One evident danger of Facebook or MySpace activity is the increased risk from stalkers and predators. Kids and teens, and even those beyond their teenage years may unintentionally place themselves at risk from stalkers and sexual predators. Your friends aren’t the only people who may be looking at your profile, and MySpace is a stalker’s haven where personal photos and information are a click away.

Most interesting are those who claim the variety of health problems that come about from social networking. Aric Sigman, a highly acclaimed British scientist has inflamed and enraged the population through his books like Remotely Controlled: How Television is Damaging Our Lives. Sigman is to be respected for taking the minority stand on unpopular issues. His talks on alcohol and technology are equally scintillating, but it’s his comments regarding social networking with which we are interested. In his influential paper, “The Biological Implications of ‘Social Networking’” (Biologist, February 2009), Sigman attempts to prove his thesis that online social networking has biological effects that adversely alter our health. In other words: Facebook is bad for you. If you can navigate his medical verbiage, you will discover that online social networking subjects you to increased risk for cancer, genetic mutation, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, dementia, lupus, arthritis, strokes, and yes, even the common cold. His charts which trace the size of one’s social circle and its direct impact upon the diameter of one’s arteries are really quite insightful.

With a pointed application, Sigman closes his work with a haunting question: [Having considered th the enormous evidence of these calamitous effects] “we should now explain the true meaning of the term ‘social networking.’”

I will admit that I have a few Facebook friends, who don’t seem to sleep, judging by the constant regularity of their status updates, even in the odd hours of the morning, but I’m not sure it’s given them lupus…yet.

No doubt, it would do us all good to maintain an awareness of the way we spend our time. Few would argue that such an exercise could produce significant improvement, but you will have to judge personally whether or not you’re at an increased risk for dementia as a result of your Facebook activity.

The art of hacking in a technological world is generally a negative thing. To hack into something, usually means a breach in security and some form of data altered. However, hacking, and being particularly skilled at it, can pay off – if the skills are used appropriately.

Shane Kelly, age 16, became the world’s youngest person to pass the Certified Ethical Hacker course. Because of his dedication and precision, there are some big people very interested in utilizing his mad skills.

Hacks can be used for good! Programming something to “hack” into a problem you’re encountering, like with say your website development or network. Hacking can be viewed as a positive thing, and quite frankly, the biggest networks and programs are developed by hackers. You have to know how to get into it to be able to prevent access to it, right?

Now, by no means am I saying that it is okay to hack into someone else’s property, or copyrighted works like programs and applications, but hacking should not always be viewed as illegal. Take those skills and go work for someone who can really benefit from them. Internet companies, software companies, police departments. Fight crime! Slip into your bat-suit and get involved in the criminal investigation sector of a police department. After all, they are likely to more fully utilize your hacking super-powers (and you’d get paid for it).

Gabriel tells of a relationship that starts early in his childhood with an Atari 2600 and plays out much like the story of every adult gamer’s life. During his teenage years, he discovers two overriding passions: freestyle club dancing and Blizzard’s classic RTS Starcraft. I can’t personally sympathize with the former; the club scene has never been anything for me except a mindless churning of intoxicated bodies, a dead-end excersise who’s only real virtue is the physical discipline it requires. Too many people I knew in high school went down that bottomless spiral of meaningless social mingling, destructive relationships, and drug and alcohol addiction and found themselves in their late 20s with no skills, no family, a dead-end job and few true, reliable friends.

You might then imagine my confusion when Gabriel characterizes his relationship with dance clubs as a constructive force in his life and his personal obsession with video games as a youth-stealing, mind-rotting, addictive plague on modern society. You see, in my case, video games defined my life, my career, and my passions in a positive way that led me to a successful career, a happy marriage, and a great group of friends who share my interests. Like Gabriel, I started off with the Atari, worked my way up through the Nintendo, the Super Nintendo (still my all time favorite console), the Playstation, and then the plethora of online PC games that grew in popularity during my teenage years. As dedicated gamers, my friends and I became heavily involved in PC modding and tuning, always trying to squeeze out that extra frame per second. It built our technical skills and provided the foundation I needed to to eventually get a job as a PC technician, after years of dead-end work in civil service I’m still trying to forget.

That experience also led directly to my eventual career choice as a web software developer and web designer. As the geekiest and most technically inclined of my group, I assumed the responsibility of building guild websites, handling server administration, and a brief stint of game programming when we spent some time off from Command and Conquer and Quake to build a MUD – a Multi-User Dungeon, a prototypical MMO with an all-text interface, for those of you who came along after Ultima Online and Everquest. The skills and social connections I developed while pursuing my gaming hobbies are more valuable to me than any other character-building experience in my life.

