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We're probably not getting hoverboards in 2015, bt at least we have the consolation of knowing that Lego approved an actual, licensed Back to the Future DeLorean set for release in the middle of next year. The set - which should include the necessarily Legos to modify the DeLorean for all three movies, as well as various figures of Marty McFly and Doc Brown - was submitted to Lego's Cuusoo site, where it reached the necessary 10,000 votes to be considered and was chosen by Lego for actual production. What's super-cool is that Masashi and Team BTTF, the people who designed and submitted the set, are donating all of the royalties they'd receive from the set's sales directly to the Michael J. Fox Foundation to help fight Parkinson's disease.
Apparently the next judging period includes a Portal 2 set. Cross your fingers.
Back to the Future II Version
Back to the Future III Version
Marty and Doc minifigures
DeLorean close-ups
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If you were counting down to "Gangnam Style"'s one billionth YouTube view on the site BillionCount.com, you might have been a little confused at what happened when the counter hit 1,000,000,000: it turned into a porn site: the "Xpress Cougar Dating Club." "When it was getting closer to 1 billion views I figured I had to do something with it," the site's creator told us. More »Unfurl
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Christmas is almost here, so you know what that means? Time to buy stuff! That’s why this week’s show is all about the Christmas commercials that we love. The show has a bit of a different format this week, being … Continue reading →Unfurl
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We'd heard reports about an Acme Company movie ages ago, but now it's apparently really happening. And producer Dan Lin explained to Collider that it's not an animated film, it's a live-action comedy — and Acme's most famous customer, Wile E. Coyote, won't be in it.
Said Lin:
We're not going to use Looney Tunes in the ACME movie, it's a live action movie. What were so excited about is the lead character is a Steve Jobs meets Dean Cameron kind of character and because it's ACME you can create some incredibly funny, wacky inventions that you can't do on any other movie. So naturally it's just a super imaginative movie.
Meanwhile, Lin said there's actually a screenplay for the long-delayed movie of DC's Suicide Squad comic, written by Justin Marks — but it's not actually happening any time soon. Said Lin, "I think Warner Brothers wants to finish their A-list stories first and then we'll talk about stories like Suicide Squad." In the right hands, a Suicide Squad film could obviously be amazing — but only if they're able to nail the bleak, character-oriented tone of the 1980s Ostrander comics.
Tons more details at the link. [Collider]
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An Amazon spider has been caught pulling the strings behind intricately built arachnid decoys. Biologist and science educator Phil Torres says the artful arachnid is the first discovered that builds "replica" spiders with eight legs. Mr Torres has recorded the spiders amazing work in a blog for ecological tourism firm Rainforest Expeditions which operates a combined lodge and research centre in the Tambopata national park in Peru.
"It (first appeared) to be a medium sized spider about an inch across, possibly dead and dried out, hanging in the centre of a spider web along the side of the trail. Nothing too out of the ordinary for the Amazon," he said. "As you approach, the spider starts to wobble quickly forward and back, letting you know this spider is, in fact, alive.
"That spider form you were looking at is actually made up of tiny bits of leaf, debris, and dead insects," he said. The culprit was spotted hiding behind its articulated arachnid-shaped shield: a tiny spider about 5mm wide. Mr Torres said he believes the fake spider is positioned as a decoy to distract and confuse predators and prey.The puppeteer spider sitting above one of its constructions.
About 25 of the spiders - believed to be a member of the Cyclosa family - have been spotted in the floodplain surrounding the research centre since first spotted in September. However, none have yet been found further afield. Mr Torres said specimens would now have to be collected and carefully recorded before an article could be submitted to a scientific journal before it could officially be named a new species.FeedUnfurl
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There is nothing cuter than baby monsters. And a recent crop of art from Pixiv proves this theory once and for all, by depicting a tired, three-headed baby chimera and a pair of napping baby griffins. It's almost too cute.
More images from the artist J on Pixiv.
[via Unreality Magazine]
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The extremely talented and wonderful Malcolm McDowell sits down with Chris to discuss the nostalgia of old Hollywood, his days on set of A Clockwork Orange and much more!Unfurl
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The original Star Wars trilogy isn't really known for having a lot of roles for women — but it turns out that the third film, Return of the Jedi, featured some female pilots in the Battle of Endor. Two of these fighter pilots are featured among the deleted scenes and extras on the recent Blu-ray release, but not the two female X-Wing pilots.
And curiously, we still haven't seen the deleted scene featuring Vivienne Chandler (left) as a X-Wing pilot, who had a full page and a half of dialogue in a cockpit set. Apparently, Chandler actually went to a screening of the film that included her scenes, and then when it was actually released, they were gone.
You can glimpse the female pilots in the briefing scene before the battle. One of them was actually included for a split second, but her one line of dialogue, "Got it," was replaced by a male voice in post-production.
