АП: Заявки на перевод

Отредактировано - Эль on 08 Фвр 2008 17:02:13

1. http://bsfa.co.uk/bsfa/website/awardscurrentsl.aspx

2. http://www.cinematical.com/2008/01/24/new-narnia-pics-prince-caspian-is-ready-for-battle/

Срок: 1-2 дня
Условия: в премии (п.1.) английский названия скорее всего еще не переведены, так что оставляем оригинал, в скобках указываем свой русский вариант перевода. Названия номинаций и самой премии можно посмотреть в админской части Архивов (вывод в общий доступ заложен в ТЗ, но еще не сделан). Статью про Нарнию из 2.п. по возможности избавить от авторского стиля и сделать безличный текст.

Если кто возьмется, отметьтес, плз.

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Цитата:

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названия скорее всего еще не переведены, так что оставляем оригинал, в скобках указываем свой русский вариант перевода.

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типа, техподдержка
...и тестирование

Вот текст для второй:
Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian is almost here -- we've got just under four months until the Pevensie children galavant on the big screen once again. This time around, the kids have been out of Narnia for a year when they find themselves back -- 1300 years later. The Golden Age is gone, and the evil King Miraz is in control. Of course, they do what they must -- team up with Prince Caspian to get him back in the throne and restore Narnia's glory. I can't help but wonder: Would world peace be possible if you gathered together all of the literary, heroic children of the world? They seem to accomplish a heck of a lot.

The above picture comes from Cinema Blend, and you can head over there to see some battle scenes, and a Caspian close-up for you Ben Barnes fans out there. Prince Caspian opens on May 16.

simplemente para llamar su atención

Upd. Сделала отдельную тему для вычитки, чтоб эту не загромождать. Здесь тогда лучше оставлять просто запись о том, что текст взят, и примерное время окончания работы.

Отредактировано - EI on 28 Янв 2008 16:37:15

Отредактировано - SeaJey on 13 Марта 2008 12:23:46

На крайняк, можно в сообщества Debian/Ubuntu толкнуть, а то, говорят, у них имена для дистрибьютивов кончаются :-)

Отредактировано - SeaJey on 13 Марта 2008 12:24:23

"I made a joke about the Baldwin Steam Dragon Works, [my wife] Marianne laughed, and then I asked her to write that down--because it implied an industrialized Faerie, one that I could work my own experiences into," Swanwick said in an interview. "That became The Iron Dragon's Daughter. I never expected [to] write another book in the same world, but not long ago I had the image of young Will running to the top of Grannystone Hill to see the war-dragons flying by. I set it down on paper, and by the end of the first two pages, I knew I had a novel on my hands."

In The Dragons of Babel, young Will le Fey's idyllic life is disrupted when an injured mechanical war-dragon crawls into his village and declares itself king. "Though Will kills the dragon, he becomes an outcast and then a refugee, who ends up in the monstrous heart of empire--the Tower of Babel," Swanwick said. "There he rises from the lowest levels of society to its very peak. But the dragon is not entirely dead: He still carries it within himself."

We all know how this plot is supposed to go, Swanwick said: The hero has a destiny of which he is unaware and winds up being crowned the king. "My problem with that is that as an American and a small-D democrat, I don't think that the restoration of the monarchy is a good thing," he said. "So I set myself the task of turning the conventions of fantasy on their head, while still providing the traditional satisfactions of fantasy."

Swanwick is currently working on a novel featuring the "post-utopian con men" Darger and Surplus, the subjects of his Hugo Award-winning story "The Dog Said Bow-Wow." --John Joseph Adams

Отредактировано - SeaJey on 13 Марта 2008 12:27:37

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Да-да, давайте есть пчелу мирно! (с)

Shrek, that lovable Ogre brought to life in three films and one TV Christmas special by Mike Meyers is heading for the Broadway stage, but without that signature voice from the famous comedian and, even though there has been no major stage star attached to the role to date, indications are that the stageplay and lyrics written by David Lindsay-Abaire and Jeanine Tesori will be a long running hit.
“Shrek the Musical,” will showcase all the movie’s familiar characters from Shrek, Donkey and Princess Fiona, who will be portrayed by actress/singer Sutton Foster (”Thoroughly Modern Millie,” “Little Women”). Christopher Sieber (”Monty Python’s Spamalot”) will star as the evil Lord Farquaad and Kecia Lewis-Evans has been brought in to portray Donkey’s wife, the Dragon. Donkey, the role so perfectly performed by Eddie Murphy in the animated feature films, has yet to be cast as well.
The musical opens on Broadway this coming December 14th at the Broadway Theatre after a trial run at the Seattle based Fifth Avenue Theater from August 14 thru September 21, 2008.
One month before the show’s grand Broadway premiere it will give a preview performance on November 8th.
“Shrek the Musical” will be based purely on the book by William Steig, and loosely on the three popular movies. One character yet to be mentioned is Puss, played by Antonio Banderas in two of the movies. Banderas is a well established Broadway performer himself leading some to wonder if he will end up being attached to the musical. Lending his name to the project would only enhance its chances of being a big success once it hits the Great White Way.

