Nikola Tesla sits beside his spiral coil in New York in 1901. (Credit: Tesla Memorial Society of New York)
The writer and producer behind tonight’s documentary about Nikola Tesla admits that he didn’t even know who the inventor was when he was first contacted about creating a video biography for PBS’ “American Experience” series.
Since then, Grubin has learned a lot about the original Tesla and his appeal, particularly to geeks.
“Tesla was like your garage geek,” Grubin told GeekWire. “He was figuring it out on his own. … He was the Mozart of scientists. His ideas came out fully formed. That is his genius.”
Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson hosts “StarTalk” from the American Museum of Natural History in New York. (Credit: National Geographic Channel)
Few people can geek out to a movie harder than astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, but he met his match when it came to Thor’s hammer.
Tyson, who’s the director of New York’s Hayden Planetarium as well as the host of such TV shows as “StarTalk” and “Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey,” is likely to tell the tale during his sold-out lectures at Seattle’s Paramount Theater on Sept. 21 and 22.
The tempest over Mjolnir, the hammer wielded by Thor (played by Chris Hemsworth in the Marvel movies), marks one of the rare times when Tyson admits he was out-geeked at the movies.
An exhibit at Seattle’s EMP museum features costumes and props from 50 years of “Star Trek” shows, including the bridge from the original Starship Enterprise set. (Credit: Brady Harvey / EMP Museum)
Fifty years after “Star Trek” made its debut, the science-fiction saga’s biggest legacy may well be its inspirational impact on millions of scientists and engineers, writers and fans over the decades.
Humanity hasn’t yet invented the starships and transporters that are commonplace in the TV shows and movies, but we do have plenty of people who are exploring strange new worlds, seeking out new life and laying plans to boldly go where no one has gone before.
Facebook’s reaction emojis take on a Star Trek look for fans today. (Credit: Facebook)
Do you love “Live Long and Prosper”? Then you’ll probably be reacting to Facebook posts with Star Trek icons today.
The social-media giant morphed its usual lineup of like, love, haha, wow, sad and angry emojis to reflect a Trek vibe, in honor of the 50th anniversary of the “Star Trek” TV show’s U.S. premiere.
The thumbs-up for “Like” adds a Starfleet sparkle. “Love” has been turned into a Vulcan salute, the “Haha” face has a Captain Kirk hairdo, “Wow” gets the Spock treatment, “Sad” looks like Geordi La Forge from “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” and “Angry” has the furrowed brow of a Klingon.
“We wanted to mark this fun, nostalgic moment and help the passionate community of Star Trek fans celebrate in some unique ways on Facebook,” Lindsey Shepard, marketing lead for Facebook Messenger, said in a Medium post explaining the shift.
Lt. Uhura and Captain Kirk (played by Nichelle Nichols and William Shatner) embrace in a controversial episode of “Star Trek.” (Courtesy of CBS Television Studios)
Fifty years ago, “Star Trek” pushed the frontiers of technology with 23rd-century smartphones – also known as communicators – but the TV show pushed social and political frontiers as well.
“While the original premise of the show may have been, ‘Let’s just have some adventures with a spaceship,’ very quickly it became social commentary as well,” screenwriter David Gerrold observes in “Building Star Trek,” a Smithsonian Channel documentary about the show and its legacy.
In honor of the 50th anniversary of the “Star Trek” premiere, we’re listing five ways in which the show’s scripts – and its creator, Gene Roddenberry – went where few 1960s-era TV sagas had gone before.
A model of the Starship Enterprise hangs from the ceiling at “Star Trek: Exploring New Worlds,” an exhibit at Seattle’s EMP Museum marking the TV show’s 50th anniversary. (GeekWire photo by Kevin Lisota)
The vision of the future that “Star Trek” laid out in 1966 may have been bright and shiny, but 50 years later, the most valuable artifacts that the show left behind were a real mess.
“Building Star Trek,” premiering on the Smithsonian Channel on Sept. 4, tells how those artifacts were restored to their 23rd-century glory – for the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum, and for Seattle’s EMP Museum.