Did George Lucas decide that showing female pilots getting blown up was too intense? Or was there some other reason why he wanted an all-male fighter squad? We'll probably never know — but it's weird that Chandler's footage has never turned up, in any form, after being in an early cut of the film. More details at the link. [Star Wars Afficionado and Star Wars Afficionado via BuzzFeed]
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NotesAdd this to your ever-growing list of things you never knew existed but now desperately need: a BNSF rotary snow blower. The video up top is of a model currently in operation clearing railroad tracks in Aurora, NE, but you'll find them all over the country, churning through formidable heaps of tightly packed snow like so many styrofoam packing peanuts.
Like pretty much all snow blowers, the various models of BNSF rotaries work by virtue of an engine-powered blade that pulls powder into the apparatus before jettisoning it far away from the area being cleared. The only difference is that BNSF's blowers look like someone spliced genes from the Death Star's Concave Dish Superlaser with a Langolier and mated the outcome with a locomotive. Can you think of anything scarier than finding yourself on the business end of one of these monsters? I mean just look at these things:
Terrifying and awesome and terrifying. All at the same time.
[Spotted on boingboing]
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Client: We would like to have a shot of the sun rising and setting over the ocean.
Me: We can shoot the sunset, but it’s impossible to get the sunrise right.
Client: Why?
Me: Well, the sun rises from the East. The coast we are shooting from is on the western part of the country.
Client: So what?
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Along with his new companion, the Doctor is getting a new TARDIS interior. BBC America released this small hint to the new design—cold metallics with Circular Gallifreyan inscriptions. Anyone want to take a crack at translating it? (Or, rather, hazard a guess as to what it's about?)
[BBC America via Nerd Approved]
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A set of internal documents published by the New York Times has shed light on the "bundlers" who help raise money for Obama's campaign, and many of them are from the world of technology. After analyzing the data, BuzzFeed found that through 2011 and 2012, $27 million of the $180 million raised came from people in the tech industry, including Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer. What's more, tech industry donors could be outspending their counterparts in the entertainment industry, long a powerhouse in Democratic fundraising. BuzzFeed counted only $9.5 million from the entertainment sector over the same period of time, although Los Angeles donors still outspent those in Silicon Valley.
Since the data only covers the Obama or general Democratic...
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A team of European and American astronomers have found signs of a simple sugar molecule, glycolaldehyde, in a gas cloud surrounding a young sun-like star. Located 400 light-years away, it's the first time that sugar has been located around such a celestial object — and this indicates that the early building blocks of life are present when planets start to form around stars.
To make their finding, lead researcher Jes Jørgensen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Denmark used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). It's an extremely sensitive radio wave receiving device that's capable of capturing exceptionally short wavelengths, and without this feature the discovery would have been impossible.
By using ALMA, the researchers were able to pick up on the characteristic radiation signatures emitted by the sugar molecules. ALMA was able to capture these signatures from radio waves, which the researchers were then able to map and identify.
This is not the first time that glycolaldehyde has been found floating in the depths of interstellar space — but it is the first time that it has been spotted near a sun-like star at distances comparable to the distance of Uranus from the Sun in our solar system. As a result, the discovery is a strong indication that the chemical compounds required to sustain life are already in existence at the time of planet formation.
Specifically, glycolaldehyde is a key component to RNA, which like DNA, is an integral precursor to life.
Moreover, the gas containing the sugar molecules is falling in towards one of the stars in the system. "The sugar molecules are not only in the right place to find their way onto a planet, but they are also going in the right direction," Jørgensen noted through a release.
Moving forward, the astronomers are hoping to gain an understanding of just how complex these molecules can get before they're incorporated into new planets — an important clue about the early composition of new planets, and the chemical compounds they carry that could eventually ignite the processes of life.
The entire study will be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters. I'll update the link once the paper has been published online.
Image: ESO/L. Calçada & NASA/JPL-Caltech/WISE Team.
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Futurama powers down Wednesday night until next summer. Patrick Stewart is probably going to need the breather.Image courtesy Comedy Central
The thespian who played Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Captain Jean-Luc Picard joins Bender in a not-so-jolly robot fox hunt in “31st Century Fox,” the first of Futurama‘s back-to-back midseason finale episodes Wednesday.
And let’s just say that the real thing is not really his thing.
“In real life, Patrick Stewart is actually an anti-fox hunt crusader,” Futurama executive producer David X. Cohen told Wired earlier this summer as the seventh season of The Sci-Fi Toon That Wouldn’t Die booted up.
“31st Century Fox” airs Wednesday night alongside “Naturama,” which transforms Futurama‘s snarktastic space messengers into animals locked in sexual struggle (see a clip below).
In “Naturama,” Fry, Leela and Zap navigate a salmon love triangle, Bender battles back hordes of haters encroaching on his elephant seal harem and Professor Farnsworth faces down extinction and solitude as a Galapagos tortoise.