Отредактировано - SeaJey on 13 Марта 2008 12:28:01

Carolyn Porco, the lead imaging scientist on the joint NASA/ESA Cassini mission to Saturn has been tapped by the “Star Trek” (2008) crew to provide her expertise to the graphics teams. She will be ensuring that the sets, mattes, and planets are all realistic and at least scientifically plausible, following a time-honored Star Trek tradition of bringing aboard scientific advisors to make the film that much more real.
Said J.J. Abrams, “Carolyn and her team have produced images that are simply stunning. I’m thrilled that she will help guide our production in creating an authentic vision of space, one that immerses our audience in a visual experience as awe-inspiring as what Carolyn’s cameras have captured.”
Porco directs the Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for Operations (CICLOPS) at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado. CICLOPS is the flight control center for Cassini and processes all of the imagery from Saturn that the probe sends back to Earth.
Porco will be working with Industrial Light and Magic’s Roger Guyett, who has been working with ILM for 14 years. His work can be seen in such blockbuster films as “Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith,” “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End,” “Mission: Impossible: III,” and the latest Harry Potter film. Carolyn Porco served as a consultant for the 1997 Jodie Foster movie “Contact,” and worked with A&E television on the 25th anniversary Voyager mission special “Cosmic Journey.”

Отредактировано - SeaJey on 13 Марта 2008 12:28:17

Цитата:

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Я так понимаю работа окончна и можно брать новые кусочки для перевода?

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Да-да, давайте есть пчелу мирно! (с)

Scientists on the HiRISE team have discovered never-before-seen impact “megabreccia” and a possibly once-habitable ancient lake on Mars at a place called Holden crater.

The megabreccia is topped by layers of fine sediments that formed in what apparently was a long-lived, calm lake that filled Holden crater on early Mars, HiRISE scientists say.

“Holden crater has some of the best-exposed lake deposits and ancient megabreccia known on Mars," said HiRISE’s principal investigator, professor Alfred McEwen of the UA’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. ”Both contain minerals that formed in the presence of water and mark potentially habitable environments. This would be an excellent place to send a rover or sample-return mission to make major advances in understanding if Mars supported life.“

Holden crater is an impact crater that formed within an older, multi-ringed impact basin called Holden basin. Before an impact created Holden crater, large channels crossed and deposited sediments in Holden basin.

Blocks as big as 50 meters across were blasted from Holden basin when Holden crater formed, then fell chaotically back to the surface and eventually formed “megabreccia,” a conglomeration of large, broken boulders mixed with smaller particles. HiRISE images show megabreccia outcrops in Holden crater walls. This megabreccia may be some of the oldest deposits exposed on the surface of Mars.

At least 5 percent, by weight, of the fine sediments in the layer on top of the megabreccia consists of clay, according to another instrument on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars, or CRISM.

“The origin of the clays is uncertain, but clays in the probable lake sediments implies quiescent conditions that may preserve signatures of a past habitable environment,” HiRISE co-investigator John Grant of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum said. “If we were looking on Earth for an environment that preserves signatures related to habitability, this is one of the kinds of environments we would look at.”

And even the clay-containing layers aren’t all that’s icing the cake. Topping the clay layers that formed in the placid Holden crater lake are layers of great boulder-filled debris unleashed later, when water breached Holden crater rim, creating a torrential flood that eroded the older lake sediments.

The clay-rich layers would have remained buried from view, except for that great piece of luck, the fact that Holden crater rim could no longer withstand the force of an estimated 4,000 cubic kilometers of water dammed behind it. The body of water would have been larger than Lake Huron.

“The volume of water that poured through during this flood must have been spectacular,” Grant said. “It ripped up finely bedded materials, including blocks 70 meters or 80 meters across -- blocks nearly the size of football fields.”

The first, prolonged watery episode at Holden crater that settled out the fine-grain sediments probably lasted at least thousands of years. By contrast, the second lake, formed when the crater rim was breached, may have lasted only hundreds of years, not long at all, Grant said.

The megabreccia excavated when Holden crater formed is the first found on Mars, Grant said. “When large craters form, they produce very large blocks of material. We see them on Earth. Popigai Crater in Russia is one example. But we'd never seen them on Mars, and we knew they ought to be there. Now we’ve seen them with HiRISE.”

The observations suggest that the clays originally could have formed before the impact created Holden crater in the older Holden basin. Many of the blocks in the megabreccia appear to erode more easily than the surrounding crater wall material. These blocks could be chunks of Holden basin sediments that predate the impact crater, Grant said. "These blocks could be derived from the earlier Holden basin that were excavated on impact, then later re-eroded, with the sediments settling to the bottom of the long-lived lake. It's intriguing to think the clays we see in Holden crater now might actually have been recycled."

Holden crater is one of six remaining landing site candidates for NASA's Mars Science Laboratory, a mission scheduled for launch next year.

So far, most evidence for sustained wet conditions on Mars is limited to the planet's earliest history, the HiRISE scientists say. While water certainly flowed over the planet later in its history, it may have flowed only in short-lived, or catastrophic events.

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Да-да, давайте есть пчелу мирно! (c)

We currently search for signs of alien intelligence by scanning the sky with SETI and similar efforts. It's a noble effort, but one that makes a needle in a haystack look like a five minute job. The universe is very, very big while our current communications capability is very, very small. Which is lucky, because it limits the volume of universe contaminated by reality TV. Some propose the idea of using one of our greatest fears - self-replicating robots - to realise one of our greatests dreams: extra-terrestrial contact.

