I wonder if the 1974 movie "The Godfather Part II" would have been anywhere near as good or as memorable if it had been a computer-generated de-aged 50-year-old Marlon Brando playing Vito Corleone as a young man rather than a real-life 30-year-old Robert De Niro (who won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance)? (This is a rhetorical question - I'm pretty certain most of us know the answer)
Also, the article below gives me a better understanding of the Star Trek: The Next Generation 1989 & 1991 episodes "Booby Trap" (where Geordi La Forge creates a very life-like hologram of Dr. Leah Brahms, the engineer who designed the Enterprise's warp drive, and falls in love with his computer-generated creation) & "Galaxy's Child" (where a year or so later the real Dr. Brahms comes aboard the Enterprise & is extremely unimpressed when she finds out La Forge had created a holographic likeness of her & romantically interacted with it).
"If a studio has the kit, not to mention the balls, to deepfake Tom Hanks into a movie he didn’t agree to star in, then it has the potential to upend the entire industry as we know it. It’s one thing to have your work taken from you, but it’s another to have your entire likeness swiped.
The issue is already creeping in from the peripheries. The latest Indiana Jones movie makes extensive use of de-ageing technology, made by grabbing every available image of Harrison Ford 40 years ago and feeding it into an algorithm. Peter Cushing has been semi-convincingly brought back to life for Star Wars prequels, something he is unlikely to have given permission for unless the Disney execs are particularly skilled at the ouija board. ITV’s recent sketch show Deep Fake Neighbour Wars took millions of images of Tom Holland and Nicki Minaj, and slapped them across the faces of young performers so adeptly that it would be very easy to be fooled into thinking that you were watching the real celebrities in action."
"The Parkes radio telescope Murriyang, which helped broadcast the moon landing in 1969, has played a central role in another scientific discovery.
CSIRO scientists working at Murriyang have been observing an array of nano hertz frequency pulsars for almost 20 years. They are ripples in space time [gravitational waves] that are nearly the same size as the Milky Way.
‘Seriously cute’ population of rare native rodent found.
A detection dog has unexpectedly discovered a new population of rare native rodents in Melbourne’s outer east.
The previously unrecorded broad-toothed rat population was found by a four-year-old labrador called Moss who was searching the Coranderrk Bushland near Healesville Sanctuary.
Moss was searching in an area when he alerted his trainer to grass-filled, bright green animal scat.
Scientists confirmed it came from the broad-toothed rat, a native species known for its chubby cheeks, fluffy fur and short tail.
Zoos Victoria’s Sakib Kazi said the rats were notoriously hard to trap but adorable.
"I challenge you to have a look at their face and not immediately fall in love.
"Unilever has been named as an international sponsor of war by the Ukrainian government after the Marmite, Dove and Domestos owner became subject to a law in Russia obliging all large companies operating in the country to contribute directly to its war effort.
The move came as campaigners called on Unilever’s new boss, Hein Schumacher, who started work this weekend, to withdraw from Russia, where its local business continues to sell “essential” products from tea to ice-cream, after evidence emerged that it paid Moscow $331m in taxes last year.
"Another theory goes that the low-frequency gravitational waves were generated just after the Big Bang, right when the “inflation” or early exponential expansion of the universe began. If that bears out, these signals could be analysed to bring scientists to the start of the known universe.
Analysing electromagnetic radiation only gets astronomers to about 400,000 years after the Big Bang. The gravitational waves, if they are indeed relics of the early universe, could contain information that brings us within a nanosecond.
"All South Koreans have instantly become a year or two younger, as the country ditched its traditional – and increasingly unpopular – system for counting someone’s age and replaced it with the internationally accepted method.
Under the previous system, the country’s citizens are deemed to be a year old when they are born, and a year is added every 1 January. The unusual custom meant that a baby born on New Year’s Eve would become two years old as soon as the clock strikes midnight." #Korea#SouthKorea#calendar#birthday
Good on her! The Belgian team, devastated by injuries, needed to earn the points for competing in the race that would hopefully stop them from being relegated to a lower division. #sport#athletics#TrackAndField#Belgium#JolienBoumkwo
"Belgium shot put and hammer throw champion Jolien Boumkwo showed her team spirit at the European Championships in Poland when she stepped up to run the 100m hurdles and save her team from getting disqualified.
Boumkwo smiled as she carefully attempted each hurdle on Saturday. The 29-year-old finished the race without knocking any of the hurdles down in 32.81 seconds. That was 19 seconds after the winner, Teresa Errandonea of Spain."
"A tiny earless dragon feared to be extinct in the wild has been sighted for the first time in more than 50 years – at a location that is being kept secret to help preservation efforts.
"After briefly attending music college, Dr Larissa Suzuki abandoned plans to be a professional pianist and switched to a computer science degree, where she describes being the only girl in a class of 40 boys. “At first, I never questioned why there aren’t many girls in here,” she said.
