Rocket Pants

Those who know me know that I have a couple of soapboxes that I'm wont to climb on after a beer or two: one of them being how my generation has been let down by technology. We were promised holidays on the moon. We were promised food pills. Damn it, we were promised rocket pants. All have failed to materialise in our lifetimes so far leaving - well, me I guess - technologically disillusioned.

The men who want to fly. By Larry Smith - Slate Magazine is thus a brilliant read, largely because it contains the salient fact that: To date, only 11 men in history have free-flown a rocketbelt. More men have walked on the moon.

And with that knowledge, my pain diminishes somewhat. Still miffed about those moon holidays though...

Oooohhh - look what's just gone live

BBC - Torchwood - The Official Site

And I'm in South Africa when it starts, damn it.

The Scarefactory

The Scarefactory - Haunted Attraction Props and Accessories - Skelerectors, Monsters, Demons

A nondescript TV sits on top of a small dresser. When activated glazed plexiglass screen drops with a crash and out Ring Girl flies up, out and down out of the front of the TV.

And it's yours for only $2895.

Ever wondered where people go to get their animatronic props for haunted houses? Looks like they go here.

Steampunk laptop

If anybody ever starts making something like this, consider me first in the queue (though whether I could afford the porter you'd also need to carry it round is another matter entirely).


[Via Boing Boing]

Make Love Not Warcraft

Boing Boing: South Park: Make Love Not Warcraft

The one in which everyone becomes WoW zombies...

Cartman: You can just hang around outside all day tossing a ball around, or you can sit at your computer and do something that matters.

Just screened in the US, therefore downloadable somewhere.

[Via Boing Boing]

Red break-in

Looks like those doyens of the digital camera hype, Red, have suffered a break in at their premises. Here's what the OC Register says about it:

"A prototype for a digital cinema camera that creators say will revolutionize the cinematography industry was stolen late last month from the Lake Forest office where it was being tested, authorities said Tuesday.

Red Digital Camera Co., the brainchild of Oakley sunglass creator Jim Jannard, is in the process of perfecting RED ONE, a high-performance 4K digital camera that promises to deliver the quality of 35mm film with the ease of a camcorder at a bargain price.

'Losses could venture into the millions' if the technology is compromised, said Jim Amormino, a spokesman for the Orange County Sheriff's Department.

Article - News - Company's cinema camera prototype stolen

Burglary or espionage? CinemaTech, where I got the story from, favours the former, while noting the publicity benefits of the latter. Reminds me of the time a facility I was visiting in London had been turned over the night before. Result, one stolen Mac. Lucikly, an entire case of Zeiss HD lenses were still lying there beside the hole where the G4 used to be. Cue one very relieved facility owner. There was a Quantel iQ there too, but at the time I guess the Mac had a better resale value. Arf!

Need a Wii...

Tech Digest has this running on its site: Ten YouTube videos that'll make you want a Nintendo Wii.

Didn't need ten. The first, five minute long trailer was enough...

Crawling cross the face of the sun

Via inky circus, the Space Shuttle and the ISS caught against the sun. O humanity is but a speck of dust etc.

Protest to (not) survive

A classic of the genre from Boing Boing - a zombie rights march in Austin, Texas, that suffered an attempted boarding from a counter-march of pirates.

The zombies' signs in the march included badly spelled slogans such as "Mairage = 1 Zombie + 1 Zombie", "More Binifits for Zombie Vets in Our Necronomoconomy", "Brains...The Other White Meat", "We're here, we're dead, get used to it!" and "Zombies Was People Too." The zombies, shouting "What do we want? Brains! When do we want them? Brains!" was unhindered by a group of pirates protesting the undead's demands for their rights.

in-flight (un)safety

A nice one from the Economist - an honest flight safety announcement. It'll never catch on:

"Please switch off all mobile phones, since they can interfere with the aircraft's navigation systems. At least, that's what you've always been told. The real reason to switch them off is because they interfere with mobile networks on the ground, but somehow that doesn't sound quite so good. On most flights a few mobile phones are left on by mistake, so if they were really dangerous we would not allow them on board at all, if you think about it. We will have to come clean about this next year, when we introduce in-flight calling across the Veritas fleet. At that point the prospect of taking a cut of the sky-high calling charges will miraculously cause our safety concerns about mobile phones to evaporate."

