NASA have strung together a series of pictures of Earth taken by the Messenger probe as it swung by on its way towards Mercury into a movie. Even prettier than the Stellarium.

[Via Betsy Devine]

Pets with their heads in bags of food! might just be even better than Cats in Sinks.

[Via scrubbles.net]

Chelyabinsk in Russia might just be the least desirable bit of real estate in the northern hemisphere, according to Sprol:

Over the last five decades Chelyabinsk’s history reads like a contemporary version of the Book of Revelations. Not one, not two, but three nuclear obscenities have brutalized this region in the name of the Cold War. Radiation levels are so high that to compare it with Chernobyl would be like comparing a 361 car pile-up with a fender-bender between two Lexus SUVs in a 5 MPH school zone. Yet so few people, including its citizens, know the true shock of Chelyabinsk’s nuclear recklessness.

It's a hell of a story.

Kate Bush is releasing a double album, Aerial, on the 7th of November. The first single, King of the Mountain, is out on October 24th.

I'm counting the days…

[Via Do You Feel Loved?]

TV producer Keith Addis has announced plans to put together an anthology show, adapting classic SF short stories that'll fit into an hour (that is, 42 minutes.) Considering the line-up of stories and screenwriters, this could be very good indeed:

Michael Tolkin (The Player) will adapt Heinlein's "Jerry Was a Man." John Milius (Conan the Barbarian) will rework Lem's "The Hunt." Bradbury will adapt his story "Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed." Similarly, Ellison will adapt his short story, "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the TicktockMan," Addis said.

Harlan Ellison scripting 'Repent, Harlequin!'…

One of my five favourite SF short stories of all time.

Adapted by the author.

A man who, it should be remembered, actually knows how to write for the screen.

Ladies and gentlemen, I do believe the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) for 2007 is taken. Just so long as the screenwriter's name that appears on the credits isn't "Cordwainer Bird."

Seriously, that's a fine collection of stories and screenwriters Addis has lined up. Obviously a lot will depend on the quality of the scripts, the casting, the budget, the directors, whether a willing customer can be found for the series, whether SF and fantasy are still in vogue by the 2006/7 season and so on and a couple of hundred other imponderables; there's a long, long way to go yet and we may never hear another word about the show should the stars fail to align at the right time.

(You'll notice I'm not even mentioning the question of whether the show will be bought by a UK terrestrial channel. That'll certainly be an issue for me if/when the time comes, but for now let's just get the show made, then I'll worry about how I'm ever going to see it.)

The main point at this stage is that at least they're starting out right: good stories, and screenwriters with genre experience.

[Via Amygdala]

Things you don't see every day: what happens when a praying mantis encounters a hummingbird.

[Via Making Light Particles]

Opinionista posted a typically amusing piece about her experience of campus recruiting by law firms. However, I think one of her comments on her post, from Dave, was even better:

I went through the same process for I-Banking interviews. My roomate at the time was also interviewing. The whole waiting game outside the hotel room where interviews were being conducted made him totally nervous.

As the interviewer from Goldman shook him firmly by the hand and ushered him into the room, he turned to her, and tried a little quip to break the ice. Gesticulating to the bed in the room, he said "Well, I guess we won't be needing that."

They both stood there for a moment, in mutual disbelief at what he had just said. He was not in the least surprised when she turned around and, without a word, showed him straight to the door.

To this day, we both struggle to think of a way to make a worse impression – and laugh like hell.

[NB: Comment quoted in full because I'm not sure how well hotlinking to a Haloscan comment works. In at least one browser I've tried - the Mac version of IE - the page of comments loads but doesn't jump to the right comment.]

Stellarium is a very nice planetarium simulator, released under the GPL for Windows, Linux/Unix and OS X.

As you'd expect of a decent planetarium program, Stellarium allows you to choose to display a minimal set of graphical elements to help you understand what you're seeing, or to go over the top in very-pretty-but-utterly-unrealistic mode.

Incidentally, if you're using a Mac with a screen not catered for by any of the preset resolutions it's possible to edit the configuration file at Stellarium.app/Contents/Resources/config/config.ini and insert the appropriate pixel values for your display. For example, the following values work nicely for my iMac G4's 17" display:

[video]
fullscreen                     = true
screen_w                       = 1440
screen_h                       = 900
bbp_mode                       = 32
horizontal_offset              = 0
vertical_offset                = 0

I did experiment with changing the value of fullscreen to false, but although the program did use a standard OS X window it was expanded to fill the desktop and could only be minimised or closed, not resized, and clicks on the controls appeared to be missing the target by some undefined vertical offset. Methinks some reading of the documentation is in order.

[Via The Tao of Mac]

Just a quick mention before I forget that Channel 4 are about to start showing the final season of Oz, aka The Best Damn Prison Drama Ever, starting at 3am on Wednesday morning.

