Entertainment/New Media

‘Weird Al’ Yankovic explains Antares’ Auto-Tune technology sensation

Know Your Meme | The Rocketboom Institute for Internet Studies examines the phenomenon of Auto-Tune with help from special guest Professor “Weird Al” Yankovic. [ For more info on this, visit the Meme Database ]

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The Undivided Mind virtual installation fuses the wonder of art and science

The Imaginary Foundation | A tour of the cosmos in bytes and atoms: the mysterious think tank and art apparel collective known as The Imaginary Foundation recently created an installation entitled The Undivided Mind, which merged the seemingly opposing worlds of art and science. The San Francisco gallery, covered wall to ceiling in scribbled chalkboard scientific [...]

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Who is John Galt?

Atlas Shrugged Part I, the movie, an adaptation of Ayn Rand’s 1957 objectivist novel Atlas Shrugged, tells the first installment in the story of a dystopian future in which a collectivist society has forced the great thinkers of the world to go on strike, leaving the functioning world without scientists, engineers, philosophers, or artists. Its [...]

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UPDATE | Kurzweil to ‘grind into smithereens’ Colbert’s understanding of world tonight, says Comedy Central

Tuesday night April 12, “Ray Kurzweil — inventor and subject of the documentary Transcendent Man — stops by to take everything that Stephen thinks he understands about the world and grind it into unrecognizable smithereens before his forlorn and tearful eyes,” Comedy Central’s Indecision reports. 11:00 p.m. EDT update: In related news, at #30, Kurzweil [...]

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Comedy Central The Colbert Report | Ray Kurzweil believes man and machine are becoming one

Comedy Central The Colbert Report | Ray Kurzweil predicts that people will merge with technology and become a billion times smarter by 2045. Kurzweil and Stephen Colbert discussed nanobots in the body (“Millions of tiny nanobots into our blood system — is there any way that couldn’t turn into a horror movie?” Colbert asked), uploading into [...]

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Film Preview | Source Code movie combines mind-uploading, parallel universes, time travel, simulated reality

In the science-fiction movie Source Code (April 1 release), a secret program called “Source Code” sends a pilot back in time to cross over into another man’s identity and relive the last eight minutes of the passenger’s life on a train. The mission: find a bomb that exploded on the train, killing everyone on board, [...]

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Film Review | Smart drug thriller is pretty smart

Limitless | Director: Neil Burger. Cast: Bradley Cooper, Robert De Niro, Abbie Cornish The moment I saw the film title — Limitless — I knew I was in for an oversimplified Hollywood-styled dramatization of transhuman themes, and set my expectations to a moderately amusing piece of crap. Surprise! This is a tightly constructed and reasonably clever [...]

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Films inspired by renowned sci-fi author Philip K. Dick

Philip K. Dick Films website | Since Ridley Scott turned Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? into the science fiction classic Blade Runner, eight of Philip K. Dick’s novels or short stories have made their way to the big screen. To date, these films have generated over $1 billion in world-wide box office and ancillary [...]

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Julia Map generates fractals with just a browser

Google Labs has launched Julia Map, a fractal renderer in HTML 5. which lets you generate and explore fractals — specifically, the Julia set and Mandelbrot set — with just a browser (no need to launch a program). It uses the Google Maps API to zoom and pan into the fractals. The images are computed [...]

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Activism in the age of viral reality

On the subject of Egypt’s and other countries’ protests, I’m currently doing anthropological research into social media and activism in Barcelona. I’m wondering whether we’re entering an era in which political reality is framed by re-sent SMS messages, retweets, YouTube videos, viral campaigns, and so on — an age of “viral reality.” Even those who [...]

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