Short film produced at the New York Film Academy and directed by Stephen o'regan. (...)
They're Made Out of Meat is a Nebula Award-nominated short story by Terry Bisson. It was originally published in OMNI. It consists entirely of dialogue between two characters, and Bisson's website hosts a theatrical adaptation. A film adaptation won the Grand Prize at the Seattle Science Fiction Museum's 2006 film festival.
The two characters are sentient beings capable of traveling faster than light, on a mission to "contact, welcome and log in any and all sentient races or multibeings in this quadrant of the Universe." Bisson's stage directions represent them as "two lights moving like fireflies among the stars" on a projection screen. They converse briefly on their bizarre discovery of carbon-based life, which they refer to incredulously as "thinking meat." They agree to "erase the records and forget the whole thing," marking the Solar System "unoccupied."
The story was collected in the 1993 anthology Bears Discover Fire and Other Stories, and has circulated widely on the Internet, which Bisson finds "flattering." It has been quoted in cognitive, cosmological, and philosophical scholarship.
"The Best of Both Worlds" is a two-part episode from the third/fourth seasons of the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation. (...)
"The Best of Both Worlds" is a significant and highly regarded two-part episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that was written by Michael Piller and directed by Cliff Bole. Part I first aired during the week of June 18, 1990 as the third season finale and ended as a cliffhanger and fandom speculation began to mount about the fate of Captain Picard and the crew of the Enterprise-D (...)
Borg drones start attacking them, but just before the away team is beamed back, they are horrified to see an assimilated Picard.
Although unable to save Picard, their actions force the Borg to drop to impulse and give the Enterprise a chance to use their weapon. Riker asks if the weapon is ready, and Geordi confirms. Shelby, though, wants to try to save Picard, though there are only minutes left and the Borg appear ready to return to warp. Suddenly they are hailed by the Borg ship. "Picard", now Locutus, appears on the viewscreen, and delivers an ultimatum:
"I am Locutus of Borg. Resistance is futile. Your life, as it has been, is over. From this time forward, you will service us."
Faced with the prospect of losing his captain or risking the future of humanity, Riker orders Worf to destroy the cube - "Fire."
James Randi, stage name The Amazing Randi, is a stage magician and scientific skeptic best known as a challenger of paranormal claims and pseudoscience. (...)
Uri Geller, an Israeli-British performer and celebrity famous for his claimed psychic powers, was unable to bend any tableware during a 1973 appearance on The Tonight Show where the spoons he was to bend had been preselected by Johnny Carson. Earlier in his career, Carson had been an amateur stage magician, as had James Randi who advised Carson on how to thwart potential trickery. Randi explained in a 1993 Secrets of the Psychics for the NOVA television series: "I was asked to prevent any trickery. I told them to provide their own props and not to let Geller or his people anywhere near them." (...)
Peter Popoff, is a German-born U.S. televangelist who has spent most of his adult life claiming to treat physical ailments through the use of faith healing. These claims were debunked in 1987 when noted skeptic James Randi and his assistant, Steve Shaw, researched Popoff attending shows across the country for months to discover radio transmissions of Popoff's wife. The transmissions were made by his wife, Elizabeth Popoff, off-stage reading information which she and her aides (Volmer Thrane, the brother of his manager Nancy Thrane, and Reeford Sherrill) had gathered from earlier conversation with members of the audience. Popoff would simply listen to these promptings with his in-ear receiver and repeat what he heard to the crowd. After tapes of these transmissions were played on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, Popoff's popularity and viewing audiences declined sharply, and his ministry declared bankruptcy later that year
James Hydrick was a self-described psychic who claimed to be able to perform telekinesis. Following a nationally televised demonstration of his abilities, he was exposed as a fraud on a subsequent show and eventually Hydrick confessed to an investigative reporter. (...)
