Canta per me

Noir, the first series in Kouichi Mashimo’s “girls–with–guns” trilogy, is being remade as a live action TV show (by Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert).

I’m going to go out on a limb and say this adaptation will probably be good; it’s got a couple factors in its favor.

The characters are almost all European; one main character is an amnesiac Japanese girl who can only remember the word “Noir” and how to kill people, but the rest are Western. They won’t have to make everyone into a foreigner for the show to be accessible to Americans, since everyone already is one!

It’s a show rife with action; guns are everywhere, and gunplay is easy for Hollywood to handle without looking (completely) ridiculous.

The guns are varied; Kirika (the amnesiac) carries a Beretta 34, and Mireille (her eventual partner and the other main character) carries a Walther P99.

I doubt they’ll keep Yuki Kajiura’s excellent soundtrack, though.

Quote of the Indeterminate Time Interval – James M. Taylor

Apparently the University of Colorado’s Sea Level Research Group has decided to add 0.3mm each year to their actual sea level measurements (H/T Hotair); land masses are still recovering from the ice age, and this fudge factor accounts for the gradual rising of land masses. This accounts for the fact that ocean basins are getting bigger.

If that’s the case, then the rate of the sea level rise by itself doesn’t tell us much; what matters is the relative rate. If the basins are increasing in volume faster than the sea levels rise, then who cares about the rise in sea level? It’s not going to affect us at all. If the rates are the same, then the sea level will remain essentially constant. If the sea level rate is faster than the ocean basin rate, then rising seas could be a problem; but just giving us the rate of sea level rise by itself doesn’t tell us how serious the problem is. If the seas are rising at 0.31mm per year, and the land is rising at 0.3mm per year (note: these numbers are made up), then the actual rate of sea level rise isn’t 0.31mm/year, but is instead 0.01mm/year.

That’s a problem of an entirely different magnitude.

Which brings us to our quote:

When Al Gore talks about Manhattan flooding this century, and 20 feet of sea level rise, that’s simply not going to happen. If it were going to happen, he wouldn’t have bought his multi-million dollar mansion along the coast in California.

Or, as the Instapundit is so fond of putting it, “I’ll believe there’s a crisis when the people who tell me there’s a crisis start acting like there’s a crisis.”