Posts by Keir Leslie
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And the amount of engineering is not irrelevant, it's the difference between a good car and a bad one, after all. Why is it not the difference between a car and a bike? Cars have massive redundancy of safety features built in.
No, the amount of engineering is irrelevant. It's like saying Windows is a better operating system than Linux, because Windows has some indefinable thing called more engineering.
The reason that a bicycle has very little engineering involved these days is that it is a classic product of the Victorian hero-engineers. It is like the wheel; one doesn't need to improve it really. Wells didn't write any books about cars, did he?
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Most people riding do NOT ride a $5k bike and there is NO WAY it's as engineered as even a lame weak car
Ben, you do realise that a rusty old Edwardian banger is probably more efficient than any car on the road today, right? (In kms for energy used. (& `As engineered as' is meaningless.))
If you've gone over the handlebars, that means 100% of the braking was being done by the front wheel, which might have something like 2 square inches of rubber on the road.
This really isn't a useful way of thinking about bicycle braking at all.
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I have no particular comment to make on the actual sculpture as presented, but the idea that the people working at Weta aren't artists is wrong. I know a couple of people who slaved away on the various movies and got their jobs precisely because they had fine art degrees.
Possession of a fine arts degree is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for being an artist.
Also, there's a difference between sculpture and set design. (Demarcation issues, as the guild of philosophers sez.)
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Depends if you value 'professionalism' or 'authenticity'.
You know, once you've read HRO you can't take authenticity seriously any more.
(It's a serious problem.)
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The Yellow Pages is a better book than The Great Gatsby, if you're looking for an effective doorstop. As literature though...
But `as literature' is meaningless, and in practice leads to rigid formalism and rather bizarre prescriptions about what art forms Ought To Be.
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But if it isn't how we actually do it, isn't that a strong argument that it isn't right?
It is often interesting to look at art purely from a conceptual standpoint, but that isn't to say that concepts are the important thing in art.
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(This was a double post but now just waffling.)
It isn't fair to say that Gio's objecting to prosaic analysis; rather he objects to the rejection of analysis.
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Likewise, a film can be used to pass the time, impress a date, learn factual information from, etc., but "good"/"bad"/"better"/"worse" means judging a film as a film, ie it's aesthetic qualities.
Yay formalism. I disagree that the notion of judging film as film is universally meaningful, and I don't think that is the way we judge artworks in practice.
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Christ, if you set `rugby statute on the waterfront' as part of the first year course at Canterbury or Auckland you'd probably get something better than this.
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It's mainly a pity it's a bit shit, isn't it?