This week a 9.3 hectare man-made lake in a suburb in Missouri suddenly drained away. Apparently a sinkhole developed under the lake because of the porous limestone floor, and after a huge rainstorm, the limestone structure collapsed. Goodbye lake! As one resident said, “Mother Nature. Don’t mess with her.” Duh!

I recently saw the trailer for The Polar Express, a 3D-animated movie based on the picture book. Ewwww! It looks like it’s filled with creepy, lifeless robots. A Japanese researcher, Masahiro Mori, explored the concept of robotic design and used the very evocative phrase “the Uncanny Valley” to explain human psychological reaction to humanoid designs.
In short, as an artificial humanoid object (robot, 3D figure) gets closer to human appearance (ie looks, movement), people have a higher and higher empathetic response towards it, until it hits a certain point, whereupon people find it disquieting and even creepy–this is the realm of the Uncanny Valley. This would explain why a vaguely humanoid robot (eg C-3P0) can be appealing, while the super-realistic animated people in some 3D movies/ads etc are totally off-putting. In contrast, Pixar seems to be going in the right direction with The Incredibles–they’re using 3D human characters, but they’re deliberately cartoony, so they can move in a dynamic, cartoon fashion. And in doing this they look waay more “realistic” than any of those dead people in The Polar Express.