“The Case for Mars” is the sixth installment in the Symphony of Science music video series. The clip features Robert Zubrin, Carl Sagan, Brian Cox, and Penelope Boston. Samples come from the documentary “The Mars Underground”, Cosmos, and Wonders of the Solar System. Enjoy!
[Via Gizmodo]
Following a long tradition of providing vaguely pointless diagnosis to fictional characters, a group of French psychologists have determined that Anakin Skywalker may have suffered from Borderline Personality Disorder – which is, according to the DSM, “a pervasive pattern of instability of interpersonal relationships, self-image and affects, as well as marked impulsivity, beginning by early adulthood.” The disorder has to fit five of nine specified contexts, like “frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment,” “identity disturbance,” and “inappropriate anger.” Anakin hits six out of nine. According to LiveScience, the psychologists’ memo on the diagnosis is appearing as a letter to the editor in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Psychiatry Research.
And of course, one researcher has a treatment recommendation: “I believe that psychotherapy would have helped Anakin and might have prevented him from turning to the dark side. Using the dark side of the Force could be considered as similar to drug use: It feels really good when you use it, it alters your consciousness and you know you shouldn’t do it.”
NASA has an awesome section of their site called “Astronomy Picture of the Day” where they… well… post an astronomy picture every day (Duh!) A few days ago, they posted a shot of Thor’s helmet, an helmet-shaped cosmic cloud with wing-like appendages. Check it out:
Heroically sized even for a Norse god, Thor’s Helmet is about 30 light-years across. In fact, the helmet is actually more like an interstellar bubble, blown as a fast wind from the bright, massive star near the bubble’s center sweeps through a surrounding molecular cloud. Known as a Wolf-Rayet star, the central star is an extremely hot giant thought to be in a brief, pre-supernova stage of evolution. Cataloged as NGC 2359, the nebula is located about 15,000 light-years away in the constellation Canis Major. The sharp image, made using broadband and narrowband filters, captures striking details of the nebula’s filamentary structures. It shows off a blue-green color from strong emission due to oxygen atoms in the glowing gas.
[Via]
In the following video, American psychologist Philip Zimbardo explains how our individual perspectives of time can affect our work, health and well-being. If you’ve got 10 minutes of free time, I highly recommend that you watch this video, and if not, come back later to do so. This is probably one of the most enlightening talk I’ve heard so far this year.
Ladies and Gentlegeeks, let me present you with one of the most awesome and epic stein I’ve ever seen: The Smaug The Magnificent Stein. This +5 tankard of beer holding (not sure if this is actually possible, I haven’t played D&D in ages!) comes in two versions: The Epic Collection and the Legendary Collection editions, with the latter featuring an 18K gold-plated One Ring and other hand painted gold trimming.
Taverncraft proudly announces The Hobbit Stein Collection, an extraordinary series of new steins based on the beloved fantasy masterpiece by J.R.R. Tolkien. Each iconic moment is brought to life with panoramic, bas-relief sculpting and are hand-crafted in the old-world style with fine-grain stoneware by the world-renowned stein artisans. An absolute must-have for fans of both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy, each exquisite stein stands over 10? tall (25.4cm), weighs a hefty 3 lbs. (1.36kg.), and is topped with a sculpted pewter lid.
And if this one isn’t to your liking, Taverncraft produces other awesome WOW and Warhammer-themed steins. Check these out:
[via Bits&Pieces]
Flyfire, a project initiated by the SENSEable City Laboratory in collaboration with ARES Lab (Aerospace Robotics and Embedded Systems Laboratory) aims to transform any ordinary space into a highly immersive and interactive display environment. To do so, they put a few hundred LED-equiped toy-like helicopters in the air, and use them to create some fantastic visual effects. Check it out:
So here we are on the fifth and final day of our group rehab. If you still haven’t found something to ease the pain of the post-Lost/24 world, it’s time to take a completely different approach. Instead of looking for more examples of compelling action, crisp writing, finely-honed characters, and great special effects, let’s try something completely different: the worst movie ever.
(For the sake of argument, I’m sticking to movies with a vaguely geek-related theme. If I didn’t, I might have to finally get round to watching the DVD of the Ultimate Weapon in which a toupee-clad Hulk Hogan plays a mercenary who discovers the Special Forces unit which hired him are actually IRA terrorists and he must now destroy them in the jungle to rescue his daughter…)
Before I get to the worst geek movie ever, there must be a dishonorable mention for Countdown to Chaos, also known as Y2K the movie. The plot is simple: fears of the Millennium Bug prove not only accurate, but understated, and the hero is a computer whizz who needs to stop a nuclear station melting down.
Now, I’m one of the people who doesn’t believe Y2K was completely overhyped: the reason nothing happened is because we actually did something about it. But this is wonderfully entertaining dross, in which everything that can go wrong with the change over to midnight does go wrong. And of course, there’s the important lesson that the 17 time zones which get to midnight before the US can go screw themselves because it’s only American peril which counts.
But the worst geek movie ever is Terminal Error. Wikipedia’s attempt to summarize the plot is as follows: ” An ex-employee of a computer firm wants revenge and befriends the boss’s son giving him a MP3 file containing a computer virus. This virus creates havoc all across the city by poisoning the water with chlorine, making planes crash and ultimately developing an intelligence of its own.”
So what makes the movie so joyously bad? Yes, partly it’s the awful acting, terrible dialog (“I helped create you… and now I’m going to help you die.) and clichéd characters, notably the disgruntled hacker with Hawaiian shirt and disheveled ginger hair. But really the movie is made by the portrayal of technology. Imagine every questionable line about firewall parameter mainframes from 24 and take it to the max. Without wanting to give too much away, the virus literally speaks to people, makes a an ASCIII face from green-screen text, and turns out to be vulnerable only to a Nintendo Gameboy.
Buy, beg, borrow or steal.
Whitestone Motion Pictures presents Heartless: The Story of the Tin Man, a short movie based on the backstory of The Wizard of Oz. Featuring magnificent visuals and outstanding storytelling, Heartless is truly one the best short films I’ve ever seen online. If you’ve got a bit of free time today, make sure you watch every minute of it, you’ll be glad you did.
[Full Heartless soundtrack available for download here]
[Via Neatorama]
[Via]