Daily Blog 06/08/2012
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Action Adventure Tropes – Television Tropes & Idioms
Action Adventure Tropes
Elements used for exciting sequences, or primarily only found in stories about adventure. -
Top Ten action movie cliches Jim Schembri CineTopia Killer Elite
CineTopia’s Top Ten action movie cliches – as championed by the new, mostly-shot-in-Melbourne action thriller Killer Elite.
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Back to the workhouse | Society | The Guardian
Much of this can be traced back to innovations by the last government, which decisively embraced what some people call workfare – though the coalition has expanded such practices to mindboggling proportions. Sometimes this is a matter of people being forced to work for nothing under pain of having their benefits stopped. Slightly higher up the employment hierarchy, it might be a matter of a jobcentre or work programme adviser telling them a spell of unpaid work will brighten up their CV, or lead to a proper job with the same employer. Politicians praise all these things as a means of getting people into work and thereby attacking unemployment; what nobody mentions is that expanding unpaid labour ensures there is even less proper work in the economy.
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One Per Cent: Software knows what makes Paris look like Paris
It is a Hollywood cliché that every window in the French capital has a grand view of the Eiffel Tower, but even seemingly nondescript streets have uniquely Parisian architectural features that separate them from the likes of London or Milan.
Now, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and INRIA in Paris have written software capable of spotting these small details. It could help animation-makers avoid the Eiffel Tower cliché by crafting virtual cities with a distinct visual DNA – at present, animators like Pixar spend weeks documenting a location, as they did for Paris in the film Ratatouille.
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D-Day: Rare colour pictures from World War II depict invasion in whole new hue | Mail Online
A new batch of incredibly rare colour photographs has been released by LIFE magazine in honour of D-Day, showing masterfully coloured images both before and after the assault of World War II’s dramatic turning point.
Captured by photographer Frank Scherschel, the pictures from before and after the Normandy invasion depict the operation in a whole new light.
Mr Scherschel manages to capture nearly idyllic images after the invasion, including reactions in small French towns and the rolling countryside and civilians coming together in Paris to celebrate their freedom.
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How to Bike With Your Kids | GeekDad | Wired.com
It’s one of the great pleasures of parenthood: strapping your kid to a bike and going for a ride. There are lots of ways to do it. Tons, in fact. Too many, actually. Rear-mounted seats, front-mounted seats, trailers, cargo bikes, trailer bikes, duct tape—each with its own trade-offs and advantages. It’s enough to send you back inside for the car keys.