An amazing Lego Victorian house

Very well done and creepy. Lots of construction details at the link. [Link]

Now that is a big gun

A pistol that fires shotgun shells. A very big pistol. [Link]

When the Taurus Judge originally came out most observers in the firearms industry laughed. Taurus is a very serious company, and because of their quality, prices and a lifetime guarantee, they are a mainstay of most gun shops. But the idea of a giant revolver that was made for both .45 Colt and .410 shot shells just seemed a little over the top. It had been made before as a novelty product, but nobody thought that it could be a commercial success. Several years later we now know that this was not the truth. The Judge is a runaway success and has become the primary home defense weapon for tens of thousands of households all over the country. The comfort of .410 buckshot apparently outweighs the gun by several pounds.

Up another notch we go to the Raging Judge. It is 28 gauge, which you may never have heard of. Historically the 28 gauge shotgun has been an alternative to the .410 for hunting doves and quail. You will find it as a “hard to get” in the Browning line and most European high grades, generally commanding higher values than their .410, 20, 16 and 12 gauge counterparts. There is currently no such thing as 28 gauge buckshot, but Federal and at least one other manufacturer have it in the design and testing stages and it should be available this year.

In Soviet Russia, Bad Movie Makes Fun of You

Russian MST3K ripoff. [Link]

Just how much does the Russian TV show Project Popcorn ape Mystery Science Theater 3000? Check out the theme song. Something tells me nobody from the original MST3K was consulted on this.

Even the plot appears to be ruthlessly cribbed from MST3K. In short, Stephen the protagonist needs money, so he signs up for an experiment run by the nefarious Professor Zamishlavkin. The Professor imprisons Stephen and forces his captive to watch bad films to study the effect on his psyche.

New Disney Light show

Pretty amazing. They use the geometry of the buildings they are projected on as part of the show. [Link]

"After independently covering the world premieres of Disney's new high-tech projection shows at Disneyland and Walt Disney World, I've synchronized videos of both shows side-by-side. They feature the same soundtrack and similar visuals, but one is projected on Cinderella Castle, the other on the "it's a small world" facade. The result is a simultaneous view that's impossible to get in real life, but entirely enjoyable. 1080p HD full screen for the best experience."

China passes off Top Gun footage as real

Amazing. [Link]

A few days ago, China Central Television showed footage of what they claimed was an air force training exercise conducted on January 23. From the looks of things, they were actually just playing clips from Top Gun.

The clips in question were reportedly aired during the News Broadcast program on China Central Television, the major state television broadcast company. They supposedly showed a J-10 fighter firing a missile at another aircraft during a practice exercise.

But an internet commenter quickly pointed out that the aircraft the J-10 was shown shooting down was an F-5, an American aircraft, and the very one Tom Cruise guns down in a scene from Top Gun. Comparing frames from the CCTV broadcast (left) and Top Gun (right), well, they're lookin' pretty much identical.

Flying Yacht

Almost practical. For the Bond villain on the go. [Link]

From the designer:

The EkranoYacht is a hydrogen powered wing-in-ground effect vehicle for permanent residence — set for 2025… The craft performs at approximately 400kph [or 250 mph] in full flight. It can tackle waves of up to 3.5 m and can also be used as normal yacht when necessary. The 36.5m craft can house 6 people comfortably. The interior design was a very important part of the project, because if people are going to give up their static home living arrangements, there can't be any sacrifice moving on to the EkranoYacht. I designed for open floor plan living, with large windows for natural light.

Be sure to check it out in the gallery below — Dickson even made a scale model of the thing.

MeatWater?

Eww. [Link]

I mean, I guess we can congratulate Till Krautkraemer for creating liquids that taste like a poached salmon salad, thai beef salad, cheeseburger or Hungarian goulash (best seller!). But doesn't half the appeal of eating meat lie in its physical properties?

State of the Union

The President as CEO. [Link]

The US government's situation is not quite that bad.  But it's pretty bad.  The underlying economy is, I think, ultimately fine, but the structural problems with the government's finances are driving it rapidly towards an unpleasant denouement.  Like a CEO with a stuck company, however, he can't just say that.  Stating the obvious would make things worse, as customers and creditors decide that the end really is nigh, and it's time to get out while they still can.

