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.

More detail for this, and Baer’s other models, can be found at MOCPages.

(Blake Baer via Brothers Brick, MOCPages)

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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)

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)

Watch, in 1,000 glorious frames per second, as this bald man throws a needle through a pane of glass. You can even skip to halfway through the video, if you are impatient, young Grasshopper.

Now, I can accept that Shaolin Monks are real, but seeing one throw a sewing needle through a pane of glass has completely altered my understanding of reality. I’m expecting by this time next week to see people shooting ki-balls in the street, and deadly monks stalking the average person like their shadow — and no less silently!

(via Neatorama)

The time has come for a member of the Fantastic Four, that stalwart superhero group. For several issues, Marvel comics has been ringing a death knell for someone in the quartet-soon-to-be trio, and today the speculation comes to an end with issue #587.

Spoiler lovers, read on.

It’s The Human Torch.

Johnny Storm, whose pyrotechnic powers are triggered by the phrase “flame on,” has been confirmed to be the casualty that knocks the Fantastic Four down 25%. Comics Alliance has an excellent dissection of the events leading up to the death (events I haven’t followed, but CA is making me wish I had), and Marvel has confirmed the career ending blaze of glory in a number of mainstream media outlets.

What’s surprising is not that a comic book publisher is killing off a main character. This is quite possibly the oldest trick in the book for comics; Captain America, Superman, and (by popular vote) Robin were all axed in spectacular fashion in the past few years. What is a little strange is how Marvel is talking about the death of the Human Torch on the day of release — before most people can actually get their hands on an issue.

From the NY Times:

“The death of the Human Torch is the first major move in this incredibly exciting evolution of the legendary Fantastic Four franchise and a necessary part of the larger story we will be telling featuring the beloved characters moving forward,” said Tom Brevoort, the senior vice president of publishing at Marvel Entertainment.

The cynic in me thinks this is just a somewhat bungled full-court press by Marvel PR, trying to bring in as much coverage as possible. But talking about it so openly does deflate their efforts, making their silly double bagging stunt seem even sillier. For many readers, this stinks of the tireless “collectible” frenzy of the 1990′s, when comics publishers nearly destroyed themselves with media stunts of this kind.

There is another, more optimistic, view: That this whole death thing is actually being done for the sake of a larger story displaying some level of artistic integrity. It’s impossible to judge how this will play out, since the death has been touted since the beginning and Johnny Storm’s resurrection is all but inevitable. But the writer, Jonathon Hickman, made a name for himself with the surprising and subversive Nightly News and (the abortive) Pax Romana. He’s a writer that’s full of surprises, and loves a complex plot that leaves you reeling until the very end.

Perhaps there’s more going on here than just another cash-in.

(via Topless Robot, Comics Alliance, image via Newsarama)

Drugs are expensive. This is understandable. But I guess that when you really have to snort something, you really have to snort something. And now, people looking for a quick high — or, apparently, any kind of high as long as it’s a high — under their mom’s bathroom sink. Oh, yes. People are turning to bath salts. Calgon, take me away!

Someone found out that chemicals found in bath salts as well as some plant foods, specifically mephedrone and methylenedioxypyrovalerone (MDPV), can cause a high. This means that someone thought of snorting bath salts and plant food in the first place. According to the Washington Post, the bath salts being used as drugs are not necessarily the brands being sold in drugstores, but are simply derived from them and sold under names such as Vanilla Sky, Hurricane Charlie, and Ivory Snow, not to be confused with the soap of the same name. But then again, the people dealing bath salts are trying to sell them as a more innocuous alternative to, let’s just say, meth.

However, these bath salts are reportedly even more powerful than meth, heroin, crack, etc. and cause “intense cravings,” a rapid heartbeat, and severe hallucinations. One user of bath salts, Neil Brown, who claimed to have used all of the drugs I just named, wrote to his local newspaper to warn them about the use of bath salts — after he stabbed himself in the face and stomach during a bath salt hallucination. Another user, the son of a physician, shot himself in the head after slitting his own throat after “three days of intermittent delirium”:

“If you could see the contortions on his face. It just made him crazy,” [the physician] said. He added that the coroner’s office confirmed that the chemicals were detected in his son’s blood and urine.

