Tag: humans
This Bionic Eye Could Restore Vision (and Put Humans in the Matrix) – CNET
As AI consumes search, what will be left for us humans?
I hope that you’ll still want to read my stuff in the future. If not, at least I probably helped train my replacement.
As AI consumes search, what will be left for us humans? by Alex Wilhelm originally published on TechCrunch
‘The Muppets Mayhem’ review: The Electric Mayhem rocks, but the humans are a snooze
The Muppets Mayhem begins with a rather brilliant idea: Center a comedy series on the chaotic but charismatic band Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem.
Since debuting on the pilot of The Muppet Show in 1975, this madcap musical act has delivered wackiness and bliss while appearing alongside a dazzling slew of stars. Their new Disney+ show is at its best when it leans into these sweet spots, playing toe-tapping songs and lining up cameos that range from surprising to deranged. However, where The Muppets Mayhem fumbles is in its dogged interest in the human hangers-on of this epic band.
Essentially, when the spotlight shifts from the Mayhem to humans, things get meh.
What’s The Muppets Mayhem about?
Credit: Disney/Mitch Haaseth
For decades, the Electric Mayhem has been touring the U.S. nonstop, making famous friends and fields of fans along the way. However, they’ve yet to record an album.
Leave it to an ambitious record exec (Lilly Singh) to change that. To save a company on its last legs, Nora must get the band to deliver the album they took an advance on ages before. However, troubles pop up at every turn (well, in every episode), and she’s always ill-prepared. Despite the record industry being her vocation, Nora knows virtually nothing about this band that’s so seminal that they’re beloved by music legends like Tommy Lee, Lil Nas X, “Weird Al” Yankovic, and Paula Abdul.
While the band battles past demons, reveals touching origin stories, and grapples with their creative insecurities, The Muppets Mayhem binds its A-plot to a boring businesswoman who exists chiefly to nag and manipulate to get her way. Yes, yes, Nora will learn life lessons along the way, much as you’d expect from a Disney property. But why did the writers pick “selfish suit” as the archetype to center the show around? It’s as inexplicable as when The Smurfs movie was pegged to a make-up executive.
Adult audiences aren’t tuning in for the human actors paired with the nostalgia-tweaking critters they love, and kids won’t care about the stakes of a record company going belly-up or the tedious love triangle between Nora, Mayhem fanboy Moog (Tahj Mowry), and tedious biz bro JJ (Anders Holm). The Muppets Mayhem also works in themes about sisterhood by wedging in Nora’s TikTok-obsessed influencer sibling Hannah (Saara Chaudry). How else would they work in Animal doing TikTok dances? (Yes, the arc about the band falling hard for social media is forced and terrible!)
The Muppets Mayhem is bliss when it dares to be stupid.
Credit: Disney/Mitch Haaseth
Creators Adam F. Goldberg, Bill Barretta, and Jeff Yorkes punish Muppets fans by making us endure the insipid Nora storylines, but their writers’ room has done a remarkable job of recapturing the magic of Muppet Show banter and the gleeful capriciousness of the band. Cold opens boast quick and silly setups and punchlines that spark chuckles, which ring out over the rocking theme song. The comedy of this crew is enthrallingly silly. For instance, when the band is challenged to write a new song, they get stuck, writing a string of beginnings, middles, and ends, and the rule of threes means each of these is increasingly silly, poking fun at the music industry with a gentle foam finger. (All the same, you might be singing their clumsy choruses to yourself because they are catchy.)
Over 10 episodes, The Muppets Mayhem has space to relish in each of the bandmates. Mumbling Lips (Peter Linz) has two running gags: being indecipherable in his speech and the most well-connected Muppet in Hollywood. He’s often entering a scene with a big celeb on his arm, and there’s a contagious joy in watching these stars genuinely giddy to be working alongside Muppets. (Who could blame them?)
Spaced-out Zoot (Dave Goelz) has terrible recall from too many years — uh — tripping on the road. His confusion over the concept of a documentary about the band (a groan-inducing promotion for Disney+’s Beatles doc) leads to actors popping by to audition in costumes that are a cross between funny and frightening. Elsewhere, Animal bops about with bunnies and drums, playing the eternal kid brother to the band. Meanwhile, Janice’s hippie-dippy philosophies lead to a gentle mockery of the self-help industry and the blurry line between wellness centers and cults.
Floyd and Dr. Teeth prove to be the fuzzy heart at the center of Muppets Mayhem.
Credit: Disney/Mitch Haaseth
Unquestionably, bassist Floyd Pepper (Matt Vogel) has always been the hottest member of the Electric Mayhem. I won’t be addressing questions. This is fact. Here, the minds behind the Muppets smartly tap into the Pedro Pascal effect, though sadly not by casting the actor in a cameo (just imagine!). Instead, they tap into Pedro’s Protective Daddy energy in The Mandalorian and The Last of Us by creating an origin story for Animal that makes Floyd into a crushable father figure. But that’s not all.
An episode unfurling the origins of the group’s iconic van, Dr. Teeth’s name, and how he and Floyd started the band proves to be an emotional lynchpin in the series. Flashbacks give compelling complexity to these long-goofy musicians. The episode plays into themes of parents at war with their art-aspiring kids, bringing the Muppet bounce to a serious topic; the results are familiar but reassuring and fun. Dr. Teeth also gets a fiery old flame, some psychological analysis, and the chance to explain how he’s not really the frontman, despite the band’s original name. And this is where The Muppets Mayhem is at its best.
