Shepherd Gets His Own Book

A Book for Book! Or, at least, a graphic novel treatment. Ornery Firefly fans rejoice: according to i09 and various other outlets, our dear Shepherd is at last getting an origin story. Written by Joss Whedon and his brother Zack, the title is called Serenity: The Shepherd’s Tale. As i09 puts it:

Shepherd Book got the short shrift in Serenity, and this graphic novel fleshes out his backstory, including the time he found God in a bowl of soup. Ron Glass dropped some teasers about the character a while back, but it’s good to see the mostly awesomely coiffed guy on the Serenity get a backstory.

If you’d like a preview of the issue, just go ahead and visit the Dark Horse site. From a cursory glance, it appears the graphic novel takes off in media res of the Serenity timeline. In order to remain spoiler-free, I’ll leave it at that.

I guess one of the things about losing our favorite televisions shows is, that in some cases anyway, they can be born again in graphic novel form, helping to fill in all the blanks and answer the questions left lingering! I’m particularly fond of the cover art. And this reminds me, I really need to catch up on the Serenity series.

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Frog Dissection: The Lego Edition

This Lego reproduction of a dissected frog looks almost as educational as the real thing, minus the smell and general yuckiness of having to handle a real frog’s innards. Too bad those weren’t available back when I was in high school. Oh well, what can we do? Those days are long over now… not that I particularly miss them.

[Via | Source: Flickr]

Electric car takes another step to practicality

A German company has produced a battery pack that allows an ordinary car to travel 375 miles on a single charge. It’s not a record, but is arguably the most impressive overall performance.

The record for a single charge appears to be 623 miles, achieved by a converted Daihatsu van. However, that only averaged 27 miles per hour and the vehicle could only carry the driver, with no room for passengers.

In contrast, the DBM Energy Audi A2 has all four original seats and drove at an average speed of 55 mph. That’s hardly going to leave other drivers standing on the speed limit-free German autobahns, but it certainly means the car would be practical even outside of urban locations.

Indeed, while the Daihatsu test drive was on a race track, the Audi journey was between Munich and Berlin.

The Allscarelectrics blog notes that the CEO of the company producing the vehicle has a keen eye for public relations: not only did he drive the vehicle during the test, but even offered to let waiting journalists charge their cellphone with the remaining energy at the end of the journey.

DBM says the car can be fully charged in six minutes at virtually any power socket. It says the battery system is already used by a logistics company in fork lift trucks (running 28 hours without recharging), and that it’s ready to go into large-scale production if it finds a buyer in the auto business.

The Greasiest Sandwich Ever AKA The Angry French Canadian

The Angry French Canadian: a 20″ french toasted Parisian baguette covered with poutine, steamies, and bacon, all smothered in 100% pure maple syrup from the tit of The Mother Maple Tree. As a French Canadian myself, I approve of this sandwich, and my very pregnant wife would probably approve as well.

Thanks Big Eater!

Kilogram on yo-yo diet

A United States agency is calling for the abolition of the kilogram.

That’s not to say the National Institute of Standards and Technology wants to get rid of the unit of measurement itself. Instead it believes it’s time to stop using the physical object (or “artifact”) that determines the precise mass that makes up a kilogram.

The kilogram is the base unit for mass in the International System of Units (or “SI” from the French, which is the main international system for seven key measures: mass, length (base unit the metre), time (the second), electric current (the ampere), thermodynamic temperature (the kelvin), luminous intensity (the candela) and amount of substance (a measure used in particle studies, for which the unit is the mole). In each case, all other units of measurement are decimal derivatives of the base unit.

What makes the kilogram — and thus mass as a whole — unique is that it is the only SI unit still based on a physical object. Everything else is based on a physical process that remains constant: for example, one meter is the distance that light travels in a vacuum in one second, divided by 299,792,458. (That number does stem from the original, physical definition, but by being fixed it’s not affected by physical changes.)

It’s also believed that all of the kilograms are gradually declining in mass over time through material decay. Unfortunately, and ironically, there’s no way to verify this under the current system as, by definition, the original kilogram always has a mass of, well, one kilogram, regardless of any physical changes.

To make things slightly worse, although the ampere, mole and candela are all based on physical processes, they all involve a measure of mass, meaning they are in turn reliant on the stability of the kilogram.

There has been serious talk of switching the definition of the kilogram for the past five years or so. The most common proposal’s precise definition involves calculations that frankly I don’t dare try to summarize for fear that I get things wrong and somebody tries to recreate them only to end up tearing the fabric of space and time.

The key, though, is that the definition of the kilogram would be based on the speed of light and a fixed amount of energy, the unit thus deriving ultimately from E=MC2.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology has filed a resolution to bring about the change and hopes it will be discussed and adopted at an international meeting next October.

Halloween 2010: GAS’s Facebook Fans Costume Picture Compilation

Yesterday, when we asked our Facebook fans to send in pictures of their Halloween costumes, we never thought that so many would participate! While we simply can’t post them all (there was waaaayyyy to many for that), we can at least feature a few of the ones we liked best, just like the one above from our friends at Ball State University, Muncie, IN. Enjoy!

Now here’s one of the sexiest Catwoman costumes I’ve ever seen

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