Magician and paranormal skeptic James Randi demonstrated the pencil trick on the television program That's My Line, hosted by Bob Barker. In a follow-up episode, Randi and Hydrick both appeared. When Randi performed the simple control of placing small pieces of styrofoam "peanuts" on the table around the phone book (to show if Hydrick was actually turning the pages by blowing on them), Hydrick's "powers" suddenly failed him. Hydrick attempted to explain that when the foam was heated by the stage lights they developed a static electric charge which, when added to the weight of the page, required more force than he was able to generate to turn the page. Randi and the judges, though, declared that this theory had no scientific basis. After an hour and a half of Hydrick staring at the pages (the show was edited for time) without any results, and indignantly claiming that his powers were real, he finally admitted being unable to complete the challenge. The judging panel (which included a parapsychologist) stated that, in their opinion, no supernatural phenomenon had taken place. The failed stunt resulted in the television show That's Incredible receiving a Pigasus Award, and effectively ended Hydrick's television career in a humiliating fashion.
"Anthology of Interest I" is episode sixteen in season two of Futurama. It originally aired in North America on May 21, 2000. This episode, as well as the later "Anthology of Interest II", serves to showcase three out-of-canon "imaginary" stories, in a manner similar to the "Treehouse of Horror" episodes of Matt Groening's other animated series The Simpsons. (...)
Fry narrowly misses falling into the cryogenic tube, and a rift in the space-time continuum appears, which shows the Planet Express crew in the future. The next day, after talking to Mr. Panucci, he came to the attention of Stephen Hawking who arranges for Fry to be abducted.He is introduced to the "Vice Presidential Action Rangers", whose task is to protect the space-time continuum.
Fry explains what happened the previous night at the cryogenic facility and the Vice Presidential Action Rangers determine that Fry was supposed to die and try to kill him. Another rift appears during the attempted murder and Nichelle Nichols suggests that Fry be frozen and Gary Gygax gives Fry his +1 mace for protection in the future. Just before Fry is frozen, he smashes the cryogenic tube, causing the universe to collapse into a space-time rift. This results in Fry and the Vice Presidential Action Rangers appearing at some other indeterminate dimension which is not part of the universe. The scenario ends with them playing Dungeons and Dragons for the rest of eternity.
Scientists now believe there may really be a parallel universe - in fact, there may be an infinite number of parallel universes, and we just happen to live in one of them. These other universes contain space, time and strange forms of exotic matter. Some of them may even contain you, in a slightly different form. Astonishingly, scientists believe that these parallel universes exist less than one millimetre away from us. In fact, our gravity is just a weak signal leaking out of another universe into ours.
For years parallel universes were a staple of the Twilight Zone. Science fiction writers loved to speculate on the possible other universes which might exist. In one, they said, Elvis Presley might still be alive or in another the British Empire might still be going strong. Serious scientists dismissed all this speculation as absurd. But now it seems the speculation wasn't absurd enough. Parallel universes really do exist and they are much stranger than even the science fiction writers dared to imagine.
The X-Files is a Peabody- and Emmy Award-winning science fiction television series created by Chris Carter, which first aired on September 10, 1993, and ended on May 19, 2002. The show was one of the American FOX network's first major hits, and its main characters and slogans (e.g. "The Truth Is Out There," "Trust No One," "I Want to Believe") became pop culture touchstones. The X-Files was seen as a defining series of the 1990s, coinciding with the era's widespread distrust of governments, interest in conspiracy theories and spirituality, and belief in the existence of extraterrestrial life.
The Outer Limits is an American television series. Similar in style to the earlier The Twilight Zone, though tending more to science fiction than fantasy, The Outer Limits is an anthology show in which each episode is a self-contained story with a plot twist. In its original incarnation the show ran for two seasons from 1963 to 1965 in black-and-white. It was revived in 1995 and ran for seven seasons, until 2002. (...)
"There is nothing wrong with your television. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are now controlling the transmission. We control the horizontal and the vertical. We can deluge you with a thousand channels or expand one single image to crystal clarity - and beyond. We can shape your vision to anything our imagination can conceive. For the next hour we will control all that you see and hear. You are about to experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the deepest inner mind to... The Outer Limits. Please stand by." — Opening narration – The Control Voice – 1990s
