Read it here folks.That's a helluva over-reaction to something that otherwise hasn't been inordinately differently from the typical garden-variety influenza. But to hear it from some people, it's already akin to the 1918 pandemic that killed millions in a very short period of ti...
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Friday, October 23, 2009
If you can find them, and no one else can help...
...maybe you can hire... The A-Team!ComingSoon.net has just posted this pic (click to significantly embiggen) of Bradley Cooper as Lt. Templeton "Faceman" Peck, Quinton "Rampage" Jackson as Sgt. "B.A." Baracus, Sharlto Copley as Capt. "Howling Mad" Murdock, and Liam Neeson as John "Hannibal" Smith - along with the team's signature van - from the upcoming film adaptation of...
N.C. State engineers create chip with storage out the wazoo
Some cutting-edge stuff coming out of North Carolina State University: researchers there have created a chip the size of a human fingernail that can store... get this... a TERABYTE of data!In layman's terms that's about 20 high-definition DVDs or 250 million pages of text.The engineers made their breakthrough using the process of selective doping, in which an impurity is added to a material whose properties consequently change.Working at the nanoscale,...
Nifty, Nifty: "Weird Al" Yankovic is FIFTY!
Fifty years ago today, on October 23rd 1959 in the little burg of Downey, California, proud parents Nick and Mary Yankovic celebrated the arrival of a son. They dubbed their newly-spawned offspring Alfred.A few years later a door-to-door salesman arrived at the Yankovic home in nearby Lynwood and offered either guitar or accordion lessons at a nearby school. Nick and Mary...
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Man pleads guilty on charge of drunk-driving his La-Z-Boy
62-year-old Dennis LeRoy Anderson has rigged his La-Z-Boy recliner with a lawnmower motor, stereo and cup holders for his beer. Last year following drinking "eight or nine beers" Anderson crashed his... thing... into a parked car after leaving a bar in Duluth, Minnesota.Anderson has now plead guilty to a DWI charge. The judge has sentenced him to two years of probation.(That...
Understanding Einstein's energy
Energy Tribune has a BRILLIANT essay by William Tucker about Albert Einstein's classic equation E=mc2: the formula describing the interchangeability between mass and energy. Tucker's essay not only lays out E=mc2 in terms that anyone can easily grasp, it also argues why current efforts at renewable energy are not sufficient. Instead, Tucker lays out a solid case - using...
Awright, 'fess up y'all
How many poor saps out there were waiting in line at midnight to buy a copy of the Windows 7 operating syst...
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Claudville, Virginia gets first public white-space network
The town of Claudville in Patrick County, Virginia - a place where I have lots of ancestral roots - is the launching site of the much-awaited white-space network technology! Described as "Wi-Fi on steroids", white-space allows for much more bandwidth over larger areas. A bunch of it just got freed-up from switchover to digital television transmission earlier this year (what,...
Gears of War Snuggie
Epic Games PR lass Dana Cowley has Twitter-ed about the latest creation from Epic's studio a few towns over in Cary: a prototype Gears of War snuggie! Yes, you can now wrap yourself in luxurious warmth and the body armor of legendary COG hero Marcus Fenix... all at once!Ehhhh... personally I'd rather have official Gears of War Underoos ...
It's that time of year again
And if you buy extra boxes of chocolate chip, the Girls Scouts will even give "protection" for your place of busine...
Russia watches American "Self Immolation"
'Tis painfully ironic that these observations are being made in Pravda, of all places. Stanislav Mishin writes...It can be safely said, that the last time a great nation destroyed itself through its own hubris and economic folly was the early Soviet Union (though in the end the late Soviet Union still died by the economic hand). Now we get the opportunity to watch the Americans do the exact same thing to themselves. The most amazing thing of course,...
BATMAN & ROBIN is the most important comic book movie ever
So sayeth Marvel's president Kevin Feige... and it's pretty hard to disagree with his logic. 1997's fourth and final installment of the original Batman film franchise, notes Feige, "was so bad that it demanded a new way of doing things. It created the opportunity to do X-Men and Spider-Man, adaptations that respected the source material and adaptations that were not campy."...
What the...?!?
Sesame Street has spoofed AMC's Mad Men?!?Considering that once upon a time Sesame Street did a parody of Twin Peaks starring Cookie Monster, can't really say that I'm surprised Children's TelevisionSesame Workshop would also adapt what is currently one of television's hottest shows for pee-wee appreciation :-)Next month begins Sesame Street's fortieth season. Wonder if they could do a send-up of House or Lost sometime...
Sequoia accidentally releases source code for its voting machines!
I absolutely hate, hate, HATE the very idea of electronic voting. Cannot say nearly enough rotten about it. I've no doubt that a lot of our more recent elections have been compromised and rigged - one way or another - by paperless tabulation. In a saner age, enough Americans would have gotten honked-off enough to have marched on the corporate headquarters of Diebold and...
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
BioShock Big Daddy action figure
For $20 you can now get this latest entry from the "Things We Don't Really Need But Are Lusting For Terribly" file: the BioShock Big Daddy Ultra Deluxe Action Figure! Those big lumbering brutes that once guarded the Little Sisters in Rapture can now be guarding your desktop. Figure comes with full articulation, removable oxygen tank and deadly drill arm. Doesn't look like...
DEATH TROOPERS prequel coming October 2010!
Joe Schreiber has already turned in the manuscript for a prequel to his just-released Star Wars: Death Troopers novel. The book is now scheduled for an early October 2010 release. In an interview on StarWars.com Schreiber says that the next book will deal with (SPOILER highlight with mouse to read) the origin of the virus that got loose on that Star Destroyer and turned so many people into zombies.Incidentally, here's my review from a few days...
Monday, October 19, 2009
U.S. Senate's health care bill: 1,502 pages long
That's gotta be a helluva big hopper that this bill was placed into.(It would be better for the entire country and our posterity if it had been dumped into a trash can instead.)S. 1796 has been filed. The Senate's version of "health care reform" is one thousand, five hundred and two pages long.What the hell is inside that thing?Here's the link to a PDF file of this monstrosity if you're so inclin...
