Terminator Time
The significance of an MIT drone weaving around tree branches at 30 mph
To get his PhD, MIT grad student Andy Barry packed up a car with a drone and a catapult to launch it. Then he headed west.
Barry’s destination was a farm in western Massachusetts. It had a great restaurant, a friendly owner and a ton of space. Boston, with all of its density, wasn’t the right place to test an automated drone flying at 30 mph.
Barry’s trips to the farm grew out of conversations five years ago with his adviser at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. Could a lightweight drone be launched at obstacles, and avoid them with no prior knowledge of its surroundings?
Barry didn’t think he had a chance. Computers were too slow. But his adviser reminded him of Moore’s Law, the observation that computing power doubles roughly every two years.
Fast forward to today. Moore’s Law delivered, and now Barry will be defending his thesis next month. A new video shows his drone avoiding trees at 30 mph. There’s nothing special about the components. The drone is powered by the same chip that’s in a Samsung Galaxy S3. Barry shot the video as proof for his thesis committee.
“Some people call me Mr. Ra – some call me Mr. Ree”
The Feeling Of Space: How Sun Ra Integrated Sci-Fi in Music
“Some people call me Mr. Ra,” Sun Ra often told interviewers, “and some call me Mr. Ree.”
Sun Ra was a man of many mysteries, not the least of which was how much he believed his own story. He insisted that he wasn’t born as Herman Blount on May 22, 1914, in Birmingham, Alabama, as official records had it, but was instead an angel from the planet Saturn who made his first appearance on this planet at that time and place.
Many people watched him closely for the wink or smile that would acknowledge that the tale was an extravagant joke or elaborate fiction. He never provided any such indication and stubbornly stuck to his story that he was a messenger from a superior race come to help troubled earthlings.
This left it up to each member of his far-flung audience to decide just how to take Sun Ra’s claims. For most of us, the tale of his voyage from Saturn to Earth was clearly not reality but just as clearly no joke either. All of Sun Ra’s work included sci-fi elements: his instrumental compositions boasted exotic, extraterrestrial sounds; his poems and song lyrics referenced interplanetary exploration; he and his band members were costumed in otherworldly attire. But in many ways his greatest science fiction was his own life.
In Robert Mugge’s brilliant documentary film, Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise, Sun Ra stands on the rooftop of a tall building in Philadelphia. He’s dressed like an angel from Saturn: a rotund man in a gold mask, blue face paint, a purple caftan, Mardi Gras beads, a magenta wig and a maroon mesh cap bristling with silver wires.
“With all the churches you’ve got, all the schools you’ve got and all the governments you’ve got,” he proclaims, as if he were the inspector from an intergalactic accreditation agency, “you’re supposed to have a better planet than this. Man has failed…He should be a good sport about it and say, ‘I give up. I need help.’ I’m here as a bridge for them to get help.”
George Barris Gone
George Barris, creator of the Batmobile, dies at 89
By Elaine Woo and W.J. Hennigan
(Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)
In 1965, producers of the “Batman” television show needed a supercar that Adam West could wield to battle the Joker and the Riddler.
There was just one man for the job: George Barris.
“I saw the script and it said, ‘Bang,’ ‘Pow,’ ‘Boom,’ ” Barris told The Times in 2012. “That’s exactly what I wanted the car to be able to do. I wanted it to be as big a character as the actors themselves.”
It took 15 days and $15,000 for Barris to transform a 1955 Ford Lincoln Futura into the iconic midnight black and fluorescent-red-pinstriped Batmobile with plexiglass bubble windshields — “bulletproof,” of course. He didn’t forget the Bat Ray, with its dual 450-watt laser beams for obliterating obstacles, the Bat-O-Meter for identifying the bad guys, or the oil squirters for repelling evildoers.
Barris, the Southern California custom-car legend who created many of the most memorable and outrageous automobiles ever seen on film and television, died Thursday at his home in Encino. He was 89.
A man nearly as flamboyant as his cars, Barris also designed special vehicles for many of the biggest names in Hollywood, including Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson and John Wayne.
For his everyday use he drove a Toyota Prius that was tricked out in true Barris fashion — sprayed gold with emerald green metallic accents and doors that opened upward, like a Lamborghini.
Wow, bummer.
