For those of you who have had the traumatic experience of watching one of the campiest superhero films of all time, this Honest Trailer for Batman & Robin might be too real.

For those of you who haven’t, take a look and find out everything you need to know about why the Batman movie franchise died (only to be resurrected by the hand of Christopher Nolan, who made it not terrible).

As for the part about the director’s awkward closeups of Batman and Robin’s butts, I can only say one thing:

“Bat ass.”

(via LaughingSquid)

Previously in Batman

• Batgirl and Nightwing Tie In To Batman Zero Year
• Fight For Justice In Style In These Blinged-Up Batman Heels
• Things We Saw Today: Lego. Batman. Cake.

Benedict Cumberbatch Hates Liquids...

On Friday, xkcd #1190—Time—came to an end.

It was a huge project, but since it was all concealed within a single comic panel, I thought I’d end with this short post to explain what was going on. If you want to see the story yourself before I spoil anything, you can use one of the many excellent third-party Time explorers, like the Geekwagon viewer, or one of the others listed here.

When the comic first went up, it just showed two people sitting on a beach. Every half hour (and later every hour), a new version of the comic appeared, showing the figures in different positions. Eventually, the pair started building a sand castle.

There was a flurry of attention early on, as people caught on to the gimmick. Readers watched for a while, and then, when nothing seemed to be happening, many wandered away—perhaps confused, or perhaps satisfied that they’d found a nice easter-egg story about castles.

But Time kept going, and hints started appearing that there was more to the story than just sand castles. A few dedicated readers obsessively cataloged every detail, watching every frame for clues and every changing pixel for new information. The xkcd forum thread on Time grew terrifyingly fast, developing a subculture with its own vocabulary, songs, inside jokes, and even a religion or two.

And as Time unfolded, readers gradually figured out that it was a story, set far in the future, about one of the strangest phenomena in our world: The Mediterranean Sea sometimes evaporates, leaving dry land miles below the old sea level … and then fills back up in a single massive flood.

(A special thank you to Phil Plait for his advice on the far-future night sky sequence, and to Dan, Emad, and everyone else for your help on various details of the Time world.)

Time was a bigger project than I planned. All told, I drew 3,099 panels. I animated a starfield, pored over maps and research papers, talked with biologists and botanists, and created a plausible future language for readers to try to decode.

I wrote the whole story before I drew the first frame, and had almost a thousand panels already drawn before I posted the first one. But as the story progressed, the later panels took longer to draw than I expected, and Time began—ironically—eating more and more of my time. Frames that went up every hour were sometimes taking more than an hour to make, and I spent the final months doing practically nothing but drawing.

To the intrepid, clever, sometimes crazy readers who followed it the whole way through, watching every pixel change and catching every detail: Thank you. This was for you. It’s been quite a journey; I hope you enjoyed the ride as much as I did!

P.S. A lot of people have asked if I can sell some kind of Time print collection (or a series of 3,099 t-shirts, where you run to the bathroom and change into a new one every hour). I’m afraid I don’t have anything like that in the works right now. I just made this because I thought it would be neat, and now that it’s done, my only plan is to spend the next eleven thousand years catching up on sleep. If you liked the project, you’re always welcome to donate via PayPal (xkcd@xkcd.com) or buy something from the xkcd store. Thank you.

Randall Munroe has finally finished Time, his 3,000+ frame slow-motion animation that began life as wordless, enigmatic single-panel XKCD installment. Since then, the panel has been slowly, slowly updating itself, running out its course over several months. Geekwagon has collected the whole series in an easy-to-control window, and the story, taken as a whole, is a beautiful and odd existentialist parable touching on the discovery of geographic knowledge; cultural first contacts; environmental disaster, friendship and ingenuity. (Thanks, @dexitroboper!)

