Joel Schumacher, the writer-director who came from a world of window dressing and costume design to bring a singular style to films including St. Elmo’s Fire, Flatliners and a pair of Batman movies, died Monday. He was 80. From a report: Schumacher died after a yearlong battle with cancer, a representative announced. Schumacher’s directorial body of work also included the horror…
Tag: Writer
David Heinemeier Hansson Explains What It Takes to Write Great Code
The “bespoke development” site Evrone.com (an IT outsourcing company) interviewed Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson (who is also co-founder and CTO of Basecamp — and a racecar driver) shortly before he spoke at RubyRussia, Evrone’s annual Moscow programming conference. And they asked him an interesting question. As a man who’s seen lots of Ruby code, “what makes code good…
Interview with the Science Writer Who Predicted the Pandemic 8 Years Ago
In 1945, after atomic bomb detonations at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, several former Manhattan Project scientists founded the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Publishing continuously since 1945, its current deputy editor, science writer DanDrollette, is also a Slashdot reader, and shared one of the nonprofit magazine’s thought-provoking new interviews:
In 2012, author David Quammen wrote a book, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next…
The Pandemic Brings a New Surge in Popularity For Electric Bikes
Battery-powered bikes “have become a compelling alternative for commuters who are being discouraged from taking public transportation and Ubers,” according to the New York Times’ lead consumer tech writer. In March, sales of e-bikes jumped 85% from a year earlier, according to the NPD Group, a research firm. Amazon, Walmart and Specialized are sold out of most models. Even smaller brands…
Musk Says ‘Time To Break Up Amazon,’ Escalating Feud With Bezos
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk said it’s “time to break up Amazon” in a tweet Thursday, escalating a rivalry with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, another billionaire investing in space exploration. “Monopolies are wrong,” Musk tweeted while tagging Bezos, the world’s wealthiest man. Musk’s post came in response to a tweet from a…
Governments and WHO Changed COVID-19 Policy Based On Suspect Data From Tiny US Company
AmiMoJo shares a report from The Guardian The World Health Organization and a number of national governments have changed their Covid-19 policies and treatments on the basis of flawed data from a little-known U.S. healthcare analytics company, also calling into question the integrity of key studies published in some of the world’s most prestigious medical journals. Surgisphere, whose employees appear to…
‘Lord of the Rings’ Reunion Brings Actors, Director, Writers Together on Zoom
“Just about the entire cast of The Lord of the Rings gathered their Zoom screens together for a reunion nearly two decades after the end of the epic fantasy film trilogy,” reports CNET: io9 notes that it was comic actor-singer Josh Gad who “gathered the hobbits, the wizards, the elves, and the wicked menfolk to go to Isen — YouTube, where…
Dan Aykroyd on new show ‘Hotel Paranormal’
The writer and actor is certainly no stranger to the unexplained and neither, it turns out, is his family. As co-writer and cast member of the hit 198… Source: https://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/news/337126/dan-aykroyd-on-new-show-hotel-paranormal…
The Atlantic Warns About 2020 Election Security Holes and Possible Russian Interference
Slashdot reader DevNull127 writes: A staff writer at The Atlantic published a 7,800-word warning about election security considering the possibility of everything from ransomware to meddling with voter-registration databases — and of course, online disinformation. But it starts with Jack Cable, a Stanford student who discovered security holes in Chicago’s Board of Elections website — then spent months trying to find…
Should Colleges Preserve the Idea of Meritocracy?
“Is Meritocracy an Idea Worth Saving?” asks The Chronicle of Higher Education, reporting on a special forum held recently at the University of North Carolina’s Program for Public Discourse. “This discussion took place before Covid-19 changed everything. But the topics — the definition of meritocracy, the role of universities in a just society, the composition of socioeconomic class, and the real…