Howard The Duck
“The story has no center; the duck is not likable, and the costly, overwrought, laser-filled special effects that conclude the movie are less impressive than a sparkler on a birthday cake. George ‘Star Wars’ Lucas supervised the production of this film, and maybe it’s time he went back to making low-budget films like his best picture, ‘American Graffiti.'” — Gene Siskel, The Chicago Tribune.
From Justin to Kelly?
“How bad is ‘From Justin to Kelly?’ Set in Miami during spring break, it’s like ‘Grease: The Next Generation’ acted out by the food-court staff at SeaWorld.” — Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly.
3D-animated film piles on the insanity—yet wins with family, heart, and stakes.
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is right up there with Black Panther and Deadpool 2 as one of the best comic book adaptations in theaters this year. What's more, it's easily the best comic-nerd film in years to warmly embrace the kinds of viewers who know their comics canon front and back, all without intimidating the inevitable kid and newbie viewers attracted to this incredibly family-friendly adventure.
Centuries of looting had completely demolished the structure.
The unfinished temple in a southern valley of the Lake Titicaca Basin in modern-day Bolivia has been a mystery for at least 500 years. Now known as the Pumapunku—"Door of the Jaguar" in the Quechua language—the complex stone structure is part of a sprawling complex of pyramids, plazas, and platforms built by a pre-Columbian culture we now call the Tiwanaku. Construction began around 500 CE and proceeded off and on, in phases, over the next few centuries until the Tiwanaku left the site around 900 or 1000 CE.
NYT: Bing could see nearly "all Facebook users’ friends without consent."
The news comes days after Facebook disclosed a massive photo bug, weeks after 50 million people were affected by an access-token harvesting attack, and less than a month after it was revealed that Facebook considered selling access to its users’ data. And all of those scandals are in addition to the Cambridge Analytica debacle. In June 2018, Facebook dodged some lawmakers' questions in written testimony, after two days of CEO Mark Zuckerberg's appearance before the US Senate.
Matching light wavelength and atom's energy level creates focus.
If you turn over your cell phone, you will find the lens on your camera. This is what lets the camera create a nice image. But for light in the wavelength range of 1-100nm (called the extreme ultraviolet), lenses don’t work. Or, rather, that was the accepted wisdom until now. But that wisdom will change, as researchers have shown how to make a lens for extreme ultraviolet radiation.
Closest flyby will come just after midnight in its operators' time zone.
If you want your New Year celebrations to be truly out of this world, then you might consider stopping by the New Horizons website. Following on from its phenomenally successful flyby of Pluto, the spacecraft will perform its closest flyby of a small Kuiper Belt object at just after midnight in the US Eastern time zone—the one where the operations center of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory is located.
I found a video of Curtis attempting to post...
"One summer can change everything."
Just before 2018 ended, Netflix tweeted out another trailer for Stranger Things 3 (the above video is a shortened version from Netflix's YouTube channel). The nearly four-minute-long clip takes viewers back to New Years' Eve 1985, specifically Dick Clark's iconic New Year's Rockin' Eve broadcast. Mysterious interferences interrupt the broadcast, sending static onto the screen along with strange messages like "when blue and yellow meet in the west."
New analysis of surviving satellite documents puts the date between 1098 and 1114.
At Christmas in 1085, William the Conqueror decided to commission a kingdom-wide survey of England, sending census takers into every shire to take stock both of the population and its resources: land, livestock, castles and abbeys, and so forth. The result was the Domesday Book, a tome that provided an unparalleled record of daily life in 11th-century England, long revered and studied by medieval historians. It got its moniker because the English complained that its decisions could not be appealed, just like on the Day of Judgement.
"This may be the most primitive object seen by any spacecraft."
After the New Horizons mission zoomed by the then-unknown Ultima Thule object in the outer Solar System early on New Year's Day, the spacecraft began returning data to Earth via a deep-space network. Although only about 1 percent of that data is now on the ground, scientists were able to share some top-line findings on Wednesday.
