Video of the Sun

You can see the Sun rotating with plumes arcing up into the sky.

Just in case you need a reminder, NASA's STEREO mission is a set of twin solar observing spacecraft. One is leading the Earth in our orbit around the Sun, and the other is trailing behind us. Because of their different points in space, they'll be able to create a 3-dimensional view of events on the Sun's surface - just in the same way your eyes give you depth perception. They launched in October, 2006 on board a Delta II rocket.

One of the best uses of this binocular vision will be to trace the path of coronal mass ejections; especially the ones headed towards Earth. With STEREO, astronomers will be able to know right away if a CME is headed our way, and can help power companies and satellite operators prepare for some rough space weather. And they'll be able to give us a better idea of when to head outside and see an aurora.

Dune movie remake?

I liked the actors and story of the Sci-Fi miniseries and I loved the visual design of David Lynch's Dune. Maybe we will get a nice middle ground.

"We're getting VERY close to a deal. Heard that news today," Merritt reportedly posted on Aug. 24. "Although only rumor, I've heard that 'someone' at the studio wants Dune reallllly bad and has been a fan of the novel for years. They're not saying who this is (and it might just be hype), but I'm holding out hope that whoever this might be is a big enough fan that he/she will do the book justice. Supposedly it's some director."

Next Gen Touchscreen

This is cool. A touchscreen with multitouch, and each pixel is a scanner as well, allowing the scanning of fingerprints, barcodes or business cards. Could the screen itself be used as a camera?

The new 1-mm depth was achieved by integrating the optical sensor into each pixel while incorporating scanning functionality for fingerprint authentication or barcode and business card scanning. Right, with the appropriate underlying software of course. Sharp expects to adapt the new technology to multi-touch, glass panels as large as 12.1-inches. Sample LCDs will be made available in September before mass production beings in the Spring of 2008.

Update: Whoa, reader Tony C just reminded us of this Apple patent application. Sure, the jump from scanning business cards to having your screen become the webcam is pretty big. Still, it's not as crazy as it once sounded, eh?

Amazing user interface

The Reactable

Denver International Airport

Some people will believe anything. Denver airport is all things to all conspiracy activists.

When Syracuse University professor Michael Barkun was researching his 2006 book A Culture of Conspiracy, he found DIA in the stream of conspiracy theory that considers the Freemasons, a fraternal organization that grew out of the stone-mason guilds of medieval Europe, as a group secretly in control of world politics. "We think of anti-Masonic material as essentially a nineteenth-century genre," Barkun says. "But there is an enormous amount of anti-Masonic stuff being recycled." Barkun wasn't really surprised by DIA's Freemason-to-Illuminati-to-New World Order conspiracy connection, but he was intrigued by how DIA conspiracies intersected not only with UFO and 2012 "millennialist" contingents, but also the conspiracy branches concerned with underground military bases and reptilian aliens. Left-wing radicals, fundamentalist Christians, UFO hunters, white nationalists, hippie mystics, Vietnam veterans and anti-U.N. Libertarians are all able to pick out evidence within the main body of DIA infatuation to support their competing perspectives.

Other links:

http://www.anomalies-unlimited.com/Denver_Airport.html
http://www.uforanks.com/reptilians.htm
and a video tour of the airport

360 degree 3D Holographic display in action

This is pretty damn amazing.



I want one. Although 15-20Hz seems a little slow for the rotation.

Really complex watches

I'm partial to #6, the Quentin. It looks like some kind of clockwork difference engine.

5 ways to make a comics fan happier with DC

I can get behind all of these, but I think number five is the biggest:

5. Five-Year Crossover Moratorium.

That’s right, five years — at least. DC’s credibility is pretty much zero when it proclaims Final Crisis to be just that. Much of that is due to the company’s perpetual-crossover mentality, going back at least to the start of Identity Crisis in the summer of 2004. (You could make a case that it goes back even to the death of Donna Troy in 2003, but Identity Crisis really kicked the whole thing off.) With the last issue of Final Crisis coming out at the end of 2008, that’ll actually cap about four and a half years of mega-crossover hijinx, but as you’ll see it pretty much works out.

There are two exceptions, but only two, and they come with conditions:

The first is for DC’s 75^th anniversary in 2010. A twelve-issue limited series would be appropriate, but it cannot promise that a) everything we know is wrong, b) nothing will ever be the same, or c) the streets will run red (or whatever) with blood. If DC’s superhero continuity still needs maintenance after our current series of events, it’ll be on the level of rearranging the Titanic’s deck chairs. After all, the Sinestro Corps War is proving to readers that a big-event crossover can be engaging without rewriting the rules of the universe.

20% of DC students don't show for day 2 of school

This is ridiculous.

About 20 percent of students enrolled in D.C. public schools were absent on the second day of class this week, according to attendance records provided by school system officials.

Many students who had enrolled were not present because they had not registered for classes, Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee said last night. It was not clear yesterday how much of the attendance problem was due to students who had not registered on time and how much was due to students who didn't show up for other reasons.

Getting Vietnam Right

Reaction to the President's speech on Vietnam isn't responding to the speech, but their visceral reaction to the word Vietnam.

Emblematic of the attackers was Senator John Kerry, who said that the President's comparison of Vietnam with Iraq was "irresponsible" and "ignorant of the realities of both of those wars." Kerry explained that in Iraq, as in Vietnam, "more American soldiers are being sent to fight and die in a civil war we can't stop and an insurgency we can't bomb into submission." Senator Ted Kennedy, another opponent of both wars, backed this interpretation with the comment that the United States lost the Vietnam War because the South Vietnamese government "lacked sufficient legitimacy with its people."

Kerry and Kennedy missed key facts about Vietnam, some of them long obvious, others newly emerged from historical studies. The New York Times and NBC News and CNN and so on missed them, too, because they chose to rely on outdated historians or their own prejudices. The insurgency in Vietnam was dead by 1971, thanks to South Vietnam's armed forces, America's forces, and a South Vietnamese civilian population that overwhelmingly viewed the South Vietnamese government as legitimate. During 1972, after all American combat units had departed, South Vietnamese forces defeated a massive North Vietnamese invasion with the help of American air power. The so-called Christmas bombing of 1972 bombed North Vietnam into submission, resulting in a peace treaty. Had the antiwar Congress not slashed aid to South Vietnam and prohibited the use of American aircraft over Vietnamese skies, the South Vietnamese probably could have repulsed the North Vietnamese when they violated the peace treaty in 1975.

Japan Launching Space Fireworks

They're launching a rocket that will discharge Lithium at three different altitudes and will be visible all over Japan.

　In order to search the circumstances of outer space and the boundary territory of the atmosphere, space aeronautics research and development mechanism (JAXA) and the like the team, launching the rocket from the Kagoshima prefecture Osumi peninsula, lithium is discharged at the sky, the experiment which is observed from the ground is planned. Lithium receiving solar light, while shining red, is seen that it spreads to spherical shape. These “space fireworks” west may be seen from every place in Japan with naked eye.

Edward Gorey's The Trouble With Tribbles

Spot on. When reading it, I was thinking of the Mystery theme and how there should be a Star Trek theme done in that style.

Viacom's Chutzpah

Guy makes commercial to run for local office. Guy posts video on YouTube. Viacom's Web Junk 2.0 takes the video and shows it on VH1 without permission of guy. Guy posts segment featuring his video from VH1 on YouTube. Viacom tells YouTube to remove infringing video for copyright violation.

