“Imagine a world in which there is no need to express your thoughts or emotions in words, where you can let others experience your brain states directly. This is what Michael Chorost calls ‘telempathy’: the ability to feel another person’s emotions through a technological connection to their brain.”
Tag: 02.16.11
Kenzaburo Oe Leads Shortlist for ‘Asian Booker’
“Oe is in the running for the prize for his book The Changeling, as is Indian debut novelist Manu Joseph for Serious Men. The award is given to the best novel by an Asian writer, written in English or translated into English, published in the previous calendar year.”
Why Would the South Park Guys Write a Musical About Mormons, Anyway?
Trey Parker: “My first serious girlfriend was a Mormon. I remember going to family home evening at her house, and just being like, ‘What are you people doing?’ But in a good way. I was actually going home to my parents and being like, ‘Can we play a board game?’ They were like: ‘What? No, we’re watching TV’.”
Aziz Ansari’s Comedy Is a Sort of Reverse Ethnic Humor
“Ansari often satirises people’s expectations of him based on his ethnicity, and the fact that he tells these stories with the light southern accent that comes from having grown up in South Carolina makes them funnier. But it’s the way he tells them that gives them that extra comic twist, devoid of the anger or bitterness that is so common in standups.”
Nazis Had 3D Film; Two Examples Discovered
“The Australian film-maker Philippe Mora says he has discovered two 30-minute 3D films shot by propagandists for the Third Reich in 1936, a full 16 years before the format first became briefly popular in the US.” (One of the films shows “sizzling stereoscopic bratwursts on a barbecue.”)
Humans Chasing the ‘Three Origins’ (Of the Universe, of Life, of the Mind)
“We seem to have a deeply ingrained need to understand where we come from, and know that our origins are enmeshed with the origin of the cosmos itself: since we are thinking chunks of stardust, to understand where we came from we need to understand where stars came from, how dust got assembled into living matter, and how living matter became thinking matter.”
Banksy Sightings in Los Angeles
“[V]arious Los Angeles bloggers are pointing to evidence that graffiti street artist Banksy has targeted Hollywood with his latest round of art … Whether he’s here and whether these are, in fact, his works remain to be seen, but the timing is curious” – his documentary Exit Through the Guft Shop is on Oscar voters’ ballots.
Rage Against The Machine (Not Quite). How Jeopardy Champ Felt Losing To Nuts & Bolts
“I envisioned myself as the Great Carbon-Based Hope against a new generation of thinking machines – which, if Hollywood is to believed, will inevitably run amok, build unstoppable robot shells, and destroy us all. But at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Lab, … I wasn’t the hero at all. I was the villain.”
Spider-Man Calls In a Script Doctor
“The producers of the Broadway musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark have asked Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, a playwright who [has] also written Spider-Man stories for Marvel Comics, if he is interested and available to help rewrite the script for the big-budget, critically assailed musical.”
Ken Winter, 81, Longtime CBC Radio Producer and Classical Music Critic
He “was a prominent CBC radio host and contributor for [40] years, most notably during his tenure at Mostly Music in the 1980s and 1990s.” His long career as a critic included work for the Winnipeg Free Press, Toronto Telegram, and The Globe and Mail, and he was a principal editor of the Encyclopedia of Music in Canada.