So what do those CEOs do?  They spend a lot of time talking about their company's proud history, even if that history only stretches back a few years. They lavish extravagent praise on their awesome, dedicated workforce.  And they deftly avoid talking about the big problems, for which they have no solutions, by talking about strategic areas for potential growth ("green jobs"), and going over a laundry list of new initiatives that do nothing to solve any of the core problems.  When they are forced to talk about the core problems--and if the company is big enough to attract analyst coverage, they will rudely draw his attention to the problematic areas on the financial statements during the Q&A--he responds in vague generalities that restate the problem as if doing so constituted a solution:

To put us on solid ground, we should also find a bipartisan solution to strengthen Social Security for future generations. And we must do it without putting at risk current retirees, the most vulnerable, or people with disabilities; without slashing benefits for future generations; and without subjecting Americans' guaranteed retirement income to the whims of the stock market.

Religious discrimination

Richard Dawkins calls for discrimination against those who might be evangelical. [Link]

Some background: in 2007, Gaskell was up for a position at the University of Kentucky. He was a hot contender, but one of the members of the search committee researched his religious beliefs and concluded that he was "potentially evangelical." He was questioned about his faith in his interview, and ultimately didn't get the job-- despite, according to one committee member, being "breathtakingly above the other applicants in background and experience."  E-mails sent among the search committee submitted as evidence in the case make it clear that Gaskell's religious beliefs-- which don't play a role in any of his peer-reviewed work on quasars and supermassive black holes-- were pretty much the only factor in the committee's decision not to hire him. Gaskell is not a creationist, and accepts the theory of evolution-- things which would be unlikely to turn up in his work anyway. All of which renders that phrase "potentially evangelical" even more chilling. Gaskell was rejected not because he wasn't the right guy for the job, and not even because his beliefs conflicted with his duties. He wasn't even rejected for beliefs that he actually held. He was rejected because of his membership in a group that also contains individuals whose beliefs are in conflict with a related department to the one in which he was applying to teach. It was a clear-cut case of religious discrimination, and the school has settled the case out of court for $125,000.

Enter Dawkins, who concludes from this that all kinds of beliefs, religious and otherwise, should justly and rightly serve as grounds for dismissal or rejection of employment, laying out several hypothetical cases-- none of them bearing more than a superficial resemblance to the Gaskell case-- in which he feels discrimination would be just. He even laments that "the word 'discriminate' carries such unfortunate baggage." The piece reads like an opening salvo in a witch hunt for "the creationists among us": it is a call for greater prejudice. 

The entire argument rests on the faulty assumption that religious ideas are protected and non-religious ideas are not. I'm no lawyer, but it seems to me that if I were dismissed from my job because I believe in a subterranean super-race of mole people, I would start taking notes for my wrongful dismissal suit. Unless that belief interferes with my completion of assigned tasks (I am an excavator operator who will not break ground on a building project for fear of angering the mole people) or it interferes with my coworkers, clients, or customers (sales are down at the hardware store because I keep scaring people away with talk of their underground masters when all they wanted to do was buy a hammer). My personal beliefs-- religious or otherwise-- are personal, and if they don't interfere with my job, then there is no cause for termination. 

In the Gaskell case, of course, it's even more preposterous: Gaskell doesn't believe that the Earth is 6,000 years old any more than he believes that the mole people are preparing to reclaim the surface world. But Dawkins' entire article is framed to mislead the reader into believing Gaskell is a secret creationist. The attempt to paint Gaskell with the creationist brush has its roots deep in Dawkins' views of religion in general, and the idea of God in particular. Dawkins will only grant that Gaskell "claims... that he is not a full-blooded YEC [young earth creationist]." For Dawkins it can only be a "claim," not a fact, and that use of "full-blooded" shows that he is only capable of considering religious people as holding some degree of creationist ideas. Dawkins includes a selectively-clipped quote from Gaskell, " I have a lot of respect for people who hold this view because they are strongly committed to the Bible," Dawkins quotes. A-ha! A creationist! But here's the remainder of the quote: "...but I don't believe it is the interpretation the Bible requires of itself, and it certainly clashes head-on with science." Gaskell does what Dawkins cannot: see multiple ways of reading a text.

Dawkins is narrow minded in exactly the same way he claims those who are religious are.

Visual Studio Achievments

Awesome. [Link]

What if Visual Studio supported achievements, just like games on Steam, Xbox or PS3? Bragging to your coworkers about which one you’ve just unlocked, imagine that! Here’s a little proposed list for some of them. .NET / C# flavored, of course.

