David Lidsky's Blog, page 4615

Night of the Living Dead, Reimagined by Today's Artists

What would the zombie classic Night of the Living Dead look like as a mash-up of mixed-media scenes from today's creative visionaries? Night of the Living Dead: Reanimated, a collaboration between 150 artists and animators, attempts to answer the question using sock puppets, oil paintings, CGI, hand-drawn animation, and everything in between.

We haven't seen the full film--Neoflux Productions will release it on DVD in late July--but we can already tell from the previews that the movie lacks...

World's Best Skyscraper Awards Include Stout, Rusty School Building in England

Is it a sign of the times?

[image error]

This week, the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat announced the best skyscrapers of the year. The awardees: SOM's Burj Khalifa (obviously), Cook + Fox's ultra-green Bank of America Tower (yes, yes), ARC Studio's Pinnacle @ Duxton (fair enough) and...  a squat rusty thing in Leeds. Huh?

[image error]

Indeed, Broadcasting Place, a decidedly un-skyscrapery skyscraper for Leeds Metropolitan University, took home the high honors alongside some of the splashiest new towers...

JetBlue COO Thinks Flying From New York to Boston is a Waste

It seems obvious: flying short distances is less efficient than taking the train. We never expected an airline executive to admit as much, but Jet Blue Chief Operating Officer Rob Maruster surprised us all at the recent "Airports: 21st Century Makeovers For The New York Metro Region" conference when he noted that high-speed rail often makes more sense than flying.

Maruster's exact words, courtesy of Transportation Nation:

"I may be shooting ourselves in the foot here, with five daily flights
...

Microsoft's Kinect vs. Sony's PlayStation Move: E3 Showdown

E3 has concluded, the press events passed and the booth tours finished. Microsoft and Sony both are turning to their respective motion controls to extend the life of this generation their video game consoles, and each revealed new games and hardware. Now that the dust has settled from the showdown, which platform came out the winner from this year's game exravaganza?

Sony's presentation hyped Move, a more precise and ergonomic version of the Wii controls. On display was a mix was of...

FDA Calls Marlboro Out On Creative Marketing of "Light" Cigarettes

Cigarette manufacturers, beware: the FDA won't stand for any creative workarounds to its ruling requiring  companies to remove descriptors like "light," "mild," and "low tar" from cigarette packaging. The New York Times reports that the FDA is opening an investigation into Altria Group, the maker of Marlboro Lights, because of notes on packaging that read, "Your Marlboro Lights package is changing, but your cigarette stays the same," and "In the future, ask for Marlboro in the gold pack."...

Space Robot Can Repair Ships or Bring Satellites to Fiery Doom

Meet Justin, the space robot. He's clever, agile, wired to a human for control (of the robot, not the human) and he's a possible solution for fixing orbiting satellites in the post-Shuttle era. If they're dead, he can even fire them to their doom.

Justin's the product of ongoing research by the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics at DLR, the German Aerospace Center, and like many of his robot brethren he's been through a number of iterations in his life. His current version was just...

Danger Zone: What It's Like to Fly in Red Bull's Aerobatic Plane

With the Red Bull Air Race coming to New York City this weekend, I was offered an opportunity to fly in one of the aerobatic planes that will be zipping along the Hudson and buzzing the Statue of Liberty. The idea is to get a feel for the high speeds and intense G forces pilots experience as they negotiate a track that one veteran flyer said was designed by a "bumble bee in a jam jar."

As I ride out to Linden Airfield in New Jersey, I casually ask my contact about crashing.

"It's not...

Leaked iPhone 4 Enables First Hands-On Review

Apple's iPhone 4 has now been manhandled and fondled and talked about endlessly ... but in the days before its launch we've still not seen one in action in the wild... until today.

Somehow, one of the readers of Czech Web site Jablickar.cz got hold of an iPhone 4, which appears to be the real deal, running full iOS4 firmware, rather than a pre-release prototype. They put the device through its paces in ways that non-Apple folk haven't yet been able to, and thus put together what amounts to...

Cap and Trade: It's Not That Complicated

This post was written by Matt McDermott for Planet Greet, and a follow up to a post earlier this week on the differing impact of Cap and Trade on socio-economic classes.

In practice a cap and trade program for carbon emissions is a pretty
complex thing, no doubt about it. It also can seem like a pretty wonky
concept for the average person to pay much attention to. If fairly recent public polls are anything to go on, most Americans haven't the foggiest idea of what all the fuss is about.

...

Infographic of the Day: CNN's World Cup Twitter Site

A new interactive feature lets you follow trending topics on Twitter in real time.

[image error]

Vuvuzelas, goals, red cards: How to keep up with it all? A new
interactive feature from CNN lets you watch not just the World Cup action but the reaction, which can occasionally be even more entertaining.

Here you can follow the tournament's trending topics in real time, culled from hundreds of thousands of tweets a day. Topics generating the most tweets are represented by images
(flags for teams; photos for...