Originally posted by The Boston Globe

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It's all connected?
Fans say there's evidence that ties 'Lost' and 'Heroes' together, but creators don't buy it

By Joanna Weiss, Globe Staff | March 4, 2007

Across the Internet, the screen-grabbing obsessives -- the ones who deal in frame-by-frame analysis of ABC's "Lost" -- were getting in a lather about the NBC hit "Heroes." It had to do with a brief scene a few weeks ago, when Nathan Petrelli, the caddish politician who can shoot into the air like a bottle rocket, grumbled about what might happen if word got out about his powers.

Officials could "round us all up, stick us in a lab on some island in the middle of the ocean," Nathan said. And within nanoseconds, the clarion call clanged out in cyberspace: "Heroes" mentions island! It must be a reference to "Lost"!

Yes, "Lost" and "Heroes" air on different networks, tell different stories, and exist -- as "Lost" producers point out -- in totally different time frames. (The "Lost" castaways live, after all, in the fall of 2004.) But to their most devoted fans, the shows have come to represent a sort of yin and yang of serial TV, in constant battle for the title of the Mystery Show That Does It Better.

"Lost," the word goes, is deeper and more cinematic; "Heroes" is pulpier and better-paced. And the way fans sometimes talk, there seems a cosmic cyber-wish for the shows to somehow merge -- to meld into a single supernatural drama that doles out questions and answers in acceptable weekly doses.

Indeed, some seem to believe it's already happening. One fansite, darkufo.blogspot.com, has posted pictures of a "Gannon Car Rentals" brochure, held by Hiro in "Heroes," and Hurley and Claire in "Lost." It also shows off photos of a suncatcher in the background of a trailer in "Heroes," and a similar, fleeting image from a torture video in "Lost." Some fans have noted casting coincidences: Greg Grunberg, who plays Matt Parkman on "Heroes," had a short stint as a doomed pilot on "Lost."

And on a recent Entertainment Weekly blog, Jeff "Doc" Jensen half-jokingly floated the idea that the Dharma Initiative, a fictional company in "Lost," created the super-folks who populate "Heroes." (He added, "Oh, like they would ever admit it if this were true!")

A vast conspiracy? That would be wish-fulfillment at its most geekishly appealing. So it might cause disappointment, in certain circles, to reveal that the heads of both shows claim absolute ignorance.

"Really?" said "Heroes" creator Tim Kring in a telephone interview last week, when told about the eerily-similar car-rental brochures. Then he quickly came up with the same mundane theory that "Lost" executive producer Carlton Cuse had suggested a day earlier.

Some fictional names, Cuse explained, have been cleared, for legal purposes, for use by TV studios: Oceanic Airlines, featured prominently in "Lost," also turned up in the movie "Executive Decision." So it's not such a stretch to imagine that a pamphlet for "Gannon Car Rentals," preprinted and free of legal strings, might have wound up in the hands of the "Heroes" prop department.

"Sometimes," Cuse said, "a rental-car pamphlet is just a rental-car pamphlet."

As for that suncatcher? Nothing intentional, producers swear. But the thought of a link gets Kring talking a bit like a fanboy himself. "That's fantastic! That's so great!" he said. "What if this is sort of happening on some sort of bizarre cosmic level, and we're not even aware of it? That's the best conspiracy."

It's not that there aren't connections between "Heroes" and "Lost"; there are deep ones, in fact. But they generally have to do with the trajectories of Hollywood careers and the legal vagaries of show business. In short, they're less about international mystery and more about "Crossing Jordan."

That's the NBC medical-examiner drama that Kring created; it premiered in 2001, and had on staff an up-and-coming young writer named Damon Lindelof. Toward the end of the third season, Lindelof recalls, he asked permission to meet with "Alias" creator J.J. Abrams, who had an idea for a show about a plane crash on a desert island.

As Lindelof recalled last week, Kring "was incredibly gracious," and helped Lindelof get out of his NBC contract and become a co-creator and executive producer of "Lost."

And, a few years later, when Kring was working on a pilot about genetic mutations and superpowers, he called his old colleague Lindelof to bounce off some ideas.

"We had a couple lunches, had a couple beers, he would talk to me about some of the ideas he was having . . . sort of pick my brain," Lindelof said. To good effect. It was Lindelof, it turns out, who suggested the plot-twist ending of the "Heroes" pilot: That idealistic Peter Petrelli, who believed he could fly, should plummet off a building and be rescued by his brother Nathan -- who actually could. (It was Kring, Lindelof said, who added the idea that Peter has powers, too.)

