Author: m1k3y

If there’s a thread that runs through Cruise’s recent movies, it’s this: You may think you know me, but you don’t. His character in the Mission: Impossible movies seamlessly switches faces and is described as “a ghost”; even Ethan Hunt’s surname reflects his elusive nature. In Knight and Day, he’s a high-level spook who’s built an untraceable life on a private island. And in last year’s Jack Reacher, he’s a man without a country, an American citizen who’s barely set foot on the nation’s soil: “blood military,” he’s called. Jack Reacher has “no driver’s license, current or expired, no residence, current or former, no credit cards, no credit history, no P.O. Box, cell phone, email.” By the standards of his home country, he doesn’t exist.

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The allure of an invisible existence is a constant in Cruise’s filmography. In Mission: Impossible, Vanessa Redgrave’s arms dealer says anonymity is “like a warm blanket.” Jack Reacher says living off the grid “started out as an exercise, and became an addiction.” In Rock of Ages, Cruise plays rock legend Stacee Jaxx, a foundering rock star who, like Cruise himself, is known to all but understood by none. When Malin Akerman’s Rolling Stone journalist tries to get under Stacee’s skin, he taunts her with his own inaccessibility. “I know me better than anyone,” he says, pointing at his face, “because I live in here.”

Tom Cruise autobiography: His recent movies Oblivion, Rock of Ages, and Jack Reacher. – Slate Magazine
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Japan’s nuclear watchdog has said the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant is facing a new “emergency" caused by a build-up of radioactive groundwater. A barrier built to contain the water has already been breached, the Nuclear Regulatory Authority warned. This means the amount of contaminated water seeping into the Pacific Ocean could accelerate rapidly, it said.

BBC News – Fukushima radioactive water leak an ‘emergency’ (via dendroica)
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This corroded site of a lost and forgotten politics made a spectacularly weird setting for the “Share Conference,” an event originally from Belgrade and Novi Sad. It speaks volumes for the new generation of Balkan activists that they can throw an international event in newly Europeanized, relentlessly hip, Croatian Rijeka.

This Adriatic port town, which used to specialize in toxic paper mills and oil refineries, is remodeling itself as a green tourism and cultural hub. Rijeka got everything they bargained for with the Share three day festival of cybergeeks, pirates, dj s and electronic artists. They arrived from all over the world: the Internet-famous, the net-celebrities: the law professors who were were also tattooed djs, the musicians were somehow cryptographers, the elected officials were Icelandic punk poets, the free-software coders who are game designers. They were all young people of searingly high intelligence who lacked any proper career.

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Strange things have happened in this historical city, which has been Roman, feudal, pre-national, post-national, an independent city-state on long occasions, Austro-Hungarian, Italian, Croatian, various forms of Yugoslavian, and which now happens to be European Union. Ninety years ago, Rijeka was the legendary breakaway pirate republic of the warrior-poet Gabriele D’Annunzio, a sinister genius of political theater who wanted to make Rijeka his springboard to conquer all the other ancient Italian republics along the Dalmatian coast.
In the ecstatic D’Annunzio dictatorship, for a year and a half, this port city was a world laboratory of twentieth-century extremist politics, a cradle of all kinds of oddities: fascism, newsreels, radio propaganda, nudity, fad diets, cocaine smuggling, air-war, torpedo boats, piracy, ship hijacking, Black Shirts, and the revived-Roman Fascist one-armed salute. Rijeka even briefly boasted its own anarcho-syndicalist constitution, based on music. The “cyberpunk academy” was the official title for the shipboard event in Tito’s post-disaster dystopia, where conclaves were held in the wrecked bedrooms of the dictators, where workshops and panels graced the rusty decks with seating from packing crates. We exchanged codes, secrets, plans, good energy…

http://boingboing.net/2013/07/22/cyberpunk-academy.html

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crookedindifference:

The Day the Earth Smiled

In this rare image taken on July 19, 2013, the wide-angle camera on NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has captured Saturn’s rings and our planet Earth and its moon in the same frame. It is only one footprint in a mosaic of 33 footprints covering the entire Saturn ring system (including Saturn itself).  At each footprint, images were taken in different spectral filters for a total of 323 images: some were taken for scientific purposes and some to produce a natural color mosaic.  This is the only wide-angle footprint that has the Earth-moon system in it.

The dark side of Saturn, its bright limb, the main rings, the F ring, and the G and E rings are clearly seen; the limb of Saturn and the F ring are overexposed. The “breaks" in the brightness of Saturn’s limb are due to the shadows of the rings on the globe of Saturn, preventing sunlight from shining through the atmosphere in those regions.  The E and G rings have been brightened for better visibility.

Earth, which is 898 million miles (1.44 billion kilometers) away in this image, appears as a blue dot at center right; the moon can be seen as a fainter protrusion off its right side. An arrow indicates their location in the annotated version. (The two are clearly seen as separate objects in the accompanying narrow angle frame: PIA14949.) The other bright dots nearby are stars.

This is only the third time ever that Earth has been imaged from the outer solar system. The acquisition of this image, along with the accompanying composite narrow- and wide-angle image of Earth and the moon and the full mosaic from which both are taken, marked the first time that inhabitants of Earth knew in advance that their planet was being imaged. That opportunity allowed people around the world to join together in social events to celebrate the occasion.

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Uranus and its five major moons are depicted in this montage of images acquired by the Voyager 2 spacecraft.

The moons, from largest to smallest as they appear here, are Ariel, Miranda, Titania, Oberon and Umbriel.

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