The Algaeus (pictured at right) is said to be the world's first fuel-powered vehicle running on algae. The other notable components of the Algaeus are a nickel metal hydride battery and an electrical plug. There are no other modifications made to its gasoline engine. It's currently attempting to cross the United States from coast to coast... on just 25 gallons of fuel!Saturday, September 12, 2009
Algae-powered car attempting to cross America on 25 gallons of fuel
The Algaeus (pictured at right) is said to be the world's first fuel-powered vehicle running on algae. The other notable components of the Algaeus are a nickel metal hydride battery and an electrical plug. There are no other modifications made to its gasoline engine. It's currently attempting to cross the United States from coast to coast... on just 25 gallons of fuel!Friday, September 11, 2009
Scientists levitate mouse with magnets
Sounds like a Marvel Comic character in the making, doesn't it?
Scientists working for NASA have created a device which uses magnetic fields to levitate small animals (in this case, a three-week old mouse) in an effort to simulate and study various amounts of gravity.
The fourth PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN movie has a title...
Johnny Depp will set sail again as Captain Jack Sparrow - in my opinion the most delightfully original character of American cinema of at least the past decade - in Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. Production begins this coming spring with a release date of summer 2011.Read more here, mates!
Chris Knight's Somewhat Sacrilegious Theological Thought O' The Day! (patent pending)
Christian denominations are like all families: go back far enough in the history of each, and you'll find a relative who once wore a rope for a necktie.
Something I've never been able to come up with words for
I'll just let this image and the circumstance surrounding its existence speak for itself.
This is the opening shot of the third-from-last scene of Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones. This shot and the ensuing dialogue between Obi-Wan Kenobi, Mace Windu and Yoda are dominated by a brilliant and beautiful sunset, which poignantly echoes the darkness that is now falling across the galaxy...
According to the original online annotations for the Star Wars Episode II DVD on StarWars.com, the background plate in this scene was a photograph made of the Tokyo skyline at sunset.
And this is a photograph that was taken on September 11th, 2001.
If you figure the time zone difference, the dominant element of this pivotal scene in the Star Wars saga was taken from the real world, at about the very same moment that New York City was coming under attack thousands of miles away.
Then again, maybe I don't need to come up with words. Some things... just seem to speak plenty enough on their own.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Pigeons much faster than Internet in South Africa
Telkom is the largest provider of Internet service in the country of South Africa. You'd think that data delivery would be especially speedy over its network, right?Well, Unlimited IT wasn't satisfied. So on Wednesday it conducted an experiment: using an 11-month old carrier pigeon to send data from the company's office near Pietermaritzburg to the city of Durban, 50 miles away. A data card was strapped to the pigeon's leg and sent on its way. As Winston the pigeon was flying out the window, Unlimited IT began transmitting the same data via the Internet to the Durban location.
Winston the pigeon arrived 1 hour and 8 minutes later. The data was downloaded upon arrival. The complete transfer took 2 hours, 6 minutes and 57 seconds.
By that point, Telkom had only delivered four percent of the same data!
(I don't think my old 14.4 modem was that slow...)
Just the facts: Joe Friday and Bill Gannon lay it down for Obama
Apart from splicing-in the footage of President Barack Obama, this scene is exactly as it was when it first ran on Dragnet. Joe Friday and Bill Gannon (Jack Webb and Harry Morgan, respectively) give Obama the 411 on health care "reform" and socialism in general...
That has to be one of the better politically-oriented videos that I've ever seen on YouTube. Amazing how a scene from a television series more than forty years ago can be more relevant than ever.
Darn you Steve Jobs!
Catch me anywhere out and about, and chances are I've got my iPod classic hanging on my belt. It's the first iPod I've ever owned, the model that came out two years ago with the 80 gigabyte hard drive. And yesterday was the annual press event where Apple rolls out the newest iPod models. I was expecting to not update to anything new until sometime next year, when I figured that flash storage will finally catch up to the capacity I demand that's currently only on hard drive. And that might happen then, since the latest iPod touch now maxes out at 64 gigs of flash memory (I'd way love to see at least that much on an iPod classic design).Then I saw the 5th generation of iPod nano.
And I am now lusting for one terribly.
FM radio (with Live Pause - sorta like audio DVR - and iTunes Tagging). Built-in voice recording capability. And... a video camera with 376 x 240 resolution.
I could literally not run out of neat ideas to try with this gimmick. All of them legal, of course!
(I can see it now: some pervert using an iPod nano to discreetly "look up" the skirts of unsuspecting ladies. Or even more likely: a certain cult that this blog has been monitoring and chronicling for awhile now that is already ambushing and hurting innocent people with hidden video cameras.)
