This is a very clever way to promote your performance motorcycle: BMW chains a very, very long tablecloth with a very, very elaborate cluster of place-settings to a S 1000 RR "superbike" and has a driver roar off, taking the cloth away and leaving the dinner setup intact. Impressive acceleration!

Video: BMW S 1000 RR pulls off the old tablecloth trick (Thanks, Alan!) Previously:

• Royal Enfield Military 500 motorcycle
• First Look: Mission One electric motorcycle Gadgets
• Homemade motorcycle ad on Craigslist
• This is a motorcycle helmet
• LEGO minifig motorcycle helmet Gadgets
• Coordinated motorcycle performance video from the 1950s
• CORE Competency: Victory Motorcycle's new concept
• Retro-futuristic motorcycle

Art of the Title Sequence celebrates the world's greatest film/TV title sequences, those oft-experimental opening moments of a movie or TV show that really set the mood of what's to come. I've always been intrigued by this art form and it's fun to watch examples from around the globe. The site also features interviews with more than a dozen masters of the media. Art of the Title was mentioned in a New York Times article today about the South by Southwest Film Awards new Title Design Competition. Winners will be announced at the festival next week. According to the NYT, "The modern approach to film titles crystallized, more or less, in 1955 with "The Man With the Golden Arm." It opened with a kind of jazz ballet in which dancing white lines, over music by Elmer Bernstein, eventually tightened into the contorted arm of a drug addict.



From the NYT: The sequence was designed by Saul Bass, who tossed aside a more mechanical approach that had largely prevailed in Hollywood to create story-telling openings for films like "Psycho," "North by Northwest" and, later, "Goodfellas" and "The Age of Innocence."

(Among the entries at South by Southwest, "Cigarette Girl," an independent film about a world in which smoking restrictions have murderous consequences, is one that recalls the Bass oeuvre: guns, cigarettes and people flicker between the real and the abstract, over a cool-toned soundtrack.)

Before his death in 1996, Bass had been nominated for Oscars three times, winning once, for his short films. But his work on the titles fell through the cracks of a film industry awards system that has given far more recognition to directors "New Honor for the Designs That Get Movies Moving" (Thanks, Jess Hemerly!)

As part of Converse's "Music Collection," they've issued a variety of Chuck Taylor All Star sneakers themed around The Clash, Blondie, Metallica, and Kurt Cobain. To be fair, they really should have made Cobain-branded Converse One Stars as those were the shoes he was wearing at his death. Now, I do dig The Clash sneakers seen here. But I am aware that Nike selling sneakers co-branded with the name/art of an iconic punk band is... problematic. That said, somebody from The Clash's camp (and Cobain's) had to approve these.
Converse Music Collection

tad001 writes "The Japanese phone giant KDDI has developed a way to track users movements in fine detail. It works by analyzing the movement of accelerometers, found in many handsets. Activities such as walking, climbing stairs, or even cleaning can be identified, the researchers say. The company plans to sell the service to clients such as managers, foremen, and employment agencies."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The middle class needs a bailout for the same reason the banks needed a bailout--long-term systemic risk. If the (much smaller) government during the Great Depression could hire 4 million people in 4 months, why can we not do that today, now, immediately during the Great Recession?

Like the as-yet to be incurred, but already embedded, long-term costs of the Iraq War, the psychological and career trauma inflicted by prolonged unemployment are yet to be felt. But, they are real, they are profound, and they are increasing every day.

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In 1964, media analyst Marshall McLuhan suggested that a given medium was more important than its message. In 2009, I sat down with Dan Rather, Geraldo Rivera, Tim Zagat, Amy Goodman, Rachel Sklar, Carol Jenkins, Bill Pullman, Bob Simon, John Ziegler, Juan Williams, Kevin Macdonald , Mary Alice Williams, and Stephen Cannell to see what they had to say about the changing face of our news media.

Watch 'The New Media News'

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Although Nan Schrack and Mark Neville have been together since the mid-1990s, years of homelessness, unemployment and health problems have made it difficult for the couple to express their love like other couples might: by getting married.

When Neville approached Jim McNeil, a volunteer at a local church, for suggestions on how to raise money to get married, he had no idea the support he and his bride would receive. McNeil collected money from church parishioners to buy wedding rings, convinced a local hair salon to offer the couple free haircuts and found wedding clothes for them to wear. Wednesday afternoon, in an outdoor ceremony attended by the couple's friends, Neville and Schrack finally said their vows.

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Today's most interesting stories in technology, media and entertainment:

Sony just revealed its new PlayStation Move motion controller. The new controller is similar to the Wii controller in that it moves seamlessly with the user, with Sony calling it an "extension of your body." The Move uses the PlayStation Eye camera to sync the gamers motions to the screen, and will be available by the end of 2010.

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A split Kansas City school board tonight approved a historic plan to close 26 schools after turning back an effort to take several buildings off the list.

Usually St Patrick's Day is a day of celebration: whether it's wearing different shades of green, nibbling on soda bread, taking in a parade, tipping back a few cold ones, reciting Irish proverbs or belting out popular Irish songs with the sounds of bagpipes and drums filling the air.

But for employees of the Seattle-Post Intelligencer, St Patrick's Day, 2009 was a day for doing only one thing; crying in their beer and wondering what the future holds as Seattle's oldest newspaper rolled off the presses for the final time.

