The Smidgen

Everything you never needed to know. Ok maybe not everything, that would be ridiculous.

Browsing Posts published in August, 2009

TweetStraight out of the land of “Someone Got Paid to Do This” comes the mathematical apocalypse known as When Zombies Attack! A team of mathematicians from the University of Ottawa have taken the time (and money) to calculate how fast the spread of undead will occur should the popular doomsday scenario outbreak begin (finally!).  It’s [...]

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TweetFirst, the background.  When you electrically charge a block of plastic and then strike the plastic with a nail you get what we see on the left there, termed “frozen lightning”.  In truth it’s actually a series of tunnels carved out of the middle of the plastic when the electrically charged particles race toward the [...]

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TweetTake a good look at that guy, he is the face of Evil.  Well he’s at least the computer generated face of E, an artificial intelligence specifically programed to be … evil. Yes, this does immediately make everyone say, “why?” which leads to the obvious answer, “for science!”  Selmer Bringsjord of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute [...]

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TweetPaul Teutul Sr. and the gang at OCC have created an electric chopper for the Siemens company.  While it’s not the first electric bike by far (both the Zero and the Brammo are publicly available if you want one) it might be the first ever electric chopper style bike and it’s also probably the coolest [...]

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TweetSony has been in the eReader business for a while now but with the recent success of Amazon’s Kindle devices, Sony has redoubled it’s efforts in order to push themselves back into this market. In a surprising (for Sony) move in the right direction they have abandoned their proprietary eBook format, BeBB, for the EPUB [...]

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TweetA European patent reveals a new Wii peripheral tentatively called the Nintendo Wii-tarded (not really).  The inflatable seat … thing, to the left there is supposed to house a Wiimote to sense balance shifts and use the nun-chuck or second Wiimote to simulate riding a horse or other animal or perhaps a vehicle (like a [...]

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TweetWhile it’s not terribly surprising to hear, the recent update to the Xbox 360 dashboard (released today) contains a little blurb about how Netflix has an “exclusive” partnership with Microsoft, sorry PS3 and Wii fans. Netflix Partnership This exclusive partnership offers you the ability to instantly stream movies and TV episodes from Netflix to the [...]

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TweetLaunched in March of this year, NASA’s latest planet-hunting telescope, Kepler, has just turned in it’s first report.  The result was gas giant HAT-P-7b, a planet with an orbit of 2.2 days and a surface temperature of over 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit, known as a “Hot Jupiter”. Sure ol’ HATtie has been spotted before but what’s [...]

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TweetSprint and Samsung are going green in a bigger way now with the newly announced “Reclaim”, available August 16th.  Although environmentally friendly, the phone is no slouch either featuring a full QWERTY slide out keyboard, web browser, 2.0 Megapixel camera with 3x digital zoom, stereo Bluetooth 2.0 and expandable memory up to 32GB. So what [...]

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TweetOh this is just good.  Apple has now censored the English dictionary.  The new app “Ninjawords” has finally been released to the app store after a three month waiting and updating period because it contains words that are in every single other dictionary out there. Apple censored an English dictionary. A dictionary. A reference book. [...]

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