Vladd’s view of the World

By Ed Johnson

July 31 (Bloomberg) — Scientists have found liquid on Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, making it the only body in the solar system other than Earth known to have fluid on its surface, NASA said.

The discovery was made using data from an instrument on board the Cassini spacecraft, which traveled more than 2.2 billion miles before entering orbit around Saturn in 2004.

“This is the first observation that really pins down that Titan has a surface lake filled with liquid,” said University of Arizona scientist Bob Brown, team leader of Cassini’s visual and mapping instrument. At least one of the lakes on the moon contains liquid hydrocarbons, NASA said in a statement yesterday.

Titan, with a diameter of about 3,200 miles (5,150 kilometers), is the second-largest moon in the solar system after Jupiter’s Ganymede. It orbits at a distance of about 745,000 miles from Saturn and is one of at least 56 moons of the ringed planet.

The lake, Ontario Lacus, in Titan’s south polar region, was spotted during a flyby in December, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration said. It is about 7,800 square miles in area, slightly bigger than North America’s Lake Ontario.

Scientists concluded the area is liquid by studying the way it absorbed and reflected infrared light.

Saturn’s moons have long been of interest to scientists, who say Titan may resemble an early version of Earth, providing clues to how the planet developed. In 2005, scientists detected a “significant atmosphere” on another moon, Enceladus.

Cassini was launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in 1997, bearing the Huygens probe. Huygens was sent down through Titan’s atmosphere in 2005, gathering data on the moon’s physical, chemical and electrical properties.

The $3.2 billion Cassini-Huygens mission is a collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency.

To contact the reporter on this story: Ed Johnson in Sydney at ejohnson28@bloomberg.net.

source:http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601116&sid=ab8tWfRz.8YU&refer=africa

A man blew up his garage attempting to make biodiesel from cooking oil at his Northamptonshire home.

The victim received 20% burns when his makeshift garage factory, in Middleton Cheney, exploded on Saturday afternoon.

He was airlifted to the specialist burns unit at Stoke Mandeville Hospital, Buckinghamshire, where he is now being treated.

Fire crews from Banbury, Oxfordshire, in breathing apparatus, sealed the area off until the chemicals were made safe.

It is understood the man regularly made fuel from used cooking oil, which he got from his local Chinese takeaway.

Soaring prices

He was using an electric drill to mix the oil with ethanol and caustic soda when a spark ignited the flames, causing the explosion.

Making your own fuel is legal – the government allows people to produce 2,500 litres of biofuel a year, tax free.

The AA has said more people are making their own supplies since the price of petrol and diesel began to soar at the pumps – with one estimate suggesting that 20,000 people across the UK are doing so.

But the organisation said while biodiesel might work in older cars, newer engines often do not react well to home-made fuel.

Oxfordshire County Council Fire and Rescue Service warned that people without sufficient knowledge of how to deal with chemicals were likely to face problems.

A spokesman said: “Firefighters would like to urge members of the public to take extreme caution if undertaking such chemical mixtures in their own homes and ensure they know exactly what they are doing and the potential consequences.”

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/northamptonshire/7527630.stm

Water penetrates thick ice, lubricating the base of glaciers

Related Multimedia

Greenland lakes

» View Slideshow

An Ice Sheet’s ‘Plumbing System’
Illustration by E. Paul Oberlander; Animation by Jack Cook, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

» View Video (Quicktime)

Ice Scientist
Sarah Das, a glaciologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, describes her expeditionary work in Greenland to learn how glaciers flow like rivers of ice to the sea.
Tim Silva, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

