The official name for the Empire Strikes back spoof is Something Something Something Dark Side, and it'll be on DVD & Blu-ray 12/22.

We interviewed creature designers Wayne Barlowe and Neville Page, plus concept artists James Clyne, Ryan Church and Daphne Yap, about creating a whole new universe from scratch. Plus we've got some stunning concept art, from the new book The Art Of Avatar. In a year that's seen some amazing books of movie concept art, The Art Of Avatar features 106 pages of lush full-color paintings, interspersed with the industry's greatest design minds geeking out about every little aspect of Avatar's creation.

So here are a few things you didn't know about the design of James Cameron's Avatar:

Avatar Started As A Four-Month, Late-Night Jam Session At James Cameron's House

"[We'd be] working late at Jim's house, and having him come back after a three week spell of being down at the freaking Titanic, and having him tell us a story [about being on the ocean floor]." Read the rest of the story.

Pandora's creatures were partly based on cars

Early on in the process, James Cameron "mentioned the core idea" of having Pandora's creatures be "superslick and aerodynamic, and be like a race car with racing stripes," says creature designer Neville Page. Read the rest of the story.

Those crazy color schemes are from the ocean floor — and Art Nouveau

"In the real world, we didn't invent these colors. They exist on animals today. We didn't invent a whole new palette. I think the problem is — the challenge is — you don't often see large creatures with this much color on them." Read the rest of the story.

The human hardware, including those crazy battlesuits, is all based on real stuff

"One thing I worked on big interior for the mech suits, and the whole interior had to have a reason and function for why the suits were lined up the way they were, and how they could work on them like a pit-stop at an F1 race. It had to have that functionality." Read the rest of the story.

Avatar concept art from The Art Of Avatar (Abrams 2009)

The comic is called Paranormal Activity: The Search For Katie, A Case Study by Dr. Johann Averys DMN. And if you remember the end of the film, Katie has vanished and Micah is... well, gone as well, sadly. Apple paired up with IDW to continue the story. The comic app picks up right after that, with the demon expert Dr. Averys finally showing up to their home, and searching for Katie, and some answers. It was written by Scott Lobdell and drawn by Mark Badger. Here are the first set of exclusive stills from the beginning.

We emailed Lobdell asking why he thought the story must go on, since the ending seemed so definite, we didn't think there could be a sequel even in a comic book series. To which he responded:

I have to disagree! Even before I left the movie theater my mind was racing though a hundred different questions! Where did Katie go? How long had she been in thrall to the demon? Why did he do what he did to Micah... or have Katie do it? What about the mysterious Dr. Johann Averys — often mentioned but never seen? Could the case he was working on in Europe have anything to do with the case in San Diego? What would the investigation into the murder be like? One part cop forensics, one part study in demonology? The demon seemed like it had much larger fish to fry to scaring young women... could it have followers? A lot of this is set up in the first installment of the online comic book, and I can't wait for the opportunity to further explore the world of Paranormal Activity.

The application is available now at itunes, For 99 cents.

Watch it, share it, do what you like. And if you just want the short and sweet, here again are our five featured bits (shot and edited by Mike Short):

Steve Ballmer Exclusive Interview Series:
Part 1: Ballmer Talks Natal, Says Blu-ray Add-On for Xbox Coming
Part 2: Ballmer on the Smartphone Race: "It Doesn't Matter What the Critics Say"
Part 3: Ballmer on Zune: Sometimes You Get It Right The Third Time?
Part 4: Ballmer on Those Crazy Ballmer YouTube Videos
Part 5: Ballmer Optimistic About Win 7, But Says Vista Is "Very Popular"

As you can see in the video, he's not going to stop being himself, just because Bill Gates is officially out of the picture and the public finally sees Ballmer as the big man up top.

I'm me. And sometimes I'm very ebullient, sometimes I'm less. I think the most important thing is that I need to convey my belief, my optimism, also my views of how we need to improve, to our folks. And I try to do the best job I can and I do it my own way.

Does that mean more YouTube excitement? If it does, you'll surely see it here.

Stay tuned for more exciting Ballmer moments (and facial expressions), and then the full uncut interview video on Friday.

Steve Ballmer Exclusive Interview Series:
Part 1: Ballmer Talks Natal, Says Blu-ray Add-On for Xbox Coming
Part 2: Ballmer on the Smartphone Race: "It Doesn't Matter What the Critics Say"
Part 3: Ballmer on Zune: Sometimes You Get It Right The Third Time?

And in the rare case you hadn't seen the video I'm referring to:

When I asked if he gave an order to make Zune better, he replied:

Sometimes you get it the first time you cook the soup, sometimes it takes till the second time you cook the soup...You get better every time.

Maybe it's not the same as saying the first Zunes sucked, but however you interpret that, it's the closest Ballmer comes to conceding that product improvement was needed, that it wasn't just revision for the sake of the sales cycle.

Stay tuned for more exciting Ballmer moments (and facial expressions) over the next day, and then the full uncut interview video on Friday. Video by Mike Short

Steve Ballmer Exclusive Interview Series:
Part 1: Ballmer Talks Natal, Says Blu-ray Add-On for Xbox Coming
Part 2: Ballmer on the Smartphone Race: "It Doesn't Matter What the Critics Say"

Did your mouth drop? Because mine did. All I know is that rubbing that strip illuminates it and unlocks the aluminum lid. I also got to hold the system for a bit and it is really really sturdy. I thought it would be more flimsy, but it has strength.

I can't tell you much more, other than it will be officially annouced in November and production is scheduled to ramp up soon. As for what is inside, I can sleep soundly now that I know that there isn't an Intel Atom processor (like the Sony Vaio X), but rather will use an Intel ULV chip of some sort. Now back to your regularly scheduled Windows 7 programming. [Dell Adamo XPS]

As you can see in the video, Ballmer acknowledges that Windows Mobile 6.5 is receiving negative reviews, but I never get him to actually admit that the platform still needs work. He says, "reviews aside," he's happy with what Windows Phones (running 6.5) can do now.

And faced with competition of iPhone, BlackBerry and others, he contends it's currently "kind of a horse race." The only clear leader, market-share wise, is Nokia, and they're losing ground. When I said that Nokia was another developer currently lambasted by reviewers, Ballmer replied:

At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter what the critics say, it matters what the customers say.

Perhaps given the power of advertising (still mighty, even if it's on the decline), there may still be a way for a product to get positive sales despite negative reviews. But the internet has changed that landscape, and the lines between critic and customer blur more every day. We all share knowledge in order to make better choices. So who, in the end, is this customer, who is so different from the critic? Not anyone who reads Gizmodo, that's for sure.

Stay tuned for more exciting Ballmer moments (and facial expressions) over the next day, and then the full uncut interview video on Friday. Video by Mike Short

Steve Ballmer Exclusive Interview Series:
Part 1: Ballmer Talks Natal, Says Blu-ray Add-On for Xbox Coming
Part 2: Ballmer on the Smartphone Race: "It Doesn't Matter What the Critics Say"
Part 3: Ballmer on Zune: Sometimes You Get It Right The Third Time?

When I asked Ballmer about adding Blu-ray to the Xbox, he said:

Well I don't know if we need to put Blu-ray in there—you'll be able to get Blu-ray drives as accessories.

Though he says it with certitude, the timing of any kind of Blu-ray accessory is unclear. Could he have mispoken? Certainly. However, when I asked Xbox spokespeople about Ballmer's revelation, they responded:

Our immediate solution for Blu-ray-quality video on an Xbox 360 is coming this fall with Zune Video and 1080p instant-on HD streaming. As far as our future plans are concerned, we're not ready to comment.

Microsoft PR is good — we trust them to say no if they're not making one, and in this case, the best strategy is a "no comment". Which turns out to be a comment.

Of course, his Blu-ray comment may not mean that Microsoft is coming out with an external drive—he may have just been shooting down the idea that the Xbox 360 will ever have an internal Blu-ray drive, by saying that any Blu-ray the Xbox gets would have to be external. On the other hand he did actually say, "You'll be able to get Blu-ray drives as accessories."

As you can see in our back-and-forth, Ballmer plays his cards close to the chest, but in my sit-down interview with him, he shared a lot. Prior to the Blu-ray business, Ballmer and I talked about Natal, and the excitement that Matt and Mark experienced when they stepped into the chamber back at E3. When I asked him if Natal was Microsoft's attempt to do away with concept of game console generations (thereby prolonging the life of a given platform indefinitely), Ballmer smiled knowingly and said "We'll see."

Stay tuned for more exciting Ballmer moments (and facial expressions) over the next day, and then the full uncut interview video on Friday. Video by Mike Short

Steve Ballmer Exclusive Interview Series:
Part 1: Ballmer Talks Natal, Says Blu-ray Add-On for Xbox Coming
Part 2: Ballmer on the Smartphone Race: "It Doesn't Matter What the Critics Say"
Part 3: Ballmer on Zune: Sometimes You Get It Right The Third Time?

The Barnes and Nobles e-reader project, set to be revealed next week, has been under development for years, with several devices of varying size and capability in the pipeline. First rumors said it would have a color e-ink screen. Then people said it didn't. They were both kind of right: The layout will feature a black and white e-ink screen like the Kindle has—and a multitouch display like an iPhone underneath other. Pow!

More hardware details of the Barnes and Noble E-Ink/LCD reader here:

What's interesting is that B&N will sell the books it also publishes (yes, remember, they are also a publisher and not just a store) at a deep discount compared to print editions. And the device will have some sort of access to all books scanned by the Google Books project; probably books that are out of print.

The name of the gadget, which I cannot reveal and may have changed anyhow, is freaking terrible. I hope they change it before it ships. Oh and yeah, it runs Android.