Without video games, I can’t predict exactly where my life would have ended up, but they provided me the focus that helped me develop my own personal talents into a successful career much the way Gabriel developed his based on his passion for dance. The similarity and contrast between our lives leads me to wonder, once again, at the impact articles like his will have both on gaming culture and on clinical and popular psychology – by further diluting the meaning of addiction and confusing cause and effect in the case of obsessive behavior, involving video games or anything else. The plight of real addicts with debilitating chemical addictions is mocked every time someone characterises an obsession as an addiction, and likewise people with unhealthy obsessions may be suffering from a fundamental misunderstanding of the cause and consequence of their problems which prevents them from seeking and finding the help they need.

I also worry that it provides a skewed view to the already misinformed older generation, as well as the members of our generation who never quite got on the boat, who are still playing the politics of fear we gamers are oh-so-familiar with. Every generation in the past century has been the first to embrace some amazing new technological or cultural advancement and each has had to deal with ignorance and fearmongering that big changes like these bring about. It’d be nice if we could look past generational lines and find the common ground we share as the children of a rapidly progressing society. Certainly Gabriel is welcome to tell his story. I hope that he, and others like him who have allowed a single facet of their life to become an overriding destructive obsession, will someday have the maturity to admit that the problem is theirs, and accept responsibility for their actions and their lives instead of placing blame on the object of their obsession.

(thanks to QJ.net for the image, used without permission, sorry!)

Technorati Tags: video, game, obsession, addiction, addict, obsessive, personality, bohemian, gabriel fransisco

Looking at Spore, a game I’ve been excited about for a while now, it looks like there will finally be a change from the grind of rapid build up and nuke, or hide behind the pretty foliage from alien’s shooting beams at you paradigms that have been so prevalent lately.  I’m even getting sick of my new old standby – COD4.  Level 55 on a PC and. . . wow.  A gold gun, more shots down the line and more infantile chatter over which levels are ‘teh suck’.  They’ve even launched a whole ad series in a bunch of major urban public transportation stations.  How cool is it to see a video game, any video game, advertised in a place like that?

Call me nostalgic or an old fart but I miss the days of turn based RPGs and strategy games that really made you think.  Civ, Baldur’s Gate, Total War, MOO2. . . these are games I spent days on, working out my strategies, leveling my party, conquering worlds and taking real pride in my accomplishments.  No twitching involved.  All of these games had their shortcomings and limitations based on the systems and resources available – but they also all had that golden sheen of near endless replayability, go at your own pace game play and customization.

Guess what Spore is offering?  Pretty much all of the above.  While game play isn’t strictly turn based, it does look to be paced at a rate I want it at – not at the fastest click or quickest button push.  You start with your creatures at a cellular level and bring them all the way through to interstellar conquest.  Yowza!  It’s got vast scope, incredible customization, the ability to be not just a game but a social network without the grind of MMORPG camping.  I can’t wait to get my hands on this game and tool around with it.  Single player with creature sharing – so I can choose my level of interaction with other people online and I’m not forced into reading inane comments by school kids learning they can swear on the ‘net or grouping with a bunch of strangers.

There will of course be some limitations and downsides to this game – there is no gaming nirvana, at least not yet and probably won’t be until we get a Holodeck or its equivalent.  There will be limitations to the game but worst of all, there will be DRM.  Good old SecureRom, in it’s scaled back form.  At least there’s no 10 day activation anymore, EA has backed off of that, you can even play the game offline.  You will however need to authenticate when you install, and every time you update.  Here’s the official word:

We authenticate your game online when you install and launch it the first time.

We’ll re-authenticate when a player uses online features, downloads new content or a patch for their game.

The new system means you don’t have to play with the disc in your computer. And if you are like me, always losing discs, this will be a huge benefit.

You’ll still be able to install and play on multiple computers.

You can play offline.

Better than the original 3 installs and 10 day activation period but still DRM.  Why couldn’t the folks at Stardock have developed this with Will Wright?

You can pre-order Spore right from EA and they’ll do a ‘pre-load’ which essentially downloads a huge, encrypted install file onto your machine (PC only, no Mac right now) which you can install at 12:00:01 on the 7th I’m assuming.  This saves you the hassle of having to go out and buy the game somewhere physical or wait for Amazon to deliver it to your door, but does mean you get no physical copy, at least at first.  I can’t tell whether a pre-load and pre-order also entitles you to a shipped product.  You’ll also have to download, install and trust EA’s Download Manager, yet another piece of software to manage your stuff for you.

So yes, Spore has it’s faults, and I’m sure there will be game play issues like there are in all games where not everything is perfect for everyone – an impossible goal but I’m still looking forward to it.  I can even forgive the cartoony graphics if the game gives me an absorbing experience that I’ll look forward to playing again and again.  Here’s hoping.

EDIT: I broke down and got the pre-install and the creature creator.  Check out the few things I’ve cobbled together here.

Technorati Tags: ea, spore, games, video game, creature creator, securerom, downloads, pre-load, micro to macro, lets hope its as good as the build up

The new book by Nick Sagan (son of Carl Sagan), You Call This the Future?: The Greatest Inventions Sci-Fi Imagined and Science Promised, is characterized by explanations of some of the fascinating technologies envisioned in classic science fiction along with explorations of the progress modern science has made towards achieving those visions. Classic science fiction references appear side-by-side with summaries of state of the art scientific research.

The book is divided into 5 broad chapters, each covering 10 technologies that we have made progress towards realizing. The chapters are Travel and Transportation, Computers, Cyborgs, and Robots, Communications, Weapons and Security, and Life, Health, and Sex.

The Pros

This book is very well written. Each technology is described with multiple fictional appearances as well as detailed accounts of modern advances involving that technology. I was also surprised at how realistic many of the concepts once considered impossible have become. There were also detailed diagrams and high-quality images for all of the sections, which made the content much more engaging.

The Cons

Some of the technologies in the book were much less interesting than others. In a desire to have the same number of sections in each chapter, some sections were added that probably could have been left out – language translators, watch toys, and sex toys, for example.

I definitely recommend this book. It was a quick read, and each section was engaging and interesting. The price is very reasonable, as well.

The Stats

Title: You Call This the Future?: The Greatest Inventions Sci-Fi Imagined and Science Promised
Author(s): Nick Sagan, Mark Frary, and Andy Walker
ISBN10: 1556526857
ISBN13: 978-1556526855
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Cost: $11.21 (from Amazon)
Format: Paperback, 160 pages
Published: April 1, 2008

Technorati Tags: Carl Sagan, Nick Sagan, Mark Frary, Andy Walker, science fiction, technology, books, book reviews, You Call This the Future?: The Greatest Inventions Sci-Fi Imagined and Science Promised

THE Singularity, that’s what he’s talking about.  You know, the point where machine intelligence jogs past human intelligence and brings us to a new era where combined computer cognition is the equivalent of a minor deity.  Not only that, but it’s Kurzweil, without the T.  I don’t know if that’s Intel’s fault or Cnet’s on the transcription.

What is the Singularity really?  It’s where machine intelligence surpasses human intelligence – even by just a tiny bit.  At that point, the machines, which are now more knowing than we are, can recursively improve on themselves in a never ending and rapidly accelerating cycle of getting better and better.

Kurzweil tones it down a bit and simply says it’s going to be a time where machines can manifest their own rapidly advancing technology.  The implications of a meteoric rise in technology, self replicating smarter than human intelligences and you know, superbeings. . . it’s all still there though.  Perhaps in Intel’s mind, the Singularity involves computers designing processors for their next of kin to the point where we have the 1nm Intel processors featuring 10,000 cores.

Is this something we really want to work towards?  Is it inevitable?  And will these machines become self aware?  No one really knows but it’s certainly an interesting concept to think on.

For their part, I’ve awarded the first ever ArsGeek Overreaching Statement Award to Intel.  Congratulations Intel! Stating that they are actively working on the Singularity goes a bit beyond miniaturizing processors and coming up with interesting ways to optimize code for multiple cores.  It’s a bit like casually stating that your experiments on family dog have yeilded a doberman with the intelligence of your or I and the ability to speak several languages.

Technorati Tags: singularity, intel, ray kurzweil, ai, overraching statement award, computers, technology, other geeks, our future overlords

Remember in grade school there was this kid who could make fart noises with his armpit? How cool that was? You wanted to be able to do that too, but never seemed to be able to pull it off. And remember how in high school, the same kid was still making fart noises with his armpit? But now you thought it was gross (You never admitted to anyone you still tried to make it work alone in your room).

Have you ever wondered what happened to that guy?

Well, you’ll be happy to know he’s alive and well. And he’s still making fart noises (though he’s since traded armpit farts for hand farts, less rashes I guess).

Meet Gerry (Jerry) Phillips. Gerry calls himself a manualist. A manualist is someone who plays music with their hands and no other instruments.

Sounds easy? Try it.

Gerry has a real talent. He’s got over a hundred videos posted on YouTube. And they are all amazing. He handfarts his way through all sorts of old favorites (Bohemian Raphsody, Killer Queen, Mario Bros. Theme) and makes some songs better than they’ve ever been (Hit Me Baby, One More Time, The Final Countdown).  Here’s Peter Frampton:

I highly suggest you check him out if you’re looking to waste some time, get a good laugh and be totally amazed. Here’s a link to his YouTube page:

http://www.youtube.com/user/gunecologist

Technorati Tags: geek, manualist, handfart, music, classic rock, super mario bros.

