In honor of the release of M. Night Shyamalan‘s Avatar: The Last Airbender, we have complied a list of the fifteen greatest chosen, prophesied, destined, or otherwise singled out heroes in science fiction and fantasy, whether they come from books, movies, television, or video games.  After all, Aang isn’t the only person to have a terrible path set before them by fate, and he won’t be the last.  Warning: we’re talking about ultimate destinies here.  Here there be spoilers.

Yes, you read that right. And yes, it means everything that you don’t want it to mean.  Fresh off the success of Sherlock Holmes, Warner Brothers is looking for other literary adventure stories to bring to the big screen, but they apparently decided that whores, dementia, and futile struggle was too depressing, and what would be really cool was if Don Quixote of La Mancha was an actual hero who fought actual monsters.

According to ScreenRant:

Producer Joel Silver – the Hollywood powerhouse behind (you guessed it) Sherlock Holmes – is teaming up with Warner Bros. to create a “Pirates of the Caribbean-style swashbuckling version of the story” for modern-day moviegoers.

If you’re an avid xkcd reader, you may recall that a few weeks back, there was a comic about a techy early adopter who had been laughed off over his web infrastructure concerns in 2003 responding to his erstwhile mocker’s Facebook privacy concerns by playing for him “the world’s tiniest open-source violin.” Well, Erik de Bruijn has taken the concept literally, with an open-source design for a tiny, tiny (20 mm) violin, to be executed or tinkered with with at a 3D printer near you.

Though he’s best known as the author of cultlike webcomic xkcd, Randall Munroe has plenty of other hobbies: For instance, tormenting strangers by making them take an endless color-naming survey. Munroe grilled 222,500 willing participants on the names of 954 different colors.

In the “men do things like this, women do things like this” department, Munroe found some … interesting disparities between the color names most disproportionately popular among men versus women:

In today’s xkcd, Randall Munroe takes on one of the great consumer tech inducers of nerdrage: Namely, HDTVs, and their decidedly non-earth-shattering resolutions.

As one commenter on the xkcd forums points out, “most laptop screens are, in fact, HD. A lot of laptops screens are currently 1280x800px (16:10) – perfect for 720p content. Though there aren’t a ton of laptops that actually have 1920x1080px resolutions, almost all laptops are well suited to view HD content (a lot better than some people’s giant TVs).”

And don’t even start on framerates:

The Boy Scouts of America are celebrating their 100th birthday this year with events, an official US postage stamp, a commemorative coin, and of course, the brand new Geocaching Badge.

In case you don’t know what geocaching is (and if you don’t, you should really read this webcomic XKCD), its basically GPS enhanced treasure hunting. Sites like Geocaching.com maintain a database of caches hidden by the geocaching community. Pop in your zip code, and the site will deliver unto you a list of the closest caches, identified only by latitude and longitude. Feed the lat and long into your gps device, and start your search.

The activity combines the best of new technology and the old scouting standby: navigating the outdoors.

xkcd, in all its wisdom, recently depicted Hell as a game of Tetris in a bullet-shaped playing frame, such that you can never quiiiite create a row.

Now, a fan has made it into a playable game, which adds extra bouncy physics to the hellishness that is Tetris with impossible rows.  We’ve pulled the game from [the imgur of .swf files] swfme for your playing pleasure, after the jump:

Here we were, all revved up to round up the inevitable crush of April Fools’ Day jokes across the Internet, but then … last night, we got distracted by our newly-founded admin powers on Reddit, ninjabanning likely spammers with extreme prejudice. By the time we woke up:

• Google had changed its name to Topeka,
• CERN had discovered its first-ever paleoparticle,
• Urlesque had rebranded itself as Urkelesque,
• xkcd had gone UNIX,
• and YouTube had rolled out its revolutionary new textp format.

Too much breaking geek news to keep track of!

Fortunately, TechCrunch’s Evelyn Rusli has been on the case, managing the site’s April Fools’ Day 2010 scorecard. You should read it:

Today’s xkcd prominently featured a plug for Miegakure, an awesome-looking 4D indie game that xkcd’s heroic stick figure said “hurt his brain.” Naturally, that sounded like fun, but when we rushed out to look for a demo to download, which seemed plausible based on the comic (in the first panel, xkcd stickman says “I just spent an hour playing a demo of this 4D game called Miegakure”), we were promptly hit with … a battering ram of information-free blogspam.

Presumably set up in response to the sudden surge of interest in the game sparked by the comic. Including this gem of opportunistic nonsense in a post titled “April Fool’s Day: Don’t Forget!” “…but most importantly don’t forget to always treat her like a lady. If you’re bored you can always search out a miegakure download or a varudu movie review.” Damn you, xkcd effect!

Anyway, we dug into it a little more, and here’s what we found out: The good news is, Miegakure is real, award-winning, and looks awesome, and there’s a demo video (after the jump). The bad news: it’s not available for download, there are no public demos, and there’s no set release date or platform yet.

Some scientists are looking at Mars exploration from a different angle, and have created two designs which can only be described as tumbleweed-based.

These spherical machines would be propelled by the carbon-dioxide breezes of Mars. While this method of locomotion lacks precise maneuverability, it makes up for it in speed, distance, and survivability.