geekosystem

Haunting, high-quality color war footage of 1945 Japan recorded from camera mounts on planes; assembled by Vincent Romano using recently declassified raw video. (Romano Archives via /r/videos)

How excited should we get about that Earthlike planet? (Bad Astronomer) Teardown of the new Apple TV (iFixit) MYST becoming a live-action movie? (Deadline) Digg founder Kevin Rose "burned out," could leave by the end of 2010 (Mashable) The inevitable rise of Kindle porn (Slate) Fallon and Timberlake give rap history lessson (Kottke) "I'm no werewolf, I'm a whenwolf!" (C&H) (title pic via WebUrbanist)

Wil Wheaton, noted geek icon and "that jerk on The Guild," responded to a double rainbow seen in Los Angeles via cellphone video, comedy, and science. (@wilw via The Daily What)

Bengals star Chad Ochocinco created OchocincO’s to help raise money for a worthy cause, the “Feed the Children” charity. There was one little problem, though – well-meaning people who called the 1-800 number on the box to donate funds were directed to a phone-sex line. The mistake was innocent enough: The cereal listed 1-800-HELP-FTC as Feed the Children’s number when the group’s real number is 1-888-HELP-FTC. But those three little numbers connected people to something not-so-innocent. >>>Full story at SportsGrid.

Following Nintendo's 3DS announcement yesterday, their stock dropped 9.34%, probably in part due to missing the holiday launch window and in part due to carrying a hefty price tag that is $100 more expensive than their own current-gen console. The 3DS was delayed until February in Japan, causing Nintendo to change its fiscal year profits forecast from $2.4 billion down to $1.08 billion. In a statement by Nintendo:

"The earnings forecast has been modified to reflect the trend of stronger-than-expected yen appreciation, current sales performance, the sales outlook for the holiday season and the decided release conditions for the Nintendo 3DS."

CNET has the tantalizing, techy scoop on WebP, a new graphics compression format that Google plans to officially unveil later today. Based on WebM, the open, royalty-free video format launched earlier this year by Google, Mozilla, Opera, Adobe, and more than 40 other publishers, WebP aims to take on the ubiquitous JPEG standard of image compression, the first version of which was released way back in 1992. Like JPEG, WebP is a lossy format, meaning that some image data is lost over the course of compression, though at higher qualities with less compression it'll still look similar to the eye. WebP's chief advantage according to Google, however, is that it's far more efficient. When Google surveyed 1 million sample images across the Web, 90% of which were JPEGs, compressed them in WepP, and compared, they found that WebP offered "the same quality [as the JPEGs] with 40 percent smaller file sizes." Most excitingly, Google plans to bring native support for WebP to its Chrome browser in "just a few weeks." WebP isn't perfect, however: Encoding WebP image "takes about eight times longer than JPEG." Then there's the bigger question of whether WebP can catch on at all:

Ubisoft's Beyond Good & Evil, one of the finest achievements in gaming history that no one bought, is getting another chance to reach the gaming masses by hopping on the recent HD remake bandwagon and getting a release on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 sometime next year. Beyond Good & Evil, brainchild of Michael Ancel of Rayman fame, follows reporter Jade as she unravels an alien and semi-government conspiracy. The game, often referred to as "Zelda for adults," essentially took everything that was good about the common gameplay amongst The Legend of Zelda francise, dispensed with everything gamers didn't like about Zelda, painted it with a cartoony-yet-gloomy art style, and added an intricate plot with superb writing, stellar music and a hefty dose of brilliant comedy. Despite being one of the finest achievements in gaming history, Beyond Good & Evil, like various other unfortunate critically-acclaimed games, didn't sell well, being slashed in price by 80% shortly after it was released in 2003.

Fascinating map comparing US states to countries with comparable gross domestic products. Original source (and year) unknown, so it could be a little outdated.

(Yes, we know that "Equador" [Alaska] should be Ecuador, and that Hong Kong [Alabama] is no longer a country.) (I Love Charts via GraphJam. Thanks, Hannah.)

The South Korean fried chicken chain, BBQ Chicken ), has taken its place in society as the Apple of food innovation, by combining a cup of soda with a box of chicken nuggets to bring the world the Col-Pop, currently the best way to have a drink and eat fried chicken while leaving a hand free for texting you'll see any day.

North Korean newspaper Rodong Sinmun has released the first official photo of Kim Jong-un (circled above), Kim Jong-Il's likely successor as leader of North Korea. On September 27th, Kim Jong-un was promoted to four-star general, which was notable for being the first time the state has mentioned him publicly. The Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation has an interesting, detailed post on Kim Jong-un and what his succession would mean for relations with North Korea. They write that he is "believed to be a carbon copy of Kim Jong-il’s personality and body shape" (Jong-un is estimated to be 5'5" and 192 pounds) and that he is "Believed to have masterminded the March 2010 Cheonan attack and July 2009 cyber attacks on South Korea’s government and personal websites." (via Telegraph, circle added.)

Gotta love Google for undertaking geeky projects with little commercial value for their own sakes: The company announced that Google Translate will now work for Latin. Appropriately, the post by "Jakob Uszkoreit, Ingeniarius Programmandi" was written entirely in Latin. Aside from being a nifty curiosity that will probably drive high school Latin teachers with lazy students crazy, there are two things worth noting about this.

YouTube user Joe Penna, otherwise known as MysteryGuitarMan, has released what is quite possibly his best video yet, Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" performed with slide whistles. This video showcases why he is so popular on YouTube: I mean, there's a kazoo.

Simple as it might look, the above sheet music is part of a painstaking project by Joseph Karam to transcribe what he says is a faithful transcription of Koji Kondo's score to the original Super Mario Bros.

This week, we give you ten science fiction novels that have been or have been threatened with being removed and banned from libraries and schools. Some of these are among the most popular and beloved science fiction works of the last century. They've told us how bad the future might be before we get there, how free you can be if you don't follow blind belief, and that children are perfectly capable of digesting some pretty heavy concepts, actually. Have a good Banned Books Week. Read something. >>>See the list.

50 years ago today, on September 30th, 1960, the first episode of The Flintstones aired on ABC. Google is celebrating the show's birthday/anniversary with the above doodle, which I didn't even notice spelled out 'Google' at first. (Pretty subtle.)

The Telegraph has put together a nifty list of Flintstones-related trivia that's worth checking out. The most interesting item by far (and the most surprising, given the wholesome, family-friendly image which we associate with The Flintstones) is that for its first two seasons, the show was co-sponsored by Winston cigarettes and was aimed at a more adult audience. When Welch's grape juice became the primary sponsor for Season 3, baby Pebbles was born, and the show shifted from animated Honeymooners clone to something more watchable by kids.

Surreal Flintstones cigarette commercial below: