The other day I watched Daft Punk’s Around the World video for the first time in a couple years, so naturally ended up watching a number of their vids and stumbled upon this amazing homemade video to DP’s Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger (trust me, be patient, it doesn’t really start until about 40 seconds in, and gets really good a little later).

Apparently there’s a whole genre of similarly choreographed videos to this song, including at school talent shows and a performance by the Wellesley rugby team.

For those who might not appreciate the Dose posting video of scantily clad women dancing in their parents’ basement, here are scantily clad men doing the same, which is probably a better version anyway, except they don’t capture the true essence of DP, seeing as they’re not wearing homemade robot heads wrapped in tin foil.

*This goes out to all the Kanye fans who’ve never heard of Daft Punk.

At first, Michael Bay thought that a Transformers movie sounded like “a dumb idea”. Then he had an epiphany . . . in Pawtucket.

What helped persuade Mr. Bay to take the first “Transformers” movie — which in 2007 took in more than $700 million worldwide at the box office, and whose sequel, “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,” opens on Wednesday — was a visit to the Pawtucket, R.I., headquarters of Hasbro, which creates the Transformers toys.

There Mr. Bay, 44, was given a thorough education on the narrative embedded in the 25-year-old toy line: a back story about warring factions of valiant Autobots and nefarious Decepticons, who bring their battle to Earth from their home planet, Cybertron.

An article in The New York Times examines the transformation of Hasbro under its new chief, Brian Goldner who joined the company in 2000, into a major player in the movie industry.  This new sequel is pretty much review-proof; go ahead and enjoy yourselves (you know who you are). I’ll wait for Bruno, thank you.

In celebration of the exciting new Transformers flick coming out tomorrow (or at midnight, if you’re awesome like me) dig this bad ass track and video by Maja.

You can follow my dorky thoughts on the Transformers franchise all week over at Bread and Roses.

Socialists say booooo!!!!

AFTER SIX wonderful years, it’s hard to say goodbye to Battlestar Galactica (BSG), the most intelligent, provocative, unexpected and downright gods-damn enjoyable television series of our time.

And after four seasons of mind-bending ambiguity, complexity and possibility, it has to be said that the end was a disappointment. The extended episode seemed rushed, lacking the show’s usual trademark patient unfolding. There are certainly some great moments, such as when…

We’re getting so damn close…

A laboratory robot called Adam has been hailed as the first machine in history to have discovered new scientific knowledge independently of its human creators.

Adam formed a hypothesis on the genetics of bakers’ yeast and carried out experiments to test its predictions, without intervention from its makers at Aberystwyth University.

The result was a series of “simple but useful” discoveries, confirmed by human scientists, about the gene coding for yeast enzymes. The research is published in the journal Science.

This post is next to worthless for anybody to whom it is news, as you shouldn’t start watching the show with only three episodes left. (I’d begin with the introductory miniseries, which has a kick-ass opening, but also about an hour of fat. Be patient, and trust that things will improve.)

I’ve not been so excited to watch the conclusion of a TV series since The Wire. And perhaps Deep Space Nine (also largely a Ron Moore production) before that? And man what a bring-down that series finale was…

It’s tough to write about BSG without giving much away. Let’s just say that it’s the Robot War, and you should bet on the robots.

Not every last moment is brilliant, and there’s some stinky cheese here and there, but on the whole it’s advanced the sci-fi space-faring motif to new heights, from which the genre cannot return. Which is to say, a lot of shows that might have been watchable in the pre-BSG era just wouldn’t cut it anymore. Here’s Moore describing — accurately I think — what felt wrong about Star Trek: Voyager, on which he briefly worked. In many respects, the BSG universe was created in opposition to it:

The premise has a lot of possibilities. Before it aired, I was at a convention in Pasadena, and Sternbach and Okuda were on stage, and they were answering questions from the audience about the new ship. It was all very technical, and they were talking about the fact that in the premise this ship was going to have problems. It wasn’t going to have unlimited sources of energy. It wasn’t going to have all the doodads of the Enterprise. It was going to be rougher, fending for themselves more, having to trade to get supplies that they want. That didn’t happen. It doesn’t happen at all, and it’s a lie to the audience.

I think the audience intuitively knows when something is true and something is not true. Voyager is not true. If it were true, the ship would not look spic-and-span every week, after all these battles it goes through. How many times has the bridge been destroyed? How many shuttlecrafts have vanished, and another one just comes out of the oven? That kind of bullshitting the audience I think takes its toll. At some point the audience stops taking it seriously, because they know that this is not really the way this would happen. These people wouldn’t act like this.”

The show engages an array of issues — consciousness, mysticism, will, evolution, politics, social hierarchies, and more, with an underlying existential absurdism throughout — just the way I like it. Most episodes have crisp story arcs, which also fit nicely into a compelling four-year narrative. And the show doesn’t pander: When the network pressured the writers to lighten up the atmosphere a bit — scripting in a party for a crew member’s birthday was one suggestion — they begrudgingly obliged: by setting off a bomb during the raucous celebration of a pilot’s hundredth mission. The network took the hint…

Tonight at 10pm on the SciFi network — And that time slot is all the more evidence that they have a good read on who their audience is.

Talking about feelings and self-awareness:

And, yeah — Here’s Einstein. He can hop around: