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It’s called Power of the Dark Crystal.
Set hundreds of years after the events of the first movie, when the world has once again fallen into darkness, “Power of the Dark Crystal” follows the adventures of a mysterious girl made of fire who, together with a Gelfling outcast, steals a shard of the legendary crystal in an attempt to reignite the dying sun that exists at the center of the planet.
It couldn’t possibly be better than the original:
A complete copy of the classic film Metropolis has been found in Argentina.
Made at a time of hyperinflation in Germany, “Metropolis” offered a grandiose version — of a father and son fighting for the soul of a futuristic city — that nearly bankrupted the studio that commissioned it, UFA. After lukewarm reviews and initial box office results in Europe, Paramount Pictures, the American partner brought in toward the end of the shoot, took control of the film and made drastic excisions, arguing that Lang’s cut was too complicated and unwieldy for American audiences to understand.
Film Forum in NYC is showing the complete film starting tonight (through May 20).
If you want to take macro photos without splashing the cash for a new lens, flip your existing lens around. Examples here. (via flickr blog)
Located in Canada’s Wood Buffalo National Park, the largest beaver dam in the world is more than half a mile long. That’s over twice as long as the Hoover Dam. Damn, those beavers have been busy. [ST]
D.T. Max on the Secrets of Sleep for National Geographic.
An animal must lie still for a great stretch of time, during which it is easy prey for predators. What can possibly be the payback for such risk? “If sleep doesn’t serve an absolutely vital function,” the renowned sleep researcher Allan Rechtschaffen once said, “it is the greatest mistake evolution ever made.” […]
At Stanford University I visited William Dement, the retired dean of sleep studies, a co-discoverer of REM sleep, and co-founder of the Stanford Sleep Medicine Center. I asked him to tell me what he knew, after 50 years of research, about the reason we sleep. “As far as I know,” he answered, “the only reason we need to sleep that is really, really solid is because we get sleepy.”
And this fatal familial insomnia sounds like a horrible disease:
The main symptom of FFI, as the disease is often called, is the inability to sleep. First the ability to nap disappears, then the ability to get a full night’s sleep, until the patient cannot sleep at all. The syndrome usually strikes when the sufferer is in his or her 50s, ordinarily lasts about a year, and, as the name indicates, always ends in death.
This is exactly why I bought an iPad:
In this profession, it’s critical to have a break-out area where you can think without the computer looking over your shoulder; where you can do your most valuable work without the siren song of an IDE. For the same reason that getting up and even walking to the bathroom can provide new perspective on a heretofore intractable problem, it’s in your own best professional interests to do as much of your work as possible before you handcuff yourself to your desk each day.
And:
The potential of iPad is to decouple as many tasks as possible from my work environment — and to keep me away from that environment when I’m doing things that don’t actually require me to be there other than to use a computer.
I do a lot of reading and light writing for this site and I’m hoping that the iPad will allow me to do that somewhere that’s not my desk. At least for a few hours a week. (via jb)
A 1996 profile of David Foster Wallace from Details magazine. An early mainstream magazine interview with Wallace about Infinite Jest, it hasn’t been seen since its initial publication. Craig Fehrman dug it up in the Yale Library.
Brought up an atheist, he has twice failed to pass throguh the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults, the first step toward becoming a Catholic. The last time, he made the mistake of referring to “the cult of personality surrounding Jesus.” That didn’t go over big with the priest, who correctly suspected Wallace might have a bit too much skepticism to make a fully obedient Catholic. “I’m a typical American,” says Wallace. “Half of me is dying to give myself away, and the other half is continually rebelling.”
For the 25th anniversary of his book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, Steven Levy talks to a few of the book’s subjects (Bill Gates, Richard Stallman, Steve Wozniak) about how they’ve changed and what hacking means today.
On the one hand, information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable,” [Stewart Brand] said. “On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.” His words neatly encapsulate the tension that has since defined the hacker movement — a sometimes pitched battle between geeky idealism and icy-hearted commerce.
The baby pictured here:
now works for Shepard Fairey, the artist who did the iconic Obama HOPE posters.
Yo dawg, I herd you like pop culture, so I put some pop culture in your pop culture so your brain can fucking explode from all the popular you’ve cultured. (via mediabistro)
Some of my favorites are Prezbo, My Name is My Name, Hamsterdam, Always Boris, Fuzzy Dunlop, and Sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeit. Glaring omissions? Hit Me on My Burner, Snot Boogie, and Pack o’ Newports. The full list. (thx, tash & nathan)
What if Super Mario Bros had been designed as a typical circa-2010 networked game? It might look a little something like this:
The site’s a little slow right now…check back later if you can’t get the page to load. (via waxy)
Albert Kahn was a French banker and philanthropist who financed an extensive photography project in the early 1900s. His photographers traveled all around the world, eventually amassing a collection 72,000 color photos.
Kahn’s project is the subject of a 9-part BBC documentary that’s showing on Ovation this week. All the episodes repeat on Saturday starting at noon. (via constant siege)
Malcolm Gladwell tells us about Operation Mincemeat, a caper undertaken by British intelligence to fool the Hitler and the Nazis into thinking the Allied invasion of mainland Europe would come from through Greece and not Sicily.