A Bracewell probe is a spacecraft containing all the information we might want to send an alien civilization. Since communications can only proceed at lightspeed, any attempt at long-distance chatter would take years to travel each way (so if E.T. had ever managed to phone home, it would have taken an awful long time, never mind the wicked long-distance charges). Instead of saying "Hello, how are you? Over" and waiting a few decades for a response, we can bundle anything we think is cool into the ultimate intercivilization care package and hope that somebody returns the favor.
Shooting these probes off at random is still trying to hit a bulls-eye by throwing darts out of a plane - and if we knew where to send it, we'd sort of be done already. This is where the Von Neumann machines comes in - a device built with the ability to construct a perfect copy of itself. The idea is that stars take to long to get to, so instead of sending one ship on an extreme long haul we send a self-replicating army. The robots build exact copies of themselves as they progress, and while it takes them just as long (or longer) to arrive, they reach millions of destinations simultaneously so it's much more efficient.
If an exponentially multiplying army of space robots seems like a bad idea to you, then well done, you've seen any sci-fi movie ever. Plus, building a vast army of brainless drones which occasionally discover something interesting, but mainly just repeat their own message along networks designed for communication? That's just a space internet. But (justified) fear of reproducing machines aside it does seem like the most sensible option. Expanding into the universe based solely on the resources of a single orbital rock is obviously limited - to say nothing of the problems caused by digging up our finite material supplies and throwing them into space. Using what we find up there will be essential strategy - and making the machines wait until we arrive to do it for them would be too slow.
We just have to hope they don't find someone they like better while they're up there.

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Да-да, давайте есть пчелу мирно! (c)

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Да-да, давайте есть пчелу мирно! (c)

The studio also has Cars 2, National Treasure 3 and Pirates of the Caribbean 4 scheduled for that year, the site reported.

Other reports suggest the fourth Pirates movie may focus on one character to downsize the budget. Other reports talk of a hyper-budget, ultra-fantastical feature, meaning anything from dinosaurs to Jules Verne-esque floating fortresses, the site reported.

Отредактировано - SeaJey on 13 Марта 2008 12:28:51

In Aliens: Colonial Marines, players are part of a United States Colonial Marine squad and must prepare to face an alien assault more intense and horrific than ever before. Driven by an original story penned by writers Bradley Thompson and David Weddle, Aliens: Colonial Marines will retain the atmospheric look and feel of the original films while leveraging next-generation technology to create a new interactive Aliens experience.

As an elite member of the Colonial Marines, players will have access to a range of weaponry, including pulse rifles and flamethrowers, based on the technology seen in the Alien films. The game also features claustrophobic environments, a brooding soundtrack and a multitude of surprises and shocks. Players will battle against menacing alien hordes in detailed levels that include the stark interiors of the abandoned ship Sulaco and unique environments created specifically for the game.

Aliens: Colonial Marines will feature a story-driven single-player mode and a new-four player co-op mode allowing players to share the chilling experience with three friends. In co-op mode, each player will assume the persona of a United States Colonial Marine and have a distinct role to play in the completion of every mission. Additionally, more multiplayer modes will be revealed later in the year that will complete the Aliens video game experience.

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Да-да, давайте есть пчелу мирно! (c)

Jason Statham, who stars in the upcoming SF-action film Death Race, told SCI FI Wire that the film is an homage to, rather than a remake of, the Roger Corman-produced Paul Bartel-directed 1975 cult classic Death Race 2000.

"It's fantastic fun," Statham said in an interview while promoting his latest film, The Bank Job. "It's more of [an] homage to the Corman film. It's not really a direct remake. I suppose it's very different. There's a great story to it, and I think it'll do really well. [Director] Paul Anderson was a dream to work with, and I'm really excited about seeing it."

Death Race retains little from the original movie, save for the central auto race. The movie is described as being set in a future version of America, where a prisoner (Statham) who is weeks away from being released is forced by his warden (Joan Allen) to compete in a brutal, deadly car race.

"It's [got] a big budget," Statham said about the film. "It's a great, great, fun film. I'm working with people of immense caliber. I've got Joan Allen there, who I'm doing scenes with. I've got Ian McShane. To be able to work with people like that, it just gets better and better."

Statham added that the role required unusual discipline from him. "I knuckled down quite immensely for that," he said. "I didn't have a drink for about five months, and for a Brit that's quite unusual."

The movie offers plenty for the auto enthusiast. "The cars in this are really killer," Statham said. "They've got ejector seats, and they spray out oil and napalm, and they've got rocket launchers. The story is it's a race to the death, and all the inmates in the prison build these cars." Death Race opens Sept. 26. It is being released by Universal, which is owned by NBC Universal, which also owns SCIFI.COM

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Да-да, давайте есть пчелу мирно! (c)

Mikhail Bulgakov's supernatural novel The Master and Margarita is being adapted for the screen by Stone Village Pictures and producer Scott Steindorff, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

The Los Angeles-based production company has optioned the late Russian writer's once-banned book, an inspiration for the Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil," about Satan's return to Earth.

Master and Margarita begins in pre-World War II Moscow, where the devil appears as a mysterious man who insinuates himself into a literary crowd. Amid a series of deaths and disappearances, the devil brings together the title characters, a despairing novelist and his devoted but married lover. The story shifts to the setting of the master's rejected novel, Jerusalem in the time of Pontius Pilate, and then to a supernatural world where satanic forces have taken over Margarita's life.

