The season's second David Mamet revival on Broadway, American Buffalo—which officially opened Monday on the heels of Speed the Plow, the playwright's Hollywood satire—is toast. Oh well, this is what happens to a show when its review in the Times begins: "Ssssssssst. That whooshing noise coming from the Belasco Theater is the sound of the air being let out of David Mamet’s dialogue. Robert Falls’s deflated revival...evokes the woeful image of a souped-up sports car’s flat tire, built for speed but going nowhere." In the wake of the Times pan, it was announced today that the production, which stars John...
Lingerie connoisseurs will be happy to know that CBS has launched a multi-media, multi-platform Victoria’s Secret assault on all senses. That’s right: no longer will you have to search through the Internet’s wastelands to get your Victoria’s Secret fix; it’s all there on the official website and on your mobile. Social Features The new website will feature behind the scenes videos, interviews with models, photo galleries, model bios, and other original content. The Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show will be broadcast on December 3, and if you’re the chatting type, check out www.cbs.com/socialviewing during the show, as you’ll be able...
Because the human eye has an effective “refresh rate” of around 30 frames per second, there is a certain point at which even major increases or decreases in frames per second will have no visible effect. I’d place that number, off the top of my head, around 100fps — at that point your eye isn’t going to “catch” the display in mid-update, as the refreshes will happen faster than our visuo-temporal granularity — so movement appears completely continuous and no interpolation is done by the eye, which interpolation, paradoxically, is what makes 24p such a convincing frame rate for...
Forgetomori came across this neat example of pareidolia. Have you seen Jesus today? The photo above may be a good chance. Sent by Jessica Lundgren from Sweden to paranormal.about.com, you can see the clear profile of a giant bearded man with closed eyes. It does resemble common representations of a fellow named Jesus. Even though that enormous Jesus head doesn’t quite fit into the rest of the image. What’s going on there? Jessica writes that “the child died short after the photo was taken”. The link also has another photo that is either pareidolia or a hoax. Good example...
While we don't expect it to be the type of interface that'll replace touch screens anytime soon, Bandai is certainly forging some interesting new ground with its so-called Tuttuki Bako device, or "poking box," which actually lets you stick your finger right into the device to control the on-screen finger. That's apparently done with the aid of some motion sensors which, as you can see in the video after the break, seem to work at least reasonably well. In addition to boasting various "games" like poking a panda, poking a face, or poking a stick figure, the device also...
According to InfoWorld, Marco Boerries, executive vice president and head of Yahoo’s Connected Life Division, let it slip that T-Mobile and Yahoo will be announcing a partnership to put the Yahoo OneSearch button on T-Mobile phones. If this rumor pans out, this is good news for Yahoo whose financial struggles are, well, numerous. Yahoo OneSearch may be Yahoo’s ray of hope as OneSearch is doing rather well in the mobile search market. AT&T also inked a deal with Yahoo back in September to bring OneSearch to AT&T handsets. Yahoo has an exclusive deal with O2 in the UK and...
Once upon time, video codecs and formats were really only the concern of AV nerds, anime freaks and hardcore not-so-legal movie downloaders. Now, even the most part-time of geeks has to deal with them, whether they're trying to stream a flick across their house with an Apple TV, dump some video onto their phone or just trying to grab last night's episode of Dexter because they, uh, forgot to renew their Showtime subscription that'll work in their media player. It's messy and annoying, but we're here to clean it up. Take a deep breath. You might recall our discussion about...
The latest data from the Internet Advertising Bureau shows that US online ad revenues in Q308 were $5.9bn, 8% up on Q307 and 2% up on Q208. The good news is obviously that it is still growing, the bad news is that these sorts of growth rates are not of the magnitude that will necessarily survive recession. Nor are they the sort of growth rates that have made this space such fertile ground for startups over recent years. A rising tide floats all boats, but when the tide stops rising… This chart nicely illustrates the scale of the growth we...