Sheriff Chris Dickinson of Mississipi says that most of the bath salt users whom he encounters are also meth addicts and can be extremely dangerous, saying that an officer was injured by a user who thought he was fighting “two devils.”

But the biggest problem with snorting something you can buy at Walgreens is that because the chemicals are intended for relaxing, exfoliating purposes, they are in no way illegal. So the most law enforcement can do when they’re being attacked by a guy who thinks he’s fighting devils is charge him with disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor, and remind him that bath salts are for external use only. (A warning that usually appears on the label.)

(Washington Post)

Written and directed by Quentin Dupieux, whom the internet may know better as the musician behind this music video, Rubber follows the inexplicable endowment of life to a tire named Robert and can apparently explode people at will. You know, like Scanners. That’s just about all you can discern from this enigmatic trailer. A quick trot around the internet turns up little more than references to screenings at festivals (Cannes, AFI) and an even more enigmatic plot synopsis. From Wikipedia:

In California, an audience watches a tyre through binoculars. The tyre is named Robert that has come to life. The tyre eventually starts going on a killing spree.

Given the look of the trailer, the set pieces, and the general insanity surrounding the movie, it’s clear that the producers are gunning for a cult hit. In this age of Troll 2, and Cowboys and Aliens, does Rubber have what it takes to get the geeky moviegoer dollar? Stay tuned, friends.

(via Topless Robot)

I missed this awesome casemod when it made the online rounds a while back, but thanks to the magic of Tumblr, I’ve discovered Ryan Luke Johns‘ clever iBoy design. As diagrammed above, it’s got the hardware of an iPod wrapped up in a classic Game Boy case, with a dock connector cleverly inserted such that the Game Boy buttons correspond to iPod functions.

The iBoy is an iPod case with an internal dock connector—allowing the user to control the iPod with the buttons of an outdated Game Boy. Complete with a functioning speaker, hold switch, and headphone port, the iBoy is a user-friendly theft-deterrent.

The iPod has evolved and segmented quite a bit since Johns designed the iBoy in 2006, but this would still look pretty boss with an iPod Classic.

(iBoy via It’s all for you via EPICponyz | Artist’s page)

Two years after the first Android device released, Google has released the Gingerbread update to their mobile Android operating system, with the just-announced Nexus S, codeveloped by Samsung and Google, to be the first device shipped with Gingerbread.

In a since-deleted post, Engadget wrote that some Nexus One users reported receiving the Gingerbread update as well; make of that what you will.

Update: Google straightens out the somewhat confusing wording of their initial release: “Not sure where Engadget is getting their reports. The Nexus One OTA isn’t happening just yet – should be coming in a few weeks.”

Though only a decimal-point upgrade, Gingerbread does bring a few nifty new features to Android:

• Fastest version of Android to date
• Near field communication support
• User interface upgrades
• New keyboard and text selection tool
• Internet (VoIP/SIP) calling
• Improved copy and paste functionality
• Gyroscope sensor support

Google also announced that the Gingerbread SDK/NDK is available now and that they’ll be open-sourcing Gingerbread in “the coming weeks.”

(story via The Official Google Blog; title pic via Home IT Innovation)

Last week, we mentioned that Google was set to launch its eBook store, named Google Editions, by the end of the year. A little sooner than expected, Google has launched the eBook store, named Google eBooks, with over three million eBooks available for the eReading pleasure of anyone who has a device that can access a web browser.

What sets Google eBooks apart from competitors like Amazon and Barnes & Noble is Google’s eBooks take a universal approach to accessibility, with their eBooks being readable on nearly any device that contains a web browser, whereas, for instance, Amazon eBooks are generally best viewed with their own eBook device, the Kindle.

Google is also allowing independent booksellers to sell and advertise their own eBooks on Google’s service; a smart move on Google’s part, in that other booksellers would be receiving the benefit of being on a platform with a brand as recognizable as Google, and in turn, Google eBooks gets whatever portion of the independent booksellers’ customer base to purcahse eBooks through Google’s shop.

