In a pure series hybrid a gas engine acts a generator which charges a battery, which drives an electric motor, which provides power to the wheels.
In parallel hybrids, both the gas motor and the electric motor provide traction, sometimes simultaneously.
Parallel is more efficient if you're depending on gas often, as every conversion has losses. Toyota mostly sells hybrids you can't plug in, and the ones you can plug in are variants of the ones you can't, so they all share the same drivetrain.
Nothing makes me more excited about this museum than the turnover in curatorial leadership throughout the project, capped off by Lucas assuming the title himself.
Give me his unrestrained vision. Put it in my veins.
It's reminiscent of the difference between the Star Wars prequel and sequel trilogies. Regardless of your opinions on the quality of those movies, the biggest differentiator is that the prequels were the singular vision of a self-funded artist while the sequels are a corporate product of a global media empire. Even if the latter produces a better movie, it ends up sanding off many of the edges and those edges are where a lot of us found the magic of Star Wars. The Lucas Museum is similar in that it very clearly is the product of an excentric billionaire rather than the same type of curatorial thinking you will find in other art museums.
These are two crappy choices, and it's not a coincidence that a resource strapped filmmaker having to engage with many skilled artisans to sharpen their "singular vision" resulted in much better films (the original trilogy) than either of those two.
If you think he was significantly resourceful strapped making Empire and Jedi you are mistaken. At the time they were some of the most expensive films ever made.
Mostly self-funded too (a higher percentage for Jedi than Empire) so even in the original trilogy it was still Lucas signing the checks and making the ultimate decisions. Him being willing to delegate more in those days was personality driven rather than financially driven.
Let’s not forget though, the prequel trilogies were—not good. Lucas is at his best when he has collaborators who can help take the half-baked ideas and fully bake them.
They were better than good. I wouldn't call them masterpieces (my biggest critique is that they tried to do too much in II which messed up the pacing of Anakin's arc) but they're great films.
Yes, but while I may prefer "good" when it comes to the multiplex, I much prefer "interesting" when it comes to my art museums and Lucas's prequels and museum are both very interesting.
Phantom Menace is a super fun movie. Pure Star Wars. I've used it as an entry to the series for all of my kids (then I skip ahead to the OT to not ruin the twist).
I've generally found that most people who didn't like are people who were already adults when it came out, and had a different vision of what they wanted it to be.
Yeah, I think that's one of the keys: the lore in the prequels is so rich (and was so thoroughly fleshed out in stuff like the Clone Wars series) that if you're just directionally on board with the plot, the worldbuilding, the characters, you can read between the lines and just see the whole thing in a better light than the actual film on screen provides for itself.
For me personally, the prequels were very much an "emperor has no clothes" moment. There's a lot of "meh" in the prequels--in the writing, in the story, and in the direction. Some of the scenes between Anakin and Padme are just downright painful. But I could also see someone being able to overlook at least some of that, especially if they first saw the films when they were young. So I'm not here to complain about any of that.
I can sum up my biggest problem with the prequels (well, with Lucas really) in one word: midichlorians.
When he decided to explain how the force works, he took something that had been so eloquently portrayed in the OT*, and reduced it to something banal and mechanical. And there was no reason to do that. It's not like Darth Vader needed a blood sample to know that Obi-Wan was on the Death Star. And yet Lucas chose to do it anyway.
That choice showed such a baffling level of cluelessness. Like here's this guy, this supposed visionary, who has carte blanche to do whatever he wants (with what is supposedly his own story, no less) and he just.. doesn't really seem to get it?
It really made me question whether the OT were as a good as they were because of him or in spite of him. Apparently I got something out of the story that he did not.
* I'm referring particularly to Yoda's speech to Luke about the force in ESB. "Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter!". Beautiful writing, still gives me goosebumps. No wonder ESB is often considered the best one.
> That choice showed such a baffling level of cluelessness. Like here's this guy, this supposed visionary, who has carte blanche to do whatever he wants (with what is supposedly his own story, no less) and he just.. doesn't really seem to get it?
> It really made me question whether the OT were as a good as they were because of him or in spite of him.
He didn’t get it with the original trilogy either, but had Marsha Lucas to tell him no and patiently explain how normal people work. For the prequels he was surrounded by yes-men.