That's chutzpah. So is this: multimedia giant Viacom is claiming that I have violated their copyright by posting on YouTube a segment from it's VH1 show Web Junk 2.0... which VH1 produced – without permission – from a video that I had originally created.

Viacom used my video without permission on their commercial television show, and now says that I am infringing on THEIR copyright for showing the clip of the work that Viacom made in violation of my own copyright!

People are Idiots

Students on a college campus didn't know when 9-11 happened. I don't know what to say. It's just disheartening to see. I'm sure they could tell you who won the first Survivor or American Idol.

Caitlin Upton should feel very proud today. It seems she's not the only young person in America who appears to be a little less than informed. Christian activist and author Mark Dice dropped by San Diego State University to see how many of tomorrow's leaders know what year 9/11 happened.

Apparently, the unsuspecting students couldn't quite remember. Perhaps if Mark had given them a hint -- like the year the Mariah Carey's cinematic masterpiece "Glitter" was released, or perhaps the year that Britney Spears' "Slave" song topped the charts.

The guy doing the interview, Mark Dice, is a 9-11 conspiracy nut who thinks it was an inside job. Idiot. Here's the video.


UPDATE

After some consideration, and a talk with Sarah, I feel the students are not complete idiots. They were in middle school probably and had a different sense of time than adults do. They could probably tell us what grade they were in or what they were doing when they found out.

Mark Dice, still an idiot.

Job Security

I write code. It's what I do.
I had left a job as it had become a sinking ship and I wanted to get a lifeboat on my terms, so I found a new job where I would be working on an in-house application to handle scheduling tv commercials.
It sounded great. It was in C++, so I would have to learn it, but they sounded like a good learning experience.
And then I started. The first problem was that there was some confusion over who owned the software. It was being built by contractors specifically for my new employer, but they seemed to think they owned the software and were going to sell it to other companies. My employer thought that this software would be a competitive advantage for them and that they owned the software. The contractors wouldn't let me look at the software, or do much of anything. I sat there for two of the most boring weeks I have ever had.
I gave notice and found a job I stayed at for 6 years.
I apparently have less patience than this guy:

When I finally arrived on site, I logged on to my workstation only to find a few roadblocks. First and foremost, there were no developer tools installed. Secondly, I did not have Local Administrative rights to install these tools. Not that it mattered, of course, because the CyberCorp’s “Security Policy” explicitly forbade the installation of any software on its machine.

This was to be expected, so my manager said. She pointed me to their web-based support system where I could open a ticket and request permission to install/configure developer tools on my workstation. Five days later, after constantly pestering the IT Department, they finally responded: “we’re investigating the issue.” This was also to be expected, so my manager said.

The following week’s staff meeting, however, told a different story: the CTO lambasted “us contractors” for “just sitting around and making excuses” instead of “actually getting work done.” My manager mentioned that the company’s new security policies were preventing the new contractors from writing code. “Unacceptable,” said the CTO, “there’s a lot to do other than write code.”

Star Wars & The Simpsons

The Simspon's opening done in a Star Wars style.

Tony Stark and Londo Mollari

Interesting comparison. I'm enjoying Thor and I enjoyed the early Amazing Spider-Man stuff he did, but a lot of his stuff just falters at the end.

Fortunately, most of the writers of the Marvel Universe have stepped up. I personally don't think we were ever meant to believe the "right side" won Civil War. Heck, even Tony and Reed never seemed to take in account the idea that they could possibly win. We weren't supposed to come out of Civil War feeling satisfied, I think, but with a genuine sense of "Oh shit, what does this mean for everyone now?"

I was nowhere near aisle five!

A 1.4 million dollar server fell off of a forklift during shipping. Fingers are being pointed.

Federal contractor T.R. Systems says its workers were moving the server from a freight truck into its warehouse in Alexandria, Va., when the mishap occurred. "The rear wheels of their forklift hit the raised surface at the entry door of the warehouse, causing the forklift to rock, and subsequently causing the server to rock," T.R. Systems says in court papers filed last month.

"As a result of the rocking motion, the base of the pallet and the crate broke and the crate fell onto the curb, damaging the server packed inside," the contractor states in papers filed in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va.

T.R. Systems claims IBM refused to take back the damaged server or send technicians to inspect or repair it. As a result, the company claims it was forced to purchase a replacement server from IBM following the October incident. The server was ultimately bound for T.R. Systems' customer the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

In its lawsuit, T.R. Systems claims its own clumsiness isn't to blame for the server's destruction. "The damages sustained by T.R. Systems was due to the poor workmanship and/or defective packaging design and methods used by IBM," the company argues in court papers.

Artificial heart removed after heart heals itself

This is amazing. A girl who had an artificial heart implanted while she waited for a transplant, had an amazing thing happen. Her heart healed enough for the artificial heart to be removed.

Doctors at the hospital implanted the Berlin Heart, a portable mechanical device that keeps blood pumping in an ailing heart, so she could survive until a transplant became available.

But over the next few months, Melissa's overall condition improved dramatically, and her heart muscle regained much of its strength. After 146 days on the Berlin Heart, Melissa underwent surgery to have the device removed.

"We thought the miracle was that the Berlin Heart would give us time to find the perfect donor heart for Melissa," said her mother, Sharon Mills, in a release. "We are overwhelmed that instead, the Berlin Heart gave her own heart time to rest and repair itself."

The Berlin Heart is made especially for children.

The Growth of the Web Office

I have started using more of the Google apps, GMail, Docs & Spreadsheets, Notebook and Reader. They pretty much do what they need to. I don't have complicated needs. I could easily see some companies keeping everything online for collaboration purposes and for roaming access.

But let's start at the beginning. Wikipedia currently states that a Web Office "is a set of applications hosted on a server that enable users to create, edit and share information. It is a derivative of the Desktop Office Suite, but has more collaboration capabilities due to its Web nature."

Star System With Rain

This sounds bizarre. A young star system has a steamy rain of water vapor.

The water, pulled from gassy stellar leftovers into a dusty disk, provides what astronomers think is the first direct look at how the life-giving liquid makes its way into planets. The disk is the same sort of thing that forms around many stars and, in the case of our sun, was the seedbed for planet formation.

The amount of water in the newly observed disk is thought to equal more than five times that of all oceans on Earth.

"For the first time, we are seeing water being delivered to the region where planets will most likely form," said Dan Watson, an astrophysicist at the University of Rochester in New York.

Super Futuristic Cell Phone

Now that's a cell phone. Just what we all need. A classic.

This is the ever popular Portable Rotary Phone, now in Red! Phone comes fully assembled and tested. All you have to do is open the phone, insert your SIM card, and turn the unit on! The unit will utilize your phone number and account minutes. Phone dials out like normal through the rotary. Incoming calls ring the original, loud, gong style metal bells. Please note: As with all cellular phones, there is no dial tone. While we thoroughly enjoying taking the Port-O-Rotary out on the town, please realize the sound quality will not be as good as your pocket phone. This phone is for entertainment purposes only!

The GM862 cellular module from Telit works within any country that has one of the 900MHz/1800MHz/1900MHz cellular bands (90% of the world). Each phone is specially built to customer needs. The battery can run the phone for 4-5 days and is charged by unscrewing two screws on the bottom of the phone, opening it, and attaching the charger.

Submarine Mission to Europa

Europa is a snowball with probably a liquid center of water. It's the only other place we've found in the Solar System that has liquid water.

