Gravitas is a unique video podcast that pairs original music compositions with computer graphic simulations of the universe in motion.

Here’s the podcast description:

GRAVITAS is a visual and musical celebration of the beauty in a dynamic universe driven by gravity. Animations from supercomputer simulations of forming galaxies, star clusters, galaxy clusters, and galaxy interactions are presented as moving portraits of cosmic evolution. Billions of years of complex gravitational choreography are presented in 9 animations – each one interpreted with an original musical composition inspired by the exquisite movements of gravity. The result is an emotive and spiritually uplifting synthesis of science and art.

Astrophysicist John Dubinski combines a knowledge of cosmology, galaxy dynamics and computer graphics to create breathtaking portraits of a universe in motion. Composer-pianist John Kameel Farah merges the soundworlds of renaissance and baroque counterpoint, free improvisation, Middle-Eastern music, minimalism, techno and electronica to create a musical feast that crosses time and dimension.

The podcast explores deep ideas, expressed entirely through visuals and musics.

You can subscribe to the podcast by adding this feed URL to your podcast client software:

http://www.galaxydynamics.org/podcasts/gravitas.xml

NBC’s Quarterlife – a heavily-hyped serialized drama from the creators of thirtysomething and My So-Called Life – was supposed to be a bold new direction for television. The show was hyped as “the first television-quality production for the Web.”

Unfortunately, it was a pretty awful television-quality production for the Web.

In December, we told you that Quarterlife was a bomb, getting beat out on YouTube by the likes of sleeping kitties, graffiti videos and even a video of Sims in labor.

Online views for the show plummeted from its debut, going from nearly 800,000 YouTube views for the first episode to just a few thousand for recent episodes.

Now NBC is finding out the hard way that a show that tanks on the Internet probably isn’t going to work on TV either. In its network debut, Quarterlife was last in its timeslot, losing out to Jericho and an news magazine Primetime: What Would You Do Now?

What Would You Do Now? 

What we would do now is put Quarterlife out to pasture, tell NBC to stop thinking of the Web as “TV lite” and start taking a long, hard look at shows that have proven to be successful online.

Update: NewTeeVee’s Liz Gannes reports that Quarterlife creator Marshall Herskovitz has admitted that the show was a bomb.

“I watched it last night,” said Herskovitz. “When you saw it on TV it didn‚Äôt look like TV, and when you saw it on the Internet it didn‚Äôt look like the Internet.‚Äù

NBC & Pando Networks, a provider of P2P content delivery services, announced today that Pando will be providing video delivery services for the NBC Direct service.

While it’s interesting to see a mainstream network using P2P to distribute video, it looks like NBC Direct is going to be another misbegotten proprietary Internet television offering. It requires a special player, it won’t work with Macs and it won’t work with most successful Internet media platform, Apple’s iTunes ecosystem.

What NBC Direct will offer is ad-supported downloads, via a custom Windows player, of programs across the NBC prime time line up. Pando’s p2p solution will ensure protection of copyrighted material using hash matching, digital fingerprinting and content watermarking technologies. Good for NBC – but it means that you’ll be locked into viewing videos on NBC’s terms.
Viewers will also be able to select shows that they’d like automatically delivered to their computers, in a sort of proprietary podcast-like fashion.

Programs currently available include “30 Rock”, “The Office”, “Heroes”, “My Name Is Earl”, “Medium”, “American Gladiators”, “Celebrity Apprentice”, “Friday Night Lights”, “Late Night with Conan O’Brien” and “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.”

Kent Nichols – one of the viral video gurus behind Ask A Ninja – has an interesting new post at his site. He looks at the state of Internet video, calling it the golden age:

“The Indie TV movement is on the rise. The club of show runners is now open to anyone with a dream and the entrepreneurial skills.This is the golden age. Sundance in the 80s and 90s. A time when you can create something new and fresh, get seen by millions and have the chance to retain ownership over that property as it enters the big media system.

Yesterday I tested out the iTunes rental feature by renting “Once” — the film that won the best song at the Oscars. It’s a sweet, sentimental and sad at the end. Something you don’t get in the Hollywood system.

Put aside the fact that the dude is 37 and is dating her (she’s only 19 and they’ve known each other for five years — creepy).

$160k was the budget for 86 minutes of content or about $2k/finished minute. Not bad and definitely in the range of where webseries are right now. It also shows you what you can accomplish at that budget range.”

Kent goes on to say:

“We are still looking at the seeds of an indie driven TV movement like the American cinema saw in the 60s and 70s.”

A no-budget expos√© on the meat industry can result in the largest meat recall ever. A low-budget movie can win an Oscar. A well-placed video camera can capture the next “macaca” incident and end a political career.

It’s an amazing time. Making a television show, a documentary or maybe even a movie is within your reach, right now.

