Open Road Films was originally aiming for an April 19th release date, but decided to delay the release somewhat due to the fact they weren't able to generate a lot of "buzz" about the movie. Now the production company has two months to turn on the hype machine, get a media campaign up and running and try to get you to reach for a wallet (virtual or not) and buy a ticket.
Jobs is the first real biopic based on the life and times of the former Apple CEO. Funny or Die's iStevewas apparently quite awful and was also attempting to be a comedy, so it's not being counted as a serious movie. Another biopic based on Walter Isaacson's biography Steve Jobs is apparently in the works, but isn't expected for at least another year or two.
AMD introduces today its FX-9000 Series, a family of eight-core processors that are said to be the first in the world to have a clock speed of up to 5GHz. [Read more]
Obama Is Checking Your Email posts photographs from the White House Flickr feed that show the president peering at a computer or smartphone. While the POTUS probably isn't laughing at your Hotmail account alongside Joe Biden, the reframing of context works perfectly
Note: PRISM reportedly only targets "non-citizens" that are "reasonably believed to be outside the country." So you're safe, Joe American. Read more...
Anna Christine's cover of "House of the Rising Sun" is so incredibly soulful and spot-on that it makes you wonder whether she's really only 10 years old
The young girl wowed the America's Got Talent judges and audience on Tuesday night. She's clearly very nervous before taking the stage, making matters even sweeter. But once she gets behind the piano and starts singing, it's all shock and awe
The amazing YouTube video above has been getting shared all around the social web on Wednesday. Check it out for yourself and let us in the comments if you were blown away, too Read more...
Josh Kiepert’s beowulf cluster of 33 overclocked Raspberry Pi boards is powered by a custom PCB that sends fused 5V to the boards while providing a little RGB LED action. And check out the crispy rack design! [via Embedded Projects] Filed under: Computers & Mobile, Raspberry Pi
Will Ferrell and Adam McKay are living in the past. The modern TV “event series” has its roots in, well, Roots, and other mini-series adaptations of popular epic fiction. The late ’70s and early ’80s saw a rash of highly-touted adaptations of historical novels and family sagas, with the runaway success of Roots followed by Jesus of Nazareth, Shogun, The Thorn Birds, The Winds of War, and many more.
The basic format has changed little today — you’ll still see mini-series novel adaptations with a high-profile cast and a budget that outstrips some television. but there’s a way of advertising these events that has changed a little bit.
For their IFC mini-series The Spoils of Babylon, Ferrell and McKay are taking aim at those TV events, and they’ve appropriated the old ’80s ad style to go along with it. Or a comic version of it, at least. I don’t know if this will work on people under 30, but anyone who was watching TV in the late ’70s and early ’80s will chuckle at this spot. (The series features Ferrell, Kristin Wiig, Tobey Maguire, Jessica Alba, Michael Sheen, Val Kilmer, Tim Robbins and Haley Joel Osment, but none of them show up in this teaser, just warning.)
Former SNL writer and Casa de mi Padre director Matt Piedmont directs the series. Will it end up better than that film did, or will this be a long in-joke aimed squarely at this comedy collective’s most ardent fans?
Here’s a synopsis of the series, which shoots later this year and premieres next year:
‘The Spoils of Babylon,’ a century-spanning saga, chronicles the sexy and dramatic lives of the Morehouse family, led by Jonas Morehouse (Robbins), his daughter Cynthia (Wiig) and her adopted brother Devon (Maguire) who made their fortune in the oil business. The series takes viewers from the oil fields of Texas to boardrooms in New York City, through war torn battlefields and velvet-sheeted bedrooms.
Cynthia and Devon’s unbridled and taboo passion for one another cannot be prevented. Add in Cynthia’s evil son Winston (Osment), her put upon husband Chet Halner (Sheen), and Devon’s new love interest Dixie Mellonworth (Alba), and the booze, the pills, more passion, more pills and the heartache, and you have a mercurial potboiler. Then add in illegal arms deals, international espionage, the Shah of Iran (Ferrell), and two US Army Generals (Kilmer, Steve Tom) and it begins to overflow with boiling liquid in a pot on a hot stove that is operational.
Anatarctica is frigid, self-consciously cloaked in a sheet of ice that's miles thick. But underneath, there's a wonderland of bedrock human eyes have never laid eyes on, and this is what it looks like.
This new map, named Bedmap2, was generated by the British Antarctic Survey from millions upon millions of measurements taken on the surface of those icey flows and from orbit alike, showing the age-old depths that lie below in greater detail than ever. NASA even has a little widget lets you slide between the new high-res Bedmap2 and its lower-res predecessor as well as strip and reclothe Antarctica.
Aside from being cool (haHA), this information has some practical value by helping to explain why the mammoth polar glaciers melt and flow they way they do, and exactly how they might drown us all if we don't shape up on the whole global-warming front. It's definitely neat to see, but we'll all be better off if that ice just stays intact. [NASAexplorer via Wired]
if i had a bluray, or even dvds i'd be all over this
Amazon’s Gold Box deal of the day today is The Mel Brooks Collection on Blu-ray for $23.99 with free shipping. The set includes: Blazing Saddles, Spaceballs, Young Frankenstein, High Anxiety, History Of The World Part 1, Robin Hood Men In Tights, Silent Movie, To Be Or Not To Be, and Twelve Chairs. Amazon is also offering Up to 66% Off other Mel Brooks Collections. Act fast as the price will be gone at midnight tonight!
