There Will Be Blood begins nearly in silence. Its stunning opening 20 minutes follow a solitary figure as he struggles through an American wasteland, digging, bleeding, building. In its howling quiet, its violent yet graceful choreography, the film presents an iconic image of the ravages of greed, the inextricable link between the mythology of American exceptionalism and the circuits of capital--a lone tragic hero representing the creation of the American dream as well as its inevitable apocalyptic end. Paul Thomas Anderson's 2007 epic begins with one of cinema's greatest depictions of the desire and despair at the heart of American capitalism. But then, so does WALL-E. Nearly everything about the knockout opening of Anderson's masterpiece is also true of Pixar's masterpiece, released in theaters the following year, and, as of this week, the first film from the animation studio to be inducted into the vaunted Criterion Collection.

If you're at all like me, you have paused over those lineups of different colored bins at an airport, empty coffee cup in hand, and wondered where to toss it. Or should the lid go in recycle and the paper in landfill? And then you look in the bins and realize that the contents are all mixed up at this point anyway so it really doesn't matter, it's all going to end up in trash, unfortunately. That is a problem startup Clean Robotics is trying to fix with its trash robot. The robotic system uses motion sensors to detect someone approaching and flip open a lid, load sensors to know when something is tossed into the bin, and metal detectors and a machine vision system that analyzes the objects to help determine whether they are recyclable or landfill.