Carl T. F. Ross, a professor at the University of Portsmouth in England offers an abstract design of an underwater craft built of a metal matrix composite. He also provides suggestions for suitable power supplies, communication techniques and propulsion systems for such a vessel in his paper, “Conceptual Design of a Submarine to Explore Europa’s Oceans.”

Maybe we'll find life there.

All these worlds are yours, except Europa. Attempt no landing there. Use them together. Use them in peace.
-HAL 9000 speaking for the Monolith

Castro Declares Clinton/Obama Unbeatable

Here's a ringing endorsement:

"The word today is that an apparently unbeatable ticket could be Hillary for president and Obama as her running mate," he wrote in an editorial column on U.S. presidents published on Tuesday by Cuba's Communist Party newspaper, Granma.

At 81, Castro has outlasted nine U.S. presidents since his 1959 revolution turned Cuba into a thorn in Washington's side by building a communist society about 90 miles offshore from the United States.

He said all U.S. presidential candidates seeking the "coveted" electoral college votes of Florida have had to demand a democratic government in Cuba to win the backing of the powerful Cuban exile community.

Free Fonts

Many sites with free fonts.

Fonts 500
UrbanFonts
TypeNow Themed Fonts
exljbris

Abandoned Industrial Sites

Cool photos of abandoned industrial sites.

Apple Event on September 5th

I'm hoping it is for new iPods. I really want a touchscreen video iPod.

Lego Factory

This is cool.

Warner Bros Rushing JLA film

So, live action, but with different Superman and Batman. I can live with that.

It looks as if there actually may be something to last week’s rumor that Warner Bros. wants to fast-track its Justice League of America movie. The Los Angeles Times reports that JLA is one of the projects the studio hopes to rush into production before a potential talent strike essentially shuts down the film industry next summer.

Contracts with the Screen Actors Guild and Directors Guild of America expire on June 30, which means studios must start filming by March 1 to beat the strike deadlines. It also means Warner Bros. will have to hire a director immediately and begin casting.

Kyle Rayner - Resurrectionist

Ragnell has some interesting points about Kyle Rayner and life and death. Kyle has bad luck with women, where every girl he has dated since becoming a Green Lantern has died. Donna Troy is alive again, but she was dead. there is even a term for it: Women in Refrigerators, where a woman is killed or raped by a supervillain to motivate the superhero to fight.

As an aside, I was never really aware of the amount of sexism in comics, (I mean, I knew there was some, but I didn't really think about it), and then I found a few sites that discussed it, and now I am annoyed at how much of it I see.

But back to Ragnell and Kyle:

Kyle Rayner has either actually performed or facilitated the resurrection of a dead person (or persons) on five different occasions. These aren't deaths that are just retconned away as never having happened. These are people who were in-continuity dead, and the plot was that he went out of his way and brought them back to life.

And, if you take into account that there were 5 dead Leaguers (not counting Kyle) in that JLA story, and the dead Guardians numbered 15, 31, or 35 (Kalinara and I are still arguing this one), that's actually quite a lot of people.

The Lorax and Property Rights

Reinterpreting The Lorax in terms of the Tragedy of the Commons.

Although The Lorax is often seen as a tale of capitalist greed run amok, it could just as easily be interpreted as exhibiting the inherent flaws of common property resources, flaws that can sometimes be alleviated through privatization:

Viewing the tale of the Lorax through an institutional lens, ruin is not the result of corporate greed, but a lack of institutions. The truffula trees grow in an unowned commons. (The Lorax may speak for the trees, but he does not own them.) The Once-ler has no incentive to conserve the truffula trees for, as he notes to himself, if he doesn't cut them down someone else will. He's responding to the incentives created by a lack of property rights in the trees, and the inevitable tragedy results. Had the Once-ler owned the trees, his incentives would have been quite different — and he would likely have acted accordingly — even if he remained dismissive of the Lorax's environmental concerns.

Dean's war on Florida

I think the DNC overreacted to the change in Primary date. Playing hardball like this only helps the Republicans.

Florida Democrats had, and have, little choice but to go along with the state's decision to leapfrog its primary from March to the front of the pack in January. First, they didn't have the votes to block it: Florida's legislature is controlled by the G.O.P., as is its Governor's mansion. More important, most Floridians want their primary moved up: the 2000 debacle may have subjected them to national ridicule, but it revealed the peninsula's new bellwether muscle — and they feel they deserve to flex it now in a presidential kingmaking process that could be decided by March of next year.

Saying they didn't have the votes to block is disingenuous, the vote was a landslide, with only one vote against. There is more than one Democratic representative in Tallahassee.

Florida is flexing it's muscles as an important swing state. Disenfranchising Florida Democrats doesn't seem like a good idea.

Spherical Tree House

It looks like something out of Jules Verne.

Free Spirit Spheres build lovely, spherical wooden treehouses that you enter via a suspension bridge. The photo-gallery documents the construction and installation of "Eryn," a five-windowed spherical tree-dwelling with an electric kitchen, sleeping area, and living area.

Pets Eat Owner

After his Black Widow spider killed him. He thought he was Ace Ventura.

Police broke in to Mark Voegel’s apartment to find spider Bettina along with 200 others, several snakes, a gecko lizard called Helmut and several thousand termites had gorged on his body.

Neighbours alerted police after becoming alarmed by the stink.

And horrified officers were met by a nightmare scene.

A police spokesman said: “It was like a horror movie. His corpse was over the sofa.

“Giant webs draped him, spiders were all over him. They were coming out of his nose and his mouth.

“There was everything there one could imagine in the world of reptiles.

“Larger pieces of flesh torn off by the lizards were scooped up and taken back to the webs of tarantulas and other bird-eating spiders.”

Bond Villain Super Computer

This Spanish supercomputer, 9th most powerful in the world, is the prettiest. It looks like a Bond Villain's lair.

"Yes, Mr. Bond, this computer has calculated how to take over the world. Bwaa ha ha ha!!!"

Speed Racer film technology

The Speed Racer movie is going to have the full frame in focus like a cartoon.

Question: Susan, could you talk about working with the Wachowski Brothers and filming in Berlin and also the new camera that they’re using?

Susan: I love the Wachowski Brothers. Basically all I do is make pancakes in the movie and stand around and serving breakfast to everybody.

Tommy Lee Jones: What camera are they using?

Susan: They’re using some high def thing that comes with guards and it’s beyond anything I’ve ever…. I saw 10 minutes before I left, they did a special thing for me cause they’re just wrapping and having a party tonight, they were still working after I left. They’re doing something where they’re layering film so that the front and the back are in focus like a cartoon and they’re also doing two dimensional and three dimensional stuff and mixing and everything is very, very saturated with some new kind of film, so they actually have to treat the actors in some way so we can hold our own with the background. So it’s every color that wasn’t in The Matrix is seriously in this film.

Tommy Lee Jones: The camera comes with guards?

Susan: Yeah, yeah. When I talked with them on the phone – I’d never met them – when they asked me to do it, I had two conversations with them because it’s a very small part and it was a very long commitment because of the way they were shooting this. At a certain point I just said I don’t have the faintest idea of what you are talking about, I’m in. I just thought when am I ever going top get a chance to be up to my neck in something I understand so little about and they definitely fulfilled my expectation. But they have these two big, huge, widescreen things…at the end of the day you can see how everything is going to be before it’s treated and they have a room of 200 or 300 guys that are doing all the background, it’s insane. And we were shooting on 4 stages and it was really interesting and a lovely experience and all the actors were great and I was working with a monkey…I’m sorry a chimpanzee – he doesn’t like to be called a monkey. It was wild… and they’re very, very sweet. They have complete control which is every director’s dream.