Laurie Anderson INTERVIEW’d
LAURIE ANDERSON
By
Laurie Anderson is a cultural archeologist, explorer of ideas, of experiences, big and small. She takes it all in, and she takes it all on—everything from asking exactly who and what is America to how to teach tricks to a dog. Laurie puts together and takes apart concepts so deftly that in her hands even the most dissonant of ideas snap together like Legos. She is a sprite of some sort, a lithe spirit, moving between forms and media, between voices—hauntingly beautiful feminine vocals that call us to her and a deeper voice of authority, commanding our attention.
The first time I met her was in Washington, D.C., in the mid-’80s, after she’d played a show at the historic and conservative DAR Constitution Hall. I was with a friend who worked with her, and after the show, a small group of us were waiting outside for Laurie. She came out into the humid D.C. night and, under the glow of the crime lights, spotted a tree just outside of Constitution Hall. She looked up at the tree and asked us all if we thought it was okay if she climbed it—she thought it would be great to climb a tree in Washington, D.C. We all watched and stood by as Laurie tried to scale the tree—but it was a kind of small scrabbly tree, the kind the city plants to make they city “greener,” the kind they have to replace every few years. So after Laurie attempted the climb and then abandoned it for fear of harming the tree, we hopped into my car, a 1980 Honda Civic wagon, and headed for the after-party. Laurie was folded up in the space between the front seat and the back seat, kind of curled into a space that was between spaces, her head pressed into the sunroof. And as we were driving, I started telling her about how, when I was younger, I’d gone to a camp that had metal bunk beds, and I was always on the lower bunk, and at night if I sat up, my hair would get caught in the metal webbing under the top bunk, and after a few days there would be a lot of long brown hair just hanging down from the metal webbing … There was a long pause, and Laurie curiously asked, in classic Laurie Anderson tone, “Exactly what kind of camp was this?”
She’s often described as a multimedia artist—I’m not sure why, perhaps because it’s nonspecific with room for autonomy or—but there really is no word or set of words for who she is and what she does. Why does artist fall short? Poet? Sculptor? Musician? Philosopher? Inventor?
Robot Postman
This self-driving delivery robot is coming soon to sidewalks
Starship Technologies will conduct a pilot test of the new robot in early 2016. (Starship Technologies)
The future of delivery might involve small drones zooming above pedestrians, cyclists and motorists at high speeds. Amazon and now Wal-Mart are moving down this path. Or it might be something a lot slower that travels on sidewalks.
On Monday, a London startup founded by two Skype co-founders unveiled their self-driving delivery robot. It bumbles along at a whopping 4 mph.
That’s slightly faster than a pedestrian but slower than a jogger.
Starship Technologies says the 40-pound robot could make local deliveries in 30 minutes or less. The technology could be useful for neighborhood restaurants and retailers. Because the robot is largely automated, requiring almost no human involvement, Starship Technologies thinks the costs of delivering goods will drop by an order of magnitude. The slow speed and grounded approach also removes some of the safety concerns with drone delivery.
“Our position is correct, except, no Alderaan. “
Poof! The Planet Closest To Our Solar System Just Vanished
The disappearance of Alpha Centauri Bb raises questions for planet hunters looking for Earth-sized alien worlds.
By Devin Powell, for National Geographic
PHOTOGRAPH BY REUTERS
Scientists just made a planet disappear. According to a new study, Alpha Centauri Bb, a world in the nearest star system to us, was merely a ghost in the data.
The planet, thought to be perhaps similar in mass to Earth, was hailed as a “landmark” when it was announced in 2012 in the journal Nature. The discovery got people excited about finding neighboring worlds that might harbor life in the Alpha Centauri system 4.3 light-years away—already home to science fiction characters such as the Transformers and the creatures of Avatar.
This particular alien world wouldn’t have been a good place to look for life, though. It would have been roughly a tenth the distance to its star that Mercury is to the sun, with a scorchingly hot surface probably covered in molten rock.
Now it will serve as a cautionary tale for planet hunters, a reminder that planets as small as Earth are hard to find. Distinguishing subtle clues from background noise is incredibly difficult, as shown in a new paper recently posted at arXiv.org and due to appear in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Even the team that originally reported the planet agrees. “This is really good work,” said Xavier Dumusque of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “We are not 100 percent sure, but probably the planet is not there.”
