Birth of a Star from Tom Lowe on Vimeo.

“This movie presents a visualization of the star-forming region known as S106. This unique three-dimensional view illustrates and emphasizes that many of the objects contained within astronomical images are not at the same distance, but, in fact, spread across light-years of space. The Hubble image is augmented with additional field-of-view from the Subaru Infrared Telescope. The stars and the lobes of glowing gas from the Hubble/Subaru two-dimensional image have been separated and sculpted using both scientific knowledge and artistic license to create the depth in the movie. Of note, the relative distances between stars and the nebula have been greatly compressed.”
-NASA

“This devastatingly beautiful image shows the birth pangs of a massive star. Called IRS 4 (for Infrared Source 4; it was first seen in IR images), it’s the really bright star just below center where the two blue lobes come together. It’s a bruiser, an O-type star with at least 15 times the Sun’s mass — 30 octillion tons! — and is a staggering 10,000 times as bright. It’s still in the process of forming, but it’s nearly there.

Located about 2000 light years away, IRS 4 is surrounded by an enormous cloud of gas and dust that may have a mass as high as 25,000 times the mass of the Sun. When the star first ignited, fusing hydrogen into helium in its core, the vast amount of energy it started pouring out lit up the cloud in the immediate vicinity around it. Most of the cloud is still dark and cannot be seen here, but everything within a few light years of the star is being illuminated, if not ionized, by the fierce ultraviolet light from the star.”
- Phil Plait

If you want to get the song “Funeral Canticle,” it’s an iTunes Album Only purchase, but probably worth the $10 for the 23 minute song. Tom Lowe is awesome too.

If you don’t know, Tom Lowe won 2010 Astronomy Photographer of the Year.

TimeScapes: Rapture from Tom Lowe on Vimeo.

It would be amazing to own a Red MX camera. The resolution is so high that it easily rivals movies made with film, and even though it costs $25,000 USD, it is actually cheaper than using film for any production. Most directors are switching to using Red digital cameras, except for ones like Woody Allen, where they basically have enough clout to use whatever they want. Digital will always dominate in the future.

Saw this on MTV earlier and it’s so bad. Normally, we keep it positive about the musics, but this song and video are ridiculous. Will.i.am is like junk food for music. Think about all the reasons you wouldn’t eat junk food then think about this song and how weak sauce it is. Will.i.am was working on a business deal with Universal Music Group and we heard he’s a fairly opinionated dude. Not just like strong convictions, but opinionated in a pretentious way. Don’t ask how we know that.

Will.i.am shouldn’t have to tell us how hard the beat is, really. The beat should just speak for itself. Come on buddy!

Then there’s the whole involvement of Mick Jagger. Seriously? Jagger should be thanking Ke$ha right now because since she and Maroon 5 wrote tracks playing on the words “swagger” and “Jagger,” which seems to have created an unfortunate ripple-effect. Now we have to listen to and more horribly see Mick Jagger still performing. Yes, the Rolling Stones made awesome music, but that was years ago, and unfortunately their time has passed. In the entertainment business, sometimes retirement really isn’t such a bad thing. Rather than going hard, Jagger should just go home!

We’ve got that crisis like Jagger, because this song reeks of an older dude trying to be cool for Jagger. You’ve got to know when to fold them, just like if you’re on a casino online. It’s so tempting to go hard though and try to win big when you’ve got money to burn, isn’t it? Call us what you will, but when we gamble, we like to get our video poker on. When we can’t make it to Vegas we hit up: http://www.casinotop10.net/video-poker.shtml, keeping it legal, of course. Unfortunately, much like Mick Jagger, we don’t always know when to fold ‘em. Two words: human nature.