Roman Polanski adapted the novel in the late 1980s and was set to direct it before Warner Brothers reportedly pulled the plug because of budgetary concerns. The book was adapted into a Russian TV miniseries in 2005.

Bulgakov finished the book shortly before his death in 1940, but in part because of its allusions to Stalin's regime, it was banned until a two-part censored version was published in 1966 and 1967.

Отредактировано - SeaJey on 13 Марта 2008 12:21:59

Dans le cadre du grand prix de l'imaginaire :
Catégorie roman francophone : Bloodsilver de Wayne Barrow
Catégorie roman étranger : Spin de Robert Charles Wilson
Catégorie nouvelle francophone : L’Immaculée conception de Catherine Dufour
Catégorie nouvelle étrangère : Quatre chemins du pardon d’Ursula K. Le Guin
Catégorie roman jeunesse : Uglies de Scott Westerfeld
Prix Jacques Chambon de la traduction : Jean-Daniel Brèque pour Le Quatuor de Jérusalem de Edward Whittemore
Prix Wojtek Siudmak du graphisme : Benjamin Carré pour Les Mensonges de Locke Lamora
Catégorie essai : Bernard Heuvelmans, un rebelle de la science de Jean-Jacques Barloy
Prix spécial : David Delrieux, pour le téléfilm Des Fleurs pour Algerno
Prix européen : Michel Meurger, pour les passerelles créées par son œuvre entre la France, l’Allemagne et l’Angleterre.
Le Prix Verlanger a lui été remporté par Jean-Marc Ligny pour Aqua TM.

Отредактировано - SeaJey on 14 Марта 2008 16:50:25

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бог без улыбки есть дьявол

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Да-да, давайте есть пчелу мирно! (c)

“We discovered a new species of bacteria called Microbacterium hatanonis, which we found contaminates hairspray,” Said Dr Bakir from the Japan Collection of Microorganisms, Saitama, Japan. “We also found a related species, Microbacterium oxydans in hairspray which was originally isolated from hospital material.”
The scientists, whose study was published in the March issue of the International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology, analyzed its genome and found that it is an entirely new species, naming it Microbacterium hatanonis.
Scientists are now trying to determine if there is any clinical significance of the new species, as similar bacteria have been known to infect humans. “Further testing will establish whether the species is a threat to human health,” says Dr Bakir. “We hope our study will benefit the formulation of hairspray to prevent contamination in the future.”
Hairspray may not seem like the ideal conditions for life, but as other extremophiles have already shown—life can exist in an astounding range of environments. NASA, for example, has found that even in their highly specialized, meticulously sterilized “clean” rooms, where scientists and engineers assemble spacecraft, extremophiles can’t be wiped out (see NASA Finds Unknown Extremophile Stowaways post below). In a study last year, NASA was surprised at the total number of bacteria and the diversity of bacterial species, with about half of the microorganisms being completely unknown.
Clean rooms are very extreme environments for microbes, but nonetheless bacteria were found surviving on trace elements in wall paint and off of the residue of the very same cleaning solvents that were meant to wipe them out. These clean rooms, ultra hot springs, frigid ice caves, deep mines and now hairspray, are just some of the unlikely places where scientists have discovered ultra-hardy organisms thriving against the odds. Microbes locked in Antarctic ice have even been "resuscitated" after millions of years in suspended animation (see Ancient Antarctic Microbes Revived in Lab post below).
This recent discovery, along with many other previous extremophile findings, suggest that it’s not so strange to think that life could exist beyond Earth, perhaps even in environments so extreme that we would not conventionally consider them capable of hosting any form of life. In any case, it is awe-inspiring (if not a little frightening) how incredibly well microorganisms evolve in an endless effort to exploit every possible resource of virtually every niche on this planet.

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Да-да, давайте есть пчелу мирно! (c)

The solar system now is thought to be composed of three zones instead of two, according to NASA's Dr. Alan Stern at a recent meeting of the

The four rocky planets make up the inner zone. The gas giants form a "middle solar system." Beyond them lies an enormous third zone composed of the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud, both named for the astronomers who predicted their existence.

The Kuiper Belt, which was discovered in the 1990s, is a ring of dwarf planets, including Pluto, and smaller icy objects that range from 3 billion to 5 billion miles beyond the sun. More than 1,000 Kuiper Belt objects have been detected, and astronomers think there might be 50,000 to 100,000 more. Most are small, but some rival Pluto in size. Some have atmospheres and moons of their own, and some might have warm, wet interiors.
Far beyond the Kuiper Belt is the Oort Cloud, which Stern calls "the solar system's attic." The cloud, a gigantic sphere with an outer edge almost 5 trillion miles from the sun, nearly a quarter of the way to the next nearest star, Proxima Centauri,is thought to contain at least 1,000 planetary bodies, some as large as Earth or larger, and as many as a trillion comets.
"If the Oort Cloud were the diameter of a football stadium, the inner solar system would be the size of a washer one-eighth of an inch in diameter," said David Aguilar, a spokesman for the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.

Отредактировано - SeaJey on 14 Марта 2008 16:49:42

Like an episode from "Twilight Zone," scientists are exploring the possibility "that the universe has an imperceptibly small dimension (about one billionth of a nanometer) in addition to the four that we know currently,” according to Michael Kavic, one of the investigators on the project at Virginia Tech. “This extra dimension would be curled up, in a state similar to that of the entire universe at the time of the Big Bang.”

