The recent report of the ubiquity of extrasolar planets coupled with the fact that it bodes well for searches for life friendly Earth twins, brought me back to my reading of Carl Sagan's 1966 Intelligent Life In The Universe and later article in Sky & Telescope where he came up with a remarkable number in favor of such.
In my early life I was deeply impacted by the work of physician and psychoanalyst John C. Lilly. I still have my dog-eared copies of The Mind of the Dolphin (1967) and Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer (1968). Lilly's work, with dolphins and the development of the sensory deprivation tank, has formed the basis of movies, music and television productions.
This is the Windows OS counterpart to my tutorial on how to burn the new XDG3 formatted games on Xbox 360. Microsoft invented a new disc format system to trump piracy, it's called XDG3. XDG3's standard is to burn a whole extra gigabyte of data to the disc, to allow more content, but more importantly for stopping piracy. This extra gigabyte of data makes it impossible to burn or rip a game the traditional way. So how on earth can we burn our fully-legal back-ups that we should rightfully be ab...
Stan Parker StanDP~"Avid PC Enthusiast Since 1982..."
Do you think humans are the only ones who like the challenge of a good word game? Well, think again, because homo sapiens aren't the only ones up for stimulating their brains. Other species on planet Earth like to play Scrabble, too, and they're the ones most likely to actually play the words HOMO and SAPIENS in a game, both totally legit Scrabble words... by themselves, of course.
Crysis 2 is the current standard for high-quality graphics in video games. No other game looks so smooth, so colorful, so... ultra-real. German developer Crytek has built their reputation on PC game technology to the limit, and the CryENGINE 3 graphics engine they used to make Crysis 2 might be the most powerful tool for creating 3D video game graphics on Earth. As of yesterday, it's also free for anyone, yourself included, to download from Crytek's website here.
NASA just released this beautiful image of what's leftover from a supernova explosion. The red cloud is expanding cosmic debris, the blue is a blast wave of electrons, and the stripes at the edge tell of a high energy burst of x-rays that may be bound for earth. This image was enhanced—Photoshopped—so that scientists can have an easier time interpreting the picture and so that the public can have an easier time appreciating the beauty of nature.
One of the creepiest musical instruments ever is undoubtedly the theremin, a device originating from the early 20s that emits eerie sounds with a just a wave of the hand. If you've seen the original movie The Day the Earth Stood Still, you know what I mean—freakishly creepy. Playing the theremin can be off-putting for some, since it's a relatively pricy gizmo, but a new geek gadget called the EaTheremin aims to make all of us professional, dinnertime theremists.
Type: Digital and traditional photography Theme: Wildlife
Movies spoiled
PopSci has compiled an amazing list of 30 college labs that would tempt anybody to re-enroll. If you know any high school juniors or prospective grad students, pass this along. They just might reconsider their initial choices.
ZERO WASTE. Yes, You read that right. This kitchen of the future aims to have zero waste. Ekokook the kitchen concept out of design company Faltazi gives us hope for a greener future. How is this possible you ask when in most homes 85 or 90 percent of a family's trash is generated in the vicinity of the kitchen? Ekokooks kitchen system is divided up into disposing and storing your waste in three mechanized sectioned systems Solid Waste, Liquid Waste and Organic Waste. Solid Waste- The solid w...
Innovative or downright frightening? Popsci examines five of the world's scariest science experiments-in-progress.
ACTION MOVIES The Hunger Games (2012)
I first heard the term molecular gastronomy while watching an episode of Bravo's Top Chef a few seasons back. Intrigued by the concept, I sought to find out more about this modern, deconstructed type of cookery. If you happen to be around foodies and the topic of molecular gastronomy comes up (which very likely will at some point) you'll want to have a few points to contribute and maybe even give them a run for their money.
WonderHowTo is a how-to website made up of niche communities called Worlds, with topics ranging from Minecraft to science experiments to Scrabble and everything in-between. Check in every Wednesday evening for a roundup of user-run activities and how-to projects from the most popular communities. Users can join and participate in any World they're interested in, as well as start their own community.
Since the rise of private property and industrial production, modern capitalism has been on a undeniable crash course with Mother Nature. It's no so much that we'll end up murdering the entire planet, but just that the planet will quietly smother us with a pillow of famine, heat, cold and hurricanes. We over-farm land and replace the nutrients in the soil with oil. To package our oil-based produce, we wrap them in synthetic oil-based plastics, soon to be discarded in a trash heap or ocean.
Science-fiction writer Jules Verne predicted many scientific breakthroughs, including the moon landing, tasers, and nuclear submarines. In his 1874 book The Mysterious Island, Verne writes:
If you're hungry, eat now, because this list is probably going to put you off consuming vittles for so long that you'll end up looking like the love child of Nicole Richie and Skeletor. Now that you've been officially warned, help me count down the ten most WTF food items on this beautiful blue marble we call Earth.
Author's Note: Hi there, some of you may know but most of you probably won't. My name is Semeria and I am an author on the rising. I plan to be posting one of my novels on this website for people to read. Comment and let me know what you think and I hope you enjoy the story.