In late July 2006, a 2.2-square-mile lake atop the Greenland Ice Sheet sprung a leak. Like a draining bathtub, the entire lake emptied from the bottom, sending water through a crack that reached the base of the ice sheet 3,215 feet below. Most of the 11.6 billion gallons of water in the lake drained out in 90 minutes—at times flowing out faster than the water going over Niagara Falls.
Researchers from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and the University of Washington (UW) documented for the first time the sudden and complete drainage of this so-called supraglacial lake—one of thousands that form each spring and summer on top of the Greenland Ice Sheet as sunlight returns and melts snow and ice into water that pools into lakes.
The observation uncovers a long speculated, but never detected plumbing system for ice sheets: Supraglacial lakes can build up enough pressure to crack their bottoms, creating conduits that can penetrate thick ice sheets. The cracks can send torrents of water all the way to the base of the ice sheets, where the water greases the skids between ice and ground. That speeds up the flow of the glaciers’ otherwise steady march toward the ocean, releasing more icebergs that melt into the ocean.
The finding adds a new wrinkle to climate change scenarios. Earth’s warming climate, especially near the poles, could extend the melting season, create more supraglacial lakes across the ice sheet, and cause even more widespread acceleration of the ice sheet each summer.
This could increase the rate of sea level rise in the future. (If Greenland’s 2-mile-thick ice sheet melts completely, it would ultimately raise global sea level by 23 feet, drowning coastal regions). Melting of the ice sheet would also add larger amounts of fresh water to the ocean, which might affect ocean circulation patterns that, in turn, could alter rainfall patterns, fisheries, and climate.
“We set out to examine whether the melting at the surface—which is very sensitive to climate change—could influence how fast the ice can flow,” said WHOI glaciologist Sarah Das, who led expeditions to Greenland in 2006 and 2007 with UW scientist Ian Joughin. “It’s hard to envision how a trickle or a pool of meltwater from the surface could cut through thick, cold ice a mile or more thick, all the way to the bed. For that reason, there has been a debate in the scientific community as to whether such processes could exist, even though some theoretical work has hypothesized this for decades.”
Das and Joughin reported their finding May 9, 2008, in the journal Science. The research team also included WHOI scientists Mark Behn, Maya Bhatia, and Dan Lizarralde of WHOI, Ian Howat of UW, and Matt King of Newcastle University.
Das and colleagues used seismic instruments, water-level monitors, and Global Positioning System sensors to monitor the evolution of two supraglacial lakes and the motion of the surrounding ice sheet. They also used helicopter and airplane surveys and satellite imagery to monitor the lakes and to track the progress of glaciers moving toward the coast.
The research team returned July 8 for their third summer of field work—an expedition chronicled on polardiscovery.whoi.edu.
—Mike Carlowicz and Lonny Lippsett
The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the WHOI Clark Arctic Research Initiative, and the WHOI Ocean and Climate Change Institute.

By Laura Roberts
29th July 2008

A chocolate bar advertisement featuring Mr T has been taken off the air after accusations that it is ‘homophobic’.

In the Snickers commercial, Mr T – who played BA Baracus in the 1980s show The A Team – pulls up in a truck alongside a man exercising in tight yellow shorts and shouts: ‘Speed walking. I pity you fool. You are a disgrace to the man race. It’s time to run like a real man.’

He then forces the man to break into a sprint by taking pot shots at him with a Snickers machine gun. The commercial ends with Mr T uttering the slogan to the current Snickers campaign – ‘Get some nuts’.

Mr T spies a speed walker in the latest Snickers ad

The commercial, which premiered in the UK on July 13, was made by Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO – the same agency responsible for a Heinz Deli Mayo advert withdrawn last month after showing two men kissing.

That commercial prompted 200 complaints. In contrast, the Advertising Standards Authority has received only two complaints about the Snickers advert.

However, it prompted strong protests from the U.S. – even though it was never shown on American television.

Mr T forces the man to break into a sprint by taking pot shots at him with a Snickers machine gun

The U.S. lobby group Human Rights Campaign criticised Mars – which makes Snickers – for condoning ‘the notion that the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community is a group of second class citizens and that violence against GLBT people is not only acceptable but humorous’.

A spokesman for Mars said: ‘This ad is the second in a series of UK Snickers ads featuring Mr T, which are meant to be fun and have been positively received in the UK.

