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The Power Geeks #99

by DarthMolen on May.04, 2011, under The Latest Shows

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

We are LIVE on Ustream . This week we talk Bin Laden (who hasn’t), Star Wars Day, Plenty of gaming news, and even a Dr. Horrible sequel, this and much more!

Intro Natali
Intro Ben

Items of Interest

  • Super Mario All Stars (udg)
    • It’s the 26th anniversary of Mario and what better way to celebrate than with shoes? Not just ANY shoes though- Chuck Taylor Converse All-stars. And holy adorable. There’s lil Marios all over them, the Super Mario Bros’ logo on the tongue and Starman has replaced their usual star logo. These will be hitting the stores in July and I’m guessing only for a limited time, so grab a pair when you can.
  • Han Shot First Petition (udg)
    • One thing I think we can all agree about when it comes to the 3D redo and release of the Star Wars movies is this- George has the opportunity to right the wrong. Han shot first damnit! And this guy agrees! Check out his video petition to Lucas. :)
  • May the Fourth be with You (btm)
    • Happy Star Wars Day!
    • Official site had had a countdown timer for weeks promising, “All will be revealed” and counting down to 9AM EDT Star Wars Day.
    • And the revelation was? The Complete Saga on Blu-Ray
    • Interesting marketing ploy, when you visit the site a video begins showing you behind the scenes shots and production art, but only for a few seconds, want to see more? Then you have to share the link via your Twitter or Facebook
    • So now you get to see more? Nope. Now you sit and wait for more people to share the link and when some imaginary threshold is met, more of the video will be revealed.
    • Honestly I’m finished buying the movies. I have two sets of VHS tapes, a set of DVDs and I’m done. But if you want the Complete Saga on Blu Ray, it will be available September of this year. And don’t forget the upcoming re-releases in 3D starting next year. I’m sure there will be yet another release at that time.
  • THE POWER GEEK’S 100TH EPISODE (we really need to start hyping this up and nailing out an exact plan for next week)
    • I was told there would be punch and pie. If not, I won’t be appearing. (btm)
  • Cheers Ben (SM)
    • Well, if I’m nothing else, I’m a man of my word. I guess I’ll be there (btm)

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Deals of the Week / New Releases

  • New Movie Releases
    • GREEN HORNET!
    • What Dreams May Come
    • TAPS
    • Hannah Barbara’s – Valley of the Dinosaurs
  • Free Comic Book Day is this Saturday May 7 (btm)
    • Comic Book Shops across the country will be sponsoring events and giving away free or discounted comics.
    • Comic companies will be providing “sampler” issues of many of their titles
    • Be sure to drop by your favorite comic shop and wear a costume. Many have bonuses for that as well.
      • The girls are soooooo psyched!!! (udg)
      • I’m putting together my Power Girl outfit right now (btm)
  • Sweet XB360 Amazon Deal
    • $50 Amazon Gift Card
    • 1600 Microsoft points ($20)
    • 4 GB and 250 GB Bundles (also same size Kinect Bundles)
  • Black Ops “Escalation” DLC
    • 5 new maps
    • Call of the Dead – Features Sarah Michelle Gellar, Robert Englund (Freddy Krueger), Danny Trejo (Machete), and Michael Rooker (The Walking Dead)
  • EA Week on Steam
    • Check back each day for a different deal
    • (SM) I missed the Dragon Age deals :(

Movie Minute (new feature)

  • Dr. Horrible Sequel!! (udg)
    • With the upcoming Avengers movie and staying all kinds of involved with the Buffy and Angel comics at Dark Horse, Joss Whedon is a busy, busy guy. Thankfully not too busy to sit down with the NY Times “Art Beat” column and let it slip that a sequel to Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog is coming.
    • “We’ve got several songs near completion and we’ve got a very specific structure.” Whedon said. Doing a continuation of his cult webseries is definitely something he “has his heart into,” but it’s all a matter of having enough time:  ”We’ve just all got jobs. And it’s not like Neil, Nathan and Felicia ain’t busy either. We get together at Christmas and family occasions, and then play each other our partial songs and go, “Yup, that’s still exactly as it was the last time we played it. We’re great.” It’s bad.”
    • He  also joked that the title of the Dr. Horrible sequel would be called “Dr. Horrible and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” silly silly Joss.