You can see the fruits of the conservators’ labors at the EMP’s 50th-anniversary “Star Trek” exhibit, but “Building Star Trek” shows you much more: glimpses behind the scenes at what it takes to preserve the past, parallels between the futuristic fiction of “Star Trek” and cultural trends of the 1960s, and present-day technological developments that echo the show’s sci-fi innovations.
There are even enough cheesy clips from the original series to remind you that this was a TV program from the days before computer-generated wizardry took hold, when “Bonanza” led the ratings.
Skydiver Luke Aikins descends. (Credit: Mondelez International / Fox / Stride Gum via Tumblr)
Kids, don’t try this at home: Veteran skydiver Luke Aikins made an amazing injury-free landing without a parachute on national television on July 30 – thanks to decades of experience, two years of planning, a bouncy 100-by-100-foot net, and the realities of aerodynamics.
The 42-year-old Aikins leaped out of an airplane at 25,000 feet, maneuvered himself in midair during his two-minute descent to head for the target zone set up at the Big Sky movie ranch in California’s Simi Valley, and flipped over at the last second to slam into the net at about 120 mph.
When the net was lowered, Aikins raised his arms in triumph and hugged his wife and other well-wishers. “I’m almost levitating. It’s incredible!” The Associated Press quoted him as saying.
The whole thing was broadcast live for “Heaven Sent,” a special that aired on the Fox network. The stunt made Aikins the first skydiver to leap from so high and land safely without a parachute or wingsuit.
An astronaut surveys a Martian landscape in a scene from “Mars,” a National Geographic Channel miniseries due to air in November. (Credit: National Geographic / Imagine / RadicalMedia)
National Geographic Channel’s “Mars” miniseries blends a fictional tale about Mars colonists in 2033 with modern-day musings about Red Planet missions – and so does today’s trailer for the six-part series, which is due to air in November.
The book/TV project has some heavy hitters behind it, including executive producers Ron Howard and Brian Grazer, who were also behind the movie “Apollo 13.”
Heavy hitters also appear on screen in the trailer.
An AI program analyzed this video frame and predicted that these two characters from “The Big Bang Theory” (played by Sara Rue and Johnny Galecki) would kiss. They did. (Credit: Vondrick et al. / MIT)
Researchers have taught a computer to do a better-than-expected job of predicting what characters on TV shows will do, just by forcing the machine to study 600 hours’ worth of YouTube videos.
The experiment could serve as a commentary on the state of research into artificial intelligence, or on the predictability of sitcom plots. It also calls to mind the scenes from countlessscience-fiction movies where the alien gets up to speed on human culture just by watching TV.
MIT’s Carl Vondrick and his colleagues are due to present the results of their experiment next week at the International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition in Las Vegas.
The researchers developed predictive-vision software that uses machine learning to anticipate what actions should follow a given set of video frames. They grabbed thousands of videos showing humans greeting each other, and fed those videos into the algorithm.
To test how much the machine was learning about human behavior, the researchers presented the computer with single frames that showed meet-ups between characters on TV sitcoms it had never seen, including “The Big Bang Theory,” “Desperate Housewives” and “The Office.” Then they asked whether the characters would be hugging, kissing, shaking hands or exchanging high-fives one second afterward.
A model of the Starship Enterprise hangs from the EMP Museum’s ceiling. (GeekWire photo by Kevin Lisota)
From several yards away, the bridge of the Starship Enterprise looks as if it was beamed down from the 23rd century into the “Star Trek: Exploring New Worlds” exhibition that opens Saturday at Seattle’s EMP Museum.
But up close, you can tell it’s a 50-year-old movie prop, with rocker switches from the ’60s and bits of plastic peeling off the control console.
In a weird way, that’s a big part of the golden-anniversary exhibition’s appeal. When the TV show had its premiere in 1966, “Star Trek” was all about a bright and shiny future. It still is, but the exhibition also casts a spotlight on the social issues and foibles that have shaped the saga over the course of five decades.
“All these are ingredients that you can see get funneled into ‘Star Trek,’” museum curator Brooks Peck said today during a preview of the exhibit. And they’re funneled into the exhibition as well.
