The announcement of LEGO partnering to make Lord of the Rings themed products hasn’t stopped LEGO enthusiast Blake Baer from doing up scenes from The Hobbit with interlocking bricks. Highlighting pivotal scenes from the book, Baer’s models are all in the details — a moose head on the wall, the lived-in look of Lake-town, the immensity of Smaug’s hoard, and so on. While outstanding in its own right, it’s a bit of a cruel reminder how much longer we’ll have to wait for the movie.

Well, folks, Halloween has come and gone. It’ll be a whole other year before you see all kinds of crazy carved pumpkins and intricate, clever costumes. Thank god. Seriously though, as always, there were some pretty good costumes out there this year, so we’ve collected a bunch of the geekier (and just more awesome-er) ones for your perusal. Laugh quietly to yourself as you get all the references and marvel at your vast pop culture knowledge!

If you didn’t catch The Simpsons last night because you’re one of those people who frequently claim that they only like the first five seasons and the show isn’t good anymore, you missed a couch gag animated by John Kricfalusi (generally known as the much more pronunciation friendly John K), the creator of The Ren & Stimpy Show. The couch gag was insane, and you can watch it above.

So, Facebook has Skype chat now. Surprised? Yeah, neither am I. Ever since Google+ was announced and was trotting around its Hangouts+ show horse, it became only a matter of time until Facebook announced similar functionality, Video Calling, and as of today, it’s both official and live. Soon, when you look at a friend’s profile page on Facebook, you’ll be able to simply click the call button to launch a Skype-based, in-browser video chat, no Skype account or third-party software necessary (except for a small plugin, but that doesn’t count).

All that being said, it looks like things will ultimately come down to a one-to-one comparison of Facebook Video Calling and Google+ Hangouts, a one-to-one comparison that is practically impossible to make at the moment. For example, Video Calling is only one-on-one. Bummer, right? Hangouts has multi-chat, but then again, I don’t have a Google+ account, and even if I did, the chances I would have multiple friends, who knew each other, who I wanted to talk with, with Google+ accounts, logged on simultaneously is slim-to-none. On the other hand, the chances that would happen with just one friend who is on Facebook is higher, but still not significant because those are the kind of people I tend to see in real life.

As always, we’ll have to wait to see how things play out. Facebook video chat may not be the revolutionary concept needed to blow Google+ completely out of the water, but it has the distinct advantage of being on a social networking site that is already established. How long that remains an advantage that is exclusively theirs is anybody’s guess.

(via TechCrunch)

The Sun is no stranger to solar flares (explosions of magnetic energy) or prominence eruptions (gas bursting from the surface) but the combination solar flare/prominence eruption that recently exploded on the Sun has created an astonishing and visually remarkable eruption.

The video of the explosion was captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. According to Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy the explosion could have blasted a billion tons of material away from the Sun in a plume as big as the Sun itself at perhaps over a million kilometers across.

From the video, it appears that plasma was released from the Sun’s surface, in a fountain of particles that spread outward and then collapsed back down to the Sun. Blasts like this are capable of shooting material away into space, but Earthlings needn’t worry. This particular blast was aimed away from Earth (as are most events like this.)

(Geeked On Goddard via Universe Today and Bad Astronomy)

In a moment of bored inspiration a few years back, YouTube user SomethingUnreal tweaked Windows XP and Windows 98 alert messages and bits thereof to create this song.

An interesting, and no doubt terrifying, look at one of the massive tornadoes that ripped through the southern U.S. this past week. The bright white dot in this radar image is not only the funnel cloud, but a mass of flying debris caught up in the vortex. Paul Douglas with the On Weather blog explains:

Here’s a reflectivity view from Birmingham (NWS) Doppler around 6:30 pm Wednesday, showing a 1/2 to 1 mile wide tornado. The energy beam from the Doppler is actually reflecting off debris swept up in the tornado.

(On Weather via TYWKIWDBI)

I don’t know what’s more impressive about this video: That it was shot in a single take without special effects, or how well-behaved the dogs are. I would be much more upset if the waitress never brought my table drinks.

(via Ectoplasmosis)

A frequent touchstone in the daily news narrative is the poor state of the American/global economy. It’s true that in the past three years we have seen stalwart institutions go belly-up and have had fundmental economic faiths dashed like so many castles of sand, but let’s keep things in perspective: at least we’re not in Weimar Germany. After the First World War where the economy was so bad it spawned “hyper inflation,” where the money changed in value fast and steeply. In the space of a year, the amount of paper money equivalent to gold went from 100 to 1 all the way to 1,000, 000, 000, 000 to 1. This lead to a curious malady called “Zero Stroke,” where people had an uncontrollable desire to write endless strings of zeroes.

From a Time magazine article of the period, via Wikipedia:

With the price of bread running into billions a loaf the German people have had to get used to counting in thousands of billions. This, according to some German physicians, brought on a new nervous disease known as “zero stroke,” or “cipher stroke,” which may, however, be classed with neuritis as cipheritis. The persons afflicted with the malady are perfectly normal, except “for a desire to write endless rows of ciphers and engage in computations more involved than the most difficult problems in logarithms.”

I for one am grateful that though we’ve endured three years of sad faces on the trading floor, we haven’t seen people stricken, writing zero after zero as if trying to discern where all their labor has gone.

(image and story via Wikipedia)

Settlers players with big backyards can take inspiration in the work of Matt Bell and friends:  As a project for Burning Man a few years ago, Bell constructed a life-sized Settlers of Catan board. Bell says that the size actually changed the way the game was played:

An interesting game dynamic emerged. Unlike in the board game version, people were spread far enough apart that you could have a private conversation with another player. We also had too many people wanting to play, so we ended up with 2-3 players on a “team”. As a result, a diplomatic wheeler-dealer atmosphere emerged, where players would huddle and discuss trades, periodically sending emissaries to speak with other players.

(Matt Bell via MAKE)