geekosystem

30 excellent costumes from Comic-Con 2010 (Neatorama) What if Law & Order was a sci-fi show? (io9) Literary journal explores the Rambo body count (Lapham's Quarterly) LOST's Apple II up for auction (TUAW) The longest photographic exposures in history (ItchyI) We preferred the original ... (Presurfer) Is a vaccine for stress possible? (Wired) (title image via TeeFury via Sedentário y Hiperativo)

Yesterday, Twitter announced the advent of Suggestions for You, a new feature that helps you sift through the service's more than 100 million accounts to find people Twitter thinks you should follow based on algorithms designed to measure relevance. If you like a given suggestion of Twitter's, you can choose to follow them; if not, you can click hide and the list will be replenished with new recommendations.

Much like Google Reader's similar blog recommendations, when you view a given user's profile, the new feature will also suggest other, similar users to follow. It says that Geekosystem's Twitter feed is similar to the NASA astronauts' official feed and to Gizmodo top editor Brian Lam's; we'll take it!

Also in the works: An API so "so third parties can provide these suggestion features in your favorite desktop, mobile, and web applications, too."

(Twitter via Huffington Post)

Artist Olly Moss is well known for his minimalist black-and-red movie posters. To promote a free summer movie series they'll be running in August, Levi's and the Alamo Drafthouse commissioned Moss to make posters for nine films in his signature style: He did not disappoint. Below, see Moss' reinterpretations of Dirty Harry, The Godfather Part II, Rocky, Convoy, RoboCop, On the Waterfront, Jackie Brown, The Blues Brothers, and There Will Be Blood. There are some clever references to the movies' happenings in a few, like the stairs in Rocky and the Genco Olive Oil Company in Godfather Part II. But you don't have to have seen the movies to appreciate these posters.

When a segment on the TV show features Fallon, as Neil Young, singing a song using the lyrics from the Double Rainbow Guy, the real success won't come on TV, but online.

Fallon has played Neil Young a couple other times (more background from the Late Night blog) but this was the first song that was generated by a purely internet creation. Either way, Fallon is amassing quite a few musical hits through Late Night sketches.

It’s one thing to hear the Double Rainbow guy ask “what does it mean?” and say “It’s starting to look like a triple rainbow,” but it’s entirely different to hear Neil Young sing it.

>>>Check out the video at Mediaite.

Self-described "Mad Professor" Photonicinduction, who has quite a crazy YouTube channel, performed an important experiment by throwing a brick into a washing machine.

The washing machine proceeds to destroy itself in spectacular fashion. The experimenter's girlfriend is currently not very happy with him for destroying her prized flowers, but such is the cost of scientific inquiry.

In 2009, Romain Corraze, a young French recent MBA graduate, took it upon himself to travel around the world for one year. During the course of that year, he passed through 31 countries and "enjoyed every single sunset as if it was the last one."

The beautiful video below records some of the best sunrises and sunsets he saw in countries from Mexico to China, Australia to Belgium, the USA to Mongolia.

Apologies if you thought the title was an elaborate pornographic allusion, but I'm being completely literal: After the jump, you will see Google's recently shuttered Nexus One film itself BEING SHOT 28,000 FEET INTO THE AIR, or about 5.3 miles vertically. The event was part of the PhoneSat initiative; with the support of the Mavericks Civilian Space Foundation, they strapped the smart phone with a parachute to a rocket with 1,000 lbs of thrust, to test whether the phones could be sent high enough to enter orbit. This captured video, by the way, is from the second phone launched into the sky. We won't tell you what happened to the first one (it shattered into a million pieces).

North Korean soccer team shamed by government for World Cup performance (With Leather) The science of Caddyshack (Discovery) Live action Mulan in the works (Screenrant) iPhone 4 antenna woes "significantly worse" than competition (Ars) Some Jedi are real jerks (LaughingSquid) How LEGO got its groove back (Businessweek) 57 things you didn't know about Hugh Hefner (Flavorwire)

The population of radioactive wild boars in Germany is (figuratively) exploding of late, with the average boar in one tested area showing more than ten times the level of radioactivity deemed safe by the government.

But the mushrooming crowd of radioactive boars has less to do with mushroom clouds than with plain old mushrooms:

If only you could write the next great American novel while taking a walk in the park. Well, now, you still can't, but you can take a walk in the park in these kick-ass QWERTY kicks. Features include a sole that looks like a keyboard. Features sadly don't include a Caps Lock key that forces you to stomp around until you manage to land on that precise button again, a space bar that moves you forward a step without you actually walking, or a delete key that can destroy all enemies in your path. I'm assuming those are all coming in the second generation.

Hopefully J.J. Abrams' company Bad Robot won't live up to its name when it adapts graphic novel Boilerplate: History’s Mechanical Marvel into a feature film. Unless by "Bad" Robot, we mean super sneaky sinister evil robot that's only pretending to be on our side as he fights alongside Teddy Roosevelt. Yes, that's a thing the robot does, so this is going to be awesome. But wait, the robot did a whole lot more in the wonderful alternate (or is it?) history in which he lived. According to Heat Vision, Boilerplate "purports to tell the story of the world’s first robot, who, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, fought alongside Teddy Roosevelt and Lawrence of Arabia, journeyed to the South Pole and was involved in the silent movie business before disappearing on the battlefields of World War I." Finally, my conspiracy-of-one theory has been proven correct. I knew the South Pole would be impossible to get to without robot assistance.

Maryland may be small (and by small I mean 42nd puniest state in the U.S.), but it's home of pop culture staples like Big Huge Games, Bethesda Softworks, The Wire, Hairspray, and Tom Clancy's The Sum of All Fears. But perhaps most important is developer Firaxis Games, responsible for the Civilization series, which likely comprised a good chunk of the $1 billion in tax revenues the state drew from the video game industry in 2008.

Now in honor of that annual gamer-generated windfall, Maryland State Governor Martin O'Malley will be recognizing September 21st as the first official Sid Meier's Civilization V Day!

Our sister site Styleite has put together a neat slideshow featuring childhood photos of models side-by-side with their current, runway-ready looks. We'll admit we don't actually know who half of these people are, but we're OK with that. Above: Bar Refaeli, or so we hear.

>>>See it at Styleite.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead spoke to io9 at Comic Con, and explained that comic creator Bryan Lee O'Malley provided actors of the upcoming Scott Pilgrim vs. the World adaptation ten facts about their characters neither in the books nor the film. For her character Ramona Flowers, the girlfriend of the titular protagonist, many of the facts were about her pre-Toronto life. io9 was only able to coax one fact from Winstead, though it's quite an enlightening one. Highlight for the kicker: Ramona's younger brother died when she was younger, and she wears a shoelace around her neck in memory of him. (via io9)

Blame Kevin Smith: The sixth issue of Batman: The Widening Gyre, a twelve-part, official DC miniseries written by the Clerks director and illustrated by Walt Flanagan, features this charmer of a panel, which etches Batman's avowed bladder spasm in the annals of comics history. What's worse, this is actually a flashback to Frank Miller's path-setting Batman: Year One -- to Batman's pivotal first speech to the corrupt gangsters who control Gotham, which TVTropes identifies as the comic's "Crowning Moment of Awesome." Not anymore.

Comics fans being what they are, this exchange has inspired quite some controversy: