Move over Cthulhu, a new elder god has come to replace you, and he’s gonna kick your ass.
[Source]
OMG – Battle: Los Angeles Theatrical Trailer
Wow… just wow. Listening to this literally gave me goosebumps everywhere. Finally a good alien invasion movie… or at least one that looks good at first glance. Let’s just hope that the whole thing respects the spirit of the trailer when it comes out.
[Via TDW]
ION’s Book Saver Offers Easier Digitization for Books
Theoretically an e-reader device frees users from the need to ever own printed books. But most avid readers already have full bookshelves (and in many cases, love the beauty of the physical object.) And in any case, many printed titles aren’t yet available in electronic form.
ION Audio, better known for their USB enabled turntables, has now produced what it’s calling a solution to this problem. No, it’s not, as it appears, a hammock-stroke-sunbed for your books, but rather a digital scanner.
If you’ve ever scanned a book in with a flatbed scanner, you’ll know its a painfully slow process, with added discomfort if you hate the idea of stretching your book’s spine any more than strictly necessary.
The ION Book Saver attempts to make the process easier by not requiring the book to be in a flat position. Instead, twin cameras (both fitted with flashes) can scan two facing pages in as little as a second. The users then simply turns the page and clicks a button to shoot again. The content is then saved directly to an SD card.
There are some obvious limitations. While the speed is impressive in comparison to other scanning methods, the company still reckons on almost 15 minutes to scan a 200 page title once you take into account the time spent turning the pages as well as scanning, plus processing time.
The books themselves are scanned as PDF files, which will be viewable on e-readers, but won’t have some of the key features such as being searchable or automatic text resizing and reflow. The device comes with text-detecting software, but most OCR packages I’ve used tend to be hit-and-miss, and I’d be surprised if this method of image capture didn’t make results even more unreliable.
Still, at $199, the device is pricey but not obscenely so. From a legal and ethical perspective, there doesn’t seem to be any reason why somebody prepared to use it wouldn’t be happy just searching for an illicit scan of the same book online that’s already in an e-reader friendly format. But for those with a large collection of less common titles, or with a lot of documents they’d like in digital format, this might be a viable option.
Welcome to Hothlanta
You may have heard about the winter weather making things difficult for the southern United States right now – but with everyone snowed in and missing work, they have lots of time for social media, and the best Twitter search to find complaints about the snow in Georgia isn’t “snowpocalypse” or even “snOMG” but rather “Hothlanta” (a play on the city’s usual silly nickname “Hotlanta”). Maybe it’s appropriate since Dragon Con is in Atlanta, but it seems there’s quite a geek contingent!
We recently noted that people really like to take pictures of Star Wars action figures in the snow, and so it’s not surprising that some enterprising (and probably bored) Atlanta geeks have taken advantage of the nickname with photoshoots or even video.
At the very least, the nickname is getting a smattering of news coverage, so maybe it’s raising Star Wars awareness.
[Image Source: iReport]
Global Warming: Get your facts straight… or else [Video]
[Via]
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]