Category Archives: Weekly

by | May 16, 2014 · 2:42 pm

Around the Web May 16, 2014

Knowing how much we all love Game of Thrones, NicksplosionFX has combined that love with the cultural icon Super Mario. This this video, Nicksplosion faithfully recreates the introduction to GoT, except that he replaces locations like Kings Landing and Winterfell with various sites from the Mario classic Super Mario World.

I’m also pretty amused by the 8-bit soundtrack he decided to include. It’s a nice touch.

By now I’m sure everyone is aware that Harrison Ford has joined on for Star Wars VII, VIII, and IX, along with Carey Fisher and Mark Hamill. What is nearly as exciting is that Ford will also be reprising his role as Rick Deckard in the sequel to Blade Runner. Ford has made it clear that he was very interested in returning to the role, and recently Alcon Entertainment has made a public offer for Ford to do just that.

He say you Blade Runner!

He say you Blade Runner!

Not only is Harrison Ford on board, but Ridley Scott has also signed on to the project. Scott directed the original 1982 classic.

If you have been living under a rock for the last week, then you missed the internet going crazy over pictures of Ben Affleck as Batman. While many people were busy discussing the newly redesigned Batmobile, several others couldn’t help but start nitpicking Batman’s costume. Now admittedly, the costume looks pretty crappy, especially given how great the costume was in the Dark Knight Trilogy, but it’s also distinctly possible that this costume was made up just to take these pictures and was done so in a hurry. This wouldn’t be the first time that something released way before the film looks like crap. Anyone remember the teaser trailer for Spider-Man?

This trailer was total crap and the movie was just fine so I think the internet just needs to take a deep breath.

Wrapping up this week, we’ve got a brief history of the arcade game. Going all the way back to 1909 and the invention of Skee-Ball, we track the progression through pinball and Pac-Man to the modern era of arcade gaming. Even though it’s brief, there are some great little bits of trivia jammed in there, such as the fact that Skee-Ball lanes were originally thirty six feet long (a little over half the length of a bowling lane).

Ms-pacman

I’d love to have a couple old arcade games, but they’re a little pricey. But hey, if anyone wants to donate one to the Therefore I Geek cause (working or not), I’m game for it.

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by | April 30, 2014 · 10:03 pm

Winning Science April 30, 2014

Today is the launch of Amazing Spider-Man #1 and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 comes out in theaters tomorrow. How fitting, then, that Wired gives us a great article about the physics behind Spidey’s most famous piece of paraphernalia, his webs. Being an engineer, I’m familiar with most of the equations used in the article, but I had never put much thought into what the physical requirements must be for the webs. To pull of some of Spidey’s more impressive feats, the webs would need to be five times stronger than a steel cable.

Nobody does Spider-Man's webs quite like Todd McFarlane.

Nobody draws Spider-Man’s webs quite like Todd McFarlane.

I also really enjoyed the preemptive comment responses. This man has dealt with the internet before.

Observing un-contacted native tribes has always been a tough thing to do. Frequently contact eventually results the destruction of the very culture that is being observed. In an effort to prevent this from happening but still learn about the tribes, researchers are turning to Google Earth to monitor the behavior and activity of some tribes. This form of observation will also help set up buffer regions around the tribes to prevent inadvertent contact.

I see you...

I see you…

While this is a pretty great use of technology, it’s also a high tech form of voyeurism. Just a little creepy.

NASA has chosen to honor none other than William Shatner with their highest award, the Distinguished Public Service medal. This is a real no brainer. I’d bet considerable amounts of money that you couldn’t walk twenty feet in a NASA building without finding someone who has been inspired by the adventures of Captain James T. Kirk and his successors. Shatner has also been a vocal supporter of the NASA and of space exploration in general.

William Shatner with Ricardo Montalban in the episode Space Seed.

William Shatner with Ricardo Montalban in the episode “Space Seed”.

I had no idea he was Canadian. Guess I’m not quite the trekkie I thought I was.  😦

 

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by | April 25, 2014 · 6:15 pm

Around the Web April 25, 2014

It’s well known that stormtroopers don’t exactly have the best life. The Imperial military is a tough organization to be a part of and quite honestly, the average life expectancy of a stormtrooper is like five minutes. But if you’re interested in the more intimate details of a stormtrooper’s daily life, we have some insightful pictures that may give you the insight you desire.

stormtrooper1

It’s nice to see they also have some fun between all of the dying and poorly aimed shots.

Publisher’s Weekly performed a survey of comic retailers and recently published the results. While the survey was relatively small, it did provide some interesting information about the state of the comics industry. Obvious to most people was that comic readers are moving away from the big two and embracing new creator owned content. Most interesting was the fact that female comic readers are on the rise, specifically with digital comics. Whether this increase will transfer to brick and mortar stores is still unclear.

reading

Comics Alliance correctly points out that what we need most is additional research.

With Game of Thrones being the insane hit that it is, it’s hard to remember that at one point it was just an idea in the head of one man.  Rolling Stone recently took the time to sit down and interview George R.R. Martin. The interview is fantastic and provides both Martin’s personal history and the origins of A Song of Ice and Fire. It’s hard to imagine that this epic series all started with the idea that became the opening scenes of the A Game of Thrones,

George R.R. Martin

The interview took nearly ten hours because Martin loves to talk about nearly everything.

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by | April 16, 2014 · 11:43 am

Winning Science April 16, 2014

The Cassini spacecraft has discovered what appears to be a new moon being formed in the rings of Saturn. The new moon, named Peggy, is being formed from the ice that makes up Saturn’s rings. While this baby moon is still currently too small to see, the gravitational effects on the rings are visible. Peggy joins the 62 other moons that Saturn has, both official and provisional.

peggy

The moon might be named after a real person, but all I can think about is the guy from the Capital One commercial.

Leave it to the folks at MIT to determine that our furniture is too lazy. They seem to think it should be doing more for us. The Transform projects created a table-ish structure that moves and responds to people. The system senses when a person is nearby using a Kinect (from an Xbox). The table uses 1,152 plastic pins to provide motion. There is also a fantastic video of the table rolling a ball around. Yes, you just read that right, the surface is moving a ball around, in a controlled and complex manner.

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Maybe it won’t be too long until we have hospital beds like Yashida’s in The Wolverine. Seems like it could be comfy.

Scientists in Russia have successfully grown a new esophagus and implanted it in a rat.  What is an esophagus? When you drink something and you start coughing because it went “down the wrong pipe,” it should have gone down the esophagus. It’s the part of the body that takes food and liquids (e.g. beer) from the mouth to the stomach. The Russian scientists were able to accomplish this by using a scaffold of existing cells and then allowing stem cells to develop around that scaffold. Not only is this a fascinating advance, but an interesting technique for doing it as well.

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I’m pretty partial to my own esophagus because of the whole loving beer and food thing.

 

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