Missing Mary Road

Last week saw the 30th anniversary of The Empire Strikes Back, and along with it came discussions about the best way to watch the film and what we can expect from future re-releases. Michael Kaminski wrote the exhaustively researched and illuminating book The Secret History of Star Wars, so he knows damn near everything there is to know about the film stock used to shoot the film. George Lucas famously said that the original film “doesn’t exist” anymore, but is that accurate?

How exactly does Star Wars exist now? What are the challenges and possibilities involved in re-releasing a perfected original cut? How do the bootlegs stack up? Let’s find out.

We asked Kaminksi about the master copy of the original Star Wars. What does it look like now? “The term ‘master copy’ is slightly vague, because there are various kinds of print masters of different generations,” he told Ars. The original negative is conformed to the 1997 Special Edition, meaning the physical copy has been cut and edited with CGI “improvements.” With sections of the film being too damaged to work with, parts of that print were taken from other sources. “You never throw away your original negative, so I must assume that any pieces or shots that were removed are in storage somewhere at Lucasfilm or Fox,” he explained.

click to make bigger. scroll and enjoy.

The wind howls like a hammer,
The night blows cold and rainy,
My love she’s like some raven
At my window with a broken wing.

remember the idiot box post.

well here’s some more super art from the 80’s over at /film.

i love the daily batman and superman. going straight to my rss reader in opera.

i’ve seen a lot of bad television growing up in the 80’s with state run television. and since there was only one channel which was on, we watched anything that it showed. anything in english was a bonus. luckily, i was too young to care what i saw and was only allowed an hour or two in the evening during dinner. but i caught up pretty quick. going through this website brought back a lot of fond memories of really bad shows. there’s some great art work there and i went through each and every single image. easily take you a half hour to go through them all but well worth it. i sincerely admire all the artists who have the vision to put together this sort of stuff and grateful that they would share it online for us. i think my favourite image is of danger mouse showed below. click on through for some wonderful memories.

even luthercorp needs a bailout every now and again. starring the wonderful jon hamm of ‘mad men‘ fame, which you should go watch immediately if you haven’t. it’s probably the best show on television i saw last year. anyway, click below for a humorous time.

acoustics is the study and science of sound. unfortunately it is a dying science these days with the explosion of digital media. more and more people are readily accepting shitty quality of sound to enjoy their listening. how people enjoy music using their cellphones as a music player is beyond me. ipods and other players are just as much to blame as digital audio files are compressed into such a small file that all good quality audio is sucked right out of it. an audio cd for example has an average track of five minutes which uncompressed goes anywhere from 50 to 100 MB. an mp3 of the same track would be an average of 5 mb. there’s something wrong with that picture.

now it seems like things are getting worse, as people seem to think that the decompression of the audio on the fly (and the “noise” that comes with it) is part of the actual track and they seem to prefer the screechy scratchy sounds in mp3’s.

personally, i don’t feel audiophiles have much to be worried about as vinyl and cd’s aren’t gonna disappear anywhere in the near future, but they are definitely getting harder to find and unfortune as it is, we pay more for shitty sounding music and less for good sounding music.

“Jonathan Berger, a professor of music at Stanford, tests his incoming students each year by having them listen to a variety of recordings which use different formats from MP3 to ones of much higher quality, and he reports that each year the preference for music in MP3 format rises. Berger says that young people seemed to prefer ’sizzle sounds’ that MP3s bring to music because it is a sound they are familiar with. ‘The music examples included both orchestral, jazz and rock music. When I first did this I was expecting to hear preferences for uncompressed audio and expecting to see MP3 (at 128, 160 and 192 bit rates) well below other methods (including a proprietary wavelet-based approach and AAC),’ writes Berger. ‘To my surprise, in the rock examples the MP3 at 128 was preferred. I repeated the experiment over 6 years and found the preference for MP3 — particularly in music with high energy (cymbal crashes, brass hits, etc) rising over time.’ Dale Dougherty writes that the context of the music changes our perception of the sound, particularly when it’s so obviously and immediately shared by others. ‘All that sizzle is a cultural artifact and a tie that binds us. It’s mostly invisible to us but it is something future generations looking back might find curious because these preferences won’t be obvious to them.”

the slow and inevitable doom of the art of handwriting is sure to come about. the bbc describes it. i remember the days of three lined pages to teach hand writing and urdu calligraphy. i highly doubt that this will be the case in even ten or fifteen years from now, much less a century from now.