‘However, we understand that humour is highly subjective, and it is never our intention to cause offence. Accordingly, we have pulled the Mr T speedwalker ad globally.’

Mars said the advert was intended to be humorous but has terminated the campaign

The workplace director of Human Rights Campaign Daryl Herrschaft said: ‘HRC applauds Mars for taking swift and appropriate action.’

Meanwhile reaction in the UK was mixed amongst the gay community concerning the ban.

Website comments regarding the controversy in the UK suggested that complaints from the US should not impact on what is shown here.

Reaction to the ban in the UK gay community has been mixed

One wrote: ‘As a (British) gay man myself, I am fed up with the ultra-politically correct stance of organisations such as yours seeking out homophobia in places where none clearly exists.

‘Your entire approach actually damages the efforts of those of us who live in the real world to make any kind of headway in the fight against real homophobia – you know, the one that’s responsible for people being kicked unconscious outside nightclubs, or driven to suicide through bullying.’

Another said: ‘I’m gay and I found the ad hilarious. If you make the connection speed walking and homosexuality then you just perpetuating the stereotypes about gay men.

‘And it sad to see that gay people start to take themselves too seriously, and why do Americans feel to complain on what’s is on TV on this side of the pond?

‘And why people haven’t anything better to do in their life than sending complaint emails?’

According to the Hollywood Reporter, HBO is developing a one-hour television series based on the Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon comic book Preacher. Mark Steven Johnson who wrote Daredevil and Ghost Rider is penning the pilot episode with Howard Deutch attached to direct. Johnson and Deutch will also take up executive produce duties along with Michael De Luca, George Agusto, Chris Bender and JC Spink.

Preacher tells the story of Jesse Custer, a down-and-out preacher in the small Texas town of Annville who is accidentally possessed by a supernatural creature named ‘Genesis’ in an incident which kills his entire congregation and flattens his church. Custer, driven by a strong sense of right and wrong, goes on a journey across the United States attempting to (literally) find God, who abandoned Heaven the moment Genesis was born. He also begins to discover the truth about his new powers, which allow him to command the obedience of those who hear his words. He is joined by his old girlfriend Tulip O’Hare, as well as a hard-drinking Irish vampire named Cassidy.

Sunday, April 27, 2008

The Year: 1978

The Game: Space Invaders

What the Politicians Said: Space Invaders will kill your children! This dangerous “game” gives players three “lives.” This will clearly make children think they can get another life after they die, thereby causing kids to start killing themselves in droves thinking that they can instantly come back to life! Video games will promote teen suicide! Vote for us and we’ll save your children from themselves!

The Year: 1993

The Game: Doom

What the Politicians Said: Okay, we were wrong about Space Invaders, Frogger, and Pac Man making kids jump off of buildings, but that sure as heck doesn’t mean that we aren’t RIGHT when we tell you that Doom will kill your children dead! This vile excuse for “entertainment” is different from the harmless games that came before it because it shows the violence happening from the point of view of the player. Since gamers are all stupid, we know for a fact that they will be unable to tell the difference between reality and fantasy. Clearly Doom poses a danger that a real gun never could! Playing Doom will make your neighbor’s stupid kid murder your darling angel of a child! Vote for us or your children will surely die!!

The Year: 2001

The Game: Halo

What the Politicians Said: When you were kids, you played nice, safe, harmless games like Space Invaders. The aliens looked like little white boxes. But these new games that kids are playing today have deadly graphics! They are too lifelike — There’s no way for a kid to tell the difference between people in the real world and the alien monsters they kill on their Halo machines! Do we have to draw you a map? Don’t you see how this will lead to big heaping piles of dead kids?

The Year: 2007

The Game: Manhunt

What the Politicians Said: While we have to admit that we were wrong again about Halo, we still have to warn you that the Nintendo Wii was the deadliest video game system ever! In games like Manhunt, players enact killings by actually waving their arms around in a vague simulation of real life chainsaw swinging action! This unprecedented level of immersion would — absolutely, no doubt about it, we swear on a stack of bibles this time — make those mentally unbalanced gamers finally snap! The experience they gain by wiggling the remote control joystick device will surely teach them everything they need to know about buying a gun, loading the ammunition, turning the safety off, bracing for the kickback, aiming, and firing! We’re talking about kids killing kids here, people, so get scared and start voting for us!

