If you’re like me and a terminator junkie, you’ve probably at some point tried to figure out all the different timelines. Each time the terminators go back to hunt John Connor the future is changed, creating branching futures all related to one another.
Seems that the nature of time is cyclical in this universe and the only way John Connor is going to change anything is to keep sending things back in time to change the future until there is a desirably outcome.
Anyway, the awesome geeks over at io9 have been making sense of this and one of their readers sent in the above whiteboard, which lays out pretty clearly what’s going on in the terminator mythology. Leland Rzepecki writes:
That scribbling at the bottom is from when I realized that time in Terminator must be cyclical, because that’s the only way to explain how Derek and Jessie can be from different futures but be in the same timeline now. The slash in the middle of the line is Judgement Day. Some of that stuff at the bottom was showing my roommate how Derek would have had to skip a timeline using my linear “domino” model, and I couldn’t think of a reason why that would happen.
As for the 12:00, 2:00. I was explaining how we could be seeing both futures in the show. The analogy I was using is that at 12:00 (the clock times are just to make everything relative, if that makes sense) Derek goes back in time, and causes changes to the timeline at 1:00. Then at 2:00, after Derek makes changes like killing Andy Goode, Jessie travels back in time. So even though Jessie came from the same time as Derek, she came later, in more than one way. Does that make sense?
The color coding: Black is pre-Judgement Day stuff I’m sure of, green is Future War stuff I’m sure of, and red is the blurry stuff I can’t really prove, but makes sense to me.
My major is Game Design, and I don’t recommend it, haha. I’ve always been a lot better at “fake” science than real science. I love movies like Primer where you have to keep a lot of timelines straight in your head though, so all of this came pretty naturally to me.
NBC’s (and to a degree Direct TV) Friday Night Lights just got renewed for two more seasons, according to Matthew Ausiello at EW. Thanks to the partnership, one of televisions best shows (and least watched) will have the opportunity to continue telling compelling narratives.
So it’ll be back this fall (and next!) on DTV with thirteen new episodes, which will air on NBC next January (and January 2011!) for the rest of us.
I’ve watched the show off and on since it’s debut, but always at an arms length to protect my television heart. Such is the life of a contemporary junky. Always waiting for the axe to fall, thus never fulling giving yourself emotionally over. Now, at least, I can emotionally invest in FNL knowing that it won’t leave me for two more years.
The hitch now, however, is whether the show’s creative mastermind, Jason Katims, can find a way to juggle both FNL and that prospective Parenthood series he’s producing for NBC. Ditto director Jeffrey Reiner, who’s attached to NBC’s Trauma pilot. “Losing one would be devastating; losing both would be a catastrophe,” so says Ausiello and we would agree.
College Humor has discovered a deleted scene not included on the special edition dvd of Twilight, probably because they made it up themselves. The sequence involves Edward trying to convince Bella into having “buttsex.” So just know that before watching.
This is a Twilight we can get behind. Literally. Pun intended. Is it hot in here or just me?
Apartment Therapy ran some photos of a kitchen in Victoria, Australia that has a staircase incorporated into the countertop. At first, it’s a cool idea but then you remember that you’ll be trudging dirt and fecal matter from outside onto your food prep area. So, not so cool then.
Still, I love sitting on counter tops during parties or to think and this makes that endeavor considerably easier. [via Eat Me Daily]
We’ve all been there. Eat too much ice cream at once or too pound a slurpie as quickly as possible and then your head explodes. That shooting pain drives right at the front of your forehead.
As often as this happens, I’ve never stopped to wonder what drives that headache, what the cause of it actually is. Researchers suggest it is a combination of your body’s overreaction to cold stimuli, the freezing of a cluster of nerves above the hard palate and a sudden influx of warm blood to the brain. The initial contact between the cold food and the roof of your mouth sets all of this brainfreeze activity in motion.
To the best I can find, here are the physiological effects of brain freeze:
When cold things touch the roof of your mouth, they activate a particular nerve, or bunch of nerves, in the sphenopalatine ganglion (sometimes known as the pterygopalatine ganglion).
The sphenopalatine nerves are responsible for sensation and glandular work in your palate (roof of mouth).
If the roof of your mouth doesn’t have time to warm up and those nerves don’t have time to relax, the nerves will tell the blood vessels in your brain to contract and then swell with a rush of warm blood. The theory is that these nerves do this as a sort of misguided way of trying to keep your brain warm.
When blood vessels in your brain swell, you experience that as pressure, or a headache.
While all of these blood vessels are busy shrinking and reopening with warm blood, the nerves are also contributing to the pain of brainfreeze. The pain receptors near the sphenopalatine nerve cluster sense the freezing of the palate, but the pain itself is referred to another area deeper in the skull. This is why you feel brainfreeze deep inside your head and not in the roof of your mouth.
The headache will usually subside on its own within 10 to 20 seconds.
But if you want to make the headache go away faster, you have to warm the roof of your mouth. You can do this by pressing your tongue to the roof and waiting a bit, or by drinking warm water.
7-11 owns the trademark to the word “brainfreeze.”
And by found we mean cast the role with an actual actor and not a spooky ghost. Looks like some developments as to how Jacob is going to fit into the series have been revealed. If you’re curious. [io9]
Looking for a more fashionable way to protect your laptop? Well why not pony up for a sweater cover? Davey Sommers repurposes old sweaters and gives them that jello pudding pop touch turning them into sweaters for your laptop.
They fit comfortably around a 13″ or 15″ laptop and could stretch to get around a 17″. And all for the low price of $20.
I’m pretty sure this should be marketed as the iCosby. Who wouldn’t want to jello pudding pop their life for only $20?
The problem in America is not a lack of ideas. It is a tendency to equate any large-scale government construction project, no matter how thoughtful, with the most brutal urban renewal tactics of the 1950s. One result has been that pioneering projects that skillfully blend basic infrastructure with broader urban needs like housing and park space are usually killed in their infancy. Another is that we now have an archaic and grotesquely wasteful federal system in which upkeep for roads, subways, housing, public parkland and our water supply are all handled separately.
With money now available to invest again in such basic needs, I’d like to look at four cities representing a range of urban challenges and some of the plans available to address them. Though none of the plans are ideal as they stand today (and some of them represent only the germ of an idea), evaluated and addressed together as part of a coordinated effort, they could begin to form a blueprint for making our cities more efficient, sustainable and livable.
The author goes on to examine New Orleans, Buffalo,Los Angeles, and The Bronx providing loose blueprints to make a larger point about how America has ignored smart urban development – often found in Europe – and what the country can do to rectify the problem.
ABC’s parent company, Disney, , is currently in negotiations with online provider Hulu.com which could make shows from that network available to the site. Hulu currently streams current and archived shows from NBC and FOX. No specifics on the deal or timeline of availability is currently available. The other major network, CBS, will most likely not join Hulu as it focuses its efforts on the TV.com site that it now owns. NBC is currently renegotiating its contract with Hulu.
This would be a major coup for Hulu, giving it three major networks under it’s umbrella. And would make me happy. I hate ABC’s online video player. It’s the worst.
If Hulu could swing deals with sites smaller cable outfits like AMC and A&E or some premium cable networks like HBO, Showtime, etc. then Hulu would effectively become the flagship for online television. I’m not saying that’s going to happen, just that that should be their goal.
Miniatur Wonderland in Hamburg, Germany is the largest model railway in the world. With 7 miles of tracks in an area of more than 16,000 sq. ft., it features 6 geographic regions (including America), 200,000 people, 4,000 cars, and 800 buildings. But wait that’s not all. It’s a work in progress with a goal of more than 13 miles of tracks. The builders have already clocked in more than 500,000 hours of work.
But now some of the people involved in cleaning up the financial mess are suggesting that Semgroup’s collapse was more than just bad judgment and worse timing. There is evidence of a malevolent hand at work: oil price manipulation by traders orchestrating a short squeeze to push up the price of West Texas Intermediate crude to the point that it would generate fatal losses in Semgroup’s accounts.
“What transpired at Semgroup was no less than a $500 billion fraud on the people of the world,” says John Catsimatidis, the billionaire grocer turned oil refiner who is attempting to reorganize Semgroup in bankruptcy court. The $500 billion is how much the world would have overpaid for crude had a successful scam pushed up oil prices by $50 a barrel for 100 days.
What’s the evidence of this? Much is circumstantial. Proving oil-trading manipulation is difficult. But numerous people familiar with the events insist that Citibank, Merrill Lynch and especially Goldman Sachs had knowledge about Semgroup’s trading positions from their vetting of an ill-fated $1.5 billion private placement deal last spring. “Nothing’s been proven, but if somebody has your book and knows every trade, it would not be difficult to bet against that book and put the company into a tremendous liquidity squeeze,” says John Tucker, who is representing Kivisto.
What’s known for sure is that Goldman Sachs, through J. Aron & Co., its commodities trading arm, was in prime position to use such data–and profited handsomely from Semgroup’s fall. J. Aron was Semgroup’s biggest counterparty, trading both physical oil flowing through pipelines and paper oil, in the form of options and futures.
When crude oil peaked in July, Semgroup ran out of cash to meet margin requirements on options contracts it had with Aron, contracts on which it had paper losses of $350 million. Desperate to survive, Semgroup asked Aron to pony up $430 million it owed on physical oil. Aron said no, declared Semgroup in default on its contracts and demanded immediate payment of losses.
Answers may appear in late March (isn’t it late March already) when the SEC and FBI investigations come to a close.
Combining two things endeared to my heart: Jones Soda and Emily the Strange. A variety six-pack will set you back $15.99 + shipping.
Here’s to hoping Jones does more of this, like their already sold out homage to Goon. Seeing as they have partnered with Dark Horse Comics, could we make a Hellboy six-pack happen? I would probably lose it, if that came true.
Anyway back to Emily. From the press release, “Emily’s not your average thirteen-year-old girl. Pink is her worst nightmare . . . she wears the same black dress every day. She loves math and science. Her best friends are her four BLACK CATS! She’s into old rock and punk, but also digs newer bands like My Chemical Romance (BTW, Gerard Way is featured in her Dark Horse comic book, “Revenge at Last.”) Emily is so anticool she’s cool . . . A subculture of one, and a follower of no one but herself.”
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