The new Melbourne Fringe Festival Show PRIVATE EYE was nearly cancelled before it began!
Creator of the show, magician Sue-Anne Webster was stunned to discover just how inflexible red-tape was when she was told that fellow performer Enzo Ficco (aka Magical Gangster ‘Al Cappuccino’) would make the cigarettes he uses in his act “disappear”.
Enzo does makes cigarettes disappear in the show, and appear, and multiply, and disappear again… but the problem was that these cigarettes are lit.
Enzo, a non-smoker himself, was sympathetic to the intention of the law, but had no other option but to drop out of the show as the cigarette sequences were crucial to both the character he portrays and the structure of the act.
Sue-Anne Webster was adamant, “No Enzo, No Show!”
Finally, a late night brainstorming session came up with a magical solution. As magicians like to keep their secrets, we can’t tell you what it is, suffice to say it’s nothing more than an illusion. The cigarettes are back in the show, and it definitely looks like Enzo is smoking them, but in magic – as in life – not everything is as it seems…
PRIVATE EYE is a brand new show created by internationally recognised magician Sue-Anne Webster. It stars four of Australia’s top magicians: Sue-Anne Webster, Enzo Ficco, Anthony DeMasi and Lee Cohen.
The show has it’s World Premiere on FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 28 – North Melbourne Town Hall (A Smoke Free Venue!)
The season runs until FRIDAY OCTOBER 5 and tickets are available online at www.MelbourneFringe.com.au or by calling (03) 8412 8777
By 2030, or by 2050 at the latest, will a super-smart artificial intelligence decide to keep humans around as pets? Will it instead choose to turn the entire Earth, including the messy organic bits like us, into computronium? Or is there a third alternative?
These were some of the questions pondered by the 600 or so technosavants meeting in the Palace of Fine Arts at the second annual Singularity Summit this past weekend. The meeting was convened by the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. The Institute’s chief goal is to make sure that whatever smarter-than-human artificial intelligence is eventually spawned by exponentially accelerating information technology that it will be friendly to humans.What is the “Singularity?” As Eliezer Yudkowsky, cofounder of the Singularity Institute, explained, the idea was first propounded by mathematician and sci-fi writer Vernor Vinge in the 1970s. Vinge found it difficult to write about a future in which greater than human intelligence arose. Why? Because humanity would stand in relation to that intelligence as an ant does to us today. For Vinge it was impossible to imagine what kind of future such superintelligences might craft. Vinge analogized that future to black holes which are singularities surrounded by an event horizon past which outside observers simply cannot see. Once the Singularity occurs the future gets very, very weird. According to Yudkowsky, the Event Horizon school is just one of the three main schools of thought about the Singularity. The other two are the Accelerationist and the Intelligence Explosion schools.
More:….
The Eleventh IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computers
Oct. 11-13, 2007, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
at the Hyatt Harborside Hotel
http://iswc.net
In cooperation with the IEEE Computer Society.
ISWC 2007, the eleventh annual IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computers, will bring together researchers, product vendors, fashion designers, textile manufacturers, users, and all other interested parties to share information and advances in wearable computing. ISWC is a peer-reviewed, academic-style forum for the exchange of the most recent results, and the conference routinely attracts more than 200 attendees from industry, military, government, and academia.
Viacom’s Flux has its first major tenant: ThinkMTV
MTV has just launched a new social-networking community for youth activism, ThinkMTV, which is designed to network members both online and offline around causes ranging from climate change to HIV/AIDS. While as a standalone network it’s not particularly momentous or innovative, ThinkMTV is worth noting because it’s the first major operation to be unveiled as part of MTV parent company Viacom’s new Flux social networking initiative.
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Another member joins the anti-terrorism team: working bees. Bees–or rather, bee tongues–are the olfactory key to the new “Vapor Detection Instrumentation” developed by a company called Inscentinel. The “instrument” detects explosives, cancer, drugs and pretty much anything else that stinks, according to the U.K. company.
Inscentinel uses Pavlovian principles to train the bees, the same way it’s done with canines. For every successful sniff of contraband, the little guys are rewarded with food. The bees are taped to the “measurement device,” and a camera alerts the operator when they stick their little tongues out in hunger.
So don’t be alarmed if you see the yellow and black patrolling the airport. And don’t bother calling PETA, because the “bees are happy undertaking their sniffing tasks and are comfortable throughout,” Inscentinel claims. “After their working shift the bees are returned to their hive where they happily live out the rest of their lives.”
