What did Philip K. Dick think of Blade Runner?
Philip K. Dick died a few months before before Blade Runner (adapted from his story Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) was released, but he saw a segment about the film on television before he passed away.
In a letter, he described how much he loved it:
I can only say that I did not know that a work of mine or a set of ideas of mine could be escalated into such stunning dimensions. My life and creative work are justified and completed by Blade Runner.
He believed the film would revolutionize science fiction, and he was almost certainly right (via)
What’s the best first line in fiction?
Flavorpill runs through 30 great examples. Personally, I’m a big fan of the opening to Then We Came to the End
We were fractious and overpaid. Our mornings lacked promise. At least those of us who smoked had something to look forward to at ten-fifteen.
In related news, the book will soon become a movie with Lynn Shelton directing.
How do you save a book from water damage?
I can’t tell you the number of times that I’ve ruined a book with water damage. On different occasions, I’ve dropped reading material in bathtubs, swimming pools, and oceans. Each time it kills me, and I feel guilty about it for weeks.
It turns out there’s a pretty easy fix — put the book in the freezer:
First pick the item up out of the water and hold it while it drains. Then place the item in a plastic bag, and stick it in the freezer. If you have several items of approximately the same size — such as file folders or books — you can place them upright in a milk crate or box, separated with paper toweling, butcher paper or wax paper. If you’re freezing books, stand them vertically on their spines. A milk crate is a good choice for this task because it allows air flow around the items. Use a container that won’t become water-logged. Pack the items just tight enough so that they remain upright
Freeze-dried books — it totally makes sense.
Is this the future of books?
The publisher Penguin has been thinking about how to introduce books on new formats like the iPad. What they’ve come up with is striking, and in some ways, extraordinary:
What are people buying online?
How did they make that new OK GO video?
Surely by now, you’ve seen the video for “This Too Shall Pass” — the new track from OK Go?
In case you’re wondering, that near-perfect four minutes of Rube Goldberg machinery wasn’t easy to pull off:
What started with a two-paragraph synopsis of the band’s vision quickly ballooned into a massive-scale project requiring 20 engineers. The work was headed up by Syyn Labs (formerly Mindshare), a collective of “creative engineers” who explore the intersection of art and technology.
The actual video took two days and nearly 60 takes to get right.
Did the day just get a little bit shorter?
The earthquake that struck near Chile over the weekend was so violent that it might have changed the course of the Earth’s orbit and actually shortened the length of our day:
Richard Gross, a geophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, says he has done the calculations. Gross says the earthquake, which measured 8.8 on the Richter scale, moved large amounts of rock, altered the distribution of mass on the planet, and moved the Earth’s axis by about 2.7 milliarcseconds (about 8 centimeters or 3 inches). The change in axis directly impacts Earth’s rotation, and the rate of the planet’s rotation determines the length of a day.
Similarly, the earthquake that caused the massive 2004 tsunami measured a 9.1 on the Richter scale, which was strong enough to reduce the length of a calendar day by as much as 6.8 microseconds.
Can Walmart revive the local farm?
Walmart doesn’t just sell organic food in its stores. It’s also established a plan to sell local food:
The program, which Walmart calls Heritage Agriculture, will encourage farms within a day’s drive of one of its warehouses to grow crops that now take days to arrive in trucks from states like Florida and California. In many cases the crops once flourished in the places where Walmart is encouraging their revival, but vanished because of Big Agriculture competition.
While the success of the program is far from certain, Walmart says the company hopes to revive local economies and farms communities across the country.
Fact of the Week
From 2003 to 2008 the number of texts Americans send each month jumped from 2 billion to 110 billion (via hard copy March issue of Wired).
What would you pay for the original Superman comic?
Some anonymous collector is very happy today:
A 1938 edition of Action Comics No. 1, widely considered the Holy Grail of comic books, was sold by a private seller to a private buyer, neither of whom released their names. The issue features Superman lifting a car on its cover and originally cost 10 cents.
The book sold for $1 million — breaking all previous records.