Three Days without You Poem Description:
Gamers who have their Xbox 360's firmware flashed may have recently noticed an inability to play backups, or even make backups of newer games that have come out, such as Gears of War 3 and Dead Island, to name a few.
REVENANT n pl. -S one that returns 61 points (11 points without the bingo)
Welcome to Minecraft World! Check out our advanced tutorials and come play on our free server. For about the past month, the folks at Mojang have been leaking pre-releases of Minecraft 1.9 and they've added many exciting things. Additions to the game include: potions, new mobs, a new biome, new realms, and something called an enchanting table. I went over how potions work in one of my previous articles and, while they are fun to play with, boy are they confusing!
Gamers who have their Xbox 360's firmware flashed may have recently noticed an inability to play backups, or even make backups of newer games that have come out: Gears of War 3 and Dead Island, to name a few.
The HP Touchpad 64 GB is out in action with a robust processor and additional applications in the market. Using the best technology on earth, it is looking forward to give a tough fight to the Apple’s iPad 2. The 64 GB HP TouchPad sound more promising to its predecessors. The experts feel that the two device, HP TouchPad 64 and Apple’s iPad-2 is more or less the same. Let’s have a glance over the device by discussing the various features it encompasses.
Video games are one of the best non-medical things that have ever happened to sick children. They are stimulating, entertaining and require very little physical strength to play, which makes them perfect for those suffering physical maladies.
For a long time, video games manuals were serious business. Especially for strategy games and RPGs on the PC, the manuals would often run to a hundred or more full-color pages in length. They explained in vivid and well-written detail the history of the game world and every facet of the gameplay system. There were pages upon pages of appendices explaining the statistics of every unit, faction, and terrain type. They were majestic, and I would spend an hour or more poring over each one before ...
In 1988, John Langley created COPS for the fledgling FOX network. 23 years later, the show is still running. It is the Energizer bunny of prime time television. Since John has followed more police officers and witnessed more crime than any human being on earth (absolutely no question), I had to ask some advice for hypothetical unwanted encounters with the men in blue.
Want to know how to patent an idea, but you just don't know how to go about doing it? It doesn't take a lot of money to get a provisional patent. The real thing you want to know is the process of taking an idea that you have all the way up to getting it patent. I will take you through each step from the beginning when you have that great idea all the way to getting your invention marketed.You Need an Idea (Obviously)Your idea doesn't have to be earth changing. It just needs to be something pe...
Watch enough Glee and Buffy's Once More, With Feeling and it will never fail to instill the urge to do something stupid in public. And hey, what better way to do this than to drag others down with you? Welcome to the world of flash mobs, and in just a few simple steps you too could be arrested!
Scenario: it's late at night, the roads are completely empty and you are stuck at the longest light ever. Solution: don't run a red- change it to green yourself. Avoid a ticket, save yourself some time (and perhaps a little gas).
This one smells like a fish story. It is not. Tuesday April 13, Dave and I got up to surf westward at 7 in the morning. First rate waves. Headache cold water....sun blocked by the cliffs. Fast, clean, beach break. 3-4 foot sets, mostly lefts. About 15 dolphins swam by. Blase blase. We always see dolphins. But then some bigass whale with barnacles breaches. We are speechless. It is about 20 feet from us. We follow it for about thirty seconds and pinch ourselves. Have-you-ever? No...
Spring has sprung, which means it's time to plant all those delicious vegetables and lucrative cash crops. If you are like me, every year you meticulously plan every aspect of your garden before dutifully neglecting it all summer. I decided enough was enough and built this simple automatic watering system.
Hey everybody, here is my entry for the medieval building contest. I don't actually care if I win, it was just fun to think about.
Skyrim really took the cake this year. With its awe-inspiring gameplay, much improved combat and leveling system, and a fresh new look, it's no wonder the game has already received a Game of the Year award. But for hardcore gamers, the fun may be over. You've played the game for thousands of hours, and have exhausted the entire game's main and auxiliary quests. You need more.
SHAITAN n pl. -S an evil spirit 60 points (10 points without the bingo)
Improve your bingo skills with a roundup of this week's Scrabble Bingo of the Days. What exactly is a bingo? It's when a player empties his or her rack in one turn, placing all seven of their letters on the board to create a word that's at least seven letters long.
The war between horror movie monsters has been going on for the better part of the last century. We're talking vampires, werewolves, ghosts, zombies and mutant flying creatures, each of which has had their fair share of the limelight in film. But it comes and goes. Once moviegoers get an overdose of a particular monster, they aren't scared anymore, meaning it's time to move onto the next. So, Dracula goes away kicking and screaming, just to be replaced by Frankenstein and then werewolves. But...
The Tokyo Game Show (TGS) is the biggest video game expo in the most game crazy country on Earth. It is kind of a big deal. As such, their "indie" game showcase/contest Sense of Wonder Night (SOWN) is a major opportunity for developers of all shapes and sizes to showcase their work to important industry leaders and expo attendees. 2011 will be SOWN's fourth year, and it began accepting submissions yesterday.