HOME IS BURNING by Dan Marshall
Home Is Burning: the profanity-laced terminal illness memoir with fart jokes
Dan Marshall’s book about his father’s death – while his mother was stricken with cancer – is possibly the most scatalogical memoir of its kind ever, and now Hollywood has come knocking
The Marshall family on 22 September 2008, the day of Bob’s death. (Left to right): Dan, Michelle, Tiffany, Bob, Chelsea, Debi, Greg. Photograph: Gary Neuenschwander/Supplied
Dan Marshall sips an iced coffee under a Los Angeles sun and mulls the notion of Hollywood sanitising his memoir, the story of how he and his siblings dealt with terminally ill parents during an anguished year in the Mormon capital of Salt Lake City. Marshall shakes his head and gives a faint smile. “It’d tear the balls off the thing if they made it PG-13.”
It would indeed. Home Is Burning, published this month and due to be made into a film, dives deep into the pain and grief of caring for a father who slowly wastes away, and a mother who hovers close to death. It also plumbs the cacophonous dysfunction of a family stumbling through the ordeal with black humour, fart jokes, painkillers, booze, feuds, sex and swearing – epic, ungodly, obscene, unrepentant, relentless swearing.
“It’ll have to be R-rated,” says Marshall. “There’s a lot of death and dying but with South Park humour applied to normally difficult and sentimental situations. I’m making jokes about wiping my dad’s ass.”
The 300-page memoir jokes about everything: the cruelty of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, which killed Bob Marshall in 2008; the brutal side effects of Debi Marshall’s cancer treatment; the vicious sibling arguments; the pious Mormon neighbours.
One unforgettable section details Debi’s declaration that she will perform oral sex on her husband – by then confined to a bed and respirator – daily until he dies. “My mom was beyond proud of the blow-job-a-day goal. I don’t know if it was because she was all fucked up on Fentanly or what, but she seemed to bring it up any chance she got. ‘A blow job a day. Not a bad deal,’ I heard her explain to a visitor. ‘You wouldn’t think it, but his penis is still strong.’”
The Marshall clan is barging into a terminal illness genre rife with sentimentality – think The Fault in Our Stars, Before I Die, Tuesdays with Morrie – with a unique strain of profane, scatological humour. Prominent memoirists have endorsed Home Is Burning. James Frey, author of A Million Little Pieces, called it hilarious and heartbreaking. Justin St Germain, author of Son of a Gun, deemed it self-aware and ruthlessly honest: “Dan Marshall might be a self-described spoiled white jerk, but he’s also a depraved comedic genius.” Publishers Weekly called him the literary love child of Dave Eggers and David Sedaris.
In person Marshall, 33, is softly spoken, almost shy. He mocks himself in the memoir as a dumpy, boozy, gummy bear-chomping screw-up. But the figure who settles into the corner of a restaurant terrace, seeking shade on a baking afternoon, is somewhat reformed. He has quit drinking, jogs and has, by his own measure, matured.
The Outlaw Bucky Fuller
In the Outlaw Area
CREDITPHOTOGRAPH COURTESY CSU ARCHIVES / EVERETT
When Richard Buckminster Fuller was in New Zealand a year ago, he spent several rewarding hours at the University of Auckland with a friend of his, a cultural anthropologist who also happens to be Keeper of the Chants of the people he belongs to, the Maoris. These chants go back more than fifty generations and constitute, in effect, an oral history of the Maoris, and Fuller, a man who is intensely interested in almost everything, undertook to persuade his friend that it was high time they were recorded on tape and made available to scholars, himself included. The anthropologist said that he had often thought of recording them, but that, according to an ancient tradition, the Keeper of the Chants was allowed to repeat them only to fellow-Maoris. Fuller thereupon launched into an extensive monologue. It was buttressed at every point by seemingly irrefutable data on tides, prevailing winds, boat design, mathematics, linguistics, archeology, architecture, and religion, and the gist of it was that the Maoris had been among the first peoples to discover the principles of celestial navigation, that they had found a way of sailing around the world from their base in the South Seas, and that they had done so a long, long time before any such voyages were commonly believed to have been made—at least ten thousand years ago, in fact. In conclusion, Fuller explained, with a straight face, that he himself had been a Maori, a few generations before the earliest chant, and that he had sailed off into the seas one day, lacking the navigational lore that gradually worked its way into the chants, and had been unable to find his way back, so that he had a personal interest in seeing that the chants got recorded. We have Fuller’s assurance that the anthropologist is now engaged in recording all the chants, together with their English translations.
The somewhat overwhelming effect of a Fuller monologue is well known today in many parts of the world, and while his claim to Maori ancestry must remain open to question, even that seems an oddly plausible conjecture. An association with the origins of circumnavigating the globe would be an ideal background for his current activities as an engineer, inventor, mathematician, architect, cartographer, philosopher, poet, cosmogonist, and comprehensive designer whose ideas, once considered wildly visionary, are now influential in so many countries that he averages a complete circuit of the globe each year in fulfillment of various lecture and teaching commitments.