Solar to become much bigger

Solar power is becoming cheaper and more efficient. It won't be too long before it enters wider use.

A few dozen companies say advances in technology will let them halve the price of solar-panel installations in as little as three years. By 2014, solar-system prices will be competitive with conventional electricity when energy savings are figured in, Deutsche Bank (DB) says. And that's without government incentives.

If that happens, solar panels would become common home and business appliances, says Brandon Owens of Cambridge Energy Research Associates.

Storm Drain Exploring

Really neat interview about exploring Storm Drains with lots of very cool pictures. Michael Cook's site.

Daleks invade Manchester

What do you call a group of Daleks? A death of Daleks? An exterminate of Daleks?

the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester and earlier today we had a Dalek invasion! The aim was to set the record for the most Daleks in one place and it was even attended by Raymond Cusick. The rule was that a person had to be inside each Dalek

BBC Coverage.

Flickr set.

MMOD damage on Shuttle

A radiator was severly damage during the mission and will have to be repaired. One of the windows was also damaged.

Similar to that suffered by Atlantis during STS-115, engineers have found a significant MMOD (MicroMeteoroid/Orbiting Debris) impact point on one of Endeavour's radiators, large enough to require a full repair.

The MMOD impact was spotted during STS-118 post flight processing of Endeavour inside of OPF (Orbiter Processing Facility) High Bay 2.

Space is getting crowded. We need junkmen.

South Korea Building Robot City

It's a city to develop and build robots.

South Korea is planning to build "Robot Land," an industrial city built specifically for the robotics industry. It'll have all sorts of facilities for the research, development, and production of robots, as well as things like exhibition halls and even a stadium for robot-on-robot competitions. The $530 million project should get underway sometime in 2009, which means we should see our own robot city here in the States around 2013.

I hope they're Three Laws Safe.

Arcade music

From Boston Diaries:

I don't even know now to begin describing episode two of Jmac's Arcade (Missile Command) other than it being a wonderful retrospective of both the game and of growing up in the 80s under the shadow of nuclear annihilation.

That was cool. I like arcade music from the eighties. I loved wandering around and watching the various games. I rarely played them, but I liked watching others play. For the music, there is a site called the Arcade Ambience Project. It seeks to provide that feeling of walking around an arcade by pulling music from games played in MAME and fading the various games in and out like you are walking through the arcade. I find it very relaxing to work while listening to it. There are three tracks, 1981, 1983 and 1986. Each is about an hour long and available here.

Heroes documentary site

Not much there yet except for profiles of great heroes throughout history and a video in Japanese by Kaito Nakamura (George Takei).

TVGuide.com has a story up on a fake documentary NBC put up on the web about Takezo Kensei, the samurai Hiro will meet this fall on Heroes:

“It’s a fake documentary — actually it’s more like a Ken Burns mockumentary — that explores the legend of Takezo Kensei,” says Heroes creator Tim Kring, referring to the iconic samurai whom Hiro (Masi Oka) will encounter this fall in 17th-century Japan.

Lightsaber sent into space

Luke Skywalker's original lightsaber will be sent into space.

The original prop of Luke Skywalker's lightsaber from the first Star Wars movie will be sent into space aboard the space shuttle Discovery in October to commemorate the film franchise's 30th anniversary, according to a joint announcement from Lucasfilm, the Space Center Houston and Southwest Airlines on Aug. 27.

The prop will be flown to Houston on Aug. 28 from its current home at Lucasfilm headquarters in Northern California.

An actor dressed as Chewbacca will hand the lightsaber over to representatives from NASA's Space Center Houston during a ceremony at Oakland International Airport.

Upon landing in Houston, the lightsaber will be escorted by costumed stormtroopers, alongside R2-D2 and other Star Wars characters, to a caravan of Hummers with a police escort. It will be transported for safekeeping to NASA's Space Center Houston, where it will be secured inside the vault once used to store samples from the moon until it is ready for its trip into space.

Mythbusters tackles superheroes

This Wednesday:

Mythbusters, the popular Discovery Channel show that proves and disproves various urban legends, will tackle superheroes this Wednesday night at 9 p.m. ET.

The description of the show reads:

You’re not seeing things. As uncomfortable as it is, it’s true. The Mythbusters are wearing their underpants on the outside. And why? Because this episode is the Superhero Hour — the Marvel comic maestros are put under the MythBusters microscope.

Lessons D&D can learn from Doom

One of the things I always found annoying was that there was really only one correct weapon to use in D&D. The only choice for a melee weapon is amount of damage. Reach can be a factor, but is used much less.

Doom’s weapons are interesting in that different weapons actually work better against certain opponents. The shotgun is Doom’s equivalent to D&D’s greatsword - offensively powerful, downs weaker foes in one hit, but leaves your defences open if you miss. Naturally, just like in D&D, players use it regardless, relying on hit points, armour and defences to avoid damage. In Doom’s case an experienced player learns the monsters’ patterns and dodges carefully, something easily represented by a “defense roll” system as in Iron Heroes.

Offensive and defensive tradeoffs would be nice to see in 4th edition, but I don't expect it.

Dating Across Ideological Lines

Good article on dating those whose political views do not match your own. Sarah and I have mostly the same views and values, with our divergences focusing on foreign policy. We respect each other and accept that we each have valid views.

I think this advice would be good for reducing partisanship in communications outside of dating.

The second-biggest reason is probably the perception that certain political views are not just mistakes, but proof that the person who holds them has corrupt values. As I will argue below, this is occasionally true. But it's not true nearly as often as many believe. Partisans and ideologues routinely overestimate the extent to which political disagreements reflect differences in fundamental values rather than divergent evaluations of the best way to achieve the same or similar values. A very high proportion of the disagreements between conservatives, liberals, and libertarians in the US today fall into the latter category. There are some important exceptions, such as the conflict over abortion. But even these partly turn on divergent views of how to apply shared values to particular cases. For example, both sides in the abortion debate claim to value both life and freedom; they differ, however, over the threshold at which a person acquires a right to life sufficient to override another person's right to bodily autonomy. Moreover, at least some of the issues where adherents of the three major US ideologies really do diverge on basic values have arisen in part because the issues in question are genuinely hard (as the abortion issue surely is). If so, one can embrace the wrong values on that issue without necessarily being a moral cretin in general.

The Greatest Man in the World

George Washington, described by George III on hearing of his leaving power.

Said King George III about George Washington:

The actual resignation of his command, having made peace between the civil and military powers of the new country -- and, in an emotional ceremony, bidden farewell to his officers on December 4, 1783 -- took place in Annapolis, Maryland, on December 23, when he formally handed back to Congress his commission as commander in chief, which they had given him in June 1775. He said he would never again hold public office. He had his horse waiting at the door, and he took the road to Mount Vernon the next day.

No one who knew Washington was surprised. Everyone else, in varying degrees, was astonished at this singular failure of the corruption of power to work. And, indeed, it was a rare moment in history. In London, George III qustioned the American-born painter Benjamin West what Washington would do now he had won the war. "Oh," said West, "they say he will return to his farm." "If he does that," said the king, "he will be the greatest man in the world."

The ability to walk away from power is not a common one. We are very lucky that he was such a man.

Shortcomings of Microsoft's "Open" Office XML file format

I've read this file format described as placing angle brackets around the binary format. Apparently, the spec is underdefined, leaving many things out, so trying to match behavior and display becomes impossible.