Technorati Tags: media player, songbird, video, audio, album art, beta, software, cross platform

The best part of the video is when Adam breaks from the itinerary to show a slow-motion video of fellow co-host Jaimie Hyneman slapping him across the face in an attempt to sober Adam up.  While locating the file on his laptop, someone in the audience points out the somewhat suspiciously named “Batman The Dark Knight.avi” on Adam’s desktop, to which Adam responds, “Well, I hadn’t seen it yet.”

The video is an hour long, but totally worth watching.

Edit: It turns out the video in question was just the trailer of Batman.  But still, Adam is a Batman fan, he recreated a Dodo skeleton, he hand-drew a map of Middle Earth, and his official occupation entails blowing stuff up on TV.  He would be hard pressed to be any geekier (or cooler).

Technorati Tags: Mythbusters, hackers, H.O.P.E., Adam Savage

Frotz is a Z-machine interpreter which is needed to run Zork and other Zork like games, made popular waaaay back in the day by this little company called Infocom.

It’s a free app from the store, which comes with a bunch of games pre-loaded, and the ability to natively browse the IFDB (Interactive Fiction DataBase) for new stuff to download and play.

Game play is a little slow thanks to the iPhone keyboard but it’s still pretty much the same experience as it was back in the 80s.

Technorati Tags: frotz, iphone, apps, app store, zork, infocom, ifdc

IMPORTANT: Your DVD shipments might be delayed…

We’re sorry to report that we’ve been experiencing issues with our shipping system, so some of you are not receiving DVDs in a timely manner and some of you have not received emails letting you know we got a DVD back from you.

We apologize and we’ll be automatically issuing credits to all of you whose shipments have been delayed. Our goal is to ship DVDs as soon as possible and to provide a personalized email update to you if your DVD shipment was delayed.

We’re sorry for any inconvenience we’ve caused you and thank you for your patience.

The Netflix Team

Technorati Tags: dvd, netflix, system issues, oops

• You are actually afraid of Chuck Norris, and have a respectful fear of Christopher Walken.
• J00 c4n und3r574nd wh47 7h15 54y5.
• Your fingers are permanently in the WASD formation.
• You have one or more Manga Girl Wallpapers on your computer.
• You know the answer to: Life, the universe and everything.
• You don’t know how far it is to your state capitol but you know exactly how may miles it is from Hobbiton to Mt. Doom.
• Rem Lezar changed your life.
• You cried when Chewbacca died.
• Your only form of exercise is DDR.
• You have had a crush on an animated character…recently.
• You learned everything you need to know in life from Wikipedia and GI Joe PSA’s.
• You wish you could visit a modern day faire and then come back to renaissance life.
• You wish talk like a pirate day was celebrated year round.
• You consider the Geek national anthem to be: Ballad of Bilbo Baggins by Leonard Nimoy.
• You consider your dyslexia a second language.
• You think the real reason The Lone Gunmen went off the air is because the writers were “silenced” by the shadow government.
• The predictive text on your phone knows words in drow, klingon and elven.
• The last time you read a book, you accidentally read 3 extra chapters before you realized that there are no ‘save points’ in real life.
• You really do think you’re turning Japanese.
• Greatest musicians of all time: Beethoven, Led Zeppelin and Weird Al.
• You’ve been out in the middle of the night wearing a costume, and you weren’t trick-or-treating.
• You are fluent in 7 languages and none of them will help you speak to another human being.
• You own 8 pounds of dice, but don’t know how to play craps.
• You refer to those dice as your ‘jewels’.
• Said ‘jewels’ are also the most expensive jewels you own.
• You have no clue who the 39th U.S. president was, but you can list back 100 generations of elven royalty.
• You know what Mjolnir is but don’t have a degree in Norse mythology.
• You’ve used you replica of the One Ring to try to sneak past/hide from someone you didn’t want to see.
• You feel the need to explain the difference between geek and nerd if someone calls you a nerd.
• Your favorite number is an irrational number.
• Every time you get hurt you say “its just a flesh wound”.
• You wear skull and crossbones not because it’s a fad but because you actually are a pirate.
• You thought the X-files was a documentary.
• You consider the game of Risk just a warm up.
• Your dresser is filled with computer parts and your clothes are on a pile on the floor.
• you are well prepared for the coming zombie uprising.
• you know what, up up down down left right left right B A start, does.
• You find yourself breaking your neighbors potted plants because you think there might be hearts, arrows or bombs inside.
• Your vacation itinerary looks like this:

1. Area 51
2. Loch Ness
3. Dragoncon
4. Silicon Valley
5. Narnia

*special thanks to my pal dsp311 for help compiling this list*

Technorati Tags: geek, humor, lists, sci-fi, fantasy, not nerds

Text adventure games were a staple of my (and my father’s) diet back in the early 80′s on our Atari 800.  Not only would we wander around for hours solving puzzles and collecting treasure in Zork but we compiled painstakingly drawn maps on graph paper, wrote clues down for other explorers (my little brother) to ease their passage and shared tips on avoiding Grues.