The 16 GB iPod nano is going for only $179. Not a bad deal at all! So I'll probably be heading to that new Apple Store in Greensboro sometime soon: second visit ever, but first with a purchase in mind.
Darn you Steve Jobs!! I was going to wait until next year to get a new iPod! And you had to make go and make it too better already! :-)
A more realistic political spectrum
One of the people that in the long run has most influenced and impacted my political beliefs is, without a doubt, Matt Mittan: host of the extremely popular show Take A Stand! on the radio and streaming on the Internet every Monday through Friday from 3 to 6 p.m. I count myself as a very fortunate person for getting to work under Matt when he was the editor of The Asheville Tribune. And I'll never forget the first time I came into his office and he showed me what his weekly newsmagazine was all about...
"Most people think of the political spectrum like this," he said, drawing a horizontal line on a dry erase board and labeling the ends "liberal" and "conservative". "But that's wrong," Matt went on. "It's really like this!" And he then drew another line: this one going up and down, with the state/government at the top and the individual at the bottom.
"It's really about the state having the power versus the one person having the power." And Matt continued to talk about how at one far end there is totalitarianism and fascism, and at the other wild extreme there is total anarchy.
And that's when I realized, for the very first time in my life, that the whole "conservative and liberal" thing is a con job. It's a fraud, that regardless of which "party" is in control of Washington or the states its only real purpose is to give more and more power to government. I don't want a totalitarian state and neither do I desire a completely lawless land. But in between, Matt suggested, there can indeed be a "happy medium" that upholds personal liberty while avoiding reckless abandon.
That's never going to be a cut-and-dried thing. But ever since then I have come to still believe in it enough to pursue it, with whatever talents and devices I might ever have on hand. Matt opened my eyes wider than he ever knew that day, and I've been praying since that others might come to realize it as well on their own.
Maybe that's starting to finally happen. David G. Muller Jr. has written an article for American Thinker called Rethinking the Political Spectrum, in which he also argues that the traditional "conservative versus liberal" paradigm is outdated and horribly flawed. And while he doesn't abandon the "left/right" model, Muller's model is quite similar to what Matt Mittan showed me in 2000...
Personally, I think this is a much greater and more accurate take on modern politics. It squarely places both liberalism and conservatism as less free mindsets than libertarianism: a school of thought which is enjoying considerable growth even if the party bearing its name has not of late. However, I would extend this range a bit further to the right and put "anarchy" on that fringe. In my mind, that is the ideal: personal liberty that stops short of all-out chaos. "Voluntary order", as V puts it in the graphic novel V for Vendetta.
Regardless of minor details, this is still a much better portrait of political reality than is the tired and obsolete version that most of our politicians and media and too many businesses (and more than a few religious folks) expect us to buy into.
But then: most of them have a vested interest in keeping the status quo going, aye?
Motivation: A requisite for useful artificial intelligence?
Edward Boyden has a fascinating essay at MIT's Technology Review website in which he describes a problem that could possibly arise from super-smart artificial intelligence. The problem, Boyden notes, is motivation: even with all of that intelligence and computational, how does a possibly sentient computer become moved to utilize that power?
Indeed, a really advanced intelligence, improperly motivated, might realize the impermanence of all things, calculate that the sun will burn out in a few billion years, and decide to play video games for the remainder of its existence, concluding that inventing an even smarter machine is pointless. (A corollary of this thinking might explain why we haven't found extraterrestrial life yet: intelligences on the cusp of achieving interstellar travel might be prone to thinking that with the galaxies boiling away in just 1019 years, it might be better just to stay home and watch TV.) Thus, if one is trying to build an intelligent machine capable of devising more intelligent machines, it is important to find a way to build in not only motivation, but motivation amplification--the continued desire to build in self-sustaining motivation, as intelligence amplifies. If such motivation is to be possessed by future generations of intelligence--meta-motivation, as it were--then it's important to discover these principles now.A second possibility that Boyden theorizes is that a strong AI might simply become overwhelmed by its own decision-making process and become locked-up from contemplating factors and uncertainties (which sounds a lot like the "rampancy" that eventually afflicts AIs in the Halo franchise).
It's a very deep and most intriguing read about what may or may not be waiting for us around the corner from the realm of computers and neuroscience. Click here and partake of the article... if you think your brains can handle it :-)
Wednesday, September 09, 2009
Quinton "Rampage" Jackson will be B.A. Baracus in THE A-TEAM movie
For as long as there's been talk of a big-budget movie adaptation of The A-Team, there has been just as much if not more speculation about who it will be taking on the iconic role of B.A. Baracus: the character that shot Mr. T to worldwide fame and acclaim.
