Late on this one, but this Phoenix Lisztomania "Brat Pack Mash-up" is just brilliant! 80s dancing - the crown jewel of 80s movies, and no one did 80s movies better than that group of roughly interchangeable teen actors collectively known as the Brat Pack.
From CNET: How technology lifts Pixar’s ‘Up’.
If you want to consider a difficult computational problem, try thinking of the algorithms required to animate more than 10,000 helium balloons, each with its own string, but each also interdependent on the rest, which are collectively hoisting aloft a small house.
That was the challenge the production team at Pixar faced when it set out to begin work on
Up,its tenth feature film, five years in the works, which hits theaters on Friday.There was absolutely no way the team was going to hand-animate the balloons. Not with their numbers in five-figures, and especially not when you consider that within the cluster, every interaction between two balloons has a ripple effect: If one bumped another, the second would move, likely bumping a third, and so on. And every bit of this would need to be seen on screen. [continue]
Ordinary people saved Superman's house. Best-selling novelist Brad Meltzer started the charitable organization Ordinary People Save the World in an effort to raise enough money to restore the home where Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel grew up in Cleveland, Ohio.
Our goal was to raise $50,000 to work on the outside," he said. "In the end, we raised $101,000. So work is now going on in the inside as well. It was just beautiful. For me, especially with all the petty infighting that goes on in comics, this was the best everyone-together victory in the comic book world in a long time."
Meltzer said his main motivation for saving the house was simply the history. "Joe Shuster's house was in such bad condition, they had to knock it down. We didn't want that happening to the Siegel one," he said. "And luckily, friends like Jim [Lee], and Neil [Gaiman], and Brian [Bendis], and Jeph [Loeb] and Geoff [Johns], and so many others thought the same. They donated the best stuff. We just had the site."
As a result, the Siegel house will have an official ribbon-cutting ceremony this summer to unveil the restored home to the public.
Now that the Siegel project has exceeded Meltzer's expectations, he's hoping to continue the work of Ordinary People Change the World by raising money for a new cause.City Year.
For more details about City Year, visit OrdinaryPeopleChangetheWorld.com and watch the video.
The title is the name of an episode of NBC's old "wacky aliens look at our culture through their eyes sitcom", Third Rock From the Sun which starred the amazing John Lithgow and seemed to fit. I came across (stumbleupon.com) Lithgow's speech to the 2005 graduating class at Harvard. I highly recommend it!
Lithgow includes everything you want in a speech such as: humor (but not too much), social commentary (but not too much), and personal anecdotes that reflect his advice to the graduates ("be creative, be useful, be practical, and be generous").
Instead of telling the audience how he achieved fame and success as an actor, he explained how he used his acting career to launch a "concurrent second career" as a children's entertainer with a "secret agenda" to instill a love for the Arts in young people.
On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, cognition and fiction by Brian Boyd
Brian Boyd's thesis is that current literary criticism - or "Theory" as it is hubristically known - has failed because it regards fiction purely as a cultural construct, ignoring the minds that create and consume it. Viewed in the light of evolution, however, stories acquire a new depth. Better yet, literature provides an untapped source of material to study the mind.
"Evocriticism", as Boyd calls it, is not new - literary Darwinists have been preaching this creed for more than a decade (New Scientist, 3 March 2007, p 38) - but the professor of English from the University of Auckland has some novel and thought-provoking ideas, and his book covers an impressively wide terrain.
Via: newscientist.com
Christian Nold’s Bio Mapping uses collaborative filtering to figure out the best spots in town — and which locations to avoid. It’s an art project that doubles as a tourist guide.
Nold equipped hundreds of volunteers with GPS devices that also measure galvanic skin response (GSR), then sent them out to walk around several cities, including San Francisco, Rotterdam, Paris, and London. The GSRs, which gauge spikes in emotional arousal, allowed Nold to create maps of the cities’ stress centers and chill-out zones. It’s a striking new way of measuring our reactions to urban environments — and scientific proof that some days our emotions really are all over the map.
Answer: Because our human ancestors thought they were tasty! Even though it technically wasn't cannibalism (it would have to be the same species) it's still rather gross and of course the genocide of a sentient species for food and trophies by our early Homo-Sapien ancestors. Sometimes, history is just weird.
Seriously, this Swine Flu thing is getting out of control!
Via: lvs2ridehorses on flickr
Been neglecting this site in favor of life, Twitter, my tumblr blog and Facebook. I know. So sharing this awesome fan made music video. Enjoy.
Via: rossching.com
