November 2011
SmartPhone Feature Film Aims for a First -...
Behind the scenes clip of “Olive” - First feature length phone-only film aiming for theatrical release (via mag.ma)
“Olive” is a feature-length film shot totally on a smartphone and its creators want to see it in theaters this year (check their Kickstarter campaign launched today). They’d probably like it if you went to see it too. Oh, and they plan to submit...
Mischief. Mayhem. Printers.
Could a hacker half-way around the world turn your printer into a fire-bomb, giving it instructions so frantic that it could eventually catch ablaze? Or perhaps use a hijacked printer as a “criminal copy machine” making identity theft super-easy? Possible?? Try probable, or even likely!
Geeks at Columbia University have chanced upon a new class of major computer security flaws that...
Find People Nearby To Deal with Your Problems, IRL
Even Slackers are feeling the pinch of unemployment these days, a shaky national economic recovery, partisan politi-fighting, and the impending now here holiday spending season. Luckily, a few web sites are filling a niche and streamlining the path to put Americans back to part time work.
While Amazon’s Mechanical Turk has been around for Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs), it’s...
Rocketboom Exclusive: Q&A With Emma Sullivan
Tweet-star of the moment and political sniper Emma Sullivan, the young woman who’s tweet heard ‘round the nation enraged the Governor of Kansas last week, shared some words with the Rocketboom blog-team yesterday on her views on youth in politics, her recent involvement in apology-gate, and answers the eternal question - werewolves or vampires? Here’s what was said:
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She Says He Blows -- Sassy Teen Tweeter Won't...
Emma Sullivan, 19 of Kansas City, was participating in a Youth Government program last week when she let her thumbs do the talking, tweeting this message about Kansas Governor Sam Brownback. “Just made mean comments at gov. brownback and told him he sucked, in person #heblowsalot.” (She actually made no such comment to the governor and tweeted the message as a joke to a few dozen...
OMFG!!! Insidious Underwater Killer Caught on...
Has anybody ever told you everything you touch turns to shit? That may be true, but you should still consider yourself lucky. If you were a brinicle everything you touched… would die.
The brinicle, or should we say “ice finger of death,” is an ice stalactite, i.e. a really mean column of ice. Ingredients: (a) very calm seas, (b) cold enough waters for sea-ice, (c) just the...
Facebook Study, Further: Bacon and Other Numbers
Now let’s run down some of the more interesting numbers from the Facebook/Università degli Studi di Milano studies:
Active Global Users: 10% (of everyone on earth!)
Total Friendships Created: 69 billion, or about 10 friendships for every human being on Earth. Friends for everyone!
Median Friend Count: 100. Seems skewed pretty low? It’s a classic paradox regarding social networks...
Facebook: Bringing People Closer Together. No...
Back in the 1960’s Stanley Milgram’s “small world experiment” pretty much confirmed the notion of social proximity then described as “6 degrees of separation.” Fast-forward 50 years, and Facebook is helping to change all that. Yesterday, in “the largest social network studies ever released,” Facebook and the Laboratory for Web Algorithmics at the...
Nor-Cal Cops, WTF?!?!
Oakland and its police force may not have the best reputations, but lately Oak-town and surrounding areas in Northern California have become flashpoints of police/protester violence and a rallying points for the Occupy Movement. Here are just four examples below:
October 25, 2011 - Occupy Oakland: Scott Olsen, Marine Vet, suffers critical brain injury from projectile during riot police action.
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If You Think A Face Full of Pepper Spray is Bad,...
UC Davis swears their protests aren’t part of the broader Occupy Wall Street movement (choosing the narrower issue of tuition hikes instead), but that didn’t stop the University Police from brutalizing them just the same.
The Blowback: After Friday’s incident, two campus police officers have been placed on administrative leave, including the Chief of Campus Police, Annette...
UC Davis Spawns A New Protest Meme
Last Friday video and photo evidence captured University of California, Davis Police Lt. John Pike using pepper spray at point blank range to remove UC Davis student protesters sitting peacefully, occupying the quad. The story blew up over the weekend: “UC Davis Pepper Spray” was the #2 “hottest” topic on Google Trends’ Hot Searches on Saturday, an eye-witness video...