• Falling Down – Created a new SharePoint project
• Job Security – Written a LINQ query with over 30 lines of code
• The Sword Fighter – 5 Consecutive Solution Rebuilds with zero code changes
• Shotgun Debugging – 5 Consecutive Solution Rebuilds with a single character change
• The Mathematician – Defined 15 local variables with a single character name
• The Academic – Written 1000 lines of F#
• Spaghetti Monster – Written a single line with more than 300 characters
• Wild One – Mixed tabs and spaces for indentation more than 5 times in a single line
• The Organizer – Created a Solution with more than 50 projects
• The Portal – Created a circular project dependency
• The Multitasker – Have more than 50 source files open at the same time
• The Code Keeper – Uninstalled Resharper because it made you redundant
• Pasta Chef – Created a class with more than 100 fields, properties or methods
• Procedural Programmer – Created a method with more than 10 out parameters

More at the link.

Battlestar Galactica Series Bible

Neat. I always love seeing how the sausage is made. [Link]

Ron Moore's original series bible for Battlestar Galactica is online, and it's full of critiques of "bumpy-headed aliens," "techno-double-talk" and other Star Trek mainstays. The most important thing to remember about the Cylons? "They are not the Borg."

The jabs at Star Trek from Moore — who had only recently ended a long stint on The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and (briefly) Voyager — are the first thing that jump out at you when you read the bible. Moore is out for "nothing less than the reinvention of the science fiction television series." And that means avoiding "the usual stories about parallel universes, time-travel, mind-control, evil twins, God-like powers and all the other cliches." And the roster of characters should not include "'the cocky guy,' 'the fast-talker,' 'the brain,' 'the wacky alien sidekick' or any of the other usual characters.

Battlestar Galactica/Caprica: Map of the 12 Colonies

Awesome map. I do think they should have had one colony per system, not three or four, but it's better than one. [Link]

Not only is this map a thing of great beauty, but it's totally official — Grazier was science advisor for Battlestar Galactica from the very beginning, and helped to define a lot of the show's concepts. And Espenson, as the original showrunner for the prequel series Caprica, had to do a lot of thinking about exactly how the Twelve Colonies were laid out. This info comes straight from the creators — and from the showrunner's bible for BSG and Caprica. And Grazier, who works at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, verifies that the info in this map is "scientifically plausible."

We're excited to present an exclusive high-res image of the map, which sells for $14.95 from Quantum Mechanix and measures 27" by 39". This is one item that should definitely be on your Dradis.

We asked Espenson and Grazier some questions about the map, and they ended up telling us a lot more about the science and backstory of Battlestar Galactica:

Click to view full sized.

Zap - Splash?

Eventually. Navy has breakthrough with Lasers. [Link]

The Navy’s Free Electron Laserprogram uses massively charged electron streams generated by an injector to focus light across multiple wavelengths, making it more powerful than most lasers. Turning it into a death ray requires at least 100 kilowatts worth of power. So far, the prototype Free Electron Laser that the Navy has can only generate 14.

But now the Navy thinks it’s broken a power threshold. Tests in December of a new injector yielded the electrons necessary to get the Free Electron Laser up to “megawatt class” beams, the Office of Naval Research said in a statement issued today, nine months ahead of schedule. One of the project’s lead researchers, Dinh Nguyen, said in the statement that he hoped to “set a world record for the average current of electrons.”

Getting it on board a ship is still a long ways away. Boeing has a contract to get the Navy a new prototype laser by early 2012. Even with the new injector showing promise, researchers don’t anticipate a shipboard test until 2018.

But the arrival of a superlaser for maritime defense is a potential gamechanger. It would represent a speed-of-light weapon that never has to be reloaded, feeding on a ship’s generator, to burn through incoming missiles or aircraft. And that’s not all: program manager Quentin Saulter told Danger Room in November that the Free Electron Laser can be used as a sensor, a tracker or a guidance system for a ship’s conventional weapons.

Fringe:Seven Suns - Violet Sedan Chair

This is neat. The producers of Fringe made an album, Seven Suns by Violet Sedan Chair that is Walter Bishop's favorite band and seeded it in used record stores around the country. It apparently has some clues about the show's mysteries. It's also pretty listenable. [Link]

Fringe co-creator J.J. Abrams first name-checked faux band Violet Sedan Chair in Wired magazine nearly two years ago.