Admittedly, I haven’t been paying attention to Arcade Fire for a long time. The last time I listened to them was in 2006, and it seemed their only reasonably decent song then was “Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels).” Yet, even that song is kind of boring. Not into the whole Modest Mouse pitchy voice thing either. In 2006, when “Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)” was released, I knew two people who talked about how awesome the band was. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, always, but those same two people also enjoyed bands like Rascal Flatts, Pete Yorn and Lifehouse, which doesn’t really need further explanation.

The more recent Arcade Fire song “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)” is actually surprisingly good. What happened in five or six years? Now Arcade Fire is actually good? Wow. Stop paying attention to a band and they get better? That’s somewhat unusual. So, kudos to Arcade Fire for stepping their game up, whenever that happened.

*Begin tangential story*

I will say this though: back in ’06 I actually purchased a Lifehouse song per the request of a girl who also raved about Arcade Fire. Can’t remember what song it was, but yes, I actually personally supported the band with a $.99 contribution. This was back when iTunes still sucked and had exclusively 128kbps mp3s (low quality) available for download. How dare Apple? Selling compressed-ass, lossy quality music at $.99 a song. This dude over at TweakHound breaks down audio quality differences in a pretty straightforward way… if you’re interested. Yes, iTunes was terrible for audiophiles, or anyone who prefers CD quality sound, even a full five years after its launch in January 2001!

Anyway, I couldn’t believe this girl liked Lifehouse and asked, “Ha! Is this song for you?” She tried to cover it up by saying “It’s for my roommate.” Mmmmhmmm. Sure gurl. Didn’t mean to make her feel insecure about her taste in music there, but these things happen. At least she was smart enough to have no iTunes account at the time. Maybe she was an audiophile too! Needless to say, the song was promptly deleted from my music library after burning it to disc for her.

More background: in the brief one and a half months I hung out with this girl, she kept talking about some guy she was clearly hung-up on. The story went something like: “We met at a party and had sex eight times in one night. How does that happen? Who does that?” I didn’t care so much that she slept with some random guy from a party but instead kept wondering what would cause a couple to bone eight times in one night. Of course, her obsession about the dude continued to resurface in our chats–even though she insisted she was over him–and she eventually told me his explanation for rejecting the idea of dating her. His reasoning? He “couldn’t date [her] because dating as an official couple is so conventional and overrated and why do people always have to put a label on things anyway?”

I responded to that by saying, “This guy is basically telling you ‘Thanks for the fuck. It’s been real!’” Enough time had passed for that conclusion to be a fair one. Oh, that phone call ended nice and cordially, but that didn’t stop her from calling me up a few days later while drunk only to scream about what an insensitive bastard I was for making such an inconsiderate statement about a guy she’d had relations with. In that entire call I think I only got to say two things: “I thought you were over him?” and “Sorry about that!” The rest was me getting chewed-out. That was the last I heard from her. Give someone a little taste of reality and they get all mad about it. Oblivion might be blissful, but delusion isn’t.

*End tangential story*

So the lovely, sexy, Ryan Gosling has become a meme-target. Hooray. What we like even more? That the meme went tech within the past few days. Here’s a top ten of the meme images, starting with 10, for your viewing pleasure.

Hollywood has gone crazy for 3D, every other movie appears to be “in 3D”, but is this really a revolution or is this just another fad? Sortable.com has taken a look at the 3D movie industry to see if 3D is here to stay or if the bubble is about to pop!

Check out the Sortable inforgraphic below!

Sortable 3D Bubble

Here’s a theory we propose: rather than spending money on 3D technology development, the entertainment industry really needs spend more time on holographic TV development. Forget flat screen, get your media floating in mid-air like R2D2 in Star Wars (only in HD), and that’s a step in the right direction. In Japan, they already have concerts with nobody on stage, but just a holographic video of a performer. Yes, they have branded computer-generated musicians that sell-out venues.

Image via Engadget.

That’s right. We just predicted the future. How does that feel?

Oh shit, and here’s some hipsterwaver submitted GTA cosplay. Love it.

