How a handful of desperate innovators took special effects to new heights in two 1977 movies--Star Wars and Close Encounters

You probably recognize this shot...
...because it's the opening shot of the most famous science fiction film ever created.

That shot almost never happened. Indeed, it was so difficult to get that the man who realized it--Richard Edlund, who did visual effects for Star Wars--procrastinated shooting it until the very end of production, when there wasn't enough money left to create this scene using a gigantic, building-wide model of the star destroyer, as he'd hoped.

Instead, he took the biggest model star destroyer he had, which was three feet long, stuck a 24mm lens on the front of his camera, and got it to within 1/32nd of an inch of the bottom of the model, almost scraping off the bottom as his motion-control rig played out the scene.

It may be hard to believe now, but immediately before 1977, the watershed year that witnessed the release of both Lucas's Star Wars and Steven Spielberg's UFO epic Close Encounters of the Third Kind, big-budget effects-laden movies were incredibly rare.

Via an exhaustive history of special effects at Invention and Technology.

this fanny shure got a spanking

Socialist Revolutionary Attempts to Assassinate Lenin (1918)
Fanny Kaplan was a political revolutionary who was executed for attempting to assassinate Vladimir Lenin. She became disillusioned with Lenin as a result of the conflict between the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Bolshevik party and decided to take action, shooting Lenin three times as he exited a Moscow factory. Though she confessed to the shooting, it has been suggested that Kaplan could not have been responsible for the assassination attempt. Why not? More...

Fascism Is Fun

Great little ad from downunder

Three ways to levitate a magic carpet

15:38 06 August 2007
NewScientist.com news service
Zeeya Merali

It sounds like a science fiction joke, but it isn't. What do you get when you turn an invisibility cloak on its side? A mini flying carpet.

So say physicists who believe the same exotic materials used to make cloaking devices could also be used to levitate tiny objects. In a further breakthrough, two other research groups have come a step closer to cracking the mysteries of levitation.

Scientists have levitated objects before, most famously using powerful magnetic fields to levitate a frog. But that technique, using the repulsive force of a giant magnet, requires large amounts of energy. In contrast, the latest theories exploit the natural smaller amounts of energy produced by the quantum fluctuations of empty space.
Force reversal

In May 2006, two research teams led by Ulf Leonhardt at St Andrew's University, UK, and John Pendry at Imperial College, London independently proposed that an invisibility cloak could be created from exotic materials with abnormal optical properties. Such a cloaking device – working in the microwave region - was manufactured later that year.

Dr Strangelove meets the Terminator 2

Robots have been roaming the streets of Iraq, since shortly after the war began. Now, for the first time -- the first time in any warzone -- the machines are carrying guns.

After years of development, three "special weapons observation remote reconnaissance direct action system" (SWORDS) robots have deployed to Iraq, armed with M249 machine guns. The 'bots "haven't fired their weapons yet," Michael Zecca, the SWORDS program manager, tells DANGER ROOM. "But that'll be happening soon."

suicide dragons bombers OH MY

AUSSIE SECURITY experts claim that Second Life and online games such as World of Warcraft are being used to train terrorists.

According to the Australian newspaper a terror campaign has been waged in Second Life which has left a trail of virtual dead and injured, and caused hundreds of thousands of dollars' damage.

Apparently there are three jihadi terrorists registered and two elite jihadist terrorist groups in Second Life and they use the site for recruiting and training. This is on top of the Second Life Liberation Army, which has been responsible for some computer-coded atomic bombings of stores on the site.

Rohan Gunaratna, author of Inside al-Qa'ida, said terrorists are rehearsing their operations in Second Life because they can't practice in the real world.

Kevin Zuccato, head of the Australian High Tech Crime Centre in Canberra, says terrorists can gain training in games such as World of Warcraft in a simulated environment, using weapons that are identical to real-world armaments.

So we can expect more terrorist attacks involving broadswords and Heathrow airport to be closed due to suicide dragons.