I generally don’t think all that much about Zork or other text adventure games on a regular basis unless something comes along to remind me about them.  This usually happens about once a year.  This time, my reminder comes via MC Frontalot – a nerdcore rapper who’s compiled a wonderful tome of text adventure lingo into “It’s Pitch Dark”.  Words that brought horror to many a Zork player.  With the opening words (and chorus) “You are likely to be eaten by a grue” I was sucked into a style of music I’m not generally partial to.  There are tons of adventure games references scattered throughout the song, as well as references any hardcore gamer will get.  You can check out this (and other) songs here on his site.  For your text-only pleasure, I’ve included the lyrics below as well.  Definitely worth a listen.  If you like his stuff, you can even join the Valued Suckers Program.   The dude gets up on stage and rolls a 20 sided, raps about computer games – in a short sleeved button up shirt.  What’s not to like?

And for you fans of Infocom games who continue to struggle through, there’s the Infocom Documentation Project, featuring manuals, hints, maps and more.

It’s Pitch Dark

You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
If this predicament seems particularly cruel,
consider whose fault it could be:
not a torch or a match in your inventory.

It got narrated at you in the second person.
Every time you booted up, it seemed you got another version
of your life told to you by a status line blinking,
the impossible people you could be without thinking
yourself insane of personality problems,
with a mop on a drop ship or trying to stab a goblin.
That don’t play in public life. You get arrested,
psychoactive medication daily in your big intestine
and attesting that the voices in your head
said the dwarf shot first, embedded arrow then you bled.
But doctors with needles posit repeatedly
that you knocked down that midget in the park unneededly.
This has seeded the idea that you should
never venture from the house, never get misunderstood
by the non-player characters inhabiting Earth,
none of whom are too concerned about Nord & Bert,
not one of whom ever aimed a fish around the room,
trying to get it in the ear canal because doom
beset the last planet they were on, or near
the verge of a set of poetics they wouldn’t hear.
Never peered at the clues with invisible ink.
No SM goddesses ever gave them pause to think.
Never piloted six robots, each distinct.
Don’t matter how many 2-liters they drink,
they’re not gonna follow what you’re saying at all.
They impugn and appall in the scope of their gall,
as you hide in your room in disgust with the lights turned out.
Turn ‘em on in a turn. Leave ‘em off for now.

You read a pamphlet from a mailbox that urges low cunning,
offers cursor and prompt: type >run and you’re running,
and parses what you tell it, pronouns intact,
abbreviations if you need ‘em (better keep it gramat.).
Better punctuate your sentences and never redact
the name of anything ambiguous. You’re about to get asked,
do you mean the red one, the round one, the crooked, or the blue?
Better keep that in your pocket, don’t know yet what it could do.
Could be the spray for the grue; you’re gonna need it if it is —
a situation that reloads, restarts, or quits.
Wonder how many points out of how many points
you’ve got to get before you’re done. Endeavor then to rejoice,
when you wish more ardently, identities shed,
for continuance, the rhyme forever voyaging. Fled
from all lights and colors, from all smells and sound:
just the lyric on the monochrome display and you’re proud
to make another verse appear by solving riddles.
If you didn’t have to sleep, you know you’d never seek acquittal.
You’d be ever in the middle and the midst of quest.
If it weren’t for >don the gown. you’d never get dressed.
In your underwear typing, just like Front,
keyboard attached up to my fingers — wrists bear the brunt —
as I seek to do stunts simply through their descriptions.
I think I went once to some sands that were Egyptian.
And I retain plane tickets, snapshots, receipts,
yet I stand unconvinced that this has happened to me.
I wouldn’t want to misremember or get confused.
Recall of crawling towards a pyramid appearing over dunes.
Recall of entering the thing and descending stairs.
Does it descend from there, adventure to nightmare?
Did I battle a snake? Was the treasure intact?
Or did the TRS-80 in my brain get hacked?
Thanks, Grampa, for buying it. Now my life’s ruined.
Twenty-two years later, head’s infested: got the grue in.
PLUGHing, XYZZYfying, trying to escape,
but I can’t ‘cause I’m up and around and awake.

Technorati Tags: music, nerd, rap, nerdcore, mc frontalot, zork, text adventures, infocom, grue, awesome, art

Combining zombies, action figures and The Thing – that’s a geek triumvirate of amazingness right there.

Technorati Tags: Zombie zombie, the thing, carpenter, video, movies, tribute, gi joe, action figures, geek films

Cheers to you Tenille and Thomas! May the force be with you both.

By Sarah Tippit

SAN DIEGO (Reuters) – The bride and groom grasped one another’s dart launcher-clad wrists and stared into each other’s starry eyes.

Fifty armor-clad guests, including several “Jedis” and a white caped “Elvis” in a rhinestone-studded ammo belt, stood reverently at attention. A couple of superheroes showed up late.

