Kirat submitted a story about a shape-shifting building being constructed in Dubai. An innovative way to blow off some of the ludicrous amounts of money they have over there, now that they've already created elaborate man made islands for houses.

The 80-story Dynamic Tower, described as the "world's first building in motion," will also be the first skyscraper constructed from prefabricated units, according to a press statement released by New York-based architect David Fisher's Dynamic Group.

Each floor would be capable of rotating independently, powered by wind turbines fitted between each floor.

"You can adjust the shape the way you like every given moment," Fisher said. "It's not a piece of architecture somebody designed today and that's it. It remains forever. It's designed by life, shaped by time."

Apartments will sell for about $3,000 per square foot, making each unit range in price from about $4 million to $40 million. Work on the tower is to be completed by 2010, according to Dynamic's Web site.

Seems a little overkill. Also I don't get how there's wind turbines between each floor...where would the blades of the turbine fit?

I saw Get Smart over the weekend and it was pretty funny. And it wasn't just Steve Carell that made it funny. But I just saw an ad on TV for this apparent, straight-to-DVD release called "Get Smart's Bruce and Lloyd out of Control" and I did a double take. Bruce and Lloyd are two characters played by Masi Oka (Heroes) and Nate Torrence (Studio 60) that have a somewhat substantial amount of screen time in Get Smart, but aren't really major characters.


I've come to understand that studios will do anything and everything to milk a blockbuster for all it's worth, but who on earth is spending $20 on a 70-minute DVD of some minor characters? The full actor list on Amazon is: Larry Miller, Patrick Warburton, Masi Oka, Jayma Mays, Nate Torrence. And I definitely can't imagine someone plopping down $25 for the Blu-Ray version.

I just posted about the Season 3 DVD release of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia because it was the funniest one yet. And now FX is running ads saying the show will return for Season 4 on Thursday, September 18th at 10 (I'd assume that's Eastern Time). Booyah! It was never really official, and I hadn't seen a concrete date anywhere before now.

In case you're behind, hulu is streaming a lot of episodes for free.

That's right, Mozilla is releasing Firefox 3 today, and is trying to get a world record for most downloads in a day. They should be making the official release available at 10am PST at the Download Day website.


Firefox 3 has majorly improved, most notably by being quicker and much lighter in memory usage. They've also updated the UI to better match the operating system it's running in. Big functionality changes are evident in bookmarking, the location bar, downloads, and addons. Basically they've made major improvements across the board. Also, a lot of reviews have suggested it's gone from unusable in Mac OSX to a browser that now is much better than Safari. In less than two hours you can see for yourself!

Still not convinced? Check out some of Ars Technica's reviews:
Memory Usage
User Interface

And one for Mac users about exactly why this blows away FF2.

This was pretty funny because you could tell Ed Norton was having a great time with it, really bleeping up a storm and talking about his movies and joking about how the previous Hulk sucked:

(Contains a bunch of bleeps)

Yes, this car is awesome. But BMW is not...they're not putting this crazy car in production even though it functions and has taken safety and weather issues into account. The car is completely covered in a fabric that can dynamically change shape by shifting metal underneath. So what was the point of this? Just make a car that goes straight into the BMW Museum in Munich?

Just when it seemed like it would never happen:
Of course, she's only "suspending" her campaign, which means she still keeps her delegates. We'll see if that has any additional implications, though I seriously doubt that she'd be a VP option. But uniting her supporters with Obama will be a big deal.

In case you're wondering (and who could blame you with all the conflicting news that keeps getting tossed around), this story is being reported by CNN, The New York Times, and ABC News.

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia is an awesome show, so it was good to hear Season 3 will be out on DVD this September. Hopefully the beginning of Season 4 will coincide with that.

Aside from all of that, the creators of the show (Rob McElhenney, Charlie Day and Glenn Howerton) are going to start shooting a show for Fox called "Boldly Going Nowhere" in October, which Variety claimed would give them enough time to finish shooting Season 4 of Always Sunny. So there's more indication that Always Sunny will be back soon. Regarding the new show (with my bolded emphasis):

The single-camera half-hour is a high-concept laffer set in the future and focused on the mundane world of a spaceship captain when he's not on a mission. Fox has ordered five additional scripts beyond the pilot.