The Year: 2008

The Game: Grand Theft Auto IV

What the Politicians Say: Studies now show that the average video game player is not a child at all and that their average age is actually 34. Considering this alarming data — along with our history of pandering for votes by portraying gamers as evil, psychopathic, nut jobs for more than a quarter of a century now — we have determined the obvious course of action: To protect our political careers, it is imperative that we raise the voting age to 35!

by Kurt Vonnegut
Newspaper reporters and technical writers are trained to reveal almost nothing about themselves in their writings. This makes them freaks in the world of writers, since almost all of the other ink-stained wretches in that world reveal a lot about themselves to readers. We call these revelations, accidental and intentional, elements of style.
These revelations tell us as readers what sort of person it is with whom we are spending time. Does the writer sound ignorant or informed, stupid or bright, crooked or honest, humorless or playful– ? And on and on.
Why should you examine your writing style with the idea of improving it? Do so as a mark of respect for your readers, whatever you’re writing. If you scribble your thoughts any which way, your readers will surely feel that you care nothing about them. They will mark you down as an egomaniac or a chowderhead — or, worse, they will stop reading you.
The most damning revelation you can make about yourself is that you do not know what is interesting and what is not. Don’t you yourself like or dislike writers mainly for what they choose to show you or make you think about? Did you ever admire an emptyheaded writer for his or her mastery of the language? No.
So your own winning style must begin with ideas in your head.
1. Find a subject you care about
Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.
I am not urging you to write a novel, by the way — although I would not be sorry if you wrote one, provided you genuinely cared about something. A petition to the mayor about a pothole in front of your house or a love letter to the girl next door will do.
2. Do not ramble, though
I won’t ramble on about that.
3. Keep it simple
As for your use of language: Remember that two great masters of language, William Shakespeare and James Joyce, wrote sentences which were almost childlike when their subjects were most profound. “To be or not to be?” asks Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The longest word is three letters long. Joyce, when he was frisky, could put together a sentence as intricate and as glittering as a necklace for Cleopatra, but my favorite sentence in his short story “Eveline” is this one: “She was tired.” At that point in the story, no other words could break the heart of a reader as those three words do.
Simplicity of language is not only reputable, but perhaps even sacred. The Bible opens with a sentence well within the writing skills of a lively fourteen-year-old: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”
4. Have guts to cut
It may be that you, too, are capable of making necklaces for Cleopatra, so to speak. But your eloquence should be the servant of the ideas in your head. Your rule might be this: If a sentence, no matter how excellent, does not illuminate your subject in some new and useful way, scratch it out.
5. Sound like yourself
The writing style which is most natural for you is bound to echo the speech you heard when a child. English was Conrad’s third language, and much that seems piquant in his use of English was no doubt colored by his first language, which was Polish. And lucky indeed is the writer who has grown up in Ireland, for the English spoken there is so amusing and musical. I myself grew up in Indianapolis, where common speech sounds like a band saw cutting galvanized tin, and employs a vocabulary as unornamental as a monkey wrench.
In some of the more remote hollows of Appalachia, children still grow up hearing songs and locutions of Elizabethan times. Yes, and many Americans grow up hearing a language other than English, or an English dialect a majority of Americans cannot understand.
All these varieties of speech are beautiful, just as the varieties of butterflies are beautiful. No matter what your first language, you should treasure it all your life. If it happens to not be standard English, and if it shows itself when your write standard English, the result is usually delightful, like a very pretty girl with one eye that is green and one that is blue.
I myself find that I trust my own writing most, and others seem to trust it most, too, when I sound most like a person from Indianapolis, which is what I am. What alternatives do I have? The one most vehemently recommended by teachers has no doubt been pressed on you, as well: to write like cultivated Englishmen of a century or more ago.
6. Say what you mean
I used to be exasperated by such teachers, but am no more. I understand now that all those antique essays and stories with which I was to compare my own work were not magnificent for their datedness or foreignness, but for saying precisely what their authors meant them to say. My teachers wished me to write accurately, always selecting the most effective words, and relating the words to one another unambiguously, rigidly, like parts of a machine. The teachers did not want to turn me into an Englishman after all. They hoped that I would become understandable — and therefore understood. And there went my dream of doing with words what Pablo Picasso did with paint or what any number of jazz idols did with music. If I broke all the rules of punctuation, had words mean whatever I wanted them to mean, and strung them together higgledy-piggledy, I would simply not be understood. So you, too, had better avoid Picasso-style or jazz-style writing, if you have something worth saying and wish to be understood.
Readers want our pages to look very much like pages they have seen before. Why? This is because they themselves have a tough job to do, and they need all the help they can get from us.
7. Pity the readers
They have to identify thousands of little marks on paper, and make sense of them immediately. They have to read, an art so difficult that most people don’t really master it even after having studied it all through grade school and high school — twelve long years.
So this discussion must finally acknowledge that our stylistic options as writers are neither numerous nor glamorous, since our readers are bound to be such imperfect artists. Our audience requires us to be sympathetic and patient readers, ever willing to simplify and clarify — whereas we would rather soar high above the crowd, singing like nightingales.
That is the bad news. The good news is that we Americans are governed under a unique Constitution, which allows us to write whatever we please without fear of punishment. So the most meaningful aspect of our styles, which is what we choose to write about, is utterly unlimited.
8. For really detailed advice
For a discussion of literary style in a narrower sense, in a more technical sense, I recommend to your attention The Elements of Style, by William Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White. E.B. White is, of course, one of the most admirable literary stylists this country has so far produced.
You should realize, too, that no one would care how well or badly Mr. White expressed himself, if he did not have perfectly enchanting things to say.
In Sum:
1. Find a subject you care about
2. Do not ramble, though
3. Keep it simple
4. Have guts to cut
5. Sound like yourself
6. Say what you mean
7. Pity the readers