Geek Speak

  • The Internet’s New Alternate Reality: It’s Positive and Negative affect on historical events.
    • We are quickly approaching our 100th episode. In that time, we’ve talked a great deal about the affect that the Internet and sites such as Twitter and Facebook have had as an impact on our lives. We’ve talked about how technology has allowed events that would have taken hours to make it’s way around the world now does it in seconds. How with one click of a cell phone camera, the contents of that click attached and tweeted- worlds can be witnessed like never before.
    • Tonight we talk about the impact that the Internet has had and will have on history.
    • Until very recently, if every professional news organization in the nation examined a charge and found it baseless, it was — for all intents and purposes — dropped. Today, the growth of the Internet has drained the noun “news” of its former authority. If you don’t like the facts presented on the sites of established news organizations, you simply keep clicking until you find one whose “facts” accord with your beliefs.
      • “There are no more arbiters of truth,” former White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs told the Politico website. “So whatever you can prove factually, somebody else can find something else and point to it with enough ferocity to get people to believe it. We’ve crossed some Rubicon into the unknown.
  • The main point of topic: The internet’s Positive and Negative affect on historical events. The ease at which a rumor that appears to be completely true (i.e. the now clearly photoshopped photo of a supposed dead Osama believed to be released by the Persian Media that major news organizations ran with as truth) and quite the opposite- 9/11- google it, search it on YouTube and there are thousands of conspiracy sites and videos everywhere that actually appear legit enough to make people think.  The very documents leaked by WikiLeaks last week are being speculated as lighting the match that made the decisions made by President Obama have to occur this past weekend. The saying “don’t like the answer? Keep googling” is so true. How will all of this affect world history for our future generations? What will the definitive source be now? Our high schoolers can now quote Wikipedia – a user edited site and Twitter in papers.