There's something uncanny about drones, those autonomous airplanes that kill insurgents and civilians—but mostly civilians—and anger the pants off of many liberty-loving Americans. But drones aren't all bad. Outside of warzones, drones have been helping everyone from farmers to journalists and now they're helping doctors too.
Imagine using a brain-to-computer interface that enables people to control the drones with their minds. You'd not only have an amazing cocktail party trick but also a slew of new knowledge about how the brain works. A team of well meaning researchers from the University of Minnesota are doing just that. They strapped noninvasive scalp electroencephalogram (EEG) devices onto some grad students and trained them to fly a quadcopter through very whimsical-looking obstacle course. Essentially, the electricity flowing through the pilot's brain, controlled the quadcopter.
The mechanics of the setup are pretty darn futuristic. Like other devices that serve as brain-to-computer interfaces, the hood used by the researchers puts sensors on the subject's scalp that detect the brain's electrical signals. Kelsey D. Atherton at Popular Science explains, "Clusters of activity, like thinking about making a fist with a right hand, generates a spark in a specific area of the brain." Sounds like something out of Tron right? "That spark gets translated through a computer into a quadrotor command ('turn right'). The command is then beamed to the quadrotor via WiFi." The computer that linked the brain to the quadcopter also used a special algorithm to keep the drone steady in the event of a weak signal. It took a little bit of training, but all five subjects completed the task with 90 percent accuracy.
Despite the fear and disdain the word "drone" stirs up, the end goal of this project is undeniably noble. Rather than designing war machines, they hope to build tools for the disabled with this kind of technology. The Minnesota team is just a small part of a much larger effort to create mind-controlled machines that can do anything from help paralyzed people walk to enabling blind people to see. Believe it or not, DARPA and the Pentagon are largely leading the effort by funding countless research projects. Perhaps as a result of the increased government funding, the last year or so of research feels like a watershed moment, too, as great ideas start to become real-life experiments and even real-life tools.
The drone experiment is specifically interesting because it's three-dimensional. Most past experiments operate in two-dimensions, asking subjects to move a cursor or play a simple game on a screen, for instance. That third dimension changes everything because, well, the world is three dimensional and any cyborg-like devices invented would need to operate as such. The particular challenge of flying a quadcopter also require a bit more rigor, since you're not just moving something along a flat plane but rather up-down-forward-back-side-to-side.
Next, the team from the University of Minnesota will start working on a robotic arm that operates in three-dimensions. Meanwhile, the burgeoning group of drone hobbyists will surely be scrambling to get their hands on a mind-controlled drone. The military probably already has them, too, but it's safe to assume that not all of these robots are being sent to Afghanistan. Bear in mind that DARPA is a major funder of innovative research, some of which goes to war and some of which goes to progress. They did sort of invent the Internet, after all.
If you don't actually think you need professional help you can just test yourself for fun on the Web. You don't even need to visit a serious website to gain an informal assessment of your health, with YouTube videos offering a fun and innovative way of testing various states of being.
That Marvel Studios and director James Gunn are collecting quite a cast for Guardians of the Galaxy is clear. But exactly which roles these stars will play has been a bit tougher to suss out.
When Benicio Del Toro was announced for a “lead role” earlier this week, we didn’t even know whether he’d play a hero or a villain. However, one site is now claiming to have confirmed information on Del Toro’s character. And since the actor is signed to appear in multiple Marvel movies, it could have interesting repercussions for the Cinematic Universe as a whole. Hit the jump to find out who he is.
According to a “very reliable source” who spoke with Comic Book Movie, Del Toro will be playing the part of Taneleer Tivan a.k.a. The Collector. The character has been rumored to be making an appearance for some time; initial reports of Ophelia Lovibond‘s casting indicated that she’d play his aide.
In the comics, The Collector is one of the Elders of the Universe. After his daughter leaves and his wife dies, he realizes he needs to find a will to live lest he pass away as well. He has a vision of a powerful being annihilating the universe, and subsequently makes it his vision to collect living beings and artifacts from all over the universe so that he can repopulate the universe after its destruction.
The Collector’s storyline connects him to Thanos, whom we first glimpsed at the end of The Avengers. Joss Whedon and Kevin Feige have previously hinted that Thanos could be the Big Bad of Phase Three, so The Collector could conceivably fit into that larger plot arc. For now, though, we know only that Del Toro’s character is “built to be part of future Marvel films.”
Aside from Del Toro, Guardians of the Galaxy will also feature Lee Pace, Karen Gillan, and Michael Rooker as villains and Glenn Close and John C. Reilly as leaders of the intergalactic space patrol group Nova Corp. Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, and Dave Bautista will play heroes Star-Lord, Gamora, and Drax the Destroyer, respectively. Guardians of the Galaxy opens August 1, 2014.
NASA is determined to bring the final frontier closer than ever -- or at least a small, photographic slice of it. Using NASA's Swift satellite, astrophysicists at Goddard Space Flight Center and Pennsylvania State University were able to create a stunningly detailed survey of the two galaxies closest to us: the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds. The 160-megapixel image was painstakingly stitched together using thousands of smaller photographs captured with Swift's Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope. Rendering the galaxies in UV wavelengths allows researchers to study details unseen in visible light images, like individual stars surrounding the Tarantula Nebula in the LMC (the large pink cluster in the photo above). This high-res mosaic provides ample opportunity to study the life cycles of stars, from birth to death, in detail astrophysicists could previously only dream about. Fancy a tour? Check out the video after the break -- or journey on past the source link to download the 457MB TIFF.
AMD is blurring the lines between PC and consoles.
