When I read this article earlier that Victor posted about how the internet is going to slow to a dead crawl, I didn’t think it was going to happen tonight!
Month: November 2007
Brave new world:
- “U.S. discount retailer Target Corp, known for its innovative marketing, is staging a “model-less” fashion show in Manhattan next week that will feature holograms strutting down a runway in its merchandise instead of size-zero models.” [link | via]
- “New technology that can make tanks invisible has been unveiled by the Ministry of Defence.” [link | via]
- “No agency admits to having deployed insect-size spy drones. But a number of U.S. government and private entities acknowledge they are trying. Some federally funded teams are even growing live insects with computer chips in them, with the goal of mounting spyware on their bodies and controlling their flight muscles remotely.” [link | via]
- “Under the cloud cast by Steve Fossett’s apparent accident, Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic moves forward with the ambitious Spaceport America in the New Mexico desert.” [link | via]
- “Genetically modified plants that can break down pollutants may be an effective way to clean soil contaminated by industrial chemicals and explosives used by the military, according to scientists.” link | via]
- “The biggest retailer in the world covers an area larger than Manhattan.” [link | via]
- “University of Minnesota astronomers have found an enormous hole in the Universe, nearly a billion light-years across, empty of both normal matter such as stars, galaxies and gas, as well as the mysterious, unseen “dark matter.†While earlier studies have shown holes, or voids, in the large-scale structure of the Universe, this new discovery dwarfs them all.” [link | via]
You know, Dan Hopper isn’t wrong: this does sound like every Kitchen Nightmares episode. Yet I still sort of like it.
Hmm, obviously a mistake but still sort of amusing: on the IMDB page for Beowulf, Ray Winstone is listed as “Drunken Thane,” not the title character. Apparently nobody was Beowulf.
As to the movie itself…eh, it was okay. I saw it in IMAX, which is unusual for me, and I don’t know if that’s part of why I feel oddly disconnected from what I saw. I didn’t dislike the movie, but I can’t help thinking that maybe Tasha Robinson is right that the animation, the decision to make this an animated movie, is the heart of what’s wrong with it.
You know, I love me some Sarah Michelle Gellar without her shirt on as much as the next guy — or with it on — but naming her Woman of the Year does seem a little shaky, even by Maxim’s standards.