Be aware that it's not going to be showing weekly, like a normal hour-long drama, but daily. But not every day; going by the entries in DigiGuide they seem to be skipping days here and there, so check your TV guide before programming your VCR.

[While I'm on the subject, if you're a fan of Oz and have any interest in web design, you might like this old article at A List Apart: Everything I Need To Know About Web Design I Learned Watching Oz.]

After half-watching The Great Escape on TV this afternoon, I spent a happy thirty minutes or so wandering round the IMDB, following cast members from film to film as you do. I ended up looking up Tunes of Glory, a 1960 military drama starring Alec Guinness, John Mills, Gordon Jackson and a young Susannah York. It's one of my favourite British films, and I've seen it numerous times on TV over the years.

Somehow until I read the film's IMDB entry this afternoon I'd been completely unaware of the film's tagline. If you've ever seen Tunes of Glory, I suspect you'll agree with me that either the IMDB's information is wildly inaccurate or else someone in the publicity department at Knightsbridge Films or United Artists was smoking crack in 1960:

Tagline: Here's a Helluva Swelluva Free-Swinging Movie!

I'm finding it hard to imagine anyone who would be attracted to the cinema by that tagline actually staying in their seat for more than ten minutes before storming out to see the manager, accuse him of false advertising and demand a refund.

Is this the Worst Tagline in History?

Serenity wasn't the only SF/fantasy film to make its debut at the Edinburgh Film Festival. Dave McKean's Mirrormask premiered a week or so ago. Paul O'Brien gave it a positive review.

[It's] McKean's unique style that makes the film distinctive. Oh, and Stephanie Leonidas, playing Helena, is great – as she'd need to be, given that she's on screen for pretty much the entire film. Fans will adore it. It's getting a limited release in America in September, and it seems they're still deciding what to do with it in the UK. According to McKean, it was commissioned in an attempt to duplicate the success of The Dark Crystal, which is to say that they don't expect it to take much at the box office, but they're hoping it'll do well in the long run.

I think it's safe to say that it'll not be seeing anything but a very limited cinema release over here. Here's hoping that the DVD release arrives sooner rather than later.

Matthew Baldwin has posted an entertaining account of his team's entry to "the Game," which appears to be essentially a kind of scavenger hunt for geeks:

As with everything involving the Game, the application process has a few catches. In addition to general information about our team, Galactic Consortium asked us to bring an assortment of miscellaneous items; these requests, however, were hidden on the web site and encoded into riddles. For example, this was the bio for Application Judge "Kered DaVeen":

[His] pride and joy are his five children. The first loves to go buy things, the second is a homebody, the fourth won’t touch his food, and the fifth keeps repeating the Anchooozian exclamation, "Wee!" His third son is his only confusion. Kered would love nothing more than to have someone present little Snookums’s favorite dish; wouldn’t that spice up an application!

Upon reading this we knew immediately what to do. That is to say, Gordon, our captain, knew what to do. I was stumped until Gordon sent an email to our crew with a To Do list that included "buy roast beef." Because I recite the "five little piggies" rhyme to my toddler several times a day, I felt like an idiot for not figuring this one out on my own.

Weekly instalments will follow recounting the efforts of his team, The 'B' Ark, to win the Game, or at least place as highly as a rookie team can.

[Via Amygdala]

Worth1000's Mate a Movie contest invited users to combine film posters to comic effect.

My favourite entries: Mr & Mrs Smith, Saving Private Brian and Freaky Friday the 13th.

[Via PosterWire]

If you were ever wowed by one a movie title sequence designed by Saul Bass – and believe me, you probably have been even if you don't recognise the man's name – you'll enjoy this Saul Bass tribute. Very nice work.

[Via scrubbles.net]

Inspired by some flowery talk from Kevin Kelly on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the launch of Netscape as a public company (an event which, Kelly argues, made the whole wide world notice the World Wide Web), Peter Edidin looks at early predictions of the effects of other communication technologies. For example, radio:

1922
Bruce Bliven, "The Ether Will Now Oblige," in The New Republic.
There will be only one orchestra left on earth, giving nightly worldwide concerts; when all universities will be combined into one super-institution, conducting courses by radio for students in Zanzibar, Kamchatka and Oskaloose; when, instead of newspapers, trained orators will dictate the news of the world day and night, and the bedtime story will be told every evening from Paris to the sleepy children of a weary world; when every person will be instantly accessible day or night to all the bores he knows, and will know them all: when the last vestiges of privacy, solitude and contemplation will have vanished into limbo.

Not that Bliven missed the mark completely; for my money, that penultimate clause about instant accessibility and the loss of solitude describes the mobile phone nicely.

Further to yesterday's post about the possibility of an avian flu pandemic:

• Note to self: apply for job with BBC, ASAP.