There’s a fun post on the 10 Weirdest iPod Accessories over at PC Mag.

Our favorite is probably the Dreamgear i.sound Plasma, above. It’s a psychedelic plasma globe that has four integrated speakers, giving you a “custom-designed electro-magnetic lightshow dance to the beat of your music.”

Of course, if you really want to see weird iPod accessories, the definitive guide is probably still our Holiday Guide to iCrap.

Abilene Christian University announced this week that they would outfit all incoming freshmen with their own iPod Touch or iPhone, to enable the students to receive homework alerts, answer in-class quizzes, and use about a dozen other web applications the university has developed for the devices.

ACU’s plans for have attracted the attention of executives at Apple and administrators at other universities. ACU Chief Information Officer Kevin Roberts returned to Abilene Monday from Apple headquarters, where he was asked to present the university’s “creative vision for converged media devices” to executives and to selected leaders from universities including Harvard, Yale, MIT, Duke, Stanford, Oxford, Princeton and UCLA.

The university’s overall plan for using mobile technology in education has been captured in a film called ‘Connected.

“We are not merely providing cutting-edge technology tools to our incoming students,” said Roberts. “We are also providing the web applications that ensure these tools will become critical to the students’ learning experience. Because 93 percent of ACU students bring their own computers with them to college, we are choosing to take them to the next level by providing converged mobile devices.”

Apple Computer today announced that iTunes is now the number two music retailer in the United States, second only to Wal-Mart, based on the latest data from the NPD Group. Apple also disclosed that there are now over 50 million iTunes Store customers, who have bought over four billion songs (20 million songs sold on Christmas Day 2007 alone) from a catalogue of over six million songs from all of the major and thousands of independent labels.

Today’s number-two retailer ranking is based on data from market research firm the NPD Group‚Äôs MusicWatch survey, which captures consumer-reported past week unit purchases. The research census counts one CD as representing 12 tracks, excluding wireless transactions. The iTunes Music Store became the second-largest music retailer in the US after Wal-Mart, based on the amount of music sold during 2007.

Apple today updated its MacBook and MacBook Pro notebook lines with the latest Intel Core 2 Duo processors, larger hard drives and 2GB of memory standard in most models. In addition, MacBook Pro includes the latest NVIDIA graphics processors, now with up to 512MB of video memory, and Apple’s Multi-Touch trackpad, first introduced in MacBook Air.

The new MacBook Pro features the latest Intel Core 2 Duo technology with:

• up to a 2.6 GHz processor with 6MB of shared L2 cache;
• up to 4GB of 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM memory;
• up to a 300GB hard drive; and
• NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT graphics with up to 512MB of video memory.

Every MacBook Pro now includes a trackpad with Multi-Touch gesture support for pinch, rotate and swipe; an illuminated keyboard and a built-in ambient light sensor, which automatically adjusts the brightness of the keys as well as the brightness of the display for optimal visibility.

Pricing & Availability

The new MacBook and MacBook Pro models are now shipping and will be available through the Apple Store (www.apple.com), Apple’s retail stores and Apple Authorized Resellers.

TalkShoe has introduced an iPhone application that lets you participate or conduct community calls from your phone and even lets you use the service to create podcasts.

Features:

• iPhone users can join live calls and view upcoming calls they may want to participate in.
• The iPhone application provides a one click link to auto dial-in and participate in a call. Up to 250 people can join and talk all together at once.
• Hosts can create public or unlisted community call episodes and manage them through their iPhone.
• TalkShoe members can follow specific calls, which can then be viewed from their iPhone or be notified via email or SMS when they start.
• The iPhone application makes it easy to record a podcast right from your phone.
• Calls can be recorded for later listening or turned into a podcast.
• In addition to participating through iPhone, anyone can also participate via phone, mobile phone, Skype, or VoIP via the talkshoe.com website.

People now spend twice as much time surfing the Web as they do watching TV, according to new research from IDC.

IDC surveyed nearly one thousand Internet users for the survey. They found that:

• The Internet is the medium on which online users spend the most time (32.7 hours/week). This is equivalent to almost half of the total time spent each week using all media (70.6 hours).
• People spend twice as much time on the Internet as they spend watching television (16.4 hours).
• People spend eight times as much time on the Internet as they spentd reading newspapers and magazines (3.9 hours).

“The time spent using the Internet will continue to increase at the expense of television and, to a lesser extent, print media,” said Karsten Weide, program director, Digital Media and Entertainment at IDC. “This suggests that advertising budgets will continue to be shifted out of television, newspapers, and magazines into Internet advertising.”

The data also show that consumers tend to use the media they grew up with. The older the respondents, the more they consume TV, newspapers, and magazines; the younger they are, the more the Internet displaces usage of traditional media.

Using search engines (84% of respondents), mapping and navigation services (83%), personal research (77%), and using email (76%) are the most frequent online activities.