And because the life cast, or the bust the maquette of Benjamin was made from Brad, we could transpose the data of Brad at 44 onto Brad at 87.

We worked from dental molds of Brad.

Now, this was made from a life cast of Brad.

This is Brad doing one of the Ekman FACS poses.

Brad Pitt What if I told you that I wasn't getting older ...

My friend Brad Kessler says that we didn't become human until we started keeping goats.

Now, there's no use of prosthetic makeup or photography of Brad superimposed over another actor's body.

So, effectively we created a digital puppet that Brad Pitt could operate with his own face.

We needed to make Brad look a lot older needed to age him 45 years or so.

Most people that are following the story of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt will know where Namibia is.

Right? So, effectively, we ended up with a 3D database of everything Brad Pitt's face is capable of doing.

On a frame by frame basis, we could actually reconstruct a 3D head that exactly matched the performance of Brad.

Brad Pitt Well, I heard momma and Tizzy whisper, and they said I was gonna die soon, but ... maybe not.

And the Aha! was, what if we could take Brad Pitt, and we could put Brad in this device, and use this Contour process, and we could stipple on this phosphorescent makeup and put him under the black lights, and we could, in fact, scan him in real time performing Ekman's FACS poses.

And these raised and energy efficient homes were developed by Brad Pitt and Make It Right for the hard hit Ninth Ward.

So now, we had a 3D database of everything Brad Pitt's face can do at age 87, in his 70s and in his 60s.

It's a good film in the sense that I certainly want to see it, right, but don't expect Emmerich to cast Brad Pitt in his next movie digging latrines in Tanzania or something.

Ed Ulbrich, the digital effects guru from Digital Domain, explains the Oscar winning technology that allowed his team to digitally create the older versions of Brad Pitt's face for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

We shot him with four HD cameras so we'd get multiple views of him and then David would choose the take of Brad being Benjamin that he thought best matched the footage with the rest of the cast.

And so we edited the footage that was shot on location with the rest of the cast and the body actors and about six months later we brought Brad onto a sound stage in Los Angeles and he watched on the screen.

And then, the sauce I talked about with our technology stew that secret sauce was, effectively, software that allowed us to match the performance footage of Brad in live action with our database of aged Benjamin, the FACS shapes that we had.

Its burgeoning population far outstrips the country s ability to feed itself. So desperate is Ethiopia that celebrity causes from Bob Geldoff s Live Aid famine relief concerts to Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt s adoption of orphaned babies supplement what donors cannot possibly provide.

Even Jennifer Aniston, whom Brad Pitt left because she did not want kids, now sighs in interviews, as she nears 42, that she has stopped waiting for Prince Charming, and that she, too, could be ready to adopt and go it alone.

Many of you, maybe you've seen it or you've heard of the story, but what you might not know is that for nearly the first hour of the film, the main character, Benjamin Button, who's played by Brad Pitt, is completely computer generated from the neck up.

Indeed, the economy is vastly inferior to Hollywood as a source of glitterati gossip, but much economic reporting makes the coverage of the birth of Brad Pitt s and Angelina Jolie s baby look profoundly serious. Likewise, government is vastly inferior to the World Cup as a sporting spectacle, but much political reporting focuses on who played well and who played badly.

Brad Delong and Larry Summers have argued that in a repressed economy, short term increases in borrowing can pay for themselves, even if the expenditures do not directly increase long run potential. By contrast, Alberto Alesina and Silvia Ardagna argue that in an economy with a large and inefficient government, debt stabilization measures directed at reducing the size of government can actually be expansionary.

Many leading economists and policymakers are forecasting continued economic gloom. Stephen Roach has suggested that in the post crisis global economy relapse is the rule economist Brad DeLong, speaking of the consequences of our lesser depression, argues that the pretense of a eurozone recovery has collapsed and European Central Bank President Mario Draghi has acknowledged the need not only for structural reform, but also fiscal expansion to boost aggregate demand.

Now these themes have been picked up by Dan Tarullo, an influential member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. In an important recent speech, Tarullo called for a cap on the size of America s largest banks, to limit their non deposit liabilities as a percentage of GDP an entirely sensible approach, and one that fits with legislation that has been proposed by two congressmen, Senator Sherrod Brown and Representative Brad Miller.

For example, a 2004 study by Brad Barber and Terrance Odean of the University of California and Yi Tsung Lee and Yiu Jane Liu at National Chengchi University acquired trade by trade data on individual day traders on the Taiwan Stock Exchange. The study found that only the top 1 of day traders made a profit after deducting trading costs in two consecutive six month periods, and the median profit was hardly worth the effort only about US 4000.