Black holes, LHC, Star Wars, quantum uncertainty… if it is of general geek interest, but doesn’t fit into one of the other categories, it lands here.
Liars, damned liars, and statistics. Apparently, several of the most “reliable” temperature recording surveys in the world indicate that the Earth’s average temperatures are actually showing a downward trend during the last decade. But the single most quoted source, NASA, says exactly the opposite. From an article on The Register…
According to Jim Cicconi, “Vice president of legislative affairs” at AT&T, the whole Internet will be completely full by 2010. If you believe Jim, 20 typical households in 2010 will generate more traffic than the entire Internet today.
I’m shocked and disappointed. Apparently, that Iron Man trailer I told you about some time ago is being made into a (are you sitting down?) a *movie*
I came across this video on Gizmodo today and… well, there is something about automatic weapons, rockets, and cars instead of clay pigeons that just tickles my funny bone.
I spent a couple of hours this weekend trying to remember the name of a movie I vaguely recall watching many years ago. It was back in the ’80s, during the era of Conan and its imitators: the era of Sword and Sorcery movies. I recall the film being kind of fun: a first rate B movie, if that makes sense. Yet I couldn’t recall a title or, with any certainty, the details of the plot.
I remembered two scenes from the movie, and possibly a third one. I wasn’t sure if perhaps I was misremembering, and combining these scenes from several different movies together into some sort of frankenmemory. I recounted my vague recollections to my nephew Shane when we were talking about other movies, and to my friend Chris, who I recall was there when I saw this particular flick all those years ago.
I clearly remember how I first got into Dungeons and Dragons. I was 15 years old at the time. My friend Tim was a member of Mensa, and told me that they had this thing called Dungeons and Dragons that they played. Since I was a big fan of Tolkein’s Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, Tim’s description of D&D sounded perfect. I wrote an IQ test and discovered I missed the grade by a couple of points: the fact that I wrote the test on the day I found out my Dad had died might have had an impact, but I also never really claimed to be a genius. But the desire to play D&D remained.
I vaguely recall hearing that an Iron Man movie was in the works, but more or less ignored it. I like superhero movies when they are done well: Batman Begins was done well, the first Spiderman was done well, but many (most?) such movies end up being more or less… bad. And I didn’t have a lot of hope for Iron Man.
I am not really the "typical" Wired reader. For one thing, I'm far from "cool" or "hip". I've got the "geek" thing down, though. Despite being outside the correct Wired…
I came across an interesting post on Wired today, referring to a Dutch study that just made me shake my head. The study found that obese people actually save society money versus healthy, thin people. While they are alive the fat people cost more, but since they die younger they end up being cheaper overall versus the healthy people who live longer and require care as they age.