(YouTube link)

College Humor staged a prank in which a live human voices a taxi cab's GPS. The service goes from believable to slightly incompetent to downright goofy. This compilation of passengers only contains those who were paying attention. Paying attention can turn out to be fun! -via Viral Viral Videos

La la la la la… La la la la la…

She’s back– College Humor released this fake movie trailer for Daria: High School Reunion starring deadpan darling Aubrey Plaza. A while ago there were some rumors floating around of Plaza actually playing Daria in a live-action movie, but nothing ever came of it. Now that she’s in this trailer, we wish something had! Check it out and get your nostalgia on.

(via Flavorwire)

Previously in Daria

• Cartoons Go Couture: Animated Ladies Paired With High Fashion
• Cartoon Characters Can Celebrate Halloween, Too!
• Beavis and Butthead Are, Like, Back And Stuff… Huh huh. [VIDEO]

Are you following The Mary Sue on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, & Google +?

A new meme compares the awful things that happen in the Star Wars saga and the HBO series Games of Thrones. Continue reading to see a lot more, but be warned they contain spoilers, if you're not current on both series. However, if you don't know what happens in Star Wars, you are too young to confront these issues anyway.   

You'll find a lot more of these in a growing subreddit called Wars vs. Throne. Link -via Geeks Are Sexy

Random Sneeze Call

If you call a random phone number and say “God bless you”, what are the chances that the person who answers just sneezed? On average, not just in spring or fall.

–Mimi

It's hard to find good figures, but it's probably about 1 in 40,000.

Before you pick up the phone, you should also keep in mind that there's roughly a 1 in 1,000,000,000 chance that the person you're calling just murdered someone.[1]Based on a murder rate of 4 per 100,000, the average in the US but on the high end for industrialized countries. You may want to be careful when you hand out blessings.

However, given that sneezes are far more common than murders,[2]Citation: You are alive. you're still much more likely to get someone who sneezed than to catch a killer, so this strategy is not recommended:

(Mental note: I'm going to start saying that when people sneeze.)

Compared with the murder rate, the sneezing rate doesn't get much scholarly research. The most widely-cited figure for average sneeze frequency comes from a doctor interviewed by ABC News, who pegged it at 200 sneezes per person per year.[3]Cari Nierenberg, The Perils of Sneezing, ABC News, Dec. 22, 2008

One of the few scholarly sources of data is a study which monitored the sneezing of people undergoing an induced allergic reaction.[4]Werner E. Bischoff, Michelle L. Wallis, Brian K. Tucker, Beth A. Reboussin, Michael A. Pfaller, Frederick G. Hayden, and Robert J. Sherertz, “Gesundheit!” Sneezing, Common Colds, Allergies, and Staphylococcus aureus Dispersion, J Infect Dis. (2006) 194 (8): 1119-1126 doi:10.1086/507908 To estimate the average sneezing rate, we can ignore all the real medical data they were trying to gather and just look at their control group. This group was given no allergens at all; they just sat alone in a room for a total of 176 20-minute sessions.[5]For context, that's 490 repititions of the song Hey Jude.

The subjects in the control group sneezed four times during those 58 or so hours,[6]Over 58 hours of research, four sneezes were the most interesting data points. I might've taken the 490 Hey Judes. which—assuming they only sneeze while awake—translates to about 400 sneezes per person per year.

Google Scholar turns up 5,980 articles from 2012 that mention "sneezing".[7]Google Scholar search for "sneezing" If half of these articles are from the US, and each one has an average of four authors, then if you dial the number, there's about a 1 in 10,000,000 chance that you'll get someone who just that day published an article on sneezing.

On the other hand, about 60 people are killed by lightning in the US every year.[8]Lightning fatalities by country That means there's only a 1 in 10,000,000,000,000 chance that you'll call someone in the 30 seconds after they've been struck and killed.

Lastly, let's suppose that, on the day this article was published, five people who read it decide to actually try this experiment. If they call numbers all day, there's about a 1 in 30,000 chance that at some point during the day, one of them will get a busy signal because the person they've called is, themselves, calling a random stranger to say "God bless you."

And there's about a 1 in 10,000,000,000,000 chance that two of them will simultaneously call each other.

