French Roast

French Roast is an animated short  created by Fabrice O. Joubert. It is Joubert's first short film but managed to get itself nominated for an Oscar last year. 

When you watch it we are sure you will agree that the nomination was well deserved.  Although the action takes place in a single Parisian cafe, there is plenty of it.

The animation is set circa1960. An uptight and snobbish businessman makes the horrifying (for him) discovery that he has forgotten to bring his wallet.  Mortified, he bides his time by ordering more coffee - to admit that he has no money is my far the worse option. He turns away a rather hirsuite and smelly homeless man who asks him for money, but finally, because of a more than curious turn of events, it is the homeless man who is unselfish enough to pay the businessman's bill thus saving him from embarrassment.


Find out how by watching the animation in its entirety!

Forget Aquarius - Is this the Dawning of the Age of the Anthropocene?

ImageCredit

Human history on a geological scale is miniscule, tiny – a blip.  The geological time scale goes back four and a half billion years from the fiery birth of the earth to the present day.  Now, however, some scientists are calling for an end to the current epoch – the Holocene.  They are suggesting we have moved in to a new epoch altogether – the Anthropocene.  This translates literally to the Human Epoch.  So why the need for change?

The term Anthropocene was only coined ten years ago by Paul Crutzen.  The Nobel Prize winning atmospheric chemist, best known for his groundbreaking work on ozone depletion coined the term to satisfy his need to describe the age in which we are now living.  It is different from the Holocene, he argues (image of the Early Holocene left). The Anthropocene is the representation of the effect a single species has had on the planet.  That species is, of course, us.

His case is that by our actions we are going to leave a permanent signature in our earthly geology. These actions will be traceable back to us even millions of years in the future when scientists (possibly not us by that time) will be able to see the point at which we changed the earth’s oceans and biosphere irreversibly.

The geological time scale is vastly important in terms of understanding what has happened to the earth over hundreds of millions of years.  As rock is penetrated it delivers revelations about what life was like ten thousand, ten million or at its very beginnings billions of years ago.

The changes to the time scale have to this point always been natural.  The great big meteoric rock that killed off the dinosaurs for example was one point at which the time scale changed.

So indeed was the Ice Age which resulted due to a shift in the earth’s orbit.   There are many different epochs and their records are in the rocks.  Imagine them like pages in a book, each one making a chapter telling its own part of the planet’s lengthy and complex history.

Not just one book, though – think volumes.  It’s like one of those huge episodic Dickens novels but about stone instead.

Each epoch is only a small part of the scale.  They are subdivisions of a Period – the one in which we find ourselves currently is the Quaternary Period.  Each Period is a subdivision of an Era.

We are in the Cenozoic Era.  Still with us?

We are currently in the Holocene epoch, which has only been around since the last Ice Age twelve thousand years and is in terms of geological eras still pretty wet behind the ears itself.  Even its name translated from the Greek means entirely new.  So, why bother with the change at all – couldn’t we, shouldn’t we simply be included in the Holocene?

Well, that sets the scene for what will no doubt become the hottest of heated debates in geological circles.  Like Knights Templar of stones and rocks, there is a body which guards the integrity of the geological time scale.  They go under the marvellous title of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (image in the head of a certain Time Lord flashing his telepathic paper and saying I’m with the ICS – cool).

In May they will meet up to discuss the findings of their Anthropocene Working Group (no doubt referred to as the AWG).

The battleground is set – with it seems just under half of the ICS agreeing with the need to change and slightly over half of them in favour of giving the idea the old heave ho.  Most foresee, however, that we are living in an age which may well see a massive shift in the contents of the fossil record. However, it was only a few years ago that scientists were predicting a new Ice Age and look what came of that.

It is possible of course (and many geologists agree) that it is way too early to tell if this will truly be the case as – to put it simply – we just haven’t been around long enough to leave anything but a thin sliver on the fossil record.

Although they use the term informally they see no need to, ahem, set it in stone.

