Can't Stop Geeking

My friend is looking to get a replacement class ring from college.  I told him of this great orange county jewelry store that sells class rings. And since we graduated in the same class, he wants me to get one with him. I never got a class ring for college. Would any of you get one?

Really?

According to Newsweek, there has been a true civil war concerning the Chinese movie theaters.  Chinese officials ordered several hundred movie theaters to stop showing the Hollywood movie Avatar and screen the government sanctioned biopoc Confucius.  Chinese officials probably wanted to pull Avatar due to the unflattering comparisons people can make between the Chinese government and the military portrayed in the movie.  Film goers responded by essentially boycotting Confucius to the point where the Chinese government allowed the movie to start screeening again in some theaters.

I always thought of Avatar as an allegory of the US/Native American relations in the 1800s, but I guess this is more of a movie with applicability to a variety of situations.

This came from inhabitat.com. There’s an artist by the name of Luke Jerram who is working on a project which is best described as a walk-in wind chime. Tubes of various lengths surround a small chamber and each tube has strings in it that will resonate when the wind blows into it. So, change the wind, change the tune. you will literally never hear the same thing twice. Cool!

Virgin Atlantic owner Richard Branson is upping the ante of deep sea exploration with a new submarine from Hawkes Ocean Tech. His goal is twofold: have a submersible that can plunge to depth’s of 35,000 feet below sea level and transport tourists at a weekly rate of $25,000 a week. Now, this is obviously meant to cater to the uber-rich, but the idea of exploring seas not charted yet is really cool. To give you an idea of scale, the deepest we’ve been able to get is almost 12,500 feet which is the depth of the Titanic wreck; Mt. Everest is 29,000 feet and the tallest mountain in the world. The deepest part of the ocean is the Marianna trench, 35,000 feet below sea level. If this work’s I wonder what we find.

I’m a fan of optical illusions. The right combination of color, shape and texture, and your eyes tell you something is happening that really isn’t. I got this from foxnews.com. It’s from one of their slideshows of various optical illusions. This is just plain cool.

If you want to see more of these and other mind-bending things, go to unrealitymag.com.

Well, the cat is officially out of the bag. Apple announced it’s latest gadget, the iPhone on steroids, the iPad. The only thing this thing doesn’t do is telephone stuff. You can surf the web, stream movies, etc., bascially everything thi iPhone does. You know what I want? I want a way to talk to someone in the next town, state or country and be able to see their faces while I do it. That to me would be breakthrough technology.

Toyota is voluntarily recalling nine models of their vehicles to fix faulty accelerator issues.  The recall will include 2.3 million cars.  If you own a Toyota, take a look at the slideshow in foxnews.com here to see if your Toyota is one of the recalled models.  I know this is not really a IT thing, but I wanted to get the word out to people.

MSNBC today ran a story about overhyped tech products. Not necessarily in the past year, but just the tech world in general. What surprised me was that some of the items they listed have been big sellers. So, when they say overhyped, they just mean the buzz created before or around the items release. You can see the full list here, but here are some of my favorites from the list:

• The Virtual Boy, Nintendo’s early attempt at 3D gaming, if you can call it that
• Windows Vista, ’nuff said

There’s a new study coming Britain that TV and video games may be the cause for a resurgence of rickets in children.  Rickets can lead to developmental abnormalities such bowed legs.  Rickets can occur when a child has chronic vitamin D deficiencies from too many hours out of direct sunlight and/or with poor nutrition.  Healthy exposure to sunlight helps the body produce vitamin D which promotes normal growth and development.

What’s the lesson to be learned here?  Connecting and playing in the cyber-world is fun, but balance your time between virtual reality and reality for healthy mind and body. Read the full story here.

Nasa has released a video on Youtube demonstrating a theoretical personal aircraft equipped with vertical takeoff and landing capabilities.  Now, these are the guys who put a man on the moon, so this concept can work.  The initial cost will probably put this into the reach only of the uber-rich, but given time it might be more available to the public.  This is just a demo video, but I’m already excited for the possibilities.  This will revolutionize daily life like nothing else if this thing goes into mass production.