Geek Chic

Kacie Kinzer, a student at Tisch in NYC, is working on a cool project called Tweenbots — little unmanned robots that can only move forward, but which have a destination that’s not in a straight line, and therefore depend on human interaction to get where they’re going (in this case, from the northwest corner to the southeast corner of Washington Square Park ).

Watch what happens:

Check out her site to get the full story.

And thanks, It’s Nice That.

Check this:

A team of eight surgeons at Brigham and Women’s Hospital performed a partial face transplant yesterday, which is only the second time such a procedure has been done in the United States, according to the hospital.

What?  I’m sorry?  Partial Face Transplant?

You learn the weirdest things on that ‘Captivate Network’ in the elevator…

Read the full story on Boston.com

I’m sure this has been floating around the interwebs for awhile now, but I just found it this morning and I think a) it’s hilarious and b) whoever did the editing has both a ridiculous amount of skill and an unbelievably large amount of time on his or her hands.

Without further ado Geek Chic is proud to  present the Bert and Ernie / M.O.P mash up:

What’s funny about the whole thing, I think, is that their voices line up better in this edited fake ‘music video’ than they do on Sesame Street (from what I can recall…).

For more kids show/Rap mash ups, see Unreality

I’m not quite sure what to say about this, but I think it actually looks pretty good:

In the same vein as Being John Malcovich, Van Damme plays himself — a past-his-prime action star, returning to his home in Brussels, and playing out his remaining career shooting more and more questionable B movies.  Until one day he runs out of money.  And finds himself in the middle of a real-life bank robbery.  Comedy and drama ensues.

I know what you’re thinking — Jean-Claude Van Damme? From Universal Soldier?

I know.  I had the same reaction.

The amazing part is — at least in the trailer — Van Damme’s acting is actually pretty good.  He’s actually funny and compelling — and overall the film – JCVD – looks really good.  It comes out on DVD on 4/28, so we’ll just have to wait and see.

Thanks for the tip VSL!

I heard a report on NPR this morning about the decommissioning of the Shuttles remaining in the Space Program and the movement towards the new Orion rockets (based, if I remember correctly, on the early Saturn rocket design).

While I have no objections to the design they’re moving towards (staged separation rockets, as far as I know, have a lot less of the maintenance issues that plagued the Shuttle over the last few years — and as a result cause far fewer teachers to incinerate), I do have some objections to the trajectory of the program.  The main goal, it seems, is to get back to the Moon.

The arguments in favor of this, as stated by the NASA scientists interviewed this morning were as follows:

1. While our parents’ generation went to the Moon, our generation hasn’t yet
2. We’ve only had a little over 300 hours to explore the Moon.  There’s so much left of the planet to explore.
3. We need to get smart minds excited about space again.

My responses to these are:

1. So what?  My parents generation has been to Vietnam.  Doesn’t make me want to fight another war there.  Seems like a pretty juvenile argument, to tell you the truth.
2. First of all, the Moon isn’t a planet.  It’s a moon. Show some respect to poor Pluto.  Second of all, in the time we’ve spent there, we’ve figured out that a) the moon is not easily or readily inhabitable and b) the moon used to be part of the Earth c) it’s now a big ball of dust and rock with little signs of life, water, etc.  What else do we need to know about it?
3. There are tons of exciting challenges in space.  Tons.  Not the least of which would be cleaning up all of the junk we have in orbit which caused the ISS people to be on high alert last week.  I don’t see how going to the moon is particularly exciting and inspiring to a new generation.  It’s done (unless of course you believe the conspiracy theories, in which case we haven’t actually done it yet).   Let’s aim higher.

There are those who agree with this and think that, if we want to head to the Moon again it should only be to the purpose of establishing it as a base of operations for deeper space exploration (Mars for example).

The Russians seem to have the right idea.  On Tuesday they will start experiments with the aim of testing how humans would react to such a long space flight as the one required to get to Mars.

Only time will tell how this all will come out in the wash.  But I definitely think we should think carefully about our long-term goals in terms of space travel.  Especially considering it’s a recession and these things are damned pricey.

This is fun:

Slagsmålsklubben – Sponsored by destiny from Tomas Nilsson on Vimeo.

Thanks VSL!

Check this out:

It’s a strange interactive Ikea ad where music makes the actors/dancers move around (mostly backwards as far as I can tell).  It lets you choose from a couple of pre-selected tracks and use your keyboard for some midi-style canned drum samples.  The most fun thing I’ve found with it is to upload something from your music library and have them dance to it.  They seem to especially like TV on the Radio.

Kudos to whoever designed this.  I can’t imagine it was easy writing a Flash program where a video track responds to the amplitude of sound waves…

Thanks VSL