Matt Damon
milhayser | August 21, 2013For writer and director Neill Blomkamp, Elysium is round two of sci-fi feature as social allegory, following in the footsteps of 2009's District 9. Whereas District 9 paralleled the history of apartheid in South Africa, Elysium deals with issues of illegal immigration and social class, centered on everyone's favorite pre-apocalyptic wasteland, Los Angeles.
It's a pure joy to see L.A. extrapolated to a vibrant, populous, spray-painted pile of rubble in the year 2154, where even gringos like Matt Damon hablan español. This proletariat L.A., where ex-con Damon earns minimum wage building robot…
tsmith | February 13, 2013Readers may be familiar with Matt Damon's charity work with water.org, an organization he co-founded. Water.org seeks to raise awareness of the lack of clean water by almost a billion people on earth, and lack of toilets by almost 2.5 billion--and more importantly, they work to remedy that situation by providing sustainable, local solutions. His new video brings awareness in a rather unorthodox manner: he's refusing to go to the bathroom until everyone on earth has access to clean water and toilets.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=jQCqNop3CIg
drorzel | July 23, 2010This week's big story in physics is this Science paper by a group out of Austria Canada (edited to fix my misreading of the author affiliations), on a triple-slit interference effect. This has drawn both the usual news stories and also some complaining about badly-worded news stories. So, what's the deal?
What did they do in this paper? The paper reports on an experiment in which they looked at the interference of light sent through a set of three small slits, and verified that the resulting pattern agrees with the predictions of the Born rule for quantum probabilities.
What does Matt Damon…