What better place to hold a “Star Wars” themed wedding than a green patch of grass just outside the famed Comic-Con convention where thousands of fans have congregated this week to revel in all manner of superhero and sci-fi lore?

Friday’s wedding ceremony, based on the language, costume and lore of a fictional Mandalorian race in the “Star Wars” movies, was the brain child of Tenille Kuhlman, 30, and Thomas Kuhlman, 39, avid fans who decided that the convention was a perfect place to gather far-flung members of their close-knit “Star Wars” fan club to celebrate their special day.

The couple met online two years ago, said Tenille Kuhlman, who said she was at first was hesitant to embrace the Mandalorian lifestyle. “When I met him I knew what every Joe Blow knows about ‘Star Wars.’ It just sort of turned into life for us.”

Last winter they married in a civil ceremony and settled in Yuma, Arizona, yet Thomas Kuhlman longed to receive a Mandalorian blessing of their union. “I said, ‘Hey, that’s never going to happen,’” Tenille Kuhlman said.

But according to clan creed, Mandalorians don’t make threats, they make promises. The wedding quickly began to take shape. Yet 10 minutes before the ceremony was to begin, despite her careful planning, Tenille found herself still wearing her “I Love Nerds” T-shirt, nervous and without makeup.

Friends stepped in to help. “Hey, come on guys I’ve got jobs for you to do!” one Mandalorian shouted. “Bounty hunters are all about jobs!” an eager warrior replied.

With that friends quickly set up a makeshift arch and helped the bride, blushing from the heat of the hot summer sun, into her homemade armor, which included metal thigh plates, metal collar, cape, belt, and plastic cuffs known as gauntlets which in movie lore, are capable of shooting darts.

The guests — in full regalia including helmets, boots and jet packs — formed two lines and created a light saber arch leading toward the altar.

“I don’t have my fake gun!” somebody shouted. “That’s OK,” said another guest. “This is a wedding ceremony. I left mine in the car.”

The crowd fell silent as Tenille, escorted by armor-clad P.J. Reindel, a police officer from California who she met online, walked her down the aisle toward Thomas, who stood under an archway decorated with white faux roses.

The bride and groom held their helmets in their hands, a solemn sign of Mandalorian respect. As they grasped wrists, Tom Hutchens, a 30-year-old IT professional and erstwhile Mandalorian preacher, began the ceremony.

“Vodas,” he said, using the Mandalorian word for “friends,” “Outsiders, Jedis, everybody, welcome. This is a contract between two Mandalorians who made a journey and future together and bled together and will continue to bleed together until their last day,” he said.

After reciting their vows in both Mandalorian and English translation, the jubilant crowd shouted: “Oya!” which in Mandalorian language means “celebration.”

“I now pronounce you Mandalorian husband and wife,” Hutchens said.

(Editing by Bill Trott)

Arecibo Observatory, the world’s largest radio telescope and the source for
the SETI@home data that your computer analyzes, faces massive budget cuts that
will END its ability to continue the search for life beyond Earth. The decision
to ensure full funding currently rests upon votes in Congress on Senate Bill S.
2862 and House Resolution H.R. 3737. These bills desperately need more support.

Please take a moment to help us SAVE ARECIBO.

Clicking THIS LINK will direct you to a web page that allows you print
out letters prepared for your Senators and Congressional Representative urging
them to support Arecibo. Printing and mailing the letters is really easy, too!
You will also have the chance to add a few personal thoughts, if you wish, to
let your Senators and Representative know why this funding is important to you!
And if you’re really feeling passionate about saving Arecibo, please use these
letters as the basis for letters you write yourself, urging your congressmen
and women to vote to save Arecibo.

Because our representatives in Congress rarely give much attention to all the
email they receive, printing out and MAILING these letters via standard U.S.
Postal mail remains our best option for contacting them and our best hope for
saving Arecibo (The second best option is to call your representatives). Your
42 cent stamps on these letters could help us get the millions of dollars
needed to save Arecibo.

Our search cannot continue without the necessary support. Your work, as
SETI@home participants, represents an indispensable resource for conducting the
search. Now, we need your help to ensure that our other most valuable resource
- our eyes and ears to the cosmos – can continue to probe the universe as we
seek to answer the question: Is there anybody out there?
Photo courtesy of the NAIC – Arecibo Observatory, a facility of the NSF

It’s a fairly simple idea which can I think have pretty far reaching effects.  It lets you chat in IM style directly over a television broadcast by laying two lines of text at the bottom of the image.  Simple, right?  But ground breaking at the same time.   In this demo video, there’s a chat going on over one of President Bush’s addresses.

You can see where this could lead.  Imagine many different chat channels, some populated by well know and respected commentators, some by you or me or anyone else.  You could be watching your favorite sports match and reading comments from fans, ESPN commentators or even the moms of some of the players involved.

