Stop the Ride! I Wanna Get Off!: Earth-Sized Planet Discovered

By Derek Clark
Contributing Writer [GAS]

The more I live on this planet, the more I want to pack up and move to a new one. Considering humanity’s impressive talent at destroying this world of ours (wars, environmental disasters, Justin Bieber and whatever it was my coworker just did to that bathroom), I think it’s time to call my travel agent and reserve a seat on the next rocket out of here.

And not a moment too soon, either! NASA’s Kepler team just announced the discovery of the first Earth-sized planet orbiting a star outside of our solar system! And it’s rocky like Earth, not another one of those stupid gas giants we keep finding like Hummers in a haystack.

God bless you, NASA. I’m saved. Now, I simply have to Google the directions to our government’s version of the Battlestar Gallactica (someone has to know where they’re hiding it) and pack my towel.

As my mind races with thoughts of becoming the new ‘Adam’ to a planet full of Amazonian ‘Eves’–a planet I’ve appropriately renamed ‘Dereklandia’ (shut up, this is my fantasy)–I read the rest of the press release and hit a few speed bumps.

It seems this new planet is more than a few blocks away–560 light years to be exact. Unfortunately, no matter how much I yell at my kids, I don’t think I can generate enough negative energy to open a wormhole to get there.

Even if I could make it there somehow before my 560th birthday, I wouldn’t have much time to enjoy it. The planet has no atmosphere and is 20 times closer to its star than Mercury is to our Sun, making its surface a cozy 2500 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s so close that iron flecks and silicate minerals constantly explode from its hot ass like a bad burrito out into space.

Bummer. Sounds like Dereklandia is about as nice as living in the armpit of an overheated Lane Bryant model. Guess I’ll be cancelling my flight off this rock… for now.

There’s still hope for the discovery of a habitable, Bieber-free world though. Last June the NASA Kepler team published a catalog of 306 stars with planet candidates. Even though it’s a long shot, I’m going to go ahead and trademark the name ‘Dereklandia’ just in case.



Y’all be speaking funny on Twitter

Twitter can be coo. Twitter can also be koo. But which it is depends on where you live.

Carnegie Mellon University researchers have been using the microblogging site to learn more about regional slang. They analyzed 380,000 messages from the site during a one-week period from last March, an estimated 15% of the daily US total at the time. Thanks to the site’s use of geotags for users posting from mobile devices, they were able to track trends of where different phrases were most popular.

The results encompassed cliches/truisms old (“y’all” in the south, “yinz” in Pittsburgh) and new (“hella” in Northern California), as well as the revelation that there’s “suttin” notable about New Yorkers.

There were also some notable differences in modifiers: a New Yorker would be more likely to be “dead ass tired” while a Los Angeles citizen would more likely be “tired af” with the “a” standing for as, and the f, well…

It also appears that New Yorkers, for all their stereotype as being rushed for time, don’t always practice text-style abbreviations: they are disproportionately likely to write “youu” in place of “you” or to double type the letter “l”. Of course, the assumption is that this has something to do with the people rather than New York keyboards being more unreliable.

The research isn’t necessarily a representative sample of the general population: Twitter users are much more prevalent among 18-34 year olds, though as of 2009 the site had a higher median age of user than both Facebook and MySpace. (That may have changed since, with a lot of older users joining Facebook.) And while I don’t have figures, I’d suspect that as the sample was restricted to those posting from phones, the bias to younger users may be even stronger.

The report was part of work by a team of four headed by post-doctoral fellow Jacob Eisenstein: it wasn’t designed so much to find out what people said on Twitter as to find a model for analyzing the text.

As part of the project, Eisenstein and company tried to automatically predict users locations. When it came to pinpointing a location, they were out by a mean average of 900km, but a median average of 494km (suggesting that the larger misses were rarer but more spectacular). In picking a more general location, they were able to get the correct state 24% of the time, and correctly pick one of four regions of the country on 58% of occasions.

Oh, and if you’re wondering, it’s coo in Southern California and koo in Northern California.

Brilliant: NASA – The Frontier is Everywhere

No, this isn’t an official commercial promoting NASA, but we definitely think it should be. Sit back, relax, and enjoy.

[Via Reddit]



9 Developments That Prove We Really Are Living In The Future

There is little doubt that as time marches on, the sheer amount of impressive technology that each of us has access to will grow exponentially. After all it was only 30 years ago that the thought of home computing was a novel and futuristic concept, whereas today, the thought of not having immediate access to some kind of computer is a scary and disconcerting one. Technology has gotten to the point where all of those fantastic visions of the future we grew up with have come true in some form or another.  To me, this proves that we currently are living in the sci-fi future so frequenty imagined in the past.

