Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Emerging Tech
  3. News

The end of the world, Modern Seinfeld, and brains and bacon in this week’s Staff Picks

By

Monster invasions, bionic men, and the future of cool cars in this week's Staff Picks
Image used with permission by copyright holder

caleb denisonCaleb Denison: Run for your lives! The world is totally not ending next week!

You know why I can’t wait for 12/22/2012? So everybody can shut the hell up about the Mayan Calendar and the end of the world. Sure, folks will probably be buzzing and joking about how the world didn’t end, but even that will be a welcome relief after the ridiculous speculation and debate we’ve had to endure for the past few years and, especially, the past few months.

If you’re as fed up with all this doomsaying as I am, then it may come as some consolation to know that you are not alone. The folks at NASA – you know, that organization filled with some of the most brilliant scientific minds in the world – are so certain that the world isn’t going to end on 12/21/2012 that it has already released a video titled “Why the World Didn’t End Yesterday.” In it, hard-nosed scientists explain that the Mayan calendar did not end on December 21st, 2012 and there are no Mayan prophecies fortelling the end of the world on that date. NASA also does a pretty good job of debunking the wildly exaggerated claims that a celestial body – be it a planet, comet or the sun – poses any threat to us at this time. And they do it all without making us puny humans feel stupid. Simply put, nothing is going to happen.

 
natt garun
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Natt Garun: Christopher Nolan should just make every movie

I’m still buzzing from the high that was Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight trilogy. There’s just something about his storytelling that makes every movie so epic. This was reiterated when the most recent trailer for Man Of Steel surfaced this week, starring Henry Cavill (The Tudors) as the one and only Superman himself. Melodrama! Beautiful cinematography! Bluish-hue overtones! YouTube commentators say it best: This trailer makes The Avengers look like a Disney movie.

Okay, so maybe I should also give some credit to Zach Snyder (Watchmen) for actually directing Man Of Steel, but attach Nolan’s name to a movie trailer and I am so there. See you in the theater lines on June 14, 2013.

 

Les Shu: When food styling didn’t exist as a profession

The first thing everybody comments on when they walk into my stately studio apartment is the large collection of cookbooks that line the pantry shelves. Besides attempting the recipes (some of which require a science degree to execute), the real reason for my cookbook hoarding is the visual stimulation I get from the incredible, mouth-watering photos. Call it food porn, if you must. 

But once upon a time, cookbooks were not always so beautiful. Imagine my horror (and laughter) when I found myself scrolling through the entries at Yuckylicious (by way of Boing Boing), a site dedicated to “exploring the world’s worst cookbooks.” Its author, Micki Myers, highlights recipes that are not only questionable as edible food, but are equally revolting as eye candy.

As the site states, “Yuckylicious seeks to showcase examples of these awful cookbooks as well as recipes from decent vintage and classic cookbooks for dishes we no longer eat.” Let’s hope we never have to revisit “brains and bacon” again.

Brains and bacon staff picks
Image used with permission by copyright holder
andrew coutsAndrew Couts: This crazy guy is the most sane person in the world

Thanks to a major case of jet lag, I recently found myself doing some late-night link-clicking and came across what has to be the best celebrity interview ever given: Dave Chappelle on “Inside the Actor’s Studio.”

The two-hour conversation between the comedian and host James Lipton dates back to 2006, after Chappelle escaped to Africa rather than accept a $50 million dollar deal to continue making his The Chappelle Show for Comedy Central. Most people assumed he’d lost his mind – who turns down $50 million?

As the interview reveals, the truth is much more complex. In fact, I staggered to my bed after watching all two hours of this thinking me might be the most sane person on the planet. Another surprise: the interview, which can still be purchased as a DVD, has survived the intense copyright-infringement gamut that so often keeps videos like this off YouTube. 

So if you find yourself Web-surfing the night away, take some time to relish in this long-lost gem of the Web. You’ll laugh. You’ll cry. And you’ll learn a thing or two about life.
Jennifer BergenJen Bergen: A Twitter feed for the Seinfeld-obsessed 

I was in middle school and far away from New York when Seinfeld, which I watched every week, went off the air. Now, more than 10 years later, I live just a few blocks away from Tom’s Restaurant on the upper East Side and wish more than ever that the show was still on. Sure, as a kid I laughed at Kramer’s crazy antics, but I didn’t really understand the more adult jokes until years later watching reruns. Thankfully, it looks like my prayers have been answered … in the form of a Twitter account.

