Paint Drying
In 2016, British independent filmmaker Charlie Shackleton produced the film "Paint Drying," which was 10 hours and seven minutes long and consisted of one continuous shot, without audio, of white paint drying on a brick wall.
The film was made to protest film censorship in the UK and the law requiring filmmakers to pay for ratings from the British Board of Film Classification.
The cost to rate "Paint Drying" was the equivalent of about $5,000, which Shackleton paid via a Kickstarter campaign. The BBFC rated the film "U" for Universal — "No material likely to offend or harm."
Promotional still by Charlie Shackleton for Paint Drying.
Big Blue
The American technology behemoth IBM, International Business Machines Corporation, was founded in 1911 as CTR — Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company. It renamed itself IBM in 1924.
IBM grew to become the acknowledged leader in many computer-related services, including early punch-card technology, electric typewriters, mainframe computers, and personal computers. By the 1970s, IBM produced 80 percent of computers in the US and 70 percent worldwide.
Eventually, IBM backed away from personal computing to focus on hardware, mainframes, nanotechnology, consulting, and research.
IBM innovations over the years have included the floppy disk, the hard drive, the magnetic strip card, the ATM, and the UPC barcode. The company holds about 150,000 patents. Its revenue in 2022 was, oh, about $60 billion.
Dolly
The first mammal to be cloned was the female sheep Dolly in 1996. Scottish researchers extracted a cell from an adult sheep, combined it with an unfertilized egg from another sheep, and implanted the embryo in a surrogate mother.
Having been cloned from a mammary gland cell, the sheep was named after Dolly Parton.
Dolly (the sheep) was born normally, lived an ordinary life on a farm, and had six lambs. She (the sheep) developed a malignant lung tumor in 2003 and was euthanized.
The tumor was caused by a virus that also infected non-cloned sheep on the farm, so Dolly's status as a clone apparently was not a factor.
No comments:
Post a Comment