Lifeboat Foundation

All restaurants, cafés, cinemas and clubs in France will close at midnight in an effort to stop the spread of the coronavirus, the French prime minister Édouard Philippe said in a press conference.

He said the virus is spreading faster even though limitations on mass gatherings were imposed.

“People are still going to cafes and restaurants which is something that I would normally enjoy because this is the French way of living but not during these times,” he said.

Foldit is crowdsourcing a cure and needs lots new players. All Transhumanist should participate.

The University of Washington is taking a novel approach to combat the spread of coronavirus around the world.

A new puzzle game from the university challenges scientists and the public alike to build a protein that could block the virus from infiltrating human cells. The game is on Foldit, a 12-year-old website created by the university’s Center for Game Science designed to crowdsource contributions to important protein research from more than 200,000 registered players.

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https://paper.li/e-1437691924

On October 4, 1923, the American composer George Antheil made his highly anticipated Paris debut at the Champs Elysées Theatre, in front of a rioting audience. A few minutes into the recital the crowd became unsettled; members of the audience started to protest the offensive nature of the music, others jumped to the musician’s defence, and before long the house was out of control. Unbeknownst to Antheil, the riot was in fact staged by his friends Marcel L’Herbier and Georgette Leblanc, who needed to film just such a scene for their upcoming movie, The Inhuman Woman. The ruse would only be revealed to him about a year after the incident. As he recalls:

I went to see a movie called L’Inhumaine, featuring Georgette LeBlanc. In this silent movie (still preserved by our New York Museum of Modern Art) you can if you wish see a vast rioting public… However, most curiously, this riot is no fake one. It is an actual riot, the same riot through which I played and lived that night. [1]

Continue reading “Three Articles of Posthuman Modernism: The Meta-Cinema of Marcel L’Herbier (and Friends)” »

What I used to think was a basic suit for batman is anything but normal if it were true. It would cost about 1 million to make a real life one and the fabrics and materials might as well be alien because they are so exotic but look like fabric. If batman were real it would show how genius of science he truly is as his fabric technology is some of the most creative work any material scientist could ever dream of. Essentially it is like having a tank in a lightweight suit.

Happy Batman Day! DC Comics first created Batman Day for Batman’s 75th anniversary in 2014, and has continued to celebrate the Dark Knight on Sept. 23 each year since. While Harley Quinn has been trying to steal Batman’s thunder (happy 25th, Harls) this year, we still want to take a closer look at the guy who started it all.

A few years ago, MoneySupermarket.com put out an excellent infographic about the cost of being Batman. They used numbers based on The Dark Knight trilogy of films from Christopher Nolan, which means they were using modern technology (and values). But they only looked at base costs, not at ongoing numbers, and the base costs alone were astounding: $682 million just to become Batman. Based on those starting numbers, how much has Bruce Wayne spent on being Batman over the years? We’ll start with their numbers, and break it down based on the DC Comics sliding timeline; thanks to the New 52 reboot, where Bruce had been Batman for “about 7 years,” and assuming at least a year or two has passed since then, let’s go with nine years of Batman-ing.

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Sci-fi writer/director Alex Garland has some strong feelings about modern science and technology. If you haven’t yet seen his visually stunning and ideologically complex films, Ex-Machina and Annihilation, let’s just say he holds some skepticism about things that evolve beyond human control. But Garland evidently also has some feelings about dealing with film studios and production companies (many of which may not fancy the unflinching outcomes of his stories). So for his latest idea, he turned to the mini-series masters at FX to make his TV debut: Devs, an eight-part miniseries that seems to take Garland’s emerging mythos and apply it to the tech/research industry itself.

Ex-Machina scribe Alex Garland’s FX show continues his skepticism of things beyond control.

Continue reading “Starring Nick Offerman as bearded tech-bro enigma, FX’s Devs has a lot going on” »

A young Star Wars fan and amputee has received an R2-D2 bionic limb and a phone call from Luke Skywalker himself.

Bella Tadlock, from Tallahassee, Florida, raised almost 14,000 dollars (about £11,000) for her bionic hero arm, created by Bristol company Open Bionics.

The 11-year-old started a fundraiser that first caught the eye of actor Mark Hamill in November — Hamill, who played Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars movies, retweeted her appeal to his 3.6 million followers.

Google has released a neural-network-powered chatbot called Meena that it claims is better than any other chatbot out there.

Data slurp: Meena was trained on a whopping 341 gigabytes of public social-media chatter—8.5 times as much data as OpenAI’s GPT-2. Google says Meena can talk about pretty much anything, and can even make up (bad) jokes.

Why it matters: Open-ended conversation that covers a wide range of topics is hard, and most chatbots can’t keep up. At some point most say things that make no sense or reveal a lack of basic knowledge about the world. A chatbot that avoids such mistakes will go a long way toward making AIs feel more human, and make characters in video games more lifelike.

This would be great so we can just read or watch movies while on a road trip 😃 Incentive to lessen air travel!

Nissan, BMW and GM have shown off self driving cars with spacious, adjustable interiors that are reminiscent of boutique hotels.

“A new knight rises.” 🦇
#TheBatman2021 ▼

Teaser Trailer CONCEPT for the newly announced Matt Reeves directed Batman movie starring Robert Pattinson as Bruce Wayne. Let me know what you think of the casting in the comments below.

Continue reading “THE BATMAN (2021) Teaser Trailer Concept — Robert Pattinson, Matt Reeves DC Movie” »