“When your great-great-grandchildren find that letter of yours in the attic, they’ll have to take it to a specialist, an old guy at the library who would decipher the strange symbols for them,” says Ms Florey, author of the newly-published Script and Scribble: The Rise and Fall of Handwriting.

She argues that children – if not this generation then one soon to come – may grow up using only a crude form of printing for the rare occasions in life they need to communicate by pen.

The way handwriting is taught has undoubtedly changed. At Ms Florey’s school in 1950s America, a nun beat time with a stick as the class copied letters from the blackboard. It was not a place for individuals. There was a right way to form letters and very many wrong ways.

All the Superman logos. Awesome.

Tuba Sahaab is taking on the Taliban. But the 11-year-old Pakistani girl is no militant and her weapons are simply her words. She lives on the outskirts of Islamabad and writes poems about the pain and suffering of children in her country despite personal threats from hardline Islamic militants.

“If they kill me, do not worry,” she says. “I want everyone in Pakistan to be equal.”

The young poet has been interviewed by US network, CNN, and now regularly appears in the media. She is not afraid to express her views and is famous in Pakistan.

“I want to give peace to my nation,” she tells CNN (photo). “I will fight for it.”

Sometimes there are words that cannot be translated into another language without losing some of its meaning. According to the BBC and 1,000 linguists, the most difficult word to translate is “ilunga”. A word in the Tshiluba language, which is spoken in south-east Congo. “Ilunga”, when attempted to translate into English means “a person who is ready to forgive any abuse for the first time, to tolerate it a second time, but never a third time”.

In second place was shlimazl which is Yiddish for “a chronically unlucky person”. Third was Naa, used in the Kansai area of Japan to emphasise statements or agree with someone. Although the definitions seem fairly precise, the problem is trying to convey the local references associated with such words, says Jurga Zilinskiene, head of Today Translations, which carried out the survey.

the complexity of this is mind numbing.

The Mathematician in Love
William John Macquorn Rankine

I.

A mathematician fell madly in love
With a lady, young, handsome, and charming:
By angles and ratios harmonic he strove
Her curves and proportions all faultless to prove.
As he scrawled hieroglyphics alarming.

II.

He measured with care, from the ends of a base,
The arcs which her features subtended:
Then he framed transcendental equations, to trace
The flowing outlines of her figure and face,
And thought the result very splendid.

III.

He studied (since music has charms for the fair)
The theory of fiddles and whistles, –
Then composed, by acoustic equations, an air,
Which, when ’twas performed, made the lady’s long hair
Stand on end, like a porcupine’s bristles.

IV.

The lady loved dancing: — he therefore applied,
To the polka and waltz, an equation;
But when to rotate on his axis he tried,
His centre of gravity swayed to one side,
And he fell, by the earth’s gravitation.

V.

No doubts of the fate of his suit made him pause,
For he proved, to his own satisfaction,
That the fair one returned his affection; — “because,
“As everyone knows, by mechanical laws,
“Re-action is equal to action.”

VI.

“Let x denote beauty, — y, manners well-bred, –
“z, Fortune, — (this last is essential), –
“Let L stand for love” — our philosopher said, –
“Then L is a function of x, y, and z,
“Of the kind which is known as potential.”

VII.

“Now integrate L with respect to d t,
“(t Standing for time and persuasion);
“Then, between proper limits, ’tis easy to see,
“The definite integral Marriage must be: –
“(A very concise demonstration).”

VIII.

Said he — “If the wandering course of the moon
“By Algebra can be predicted,
“The female affections must yield to it soon” –
– But the lady ran off with a dashing dragoon,
And left him amazed and afflicted.