Geeks are Sexy Technology News

By Mark Edlitz
Guest Blogger

Mark Hamill was met with deafening applause when he took the stage in August for a rare personal appearance at the Star Wars Celebration V that was held in Orlando, Florida. He charmed the audience by calling them “UPFs”–his term for ultra-passionate fans. He said his goal was to make the fans as happy as they have made him over the years.

Hamill has appeared in many films (including Sam Fuller’s “The Big Red One,” on television, and in critically acclaimed Broadway performances (notably in “Amadeus” and “The Elephant Man“), but he will probably always be most closely identified with his characterization of Luke Skywalker

Hamill reminisced about his introduction to the Star Wars saga, long before the films became a blockbuster and a cultural touchstone. He recalled being “blown away” the first time he read the script which bore the original and inelegant title: “Adventures of Luke Starkiller, as taken from the Journal of the Whills, Saga I: The Star Wars.”

Even before a frame of footage was shot, Hamill believed the film was going to find a passionate audience, irrespective of whether it became a mainstream hit. “I thought it had “cult classic” written all over it”. He thought the screenplay was intentionally subversively funny and “didn’t take itself as seriously as other Sci-Fi films.” He also admired how Lucas created the fictional construct of the “Force” to talk about spirituality without making people uncomfortable by talking about religion”

Hamill assiduously prepared for his part by grilling writer-director George Lucas with endless questions: “Why do I live with my Aunt and Uncle? Where’s my Dad?” Hamill said that Lucas was evasive about that last question which in future installments would become a central and much debated topic. Lucas was similarly poker faced when Hamill observed, “Darth Fader sounded like ‘Dark Father’” Hamill dryly observed, “I realize now he made up all these lies just to shut me up.”

Hamill lamented the loss of his character’s original introduction in Star Wars. Luke was initially going to be seen first gazing at the skies (possibly watching a battle) and then going to a “teen club” to hang out with his friends who ridicule him for being “geeky”. Hamill thought this entrance effectively established Luke as an ordinary person and as surrogate for the audience.

Back in 1977, Hamill was nearly as wide-eyed as the character he was playing. He was so in awe of meeting Sir Alec Guinness (Obi-Wan Kenobi) that he was afraid if “I opened my mouth that I would cry like a little girl.” He said that the legendary actor of The Bridge On The River Kwai had a great sense of humor, which he demonstrated, by playfully slapping Hamill in the face when the young actor wouldn’t stop referring to him as “Sir Alec.”

Hamill also spoke about the dynamic between him and his costars. Between takes he and Harrison Ford competed for Carrie Fisher’s attention. They both were determined to be deemed the “coolest” by the comely actress.

He says he doesn’t have a favorite Star Wars film but that The Empire Strikes Back is the “most surprising, most challenging, the most thought provoking. Who would have thought that good guys would be defeated?”

Empire also holds the dubious distinction of being for Hamill the most physically demanding of the Star Wars films. “It was like going to work and being beaten up for 12 hours.” For his own amusement he’d take Polaroid photos of the bruises that he incurred while performing stunts.

When telling stories about his behind the scenes adventures, Hamill didn’t always remember the name of the myriad of planets and characters that populate Lucas’s detailed fictional universe. Instead of correctly identifying the “All Terrain-Armor Transport” as the vehicle in Empire Strikes Back that crushes his space ship Hamill referred to them as “big walking things.” His malaprops were met with frequent (but good natured) laughs from the audience.

In his defense, Hamill said that most of the creatures and ships weren’t named “until they made a toy of them.” As a result, on-set the actors and crew would make up their own names. One droid was called “the dustbin robot.” Hamill has subsequently forced himself to remember the names of some characters because it’s “disconcerting when five year olds [fans] laugh at you.”

While George Lucas has said very clearly that there will be no more Star Wars movies, Hamill said that the filmmaker originally wanted to make nine movies. While shooting the original trilogy, Hamill recalled that Lucas offered him a part as “sort of an Obi Won role” in “Part 9,” which he anticipated would be released in 2011.