The team of physicists at Virgina Tech is looking for small primordial black holes created a fraction of a second after the beginning of the universe that, when they explode, may produce a radio pulse that could be detected here on Earth.

A black hole larger than the extra dimension would wrap around it like a thick rubber band wrapped around a hose. As a black hole shrinks down to the size of the extra dimension, it would be stretched so thin it would snap, causing an explosion, which would produce a radio pulse. Under a National Science Foundation grant, the Virginia Tech group is preparing to set up an Eight-meter-wavelength Transient Array radio telescope to search the sky for these radio pulses from explosions up to 300 light years away. They have a similar telescope in southwestern North Carolina that has been looking for events for the past several months.
Why search for extra dimensions? One reason has to do with string theory, an area of physics that postulates that the fundamental building blocks of the universe are small strings of matter that oscillate much like a guitar string, producing various harmonics.
“String theory requires extra dimensions to be a consistent theory,” Kavic said. “String theory suggests a minimum of 10 dimensions, but we’re only considering models with one extra dimension.”
Some theorists believe the Large Hadron Collider, a giant particle accelerator being constructed near Geneva, Switzerland, might be able to detect an extra dimension. The Virginia Tech group hopes to detect them via radio astronomy over a five-year period, a much less elaborate and costly endeavor.
“If we had evidence there is an extra dimension, it would really revolutionize how we think about space and time,” Kavic said. “This would be a very exciting discovery.”

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Да-да, давайте есть пчелу мирно! (c)

Apparently upset by the total lack of giant space robots attacking Earth, NASA have decided to build their own. "Dextre" (pronounced "Dexter"), a ten meter wide remote-controlled megabot, will be attached to the side of the International Space Station over the next fortnight. The robot will be taken up in pieces next Tuesday then assembled over three spacewalks, in a job that makes even the most expensive Perfect Grade Gundam kit look snapping two Lego blocks together.

The makers haven't commented on why they named a giant robot system after a psychotic killer. It's not like they can claim they haven't seen the TV show - it's on the SciFi channel and they work for NASA, for God's sake. That's like an alcoholic exclaiming "What is this 'beer' substance you speak of?" Since they actually are rocket scientists they're probably justified in thinking they're smarter than regular folks, but they have to realise that even us regular non-astronauts can crack the "swapping the last two letters" code. What's next, pig latin? Will they be launching the "Manhu-nay Ingkill-nay" in the summer?
We don't have to worry about Dextre enslaving us all from orbit - it isn't exactly HAL9000 in the brains department. While its four meter long seven-jointed arms are massively intimidating in action, it can only use one at a time - to avoid the risk of accidentally bashing them off each other in what would simultaneously be the funniest, most expensive and highest-altitude piece of slapstick ever performed. Dextre will co-operate with the ISS's existing robot arm Canadarm2 (guess where it's from). Again, NASA insists that the risks of programming robots to co-operate are negligible.
There are non-mechanical-death based criticisms of the system, but they're not very valid. Astronaut Richard Linnehan insists that human astronauts can work more quickly and react faster than robots, but that's generally because they have to. Robots don't get fatigued, nor do they have to run crying back inside the shuttle because the cold hard vacuum of space "makes their lungs hurt". When you can sit in orbit all day every day you get a lot more done than people who need to sleep, eat and not freeze to death.
To begin with Dextre will have only a few tools compared to the hundreds available to his human hosts, but expect this to change. Working around the clock on repair tasks around the ISS he'll be advancing science in two ways - freeing up the astronauts to work on "actual experiments" rather than "fixing the things that keep them alive", and with every move he'll be teaching designers about the needs and potential of robots in space.

Отредактировано - SeaJey on 14 Марта 2008 16:51:09

"A film is - or should be - more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what's behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later.
"If the film stirs the emotions and penetrates the subconscious of the viewer, if it stimulates, however inchoately, his mythological and religious yearnings and impulses, then it has succeeded."
Stanley Kubrick, Legendary Director of Dr Strangelove and 2001: A Space Odyssesy

