Misc

I’m not a Web retailer, and if I were I would probably find this exchange more painful than fascinating, but as it is I can just sit back and enjoy the weirdness of it. Forbes has a piece up about “Google Hell,” which is where Web retailers end up when they fall out of the top Google rankings and into the search engine’s less accessible …

It never fails to surprise me when I see once-extinct franchises getting re-animated — you think they’re dead, then somebody finds a scrap of intact DNA trapped in amber, and before you know it you’re back to the box office all over again. Arrogant fools — have we not learned to leave Mother Nature alone? I thought the rumors of a new …

My body has been invaded by strep-bearing nanites that are sapping my ability to type coherently and without hallucinating. So I will transmit this post in compressed bullet-point form (I wanted to use the phrase “stuttered tight-point” right there, but I don’t think that actually means anything outside

Years of being sent free books by publishers have made me something of a jaded bastard. But I uttered an involuntary ‘sweet’ today when I opened a package containing an early copy of Spook Country, William Gibson’s new novel, which is due out August 7.

Dedicated Gibson-watchers know that he tends to stick with a mood and a setting …

My colleague Jeff Kluger notes that a team of European planet-hunters have found a promisingly Earth-like specimen, which they’ve named Gliese 581c. The money shot is as follows:

Like Earth, it orbits a comfortable distance from its sun; like Earth, it maintains a surface temperature somewhere between 32 and 104 degrees Fahrenheit. Most

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I guess I always did kind of wonder why Picard had a French name but an English accent. Now it can be told: they were supposed to cast a French guy, but couldn’t find one with the proper chops. Roddenberry was dead set against casting Patrick Stewart at all — thus TNG producer Robert Justman:

“We met at Gene Roddenberry’s house,

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Far less coy than the first one. I’m not sure why this is YouTube-only and not on the official site, but it gives you a lot more of what you want: angry Harry — usin’ those Equus acting chops — the Weasley twins on rampage, a killer giggle from Dolores Umbridge, thestrals, centaurs, Voldemort, the Ministry of Magic courtroom, the …

A quick note to plug nerdcore icon MC Frontalot’s new album Secrets from the Future. If you require background on the whole nerdcore phenomenon, I’ve blogged about it here and here. Frontalot was the first artist who got me into nerdcore hip-hop, and he’s fast becoming it’s most visible spokesperson – cf. the upcoming documentary …

I was tired. It was a long flight. The woman next to me was watching a romantic comedy starring Minnie Driver and David Duchovny. Plus I’d already ready the Tolkien book, and it was all I had left in my bag. This is how I came to read All Those Moments, the memoir of Rutger Hauer.

I don’t recommend that you read this book. There are a …

As a very peripheral side-note to the still-unfolding story of the Virginia Tech tragedy, I can’t help keeping a weather eye out for the return of the killer nerd meme that got loose in the wake of the Columbine killings: the anti-social, trench-coated video game freak who finally snaps. So far sightings of the meme have been relatively …