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Police in the Spanish city of San Sebastián de la Gomera have cordoned off an abandoned house after finding a 22-foot-long wasp nest.

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A three-year-old Asiatic Black bear named Champa has just undergone successful surgery to remove a buildup of water in her brain. It marks the first time in medical history that a bear has been given such a procedure.

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It takes 13 minutes and seven seconds to complete Snake, the decades-old game that enjoyed a renascence through Nokia's early mobile phones. 13 minutes, seven seconds, one hundred pellets. But what is this endless pursuit of pellets for? What reward lies at the end of this snake's insatiable desire for food? Nothing. Victory in life only results in death. Immortalized in a two-minute GIF, this foreboding tale of how reptilian consumerism breeds nihilism is a mesmerizing journey of birth, life, and death.

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Pois então, nerds amaldiçoados… Como sabem, desde uma manobra ousadamente safada de Joe Quesada em 2009 que a Marvel detém os direitos de publicação do Marvelman/Miracleman, mas até agora a editora tinha se limitado a republicar as antigas histórias dos anos 50 de Mick Anglo…

Todo mundo se perguntava quando é que a Marvel iria trazer histórias novas do personagem, ou se ela poderia finalmente publicar o fodástico arco de Alan Moore, que ficou décadas no ostracismo devido a brigas e pendências judiciais entre Todd McFarlane, Neil Gaiman e também o próprio Mick Anglo (o “criador” do personagem).

E até hoje, 4 anos depois ainda fazemos essas perguntas… mas eis que ontem, numa rápida entrevista ao Newsarama o editor-chefe da Marvel, Axel Alonso, disse o seguinte:

Fizemos progressos, progressos consideráveis, eu diria… E vamos fazer um grande anúncio em breve. Também sou um grande fã do Marvelman e fico muito orgulhoso dele ser agora publicado pela Marvel.

Vale lembrar que a Marvel, aparentemente, não republicou a fase de Alan Moore/Neil Gaiman do personagem porque ainda havia um terreno nebuloso no meio legal sobre o personagem, pois a Warrior, revista que publicou essa fase, NÃO TINHA os direitos sobre o Marvelman na época, e até que se elucidasse essa questão o material não poderia ser republicado ou continuado (já que Gaiman nunca terminou o seu arco com o personagem).

Com Gaiman na Marvel e levando inclusive a sua personagem que estava no meio do imbróglio judicial com McFarlane (que já foi resolvido, Todd perdeu a briga judicial) pra editora, E Angela aparecendo no final da edição #5 de Age of Ultron, (e dizem que ela fará parte do “elenco” da revista dos Guardiões da Galáxia) especulam que a editora finalmente deva terminar o arco de Gaiman à frente do MArvelman.

O que eu acho? Bem, já cansamos aqui no Mdm de falar sobre o Marvelman, acho que se fosse pra usar o termo “revolucionário” em apenas uma obra de Alan Moore, com certeza o seu Marvelman seria o que mais se encaixa no sentido da palavra… Gosataria muito de ver o Marvelman de Moore publicado de maneira decente, mas se isso não for possível, me contento com Gaiman terminando o seu arco com o personagem e lançando um encadernado de luxo, afinal eu sou RYCAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!

After the Elite Squad films, Brazilian director Jose Padilha seemed like a mold-breaking choice to direct the RoboCop remake for MGM. We have to wait to see how that worked out; while many photos have hit the web, we still haven’t seen any footage from the film.

Now Padilha is signing on to a film that sounds more directly in his wheelhouse: The Brotherhood, based on the book The Brotherhoods: The True Story of Two Cops Who Murdered for the Mafia written by Guy Lawson and William Oldham. The story follows two corrupt cops, each of whom works for a different crime organization, and the third detective who tracks their activities.

The crime film is set up at Warner Bros, with Dan Lin producing. THR explains that Bill Dubuque scripted.

If the project sounds close to The Departed, that’s probably no coincidence; Lin worked on that film in development, and has also worked on Gangster Squad and produced the Sherlock Holmes movies. He seems to have an interest in crime.

Detective Stephen Caracappa achieved the distinguished rank of first grade detective while under the hire of the Luchese crime family. Detective Louis Eppolito worked the heart of Brooklyn’s mobland; he himself was the son of a Gambino crime family soldier. Detective William Oldham, the lead investigator on major organized-crime cases, quietly and relentlessly tracked Caracappa and Eppolito for more than seven years.

The Brotherhoods is the riveting account of the notorious rogue cops charged with murdering for the mob, and the brilliant detective who stalked them. With unparalleled access to both the NYPD and organized crime, a gallery of unforgettable characters, and sweeping from Manhattan to Las Vegas to Hollywood, this is the ultimate wiseguy story, packed with psychological intrigue, criminal audacity, and paranoid, blood-soaked fury.

• Remake Bits: ‘Robocop’, ‘Godzilla’, ‘Evil Dead’, ‘The Town That Dreaded Sundown’
• Remake Bits: Watch Four Minutes of Behind-the-Scenes Footage From ‘Maniac’, Plus: ‘Robocop’, ‘The Fly’, ‘Carrie’, ‘Scarface’
• The 2012 Black List: The Year’s Hottest Unproduced Screenplays
• ‘RoboCop’ Licensing Reel Explains Suit Evolution, Features New Concept Art, Interviews and An Army of RoboCops
• Did ‘RoboCop’ Get a New Suit?
• Remake Bits: ‘RoboCop’, ‘Red Dawn’, ‘The Little Rascals’

Twitter / redcatco: “We live in a world where even trash cans can kernel panic.”

Walter White’s torturous journey will come to an end one way or another this summer, as Breaking Bad concludes its fifth and final season. But one of his business partners could stick around AMC a little while longer.

The cable channel is reportedly eyeing a Breaking Bad spinoff series centered on Saul Goodman, the sleazy but competent lawyer played by Bob Odenkirk. This development comes months after series creator Vince Gilligan first floated the idea. At the time, he admitted that the potential project was nowhere near production. Now that Breaking Bad is on the verge of ending its acclaimed run, though, AMC is apparently willing to give it some serious consideration. Hit the jump to keep reading.