At this point, probability will give up, and they'll both be struck by lightning.

An anonymous reader writes "The Atlantic has an interesting piece on the life and work of the scientist most responsible for moms around the world giving their kids Vitamin C tablets to fight off colds, Linus Pauling. From the article: 'On October 10, 2011, researchers from the University of Minnesota found that women who took supplemental multivitamins died at rates higher than those who didn't. Two days later, researchers from the Cleveland Clinic found that men who took vitamin E had an increased risk of prostate cancer. "It's been a tough week for vitamins," said Carrie Gann of ABC News. These findings weren't new. Seven previous studies had already shown that vitamins increased the risk of cancer and heart disease and shortened lives. Still, in 2012, more than half of all Americans took some form of vitamin supplements. What few people realize, however, is that their fascination with vitamins can be traced back to one man. A man who was so spectacularly right that he won two Nobel Prizes and so spectacularly wrong that he was arguably the world's greatest quack.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's a serious question

If you are anything like the radio producer who phoned me Monday morning, you won't have a clue what Kevin Rudd just did.

“What's the difference between a carbon tax and an emissions trading scheme?” he asked. “Our presenter needs to know.”

It occurred to me that if neither of them knew the difference I had been doing my job very badly, along with all the other economics writers and also the politicians who thought up the scheme in the first place.

We have been doing it so badly that after a decade of talk about the schemes Tony Abbott thought he could get away with describing them as “a so-called market in the non-delivery of an invisible substance to no one" – a line he had apparently pinched from the UK Telegraph newspaper, demonstrating that dumbed-down descriptions travel further than information.

My defence is that I began writing about the schemes years ago. I set down in print what I knew at the time and then settled down to reporting on changes to them rather than standing back every now and then and explaining what they were.

Readers who didn't understand what I have written were apparently too embarrassed to ring up and ask. They're never embarrassed to ring up when they do understand and they disagree.

So here's the explanation I should have been including all along.

If we wanted to completely stop emissions of carbon dioxide and associated greenhouse gasses it would be simple (although suicidal – plants need carbon dioxide in order to create oxygen). We could simply ban them.

But in trying to slow climate change we are attempting something more subtle. We want to wind back the emissions by a specified amount each year...

We could do it by passing a law saying each existing emitter will have to wind back its emissions by, say, 1 per cent per year. It would get the job done, but it would be enormously expensive for some firms (who have no easy way of cutting their emissions) and very cheap for others (who could easily cut their emissions further). Industry would end up suffering far more than is needed to achieve a fairly modest goal.

Australia pioneered a less painful solution to this type of problem in the early 1980s. Blue fin tuna was at risk of being wiped out. But there was no need to completely ban fishing, just to wind back the number of kilograms caught. So the government handed out a limited number of “individual transferable catch quotas”. If anyone wanted to catch more than their quota they could buy a spare from someone who was happy to catch less and sell it at a profit. There were few complaints and blue fin tuna survived.

A few years later in the United States President George Bush Senior picked up the idea, signing into law a new act to fight acid rain which was caused by emissions of sulphur dioxide. He issued a limited number of annual permits for sulphur dioxide emissions, but each year fewer than the year before. Then he encouraged the Chicago Board of Trade to set up an exchange on which the permits could be traded.

Over a decade the price of permits for sulphur emissions climbed from $100 to $800 a ton. The polluters who could easily cut back found themselves with something valuable. Those that couldn’t found business increasingly expensive, but not so expensive as to force them out straight away.

Over that decade sulphur emissions halved throughout the United States. In some parts of the country acid rain fell 25 per cent. The annual saving in healthcare costs was said to top $20 billion.

That's the sort of scheme that Kevin Rudd is going to bring in one year early in mid 2014, one with a history of working. Until now the government has sold permits to whoever needed them for a fixed price (which makes them a tax). From next July it will issue a limited number of permits each year, and fewer in each successive year than the year before. Some will be auctioned, some will be given away, but the important thing is that they will be tradeable. Firms that can easily cut their emissions can clean up by selling their unwanted permits to firms that find it harder.