The leak came from someone who (quite convincingly!) claims to work for B&N developing mobile apps—his background knowledge of their app projects was startlingly deep, at any rate—and makes quite a bit of sense as an alternative to the brutally dumb software of current ebook readers.

Think about it. At six inches, it's a smallish device, and we've seen Android on similarly-sized screens already. Wireless connectivity is built into the OS. Extraneous, inappropriate software and settings could be easily stripped out and replaced with relevant ones. A custom-designed interface could be easily dropped in. Apps—oh, sweet apps—could be a huge boon. And hey, E-Ink Android drivers have already been demonstrated on video. Not to mention the fact that B&N has conveniently skirted releasing an Android app, despite putting quite a bit of effort into iPhone and BlackBerry versions of the mobile ebook sofrware.

Simply put, this would be pretty fantastic, and it's eminently plausible. And from the looks of it, we won't have to wait long to find out.

• RIM BlackBerry Curve 2, before Black Friday
• RIM BlackBerry Storm 2, before Black Friday
• HTC Imagio, on October 20
• Samsung Saga 2, early November
• Samsung Omnia 2, early November
• Pantech TXT8030 Razzle, early October
• Casio C731 Rock, mid-November
• Casio C741 Brigade, late October
• Motorola V860 Barrage, "soon" (it's already available online in Verizon)
• LG VX8575 Chocolate Touch, first or second week of November

On the Android front:
• HTC Desire, which will be available before Black Friday. Note: This may be the Verizon Android phone sighted today, though Boy Genius says that might be called the Hero.

• Motorola Tao or Droid (possibly the phone currently codenamed Sholes?) will also be available before Black Friday.

Since publishing the first leak, several more people have come forward with details on the Courier project.

This video is produced by the same firm that collaborated with Microsoft's Pioneer Studios on the previous clip, and it walks through a slightly different (and more conservative/realistic) iteration of the Courier interface. While the first video showed a handful of use cases, this one actually provides an overview of the interface and Courier's features, and more of how you would actually use it if you are not a designer.

The heart of Courier appears to what's called the "infinite journal," which is what it sounds like: A journal/scrapbook that is endless, bound only by storage constraints (presumably). Hopefully they will call it something less awkward. The journal can actually be published online, and it's shown here as able to be downloaded in three formats: a Courier file, Powerpoint or PDF. There's also a library that looks a lot like Delicious Library, where things like subscriptions, notebooks and apps, are stored.

This interface does share a few things in common with the other one: In particular, the hinge between the screens is still used as a pocket to "tuck" items you want to move from one page to another. It also still revolves almost exclusively around using the pen for input: In 4 minutes of video, there's not a virtual keyboard in sight. Fingers are still used just to navigate, through flicks, swipes and pinches.

The interface has a few more traditional elements than the first video, with more of a Microsoft feel (fonts and titles bars) and less of the entirely handwritten journal aesthetic: a smart agenda, more defined folder system, universal search and multi-page web browsing. It feels more evolved and fined, and less convoluted, suggesting it's more recent.

It also begins to bring into focus Courier's priorities, and possible limitations: Other than the brief glimpse at the library and the web browser, there is basically nothing about viewing content, like watching movies, reading books, or listening to music. Courier, in this iteration, appears to be all about creating and writing with a pen, which is vastly different from what everybody expects out of the Apple tablet.

We expect to have more a in-depth breakdown of the Courier interface in the next few days, so stay tuned.

These phones are going to be made by Sharp, who'll get to share branding with Microsoft. Sharp produced the Sidekick hardware for Danger, who was bought by Microsoft almost two years ago. Pink will be primarily aimed at the same market as the Sidekick, and the branding and identity for it is highly developed, pointing toward a later stage in the development cycle.

The prior relationship between Danger and Sharp is the only reason we can think of why Microsoft stuck with Sharp for the new phones, and perhaps why they look so much like remixed Sidekicks. (Kind of yucky, that is.) The youth bent is somewhat surprising, if Pink is going to be their big consumer phone play, building off the expertise of Danger and members of the Zune team.

The hardware design has a definite younger feeling: Turtle looks like a chunky child's version of a Palm Pre, while Pure seems like a standard slider, and both are clearly plastic, with an overall sense of roundedness, thanks to lots of soft angles and circular keys.

It's been reported elsewhere that Pink phones will include Zune services, and have its own app store, making it as close to the Zune phone as we may get. We'll see if it's close enough in the coming months, though these are the only facts our source will let us safely publish for now.

Come by Giz Gallery to see it in person, just be careful, it might eat your head.

Check it out for yourself. It is pretty short (and dark), but it is enough to tell you that the 8.7 pound killer has a pretty sturdy sliding mechanism and you can obviously extend your desktop to the second monitor and drag windows from one to another. This is pretty sweet to see in action. Maybe there is really hope that this thing will hit before the end of the year after all, but again we will believe it when we finally get put our hands on its real live flesh. [gScreen]

The F-keys have stenciled icons for the standard iPhone tasks (Mail, Safari, etc), and the keyboard letters have logos for some of the most popular iPhone apps. It actually doesn't look too bad, but there's no way to customize the icons. I've never used LinkedIn, so it would seem pointless blazoned all over my L key.

XSKN says that it's currently working with a U.S. engineering firm that specializes in "Made for iPod" stamps. Of course, it's also waiting on that pending Bluetooth driver—as are rivals like the $100 MacAlly BTKeyMini.

What's interesting, though, is XSKN's hopes to sell the iKeyboard by the end of this year for $160. Are they just being optimistic? (And I'm not just talking about that price). Do they know something we don't?

As a backgrounder: You may know XSKN for its keyboard skins and iPhone case leaks (one of which was on the money, while others were definitely not). So make what you will of their ambitions.

Either way, what the hell Apple? There are a bunch of fold up/roll up Bluetooth keyboards for other smartphones, and they can come in pretty handy for meetings and traveling. Sure, I could use my laptop in many situations, but is Apple the only one to not even give me a choice?

The Alaska based company, started by Gordon Stewart (yep, that is where the G in gScreen comes from), is aiming its dual screen laptops at professional designers, filmmakers, photographers and really anyone who can't live without a dual screen for everyday productivity. They have also been in talks with the military. The chassis (which we expect is at least 12 pounds) is built around the 15.4 inch screen (though the first units that come to market will have 16-inch or 17-inch screens) and its twin, identically sized screen slides out from behind the first using a uniquely designed sliding mechanism.

"We designed this knowing that many may not need the extra screen at all times," Gordon told me. But when you do use both screens you'll get about 30-inches of screen space. GScreen plans to release dual 13-inch models at some point.

Gordon plans to have the first Spacebooks being sold through Amazon.com by December of this year. Currently they are making tweaks to the power source (as you can see from one of the images) and to the screen slider.

They will run Windows 7 and be powered by Intel Core 2 Duo processors (we would love to see some mobile Core i7 love here), 4GB of RAM and high-end Nvidia GF900M GT discrete graphics. The plan is for fast 7,200 RPM hard drives and six or nine-cell batteries. It will also have a DVD player so you can watch a flick on one screen and refresh Giz on the other. "It is absolutely the opposite of a netbook," he told us. Yea that is no kidding with a price tag that he is hoping to keep under $3,000.

Now we are skeptical about them meeting their end of the year production date considering this model's power cord looks like more than a work in progress, but seeing as Santa is close by to gScreen's Alaska headquarters we don't see why he can't just drop off some dual screen craziness in time for Christmas. [gScreen]

I was driving, and swerved a little bit, even though both hands were on the wheel. Someone honked at me.

"What was that?" 

They repeated themselves.

I switched on Bluetooth and pulled over to the side of the road to hear the story. You see, earlier in the day I'd given my phone number out to someone who sent me a cryptic email wanting to talk Apple. This must have been them. (Later on I verified to a high level of certainty that they were in the position to have access to the information and after talking to them for over an hour, I believe them to the same level of certainty.)

"The device, which I've held mock ups of, is going to have a 10 inch screen, and when I saw it looked just like a giant iPhone, with a black back— although that design could change at any time" they said, "with the same black resin back, and the familiar home button." That's obvious.

"But it will come in two editions, one with a webcam and one for educational use."  

Educational use?

They continued to explain the device as something that would sit between an iPod/iPhone and a MacBook, and would cost $700 to $900—"More than twice as much as a netbook," they said.

To make up for that cost and make the device more than just a big iPod there was, this person claimed, there was talk of making the device act as a secondary screen/touchpad for iMacs and MacBooks, much like a few of the USB screens that have come out in recent months from Chinese companies. Very interesting.

They went on to say that although the project has been going on under various names between four and six years, the first prototype was built around the end of 2008. Adding, "The time to market from first prototype is generally 6-9 months." That would place the device's release date in this holiday season, at earliest. (Update: Added, at earliest in light of John Gruber and Jim Dalrymple beliefs that the date is further out, however. Dates are easy to push out.) They then said, "There was a question of what OS the device would run, too." (Other people I've talked to have implied this remains a huge secret. Update: in variation. Obviously, it'll be OS X.)

My call dropped on some windy road off Skyline Drive. Fucking AT&T.

Later, I asked, was there a code name for the project?

"Yes...[redacted]." 

I thought about it for a second, googled the term, and it all made sense. 

"Don't publish that name, please," they requested.

Don't worry, I won't.

It's a little later than we thought (we had guessed a week earlier) but we suppose we'll wait. There's still no official price, but we're pretty confident in our $220/$280 for 16GB/32GB target, especially after it appeared on Amazon. [Thanks, Anonymous Tipsters!]

Click on this image to see the full picture.