Swatch has released these pretty awesome touch watches that merge the company’s watchmaking reliability with touch technology. Seems like more and more we’re gravitating towards replacing buttons with touch-sensitive technology. It’s probably a step in the right direction.

The more bottlenecks we can eliminate in striving towards making the integration of life and technology seamless, the better our lives will be. That idea is probably at least worth considering, unless you’re anti-technology or afraid of the unknown, which you’re neither. Right?

Swatch Holiday 2011 Collection

Swiss fashion brand Swatch presents Swatch Touch 2011, a colorful new collection of trend-setting timekeepers with big-screen LCD dials and a touch-sensitive zone in place of pushbuttons.

Swatch Touch 2011 models give touch-screen access to six digital functions: time (2 zones, t1 & t2), date, chrono, alarm, timer and beep. Users sweep through the functions with ease using finger-taps and sideways scrolls—no pushbuttons—and can activate the screen’s built-in backlight to assure readability under all conditions. Revealing Swiss-made quality throughout, Swatch Touch’s 2011 curved plastic glass display and coloured LCD present Arabic numerals in a big, stylish font designed to fit the shape of the watch. Ergonomic in every detail, the smooth integration of the watch head and strap makes Swatch Touch 2011 a real pleasure to wear.

By far the biggest numerals on the Swatch Touch 2011 screen are the seconds: animated like the seconds hand on an analog watch. They are constantly changing, alive, giving rhythm and a pulse to life in the digital age. They are, in fact, the “heart” of the watch—Swatch on the move.

Swatch Touch Black, Swatch Touch Camouflage, Swatch Touch Pink, Swatch Touch Blue, Swatch Touch Purple and Swatch Touch White are all $140 each.

Purchase: bit.ly/SwatchTouchholiday

Nerd swagger:

It’s not so much the actual release of this “cracktro” or “loader” from Razor 1911 that interests us, but more the loader itself, the music, coding and graphics.

Definitely wouldn’t have gone with the music in the clip above–so we made our own dub-over version below (you’re welcome BMW)–but it’s interesting to see what BMW is doing with body design as the auto market shifts more importance on cosmetics.

Bottled water has been a bad idea for a while now. Aside from having to lug cases of it around if you want to keep drinking it, consuming it just adds unnecessary environmental waste to deal with. You’ve probably already seen commercials for these portable water filters, but in case you haven’t, now you know. Now there’s even less of a need for bottled water so long as you remember to carry one of these around. Oh, and the filter is much quicker than with Brita filters, but still as effective. So, unless you’re in a crunch situation where it’s impractical for you to use these, it’s probably worth picking one up (available for pre-order now) if you like your water pure and tasty and care about your carbon footprint.

Hydros, an innovative socially and eco-conscious company helping to lead the fight against the global water crisis, to let you know about their NEW Hydros Filtering Water Bottle with side fill technology, launching mid-December! Perfectly timed for holiday gift-giving with pre-orders available starting Nov. 21 and shipping Dec. 15, this enhanced bottle is the ONLY bottle on the market that boasts a twist and turn spout that filters on entry and makes filling, pouring and drinking fresh, delicious water simpler than ever. Featuring a sleek ergonomic shape, the new Hydros Filtering Water Bottle is made from sustainable, premium materials that are dishwasher safe, BPA- and phthalate-free, and American-made, with 100 percent leak-proof sealing for advanced portability.

Offering a convenient and cost-effective alternative to bottled water, Hydros Bottles can save consumers $400 per filter and help reduce the 60 million plastic bottles that find their way into landfills every single day. Each Hydros Bottle purchase makes it possible for Operation Hydros to build sustainable water infrastructure to aid the nearly one billion people worldwide who do not have access to clean, drinkable water. Every bottle sold provides clean water to one person in need for one whole year.

Hear that? More secure than a regular wallet because it has a PIN. Time for less cash to be used and more silicone.