It's a better way of getting there, except that Rudd will also allow Australian polluters to use permits from the European scheme which are dirt cheap because of problems in the design of that scheme and the European financial crisis.

Eventually he'll have to wind back access to the European permits or hope the price improves if he wants to meet the Australian target. He is moving in the right direction, taking a detour through Europe.

In The Canberra Times, and Sun Herald 


Related Reading

. Emissions trading: A mixed record, with plenty of failures

. Yes, Virginia, there can be a free market in carbon


Related Posts

. Carbon tax, your questions answered

. Fighting pollution without using prices is like...

. Truth time. How much has the great big new tax pushed up the cost of living?

[ By Delana in Art & Drawing & Digital. ]

Some of the world’s greatest abstract artists have created portraits of humans that, while inspired by the human form, have completely dispensed with any actual human’s natural proportions.

Hungarian artist Flora Borsi decided to take some of those abstract paintings and digitally create what the models would look like if the paintings were realistic depictions of real humans.

The results are equal parts entertaining and disturbing. Elongated necks, exaggerated facial features, and impossible proportions make the subjects look vaguely human but not quite what we would expect from actual human models standing next to the portraits they inspired.

The paintings of Modigliani, Picasso, Malevich and more are given the unusual treatment of working backwards to create something new from an already-existing piece of art.

Entitled “The Real Life Models,” the project is one that takes you a bit by surprise. Seeing these human forms outside of their respective paintings only highlights how creative and liberal the artists were in painting the original pieces.

Borsi did include in her series one real historic photo of models next to the painting they inspired. The older couple who actually posed for Grant Wood’s “American Gothic” are pictured next to their own portrait, looking nearly as sullen as they do in the painting.

---

---

[ By Delana in Art & Drawing & Digital. ]

[ WebUrbanist | Archives | Galleries | Privacy | TOS ]

A declassified mission transcript from Apollo 10 (PDF) includes a passage in which the spacemen argue about whose turd is floating weightlessly through the capsule.

(Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

There's not many times in my life I'll be able to reference Game of Thrones and Boyz II Men in the same sentence, but this is one: The GoT panel at Comic-Con opened with this fantastic "In Memoriam" video, paying tribute to every character that's died in the show so far, set to the dulcet tones of Boyz II Men.

Read more...

According to Entertainment Weekly, Mycroft Holmes (Mark Gatiss) will be making his way out of Sherlock‘s London and into Westeros for Game of Thrones Season 4!

I wonder if he’ll be in the Westerosi equivalent of  MI6…

Who is he playing? Will Benedict Cumberbatch be close behind? Questions answered under the cut!

The identity of Gatiss’ character is being kept under wraps by the production team. That means, however, that speculation has been flying! Which character is the popular choice for who Gatiss will play?

From Big Shiny Robot:

Gatiss’s role hasn’t been announced yet, but most sites already seem to be speculating that we’ve gotten our Mace Tyrell. Mace, without giving too much away, is father to Maergery and Loras and son to Lady Olenna. He’s also head of one of the only families in the realm that can give a Lannister a run for the money.

If Gatiss is indeed going to be our Mace Tyrell, I can’t wait to see how the next season plays out. He would be heavily involved in the court life with the rest of his family, and particularly watching him interact with Natalie Dormer‘s fantastic  Margaery Tyrell would be a treat.

Sadly, there is no evidence to suggest that any of the other Sherlock actors will be joining the HBO hit; though I would definitely watch an LOTR/Game of Thrones mashup with Martin Freeman as Bilbo going across the sea to Westeros. And Cumberbatch as Smaug, one of Dany’s dragons. Entirely unrealistic, maybe, but that would be awesome.

(via Big Shiny Robot and Entertainment Weekly)

Are you following The Mary Sue on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, & Google +?