The Only Cat Video That Will Ever Be Posted Here
Starry Night in Agar
Van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’ recreated with bacteria in petri dish
(Photo: American Society for Microbiology)
Bacteria may not be the tool of choice for most artists, but for microbiologists getting in touch with their creative side, it’s just as good as paint.
Microbiologists, members of the American Society of Microbiology, and a few citizen scientists were recently challenged to use microbes to create works of art as part of the American Society for Microbiology’s first Agar Art contest.
As a canvas, each artist used a petri dish filled with agar, a jelly type substance where bacteria live and grow.
“The artist picked the bacteria they wanted to use based on the different color expressed when that strain of bacteria grows,” Emily Dilger, public outreach manager for American Society for Microbiology, told USA TODAY Network.
The winners of the contest were announced in September and works of art included representations of Vincent Van Gogh’s “Starry Night,” as well as numerous originals. There was even an outline of North Carolina created with Chromobacterium violaceum,which is a flesh-eating pathogen, according to American Society of Microbiology.
The Real Big Bang
The Greatest Animal War
BY BROOKE BOREL / ILLUSTRATIONS BY KATIE SCOTT
A simple species count does not do justice to the power of the Cambrian Explosion. Species have continuously formed over time. A new type of moth may have antennae that are furrier than its sisters; a new species of dinosaur may be distinguished by clawed wings and vicious front fangs. But a new phylum—a major branch on the tree of life, the upper-level ranking that separates an insect from a pterodactyl—is rarely born.
Most of today’s 30 to 40 animal phyla originated in the Cambrian, and have persisted through time with hundreds of variations on a theme (see Explosion). Where the Cambrian Explosion saw a proliferation of architectures (picture igloos, cabins, skyscrapers, suburban houses, and grass huts), the rest of time has mainly been about remodeling existing forms (add a Jacuzzi, a deck, or a tin roof). The explosion of animal phyla in the Cambrian includes the category, the chordates, to which humans, reptiles, sloths, and fish belong. Chordates are united by a central bundle of nerve fibers running down our backs, supported by a stiff rod.
Why did it take so long for the explosion to happen? After all, life arose 3.5 billion years ago, and the first eukaryotic cells (the kind within our bodies) occurred a billion and a half years later. Beneath the surface, a lot was probably going on: DNA had to work just right for organisms with multiple cells to evolve, and then enable a diversity of forms for natural selection to play with. In the Cambrian, “[animals] got large, and biomineralized, and they started doing stuff they never did before,” says Nick Butterfield, a paleontologist at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. “Suddenly,” he says, “it just started to click.”
Joanna Newsom’s DIVERS
Joanna Newsom: Divers Review By Mack Hayden
I was a non-believer for a pretty long time. Joanna Newsom was an artist I just didn’t “get.” I was too busy being pretentious about Pavement in my younger years to really give her quirky, baroque complexities and off-kilter vocal style a chance. Hell, I even came around on liking Swans before her stuff clicked for me. Hopefully, my initial disinterest and naiveté may convince another skeptical listener to give Newsom’s new album, Divers, a shot.
Newsom definitely requires some patience of her listeners, not to mention a palate accustomed to outside-the-norm instrumentation. She’s long been upheld as an indie goddess, but her music exists far from the label’s general conventions. There are barely any guitars and, when there are, they’re in the background. The drums are spare, and she’ll always go for a traditional piano over a synth. She plays a harp, her voice indulges in nuances unique enough to almost go beyond the realm of mimicry, and her previous record, 2010’s Have One On Me, went a few minutes past two hours in length.
In other words, if you put her on a mix CD for someone whose only experience of “indie” up to that point was Death Cab for Cutie, they’d probably snap it in half or you’d at least get a “what the hell is this?” text. But, like so many other at-first-difficult artists or bands, once her stuff clicks with you, it sticks forever. She’s got the musical ingenuity to go from being a frustration to a favorite in one second’s worth of enlightening epiphany.
Mr. Richardson’s First Monograph
TERRY RICHARDSON RELEASES HIS FIRST MONOGRAPH
By
Terry Richardson, an image maker renowned for his often provocative, bold and striking portraits is releasing a new tome with Rizzoli. The self titled, Terry Richardson, features 600 of the photographer’s works from over the past 20 years, including his most iconic shots and never-before-seen images that encompass the breadth of his career. The tome is divided into two volumes: portraits and fashion photography.
