Darth Vader goes to Disneyland [Video]

Just a cute little commercial featuring Darth Vader at Disneyland I stumbled upon this morning. Enjoy!

[Youtube]



Tech Start-Up Offers New Hires Free Beer, Skinny Jeans

Maybe before this week no one had heard of Hipster, a San Francisco company that lets people post queries and answers to others in their geographic area using the Web and a mobile phone, but with their new-hire incentives, everyone is talking about them.

If you are hired by–or if someone you recommend is hired by–the start-up, Hipster will give you $10,000, a year’s supply of PBR (Pabst Blue Ribbon for the blissfully unaware), skinny jeans, a bow tie, a bicycle, oversized eyeglasses, a pair of boots and, last but not least, mustache-grooming services. Sorry, lady tech geeks. Maybe you can exchange for eyebrow waxing or something.

“As you know, recruiting is insanely competitive right now, so we wanted to do something that would break through the noise, and get the attention of the people we’re trying to reach,” said Doug Ludlow, one of the founders of the company.

I’d say the tactic worked, at least as far as getting people to talk about Hipster. No word yet on whether or not the campaign has attracted new applicants, or whether or not those applying now knew about Hipster before it was cool.

[source: 1|2] [image]



Anime Doctor Who by Otaking [Video]

Anime Doctor Who from Otaking (Paul Johnson), two years in the making. From Johnson:

13 minutes of the completed fake Doctor Who 80s-style anime. Drawn, animated and partially voiced by myself. Some bits are good, some bits are poor, but on the whole it turned out okay, I think. Enjoy! This is old school Who, so fans of the new reboot show may be confused by the fact that the Doctor is doing martial arts and Cybermen say “excellent.” Watch the classics and you’ll understand. You’ll also become almost instantly more handsome by watching classic Who.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePtj3z8rSq4&feature=player_embedded

What do you think, Whovians?

[via] [YouTube]

Angry Birds Los Angeles

http://youtu.be/VWhvkBhBCm4
Perhaps the best live-action VFX Angry Birds vid you’ll ever see! We especially loved the cameo by The Finger.

The Who, Why and How of Twitter [Infographic]

“Of the millions of tweets created every day, 71% produce no reaction.” I find this unsurprising when people talk so much about what they’re eating and where they are.

[by BuySellAds via TNW]

Space Age Designs from the PopSci Archives

Years before Sputnik launched and even longer before The Jetsons debuted, Popular Science was tracking Space Age trends in automobiles, appliances, architecture and interior design.

Check out the PopSci gallery of Space Age-design articles from 1951 – 1968, which include everything from rocket-shaped cars to a lunar-base summer camp.

[PopSci]

7 Things I Learned from This Week’s Infinite Monkey Cage

This week saw the start of the fourth series of British radio series The Infinite Monkey Cage, which aims to present “a witty irreverent look at the world according to science.”

(The show has proven so successful it even produced a national live event tour, which I reviewed recently.)

British readers who missed the show should still be able to access it via the Radio 4 website and associated podcasts, while international readers may like to chance their arm in the murky world of IP verification and geographic proxy servers.

For those who aren’t able to hear the show, here’s what I learnt from this week’s episode, which centered on the question “What don’t we know?” (in between attempts to establish “That’s entropy!” as a catchprase.)

  1. The study on physics is based on our knowledge of around two percent (by mass) of the material in the universe. Marcus Chown compared this to Darwin developing his biological theories based solely on study of snails.
  2. The number of genes in a human body (around 24,000) is roughly the same as the number of parts that make up a London bus. Geneticist Steve Jones likened the current state of DNA knowledge to having said bus parts, sorted and stored in buckets, but trying to figure out how to build the bus without any instructions.
  3. If a human only ate raw food, he or she would die within three months.
  4. Science is a pessimistic profession because you start out by trying to prove what you think is right is actually wrong, and the most common comment you’ll make is “we don’t know.”
  5. Dark energy differs in reality from the predictions made by quantum theory by a factor of 10 to the power of 120. That’s the biggest discrepancy in the history of science.
  6. In the pre-decimalization era, one estimate said the chemicals that make up a human being could be bought for 12 pounds, eight shillings and four pence. (Though a date wasn’t given, if you take it as being just before 1971 when British currency went decimal, it’s the modern-day equivalent of £150 or around US$250.)
  7. An unnamed (and possibly apocryphal) scientist once spent years repeatedly chopping tails off mice, breeding them, then chopping the tails off the descendants and so on in the hope they would eventually prove his theory that the mice would evolve to be born without a tail. He abandoned the experiment when it was noted Jewish people had unintentionally been carrying out a similar experiment for centuries.