The Fibonacci sequence as seen in flowers (Environmental Graffiti)

How Facebook going public will change it for the worse (Slate)

Awesome walking cardboard sculptures (Laughing Squid)

Original Bladerunner screenwriter to write sequel (ComingSoon)

The Elder Scrolls Online’s story is 100% solo (Eurogamer)

Meet Sara Seager, member of asteroid miners Planetary Resources (The Mary Sue)

14 essential talking points about the Berestain Bears (Mental Floss)

(title pic via reddit)

Now that the Facebook IPO is finally going down, you’re probably wondering “what exactly happened?” If so, this “re-enactment” from everyone’s favorite Taiwanese Animation house Next Media Animation is the perfect primer on what totally didn’t happen. That said, you’re good old pal Zuckerburger totally has enough money to do pretty much whatever he wants. The fact that it wasn’t this is just a coincidence.

(via TechCrunch)

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If you’re into both LEGO art and legalizing it (maaaaan), has Known Gallery got the exhibit for you. Opening May 26, art collective LAGO will be showing off their “Legolize It!” exhibition, which, as you might’ve guessed from the pun and above picture, is a LEGO art show dedicated to marijuana.

The show, at the Known Gallery in Los Angeles, will be opening May 26 and running to June 9. The description for the exhibition is even weirder than the phrase “LEGO marijuana art.” It involves providing a lifelike medical marijuana purchasing experience, complete with synthetic starter-plants and seedlings.

In the wake of increasing raids on Medical Marijuana dispensaries by local, state and federal drug enforcement agencies, the LAgo brand’s brand-new, flagship storefront is set to open on May 26, 2012 at Known Gallery located at 441 North Fairfax Avenue in Los Angeles. The LAgo brand, as a perpetual “harvest” of healing power, has been especially commodified to meet the addictions of anyone who has ever wanted to experience the transaction of purchasing medical marijuana – or fine art – at a legal business organization.
Synthetic starter-plants, seedlings,  clones and a totally huge selection of intoxicating, fake plastic buds- all built with LEGO bricks to resemble some of the finest strains of medicinal marijuana ever grown- will be on display and available for limited purchase.

I guess this makes sense when you think about some terminology. LEGO pieces are bricks. A lot of pot packaged in such a way is referred to as a brick.

Yeah.

(Known Gallery via Boing Boing)

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Important to note, the deal isn’t applicable through every single retailer on the face of the Earth, but it’s a wide enough variety that students shouldn’t have much trouble finding the deal. Participating U.S. retailers include Best Buy, Dell.com, Fry’s Electronics, HPDirect.com, Microsoft Stores, and Newegg.com. Canada retailers offering the deal include Best Buy, Dell.ca, Future Shop, Staples, and The Source. In order to take part in the deal, the purchaser must provide some sort of student identification at the time of the purchase.

A free 4 GB Xbox 360 isn’t too shabby, as the console goes for $199 over at GameStop. So, if you’re in the market for a new PC, you might as well strike while the iron is full of free brand new gaming consoles.

(via Windows Blog)

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In my writeup of the Diablo lore in preparation for the release of Diablo III, I neglected to mention the (in)famous Cow Level. It began as a rumor in the original Diablo and only became reality in the second game. References and persistent denials about the Cow Level have become as much a part of Blizzard as delays and obsessive secrecy. Now, it seems that Diablo III has a secret cow level of its own. Spoiler-ish information and a video follow below.

The secret level in Diablo III is called Whimsyshire, and is apparently a result of the complaints after the game’s unveiling two years ago that it was too cartoony and colorful. At the time, Blizzard released the image you see above as a response, calling it the official Diablo III logo.

However, the company has taken it a step further with Whimsyshire, which is a happy-happy My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic-style level sodden with rainbows and crawling with animated flowers, teddy bears, and sparkly unicorns. Who want to kill you, of course.

Interestingly, Whimsyshire seems to be low on high-level monsters and has no big boss to fight. This might be a response to criticism that the original Cow Level had too many rare items and was too good a place for grinding that it actually broke the game. Whimsyshire, by contrast, is more in line with a joke that players can just have fun with.

