awesome duuuuuuude

Chris Knight's avatar

Disclaimer: I have yet to see Disney’s Frozen, so I have no idea about how extensive Elsa’s criminal activities go.  I’m assuming they are pretty pervasive, given how much I’ve heard it talked about by numerous children I’ve found myself around.

Just days after police in Harlan, Kentucky issued a warrant for her arrest, Queen Elsa was located this morning all the way in Hanahan: a small town near Charleston, South Carolina.  Hanahan police spotted Elsa freezing a fountain in broad daylight.  Police swooped in and arrested the Snow Queen before she could bring down the fury of a cold front threatening the area.

ABC News 4 is reporting that…

With more bitter cold heading to the Lowcountry this week, Hanahan
police officers tried to do their part to stop the encroaching weather
by arresting the Snow Queen.

Police Chief Mike Cochran and Officer Flor Reyes made

...
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Catherine Rose and her daughter Alexis

It is an honor and a privilege to be able to say that I have been able to count Catherine Rose among the friendships that I have made through this journey in life.  She and I were in high school together and shared many conversations back and forth from our swim meets.  Catherine is, literally, one of the most powerhouse intellects on the face of the Earth.  I thought that then about her and the past decade has only served to reinforce that estimation.

Catherine and her husband are blessed to be the parents of two beautiful daughters.  One of them, Alexis, was born with severe disabilities that prevent her from learning and communicating as other children her age.  It was something that led Catherine to take a position at Philips and their healthcare division.  In her time at Philips, Catherine has led the ...

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YES!!!

Holy cow, this is a SERIOUS dream of mine come true! For literally decades I’ve been saying that there needs to be an entry in the Alien franchise
that picks up after Aliens and totally ignores that Alien 3, Alien Resurrection
etc. ever happened.

And now it’s actually happening!!

It began two months ago when Neil Blomkamp (director of District 9 and the upcoming Chappie) twittered some concept art he had quietly been commissioning for his vision of what an Alien movie should look like.  An Alien movie where Ripley and Hicks made it back and thus totally repudiating Alien 3.

Here’s some of what Blomkamp had in mind:

Needless to say, the response those pics engendered was one of frenetic approval.  Throughout social media and across reams of websites the message to Fox was clear: “we demand that Neil Blomkamp make a proper Alien movie!”...

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I won’t apologize for the all-caps there.  I mean, we are talking about something of monstrous proportions here…

Four hundred-some light years away is the recently-discovered exoplanet J1407b.  Its parent star kept blinking in and out of view.  Astro-boffins went to work on the case, doing analysis of light patterns and spectroscopy and all kinds of stuff like that.

What they found is that J1407b, a young planet with about 40-50 Jupiter masses, boasts a massive, MASSIVE ring system.  One that is more than 200 times larger than the one Saturn has.

Here’s what it might look like…

See that teeny dot?  That’s meant to be J1407b.  Mind you, this is a planet already with 40 times more mass than Jupiter.  See those rings?  They’re spread out over 120 million kilometers of diameter’s worth of disk.

If J1407b was located where Saturn is in our solar system, not only ...

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You might have heard about the Internet Arcade that Internet Archive fired up a few months ago.  All of those arcade games that we (or at least some of us) used to feed quarters into?  Well, almost 700 of them – as in the originals, not home console ports – are available to play for free in your web browser!  Which is a great thing because these games are a considerable part of computer technology history and Internet Archive is preserving them for posterity.

Well anyhoo, last week I visited Internet Arcade for the first time.  And something occurred to me: that maybe I could see if Zaxxon was in the collection.

Bit of info: Zaxxon was a game that Sega came out with in the early Eighties, and it’s arguably the first video game to attempt a 3-D feel for the player.  As you fly your fighter ...

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Gowron, not David Waddell
(but Gowron should have
resigned too, when you
think about it…)

That does it: if I ever run for office again and win, I’m going to give my acceptance speech in High-Elvish Sindarin!