Saving The Accidental Sea
Why Don’t Californians Care About Saving The Salton Sea?
by
The Salton Sea is critical wildlife habitat | Photo: David Prasad/Flickr/Creative Commons License
It looks as though the state of California is starting to take the dying Salton Sea seriously. After years of relative inaction, both the Legislature and the Governor’s office are taking actual steps to halt what could become one of California’s biggest environmental and public health nightmares.
There’s a new Salton Sea Czar to oversee restoration of the Sea’s wetland habitats, a new resolve from the Brown administration to restore thousands of acres of wetlands around the shore, and a new, pressing deadline set by the Legislature to get those restoration projects lined up. After 15 years of warnings from environmental analysts, good government advocates, and regional leaders, California’s government may finally be ready to roll up its sleeves to do something about the Sea’s accelerating decline.
And that’s a good thing, because doing nothing means losing crucial wildlife habitat, consigning some of California’s least-affluent residents to chronic illnesses, and lowering Southern California property values by the billions. So why don’t most Californians care?
The Salton Sea, formed 110 years ago by an engineering accident that diverted the Colorado River’s flow into the Imperial and Coachella Valleys, has been fed in the intervening century by runoff from agricultural irrigation. In that time the Sea has become crucial habitat for migrating birds and other wildlife. That’s especially important given that our use of the Colorado River’s water has starved the formerly lush Colorado Delta, diverting the water that once supported lush wetlands and riparian forests. Now, the Salton Sea is often the only suitable stopover habitat in the region for birds migrating along the Pacific Flyway.
That’s about to change. In 2018 the Salton Sea will likely begin shrinking dramatically, the result of drastically reduced flows into the inland sea. The nearby IID has been deliberately sustaining the Sea by releasing so-called “mitigation water” into the Sea, but that “mitigation water” will dry up at the end of 2017, when IID reaches the end of its legal obligation to supply that mitigation water.
This Man Is To Blame
Max Martin: the Swedish svengali with a formula for the new pop age
How the legendary producer’s hit factory works
by John Harris
© C Flanigan/WireImage for KAABOO Del Mar via imageSPACE
Popular music was changed forever when a Swedish producer’s in-car cassette machine broke, and he found himself unable to listen to anything other than a song called “All That She Wants.”
It was 1992. The producer’s name was Dag Krister Volle. Some people knew him as “Dagge,” but he went about his musical business under the name of Denniz PoP. He apparently had a “childlike wonder” about him, and loathed music that was in any way anodyne or boring. As he saw it, “every note, word and beat had to have a purpose, or be fun.” The song that got stuck in his tape deck was an early version of the eventual breakthrough hit for a quartet called Ace Of Base, who were led by a musician named Ulf Ekberg. At that stage, it was called “Mr Ace,” and its creators obviously knew it lacked a certain something. Having heard what Denniz PoP had achieved with a minor Swedish hit entitled “Another Mother,” they had sent it to him in the hope that he might help.
At first, Denniz PoP was not impressed at all. But as he drove his car each day and listened repeatedly, familiarity began to melt his scepticism and suggest that something could be done. Having met the group, he then took out half the instruments on the recording, and moved the whistled melody that closed the song to its introduction. Denniz PoP also pushed Ekberg to add more lyrics.
What resulted was seemingly gauche, clunky and devoid of much sense. The reggae-ish music sounded synthentic and flimsy; the vocals were so treated with effects that they seemed almost inhuman. Ekberg later claimed that Ace of Base had an advantage in not being native English speakers, because he and his colleagues were able to treat the language “very respectless [sic], and just look for the word that sounded good with the melody.” But even on that basis, the stuff they came up with was pretty awful:
When she woke up late in the morning light
And the day had just begun
She opened up her eyes and thought
Oh what a morning
It’s not a day for work
It’s a day for catching tan
Just laying on the beach and having fun
She’s going to get you
The chorus was even worse: it was built around a refrain of “all that she wants, is another baby,” which suggested the condition medical professionals know as secondary infertility, but was actually meant to refer to a quest for a lover. To rock snobs like me, this was the kind of fleeting hit that one occasionally hears on European holidays, safe in the knowledge that such tripe could never be successful back home. What I chose to ignore was the fact that the song lodged itself even in my self-denying brain for keeps after a single hearing.