[Internetwork Notes]

Community returnee Dan Harmon talked to Lacey Rose for a profile that covers the next Hollywood Reporter. Because Rose is both a great journalist and also plugged in to digital criticism of Harmon (which, given his large online presence, it would be hard not to be), the piece covers all his recent ups (getting rehired on the show he got fired from last year) and downs (saying very stupid things in public about...that. And other stuff). If you like him and the show, you'll probably find the profile very fair; if you are not such a fan of either, to the extent that you even listen to his girlfriend's podcast (hi), you'll still find lots of fodder to confirm your prejudices.

Read An Interview With Returning Community Creator Dan Harmon appeared first on Previously.TV

For a while now Neil Gaiman and Terry Gilliam have been teasing that there’s something secret in the works, a project that tangles the two of them together, somehow.

The widest, and nicest assumption, I think, was that they’re preparing for another attempt at filming Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s novel, Good Omens.

Seems to make sense, perhaps, as Gilliam had been attached to direct a Good Omens movie before, it just seems likely that he’d still want to try.

Even though, if we’re being suitably critical of the idea, there’s plenty of evidence that Good Omens has been moving ahead as a TV project with Monty Python‘s other Terry instead. Is there any room for Gilliam as well as Jones in that picture? Maybe, maybe not.

So, while it’s not impossible that Gaiman and Gilliam are working on getting Good Omens together, it’s certainly not the only explanation for their meetings.

Consider some circumstantial evidence from Gaiman’s twitter feed.

It is. RT @Starocotes: @neilhimself very interesting that Diane Nelson mentioned Sandman here: http://t.co/I042YpsYdA

— Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself) July 17, 2013

“Very interesting” because Gaiman sees this as a satisfying, attractive possibility? Or because it’s the first hint we have that maybe, sooner on later, DC Entertainment will be pushing into another Sandman adaptation?

Let’s also note that “Very interesting” wasn’t even in Gaiman’s own words.

Meanwhile, Gaiman has also shared word of an epic, stratospheric NDA being signed. Does that sound like a TV series of Good Omens? Maybe not…

Just signed a Non Disclosure Agreement on a plane in order to stop me talking about the cool thing I am going to do. Pretend I said nothing.

— Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself) July 17, 2013

I have another theory, which draws in a third of Gaiman’s tweet. Maybe it is Sandman, but maybe it’s not a TV series or a film…

I am now following @TheOddGentlemen. One day this may be important.

— Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself) July 17, 2013

The Odd Gentlemen are video game designers, so maybe there’s more info to come, and Gaiman’s secret pertains to something rather more interactive than normal.

Or, you know, perhaps there’s a lot going on in Gaiman’s world, as usual, and he has one project with Gilliam, one with The Odd Gentlemen, some other big gig that required an NDA, and is just excited that DC Entertainment consider The Sandman a hot property.

That’s probably real life, when we’re awake and we have our eyes open. Can you blame me for dreaming a little, though?

Will Neil Gaiman’s Sandman Finally Be Coming To Film Or TV? With Terry Gilliam? Or Is It All Just A Dream?

io9 just released a great article on how to spice up your Comic Con cosplay (so you won't be yet another Spider-Man or Slave Leia). While the article has some great advice on picking a good costume, I couldn't help but be overcome with joy by this photo, used as one of their examples, of the Dood, who appeared on the scene at the Galifrey One convention.

Link

Diane Nelson is the President of DC Comics, so outside of Warner Bros., she is the most influential person on the planet in terms of getting DC characters onto a movie screen. And her first choice? Neil Gaiman's Sandman.

Read more...

Neil Gaiman and JH William III‘s prelude series Sandman: The Overture is likely going to be a very big presence over the next few months, but one of the most exciting parts of their revival of Gaiman’s classic Vertigo series is that original cover artist Dave McKean will be returning for a new run.

True to form, McKean’s cover for issue #1 has just been released via Entertainment Weekly, and it’s an absolute belter. It’s been ten years since McKean’s touched the character, but clearly that hasn’t dulled his edge.

