Making Future Magic: iPad light painting from Dentsu London on Vimeo.

Well worth a watch. Fantastic, intriguing and downright clever.

According to The Economist (and NASA), two asteroids are due to pass closer to Earth than the moon today.

Neither object is big enough to pose any threat to the planet, and neither object has any chance of actually hitting the planet. The larger of the two asteroids is only about 10-20 metres wide, and apparently a 10-metre rock is expected to pass within lunar distanceevery day, on average.

No need to panic just yet.

That’s us, that pale blue dot right in the center of the image is Earth. The image above and the video posted below just makes you realise just how small we are in the grand scheme of the universe.

Enjoy the video.

Discovery Channel have announced that they’re teaming up with Steven Spielberg to create a new mini-series: Future Earth.  It’s big on the ‘sci’, but less so on the ‘fi’. 

The show is designed to show us what our future will look like in 25, 50 and 100 years based upon the opinions of leading scholars and experts.

The press release follows:

DISCOVERY CHANNEL ANNOUNCES DEVELOPMENT DEAL WITH STEVEN SPIELBERG, DREAMWORKS TELEVISION AND DREAMWORKS ANIMATION

Discovery Channel announced today that it is working to develop a new mini-series project with Academy(R) Award-winning filmmaker Steven Spielberg, DreamWorks Television and DreamWorks Animation SKG, Inc. (Nasdaq: DWA) entitled FUTURE EARTH (wt). DreamWorks Television and DreamWorks Animation will co-develop this future project, of which Spielberg will personally oversee development.

“We pride ourselves on bringing the best storytellers in the business to Discovery,” said Clark Bunting, president and general manager, Discovery Channel and president, Science Channel. “Steven Spielberg, his team at DreamWorks Television and DreamWorks Animation are at the top of that list. We are excited and look forward to collaborating with them on an exciting array of new nonfiction programs.”

FUTURE EARTH aims to be an epic mini-series examining what life on Earth will be like in 25, 50 and 100 years. The mini-series will draw from a vast number of sources, including the leading futurists, scholars and great minds of today, to dramatize and explore how various facets of our daily lives – health and medicine, technology, the environment, the military, the economy and media – will evolve over the next century.

“I am excited to be back in business with DreamWorks Animation and all the active imaginations and creative artists at the best animation company in the world today. Joining together with Discovery, we have an opportunity to bring exciting new experiences to take television audiences into the imagined future of planet Earth, said Steven Spielberg.

“We are thrilled to join forces with Discovery on such a uniquely positioned new mini-series and look forward to reuniting with Steven and his team to bring FUTURE EARTH to life for viewers in creative and innovative ways,” added Jeffrey Katzenberg, Chief Executive Officer of DreamWorks Animation.

“We are all enormous fans of what Discovery did with PLANET EARTH and LIFE, and how they were able to expose us to the world around us in a way we had never seen it before. With FUTURE EARTH, we endeavor to do the same with the world of the future,” said Darryl Frank and Justin Falvey, Co-Heads of DreamWorks Television and Executive Producers on the project.

As of last week, three Google executives were found guilty of violating privacy laws in Milan, Italy.

Apparently, a video of Italian students bullying an autistic child ended up on Google in 2006.  Italian police let Google know, and the company removed the content.  Google also says that it did what it could to help police identify those who were shown in the video as well as the individual who uploaded it.  The result?  The uploader and other students were sentenced to 10 months of community service.

The Italian courts then indicted four executives from Google for defamation and violation of privacy laws.  Three of the four were found guilty of violation of privacy, and all four were found not guilty of defamation.  This case is slippery.  After all, to what extent should hosting sites be held responsible for user-placed content?  Most hosts do have some sort of policy on this subject, but should the law be allowed to override what’s stated by the site itself, and if so, to what extent?  Law and the Internet tend to advance at different rates.  Throw in the monkey wrench of different countries’ legal jurisdictions, and you’ve got a massive issue that, frankly, I don’t think anyone is quite ready to handle.  According to the Italian media, elements of the arguments presented stated that the trial was “not about Internet freedom, but whether a free zone exists where laws do not apply.”

On a side note, Internet bullying laws have been put in place in the United States and many other countries, but has anyone done nearly as much to stop ACTUAL playground bullying?  Bullying in schools is a huge issue, and the law has certainly looked the other way on that one.

It looks like the United States backs Google on the privacy issue.  The executives face sentences from six months to one year.  Google plans to appeal the ruling, but that might not be the end of its legal troubles.   It’s under investigation by European antitrust officials.

I’m interested to hear more opinions on this one.  When I get the chance, I’ll drag out Ye Olde International Law Textbook and see what I can find, as well.

