brainwagon

Slashdot is running a story about a N.Y. Times article (registration required, yada yada) that details Guerrilla Drive-Ins, mobile parties that use a DVD player and an LCD projector, and show movies projected against a wall in impromptu locations. This is of course of questionable legality, given the warning that most DVDs specify (that they are for private use only). But here’s a kooky idea: why not use the techniques to show and promote films that are in the public domain?

If you surf on over to archive.org, you can download a bunch of films that are in the public domain, films like:

• Night of the Living Dead
• Reefer Madness
• D.O.A., and
• The Brain that Wouldn’t Die

Besides the obvious impromptu MST3K-like possibilities, you could use it as an opportunity to show many classic movies and to educate the public on copyrights, fair use and the public domain.

Slashdot mentioned work by Nayar and Nishino on generating images of what people see by processing images of reflections in the cornea. I thought the paper itself was pretty cool, but there are lots of other good things that the two authors have written about. In particular, I liked the idea of A Jitter Camera which generates superresolution images from a low resolution sensor. Good stuff.

The Arizona Daily Star reports that:

A rally organizer for the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign asked Teri Hayt, the Star’s managing editor, to disclose the journalist’s race on Friday. After Hayt refused, the organizer called back and said the journalist probably would be allowed to photograph the vice president.