However, she recalls being underestimated, including by one professor who suggested she had copied a classmate’s homework, when the reverse was the case. “They asked me, ‘Where did you get these answers?’” she said. “They believed these boys, who were skipping class and laughing in lessons, had done the work and I had not, even though I was so dedicated.”
According to Valerius Maximus, Aeschylus, the eldest of the three great Athenian tragedians, was killed by a tortoise dropped by an eagle that had mistaken his bald head for a rock suitable for shattering the shell of the reptile. Pliny, in his Natural History, adds that Aeschylus had been staying outdoors to avert a prophecy that he would be killed that day "by the fall of a house".
Watching State of Origin. Game hasn’t even started yet and I’m already annoyed by how gambling ads are allowed to be presented as part of the game commentary.
Why is this allowed?
Does anyone think that quickly mumbling ‘think what you could be buying instead’ after a 2-3 minute long ad would have any effect at all?
I watch with the TV muted & listen to the excellent ad-free radio commentary on ABC Sports radio instead.
Also, to avoid the irritating gambling ads shown before the game, I don't switch the TV on until the radio says the players are running onto the field.
One of the first things I thought of when I read that the missing Titanic submersible's pressure hull was made of titanium & carbon fibre was the carbon fibre handlebars snapping off the Australian cyclist's bicycle at the Tokyo Olympics. I'm fairly sure the failure was later attributed to a previously unknown weak spot in the carbon fibre handlebars, & the extra pressure applied to them when the cyclist was accelerating at the start of the race. #Titanic#submersible#Titan
(FULL VIDEO) Alex Porter crashes in Olympic team pursuit after handlebars fall off his bike - YouTube - https://youtu.be/dxxjoR7Bi9w
Puddin Fingers DeSantis you are a POS. Insulting the residents of San Francisco by calling them "Riff-Raff" when your own state of Florida is literally full of Nazis.
Go back and clean up your own state before you criticize others. SMH
"In 2010, a teenage rugby player in Australia named Sam Ballard accepted an unusual dare at a party: swallow a live garden slug. The experience left him paralyzed and with significant brain damage, and on Friday (Nov. 2), Ballard died in a Sydney hospital at the age of 28.
The strange and sad case occurred because, along with the slug, Ballard had swallowed a parasite called Angiostrongylus cantonensis, commonly known as rat lungworm, which the slug likely picked up from rat droppings, according to the U.K.'s EveningStandard."
@nixCraft None of the above. Fibre-to-the-curb & then copper wire to the home (Australia's cut-price, i.e. twice as expensive, mix of 21st century & 1950s technology).
I think there might be a new type of phone scam doing the rounds here in Australia.
I just got a call on my unlisted landline number from a woman (with an Aussie accent) who said that she had a missed call from my phone number. When I told her I hadn't called anyone, she was adamant that I had.
The thing is (and I just tested by calling my mobile from my home phone) that calls from my landline do not broadcast the phone number. They just show as a call from a "Private Number". So she couldn't return a missed call from me.
Either someone is spoofing my private phone number, or more likely there is a new type of scam where people call your number & tell you that you had called them in the hope that you might reveal some other information while trying to work out what the "missed" call was about.
So, if someone calls you saying that they are returning a missed call from your number, and you don't believe you had called them, be very cautious about providing any personal information to them.
"Victoria Cross recipient Ben Roberts-Smith directed one of his SAS comrades to kill an elderly man who was dragged from a mosque in Afghanistan, according to allegations examined by the Brereton inquiry into alleged war crimes.
"Scientists have identified one of Australia’s first long-distance walkers: a 250kg marsupial with “heeled hands” that roamed across the continent’s arid interior 3.5 million years ago.
On this day in 1871, the Paris Commune, a hotbed of radical working class politics and watershed moment in revolutionary anti-capitalist history, was crushed by the French National Army. 20,000 people were killed and 44,000 arrested.
I think I would vote for every single one of these policies:
"The Commune governed Paris for two months, establishing policies that tended toward a progressive, anti-religious system of social democracy, including the separation of church and state, self-policing, the remission of rent, the abolition of child labor, and the right of employees to take over an enterprise deserted by its owner. All the Roman Catholic churches and schools were closed. Feminist, socialist, communist and anarchist currents played important roles in the Commune. However, the various Communards had little more than two months to achieve their respective goals."
This cartoon reveals that road rage is not a recent phenomenon, but also an issue recurring with each generation of drivers.
Due to its subtle topicality, it and two 1965 Goofy cartoons about freeway safety, Freewayphobia#1 and Goofy's Freeway Troubles, have been shown in driving schools across the continent.
This short was awarded the Buyer Trophy for the best film on traffic safety.