From the “Hey-This-Is-Pretty-Gross” Department:

“Doc­tors at Chimkent Children’s Hos­pi­tal in Kaza­khstan orig­i­nally believed Mourat Zhanaidarov was suf­fer­ing from a cyst.

But dur­ing surgery, they dis­cov­ered he was in fact car­ry­ing the dead foe­tus of his twin brother.

The foe­tus* had devel­oped into a tumour but was found to have hair, nails and bones.”

*Make note of the word foe­tus as it’s appar­ently spelled this way in Europe.

Read this absolutely dis­gust­ing, yet inter­est­ing arti­cle here. 

Some fish­er­men out there will catch a fish and non­cha­lantly toss it back into the stream mut­ter­ing to one­self, “Eh, it doesn’t feel anything.”

“Anglers take note ? British sci­en­tists say that after years of debate, they now have proof that fish feel pain.” (MSNBC.COM)

Read the arti­cle here. 

Accord­ing to the MIT Kismet project site, “Kismet is an expres­sive robotic crea­ture with per­cep­tual and motor modal­i­ties tai­lored to nat­ural human com­mu­ni­ca­tion chan­nels. To facil­i­tate a nat­ural infant-caretaker inter­ac­tion, the robot is equipped with visual, audi­tory, and pro­pri­o­cep­tive sen­sory inputs. The motor out­puts include vocal­iza­tions, facial expres­sions, and motor capa­bil­i­ties to adjust the gaze direc­tion of the eyes and the ori­en­ta­tion of the head. Note that these motor sys­tems serve to steer the visual and audi­tory sen­sors to the source of the stim­u­lus and can also be used to dis­play com­mu­nica­tive cues.”

It’s not Furby, that’s for sure.

View more infor­ma­tion on this excit­ing advance­ment in robotic technology.

In sim­i­lar news, Busi­ness 2.0 has a won­der­ful arti­cle on Six Tech­nolo­gies that will change the world. Project Kismet has already evolved into a new robot called Leonardo who accord­ing to the arti­cle is already in dis­cus­sion to imple­ment into spe­cial effects in movies. It’s reported that Stan Win­ston is highly inter­ested in this advanced stage of robotics.

Now all they need to do is cre­ate a home ver­sion of Kismet or Leonardo. 

This Fri­day.

X2.

’nuff said. *woot* 

The Hol­ly­wood craft of the stunt­man should never go unno­ticed. These men and women shed blood and tears to con­vey a sense of lumi­nous dan­ger on screen. If the par­tic­u­lar movie needs a race car that meets its end in the final laps of the race, a stunt­man is called on set. He pro­ceeds to enter the spe­cially made “stunt vehi­cle” with bars and safety har­nesses embed­ded in the car. When the direc­tor yells action, he along with the pyrotech­nics crew cre­ate the magic on screen.

Which brings me to an impor­tant aspect of being a stunt­man. You have to have the courage to put your­self out on the line just to make the effect seem all the more per­fect on screen. Oth­er­wise the trans­la­tion from script to screen is mediocre and ill fea­si­ble. In other words, it looks like crap.

The per­son involved in the process of trans­lat­ing effec­tive on-screen stunts is known as a stunt coör­di­na­tor. Cinem@ defines a stunt coör­di­na­tor as some­one who “lines up pro­fes­sional stunt peo­ple to take the risks that make the movies so excit­ing. The stunt coör­di­na­tor makes sure that all safety reg­u­la­tions are fol­lowed and that all safety equip­ment is on the set and ready for action!” 

My offi­cial Hob­bit name is:

Fas­tolph Loams­down of Deephallow

.. and my Elvish name is:

Lólindir Car­nesîr

I can pro­nounce the first one, but the sec­ond — well, I’m sure I’m mess­ing up the “cor­rect” pro­nun­ci­a­tion. In my mind it’s some­thing like “Lo-lyn-deer Carney-sir”. Sounds more like a freak show name.

What about yours? 

My nick­name in high school was “Won­der Bread”. It was given to me much like an Indian boy becomes a man in his tribe. Instead of “Running-in-the-Wind-with-Ducks”, I was named Won­der Bread and car­ried the nick through­out the next few years. The name, while extremely prej­u­dice, became a run­ning joke in my fam­ily and at times I’ll admit it was irritating.