“All That She Wants” went to number one in 10 countries, including the UK. In the United States, it reached number two on the Billboard charts, and was certified platinum, denoting sales of one million copies. Denniz PoP and some of his Swedish associates were suddenly in demand, and about to push music somewhere new. If the cultural period running from the mid-1960s to the early 1990s was the rock age, we now live in the era of pop, and “All That She Wants” is the song that began it.
Gymkhana Cop
Men Are Worms.
Male brain is programmed to seek out sex over food
By Sarah Knapton, Science Editor
An amorous couple Photo: ALAMY
It is said that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, but a new study suggests that when it comes to sex, food is the last thing on his mind.
Researchers have found that the male brain is hardwired to seek out sex, even at the expense of a good meal, with specific neurons firing up to over-ride the desire to eat.
The worm species used in the study, Caenorhabditis elegans, has two sexes: males and hermaphrodites.
These hermaphrodites are essentially modified females that carry their own sperm and do not need to have sex in order to reproduce.
Scientists conditioned the worms so that when salt was present they realised that they would be starved. Over time, the worms moved away from the salt. However when the salt was present at the same time as a mate, the male worm still moved towards the mate. In contrast, hermaphrodites moved away from the salt even when a mate was present.
It indicated that for males the sex trigger was stronger than the salt.
“Those MotherF†ckers!”
Street-Racing Arab Playboys Tear Up L.A.
by M.L. Nestel
Photo Illustration by Emil Lendof/The Daily Beast
The Qatari sheikh who staged an illegal street race through Beverly Hills is just one of a cohort of rich, car-obsessed Arabs who are eyeing L.A. as their new favorite vacation spot.
The speed-freak Qatari sheikh who fled the U.S. after running into trouble with cops—for allegedly staging a private Grand Prix in Beverly Hills—was living the high life in California, renting a palatial abode for $55,000 a month, The Daily Beast has learned.
Cops suspect that Sheikh Khalid bin Hamad al-Thani was behind the wheel of an unregistered Giallo Modena yellow Ferrari LaFerrari that street-raced another driver (in a Porsche GT3) for over 30 minutes on September 12, and “almost killed someone” as throngs of neighborhood kids gawked on the sidewalks.
Meanwhile, a source who had been shadowing al-Thani said that his brother arrived in L.A. also sporting multimillion-dollar wheels—a satin white LaFerrari—and that his car magically “had a California plate on it within a day of arrival.”
Several kids in the neighborhood claimed to have seen the race. “I was by the house and watched as they sped by my house and they woke up my parents, who were sleeping,” said one 10-year-old. “Next day, [the sheikh’s family] were gone.”
Another 10-year-old boy was revved up over the Ferrari festivities. “It was really loud,” he said, smiling, as his mother looked on disapprovingly. “I was playing in the alley and the car started smoking,” he said. (The smoking, a source with knowledge of autos said, “was caused by dumb driving… [the sheikh] drove the car when it was cold and the oil wasn’t properly warmed up.”)
The mother of the boy admitted the illegal event “was exciting for the kids” but she remains “really pissed.”
“They think they can come here and do whatever they want,” she said. After the roadsters roared by the family’s home multiple times, she said her husband shouted: “Those motherfuckers.”
Other neighbors (most of them parents) had seen the cars go by before but on this particular weekend, one mother said, “they let it rip.”
Unusually High-velocity Halloween asteroid, hmmmm?
Asteroid making surprise flyby at an ‘unusually high’ velocity
by Steve Dent
A newly discovered asteroid (not pictured) will make Halloween more thrilling by passing within 1.3 lunar distances (310,000 miles) of Earth. The object, which measures between 300 and 600 meters (1,000 and 2,000 feet) across, was discovered last week by the asteroid-hunting Pan-STARRS observatory in Hawaii, according to NASA. It’ll streak by on October 31st at an “unusually” high encounter velocity of 35 km/s, or around 78,000 mph. By contrast, the Russian meteorite caught by vehicle cameras in 2013 was 17 meters (55 feet) across and traveled at a top speed of 19 km/s, while the one that flattened a Russian forest in 1908 measured 40 meters (130 feet).
Movie One-sheets Re-imagined
The Underground Movie Poster Scene Booming on Social Media
Tired of the celebrity-centric posters that dominate the industry, artists are reimagining the medium
By
Robocop by Van Orton Design, to be featured in Alternative Movie Posters II: More Film Art From the Underground. (Photo: Van Orton Design)
Gorgeous, eye-popping movie posters are still out there—they just aren’t being made in Hollywood anymore.