Here’s a look at the level, from Force Strategy Gaming. The video discusses some minor spoiler-ish details about Diablo III, so consider yourself warned.

While getting to the Diablo II Cow Level was relatively straightforward, getting to Whimsyshire requires items from all the acts of the game, and some of those items can only be obtained during rare random events. So, again, some spoiler-ish information follows below. Here’s the full Whimsyshire recipe, again from Force Strategy Gaming:

Step 1 (Acquire the following items):

• The Black Mushroom from Cathedral level 1 in Act 1
• Leorics Shinbone from the fireplace in Leorics Manor in Act 1.
• Liquid Rainbow in a Mysterious Cave from a Mysterious chest in the Oasis Act 2. To enter the cave you must find a random spawn vendor in the Oasis.
• Wirts Bell from a vendor in the Bazaar Act 2. This item costs 100,000 gold.
• Gibbering Gemstone drops from Chiltara a rare spawn in the Frozen Cave Act 3. This is in the same area that you destroy the ballistics.
• The recipe for the Staff of Herding drop of Izual in Act 4.

Step 2 (Build the Staff):

• Using all the items found above, the recipe for the Staff of Herding, and 50,000 gold. This is built at the Blacksmith.

Step 3 (Enjoy):

• Take the staff to the open red glowing crevasse on Old Tristram Road in Act 1, use the staff and accept the quest.

Though I haven’t yet had time to try this out for myself, it sure looks like an awful lot of fun.

(h/t The Mary Sue, image via Obvious Winner)

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When I first got a smartphone, I was blown away by the awesome functionality it can have as a second screen when you’re at your computer. You can use it for Twitter, or a dedicated clock or calender, you can even use it to half-watch videos or TV while doing something else. The problem is, you need some way to prop it up so you can see it conveniently and have it charging at the same time. The upcoming Une Bobine combination cable and stand looks like it’ll do a great job, and give you a lot of flexibility in the meantime.

Like practically all cool things nowadays, the Une Bobine stand is a Kickstarter project, and like practically all the Kickstarter projects you hear about nowadays, it is ludicrously over-funded. At the time of this writing, it has collected $74,000 of its $9,800 goal, so you know it’s coming for real. As well it should because it looks awesome.

Une Bobine (French for “a coil”) is a flexible metal cable that’s strong enough to hold your iPhone but gentle enough for a woman flexible enough to be positioned in any way you see fit, whether that’s at eye level to your computer screen, just barely visible at the corner of your eye, or facing your coworkers desk as it plays video of a birthing cockroach on repeat. And like a normal cord, it plugs into USB ports and charges your phone.

Since it has already reached its funding goal, Une Bobine doesn’t need your money to get made. You can, however, shell out some cash if you’d like to buy one now, as opposed to later. The stand — complete with free shipping internationally — is a mere $25, almost unbelievably cheap for something that could be so useful. Unfortunately, I have an Android phone, so if you’ll excuse me, I have to try and figure how to, like, glue it to the side of my computer screen or something.

(Kickstarter via Core77)

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It’s been nearly a year in the making, but SpaceX’s historic mission to the International Space Station is on track to begin tomorrow with the blast off of its Dragon spacecraft. The unmanned mission will be a historic first for the company, and will no doubt become a touchstone as we enter the age of commercial space flight. Also, there will be an awesome rocket launch.

Yesterday, SpaceX founder and PayPal creator Elon Musk tweeted that the company has just passed NASA’s final launch review adding, “All systems go for liftoff on Sat morn.” Barring any last minute hiccups, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket is scheduled to blast off from the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, FL  at 4:55 AM EDT Saturday morning. Should something go wrong, the next flight opportunity would be on May 22.

The mission will be the second flight of SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft, which has been packed with 1,200 pounds of food, clothing, and some experiments designed by school children. While the ISS crew will no doubt appreciate the cargo, the mission’s real goal is to demonstrate that the Dragon can coordinate, communicate, and safely dock with the space station. Once at the orbiting outpost, this will mark the first time a spacecraft from a non-governmental organization has berthed with the station.

In addition to that milestone, the mission will also kick-off the first of a dozen resupply missions NASA has contracted SpaceX to perform under its Commercial Orbital Transportation Services plan (or COTS). The contract is reported to have cost NASA around $1.6 billion.

