Up to this point we’ve only ever gone to Ft. Fischer as it was the closest, but this year we took the extra 1/2 hour drive up to Pine Knolls on the Emerald Isle of the Outer Banks. It was well worth it. They have a giant tank recreating the sunken U-boat 352 complete with most of the sea life you’d find around it. Big fish, eels, sea turtles and sharks.

If you are ever in North Carolina it’s worth visiting their aquariums – and the admission prices are easy on the pocket book too.

io9 has the latest scoop, check it out! I’m rarely big on remakes, but David Tennant can bring a whole lot to a role!

The original movie poster was rad!

In short, this volcanic island in the middle of the Atlantic was a barren rock.

What happened in the interim is the amazing story of how the architect of evolution, Kew Gardens and the Royal Navy conspired to build a fully functioning, but totally artificial ecosystem.

By a bizarre twist, this great imperial experiment may hold the key to the future colonisation of Mars.

Go read the rest here!

In all, we’ve been lucky for the many years we’ve been coming to Topsail Island as we’ve never had a major storm come near us. So this particular storm seemed mighty fishy, almost like something was sending it this way on purpose.

Luckily I purchased our very own super hero for the trip. This is probably his 7th or 8th version of his armor. It’s freaking wild what you can buy at Costco now-a-days. Your own god damn Iron Man.

So, we sent Ironing Man (as he is known by the wee ones) aloft to survey the skies and determine what was behind this foul storm.
Using his advanced sensors, state-of-the-art velco and aluminum bar design, and a washed-up bag that served as a weight on his tail he was able to do some serious reconnaissance of the beach and spot the neer-do-wells.

Jellyfish! It was their fiendish plot to storm the beaches and sow terror among the populace. Riding the large waves and heavy surf created by Earl they flung themselves without mercy upon the beaches… and promptly stopped, forgetting their jellied bodies were no match for dry land. Fools!

Better luck next time, suckers.

Extra freaky jellyfish at no extra charge.

Onto the choice bits. Apple said it will be live-streaming the event using ‘open standards’. But the catch is you can only watch the live-stream on an Apple product running iOS 3 or 4, in the Snow Leopard operating system running Safari.

WTF? Why even bother saying “open standards” if you are employing it in a fashion that a vast majority of the internet connected populace can’t use? I can’t even watch this live-stream on my Mac Book Pro because I ONLY have OSX 10.5. I might be able to watch it on my iPhone if the 3G connection down here in the OBX works for me than two minutes.

In all, it’s contrived double-speak of Microsoft proportions.

They really should run for some government positions at this point given the shit that dribbles out of their mouths.

Ah science – even the sketchy, fuzzy science of crowd counting delivers better numbers than the biased squint and pull a number out of your ass routine that we’ve seen come from all sides of the media.

Steve Doig does this kind of science. You can read about his latest efforts on Glen Beck’s rally:

My estimate is that about 80,000 people were at the rally. Ryan Shuler, an Airphotoslive image analyst, used the same images and a different grid-density method to produce an estimate of 87,000. Considering the error margins around our separately-calculated estimates, they are statistically identical.

Of course he’s taken all kinds of heat for publishing this from the same right-wing groups that lauded his numbers on the Obama inauguration.

Do numbers really mean anything? Not always. In fact, often it becomes a crutch, a logical fallacy - argumentum ad populum, that because a lot/too little people were there an idea is good/bad. How many news stories will fill the airwaves balanced on this exact crutch rather than addressing the issues that were presented? Too many.

I fully expect one of the few, if only  place that will actually dissect the messages presented at the rally will be the Daily Show. Then again, throughout all of man’s history comedy and satire has always delivered the truth.

For almost two decades the graphics card market has been a hotly contested place. It’s been a race of pure horsepower, and the winner is always the customer. A few giants have come and gone, and this last decade has mostly seen ATI and Nvidia duking it out for the crown.

They’ve alternated turns at the top, and in this last round it looked like ATI was down for the count. They surged back with their 4000 series and 5000 series of cards to beat Nvidia and take back the crown. In return customers saw graphics cards more powerful than ever before, and ultimately delivering better gaming experiences.

And now ATI is going away – at least in name. They were bought back in 2006 buy chip maker AMD (another giant who regularly trades blows with Intel – and again we win because of it), who has now decided to dissolve the ATI brand completely.

While AMD gives reasons for this change but it still seems… foolhardy - especially given the amount of pixel-ass-kicking ATI has delivered over the past year. It’s like DC Comics renaming the Joker as ‘heinous villain owned by DC Comics’.

Things just won’t be the same.

RIP

Powered by Twitter Tools

Powered by Twitter Tools