Netflix is now available in Cuba

At least, it's now available for the few Cuban citizens with the resources needed to watch it. Access to the Internet costs far more than the average Cuban can afford, and even those who have the money are often restricted to seeing only what information is available on the government's tightly controlled intranet. All the same, Netflix's streaming video service has been available on the island nation since yesterday, which makes it one of the first American companies to take advantage of the U.S. government's decision to relax the trade embargo first imposed on Cuba in the '60s.

Outside of whatever the government allows to air on Cuban state television, many Cubans have never been exposed to much in the way of foreign programming, which means they have decades of Doctor Who to catch up on. In a press release, Netflix spotlighted the availability of original series like House Of Cards and Orange Is The New Black, and also took care to note that The Adventures Of Puss In Boots is now available, since it knows its audience. Generally, the company's Cuban programming is similar to what it offers in other Latin American countries.

"We are delighted to finally be able to offer Netflix to the people of Cuba, connecting them with stories they will from all over the world," said Netflix CEO Reed Hastings. "Cuba has great filmmakers and a robust arts culture and one day we hope to be able to bring their work to our global audience of over 57 million members."

Because so few people in Cuba can reliably access to the Internet, Netflix's decision to expand there seems largely ceremonial at this point. Now that the embargo is lifted, however, the company is betting that it will get more subscribers "as Internet access improves and credit and debit cards become more widely available." The plan to increase trade with Cuba included provisions aimed at allowing telecommunications companies to improve the country's Internet services. If all goes according to plan, it could mean the biggest nationwide binge watch in history.

This video shows how important film colorists are to making a finished movie

We're currently in the thick of awards season, and the coming weeks are sure to be packed with discussions over which actors, directors, and screenwriters most deserve to be honored for their work. Meanwhile, those toiling in the movie industry's less sexy professions—the line producers, script supervisors, and key grips of the world—will probably have to watch their better-dressed brethren receive awards from the comfort of their own homes, or at best from a table near the bathroom way in the back of the hall.

This video sheds some light on one of those under-appreciated professions: film colorization. Post-production artists have been manipulating image color since filmmaking began, first by painting individual negatives by hand, then by treating them with chemicals, and finally by touching up digital images with computer programs. With the proliferation of digital cameras, the latter method has become increasingly popular. As the video below makes clear, a lot of raw, unedited digital footage has a washed-out look to it, but shooting it this way preserves a ton of information that can later be manipulated. This particular video is made up of before-and-after shots from indie horror flick The House On Pine Street, which was colored by Taylre Jones. It gives viewers a great idea of just how much work is done on an image between the time it's shot and when it gets projected in a theater, and makes a compelling argument for seating the technical types a little closer to the stage.

[via No Film School]

Read this: Wired ruins The Hobbit by explaining why no arrow could kill Smaug

Hot on the heels of a dense exploration of the science behind Thor's magical hammer, Wired has published an article applying real-world physics to a climatic scene from The Hobbit. If this story about elves and dwarves and goblins played out in real life, the article explains, the dragon would have killed everybody.

In both J.R.R. Tolkien's novel and, presumably, Peter Jackson's upcoming film adaptation, the dragon Smaug is shot out of the sky with a black arrow. In his article, physics professor Rhett Allain focuses on the movie version of the arrow, which viewers got a glimpse of in The Hobbit: The Desolation Of Smaug. After estimating its length, volume, and mass, Allain performs some calculations based on a flashback from the movie in which a drawf fires a different black arrow at Smaug. Allain concludes that this arrow, at least, moved at a speed roughly equivalent to that of a nerf dart. That's probably not fast enough to help the people of Lake-town defeat Smaug. That's probably not fast enough to help anybody.

After dooming the citizens of Lake-town to death by dragon fire, Allain rubs salt in the wound by explaining why the recoil on the ballista-like contraptions used to fire the black arrows would endanger the lives of anyone who operated them. Slow arrows or not, Smaug is probably still going down in The Hobbit: The Battle Of Five Armies, but the knowledge that the victory isn't rooted in hard science is sure to dampen the triumph. After all, no one watches The Hobbit movies expecting a break from reality.

Read this: A deep look at some of the mathematical in-jokes on The Simpsons

It's no secret that many of the writers on The Simpsons are great big nerds. A lot of them went to Harvard, a school noted for the high collective IQ of its student body, and got degrees in subjects like Applied Mathematics, Computer Science, and Physics. All that brainpower resulted in one of the funniest, sharpest sitcoms in television history, at least in the early going. It also bled into the show in less obvious ways, as Simon Singn makes clear in an excerpt from his book The Simpsons And Their Mathematical Secrets, published by Bloomsbury and now available in paperback.