They insist on the fact that, provided you make a valid use of the XML, pretty much changing the content of anything in an existing document can be achieved by sequentially 1) unzipping the content 2) making appropriate changes to one or more XML parts that are compatible with the provided XML schemas and open packaging relationships 3) zipping the content back .

Let's see if that's true.

Doesn't appear to be.

A Real American Hero?

Apparently not.

Who needs A Real American Hero? Not Paramount or Hasbro it seems. The studio's live-action feature film version of G.I. Joe will no longer revolve around a top-secret U.S. special forces team but rather an international operation.

In a follow-up to their confirmation that Stephen Sommers will direct G.I. Joe, Variety offers this new description of the team: "G.I. Joe is now a Brussels-based outfit that stands for Global Integrated Joint Operating Entity, an international co-ed force of operatives who use hi-tech equipment to battle Cobra, an evil organization headed by a double-crossing Scottish arms dealer. The property is closer in tone to X-Men and James Bond than a war film."

Wow. A Real Globally Integrated Hero! Can we assume that this "double-crossing Scottish arms dealer" is Destro since he was one in the comics? And does that mean there will be no Cobra Commander in it?

From Brussels? What will they fight with, strongly worded memos?

Feh.

Liquid Armor

Lighter and more flexible, but stiffens on impact.

Liquid armor using shear thickening fluid (STF) is being developed at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory at Aberdeen Proving Grounds. The STF referred to in this article is made up of hard silica particles suspended in polyethylene glycol, a non-toxic fluid. Kevlar fiber vests soaked with STF are pliable under normal conditions:

"During normal handling, the [fluid] is very deformable and flows like a liquid. However, once a bullet or frag hits the vest, it transitions to a rigid material, which prevents the projectile from penetrating the Soldier's body," said Dr. Eric Wetzel, a mechanical engineer from the Weapons and Materials Research Directorate who heads the project team.
(From Army Creates Liquid Armor)

Liquid armor could be used in bomb blankets, and even jump boots, which could be made to stiffen upon impact to support the ankle.

Pink & Blue

Pink is for girls and blue for boys. Such it has ever been, right? Wrong.

"The reason is that pink being a more decided and stronger colour is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl." So said the Ladies' Home Journal back in 1918,

When was the crossover? When did pink go from being manly to girly and vice versa?

Create your own comic strip

No drawing required.

Preview pages from Thor #3

Thor and Iron Man. Let me paraphrase:

Iron Man: Hey, good to see you pal. Uh, you're going to need to move Asgard and register and work for us, or we're going to put you in prison. We can do it too.

Thor: You created a murderous cyborg and passed it off as me. You hunted down and imprisoned or killed those I respect. I am angry and a storm god. I think you have forgotten just who you were messing with? So Tony, is it worth the asskicking I'm going to give you? Is it?

Get me some popcorn. I can't wait.

Star Wars: The Musical

Like Spaceballs: The Musical, except with Star Wars.

It's a musical. and it's Star Wars.

Here is a link to a fan film version of Let's Blow This Thing.

All the music as well as more musical fan films are at here.

Living in Sci-Fi

Robot arm with fluid filled artificial muscles.

The racing simulator, robot arm and waterborne manta all make extensive use of Festo’s fluidic muscles, an alternative to pneumatic cylinders and other actuators. Consisting of an elastomer tube reinforced by aramid fibers, these actuators contract quickly and exert a pulling force when they're filled with a blast of compressed air or liquid. And much like their natural muscle counterparts, these bionic muscles experience a decay in force as they shorten.

But the initial force and speeds with which that force is reached can be significant. Elias Knubben of Festo’s Corporate Design Center reports that the company has developed muscles that can exert 6,000 N of force when filled to a pressure of 6 bar. They can respond quickly too—at frequencies up to 100 Hz. At more than 25 percent smaller than comparable pneumatic actuators, they also take up relatively little space.

Those characteristics came in handy in the impressive robotic hand and arm that Festo developed for the show. Called Airic’s Arm, it features 32 fluidic muscles and laser-sintered artificial bones that approximate the structures of a human arm—well, sort of, given that human arms and hands have more than 60 muscles. But Airic’s Arm still offers pretty much the same range of movement as a human arm and hand, according to Knubben. “It has the same degrees of freedom as a human arm,” he says, adding that it's capable of handling a 3-kg load while full extended.

Festo runs the arm's fluidic muscles with a compact collection of 72 proportional valves along with related pressure sensors and power electronics. The entire assembly weighs just 6.4 kg.

With this and the rocket powered steampunk arm, we are really starting to live in Sci-Fi.

Mother Teresa's Letters

She didn't feel God for the last half of her life.

The letters, many of them preserved against her wishes (she had requested that they be destroyed but was overruled by her church), reveal that for the last nearly half-century of her life she felt no presence of God whatsoever — or, as the book's compiler and editor, the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, writes, "neither in her heart or in the eucharist."

I myself feel no presence. It's one of the reasons I'm an agnostic. It is obviously a real phenomenon that many people experience, but one I do not share. At times I am more than a little envious. I think many things would be easier with that feeling supporting you.

I wonder how many atheists feel that presence and consciously reject it? Perhaps the more strident the atheist, the more they feel it and the more they reject it.

Optimizing performance of VirtualPC

We use VirtualPC at work for testing software and it can get really slow. These instructions look like they would really boost performance. I don't know that I'd do all of them, but some look like they'd really make a difference.

Body Modification

Top 10 modified people. Plus some videos on branding and tongue splitting. I couldn't actually watch the tongue one and the branding one made me queasy.

Opus pulled from newspapers for next two weeks

A storyline about Islam has caused controversy. If the storyline was about Christianity or Judaism, I am quite sure it would have run, regardless of complaints, and the editors would have patted themselves on the back for their defiance. People keep bending over backwards to give extra consideration to Islam. Give an inch, don't be surprised by the mile taken.

On his website, Berkeley Breathed has posted a note saying that many newspapers that carry his comic strip Opus won’t publish it for the next two weeks:

The Opus strips for August 26 and September 2 have been withheld from publication by a large number of client newspapers across the country, including Opus’ host paper The Washington Post. The strips may be viewed in a large format on their respective dates at Salon.com.

You can see one of the strips here.

Why even have wifi?

I didn't realize wifi access was so locked down in Europe. Why even have it?

Free-surfing isn’t so easy in Europe. In Italy it’s nearly impossible to get your own machine on the Web. To even access the Internet at a café you have to leave a copy of your license or passport.

Men are Evil

Men are evil. That's the conclusion of many with regards to children.

When children get lost in a mall, they're supposed to find a "low-risk adult" to help them. Guidelines issued by police departments and child-safety groups often encourage them to look for "a pregnant woman," "a mother pushing a stroller" or "a grandmother."

The implied message: Men, even dads pushing strollers, are "high-risk."

Are we teaching children that men are out to hurt them? The answer, on many fronts, is yes. Child advocate John Walsh advises parents to never hire a male babysitter. Airlines are placing unaccompanied minors with female passengers rather than male passengers. Soccer leagues are telling male coaches not to touch players.

And this just makes me sad:

This summer, Virginia's Department of Health mounted an ad campaign for its sex-abuse hotline. Billboards featured photos of a man holding a child's hand. The caption: "It doesn't feel right when I see them together."

More than 200 men emailed complaints about the campaign to the health department. "The implication is that if you see a man holding a girl's hand, he's probably a predator," says Marc Rudov, who runs the fathers' rights site TheNoNonsenseMan.com. "In other words, if you see a father out with his daughter, call the police."