Continue reading ›

How do you listen to music and watch videos on the go?

When it comes to listening to music while I’m on the road, I pretty much only use my simple 4gb mp3 player. The thing was really cheap, and it only does one thing: play music. No video player, no voice recording feature, nothing else. Just play music. I’ve briefly considered getting an iPod touch last month, but considering its price and the fact that I wouldn’t use it for more than 30 minutes per day, I quickly abandoned the idea. But what about you? How do you listen to music and watch videos on the go? Do you have a laptop that you carry around as a do-it-all kind of device, or are you just like me, preferring to keep things simple. Be sure to let us know in the comments below!

The Font Alphabet [Video]

We’ve featured a few alphabets on [Gas] in the past, most notably our own Geek Alphabet, but Vimeo user n9ve used various fonts to create his own version, where each character is the initial letter of a font name. Check it out:

[Via TDW]

Mike’s Fabulous Dragon Cake [Pics]

All I can say is: Wow, have you looked at all the details on that thing? It looks almost real! Kudos to the crew over at Mike’s Amazing Cakes for one of the most delicious and awesome looking dragon cakes I’ve ever seen… not that I’ve seen many, of course, because let’s admit it, there’s not a lot of people who can pull off making a cake look like that.

Hit the jump for a few other pics >> Continue reading ›

Dungeons & Dragons Drawings

By Rob Lammle
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

Dungeons & Dragons is pretty much a right of passage into nerdery. Even if you didn’t play a lot after you discovered the opposite sex, most of us have rolled a few saving throws in our day. Which is why, when I stumbled upon the website Dungeons and Drawings, by the British duo Blanca Martinez and Joe Sparrow, fond memories of late nights drinking Mountain Dew and eating Cool Ranch Doritos while huddled over a 20-sided die, came flooding back to me.

The two artists are posting their own interpretations of the creatures that have haunted many a Monster Manual, giving a new twist to some old, familiar faces, tentacles, and horns. Most of the illustrations, like their awesome Beholder, are entirely original. While others pieces, like the Rust Monster, borrow heavily from artwork seen in previous versions of the Manual, adding an extra level of joy for you old school geeks out there who will spot the references.

You might notice the illustrations are intentionally avoiding the traditional, more realistic style of fantasy art that’s been so commonplace since Frank Frazetta painted his first muscled barbarian. Martinez and Sparrow say, while they love that type of art, they wanted to bring something new to the genre with a more modern sensibility. Their philosophy is definitely a nice change of pace.

Check out the site for more artwork, and if there’s a particular beast you’d like to see, drop them a line, because they do take requests.

Movie director moves to the (very) small screen

Oldboy director Park Chan-wook has produced a movie shot entirely on the iPhone. But those of you thinking this is a green-light to win an Apple-powered Academy Award may be out of luck.

The movie, Paranmanjang only runs for 30 minute and the budget, while tiny compared to most Hollywood blockbusters, still ran to $133,000.

According to Park, it wasn’t purely the cost brought benefits from the iPhone. Instead it was a combination of the handsets being relatively affordable and easy to operate, which allowed his crew to film with more cameras than would be practical on a standard movie shoot. In turn, that allowed more chance to get the “perfect” shot, as well as making editing effects, such as fast-paced cutting, easier.

The production process of the movie, including finding a location, auditioning, and even producing a documentary on the filmmaking, was carried out in exactly the same way as a standard movie.

Park also noted that there’s a psychological effect for the viewer as they are familiar with the look and feel of iPhone footage, but not in a movie context.

Part of the budget for the movie came from KT Corp, which happens to be the sole distributor of the iPhone in South Korea. It’s not clear to how much extent this funding influenced Park’s decision to carry out the project.

The movie, which the Associated Press describes as being “about a man transcending his current and former lives” will open in nine Korean theaters this month.

[Picture Source]

A Mystery: Why Can’t People Walk in a Straight Line?

Try as you might, you can’t walk in a straight line without a visible guide point, like the Sun or a star. You might think you’re walking straight, but as NPR’s Robert Krulwich reports, a map of your route would reveal you are doomed to walk in circles.

So, anyone here care to explain the reason why human beings can’t walk in a straight line?

[Via Reddit]