A vast, growing network of artists designing some of the most innovative movie posters in decades—completely independent from Hollywood studios.
Author Matthew Chojnacki documented the artwork of the movement in his 2013 book Alternative Movie Posters: Film Art from the Underground, and a sequel book—Alternative Movie Posters II: More Film Art From the Underground—is published in November.
According to Mr. Chojnacki, who works in finance by day and is an author in his spare time (his first book, Put the Needle on the Record, was about vinyl album art from the 1980s), the popularity of artist-designed posters grew organically through social media.
“It’s a great way [for artists] to get their art noticed,” he told the Observer.
Skateboard Assassin
Billy The Kid Captured
Billy the Kid photo bought for $2 could be sold for $5 million
By Barney Henderson, New York
The photograph of Billy the Kid whch was purchased for $2 at a Fresno junk shop in 2010, could sell for millions at auction. Photo: Kagin’s
Billy the Kid, the Wild West gunslinger, is usually associated with a Colt single action 44, not the genteel English elegance of a varnished oak croquet mallet.
However an extremely rare photograph of the legendary outlaw leaning on a croquet mallet has emerged – only the second known photo of “The Kid”, whose real name is Henry McCarty, thought to exist.
The photo shows McCarty playing croquet with his gang of Lincoln County Regulators in late summer 1878.
It was bought by collector Randy Guijarro for $2 from a Californian junk shop in 2010 and will now be sold by Kagin’s auctioneers for an estimated $5 million.
“When we first saw the photograph, we were understandably sceptical — an original Billy the Kid photo is the holy grail of Western Americana,” said Kagin’s David McCarthy.
Alien Megastructure, Egad!
‘Alien megastructure’ could surround giant star baffling scientists looking for new planets
BY KIRSTIE MCCRUM
A series of mysterious objects surrounding a giant star millions of miles away could be an alien megastructure, experts believe.
Planet spotters examining data from the Kepler Space Telescope were startled by an unusual light pattern orbiting a star called KIC 8462852.
When they studied the star, which sits some 1,480 light years from Earth, they noticed a swarm of objects surrounding it in an usual pattern.
At first it was thought to be comets, shrapnel from an asteroid impact or even a mistake in the data.
But astronomer Jason Wright from Penn State University offered a more science fiction explanation.
He believes it could be an ‘alien megastructure’ designed to harness energy from the star.
He said: “Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build.”
Spielberg & Frey Do AMERICAN GOTHIC on CBS
Steven Spielberg, James Frey Murder Mystery ‘American Gothic’ Gets Series Order From CBS
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CBS has given a straight-to-series order for 13 episodes of “American Gothic,” a new one-hour murder mystery from Steven Spielberg‘s Amblin Television and author James Frey‘s Full Fathom Five, TheWrap has learned.
The series, which will be broadcast during summer 2016, centers on a prominent Boston family that is attempting to redefine itself in the wake of a discovery that links their recently deceased patriarch to a string of murders spanning decades, and amid the mounting suspicion that one of them may have been his accomplice.
“American Gothic” is produced by CBS Television Studios in association with Amblin Television. Justin Falvey and Darryl Frank of Amblin Television, James Frey of Full Fathom Five and “The Good Wife’s” Corinne Brinkerhoff, who is writing the script, will serve as executive producers.
Emilia Clarke Game of Sexy
‘Game of Thrones’ star Emilia Clarke named Esquire’s 2015 ‘Sexiest Woman Alive’
Emilia Clarke is the Mother of All Dragons on “Game of Thrones,” and now she has a new title: Esquire’s Sexiest Woman Alive.
“Half pal, half dominatrix. Half kid sister, half sexy queen,” the magazine’s cover story gushed about the star.
The magazine chose Clarke for her “gorgeous balance” of sexy siren and girl next door. But the 28-year-old said when she was a drama student, she wasn’t anyone’s “favorite.”
“I was a keen bean,” she described her studious younger self.
But Clarke was transformed into a sex symbol after landing the role of Daenerys Targaryen on the hit HBO series.
The actress said that she got the part even though she didn’t fit the description of the dragon queen from George R. R. Martin’s books.
ENDGAME Gold Won – Congratulations to Froylan Moreno del Rio!
Claiming Gold
By Robin Leach
The first puzzle in the “Endgame: The Calling” high-stakes apocalyptic book trilogy brought to life by bestselling authors James Frey and Nils Johnson-Shelton was solved just 24 hours before today’s deadline.
