Cody Taylor

In a new book, the man who sold steroids to Roger Clemens’s former trainer and chief accuser, Brian McNamee, contradicts part of McNamee’s testimony before Congress –raising questions about quality of witness McNamee will be in possible Clemens perjury trial.

The tragedies that killed three Apollo astronauts and two space shuttle crews have anniversaries during less than one week’s time: Apollo 1 on Jan. 27, 1967; Challenger on Jan. 28, 1986; and Columbia on Feb. 1, 2003.

What a difference a preposition makes. Oscar for is one thing – Oscar in is quite another. Rare as it is for a film to win an Academy Award, it’s rarer still for a film to include an Academy Awards scene…

– Authorities in France and Spain begin to repair houses, roads and power lines damaged by hurricane-force winds.

I’ve been tracking the distribution of Oscar-nominated films every year, culminating with the release of six years of piracy data last year. I’ve updated those spreadsheets with this year’s 26 nominees, for a total of 211 films from the last seven years.

At opposite points in the their careers, the Australian Open will go a long way in deciding whether or not Britain’s Andy Murray has what it takes to prove himself better than Roger Federer.

An anonymous reader writes “Intel released the article ‘Quake Wars Gets Ray Traced’ (PDF) which details the development efforts of the research team that applied a real-time ray tracer to Enemy Territory: Quake Wars . It describes the benefits and challenges of transparency textures with this rendering technology. Further insight is given into what special effects are most costly. Examples of glass and a 3D water implementation are shown. The outlook hints into the area of freely programmable many-core processors, like Intel’s upcoming Larrabee, that might be able to handle such a workload.” We mentioned the ray-traced Quake Wars last in June; the PDF here delves into the implementation details, rather than just showing a demo, and explains what parts of the game give the most difficulty in going from rasterization to ray-tracing.

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csn writes “On Wednesday, January 28th at 6:00 PM PST and 9:00 PM EST, the stars of the cult television hit ‘Mystery Science Theater 3000’ will reunite to do what they do best — heckle bad movies. Join Mike Nelson, Kevin “Tom Servo” Murphy and Bill “Crow T. Robot” Corbett as they make fun of the 1950 short film, ‘Overcoming Fear,’ live over the internet.

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