Talking to the rapt crowd Hamill was as warm and jovial as he’s ever been. But that’s not to say that he likes taking too many trips down memory lane. He reported that sometimes fans come up to him and say that they hear he’s “not a Star Wars fan.” As much as he clearly proud of his work on the movies he does not generally like to look back. “It’s not my thing. I apologize but that’s the way it is.” He likens it to how often you revisit your high school yearbook. It was obvious that the fans (whom he called “family”) enthusiastically appreciated his dusting off that old light saber for one more trip around the galaxy.

[AT-AT Picture (CC)]

Science fiction and animation are a natural combination. It’s a hell of a lot cheaper to draw an alien landscape covered in space ships than it is to create one in a studio. Too often forgotten as just “kid’s stuff”, there have been some truly excellent cartoons that combine science fiction and animation in absolutely awesome ways. Sorry to all you Japanophiles, we’re sticking with western shows for this one. I know, I know, GitS and Cowboy Bebop are amazing, maybe next time, okay?

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Anyone else here thinks he’s not as convincing in this as in his original video? I mean, no sobbing, no crying… how disappointing is that?

When Brazil’s Roberto Carlos struck a soccer ball from 35 meters against France and it appeared to change direction in mid-air on its way into the goal, the phrase “defied physics” was uttered by numerous pundits.

Now physicists say it did nothing of the sorts.

Four French scientists (Guillaume Dupeux, Anne Le Goff, David Quéré and Christophe Clanet) have just published a paper that shows it’s actually perfectly normal for a ball to travel in such a manner when it is struck with enough force. It’s just that normally the ball is stopped in its progress before that pattern becomes visible.

Clanet and Quere were originally researching bullet trajectories but began looking into the movement of spheres. They carried out a series of tests with plastic balls in water, making sure the balls had the same density as the water to create conditions as near to perfect as possible.

It turned out that, because it is a spinning sphere, a ball seemingly moving in one direction will eventually move in an increasingly tighter spiral. The reason we don’t normally see this with balls in the air is that gravity takes effect and limits the curve. However, if the ball is initially propelled with enough force, it takes longer for the gravity to make a noticeable difference.

What made Carlos’ shot so spectacular is that shooting from such a distance meant it traveled far enough without being blocked (either by a player, the goalpost, the goal net or another obstacle) that far more of the spiraling movement could be seen.

Don’t you just love cheap Chinese knockoffs?

[Via TheDailyWhat]

Apple made some new announcements at their Apple Fall 2010 event, and if you’re an Apple aficionado, you’re going to want to check out the whole thing over at Engadget.

However, one of the things that Apple mentioned is that Apple iPhone 4 users will soon be able to take High Dynamic Range photographs.

You’ve probably seen, or at least heard of, High Dynamic Range photography. At its simplest, high dynamic range photography combines otherwise identical shots that have been taken with differences in exposure, and then composite the photographs into a single photograph which shows details in both highlights and shadows.

In any photo medium, there will be a point at which there will be something “too dark” to make out any detail, and a point at which something will be “too bright” to make out any detail. You could make the picture “brighter” and bring more details to the shadows, but then more bright spots will end up “too bright,” (or outside the dynamic range.) Similarly, capturing more bright detail means you lose more in darkness.

Think about taking a picture through a sunny window in a dim room. If the room looks good in the camera, chances are the window will be blown out; if the window looks fine, the room will be too dark to make out details.

The “distance” between “too dark” and “too bright,” as measured in “stops” of light, is the dynamic range. A point-and-click digital camera may have a small dynamic range – perhaps 8 stops of dynamic range or so. High-end SLR cameras tend to have around 10-11 stops of dynamic range. And film tends to have the highest dynamic range at around 14 stops of light.

