By Mark O’Neill
Between Chad Vader and now Emperor Palpatine, everyone is sure having fun squeezing as much satire as possible out of the Star Wars movies these days!
This one is Ask Palpatine which is obviously someone’s hand covered in a piece of cloth. So zero budget compared to the Chad Vader episodes but this guy’s humour is spot on and I was laughing out loud.
You can apparently send questions to him and he will answer them. This one is “what happened to your lightsaber?”
By Mark O’Neill
I went to Disney World today – well not the real Disney World. Rather I went to the online digital version, courtesy of Google Earth. Not as good as the real thing obviously but it’s as near as I’m ever going to get to it. The Google Earth version doesn’t give you the chance to sit on Mickey Mouse’s knee (although I am rather partial to Minnie myself).
The online version of Disney World comes courtesy of the latest version of Google Earth and I have to admit it’s not bad. It didn’t have me jumping up and down for joy but then again I’m not five years old either. The graphics were pretty good and smooth and by clicking on Mickey’s ears, you could go to different areas of the park. But the big downside was that Google Earth was chewing up huge amounts of my RAM (300MB +) which meant I had to shut down everything else to keep it going. I seriously hope that this was a temporary glitch, otherwise this visit will be a one-off!
By Mark O’Neill
One of the features I like the most in Google is the suggestions feature when you are typing in your keywords. But sometimes you come across some really crazy and outrageous suggestions. I mean, look at these ones….
81,300 pages for that?
Yes, many a long and cold night, I have tapped away at Google, searching for the solution to that riddle. But still the answer eludes me….
You don’t need Google to tell you that one! I suppose it all depends on the class of girl you’re dating! Nice girls don’t fart (apparently) while guys just fart away ALL the time…
Now you may say this is just my imagination but Google searchers seem to have an unhealthy obsession with black people! First with black kids in the cafeteria and now this? Why are black people black? What the hell? And are there really 51.9 million pages on the subject?
By Mark O’Neill
Sometimes things are just fated to happen. When Hasbro broke the mold of the old Millenium Falcon toy, they realized that they would have to then make a new one. Then they thought, “since we’re making a new mold, why not make it 30% bigger and at the same time, make the toy absolutely wonderful, so wonderful in fact that a 33 year old geek blogger from Germany is going to salivate all over the computer screen screaming “I WANT ONE OF THOSE!!!!”.
Here is a YouTube video of the brand new spanking version of the Millenium Falcon due to hit the shelves on July 26th. You even get a free Han Solo and Chewbacca thrown in. Sweeeet!
All I’ve got to do now is break it to the girlfriend that she’s out and the Falcon is coming in her place… hmmm, how do I break THAT one to her?
Raised in Vancouver and Toronto, Severn Cullis-Suzuki has been camping and hiking all her life. When she was 9 she started the Environmental Children’s Organization (ECO), a small group of children committed to learning and teaching other kids about environmental issues. They were successful in many projects before 1992, when they raised enough money to go to the UN’s Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. Their aim was to remind the decision-makers of who their actions or inactions would ultimately affect. The goal was reached when 12 yr old Severn closed a Plenary Session with a powerful speech that received a standing ovation.
Believe it or not, what you are about to see has been filmed in 1992, yet the speech you’ll hear is now more relevant than ever.
The following Radiohead song was performed using an old Sinclair ZX Spectrum 8-bit PC, an HP Scanjet 3c, an Epson LX-81 Dot Matrix Printer and bunch of old hard drives. Surprisingly, the end result isn’t all that bad. The song starts at about 1:10 in the video, so the impatient ones among you might want to jump ahead right away.
By JR Raphael
Contributing Writer, [GAS]
You may have been part of a scientific study and not even known it. New word is out this week that researchers used cell phone towers and call records to secretly track every step made by 100,000 people — without ever getting their permission.
The study, conducted by Boston’s Northeastern University, spawns a slew of as-of-yet unanswered questions. We’ve seen how cell phone spying techniques can let other people tap into your private world undetected, but this marks the first documented time the monitoring’s been used on such a large scale, without any authorization.
Northeastern won’t reveal where the study took place other than that it was in an “industrialized nation” and was outside of the United States — a good thing, since the actions would have been a crime in America. Organizations would have to get your permission to legally conduct this kind of research in the U.S.
The researchers pulled data from cell phone towers, logging an exact location any time a call or text came in or out, and also monitored actual records from the cell phone provider. The school won’t reveal which provider agreed to give them that information.
Northeastern says the numbers were disguised, so no one on the team could identify any individual users. That may not be enough, though, to answer all the ethical concerns. Regardless of whether one’s identifying information was attached, the data being accessed was still private information that shouldn’t have been readily available.
The research director says he never consulted with an ethics panel because his experiment involved “physics, not biology,” and it was therefore not required.
The study’s findings, for what they’re worth, were that the majority of people — more than half — rarely venture out of a six mile circle of their homes. Eighty-three percent, the study says, stayed within a 37 mile wide circle.
The study is highlighted in this week’s Nature International Journal of Science. As you’ll see, a fierce debate has already broken out in the comments section of the story, including some calls for the study’s authors to be dismissed from the university.
So, sound-off time: Did the researchers cross a line, and if so, what should happen as a result? The floor is open for discussion — though, you never know, someone might be monitoring what you say.
By Mark O’Neill
Doctor Ray Kurzweil is no ordinary predictor of the future. He doesn’t just make up random predictions and cross his fingers, hoping they come true. He has actually made some predictions that have been mostly spot-on.
For example, back in the 1980’s, he predicted the rapid growth of the internet in the 1990’s and a computer chess champion by 1998 (it was actually 1997 with Deep Blue so he was one year off). He also predicted a handheld device for blind people by 2008. Last Thursday night at the World Science Festival, he produced it (I tried searching for it and it may be this but I am not sure).
But now he has made three new predictions that I have found fascinating and I wonder if they will come true :
What do you think? Do the predictions sound credible to you?
Doctor Kurzweil – visionary or dreamer? You decide.
Via New York Times
Located somewhere in Germany, this fun-looking water slide will fling you through a full loop before bringing you crashing down in its pool at the bottom, effectively atomic-wedgying you in the process. Enjoy!
By Mark O’Neill
Google have announced their latest project – Google Health – which is a service where you can have your entire medical history uploaded into your Google account. But before you start hyper-ventilating, Google has promised that everything in your medical records will be password-protected and therefore will not be publicly indexed in Google Search (I certainly hope not!).
The whole theory behind Google Health is that wherever you go in the world, your medical history will follow you. I mean, how many times have you relocated to another part of the country or another country altogether and your medical records have been lost? Mine have been more times than I care to remember, so Google Health wants to help people like me keep their records in the one place, fully organized and fully digitized. Never again will they go missing.