It did not take long for word of the downed officer to make its way to German intelligence agents in the region. Spain was a neutral country, but much of its military was pro-German, and the Nazis found an officer in the Spanish general staff who was willing to help. A thin metal rod was inserted into the envelope; the documents were then wound around it and slid out through a gap, without disturbing the envelope’s seals. What the officer discovered was astounding. Major Martin was a courier, carrying a personal letter from Lieutenant General Archibald Nye, the vice-chief of the Imperial General Staff, in London, to General Harold Alexander, the senior British officer under Eisenhower in Tunisia. Nye’s letter spelled out what Allied intentions were in southern Europe. American and British forces planned to cross the Mediterranean from their positions in North Africa, and launch an attack on German-held Greece and Sardinia. Hitler transferred a Panzer division from France to the Peloponnese, in Greece, and the German military command sent an urgent message to the head of its forces in the region: “The measures to be taken in Sardinia and the Peloponnese have priority over any others.”
James Cameron spoke about the science of Avatar at Caltech last month; Discovery has a summary.
“We tried to make it not completely fanciful,” Cameron told the crowd, which filled the auditorium. “If it was too outlandish, there would be a believability gap.” So while Pandora features floating mountains, that might not be so far-fetched, Cameron said, considering Earth has developed high-speed “bullet” trains that levitate on magnetic fields. Of course, the “reality-based” scenario did have its limits. “We figured that to actually lift mountains, the magnetic field would have to be strong enough to rip the hemoglobin out of your blood,” says Cameron. “But we decided not to go there.”
No word on whether he addressed the Na’vi’s lack of technological advancement.
There are so many really fantastic things about this video and its subject, Bob Munden. To start: look at how fast he can shoot his gun and re-holster it! I’ve seen it 20 times and I still can’t believe it.
The only thing that rivals Munden’s quickness with a gun is his confidence.
BM: Fast-draw is the fastest thing a human being does. Nodody does anything faster than what I do with guns.
Q: Can you give a comparison with something that would come close but is not as fast?
BM: Speed of light. Which is far beyond it. There is nothing next to it.
Shades of Ali. (Or as Munden might put it, in Ali, we can see shades of Munden.) To date, he has not shot himself in the crotch, which seems to me to be a minor miracle. (thx, dan)
The websites of the top 10 luxury brands don’t work that well on the iPad…most throw up a splash page prompting you to download Flash. This is what Cartier’s site looks like:
If I were Anna Wintour, I would be screaming at these companies to fix these sites. They reflect poorly on an industry that’s all about effortless style, appearance, confidence, and never, ever having a hair out of place (unless that’s the look you’re going for). This? This is like they’ve got no pants on — and not in a good way. That goes double for restaurant sites.
Inc. Magazine has a nice profile of Tim O’Reilly. Tim’s business philosophy is refreshing.
O’Reilly says he sometimes wonders what would have happened if he had raised venture capital and given his company a chance to get really big. But he sounds more amused by this question than truly troubled by it. “Money is like gasoline during a road trip,” he says. “You don’t want to run out of gas on your trip, but you’re not doing a tour of gas stations. You have to pay attention to money, but it shouldn’t be about the money.”
The Economist redraws the map of Europe with some countries in new places.
In Britain’s place should come Poland, which has suffered quite enough in its location between Russia and Germany and deserves a chance to enjoy the bracing winds of the North Atlantic and the security of sea water between it and any potential invaders.
Grant Achatz, Nick Kokonas, and his team are opening a restaurant called Next:
No reservations…you have to buy tickets, like for a play or a ballgame.
Your tickets will be fully inclusive of all charges, including service. Ticket price will depend on which seating you buy — Saturday at 8 PM will be more expensive than Wednesday at 9:30 PM. This will allow us to offer an amazing experience at a very reasonable price. We will also offer an annual subscription to all four menus at a discount with preferred seating.
The menu changes four times a year and each menu will be influenced by a particular place and time (Paris 1912, Hong Kong 2036). A Mad Men-era NYC menu please?
Yulia Brodskaya makes elaborate typographic creations entirely out of paper. She calls them PAPERgraphics.
This is like Si Scott in 3-D.
Amazon has opened slightly their data kimono with a look at the most highlighted passages by Kindle users. The results aren’t that interesting (to me) because the bestsellers dominate: some Gladwell, Dan Brown, etc. To make it more useful, they should weigh the results by sales and cram some social in there: the most highlighted passages by my friends = gold.
The hot new Chanel bag this season is a brown paper bag.
As one of the commenters says, “fake it until you make it”.
Amazon has finally added the ability to earn affiliates fees with Kindle books. From the press release
Amazon is excited to announce that effective May 1, 2010, you can earn advertising fees on Kindle books. With over 500,000 books, including 105 of 112 New York Times Best Sellers, Kindle books represent another great way to earn money advertising Amazon products. Advertising fees range from 4 to 8.5%.
Indiewire has a review of the Freakonomics documentary that premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival the other day.
Taking his central cue from Levitt’s conviction that “incentives matter,” executive producer Seth Gordon (“The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters”) directs several introductory segments featuring Levitt (the economist) and Dubner (the journalist) breaking down the book’s main assertions, aided by playful 2-D animation. The first of these sequences borrows from an early chapter in the source material, taking on self-interested real estate agents to explain the authors’ intention of parsing the motives behind many phenomena often taken for granted. While Gordon’s fluffy treatment of his chatty subjects suggests the potential for a “This American Life”-type television series, the individual short films embody their claims with a variety of methods.
Magnolia Pictures acquired the North American rights to the film so we should be seeing it in theaters later in the year.
A Times Square tshirt vendor alerted police to an oddly parked truck near his stand. A bomb squad found a crudely built bomb inside the truck.
When asked if he was proud of his actions, he said: “Of course, man. I’m a veteran. What do you think?” The vendor said that he had served during the Vietnam War and had been selling wares on the street for about 20 years. “I don’t have too much of a choice, nobody’s giving me a job,” he said.
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