I hate the horse-racing of art. I could never bring myself to declare "THE" ten most groundbreaking of anything. And especially something as subjective as avant garde art and music.
I look at this list and immediately think "What, no Glenn Branca? Magma? The Residents? SOFT MACHINE?" I could go on. And I could easily come up with ten more records that I think are as groundbreaking as these. But that said, this is a very good list of very important records. I have most of these in my collection.
First, take a look at this 1895 short movie "L'Arrivée d'un Train à la Ciotat" ("Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat," from the Lumière Brothers. This film was upscaled to 4K and 60 frames per second using a variety of neural networks and other enhancement techniques. The result can be seen in the video below:
[YouTuber Denis Shiryaev] used a mix of neural networks from Gigapixel AI and a technique called depth-aware video frame interpolation to not only upscale the resolution of the video, but also increase its frame rate to something that looks a lot smoother to the human eye.
A man in Massachusetts who was being attacked by two pit bulls was then accidentally shot to death by a crossbow-wielding neighbor -- who was trying to help. The tragic incident happened Wednesday afternoon. (more…)
Unless you’ve been living under an extremely large rock over the past year, you’ve doubtlessly heard about the vaping epidemic, which has put dozens of people in the hospital and threatens the lives of smokers who are simply trying to find a safe way to quit.
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I’ve tried many ways to extend Wi-Fi through my house. Powerline networking, which creates networks through electrical wiring, works the best for me. TP-Link has this kit with 2 units. One unit plugs into your wall outlet and router. The other unit can be plugged into any wall outlet in your house to provide Wi-Fi in that area. I've had great results with it.
Comic book nerds are likely familiar with the work and controversies surrounding artist and inker, Vince Colletta. He is best known as an inker on Jack Kirby's The Mighty Thor, other Kirby titles, and other books at Marvel and DC.
But Colletta is not best known for the quality of his work, but rather, how fast he was, how many corners he cut, and how he did a disservice to the artist's original work in the process. Kirby would submit pencil art with crowds in the background that Colletta would simple remove, or he'd greatly simplify the machinery and technical greeblies in the backgrounds that Kirby was known for. If an image had background characters that needed to be there, Colletta would render them in silhouette rather than ink in the details. Management loved him because he met deadlines. Co-workers liked him because he was pleasant. Artists and generations of fans disparage him, dubbing him "the inker who ruined Jack Kirby's art."
Esteemed toy collector Joel Magee of Pawn Stars fame has acquired a prototype of an original Hot Wheels Camaro that was part of the 1968 "Sweet 16" series of the first Hot Wheels cars. Magee says the Camaro is valued at US$100,000 although, in reality, it is only worth whatever someone will pay for it. Apparently the white enamel paint indicates that it was a prototype. From Carscoops:
Only a “few” prototypes are known to have been mistakenly sent to retailers and most buyers would have been clueless. That appears to be what happened to the Camaro as it was found among a set of several other Hot Wheels cars. Joel examined the collection and consulted a Hot Wheels expert to determine that the “lone white Camaro was, in fact, the rarest of rare.”
Magee says the Camaro is the third rarest Hot Wheels car and the only one of its kind believed to exist. That puts it in rare company as “The Beach Bomb and the Olds 442 are the only other rare Hot Wheels on the level of the white enamel Hong Kong Camaro.”
“A network of dozens of fake local news sites has been stealing content from major media organizations and flooding Google News and Alerts results for years,” says Craig Silverman. “I tracked the scheme back to a former NASDAQ and Thomson Reuters employee.” (more…)
I just watched the trailer for The Vast Of Night, an Amazon Prime Video feature movie that's "coming soon to theaters and Prime Video." Looks like creepy fun!
In the twilight of the 1950s, on one fateful night in New Mexico, a young, winsome switchboard operator Fay (Sierra McCormick) and charismatic radio DJ Everett (Jake Horowitz) discover a strange audio frequency that could change their small town and the future forever. Dropped phone calls, AM radio signals, secret reels of tape forgotten in a library, switchboards, crossed patchlines and an anonymous phone call lead Fay and Everett on a scavenger hunt toward the unknown.
[UPDATE 2/6/20 12:09pm PT: According to the CNN, the doctor is alive but in critical condition. "Hours earlier the same state media organizations reported that he had died."
"Wuhan Central Hospital said on its official Weibo account that Li Wenliang, 34, had become seriously ill. 'In the fight against the pneumonia epidemic of the new coronavirus infection, our hospital's ophthalmologist Li Wenliang was unfortunately infected. He is currently in critical condition and we are trying our best to resuscitate him,' the statement read."]
