You didn't notice that the person answering the majority of the question was American then, huh?

The obnoxious nerd in the middle with the shirt that looks like a galaxy vomiting had an accent. His talent was so luminous I didn't notice anything else.

*happy *videogames (Lumines II)

Ironically the cigarette smoking man or CMS from the original X-Files does not actually smoke. He used herbal cigarettes actually as stand ins. There must be a stage cigarette, because I used to be smoker and nothing I smoked ever produced the luminous, wonderful spirals of smoke those on film do.

I bet its all CG

is the whole damn movie filmed in this "drive everything under a certain luminance to black" style? do Han Solo and Chewie pick up the dudes when they fall out the exhaust vent?

Yes I have read it - cover to cover! As I have said before on the Sift:

Dawkins is a good scientist - I would not deny that - but over the years he has moved from being a scientific sceptic to a preacher of intolerance. This move from scepticism to intolerance may have been motivated by the many vocal religious fundamentalists he met on his way who regulalry condemned him. But one should never respond to intolerance and bigotry with more intolerance and bigotry.

My charge against the God Delusion is precisely that in many of his arguments Dawkins abandons empiricism and reason in favour of simplistic generalisation and rants against the evil of religion. As Francis Collins, Director of the Human Genome Project has argued: "Dawkins has abandoned his much cherished rationality to embrace an embittered manifesto of dogmatic atheist fundamentalism." Or as Owen Gingerich, Professor of Astronomy at Harvard, has argued, Dawkins reasoning is full of "gaps, inconsistencies, and a suprising lack of depth of argument".

As Alister McGrath has argued: "The total dogmatic conviction of correctness which pervades some sections of Western atheism today - wonderfully illustrated in the God Delusion - immediately aligns it with a religious fundamentalism which refuse to allow its ideas to be examined or challenged. Dawkins is resistant to the calibration of his own certainties seeing them as being luminously true, requiring no defence. He is so convinced that his own views are right that he could not bring himself to believe that the evidence might legitimate any other options - above all religious options. What is particularly worrying is that, without seeming to realise it, Dawkins simply treats evidence as something to shoehorn into his pre-conceived theoretical framework. Religion is persistently and consistently portrayed in the worst possible way, mimicking the worst features of religious fundamentalisms portrayal of atheism. When some leading scientists write in support of religion, Dawkin retorts that they simply can't mean what they say. Dawkins clearly feels deeply threatened by the possibility of his readers encountering religious ideas or people that they might actually like - or even worse, respect, and regard as worthy of serious attention."

Dawkins is a good scientist - I would not deny that - but over the years he has moved from being a scientific sceptic to a preacher of intolerance. This move from scepticism to intolerance may have been motivated by the many vocal religious fundamentalists he met on his way who regulalry condemned him. But one should never respond to intolerance and bigotry with more intolerance and bigotry.

My charge against the God Delusion is precisely that in many of his arguments Dawkins abandons empiricism and reason in favour of simplistic generalisation and rants against the evil of religion. As Francis Collins, Director of the Human Genome Project has argued: "Dawkins has abandoned his much cherished rationality to embrace an embittered manifesto of dogmatic atheist fundamentalism." Or as Owen Gingerich, Professor of Astronomy at Harvard, has argued, Dawkins reasoning is full of "gaps, inconsistencies, and a suprising lack of depth of argument".

As Alister McGrath has argued: "The total dogmatic conviction of correctness which pervades some sections of Western atheism today - wonderfully illustrated in the God Delusion - immediately aligns it with a religious fundamentalism which refuse to allow its ideas to be examined or challenged. Dawkins is resistant to the calibration of his own certainties seeing them as being luminously true, requiring no defence. He is so convinced that his own views are right that he could not bring himself to believe that the evidence might legitimate any other options - above all religious options. What is particularly worrying is that, without seeming to realise it, Dawkins simply treats evidence as something to shoehorn into his pre-conceived theoretical framework. Religion is persistently and consistently portrayed in the worst possible way, mimicking the worst features of religious fundamentalisms portrayal of atheism. When some leading scientists write in support of religion, Dawkin retorts that they simply can't mean what they say. Dawkins clearly feels deeply threatened by the possibility of his readers encountering religious ideas or people that they might actually like - or even worse, respect, and regard as worthy of serious attention."

Dawkins would like to say that religion is only responsible for ill. He conveniently ignores the fact that people like Muhammad Yunus - founder of the Grameen Bank and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize 2006 - were inspired to lift millions of people out of poverty by their religious beliefs and convictions which taught them to devote their lives to the upliftment and empowerment of some of the world's poorest and most impoverished people.

this is my favorite skin on Lumines 2 for PSP

gah...do I have to get Lumines II now? *grumble*

Funny point - but a photographer/photoshopper is not the same thing as a graphic designer. Trust me, I do the latter for a living and I've met my fair share of talented photo people with absolutely no taste when it comes to typography, layout, etc. Just look at a lot of the great photo sites and their terrible designs: www.luminous-landscape.com for example. I do agree on the sloppy shopping though ... seems like he's trying to win a race.

From the YouTube page:
"The reactable, is a multi-user electronic music instrument with a tabletop tangible user interface. Several simultaneous performers share complete control over the instrument by moving physical objects on a luminous table surface. By moving and relating these objects, representing components of a classic modular synthesizer, users can create complex and dynamic sonic topologies, with generators, filters and modulators, in a kind of tangible modular synthesizer or graspable flow-controlled programming language.

This instrument is being developed by a team of digital luthiers (Sergi Jordà , Martin Kaltenbrunner, Günter Geiger and Marcos Alonso), at the Music Technology Group within the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain."

There's already another video on here about this table. This one explains what the different objects do and how they are used.

More info here: http://mtg.upf.edu/reactable

A fascinating one-off documentary from Channel 4 (UK) - detailing Einstein's struggle with his cosmological constant:

" When Albert Einstein formulated General Relativity in 1915, he was not aware the Universe was expanding. Large scale structure in the form of galaxies was not known and all fuzzy luminous nebulae were considered basically similar and within stellar distance scales. Only with Hubble work in 1930 came the realization some of those nebulae were in fact island universes, and that they were not only very far, but also receding from us at enormous speeds. This was not known for Einstein, and since gravitation exerts its influence up to infinity, it was natural for him to postulate some force working in the preservation of an apparent equilibrium among matter, preventing universal collapse. This is why he postulated the Cosmological Constant, symbolized by the Greek letter Lambda, and included a term accounting for it in the field equations. Once universal expansion was discovered, the need for an unknown repulsive agent could be dropped and Einstein dismissed the Cosmological Constant as his 'biggest blunder'"

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I was thinking the dark areas could have been clouds too. Just dark ones, or lower down ones. I don't know, maybe not.

I think the most convincing UFO video I ever saw was also in Russia, it was like this luminous diamond, and it was filmed from the ground. I seem to remember a lot people in a crowd looking up and pointing. Anyone remember that?

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Yeah, looks good. Although, 25th century? maybe not. I expect the Honda Civic of that time to be a ball of luminous energy that you pour your consciousness into.