While these characters might have been created for musical bits and pithy punchlines, this series shows there is more to them. And it’s a thrill to watch them play together, even when they play rough. In their van, there’s always cheerful chatter, dumb jokes, and good vibes. It’s a pleasure just to get to hang out with the Mayhem. This show could have just leaned into the chaos of this motley crew as a series of sketches, surreal and sweet. It’s such a bummer when the show leaves them to return to Nora’s tiresome Sad Girl Tour.
Muppet productions can work when centered on a human, as The Muppet Christmas Carol proved with a deeply committed Scrooge in Michael Caine. However, this only works when the human meets the level of energy or intensity of the colorful kooks around them. (See also Tim Curry as Long John Silver in Muppet Treasure Island or Charles Grodin as the lusty cat burglar in The Great Muppet Caper). Here, the humans aren’t legendary baddies; they’re just flustered millennials. Moreover, Singh and company aren’t giving theatrical, weird Muppet movie performances but are putting on woefully sanitized, broad ‘n’ bouncy Disney Channel acts. (Please remember Grodin went so far as to insist he and Miss Piggy had a torrid affair.)
Even with the bland human hangers-on, The Muppets Mayhem is a rollicking delight. I binged a bunch of episodes in one sitting and repeatedly paused because I was cackling too hard to hear what the band had to say next. So, I unreservedly recommend Muppets fans young and old to jump on board this bombastic bus and rock along with the Electric Mayhem…Just keep the remote handy to scroll through the human drudgery.
And if the show gets a second season, here’s hoping it embraces the Mayhem and kicks their too-human entourage to the curb.
The Muppets Mayhem streams exclusively on Disney+ May 10.
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The post Just Nine Per Cent of Humans Are More Creative Than AI, Study Shows appeared first on TechRound.
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Colossal space explosion is the most powerful humans have ever seen
Astronomers knew the space explosion last fall was huge.
A blast mighty enough to overload many cosmic explosion detection instruments is certainly something our satellites and telescopes don’t see every year. “It’s a very unique event,” Yvette Cendes, an astronomer and postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told Mashable in October 2022. Now, with months of follow-up research, astronomers have concluded that such bright light (or radiation) from this gamma-ray burst — the most powerful known type of explosion in the cosmos, and strong enough to create a black hole — likely hasn’t arrived at Earth in thousands of years.
“GRB 221009A was likely the brightest burst at X-ray and gamma-ray energies to occur since human civilization began,” Eric Burns, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Louisiana State University who worked on the new research, said in a NASA statement.
In the latest batch of research, published this week in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, scientists scrutinized around 7,000 detected gamma-ray bursts to deduce the odds of seeing such a fantastically bright event. The answer: We’ll likely only observe such a gamma-ray burst once in every 10,000 years.
So this was extremely bright. Some dub GRB 221009A as the “BOAT” — the “brightest of all time.” But, as with other distant space explosions, you need not worry. Yes, radiation from the blast passed through our solar system and allowed us to detect an event that happened 1.9 billion light-years away (meaning it took 1.9 billion years to arrive here). But this radiation has been spreading through space for eons, and it is so faint that sensitive instruments like NASA‘s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope are required to even pick up these signals. We’re watching, but we’re unaffected by the light.
“It’s the equivalent of getting front row seats at a fireworks show,” Cendes told Mashable last year.
What caused this giant space explosion?
The gamma-ray burst GRB 221009A trumped such previous explosions. Most instruments designed to detect this type of light couldn’t handle the anomalously extreme radiation. “The burst was so bright it effectively blinded most gamma-ray instruments in space, which means they could not directly record the real intensity of the emission,” NASA explained. Fortunately, scientists used other data from the space agency’s Fermi telescope to reconstruct the gamma-ray radiation.
Here’s how unusual the event was:
Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center / Adam Goldstein (USRA)
What might cause such a giant blast? A giant star collapsing, and then likely exploding.
An exploded star, after running out of fuel and collapsing on itself, is called a supernova. And for a star to go supernova, it must be quite massive — at least eight times the size of the sun. But for a supernova to produce the strongest type of gamma-ray burst, the star must be 30 to 40 times the size of the sun. This recent powerful detection came from such a mighty star.
And we saw it because a jet of light or radiation emitted from the blast happened to be directed toward Earth. That’s part of why it appeared so bright.
Scientists are certain that a collapsing star triggered the blast. But what happened next is still uncertain. Did the star collapse, explode, and then under such dramatic pressure, form a powerful black hole — an object so dense and massive that not even light can escape its powerful grasp? The researchers watching this gamma-ray burst have not seen evidence of the star’s explosion, yet. That means there’s potential that the colossal star collapsed into a black hole, without a giant explosion. The rapidly forming black hole, too, would have ejected immense energy into space.
Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
“We cannot say conclusively that there is a supernova, which is surprising given the burst’s brightness,” Andrew Levan, a professor of astrophysics at Radboud University in Nijmegen, Netherlands, who researched the event, said in a statement. “If it’s there, it’s very faint. We plan to keep looking,” Levan explained, “but it’s possible the entire star collapsed straight into the black hole instead of exploding.”
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Scientists, using powerful telescopes, will keep watching this curious development in the deep universe. The cosmos are mysterious, and full of unfathomable explosions, but the scientific goal is to make them a bit less mysterious.