Month: November 2010

Shatner-ific Biopic of Stanley Milgram

In 1976, CBS aired a biopic of Stanley Milgram starring William Shatner called The Tenth Level. Milgram, of course, conducted a series of now-famous experiments in which he tested how willing ordinary people were to administer what they thought were painful shocks to research subjects. He found that a very high percentage of people were willing to administer shocks right up and past the point where the shocks would cause serious injury.

Mind Hacks notes that the Tenth Level is available on YouTube, cut into seven parts. The first part is here. As Mind Hacks notes,

The combination of some of the most notorious experiments in the history of psychology, Big Bill Shatner, cheap production and hammy acting make for a heady mix, although it doesn’t particularly overdo the psychology.

One thing I’d strongly recommend is actually reading the book Milgram wrote about the series of experiments, Obedience to Authority. It is a relatively quick read, and Milgram goes into depth about the numerous variations of the experiment he did to try to better understand why people would obey so readily and under what circumstances they would disobey.

Hot Toys 1/6th Scale Bruce Lee ‘Enter the Dragon’ Action Figure

I’ve previously mentioned Enterbays 1/6th scale Bruce Lee action figure from Fist of Fury, but I’m really liking this Hot Toys 1/6th scale Bruce Lee action figure from Enter the Dragon.

This one will set you back $200-$300 depending on where you buy it, but for that you get,

– Multi-layered stereoscopic hair sculpture
– Approximately 30 cm tall
– Newly sculpted muscular body with over 30 points of articulation with battle damaged scars on chest, waist and back
– Fourteen (14) pieces of interchangeable palms including:
– One (1) pair of relaxed palms
– One (1) pair of fists
– One (1) pair for holding nunchucks
– One (1) pair for holding rods
– One (1) pair of posing palms during grappling
– One (1) piece for grappling
– One (1) piece of open palm
– One (1) piece for practicing Wing Chun
– One (1) piece with thumb up for imitating his act of nose touching
– Each piece of head sculpt is specially hand-paintedCostume:
– Two (2) sets of costume including:
– Style 1:
– One (1) piece of Chinese style white shirt
– One (1) pair of dark blue trousers with black waist band
– One (1) pair of white socks
– Style 2:
– A (1) one-piece dark blue stealth suit
– One (1) pair of black socks
– Two (2) pairs of black cotton shoes

Weapons:
– One (1) pair of nunchucks
– Two (2) short rods
– One (1) long rod

Accessories:
– One (1) dark blue bag
– One (1) ball of strings
– One (1) snake

Diorama backdrops:
– Two (2) movie-accurate diorama backdrops with Bruce Lee’s Chinese nameplate, Chinese movie name and MMS DX series title including:
– One (1) imitating the scenario of dungeon in the movie
– One (1) imitating the scenario of mirror room in the movie, with middle part of the mirror which can be rotated with its back showing scene of Chinese cultural implement of punishment

LifeIO – Toward a Master Personal Dashboard

I like the idea behind LifeIO — in fact I’ve been thinking about something like this for awhile. As you can see from the video below, LifeIO is yet another service that promises to aggregate numerous activity streams, including email, ToDos, etc., and provide a central interface for handling everything in your life.

Now as I said, I like the idea of LifeIO, but I’m not actually using it (and don’t plan to). It’s a nice step forward in what an application like this should be, but I’d take it further.

I’m most interested in the Now view depicted in the video above, but what I want is a flat timeline view that I can manipulate easily. Maybe I want to see yesterday at 4:45 p.m. Maybe I want to see an aggregate of the last month.

Then I want the ability to quickly add and remove activity streams being shown. For example, maybe I’m working on a project and I want to see my Gmail, my Twitter feed, and the RSS feed from my blog. But a few minutes later, I’m trying to figure out what to do tonight, so I want to see my GetGlue, Raptr and Last.FM feeds.

But lets take that one step further. Since 90% of this stuff is tagged in some way, I want to be able to further filter based on tags and/or keywords (i.e. only emails, etc that contain a specific string).

And I want this to be pretty much instantaneous and able to handle the terabytes of data I want it to munch on (yes, I want to be able to cross-reference my WoW combat logs with my Last.FM stream to see if there’s any correlation between leveling with gangsta rap vs. folk music — and just because I want to be able to).

Make it open source so I can run it in a box in the rack in my basement and maybe throw in a couple of mints, and I’d call it done.

Vintage Covers for eBook Readers and Other Gadgets

Vintage Covers is one of those “why didn’t I think of that” shops at Etsy — take covers from old fashioned printed books and rework them as cases and covers for eBook readers and gadgets like the iPad.

For example, check out this awesome iPad cover featuring a classic cover from The Phantom comic book,

According to the person making these,

This is a hand made cover using traditional bookbinding methods with a vintage comic book cover on the front, an ad from the comic on the back and a page from the comic on the inside front.

And, the possibilities range from comics to magazine covers to old book dust jackets and covers. Prices vary depending on device and the cover. The comic book cover for the iPad above cost $50, and smaller covers are less.

For example, for $27.50 I could have this dope Tom Corbett cover on my Sony Reader,