The coming battle between HTML 5 and Adobe Flash isn’t going to end well…for Flash.

Netflix streaming is great and all, but one has to admit, the selection of movies leaves a lot to be desired.  Mubi will soon be filling this void when they bring their online service to the Sony PS3, offering a ton of awesome movies created by top directors from around the world.

The Announcement:

Hello,

We are MUBI.

Who? What?

Ok, lets make this simple… Do you know who Kubrick is? What about Antonioni? David Lynch? Ring any bells?

It’s ok, don’t bother if you don’t…

But if you are still reading you are going to like this a lot.

Well, we are MUBI and we are basically transforming your PS3 console into your own online cinema. (You can still play games and all that, don’t worry!) We couldn’t resist the idea of everyone having their own exquisite film library—And that’s it in a nutshell.

But lets get this straight, we are not just an online cinema and we are not just some tech and film geeks in California—well, some of us are, yes—but we are 300,000 friends talking, discovering, and sharing films with one another every day. In fact, every 2 minutes there’s someone joining us. Yes. 2 minutes. Sorry to get a bit geeky (we warned you!), but that’s 700 people joining each day. Not bad… but joining what?

The truth is, we can’t even start explaining. But let’s try this: At the moment, some of us are at the Cannes Film Festival announcing a major collaboration with SCEE for PS3. So, soon, you will find a new application on your console, which will let you stream the best of international cinema from the comforts of your couch. This is not a simple virtual videostore; we emphasize quality over quantity. You’ll find undistributed festival gems ripe for your discovery, your favorite recent independent and art-house releases. Names like the Coen brothers, Godard, Kitano, Almodóvar, Tarantino, and Van Sant are some we’ll bring home to you.

Palm d’Or winners and simply films we think should have won awards. But that’s not all. We’ll bring you exclusive online premieres, collaborations with international film festivals, and retrospectives of some of the best cinema the world has ever seen.

And as we said, we love talking and sharing wonderful cinema too. Which makes MUBI like a small coffee shop, a place where you can gather and chat about alternative endings, directors’ cuts, or whatever those frogs in Magnolia meant.

You can follow members and interact with them: This is Martin Scorsese’s profile for instance (he happens to be a member!). Anyway, you get the point. We’ve spent some time tying together an online cinema with a simple, engaging social network to help film lovers spread around the world connect over the movies they love best. And that is that. Welcome to MUBI.

For hundreds of years people have reported seeing mysterious balls of lightning during heavy thunderstorms, balls of lightning that supposedly roam around, enter through windows and look like something out of the mid-80s Steven Spielberg movie. Well, it turns out these sightings were probably nothing more than hallucinations; illusions prompted by huge amounts of magnetism:

Ball lightning is often reported during thunderstorms, and it’s known that multiple consecutive lightning strikes can create strong magnetic fields. So Joseph Peer and Alexander Kendl at the University of Innsbruck in Austria wondered whether ball lightning is really a hallucination induced by magnetic stimulation of the brain’s visual cortex or the eye’s retina.

In previous experiments, other scientists had exposed humans to strong, rapidly changing magnetic fields using a medical machine called a transcranial magnetic stimulator, or TMS. The machine’s magnetic fields are powerful enough to induce electric currents in human brain cells without being harmful.

Focusing magnetic fields on the visual cortex of the brain caused the subjects to see luminous discs and lines. When the focus was moved around within the visual cortex, the subjects reported seeing the lights move.

In their paper, which appeared online May 7 on the physics research website arXiv.org, Peer and Kendl argue that magnetic fields made by lightning could have the same effect as TMS machines on nearby humans.

Source

Apple can’t keep up with the demand for the iPad in the United States and is currently rolling out its European debut of the product, so the last thing Apple needs is a new retail partner to sell more product, especially Wal-Mart.  Senior vice-president of entertainment at Wal-Mart told Bloomberg, “We anticipate being able to have the iPad later this year.” An announcement is expected later today that will explain Wal-Mart’s intentions to expand their electronics division, though a specific iPad announcement will probably be a few weeks, if not months, away.

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