Cohen told Wired that Futurama‘s artists nearly went metaphorically extinct after first seeing how far they were being asked to push their impressive skill sets. It’s one of those episodes where “our animators have heart attacks and collapse in front of us after we hand them the script,” he said. “Because they have to redesign the entire universe and all of the characters three times instead of once. These episodes are always our favorites, but they’re difficult.”
Futurama‘s back-to-back midseason finale airs Wednesday night at 10 p.m./9 p.m. Central on Comedy Central. (The remaining episodes of Futurama arrive next summer.)
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Notes Eight-year-old Ashley Taylor's Mandeville, Louisiana, home was in the path of Hurricane Isaac, so her dad, Greg, sent her and the rest of the family to Alabama for safekeeping. More » Unfurl
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remember when time ruiner tried to prevent air-breathing organisms from existing? that was a rough two weeks
hey PAX! come see me in bandland this weekend!! i will have lots of cool things :D
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The GoPlate is described as the “answer to mobile socializing” and is seems to be one of those things you didn’t know you needed until you saw it existed. It’s a reusable snack plate made of BPA free plastic designed to wrap around a beer bottle (or really any kind of beverage vessel, like a wine glass or soda can), so you can hold your food and drink in one hand. It does come with a warning though, which should be heeded: “Always remove beverage before drinking.” The GoPlate is available in several colors and available to purchase online.
Hold your plate and drink in one hand easily, then eat, greet, and cheer with the other hand. They’re perfect for tailgating, picnics, outdoor concerts, street fairs and more. The Go Plate has a specially engineered center cone that accommodates glass bottles and aluminum cans, resting comfortably and snugly around them, and it has a specially designed ridge that can also accommodate standard 16/18-ounce plastic cups. To enjoy your beverage, you just lift The Go Plate off.
via Incredible Things
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"We consider a setting in which a single divisible good ("cake") needs to be divided between n players, each with a possibly di?fferent valuation function over pieces of the cake. For this setting, we address the problem of ?finding divisions that maximize the social welfare, focusing on divisions where each player needs to get one contiguous piece of the cake. We show that for both the utilitarian and the egalitarian social welfare functions it is NP-hard to find the optimal division. For the utilitarian welfare, we provide a constant factor approximation algorithm, and prove that no FPTAS is possible unless P=NP. For egalitarian welfare, we prove that it is NP-hard to approximate the optimum to any factor smaller than 2. For the case where the number of players is small, we provide an FPT (fixed parameter tractable) FPTAS for both the utilitarian and the egalitarian welfare objectives."Unfurl
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A lecturer who asked a female student to stuff a pie down his pants has been struck off by Scotland's teaching watchdog. Gavin Bradford, 37, asked other girls to smear themselves in ketchup and eggs and pour sour milk into their underwear. In the bizarre exchanges, which happened online late at night when Bradford was teaching in Canada, he asked more than 20 girls — some as young as 12 — to switch on their webcams so he could watch them.
The General Teaching Council (GTC) panel heard that Bradford told one girl he would "take delight in slowly pushing a gooey pie in her face" and asked two others to make a video of them urinating. He also told students his favourite swear words and demonstrated using them in a sentence. The Ontario Discipline Committee panel, which revoked Bradford’s teaching certificate in November 2011, said: "The behaviour may have started out innocently but escalated to the point of using vulgar language and making improper suggestions of an explicit sexual nature."Photo from here.
On Tuesday, the Fitness to Teach panel of the GTC ruled that Bradford was not fit to teach in Scotland. Bradford, from Glasgow, fled home after the Canadian scandal and got a job as a performing arts lecturer at Coatbridge College in Lanarkshire in January 2010, where he took charge of a production of the musical Chess — telling staff there he had left Canada because his marriage had broken up. However, the Ontario authorities tipped off their Scottish counterparts.
Bradford did not turn up at the hearing in Edinburgh, where GTC presenting officer Paul Reid said his conduct fell significantly short of the standards expected of a registered teacher. He highlighted the nature of the correspondence between Bradford and his pupils in Canada, in particular the fact the "inappropriate and vulgar communications" had taken place outside of school hours. He said there was a need to protect children and maintain the confidence of the public in the teaching profession.FeedUnfurl
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kimrom:
Torchlight vs. Torchlight II in numbers. Holy cow.
Will 2012 be remembered as the year of the Click Ass games?
SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY.
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fuck yeah dementia!!1!
Nothing To Do With Arbroath: Tiny puppeteer spider observed building bigger spiders as decoys
Client: We would like to have a shot of the sun.../cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/14057681/barackobamawebsite.1419973946.jpg)
In Obama campaign, tech industry donors could be outspending their Hollywood counterparts | The Verge
Look at this Frakking Geekster - sollux:
The GoPlate, A Snack Plate That Wraps Around Your Beer
arxiv.org
Nothing To Do With Arbroath: Food fetish lecturer who asked female student to stuff a pie down his pants struck off
Nathaniel Payne's Blog: kimrom: Torchlight vs. Torchlight II in numbers....