At the moment, users can read eBooks via Google’s Web Reader, as well as on iPhone, iPad and Android apps. The eBooks will sync across platforms as well, allowing a user, for example, to start reading an eBook on their computer at home, then pick up where they left off on their iPad.

Check out the service over at Google eBooks.

(Google eBooks via Mashable)

Tracy Morgan tells it like it is.  Love: and you thought it smelled bad on the outside.

(via Blastr.)

Last night Conan O’Brien treated us to a sneak preview of the songs and technology that have gone into the multimillion dollar Spider-Man musical, and boy does it shine. Man!Wonder Woman was a daring, avant garde choice, but mostly it was very effective comic book nerd trolling.

Retired French electrician Pierre Le Guennec revealed 271 previously unknown works of Picasso that he had sitting around in his garage, worth about $80 million. Though Le Guennec claims he legitimately received the pieces as gifts, the Picasso family is suing Le Guennec, claiming he stole the works.

Le Guennec worked for Picasso for three years until the artist died in 1973, at which point Le Guennec continued to work for Picasso’s widow, Jacqueline, for the next thirteen years until she died. According to Le Guennec’s lawyer, Le Guennec asked Jacqueline for pieces of Picasso’s work and she gave them to him over time–a reasonable possibility–but the Picasso family claims that the sheer quantity of the pieces “gifted” to Picasso makes the claim less believable.

The Picasso family found out about Le Guennec’s cache of art when he contacted them to see if they could authenticate whether or not the pieces in his possession were real, to which they responded with a lawsuit, confirming the authenticity of the pieces, but questioning the authenticity of the method in which they were obtained.

Surprisingly, Le Guennec doesn’t wish to sell the pieces, claiming they have sentimental value. With the large amount of pieces in his possession, though, he should probably just open up a Picasso museum and instate a modest entry fee. That’d keep the cash flowing in the long run, and he’d be able to keep the sentimental pieces. Geekosystem would be happy to help out with such an endeavor.

(story via CNN; picture via Daily Mail)

This weekend audiences were given a taste of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, a Broadway musical that everybody keeps calling the most “daring,” “ambitious,” and “expensive” thing to ever go up on stage. While a small number of theatergoers actually got to watch a preview of the show that was reportedly riddled with wire-work gaffes and production pauses that stretched the show’s length to three hours, everyone else had the opportunity to catch a 60 Minutes segment that detailed the show’s rocky path to even this preliminary opening.

What does the segment make the show look like?

Basically, the show looks like it’s trying to be an visually shocking, technically amazing Broadway showpiece.  Probably at the expense of Spider-Man.  Fans, beware.  This is the inherent problem with packaging geek media for the mainstream: there just aren’t enough of us to turn a profit on an expensive project, and there certainly aren’t enough of us in the Tri-State area to support a Broadway show.  So the show isn’t about Spider-Man, it’s about making a spectacular Broadway event.

This isn’t a statement about whether the show is going to be good or not.  Just because a Broadway show is highly technical or visually dazzling doesn’t mean it’s going to lack in other areas.  So, lay it on me, New York Post.  How was it?

It opened with Taymor’s personal creation, the eight-legged female character Arachne, taking the stage.

The spider is the radioactive arachnid that bites Peter Parker, giving the photographer his superhuman Spider-Man powers…

…wait.

…As the character, played by actress Natalie Mendoza, finished her big number “Rise Above” while suspended over the crowd, an apparent wire malfunction left her stopped in midair…

Wat.

As the [Green] Goblin — played by Patrick Page of “Grinch” fame — sat down at the piano for a scheduled number, he was left to continue playing on . . . and on . . . as stage workers openly rushed around to fix faulty equipment.

Okay, well maybe the New York Times has a not totally mind-breaking take on it.

Sherry Lawrence, a writer for a U2 fan Web site, said that even though she liked some of the songs, she planned to tell readers to wait for the creators to do more work during previews.

But Marc Tumminelli, 30, who runs a Manhattan acting school for children, said he was concerned that the musical’s problems were too fundamental to be corrected quickly. “The story-telling is really unclear and I found it hard to understand exactly what was going on and why certain things were happening,” Mr. Tumminelli said.

