Wednesday: May 12, 2010
Rogue star mystery finally deciphered thanks to Hubble Space Telescope.The massive, hot star seemed out of place when astronomers first spotted it in 2006, and now thanks to Hubble, we know why. The misfit, 30 Dor #016, appears to have been ejected from a cluster of even heftier stars, pinging off of them and off into space at tremendous speed.
Friday: December 14, 2012
University of Chicago receives mystery package addressed to one Henry (Indiana) Jones Jr.An interesting read if only for the care and detail that went into the package itself. The package was received by the admissions department and reportedly almost thrown out until a student worker made the discovery. Could this be some new viral marketing in the making or a student with a really unique application package? Who knows - but either way, this is pretty neat.
Monday: December 10, 2012
Upcoming Star Wars 1313 video game getting some helping hands from all facets of LucasFilms.Now that Disney has acquired LucasArts some interesting news is starting to trickle out regarding their games division. It seems that all of the different entities under LucasFilms such as Industrial Light and Magic, Skywalker Sound, Lucas Animation, and LucasArts are all collobarating on this next generation title. Star Wars 1313 will take place in the seedy underbelly of Corsuscant which alone sounds like an interesting premise. Whatever does come out of this Disney/Lucas effort it will most likely be better than The Force Unleashed 2 by default (zing).
Sunday: December 9, 2012
Modern Family's Ty Burrell to star in sequel to the recently relaunched Muppets franchise.Ty Burrell, one of the stars of ABC's Modern Family, is set to join the cast of Disney's sequel to The Muppets as one of the movie’s human stars. Christoph Waltz was in talks for the role, but the Austrian actor’s schedule prevented the studio from making a deal. The adventure moves from Hollywood to Europe, and while the film is expected to have a slew of cameos -- as is the Muppets' movie tradition -- one of the key roles is an Interpol inspector, whom Burrell will portray.
Monday: November 14, 2011
Everything you never knew about Google's top secret lab where they pursue future ideas.According to the article, this magical place (dubbed 'Google X') is where Google may or may not be working on the following futuristic concepts: 1) an internet fridge that orders food when it's low, 2) driver-less cars, 3) space elevators, 4) personal assistant robots for your home, 5) networked coffee pots and gardening tools and finally 6) training monkeys to fly airplanes for special covert operations.
Wired would like you to know Amazon's Jeff Bezos owns more of the web than you think.An interesting read for those of you who want to have a little more insight as to just what Amazon does these days on the Interwebs besides selling everything under the sun. There's an interesting chart about half-way down he page that discusses how some important companies rely on Amazon's web services to power their products. If AWS shut off today, well - it's best not to think about it.
Thursday: August 11, 2011
Begone memory leaks! Firefox 7 will reportedly use up to fifty percent less memory.If you leave Firefox running for any length of time its memory footprint seems to keep increasing. This can escalate to the point where it stops responding and there’s nothing to do but restart the browser. Personally, I’ve seen this problem have less of an impact during my daily usage since moving to Firefox 5, but it’s still there. Mozilla knows this problem exists and aims to fix it. By the time we see Firefox 7 available for download it will use as much as 50% less memory than any version that has gone before, as well as having those problematic memory leaks fixed.
Wednesday: August 3, 2011
New study suggests that Earth may have originally had two moons.A tiny second moon may once have orbited Earth before catastrophically slamming into the other one, a titanic clash that could explain why the two sides of the surviving lunar satellite are so different from each other, a new study suggests. The second moon around Earth would have been about 750 miles (1,200 kilometers) wide and could have formed from the same collision between the planet and a Mars-sized object that scientists suspect helped create the moon we see in the sky today, astronomers said.
Monday: August 1, 2011
Turns out that coin tosses don't really provide fifty-fifty odds.As usual, it's humanity that messes things up. When flipped by a machine, coins come up heads a solid fifty percent of the time, and tails the other fifty percent. Put the fate of the coin in grubby human hands and the odds tip slightly in favor of the side that faces up just before the coin is flipped. The side that was face up at the beginning of the flip has a fifty-one percent chance of landing face-up at the end. Humans are not as precise as machines, and so the coin rotates around several axes instead of one.
Friday: July 15, 2011
Ten neat Star Wars shirts for your viewing pleasure, go forth and wear The Force proudly.Be the envy of all of your friends as you wear your Wookie of the Year t-shirt with pride and honor knowing that you've served The Republic and rid the galaxy of evil forces who came at you with robotic droids. They may have overrun your planet and caused a Jedi Master to flee into exile but in the end you can always crash with your Ewok friends on Endor and call it a day. Too much?
Tuesday: July 12, 2011
No day is ever complete without a Star Wars a capella light saber battle and accompanying soundtrack.The fun begins about fifteen seconds in if you can't see the giant visual countdown over the video. In a rare instance I find myself agreeing with some of the YouTube comments. So yes, please make more of these and apply this effect to even better movies. Edit: spoke to soon, there is already a Matrix version out there.