For the most part, Lindelof said, he offered generalized advice about the overarching truths he had learned after the first season of "Lost." The show aired for two seasons before "Heroes" joined the NBC lineup and became a breakout hit, routinely topping "Lost" in the ratings.

"Don't be afraid to make it really expensive," Lindelof said he told Kring. "Don't be afraid to have a large, sprawling cast. Don't be afraid to kill people off."

And Kring said the success of "Lost" made it easier to pitch and plot his own ambitious show. "Lost" pioneered the model of a "parity" pay scale, which made a large ensemble cast seem more affordable. And the scheduling woes that have angered "Lost" fans made Kring extract a promise from NBC: set the schedule in stone. Knowing he would face a pair of six-week breaks, he said, allowed him to plot out a couple of mini-cliffhangers.

But the conceits behind the shows are different, too, Kring said. And because he's not locked in space or time, he has the easier job. "We're not positing the central mysteries that you have to wrap a story around," he said. "It frees us up to tell a story at a different pace."

Lindelof and Kring haven't talked shop in a while; both say they're immersed in their own shows. But the brain-power link between the series has continued. Writer Jesse Alexander moved to "Heroes" from "Lost" (he knew "where the bodies were buried," Kring said). So did writer Jeph Loeb , a comic-book veteran who has known Kring since the '80s, when he co-wrote the movie "Teen Wolf" and Kring wrote the screenplay for the sequel, "Teen Wolf Too."

It was Loeb, Kring notes, who wrote the "Heroes" episode that featured Nathan's desert island speech. So it might have been a shout-out, Kring said, to his former colleagues on "Lost."

Lindelof didn't take it that way. He's a comic-book aficionado himself -- he wrote the graphic miniseries "Ultimate Wolverine vs. Hulk" -- and said he thought that was a reference to Genosha , an island in the Marvel Comics books where mutants are exiled.

"It didn't even occur to me that it was a wink-wink to 'Lost,' because our characters don't have superpowers," he said.

Then there's the recent reference to "fish biscuits" -- the unappetizing food that Sawyer gnawed in an outdoor cage on "Lost" -- on Hiro's fictitious blog on the NBC "Heroes" website. Here, Kring claims ignorance, as well. He doesn't write the blog. But it was probably a pop culture reference, he says. Which makes him wax a little philosophical.

"We've often asked ourselves the question -- and this is something that a lot of people never think about -- does 'Heroes' exist in the same world that 'Lost' does?" he said. "In our world, do Claire's friends watch 'Lost' on television?"

And if the characters on "Lost" exist in the world of "Heroes," the chance for a TV rendezvous gets even more complex. Getting them together, after all, would require a trip to the past.

It could only be done by Hiro, the "Heroes" character who has the power to bend time and space.

And Lindelof has a thought.

"If there was ever a crossover," Lindelof said, "he would pop up, appear on the beach for, like, two seconds. He'd look at Hurley and he'd say, 'Hello,' and Hurley would say, 'Hello,' and then he would disappear again. And that would be it."

Cuse, Lindelof, and Kring all agree that's unlikely to happen. The shows are produced by different studios and networks -- all with different lawyers -- and the paperwork hurdle would likely be insurmountable. But Kring, for one, says he loves the idea.

"If we could talk them into doing it," he said, "we'd do it."

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Condom device wins Most Beautiful award

Design Indaba update: a condom applicator designed to help AIDS prevention has been named the Most Beautiful Object in South Africa by Dutch designer Jurgen Bey.

Bey, who was in Cape Town to speak at the Design Indaba conference last week, selected the product from a shortlist of 15 products at the Design Indaba Expo.

The applicator, invented by Willem van Rensburg and designed by industrial designer Roelf Mulder of South Africa’s XYZ Design, allows a condom to be put on easily and rapidly.

The user holds the device with the thumb and forefinger of both hands, pulling the condom down over the penis in a single rapid movement. See video demonstrations of the product here and here.

It is hoped the design will encourage the use of condoms, thereby helping reduce the spread of AIDS.

The applicator, which was selected for the SAFE exhibition at MoMA in New York two years ago and is in the museum’s permanent collection is now being marketed and sold under the Pronto brand.