> Some of the scenes between Anakin and Padme are just downright painful.
The worse part of that is seeing clips from between takes: they actually have chemistry! They were actually directed to be unrealistic and unbelievable.
> It really made me question whether the OT were as a good as they were because of him or in spite of him.
Harrison Ford is why Han Solo says "I know" in response to Leia's "I love you". Contrasts directly with Anakin/Padme. "in spite of him" is at least a big chunk of it.
It can be both. Good art tends to allow a measure of interpretation outside of what the artists originally intended.
Dunno how in tune you are with random factoids but Lucas is on the record saying that his favorite episode in "The Clone Wars" is "A Sunny Day in the Void", where a bunch of droids are stuck in the desert. So...yeah, there's definitely _something_ he gets out of this series that might not line up with the fanbase at large.
He also wanted to double down on the midichlorians and the Whills for the sequels, so it definitely wasn't a one-off for him.
As for me, I don't hate the idea that a spiritual quality can have a physical component to it. (Makes you think about if a parting of the Red Sea or an ax head floating are "truly supernatural" events or more "natural, with mechanisms we can't understand".) I suppose it's a bit coarse that it's used to boil mysticism down to a number for comparison, and it certainly wasn't _necessary_ to move the plot along, though.
Nope. None of the frivolous NIMBY lawsuits ever made it to trial, nor was the museum ever a defendant in any of them (it was the city being sued for approving it). I don't see what you gain from misrepresenting this years after the fact.
The city could've gone to trial for the one case you're referencing, and would've won given enough money and time, but by that point the museum had already started investigating other locations.
I appreciate you recognizing us as the OG. We've tracked every launch since 2009!
Who is in space, they seem like nice people, I love the Smarter Every Day crew. (They actually tried to buy my domain years ago.) Pretty lame that they're running those insane Starlink ads but it is what it is.
I also think that would be pretty cool. But, I think one of the things that people have loved about my site is that it really just sticks to answering the question that the URL asks and tries not to get lost in the read-more sauce. At one point we had an iOS app that had more information (and notifications!) but that thing hasn't been updated in a long time.
I liked checking that website, until it listed the Artemis II crew for weeks after they came back. Now I have no idea how accurate it is; I don't know what other source to compare it to.
But maybe there's a more reliable method it uses for tracking the ISS astronauts, and the Artemis II needed more human input or something. For what it's worth, both websites currently list the same ten astronauts.
Yeah you're not wrong. I've updated this site by hand since 2009. There's not one data source so for a long time I was that data source. I'll be honest: I got kind of soul-crushed when Bezos and Elon started sending people up in a way that just started to feel really dirty to me. Honestly I hated updating the site, then having to update it again an hour later every time Bezos sent someone up. It's only been in the last year that I've started keeping it current.
Or Disney releasing a movie called "Frozen" so that web searches for "Disney Frozen" stopped returning macabre rumors about Walt Disney's possible posthumous cryogenic preservation.
Ah, so that’s why they released one of their most successful blockbusters, it was all an elaborate plot to bury the well known and long debunked story of the frozen Walt Disney.
Of course, that's why they used the generic word "frozen" with a lot of meanings, as opposed to the specific word "cryogenic" that people would actually search for.
Well, it could be because google sucks. Allegedly, the way google enshitifies their searches is to include parallel search terms in the query. Why does google enshitify their searches? Because people spend longer on the google site searching multiple times = more ad time.
So, searching for either cryogenic or frozen individually on google may include the other search term, meaning that when searching for cryogenic and disney, you will more than likely get results for frozen and disney, which are probably ranked higher.
So the theory is now that Disney named one of their most successful films "Frozen", not because it's a good name for a story inspired by "The Snow Queen", but it's actually to stop people finding out the rumours that Walt Disney was cryogenically frozen by having results about the film outrank results about the conspiracy theory, even though that's trivially overcome by asking about "walt disney cryogenic" instead of "walt disney frozen", but they did that because Disney knew that Google sucks and would somehow be unable to stop pages about the film from outranking pages about the conspiracy theory.
That's a bold theory. Let's test it. Google results for "disney cryogenic":
Was Walt Disney frozen after death?