In the issue, which Abrams guest-edited, an article titled “Musical Mystery Tour: Messages Embedded in Your Favorite Album” listed Violet Sedan Chair’s recording Seven Suns and said the mythical album contained a song “rumored to produce hallucinatory effects when played on multiple turntables.”

The long-gestating viral prank pays off Friday when Fringe returns for its midseason premiere. In the episode, Christopher Lloyd plays Roscoe Joyce, Violet Sedan Chair’s keyboard player, who was once idolized by the sci-fi series’ guilt-ridden mad scientist, Walter Bishop (played by John Noble).

When word leaked earlier this month that LP copies of Seven Suns would soon be popping up in indie record stores, the Fringe faithful began combing through vintage-vinyl outlets in search of the album. This week, Kiki Kane discovered a copy of Seven Suns, pictured in the gallery above, in the used-vinyl section of Seattle’s Easy Street Records.

You can listen to the album here:
Violet Sedan Chair Seven Suns Side One
Violet Sedan Chair Seven Suns Side Two

Literal Cold War base

Camp Century, built under the Greenland ice as an ICBM base. [Link]

A fully-functioning "underground city," Camp Century even had its own mobile nuclear reactor-an "Alco PM-2A"-that kept the whole thing lit up and running during the Cold War.

Watch the documentary film about the making of the base.

This just seems unnatural

AT&T and Verizon together.



Dogs and cats living together; mass hysteria!

Steampunk Palin

This is not a political post. It's a comics one. [Link]

Picture in your mind the most insane possible story that could be contained in a book named Steampunk Palin. Go ahead, take ten seconds or so to imagine it perfectly in your mind's eye. Use this cover image for help.

Blood and Chrome preview

Interesting. I'll watch it. [Link]

When we heard Caprica was being replaced with a different Battlestar Galactica prequel, a gritty war drama set during the first Cylon War, we were skeptical. But now we've read someBlood and Chrome script pages, and we're more pumped.

Blood and Chrome is putting out casting calls for the three main characters in its pilot TV movie, probably airing late this year or sometime next year. As we reported a while back, the three main characters in the pilot are the young William Adama, his comms officer Coker Fasjovik, and the young software genius Beka Kelly. (No clue yet if Nico Cortez will reprise his role as the young Adama from the Razor TV movie.)

We read the casting call pages for these three characters, which were sent to casting agencies recently and appear to be pages from the actual pilot script. Major spoilers ahead...

So the arc of Blood and Chrome is the first mission for a young William Adama, a green pilot just out of training. Over the course of his first week on the job, Adama loses his innocence and discovers that things in war are more complicated than he'd believed when he signed up. The story starts at the end, with the battle-haunted William Adama looking up in a stained Colonial uniform under a tattered parka, with a "thousand yard stare," as a voiceover talks about you find out who you are in wartime, both the good parts and the bad parts... and we all get what's coming to us.

Smooth Criminal

Ron Moore's Harry Potter for grown ups

A pilot has been ordered. It is a fantasy ensemble police drama. [Link]

Battlestar Galactica reboot visionary Ron Moore just took another step forward to bringing a fantasy series to broadcast TV.

NBC just picked up his pilot, which could be described as “Harry Potter for grown-ups.”

The Sony Pictures TV project takes place in world ruled by magic instead of science. The working title is 17th Precinct and it’s basically an ensemble police drama set in the fictional town of Excelsior.

Abandoned Remains of the Russian Shuttle

Lots of photos. [Link]

German Post war sci fi art

Neat. Lots more at the link. [Link]

Mixed Emotions

Pro: Cake's new album is number one.
Con: It got there by selling the least of any other number one record. [Link]

The year is off to a rotten start for the music industry, with the new No. 1 album setting a new record for the smallest sales total.

Alternative rock band Cake debuted at No. 1 for the first time in its career after selling just 44,000 copies of its new album "Showroom of Compassion" during the week ended January 16, according to Nielsen SoundScan data issued Wednesday.

It's the smallest week for a No. 1 album since the tracking firm began recording point-of-sales data in 1991, and beats a record set only last week when Taylor Swift's hit album "Speak Now" led the field with 52,000 units in its 11th week of release.

