If you've read Gates's column, you know the signs are not encouraging. Whether or not it will stay there depends on the kind of rabbit the book's team of writers and editors pulled out of the hat. Advance sales have been booming, meaning a sure lead on the bestseller lists. HIT THE ROAD: Bill Gates's long-delayed tome The Road Ahead will arrive in bookstores any day now. Gamers will be pleased to know The Dig avoids falling into this, er, hole. LucasArts' last few adventures sacrificed interactivity to tell tales. Not to be overlooked is award-winning science fiction writer Orson Scott Card's expertly crafted dialog - it sets a darkly humorous mood of its own. But the drop-dead noninteractive animation sequences positively glow. Though LucasArts recruited George Lucas's "other" company, Industrial Light & Magic, to work on the graphics, not all of the in-play animation is as smooth as some state-of-the-art videogames. Spielberg's close three-year collaboration with LucasArts and The Dig's producers has resulted in an adventure that looks like a cross between Forbidden Planet and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
#STRINGS THEORY YOUTUBE MOVIE#
So begins The Dig, a Steven Spielberg adventure that the filmmaker/avid computer-gamer decided would be too expensive to make into a movie - but that would be perfect for a videogame. Led by Commander Boston Low, three brave astronauts scurry into orbit to stabilize the satellite - and discover it's no hunk o' granite, but an evil alien craft. Toronto Public Library: +1 (416) 393 7747.Ī large asteroid assumes an unstable orbit around Earth, threatening to smash into the planet and leave a crater the size of Rush Limbaugh's right buttock. This futuristic lair for facts and fantasy is a testament to times lost and found.
The third floor houses the Electronic Resource Center, an array of biblio-technologies (including 20 multimedia workstations) that provide access to Toronto's Free-Net and an extensive CD-ROM collection. Disintegrating relics of the predigital era, these antiquated books, some dating back to the Gutenberg Press, are stored under low light and at a constant 1 degree Celsius and 50 percent humidity. Inside the huge rotunda, a staircase suspended without columns leads to reading rooms, stacks, and a refrigerated glass vault that houses a world-famous collection of rare children's books and the Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation, and Fantasy. Never mind them - clunky flip-phone owners will gape in envy.ĬM-RX100: Price unavailable at press time. Of course, walking around town using a hands-free mike may cause passersby to assume you're talking to yourself. An infrared remote control stores and dials programmed numbers. If this proves obtrusive, an earpiece microphone allows you to make calls with the phone in your pocket or clipped to your belt. But while Sony has managed to pack this phone into a package about the size of a pager, the CM-RX100 makes up for its diminutive heft with enough clever features to make a gadget fiend blush.įor starters, the mouthpiece is a delicate lever that pops up and down for easy use.
When I travel, my PowerBook stays in my room, my SkyPager is welded to my hip, and my cell phone rests somewhere in between - usually in my knapsack between good books I never read and bad magazines I stole from the plane.Įnter the Sony CM-RX100, perhaps the world's tiniest cellular phone.
Size determines where we're willing to tote a device, and when we're likely to use it. A procession through them and their accompanying (minimal) words leaves a reader strangely calmed, as if the reader has visited a place that is simultaneously tranquil, reassuring, and thoughtful - as if the reader has felt exactly what it is that the world is trying to say.Īs any Wired road warrior knows, when it comes to choosing gadgets, one cardinal rule applies: Size matters. Yet the world's strings have become tangled, and holiness reveals itself in the oddest places: decaying sidewalk movie posters in Madras, India underground parking spaces in Los Angeles a clot of drapery in County Clare, Ireland carnival attractions in Coney Island.īyrne's photos have a distinct, nondesigner feel. Byrne believes the world is a holy place where people continually pull their internal strings to reflect their numinous nature. In Strange Ritual, a lush and genuinely beautiful 176-page collection of color photos taken over the past two decades, Byrne applies the "string theory" to the spiritual dimension of the globe. But sometimes these strings become misconnected - and our real feelings are either misrepresented, or simply get lost in the process. David Byrne has a theory: he reckons human emotions are connected to our bodies by strings that we pull to make our faces and bodies reflect what we're feeling.
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