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The European Union Commission has proposed a new directive, to be voted on in March, that would make maternity leave compulsory for the first six weeks after a woman gives birth. You read that correctly -- compulsory. As in, women would be forced to stay home, regardless of their own wishes, if they have children.

Beyond the obvious affront on personal free will, the problems with this proposal are so numerous and egregious it's making our heads spin. Firstly, Europe as a whole already suffers from low female labor participation rates; continent-wide, only six out of ten women work. This is a major problem for the region, as it turns out women have been the key factor driving economic growth worldwide in recent years ("women have contributed more to global GDP growth than have either new technology or the new giants, China and India," according to a pre-mancession article in The Economist). Stigmatizing women by telling employers outright that women will not, by law, be as committed to the workplace as men is a foolish and self-defeating move.

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I may owe Sammy Sosa an apology.

In a recent post, I wrote about Sosa's apparent use of a skin product designed to make him appear whiter. I wondered if the baseball great's light skin was a capitulation to the colonizer mentality. This mindset holds that anything white is superior, and it has caused many black people to go to absurd lengths to seem whiter (both culturally and literally).

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Corey Haim is dead.

He spoke openly about his drug demons, struggled for years to re-find his footing in Hollywood and looked far older than his 38 years in photos. In a way, the Internet headline seemed morbidly preordained and not at all surprising. Still. There was something so tragic about it. And all day long, my mind has been stuck on Ally Sheedy's infamous line in The Breakfast Club: When you grow up, your heart dies.

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Filed under: iPad

During CES 2010, HP gave the public a slight tease of its upcoming slate device. The touchscreen device, which runs Windows 7, sports a form factor similar to Apple's iPad, as well as similar uses; it supports eBooks, music, videos, and of course, the Internet. But wait, there's more. According to a post on HP's Voodoo blog, the device will give you a "full Web browsing experience," not a "watered-down Internet" with "sacrifices." In other words, the HP slate device supports Flash and, well, the iPad doesn't.

While the blog posting didn't mention the iPad by name, it was fairly clear that the statement in question was an indirect jab at it. Accompanying the post is a short, 30 second clip. The highlight of the clip, which occurs toward the end, shows the user going to Hulu.com and watching a Flash-based video.

The reason that the clip is only 30 seconds long, and the Hulu portion is at the end of it, is that running Flash may have drained all of the device's batteries before all footage could be shot. (Just kidding! I couldn't help myself).

On a serious note, while the lack of Flash on the iPhone, and now the iPad, has its drawbacks, these drawbacks have been muted to a degree. The advent of the App Store created a non-Flash, potentially monetizable, playground for the creations of developers and content creators to play in. In addition, HTML 5 is emerging as a potential Flash development alternative.

via [AppleInsider]

TUAWHP attacks Apple iPad over Flash originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 10 Mar 2010 22:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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angry tapir writes "A Transportation Security Administration analyst has been indicted with tampering with databases used by the TSA to identify possible terrorists who may be trying to fly in the US. If convicted, he faces 10 years in prison."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In January, I began following the 442 students of Charlotte Middle School in Charlotte, Tenn. who had decided to partner with UMCOR, one of the world's largest relief organizations, to provide "hands-on" support for Haiti by making 442 health kits.

Once they knew what each health kit needed to contain -- a hand towel, wash cloth, comb, bar of soap, nail clipper or file, toothbrush, toothpaste, and six adhesive bandages -- the Charlotte Tigers took their January focus on the positive character trait of generosity to great heights. All the students pitched in. It was reported that Ms. Richard's sixth grade homeroom students brought in 1293 items for the kits, and Ms. Baldwin's eighth grade homeroom students brought in 965! By the end of February, there were enough supplies to complete 525 kits, and the remaining items were donated to the Dickson County Help Center.

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WASHINGTON — Joanne Johnson wiped a tear from her cheek as she told a congressional hearing Wednesday how her brother died an unnecessarily early death because he didn't have health insurance.

Bill Maher unloaded on former Congressman Eric Massa Wednesday night during an appearance on "Countdown with Keith Olbermann," telling guest host Lawrence O'Donnell that Massa predictably blamed a list of cliche factors for his decision to resign.

"When I see this creep give every possible excuse that he could when he was first defending himself, I thought 'wow,'" Maher told O'Donnell. "He goes right down the list. First he blames it on health, then he mentions his family. Then it's the climate in Washington. I thought 'OK, are we gonna get to personal responsibility? Are you gonna get to that part?' And darn-it if he didn't do it. 'Yes, I disappointed myself, cause I'm usually such an awesome dude.' And I thought 'Wow, you stuck the landing dude. You got every single one of them. Now please go kill yourself.'"

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Glenn Beck and Michael Moore agree on one thing: If we could just beat the Republicans AND the Democrats this November, maybe we'd have a shot at solving the enormous challenges we face.

But since that's not likely, I would like to offer ten reminders to each party, to help them avoid some of the failings of their past and present.

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"Bring cops... a lot of them!... And soldiers too."—Carlos, a brave 7 year old boy from Norwalk, California, calling 911 after armed attackers broke into his home and threatened to kill his family. (Audio of the call)