Tech, Gaming, and Geek News

  • The Science Behind “That’s What She Said” (udg)
    • We’ve all probably said it once or twice. Steven loves to whip it out whenever he can. I personally kinda suck at it, despite my best efforts. So, ever wonder what exactly makes a good “That’s What She Said”? Well, thanks to research done by Chloé Kiddon and Yuriy Brun of the University of Washington, it turns out it’s all about noun sexiness.
    • Kiddon and Brun, who cite television show The Office as the prime cause behind the repopularization of TWSS, are actually serious, bona fide computer science researchers. Their paper, which will be presented in June at a computer linguistics conference, details their work at improving the parsing and understanding of TWSS jokes, which are a specific subset of the more maturely named double entendre. Mmmm I do love a good double entendre.
    • The intellectually stimulating duo dubbed their method at parsing humor: the DEviaNT approach. They took 1.5 mil sentences from textfiles.com/sex/EROTICA corpus, and 57 thousand non-erotic sentences from the Brown corpus — and then measures how closely-related “a noun, an adjective, and a verb phrase are to the erotica domain.” The end result, if we’re being entirely scientific about it, is a bunch of nouns, verbs, and adjectives with a “sexiness rating.”
    • Because DEviaNT is a learning algorithm, the researchers had to feed it some data so that it could actually learn what a TWSS looks like, and more importantly what a TWSS doesn’t look like. Their choice was positive examples from twssstories.com, and false examples from textsfromlastnight.com, fmylife.com, and wikiquote.org. Then, with sexiness ratings and an accurate linguistic model of what makes up a TWSS, the researchers started feeding sentences into DEviaNT to see whether it could detect TWSSes.
    • The end result, rather surprisingly, was the accurate detection of That’s What She Said double entendres 71% of the time. Qualitatively, DEviaNT was most capable at identifying noun euphemisms like “don’t you think these buns are a little too big for this meat?” and weaker with ambiguous phrases like “yes give me all the cream and he’s gone.”
    • You know this whole article mixes grammar, scientific algorithms and wraps it with a bow of humor on top. It doesn’t get much more perfect than that for me. Hmm…that may account for why DEviaNT is far more successful at kicking out a better That’s What She Said than I am.
  • Twitter knew about Osama Raid Before We Did (sm)
    • Obama wasn’t the only person to announce the happenings in Pakistan
    • Twitter user, Sohaib Athar, unwittingly micro-blogged the event on the social network site
    • He tweeted about helicopters noises, explosions, plus crashes
    • even his worries of “something worse going down” and faulty “spy copters”
    • All before Obama’s speech came on.
  • Cybercriminals using bin Laden death to spread malware (btm)
    • As with most major news stories criminals are ready with malware
    • Links show up in Twitter and Facebook that lead to malicious sites where you are asked to install a codec to watch a video at which point malware is installed on your computer.
  • Osama’s last attack? Your social news networks (SM)
    • CNN Mobile New site crashed because of the load
    • Most news sites were taking 6x as long to process requests
    • Tweets reached 4,000 p/ second
    • Keith Urbahn, “Former Secretary of Defense Chief of Staff”,  tweeted before Obama’s speech “So I’m told by a reputable person they have killed Osama Bin Laden. Hot Damn”
    • Facebook had 200,000 likes of one fan page “Osama Bin Laden is DEAD”
    • How are YOU getting your news nowadays?? The landscape is changing
  • AT&T Broadband Usage Caps Go Into Effect (udg)
    • We’ve covered cell data usage caps on here before. Now it’s coming to your home. If you use AT&T as your ISP beware- the data use cap has begun.
    • America’s largest ISP has now become the 2nd broadband carrier after Comcast to start limiting broadband usage to its customers.
    • DSL users will be capped at 150 GB per month. U-verse users will be capped at 250 per month.  Those that go over the limit more than 3 times in 3 separate months will have to fork over $10 for each 50 GB over the limit.
    • AT&T estimates that, with the average customer ringing in at about 18 GB per month in use, only around 2% of their high-speed Internet customers will be affected. However, rising cloud technologies that sync files with remote servers in the background, customers could face data usage issues under such a plan.
    • Some advocates see the move as a potential hindrance to the growth of the Internet and online innovation. Representative Ed Markey criticized AT&T for undermining national broadband goals and making it more difficult for new adopters to access high-speed Internet.
  • Superman renounces US citizenship (btm)
    • MSM (esp. Fox News) reacted all weekend
    • Commenters on Fox News site goes bat#%&! crazy
    • Several think this “globalization” is to increase overseas sales for upcoming movies
    • (SM)Next thing you know, Thor is going to renounce his citizenship of Asgard because, well, Norse legends are out of style nowadays anyways
  • The App That Turns Your iPhone Into a 3D Scanner (udg)
    • With over 350,000 apps out there, it would seem that every possible idea for the iPhone 4 has been thought up. Georgia Tech researcher Grant Schnidler has proven otherwise. He uses it to create 3D models and now you can too.
    • Schindler’s app, called Trimensional, works by shining light on a person’s face from four directions, and recording the results. These are compiled into a single image that (if you’re using the advanced version of the software) you can export to a 3D printer and create a model of your face, or whatever you’ve scanned. Cleverly, Trimensional does not require any additional equipment to perform the scan, such as a light kit. Instead, it uses the iPhone’s screen as a light source, and records the images with the front-facing camera.
    • Schindler describes the scanning process as answering a series of questions. From the Georgia Tech Digital Lounge:
      • “If I take a scan of my face, the app asks ‘what does the image look like if I shine the light from the left side, what does it look like from the right side,’ and so on. There’s one three-dimensional answer per pixel, and combining all those answers results in the full 3-D model.”
    • I see a wide variety of uses for this app and encourage you to check out the link in the show notes to watch a video of it in action.
  • Artists and writers start anti-bullying Kickstarter drive for comic (btm)
    • Original comic produced at a 24 Hour Comic Day event by Charles “Zan” Christensen and Mark Brill.
    • Inspired by last year’s rash of gay teen suicides
    • Art being reworked and cleaned up for a more polished look and to include new bonus pages by Dan Parent, Gail Simone, Phil Jimenez, Carla Speed McNeil, Andy Mangels and Donna Barr.
  • Home Gaming Consoles in Apple’s Future ? (udg)
    • For years rumors have flown about an Apple Gaming Console. And for years we all pretty much laughed at them. But, a good look at the A5 processor that the new iPad 2 is sporting may have us at least stop laughing for a bit.
    • Most have dismissed the revised hardware on the iPad 2 as accomplished, but fairly underwhelming. However, underneath the hood of that A5 shows an unprecedented leap in mobile games-playing power.
    • The article I stumbled upon for this item goes into some pretty incredible detail on the iPad 2 as an actual soft core gaming device and is a pretty good read. It gets into the details of things such as fill rates and frames per second.
    • It’s clear this is a hardware design that is about so much more than just a revised form factor and a bunch of cameras. Add to it that Apple also recently added Nintendo’s ex-head of communications Rob Saunders and Activision’s UK PR director, Nick Grange to their UK operations and they could possibly be laying the groundwork for the future of its gaming business.
    • What is that future? Do I personally see Apple coming out with a Gaming Console? While they plead a good case in the article, I don’t see it. What I do see is Apple doing what Apple does. Seeing a way to get in on the booming mobile gaming industry, while integrating it into their already useful products. In short- they see the future potential, it already fits into their product line, now they’re going to bump it up a notch.