The Sequel Map

Map of how well sequels did compared to the original film. [Link]

Which sequels were truly better than the originals? Finally! The answers! This chart graphs the Rotten Tomatoes scores of a hundred-some sequels against the scores of the originals which preceded them. Apparently the first Star Trek movie really did suck!

Yup, that's Wrath of Khan way up there above the "better-than-the-original" dotted line—the originals' scores are plotted on the the X-axis; the sequels' scores on the Y. Other quantitatively better sequels: Dark Knight, Stuart Little 2, and Mighty Ducks D2. I've always said that! Fans of Bad News Bears Go To Japan, however, which appears to be the greatest drop in critical acclaim from an original film to it sequel, might not like what they see.

How to select an RPG

Not bad, but misses Pulp (Adventure! or Spirit of the Century), and New World of Darkness or Dresden Files. [Link]

I threw this chart together just for fun.  Start in the red diamond which is roughly in the center.

Please excuse any slights that may be part of the chart.  Some may be my biases, but most are based on consensus opinions of various message boards. There are 44 games listed currently.

If you have suggestions of games to add, please suggest them in the comments!  But please also include one or two things that differentiate the game you’re suggestion.  Also feel free to mention more/better ways to differentiate the games already on the chart.

There are lots of games that could be added, but there will have to be some cutoff too avoid overload.  For example, I may add some D&D retro-clones, but I probably won’t do more than the 5-7 most popular clones.

To Rephrase: Don’t see something listed which should be?  Don’t get your rant on.  This was a first draft… post a comment and it will likely be added in a day or two.

Zoolander 2

Awesome. [Link]

Ben Stiller confirmed 'Zoolander 2,' is happening, and even gave some big plot spoilers.

After co-star Owen Wilson talked up the development of the film in December, Stiller took it up a notch in an interview with Empire Magazine, saying he'd finished and submitted the script and then talking about what's happened to the characters since the first film, and what to expect in the sequel.

"It's ten years later and most of it is set in Europe," Stiller revealed. "I don't want to give away too much, but it's basically Derek [Stiller's character] and Hansel [Wilson's] ten years later - though the last movie ended on a happy note a lot of things have happened in the meantime."

Not a lot of good things, he specifies. But good news for fans: their favorite villain may be coming back.

"Will Ferrell is written into the script and he's expressed interest in doing it. I think Mugatu is an integral part of the Zoolander story, so yes, he features in a big way."

The center needs to be at least three times bigger than this.

Superstreets

No left turns means more efficiency. [Link]

Superstreet intersections are designed for situations where you've got a major road intersected by a bunch of smaller roads. What generally happens in these situations is that the people on the smaller roads trying to get across the major road have to wait forever, or if there's a traffic light, all of the traffic on the main road has to stop and wait for just a couple cars to get across. This is horribly inefficient, not to mention frustrating.

The Superstreet intersection attempts to solve this problem by entirely doing away with left turns and preventing streams of traffic from directly crossing each other. To cross a Superstreet, traffic from side roads must first turn right, joining the main flow of cars. A dedicated u-turn lane allows you reverse your direction, at which point you can continue straight (effectively making a roundabout left turn), or turn right, which gets you across the intersection.

Stop Hitting Yourself

Many on the Left can't help it, where Sarah Palin is concerned. [Link]

But here’s what’s going on in the dance between Palin and what she calls the “lamestream” media: Every time they attack her, they wind up doing something that hurts them worse than it hurts her. She may not become President, and she may not even want to be President — though, regardless, it’s in her interest to keep everyone guessing as long as possible — but with little more than an Internet connection and Facebook she’s done more lasting harm to their position than anybody else. Last night Barack Obama threw them under the bus over the whole “rhetoric” question, just hours after she had managed to work them into a snarling frenzywith an Internet video. Even though it’s hurting them, they can’t — and I mean, literally, psychologically can’t — leave her alone. And she’s getting rich the whole time.

So I don’t know about “Presidential,” but who’s dumb, here?

Vitriolic behavior

I get the feeling that these people don't even see their own hypocrisy.



I can understand not liking her or her politics, but the level of vitriol she provokes in some on the Left is incredibly out of proportion to anything she has done.

I'm an agnostic, but this seems apropos. Matthew 7:5

5. Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.

Let's not call for someone's death or sickness to reduce the level of vitriol.

Please.

Jon Stewart on Arizona

Good.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Arizona Shootings Reaction
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog</a> The Daily Show on Facebook