"We grew up watching shows like 'Star Trek,' anything having to do with the future, and it was always about the adventures they'd go on," McElhenney said. "We thought it would be funny to watch what goes on in between those adventures, when they're waiting for the next big thing to happen. How do they keep themselves busy?"

Pilot is based on an idea that came from "Sunny" writers' assistant Adam Stein; as a result, Stein will get a "written and created by" credit alongside the "Sunny" guys. McElhenney, Day and Howerton are also set to exec produce, along with Michael Rotenberg and Nick Frenkel; RCG, and 3 Arts will produce with 20th Century Fox TV.

"I wish it was less rare that when you get a comedy script, you laugh out loud," said Fox Entertainment prexy Kevin Reilly. "This really felt like a bull's-eye for Fox. It's a concept I've seen developed before badly, many times. These guys nailed it."

Unlike "Sunny," the trio don't plan to star in "Boldly Going Nowhere," which they said will contain characters that greatly vary in age, sex and race.

McElhenney, Day and Howerton -- who christened their company RCG, after the first letters in their first names -- began talking to 20th about a deal before the strike, but such a pact was put on hold during the work stoppage. After the strike was over, "We sat down and wrote the script in two or three days," McElhenney said. "As soon as it was done, we told 20th we had a script idea and asked 20th if the deal was still available, and they said yes."

McElhenney said signing on with 20th also helped avoid any logistical problems in continuing with "Sunny," since that show airs on a fellow News Corp. property. The next 13-episode season of "Sunny" will be shot this summer for a fall bow.

"We didn't want to step on anyone's toes or shoot ourselves in the foot for neglecting our duties on 'Sunny,'" he said. "It's what got us here in the first place, we're proud of it, and our faces are all over it."

It's definitely awesome to see they're not ready to neglect Sunny, and this new show means more of their humor on TV which is great. I'm really interested to see how much they try to do within the constraints of a major broadcast network, compared to the incredible freedom they have on FX with Sunny to be able to swear, make drug/sex references, etc.

Yes, the US banknotes have gradually gone through a redesign that's added some color and changed some features on the notes, but a federal appeals court upheld a ruling that the U.S. Treasury is discriminating against visually impaired people by not offering any significant features that could help them differentiate between notes. This wouldn't just include blind people, as people with partial vision can be affected as well. The treasury was arguing that the cost to replace the current printing machinery would be massive, and also that the cost would be great to alter things like vending machines and ATMs to accommodate notes of different sizes or textures.

A sensible approach would be something like the Euro, which has plenty of features to help those with poor or no vision.

From Wikipedia:

Euro banknotes increase in size with increasing denominations, which helps both the visually impaired and the blind. The predominant colouring of the notes alternates between "warm" and "cool" hues in adjacent denominations (see the chart above), making it still harder to confuse two similar denominations for those who can see the colour. The printing of the denominations is intaglio printing, which allows the ink to be felt by sensitive fingers, allowing some people to distinguish the printed denominations by touch alone. Lower denominations (5, 10, 20) have smooth bands along one side of the note containing holograms; higher denominations have smooth, square patches with holograms. Finally, the €200 and €500 notes have distinctive tactile patterns along the edges of the notes: the €200 note has vertical lines running from the bottom centre to the right-hand corner, and the €500 note has diagonal lines running down the right-hand edge.

Although there have been other currencies pre-dating the euro that were specifically designed in similar ways (different sizes, colours, and ridges) to aid the visually impaired, the introduction of the euro constitutes the first time that authorities have consulted associations representing the blind before, rather than after, the release of the currency.

One can hardly be blamed for missing episodes of SNL, as it's rare to find a truly funny episode in recent years. But I knew when they said that Steve Carell was hosting this season's finale that it had to be pretty good. There were a few off-sketches, and too much John McCain, but at least half the show was good and I couldn't stop laughing during the opening sketch. So here's the really good sketches if you missed it or want to see it again:

Awesome opening sketch:
(Probably NSFW language)


Carell's monologue, with appearance of wife Nancy Walls:


A Barack Obama/Hillary Clinton ad (that seems to really bash Hillary):


Deal or No Deal, with Steve Carell's hilarious embarassed anger:


The Japanese version of The Office, pure gold:


There were a few more sketches that I wasn't particularly fond of...TVSquad has embedded them in their article if you want to see them.