Walt Disney was cryogenically frozen : r/MandelaEffect
Walt Disney's Cryogenic Chamber - Myth and Folklore Wiki
How a strange rumor of Walt Disney's death became legend
The truth behind Walt Disney's frozen head
Was Walt Disney cryogenically frozen?
Fact or Fiction: Was Walt Disney Frozen?
What is the story behind the conspiracy theory that Walt Disney was cryogenically frozen?
8/8 are about the conspiracy theory, 0/8 are about the film.
my theory is, that in hindsight it could look like a straight line from naming a film "frozen," and that in turn, at the height of frozen's popularity and due to googles policies, a search for "disney cryogenic" could return results for the movie frozen, which could lead to the suspicion that it was done on purpose.
i am very surprised to find that my search results for "disney cryogenic" almost match yours perfectly.
When I took the two day Disney "Walk in Walt's Footsteps" executive employee training 25+ years ago, the training that takes you to his secret apartment above the firehouse, and makes you spend an afternoon as a costumed (minor) character, at the end the woman leading us said "Ok! Now it's time for all of you to kiss Walt's frozen head."
This is my read of the situation too. Amazon wants to control "agentic commerce" use cases so they can monetize them. A generic agent using amazon.com undermines that effort, so they're trying to use the courts to prevent it.
They're going to be confronted with the ADA soon enough. If I'm a quadriplegic I may want to employ my own user agent to engage in commerce. Amazon doesn't have any standing to dictate how I access their services.
I've long been thankful for a lot of ADA requirements in software, like OSX, which has enabled some interesting automation tools over the years. More recently, I have been saying the best part of MCPs and AI era is all of a sudden its gotten companies to expose all their data in a universal format, so I am no longer beholden to what a PM or UX designer things is best for me.
Selfishly, I will always advocate for this, but as someone who is colorblind (which barely counts as a disability) I am very aware of how easily inaccasbile so many tools are.
The powerbi dashboard that ships w/ fabric usage credits is the only place I have to know how much my work costs, and its the same color as several other things. Id so much rather they just give me the raw data on an API feed but instead I need to use like 400mb of ram to view an illegible chart.
Legal issues asside, I find this agentic commerce goal naive. Its like expecting me to buy a different microwave so the popcorn button works with the official amazon popcorn. Theres no way they will be able to replace the context and tooling I have setup for my own personal agents. And theres no way in hell im going to give Amazon every piece of information in my life so they are slightly better equipped to recommend which usbc dongle I need.
I understand that the sheer size of Amazon, and industry standard of forcing AI into every tool, makes them think its worth investing in. But from my outside perspective this is not a winable strategy.
If this is basically an MCP/api with curated data sources, then yes im interested.
I think there is some legit market opportunity to try to provide this to small - medium businesses. The biggest advantage Amazon has over them is visibility, and the tooling that comes with it. If you made a squarespace plugin or otherwise that would index someone's store, then that store owner would be able to get business from the shared platform, while not worrying about having a good search tool. As a potential shopper, I would have value in buying on this network, especially if I had reason to beleive the reviews were legit.
After I typed the above out I checked out your profile... you may already be working on this but I have some other ideas, can I message you?
Don't they already do something similar but with Shopify? Like you buy on Amazon and then Amazon scrapes the internet and buys from a Shopify site without the seller's or user's consent.
Exactly right. With LLMs, you can go directly to the website and checkout instead of going thru Amazon so they can collect their commission.
It’s actually why I’m building an open-source, decentralized Amazon alternative that’s powered by agentic commerce and MCP-UI that brings the cart and storefront into the chat directly.
Amazon and every marketplace’s days are numbered. It’s why you see so many of them trying to push their own sort of agentic commerce protocol because they want to control commerce in the age of AI. It’s exactly why I chose MCP-UI and not their protocols.
This is an is-ought inference. Americans have not been given an option and use the units they're provided with, which is a frustrating mix of everything depending on context.
In parallel hybrids, both the gas motor and the electric motor provide traction, sometimes simultaneously.
Parallel is more efficient if you're depending on gas often, as every conversion has losses. Toyota mostly sells hybrids you can't plug in, and the ones you can plug in are variants of the ones you can't, so they all share the same drivetrain.
reply