New Star Trek Trailer now available in HD!
It’s the new full trailer for Star Trek! Just click the screenshot and go look. You know you want to.
Tags: Star TrekPhoto of the day: Nanobama
Thanks to one of my Facebook friends for pointing this one out. This is just too geekily cool for words, a few intrepid artists/scientists have created hundreds of tiny nano-scale carvings of our future president. According to the Nanobama site, this is how it’s done:
The nanobama structures are made of carbon nanotubes, and the pictures were taken using optical and electron microscopes. Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are tiny hollow cylinders of carbon; the diameter of a CNT is tens of thousands of times smaller than a human hair, and CNTs are several times stronger and stiffer than steel. CNTs are grown by a high-temperature chemical reaction, using patterns of nanoscale metal catalyst particles arranged in the shapes of the faces, text, and flags that you see in the images. Each face contains millions of parallel nanotubes, standing vertically on the substrate like a forest of trees. If you were standing next to the nanotubes as they grow, and each nanotube was a 1 foot (0.3 meter) diameter tree, the trees would be growing at over 500 miles per hour! The nanobama faces are approximately 0.5 millimeter wide, or about ten times the width of a human hair.
The nanobamas are made as follows, and as shown in the diagram below:
(1) convert an image (original by Shepard Fairey) of Barack Obama to a line drawing
(2) shrink the drawing and print it onto a glass plate (mask), using a laser system
(3) shine ultraviolet light through the mask, and onto a thin layer of polymer on a silicon wafer, thereby patterning the polymer by photolithography
(4) coat the wafer with a thin layer of catalyst nanoparticle “seeds” for nanotube growth
(5) remove the remaining polymer, leaving the catalyst seeds in the shapes of the nanobamas
(6) grow the CNTs from the catalyst patterns, by placing the wafer in a high-temperature furnace and filling the furnace with a carbon-containing gas
(7) take pictures of the structures, which are barely visible to the naked eye, using electron and optical microscopes
Is Starbucks making its red cups product(RED)?
Well talk about cool. Starbucks has partnered with the product(RED) movement with a new initiative starting on November 26th. For those of you who aren’t familiar with product(RED) here is a description from their homepage:
Each time you buy a (RED) product or service, at no extra cost to you, the company who makes the product will give up to 50 percent of its profit to buy and distribute antiretroviral medicine to our brothers and sisters dying in Africa.
Now, Starbucks’ version of the initiative hasn’t been announced yet. But I have a pretty good idea what it will be. What usually happens around the end of November at Starbucks? RED CUPS.
Red cup season at Starbucks is my favorite time of year, it signals the beginnings of cold weather, hot chocolate and the coming of the holidays. Since the holidays are generally a season of giving, could Starbucks be planning to turn it’s usual red cups into (RED) cups? Donating a percentage of its profits towards Africa? It certainly seems in line with something that the company would do. I’m looking forward to finding out.
If it’s true, it would be a pretty impressive use of profits, and very respectable considering the drop in business as of late. Perhaps Starbucks will using the (RED) promotion to try and get people into drinking Starbucks under the auspices of helping people. It could certainly be a win-win for the company, getting more people in the stores for the cause of donating, and also increasing its customer base.
All I know is that I can’t wait to sit in a comfy-chair with a red cup of hot chocolate watching the snow fall. It’s one of my favorite small joys, and if I can help someone while I do it, all the better.
Tags: Product(RED), Red Cup Season, StarbucksRichie Cunningham and the Fonz endorse Obama
See more Ron Howard videos at Funny or Die
There isn’t much I can say about this one, other than “AWESOME.” Enjoy. Tags: Barack Obama, The Fonz
Wallpaper of the Day : Wantagh Park HDR
Well for once, one of the photos I’m posting here is my own. This is an HDR panorama image of Wantagh Park, in Wantagh, NY, that I turned into a wallpaper for my MacBook. The size is 1280×800. Please feel free to use and enjoy it.
Tags: HDR, Panorama, Photography, Wallpaper, Wantagh ParkFIRST SHOTS FROM THE NEW STAR TREK MOVIE!
October 15th, 2008 | 6 Comments | Posted in General Nerdery, Rumor Mill, Sci-fi / Fantasy by Justin Flood
(click to enlarge)
Here are the first exclusive shots from the marketing campaign that is starting on the new Star Trek movie, being released next year. So far, I have to say that this looks freakin AWESOME!
To see the rest of these great new shots, check them out after the jump.
Shots courtesy of UGO, TrekMovie, MTV, IGN, and Aint it Cool News
Tags: Enterprise, Kirk, movie, Spock, Star Trek