Mark Roth studies suspended animation: the art of shutting down life processes and then starting them up again. It’s wild stuff, but it’s not science fiction. Induced by careful use of an otherwise toxic gas, suspended animation can potentially help trauma and heart attack victims survive long enough to be treated.
Batman Fighting a Shark with a Lightsaber
I suppose I didn’t really need to title this picture. It’s pretty self explanatory as far as pop culture mash-up awesomeness goes.
I should note that starting at BuzzFeed I followed a good half-dozen “via” links to try to figure out where this piece of fine art originated, and finally landed at a dead end at a tumblr page called awesomesauce. Which then sucked up a good ten minutes of my life with things like Uhura and Ultraman on a Unicorn Underwater and a stormtrooper on a horse.
Fairy Tale + Werewolves + Felicia Day = SyFy’s “Red”
You may have heard that Amanda Seyfried is going to be starring in a new retelling of Little Red Riding Hood helmed by the director of Twilight, but who cares about that when SyFy’s doing their own retelling that features both werewolves and Felicia Day?
Here’s the description from SyFy for the upcoming Red:
In the action-packed Red, Red (Day) brings her fiancé home, where he meets the family and learns about their business – hunting werewolves. He’s skeptical until bitten by a werewolf. When her family insists he must be killed, Red tries saving him.
The SyFy original also stars Kavan Smith from Stargate Atlantis and Stephen McHattie from Watchmen. It’s shooting in Canada now, where apparently it’s cold.
Yes, I’m well aware that SyFy hasn’t exactly been producing films of the highest caliber recently, but I’m still holding out hope that this will be more like Tin Man and less like DinoShark. (Also, if any of you happened to watch DinoShark this weekend, please do comment and let us know how bad/awesome/awesomely bad it was.)
[Image Source: SyFyMovies]
Getting Inside a Balloon
It did not turn out as planned. With further attempts, he eventually succeeded. Billoon45 has a series of videos about his giant balloon hobby. Do NOT try this yourself!
[via Metafilter]
Monday Afternoon Insanity: Invasion Of The Crazy Teddy Bears
All the latest on the iPad
The rush for the iPad appears to have slowed down slightly after some fairly insane first day orders. It comes as Apple reveals more details including how it will treat battery failures, an audio option for iBooks, and a “breakthrough” mobile contract.
In our link roundup this morning, we linked to an article reporting that Apple presold 51,000 iPads in the first two hours after it was made available online last week. This post has now been updated to 120,000 units. Over the weekend, the rate slowed to about 1,000 an hour.
The estimates come from a variety of sources, though the most popular is from blogger “Deagol” who has been collating and analyzing order numbers from buyers. That’s slightly prone to inaccuracy as the sequential order numbers also cover sales of other Apple products from the company’s site. However, the iPad is boosting overall Apple site sales so much that the blogger has made what appears a credible estimate of what proportion of the sales are indeed iPads. The only other caveat is that this wouldn’t account for people ordering multiple iPads, but that’s unlikely to make a significant difference.
Meanwhile, there will be a solution for if and when the battery dies, though it might not be to every user’s liking. Instead of replacing the battery, Apple will simply exchange the iPad for a replacement machine. It’ll cost $99 and users will be responsible for backing up their own data to resync to the new iPad. It’s not clear if the replacement will be a new machine or a refurbished model.
The iBooks application will have a feature which may attract the wrong kind of interest: it will include a text-to-speech tool named Voiceover. That caused problems for Amazon which faced a legal challenge over a similar feature after the Author’s Guild claimed that said feature breached a separate copyright restriction designed to protect audio editions of books. That case was settled by Amazon agreeing to allow publishers and authors to request the functionality be turned off for specific books.
Finally, the 3G edition of the iPad will not require a service contract. Instead users can choose between paying $14.99 a month for 250MB of data or $29.99 a month for an unlimited deal; they can switch between the plans or cancel the service completely at the end of each month. Surprisingly Apple’s description doesn’t have any pesky asterisk’s beside the word “unlimited”, which suggests some users may be able to test AT&T’s network coverage to the limit.
A New Anthem for Dorks
If you’ve been with us for a while, you’ll probably remember the Pantless Knights, the guys behind the “I’m on a Mac” and “Mac or PC” raps. Well folks, this intrepid team of geeks is back with a new song, and this time they’re singing the praises of geekdom to the world. Check it out:
THE NEW DORK – Entrepreneur State of Mind (Jay-Z ft Alicia Keys Spoof)
Not only is the tune pretty catchy, but it’s absolutely brilliant from a marketing point of view. After giving shout outs to major blogs such as Techcrunch, Mashable, Valleywag, Gizmodo and Geekologie (which almost all covered it following the release day), the video uses the opportunity to push Grasshopper, a virtual phone startup based in Needham, Massachusetts. Bravo guys, well done!
Lyrics after the jump.
Google is a Hungry Beast [Video]
Meet Google. The noun that became a verb. The world’s favorite search engine, and the company whose motto is “Don’t be evil…”
[Via MUO]
Wall of Deeeeeaaaaatttthhhhhhh!!! [Video]
While nowhere as awesome as the picture located on top of this paragraph, the following video, which shows a bunch of crazy Indian people riding around a circular pit at the Diamond Maruti Car Circus in Delhi, India, is still really impressive. Check it out.
Iron Man 2’s Incredible Suitcase Armor
If the official trailer wasn’t enough to get you excited, here’s some footage of Tony Stark getting in his brand new suitcase armor. Enjoy!