To win “Endgame,” the winner had to solve an interactive puzzle comprised of clues leading to a real-life $500,000 cash prize. Froyal Moreno del Rio solved the puzzle and this afternoon unlocked the gold vault at Caesars Palace for the big payoff.
Book 2, “Sky Key: An Endgame” was published Tuesday. The New York Times bestselling authors were on hand at Caesars to autograph copies of both books. No word yet on the title of Book 3 or its publication date, but more puzzles and cash prizes await.
Algorithming Alzheimer’s
Memory loss breakthrough: New implant can reverse Alzheimer’s damage
By ANIL DAWAR
GETTY
Scientists have developed an electronic implant to help brains damaged by Alzheimer’s retain memories.
They hope it will be used to take over certain areas of diseased brains to help “translate” a short-term memory into a permanent one.
The project is funded by the US military as a way of helping injured soldiers overcome memory loss.
But researchers say the astonishing technology could also help to treat brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s.
Alzheimer’s causes the brain to degenerate and the damage interferes with the formation of new long-term memories while old ones survive.
The new US technology has already been tested on nine people with epilepsy who had electrodes implanted in their brains to treat chronic seizures.
Researchers read the electrical signals created in the patients’ brains as they conducted simple tasks.
The results were then used to create a computer program which could predict with 90 per cent accuracy how the signals would be translated.
Coding The Mind From Scratch
Thought process: Building an artificial brain
Paul Allen’s $500 million quest to dissect the mind and code a new one from scratch
Paul Allen has been waiting for the emergence of intelligent machines for a very long time. As a young boy, Allen spent much of his time in the library reading science-fiction novels in which robots manage our homes, perform surgery and fly around saving lives like superheroes. In his imagination, these beings would live among us, serving as our advisers, companions and friends.Now 62 and worth an estimated $17.7 billion, the Microsoft co-founder is using his wealth to back two separate philanthropic research efforts at the intersection of neuroscience and artificial intelligence that he hopes will hasten that future.
The first project is to build an artificial brain from scratch that can pass a high school science test. It sounds simple enough, but trying to teach a machine not only to respond but also to reason is one of the hardest software-engineering endeavors attempted — far more complex than building his former company’s breakthrough Windows operating system, said to have 50 million lines of code.
The second project aims to understand intelligence by coming at it from the opposite direction — by starting with nature and deconstructing and analyzing the pieces. It’s an attempt to reverse-engineer the human brain by slicing it up — literally — modeling it and running simulations.
Made up of 100 billion neurons, each one connected to as many as 10,000 others, the human brain is the most complex biological system in existence. When you see, hear, touch, taste or think, neurons fire with an electrochemical signal that travels across the synapses between neurons, where information is exchanged.
Somewhere within this snarl are patterns and connections that make a person who he is — his memories, preferences, habits, skills and emotions.
Building on the work that Allen accelerated through his philanthropy, governments around the world have launched their own brain initiatives in recent years. The European Commission’s Human Brain Project, which began in 2013 with about $61 million in initial funding, aims to create an artificial model of the human brain within a decade. President Obama announced the United States’ own BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) effort in 2014 to great fanfare, comparing it to the Human Genome Project that led to the current genetic revolution. BRAIN was launched with initial funding of $110 million.
Some futurists even believe that the brain, not the body, may be the key to immortality — that at some point we’ll be able to download our brains to a computer or another body and live on long after the bodies we were born in have decayed.
Allen’s own interest in the brain began with his love of tinkering.
He always has been interested in how things were put together, from steam engines to phones, and as he grew older he became fascinated with the brain.
“Computers are really basically computing elements and a lot of memory,” he said. “They are pretty easy to understand, as compared to the brain, which was designed by evolution.”
But it wasn’t until his mother, Faye, a former elementary school teacher, became ill with Alzheimer’s that Allen’s brain philanthropy took shape.
Aliens could ‘conquer and colonise’ our planet, warns Stephen Hawking – whilst assuring us he’s not one of them.
Advanced aliens could ‘conquer and colonise’ our planet, warns Stephen Hawking
BY JEFF PARSONS
Stephen Hawking believes that aliens visiting Earth might not turn out well for us
Stephen Hawking has tackled the mysteries of the universe his entire life.
Now the world-renowned scientist has some new things to say about a potential alien invasion .
“If aliens visit us, the outcome could be much like when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans,” Professor Hawking told El País .
“Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonize whatever planets they can reach,” he said.
The physicist, who has suffered from motor neurone disease since his twenties, explained that the existence of aliens is beyond doubt.