So, being loyal Geeks are Sexy readers, you’ve surely all tried making some artery-jamming Krispy Kreme bacon burgers since we’ve posted about them almost 2 years ago, right? And if you didn’t, you probably thought that these burgers were the ultimate in unhealthiness, and rightly so.
But lo and behold folks, the king is dead. Enters the KFC Krispy Kreme Double Down. Long live the king.
[Via Buzzfeed]
Barnes & Noble has unleashed twin weapons in its battle with the Kindle and iPad: the company is updating its Nook reader to offer both chess and sudoko games!
OK, OK, that’s not the main selling point. The firm is also adding an “experimental web browser” which will run in the main grayscale window rather than the smaller color touchscreen. It will only work on Wi-Fi.
The publicity for the update somewhat downplays this feature, which probably suggests it doesn’t want to invite comparisons to the web experience on other devices, including those with color screens. One benefit it has noted is that users can now access Wi-Fi networks which use a log-in page.
There’s also a particularly creative offer: Nook users will be able to spend up to an hour a day reading books from the Nook catalog without charge. The catch is that it only works when the user is at a physical Barnes & Noble store. It’s possible this feature will mainly be used by freeloaders and cheapskates who’ll be slow to splash the cash, but it’s certainly one way to get people into stores.
It’s not yet entirely clear if the entire online range of books will be available, or just a selection. Barnes & Noble has confirmed users will be able to read books that aren’t physically stocked in a store and that it will be adding magazines to the free reading options later.
This all sounds great, but the problem for Barnes & Noble is that the device is still struggling to find a market where it can lead. If you want something that does everything well in a pleasing way, there’s the iPad. If you want something that does everything well and offers full computing power and control, there are netbooks. If you want something that does one thing — e-Books — well, there’s the Kindle. At $259, it’s hard to think of many people for whom the Nook would be either the best value or the perfect solution.
Okay, so technically there is no such thing. But stay with me a moment and let me explain.
So I totally missed the ball yesterday for Earth Day. I’m sorry, Earth. It’s nothing personal. It’s not like I was dumping garbage around my back yard and leaking batteries into the soil. No, I took a nice walk. I marveled in the beauty of Mother Earth, and got some good old fashioned Vitamin D from the sun. And during that walk I started to think about other Earths, alternate Earths.
You know what I mean—Earths from fiction or film that are just so slightly different from our own that they act like a mirror, distorted just enough to feel foreign while retaining that same sense of familiarity. Like Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, or the Marvel Universe (comic books make particular use of this concept in the “what-if” Earth scenario).
All throughout my life, I’ve wanted to dwell in alternate Earths. So, in lieu of writing a post about our Earth, I thought I’d share two of my favorite alternate Earths in hopes that you’ll share some of yours (from comics, books, movies, whatever.)
Jacqueline Carey’s Terre D’Ange: If you open up Carey’s books you’ll find that the map looks like our own world, but upon reading the first few pages it’s quite clear that history took a huge turn at some point. She creates cultures which mirror many of those we’re familiar with, including kingdoms in France, the British Isles, and as far away as the Middle East. She even bases the religion of Terre D’Ange (the French-based kingdom) loosely on Judeo-Christian mythology—but turning it from monotheistic to polytheistic in practice. The result is that Carey’s world becomes as much of an exploration for the reader as the characters. With each new journey, there’s a sense of deja-vu amidst the discovery, and a thrill to see what she’s done with the culture. A highly recommended series of books, especially if you like a little sauciness and sexiness with your world building.
Cherie Priest’s Seattle & United States – Steampunk literature, in my opinion, sometimes suffers from a little too much in the way of alternate history without good alternate world building. The result ends up feeling like name dropping, with authors working to include Tesla, Babbage, and Lovelace in everything they write without really exploring the what-ifs of the world itself. But in Boneshaker, Priest’s much lauded book, the world building is top notch and decidedly different. In fact, her Blight-infected Seattle—while rooted in historical detail (down to the street names and buildings)—is a truly new world. You can almost feel the city breathe and wheeze through the pages, and it becomes as much a character as anyone in the book. In Priest’s world, the Civil War has not ended, and we get hints throughout the book of its impact on the West Coast—but those little details are just so tantalizing. Not to mention it’s downright gritty, as opposed to much of the gaslight romance stuff out there. Part of her Clockwork Century books, Boneshaker will be followed up by Clementine and Dreadnought.
So how about you? What are your favorite alternate Earths? Any you wish you lived in? Any you have nightmares about?
Tags: alternate earth day, alternate history, cherie priest, earth day, jacqueline carey
As part of an icebreaking event at the latest meeting of my local social media enthusiasts group Brrism, the 30 or so people on hand were asked to compare birthdays. It turned out that three pairs of people each shared a birthday.
As unlikely as that may sound, nobody is calling Ripley’s Believe It Or Not? to report an incredible freaky event.
Why not? Because it’s an example of the birthday paradox, a classic example of how probability theory can be difficult to understand. And while three matches is certainly unusual, having one match was more likely than not to happen.
Many people asked the question “What are the chances of two people in this group sharing a birthday?” assume it is very remote. That’s because they use a false premise to solve the question: they take the idea of one particular birthday and assess the likelihood of somebody else sharing that birthday, which is of course around 1 in 365 (or a little higher with leap years). While this is partly down to confusion over probability, it’s also possibly down to people instinctively personalizing the question and approaching it as if it were “What is the probability of a particular person sharing my birthday?”
The actual answer will depend on the size of the group, but what surprises people is that it only takes a group of 23 people before there’s a 50% probability of a match. (Put another way, in most school classes, it’s more likely than not that there will be a match.)