Abuse of Power

Who Watches the Watchmen?

So I guess once you're elected to Congress, you're immune from drunk driving laws; you can stash the evidence that you've committed a crime in your office, because investigators aren't allowed to search it; if you kill someone because you've got a lead foot and blew a stop sign, the taxpayers will cover your financial liability; and, we learn today, you can commit whatever Internet-related crimes you please, because the police aren't allowed to search your computer.

Meanwhile, the same Congress that has immunized itself from much of the law is also responsible for the ever-expanding federal criminal code, which we can thank for our shamefully enormous and still-soaring prison population, which is by far and away the largest in the world.

How has Superman changed?

Nice post about how Superman has changed over the years.

The Golden Age Superman was almost anti-authoritarian. As a reaction to the powerless people felt during the Depression, the GA Superman broke into people's houses (including the Governor), beat the snot out of normal humans, hung them from flagpoles, grabbed unsympathetic employers and forced them to experience the deplorable conditions of their workers... . Superman (no matter what Frank Miller might think of him), has never been about supporting authority, but about having the power to circumvent it.

I think one superpower that is not often mentioned that most heroes have is Super-Morality. Flying and super-strength are nice, but having the power to do whatever you want to whoever you want with impunity and not doing so shows morals and integrity that most of us don't have.

Lucid Touch from Microsoft

This is cool, you can touch on the front of the device in a standard, recognizable way, plus you can touch from the back of the device and see your back fingers at the same time. This is going to be huge in handheld devices.

Do Re Mi

I may not be clinically tone deaf, but I'm pretty close. Sarah cringes every time I start singing.

Do people cringe when you sing? You’ve got company. But researchers have found that only 1 in 20 people truly has amusia, the technical term for tone deafness. Tests have shown that some people with bad singing voices hear music just fine. Amusics are a smaller group with a perceptual problem: They can’t pick out differences in pitch or follow the simplest tunes, reports the September 2007 issue of the Harvard Health Letter.

Brain scans haven’t revealed major anatomical differences in amusics, but more sophisticated tests have uncovered some subtle variations. In a study comparing amusics to people with normal musical ability, researchers used a brain imaging and statistical technique to measure the density of the white matter (which consists of connecting nerve fibers) between the right frontal lobe, where higher thinking occurs, and the right temporal lobes, where basic processing of sound occurs. The white matter of the amusics was thinner, which suggests a weaker connection. Moreover, the worse the tone deafness, the thinner the white matter.

Test whether you are tone deaf: http://www.delosis.com/listening

Spore hands on

Hands on with Spore. It appears to be more actual playable game and less demo. I'm really looking forward to this. It looks fun and looks to have a lot of replay value.

Our guide told us that the build he would be demoing was complete enough that a player could start from the cellular level and work all the way through the point where the game’s creatures discover space travel. He even teased us by saying that we could probably even do it ourselves, with the only limitation being one of time. So, he took the controls and started the game. Rats.

Spore, if you don’t know, is the brainchild of Will Wright, the man behind the insanely popular SimCity and Sims games. With Spore, he takes on an even more ambitious concept, with a game that lets players guide an entire lifeform. Players will guide and nurture their budding creation from single-celled organisms to intelligent beings capable of exploring—or dominating, should you prefer—other planets across the galaxy. At the heart of the game is a set of easy-to-use creation tools that allow players to design their own creatures, buildings and vehicles.

In our demo, we skipped past the cellular stage and went right to the second phase of gameplay. If players were starting from scratch, we were told that it would take players about 30 minutes or so to evolve to this point.

Water Tower converted to home

Amazing conversion of a water tower to a home. It's like a post modern wizard's tower.

Instant French Fry Maker

Go from powdered potato flakes to french fries in 90 seconds.

Pour flakes into the top of the machine; fries come out at the bottom. They also stay crisp and relatively hot for a discomfiting period of time. The taste? French-fryish. Like crispy instant potato with a hint of cardboard.

Watch the video at the link.

I don't eat french fries regularly anymore, but the next time I get some will be McDonalds fries. They still taste the best. Just the right texture and taste. Mmm.

Hole in Universe

There's a hole in the universe, and it's presence has surprised scientists.

The hole is nearly a billion light-years across. It is not a black hole, which is a small sphere of densely packed matter. Rather, this one is mostly devoid of stars, gas and other normal matter, and it's also strangely empty of the mysterious "dark matter" that permeates the cosmos. Other space voids have been found before, but nothing on this scale.

Astronomers don't know why the hole is there.

"Not only has no one ever found a void this big, but we never even expected to find one this size," said researcher Lawrence Rudnick of the University of Minnesota.

Rudnick's colleague Liliya R. Williams also had not anticipated this finding.

"What we've found is not normal, based on either observational studies or on computer simulations of the large-scale evolution of the universe," said Williams, also of the University of Minnesota.

The finding will be detailed in the Astrophysical Journal.

I know who's to blame:

Morgan Freeman developing Rama

Morgan Freeman has been working on a film adaptation of Arthur C Clarke's Rendezvous With Rama.

The book deals with an Earth mission in the 22nd century to find out what is behind the mysterious arrival of a 30-mile-long alien spacecraft that has appeared in the solar system.

"I play the captain of the spaceship Endeavor that is charged with rendezvousing with this thing from outer space to find out what it is [and] what its intentions are," Freeman told the site.

Freeman has long been developing the movie with director David Fincher (Alien 3).

"It's a very intellectual science fiction film, a very difficult book to translate cinematically." Freeman said. "[At least] we have found it very difficult to translate, to get ready for film." He added about the cerebral story: "There are no guns, no explosions. Although it's fiction, it's all based on pure science."

Freeman added: "But it's worth doing. We're still at it."

I'd go see it, but I think it might work better as a TV miniseries.

1 Terabyte on a single optical disc

I want one eventually.

Eschewing the reflectivity principles in current optical media entirely, the TeraDisc system uses light-sensitive molecules called chromophores to create hologram-like matrices that can be used to store a full terabyte of data on a single disc using a red laser -- and Mempile says that an eventual transition to a blue laser system will enable storage capacities of up to 5TB. The company is hoping to get a prototype ready in 18 months, and plans to ship the first version a year after that, priced around $3,000 for the drive and $30-60 for a 600GB disc. No word on the price of those 1TB discs, but you can bet they won't be cheap.

Airline paints over burned plane's logo

Amazing. China Airlines had a plane catch fire in Okinawa. The next day employees from the airline painted over the name and logo of the plane.

The accident took place on Monday. On Tuesday, witnesses saw a service crew splashing white paint over the name "China Airlines" and the plum flower logo on the aircraft's tail. (On the image to the right, the Japanese text says "yesterday" on the top and "today" on the bottom.) No one was killed in the accident, so the Japanese press can have a guilt-free field day with the incident.

Gagging the Safety Experts

If you are a reporter and want to talk to someone at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on the record, unless that person is the director of the agency, don't bother. All employees are now forbidden from talking on the record, they can only speak on background, anonymously.

It seems that Ms. Nason has adopted a policy that has blocked virtually all of her staff — including the communications office — from providing any information to reporters on the record, which means that it can be attributed.

As an alternative I was told I could interview Ms. Nason on the record (instead of the expert on the subject of my article). I declined, failing to see how her appointment as administrator — she was trained as a lawyer — made her a expert in that subject.

When I said I would like to talk to Ms. Nason on the record about her no-attribution policy, she was not available.