More delighted was the 6-year-old boy sitting a row ahead. “Parts of it were really exciting,” said the boy, Jack Soldano, whose parents brought him. “I’ve never seen people flying before.”

Typically, a Broadway show is not formally reviewed before opening night, so the production has six weeks to work out the kinks.  By all reports, what the audience saw last night was essentially the first full dress rehearsal.  But there you have it: a U2 fan liked some of the songs.  A six-year-old thought it was cool.  The story may be dense and unclear. With no less than 10 original and classic villains cast for the thing, that doesn’t surprise us.

Sounds like a “spectacular,” “daring,” visually “amazing” show piece to me. As to what else it might be, my expectations are low.

Oh, and if you can think of a super villain for whom it is in character to sit at a piano and sing a song about how you’re going to take over a city (other than the Joker, natch) let us know in the comments.

A few days ago, this PSA for seatbelt use was named the YouTube ad of the year, beating the far more talked-about Old Spice Guy ads; understated, yet evocative and effective at conveying its message without going in for shock value, you can see why.

(via The Awesomer | Creators’ page)

Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Rupert Grint and Tom Felton appeared on MTV News for a comedy segment called “American Talk with Josh Horowitz,” where each cast member was given a few “popular” American phrases, such as “Twilight blows,” and are asked to speak said phrases in their best American accents.

On a related note: Does anyone else ever notice that most singers sing in an American accent?

(MTV Movies Blog via Bonjour via The Daily What)

An unknown Washington State University student took control of two-dozen in-class projector units this November 5th, causing them to play a pre-recorded spoof of the televised speech given by the protagonist/antagonist/terrorist/anarchist character V of the movie V for Vendetta, exhorting his fellow students to rise up a year hence against a terrible threat encroaching on their school:

Squirrels.

(England, I’d like to apologize on behalf of America for the comical extent to which we have misinterpreted your holiday about anti-Catholicism and the defeat of violent fringe elements.)

The considerate prankster left instructions on how to remove the bit of software that ran the videos on the hour, every hour, through most of November 5th on the website they created for the video:

One final note to the AMS people: We didn’t break your computers. They will be back to normal at 5:01 PM. Don’t worry about it. (Unless you tampered with them, in which case you should run the script “c:\v\uninstall.bat” as Administrator. This script will cleanly remove and reverse all modifications made to the systems.)

Despite the relative nonviolent, non-vandalism, and impermanent nature of the prank, some WSU officials are framing it as “terrorism.” In an e-mail to the WSU student newspaper, the hacker acknowledged:

Some officials seem to be taking what should be interpreted as a simple prank out of context. I have been told that the police are after me. I am and was aware of this possibility; they’re only trying to do their job. If I did my job, they will have a very difficult time finding me. I just hope they realize I’m not worth the effort. There are real criminals out there; they deserve far more attention than I…

Student reactions run from initial moments of shock and fear that led to amusement (once they realized the speech was about squirrels) to annoyance from having an important satellite lecture interrupted.  The hacker maintained that the squirrels in his speech were meant literally: they were not a metaphor for anything else; he was simply trying to get students to “take a more active role in both this university and their future.”

The WSU video is below:

A transcript can be found here, and you can compare with the speech it is based on here.

(via io9.)

Dating back to 1994, GeoCities was free web-hosting service and can easily be considered a big part of the Internet’s history. Yahoo! bought the service only five years after its creation, but then shut it down in 2009.

In an effort to preserve digital history, the Archive Team has compiled and will release a 900-gigabyte torrent of as much of GeoCities as it can.

A post by the Archive Team explains the mindset behind collecting and releasing GeoCities:

What we were facing, you see, was the wholesale destruction of the still-rare combination of words digital heritage, the erasing and silencing of hundreds of thousands of voices, voices that representing the dawn of what one might call “regular people” joining the World Wide Web. A unique moment in human history, preserved for many years and spontaneously combusting due to a few marks in a ledger, the decision of who-knows for who-knows-what.

A little further into the post:

But you see, websites and hosting services should not be “fads” any more than forests and cities should be fads – they represent countless hours of writing, of editing, of thinking, of creating. They represent their time, and they represent the thoughts and dreams of people now much older, or gone completely.  There’s history here. Real, honest, true history.