Buy Nikon Cameras

Image Credits
Ammonite - Flickr User Kevin Zim
Fossil Frog Flickr User Kevinzim
Early Holocene
Meteor Collision
Ice Age House

The Man With Einstein's Brain

Pictured here is Dr Thomas Harvey, who died three years ago. He had the rather dubious claim to fame of bein the pathologist who was responsible for the autopsy on Einsten (after his death in 1955).

He was just a little naughty because he removed Einstein's brain - not completely necessary as the scientist had expired from heart failure. He then sliced it up and kept the pieces for many years after - in order to perform research on to what had made the world famous scientist tick.

This picture was taken on the very day that Einstein died. However, the photographer, Ralph Morse, always maintained that the stuff under the knife in the photograph is most definitely not Einstein's brain.

Absolutely, definitely, without a shadow of a doubt. Yes, right!

This is one of a series of remarkable photographs taken by Morse on that day and now up on the Time website for the first time.

Link thanks to Neatorama.

Even Imperial Stormtroopers Need a Break

In fact, this is the work of Kristina Alexanderson who is producing one of these extremely cool Clone photographs every day for the whole of the year 2011.  To see more, take a look at her Flickr Photostream or follow the clones on their daily adventures on Facebook or Twitter.

Viral video by ebuzzing

Living It Up

Image Credit Flickr User Articulate Matter

A Barbaric Tale

If you are expecting something a little more Conan that you will get from this award winning animated short film then I hope that less turned out to be something more.  A Barbaric Tale certainly has many of the elements you might expect from a movie in this genre – a muscle-bound barbarian on a quest, a walking warrior skeleton and an enormous dragon but from this starting point the genre is well and truly subverted.

The object of the quest turns out to be something that you may not have expected, the skeleton is something of a coward and the dragon is more like an excitable puppy that a fire breathing menace.  Plus there is a twist ending which I didn’t see coming at all (but perhaps should have!). 

This is a very cool, very funny animated short by Richard Vaucher. Quite rightly, it won the CG Excellence Award at CGOverdrive in Singapore in 2006.

Light Up

What do you do if you are a little girl with a passion for astronomy but you live in a world without any stars? Keep a heart full of hope and a close eye on the empty night sky would seem to be the answer in Light Up, a charming Belgian animated short.

Often in life we have to persevere and believe in something perhaps even when there is little or no evidence of its existence. Yet, for this little girl, something does finally appear one evening and it will change her life forever.

Light Up was created in 2011 by Aveline Stoquart and David Duvieusart, students at the Haute École Albert Jacquard in Namur, Belgium.

1920s Design, 21st Century Technology

A telephone from the 1920s.  A simple yet elegant design, timeless but at the same moment very much of its own era.

While the Apple fans of this century drool over every new ultra modern looking product from the ubiquitous company some people harken back to a time when communication hardware was pleasing to the eye and stylish in an altogether different way.

Yet why not mix and match?  Adam Ben-Dror a South-African born designer and inventor who now lives in New Zealand has done just that. Ben-Dror has taken the beauty and utility of the 1920s design and added nothing to it: except all the technology that is needed to make it wireless.

If you take a look at what lies within the almost century old design you will see that certain changes have been made to the phones functionality. These changes enable the user to have twenty first century connectivity with the glamor of chich 1920s design.

The cordless candlestick phone is a old-world design housing truly twenty first century technology - a 2.4ghz wireless transceiver to form a truly fantastic yet functional piece. The original aesthetic of the phone has been left by Ben-Dror to do what it has always done. The only indication that anything has been changed is the cord – it isn’t there anymore.

When everything is tucked away it looks exactly the same as it did almost a century ago. The transceiver allows the 90 year old phone to be used wirelessly. A pulse to DTMF converter (built into base) allows the dial to work. Calls are answered by lifting the earpiece from its cradle and it is ended by putting it back. Redial and speed dial are activated by dialing and holding selected numbers.

Take a look at Adam Ben-Dror's website which features this phone and other projects too.