The agency’s new policy effectively means that some of the world’s top safety researchers are no longer allowed to talk to reporters or to be freely quoted about automotive safety issues that affect pretty much everybody.

Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition preview videos

Teaser Trailer


Dungeons & Dragons Insider: Sneak Preview


The D&D Insider computer component I'm lukewarm about. I prefer face to face gaming with no distractions. We get distracted easily enough as it is. That being said, the character creator looks good as well as the mapping. I like that they don't seem to have added a lot of special effects of magic or combat. I think that would cheapen the experience.
I'm also not sure if I would spend $9.99 a month for it.

Heroes previews

Heroes Season 2 Teaser


Heroes Season 2 Promo 1


Can't wait!

What's wrong with DC Comics?

A whole lot. Countdown has been pretty much a joke.

I'm reminded of that skit Eddie Murphy did about Bill Cosby, where Bill calls Eddie up and tells him what is "wrong" with his act. Bill's sole interpretation of Eddie's work consists of "filth florin filth" -- that the secret of Eddie's appeal is that all he does is say dirty words. Marvel's secret to success was not that they had violence, or grit, or adult situations, or "filth florin flith." Marvel's secret to success is that their characters are, essentially, underdogs. Well-written underdogs, freaks, weirdos and outcasts. What better type of character to appeal to teenagers? Further, Marvel superheroes are not just flawed to be flawed, but have their flawedness organically built into their backstories and characterizations.

By contrast, the serious personality flaws imposed on some DC characters in Didio's regime -- such as sociopath/killer Max Lord, sociopath/killer Superboy, "bad girl" Supergirl, rapist Dr. Light, cruelly unethical Leslie Thompkins, and amoral JLA -- have been superimposed, artifically added, uneccessary. They are "filth florin filth," what DC thought Marvel did to attract readers.

Now, what Jenette Kahn & Paul Levitz understood 20 years ago was that DC was not Marvel. They didn't even want DC to be Marvel. Instead, they concentrated on how to make the company even more unique. And that produced "Watchmen," Vertigo Comics, "The Dark Knight Returns," and a lot more.

I hope after Final Crisis some stability and regime change will happen and DC's comics can get back to being true to themselves.

China needs an intervention

Tainted toys, tainted toothpaste, tainted blankets, and now repackaged used chopsticks.

A Beijing factory recycled used chopsticks and sold up to 100,000 pairs a day without any form of disinfection, a newspaper said on Wednesday, the latest is a string of food and product safety scares.

They have no regulation now. When?

China, on track to overtake the United States this year as the world's second-largest exporter, lacks a basic food safety law and the manpower to enforce food and drug safety regulations at home or for export. Imports are generally carefully scrutinized.

A lack of business ethics and a spiritual vacuum after China embraced economic reforms in the late 1970s have been blamed for unscrupulous business practices and corruption.

This is why Libertarianism doesn't really work in practice. Sure, the market will correct itself, when people stop buying from those who produce tainted items, but the damage has already been done. Regulation, in and of itself, is not evil.

China needs to fix this now, while they still have customers. It won't matter how cheap their products are, if no one is willing to bet their life on them being safe.

13 Worst Film Accents

Pretty good list.

• catherine zeta jones - traffic
• keanu reeves - dracula
• tommy lee jones - blown away
• kevin costner- robin hood
• dick van dyke - mary poppins
• don cheadle - oceans 11
• sean connery - the untouchables / hunt for red october / highlander
• brad pitt - seven years in tibet / devil’s own
• mike myers - shrek
• josh hartnett - blow dry
• julia roberts - mary reilly
• patsy kensit - lethal weapon 2
• michael caine - cider house rules
• john malkovich - rounders

Simulated Mars Mission Ends

This is cool. I wonder how stir crazy they got, being stuck in their habitat unless outside in a n EVA suit.

The simulation is an experiment in planetary exploration and its demands. The team was looking at what happens to a crew in a remote, harsh, close-quartered environment under simulated Martian conditions (crews would only go outside the habitat during a fully simulated EVA) when they are working on real science.

"The work that this crew has done will contribute to studies of Mars and to studies of the response of permafrost on Earth to global warming," said the mission’s remote science principal investigator Chris McKay, of NASA Ames. "Their pioneering simulation of crew operations on Mars time is by far the best work on this topic ever done. It sets the standard for future Mars mission simulations."

Next to studying global warming, the coolest thing the crew did was take advantage of the 24 hours of summer sunlight in the Arctic to shift all their operations to Martian Time (a day on Mars is 24 hours and 39 minutes). The crew would simply cover the hab windows from 8pm to 8am "local" Mars time every night.

OZ stories to be made into edgy movies

The 15 original OZ stories by L Frank Baum are going to be made into movies by Warner Bros and Todd McFarlane.

This has been a project in the works for quite some time but now it can go full steam ahead since Warner purchased the rights to “Oz” from Ted Turner.

“McFarlane has a vision of Oz that is a dark, edgy and muscular PG-13, without a singing Munchkin in sight,” wrote journalist Michael Fleming. “That was clear with a toy line he launched several years ago that featured a buxom Dorothy and Toto re-imagined as an over-sized snarling warthog.

Olson’s vision is of a bit tamer PG movie and hopefully the two can find some middle ground of compromise that will please them both and not hurt the final product.

“I saw those toys, and Dorothy as some bondage queen isn’t something I want to do,” Olson told Fleming. “The appealing thing about the Baum books to me is how wildly imaginative they are. There are crazy characters from amazing places. I want this to be ‘Harry Potter’ dark, not ‘Seven’ dark.”

“My pitch was ‘How do we get people who went to ‘Lord of the Rings’ to embrace this?’ ” McFarlane said. “I want to create [an interpretation] that has a 2007 wow factor. You’ve still got Dorothy trapped in an odd place, but she’s much closer to the Ripley from ‘Alien’ than a helpless singing girl.”

I liked the Return to OZ movie, but I don't know whether I'd like this.

Virtual epidemics

An epidemic, Corrupted Blood, swept through World of Warcraft. The effects and behaviors of players has now been used in research.

Researcher Professor Nina Fefferman, from Tufts University School of Medicine, said: "Human behaviour has a big impact on disease spread. And virtual worlds offer an excellent platform for studying human behaviour.

"The players seemed to really feel they were at risk and took the threat of infection seriously, even though it was only a game."

She acknowledged that a virtual setting might encourage riskier behaviour, but said this could be estimated and allowed for when drawing conclusions.

I wonder what other real world situations would benefit from MMORPG research?

Star Trek news

Spock speaks:

Zachary Quinto, who will play a young Mr. Spock in J.J. Abrams' upcoming Star Trek movie, told USA Today that he will begin shooting the top-secret movie in November, during a break from his role as the villainous Sylar on NBC's Heroes.

Quinto added that 11 sets have been built on the Paramount lot and that two weeks will be spent shooting in Iceland.

Quinto also offered a few hints about the movie's storyline. "I really identify with Spock's struggle," Quinto told the newspaper. "We're going back to a time before anything [original Spock Leonard Nimoy did in the original series] was established. These characters are in a completely different stage of their lives."

The Birth of Silicon Valley

Photos from inside the Hewlett Packard Garage, the birthplace of Silicon Valley. There's some neat history there.

Top Ten Transhumanist Technologies

That's a tongue twister. I'm a fan of a lot of Transhumanist thought. I want to be smarter, live longer, and experience the Singularity. How can we get there?