Once in orbit, it will take three days for the Dragon to reach the ISS, and two more days of pre-docking maneuvers to ensure everything is in order before finally meeting the ISS on the fifth day of the mission. After nine days at the station, the ISS crew will load the Dragon with return cargo which will be recovered after the spacecraft splashes down in the Pacific ocean.

We’ll be bringing you coverage of the launch as it happens, so tune in early tomorrow!

(via Universe Today, Wikipedia, image of April 30 Falcon 9 static test via SpaceX)

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We’ve relied on Jörg Sprave, the mind behind the Slingshot Channel, to provide us with the latest and greatest in rubber-band powered weapons of destruction. Whether it’s a gatling gun or wrecking a car with a ridiculous piece of slingshot artillery, Sprave is a DIY guru of destruction. His latest creation is a little bit off the beaten path, eschewing traditional slingshots and instead strapping a bunch of steak knives onto a spinning wheel of death. You need to see this.

(via The Slingshot Channel)

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In a blog post describing the new tailored suggestions feature, Twitter’s Growth and International Director Othman Laraki was surprisingly transparent about the site’s goals and operations. The information Twitter uses to suggest accounts, Laraki wrote, comes from website with Twitter buttons — like the one at the top right of this post. Twitter, along with other sites like LinkedIn and Facebook, collects this information in order to recommend the accounts of sites you visit, or just generally popular sites.

Laraki explains it this way, in his blog post:

By recognizing which accounts are frequently followed by people who visit popular sites, we can recommend those accounts to others who have visited those sites within the last ten days.

That sounds a bit creepy, but Twitter has some sweet to wash down the bitter.

Laraki says, and it has been confirmed on other sites that have been critical of Twitter’s information gathering, that information is only kept for ten days. This means that Twitter is not building an enormous user profile of user information that it could, say sell to marketers. In fact, Twitter says it wouldn’t do that anyway. The entire tailored suggestions information scheme is laid out in the site’s privacy policy under “widget data.”

Users who don’t want Twitter collecting this information can opt-out from their “account settings” page on Twitter.com in the “Personalization” section. Because the tailored suggestions feature has not yet rolled for all users, some will not see this section.

If a ten day expiration date and built-in opt-out still isn’t enough, Twitter is also complying with the newly created FTC Do Not Track initiative. DNT basically allows users to have their browsers tell websites not to gather information. It’s currently supported as part of FireFox, Internet Explorer and Safari. It will be integrated into a future version of Google Chrome, but can be activated now with this plugin. More information about DNT is available here.

While it’s always a bit disconcerting to learn that companies have means of gathering user information, it’s surprising that Twitter has been so forthcoming about it. Not only forthcoming, but that they have also provided two means by which users can avoid having their data collected. Perhaps what’s more surprising is that this kind of good behavior is the exception and not the norm.

(Twitter, dcurtis via Techmeme)

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If you need a bottle opened, but don’t have a bottle opener, Max’s belt buckle, or the side of a desk or table that you don’t really care about scuffing, but you also happen to have a chainsaw handy — because why wouldn’t you — you can follow in the footsteps of this master chainsawman and have that bottle opened rather quickly.

(via reddit)

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If you’ve ever done any programming, you know that one of the best things about computers, and also one of the most annoying things about them, is that they don’t make mistakes. A computer will always do exactly what you tell it to, and if you don’t get the right result, it is 100% your fault. At least, this is usually the case. Researchers at Rice University have made an interesting discovery, however. If you build your computer chips so that they can make mistakes, you can boost your efficiency by crazy amounts, to the point where more accident-prone chips can be 15 times more efficient than their always-perfect counterparts.

How do you build a chip that can make mistakes? Simple, you take out some of the components that are rarely used. This gives you increased speed, a smaller size, and more simplicity overall and the only price you have to pay is that the chip can now start making the mistakes that those components where there to prevent. Depending on what you’re doing, this can be an extremely worthwhile trade-off.