How­ever, now look­ing back at the inci­dent I can’t help but laugh. Here I was, a 16 or 17-year-old guy in the gym play­ing a round of solo bas­ket­ball. Sud­denly, from behind me these two African-American girls star­tle me yelling at me to get a “new court”. Prior to this inci­dent I was con­fronted by a fresh­man with a bad atti­tude and that didn’t work out well, so I wasn’t going to budge on the issue. It was as sim­ple as: “No. Get your own court. Find­ers keep­ers. Losers weep­ers.” Not quite those words, but close.

With­out mak­ing this a long story, they grunted and screamed, “Fine, White­bread. We’ll find our own court.” I mut­tered, “Good, why couldn’t you think of that solu­tion in the first place.” Obvi­ously, some peo­ple are lazier than oth­ers. How hard is it to get a bas­ket­ball court, non­the­less “claim” it as “yours”. Some peo­ple are so territorial.

Speak­ing of pale beings, Wired has a great arti­cle on the rep­re­sen­ta­tion of pale-skinned peo­ple in movies. Accord­ing to rep­re­sen­ta­tives for Albi­nos, the depic­tion of these char­ac­ters is in an evil man­ner. Movies like the Time Machine and the soon-to-be-released Matrix Reloaded sup­pos­edly depict these char­ac­ters in a “pale” light.

It’s an inter­est­ing read. Although, not nec­es­sar­ily one that I entirely agree with.

Won­der­bread, sign­ing off. 

Remem­ber the Holo­gram Time Trav­eler arcade that made it’s appear­ance in arcades in the early 90s? Well, I do. I can remem­ber search­ing through my pock­ets for tokens to oper­ate this machine. For its time, it was pretty amaz­ing. It uti­lized early tech­niques of the psuedo-hologram, wherein the image of the Cow­boy is pro­jected onto the view­ing area via mir­rors. It was a lit­eral smoke and mir­ror effect.

The premise of the arcade was to con­trol the Time Trav­eler and try to get him out of tight spots. It was from the cre­ators of the Drag­ons Lair arcade so in a sim­i­lar fash­ion it used timed sequences where the player had to tap the but­ton at the right time in order to per­form the action.

If your mem­ory is get­ting worse or you’ve never heard of this arcade machine, check out this write up on the “Holo­gram Time Trav­eler”.

Speak­ing of arcades, noth­ing is bet­ter than free. Which is why this page is the coolest. Like many sites such as Shock­wave or RealAr­cade it show­cases sev­eral Flash-powered (or Java-powered) games. How­ever, the thing that makes this link extra-cool is every­thing is on one page. It’s a dig­i­tal arcade on the web, or a Web­Cade.

So many choices, so lit­tle time. 

Per­son­ally, I’m dis­gusted at the amount of “real­ity” TV shows that are clut­ter­ing the net­works. Among them are the most pathetic attempts at cap­tur­ing the so-called real­ism of life. Mr. Per­son­al­ity is a show that has men in mas­quer­ade attire attempt­ing to per­suade the woman into ador­ing him through his “per­son­al­ity”. Come on now, by mask­ing the guy we are to believe that his true col­ors will shine? I don’t buy it one bit.

I can’t stand watch­ing these shows. Last night, Amer­i­can Idol was on and it was the first episode I actu­ally sat through. Let me admit that par­tially it’s not a bad show at all — reminds me of Star Search meets Can­did Cam­era. Expect in this case, Simon is the spot­light judge of the show who gets the most atten­tion in the media.

Now, the net­works are for­mu­lat­ing a new scheme — real­ity movies! Don’t they know that we’ve always had real­ity movies in the form of doc­u­men­taries? Movies like the recently released ‘Real Can­cun’ are try­ing to mar­ket their “real­is­tic” approach to films. Why are these kinds of shows so appeal­ing? The answer is sim­ple: peo­ple love watch­ing peo­ple. But really, I’d rather watch the the peo­ple com­ing through the medal detec­tors at the air­port. You talk about fun, that’s fun. Next time your at the air­port, sit in an area where you are fac­ing the secu­rity sec­tion. It’s hilarious.

You know they’ve gone too far when you read about an O.J. Simp­son real­ity show in the works..

It’s mind-boggling.