When JJ Abrams said that he wanted to put some Star Wars into Star Trek, apparently it also applied to the scale of spaceships (and matching viewscreens.) And while the new Enterprise doesn't even reach half of the 1,600 meters—that's a mile long—of an Imperial Star Destroyer, it's still amazingly big compared to the 288 meters of the old Enterprise. Maybe now you would be able to take down an Star Destroyer with a couple of these.

The battle I would really want to see now, however, is not the old Star Trek vs Star Wars (we already know who would win that one.) No, you know what I want to see.

Yes, Starbuck vs Uhura. In a chocolate pudding pit.

Maybe Galactica vs Enterprise too, but that's a distant second. [Thanks to David B. from Bad Robot Productions]

UPDATE: Since we did the original ISS comparison, the specifications for the new Battlestar Galactica have changed. After the end of the series, one of the visual effects guy shared information about the actual size of Adama's new ship. It measures 1,438.64 meters. Almost a mile, so it's bigger than the new Enterprise and less than 200 meters shy of an Imperial Star Destroyer. I changed the graphic to display the old Galactica, which has the correct size. [Thanks to the readers who pointed this out]

Building 31 North's white halls are empty, because it is the middle of the night. NASA interns Thad Roberts and Tiffany duck inside a bathroom, and tear off their clothing. Then they change into the contents of their duffel bags—2mm thick neoprene bodysuits. Like in a bad movie, the suits will help Thad and Tiffany avoid heat sensors armed to feel out threatening climate changes inside a vault. The adrenaline, their attraction, the smell of rubber suits and the fear of failure is almost overwhelming. After pulling on the thermally shielded gear, Tiffany and Thad step back into the corridor, moving toward the turnstile lock that guards their target: NASA's prized stash of moon rocks.

********

Building 31 North, which sits on the grounds of Houston's Johnson Space Center, is where NASA keeps all 600 pounds of the moon rocks it has secured. They are the sole property of the government, collected over six lunar missions and protected with the dramatic intensity of national treasures. Building 31 North is one of the few buildings on earth constructed under Class 100 standards—it is a structure that can withstand 1000 years of water submersion, among other durability metrics that should not be tested this side of Armageddon.

Breaking into it is designed to be impossible for normal people. But not harder than building a shuttle, or figuring out how to put a rover on Mars. The agency hires people with the ability to find solutions for intimidatingly large problems exactly like this one. In this regard, Roberts was your typical NASA intern. The 25-year-old was pursuing multiple degrees in Physics, Geology and Anthropology. But while Thad was school smart, he also has an almost unquencheable adrenaline-seeking side, and was consumed with a strange Excel spreadsheet of personal goals that read like he was trying to prove himself to Evel Knievel and a rocket scientist at the same time: Experience zero gravity, check; experience severe dehydration, check; find dinosaur tracks, no problem. The list was long, and as he checked off one after another, maybe Thad's ego began to believe anything was possible.

But Thad wasn't in this alone. He was on his way to a divorce fueled by an affair he was having with fellow intern Tiffany Fowler. Tiffany was equally dynamic—a firecracker and former cheerleader who spoke French in bed and conducted stem cell research on NASA's behalf. Thad wanted her, so when Tiffany begged to hear his idea to liberate the moon rocks, he told her. And when she wanted to follow through with the plan, the romantic and exciting thing was to start hatching a plan as if it were yet another science problem at work. One that would could make them very rich, or ruin their lives.

Soon one more curious co-op, the 19-year-old Shae Saur, had joined in on the heist. After months of preparation, they found themselves embarking on their unauthorized mission, driving for Building 31 North after dark with intel on every security device—and plans to get around them.

********

When it comes to Thad's story, it is worth noting several things. I was not allowed to quote him directly from my interviews, and the others involved in the crime declined to verify his facts. This is his story as he told it to me. And in the time since, he's written a novel about the heist, which was "based on truth, but it's embellished." So, take the tale for what it's worth.

The Space Center had been under 24-hour supervision since the 9/11 attacks, but the guards planted at each entryway are not in the habit of stopping NASA's carefully selected interns—who are always working—from entering after hours.

The guard said, "You get a new car?"

Thad replied, "No, sir. Borrowed it to help a friend move."

So with a wave of a hand, Shae, Tiffany and Thad were granted access. Thad guided the Jeep Cherokee on the short journey past Rocket Park—an open sky cemetery of former rockets and spacecraft—then parked near the entryway of Building 31.

Once they were in range, the three set about linking and looping the cameras inside Building 31, a system that they had previously taped between shifts of employees responsible for watching the cameras. It is unknown how Thad and company received the intel required to do such a thing, even if the idea itself is straight out of a heist flick. But Shae stayed in the car to monitor the rewired cameras, to warn Tiffany and Thad if anything went wrong. While they prepped, they watched for the presence of fellow late night co-workers, but Thad timed their arrival well and they are alone. So far so good. Thad and Tiffany crawled out of the Jeep, grabbed their duffel bags, and headed for the entryway. Getting inside the front door was easy—a former coworker had simply emailed Thad the code that would allow them access. Inside jobs are often like this, but NASA doesn't make it easy to steal moon rocks—the puzzle was only starting to get complicated.

Inside the building, an unassuming university-like structure formed by blocks and filled with sterile white walls, Thad and Tiffany walked down well-lit hallways. The milky corridors, warmed by picture shrines to missions past, form the passageway between the offices of full time NASA employees, as well as the route to the inner sanctum of Building 31 North. They stopped to prepare.

In the bathroom, when Thad and Tiffany put on their wetsuits, they also stopped to check their breathing apparatus. The moon rocks were in a chamber devoid of oxygen in order to keep the rocks from rotting by oxidation. They would have 15 minutes of air supplied from their tanks once they entered the nitrogen-filled chamber, past the airlock.

If the interior of Building 31 can be described as white, then the interior of Building 31 North can be described as bleached—immaculate and bloodless in a wash of round-the-clock sterility. During the day, the single lab inside the pearly building buzzes with the movement of white jackets occupied by some of the biggest brains in the world. But at night, once the scientists have passed through the clean room that guards their entries and exits, the lab is nothing but white surfaces, cold metal, glass panels and the unearthly presence of nitrogen tanks. Thad and Tiffany's path took them straight through clean room and across the empty laboratory, leaving them at the edge of a short hall that dead-ended at the door to the vault.

Breaking into the actual vault required a complex series of codes, some of which were cracked using a dusting of calcite, fluorite and gypsum powder. The mix of the three glows under blacklight, and by paying careful attention to the absorption of the powder it is possible to tell which finger came down first and so forth. It doesn't quite make sense that Thad could use this trick to figure out the exact sequence for all the codes, based off such rudimentary information. But once Thad had eventually thrown his whole weight against the vault door, the two were inside.

The vault itself was much like the laboratory, a big room in which core samples and moon rocks are encased in glass and metal, numbered by mission. But they hadn't the time to admire their surroundings. To stay on track—or more importantly, to stay alive—Thad and Tiffany had only 3 minutes to crack the safe, or they wouldn't have enough air to get back outside.

As the seconds crept onward, Thad continued to struggle with the code, so he quickly moved to plan B, which involved unbolting the heavy safe from the ground, loading it on to a small dolly and carting it back out to the car. It wasn't easy, but within the remaining time allotted to them, the two managed to slip out of the vault, through the laboratory, down the hallways, past the rooms, through the doors and out of the grounds undetected—all while dragging over a quarter ton of rocks and metal. No small feat, and I'm unsure of how, even on a dolly, a man and a woman could have moved it all.

NASA didn't realize the safe was gone for two days. A list of suspects was slowly put together. There were no clues left behind—not a fingerprint, a piece of hair, nothing—so the resulting set of names (which was void of that of the actual culprits) looked more like a compiled NASA shitlist than anything else.

The samples they took were from every Apollo mission, ever. Sometime between the heist and its resolution, Tiffany and Thad arranged the moon rocks on a bed—and had sex amongst them.

********

Typically, the life of NASA terrestrial moon rocks is dull. After reams of paperwork get approved, a small fragment of the rock makes its way out of this building and into the hands of a researcher, who for a period of time can coax the moon to give up its secrets. However, when the researcher's time is up, the rock must be returned to the safekeeping of its disaster-proof home, but now permanently compromised by the prods and chemical dousings that so rarely result in something worth talking about.

By this point, the rock is considered too tainted for further use, but is subjected nonetheless to the same eager security as the rest of the contents of 31 North. The rocks, never to be touched again, go in the safe that Thad stole, which is kept inside the same vault where the untested moon rocks rest behind glass panels in a heavily monitored, oxygen-free climate to simulate the moon.

It is worth noting that at any point in the vault, Thad or Tiffany could have used glasscutters to get to the untouched moon rocks behind a panel, but stole the much more difficult to carry safe instead. Why?

There is significant frustration among NASA employees regarding the tested rocks. Tainted as they may be, many feel they deserve to be at least on display. Perhaps most irritatingly, they present an obvious answer to NASA's funding issues. Science's trash can be a collector's treasure, and the price on a piece of the moon, chemical-laden or otherwise, mirrors that of any other intergalactic relic. For these reasons, conversations about these stored rocks are as common on the grounds of the Johnson Space Center as the solving of more everyday astronautical problems. And NASA employees like to solve problems. To Thad Roberts, the problem of the underutilized-but-valuable moon rocks had a simple answer. He told me that if they were useless to science, he saw no harm in stealing them. And the fact he stole the safe, not the more easily taken fresh rocks, seems to back this up.

On the other hand, the FBI's case files contradicts this notion:

...they also contaminated them—making them virtually useless to the scientific community. They also destroyed three decades worth of handwritten research notes by a NASA scientist that had been locked in the safe.