Cats in Sinks. It's about cats. In sinks.

What more needs to be said?

[Via Look At This...]

Over at TomDispatch, Mike Davis writes about the forthcoming avian flu pandemic:

The avian flu outbreak at Lake Qinghai was first identified by Chinese wildlife officials at the end of April. Initially it was confined to a small islet in the huge salt lake, where geese suddenly began to act spasmodically, then to collapse and die. By mid-May it had spread through the lake's entire avian population, killing thousands of birds. An ornithologist called it "the biggest and most extensively mortal avian influenza event ever seen in wild birds."

Chinese scientists, meanwhile, were horrified by the virulence of the new strain: when mice were infected they died even quicker than when injected with "genotype Z," the fearsome H5N1 variant currently killing farmers and their children in Vietnam.

As you'd expect, the article focuses on the state of preparedness for a pandemic in the US; Davis even mentions at one point that the British government is much better prepared. Which sounds quite comforting, until Davis puts this in persepective:

[The British press...] revealed that officials were scouring the country for suitable sites for mass mortuaries, based on official fears that avian flu could kill as many as 700,000 Britons. The Blair government is already conducting emergency simulations of a pandemic outbreak ("Operation Arctic Sea") and is reported to have readied "Cobra" — a cabinet-level working group that coordinates government responses to national emergencies like the recent London bombings from a secret war room in Whitehall — to deal with an avian flu crisis.

Note to self: must stockpile three months-worth of food, pronto.

There are a couple of interesting stories about downloadable music today. First, according to the New York Times at least two of the major labels are going to take the opportunity afforded them by the expiration of their original agreement with the iTunes Music Store to put pressure on Apple to drop their uniform pricing policy for single tracks. Considering that Apple have so far managed to make a much bigger success of downloadable music than anyone else to date, I think the record labels would be crazy to mess with a winning formula. Or, as on analyst quoted in the article puts it:

"As I recall, three years ago these guys were wandering around with their hands out looking for someone to save them," said Mike McGuire, an analyst at Gartner G2. "It'd be rather silly to try to destabilize him because iTunes is one of the few bright spots in the industry right now. He's got something that's working."

Meanwhile, on this side of the Atlantic we're about to see a really interesting experiment in online music distribution, with the debut of Playlouder MSP, a "Music Service Provider" which will sell you both a 1MB DSL internet connection and the right to download and share music from a variety of independent labels and one major, Sony BMG. In return, Playlouder will track the files being shared across their network so they can divide up a share of the fees paid by Playlouder customers among the various record labels involved. It all sounds far too sensible an idea to be true: an industry-backed music sharing scheme that even Cory Doctorow can get behind.

(Edited to note that The Register has more details of the Playlouder system.)

It's hard to believe that the content arm of the Sony empire, which has managed to persuade their own techies to use proprietary media formats in almost every piece of consumer electronics they'd produced in recent years, is open to an idea this sensible. According to Techdirt Sony BMG are trying a similar setup in the US with a company called Mashboxx; perhaps someone in Sony's music division has finally realised that they've been marching into a cul-de-sac for the last decade and has decided to experiment with something a little more practical than attempting to lock every file and every computer in existence down just in case someone tries to share music.

About the only drawback I can see of a Playlouder-type system is that if it's successful it's liable to fuel demands from major content owners that more and more file types be watermarked or tagged and that all ISPs devote resources to monitoring the borders of their networks to make sure they know exactly whose intellectual property is being passed around the internet. Or perhaps even that ISPs stop letting untagged material out onto the wider internet, in case it might contain someone else's intellectual property. Still, that's a battle that may need to be fought anyway one day, whether Playlouder succeeds or fails.

Unfortunately my attempt to view the Playlouder web site keeps timing out; I assume that they're suffering from the Slashdot effect in spades after being linked to by Boing Boing.

Today's Snowmail, detailing tonight's headlines on Channel 4 News, announced that "[We shall...] tell you why somebody thinks it's a good wheeze to put a glass bridge over the Grand Canyon.".

Not being able to wait until 7pm, I just had to do a bit of googling and see this for myself. It's not quite what it sounds like – as this rendering shows it's more of an observation platform than what I'd have called a bridge. Doesn't the word "bridge" imply a structure which crosses from one side of a river/canyon to another, rather than one which ends just a few yards away from where it begins?

I can safely say that should I ever end up in that neck of the woods I'll be content to keep my feet firmly on solid ground. It's not that I doubt the engineers' ability to calculate the stresses and loads involved and use appropriate construction material; it's just that I really, really don't like the idea of looking down and seeing the ground 4,000 feet below the soles of my shoes. (And yet I don't mind flying in an aircraft in the slightest, whether in an airliner or, many moons ago, in a single-engined piston craft or a glider. I never said my fear was logical…)