geekosystem

Cool dad migpics11 created a neat robotic LEGO device that makes pancakes in the shape of Mickey Mouse's head and trucks. And he's even nice enough to let his daughter within several miles of it. What a guy. The camera work is a little shakey, but the guy automated Mickey Mouse pancake-making, so he probably deserves to be cut a little slack. Besides, the slight motion sickness is the only thing keeping me from wanting to eat my screen.

(via Reddit)

If you aren't too versed in your Doctor Who, it's entirely possible that you'd misunderstand exactly what it means when fans say, "The Doctor has had a lot of companions." This isn't the Firefly definition of "companion" (re: fancy prostitute), it's the literal definition, a person with whom one travels. The Doctor is the last of his race, is over 900 years old, and is pretty lonely, so every now and then he picks up a human friend and takes them around time and space. Sometimes they end up choosing to leave the Doctor, sometimes they end up dead, and sometimes they fall in love -- and how couldn't they, the Doctor literally has double the heart -- but whatever mystery their fate may be, it's never a mystery as to whether or not the Doctor will pick up a straggler during his travels and save their lives on a weekly basis.

Considering the Doctor is over 900 years old, he's had a lot of companions (fine, make the joke anyway, go ahead), but luckily for us, with the help of Muhammed Saleem and Geeks of Doom, we can now keep track of every single one of them. Head on past the break to see the (very) full infographic.

So, there are some interesting statistics floating around that are highlighting the fact that nobody clicks on banner ads anymore. Solve Media, a company that puts banner ads in those lovely CAPTCHA tests, has been collecting the data and compairing it against some relatively infrequent (and extremely rare) phenomena. Apparently, you are 2.13 times as likely to get a full house in poker, and 475.28 times more likely to survive a plane crash than you are to click on a banner ad. Amusing, no? Of course, now that more and more Internet users are becoming acquainted with the Internet enough to know that banner ads are bad news, you can only expect that banner click-throughs are dropping off like crazy. And while these statistics seem to be showing that in an interesting manner, there's something about them that doesn't quite feel right. It has been a while since I took statistics and even longer since I paid a lick of attention to statistics, but some of these odd ratios strike me as vague and lacking in context, so I wouldn't bet on them (ha!). Whatever the case, I'm completely in favor of not clicking on banner ads anymore. Unless they're the ones that let you punch a monkey or something. Those can stick around. Check out the rest of these "statistics" after the jump.

What Google learned from Buzz and Wave (Smarterware)

The best of Ludum Dare 20 (Rock, Paper, Shotgun)

Would you rather intern at Google and Facebook, or startups? (Business Insider)

Mark Zuckerberg isn't too happy to be on Google+ (Mogulite)

Wondering where the party's at? There's an app for that! (Popular Science)

The Chris Hansen meme just might become even more fun (Gawker)

If gender roles were reversed in World of Warcraft (The Mary Sue)

(title pic via Daily Picks and Flicks)

Winner of "Best Group Layout" at Brickworld 2011 was Middle-earth from The Lord of The Rings made entirely out of LEGO. The project was completed through a collaborative build that got its start on the MOCpages for sharing LEGO creations, following Brickworld 2010. After a year of planning and building, a team of participants from five different countries built an approximately 200 square foot rendition of Middle-earth. I mean, all of Middle-earth. From Hobbiton to Helms Deep, from Ringwraiths and the Armies of Mordor to the members of the Fellowship - it's all here. We've chosen a few of our favorites, but the entire collection can been viewed on the Journey of the Fellowship 2011 MOCPage.

As a part of the White House 2.0 project, President Obama will be holding the nation's first Twitter Town Hall meeting on July 6th. Responses will come from the, miraculously available, @townhall Twitter account which has been set up for this particular purpose. You and your fellow trolls Americans can troll ask questions through the use of the #AskObama hashtag. Twitter has even whipped up a little webpage to publicize the event, specifying that Obama will answer your questions about the economy and jobs, presumably ignoring the more irrelevant questions that are sure to pop up. This is, after all, the internet.

President Obama used Facebook for a similar event in the past, and this Twitter Town Hall shows a certain amount of persistent dedication to the whole White House 2.0 project. In addition, just last week Obama started tweeting from his @BarakObama account (someone has to be saving these names for the government). Unfortunately, there have yet to be any tweets about what he ate for dinner or what's on TV, you know, the usual things to tweet about. For as much sense as it makes, it feels weird to see the President on social networking sites, but with 2012 looming, it's a good time to get back in touch with those youth voters. Good luck sir, but I won't be impressed until I start seeing some snarky, real-time Twitter commentary about an awards show. Or some juicy executive branch gossip.

(via VentureBeat)

Before you laugh at Martin Gamal's special effects demo reel, keep in mind that even though it looks ridiculous, you probably don't even know how to make special effects. Then you may freely resume laughing about the demo reel, because look at that thing.

(via The Daily What)

Created by Bonkers World, this graphic shows what the organizational charts of tech companies Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, and Oracle would look like. (via Laughing Squid)

Google's new social networking attempt Google+, which is currently in an invite-only trial period, is already having some privacy issues. You might say "it's a social network, of course there are privacy issues" and you would be right, but you'd also be ignoring the fact that Google+ marketing tauts Google+ as not having those problems. Privacy issues do kind of come with the territory, but Google's insistence that they don't have to makes this all the more of a shot in the foot.