Who do you trust less, a convicted thief, or the US government?

The story, however, does not end here.

********

Gordon McWhorter, a friend of Thad's who was largely unaware of the magnitude of the heist, had helped to find a buyer for the rocks, across the internet.

Greetings.

My name is Orb Robinson from Tampa, Fla. I have in my possession a rare and multi-karat moon rock I'm trying to find a buyer for. The laws surrounding this type of exchange are known, so I will be straightforward and nonchalant about wanting to find a private buyer. If you, or someone you know would be interested in such an exchange, please let me know.

Thanks.

A Belgian amateur mineralogist by the name of Axel Emmermann had been coveting moon rocks as an addition to his unusual collection. Emmermann wanted the rocks if the price was right, and Thad had priced a quarter pound of moon far, far under NASA's post-crime estimate of over $30 million. The price was so right, in fact, that Emmermann grew suspicious, and worried that the deal might be less black and white than it seemed.

On July 20, 2002—exactly 33 years to the day after the day that Armstrong first stepped on the moon—"Emmermann" met Thad in a Florida restaurant. They chatted, then headed for a hotel where the official swap was to take place. They all stepped out of the car. The Orlando Sentinel reported that Roberts joked, "I'm just hoping you don't have a wire on you." He was. The person Thad thought was Emmermann was actually an FBI agent.
In moments, 40 agents, 40 guns and the sound of a helicopter overhead surrounded them. The freeway had even been shut down in case of escape. They'd been made.

Tiffany and Thad were in a holding cell together for 24 hours, but that was the last time they'd be together until the sentencing date.

In court, Thad looked back at her from his seat in the courtroom; Tiffany looked down at her feet.

The punishments were doled out in unfair, interesting packages. Both of the girls were simply handed probation, but the boys were both dealt several years. Gordon was served nearly as harshly as Thad, who received 100 months for his planning, execution of the crime (a sentence that was later reduced). As if all of this wasn't enough, Thad was also brought up on charges of stealing dinosaur fossils from a dig site in Utah. The case was folded into this one.

Thad spent his time in prison doing things befitting of an ex-NASA co-op, like teaching his inmates about quantum physics, but also spent a good deal of time mourning the loss of Tiffany. On August 4th, 2008, when his sentence was finished, he was dismayed to learn she had moved on. By that point, however, he had another thing in his possession, a completed book entitled Einstein's Intuition: Visualizing an Eleven-Dimensional Framework of Nature, An Introduction to Quantum Space Theory. That says that the book covers Einstein's theories of truth, the rational complete form of nature, and the interplay of the seen and the unseen. It has yet to be published.

There are rumors of unsolved mysteries. Supposedly, two significant pieces of NASA history went missing during the time of the crime, and have not been recovered: The original video tapes of the 1969 Lunar Landing, and six folders of more mysterious content that were supposedly stored in the safe. Thad claims to have never seen them.

Carmel Hagen serves as editor at realtime search engine OneRiot, where she guzzles Bawls energy drink and chucks empty bottles at PCs. In her spare time she sleeps, explores San Francisco, and writes for a solid mix of urban culture, trendsetting and tech publications.

The $140 thing fits in your pocket, runs for four hours on a lithium-ion battery, connects up to 8 laptops via Wi-Fi, and works like a charm when you're in a decent WiMax coverage area. (You still need to connect a WiMax modem, which costs $50 and requires a data plan.)

I tested it on the outskirts of Portland, at a Burgerville right off of I-5 in Vancouver, WA, essentially becoming a totally unwired, totally portable wireless hotspot for anybody with a computer or smartphone in the vicinity. Anyone can see the hotspot itself, as it has a standard Wi-Fi SSID, but once on, you have to enter a password, like you do in hotels or airports where the Wi-Fi network itself is technically public.

I can't make enough of the experience, and how much it could change businesses, sales forces or mobile bloggin' teams like Gizmodo. You don't even have to be plugged in, you can just all hop on and work as usual for up to four hours, more if you can find an electric socket. And with WiMax, you're not nearly as limited as you are with 3G—though there are some constraints, you at least have access to a network that, in certain coverage areas, bestows blistering broadband speeds similar those from today's wired cable modems.

One big constraint, of course, is that WiMax from Sprint/Clearwire is currently limited to Baltimore and Portland, OR, but is growing this year and next to many cities.

There is also an internal limit to how much WiMax bandwidth you can harness. Since the Clear Spot uses the same Motorola WiMax USB modem that Clearwire sells for its standard WiMax service, I could test how well the bandwidth was passed through.

• What I got when connecting an HP Pavilion dv4 Windows laptop to WiMax: Around 7Mbps
• What I got when connecting the same modem to the Clear Spot, then connected MacBook Pro via Wi-Fi: 3-4Mbps

That does certainly represent a bottleneck, and there's a reason for it: The wireless hotspot itself—which you might have seen under the brand Cradlepoint for a year or more—was designed for 3G, for whom 3Mbps downstream is a frickin' miracle. It has a gimped USB port that throttles bandwidth over 5Mbps.

Though that's a flaw, it's not a big deal when you consider most Clearwire WiMax plans will be sold with a 4Mbps cap.

Beyond the hardware bottleneck, my other complaints are relatively minor:
• There's no Ethernet port, so this can't fundamentally replace home broadband.
• In areas of low coverage, you get an error message saying the modem was not found, which is inaccurate.
• There's no good way to read WiMax signal strength on the device itself.

The good news for patient people is that, according to Scott Richardson, Clearwire's chief strategy officer, the company is exploring selling an unfettered WiMax account, so you'd get an experience closer to the one I got in my uncapped testing. Also, Scott tells me there will be another portable WiMax-to-Wi-Fi hotspot device available—probably in the fall—that's even smaller, and that wouldn't be restricted by the USB bottleneck.

This is one of those products that's totally niche but totally cool. Like, even if there are many people who are interested in getting WiMax, or better yet, a combo EVDO/WiMax modem from Sprint, I am not anybody would, at that point, also feel the need to share it with others. Maybe it's good for bringing your work-supplied modem home, or maybe it's a good way to split the cost of wireless modem service between a team of people who are always working together, on separate devices.

Regardless of all these scenarios, the fact is, it's a truly new experience, and hopefully something we see more of in the future. I would say this is one of hell of a reason for Big Cable to be shaking in its boots—that is, if only Comcast wasn't already part owner in Clearwire. [Clearwire Clear Spot release]

Here are the details: they're a new Latitude notebook design branded for the education market using the Atom architecture. They can support an optional SSD, hold up to 2GB RAM, hit 1.6GHz and weigh in at under 3lbs.

In other specs, there's three USB ports, SD/MMC slot, Gigabit Ethernet, 802.11 a/g/n, Bluetooth, 3 and 6-cell battery options and a possible Touchscreen. Dell's trying to launch this around May 2009 in time for back to school season. If this leak is true, this is a pretty snazzy netbook for schoolkids for a pretty decent price. [Thanks Tipster!]

Jason Statham has one hour to live in this exclusive spot that can only be found at io9 right now…and it looks like he'll rub up against anything to stay alive.

I am so ready for Crank High Voltage to come out, we desperately need more Chev. I especially enjoyed the moment where our dear anti-hero is getting tasered by a group of cops and then proceeds to take down all five of them in one swift movement. Or is it Bai Ling running around in a bikini with guns? No, it's definitely getting glimpse of what I'm hoping is another segment of gettin' busy in public with the delightfully dirty Amy Smart.

Crank High Voltage opens April 17th.

Sean tells us that the store was empty down to 3 carts, which meant Circuit City did the only thing they could: They sold their fixtures.

Those yellow price tags you see in the image below are how much the shelves went for, which is what the BB people were there to buy. Everything was somewhere between $75 and $250, in case you were wondering.

Goodbye Circuit City. You were a store we went to before.

All of Giz's Circuit City coverage - Thanks Sean!

In the movie, the computer runs the classic Macintosh System in inverted video mode, white over black. Don't forget to check io9's Watchmen review and coverage, as well as our Steve Jobs conspiracy theory and multiple babblings on the movie.

Update: VERY sorry for the spoilers. Took those out. – JC

Spearheaded by Gregoire Gentil, the man behind the Zonbu Desktop and Laptop, the Touch Book is his latest project, and a promising one at that. Gentil says the Touch Book's hardware and software are fully open source and ready for modifications. While the device will come preloaded with a custom Touch Book OS, Gentil says this machine is capable of running mobile operating systems such as Android or Windows CE.

The hardware I saw wasn't quite complete—the software was demoed on a prototype, and the final hardware above were just empty shells to give an idea of the design—so I cant comment too much on how well the end product performs, but I saw enough to consider this thing more than vaporware.

The Touch Book is the first netbook powered by a 600 MHz TI OMAP3 processor (built around ARM technology), 256 MB RAM, 3-axis accelerometer, an 8-gigabyte microSD card for storage and two batteries providing up to 15 hours of usage between charges. The 8.9-inch screen can display resolutions up to 1024x768 and uses a resistive touch panel.There's also the usual offerings of 802.11b/g/n wi-fi and Bluetooth.

As a standalone tablet, the Touch Book is roughly 9.5"x7"x1" and weighs about a pound. When docked to the keyboard, it is about 1.4-inches thick and weighs 2 pounds. All of the Touch Book's guts, except for one of the batteries, are housed in the tablet portion of the device, so that it's fully functional while detatched from the keyboard.

The chipset fits on a motherboard about the size of an index card, and is heavily optimized to get the best performance out of the hardware. Part of this involves stacking the RAM directly on top of the processor in a package on package configuration. The lid of the touchbook also pops off, so you have easy access to the hardware and it's two internal USB ports you can use for dongles you dont want hanging off the side of the tablet.