Economist.com

[via them lovely people at inky circus]

Enigma crack

Ever since reading Stephenson's magnificent Cryptonomicon, Bletchley - a god-forsaken part of Milton Keynes nowadays - and the work they did there on cracking the Enigma code has always exerted a pull. Now they've on the verge of recreating the Turing Bombe - the machine that Churchill ordered smashed at the end of the war.

BBC NEWS | UK | WWII Nazi code-break re-enacted

Feel a field trip coming on...

There goes Xmas

BBC NEWS | Technology | PlayStation 3 Euro launch delayed

Bugger.

Watchmen remix

Alan Moore's seminal Watchmen remixed as if it had been written by that master of the hyperbolean comic form, Stan Lee. Genius. BeaucoupKevin // BlogMachineGo: This Week's Project.

[via BoingBoing]

Uber Lego

The chaps and chapesses over at arstechnica have been looking at the new Lego and pronounced it good. Lego Mindstorms NXT review

And I quote: "The NXT brick can communicate with three other Bluetooth devices at any one time. This means that if you had four Mindstorms kits, you could create a mega-robot with four brains, twelve motors, and sixteen sensors—all of it coordinated through Bluetooth. The setup also works with cell phone and PDA Bluetooth systems, meaning that you can use your phone as a remote control or an output device."

Now that rocks. Beats my boyhood Capsela set into a cocked hat.

Story synchronicity

So, no sooner do you hear that: Airfix crashes and burns | The Register

But you also get to hear that Peter Jackson's to remake The Dam Busters.

As The Register adroitly puts it: "When Jackson first enquired about the film rights back in the 1990s, he was told that Mel Gibson had a plan to direct and possibly act in his own remake. Mercifully for cinemagoers, that never happened. The result would most certainly have been a U-571-style adaptation showing the Americans breaching the Möhne and Eder dams, in the process drowning an English army led by a sneering Alan Rickman on its way to massacre Scottish Highlanders."

Stars = profit?

Interesting New York Times piece analysing the relationship between big movie stars and whether their films are succesful or not.A Big Star May Not a Profitable Movie Make - New York Times

'Course, it starts with the schadenfreude-friendly news that Tom Cruise got dropped by Paramount pictures recently, but rather than simply putting the boot into the munchkin scientologist for the next 2000 words, it goes off and digs up some economics. Educational, but a pity really...;-)

Anyway, a quote:

"In one study, Mr. De Vany and W. David Walls, an economist at the University of Calgary, took those factors into account. Looking across a sample of more than 2,000 movies exhibited between 1985 and 1996, they found that only seven actors and actresses — Tom Hanks, Michelle Pfeiffer, Sandra Bullock, Jodie Foster, Jim Carrey, Barbra Streisand and Robin Williams — had a positive impact on the box office, mostly in the first few weeks of a film’s release.

In the same study, two directors, Steven Spielberg and Oliver Stone also pushed up a movie’s revenue. But Winona Ryder, Sharon Stone and Val Kilmer were associated with a smaller box-office revenue. No other star had any statistically significant impact at all. So what are stars for? By helping a movie open — attracting lots of people in to see a movie in the first few days before the buzz about whether it’s good or bad is widely known — stars can set a floor for revenues, said Mr. De Vany."

[via boing boing]

Muse time

It's been a bit of a YouTube sort of day. And in honour of this weekend's Reading Festival, here's Muse's unhinged Knights of Cydonia with an equally unhinged video. Cowboys, robots, phasers, women on unicorns...what more could anybody want?

Ulysses 31 title sequence

Sometimes, just sometimes, nostalgia is all that it's cracked up to be.

Tea 'healthier' drink than water

Ha! Always knew it.

BBC NEWS | Health | Tea 'healthier' drink than water

Time for a cuppa.

Ecopod: Residential Recycling Trash Masher

One from Treehugger.
Treehugger: Ecopod: Residential Recycling Trash Masher

Quoth the site: "Designed by BMW Designworks USA, "The appliance houses a compactor, and provides an efficient way to crush, store and redeem recyclable beverage containers, specifically plastic bottles and aluminium cans. Consumers throw their bottle or can in the appropriate slot, step on a foot pedal, and enjoy the satisfying sound of compaction. The compacted container falls into an internal bin, which can be removed for redemption or curbside disposal. Each pod has storage capacity for approximately 50 crushed containers, while an upper compartment has additional room for glass bottles, newspapers and other recyclable materials. Everything neatly stored away and ready to moved to the next step in the recycling chain."

They also point out that it might go under a different name, ecopods being slang for biodegradeable coffins in the environmental community