So it looks like the rumour mill got this on spot on. Apple today sent out invitations to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater in San Francisco on Thursday 27th at 10AM. I’m a tad disappointed I didn’t get an invite, but what can you do! Apple will be showing off their latest creation, whatever that might be, there is talk of some kind of tablet device, but what rumours can you actually trust these days.

I have my VISA card primed and ready to go, I’ll let you know if I go for it.

One of the things I love to look at in life are the stars, and I am sure a lot of you sci-fi loving geeks are the same. The above image shows the sharpest picture ever taken of the Grand Design Spiral Galaxy M81. It uses the combination of images taken in blue, visible, and infrared light to produce this incredible image.

You can head here to the European Homepage for the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope for the image in it’s original size of 22620×15200 or if you don’t have the monitor the size of a football pitch you can download it in some smaller sized resolutions that are perfect for you screen.

I don’t know about you, but I am severely tempted to download the image in its original size, even though it would take the guts of a day with my laughable broadband connection.

And on a side note, you should definitely check out the Top 100 image on the site here.

As a lot of you may have guessed by now I am a big Apple geek. I subscribe to many, many Apple related RSS feeds. This morning, while doing the rounds on the blogosphere, I came across the latest rumour which backs up my previous post on the state of the Apple rumour mill.

9to5mac are clinging to the latest rumor from a guy called Jason Wilk on tinycomb.com that the tablet is not actually designed with we geeks in mind, but rather for use in the hospital. Okay, I’ll bite: it makes a lot of sense to cater for a big market such as the health care industry, which already use tablets in their daily tasks, so I looked into this story.

The part which made me laugh and finally decide the rumour mill is in such a state follows:

Apple has been going around targeting their first major paying customer for the device, which is not the average consumer, but the Healthcare industry (sorry fan bois, you’re not first priority here). This is a move widely overlooked by the media, since Apple has generally tried to own the consumer arena, and besides the film industry, hasn’t dominated enterprise. Well, now that they own the music, mobile, laptop and every teenager market, the medical industry is the next up to take over. [What's my intel? My Dad plays golf with Cedas-Sanai hospital execs, who say they have been getting frequent visits from Apple about a new device in the last 6 weeks].

So a guy (who just happens to write for a tech related blog) who’s dad plays golf with some hospital execs whom got told about a new device by Apple… yeah this is nearly as good as my Mother’s cousin’s daughter’s friend’s dad is a high up exec in Apple and he says….

Are we are expected to believe this?

i09 have posted a rather interesting article about the true purposes of the Antikythera mechanism, a device discovered over a century ago.

New visual imaging techniques have revealed what scientists propose is the true function of the device: an extremely advanced piece of astronomical and calendar-keeping technology.

The findings, published in Nature, are probably best described as "mind blowing." Devices with this level of complexity were not seen again for almost 1,500 years, and the Antikythera mechanism’s compactness actually bests the later designs. Probably built around 150 B.C., the Antikythera mechanism can perform a number of functions just by turning a crank on the side.

Using nothing but an ingenious system of gears, the mechanism could be used to predict the month, day and hour of an eclipse, and even accounted for leap years. It could also predict the positions of the sun and moon against the zodiac, and has a gear train that turns a black and white stone to show the moon’s phase on a given date. It is possible that it could also show the astronomical positions of the planets known to the ancients: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.

The full article can be found here, and is well worth a read.

From reading the latest rumours (or, for those American readers out there: rumors) regarding Apple’s latest handheld offerings, I am starting to think that the big publishers are starting to grasp at straws in order to get something new and interesting for the Apple geeks on the interwebs to read and get excited about.

The New York Times has seemingly started picking out random ex-employees of Apple to discuss with them any information that they have on such devices. Here is a tidbit from the article…

Another former Apple designer said a team at the company had “spent the past couple of years working on a multitouch version of iWork,

Now don’t get me wrong I am sure it could be an accurate rumour but I am starting to think they are clutching at straws, just like another fine example here from business insider:

* It’s “pretty” — obviously.
* “The UI has a good bit of new sexy to it.”
* “It’s a big iPhone, but it’s not just a big iPhone.”

Pretty much as vague as vague comes, these guys don’t even give to much information on who the source is other than an industry insider who has seen the OS. I think if said industry insider actually said this, Apple’s SS may come a knocking.

So for what it is worth here is the latest rumour coming from “industry sources”.

The Apple tablet has everything you ever wanted it to have. It will do anything you tell it to (yes even make the tea), and it’s sexy as hell! Oh and the 4th generation iPhone will do all this… and more…

I wonder how long it will take before some of the big guns print this off?