Meme Scholar with Madness (PhD)

[EndtheMadnessNow]

Jan 8, 1960: The "Third from the Sun" episode (S1.E14) of THE TWILIGHT ZONE aired on CBS.

Summary:
Two families of Government employees plan to steal a spaceship and travel to another planet just prior to a nuclear war. They must also deal with a stooge who wants to stop them.

The Los Angeles Times TV capsule writer was impressed by THE TWILIGHT ZONE's "many fine scripts."



The background noises heard aboard the ship in the final scene were later reused in Star Trek (1966).

Rod Serling - Narrator: [Closing Narration] Behind a tiny ship heading into space is a doomed planet on the verge of suicide. Ahead lies a place called Earth, the third planet from the sun. And for William Sturka and the men and women with him, it's the eve of the beginning - in the Twilight Zone.

The "Third From the Sun" teleplay was written by TWILIGHT ZONE creator Rod Serling, based on the short story by Richard Matheson published in the Oct. 1950 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction.



You can read the Galaxy Sci-fi short story here starting on page 61.


Which three movies should be watched together as an unofficial trilogy?


I think "Hidden Agenda" (1990) is one of the best "conspiracy" movies on how well intentioned people get drawn into a cover up.


News reporters in Israel don’t mess around...



Never know when the Joker is going to be interviewed.





Second-largest U.S. radio company Audacy files for bankruptcy protection

"Social media killed the radio star."

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Alex Schomburg cover art for Fantastic Universe, December 1954.


Read/download a full PDF copy


Jan 7, 1963: MIT PhD student Ivan Sutherland unveiled his "Sketchpad", which pioneered the CAD technology used in today's computers.

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_...KRbHwcL1v2

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.”

Full article: A Talk with Computer Graphics Pioneer Ivan Sutherland


Why did Frank Herbert write DUNE? Interesting 16 min compilation.