The excerpt takes an extremely detailed look at a throwaway joke tucked into the background of "The Wizard Of Evergreen Terrace," an episode from the show's tenth season that finds Homer following in the footsteps of Thomas Edison  and trying to become a great inventor. While trying to come up with ideas, Homer scribbles down the following on a blackboard:

The blackboard isn't prominently featured in the episode, and most viewers could be forgiven for ignoring it in favor of giggling over the ingenuity of Homer's makeup gun. According to Singn, however, it contains a college semester's worth of mathematical in-jokes. The third equation, for example, predicts that the universe will eventually implode under its own weight, a setup paid off when there's a minor implosion in Homer's basement. The fourth line involves topology, an area of geometry in which researchers study shapes by bending and stretching them into different forms. Here, Homer has transformed a doughnut into a sphere, an impossible feat in topology, by taking progressively bigger bites out of it, as is his wont.

The second line suggests that Homer has solved Fermat's last theorem, a subject Singn spends over half the excerpt discussing. It's too involved to summarize here, but it suffices to say that it's not the kind of intellectual puzzle viewers have been led to believe Homer capable of solving. The full except is up on BoingBoing, alongside another one identifying which writers on The Simpsons and Futurama were incredibly, dumbfoundingly nerdy, instead of just the ordinary kind of nerdy required to write for an animated comedy show. They're both absorbing reads, and go a long way toward proving that your sixth grade teacher may have been right about math being fun after all.

Here's an intro to an imaginary Buffy animated series

Having previously given the world a terrific look into what Doctor Who would be like as a Saturday morning cartoon, artist Stephen Bryne has moved on to Buffy The Vampire Slayer, carving out a niche as the guy who makes intros to imaginary cartoons the world deserves but never got. Bryne, clearly full to bursting with affection for the show, has packed his intro with nods to Buffy's history, from Willow's changing hair color to visits from ghostly versions of Tara and Anya to a glimpse of a world full of nothing but shrimp. As with the animator's previous work, the character designs are incredibly charming, and the wild adventures the Scooby gang never got to go on make us wistful for the actual animated Buffy series that was developed years ago but never happened.

With stuff like this under his belt, we'll be on the lookout for anything else Bryne does in the future—perhaps an animated version of Game Of Thrones, or he could go the other way and make live-action intros for Futurama or The Venture Brothers.




[via Nerdist]

Give in to paranoia with this clothing line based on Nineteen Eighty-Four

If you enjoy wearing clothes, but don't think they sufficiently protect you from the gnarled, grasping fingers of omnipotent government forces threatening to steal your secrets and charge you with thoughtcrimes, this may be for you. The Affair, a British fashion outfit that specializes in tee-shirts inspired by literature, is trying to get a clothing line inspired by George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four off the ground. Naturally, they have taken to Kickstarter, rather than accepting investment capital from within a system that works only to sublimate the human will.

The clothing itself is fairly standard. It features things like shirts, pants, and jackets that have been cunningly renamed as Party Workshirts, Party Chinos, and Outer Party Jackets. The selling point is the presence of the UnPocket, a detachable pocket made from the latest in "stealth fabrics" that securely blocks all Cell, WiFi, GPS, and RFID signals. This will allow wearers to tweet or text about how their new garments free them from the prying eyes of Big Brother, or big pharma, or big dairy, or whoever, before they tuck the cell phone into the UnPocket, where it will never be touched again.


[via boingboing]

Here's a video about the history of showing text messages on film

Sometimes, it takes Hollywood a while to find an engaging way to depict emerging technologies. For example, the '90s are littered with strained attempts to make the act of surfing the Internet—an act that involves a lot of sitting and staring and not moving—look interesting enough to compete with action blockbusters of the day. Over the last several years, many filmmakers have tried to do the same for text messages, with mixed results. For the latest video in his Every Frame A Painting series, Tony Zhou takes a look at those attempts.

Zhou—who also dedicated videos to the comedic prowess of Edgar Wright and the chaotic visual style of Michael Bay—traces the history of filmed text messages from early experiments with shoving phones into the foreground of shots, to the current trend of having text float in the air next to phones, as seen on shows like Sherlock and House Of Cards. Like his other videos, A Brief Look At Texting And The Internet In Film is well-researched and crisply edited, although it may be useless in a few years after text messaging is replaced with some kind direct brain-to-brain networking system, presenting Hollywood with a whole new problem.