Think of a standard CNN broadcast with a chat channel featuring some of the writers from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.  Or the unfolding of a natural disaster with relief being coordinated real time on several chat channels.

This is I think a first step, but an important one in user generated television content.  Will there come a time when the comments are as important as the show being broadcasted?

The instructions are available here and they are fairly simple but do require you to telnet to your Neuros.  Did I mention that I love this little gadget?  As does everyone I’ve introduced it to so far.

Technorati Tags: Neuros, hacks, open source, technology, geeks,   television, chat, coolness

People like me just enter the once in a blue moon contest for one of the gadgets and hopes for the best. If I don’t win (which is each and every freaking time), then I shrug it off and make due with what I have. (I super glued my cell phone to my laptop and taped an apple on it- Oh yeah baby, I’m happening.)

NEW YORK (Reuters ) – Know someone who loves gadgets and can’t wait to buy the newest model? Chances are you would describe them as assertive and a strong leader — and possibly arrogant, according a U.S. research.

An online study evaluating the characteristics of 25,000 American adults found avid technology consumers tended to score highly in personality traits such as leadership, dynamism and assertiveness — but low in modesty.

“A lot of previous research points to wealthy young males as early adopters of technology,” said Sarah Welch, lead researcher at Internet ad network firm Mindset Media that conducted the study in partnership with Nielsen Online.

“But this study tells us that there are characteristics beyond age and gender and income that are also extremely highly correlated with tech consumption,” she added.

The study looked at 20 personality traits or “mindsets” including openness, creativity, self esteem and spontaneity.

Respondents were rated on a scale of 1 through 5, with 1 representing those who demonstrated the least amount of a given mindset and 5 representing those who demonstrated the highest intensity of a mindset.

Those who scored a 5 in leadership were 68 percent more likely to have purchased three or more computers in the past two years, the study found.

Likewise, respondents who rated highly in assertiveness were 62 percent more likely to purchase a new cell phone when the newest model arrived on the market.

Although tech consumers don’t fit a typical demographic mold, the findings weren’t entirely surprising, Welch said.

“If you look at those with qualities of a modern leader, they’re often forward-facing and interested in what’s next,” she said.

“And those who are really assertive are the types to grab life by the horn, so it also makes sense that when they see something they want or like they go straight for it.”

Welch said the results could have implications for technology companies looking to attract a new set of consumers and even potentially impact the way such products are designed.

But the study also found that avid tech consumers were also likely to be low in modesty and may be perceived as conceited or arrogant by others.

Low levels of modesty also correlate with what Welch calls “badge-buying”, or a tendency to buy luxury brands.

“So there’s an element of pride in being able to have the latest and greatest, not just in the realm of technology, but in all other areas,” Welch said.

(Reporting by Lara Hertel; editing by Belinda Goldsmith)

Personally I enjoyed the show as sort of light, escapist end of the world fantasy.  I’m not sure how much longer they could have carried it off though, with the reconstruction of the USA coming into play.  Something more along the lines of Damnation Alley is more my style.

Technorati Tags: scifi, jericho, television, fans, culture, geeks, a boy named skeet

With gas prices now over the four dollar mark (Road Warriors still plays in my head when I think about that).

Seth Sandler, you’re my new hero. With merely a cardboard box, tape, a piece of glass, paper and a webcam; he was able to create a Multi-Touch pad. His parents should be proud.

With the $10,000 you save, you can actually afford that tank of gas.

They then used Britain’s Data Protection Act to request the footage that was shot of them.  Grab some decent and inexpensive video editing tools (say. . . an iMac) and presto!  They got themselves a unique and in my opinion quite interesting music video.

Technorati Tags: brilliant, cctv, nanny state, music, video, technology, big brother

Yesterday Nine Inch Nails in the person of Trent Reznor (who’s name I always thought sounded like a hardy German stout. Sorry.) put up a whole brand new album on their site.  The Slip is completely free, as a way of thanks to the fans of NIN, who’ve recently embraced digital distribution and life without a label.

The kicker?  It’s a great album, it’s CC licensed, it’s NIN – there is no kicker!  Go get it!

Technorati Tags: nin, the slip, awesome, artists, who, get, it

Technorati Tags: star wars, comiccon, comic con, stormtrooper, storm trooper, chubby, snow trooper

Enter Elementeo – a collectible card game featuring magic, combat and 121 cards based on the elements. Chemistry folks, chemistry. This game was created by an 8th grader with an eye for games and entrepreneurship.

He expects to sell the game for $25 a pop and is currently taking pre-orders for the late April release.   Sheesh.  I’m way out of 8th grade and all I’ve got is this blog!

Technorati Tags: games, card game, elementeo, science, chemistry, geeks, business, young dude with chutzpah

What is it? It’s a self replicating 3D printer. Yeah, that doesn’t sound as high and mighty as an autobalancing transportation device that Presidents and mall security have been falling off of but it’s much, much more important.

