Blog writer Michael Graham Richard has an interesting story on his site comparing the Hubble Space Telescope with the as yet unlaunched James Webb Space Telescope.

The new James Webb Telescope is due to launch no earlier than 2013. It will launch on an ESA Arianne 5 rocket and be delivered to the Earth’s L2 Lagrange point which will keep it permanently in the Earth’s shadow relative to the Sun. Unlike the Hubble Telescope which is due to be serviced for the fifth and final time by shuttle mission STS-125, the James Webb Telescope will not be reachable by the Shuttle or any other manned flight so it will need to Just Work(tm).

While browsing the ‘tube, I recently discovered this new edit of the Parker/Lambert death scene from the Ridley Scott film Alien.

The re-cut scene intersperses footage of the Alien unwinding it’s tail as Lambert throws cannisters to Parker. This footage, I believe, was provided without an audio track as an extra on some VHS and DVD releases. The audio found on this edit seems to be a rehash of the theatrical release, this becomes apparent when a couple of shots of Lambert presumably screaming and Parker reeling in agony appear mute. However, the fact that no sound seems to come from their mouths actually enhances the spectacle of fear; you can imagine that they are paralysed with terror.

The footage of the Alien itself was not included in the theatrical release as Ridley Scott apparently found the Alien to have a more powerful presence when it was only briefly seen. In the footage found in this edit, we see the Alien in full, first crouched and then uncoiling it’s tail and standing. I can’t for the life of me remember if the part seen here where Parker attempts to attack the Alien was in the theatrical release but the cut immediately after as the Alien turns again on Lambert looks a little poor in the props department.

The audio towards the end is Veronica Cartwright’s infamous blood-curdling screams. For a person born in England, I think Veronica (Lambert) has a tremendous ability to scream in an American accent

You’ll probably have heard it before if you’re an Alien fan but take note of Lambert’s ‘cowboy boots’. They change to trainer(sneaker) type shoes in the ‘tail’ scene so we have to assume the footage was cut from Brett’s earlier death scene and reused here (it appears in the theatrical release as it appears here)

I presume that this edit was produced by a fan of the film as it does not appear to be officially sanctioned.

Warning: NSFW. Although this edit has probably never been shown to the censors, the original film was rated with an X certificate in the UK meaning “only suitable for those age 18 and over”.

My friend, Spoon just acquired the chassis for a classic 1/12th scale Tamiya Lamborghini Countach LP500S (CS)

So here we have a couple of pictures showing the initial cleanup prior to restoration.

Before:

After

If anyone has or knows of the whereabouts of an original Tamiya Countach shell or radio gear, please contact me by the comments section (your email will not be shown on the site).

To illustrate the dangers of leaving a Dutchman in charge of a car when he has too much time on his hands, today we have Danny, 26, from the South of Holland.

Danny decided to ‘pimp out’ his Opel Astra Mk4 and took things to extremes including two-tone paintwork, integrated TVs and an entire leather-clad lounge suite built behind the front seats.

 The worrying thing is that I actually quite like the look of it.

You can read the whole thread with more pictures over at MIG Performance Vauxhalls

Perhaps it is a sign that the age of the Metaverse has finally come when two major corporate players decide that it could be useful to them as an internal tool.

Both Sun Microsystems and IBM have distributed workforces in offices across the globe. They obviously need to comunicate with one-another and personally, the phone doesn’t work too well for me. These days, videoconferencing is a credible option but Sun and Big-Blue seem to feel that a 3D, avatar based collaborative environment offers more.

Ian Hughes of IBM UK leases a private island called Hursley in Second Life for development of 3D environment ideas and concepts but Big Blue is also developing an in-house metaverse based on the Torque 3D engine. The internal metaverse already looks quite asthetically pleasing, probably by virtue of the engine in question. (When oh when will SL’s render engine be brought up to date?)

IBM’s SL Branch office, part of their Second Life presence.

Sun has also developed an in-house metaverse known as MPK20 built on top of their Project Darkstar server infrastructure and Project Wonderland rendering engine (which somehow manages to look more dated than SL’s render engine at the moment).

3pointD writer Mark Wallace who has an extended piece on MPK20 notes that Sun has integrated Sun Labs Voice Bridge to provide VoIP (or should that be ViMV?) support to enable direct voice communication between users (via their avatars).

Personally, having experienced many virtual environments, I’m not sure how they could really enhance distance working as they still seem somewhat cumbersome to use for complex tasks. That’s not to say that this situation isn’t likely to improve.

A new video we just found Youtube. British Soldiers in Iraq proving that when there is nothing particularly funny about your situation, it’s best to continue taking the proverbial

WARNING: NSFW. Naughty word at the start and British soldiers in various states of undress.

My personal favorite from this video is the squaddy getting pushed by an Iraqi youth. The squaddy makes to ‘duke’ him and the Iraqi lad jumps a mile

Worryingly though, our troops seem to have developed a ‘thing’ for portaloo humour.