A Chinese ophthalmologist in Wuhan who tried to warn his colleagues on December 30 about seven patients who had come down with a SARS-like virus but was censored by the Chinese government – and and then detained two days later for "rumor mongering" – has died from the disease.
After being detained for two days, Li Wenliang, age 34, helped patients with the novel coronavirus who streamed into his overrun hospital, until he himself became infected with the coronavirus and was hospitalized.
The full outlines of his story, which came to light in recent weeks as the Wuhan outbreak exploded into an international emergency, set off a swell of outrage in China, where citizens have long chafed at the government’s penchant for relentlessly snuffing out any speech deemed threatening to social stability.
Many, including China’s judicial authorities in a rare rebuke of the police, have wondered whether the epidemic could have unfolded differently had Li not been silenced at a critical juncture ahead of the Lunar New Year holiday in late January...
Li was released from detention Jan. 3 after signing a police document admitting that he committed an illegal act by making “untrue statements” on social media and promising that he would “earnestly reflect” on his mistakes.
Li, who was on the frontline of spreading the news about the virus early on, "became a national hero and symbol of the Chinese government’s systemic failings."
Ten months ago the director of New Jersey's Division on Civil Rights alerted Facebook about a racist and anti-Semitic group page it was hosting, but Facebook took no action, reports Ars Technica. It took a letter from the state's attorney general to convince Facebook to remove the group page.
On Wednesday New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal and New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy issued a joint statement, which read:
"We just learned that Facebook has decided to take down the public page on the company’s social network called ‘Rise Up Ocean County.’ Facebook’s action comes ten months after the Director of our Division on Civil Rights, Rachel Wainer Apter, first sent a letter to Facebook expressing concerns about racist and anti-Semitic statements on the page. Since then, we’ve consistently and repeatedly made clear our view that the page appeared to violate Facebook’s terms of service, and we appreciate that Facebook has now decided that this kind of hateful rhetoric has no place on its platform.
There remains much that should be done to stop the spread of hate on the Internet. The Murphy Administration will continue to call out hate whenever and wherever we see it, we will persist in demanding meaningful reforms to address the proliferation of hate online, and we will continue working to make New Jersey a safe and inclusive place for all of our residents.”
From the Ars Technica article:
In January the Facebook page went briefly offline, leading state officials to believe Facebook had in fact taken it down, but the group came back several hours later, "gloating" about its perseverance. Its current demise, however, appears to be sticking.
Lonnie Johnson, age 70, was always a maker. As a child, his experiments with rocket fuel nearly burned down his house. While in high school, Johnson was the only black student to enter the Alabama science fair; his entry, a pneumatic robot named Linex, took first prize. Johnson went on to earn engineering degrees from Tuskegee University, worked on the stealth bomber for the US Air Force, developed nuclear power systems for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and has since founded two tech companies -- one that develops solid state batteries and the other focused on thermo-electrochemical converters with green energy applications.
On his day job in 1982, Lonnie G. Johnson, a 32-year-old aerospace engineer, was preparing an interplanetary spacecraft for its atomic battery. But he dreamed of inventing something that would change life on earth.
He often worked at home as his wife and children slept. One weekend, while tinkering in his bathroom, Mr. Johnson hooked up to the sink a prototype cooling device.
Meant to run on water, it bore at one end a length of vinyl tubing and a homemade metal nozzle. The rest, as they say, is history.
''I turned and shot into the bathtub,'' he recalled. The blast was so powerful that the whoosh of accompanying air set the bathroom curtains flying. ''I said to myself, 'Jeez, this would make a great water gun.' ''
Bernie Sanders today declared victory in Iowa's bungled headcount of Democratic voters, with the latest results putting him neck-and-neck with Pete Buttigieg. It was already clear he had the most votes, but Iowa Democrats' abstruse "caucus math" had awarded Buttigieg an advantage in delegates earlier in the count.
"With 97 percent of precincts now reporting, the results showed South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg with 26.2 percent of state delegate equivalents and Sanders with 26.1 percent," reported The Hill's Kyle Balluck. "Sanders, however, is leading in the final alignment votes tally, though the share of delegates is considered the most important metric of the Iowa results."
When asked why he was declaring victory despite the neck-and-neck delegate count, he told reporters "because I got 6,000 more votes."
Global warming is to blame for a "drastic decline" in the bumblebee population in North America and Europe, reports The Guardian, citing a new that "suggests the likelihood of a bumblebee population surviving in any given place has declined by 30% in the course of a single human generation. The researchers [ at the University of Ottawa] say the rates of decline appear to be 'consistent with a mass extinction.'"