Scanning my Twitter feed Monday morning, I was surprised to see a retweet from an account by the name of “@SeinfeldToday.” I immediately began laughing and reading all of Modern Seinfeld’s tweets.

modern seinfeld tweetsI realized what I had stumbled upon … the present-day Seinfeld that jokes about things like being embarrassed about having a BlackBerry (George), breaking up with a girlfriend who Instagrams everything she eats (Jerry), accidentally restarting the Occupy movement (Kramer), and yelling at co-workers for loving Pinterest (Elaine). The genius minds behind @SeinfeldToday have created scenarios so real and so hilarious that only Seinfeld’s kookie characters could pull them off. Unless Larry David decides to bring the gang back together, this is the next best thing. 
Topics
Digital Trends Staff
Digital Trends Staff
Digital Trends has a simple mission: to help readers easily understand how tech affects the way they live. We are your…
Rivian set to unlock unmapped roads for Gen2 vehicles
rivian unmapped roads gen2 r1t gallery image 0

Rivian fans rejoice! Just a few weeks ago, Rivian rolled out automated, hands-off driving for its second-gen R1 vehicles with a game-changing software update. Yet, the new feature, which is only operational on mapped highways, had left many fans craving for more.
Now the company, which prides itself on listening to - and delivering on - what its customers want, didn’t wait long to signal a ‘map-free’ upgrade will be available later this year.
“One feedback we’ve heard loud and clear is that customers love [Highway Assist] but they want to use it in more places,” James Philbin, Rivian VP of autonomy, said on the podcast RivianTrackr Hangouts. “So that’s something kind of exciting we’re working on, we’re calling it internally ‘Map Free’, that we’re targeting for later this year.”
The lag between the release of Highway Assist (HWA) and Map Free automated driving gives time for the fleet of Rivian vehicles to gather ‘unique events’. These events are used to train Rivian’s offline model in the cloud before data is distilled back to individual vehicles.
As Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe explained in early March, HWA marked the very beginning of an expanding automated-driving feature set, “going from highways to surface roads, to turn-by-turn.”
For now, HWA still requires drivers to keep their eyes on the road. The system will send alerts if you drift too long without paying attention. But stay tuned—eyes-off driving is set for 2026.
It’s also part of what Rivian calls its “Giving you your time back” philosophy, the first of three pillars supporting Rivian’s vision over the next three to five years. Philbin says that philosophy is focused on “meeting drivers where they are”, as opposed to chasing full automation in the way other automakers, such as Tesla’s robotaxi, might be doing.
“We recognize a lot of people buy Rivians to go on these adventures, to have these amazing trips. They want to drive, and we want to let them drive,” Philbin says. “But there’s a lot of other driving that’s very monotonous, very boring, like on the highway. There, giving you your time back is how we can give the best experience.”
This will also eventually lead to the third pillar of Rivian’s vision, which is delivering Level 4, or high-automation vehicles: Those will offer features such as auto park or auto valet, where you can get out of your Rivian at the office, or at the airport, and it goes off and parks itself.
While not promising anything, Philbin says he believes the current Gen 2 hardware and platforms should be able to support these upcoming features.
The second pillar for Rivian is its focus on active safety features, as the EV-maker rewrote its entire autonomous vehicle (AV) system for its Gen2 models. This focus allowed Rivian’s R1T to be the only large truck in North America to get a Top Safety Pick+ from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
“I believe there’s a lot of innovation in the active safety space, in terms of making those features more capable and preventing more accidents,” Philbin says. “Really the goal, the north star goal, would be to have Rivian be one of the safest vehicles on the road, not only for the occupants but also for other road users.”

Read more
Jaguar Land Rover, Nissan hit the brake on shipments to U.S. over tariffs
Range Rover Sport P400e

Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) has announced it will pause shipments of its UK-made cars to the United States this month, while it figures out how to respond to President Donald Trump's 25% tariff on imported cars.

"As we work to address the new trading terms with our business partners, we are taking some short-term actions, including a shipment pause in April, as we develop our mid- to longer-term plans," JLR said in a statement sent to various media.

Read more
DeepSeek readies the next AI disruption with self-improving models
DeepSeek AI chatbot running on an iPhone.

Barely a few months ago, Wall Street’s big bet on generative AI had a moment of reckoning when DeepSeek arrived on the scene. Despite its heavily censored nature, the open source DeepSeek proved that a frontier reasoning AI model doesn’t necessarily require billions of dollars and can be pulled off on modest resources.

It quickly found commercial adoption by giants such as Huawei, Oppo, and Vivo, while the likes of Microsoft, Alibaba, and Tencent quickly gave it a spot on their platforms. Now, the buzzy Chinese company’s next target is self-improving AI models that use a looping judge-reward approach to improve themselves.

Read more