And now we know...
Former UFC light heavyweight champion Quinton "Rampage" Jackson will don the mohawk and gold chains and become B.A. Baracus in the film based on the Eighties television action/drama/comedy series. Jackson joins Liam Neeson (playing "Hannibal" Smith) and Bradley Cooper (as "Faceman" Peck). Casting is still being done for Murdoch.
Okay, so... what do y'all think? Jackson looks like he might could carry it. But this is one role that calls for attitude. As in BAD ATTITUDE!
THE BEATLES: ROCK BAND launches today
Today finally sees the release of the much-anticipated The Beatles: Rock Band from Harmonix and MTV Games. The latest installment in the popular Rock Band music game series lets you and up to three friends re-live the career of the Fab Four from Liverpool right in your living room!I don't have the game yet (it's available for all three major consoles) although I am looking forward to getting it at some point. However, for those of you who have bought it already, I've been wondering about something ever since this game was first announced...
Does The Beatles: Rock Band let you play the "John has a girlfriend" concert? Does a digital avatar of Yoko appear onscreen and break up the band all over again? Will your game data get erased when the Beatles go their separate ways?
(Probably not, but that would be so funny if it did :-)
Study finds men lose minds around beautiful women
Maybe this should be filed in D for "Duh!": a new scientific study has confirmed that the mental capabilities of men drop precipitously in the presence of a pretty woman.
The research shows men who spend even a few minutes in the company of an attractive woman perform less well in tests designed to measure brain function than those who chat to someone they do not find attractive.I think there might be something to this. F'rinstance, if I were to post a photo of Rita Hayworth...Researchers who carried out the study, published in the Journal of Experimental and Social Psychology, think the reason may be that men use up so much of their brain function or 'cognitive resources' trying to impress beautiful women, they have little left for other tasks.
The findings have implications for the performance of men who flirt with women in the workplace, or even exam results in mixed-sex schools.
Women, however, were not affected by chatting to a handsome man.
This may be simply because men are programmed by evolution to think more about mating opportunities.
...then the odds are high that useful work among most males looking at this blog at this moment would probably drop by 50% if not more :-P
It's the trailer for the remake of PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE
It was inevitable: a remake of Ed Wood's masterpiece Plan 9 from Outer Space. Here's the just-released trailer for Plan 9...
Tuesday, September 08, 2009
The United States Federal Government: Worse than useless
In this afternoon's mail I received some correspondence from the federal government. It was a follow-up to something I had mailed to it previously.
Said original mailing being early last November.
It's early September now. Ten months.
And we're supposed to believe this same bunch of bureaucrats should be trusted to run our health care?
Feh!
Crooks clean out Apple Store... in 31 seconds!
Last Wednesday the Apple Store in Marlton, New Jersey was heisted by five men who shattered the plate glass windows at 2:05 in the morning and proceeded to rob the place. The truly astonishing thing is how fast they did it: they ran off with all the iPods, iPhones and MacBooks in 31 seconds.
Here's the surveillance footage. It's like Ocean's 11 with a NASCAR pit crew...
Monday, September 07, 2009
"Jerry Lewis as a clown in a Nazi concentration camp!"
Ahhh, Labor Day. The holiday consecrated to the common working stiff. The traditional end of another summer. The start of the final stretch of the year. And as most people know it's also the occasion of the annual Jerry Lewis Labor Day Telethon for the Muscular Dystrophy Association.
Two things I'm compelled to say from the getgo: first, Jerry Lewis is one of the all-time greatest performers of stage and screen. And second, the Muscular Dystrophy Association is one of the finest charitable groups in the land. All of the money that's raised locally remains local and helps people in your own area. MDA has some of the least overhead of any organization of its kind. I've had a number of friends over the years that MDA has been there for, and has allowed them to know opportunities that they otherwise might never have enjoyed. So if you've some coin to spare, I'd like to urge y'all to donate to the Muscular Dystrophy Association.
Okay well with that said, let me take advantage of this Labor Day to enlighten you, Dear Reader, of an aspect of Jerry Lewis' career that you might have never known... until now. Because for good or ill that's the sort of thing we do here at The Knight Shift.
I had thought myself fairly well educated on the subject of the Holocaust in cinema. And my breadth of knowledge has not only covered Schindler's List, Europa Europa and the like but also the very real propaganda films of the Nazi government. I have seen Triumph of the Will. And I have also seen Jud Süß ("Jew Suss"): one of the most evil things ever committed to film. Along with very nearly every other movie and documentary pertaining to the Holocaust.