Intarweb Goldmine

  • Jersey Town Limits Conjugal Visits (udg)
    • A New Jersey town is cock blocking both literally and figuratively. Hopewell Township has adopted an ordinance that regulates when chickens and roosters can hook up in backyard henhouses.
    • Roosters must show they’re disease-free and they better not crow about their conquests.
    • Hopewell Township residents can have up to a half-dozen hens on half-acre lots. Roosters would be allowed only 10 days a year for fertilization purposes.
    • Mature roosters are not allowed because they’re too noisy. Any roosters that crow too long can be banned from the property for two years.
    • Mayor Jim Burd told The Times of Trenton the ordinance is a compromise between today’s lifestyle and the township’s agricultural history.
  • Washington Man Shaves Beard (btm)
    • Has had beard since the 9/11 attacks
    • Vowed not to shave until bin Laden was captured or proven to be dead
    • Middle School teacher in East Wenatchee, WA. used the beard to tell students about the attacks
    • Once story was confirmed he says he wasted no time getting rid of the beard
      • Both he and his wife had wanted rid of it for years, but “a vow is a vow”.
    • His three daughters were in Middle School when he started growing the beard. They are now college age.
  • Words Every Bride Dreams Of- “Would You Like Fries With That?” (udg)
    • It may not be a royal wedding, but a typical Hong Kong marriage ceremony is epic in scope.
    • It involves a team of handlers, photo sessions, multiple banquets, ancestor worship, more photo sessions, countless costume changes, red packets of money, numerology and a suckling pig.
    • McDonald’s, of all places, has a better offer — and, yes, it comes with fries.
    • Beginning in January, the U.S. fast food chain’s Hong Kong operation responded to what it called strong customer demand and began offering wedding party packages at three of its 225 locations. The “Warm and Sweet Wedding Package” pares the wedding process down to the bare essentials.
    • For less than $1,300, a couple gets a venue and decorations, invitation cards, audio equipment, McDonaldland figurines for each guest, an emcee and $385 worth of McDonald’s food.
    • In addition, the bride and groom can choose among wedding gifts that include a crystal McDonald’s house and a pair of balloon wedding rings inscribed with the iconic golden arches.
    • The themed wedding far from a new concept in Hong Kong but McDonald’s is the first fast food restaurant to enter the arena.
  • Robotic French Kiss Peripheral (SM)
    • Guy builds a “mouth communication” device to “mimic” french kissing
    • Records how you move a metal tube on one peripheral and it replicates it to another peripheral.. even over the Internet
    • According to inventor, “It could be a good way for celebrities to interact with their fans” (more like gain stalkers)
    • Not very sophisticated now but plans to also mimic breathing taste, and saliva in the future…
  • Sword Wielding + Skateboard Riding is Bound to = Tasering (udg)
    • Poor Deandre Irby! Dude was just trying to enjoy the day like any young person would—hanging out at the outdoor mall, skating around with his backpack on, maybe think about getting a pretzel and oh, swinging his ‘fantasy sword’ with a 26-inch blade around. What the hell?
    • That’s how the police describe the sword Irby was carrying around. They said that when arrived on scene, Irby tried to flee and hide his sword in the dumpster but couldn’t do it in time. When caught, he refused to cooperate with them and “attempted to grab his sword”, which resulted it him getting tased. Ouch. Unfortunately, Irby didn’t have a concealed weapons permit to carry his sword (which begs the question, who the hell has a concealed weapons permit for a sword?) so he’s been charged with that. Next time, you may wanna leave the sword at home hon.

Extra Links

  • Smart Kids Grow up to be Heavy Drinkers? (btm)
    • Two long term studies (1 British, 1 American) have shown that children with higher than average intelligence grow up to consume alcohol more heavily and more frequently.
    • Theories as to why range from evolution to making up for boring childhoods or my favorite, drinking may be the only way to deal with morons.

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