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Originally posted by Herald Tribune

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More daylight saving time may hamper computers
By Steve Lohr
Published: March 5, 2007

NEW YORK: Two years ago, when the U.S. Congress passed a law to extend daylight saving time by a month, the move seemed a harmless step that would let Americans burn a little less fossil fuel and enjoy a bit more sunshine.

Representative Fred Upton, a Republican from Michigan, predicted that children would "rejoice" at the prospect of an extra hour of daylight trick-or- treating on Halloween in October. But there is no rejoicing among corporate technology managers, who must reset countless computer clocks.

The change takes effect next Sunday as daylight saving time begins three weeks earlier (and ends a week later, on the first Sunday in November) in the United States.

This puts the United States out of sync with the rest of the world for longer than usual this spring, almost certainly disrupting not just computers but the business and travel schedules of unprepared companies, workers and travelers. Most of Europe goes to daylight saving time March 25 — two weeks after the States — while most of Asia, Africa and South America do not observe daylight saving time at all.

Many companies are now scrambling to reset BlackBerry e-mail devices, desktop PCs and big data-center computers used to automate payrolls, purchasing and manufacturing.

Any device that has an internal clock looms as a potential problem and must be tweaked for the time change, usually with a software patch. Most internal clocks in computing devices are programmed for the old daylight-time calendar, which Congress set in 1986.

"It's a massive amount of work to get everything in order," said Kim Stevenson, a vice president at EDS, a large technology services company. "And the do-nothing plan is a high-risk plan."

The daylight-time shift, according to technology executives and analysts, amounts to a "mini-Y2K." That is a reference to the rush in the late 1990s to change old software, which was unable to recognize dates in the new millennium, 2000 and beyond.

The fear was that computers would go haywire, and there were warnings of planes falling from the skies and electronic commerce grinding to a halt. Billions of dollars were ultimately invested to fix the so-called millennium bug, and there was no wave of computer-related disasters.

This time, with extended daylight saving time, the problem is subtler. The potential pitfall is a disruption of business, if the clocks inside all kinds of hardware and software systems do not sync up as they are programmed to do.

In a business world that is increasingly computerized and networked, there could be effects on everything from programmed stock trading to just-in-time manufacturing to meeting schedules.

The latest Windows operating system, Vista, is not affected, and for those running Windows XP Service Pack 2, online software updates have been pushed out automatically to correct the problem.

"This is mainly an annoyance for consumers, but it's a major headache for corporate technology departments," said Jeffrey Hammond, an analyst at Forrester Research.

For the roughly 7,000 public companies in the United States, Hammond estimates the total cost of making computer fixes to deal with the daylight saving time shift at more than $350 million.

The impact extends beyond computers themselves. For example, utilities have begun deploying sophisticated time-of-use meters that measure electricity consumption, often at 15- or 30- minute intervals. They charge different rates at different times of day — mainly for large commercial customers — as part of the utilities' programs to manage peak loads on their grids.

Those meters have to be reprogrammed for the daylight saving time shift, sending technicians out for on-site visits costing $40 to $200 each, according to Rick Nicholson, an analyst at IDC.

The energy savings from extending daylight time are not great, but could mount, according to studies. A report last year by the U.S. Department of Energy projected savings in electricity at four-tenths of a percent per day of extended daylight savings time — or three one-hundredths of a percent of annual electricity use. Summer time modestly reduces evening electricity use.

The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, a nonprofit group, estimates that the cumulative benefit through 2020 of longer daylight saving time would be a saving of $4.4 billion and 10.8 million metric tons less carbon spewed into the air.

The major software suppliers are offering patches and assistance to customers. Microsoft has a Web site to help corporate customers and consumers, the Daylight Saving Time Help and Support Center, at microsoft.com/ dst2007.

"This is a challenge for the whole industry," said Rich Kaplan, vice president for customer service at Microsoft. "But for most users, this is mainly a nuisance issue. It's not as if you're going to lose any data — your documents, e- mail, digital music or pictures."

Gregor Bailar, chief information officer at Capital One, a large bank and credit card company, has led a lengthy program to get all its data centers and PCs ready for the daylight saving time shift.

For most people in business, Bailar said, the main problem is going to be synching calendars and meeting schedules.

"My advice to the common Luddite is to confirm, confirm and reconfirm your appointments in March and April," he said.

Or perhaps not. Bailar suggested another option: "What better excuse to miss that boring budget meeting, at least for a month?"

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Originally posted by Makura

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Hope no one takes offense, but I really need to have sex this weekend. My evil clone is posting this.

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