RepRap is short for Replicating Rapid Prototyper. It’s got two purposes in it’s existence. The first is to be able to manufacture inexpensive, solid parts made out of various types of plastic. Think about that for a second – most 3D printers available today are very expensive to purchase, maintain and operate. A cheap 3D printer however opens up all kinds of doors. Put a few of these in the poorer parts of the world and you can manufacture parts to fix, build or keep up lots and lots of things, improving the quality of life for everyone and reducing their reliance on third parties.

It’s second purpose is to be able to replicate itself. Give a community one RepRap and soon they can have dozens. Self replication is a wonderful concept – one that we should all be paying attention to. Combine these two aspects and you’ve got yourself a real breakthrough.

Look at the implications. You’ve got a machine that can produce itself endlessly given an adequate supply of raw materials. And each machine that is made can then produce other objects, from drinking glasses, tools, small construction materials to sex toys. It’s mind bogglingly simple and elegant and a real way to make a difference where such parts may be scarce. It’s also completely open source, from the software used to design 3D objects to the electronics used in building a RepRap.

They haven’t announced complete replication yet but they hope to this year. Here’s what the Darwin 1.0 RepRap can build of itself as of now.

While it’s not completely self replicating like a cornucopia machine (a machine that can create anything from the atomic level, including ice cream, weapons, robots and itself) it’s a good start, created by people not looking to profit off of it. It’s certainly got some limitations as well, such as it’s reliance on plastics as a building material, it’s need of basic electronics and it’s inability to create a working prototype from scratch – i.e. some assembly required.

Those limitations will be overcome eventually and for now it’s good to see a working, self replicating machine out in the wild. In fact, you can check this Google map to see just where all the reported RepRaps are, or get the plans to build your own Darwin 1.0 model and join the community.

In the SF world, Cornucopia machines (known also as molecular assemblers) are construction devices you feed raw materials into and get stuff out of. Often, they’ll break down anything you put into it to the molecular or atomic level, and then build on demand what you ask of it. They often come with their own store of hard to find things like radioactive materials or rare elements. They can spit out anything from coffee to a working spaceship with all the appropriate electronics and moving parts. It sounds very futuristic but may not be all that far off, particularly as we get more practice at manipulating really small things.

Self replicating machines have another interesting place in our future as well. Exploration of the Universe. Launch a self replicating probe with some basic intelligence at a nearby star system. That probe arrives, completes a survey, sends its information back to us and then builds two copies of itself. The original probe remains and updates our information while the two copies find two nearby star systems and head off to do their thing. What you have here is exponential expansion. One probe becomes two, become four, become 8, become 16 . . . until you start hitting really big numbers, really fast. As your numbers increase, your time to see every star system in the Galaxy decreases. In a relatively short amount of time we could have eyes and ears just about everywhere.

Seem pretty far fetched? Well some serious people with real science degrees are talking a lot about this. NASA type folks, in fact. This isn’t just the realm of Science Fiction authors. I’ll leave the implications of shadow projects to you conspiracy minded folks.

Of course, there are cons to such things as well. Would the probes introduce glitches to their self replication, causing evolution? Think rise of the machines.

Thinking even further, would it be possible to upload our conscious selves – who we are – in the form of data to a probe, and have it start colonizing? Stopping at each star system, replicating with our data, until it found a suitable planet to sustain life and then simply replicating us? Hundreds of copies of ourselves on distant worlds.

Then the ideas start getting funky. All this from a little 3D printer that can make it’s own parts.

Technorati Tags: sf, printer, reprap, self replication, change the world, geek, technology, mechanics, plastics, third world, second world, wealth without money

It’s part social website, part calendar, part usenet brought back to the front of things. In my fooling about with it I’ve found that it’s pretty neat. It takes all of the above mentioned things and ties it together well in a way that’s not overwhelming. It is still in beta – invitation only so expect some kinks.

There are two things I’ll need from you for me to send out an invite and I only have 8 invites.

First, you’ll have to email me though our contact page and ask nicely. Be sure to include your email so I can send you the invite.

Second, I’d ask that you join my twine, called simply ‘geek’ and contribute at least one thing to it (i.e. picture, video, story, link, etc.)

So far it’s interesting enough to keep me poking around. I participate in about 3 betas for new sites a month and the majority of them are just the same thing rehashed. This looks fun.

Technorati Tags: twine, web, semantic, geeks, sharing, the next big thing

Can I get back to surfing now?

Technorati Tags: april fools, google, virgin, virgle, a laugh a minute, sigh

Mr. Lee will also be receiving the first every New York Comics Legend award.

“He never grew up; but he never stopped growing.”

Technorati Tags: farewell, arthur c clark, RIP