Little-known Muslim group claims responsibility for a series of explosions in Chinese cities and warns that its next target will be the Beijing Games

A Muslim separatist group yesterday claimed responsibility for a series of fatal explosions in several Chinese cities and threatened to target the Olympic Games, due to begin on 8 August.

Chinese officials dismissed video statements by spokesmen claiming to represent the little-known Turkestan Islamic Party, who warned that they would attack next month’s Games and said they were to blame for the previous blasts. A US terrorism-monitoring firm published a transcript of their video.

The Chinese authorities have repeatedly alleged that extremists from the restive northwestern region of Xinjiang – known as East Turkestan by separatists among the Uighur Muslim population – were targeting the Olympics. Officials have blamed the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) and, more recently, Hizb ut-Tahrir for plots. The AFP news agency quoted intelligence analysts Stratfor as saying the Turkestan Islamic Party was another name for ETIM.

During the last fortnight alone, Chinese officials claimed they had cracked a plot to attack a football venue in Shanghai and had broken up 12 terrorist cells in Xinjiang. In addition to stationing a 100,000-strong anti-terrorist force in Beijing, a security drive has been launched in Xinjiang.

Last week explosives detectors were said to have been installed at airports in Xinjiang, and there were reports that two Muslims convicted of terrorism had been executed in Kashgar, while 15 others were jailed.

But the state news agency Xinhua yesterday dismissed the video claims, saying the details of one incident were wrong, that there was no record of a factory explosion in Guangzhou on 17 July, and that two bus explosions were not linked to terrorism.

The group claimed to have used a tractor laden with explosives to target police in the city of Wenzhou on 17 July, killing 17 people. But officials claimed the attack took place two months earlier, no police were involved, and that a disgruntled gambler was to blame. Revenge attacks are relatively common in China.

‘Nonsense! The explosion totally had nothing to do with terrorist groups,’ said Chen Shichun, head of the Wenzhou municipal public security bureau.

Shanghai officials said the bus blast which killed three people in May was unrelated to terrorism. In the Yunnan province, the public security bureau said there was no evidence of a terrorist link to two bus explosions which killed two people on Monday.

The monitoring firm IntelCenter has published a transcript of the video and a still showing three masked men, but has not released the video itself. The company could not be contacted yesterday.

It quoted the group’s leader, Commander Seyfullah, as saying: ‘Despite the Turkestan Islamic Party’s repeated warnings to China and international community about stopping the 29th Olympics in Beijing, the Chinese have haughtily ignored our warnings. The Turkestan Islamic Party volunteers who had gone through special preparations have started urgent actions. Our aim is to target the most critical points related to the Olympics. We will try to attack Chinese central cities severely, using the tactics that have never been employed.’

He urged spectators and athletes – ‘particularly the Muslims’ – not to attend the Games, adding: ‘Please do not stand together with the faithless people.’

Earlier this year the Ministry of Public Security said it had disrupted two plots to attack the Olympics. It claimed one group had been planning to kidnap athletes, foreign journalists and other visitors, while a second had been manufacturing explosives and was plotting to attack hotels, government offices and military targets in Shanghai, Beijing and other cities, on the orders of ETIM.

In a separate incident, the authorities blamed Uighur separatists for an alleged hijack attempt on a passenger flight.

Sunday, 27 July 2008

In the Seventies, music really mattered. In that marvellous disco line, people were “lost in music, caught in a trap”. They believed music could change the world or their own lives and that musicians had mighty brains and magical powers.

It made no sense: music clearly didn’t change the world and it only changed your own life if it got you a job and an income-stream of royalties. But the underlying belief was intense and, mostly, completely sincere. But in the later Eighties, music started to become meaningless. All that engagement and self-definition that characterised British tribalism started to evaporate, under pressure from the New World. The tide of Thatcherite aspiration made for a careerist young middle-class, more like America’s – with other things to get on with and more choices to dilute that intensity. The music business itself became increasingly corporate – globally linked to other “intellectual property” – electronic entertainment businesses in careful conglomerates.

The change from vinyl to CDs symbolised the process. CDs were infinitely better on any logical count. They looked and sounded sleeker and made vinyl look archaic. But they had no design impact and no emotional purchase. No CD could be a rallying call or a collector’s item like a daft old pressing.

At the end of the Eighties I found myself saying that music would shortly “come on the rates and arrive through the pipes”. That was not because I was prescient about the coming wonderworld of the information superhighway; I hadn’t a clue about any of that. It just felt as if music mattered less as it became more accessible: free CDs taped to magazines and once-defining songs used as the music-over in advertising – clever, cynical choices that, in Julie Burchill’s phrase, “mugged your memories”.

Music was no longer hard-fought – it was as universal as sandwiches, a secondary thing to warm up aerobics sessions for middle-aged green Goddesses. (And the iPod which accessed the whole world’s music at a go was even more dispiriting.)

As music started to lose it, the Seventies became the defining image-bank of our own particularly British rock-bottom, economically and aesthetically. And then, as the Nineties drew on, it became the subject of easy irony and cat-calling – “the decade that taste forgot”. In fact the Seventies were full of inventiveness and discrimination and huge aspiration; it just wasn’t directed at washed salads and luxury brands.

The “Knock-Off Nigel” campaign from The Industry Trust is designed to make theft of intellectual property – the bloodless City lawyers’ word for artistic rights in anything – socially unacceptable. Its perpetrators are grubby thieves, ruining our “creative industries”.

The creatives here were obviously raised on ‘The Office’ and ‘Little Britain’. In an office corner, Knock-off Nigel is cruelly downloading away when an annoying chorus of his colleagues accost him, urged on by a Pied Piper-type in a shiny fuchsia waistcoat, Seventies moustache and sideburns. They’re naming and shaming away. “He’s a type of man who does things on the cheap, he steals money from whiprounds, the guy’s a real creep. He nicks food from the fridge, whenever he can. He downloads knock-off films, what a grubby little man.” According to the trust, it’s working. Nigels everywhere are making redemptive plans to be Right Nigels, not wrong ‘uns.