Most know Steve Jobs as a visionary, genius and marketing guru for beautiful technology products, but who knew that he hung a Bob Dylan poster over his bed in his early 20′s – would stay up late writing poems on his electric typewriter, often re-writing Dylan tunes. Also, do most know that he had an “abrasive personality” and “unapologetic brutality” that those who worked intensely with him experienced? Interesting stuff to learn about Jobs.

Many people know Apple co-founder Steve Jobs as an exacting tech visionary. Fewer know him as a romantic, a poet or a costumed “Alice in Wonderland” character at a California shopping mall.

These latter characteristics help make up the portrait of Jobs painted by his first serious girlfriend, Chrisann Brennan, in a “Rolling Stone” story that was shared exclusively with The Associated Press before hitting newsstands Friday.

Brennan and Jobs met in 1972, when he was a senior and she was a junior at Cupertino’s Homestead High School. In the piece, she recounts her adventures with a 17-year-old Jobs that summer, from moving into a cabin together to getting paid to portray “Alice” characters at a local mall.

Jobs died Oct. 5 at 56 after struggling for years with pancreatic cancer. After taking his third medical leave from Apple Inc. in January, he resigned as CEO in August, but stayed with the company as chairman. His death came a day after Apple unveiled the latest iPhone, the 4S, which goes on sale Friday.

Brennan’s on-and-off relationship with Jobs lasted until the birth of the couple’s daughter, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, in 1978.

She says the duo decided to live together that first summer. She tried to snag a room in a Cupertino cabin for them but was turned down by the man renting the place at the time – he said there wasn’t room for a couple. Somehow, Steve was able to persuade him to change his mind.

“This alerted me to something remarkable in him,” she writes in the “Rolling Stone” essay. “This guy could make things work. And from the way he’d taken charge of the situation, I knew he knew it too.”

At the time, Brennan says, Jobs “was almost 100 percent romantic.”

“He would tell me we were part of an affiliation of poets and visionaries he called `the wheat field group’ and say we were looking out a window together, with the others, watching the whole world,” she writes. “I did not know what he was talking about, but with all my heart I wanted to see such views.”

Brennan also recounts how Jobs – who hung a Bob Dylan poster over their bed – would stay up late writing poems on his electric typewriter, often re-writing Dylan tunes.

At the time, Brennan wasn’t impressed, seeing the results as “a lot of Bob Dylan songs with a few changes.”

“Only now do I see what he was trying to do. He was a loner and he didn’t talk much, and I think he used Dylan’s songs to make sense of the world,” she writes.

On the sillier side, Brennan details how she, Jobs, a roommate named Al and Steve Wozniak (who later co-founded Apple with Jobs) played “Alice” characters at a mall in nearby Santa Clara. Brennan got the part of Alice, while Al, Jobs and Wozniak took turns playing the Mad Hatter and White Rabbit – complete with knee-length giant heads that were incredibly hot because of the summer heat and the mall’s broken air conditioner.

Brennan writes that Al, Wozniak and Jobs “could barely handle 10 minutes in costume, and so they would run into the dressing rooms to trade off heads and to drink water every 10 minutes. It was painful and hilarious to watch.”

Not all of Brennan’s recollections were friendly. In the “Rolling Stone” essay, Brennan refers to “the all-too-often despotic jerk Steve turned into as he rose to meet the world.” For two years, Jobs denied that he was the father of Lisa, the child born to Brennan in 1978.

Brennan’s piece will run in “Rolling Stone” alongside a cover story by Jeff Goodell, an early Apple employee who has written about the company for the past 17 years. In his article, Goodell describes Jobs’ business savvy, as well as the “abrasive personality” and “unapologetic brutality” that those who worked intensely with him experienced.

First of all, iOS 5 for your iDevice introduces 220 new features, so it’s totally worth the upgrade. However, if you’re using a 3GS iPhone, iOS 5 will probably run pretty sluggishly on your iPhone. Most iDevices (iPhone 4, iPad, iPod Touch) will run jailbroken iOS 5 fine).