As far as software goes, the OS is based around the Open Embedded Linux platform, but fully customized for the Touch Book hardware. As such, the Touch Book has the power to handle full screen video, and render OpenGL 3D graphics. Gentil says the Touch Book can run some of the same games found on the iPhone and plans to offer them in the future.

The Touch Book UI design depends on what configuration the hardware is in. When docked to the keyboard, the Touch Book uses a standard, cursor-based UI that looks like other Linux desktops. However, when in tablet mode, it uses a custom-designed, touch-based UI. The touch UI is based around spherical icons that rotate in a circular fashion as you swipe to the next one. Content is divided into three categories: web, apps and settings.

On the apps side, Touch Book will ship with both Firefox and Fennec (Mobile Firefox), games that will make use of the accelerometer, plus various sorts of web and productivity apps, such as word processor and spreadsheet-type programs.

Always Innovating plans to start shipping the Touch Book in late May or early June, priced at $300 for the tablet alone, or $400 for the tablet and keyboard dock combination. Pre-ordering will begin next week, and you can order the Touch Book in either red or dark grey colors. Gentil says he would also like to release future iterations that include support for GPS and 3G mobile broadband. [Always Innovating]

NEW TOUCHBOOK COMBINES NETBOOK AND TOUCHSCREEN TABLET; PROVIDES THREE TIMES THE BATTERY LIFE AT UNDER TWO POUNDS

PALM DESERT, Calif. March 2, 2009: Always Innovating today unveiled the Touch Book, a versatile new device that works as both a netbook and a tablet thanks to a detachable keyboard and a 3D touchscreen user interface. The Touch Book, previewed at DEMO 09, weighs less than two pounds as a netbook and has a battery life of 10 to 15 hours – three times longer than most netbooks.

"The Touch Book is perfect for these tough economic times because you can use it in so many ways," said Gregoire Gentil, founder of Always Innovating and creator of the Touch Book. "You can use it as a netbook computer, a hand-held game device, or a video player. You can even reverse the keyboard to prop it up on a table in an inverted ‘V'. Finally, because it is magnetic, you can remove the keyboard and put the tablet on the fridge to serve as a kitchen computer or digital frame."

The Touch Book combines the best of open source software and open hardware with a sleek industrial design by designer Fred Bould. The innovative design includes internal USB plugs. "I hate having dongles hanging from my laptop – I often end up disconnecting them accidentally – so we opted to put the USB inside," said Gentil.

The Touch Book is the first netbook featuring an ARM processor from Texas Instruments, resulting in outstanding battery life, and a fan less, heat-and-noise-free system.

According to Chris Shipley, executive producer of the DEMO Conferences, the Touch Book's innovative architecture and industrial design earned it a spot on the DEMO conference stage. "The longer battery life is a boon to netbook users. But the Touch Book's versatility – its ability to function as a netbook as well as a standalone touchscreen tablet – makes it a breakthrough product," said Shipley

The Touch Book is expected to ship in late spring and will start at $299. Advance orders can be placed at http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/store/.

As chief research and strategy officer at Microsoft, Mundie is a living portal of future technology, a focal point between thousands of scattered research projects and the boxes of super-neat products we'll be playing with 5 years, 20 years, maybe 100 years from now. And he's not allowed to even think about anything shipping within the immediate 3 years. I'm pretty sure the guy has his own personal teleporter and hoverboard, but when you sit and talk to him for an hour about his ability to see tomorrow, it's all very matter of fact. So what did we talk about? Quantum computing did come up, as did neural control, retinal implants, Windows-in-the-cloud, multitouch patents and the suspension of disbelief in interface design.

Seeing the Future
Your job is to look not at next year or next five years. Is there a specific number of years you're supposed to be focused on?

I tell people it ranges from from about 3 to 20. There's no specific year that's the right amount, in part because the things we do in Research start at the physics level and work their way up. The closer you are to fundamental change in the computing ecosystem, the longer that lead time is.

When you say 3 years, you're talking about new UIs and when you say 20 you're talking about what, holographic computing?

Yeah, or quantum computing or new models of computation, completely different ways of writing programs, things where we don't know the answer today, and it would take some considerable time to merge it into the ecosystem.

So how do you organize your thoughts?

I don't try to sort by time. Time is a by-product of the specific task that we seek to solve. Since it became clear that we were going to ultimately have to change the microprocessor architecture, even before we knew what exactly it would evolve to be from the hardware guys, we knew they'd be parallel in nature, that there'd be more serial interconnections, that you'd have a different memory hierarchy. From roughly from the time we started to the time that those things will become commonplace in the marketplace will be 10 to 12 years.

Most people don't really realize how long it takes from when you can see the glimmer of things that are big changes in the industry to when they actually show up on store shelves.

Is it hard for you to look at things that far out?

[Chuckles] No, not really. One of the things I think is sort of a gift or a talent that I have, and I think Bill Gates had to some significant degree too, is to assimilate a lot of information from many sources, and your brain tends to work in a way where you integrate it and have an opinion about it. I see all these things and have enough experience that I say, OK, I think that this must be going to happen. Your ability to say exactly when or exactly how isn't all that good, but at least you get a directional statement.

When you look towards the future, there's inevitability of scientific advancement, and then there's your direction, your steering. How do you reconcile those two currents?

There are thousands of people around the world who do research in one form or another. There's a steady flow of ideas that people are advancing. The problem is, each one doesn't typically represent something that will redefine the industry.

So the first problem is to integrate across these things and say, are there some set of these when taken together, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts? The second is to say, by our investment, either in research or development, how can we steer the industry or the consumer towards the use of these things in a novel way? That's where you create differentiated products.

Interface Design and the Suspension of Disbelief
In natural interface and natural interaction, how much is computing power, how much is sociological study and how much is simply Pixar-style animation?

It's a little bit of all of them. When you look at Pixar animation, something you couldn't do in realtime in the past, or if you just look at the video games we have today, the character realism, the scene realism, can be very very good. What that teaches us is that if you have enough compute power, you can make pictures that are almost indistinguishable from real life.

On the other hand, when you're trying to create a computer program that maintains the essence of human-to-human interaction, then many of the historical fields of psychology, people who study human interaction and reasoning, these have to come to the fore. How do you make a model of a person that retains enough essential attributes that people suspend disbelief?

When you go to the movies, what's the goal of the director and the actors? They're trying to get you to suspend disbelief. You know that those aren't real people. You know Starship Enterprise isn't out there flying around—

Don't tell our readers that!

[Grins] Not yet at least. But you suspend disbelief. Today we don't have that when people interact with the computer. We aren't yet trying to get people to think they're someplace else. People explore around the edges of these things with things like Second Life. But there you're really putting a representative of yourself into another world that you know is a make-believe environment. I think that the question is, can we use these tools of cinematography, of human psychology, of high-quality rendering to create an experience that does feel completely natural, to the point that you suspend disbelief—that you're dealing with the machine just as if you were dealing with another person.

So the third component is just raw computing, right?

As computers get more powerful, two things happen. Each component of the interaction model can be refined for better and better realism. Speech becomes more articulate, character images become more lifelike, movements become more natural, recognition of language becomes more complete. Each of those drives a requirement for more computing power.

But it's the union of these that creates the natural suspension of disbelief, something you don't get if you're only dealing with one of these modalities of interaction. You need more and more computing, not only to make each element better, but to integrate across them in better ways.

When it comes to solving problems, when do you not just say, "Let's throw more computing power at it"?

That actually isn't that hard to decide. On any given day, a given amount of computing costs a given amount of money. You can't require a million dollars worth of computer if you want to put it on everybody's desk. What we're really doing is looking at computer evolutions and the improvements in algorithms, and recognizing that those two things eventually bring new problem classes within the bounds of an acceptable price.

So even within hypothetical research, price is still a factor?

It's absolutely a consideration. We can spend a lot more on the computing to do the research, because we know that while we're finishing research and converting it into a product, there's a continuing reduction in cost. But trying to jockey between those two things and come out at the right place and the right time, that's part of the art form.

Hardware Revolutions, Software Evolutions
Is there some sort of timeline where we're going to shift away from silicon chips?

That's really a question you should ask Intel or AMD or someone else. We aren't trying to do the basic semiconductor research. The closest we get is some of the work we're doing with universities exploring quantum computers, and that's a very long term thing. And even there, a lot of work is with gallium arsenide crystals, not exactly silicon, but a silicon-like material.

Is that the same for flexible screens or non-moving carbon-fiber speakers that work like lightning—are these things you track, but don't research?

They're all things that we track because, in one form or another, they represent the computer, the storage system, the communication system or the human-interaction capabilities. One of the things that Microsoft does at its core is provide an abstraction in the programming models, the tools that allow the introduction of new technologies.

When you talk about this "abstraction," do you mean something like the touch interface in Windows 7, which works with new and different kinds of touchscreens?

Yeah, there are a lot of different ways to make touch happen. The Surface products detect it using cameras. You can have big touch panels that have capacitance overlays or resistive overlays. The TouchSmart that HP makes actually is optical.

The person who writes the touch application just wants to know, "Hey, did he touch it?" He doesn't want to have to write the program six times today and eight times tomorrow for each different way in which someone can detect the touch. What we do is we work with the companies to try to figure out what is the abstraction of this basic notion. What do you have to detect? And what is the right way to represent that to the programmer so they don't have to track every activity, or even worse, know whether it was an optical detector, a capacitive detector or an infrared detector? They just want to know that the guy touched the screen.

Patents and Inventor's Rights
You guys recently crossed 10,000 patent line—is that all your Research division?

