And while we’re talking about classics being reinvented, here’s a bit of cinema news: it looks like additional footage from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), lost since the original version was pulled from the Berlin theatres, has turned up again. According to Die Zeit, “The rediscovered material is in need of restoration after 80 years; the pictures are scratched, but clearly recognizable.” The Guardian reports,

The uncut version is said to solve the mystery as to why Maria, the workers’ insurrectionist leader, is mistaken by a baying mob for her doppelganger, a female robot.

OK, cinema buffs, here’s a question: did you find this part of the movie problematic or difficult to understand? I, for one, missed whatever is supposed to be the matter here. (Mobs are not noted for their fine powers of perception.) Perhaps the next time I watch my Metropolis DVD, I’ll smack my forehead and exclaim, “How silly of me not to have noticed that gaping hole all along!” Still, I’d be much happier to find out why Joh Fredersen wanted to let the mob into the Heart Machine. Did he just have a fantastically poor grasp of the consequences?

Extra details from the Guardian:

Schmale, a spy who is sent by the autocratic leader of the futuristic city, Joh Frederson, to pursue his son, Freder, plays a minor role in the cut version, but a significant supporting role in the original. “The role … can finally be understood,” Rother said.

A scene in which children are saved from the workers’ underworld is also said to be “much more dramatic” — and more violent — than in the cut version.

Yay violence!

Being the sort of nerd who listens to DVD commentary tracks and watches all the special features, I recall that the contents of many of the missing or damaged portions of Metropolis were deduced from the film’s censorship certificate. This document, from the Head Office of Film Censorship, listed the contents of all the title cards (I presume to certify that the film was acceptable for viewing audiences). It looks like the newly rediscovered footage thus contains either ambiguous dialogue or none at all.

Out of the 32,490 spam messages this website has received, a few have given me wry smiles:

I couldn’t understand some parts of this article The Necessity of Mathematics, but I guess I just need to check some more resources regarding this, because it sounds interesting.

Hooray for text substitution! It’s almost like having a fan.

Ooog.

There was some kind of party at my place last night.

My home filled up with people, most of whom I’d never met before. Many of them were even. . . . girls. I remember being complimented for my blueberry bread, but have few memories otherwise. While I try to extrapolate what happened from the detritus left behind, here is an electronic version of the Sunday supplements of yore:
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One of the nice things about science blogs is that they can help transmit the “life stories” of the scientific lifestyle, making a written record of the hitherto unwritten folklore our community generates. In an earlier epoch, each student had to learn the hard way the lesson that whatever you do in lab will not work the first time. Now, the student can receive a tiny foretaste of the pain which awaits and thus, perhaps, live better for it. So, in that spirit, I offer the “life lesson” for this week:

Do not oversleep and miss a meeting because the meeting announcement was sent to the e-mail address you don’t use because it’s continually broken, or else you too may draw the short straw in absentia and find yourself in charge of assembling a volume of conference proceedings. I enjoy working with the written word, perhaps more so than many of my fellow physics boffins, but I can easily think of more interesting things to edit than an overpriced book which nobody will buy and fewer will read. Hooray, academia.

And here’s another thing: the downside of working in an “interdisciplinary” environment (other than the episodic crises of “I’m not doing real science!” conscience and the assertions from specialists in field X that they can solve problems and lead revolutions in field Y without actually having the ground-level knowledge of Y) is that you might be one of the select few who know LaTeX. This is a death sentence: much as being the guy/girl who knows how the Web server works means that all the Web-related tasks fall onto your lap, being the one who knows LaTeX brings all sorts of “little,” er, “action items” your way.

But it’s not all bad. Even digging through the conference e-mail pile for the revised papers people have sent in has a few compensations. There’s the Big Name who doesn’t want to bother with the “Procrustean bed requirements” imposed by the publisher and forgoes inclusion, but even better, there’s the entertaining spam attracted to an e-mail address which was, after all, publicly announced on the conference Web site without the slightest bit of preventive obfuscation.

“We offer the clone-by-phone service of your dreams,” proclaims the e-mail. In just twelve days, their company will “synthesize and clone a 1 kb gene, with all mutations, deletions, fusions, epitope tags and codon optimizations you can think of.” Increase the size of your DNA by four micrograms in only two weeks!

The same firm — which, on casual investigation, looks otherwise legitimate — has been spamming other addresses. The linguist Mark Liberman got a similar message, for example. (“I expect they got my name and email address from some bioinformatics conference I attended, or something like that,” he notes.)

MEMO TO GEN SCRIPT: Mass, unsolicited mailings are not the way to generate good will or impress the world with your netiquette. Thanks for the laugh, though.

Upon reflection, this opens an entire new avenue of exploration. What other scientific services can be hawked by spam, and what would the messages sound like?

SILVER SPRING, MD — Tommy Thayer, 30, is quoted by the Washington Post as saying the following:

It’s a damn shame there hasn’t already been a black president as far as I’m concerned. We are so used to all the presidents being all whites and all men. That’s like telling everyone we are a racist nation. I think people are robbing themselves if they don’t get to know other cultures.