Transhumanists advocate the improvement of human capacities through advanced technology. Not just technology as in gadgets you get from Best Buy, but technology in the grander sense of strategies for eliminating disease, providing cheap but high-quality products to the world's poorest, improving quality of life and social interconnectedness, and so on. Technology we don't notice because it's blended in with the fabric of the world, but would immediately take note of its absence if it became unavailable. (Ever tried to travel to another country on foot?) Technology needn't be expensive — indeed, if a technology is truly effective it will pay for itself many times over.

Transhumanists tend to take a longer-than-average view of technological progress, looking not just five or ten years into the future but twenty years, thirty years, and beyond. We realize that the longer you look forward, the more uncertain the predictions get, but one thing is quite certain: if a technology is physically possible and obviously useful, human (or transhuman!) ingenuity will see to it that it gets built eventually. As we gain ever greater control over the atomic structure of matter, our technological goals become increasingly ambitious, and their payoffs more and more generous. Sometimes new technologies even make us happier in a long-lasting way: the Internet would be a prime example.

5 Smartest people in the DC universe

Mr Terrific is usually referred to as the third smartest person in the DC universe, but who are the top 5? Let's ask Devon

5. T.O. Morrow

What's not to love about the guy?

He's the comic book equivalent of Nikola Tesla.

He invents televisions that broadcast the future.

Out of boredom, he invents robots that infiltrate Justice Leagues.

His name is the coolest in comics.

He sips cocktails to let you know how little he cares for your impending doom.

While the world's best minds cowered like mice after being targeted by a freshly-returned from-genocide Black Adam, this man almost single-handedly defeated the World's Deadliest Mortal.

How did he do this?

Science.

The man's frickin' superpower is science.

Read the whole thing.

Giant cyberpunk arcology proposed for Tokyo harbor

This giant building, proposed to hold 1 million people and be 13,000 ft tall. That is really big and impractical. Build enough of them and we'll have Coruscant or it's inspiration, Trantor.

It would be the first really large arcology. Some small test ones have been built, but nothing to this scale.

Playing music on Vista caps network throughput

Interesting. If you have music open in a media player, your maximum network throughput drops, even if the music is paused. Close the music player, speed goes back up. It seems not to be hardware as some people are dual booting into XP and not seeing this.

on xp the network speed was between 30-50%
on vista it was stuck at just over 5%

so I followed all the advice about disabling autotuning etc, tried setting all the differerent lan driver settings, played with the tcp window size, latest drivers etc ....
none of it made a bit of difference, I was still stuck on 5% usage

until.... I stopped playing music...
doesn't matter what I play back music with, if it's playing or paused the lan speed seems to be locked at the 5%
stopping playback or quitting the player lets the file copy go to the 30-50% instantly

It seems to be a feature:

Apparenty Vista natively boosts multimedia priority in the kernel, which could explain a lot about the drop in network throughput.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/tec...2/VistaKernel/

I'm probably waiting for SP1 before I upgrade to Vista.

[UPDATE] The slowdown explained:

Many people have correctly surmised that the degradation in network performance during multimedia playback is directly connected with mechanisms employed by the Multimedia Class Scheduler Service (MMCSS), a feature new to Windows Vista that I covered in my three-part TechNet Magazine article series on Windows Vista kernel changes. Multimedia playback requires a constant rate of media streaming, and playback will glitch or sputter if its requirements aren’t met. The MMCSS service runs in the generic service hosting process Svchost.exe, where it automatically prioritizes the playback of video and audio in order to prevent other tasks from interfering with the CPU usage of the playback software:

Remakes

I was browsing the movie trailers at Apple, when I noticed a lot of previously proven properties. Remakes of old films or TV shows or video games.

• 3:10 to Yuma
• Alvin and the Chipmunks
• Halloween
• Hitman
• Horton Hears A Who
• Underdog
• Sleuth
• Get Smart

That's a whole lot of remake.

Military tests rocket powered bionic arm

This sounds like sci-fi, not the real world.

A rocket-powered bionic arm has been successfully developed and tested by a team of mechanical engineers at Vanderbilt University as part of a $30 million military program to develop advanced prosthetic devices for next generation of super-soldiers.

The mechanical arm mechanical arm with a miniature rocket motor can lift (curl) about 20 to 25 pounds, three to four times more than current commercial arms, and can do so three to four times faster.

“That means it has about 10 times as much power as other arms despite the fact that the design hasn’t been optimized yet for strength or power,” Michael Goldfarb, the professor of mechanical engineering who is leading the effort, said.

Tests show that the mechanical arm also functions more naturally than previous models.

Batteries don't hold enough energy for their weight.

At a certain point, the weight of the batteries required to provide the energy to operate the arm for a reasonable period becomes a problem, and it was this poor power-to-weight ratio of the batteries that drove Goldfarb to look for alternatives while working on an exoskeleton project for DARPA.

Goldfarb’s power source is about the size of a pencil and contains a special catalyst that causes hydrogen peroxide to burn produce pure steam which is used to open and close a series of valves.

The valves are connected to the spring-loaded joints by belts made of a special monofilament used in appliance handles and aircraft parts and a small sealed canister of hydrogen peroxide that easily fits in the upper arm can provide enough energy to power the device for 18 hours of normal activity.

It's Steampunk! real life trumps fiction once again.

D&D 4th Edition details

A lot of streamlining and refining.

• Some classes are merging (Rangers and Scouts), (Possibly Wizards and Sorcerers)
• Greyhawk is no longer the default setting. It is now a much more generic GM defined setting.
• Magic item creation no longer will require XP.
• Feats and class abilities to be replaced with talent trees as done in the new Star Wars Saga Edition.
• Critical threats automatically confirm.
• Levels go to 30. Prestige classes go away, but multiclassing is improved.
• Racial abilities are now level based. A 1st level Orc will be very different from a 30th level one.

Read the whole thing.

JLA movie picking up steam

I wonder villains they would face? You would really need something really big to challenge the JLA. Darkseid? The Injustice League? The Crime Syndicate of Amerika?

IESB.net reported a rumor that a script for a proposed Justice League of America movie is done and that the movie is moving forward rapidly.

Kiernan and Michele Mulroney's script has been warmly received at Warner Brothers, and the studio is envisioning the movie as a launching pad for others movies based on The Flash, Wonder Woman, The Green Lantern and Aquaman, as well as a shot in the arm for the Superman franchise, the site reported, citing anonymous studio sources.

I hope they can resist the temptation to include origin stories for the heroes and villains. They don't need to. Some people are good and put on costumes and fight crime. 'Nuff said. Don't get me wrong, I want characterization, but just show them already heroes, maybe with a montage of origins in the opening credits like The Incredibles.

[Update] From Newsarama:

Now IESB.net passes along a rumor that the studio is viewing the movie as a possible launching point for Aquaman, The Flash, Wonder Woman and Green Lantern, and as an avenue to rejuvenate Superman. To that end, Justice League could be fast-tracked to begin production as early as February 2008 for release in summer 2009.

Just a rumor, sure. But add to that this interview with actor Ryan Reynolds — whose name is usually connected with The Flash – who implies there’s movement.

“I don’t really know how much I’m allowed to talk about that stuff,” he tells MTV.com. “[But] it’s no secret that they have a JLA script and it’s a project that’s in development.”

Back at IESB, the site reports confirmation from studio sources that the film will consist of at least Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, The Flash (Barry Allen), Green Lantern (John Stewart) and Aquaman. The script reportedly follows the OMAC storyline, and will feature Maxwell Lord.

Again, only rumors. For now.