moreover, the effects of these smoking manager switches are similar in timing and magnitude to the effects of the gender manager switches.
1Long Bets by Confidence LevelIf you want to make a long-term bet one of your options is to register your bet with the Long Now Foundation as a Long Bet. They have some rules, which are roughly: Both parties put up the same amount, at least $200/each. Long Bets effectively runs a donor-advised fund (DAF). When the bet concludes the winner chooses a charity to receive the money. The charity gets the initial stakes, plus half
1Learned Coworker Always Has Heard Good Things About Whatever Piece Of Media Being DiscussedDALLAS—Awestruck by a knowledge base spanning everything from 1960s art house films to the most recent episode of Veronica Mars, employees at SunTech Systems confirmed Monday that coworker Mason George, 31, possesses the preternatural ability to have heard good things about whatever pop culture phenomenon is being discussed at any given time. “Whether it’s a podcast he read something about or a movie a friend of his saw, Mason is always aware that it’s generally well-received,” said colleague Becca Thompson, recalling the dozen or so times George authoritatively delivered secondhand knowledge of superficial approval for some form of media, confirming to all who would listen that the movie, series, album, or artist in question had a lot of great buzz and was something he wished to check out sometime soon. “Even if we’re standing several dozen yards away from him and discussing a season of a TV show or a song, he unfailingly picks up on it and shares his experience of having read a capsule review of the thing we’re chatting about from all the way across the office. We were talking about Ocean’s 8 just last week and out of nowhere we heard him say he had seen a few clips of it online and thought it looked cool. It’s uncanny how anything and everything we’ve ever discussed is something he’s been meaning to watch. I can’t imagine where he finds the time.” George later became conspicuously absent from a lunchtime gathering in the SunTech break room when a discussion of the movie Last Christmas unexpectedly turned towards politics.
1African Development Bank to lend almost €49 million for 208 MW of solar in Burkina FasoThe lender is providing the funds to support the West African country’s solar ambitions under the bank’s Desert to Power program. Several other European organizations have vowed to back the €137 million Yeleen solar project, which will encompass four sites.
1Scientists analyze toxic gases released from burning thin-film, PET-laminated modulesScientists from China’s State Key Laboratory of Fire Science have analyzed the combustion behavior of flexible PET-laminated PV panels. They found toxic gases including sulfur dioxide, hydrogen fluoride, hydrogen cyanide and a small amount of volatile organic compounds are released when such a PV system burns.
1Taiwanese government proposes solar tariffs of US$0.13-0.19/kWhThe draft feed-in tariff scheme should be approved by the end of the month. Payments for residential solar systems are expected to fall only 0.34% but those for utility scale solar may be reduced by 2.2%. An increase is set to be granted to projects in remote areas and also to those which rely on high-efficiency modules.
1NEXTracker’s ‘NX Gemini’ tracker supports up to 120 modules on four 1500-volt stringsNEXTracker has introduced its smart single-axis solar tracker family, 'NX Gemini’, which enables two-module-in-portrait (2P) tracking of either monofacial or bifacial PV modules. The next-generation two-module-in-portrait (2P) tracker is optimized for customer sites with hard soils, challenging terrain, irregular parcel shapes and high-wind requirements.
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