What do you think: Crude webpages from an archaic digital era or important, monumental digital history?

(via TechRadar)

When Netflix CEO Reed Hastings announced they’re primarily a streaming company that happens to offer DVD-by-mail, people speculated that the Canadian streaming-only subscription would be available stateside within the next few months. Surprisingly, the streaming option seems to be available today, only a week after Hastings made the illuminating statement.

However, there seem to be inconsistencies regarding the streaming-only option’s availability and pricing.

The existence of the option isn’t being called into question, as shown by the graphic above that was taken straight from the Netflix sign-up information page, but the pricing structure and available locations of the service are what seem to be the points of contention.

An article over at Engadget highlights the inconsistencies with the plan, complete with screenshot, stating that viewing the subscription options page with different browsers in different operating systems ends up showing different prices for the same streaming option.

As a DVD-by-mail Netflix subscriber, I opened my account information to see the new subscription options available to me, and they don’t seem to reflect the options clearly listed in the Netflix graphic above or described on Netflix’s How it Works information page. Currently, the cheapest subscription available to me is an $8.99 option that includes one DVD-by-mail and unlimited streaming–the price the sign-up information page has listed for the streaming-only option. To add further confusion, my subscription options don’t list an unlimited streaming-only service, but instead lists a limited Starz Play only streaming service. As Engadget’s article states, my operating system (OS X Snow Leopard) and choice of browser (Google Chrome) might be responsible for the discrepancy in pricing and available options.

Either way, it seems Netflix has finally brought a streaming-only option to the US; what some might classify as an act paving the way toward a more streamlined, digital future.

(Netflix via Engadget)

When a user searches with Bing, it will attempt to connect to said user’s Facebook account, gather various bits of data, then attempt to relate the data to the search results via a Facebook module that will travel up and down the search page based on Bing’s ranking algorithms. For example, if you have an active Facebook profile and search Bing for Justin Bieber, a Facebook module will pop up within your search results and incriminate all of your Facebook friends who Facebook-liked the Biebster.

In the future, the Facebook correlations will appear under the related links.

If that weren’t creepy enough, Bing will also use gathered Facebook data to better aid people searches, playing what amounts to a game of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. Luckily, Bing will allow users to opt out of what is essentially their Facebook spying program and Facebook will also have an opt-out option within its privacy settings.

(via TechCrunch)

The biggest news about the relaunch, aside from the design based on the aesthetically pleasing Golden Ratio, was that Twitter will be relaunching with inline pictures and video, no longer requiring users to rely on third party image and video hosting services.

In an announcement on Twitter’s blog, which was (hypocritically?!) too long for its own 140 character philosophy, Twitter announced the rollout, as well as a few other tidbits, such as Twitter is now natively available in six different languages and the service now boasts around 160 million users in total.

Currently, Twitter users have the option to choose between the old Twitter and the new Twitter, but not for very long, as the old Twitter will be removed within the next few weeks.

(via TechCrunch)

Improv Everywhere started out as a prankster group and evolved into a group that likes to create what they call “organized fun.” Their latest “mission” involved over 3,000 participants downloading an MP3, going to a retail store in New York City, pressing play, and following the instructions given in the MP3 file. The above video is the result.

The instructions included slow dancing with a product of the participant’s choice in a retail store, freezing in the middle of the street, high fiving strangers, and having a toilet-paper-wrapped mummy dance party in Bryant Park.

There are seven MP3 Experiments in total, all of which grow in participants from the previous experiment.

(Improv Everywhere via Gizmodo)

This graph is nothing new — it’s been floating around online since it was published as part of a 2006 study which made its way into Science, which concluded that “The acceptance of evolution is lower in the United States than in Japan or Europe, largely because ofwidespread fundamentalism and the politicization of science in the United States.” Old though it is, it bears some contemplating.

Iceland, which has the highest belief in evolution of those countries polled, sure is a conundrum: “About 10 percent of Icelanders believe in supernatural beings and another 10 percent deny them, but the remaining 80 percent on this windswept North Atlantic outpost either have no opinion or refuse to rule out their existence, a survey shows.”

(via Reddit | Original journal article from which the graph came)