Now you might be thinking “but mistakes are bad!” and they usually are. Just the right amount of mistakes, however, can be close to unnoticeable. Above, are three copies of the same image. Leftmost is a copy that was processed with 0% error. The center image has a relative error of 0.54%, the rightmost 7.58%. That last one leaves a little something to be desired, but it’s still recognizable thanks to you eyes’ ability to control for oddities.

For jobs where your eyes, or ears, can perform their own, instictive auto corrections, these chips could come in very handy. The hope is that they can be incorporated in hearing aids and tablets for students in India by 2013. If the use of these kind of chips really catches on, it could mean a whole new tier of electronics that are far more efficient — and cheaper — than other models on the market, but at the cost of more errors in the form of slightly distorted video or audio. Whether or not there’s a market for that kind inaccuracy is something we’ve yet to find out, but at least if computers can make mistakes, maybe we’ll be able to defeat SkyNet after all.

(via The Verge)

I sure could go for some chips

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You’ve had the deep-friend baconaise. You’ve munched the Taco Bell Dorito-shell taco. You’ve scarfed down the lasagna burger. You’ve even munched on the McDonald’s mummy after supping on McRibs. But are you ready for Cupcakewurst? Oh, you think that’s just an elongated cupcake? Nope: It’s what happens when you bake a cupcake in a sausage casing.

These are intriguing, if challenging, treats are the creation of The Cupcake Project. Stef, the site’s writer, has apparently made it her mission to push the boundaries of baking.

Ok, so, technically it is an elongated cupcake, but it’s also a cupcake that’s contained in a thin wrapper made of digestive tract. Though I suppose if you’re OK with eating a hotdog there’s no reason to shy away from the cupcake variant.

Stef outlines the process of baking the cupcakewurst in great detail on her blog. She recommends baking in the oven at 325º and filling the casings up only halfway with cupcake batter. This way, the wurst are less likely to burst during baking. As for the buns, she used homemade “Long John” donuts — which are basically just long donuts. The “ketchup” is a homemade rasberry sauce.

Is anyone out there ready to take up the challenge?

(Images and story via the Cupcake Project via Gizmodo)

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Black Friday isn’t the only Black day (Mental Floss)

8 portable speakers to keep you jammin’ (GeekSugar)

The Big Dipper photographed 290 km away from Earth (Universe Today)

Disaster response is a major issue in the melting Arctic (Environmental Graffiti)

For some reason Moon is streaming on YouTube for free (TDW: Geeks)

Do Band-Aids do anything useful? (Slate)

5 reasons Diablo III represents gaming’s annoying future (Cracked)

(title pic via Bits and Pieces)

In Mike Judge’s 2006 secret opus, Idiocracy, everyone in the future has become quite unintelligent. In said future, water has essentially been replaced by a sports drink called Brawndo. It’s a thirst mutilator. During the crux of the movie, Luke Wilson’s character figures out that the world’s crops haven’t been growing because people are watering them with Brawndo instead of water. When he teaches some important figureheads about the issue, they’re disgusted and wonder why anyone would water anything with “toilet water,” which happens to just be regular old clean water. Dave Dalton and Craig Berscheidt of the Hammerspace Workshop have created what our world truly needs, a Brawndo drinking fountain that has a switch that allows drinkers to choose between two liquids labeled as “Brawndo” and “toilet water.”

The liquid labeled as Brawndo isn’t some fictional drink brought to life, but the fountain contains a flavor tank that has been filled with MiO Energy Drops in order to give the regular water some flavor. Obviously, the liquid labeled as toilet water is just regular water. The tank that holds the flavor isn’t MiO-exclusive, and can hold anything a tank can hold, so Brawndo can be whatever liquid your dreams and cash fund can obtain.

And don’t worry, fans of Idiocracy, this version of Brawndo has electrolytes.

(via Hack a Day)

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The actual demo won’t be shown to the gamer community at large until this coming E3, but in the meantime, Wired got its hands on some stills from the fabled Unreal Engine 4 demo reel. Sure, it’s nothing compaired to actual footage, but it sure beats nothing. Take a look, and you’ll see what I mean. As if you needed another reason to be stoked for E3.

[View all on one page]

You can read (a lot) more about the engine here.