While it’s for the best that Breaking Bad has a set end date (no Dexter-style wheel spinning here), the drama’s enduring popularity among viewers and critics alike naturally has AMC and series producer Sony TV hoping to continue the franchise. No deals have been signed just yet, but Deadline reports that Gilligan and Breaking Bad writer/producer Peter Gould have begun fleshing out the idea.

Gould penned the Season 2 episode “Better Call Saul,” which introduced the character when Walt and Jesse needed help getting Badger out of trouble with the DEA. Saul quickly became a fan favorite and a reliable source of comic levity in the dark and heavy drama. Appropriately, the spinoff is being conceived as a comedy, either in an hour-long or half-hour format.

Though the possible spinoff would presumably be set in the same world as Breaking Bad, the vast differences between Walt and Saul suggest a very different series. At last year’s Comic-Con, Gilligan spoke a bit about what Saul’s story could look like. “I like the idea of a lawyer show in which the main lawyer will do anything it takes to stay out of a court of law,” he said. “He’ll settle on the courthouse steps, whatever it takes to stay out of the courtroom. That would be fun — I would like that.”

• TV Bits: ‘Zombieland’, ‘Beverly Hills Cop’, ‘S.H.I.E.L.D.’, ‘Breaking Bad’, ‘Game of Thrones’, ‘American Horror Story’, Damon Lindelof, Brett Ratner, Ridley Scott
• TV Bits: ‘Arrested Development’, ‘Breaking Bad’, ‘Revolution’, ‘It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’, ‘The League’, ‘American Horror Story: Asylum’
• ‘Breaking Bad’ Creator Considering a Saul Goodman Spin-Off
• TV Bits: ‘Breaking Bad’, ‘Legned of Korra’, ‘Falling Skies’, ‘Firefly’, ‘Homeland’, ‘Dexter’, ‘Arrested Development’
• ‘Breaking Bad’ Promo Roundup: Watch a Trailer, Behind-the-Scenes Video, and Clip From Season 5
• Bryan Cranston Says a ‘Breaking Bad’ Movie Sequel is “Not Far-fetched”

My curmudgeon father had a huge influence on me in a variety of ways, but the impact of his subscription to the now defunct Omni may have been the most lasting. Featuring both science fiction and actual science articles, Omni was also chock-full of wonderful images which made it one of my favorite periodicals to be swallowed up by. Plus, it appealed to my interests: space, robots, and dinosaurs! But one particular article gave a me special shock and then, in adulthood, somehow snuck up behind me, and attacked me again. And it’s all about how dinosaurs did it.

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QRorschach

by David Eberhardt.

A música nem é propriamente o problema (é só uma balada inofensiva com uma letra boba, tem muita coisa pior por aí), mas que porra de visual é esse? É como um figurinista de novela das sete dos anos 80 imaginaria um “roqueiro”…

Meet Google’s “talking shoe,” which aims to translate movement data in witty messages to users and their friends. The concept apparel, showcased at the search giant’s swanky SXSW Interactive headquarters, is part of a new arts project - ”Art, Copy, Code” – which aims to breathe a social, life-like experience into everyday objects. “If standing still was a sport, you’d be world champion,” the trash-talking shoe projects on a monitor hanging over a rainbow-colored obstacle course after it senses I’ve been standing still.

At a distance, users seem a tad pathetic trying to trigger positive feedback from the shoe. But when I strapped it on, I felt oddly compelled to impress my new automated coach. Combining coaching (even robotic coaching) made lifeless data unexpectedly motivational. Essentially, it’s Richards Simmons in a shoe.

In case critics think this is another one of Google’s flights of profitless creative fancy, Arts Copy Code is deliberately about improving advertising. “It’s explicitly aimed at how translating how Silicon Valley thinks about technology into how creative agencies think about advertising,” says project lead Aman Govil.

Brands such as Nike, who outfit professional athletes with health-tracking shoes and bracelets, could broadcast an athlete’s spring-training performance in realtime. Rival athletes’ apparel could trash talk one another automatically.

It’s still (very) early days for the arts project. The talking shoe (and shoe strap) concept was developed through a grant to electronics agency Yes Yes No. Google plans to open up the project to more everyday objects in the near future. One hypothetical use-case, imagines Govil, is an alarm block that sends snarky messages to co-workers if users have to hit the snooze on their alarm clock more than three times.

There’s been heightened attention to research that quantifies how much our friends affect our weight, success, and personal lives. University of San Diego political scientist and Connected author James Fowler found that having an obese friend can significantly increase people’s chances of also having their own set of marshmallowy love handles. And it’s no secret that a spirited friend can get us up at 5 a.m. for a morning run as much as they can tempt us into finishing their plate of fries.

Health startups have attempted to “gamify” good behavior by encouraging users to share personal goals with friends. Nike+ FuelBand, for instance, shares users’ exercise habits with their friends on the personal social network, Path.

This project attempts to remove the barrier presented by current products. The social aspect has always required one extra step of human effort. However fast a one-word message of encouragement could take to type about a friend’s morning run, the minor inconvenience is enough to seriously limit engagement. This new automated personality seems to have a place, especially when we’re all too busy to be personal.

Currently the project is just a concept. There’s no need to jump over to the Google Play store and find the buy link. But Google Glass was just a concept at one point, too.

Apple and IGB Eletrônica are allegedly close to a settlement in the Brazilian iPhone trademark dispute, according to reports from a local newspaper. Forbes reports that Folha de São Paulo, Brazil's largest daily newspaper, claims that both parties have agreed to end their lawsuit and come to some sort of agreement over the trademark. Last month, Brazil's Institute of Industrial Property determined that Apple did not own exclusive rights to the iPhone trademark. Gradiente, the company that would eventually become IGB Eletrônica, filed suit against Apple claiming that it registered the trademark back in 2000, a good seven years before the iPhone's debut.

The terms of the pending agreement are not yet known, though Apple has settled for...

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Hugh Pickens writes writes "Not that there's anything wrong with that — as the Guardian reports that Facebook users are unwittingly revealing their sexual orientation, drug use and political beliefs– using only public 'like' updates. A study of 58,000 Facebook users in the US found that sensitive personal characteristics about people can be accurately inferred from information in the public domain. Researchers were able to accurately infer a Facebook user's race, IQ, sexuality, substance use, personality or political views (PDF) using only a record of the subjects and items they had 'liked' on Facebook – even if users had chosen not to reveal that information. 'It is good that people's behavior is predictable because it means Facebook can suggest very good stories on your news feed,' says Michal Kosinski, 'But what is shocking is that you can use the same data to predict your political views or your sexual orientation. This is something most people don't realize you can do.' For example, researchers were able to predict whether men were homosexual with 88% accuracy by their likes of Facebook pages such as 'Human Rights Campaign' and 'Wicked the Musical' – even if those users had not explicitly shared their sexuality on the site. According to the study other personality traits linked to predictive likes include for High IQ — 'The Godfather,' 'Lord of the Rings,' 'The Daily Show'; for Low IQ — 'Harley Davidson,' 'I Love Being A Mom,' 'Tyler Perry'; and for male heterosexuality — 'Wu Tang Clan,' 'Shaq,' and 'Being Confused after Waking Up from Naps.' Facebook's default privacy settings mean that your 'likes' are public to anyone and Facebook's own algorithms already use these likes to dictate what stories end up in users' news feeds, while advertisers can access them to determine which are the most effective ads to show you as you browse."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

“First you see video. Then you wear video. Then you eat video. Then you be video.” — Pat Cadigan, Pretty Boy Crossover

Sheesh. A whole lot of people who presumably have never actually seen Google Glass in action appear to be really upset. “People who wear Google Glass in public are assholes,” says Gawker’s Adrian Chen. “You won’t know if you’re being recorded or not; and even if you do, you’ll have no way to stop it,” doom-cries Mark Hurst.

Seriously, people? Seriously? DARPA has built drone-mounted 1.8-gigapixel cameras that can recognize people waving from 15,000 feet. Gait recognition software is good enough that they probably don’t even need to see your face. Oh, yes, and they’re working on legions of drones the size of insects, too, while they’re at it. There’s already one closed-circuit camera for every 32 people in the United Kingdom. And the NSA is building a new 65-megawatt data center in Utah to parse this brave new world of big data.

Meanwhile, everywhere you go, hardware is getting faster, software is getting better, everything is being networked. We’re marching boldly into a panopticon future. I’ve been writing about this for years. And now, suddenly, you’re irate about the potential privacy repercussions of a few geeks bearing glasses? What is wrong with you people? Where have you been?

I think cameras on the glasses of random passersby are among the least of your privacy concerns. At least there’s a red LED that winks on when Google Glass is recording, so you’ll know that you’re suddenly starring in your interlocutor’s home video. As panopticons go, the Google Glass version is pretty mild-mannered and half-hearted. The recent spate of furious privacy concerns are enormously overwrought compared to how much we should be concerned about our governments.

But there’s something about being caught on video, not by some impersonal machine but by another human being, that sticks in people’s craws and makes them go irrationally berserk. If these were glasses that recorded audio and took still photos when the wearer double-blinked, would anyone be near as upset? Hell, no. But video is somehow primal; video hits us where we live. (That’s why it’s so insanely popular. Did you know that YouTube is arguably the world’s second most popular social network?)

To a limited extent I actually want Google Glass surveillance, in an uneasy Pandora’s-box kind of way. I want police officers, border guards, and other authorities to be required to wear them every moment that they’re on duty, and I want that data to be available to those who report police brutality or other abuses of authority. (I’ve been saying that for five years, ever since I was mugged at gunpoint in Mexico City. Pretty sure it would have made a big difference to, for instance, my friend Peter Watts.) I want street protestors to be videoing the authorities at all times. I do not trust the powers that be.

If pervasive, ubiquitous networked cameras ultimately make public privacy impossible, which seems likely, then at least we can balance the scales by ensuring that we have two-way transparency between the powerful and the powerless, rather than just a world where the former spy on the latter; and we can give people the tools required for online and/or personal privacy, such as pseudonyms and easy-to-use strong cryptography.

That’s not to say I’m feeling all Panglossian about Google Glass. (Panglassian? Sorry.) My concern is far more petty: it’s that other people’s videos are almost uniformly terrible.

I know a little about moving pictures. I’ve done camerawork for TV shows, just helped build a site that shows curated movies, and I take the odd pretty good photo, if I do say so myself. But video is hard. Much harder to do well than pictures, which anyone can get right now and again via trial and error. Take a look at Vine, or Takes: one reason they’re only a few seconds long is that, if they were any longer, almost all examples of the form would quickly be revealed as nearly unwatchable crap.

Don’t get me wrong, putting new tools in everyone’s hands, and making them easier, inevitably leads to some awesome outsider art, and that’s always been doubly true for video. Take my friend Count Jackula’s series of horror-movie reviews, for instance, which increasingly have become hilarious short films in their own right.

So let’s hope the next generation, born in video, will use it more fluently, and find ways to make use of the petabytes of data that Google Glass or its ilk will generate. And that’s “will” not “may.” Yes, it’s entirely possible that Google Glass is like Apple’s Newton, 10 years ahead of its time, but –

In long run doesn't matter whether Google Glass v1 is success or failure. Wearable, context aware, augmented reality is our future.—
Hunter Walk (@hunterwalk) March 13, 2013

– something like it is coming, sooner or later, almost inevitably. We may ultimately need augmented reality glasses in order to filter out all the bad videos of other people’s mediocre augmented realities. Maybe that’s what Pat Cadigan meant by “then you eat video.” On my bad days I feel like we’re all about to drown in a sea of awful home movies, while being tracked by drone- and signpost-mounted surveillance cameras 24/7/365; like we’re all sleepwalking onwards into a really tacky dystopia. Brace yourselves.

Image credit: I for one welcome our insect-drone masters, by yours truly, on Flickr.

Angry Google Reader users: welcome to your new home. (Maybe. Probably.) Aurich Lawson

A collective wail went out Thursday morning as millions of Google Reader users awoke to find that Google had announced plans to shut down the service by July 1. Barely half a day has gone by since the announcement, and a petition to prevent the closure has already garnered 50,000 signatures. Reader users will not go gentle into that good night—there are a lot of them, and they were happy with how things were. Why would Google kill such a successful product?

We’ve heard plenty of arguments against RSS—mainly that the format is shriveling or dying or being slowly replaced by Twitter and Facebook feeds. Google, being a creature of the Internet, can’t be blind to this trend. Due to the sheer size of the outcry against Reader’s discontinuation, though, it’s clear RSS is still in heavy use. But there’s a better—or at least a more-beneficial-to-Google—place for that RSS-like information to flow. That place is Google+.

After all the initial excitement about the social network, Google+ has limped along as sort of a vestigial supplement to the Google experience. Buttons like “Share” or “+1” across Google services, especially in Reader, all seem to want to lead you back to Google+, but they don’t seem to draw as many people in as Google would like. But if the search giant were to draw an already-successful service into Google+, it could find itself with many more (possibly grudging) Google+ users. If you can’t take Mohammed to the mountain...

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Oh Google. Thought we wouldn’t notice that you’re trying to kill off not just Google Reader, but also your support and endorsement for the RSS format itself? People have just started noticing that Google’s own RSS Subscription Chrome browser extension has disappeared from the Google Chrome Web Store. Though it’s unclear at this time exactly when the extension was removed, the change appears to be recent.

The extension, which previously placed a small, orange RSS icon next to the website’s URL in the Chrome address bar, no longer functions even on Chrome browsers where the extension is installed and enabled.

Upon clicking the icon, users used to be able to quickly subscribe to that website’s feed in their preferred RSS reader, such as Google Reader, which, of course is now shutting down for good.

It’s interesting that the extension has been removed ahead of the end date for Google Reader, since up until that time, Reader’s core audience will likely still be subscribing to new feeds. And it’s worth noting that the extension also supported other blog-reading services besides Google’s.

Though it shipped with support for iGoogle (also killed by Google), My Yahoo, and Bloglines, users could also enter their preferred feed reader’s web URL, if desired.

But now the extension is gone, and the message is clear: Google is getting out of the RSS business. It’s more than Google just shutting down a product that never gained mainstream traction and moving resources elsewhere – it’s about distancing itself from the RSS community as a whole.

While the RSS format never caught on with most people, that was never a concern for power users. Journalists (obviously), programmers, researchers, and others of a more technically inclined nature prefer to peruse their own collection of website feeds, as opposed to enjoying the “serendipitous discovery” of content now popularized by social media and other news magazines like Flipboard.

But this group, though small, are some of the web’s most engaged users. They are the people building its pieces and underpinnings, and filling it with content. As The Guardian aptly put it today, killing Reader is like killing the bees. The damage to the ecosystem extends beyond the hundreds of thousands, or millions rather, impacted directly by Google Reader’s death.

That being said, this group has sprung to action following Google’s announcement. Not only has work begun to offer the community alternatives to Reader specifically (save us Digg!), work is being done on the other pieces of the RSS infrastructure, as well. For example, Superfeedr announced this morning a baby step of sorts – it’s making the process of subscribing to a website easier with the introduction of “SubToMe” button. Upon clicking, users would get a choice of RSS readers they could add their subscription to.

This is not the only recourse for those still in need of a simple subscription option, of course. The Google Chrome Web Store still offers a dozen RSS subscription extensions.

Just not Google’s.

Image credits: MakeUseOf

Plenty of movies show spies using a set of false fingerprints to open a door — but for several doctors at a hospital in Brazil, that scene is decidedly removed from the realm of fiction. Five doctors have been suspended after being accused of using fake silicon fingers with their coworkers' fingerprints to check-in to work for the absent colleagues, reports the AFP. The scam made it appear that a number of employees were working, when only one doctor was present.

Police are told that seven doctors were in on the scam, but the town's mayor believes that there may be as many as three hundred fake hospital employees on payroll. One report alleged that the head of the emergency room's daughter had been paid for three years without ever...

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Ricky Gervais has posted the clips he did for Red Nose Day — Comic Relief 2013 — on YouTube, and they indeed herald a return of David Brent, as cringe-inducing as ever, a traveling salesman now, talking about what’s been happening with him since The Office made him a TV icon of sorts. And he’s still trying to get a music career going, this time with a young rapper, Dom Johnson, with the result being this, a song called “Equality Street”:

It’s no “Free Love Freeway.”

Now, you could quibble that the videos don’t quite match up to where we left Brent at the end of the second Christmas special, when he finally told Finch off and seemed to be finding love and, maybe, some awareness. He’s back to clueless and embarrassing here, but you might also say that a return to that Brent was inevitable, that the desire to entertain and be famous and be “loved” as celebrities are was bred in the bone. And, really, would a well-adjusted, successful David Brent be a good subject for comedy?

Ricky now has his own YouTube channel, and it’ll have original content, with stuff coming from the next Muppets movie and maybe even more David Brent.

“Stop The Cyborgs’ was founded in response to the Google Glass project and other technology trends. The aim of the movement is to stop a future in which privacy is impossible and corporate control total.”

About | Stop The Cyborgs

NB Addendum: “Two things are quickly lost in any internet debate: humor and nuance. So in retrospect we should have guessed that people would find it hard to read past the name ‘Stop The Cyborgs‘. We thought it would be a bit of fun – a suitably cyberpunk sounding opposition group. However we have been variously accused of hating technology & hating anyone who isn’t 100% biological. This is not the case. We love technology and we love people. Indeed we even wear clothes and create technology ourselves. Some of us might even have metal bits.” Read more…

“The woman is visible from thousands of miles away on a hacker’s computer. The hacker has infected her machine with a remote administration tool (RAT) that gives him access to the woman’s screen, to her webcam, to her files, to her microphone. He watches her and the baby through a small control window open on his Windows PC, then he decides to have a little fun. He enters a series of shock and pornographic websites and watches them appear on the woman’s computer.”

Meet the men who spy on women through their webcams | Ars Technica

The sweding craze may have passed its expiration date, but it turns out there's one last unspoiled masterpiece left —namely, this unbelievably brilliant Pacific Rim trailer from the sweded Avengers folks. Between the Jaeger's elliptical machine controls to the "ocean" to that stunning final shot of the giant robot getting knocked over the bridge, I'd be at least as excited to watch this version as I am to see del Toro's actual movie.

Page 2 is a compilation of stories and news tidbits, which for whatever reason, didn’t make the front page of /Film. After the jump we’ve included 46 different items, fun images, videos, casting tidbits, articles of interest and more. It’s like a mystery grab bag of movie web related goodness.

Header Photo: Wreck-It Ralph Vanellope and kart cosplay

10 Screenwriting Lessons You Can Learn From Fight Club

13 Ways to Celebrate National Alfred Hitchcock Day

Millennium Falcon Sled Does The Big Hill In Less Than 12 Parsecs

The 19 Best Movies That You Didn’t See in 2012 – Indie Gems to Watch

Ranking the Greats 8: The 14 Films of Sam Raimi

Bernie Wrightson’s FRANKENSTEIN limited edition screenprints

What comedy advice did Judd Apatow give himself?

Theater Owners Celebrate Victory Over Bloomberg’s NYC Soda Ban

Today’s t-shirt of the day on TeeFury is a The Fifth Element-inspired design “Supreme Being”.

Vince Vaughn to Host Saturday Night Live

Clark Orr’s Hoverboard piece for Gallery1988′s Product Placement show

CinemaCon: Harrison Ford to Receive Lifetime Achievement Award

Netflix Launches Speed Index To Highlight The Best ISPs For Streaming

Tribeca 2013: Festival Announces 60 Selected Shorts, Headlined by Elijah Wood, Elle Fanning

Room 237‘ poster

Ridley Scott Partners With Machinima To Develop Episodic Sci-Fi Web Programming

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BAD HAVEN are based in Ireland, and since years of drunkenness have caused us to forget the actual meaning of Saint Patrick’s Day it’s nice to have Barely Political’s Kirsten Stewart (K-Stew) 0n hand to remind us what it’s all about.

I’m fairly sure the majority of what she says, (at least 90%) is totally true. But  then don’t quote me on that, as being from the Emerald Isle, I’m fond of a shandy and thus mostly stereotypically drunk!

We've heard a lot of different theories attempting to explain why the hardy Neanderthals went extinct, but this one's probably the most original, if not the strangest. According to a new study, Neanderthals had extraordinarily good vision — an attribute that came at considerable expense.

Earlier studies showed that Neanderthals featured skulls just slightly different than our own, but not by much. By measuring total cranial volume, paleontologists noticed that Neanderthals and humans shared similar brain volume, so they figured that the internal organization was probably the same.

But this is not the case, say Eiluned Pearce, Chris Stringer, and R. I. M. Dunbar, who argue that Neanderthals had a different visual system — one that, along with greater body mass, resulted in smaller endocranial capacities compared to humans.

In other words, Neanderthals dedicated so much power to their visual systems that their high-level processing was compromised. This prevented them from developing complex social networks, which may have resulted in their inability to thrive.

The BBC elaborates:

The research team explored the idea that the ancestor of Neanderthals left Africa and had to adapt to the longer, darker nights and murkier days of Europe. The result was that Neanderthals evolved larger eyes and a much larger visual processing area at the back of their brains.

The humans that stayed in Africa, on the other hand, continued to enjoy bright and beautiful days and so had no need for such an adaption. Instead, these people, our ancestors, evolved their frontal lobes, associated with higher level thinking, before they spread across the globe.

And because Neanderthals evolved at higher latitudes, more of their brain would have been dedicated to vision and body control, leaving less brain to deal with other functions like social networking. As the authors note in their study, this may have affected their “abilities to cope with fluctuating resources and cultural maintenance.”

Check out the entire study at the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Image: NHM.

Earlier this month, doctors announced that a baby had been cured of an HIV infection. Now, using a similar technique, it appears that 14 adults have likewise been successfully treated for the disease. The trick, say the scientists, is to tackle the infection early.

The research was conducted by Asier Sáez-Cirión of the Pasteur Institute and his results now appear in the open source journal PLOS Pathogens. His team analyzed 70 people with HIV who had been treated by combination antiretroviral therapy (cART) just a short time after infection, a range spanning 35 days to 10 weeks. This is much sooner than people are normally treated. And in fact, these patients, called the Visconti Cohort, were all diagnosed with HIV early (and by chance) when they turned up at hospitals to be assessed for other conditions.

The cohort stuck to the antiretrovirals (ARVs) for an average of three years, during which time the drugs kept the virus in check (they do not eradicate HIV from the body). Eventually, all of the patients stopped taking the ARVs for various reasons (personal choice, different drug protocols, etc.).

Normally, HIV will return when patients stop taking their ARVs. But this time, something interesting happened. The authors of the study described it this way:

We identified 14 HIV patients (post-treatment controllers [PTCs]) whose viremia remained controlled for several years after the interruption of prolonged cART initiated during the primary infection.

That's roughly one in ten of the patients, a group that included four women and 10 men. On average, they were off the medication for seven years.

It's important to note that the patients still have the HIV infection. Also, they're not "supercontrollers" (the <1% of people who are naturally resistant to HIV). But their bodies are able to keep it in check — and without the assistance of medication. Sáez-Cirión suspects that the early treatment limits the reservoir of HIV that can persist, limits the diversity of the virus, and it preserves the immune response to the virus that keeps it in check. That said, he's not entirely sure why only a fraction of the patients were functionally cured.

Ultimately, Asier Sáez-Cirión's work shows that, in the words of the study, "early and prolonged cART may allow some individuals with a rather unfavorable background to achieve long-term infection control and may have important implications in the search for a functional HIV cure."

Read the entire study at PLOS Pathogens. Find out more about this remarkable breakthrough at New Scientist and BBC.

Top image: Scanning electron micrograph of HIV-1 budding from cultured lymphocyte. Multiple round bumps on cell surface represent sites of assembly and budding of virions. Via CDC.

In less than twelve hours, Warner Bros., Rob Thomas, Kristen Bell, and their Veronica Mars movie changed the movie business. Yesterday morning, Thomas and his cast asked fans to donate two million dollars to revive the canceled television series Veronica Mars as a feature film. Fans have hoped for such a movie for several years. Thomas and Bell had previously been unsuccessful in attempts to persuade Warner Bros. to fund the movie. They even talked about paying for it themselves.

It took about eleven hours for donors to pledge two million dollars. Now, Warner Bros. Digital Distribution has greenlit the film, and will pay for the marketing and distribution. Whether the studio will also contribute funds to the production cost remains to be seen. (Update: The Wrap says no; the outpouring of fan and media interest is likely to drive the budget funds higher without any extra capital required from the studio.)

So what did Veronica Mars fans say this week? Individual donors who gave just a little bit get to see a movie they might have thought wouldn’t ever materialize. Seems like a good deal.

Collectively, the fanbase sent a thundering message to studios. It said, loud and clear, that it will give up large sums of money, with no traditional investment ties, to fund a geek-oriented project. There will very likely be further developments in what could be known as the Mars model, with other producers and studios attempting to find similar fundraising success. As the Veronica Mars counter ticked quickly up to $2m, we watched the business change in real time. 

Plenty of films have been financed by Kickstarter. SXSW is going on right now, and quite a few of the movies here were partially or wholly funded by Kickstarter or IndieGoGo campaigns. They’re films made by individuals, rather than corporations, and probably would never have been able to exist without crowd-sourced funding. That’s the whole idea behind these crowd-funding opportunities.

Veronica Mars is not like those other films. It is a project from a company that could fund production if it really wanted to make the movie. And since Kickstarter is an investment scheme that gives out fan rewards rather than profit points, funding a corporate project using the service is… let’s say a creative use of the ideals Kickstarter represents. Veronica Mars is a project in a strange position: creator-driven, but corporate-owned. Fans and creators get their movie; the company gets the chance to make money from the funding and effort.

Donating to any Kickstarter project comes complete with the knowledge that any individual is giving their money away almost for free. Some Kickstarter films do get distribution, but even then, in the indie world as it is today, they are unlikely to make money. If WB is smart, Veronica Mars will make money. So far, WB has been very smart, from a business perspective, by gathering money it can now use for free.

Even after paying Kickstarter fees, taxes, and to create and distribute the incentive rewards offered to donors, the studio has (at press time) about $1.95m to add to whatever it already planned to spend on the movie. (A rough guideline to how much comes off the top of a Kickstarter campaign, I’ve been told, is 30%.) It may well end up with a lot more than that; there are another 29 days to go in the campaign. After those initial fees are paid, WB is beholden to no one for that money.

Think about that for a second.

How will this change film development? Outsourcing is the word plaguing the VFX industry right now, and fans just proved to WB that it can outsource fundraising for certain projects. This is a time when studios are less willing than ever to pay for development costs. (Ask a screenwriter about their one-step deal.) So what happens when a studio realizes it can get other people to pay for parts of the process, with only a couple strings attached? (Again, there are taxes, fees, and rewards to pay for. All one-time payments.)

The truth is that I don’t know what happens. No one does. This is new. It might not be bad. Change looks weird. This might be the best way for creators to drive fan interest towards projects that aren’t quite mainstream enough to seem like a sure thing to the board.

I’m not telling anyone not to donate, or that they should not have done so. It’s your money. Do what you want with it. Terriers creator Shawn Ryan noted that this could be a model for creating a wrap-up film for that show, and I would be tempted to pledge should he announce such a thing. If someone wants to see a movie badly enough to pay thirty-five bucks, or two hundred, or five grand to do so, I probably can’t talk them out of it.

(The average donation for Veronica Mars, at this point, is $60. Last night, when the project hit the funding mark, it was a lot higher. Pledging money, it is worth noting, does not entitle any backer to a copy of the film, or a ticket should it get a theatrical release.)

When financial situations are hardly stable for many (some companies excepted) I’m really eager to see how the value proposition works out in the long run. If Veronica Mars makes even five million dollars more than it costs to make and promote, that will be an incentive to studios. Will it look the same for those who paid for the movie — who made it happen not only with interest, but with actual money?

I said this on Twitter last night, and I’ll say it again: the best thing Warner Bros. could do right now would be to return all donations, issue a statement that this was a bold experiment in marketing and gauging interest, and fund the movie as it would any other. Fulfill the rewards, as not doing so would be a PR disaster, and fans clearly want the swag.

But that won’t happen.

Further questions are: can this happen again, and will the change it creates be brief or lasting? There are certainly other projects that could benefit from similar campaigns, though they may require a coordinated PR campaign to build interest before launching the crowd-funding project, to emulate the way that a Veronica Mars movie was discussed and teased for a long time before fans got the chance to contribute. As for the persistence of the change, the cheaply-made hit The Blair Witch Project began a change in the movie business that couldn’t really take hold until Paranormal Activity was marketed into a hit. We’ll have to see if WB can make any money on this before knowing if it is likely to happen a few more times, or many.

• ‘Veronica Mars’ Movie Completely Funded By Kickstarter In Less Than 12 Hours [Updated]
• Bryan Fuller of ‘Pushing Daisies’, Shawn Ryan of ‘Terriers’, and Mike Royce of ‘Men of a Certain Age’ React to the Veronica Mars Kickstarter Model
• ‘Metalocalypse’ Director Wants to Tell the Tale of the Tim Burton Superman Movie That Never Was
• ‘Cove’ Director Seeking Funds For ‘The Heist,’ The Climactic Event Of His Global Extinction Documentary
• VOTD: TV Kisses
• Kristen Bell Wants a ‘Veronica Mars’ Movie Enough to Finance it Herself (Or Maybe a Web Series)

Last week, a cafe in Seattle banned the use of Google Glass, a reflection of the growing concern about the ways this cutting-edge technology might be abused. But the critics are ignoring the technology’s potential to make our lives safer and more democratic. Worse, by stigmatizing its use, the Glass-haters are spawning an entirely new kind of discrimination.

Illustration by Fatal Sweets via Shutterstock

Google Glass, the much heralded wearable computer eyepiece, has yet to be officially launched, yet the hysterics against its use have already begun. The device can, among other things, be used to snap photos and access the Web. People are understandably concerned that they might be filmed or photographed without their knowledge or consent.

The critics have two primary worries: First, they're concerned that Glass will encourage people to increasingly violate social norms, particularly when it comes to privacy and the enhanced potential for remote presence (like talking to someone else on the phone, which is hardly a new problem). And second, that it’ll allow people to take even more creepy pictures of people.

These concerns are, mostly, reasonable. But what the Glass-haters don't realize is that society will find a way to adapt to these technologies (whether through new laws or social customs) — and we’ll be better off for it.

There's also no denying that Google-hating is also an important part of the equation; many people can't separate the technology from the company.

Yes, Google is a trailblazer in this area, but its developers are most certainly not the ones who came up with the idea, nor will Glass be the only game in town once the technology becomes fully realized.

The idea of wearable computing has been around for ages. Back in the 1970s, Toronto professor Steve Mann started to work on his EyeTap device, a clunky attempt at the world’s first head-mounted camera. Today, his device looks almost exactly Google Glass, which is hardly a coincidence.

But Mann was not seeking to develop technologies that would allow him to spy on people or take creepy photographs. His initial idea was far more conceptual — one with his sights set firmly on the future. Mann believed, and still believes, that camera-embedded wearables could be both liberating and empowering. Even democratizing. In a world peppered with security cameras and a sensory-sphere completely dominated by corporate memes, Mann foresaw the wearable computer as a means for individuals to re-take control of their environment and protect themselves.

His idea was called sousveillance — a way for people to watch the watchers and be at the ready to chronicle any physical assaults or threats.

“Rather than tolerating terrorism as a feedback means to restore the balance, an alternative framework would be to build a stable system to begin with, e.g. a system that is self-balancing,” he wrote. “Such a society may be built with sousveillance (inverse surveillance) as a way to balance the increasing (and increasingly one-sided) surveillance.”

Mann listed some potential benefits:

• Good drivers, professors, teachers, government officials, and police welcome sousveillance because it ensures their integrity
• Bad drivers, professors, teachers, government officials, and police oppose sousveillance
• Sousveillance is necessary to prevent crime, corruption, terrorism, etc.
• Building sousveillance infrastructure into a government, a police force, military, or the like, will ensure integrity, and ensure that surveillance is balanced
• Societies with surveillance only (e.g. no sousveillance) are unstable and tend toward totalitarianism (e.g. overthrow of government, or takeover, martial law, etc.)

Last year, in a complete stroke of irony (or validation), Mann was attacked at a McDonald’s in France for wearing such a device — what may have been the first documented cybernetic hate crime. But Mann was able to use his EyeTap to record the attack and the attackers as it happened.

Of course, what many Glass critics also fail to acknowledge is that the entire affair was recorded by McDonald's' very own surveillance cameras. When we’re out in public, we are already being filmed without our permission — and often by private firms who are not looking out for our best interests, but their own. Moreover, state-planted cameras are also starting to appear everywhere. Take the city of London, for example, where there’s virtually no public place hidden from prying eyes.

There’s no question that we’re headed towards a Vingeian Rainbow’s End, a transparent world that David Brin calls the Surveillance Society. Or what futurist Jamais Cascio calls the Participatory Panopticon. The death of privacy is upon us.

And the whole Google-hating thing is an equally misguided and unfortunate distraction.

Eyeglass devices will eventually be developed by other companies (or even through open source initiatives) and exhibit vastly different features (Glass already has a competitor). Before long, we’ll be able to engage in augmented reality while filtering out annoying objects in our environment, including billboards and other obtrusive eyesores forced upon our visual spectrum. In their place, we’ll add useful things like maps or the weather report or a picture of our cat.

So instead of being reactionary, cafes like the 5 Point should work to find work-arounds to the problems instead of simply banning them outright. Given the future prominence of wearables, bans are simply not viable long term solutions.

It's also important to not stigmatize the use of wearables and cybernetic technologies in general. Human capacities, and the ways in which we interact with each other, are constantly evolving in step with our technologies. The trick is to normalize them in such a way that no one gets hurt, and no one gets to miss out.

All while using them in an empowering sort of way.

Images: 5 Point Cafe, Google, Steve Mann.

We may be celebrating Pi Day here at io9, but we would be irrational to deny that there’s more to mathematical interestingness than simply dividing an object’s circumference by its diameter. Here are seven numbers we love as much as pi.

1. 1

1 may be the loneliest number, but it’s the littlest number that could — the first non-zero integer that displays remarkable properties of self-reliance. Aside from being the first whole number, it is its own square, cube, and factorial. It’s also very stubborn; when you raise 1 to any power — even a number as high as a googolplex (1 followed by 10 to the 100th power, or 10^(10^100)) — you still get 1. It's the first and second number in the Fibonacci sequence. It is neither a composite number, nor a prime number (mathematicians rejected this idea because it complicates fundamental theorems of arithmetic). It is, however, a unit (like -1). And it’s the only positive number that’s divisible by exactly one positive number.

2. i

Any number that doesn’t actually exist, but is still useful, has to be considered cool. Also called the imaginary unit, i is the square root of -1 (i² = -1). This number cannot exist because no number multiplied by itself can equal a negative number.

At first, imaginary numbers were considered useless (an imaginary number is a number that, when squared, gives a negative result; e.g. 5i = -25). But by the Enlightenment Era, thinkers began to demonstrate its value in math and geometry, including Leonhard Euler, Carl Gauss, and Caspar Wessel (who used it when working with complex planes). They’re useful in that they can be used to find the square root of a real negative number.

Today, i is used in signal processing, control theory, electromagnetism, fluid dynamics, quantum mechanics, cartography, and vibration analysis. The figure j is often substituted in these fields, which is used to represent the electric field current. The imaginary number also appears in several formulas, including the Euler Identity.

As an aside, Isaac Asimov’s short story “The Imaginary” (1942) featured the eccentric psychologist Tan Porus who explained the behavior of a mysterious species of squid by using imaginary numbers in the equations which describe its psychology.

3. Graham's Number

Simply put, this is the largest useful (i.e. non-arbitrary) number known to mathematicians. But it’s an astoundingly large number. Named after Ronald Graham, it’s the upper bound to a certain question that involves Ramsey Theory (a branch of math that studies the conditions under which order must appear). Consequently, it’s the biggest number used for a serious mathematical proof.

This number’s “root” arises from the extreme addition, multiplication, and powering of threes. It’s subsequently a very big power of three, and the number itself is considerably larger than a googolplex. In fact, Graham’s number is so mindboggingly huge that it cannot be expressed using conventional notation of powers, and even powers of powers. It’s so large, that if all the material in the universe were turned into pen and ink it would not be enough to write the number down. Consequently, mathematicians use a special notation devised by Donald Knuth to express it.

It’s so big that it’s physically impossible for our brains to comprehend. AI theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky put it this way:

Graham's number is far beyond my ability to grasp. I can describe it, but I cannot properly appreciate it...My sense of awe when I first encountered this number was beyond words. It was the sense of looking upon something so much larger than the world inside my head that my conception of the Universe was shattered and rebuilt to fit. All theologians should face a number like that, so they can properly appreciate what they invoke by talking about the "infinite" intelligence of God.

Interestingly, if not ironically, the lower bound to the Ramsey problem that gave birth to that number — rather than the upper bound — is probably six. Note: A reader alerted me to this study, which suggests a lower bound raised to 11, and then to 13.

4. 0

The number 0 is totally taken for granted, which, when considering that it represents nothing, is somewhat understandable. But it does serve some important functions, including as an empty place-value in our decimal number system. How else, for example, could we express the year 1906 in the decimal system without it?

Sure, the universe starts to melt when you try to divide by it, but 0 can serve some important roles in equations, including those that involve addition, multiplication, and subtraction. Numbers can also be raised by the power 0, which will always produce the value of 1. And if you raise 0 to power of anything, you still get 0. But, if try to do 0^0, math goes all squirrely again and the answer becomes basically anything (an “indeterminate form”).

Lastly, the sum of 0 numbers is 0, but the product of 0 numbers is 1. And 0 is neither positive, nor negative. It’s not a prime number, and it’s not a unit — but it is an even number.

5. e

Yes, there’s a number called ‘e’, but it’s also known as Euler’s Number. Like pi, it’s an important mathematical constant, an irrational number that goes like this: 2.71828182845904523536...

Named after Leonhard Euler (1707-1783), it’s the base of John Napier’s Natural Logarithms — the logarithm to the base e, where e is an irrational and non-algebraic number (what’s called a transcendental constant, much like pi). Some people refer to it as the natural base. Euler devised the following formula to calculate e:

e= 1+ 1/1 + 1/2 + 1/(2 x 3) + 1/(2 x 3 x 4) + 1/(2 x 3 x 4 x 5) + . . . (alternately: 1 + 1/1 + 1/2! + 1/3! + 1/4! + 1/5!)

Mathematicians have calculated e to over a trillion digits of accuracy.

Euler's interest in e came about when calculating continuously compounded interest on a sum of money. And in fact, the limit for compounding interest can be expressed by the constant e. So, if you invest $1 at an interest rate of 100% per year, and the interest is compounded continuously, you will have $2.71828 (or so) at the end of the year.

e also shows up in probability theory and the Bernoulli trials process (which is helpful for calculating things like probabilities in gambling). Other applications include derangements (the so-called hat-check problem), asymptotics (when describing limiting behavior, a useful concept in computer science), and calculus.

6. Tau

Tau is simply 2pi, or the constant that is equal to the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its radius. Thus, tau is written out like 6.283185...

Tau is the 19th letter of the Greek alphabet and was chosen as the symbol for 2pi by Michael Hartl, a physicist, mathematician, and author of "The Tau Manifesto," along with Peter Harremoës, a Danish information theorist (who knew math could get so political?).

Tau is considered by some to be more useful than pi for measuring circles because mathematicians tend to use radians instead of degrees. According to Kevin Houston from the University of Leeds, the most compelling argument for tau is that it is a much more natural number to use in the fields of math involving circles, like geometry, trigonometry and even advanced calculus.

What this means, of course, is that Tau Day should be celebrated on June 28 (6/28).

7. Phi (φ)

Also called the Golden Number, Phi (rhymes with "fly") is an important mathematical figure that’s written out as 1.6180339887...

Unlike pi, which is a transcendental number, phi is the solution to a quadratic equation. But like pi, phi is a ratio that’s defined by geometric construction. Two quantities fit within the golden ratio if the ratio of the sum of the quantities to the larger quantity is equal to the ratio of the larger quantity to the smaller one. Because of its unique properties, phi is used in math, art, and architecture. The Greeks discovered it as the dividing line in the extreme and mean ratio, and for Renaissance artists it represented the Divine Proportion.

Phi also has interesting equivalent ratios when the number one is introduced, like φ:1 is equal to φ+1:φ, or 1:φ-1. Also, two successive fibonacci numbers, when divided, produce a number close to phi. The further through the series, the more accurate (or detailed) phi becomes.

Special thanks to Calvin Dvorsky for helping me with this article!

Top image: Sashkin/Shutterstock.

It’s here it’s here it’s here! MTV Geek just released the first red-band trailer for Kick-Ass 2, which sees masked crimefighters Kick-Ass (Aaron Johnson) and Hit-Girl (Chloe Grace Moretz) a few years older, wiser, and better equipped to bring the smackdown on shady criminals. It’s a good thing that in addition to dealing with high school drama they’ve been training hard, because now they have to face off against Red Mist (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), who’s renamed himself The Motherfucker.

Not to mention a nearly-unrecognizable Jim Carrey as new masked hero Captain Stars and Stripes! This looks so good, you guys.

[Probably best to watch this with your headphones in]

Read the full article

Earlier this week we reported on the remarkable news that a Mississippi-born baby was cured of HIV. Now, as if to show the disease that it's days are truly numbered, researchers from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have shown that nanoparticles infused with a toxic bee venom can kill HIV. The researchers hope to take this new compound and develop a vaginal gel that can prevent the further spread of the disease. More »