Quote:The Committed Men is a science fiction novel by M. John Harrison. It is Harrison's debut novel, and was originally published in 1971. The book is dedicated to Michael Moorcock and Moorcock's wife Hilary Bailey.

In a dystopian Britain, social organization has collapsed, and the survivors, riddled with skin cancers, eke out a precarious scavenging existence in the ruins of the Great Society. A few bizarre communities try to maintain their structure in a chromium wilderness linked by crumbling motorways. But their rituals are meaningless clichés mouthed against the devastation. Only the roaming bands of hippie-style situationists have grasped that the old order, with its logic, its pseudo-liberalism and its immutable laws of cause and effect, has now been superseded. Among the mutants are a group of reptilian humans - alien, cancer-free but persecuted by the 'smoothskins'. When one of them is born of a human mother in Tinhouse, a group of humans sets off to deliver it to its own kind - a search of the committed men for the tribes of mutants.
Wiki

(01-07-2024, 09:01 AM)BIAD Wrote: Valerie... Call On Me!

Quote:One of cinema’s most sought-after films is set to be screened in public for the first time.

Comedian Jerry Lewis’s controversial holocaust film The Day the Clown Cried, shot in 1972 but never released due to myriad issues with the production, has never been made available in any form, leading the project to reach mythical status in the global film community.

The project, potentially in a semi-unfinished form, is set for a June screening due to a stipulation from Lewis himself. Several years before he died in 2017, a copy was given to the Library of Congress in the US with an agreement it could not be screened in any capacity until this year, though it has since been reported that it may be a rough version.

The National News - Arts & Culture

(12-20-2023, 05:37 AM)EndtheMadnessNow Wrote:

(12-20-2023, 05:37 AM)EndtheMadnessNow Wrote: I love America's economic idiocy here...

(01-08-2024, 01:30 PM)Snarl Wrote:

(12-20-2023, 05:37 AM)EndtheMadnessNow Wrote:

What was on page 11 I wonder.

(12-20-2023, 05:37 AM)EndtheMadnessNow Wrote: I love America's economic idiocy here...

Whatever happened to simply bombing the enemy out of existence ... ya know ... like what the Israelis are doing to the Philistines?

Quote:Dr. Ivan Sutherland is the 2012 winner of the Kyoto Prize for Advanced Technology. The award, created by Dr. Kazuo Inamori, founder of not one but two major Japanese companies — Kyocera and KDDI — is a Nobel-like honor given to individuals each year for advanced technology, basic sciences and arts and philosophy. Sutherland, who was born in 1938, isn’t a household name, but there’s nobody more deserving of such as honor. I got to chat with him recently about his work and the prize.

In 1963, while a student at MIT, Sutherland created a highly interactive drawing-and-design program called Sketchpad, at a time when the concept of computer graphics barely existed. It used an oscilloscope for a display, allowed the user to draw with a light pen and ran on MIT Lincoln Laboratory’s TX-2, which had a then-remarkable 64KB of memory.

Fortunately for us, MIT produced a TV show about Sketchpad in 1964, featuring several researchers talking about the software and showing it off. Here it is — and even if you don’t watch all twenty minutes’ worth, I suggest you at least skim ahead to the demo section, which begins at 3:30.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USyoT_Ha_bA&list=PL0UAR1BFZK1m4l0OV2H0mWlKRbHwcL1v2

Sketchpad was so clever that it’s still cool today; it must have been unimaginably so almost fifty years ago.

I asked Sutherland if he knew he was jump-starting a revolution which would go on for decades when he created Sketchpad. “Of course not,” he told me. “The future is very hard to see. I had no idea of what would happen in the future, nor did I think of it much. I just wanted to make nice pictures.”

He did know, however, that he was in a good situation to do interesting things. “I had the great good fortune of the most powerful computer in the world,” Sutherland said. “It had input and output devices suitable for doing graphics. I had access to it for hours at a time.”

For someone who denies being able to see into the future, Sutherland has a remarkable record of helping to create it. In the late 1960s, the Bell Helicopter Company used low-light cameras to help pilots land at night, and devised a system which turned the camera when the pilot turned his head. Sutherland, by then a professor at the University of Utah, wondered why the camera couldn’t be replaced with a computer. With the assistance of Bob Sproull, he created a gizmo — with the wonderful name The Sword of Damocles — which let a user peer into a computer-generated graphical display which, like Bell’s remote camera, adjusted automatically to head turns.

“The name virtual reality might be applied,” he said, correctly, “but it didn’t come along until ten years later.”

Quote:An initiative that sounds a lot like Jules Verne‘s Journey to the Center of the Earth might mark the first time humans have tapped into magma, the molten rock liquid flowing beneath Earth’s crust. In 2026, Iceland’s Krafla Magma Testbed (KMT) project will drill into a volcano’s magma chamber, seeking to tap into its super-hot fumes to generate geothermal energy at a scale that has never been attempted before.

The endeavor promises to power homes across Iceland with a renewable, limitless energy source. And no, this won’t cause the currently active Krafla volcano to erupt, according to John Eichelberger, a volcanologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks interviewed by New Scientist.

Iceland will tunnel into a volcano

Quote:Iran confirms its navy seized tanker in Gulf of Oman

Iran confirms that its forces seized an oil tanker in the Gulf of Oman, which was reported earlier in the day to have been boarded by armed men in military uniforms.

The state-run IRNA news agency runs a brief story acknowledging the seizure by Iran’s navy. It does not identify the vessel, but says the seizure came as a result of a judicial order.

Suspicion had immediately fallen on Iran as the ship was once known as the Suez Rajan and had been involved in a yearlong dispute that ultimately saw the US Justice Department seize 1 million barrels of Iranian crude oil on it.

The apparent seizure also comes after weeks of attacks by Yemen’s Iranian-backed Houthi rebels on shipping in the Red Sea.