Geeks are Sexy Official T-Shirts!

Hi everyone!

Just a quick post to let you know about our new official t-shirt!

Designed by [GaS] reader Autumn Rain Turkel, the design of this shirt was partly inspired by John Hughes’s 1980s-classic Weird Science. By purchasing one of our shirts, you’ll be helping us in our never ending quest to spread geekiness worldwide (and help us pay for those monstrous hosting bills, among other things.). We plan on releasing additional, more female-friendly, designs soon enough… after all, about a third of our audience is composed of the fairer sex!

The offical Geeksaresexy.net t-shirt:

  • 100% cotton (doesn’t feel like cardboard)
  • 10.2 ounce crew neck t-shirt
  • Double needle cover seamed neck, taped neck and shoulders, double needle sleeve and bottom
  • Pre-shrunk
  • DO NOT CRACK when stretched

Here are a few pictures of the shirt, right out of the printing press!

Front:

Back:

The shirt is available here for $18.95, thanks to our official partner, SplitReasons.

Edit: Oh, and when you’re done shopping, use promo code “geeksaresexy” (without the quotes) to get 10% off your purchases.

Nearness

Holy Moley, it’s a wireless Rube Goldberg contraption. Nearness, by Jack Schulze and Timo Arnall uses RFID chips to activate each step.

The film Nearness explores interacting without touching. With RFID it’s proximity that matters, and actual contact isn’t necessary. Much of Timo’s work in the Touch project addresses the fictions and speculations in the technology. Here we play with the problems of invisibility and the magic of being close.

[via Boing Boing]


The life, lyrics, and love of John Keats on the big screen

Keats19Literary geeks, rejoice! They’ve made a film about John Keats.

I’m a Romantic poetry fangirl, I totally admit it. As a young English geek (and later, English major geek) I came across the Romantics in high school, and up until that point I had never read anything so profound. The language was so beautiful, the subjects both provocative and sublime; as a fledgling writer the impact was considerable.

Of all the Romantics–most English books cite the Big Six (Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats)–Keats always held the most fascination for me. I mean, before pining, pale, sentimental vampires were all the rage, he had the whole aesthetic down. Without the whole being the vampire part, of course. Keats, as his contemporaries, was fascinated with the Gothic, too, and frequently wrote poems with macabre and dark sentimentality. And snake women, of course (see: “Lamia“.)

Keats is best known for his odes including “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode to a Nightingale“, and “Ode to Psyche.” Unfortunately he died at the age of 26 of tuberculosis, inspiring romance writers for generations to wax poetic on the subject. But before he died, he also had an intense love affair with a woman name Fanny Brawne. Their passionate relationship was only made public in the late 19th century with the publication of their letters. The interchange scandalized Victorian society, but only served increased the writer’s popularity.

Now,  Jane Campion has brought Keats and Fanny’s story to the big screen with “Bright Star“; Campion both wrote and directed the film. While a great deal of the movie concentrates on the love story, according to the New York Times review, Campion lingers long on the language and setting of the story as well. This bit in the review got me very excited:

And while no film can hope to take you inside the process by which these poems were made, Ms. Campion allows you to hear them spoken aloud as if for the first time. You will want to stay until the very last bit of the end credits, not necessarily to read the name of each gaffer and grip, but rather to savor every syllable of Mr. Whishaw’s recitation of “Ode to a Nightingale.”

According to the review, there is also a “sequence in which, fully clothed, the couple trades stanzas of “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” in a half-darkened bedroom must surely count as one of the hottest sex scenes in recent cinema.”

Geeks, it seems, have been sexy for a long, long while.

The film opens in limited locations on the 18th of September.

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Wednesday Geeky Pics: Computer Science Buildings

You may have seen photographs of the Stata Center at MIT. It was designed by Frank Gehry and looks more like a giant art installation than a building at a university. However, having spent quite a bit of time in computer science buildings at various universities myself, I’ve noticed that many of them tend to be pretty interesting looking… perhaps it’s due to a desire to look cutting-edge or high tech. There are certainly many more examples of this (and of course, many facilities that are incredibly boring looking), but here are just a few I think would be cool places to hang out and study CS.

The Stata Center at MIT, home of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, among others – tdayal (CC)

cs1

Continue reading ›

Neil deGrasse Tyson’s worst science movie of all time? Titanic.

American astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson is not only a brilliant orator, he’s among the funniest scientific personalities I’ve heard. In the following video, he gives his reasons why Titanic is one of the worst science movie of all time. The video will automatically start at 26m12s and the part you need to watch lasts for about 6 minutes.

20 per cent price cut rumored for Wii

The fact that Nintendo’s Wii is behind its console rivals in the specs state is not a problem thanks to two reasons: it’s aimed at the casual games player and it’s significantly cheaper.

However, with the Xbox 360 dropping to $299, and the new PS3 Slim coming in at the same price, the $250 Wii doesn’t look as much of a budget option. With that in mind, rumors of a drop to $199 certainly appear to make sense.

The rumor has had a double dose of credibility from gaming site Kotaku in recent days. It first noted that a Walmart ad, which it didn’t publish, mentioned the console being involved in a rollback – the retailer’s term for a permanent price cut rather than a special offer.

It’s now published what appears to a shot of a Toys ‘R’ Us leaflet (pictured below) which shows the new $199 price cut. Assuming it’s genuine, the blurry image looks to have been hastily snapped with a cellphone camera. According to the source who passed on the picture, the leaflet is due to be distributed in the last week of September.

Nintendo says it currently has no plans to cut the price and says the stories are purely speculation. It’s not commented specifically on the apparent Walmart or Toys ‘R’ Us ads.

The firm is appearing at trade events in Japan later this month, which would be the most likely occasion for officially announcing a price cut.

Assuming the ads are genuine, it doesn’t appear that there would be any changes made to the Wii package at the lower price, such as making it a console-only deal; the Toys ‘R’ Us leaflet notes the inclusion of Wii Sports. It is possible the retailers are independently cutting their prices (with Nintendo’s wholesale price remaining the same), though $50 sounds like a pretty hefty hit for a retailer to take from its profit margin on a $250 electronic device.

For a device aimed at a mass audience, $199 certainly makes sense. That figure’s often been talked about as a psychological sweet point for a new consumer electronics technology, such as Blu-ray players, being seen as affordable by the general public.

Google Fast Flip breathes new life into old news

Google Fast Flip

I honestly can’t remember the last time I bought a periodical. I’ve never had newspapers delivered to my house. I don’t have any magazine subscriptions. I completely avoid the local news. But I am a news hound, and I check multiple sites daily, even when their format isn’t great. For me, the appeal of online media is the ability to browse multiple publications from a variety of perspectives and draw my own conclusions. I need to be informed.

However, the system isn’t perfect. Sometimes finding news is just plain time-consuming, not to mention overwhelming. Search accuracy varies from publication to publication when you’re looking for something specific, and with graphic-rich sites there can be real issues when it comes to load times.

But there is a new option for those of us looking for a quicker, more efficient way of getting our news online.

Google Fast Flip, available today from Google Labs, is a different take on online news media. It’s like a news buffet from all across the web, easily searchable and customizable, with super fast load times. From the Official Google Blog:

What we need instead is a way to flip through articles really fast without unnatural delays, just as we can in print. The flow should feel seamless and let you rapidly flip forward to the content you like, without the constant wait for things to load. Imagine taking 10 seconds to turn the page of a print magazine!

Now, for a person like me, this is extremely appealing. I don’t have to miss out on format and style, which is the drawback of many news readers, and I can narrow or widen my search as much as I want. With abilities to look by subject, by popularity, and by publication, it does look quite promising. Not to mention, the list of publishers already involved is rather impressive. A total of three dozen are involved, including the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Salon, Fast Company, ProPublica and Newsweek.

It functions like a huge newspaper or magazine, with a variety of sections. One click and you’re face-to-face with dozens of front pages, and you can browse through at a remarkable pace. Even cooler? There are versions for both Android and iPhone devices, giving mobile news viewing a serious edge.

Google’s stance on the plight of the publishing industry is a bit amusing, considering their role on digitizing everything and anything, but I think it sums  up the situation rather well:

The publishing industry faces many challenges today, and there is no magic bullet. However, we believe that encouraging readers to read more news is a necessary part of the solution. We think Fast Flip could be one way to help, and we’re looking to find other ways to help as well in the near future.

So far, my only concern is that it’s so radically different–especially when compared to a reader–that users might feel a little overwhelmed. What do you think? Have you taken Google Fast Flip for a spin?

[Google Fast Flip]

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