The Batman barometer: "A year from his seventieth birthday, Batman appears to be perennial", writes Jon Barnes. "Far more versatile than any of his pop-cultural peers . . . the character is a barometer of his times." Batman's latest incarnation in Christopher Nolan's new film, The Dark Knight "presents us with a grim and desperate mirror image of the twenty-first century. Never can a movie of such size and ambition, released by a major Hollywood studio and intended for a mainstream audience of global proportions, have deliberately inculcated so minatory and oppressive an atmosphere of pessimism and despair."
Wolff at the doorFrank O'Connor once described the short story as America's "national artform" - in which case, as Rónán McDonald shows, Tobias Wolff is one of the great American artists. A new collection of Wolff's stories contains his experiments in this most nuanced form of fiction and examples of Wolff's earlier works.
Ever felt that your mind, particularly your memory, has turned...what's the word... rusty? ... [more]
The Internet as a source of information is messy, chaotic and often misleading, but it is a godsend when academic practices have stiffened into inflexibility ... [more]
Big meteorite impacts bring wealth in the wake of destruction ... [more]
GM is betting everything on the electric car ... [more]
The Dickensian disease of kings is on the rise ... [more]
The tracking of hot topics has itself become a hot topic in computer science ... [more]
Do you know your plutoid from your trans-Neptunian object? ... [more]
Important health-care results can come from basic person-to-person empathy ... [more]
A science of magic could take cognitive science and magic to new heights, and help people defend themselves from advertisers' tricks ... [more]
Fish scales may point to armour of the future ... [more]
You don't need language to count ... [more]
Microbes living deep below the oceans make up a significant carbon reserve of 90 billion tons ... [more]
The dismal science could do with a a bit of brainpower ... [more]
Who needs rockets when you could float an airship into space? ... [more]
Ernst Haeckel is being rehabilitated as a major player in the history of evolutionary thought ... [more]
The problem with the gene pool is that there's no lifeguard ... [more]
Everybody smells, but some people smell better than others ... [more]
Contrary to curmudgeonly opinion, kids who text are kids who are literate ... [more]
UK watchdog finds that The Great Global Warming Swindle was unfair to scientists but did not mislead viewers even if some found it downright offensive ... [more]
Analysing the source code of geekdom gives one nerd pause to ponder ... [more]
nerd news
Subject: Gears, BrowserPlus, and Web 3.0, baby (Yahoo! Developer Network blog) <== thanks to Manly Bob
Date: Jul 31, 2008 1:55 AM
Company takes issue with a Pittsburgh couple's lawsuit that alleges Google's Street View service invaded their privacy.
Search giant works to create a venture capital arm, in order to join the ranks of Intel, Hewlett-Packard, and Motorola in the role of seeding start-ups.
Changing the name, altering the look of the board, and adding some new play options just might be enough to keep Scrabble parent company Hasbro from claiming the Facebook app is a rip-off.
Video of the day
Security |
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| E-mail pretending to contain information on a fictitious FBI vs. Facebook case contains malicious code for the Storm worm botnet. Read full story |
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