In Arthur C. Clarke's forward to his novel 2001 A Space Odyssey, he wrote that "the barriers to distance are crumbling; one day we shall meet our equals among the stars."
More than anything, 2001 and its journey from the origins of life to Jupiter is Kubrick's philosophical statement about humanity's place in the universe, about where we as humans rate in the pecking order of life -- "feral, intelligent and hyper-intelligent." The famous Monoliths at the opening of the film and the Star Child at the end indicates that entities have reached a higher level of consciousness. Despite the fact that humanity remains more or less earthbound in the real world, Kubrick -- through his strange, serious, infuriating and by turns terrifying movie points towards our future: to our destiny beyond the Solar System.
The film's primary themes include the origins of evolution; sentient computers; extra-terrestrial beings; the search for one's place in the universe; and re-birth all seen within a cold, foreboding light. Viewers often read the monoliths as signposts of our discovery of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. Shortly after the film's release, however, Kubrick told a New York Times reporter that it's more a matter of the other beings discovering us.
The film's striking cinematography was the work of legendary British director of photography Geoffrey Unsworth who would later photograph classic films such as Cabaret and Superman.
Steven Spielberg called 2001 A Space Odyssey (1968) his generation's big bang, focusing its attention upon the Russo-American space race -a prelude to orbiting and landing on the Moon with Apollo 11 on July 20, 1969. And it prophetically showed the enduring influence that computers would have in our daily lives.
The special effects techniques Kubrick pioneered were further developed by Ridley Scott and George Lucas for films such as Alien and Star Wars. 2001 is particularly notable as one of the few films realistically presenting travel in outer space, with scenes in outer space silent; weightlessness is constant, with characters are strapped in place; when characters wear pressure suits, only their breathing is audible.
Stanley Kubrick -director of Dr Strangelove, Lolita, and Clockwork Orange- spent five years developing 2001, collaborating with SF legend Arthur C. Clarke on the script, expanding on Clarke's short story "The Sentinel". The screenplay and the novel were written simultaneously. The novel and the film deviate substantially from each other, with the novel explaining a great deal of what the film leaves deliberately ambiguous.
The film is notable for its use of classical music, such as Richard Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra and Johann Strauss's The Blue Danube waltz, as well the music of contemporary, avant-garde Hungarian composer, György Ligeti (though this was done without Ligeti's consent). Atmospheres, Lux Aeterna, and Requiem on the 2001 soundtrack was the first wide commercial exposure of Ligeti's work.
The moon docking sequence, which preceded the actual moon landing by a year, looks remarkably accurate when compared with the footage of Neil Armstrong cavorting. It's no wonder so many people believe the Apollo 11 landing was filmed on a Hollywood sound stage -- Kubrick had already done it, and he made it look easy.

One of the more crucial elements of 2001 is the lack of sound that dominates the film, which is true to that there would be no sound in space (no atmosphere means no medium for sound transmission).

The real drama begins when HAL, one of cinema's all-time evil and terrifying characters, makes his appearance. The HAL 9000: a malevolent, homicidal, and sightly effete (he sings "Daisy")) intelligent computer that controls the operations of the spaceship Discovery, which is on its way to Jupiter with a team of astronauts to explore the monoliths' origins.

In the movie's tensest sequence, Discovery crewmen David Bowman and Frank Poole attempt to disable the computer after the stability of his programming becomes suspect. Omnipotent in their microcosmic on-board setting, HAL doesn't take kindly to this suggestion. Bowman and Poole hole themselves up in space pod to engage in what they think is a private conversation. HAL, however, watches, reading their lips.

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Да-да, давайте есть пчелу мирно! (c)

Fifty years ago some young MIT scholars delivered a radical notion to the world. They proposed that it is possible to scientifically study precise mechanisms and processes of human thought. The movement was the catalyst for many fields of study.
Now after a generation of productive research, a newer paradigm shift is taking place. Science is discovering that it is our emotions that make thought possible, not the other way around. We simply cannot understand thought without understanding emotion. This is a radical departure from the traditional perspective, which used to regard emotion as the antagonist of reason.

"Because we subscribed to this false ideal of rational, logical thought, we diminished the importance of everything else," said Marvin Minsky, a professor at MIT and pioneer of artificial intelligence. "Seeing our emotions as distinct from thinking was really quite disastrous."
Cognitive psychologists have traditionally downplayed the importance of emotions to the thought process. "They regarded emotions as an artifact of subjective experience, and thus not worthy of investigation," said Joseph LeDoux, a neuroscientist at NYU.
In all fairness to cognitive psychologists, the field of cognitive psychology has always been criticized for being too “soft” of a science. The effect is that cognitive scientists have always felt compelled to “harden” the science up with logical facts, and less study of emotion and behavior. Ironically, “feelings” ARE the new “fact”, and the main determination of the choices we make- not logic.
In fact, the entire “science of thinking” was approached somewhat backwards right from the start. Perhaps, this was partly due to the field being largely dominated by men who suspected (in true Vulcan fashion) that “feeling” is inferior to logic. In fact, as I was summarizing these findings for this post, my husband called to tell me about a problem he is having with a coworker. I asked him if he had talked to the individual to find out how he was feeling. My husband replied, “Men don’t talk about feelings. We talk about facts.”
Of course, that doesn’t apply to all men. Antonio Damasio, a neuroscientist at USC has played an important role in establishing the importance of studying emotion. Before Damasio came onto the scene, most cognitive scientists assumed that emotions only interfered with rational thought. It was assumed that a person without any emotions would be a better thinker, since their “cortical computer” could process information without the hindrance of emotion. Damasio’s research challenged the assumption by showing that people who have suffered brain injuries which prevent them from perceiving their own feelings, are ineffective decision-makers. Most would spend hours deliberating over irrelevant details, such as where to eat lunch. Damasio’s research, among many other studies, is revealing that emotion is what enables us to make up our minds. It is pure reason- not feeling- that is the true hindrance to decision making. So take that, Mr. Spock!

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Да-да, давайте есть пчелу мирно! (c)

“We’re looking at a tug-of-war with dark energy and gravity trying to expand or collapse the universe.”
John Carlstrom, South Pole astronomer and University of Chicago astrophysicist.
A big telescope, as high as a seven-story building, with a main mirror measuring 32 1/2 feet across is being built at the Amundsen-Scott Station in the Antarctica looming over a barren plain of ice that gets colder than anywhere else on the planet.
The instrument at the far end of the world is being built scientists can search for clues that might identify the most powerful, plentiful but elusive substance in the universe -- dark energy.
The telescope will help scientists to reveal new details regarding a mysterious phenomenon called dark energy, which makes the expansion of the universe accelerate. Albert Einstein's famous "cosmological constant," which is one possibility for the dark energy, also will come under the telescope's scrutiny. The "gravity" of dark energy is repulsive. It pushes the universe apart and overwhelms ordinary gravity, the attractive force exerted by all matter in the universe. Dark energy is invisible, but astronomers will be able to see its influence on clusters of galaxies that formed within the last few billion years.