Indian Trail is a nice town near Charlotte here in North Carolina.  And one of its city councilmmembers – one David Waddell – had decided that “enough was enough” about the way the officials of Indian Trail were handling what he considers to be development run amok, among other things.  Exasperated by it all, David Waddell decided to resign his seat.

Except that he did it using the Klingon language: the tongue spoken by the proud warrior race from the Star Trek franchise.

Here’s the story from The Charlotte Observer:

An Indian Trail councilman decided to boldly go where no
politician has gone before – and tendered his resignation this week

...
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It’s none other than Grandpa Jones and his lovely wife Ramona doing something truly amazing with a whole bunch of cowbells…




Dare I do it? Dare I?!?

I can’t resist…

more cowbell, cowbells, christopher walken, saturday night live, the bruce dickinson, blue oyster cult, dont fear the reaper
“I gotta fever!  And the only prescription is MORE COWBELL!”

 If you don’t know who Grandpa Jones was, you need some educatin’ in the worst way!  Louis Marshall Jones was a longtime fixture on country music radio and the Grand Ol’ Opry.  He picked up his stage name when he worked at WBZ in Boston and was playfully called “Grandpa” because he was so cranky in the mornings.  Jones decided to make an act of it.  That was 1935 and Jones was “Grandpa Jones” all the way up to his passing in 1998.  He’s long been regarded as one of the greatest banjo players ever.

And he even played cowbell!  And more of it! 🙂...

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Proving once again that LEGO building is more than aesthetic art but also fully functional, an Australian and Romanian duo has constructed a life-sized roadster out of the celebrated toy bricks. And it just doesn’t sit there: you can drive it too!

It’s not all LEGO: though the company makes tiny rubber tires for the minifig-scale vehicles, it’s yet to enter the market in competition with Michelin or Goodyear.  But that detail aside, the Super Awesome Micro Project funded and built by Australian Steve Sommarito and Romanian Raul Oaida is practically 100% LEGO blocks.  Total number of pieces: about half a million.

According to the news article, “the car uses compressed air to turn 256 pistons in four rotary engines —
all made of Legos. Total construction time: 18 months, for a cost of
about $40,000.”  It’s not quite as big as the full-size X-Wing Fighter made of 5.3 million ...

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Imagine a few years from now having a smartphone or an iPad equipped with extremely nonvolatile memory, retaining information for decades, is ultra-fast, can be made cheap with already-existing manufacturing technology, and holding a terabyte of data.

Your reaction is probably gonna be the same as mine: “Shut up and take my money!!”

A Crossbar RRAM chip sitting atop a CMOS

A little company called Crossbar came out roaring yesterday with its announcement about developing what it’s calling resistive RAM (RRAM).  And as The Register is reporting, this could be the “flash killer” that makes NAND memory – which is fast approaching the upper limit for feasibility – obsolete.

From the article:

“With our working Crossbar array, we have achieved all the major
technical milestones that prove our RRAM technology is easy to
manufacture and ready for commercialization,” said Crossbar CEO George Minassian when announcing his company’s new

...
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Here’s the latest entry in the “Things we don’t really need but are lusting for badly” files…

LEGO, Back To The Future, DeLorean
1-Point-21 jigawatts of LEGO awesome!

Going on sale worldwide tomorrow at LEGO Stores, toy and other retailers as well as LEGO’s online store is this: The DeLorean Time Machine.  The fourth model to be designed, supported and approved for official production via LEGO CUUSOO, this minifig-scale replica of Doctor Emmett “Doc” Brown’s famous heavy-customized DeLorean from Back to the Future comes complete with options for builders to trick it out for whatever form it appeared throughout the film trilogy (it even includes Mr. Fusion and the OUTATIME and barcode license plates).  Unique decal-ed bricks have the Flux Capacitor and the Destination/Present Time LED display.  The doors swing up gull-wing style and the wheels swivel into air mode!

LEGO, Back To The Future, Marty McFly, Doc Brown, minifigsAnd yes, it even has minifigs of Marty McFly (with skateboard) and Doc Brown...

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