No, that's from the whole company. Every year we make a budget for investment in patent development in all the different business groups including Research. They all go and look for the best ideas they've got, and file patents within their areas of specialization. It's done everywhere in the company.

So, take multitouch, something whose patents have been discussed lately. When it comes to inevitability vs. unique product development, how much is something like multitouch simply inevitable? How much can a single company own something that seems so generally accepted in interface design?

The goal of the patent system is to protect novel inventions. The whole process is supposed to weed out things that are already known, things that have already been done. That process isn't perfect—sometimes people get patents on things that they shouldn't, and sometimes they're denied patents on things they probably should get—but on balance you get the desired result.

If you can't identify in the specific claims of a particular patent what it is novel, then you don't get a patent. Just writing a description of something—even if you're the first person to write it down—doesn't qualify as invention if it's already obvious to other people. You have to trust that somehow obvious things aren't going to be withheld from everybody.

That makes sense. We like to look at patents to get an idea of what's coming next—

That's what they were intended to do; that was the deal with the inventor: If you'll share your inventions with the public in the spirit of sharing knowledge, then we'll give you some protection in the use of that invention for a period of time. You're rewarded for doing it, but you don't sequester the knowledge. It's that tradeoff that actually makes the patent system work.

Windows in the Cloud, Lasers in the Retina
Let's get some quick forecasts? How soon until we see Windows in the cloud? I turn on my computer, and even my operating system exists somewhere else.

That's technologically possible, but I don't think it's going to be commonplace. We tend to believe the world is trending towards cloud plus client, not timeshared mainframe and dumb display. The amount of intrinsic computing capability in all these client devices—whether they're phones, cars, game consoles, televisions or computers—is so large, and growing larger still exponentially, that the bulk of the world's computing power is always going to be in the client devices. The idea that the programmers of the world would let that lie fallow, wouldn't try to get any value out of it, isn't going to happen.

What you really want to do is find what component is best solved in the shared facility and what component is best computed locally? We do think that people will want to write arbitrary applications in the cloud. We just don't think that's going to be the predominating usage of it. It's not like the whole concept of computing is going to be sucked back up the wire and put in some giant computing utility.

What happens when the processors are inside our heads and the displays are projected on the inside of our eyeballs?

It'll be interesting to see how that evolution will take place. It's clear that embedding computing inside people is starting to happen fairly regularly. There's special processors, not general processors. But there are now cochlear implants, and even people exploring ways to give people who've lost sight some kind of vision or a way to detect light.

But I don't think you are going to end up with some nanoprojector trying to scribble on your retina. To the extent that you could posit that you're going to get to that level, you might even bypass that and say, "Fine, let me just go into the visual cortex directly." It's hard to know how the man-machine interface will evolve, but I do know that the physiology of it is possible and the electronics of it are becoming possible. Who knows how long it will take? But I certainly think that day will come.

And neural control of our environment? There's already a Star Wars toy that uses brain waves to control a ball—

Yeah, it's been quite a few years since I saw some of the first demos inside Microsoft Research where people would have a couple of electrical sensors on their skull, in order to detect enough brain wave functionality to do simple things like turn a light switch on and off reliably. And again, these are not invasive techniques.

You'll see the evolution of this come from the evolution of diagnostic equipment in medicine. As people learn more about non-invasive monitoring for medical purposes, what gets created as a byproduct are non-invasive sensing people can use for other things. Clearly the people who will benefit first are people with physical disabilities—you want to give them a better interface than just eye-tracking on screens and keyboards. But each of these things is a godsend, and I certainly think that evolution will continue.

I wonder what your dream diary must look like—must have some crazy concepts.

I don't know, I just wake up some mornings and say, yeah, there's a new idea.

Really? Just jot it down and run with it?

Yeah, that's oftentimes the way it is. Just, wasn't there yesterday, it's there today. You know, you just start thinking about it.

Are you excited for the for the movie? All signs point to it being great, and I'm going to (hopefully) be seeing a screening of it tonight in LA. Will report back afterwards! [Futurama: Into the Wild Green Yonder on Blu-ray]

James Cameron loyalists, rest assured: it's going to be a fun ride.

Before the screening, director McG sat us all down, and told us the tale of getting Terminator Salvation made. The producers approached him with the idea, and he was initially skeptical — as I would be if I heard someone pitch another Terminator movie.

But McG liked the angle, and went about procuring the best and the brightest, starting with seeking out James Cameron for a pseudo-blessing, and ending with Christian Bale telling him to rewrite the entire thing, or he's out. McG's a smart director, he knew he needed someone with crazy acting chops to make fighting a giant robo-puppet believable these days. So he hired Jonah Nolan, and they wrote the story that we all love to watch: the creation of a hero.

"We started working on this becoming story of how Connor indeed became the leader of the resistance," McG explained. "And we were both passionate about those genesis stories where you think, "I'm just a high school newspaper guy." "No, you're Peter Parker. With great power comes great responsibility." "I'm just a computer hacker." "No, you're Neo. You're the one." We like that idea. This is the story about how Connor became the leader of the resistance."

But on to the goods, first the was a quickie compilation that showed a cavalry of helicopters coming to the rescue, and general John Connor ass-kickery. But finally they got to the clips: the first scene was all about Sam Worthington's character Marcus Wright, meeting Kyle Reese. To put it McG style:

When you meet Marcus in the beginning of the movie, he's being put to death in the modern day. And he's down on himself... He's in this life of privilege that he only ever saw the bad side to. Then he wakes up in this world of duress, after the bombs have gone off. And he discovers what is worthwhile about humanity. The courage of this little kid, the kindness of an elderly woman..."

Marcus, Kyle Reese and an unknown floppy-haired kid descend upon the hollowed out, worn-down 7-11 (that we've seen in set pictures before). The two scavenge for food, as a bewildered Marcus looks on. Reese is practically telling Marcus what to do and what not to do, which jibes with what McG told us about Marcus waking up in another world in the future, unaware of what has happened to him, or around him. The look itself is silvery and dirty, thanks to the specially tinted film McG mixed up himself. Everyone has a bit of a silver gloss over the shadowy part of his face, and dark circles and wrinkles are amplified to the 1000th degree across the screen. It's beautifully brutal.

The floppy-haired kid finds a small amount of milk, but they before they can devour it, a group of Mad Max-looking types pop out of their hiding places, guns a-blazin'. They shout that this is their food and fuel. Reese tries to exit without setting off any itchy trigger fingers. Yet a wise old woman stops the gang and offers up some food to the kid with the bad hair. Everyone calms down for a minute, but you all know that when things are too quiet, there's a big bad on the way. Sure enough a massive metal Harvester rips through the ceiling and carries off the good-natured woman. All the others disperses to their assembly of beat-up Saabs and trailers, and speeds away in fear, to their detriment of course. These Harvesters are wreaking destruction, "all in the interest of collecting humans so they can do nasty things to us, all in the spirit of creating the T-800," the director explained. Run, humans, run to your dirty cars and grab your shotguns, but it will do you no good, that Harvester is damn near indestructible. The action scene was tightly filmed and, thank god, didn't have an inch of shaky cam.

Since we got a good look at the really big bots in Terminator Salvation, let's just nip this whole Transformers versus Terminator controversy in the bud. Even though the effects that I witnessed last night were by no means finished, you could see what McG and friends were trying to do.

Granted, the Harvester does shoot off the wheelie Mototerminators from its legs in a very Transformery manner, but it's nothing like Transformers. The Harvesters rattle off a guteral moan so frightening, it'd make the Cloverfield monster piss his pants. It's cold, calculating robots killing and abducting men, the best way they know how. There's no personality or sassy attitudes, it is simply a gloriously intense moment of robots exterminating and capturing people. If anything, the few moments I caught felt more like the first 15 terrifying minutes of Planet Of The Apes more so than Transformers, especially with the fast pace and the ever-present fear of being dragged about by a robot into a pen filled with humans. It's cruel and fast, just like a Terminator should be. No room for witty banter or "talk to the hand" references in this movie — it would be out of place in a world where milk is a luxury.

Someone asked McG if he was worried about the Transformers comparison, and he pretty much blew it off, saying the movies are so completely different, that they just couldn't be compared.

Most of the music was filler, since the great Danny Elfman has just signed on board for Terminator 4. But we got to hear McG's original idea, of using Gustavo Santaolalla for the human-interaction scenes, paired with Thom Yorke's Radiohead robot-dream tunes for any Skynet heavy moments. This idea got thrown to the wayside after sitting down and talking with the regular spooky Elfman. Note to Yorke: it's still totally okay to pursue this idea, in fact, I'll send you my money now to see what kind of sounds you'd dream up for a Terminator flick.

The next scene pitted John Connor against a Hydrobot's tentacles, which easily kill off his crew and sinks Connor's hovering helicopter. Finally after a few more minutes of Hydrobot wrasslin', we're treated to a tiny taste of what McG described as a Faustian deal with the devil moment. He was talking about Marcus, who's been exposed as a Terminator, finding an uneasy truce with Connor so they can bust the young Kyle Reese out of the human containment facility. Yet another awesome action scene, and I admit I had a few "Oh no, look out behind you, J.C." moments. But my appetite wasn't quenched with the back-and-forth. McG is making a platform for this movie based on the stand-out dialog and acting, and I wanted to see a lot more of that.

In fact I have a feeling a lot of this movie may be full of Bale-face:

"Christian is so powerful," McG said. "There are several times in the movie where I stay on him for one shot and I don't cut. I'm talking 2 or 3 pages of dialogue where you stay on Christian Bale. He's controlling his breathing, he's choosing when he blinks, he's in such command of his physicality that it doesn't require cutting."