"With the South Pole Telescope we can look at when galaxy clusters formed and how they formed. That is critically dependent on the nature of the dark energy, this elusive component of the universe," said Carlstrom, who heads the project. "We've only known about dark energy for a few years. No one really knows what it is."

"One of our main goals is to figure out what the dark energy is," said center Director Bruce Winstein, the University's Samuel K. Allison Distinguished Service Professor in Physics. "Is it a cosmological constant or is it dynamical? The South Pole Telescope holds the promise to give us a lot of new, valuable information on this."

Understanding dark energy is one of the key scientific questions called out in the Astronomical Decadal Survey. In the survey, astronomers identified a South Pole telescope as one of their highest-priority projects for the next 10 years. "It's a way of taking the next step in understanding this crazy new cosmology that we find ourselves in," said astronomer Tony Stark of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

First described just nine years ago, dark energy is a mysterious force so powerful that it will decide the fate of the universe. Having already overruled the laws of gravity, it is pushing galaxies away from one another, causing the universe to expand at an ever faster rate.
Though dark energy is believed to account for 70 percent of the universe's mass, it is invisible and virtually undetectable. Nobody knows what it is, where it is or how it behaves.
Solving the mystery of dark energy is would explain the history and future of the universe and generate new understanding of physical laws that, applied to human invention, almost certainly will change the way we live -- just as breakthroughs in quantum mechanics brought us the computer chip.
Swinging its massive mirror skyward, the South Pole Telescope (SPT) for the last few months has begun to search the southern polar heavens for shreds of evidence of the elusive stuff. Controlled remotely from the University of Chicago, the $19.2 million telescope has quickly succeeded in its first mission: finding unknown galaxy clusters, clues to the emergence of dark energy.
The cold, dry atmosphere above the South Pole will allow the SPT to more easily detect the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB), the afterglow of the big bang, with minimal interference from water vapor. On the electromagnetic spectrum, the CMB falls somewhere between heat radiation and radio waves.

The CMB is largely uniform, but it contains tiny ripples of varying density and temperature. These ripples reflect the seeds that, through gravitational attraction, grew into the galaxies and galaxy clusters visible to astronomers in the sky today. The SPT’s first key science project will be to study small variations in the CMB to determine if dark energy began to affect the formation of galaxy clusters by fighting against gravity over the last few billion years.

Galaxy clusters (image at top) are groups of galaxies, the largest celestial bodies that gravity can hold together. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is in one of these clusters, which actually change with time.

The CMB allows astronomers to take snapshots of the infant universe, when it was only 400,000 years old. No stars or galaxies had yet formed. If dark energy changed the way the universe expanded, it would have left its “fingerprints” in the way that it forced galaxies apart over the deep history of time. Different causes would produce a different pattern in the formation of galaxy clusters as reflected in the distortion of the CMB.

According to one idea, dark energy could be Einstein’s cosmological constant: a steady force of nature operating at all times and in all places. Einstein introduced the cosmological constant into his theory of general relativity to accommodate a stationary universe, the dominant idea of the day. If Einstein’s idea is correct, scientists will find that dark energy was much less influential in the universe five billion years ago than it is today.

“Clusters weren’t around in the early universe. They took a long time to evolve,” Carlstrom said.

Another version of the dark energy theory, called quintessence, suggests a force that varies in time and space. Some scientists even suggest that there is no dark energy at all, and that gravity merely breaks down on vast intergalactic scales.
Scientists expect the telescope to detect thousands, or even tens of thousands, of galaxy clusters within a few years.
The giant telescopes components had to be custom-built by scientists and craftsmen in several different parts of the world, then shipped to Antarctica in pieces for final assembly. The largest sections of the telescope were carefully designed so each could fit into ski-equipped military transport planes. It took 25 flights to ferry 260 tons of telescope components.
"We have to get these pieces into place to within 1/2000th of an inch of accuracy," said Jeff McMahon, 29, a postdoctoral physics student. "If you move, you risk screwing it up, so you stand motionless at 20 degrees below zero."

Отредактировано - SeaJey on 14 Марта 2008 21:04:22

The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) could easily be called the "Will Make Awesome Papers" system - it's just after releasing another gift box of cosmological data, accompanied by seven submissions to the Astrophysical Journal and many more to follow. One system hasn't given rise to this much astrophysical publication since Hans Lippershey filed a patent for "a tube with two lenses in it" in 1608.