Second, you should know about a tethered jailbreak: this means you will have to use redsn0w to enter DFU mode and have it “just boot tethered” every time you power cycle your device. In other words, if your iDevice gets turned-off, you will lose all jailbreak features until you reconnect it to a computer and use redsn0w to boot it back into jailbroken mode. This is really kind of a hassle when you’re installing Cydia apps that require you to reboot, but once you’re setup, you can enjoy the benefits of a jailbroken iOS 5 and just respring the device to flush out the memory (RAM not the data stored on the iPhone solid-state drive).

Important Note: iPhone users, if you rely on an unlocked baseband you MUST stay away from iOS 5 update, it will eliminate your unlock as it will upgrade your iPhone baseband to one that can’t be unlocked. The iPhone Dev-team will release Redsn0w 0.9.9b5 to let unlockers able to upgrade to iOS 5 with preserving the unlockable basebands. This has been the deal since the first iPhone jailbreak in October 2009.

Jailbreak iOS 5 – Supported devices :
iPod touch 3G
iPod touch 4G
iPad 1
iPhone3GS
iPhone4 (GSM)
iPhone4 (CDMA)

So far, iPad 2 and iPhone 4S are not supported with this jailbreak as they powered with newer hardware (A5-processor) than the above devices.

Required Downloads:

Download Redsn0w 0.9.9b4 for Windows / Mac

Download iOS 5 ipsw firmware [Direct Links - Official from Apple]:

Download iOS 5 iPhone 4S
Download iOS 5 iPhone 4 (GSM)
Download iOS 5 iPhone 4 (Verizon)
Download iOS 5 iPhone 3GS
Download iOS 5 iPad 2 WiFi
Download iOS 5 iPad 2 GSM
Download iOS 5 iPad 2 CDMA
Download iOS 5 iPad
Download iOS 5 iPod touch 3G
Download iOS 5 iPod touch 4G

Download iTunes 10.5 for Windows and Mac

At any rate, once you have the software, it’s pretty easy to jailbreak. Just back-up your device in iTunes first, then hold shift or control (depending on if in Windows or Mac Os X) and browse to the downloaded iOS 5 firmware and perform a restore on the device. Once the restore has finished, go through the new prompts on the phone and select “restore device from previous back-up.” After that, just launch redsn0w, click on “Extras,” manually select the iOS 5 IPSW, then go ahead and jailbreak your iPhone. Questions? Leave a comment or Google it.

Sick.

Love it so much.

Fanks Google.

Remember the days of AdCritic.com? It was awesome like 10 years ago. The site was just a collection of funny commercials from TV. Yeah, most commercials suck, but some are funny and entertaining to watch. Then AdCritic started charging for access and we were no longer down. Now with YouTube, most stuff is available there, but it’s still not the same as AdCritic.

At any rate, here are a couple ads (video and print) from PERT Plus that we like, followed by a Google Chrome video ad that’s pretty exciting.

Today was a strict mix of drive-time pleasure with a bit of business. Highlights consisted of a trip from Venice to Malibu, some Caribbean cuisine and orchid browsing.

The one and only.

So maybe you know what Assembly is, but if not, these videos are still pretty cool eye-candy consideration. All videos were made using math equations on a low-level–Assembly Language–as opposed to using video editing software to simplify everything. That’s really what makes these so impressive. Not only that, demos have come so far from the 90′s demos: mostly for the graphics, although audio limitations have been drastically reduced with computer advances, and we have the benefit of more beautiful eye-candy. Nerd party! Rock on.

The 2011 Assembly party, which is sponsored by companies like Cisco Systems, Rovio, Pelitaito.fi, Dremel, etc. The video below is our change-up with alternate audio. If you want to hear the original audio and check out other demos that made the top rankings, go to the Assembly website.