First Commercial Spacecraft Another Step Closer

Tim Sayell sends in this article from Yahoo News concerning Branson's Virgin Galactic - SpaceshipTwo.

Since Branson won the $10 million Ansari X Prize, we have been getting tantalizing hints as to what Branson and aviation designer Burt Rutan plan for commercial spaceflight.

Virgin unveiled White Knight Two a little over a year ago but only mockups and the shell of SpaceshipTwo has been seen. Now the first public appearance of the commercial passenger spacecraft has been held.

Virgin says that testing of SpaceshipTwo will begin next year with flights to the crafts maximum altitude sometime in 2011.

The first passengers of course will be the families of Branson and Rutan.

For more information - read the complete article here

***update*** here is a series of photos from Boing Boing that are exclusive! Very cool!

DVD Review: G I Joe

GI Joe

The premise of this movie is that there are secret military organizations and then there is an ultra secret outfit call GI Joe.

Being top top secret -- Joes have access to the coolest hardware and weapons. And since they are so secret, they fight the most ruthless ulta evil villains on the planet.

That is pretty much the movie - two regular field operatives from NATO are thrust into conflict between ultra villains of COBRA and the GI Joes. Cobra is bent on destroying the world's infrastructure by spreading nano-tech that eats any metal. Joes, employing equally cool tech is set on finding and destroying cobra's super secret lair.

So that is the basics for the movie...lets look at the dvd

First despite what the writer and director would have you believe, GI Joe is a film for Joe fans. I count it as science fiction loosely because of the tech and that it is supposed to be set in the "not too distant future". But marketing this movie as a film for the general audience is plain disingenuous. Even in the director's commentaries after they had gone to great pains to try and convince us that its a movie for everyone they go into great detail how this or that would upset the joe fans or this was different or that was. Not being a Joe fan, I couldn't call them on any of that, so who were those comments aimed at? Yep, Joe fans.

Then like the complaints from the fantastic four directors complaining about bad cgi, they bust on their own CGI
Now, first off, there are some damn good action sequences. Plus the tech is techie goodness, but the end effect is ehhhhhhhhhhh. It is a by the numbers action flick dealt to the lowest common denominator right down to that abysmal everyone in a line walking and talking. And what is the director most proud of? Writing the movie on the fly and shooting it all in 82 days! They are proud of making a bad movie!!! And they brag about it! And then complain when some of the movie is junk!!! Is someone really going to hire these geniuses to make a part 2? I mean really, why bother to tell us that it SHOULD had taken the best part of 2 years to write and maybe EIGHT months to shoot properly and brag about how to do it in 82. This is truly one of those times when I wish I had not listened to the special commentary.

So, overall, GI Joe is pretty mindless action written and shot on the fly, mostly green screen cgi. No matter what they say, its a movie for Joe fans. Non fans might get wowed by the action sequences but the plot is so comic book that it will leave the general audience cold. The only dvd special extra is the director's comments that will leave you stunned as to the level of bad movie making and proud of the fact.

Now I will suspect that I will get the well how many Hollywood movies have you made...and I say don't bother. If you are convinced that this is a great movie, we don't have anything to talk about and second I don't have to be a structural engineer to know that eventually the Leaning tower of Pisa is going to fall over some day.

I would give this a 5, for making a good FAN movie

Happy in Paraguay: ST-TNG voice over....

Ok, first off this short contains some some fairly strong language. Nuff said.

Now I think we have all, in a weak moment, supplied somewhat colorful, ummm alternative dialogue. Trekmovie.com hosted this funny and demented if masterful voice over. The words match the lip movement, but it has to be one of the most warped version of elephant foot I have ever seen!



Attack of the Show
Trekmovie.com

Man controls Robot Hand with his mind

Tim Sayell sends in an article from Yahoo news that concerns advancements being made in the field of interfacing the human nervous system with robotic hardware.

In an experiment, that set a record for the longest time electrodes had remained connected to a human nervous system, 26-year-old Pierpaolo Petruzziello, for a month, learned to control a robotic arm with thoughts alone, achieving a here-to-fore unheard of accuracy of 95%.

Electrodes were implanted in Petruzziello's stump that not only picked up control signals, but also feedback / sensation inputs, which Petruzziello stated made it much easier to imagine the arm as his own, connected to his body.

From the Article:

• During the month he had the electrodes connected, he learned to wiggle the robotic fingers independently, make a fist, grab objects and make other movements.
  

Read more here

Short Film "The Passenger" by Chris Jones

I can safely say that there are damn few things, at this stage of my life, that make me laugh out loud. And for a film to do that inside of 5 minutes is just a wee bit short of an event. So trust me when I say, you are going to find this short film, from the fertile mind of Chris Jones, "The Passenger", most likely one of the funniest shorts you have seen this year - maybe ever. I want to thank the blog SF Signal for bringing this to my attention.