So does the back-and-forth moment deliver? Sure. Is it the most amazing intense holy-shit-my-mind-is-blown moment? Not yet, but I feel like that is yet to come (probably in the final big reveal). Which is pretty much what I'm hinging this entire movie upon. So far, it is full of good looking adrenaline inducing crazy that hits right in the gut where a great action movie should. So if you believe McG about Bale's performance, pair that with Bale's acting on set and you won't be able to rip your eyes away from him.

Still, we all know about the big twist ending that's been reported wildly across the internet, which the director insisted again was completely not true, but either way we know there is a twist. A twist that may "piss off a lot of people," quoth McG. This is what I'll hang my final decision on, only because it should change the way I view everything about the past and future of the Terminator franchise.

I'm just so happy to report to all of you that it's really coming together nicely. Our goal was always to make a big movie, one of the best movies. Because for a long time there I think the summer fare really fell off. And summer movies were becoming a little sloppy, a little disposable. I think with the Dark Knight this year that's an elegant, elegant artistic offering, and the second biggest picture in the history of cinema.

So if we're clever, we can make a big movie that's a lot of fun but and certainly a summer movie — but also an important movie, especially a movie in this genre. I think any good science fiction movie really works on two levels. The Matrix is a great example where you can watch it and say "Hey wow, that's fun that's really explosive" and then all of us can go to a graduate class at NYU and spend four years discussing the theological implications of what the Wachowskis were discussing.

Me too, McG, me too. No longer shall I join in the "fuck that guy from Charlie's Angels" chorus (which the director himself pointed out was one of the most hated on things about him thus far, besides the name). God help me, after last night I'm really pushing for a McG victory here.

Lee Kline, the Technical Director at The Criterion Collection, was in Italy. He had tracked down an original print of Il Posto, the classic 1961 Ermanno Olmi film, and he needed a digital master of it. The problem? It was far too valuable and delicate to ship to the States, so he had find a local studio to handle the transfer for him.

Sitting down in the lab, the local technician started the process of loading the film up, running it through the incredibly expensive machine to create a 2K super-high-def digital copy for Lee to take back to the States with him. The technician was deftly handling the irreplaceable film and the machine with both hands. All the while, a cigarette dangled from his lips. Lee, neither the owner of the print nor an employee of the lab, could only sit back and bite his tongue, hoping no wayward chunk of smoldering ash would find its way onto the decades-old piece of film. You could call it one tense moment in a film nerd's life.

When you go to the headquarters of the Criterion Collection, you sort of expect it to be a gigantic library. You know, one with lots of dark wood, a fireplace and a globe, complete with a dapper man in a smoking jacket sitting in an overstuffed chair. Instead of books, though, the walls would be lined with some of the greatest films ever made, DVDs that set the bar in terms of image quality and extras and packaging and liner notes. Criterion is the undisputed champ in all these things, yet the Criterion offices are simple, its walls adorned only with a collection of movie posters and framed letters from directors. There is a lovely screening room with a gigantic screen and projector setup, and there are edit suites, but it doesn't feel like you are entering into a world belonging to film historians. Until you talk to the historians.

Essentially, the people at Criterion are a combination of film geeks and A/V nerds, equally excited at the prospect of getting a great print of a classic Fellini film as they are about creating a killer 5.1 surround sound audio track.

These people act as a curator and a publisher, hand-selecting a wide variety of films, mostly foreign, classics and indies. They painstakingly create the definitive digital version of that film, completely restoring both the audio and video, gathering up the most complete supplementary features available and releasing it all in beautiful packaging. It's a film buff's dream.

The Criterion staff gathers their own supplementary features themselves, traveling to find talent and record original interviews and audio commentary tracks, finding scholars to write essays and gathering up any additional footage or video that they can find.

It's an incredible company, responsible not only for introducing hundreds of films to audiences who would otherwise have no other way to access them, but also pioneers who helped introduce many DVD features we take for granted now, such as commentary tracks, elaborate special editions and even letter boxing. And now they're preparing to deliver innovation to a new format: Blu-ray. And man, are they excited about it.

David Phillips, who works on DVD Development for Criterion, told me that "We're offering people the ability to see what is essentially 95% of the visual quality of our high-definition tape masters, something that we've dreamed of for a long time." After all, these guys have been working with digital masters that clock in at about 2K resolution for some time, which is far higher than HD. "As good as standard-def DVD looks, we've been looking at these HD images for so long and feeling like it's a shame that we can't share this." HD is the way most of these films are meant to be seen, and the people at Criterion get visibly excited when talking about the possibilities.

But with that huge uptick in resolution for the consumer, Criterion is faced with a lot of problems that they didn't have when their masters were converted to standard definition for DVD. After all, they're often dealing with old films, created before there was fancy low-grain filmstock and digital processing. And with the technology they have today, how much restoration and processing is too much?

Really, the mission of Criterion is "trying to replicate the original experience of seeing that movie when it was first released," according to Phillips. While they certainly have the ability to process old films until they look like they were shot on a DV cam, that's not the goal.

"Grain reduction has become such an industry standard that people, when they see grain, they think it's a problem rather than what film looks like. Film is a physical medium that has this grain structure to it," says Phillips. That being said, they realize that consumers buying restored HD films on Blu-ray are expecting near-pristine quality prints. It's a tough balance to strike. Essentially, "it's trying to stay on the side of not overprocessing but not leaving so much film artifact that it's distracting from getting engaged in the film."

So how do they go about getting a film prepped for Blu-ray? Well, they start with the best version available, be that a camera negative, a positive or a print, depending on the qualities available. Most of the time, they need to travel to the negative rather than having it shipped to them, especially if it's an original print. So if it's a Kurosawa film, they go to Japan; if it's a Truffaut film they go to France; and if it's an Olmi film, well, they go to Italy.

Once they get their hands on the film, they use Thomson's Spirit DataCine to digitize the print at a local facility. If available, they'll try to get the director to consult on the color of the print, making sure it's accurate to the original as they digitize it to tape in 2K—sometimes even 4K—resolution. Once done, they have their tape master, which they then can bring back to their headquarters to begin the restoration.

Once they have their master back at their offices, it goes through what they call the restoration workflow, which involves painstakingly restoring both the audio and video frame by frame. For video, this involves using a system called MTI Film, which allows a technician to go through the film and not only remove dirt and edit marks, but also fix warped frames and things of that nature. This isn't some automated procedure, either. It involves a technician sitting at an edit station with a stylus going frame by frame, ensuring that each one looks as good as possible. With two shifts a day working on a film, it still takes weeks to get through this part of the process.

For audio, they work in ProTools HD to both create surround-sound audio tracks as well as to clean up the original audio. They often get prints with extremely hissy or distorted mono tracks, so much like with the picture, they need to go through with a fine tooth comb and clean it all up. Their goal, according to Kline, is to "create a track with the original acoustics, bringing it back to clean and straightforward mono that sounds crisp and clear." I stood in while an audio technician was working on the opening of Lars Von Trier's Europa (due on DVD in December), and the difference between the original print's audio and the restored audio made the narration and the sound effects resonate much more without feeling like the original had been sterilized.

What about films they've already restored for DVD? Can they just be released on Blu-ray without much extra effort? Unfortunately, not usually. The good news is that once they've done their tape master, they have a high-def copy of it on hand and don't need to re-transfer the original print. The bad news is that once they've got those masters, half of the process needs to be done again because the original restorations were just done in standard definition. Making a quick rerelease of all of Criterion's films to Blu-ray something that just isn't going to happen.

Once they've finished their process, though, it's like viewing a film for the first time. I got a chance to sit in on a quality-control screening of their restoration of Wong Kar-Wai's Chungking Express. A scene in a crowded marketplace seemed to jump off the screen, and the surround sound perfectly placed the bustling sounds of the market behind me while keeping the dialogue front-and-center. I felt like I was in a theater in Hong Kong, watching the first, perfect print of the movie when it was first released. It was breathtaking.

These are the releases that film buffs have been upgrading their home theater setups for. After all, the best way to take advantage of thousands of dollars of AV gear is to give it material pulled carefully from the source.

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Criterion is releasing its first Blu-ray films in November, starting with The Third Man, The Man Who Fell to Earth, The Last Emperor, Bottle Rocket and Chungking Express. They plan to release two films a month in Blu-ray next year, with HD releases ramping up as sales shift from DVD to Blu-ray. [Criterion Collection]

Tomorrow night at 10PM, Food Network kicks off Alton Brown's latest TV show, Feasting on Waves, where the Mensa-smart kitchen geek and his crew hop into two 50-foot catamarans and sail around 15 different Caribbean islands in search of quality cuisine, shooting and editing the hi-def episodes right there on the boats. It turns out, despite his disdain for specialized kitchen gadgets, Brown depended on regular high-end tech to make a cooking show on a boat happen.

How do you produce a TV show from a sailboat?

One of the things about the Feasting shows in general is that they have a very small crew, and we are moving with very little space. We are extremely packed and technology dense. We had two 50-foot catamarans—it sounds fun but it wasn’t that fun.

So you shoot and edit as you go?

This year we decided to go completely tapeless: Panasonic P2 cards on 200s. We’re downloading them into our portable Avid edit system. We take as much audio equipment as we take video equipment. The funny thing is, professional audio hasn’t gotten a whole lot smaller. Although hi-def cameras have gotten smaller, lenses have gotten better and battery time has gotten better, audio is still the tricky part of the process for field reporting.

I see you were also using a little Panasonic?

I was lucky enough to be one of the first people in the US to get Panasonic’s HDC-HS100 AVCHD camcorder. It’s got a nice little Leica lens on it. We take everything through a DaVinci color correction system. Once we do that, you really can’t tell the difference between my little camera and the big cameras—it’s all 1080i. We have some scenes that were 100% shot with just my camera.

How did you connect to the internet?

It’s kinda funny, the entire time that I was in the islands, I had perfect e-mail with my iPhone. The entire time. I think there was once, during a midnight crossing, the Anegada Passage, where I lost internet for about half an hour. The rest of the time, I was getting e-mail through either EDGE or something else [probably GPRS].

I did not even take a computer with me on that trip. I decided I just didn’t want to see a computer for a while. And at the time, I figured you know, computers, boats, water, scuba diving. I thought about taking the ToughBook along, and then I thought about taking the Asus because that’s a great little box. Then I thought, the hell with it. I took a few pads of paper, some pens and my iPhone.

You also carry GPS everywhere, right?

As a motorcyclist, as a hiker and as a pilot, I’m pretty sold on Garmin. In the first Feasting on Asphalt, I had a touchscreen weatherproof version of the StreetPilot for my motorcycle that even worked with gloves on. I just really love how their interfaces work. You don’t even need manuals for most of their stuff, the stuff is so intuitive.

In New York, I use Google Maps with my iPhone, because I know where I am—I don’t need GPS. If I was going some place where I needed GPS, I’d use my Garmin Colorado [shown in top pic], which I really really like. It’s a really great marine box. It’s splashproof, but it comes loaded with all the marine functions, so it’s really easy to do marine chart info if you get the right cards for it. You can sail the world with one.

So it was your navi on land and sea?

Everywhere. We basically documented the entire Feasting on Waves journey in the Colorado. Every place we went, we popped a waypoint. It’s got so many easy functions for calculating distance it made navigating around the island easier. Even islands that didn’t have roads at all, we could get good topographic information.

Do you adhere to the old sailor’s adage that you should never have just one form of navigation?

Abso-stinking-lutely. When I fly, I may have full GPS on the plane, but I got a full set of charts too, and I keep the charts out while I’m flying to make sure I know where I am. In this day and age, if I have a major power outage, I just whip out my handheld, the 496, a spectacular handheld aviation GPS. But there could be a catastrophic satellite failure, different things could happen that could make GPS unusable—I guess.

I think your unit would fail before the satellite did.

Something could happen to satellites, you never know. So I always want to know where I am on paper, too.

And on the island, what was your backup?

There were a lot of times where I didn’t have a backup. On islands, I sometimes didn’t have anything else, because there aren't reliable paper maps for those places. The only time I wasn’t using Garmin to navigate was when we were underwater—I don’t think they have an underwater unit yet. We did a fair amount of scuba diving, and you’re still on your own under water. You still gotta use a compass.

I think you just invented something.

Underwater GPS would be spectacular. I don’t know how deep you can go with that technology without having serious problems. Even 50 to 70 feet would be useful. I wonder why they haven’t done that yet. I’ll ask Garmin when I can get that. For rec diving, having that kind of application would be fantastic.

Note: I asked Garmin why there wasn't a scuba GPS, and I got a quick reply: "The reason for no scuba GPS is simple... the signal is deflected by water."

So how do you keep everything charged up?

That’s a problem. Especially on the boats, it was really difficult. We got down there and realized that the power systems on the boats which were all 220V—the power wasn’t clean enough for our editing computers. On St. Martin, we had to go buy a Honda generator to run on the back of the boat to give us good steady clean 120V.

The Colorado runs on AAs, so I took a batch of rechargeable AAs. I ran the recharger for that in the cabin where I also charged my iPhone and my little camera batteries. I had to have three chargers. My other camera only runs on regular batteries, not rechargeables.

What kind of camera is it?

It’s an old metal Canon EF—about 30 years old. I also carry a 35mm Leica point-and-shoot with a fixed 40mm lens. I was shooting slide film in the Canon and print film in the Leica.

So you’re not shooting digital?

Not on this. I wanted Ektochrome—nothing looks like Ektochrome. I’m old school that way. I have a pretty decent Canon digital, and a Leica digital as well, but I didn’t want to have to deal with the chargers, and I wanted super robust technology, so I went film. I like film. You can’t beat it. I spent most of my career as a cinematographer before I went to culinary school, so I just got a thing about film emulsions. It’s still the way I think. I just don’t appreciate digital photography as much as I should.

I know, I know—we managed to get through an entire discussion about a food show without talking about the freakin' food. Good thing there are already clips of the show (alas, non-embeddable) up at Food Network's website, so take a look. The awesome photographs of Alton were shot—digitally—by Marion Laney, ForgottenGulf.com.

What's the upshot to this? One, the non-exclusivity leaves room for Microsoft or Sony to license the same technology and come out with something as good as the MotionPlus accessory. However since Nintendo had two companies collaborate on this, knockoffs might not be exactly the same. [Eurogamer via Reg Hardware]

Looking at the time it's taking me to finish the Falcon, I'm not going to try this unless I can get Lindsay Joy someone to help me. [Lego in Gizmodo]

This video was recorded in NetDevil's second Lego Universe Project event. According to Scott Brown, NetDevil's president, in the first LUP event they asked these Lego users to give them an idea of what the game should be like, which of course resulted in them building hundreds of actual Lego models of monsters, places, and all kinds of devices, machinery, and vehicles.

After that session, NetDevil started to program the software tools and the models needed to design Lego Universe terrains and structures. Now, in the second LUP event, they have trained those Lego people on the tools themselves, which they are using to create the virtual worlds. Apparently, NetDevil is very impressed by how fast these people—who in their day jobs are mostly engineers—got into the tools after just a three-hour class. Hopefuly that means things are progressing fast and we will see this game—which seems to have great potential—sooner than later.

The exclusive tour is divided into three parts

While the storage areas are the most impressive part of the factory, I have to admit that nothing had prepared me for the scope and complexity that is required to make and pack 19 billion bricks every year. The scale of this factory, specially compared to the tiny bricks it produces, is absolutely breathtaking.

The warehouse and the mold room

We started in the main warehouse, which is half a kilometer long. Here they house the silos holding the raw plastic granulate. Through them, 60 tons of this material is processed every 24 hours. These towers are connected to the molding machines through a labyrinth of tubes that push the granulate mixtures in a permanent tin-pitched rumble.

It's the digestive system of the enormous factory, always feeding the molding lines through the tubes and moving big boxes full of pieces—using conveyor belts—into the storage area in an endless and precise dance which never ends: this factory works around the clock to fulfill the worldwide thirst for Lego.

The molding machines

Everything is recycled in the factory. The plastic granulate itself is a by-product from diesel, and whatever is discarded in the manufacturing process gets recycled. The leftover parts from the mold—the plastic that fills the channels that take the hot plastic into the piece negative—fall down the machine, gets ground up, and put back into the production cycle. Any other waste, like faulty pieces or the transparent plastic used to clean the inner tubes when they need to change the production color of a molding machine, are also ground up and sold to other companies for the production of other things, like pipes and even heating oil.

The machines produce more than two million pieces per hour, churning incessantly into color- and bar-coded boxes. I looked around and I couldn't see many people. A woman was in one of those endless aisles looking at a few molding machines with big "QT" signs on them. She was in charge of quality testing, making sure that the production was going perfectly.

At one point I was taking photos of a box of full of yellow bricks, and suddenly the machine stopped working. Fearing I had done something wrong, I saw a big wonky box coming from the distance, some kind of weird transport with strange sensors on the top, straight from a moisture farm on Tatooine or a spice mine in Dune. I stepped back, instantly realizing it was one of the many factory robots.

This transport bot was answering the call of the central mainframes, the brains of the Lego body that control every aspect of the process at all times. The mainframes had stopped the production of the machine, following the signal of the sensor next to the box and sending the signal to the robot, alerting it that it had to harvest the crop of bricks. The robots travel down the aisles autonomously, picking up boxes and leaving empty ones so production can be resumed.

The storage cathedrals, decoration and packaging

The robots then put the boxes in the conveyors, which move them into the storage cathedrals (click here to see a complete report on them, the following video only has a brief summary). There, the huge cranebots lift them to the heavens, placing them in endless towers of boxes. There are four of these cathedrals in the Lego factory, and no humans are inside. The mainframes know what it is inside at all times, and order the cranebots to retrieve boxes and send them to decoration and packaging, where Lego sets take their final form.

Here, the Lego pieces may take two ways. One is to go straight to the packaging lines. The other is to go into decoration. Decoration is the most expensive part of the Lego process. Here, the pieces are individually painted with absolute precision, like you can see in detail in this video.

In the packaging lines the pieces are distributed: they are dumped into the machine, which separates them one by one, then counts them using optical sensors, and placed in a generic small box. I watched in amazement, seeing how the pieces fell into these small boxes on a very small conveyor. At every step, one, two, three or whatever amount of pieces will fall into the box, according to the instructions of the set in production.

Along the way, high precision scales measure the weight of the box. The computers know exactly how much a box has to weigh at any stage, indicating that the correct number and kind of pieces are inside. If there's a variation of a few micro-grams, the alarm jumps and an operator grabs the box, sorts the pieces, and puts the box back into production.

Once the box is complete, the contents are dropped into the plastic wrapping machine, which makes a bag with the pieces inside. The box are then dropped inside another box, and passed into another production line, where more bags would be added until all the set pieces are in place, ready to be packaged and sent to shops all around the world.

As I watched the boxes going away, being wrapped for shipping, I couldn't help to have this feeling of absolute marvel. From plastic grains to full sets, everything controlled by computers and robots, in a scale that—given the size of most of these piece—stunned me. Next time you look at that Lego box full of bricks, or your collection of mini-figs, think about how complex and elegant the whole production process is. Your "toy" will have then a completely new dimension.