Screen Junkies: Patton Oswalt visits the show and pitches his dream sequel (or, we should say, sequels) to M. Night Shyamalan’s secret comic book movie Unbreakable! Unbreakable was one of the better superhero origin stories. I’d love to see it continue.
Stephen King, in the New Yorker: Jim Trusdale had a shack on the west side of his father’s gone-to-seed ranch, and that was where he was when Sheriff Barclay and half a dozen deputized townsmen found him, sitting in the one chair by the cold stove, wearing a dirty barn coat and reading an old…
Eric Jaffe, for Fast Company: But the greater insight emerged when Vartanian and collaborators studied brain activity. They found heightened activity related to high ceilings in the left precuneus and left middle frontal gyrus—two areas associated with visuospatial exploration. The left precuneus, in particular, has been found to increase in cortical thickness after spatial navigation training. I…
Alison Flood, for The Guardian: Gaiman’s lecture, Immortality and Douglas Adams, is part of a series of annual talks to raise funds for two charities close to the heart of Adams, who died in 2001, aged just 49 – Save the Rhino and the Environmental Investigation Agency. The novelist spoke of how he first met Adams, in 1983,…
Dave Tach, for Polygon: They spent months trying to combine the essences of Flappy Bird and Frogger, until Hall had what he calls a “shower moment” — an epiphany in a moment of dull routine — where he realized Hipster Whale could fuse art, commerce, design and marketing into something with heart. “If you make a game that’s…
Dale North, for VentureBeat: The entire video is rendered in real time, running at 30 frames per second and taking place in 100 square miles of terrain. It features cinematic quality depth of field and motion blur, as well as fully dynamic lighting. Impressive feat, with the real-time emulation of weather, particle effects, and subsurface…
Dave Tach, for Polygon: To populate this alternate reality, the artists created seeds: the essential parts of plants and animals and geographic locations. Trees have trunks and leaves. Animals have bone structures. Spaceships have cockpits. Buildings have doors, windows and roofs. Then they threw those seeds into what Duncan calls a “big box of maths,”…
Alfred Maskeroni, for Adweek: Enter the new Vince Vaughn movie Unfinished Business, which comes out Friday. Twentieth Century Fox has teamed up with iStock by Getty Images to create a set of stock photos featuring Vaughn along with co-stars Tom Wilkinson, Dave Franco and others. This is a brilliant viral stunt — one that I wish…
Mathieu Rosemain, Hans Nichols, and Elisabeth Behrmann, for Bloomberg: “The competition certainly needs to be taken seriously,” said Stefan Bratzel, director of the Center of Automotive Management at the University of Applied Sciences in Bergisch Gladbach, Germany. “The closer we get to autonomous driving, the weaker the connection becomes between the customer and the car. And Google and Apple…
Luke Plunkett, for Kotaku: I’m very much into the premise of Kingdom Come Deliverance, which is a medieval RPG that’s all about history. No monsters, no magic, no witches, no giant rats. Just regular folk going about everyday medieval business. Looks quite intriguing. Ever since I was a kid, I’ve longed to play immersive games that weren’t…
Megan Logan, for Wired: The significance of World View’s latest endeavor lies in the downward flight of the parafoil, a fundamental piece of the projected designs its manned tourist expeditions. The company wants to load its passengers into a flight capsule, attach that to a massive (as in roughly-the-size-of-a-football-stadium massive) polyethylene balloon filled with gas,…
Joe Veix, for Death and Taxes: Last month, artists David OReilly and Kim Laughton created a blog called #HyperRealCG, in which they post banal photographs and then claim that they’re CG. Pretty much every tech blog is falling for it. I love this so hard, I can barely stand it.
A lovely video tribute to Grace Hopper. From her Wikipedia entry: A pioneer in the field, she was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer in 1944, and invented the first compiler for a computer programming language.
Phys.org: Quantum mechanics tells us that light can behave simultaneously as a particle or a wave. However, there has never been an experiment able to capture both natures of light at the same time; the closest we have come is seeing either wave or particle, but always at different times. Taking a radically different experimental approach, EPFL…
Florian de Looij has created a lovely, minimal collection of ever-looping GIFs that will put you into a nice trance.
Tim Wogan, for Physics World: … Researchers are seeking new ways that heat can reach the surface of the Sun from its core. One possibility is that the Sun might contain dark matter that it captures as it passes through the galactic halo. Such matter could carry heat from the core to the cooler outer…
Andrew Pollack, for the NYTimes: DNA phenotyping is different: an attempt to determine physical traits from genetic material left at the scene when no match is found in the conventional way. Though the science is still evolving, small companies like Parabon NanoLabs, which made the image in the South Carolina case, and Identitas have begun offering DNA phenotyping…
Jimmy Maher’s lengthy dissertation on one of the great text adventure games: One of the most noteworthy things about Trinity, by contrast, is that it is — whatever else it is — a beautifully crafted traditional text adventure, full of intricate puzzles to die for, exactly the sort of game for which Infocom is renowned and which they…
Oliver Morrison, for 219 Magazine: [Jay] Neitz, a professor at the University of Washington, tested two squirrel monkeys every day for a year and a half, confirming their colorblindness before experimenting on them. Then Neitz injected their retinas with a virus that contained the genetic code for the red pigment found in human eyes. The…
Jennifer Ouellette, for NOVA: The Glasgow researchers used a special liquid crystal mask to impose a pattern on one of two photons in a pair. Because light can act like both a particle and a wave—the famous wave-particle duality—the researchers could use the mask to reshape the wavefront of that photon, so instead of spreading…
From the Physics arXiv Blog: … The evolution of music between 1960 and 2010 was largely constant but punctuated by periods of rapid change. “We identified three revolutions: a major one around 1991 and two smaller ones around 1964 and 1983,” they say. The characters of these revolutions were all different with the 1964 revolution being…