(via Wired)

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]]> http://www.geekosystem.com/unreal-engine-4-screenshots/feed/ 1 http://www.geekosystem.com/pbs-lego-art/ http://www.geekosystem.com/pbs-lego-art/#comments Thu, 17 May 2012 20:46:24 +0000 Max Eddy http://www.geekosystem.com/?p=98667

Yesterday, The Humane Society released undercover footage it took from a stable where Tennessee Walking Horses were horrifically and systematically abused. The trainers — if the word can be applied to these people — beat, shocked, and burned their horses with chemicals in order to achieve a high-stepping gait called “the big lick.” If you were hoping to have a nice day, I don’t recommend reading any further.

The Humane Society’s investigation revealed treatment that is not only unethical, but also illegal. The head trainer, Jackie McConnell, is already on probation and yet was clearly seen continuing his work of beating and mutilating show horses. Not only that, the investigation revealed trainers using caustic chemicals applied to the horses’ feet — a practice known as “soring,” which was banned 40 years ago by the Horse Protection Act.

The footage here was said to have been used in new legal proceedings against McConnell, and featured as part of a Nightline special report. ABC reports today that, as a result of the investigation, Pepsi has pulled their sponsorship of an upcoming Walking Horse competition. Thankfully, many of the horses abused at the hands of McConnell and his stablehands have already been rescued by federal enforcement agents.

Though criminal charges and public shaming are certainly satisfying, it does little to mend the physical and psychological abuse these animals have already suffered.

(The Humane Society, via The Daily What)

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[View all on one page]

(via reddit)

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]]> http://www.geekosystem.com/some-very-twisted-ms-paint-drawings/feed/ 2 http://www.geekosystem.com/coffee-drinkers-live-longer/ http://www.geekosystem.com/coffee-drinkers-live-longer/#comments Thu, 17 May 2012 17:43:09 +0000 Eric Limer http://www.geekosystem.com/?p=98620

If you don't already drink coffee, you might want to start. If you only drink a little, maybe you should kick it up a notch. According to a new study in the New England Journal of Medicine, people who drink a pretty sizable amount of coffee tend to live longer than those who don't. What's sizable? Around four or five cups a day. Get drinkin'.

If you don’t already drink coffee, you might want to start. If you only drink a little, maybe you should kick it up a notch. According to a new study in the New England Journal of Medicine, people who drink a pretty sizable amount of coffee tend to live longer than those who don’t. What’s sizable? Around four or five cups a day. Get drinkin’.

Previously, coffee drinking had been correlated with decreased incidence of depression in women, and this study expands on those kind of positive effects. It revealed that coffee drinking is also correlated with a 12% decrease in risk of death (presumably the imminent risk, not the inevitable certainty) for men, and a 16% decrease in risk of death for women.

The discovery comes after analyzing 13 years of data from the National Institutes of Health-AARP Diet and Health Study. Drinking a little coffee helps, and drinking more helps more, at least until you hit four or five cups a day. After that, the benefits drop off a little, probably because you’re practically mainlining the stuff or because your excessive coffee drinking is an attempt to control for some kind of underlying deficiency or something.

As you might expect, it’s not exactly that simple; coffee drinking tends to also be correlated with serious vices like smoking, and — I have to imagine — being hungover all the time. And that brings us right around to the part of this study that probably deserves the most consideration: This isn’t a clinical study; it’s an observational one.

That being the case, you can’t use this to say that drinking coffee decreases risk of death because correlation does not necessarily imply causation. It could just be that people with a lower risk of death drink more coffee for some reason, or that some third factor is causing both the decrease in risk and the coffee drinking.

That said, if you aren’t engaging in the other naughty behaviors that tend to come hand in hand with coffee drinking, it might be helping you live longer. You can’t be sure, but as far as I’m concerned, this study is a good enough reason to start drinking more of the most socially acceptable addictive stimulant out there. Plus, the stuff is delicious. How can you go wrong?

(via The Atlantic)

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]]>

Yesterday, The Pirate Bay was suffering widespread outages that were reportedly the result of a DDoS attack from an unknown source. The whole situation was quite strange, considering the site didn’t seem to have any enemies that would resort to DDoSing. Now, the outage is over and Twitter user @AnonNyre has claimed responsibility, implying the whole thing is some kind of crusade against Anonymous. If that doesn’t quite make sense to you, don’t worry; it doesn’t quite make sense in general.