The WMAP has the minor task of mapping the entire universe, a job it's been at for five years now. It achieves a clear view in a complicated Lissajous orbit, constantly keeping its back to the sun and the Earth and thus avoiding the electromagnetic interference we constantly pump out. The farsighted satellite has already scanned the heavens ten times, proving that you can get an awful lot done if you go somewhere you can't watch TV.
In a field constantly held back by the difficulties in going out and getting data, the WMAP reports are precious. Already the new data has strongly affected the development of cosmological theories, disproving some while improving others. It has found evidence for cosmic neutrinos, and considering those could fly through the Earth ten million times and never leave a trace, that's pretty impressive. It has also produced incredible pictures of the birth of the universe.
How does it do that? By looking at it. It really is that simple (if you ignore the incredibly difficult system design, detector launch and data interpretation). Light takes time to travel, and when the distances involved are "The entire size of the universe" it can take a while to get here - thirteen point seven billion years, to be exact. Light from the beginning of the universe, losing energy over time and shifting down to microwavelengths due to cosmic expansion, is still visible from the right vantage point - and tells us about the evolution of this spacetime we call home.
The origin of stars, slowly born over five hundred million years from vast clouds of stellar fog, has been observed. Even the very Big Bang itself - the first trillionth of a second of everything - is under closer scrutiny than ever before. We haven't worked out what's happening yet, but the data brings us closer than every before. And WMAP is still up there, collecting information for the next round of universal revelations.

Отредактировано - SeaJey on 14 Марта 2008 21:05:58

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Да-да, давайте есть пчелу мирно! (c)

A neckband that translates thought into speech by picking up nerve signals has been used to demonstrate a "voiceless" phone call for the first time.

With careful training a person can send nerve signals to their vocal cords without making a sound. These signals are picked up by the neckband and relayed wirelessly to a computer that converts them into words spoken by a computerised voice.

A video (right) shows the system being used to place the first public voiceless phone call on stage at a recent conference held by microchip manufacturer Texas Instruments. Michael Callahan, co-founder of Ambient Corporation, which developed the neckband, demonstrates the device, called the Audeo.

Users needn't worry about that the system voicing their inner thoughts though. Callahan says producing signals for the Audeo to decipher requires "a level above thinking". Users must think specifically about voicing words for them to be picked up by the equipment.

The Audeo has previously been used to let people control wheelchairs using their thoughts. Watch a video demonstrating thought control of wheelchairs

"I can still talk verbally at the same time," Callahan told New Scientist. "We can differentiate between when you want to talk silently, and when you want to talk out loud." That could be useful in certain situations, he says, for example when making a private call while out in public.

The system demonstrated at the TI conference can recognise only a limited set of about 150 words and phrases, says Callahan, who likens this to the early days of speech recognition software.

At the end of the year Ambient plans to release an improved version, without a vocabulary limit. Instead of recognising whole words or phrases, it should identify the individual phonemes that make up complete words.

This version will be slower, because users will need to build up what they want to say one phoneme at a time, but it will let them say whatever they want. The phoneme-based system will be aimed at people who have lost the ability to speak due to neurological diseases like ALS – also known as motor neurone disease.

бог без улыбки есть дьявол

Отредактировано - nadian on 14 Марта 2008 09:59:49

бог без улыбки есть дьявол

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Да-да, давайте есть пчелу мирно! (c)

Quantum mechanics predicts that entangled pairs made up of a particle and its anti-particle can spontaneously pop out of otherwise empty space, exist for a fleeting moment, and then annihilate each other and disappear. In the 1970s, Hawking predicted that if such a pair were created near a black hole’s event horizon, one of its members might fall into the black hole before it could be annihilated. The partner left stranded outside the event horizon would appear to an observer to have been radiated from the black hole.

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Да-да, давайте есть пчелу мирно! (c)

Согласно законам квантовой механики близкая пара "частица-античастица" может спонтанно самоуничтожиться (аннигилировать), просуществовав небольшое время. В 1970-х годах Хокинг предсказал, что такие пары могут образовываться вблизи горизонта событий черной дыры и одна из компонентов этой пары, не проаннигилировав, может успеть уйти под горизонт. Частица - ее одинокий партнер - сможет тогда уйти в другую сторону от черной дыры, к наблюдателю.

Комментарий: "частица с отрицательной массой попадает в черную дыру, из-за чего масса всей дыры уменьшается, частица с положительной массой уйдет на бесконечность, имитируя излучение или "испарение" черной дыры. Этот процесс существенен ТОЛЬКО для черных дыр малых масс. Эффект впервые предложил не Хокинг, а Старобинский и Бекенштейн. Сейчас на ускорителях пытаются получить такие мини-дыры, по их поведению проверяя особенности их испарения и, возможно, и теорию суперструн"

Переведу и статью про WMAP (The Universe: mapped!), чуть позже. И про телескоп на Южном полюсе, но еще попозже. Дня в четыре устроит?

Преподобный отец Ричард Кентерберийский

Отредактировано - Дан on 14 Марта 2008 19:46:28

Слушай, а из европейских источников можно что-нибудь? Американцы в среднем уж больно сильно лажаются - комментариев надо писать больше переводимого текста. У них мода на слегка "шаловливый" (типа, смешные сравнения из мультиков все время приводят) и "экстраадаптированный для тупых" стиль, поэтому там море неточностей. И откровенно безграмотного народу последнее время среди популяризаторов много.

Преподобный отец Ричард Кентерберийский

бог без улыбки есть дьявол

Цитата:

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Переведу и статью про WMAP (The Universe: mapped!), чуть позже. И про телескоп на Южном полюсе, но еще попозже. Дня в четыре устроит?

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Да-да, давайте есть пчелу мирно! (c)

бог без улыбки есть дьявол