So what's the breach? Well, as you probably know, Google+ organizes members and their connections to each other with "Circles." This way you can post something to a specific Circle instead of the world at large. The issue seems to be that when you post something to a Circle, any receiving members can repost it with varying levels of privacy, up to and including "totally public." Alright, so that's a little disconcerting, but you should be able to turn reposting off, right? You can, but only after the post in question has been published -- and you have to do it for each, individual post. Okay, okay, Google+ is only taking its first steps here and what new service doesn't have issues that need to be patched up? The issue is, this crack happens to be running right down the keystone that's holding the whole service together. Hopefully Google can respond swiftly and appropriately without jeopardizing the trust of its many potential users.

(via FT Tech Hub)

Being afraid of the dentist is a common fear, and even if the site of a dental drill doesn't send shivers down your spine, it's safe to say it's never really an enjoyable experience. The way patients react to dental procedures has a real impact on treatment, so dentists in training need to be prepared for wincing, flinching, and the patients who clamp their jaws shut. Since all things are better when done with robots (right?), researchers in Japan have developed a dental training robot that can sneeze, shake its head, cough, gag, and even close its mouth when feeling a jaw ache. The robot was created by researchers at Japan's Showa University, with help from the country's top sex doll manufacturer Orient Industry. Why sex dolls? To get that lifelike skin, tongue and mouth, of course.

Right after coming off its 100th birthday, IBM has come up with a new type of phase-change memory that can read and write a whopping hundred times faster than existing flash memory. With capabilities like that, you might expect it to be expensive, fragile or short, but miraculously enough, this new "instantaneous memory" is reliable for millions of write-cycles, beating flash memory by about three orders of magnitude, and it looks like it will be cheap enough to make its way into use in mobile phones. This amazing little guy was only born recently so, of course, it'll be a while before any make their way into active circulation, but when they do, it will drastically reduce the amount of time we spend staring at mobile device loading animations. About time, too. Several seconds is several seconds too long. (via Engadget)

Detached from the future 1.8 update and released earlier due to the features (namely, Adventure Mode) of the upcoming 1.8 update being too meaty to push out soon, the omniscient Notch took some of the finished bits that were planned to go in along with the 1.8 update and shoved it into update 1.7, which is out now. The update list this time around is small, but it brings one of the biggest changes ever to hit Minecraft: Pistons, blocks that allow clever players to make automated devices. Another big addition is a new tool, shears, which not only removes wool from sheep, but allows players to collect placeable leaf blocks -- a monumental addition for anyone who has ever tried their hand at Minecraft topiary (which was the worst until now). Head on past the break to check out the update list, as well as the recipes for both types of pistons and the shears.

Earlier this month, Robert Adams, 54, found a Chase Bank bag that contained $17,000 near a Walgreens ATM. Being the nice guy that he is, he drove over to a Chase Bank and turned the bag in, rather than make it his partner on a spending spree. Instead of a hero's welcome for being honest and turning in the found $17,000, he ended up being fined $500. When Adams initially turned in the bank bag, he claimed he found the bag outside a newspaper stand in Rolling Meadows, when in actuality, he found the bank bag near a Walgreens ATM in Midlothian, which police confirmed via security footage. It's alright if you cannot locate Rolling Meadows or Midlothian -- the point is that Adams technically lied about where he found the bag and thus, filed a false report, which is why he ended up being fined for turning in a load of found money. Adams claimed he lied about where he found the bag simply because it was a hot day and he just wanted to go home and he felt more comfortable filing the report with Rolling Meadows police. "I wasn't looking for a reward. I was just doing the right thing," he said, and now probably knows to just take the next bank bag he finds that is stuffed to the brim with cash for himself instead of turn it in. (Chicago Tribune via reddit)

Whether you love it or hate it, RISK has been a board game staple ever since its release. Over the weekend at Game Hack Day NYC, a team of seven people modded Foursquare and turned New York City into a giant game of RISK. Using Foursquare and Google Maps API, World of Fourcraft allows players to swear allegiance to one of New York City's five boroughs, then when a player checks into a borough, the game acts as though the player just put a new army on a territory, and an algorithm decides which team controls which neighborhood based on the number of people checking in. Ricky Robinett, a member of the World of Fourcraft team, felt Foursquare and RISK weren't addictive enough, and aims to add a leveling-up style feature that would make frequent users' checkins more effective at claiming and securing territories. As if Foursquare needed to get more addictive. Check out the game over at its website.

(World of Fourcraft via Mashable)

For the past few months, Sony has been dealing with a little too much bad press: They remove the PlayStation 3's ability to install a Linux operation system, a well-known hacker responds to the removal and Sony takes legal action drawing the ire of the homebrew crowd, then -- as we're all well aware at this point -- Sony's PlayStation Network got hacked, a load of sensitive user information was stolen, and Sony finally had to shut the service down entirely in order to rebuild it from the ground up to make it more secure. After all of this, current CEO of Sony Corporation Howard Stringer was asked to step down at Sony's 94th annual shareholders meeting two days ago. Obviously, the company has been experiencing a bit of turmoil lately. It seems the first corporate response to this turmoil is to shake things up a bit at Sony Computer Entertainment Inc., appointing Kaz Hirai as Chairman and Sony Computer Entertainment Europe's Andrew House as President and Group CEO, filling Hirai's former positions. The change is expected to take place starting September 1, 2011. Sony also announced the retirement of the current Chairman, Akira Sato, effective starting August 31, 2011, and Ken Kutaragi, known as "The Father of the PlayStation," has retired as Honorary Chairman, effective two days ago. These are some big changes over at Sony, which happened to have fallen directly after the PlayStation Network mess has finally cleared up. One can only wonder how the company will fare going forward, or if the shareholders will get their wish and Howard Stringer will step down. (via GamesRadar)