The miniseries starts up in October. As Gaiman notes in the EW piece:

There is something special about Dave McKean that makes it feel real. I get the same thrill I got 25 years ago seeing his covers…

Tolerating poor people has always been a challenge to more civilised, useful members of society.
Because of a historical legal statute, the poor, unemployed and homeless were not formally recognised as homo sapiens until 1971. Before then they were officially categorised as a class of 'fruit or vegetable' just below turnip, but slightly higher than melon. Technically, this meant that they could be traded, thrown at petty criminals and fed to pigs, though this rarely occurred.

The government always endeavoured to strike a balance between eliminating the poor (and thus the strain on society) and needing them to fulfill menial, demeaning jobs such as theology and cleaning. It was Dr. Max Gongfarmer, professor of Socially Debased Ethics, who had the idea of feeding secondhand food to the poor after reading an amateur historian's account of Marie-Antoinette's life. According to the typo-ridden book, she uttered "Let them eat cak."

Unsurprisingly, the poor, who have no sense of aesthetics or cleanliness, welcomed the idea and it thrived in 1970s Scarfolk, as can be seen from this newspaper advertisement for the COUP supermarket chain. 

The 500th episode of This American Life airs this weekend, and to celebrate, David Haglund picked 10 episodes you should listen to if you've never heard the show before.

Tags: David Haglund   lists   radio   This American Life

Patrick Ballesteros takes us back to the year 1983, when He-Man was still new, and imagines the various denizens of Eternia as third graders. Everyone say, "I have the power!"

Read more...

Dilbert readers - Please visit Dilbert.com to read this feature. Due to changes with our feeds, we are now making this RSS feed a link to Dilbert.com.

Lieutenant-General Sir Adrian Paul Ghislain Carton de Wiart VC, KBE, CB, CMG, DSO (5 May 1880 – 5 June 1963), was a British Army officer of Belgian and Irish descent. He served in the Boer War, First World War, and Second World War, was shot in the face, head, stomach, ankle, leg, hip, and ear, survived a plane crash, tunneled out of a POW camp, and bit off his own fingers when a doctor refused to amputate them. He later said, "Frankly I had enjoyed the war." - Wikipedia (Thanks, Matthew!)

The Sikorsky prize for human-powered helicopters has been claimed by a Kickstarter-funded startup called Aerovelo. Aerovelo's founders, Canadians Todd Reichert and Cameron Robertson, won the $250,000 purse for the 30-second flight of Atlas, a huge quadrotor with a bike in the middle whose flight is an absolute marvel to behold.

At that point, Reichert knew that the challenge was to keep supplying enough power through his legs to keep the craft from descending too quickly. On two previous flights in which he'd flirted with the three-meter mark, Reichert had descended too abruptly and fallen afoul of a phenomenon called vortex ring state, in which a helicopter essentially gets sucked down by its own downwash. Both times Atlas had been wrecked. This time, Reichert spent the balance of the flight easing the craft down gently to the ground. "You're so focused on having the body do a very precise thing," he told Pop Mech. "If you lay off the power even a little bit, or make any sharp control movement, you can crash."

Finally! A Human-Powered Helicopter Wins the $250,000 Sikorsky Prize [Jeff Wise/Popular Mechanics]

(via Kottke)

Don't give your smartphone to anyone that you don't trust with your money. Paul Stoute of Portland, Oregon found that out when his 2-year old daughter Sorella used the eBay app on his phone to purchase a 1962 Austin Healey Sprite:

“She decided to open the eBay app, and started clicking around and one thing led to another and we own a car,” he told KOIN 6 News, laughing.

Mom and Dad had an “initial panic,” he said. “‘What do we do? We can’t really afford it’ kind of thing.”

But they decided to keep it.

Link -via Jalopnik

(Photo: KOIN 6 News/Dean Barron)

Beatboxer extraordinaire Tom Thum performs at TEDxSydney. I'd love to see a duet of Thum and Michael Winslow of Police Academy fame, seen in the video below.