Maker Celebration

Beautiful Japanese construction that lets a small ball play Bach through a beautifully tranquil forest, Via Make.com


Interesting LED display, shame about the shit music, via GeeksAre


Jumbo Harmonograph action. Hat tip to friend who wasn't as keen.

Drawingmachine by Eske Rex from Core77 on Vimeo.

The Great Antidote

Sweet warped Space visualisation looks initially like someone's Spirograph doodling. Science Daily.

BoingBoing have an amusing vid of some guy messing around with his brain with magnets.

Nicely pickled prehistoric brain found in a Heslington bog. Via Reddit.

According to some Russian boffin it's possible planets could maintain a stable orbit within a Black Hole. TechReview.


Disgustingly cute vid of a bizarre Dolphin/Cat interaction. Impactlab.

The Kepler scope keeps churning out the goods, this time it's found an unusual trinary star system that's also a bit quiet. Dawkins.net

The Yanks are probably sporting a burgeoning gun-stiffy as their new Laser weapon passes another round of testing. BBC

FBI have released a report from 1950 which refers to the recovery of 3 alien craft and some corpses.

Archaeologists are busy unearthing a catacomb with 8 million mammalian mummies, mostly dogs apparently. NatGeo

Lovely snap of Jupiter's South Pole. Via Reddit.

Soul Supplements

Lamenting Lumet

Sad news that Sidney Lumet has passed away. I've banged on a fair bit before about his many excellent films and I'm sure you've seen a few already. Here's a little miscellany of his some of his less well known gems followed by the first part of an interesting interview with the Director himself.


Part Two here.

Ortho & Pseud Docs

Defamation is a fascinating documentary journey of an Israeli born Jew who sets out to investigate anti semitism. As he trundles along with the usual talking head spots with politicians, campaigners & heretic academics he eventually becomes accused of self hating when disagrees, quite rightly, with the lobby's current folly of insisting any critique of the State's policy/actions are obviously masked antisemitism. It's an interesting 90 mins that maybe could have done with a little more weight but the fact that the ADL slammed it is reason enough to watch.

Blooded is a crappy faux documentary about the kidnapping and hunting of 5 friends staying at the home of a dickish prohunt activist in the Highlands. Split between the "real" participants talking in-studio and a dramatisation on location with "actors" it's singularly fails to rouse any tension or excitement as it bumbles through a ridiculous plot and sports a astonishing array of ropey acting. Really can't see why they bothered making it.

Zowie Trumps Rose

Source Code is Duncan Jones' 2nd film following on from his excellent debut, Moon, with another interesting, tidy but gripping slice of scifi. Jake Gyllenhaal stars as a US soldier who wakes up in a simulation of 8 mins on a train just about to explode and in a Groundhog Day stylee he must relive the time over and over till he can uncover the bomber and his next target. Despite the average performances this has plenty of pace and there's plenty here to keep you entertained and not consider the plot holes to the very end, almost. I'm sure this more mainstream offering will propel Jones into many future projects and I hope he can sustain the classic-y, 70's moderation he's brought to his first two films.

Mr Nice is the film bio of famed pot smuggler Howard Marks based on his own bestselling book of the same name. Rhys Ifans and assorted cast do a pleasant enough job as the burgeoning specialist grocers and it's an interesting enough tale with dalliances with the IRA, Afghanis and of course the usual Police/MI5 antics but it's pretty simple biopic fare in the end, quite surprising given Rose's interesting previous films anyways it's a cursory romp through Marks' Uni to Teacher to International Herbalist career with very little imagination expended on the telling of the tale. Watchable but not memorable.

Alien Brawling in Tokyo & LA

Gantz is a live action adaptation of a rather bonkers manga/anime about a bunch of peeps snatched at the moment of death to fight against aliens at the whim of one spherical Gantz, a cybernetic arms dealer cum ringmaster. Anyways it's one of the better anime to cinema ventures, certainly better than Mushashi and from what I can remember it follows quite closely the first 6 or so episodes. It's also blessed with a better than average teenage cast and a certain gusto when it comes to gorier side of alien vs human battling with plenty of headpopping, disemboweling and blood letting. Sure it's not the most sophisticated of scifi films and it's got a touch of Japanese strangeness (and cheese) to it but it's a action packed spin on the usual invasion story and I'll be keeping an eye out for the sequels.

While Japan might be able to thwart the usual Alien attack tropes Battle: Los Angeles doesn't even try and treads much more familiar ground with a semi-shaky-cam movie about the Military response to a massive, aggressive alien invasion of the US of A. Anyways Eckhart and co grimace and yell their way through the thinly drawn stereotypes as they spray the Invaders with bullets in a seemingly futile resistance with the usual dwindling numbers, but lo! our hero via a series of miraculous coincidences seems to save the day. The action is pretty good and it's a reasonable enough watch but ultimately this is as B-movie ish as Starship Troopers but lacks the social satire or tongue in cheek laughs. If it's a success I'd expect sequels.

Digital Diversions