Why exactly the number is 23 involves the type of mathematics that requires both apostrophes and exclamation marks. But put in a more simplified way:
If you imagine having 253 chances to attempt something with a 1 in 365 possibility of success, you can see how it suddenly becomes much more likely.
(There are some limitations to this explanation: this logic should mean it only takes 20 people to create a 50-50 chance of a match as 20 people creates 190 pairings, which is more than half of 365. That I don’t entirely understand why this isn’t the case is why I took an arts degree…)
While it would, of course, take 366 people to be absolutely certain of a match, the likelihood rapidly increases as a group gets larger. While a group of 23 is a 50-50 shot, once you get to a group of 50 the likelihood of a match is around 97%. With a group of 100, there’s barely a one in three million chance of not having a match
Perhaps the most surprising element of this mathematical puzzle is that matches actually happen more often in reality than on practice. That’s because births are not evenly spread out over the year. For example, in many Northern hemisphere countries there are more births in September. That’s not down to chance: without wishing to be crude, cold weather means many couples have to opt for indoor leisure activities in December, while Christmas and New Year is the time with the highest number of couples spending more time together than usual. An uneven distribution of birthdays thus increases the chance of a match.
And if you’re wondering which particular date is the most likely to be the subject of a match, well according to one site which analyzed birth certificates, it’s October 5. Why? Well, it might just be that that on average a child born on that date would have been conceived on December 31.
Many of you probably would never have heard of the World War II film Downfall if it weren’t for the slew of hilarious parodies that popped up in the past couple of years. They all use the same clip: a scene in the film where Hilter goes on a furious tirade upon realizing that the war is lost. Since it’s a foreign language film, inserting English subtitles is a seamless way to create hilarious parodies. Thanks to some very creative folks (and in theory, fair use law), Hilter has ranted about everything from Windows Vista to politics to sports teams losing to… well, the fact that everyone’s making all these darn parody videos.
You might remember YouTube’s “fair use massacre” last year, and some of the Hitler parodies were already disappearing even then thanks to takedown notices from the film’s production company. And now the automatic content filtering system has made this even easier, and you’d be hard pressed to find one of these videos on YouTube that isn’t replaced with a black screen saying “This film contains content from Constantin Films, who has blocked it on copyright grounds.”
Of course there’s nothing like pure irony to draw attention to this sort of thing, and after EFF’s Brad Templeton created a Hitler parody about YouTube’s takedown procedures, it too got taken down. And though Templeton knows his rights and cares enough to file a dispute and actually assert that the video is a parody and therefore most likely fair use, many creators just don’t bother.
Luckily, Vimeo isn’t quite as trigger-happy as YouTube, so in the interest of not eventually having a black screen of fail, here’s an embed from the Vimeo version so that Hitler can tell you all about the DMCA:
What you’re about to see, which starts at 1:20 in the video and lasts for only 60 seconds, took 2 years, 96 layers and 15 tracks to create. Since this video is in HD, I strongly suggest that you put the player in full screen mode before hitting the play button. Enjoy!
[Via Reddit]
Hey everyone! My friend Alex over at Neatorama has recently re-opened his site’s online shop, and to celebrate the occasion, he offered me two free $50 gift certificates to distribute among you guys. In case you’ve never heard of the site, Neatorama is one of the top 100 most visited blogs on the Intertubes, and its store is filled with amazing stuff you’ll have trouble finding anywhere else online.
To participate, the only thing you have to do is to write a caption (1 caption per comment. You can submit multiple comments) for the picture you see below. The two people with the best entry (as determined by me) will each win one $50 gift certificate to spend at the Neatorama shop. Please note that the contest is also open to members of our Facebook fan page. Good luck!
EDIT: Ok, we’ve got more than enough entries now! We’ll announce the winners on Monday. Thanks to everyone for making this such a great success!
EDIT 2: Congratulations to Jenny and Marco Mo who both won one $50 Neatorama Gift Certificate!
Winning caption #1: I was driving at 88mph as you told me… and let me tell you something, the future sucks.
Winning caption #2: You know how you told me to look up that site, Geeks Are Sexy? Yeah, it cost me my car! …yeahs, it’s good.
[Neatorama Store | Picture Source: Engadget]
I’m not exactly sure if this is a shopped job or not, but this French lord vader condom envelope, translated word for word to “I will not be your father!”, is so full of win, it makes the geek in me feel like squealing in glee!
Apple says it is formally abandoning attempts to bring Flash to the iPhone, and Adobe, on its side, says open platforms such as Flash will eventually win out over Apple’s closed platform.
The change in policy is said to be the result of a new clause in Apple’s iPhone app license which Adobe believes to mean that Apple could reject or remove any apps created with Flash.
That’s led Adobe to give up on a tool which allows app developers who use Flash to easily set up their apps to run on the iPhone platform. According to Mike Chambers, the “platform product manager” for Flash, Adobe’s work on the tool has not been in vain. He said it proved “there is no technical reason that Flash can’t run on the iPhone” and that “developers can create well performing and compelling content for the device”.
The tool will remain available, but Adobe isn’t planning “additional investments in that feature”, a statement that appears to relate to time and effort as much as money.
Chambers also argues that the work Adobe carried out on the tool has taught them lessons and technical approaches which can easily be applied to other devices and systems. He is also quite clear about his attitude to Apple’s policy:
The primary goal of Flash has always been to enable cross browser, platform and device development. The cool web game that you build can easily be targeted and deployed to multiple platforms and devices. However, this is the exact opposite of what Apple wants.
According to Chambers, he’ll now put more effort into how Flash can be used on Android devices. He also gives several examples of app developers who’ve begun work on Flash-based iPhone apps and have now switched their focus to Android.
And Chambers also questions whether Apple’s strategy will pay off: “I believe that ultimately open platforms will win out over the type of closed, locked down platform that Apple is trying to create.”