Looking down @AnonNyre’s rather sparse timeline, you’ll note some stereotypically Anonymous-affiliate-style material towards the beginning, even a reference to the Anonymous attack on Virgin Media that seems to be an endorsement. Sometime yesterday, though, AnonNyre’s tune changed with a little hate directed at The Pirate Bay.

Warning: from here on out, language will get a little NSFW.

The Pirate Bay, I am so fucking pissed, WHY THERE IS NO ANAL PORN IN HERE. FUCK YOU PIRATE BAY.

— ʇuıɐs snoɯʎuouɐ (@AnonNyre) May 16, 2012

This tweet was almost immediately followed up with several others insulting The Pirate Bay with a variety of racial slurs, a rant which culminated in a link to the following “explanation” — if you can call it that — on Pastebin. It reads as follows:

You must be wondering why did I attacked The Pirate Bay..

I am Nyre. I am highly against Anonymous. I do not support Anonymous anymore. I sometimes help the feds.
The Pirate Bay was a press-release website for Anonymous, then I had a idea, why not take it down? Why not make it impossible for Anonymous?
Get on your knees, Anonymous. I am a one-man army. I am not a hacker. I am a security killer.

Expect yourself, faggots.

THEPIRATEBAY.SE – Idea is, to keep it down for a week, Will try?
twitter.com/AnonNyre

As you can see for yourself, the logic here is questionable at best, especially considering that The Pirate Bay’s last public interface with Anonymous was criticizing the group’s main weapon — DDoS attacks — on principle. It seems like AnonNyre and The Pirate Bay would have been on the same side, if anything. It’s still pretty hard to suss out some kind of logical motivation here.

The key word there, of course, is “logical.” In all likelihood, AnonNyre is probably just a bored individual with access to a botnet, and who picked a target based on little more than the amount of people that it would give him an opportunity to insult. Either that, or AnonNyre is someone with literally no connection to anything and is just looking to capitalize on the incident, using it as an opportunity to insult people from a position where people might hear him.

In short: This was probably petty cyber vandalism for the lulz, if AnonNyre even had anything to do with it.

In the meantime, The Pirate Bay – mouthpiece for Anonymous or not — is back up and seemingly unscathed. I wouldn’t expect much of consequence to come out of this whole thing, but if AnonNyre does have access to a botnet of some sort, you can probably expect more site outages in the future. Which ones and why, though, is anyone’s guess.

If you’re in it for the lulz, not having a sound reason is practically a requirement.

(h/t ZDNet)

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As an April Fools’ joke earlier this year, Cartoon Network aired the old Toonami block of programming in place of Adult Swim. This caused a bit of an uproar, but the kind where people remembered how much they loved and miss Toonami. Now, Adult Swim has announced that they’ll be bringing Toonami back from the programming grave starting Saturday, May 26. For realsies this time.

The resurrected Toonami will be airing on Saturdays from midnight to six in the morning, bringing back some old anime favorites, and mixing in some new original anime programming. Adult Swim hasn’t released an official schedule as of yet, but the Anime News Network scoped out TV Guide’s listing for Adult Swim’s programming on May 27. It’s a mix of old and new programming:

12:00 a.m. – Bleach
12:30 a.m. – Fullmetal Alchemist
1:00 a.m. – Durarara!!
1:30 a.m. – Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood
2:00 a.m. – FLCL
2:30 a.m. – Cowboy Bebop
3:00 a.m. – Bleach
3:30 a.m. – Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex 2nd GIG
4:00 a.m. – Bleach
4:30 a.m. – Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood
5:00 a.m. – Durarara!!
5:30 a.m. – Cowboy Bebop

That’s certainly a lot of Bleach and Fullmetal Alchemist. The above listing is just what appeared over on TV Guide, so it might not be totally set in stone as of yet, especially considering a Toonami revival would almost certainly require Dragonball Z, which always seemed to greet us when we just got home from school back in the Toonami days. Whatever the schedule, Toonami is back, and you now have an easily accessible (and legal!) place to watch late night anime once again.