But it wasn't until about two and a half years ago that I first heard about The Day the Clown Cried.
It is a film that you have never seen and probably never will (unless you happen to be Jerry Lewis himself or one of those among his closest circle of friends and associates). The past few years has brought word that legendary "lost" movies like London After Midnight and the original cut of Metropolis may have been re-discovered and could soon see the flicker of light once again.
But that is not likely to be the fate of The Day the Clown Cried. Produced in 1972 and since mired in international litigation regarding ownership issues, it will perhaps forevermore remain the most legendary movie never seen by a public audience.
Maybe it's for the best. I'll let you be the judge. So what's The Day the Clown Cried a movie about?
It's the synopsis that I'll never forget as long as I live: "Jerry Lewis as a clown in a Nazi concentration camp!"
(Feel free to clean the coffee or Coca-Cola or tea from your screen after reading that.)
The Day the Clown Cried is about a washed-up circus clown named Helmut Dork (I swear, this is not a joke people) living in Germany at the height of the Nazi regime. One night while drunk in a bar he begins railing aloud against Hitler and the Nazis, and Dork is promptly arrested by the Gestapo. Poor Dork spends the next few years languishing in a camp for political prisoners, until he winds up making some Jewish children laugh with his antics. The prison commandant eventually puts Dork to work loading children onto train cars headed out of the camp. And then one day Dork accidentally gets locked inside one such car headed to Auschwitz. Upon his arrival Dork is employed by the Nazis as a "Judas goat"/"Pied Piper": entertaining the Jewish children even as he leads them straight into the gas chamber. At the end of the movie, overwhelmed with guilt and grief, Dork accompanies a group of children into the chamber and does his best to make them laugh. Their final moments are as happy as could be expected, before the Zyklon B lulls them into quiet death.
(Again, I swear, I am not making any of this up.)
This was supposed to have been Lewis' first "serious" movie. The script was first written by Joan O'Brien and Charles Denton in the early 1960s. Lewis was approached with the project and initially turned it down, believing it was beyond his abilities: "My bag is comedy... and you're asking me if I'm prepared to deliver helpless kids into a gas chamber? Ho-ho. Some laugh... how do I pull it off?"
In the end Lewis fully committed himself to the production, winding up not only portraying Helmut Dork (as Jerry Lew-ish a character name as there's ever been) but also directing the film and co-writing the script. And then just before filming wrapped the money ran out and a very vicious fight over ownership arose (turns out that Lewis hadn't fully secured the rights to produce The Day the Clown Cried in the first place). And so it is that the movie has been tied in up legal limbo for almost forty years.
As for how good a movie The Day the Clown Cried is supposed to be, there is obviously little to go on since so few have seen it. One of them is Lewis' friend and fellow comedian Harry Shearer, who watched a cut of it in 1979. As Shearer put it...
"With most of these kinds of things, you find that the anticipation, or the concept, is better than the thing itself. But seeing this film was really awe-inspiring, in that you are rarely in the presence of a perfect object. This was a perfect object. This movie is so drastically wrong, its pathos and its comedy are so wildly misplaced, that you could not, in your fantasy of what it might be like, improve on what it really is. "Oh My God!" — that's all you can say."But of course, as with such things, there is no dearth of information to be found about it on the Internet. So if you are interested in learning more about The Day the Clown Cried I would recommend checking out Subterranean Cinema's VERY thorough collection of resources about the film (including an exhaustively researched article from Spy Magazine in 1992), as well as FilmBuffOnline's review of the script (which can be found quite easily across the Intertubes).
Personally, having read the script: I don't see how The Day the Clown Cried would have been anything but a box office calamity. The screenplay is a very tired and tedious read, and the best editing isn't apt to salvage an outstanding product from the material. It's all just... irredeemably... wrong.
But in spite of how taken aback and even a bit horrified I was after reading this, I do also believe that there might be a unique place for The Day the Clown Cried in the chronicles of cinema. Having been produced barely a quarter-century after the Holocaust, it's very obvious from the script that the arts and entertainment industry was still struggling to understand how to approach this most delicate of subjects. It would be several more years - many would say that 1978's television miniseries Holocaust began the trend - before Hollywood would start to fully grasp with sensitivity the scope of the Shoah.
All films should be judged according to the period in which they were produced. So it is that for all the problems apparent with it, The Day the Clown Cried... regardless of lack of release... deserves to endure as a noteworthy entry in Holocaust literature and cinema. As much as for how not to make such a film as it is a benchmark of artistic courage to have even considered producing it at all.