What high dynamic range photographs are, essentially, are a computerized “cheat” to get around the limitations of dynamic range. While it would not work with a moving subject, photographers can take photos at different exposure levels (usually, but not always, by changing a digital camera’s ISO light sensitivity rating). By combining the 11 stops of dynamic range from the dark picture, and overlapping those details in the shadows with the 11 stops of dynamic range you’d get from the bright picture, with details in the highlights, you can composite a picture with the details of both.

Of course, to get the best results, you typically had to painstakingly line up the shot, manually edit camera settings, and usually use a tripod to keep the camera steady – after all, any movement, and the computer won’t be able to composite the shot correctly.

Putting HDR into the iPhone is a smart move for boosting the iPhone’s photography abilities. Typically cameras with smaller sensors (and the iPhone, being a compact, portable device, has a very small one) have tended to have less dynamic range than even dedicated point-and-shoot cameras. They also tended to gather less light as a whole, requiring longer exposure times than most cameras. Adding a built-in HDR ability makes the iPhone’s photographic capability, assuming Apple can find a way to keep shaking and blurring to a minimum, might make Apple’s camera-phone from a “nice to have” to a real professional alternative for taking photographs. Well, at least in a pinch.

What do you get when you combine the base of an old iMac G4 with a Larson scanner kit? Why, An iMac cylon helmet, or course!

[Via Technabob]

In the latest non-official edition of Will It Blend, twitter users @ahphotovideo tried to make a key smoothie inside a Blendtec Total Blender… and failed miserably. Behold:

Are you happy now @ahphotovideo? You’ve just shattered the dreams of hundreds of thousands of people with your little experiment. Shame on you.

Day Jobs is a nod to the hard working men and women who keep our beloved fictional companies going. Its full of bits of pop culture and nerdy easter eggs. It’s printed on card stock and each card is the standard 3.5 by 2 inch business card, so if you take a pair of scissors to it you could fill a Rolodex. – Days Job

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The people behind an open-source “privacy aware” alternative to Facebook say the system will launch on September 15. But it still remains unclear whether Diaspora can compete with major social networks — or indeed, what competing means.

The project is the work of four students who responded to the controversy over Facebook’s often-confusing and frequently-revised privacy policies. They managed to raise $200,000 in an online appeal after vowing to build a “privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network.”

Exactly what Diaspora is is a somewhat fuzzy topic as it’s as much about the concept as the product. One way to describe it is that if Facebook is a direct download site, Diaspora is Bit Torrent. The idea is to produce software to allow individuals to run a personal web server (a seed) to host the material they want to share, such as multimedia or status updates. And being open source means it will be easier to develop new tools, whether that be add-on applications or new ways to filter and display the content, in particular controlling who is allowed to see what.

The September launch will only be the release of the source code for developers. It will be October before the first appearance of a “consumer facing alpha”: in other words, something Joe Blow can actually use.

Whether Diaspora will succeed depends how you define success. Clearly it’s not going to kill Facebook. Half a billion users are already on Facebook, many of them there because most of the people they know are among those half a billion. And most of those half a billion likely wouldn’t even understand the concepts behind Diaspora, let alone care enough to start from scratch with yet another social network.

That doesn’t mean the concept won’t work. The chances are some great ideas will emerge from Diaspora… and the chances are some of those ideas will wind up being used by sites like Facebook. (That may be why, according to rumor, Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg is among those who donated to Diaspora.)

There’s also a great point made by Len Firewood, a commenter on a report on the Daily Telegraph website: “If Diaspora only attracts one million users just think – a million highly computer literate nerds and tech heads has got to be a very valuable market for many vendors in the computing and high tech sectors.”

Long live Bob Ross!

[Via Reddit | Source: Unknown]

I don’t exactly know how this happened, but While playing StarCraft II, Etsy user BoRoShan somehow fell in love with the Zerg’s baneling units, so he decided to turn a few into cute plush toys. Check it out:

[Source: Etsy]