DISNEY鈥橲 new movie Chicken Little is now showing in 3D in some cinemas. The film is digital, and this allows left and right-eye views to alternate so rapidly on the screen that an audience wearing special spectacles sees smooth depth.
Before the advent of digital 3D, Hollywood had to use two film projectors, one for the left eye pictures and one for the right. The glasses the audience wore ensured that each eye only saw the pictures intended for that eye. The famous 3D movie, the original House of Wax, made in 1953, had a third roll of film just for the soundtrack. The possibilities for technical foul-ups were endless and Feedback recently saw some Hollywood studio memos from back then that told what happened.
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If the film in one projector broke and had to be spliced back together, some frames were inevitably lost. To keep the pictures in step with the other, undamaged reel, the projectionist was supposed to splice in blank film in place of the lost frames. One copy of House of Wax had 21 replacement sections, some of them half a metre long, so the audience intermittently lost vision in one eye or the other.
There were other glitches too. Audiences at a cinema in California wondered why they were getting a headache and no 3D effect. It turned out the rolls had been wrongly labelled, so the left eye was seeing what should have gone to the right eye, and vice versa. That was nothing compared to what one movie buff in Ireland experienced: the left and right rolls had been repaired many times, without any attempt at keeping them in step, so scenes on screen would change for one eye sooner than for the other, an effect that was physically as well as mentally unsettling.
No wonder 3D never caught on first time round.
LONDON鈥檚 prestigious Royal Society was founded in 1660 by a group of 鈥渘atural philosophers鈥�, including the architect Christopher Wren. Since then, virtually all the UK鈥檚 noted scientists have been fellows of the society. Isaac Newton, for example, was one of its first presidents.
The society鈥檚 website at outlines the services and activities on offer at its headquarters. If you want to find out more, just hit the 鈥渃ontact us鈥� button. A drop-down menu lists the different sections of the society you can communicate with, such as conference facilities, library and archives, press office, and so on. This is all quite straightforward, but the last item on the list is puzzling, to say the least. What, exactly, is provided by the 鈥淔ellows bedroom service鈥�?
THE people running the IT department at a certain Australian university sent out a message warning of some virus-ridden emails doing the rounds, Helen Terren tells us. Recipients were told that 鈥渋n most cases, the emails originate from anywhere in the world鈥�. Terren says she did email the IT desk to ask where the emails in the other cases came from, but received in return only an automatically generated message saying that an incident report had been logged.
In similar vein, when Robert Howes searched for a job at he was offered a choice of locations, including 鈥淎ll鈥� and 鈥淲orldwide鈥�. As he was hoping for a job in space, he chose 鈥淎ll鈥�.
A NOTE circulating round the internet, which some readers will have seen but others won鈥檛, lists internet domain names consisting of run-together words that can be parsed in unintended ways.
鈥淎 serving of food may contain 137 grams of calories, according to an ad from the Tesco supermarket promoting its new labelling system. How many metres of dollars did that cost, wonders Keith Brooke鈥�
Firstly there is 鈥淲ho Represents?鈥�, a database of agencies for the rich and famous, the domain name of which is . Second is the Experts Exchange, a knowledge base where programmers can exchange advice and views: . Looking for a pen? Look no further than Pen Island: . Need a therapist? Try . And if you want to stock up on bedding plants, try the Mole Station Native Nursery, based in New South Wales, Australia: .
The list concludes with the mythical power company . We say mythical, because we investigated this site back on 5 July 2003. It turned out not to be the Italian subsidiary of the UK electricity company PowerGen, but a small company in Tuscany that charged batteries. But even that, it seems, no longer has this domain name, which has been relegated to the category of urban myth. The other sites are all real.
FROM the department of computer rage: A. Lelkens was trying to delete a folder named 鈥減ayments鈥�. But Windows refused to execute the command, saying: 鈥淐annot remove folder 鈥榩ayments鈥�: A file with the name you specified already exists. Specify a different filename.鈥