This picture just says it all. It’s good to own an iPhone. I want one. Wait, $499 each?

Above, cheering customers in line as one of the first waiters finally gets his iPhone. Was it worth it?

Ever wonder what the internet looks like from a bird’s eye view? I’m not talking about web sites but rather how networks are connected all over the earth. Below is a picture I found at the Pop Sci Blog that shows a 3D map containing nodes, the larger the node the closer to the center of the map it is. Nodes, in this case, from smallest on the outer edges to largest in the center, are actually organizations such as your local internet service provider, AT&T, Google or anything that controls some kind of network that data travels through on the internet. The map sprawls out like a tree from center to it’s outer edges, connected vertically.

The article mentions how inefficient it is to have data travel through these large bottle necks at the center of the map, because if you start at one edge of the map you must travel through the middle to get to the other side. There is no going around the edges of the map: sort of like when you send an email using Google’s Gmail service, it must travel through the center to get to it’s destination address.

I wonder what a future map of the internet will look like, say in 10, 30 or 50 years? Wouldn’t it be nice not to have to travel through the center just to get where you are going?

Check out this awesome new game from Kongregate where you must connect dots using lasers. Be careful, this is a time burner and is quite addictive

OK, I just posted the entire highlight film for the Cal State San Marcos Track & Field 2007 season (by popular demand). There are 5 short videos I put together for this one and a few new special effects, go check it out here and enjoy!

Spider Man 3 was an excellent movie, it really surprised me (and I thought number 2 was good). Movies usually don’t surprise me very often. Plot twists and great use of visual and sound effects kept me wondering why I even bother to make my own movies, this stuff puts me and so many others to shame. Then again the movie is rumored to have a $300 million dollar budget.

The flick runs about 2 hours and 20 minutes, but don’t let the long run time fool you - it’s a great film! Especially when you see it in IMAX. There were even parts where the action/special effects made people clap mid-way through, something I almost never see. The actors did a great job, everyone gave very believable performances and Topher Grace (from that 70’s show) was no exception. The writers & director are some kind of genius breed, keeping the series fresh through the end of the 3rd film. I hope they don’t make a 4th film for a long time, I just don’t see how they could top this one. Although, I have been wrong before.

Interestingly enough, the success of the spider man films lies not in Spider Man himself but in the Villains he fights against. Think about that, why do people love Star Wars so much? You know Darth Vader is, like, the cooooolest bad guy ever, and you didn’t actually wear Luke Skywalker masks for Halloween did you? No, you wore Vader helmets. We are attracted to things that we consider “bad ass”, just the way it is.

OK enough ranting, I thought the Sand Man was especially cool:

The director is quoted here:

“I had people bring in 12 different kinds of sand — this is where people think the movie industry is insane — so I could look at it.” A team of more than 200 programmers at Sony Imageworks then spent the equivalent of 10 man-years writing code that rendered the billions of individually manipulated sand particles.

Visual-effects supervisor Scott Stokdyk elaborated:

“We shot footage of sand every way we would need it — thrown up, thrown against blue screen, over black screen. John Frazier, the special-effects supervisor, shot it out of an aero can at a stuntman. Anything we could imagine sand doing in the film, we shot.”

You can read more on the making of the “Sand Man” from Spider Man 3 here.

OK, so Dell took down their Ubuntu photo, but we all know they’re going to offer linux as a solution… right?!

Check out this photo (lets hope Dell puts it back up) on Dell’s website, showing Ubuntu as a future choice for a pre-installed OS on their computer hardware product(s), pretty cool. Down with the Microsoft monopoly?

This just makes me laugh, check it out:

Check out this interesting article on black holes and Quantum Mechanics:

“Quantum mechanics is the branch of physics that deals with matter on a sub-atomic level. Its cornerstones are the Schrodinger Wave Equation, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, and the Einstein-deBroglie Equations. Schrodinger’s equation describes the nature of subatomic particles as waves. The Uncertainty Principle states that a particle’s momentum and path can’t simultaneously be observed. Einstein and deBroglie demonstrated that matter can exist as both a wave and a particle. These theories, and their successors, have combined to show us the quantum world. It is a strange world, ruled by probabilities. Very simply, from a quantum perspective, all possible outcomes of a situation exist side by side until the situation is observed.”