The NASA Visualization Explorer is a free app that allows you to explore a lot of the science NASA is doing on space-based Earth research. Topics covered include climate change, wildfires, glaciers, hurricanes, volcanoes and more. If it can be observed from an orbital platform, they will cover it sooner or later. This is a great way to get a comprehensive overview on how the planet is doing, and it is not just raw data dumps from the satellites. There are a lot of comprehensive yet concise presentations here, including narrated slide shows and full video presentations. They claim it is for the iPad only, but I am going to see if it will run on my iTouch; it looks like they have some data-dense screens you wouldn’t be able to read the text from but most of the presentations should play just fine on the small screen. You can grab it on iTunes.
According to the folks at Deadline, it looks like Fox has picked up the option to turn Issac Asimov’s The Caves of Steel into a movie. Considering what they did with the Will Smith version of Asimov’s I, Robot I don’t expect this one will be very close to the book either. Still, I will be in the theater when it hits the big screen, if only to see how close they came. Hopefully they will at least let the robot be one of the good guys this time. I should mention that I enjoyed their version of I, Robot, it just wasn’t very close to the book.
Rapparu is an 18 year old animator from Tokyo who appears to have more raw talent than most teens and some adults. The first piece is called Tenkou Kotofumi according to Crunchyroll (I can’t read the kanji and confirm that). The only part of the animation he didn’t build himself was the music, he got that as a free download song from Trial and Error. He has also created a ton of amazing black and white line art animated GIFs, and he compiled some of them into the second video on this page. I haven’t found anything of his that tells an entire story yet (or at least not one with dialog), but I am looking forward to seeing what else he comes up with.
This amazing video, called A Slice of Life, was put together by the folks at the GE Show. The premise of the program is to make the technology that is changing our day to day lives understandable in ways everyone can understand. The videos are short, punchy, and full of good information. The one presented here is the 7th in the series and demonstrates how an MRI works by giving you an analog equivalent; everyday objects (mostly food) are sliced up and photographed, the images then organized so you can view it in depth and over time. The soundtrack was nicely chosen to put a tempo to the process. Thanks to Laughing Squid for the heads up on this one.
According to Anime News Network, the latest film from Studio Ghibli, From Up on Poppy Hill, has blown away the competition to become the number one box office film in Japan for 2011. It did it so completely that it exceeded the box office draw of its next two competitors combined by $400,000 US, and is currently pushing the $54 million range. This is another work directed by Goro Miyazaki, son of renowned filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki who wrote and planned the movie. No word yet on when Disney will be releasing the film either in theaters or on DVD for the US market, but it is at least making the rounds of the usual film festivals in North America.
There really aren’t any genre films this week, so this might be a good time to catch up on anything you missed. We have two for next week however; the long-awaited Bunraku, and Tucker and Dale vs. Evil.