Invisibility Cloaking Tech Gets Sneaky
University of Texas Dallas researchers have developed a breakthrough in invisible technology providing a mirage-like effect to trick your brain into not seeing what’s in front of you. Sheets of carbon nanotubes, which have the density of air, but the strength of steel, are the material that provide the desired light-and-mind-bending effect.
Mirages occur when a big change in temperature...
Lean, Mean & Green: Facebook Strikes "Gold" With...
Last spring Facebook unveiled a new “green” data center in Prineville, Oregon and yesterday the U.S. Green Building Council showed Zuck and crew some enviro-friendly love by granting the Prinveville data center LEED Gold certification.
Gold is the second-highest LEED certification attainable, while platinum is the highest. Only GE and Vantage data centers have reached LEED platinum...
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So what if China blocks U.S. based social media...
Launched in 2009 by Sina Corp, Weibo is China’s most popular micro-blogging platform, with over 250 million users (that’s a cool 50 million more users than Twitter claimed as of May 2011). The Twitter-like service, allowing users to blog 140 character tweet-length posts and gather followers, is steadily gaining influence in China, and, perhaps paradoxically, abroad. As China...
11.11.11 - What Does It All Mean?
Holiday: Veterans Day - the United States’ annual federally recognized holiday honoring our military veterans. Since it’s federally recognized, you’d think everyone would have today day off, right? Not so. According to a Society for Human Resource Management poll conducted in 2010, only 21% of employers planned to observe the holiday in 2011… Oh well. WE ARE THE 79%!!!!
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BLOOD RICE: CHINESE MUTANT HUMAN-RICE HYBRID MAY...
Researchers at China’s Wuhan University have successfully spliced human genes into rice plants. No, this is not some neo-communist plot conceived to create a 21st century “red army” of genetically superior mutant rice-soldiers intent on securing China’s world-dominance. China is well on its way without a mutant army. Instead these genetically modified grains are designed...
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SPACE INVADER: Is Earth Cheating on the Moon with...
On Nov. 8, 6:28 p.m. EST a huge asteroid will pass within 201,000 miles of Earth. Ummm… that’s closer than the moon. The 1,312-foot object dubbed 2005 YU55 will be visible from the northern hemisphere, although it will be too dim and far away to see with your inferior naked eyes without a pretty good telescope.
Though 2005 YU55 will temporarily displace the moon as our nearest...
Even Apes Love TV!
We’ve been noticing a small flurry of chatter across the web about apes watching TV. Real life imitates art while imitating sci-fi movies, oh my!
Los Angeles based Rachel Mayeri is taking this concept to the next level by creating films specifically designed to appeal to the tastemaker apes in question. Her Primate Cinema is a two video installation at the Edinburgh Zoo: one video designed to...
Wikileaks Suspends Operations, Squeezed Out By...
Supporters of Wikileaks have found it difficult to donate to the site due primarily to Visa, MasterCard, Paypal and Western Union refusing to do business. Julian Assange claims he lost over 95% of destined revenue and must now suspend operations.
Friend or foe, it’s kinda scary that just a few corporate companies can take it upon themselves to determine what is right or wrong. It seems as...
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Time Flies When You're Playing Angry Birds: Angry...
We’re constantly asking “where does all the time go?” Earlier this week the world gained some insight into answering this chronological quandary. With Angry Birds surpassing the 500,000,000th (that’s like… half a BILLION, bro) download benchmark, it’s apparent that a significant chunk of collective man, woman, and child hours are dedicated to the high-flying...
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Sneaky Sneaky Spotify
If you’re a music fan with internet access and you haven’t heard about Spotify yet, you’re probably living under a rock and probably not reading this post. It’s certainly convenient for listening to any and every album you forgot in high school during the work day, but does this newfound music miracle really know anything about music fans?
Take for instance its ads that interrupt free streaming...
The Hobbit Blog
The Hobbit Blog is a neat way to follow the behind-the-scenes production happening as Peter Jackson undertakes yet another epic movie. The technique of using a videoblog to show behind the scenes action was also used a few years back by Jackson when producing Superman
Check out this video, Production Video #4, which gets into some of the technical aspects of how they are doing 3D:
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