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Nerd Year’s Resolutions – Nine for 2009

1) I will watch the movies from my Netflix queue that have been sitting around the house for weeks now. Look out Crank, you’re about to get mailed.

2) I will read at least one book written by a woman. That book will be, “The Tales of Beedle the Bard” by Joanne Rowling.

3) I will successfully consume a 34-course tasting menu known

Top Ten Hubble Photos

It’s the end of the year, so here at Nerd World we’re putting our own scientific spin on Time’s many Top Ten lists. We’ve collected the Top Ten most amazing photos taken by the Hubble Space Telescope over the last 16 years. Enjoy!

1) This one here is the Death Star exploding, after George Lucas computerified the Star Wars

What Do You Do in a Plane for 25 Hours?

It turns out that Australia is pretty far away. When you look up the flights on Expedia, next to the flight times there’s a little note that says +2 days. I don’t even think they’re taking into account relativistic effects with that number. I’m heading for Sydney on Monday, and that means I’m looking at 25 solid hours trapped in a metal …

My Top 10 Video Games List

I made one. I do it every year! They make me.

The way I see it, the basic problem facing any listmaker this year is that most of the games were either big or clever but not both. Gears 2, Dead Space, Rock Band 2: big but not clever. Braid, lots of little Flash and iPod games like Hunted Forever and Fieldrunners: clever but not big. …

Lara Croft Is Back and Remarkably Well-Preserved

I was never a huge Tomb Raider guy. I get it that Lara Croft is remarkably attractive. I’m just not really a puzzle-solving, box-jumping sort of fellow. And once you take that away, all you’ve got is an average-looking shooter with a hinky camera and lightweight weapons (and nowhere near enough of them). When I heard the quality of the …

Breaking Squid News, Stephen Hawking, Etc.

Extremely longtime readers of this blog — of which there might not actually be any — will know that nothing gets me more excited than breakthroughs in squid science. Judge then how excited I was when this footage surfaced:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPRPnQ-dUSo&hl=en&fs=1]

(Actually it surfaced in 2007, but the …

The Blob Blog: Post-election Malaise

Listen up ya heels! Dis is da Blob talkin, and youse gonna listen — or I’ll bust ya right in chops! Look, I may be an evil mutant, but I aint no chump. I know that George W. Bush was worse for this country than Magneto and Mister Sinister put together. This immovable mutant is an Obama man, all the way — Barack is the real homo

Batman, City Vs. Batman, Movie

The mayor of Batman, a city in southeastern Turkey which has the same name as the DC Comics superhero, is suing director Christopher Nolan and Warner Bros. for royalties from mega-grosser The Dark Knight.

Experts predict this will unleash an onslaught of copycat lawsuits, currently waiting in the wings:

Beverly Hills, California vs.

Best Inventions: Disemvoweling: An Addendum

This year in Time’s Best Inventions we included (coming in at #42, as it happens) the practice of disemvoweling, which is a way of dealing with annoying commenters/posters/whateverers by removing the vowels from their posts. What we did not include was the name of the person who invented disemvoweling. That person is blogger/editor/etc. …

The Best Inventions of 2008

They’re here.

I think this is the seventh year in a row that I’ve worked on this project. It’s the first year we actually ranked the inventions, 1 through 50, so now it’s … rankier. I also tried to push the selections a little bit away from an all-tech line-up this year, so we could talk about other kinds of innovation — you have …

Dead Space is Dead; Long Live Fallout 3

Man, there’s a lot of good games coming out. I ditched Dead Space to play LittleBigPlanet, then went crawling back, and now I’m ditching it again for Fallout 3. (I hate leaving a game like Dead Space unfinished, when I’ve actually become invested in the narrative, but duty calls. Plus I was really low on ammo and kinda needed an excuse …

Forbidden LittleBigPlanet: A Review

I’m almost done with Dead Space, a game that continues to present me with visions of extreme and total wrongness. But I’m taking a break to actually fire up my PS3, which I don’t do too often, and mess around with LittleBigPlanet, a trailer for which is …

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