Besides being hugely fun and entertaining to watch, the new video from Phoenix serves to remind us the extent to which the annoying-but-very-catchy tunes of the American power-pop band Fun (insert your own period if you like; I can not do it) are indebted to their French predecessors. Here, those predecessors (Phoenix) are played by Korean actors. Which serves to remind many of us (because we are racist Americans who cannot help but to conflate East Asian countries in our provincial minds) where we first heard Phoenix: in that great Tokyo party scene from Sofia Coppola's Lost In Translation. Which I watched for the first time in years [...]

"With faster than human speed, this is a step in the development of a high speed killer that could negotiate a battlefield quickly to hunt and kill. The biggest concern about this is that no artificial intelligence system can distinguish between civilians and enemy combatants, and so if this was operating on its own it would fall foul of the laws of war." —Great! The military has designed robots that can move faster than we can run away from them. Just in case the swarms of quadrotor drones that are coming fail to annihilate us. (I like the part in that video where the robot cheetah trips [...]