(via Adult Swim, Anime News Network)

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Over on iTunes, “jailbreak” has apparently become so reviled that Apple has removed most references to the word. Its offensive powers have been curtailed by reducing the word to “j*******k” and has joined such classics as “f**k” and “s**t” as words unspeakable on iTunes. It’s also likely to set a record for the use of amount of asterisks in a single word. 

What’s amazing about the iTunes ban on jailbreak j*******k is that it has been applied to all media available through the online store. Podcasts, movies, TV shows, and even the Thin Lizzy classic, “J*******k.” The word still appears in the textual descriptions of media, but its use in titles is completely banned. This also extends to the iTunes mobile store.

Grammatical variatons, however, still persist. For instance, an app has ingloriously been retitled J*******k, while Jailbreaker 2 is allowed to roam free. No doubt terrifying old ladies and church-goers with its horrific un-asterisked spelling.

While Apple’s displeasure with the word — and the implications it has for their smartphone — is clear, it is still completely searchable on iTunes. Type in any swear, cuss, or foul language into iTunes and it will dutifully return a result — albeit, laden with asterisks. Though it is apparently loathe to separate consumers from their media, Apple’s response to its inability to keep people from jailbreaking their phones is to throw a hissy fit on iTunes.

(@MuscleNerd via Gizmodo)

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NASA astronaut Don Pettit, in addition to being flight engineer on Expedition 31, is also something of a gifted photographer. Aboard the International Space Station, Pettit began a series of long-exposure photographs from various locations on the orbiting outpost. Perhaps it’s telling that the team chose a Starry Night-inspired background for their group photo because the resulting images are stunning.

Pettit writes that in order to get these amazing images, he had to use a few camera tricks. From NASA:

My star trail images are made by taking a time exposure of about 10 to 15 minutes. However, with modern digital cameras, 30 seconds is about the longest exposure possible, due to electronic detector noise effectively snowing out the image. To achieve the longer exposures I do what many amateur astronomers do. I take multiple 30-second exposures, then ‘stack’ them using imaging software, thus producing the longer exposure.

The image at the top of the post, for instance, has 18 stacked images. The one immediately below — which features a Russian Progress ship to the right — is comprised of 47 images. The last photo in the series, taken from within the station’s Coupola, has 46 images.

(NASA Flickr via NASA image of the day)

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At issue is a little piece of U.S. immigration law brought to light by Talking Points Memo called Sec. 212. [8 U.S.C. 1182]. According to the law, visas can be denied to persons who have renounced their citizenship in order to avoid taxation:

Former citizens who renounced citizenship to avoid taxation.-Any alien who is a former citizen of the United States who officially renounces United States citizenship and who is determined by the Attorney General to have renounced United States citizenship for the purpose of avoiding taxation by the United States is excludable.

For his part, Saverin denies being a tax dodger. Born in Brazil, Saverin moved to the U.S. as a child to avoid the threat of kidnapping in that country. He held U.S. citizenship for around ten years, but told the New York Times in an interview that he considers himself as a “global citizen.” He points out that he has, in fact, already paid a hefty 15% exit tax in the process of renouncing his U.S. citizenship, a process which began in January 2011 — well in advance of the Facebook IPO. From the NYTimes:

“I’m not a tax expert,” he [Saverin] said. “We complied with all the known laws. There was an exit tax.” That tax is based on the assets held by a citizen leaving America. The exit tax was intended to make sure the departing wealthy paid something before they decamped.

The NYTimes and other sources have pointed out that many wealthy Americans can avoid paying capital gains by borrowing against shares of stock instead of simply selling them. Were Saverin to sell his Facebook stock and cash out in the U.S., Bloomberg calculates his tax bill would be around $67 million. A paltry sum compared to the $3 billion he stands to make.

However, if Saverin were to die in Singapore as a wealthy man, his beneficiaries would avoid paying the 35% U.S. estate tax. Food for thought.

Whether or not Saverin can obtain a visa in the future is up to the U.S. Attorney General, as well as what kind of relationship the soon-to-be billionaire has with the federal government at the time. But really, it doesn’t matter what Saverin’s motivations are; tax dodger, global citizen, playboy, what have you. In the end, he’s still going to make a lot of money.

(TPM, NYTimes, ZDNet, via Techmeme)

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We’re moving further away from Uncharted 3 as time moves on, and the franchise has left us needing some sweet, sweet Naughty Dog projects on which to set our sights and hearts. We’re pretty excited about Naughty Dog’s upcoming original, The Last of Us, ever since we saw it premiere at the VGAs. There’s a new trailer to whet your appetites, and it involves a truck barreling through everything it can hit. Check it out.

(via IGN)

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You can use Arduinos to do a lot of cool things, a lot of cool things that we like to cover on Geekosystem. But what about using an arduino as a means to its own end? John Edgar Park, writer for MAKE magazine, has an answer for that; you can make a really big Arduino, one that’s six times the size of traditional microcontrollers. Enter the Arduino GRANDE, a macrocontroller, if you will.

Park’s fully functional Arduino GRANDE is due to be shown off at the upcoming Bay Area edition of Maker Faire where those attending will get a chance to see how the behemoth was designed with 3D modeling software and then brought to life through the miracle of laser-cutting. Hopefully we’ll get to see it implemented in some kind of wild build one of these days. I’m sure someone out there must be able to come up with something that could justify its size.

(via The Verge)

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Speaking at the J. P. Morgan Technology, Media, and Telecomm conference, Shammo delivered the blow, which Engadget was kind enough to fish out of the somewhat long webcast:

“LTE is our anchor point for data share. So, as you come through an upgrade cycle and you upgrade in the future, you will have to go on to the data share plan. And moving away from, if you will, the unlimited world and moving everyone into a tiered structure data share plan.”

It’s pretty difficult to take what Shammo said out of context, and it pretty clearly conveys that unlimited data plans that have been grandfathered in will be switched over to a tiered structure. It’s unfortunate that those that have been on Verizon long enough to even have an unlimited data plan to lose aren’t being treated more favorably, but what’re you going to. Those customers will just have to enjoy how their phone gets reception almost anywhere, while certain competitors’ phones struggle getting reception when a microwave is warming something within a close proximity.

Unfortunate, but there’s always Republic Wireless, I suppose.

(via Engadget)

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Rumor has it the next iPhone will have a bigger screen (The Wall Street Journal)

The Google Docs research sidebar seems pretty awesome (The Verge)

Listing of all of the most valuable asteroids we’ve found (Asterank)

11 facts about the ambidextrous (Mental Floss)

4 ways to play Battleship online (GeekSugar)

Lighthouses + nighttime = pretty (Environmental Graffiti)

An over-the-counter HIV test? (The Week)

(title pic via reddit)

Who doesn’t want faster Wi-Fi? No one, that’s who. Researchers in Japan are working on a new kind of Wi-Fi that might be able to help you out in the speed department. Terahertz range, or “t-ray“ wireless transmission has reached speeds up to 20 times faster than conventional radio Wi-Fi. It also lies in a currently unregulated area of the spectrum, meaning it could be fair game for Wi-Fi use someday.

T-rays, which fall between microwaves and infrared light, allow for some pretty speedy transmissions, up to 3 gbps using the most current version of t-ray Wi-Fi hardware being developed at Tokyo Institute of Technology. The current prototype, a proof-of-concept, uses something called a resonant tunneling diode, which will churn out terahertz frequency signals when properly tuned.

As with all exciting, super-fast alternatives to standard Wi-Fi, though, there’s a drawback. In this case, it’s that t-ray Wi-Fi operates over a pretty short range, and it’s very unlikely that range could ever be increased beyond, say, tens of yards. That said, researchers think they might be able to jack up the transmission rate to something around 100 gbps in the future, and with speeds like that, who cares if you have to be close?

All that said, it’s unlikely that typical radio Wi-Fi is going to be replaced any time soon, but considering that our level of data consumption isn’t likely to stop anytime soon either, it’s always good to be looking into alternatives. And if the laws of irony have any effect on things, we won’t discover a new, better Wi-Fi right until right around the time we finally get a good blanket of the traditional stuff installed, and that’s going to be a while.

(via Gizmodo)

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