Lifeboat Foundation

If there’s one thing R2-D2 knows, it’s flying. The astromech droid has provided air support for both Anakin and Luke Skywalker who know a few things about piloting.

However, the blue and white robot’s next flight will be on Earth thanks to the newly themed Boeing 787 Dreamliner made to look like the lovable Star Wars staple. Here’s hoping that the flights are more comfortable than some of R2’s space dog fights or dodgy landings on Dagobah.

Starting on October 18, Japanese carrier ANA will fly the newly minted plane between Tokyo and Vancouver before extending the service to include Munich, Paris, Seattle, Sydney and beyond. The 215-seater plane isn’t just Star Wars-y on the outside, though. In addition to featuring all six Star Wars films on the seat back screens, the cups, headsets, and napkins will also carry the theme on inside.

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Drawn to the Future, a major exhibition on visualization technology featuring leading pioneers in architecture and engineering tech, highlights how our experience of our cities and buildings will rapidly change.

Images of the city have always wielded psychological, emotional and political power. Anyone brought up on a diet of Hollywood movies and US TV shows will have had that uncanny experience as a first-time visitor to a US city — a sense of déjà vu, the feeling of being on a movie set, in a story. I took the Blade Runner cityscape so seriously as a student in New York in 1983, that after a late-night showing of the film, I went into a phone box and rang the number dialed by Harrison Ford on the ‘video screen’ (555−7563 in case you’re interested). The decay of Ridley Scott’s dystopian future spilled over into the rodent-rich, un-gentrified, occasionally threatening Lower East Side of the time.

Continue reading “Better Than 'Blade Runner': Re-Imagining Our Cities” »

Corporations aren’t inherently evil, they’re only as greedy as the humans behind them. It’s the same thing with robots. Robots have no emotions—they’re just a pile of metal, screws and circuits—but they will be as mean, selfish, and avaricious as the people programming them.

Wire Cutters is a brilliantly crafted student film directed and animated by Jack Anderson. It tells the story of two robots from rival mining companies that meet by chance in a desolate planet.

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A piece I wrote recently about blockchain & AI, and how I see the Lifeboat Foundation as a crucial component in a bright future.

Blockchain technology could lead to an AI truly reminiscent of the human brain, with less of its frailties, and more of its strengths. Just as a brain is not inherently dictated by a single neuron, neither is the technology behind bitcoin. The advantage (and opportunity) in this sense, is the advent of an amalgamation of many nodes bridged together to form an overall, singular function. This very much resembles the human brain (just as billions of neurons and synapses work in unison). If we set our sights on the grander vision of things, humans could accomplish great things if we utilize this technology to create a truly life-like Artificial Intelligence. At the same time, we need to keep in mind the dangers of such an intelligence being built upon a faultless system that has no single point of failure.

Just as any technology has upsides and corresponding downsides, this is no exception. The advantages of this technology are seemingly endless. In the relevant sense, it has the ability to create internet services without the same downfalls exploited in the TV show ‘Mr. Robot,’ where a hacker group named “fsociety” breached numerous data centers and effectively destroyed every piece of data the company held, causing worldwide ramifications across all of society. Because blockchain technology ensures no centralized data storage (by using all network users as nodes to spread information), it can essentially be rendered impossible to take down. Without a single targeted weak point, this means a service that, in the right hands, doesn’t go offline from heavy loads, which speeds up as more people use it, has inherent privacy/security safeguards, and unique features that couldn’t be achieved with conventional technology. In the wrong hands, however, this could be outright devastation. Going forward, we must tread lightly and not forget to keep tabs on this technology, as it could run rampant and destroy society as we know it.

Continue reading “Blockchain & Artificial Intelligence” »

The wild, behemoth 16-camera virtual reality rig that GoPro announced at Google’s I/O conference is officially called “Odyssey,” and is now available for purchase. But it is not for everyone. It costs $15,000, and only “professional content creators and producers” will be allowed to buy it — after they submit an application.

That price tag might make your eyes spin, but it does cover a good amount of equipment. Buying an Odyssey means you get 16 of GoPro’s top-of-the-line Hero 4 Black, a microphone, the rig and all the necessary cables, a Pelican case to carry it all in, as well as a warranty and support. For a production company that’s looking to get into the virtual reality game but doesn’t necessarily want to go the DIY route, this could be the best option.

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A comic book about stem cells, covering basic concepts related to stem cells, their properties and possible uses. TEXT: João Ramalho-Santos; ART: André Caetano.

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Exclusive trailer for Syfy’s mini series “Childhood’s End”, starring among others Mike Vogel (Under the Dome), Charles Dance (Game of thrones) and Daisy Betts (Last resort).

Syfy: http://www.syfy.com/
Syfy on Twitter: https://twitter.com/syfy

Continue reading “Syfy's Childhood's End HQ | Trailer 2015” »

No-A is a short student film directed by Liam Murphy. In it, a hulking robot risks everything to save its creator from an army of faceless soldiers. It’s a really neat CGI film with some really outstanding designs in it.

Overall, this feels like a bit of a sliver from a much larger story, and I hope that the creators and production team will add onto the story and continue it in another short film or maybe a longer feature. It seems like there’s a lot more story to uncover.

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Matt Damon stars as a NASA astronaut stranded on the Martian surface in the forthcoming film adaptation of Andy Weir’s The Martian. Credit: Twentieth Century Fox.

Martian dust storms rank among the most impressive in our Solar System. But no matter how menacing they appear from Mars orbit, they’re not likely to cause astronauts to abort future surface missions, says a planetary scientist who studies the phenomena.

Although such storms routinely engulf large swaths of the Red Planet for days at a time, any emergency serious enough to evacuate a crew isn’t likely to be triggered by a dust storm of the sort depicted in the forthcoming film adaptation of Andy Weir’s novel The Martian.

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