Thayer identifies himself as “all white, 100 percent white, Irish, Italian if you want specifics.” Irish and Italians as members of a cultural or ethnic majority: discuss. Have we as a nation outgrown Grandmother’s fears that Kennedy was taking his orders from the Pope? Would latter-day incarnations of Sacco and Vanzetti be regarded as white troublemakers?

To provide a pretense of added value, I will be dividing today’s list of interesting blag posts into categories. First, here are a few items in the “let’s just learn about science!” folder, listed roughly in order of increasing sophistication and presumed background knowledge:
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. . . the Carnival of Elitist Bastards.

Thanks to Glennda Chui, I noticed a piece in the CERN Courier, “Les femmes du LHC,” which interviews ten female members of the Large Hadron Collider project. For example, the dark-matter researcher Fabiola Gianotti is deputy spokesperson for the ATLAS collaboration (and a pianist who studied at the Conservatorio Giuseppe Verdi). Of being a woman in physics, she says,

Physics is, unfortunately, often seen as a male subject; sterile and without charm or emotion. But this is not true, because physics is art, aesthetics, beauty and symmetry. Women have obstacles in the field for merely social reasons. Research does not allow you to make life plans. And the difficulties for women with a family are many. Something should be done, for instance, to develop more structures that would enable women with children to go through a physics career without too many obstacles, starting with nursery schools.

And Gilda Scioli, an experimentalist from the University of Bologna, comments thusly on why physics is a male-heavy profession:

Because being a researcher is not an easy profession for women. What we do can only be done here. But if I had a small child and an experiment to do, what should I do? Do I say good-bye to everybody, leave for a year and ask my husband to breast-feed the baby?

Meanwhile, Seth Zenz explains what it’s like to be a grad student at CERN. (Hint: a stipend is like a salary for small values of N.) To make the task of cheap recreation easier, Tom Swanson has created Crackpot Bingo, to be played during those talks which turn out to be, shall we say, less than rigorous.

Every once in a while, the world of science blogging threatens to implode into navel-gazing. This time, the question is whether the 800-kilo, ten-tentacled gorilla of ScienceBlogs.com, PZ Myers, should be telling his legion of readers about online polls in which aforesaid readers can choose to vote. Is it a mild form of low-investment activism, a kind of catnip for herding cats, or a joke which has outlived its welcome? Clearly, it’s time for the “wisdom of crowds” to decide!

Voting will continue until morale improves.

What? You mean I can fill up a blog post without any content of my own?

T. Ryan Gregory has a typically excellent essay on his first experience doing scientific research. Students must learn important lessons about how science actually gets done, and probably the most important of those is, as he says, “whatever they try to do in the lab will not work the first time.” Now, if only that had been explained to me when I made my first bumbling measurements of junction magnetoresistance, during that summer program so many years ago. . . .

Elsewhere on the Network, Jeff Medkeff finds that in the free market of credibility, the Libertarian National Convention has been out-competed. Meanwhile, Steve Novella, after smacking down Michael Egnor for the Nth time, takes a break and debunks the wishful thinking known as “Brain Gym.”

Finally, on a more somber note, Ron Brown at The Frame Problem has done yeoman service putting together the first CarnivUL of The fraudless, documenting the first great Stand Alone Complex of our time.

I’m late in remarking upon the news that Steven Spielberg has snared DreamWorks the rights for Ghost in the Shell. We are to be treated to a live-action, 3D adaptation written by Jamie Moss. According to Variety,

Universal and Sony were also chasing “Ghost in the Shell,” but Steven Spielberg took personal interest in the property and made it happen at DreamWorks.

” ‘Ghost in the Shell’ is one of my favorite stories,” Spielberg said. “It’s a genre that has arrived, and we enthusiastically welcome it to DreamWorks.”

Mm-hmmm. I suppose that, basking in a John Williams score, we’re going to learn how Motoko Kusanagi just wants to be a real girl, while Public Security Section 9 hunts down the hacker once known as the Puppet Master but since rechristened the Blue Fairy.

Now, an existence proof that an assumption widespread in modern culture is in fact flawed:

Thanks to Geoffrey K. Pullum.

I’m not as excited by Doctor Who as — ahem — some people, but this news report made me perk up:

The evolutionary biologist and best-selling author of The God Delusion will appear as a guest star in the new series of Doctor Who, which began last night. “People were falling at his feet,” says Davies, creator of the BBC’s flagship show. “We’ve had Kylie Minogue on that set, but it was Dawkins people were worshipping.”

Cue the complaints that atheism is a cult of personality in 3. . . 2. . . .

(Thanks to Lee Brimmicombe-Wood at Pharyngula.)

UPDATE (7 April): He’s also become a D&D character, or more precisely, a “22th-level Evolutionary Biologist” with “spell resistance infinite” (because magic isn’t real).