But it would be easier to make him a pariah if people didn’t feel music was practically theirs by right now.

Geoffrey Macnab looks at how the web is shaking up Hollywood

Saturday, 26 July 2008

Is the Hollywood blockbuster finally eating itself? As cult movies attract a new audience who download more obscure films from the internet, so the marketing machine of the major studios is being called into question.

Every weekend in summer, multi-million-dollar would-be smashes go head to head. But by Monday morning, when the box-office figures are announced, movies that may have taken years to make are either crowned champions, as has just happened with The Dark Knight, or instantly dismissed – the sad fate of Speed Racer.

But a new generation of movie-download sites is offering fans an alternative to the summer blockbuster. Just as iTunes has transformed the record industry, so internet film download services – such as cinemanow.com in the US and vizumi.com in Britain – are beginning to have an impact on Hollywood, offering fans an unprecedented level of choice.

Industry figures are beginning to argue that Hollywood has got its marketing strategy all wrong. Observers say the now familiar battle for the box-office No 1 slot leaves far more losers than winners and may even damage the industry as a whole.

“I think the industry made a huge mistake when it made media stars out of the studios and reported their grosses [gross revenues taken at cinemas],” David Weitzner, from the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, said. “I think reporting grosses to the public is stupid. Nobody has any sense of the economics of this business. It’s a dumb thing and it has cost us dearly.”

Professor Weitzner is merely echoing a refrain that has been heard frequently over the past decade from many of Hollywood’s biggest names. George Lucas complained about what he calls the “Irving Thalberg complex”, the tendency to treat money-making studio executives as heroes rather than to acknowledge the contribution of the artists who actually created the films.

In an interview with the Los Angeles Times in the 1990s, Steven Spielberg, said: “When I first started, films opened quietly. There weren’t full-page ads touting the three-day box office in the trade press. It just didn’t seem as frantic as today … I would love it if studios stopped boasting about how much money their movies made.”

There was a certain irony in Spielberg – the man who helped launch the summer smash when he made Jaws in the 1970s – crying foul. However, the situation is arguably now even worse. The boasting from the studios has grown louder. There is an increasing sense that they are buying, bullying and hyping their way to the top of the box-office.

Sometimes, such massive publicity may make a twisted kind of business sense. If you have a dud movie, you can create so much din around it that it will attract a big audience over that all-important opening weekend before word spreads that it’s a turkey.

As Hollywood stifles choice by placing so much emphasis on blockbusters, there is evidence that audiences are searching out movies in other ways. new distribution models have given an extra lease of life to movies that might otherwise have languished in obscurity, such as the 1946 romantic drama Heartbeat (pictured above). First, there was video. Then came DVD. Now, we’re beginning to be able to download films. Films of every kind have benefited – the best horror pics, the creakiest B-movies, literary adaptations and old studio classics. It is Hollywood’s version of the “long tail” – where the web fuels endless small cults that add up to a massive audience.

Ironically, the studios have always felt aggrieved about new distribution models, citing the risk of piracy and fretting about their own loss of control. In the 1970s, Jack Valenti, head of the Motion Picture Association of America – Hollywood’s lobbying organisation – warned that video would spell disaster for the film industry. In reality, within a few years, video began to generate more money for Hollywood than theatrical exhibition.

No one knows how today’s new distribution models will work in practice. All the evidence suggests that home entertainment will become yet more sophisticated. In response, Hollywood will offer even more extravagant spectacles to lure audiences into cinemas. There is no hint that the weekend box-office battle for supremacy will be fought any less fiercely.

However, Hollywood has a 100-year history. The one consolation is that those who want to look beyond The Dark Knight and Kung Fu Panda should find it easier than ever before to delve into that history.