There’s no escaping the Zombie Apocalypse when Neil deGrasse Tyson interviews Max Brooks, author of World War Z and the worldâs leading âauthorityâ on these nonexistent killers.
Neil deGrasse Tyson and zombies? Yusplz.
Seriously, if you haven’t listened to this, you need to. Part 2 was just posted today.
I made a thing! Simon Says game from Sparkfun. Soldered all the components onto the board, with supervision from Husbandtron, lol.
And I didn’t burn the house down! Whee!
![wilwheaton:
conniecann:
On the topic of what it means to be a nerd. [x]
<3 <3 <3
Yet another thing I want to buy as an art print. At this rate, my house is gonna be papered in nerdy-writerly-gamerly crap.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/b33a82432c3f9d37146db5cf1fa20a4c/tumblr_mm7fzyJLGi1qhvb3ao1_r3_500.jpg)
On the topic of what it means to be a nerd. [x]
<3 <3 <3
Yet another thing I want to buy as an art print. At this rate, my house is gonna be papered in nerdy-writerly-gamerly crap.
Interesting.
This is actually really interesting.
Tumblr is apparently psychically jacked into my brain. HEY JESS I HEARD YOU MADE A POST ABOUT MALE GAZE AND WOMEN MEDIA, SO I BROUGHT YOU MORE POSTS ABOUT MALE GAZE AND WOMEN IN MEDIA.
This segment is very well done, and explains very well the problems with male gaze, female passivity and objectification in media, and why I get so friggin’ angry when people say things like, “Well, X show/movie/book doesn’t have anything for men, and let me heavily imply that that means it’s worthless.” If you’ve ever wondered why so many people bitch about the (whitewashed, although this video doesn’t mention it) “straight male default,” please watch this clip. I promise it’s more thought-provoking than attacking, and it’s funny.
Also, it explains the problems with even supposedly strong female characters—e.g., Lara Croft, Wonder Woman, Alice—that are heavily sexualized.
Seriously, can we get these women some pants, please?
Independent Lens, PBS
“Wonder Women! The Untold Story of American Superheroines”
EDIT: Here’s a link if you want to see it yourself. Available until June 14.
http://video.pbs.org/video/2331042879
(via ihopeyoucontinue4ever)
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Oh look, more stuff relevant to my agitated blog post from yesterday.
YOU OTHER READERS CAN’T DENY
WHEN A BOOK WALKS IN WITH A GOOD PLOT BASE
AND A BIG SPINE IN YOUR FACE YOU GET SPRUNG
WANNA PULL OUT YOUR PENS
‘CAUSE YOU NOTICED THAT BOOK WAS DENSE
READING, HALF-RIMS I’M WEARING
I’M HOOKED AND I AIN’T CARING
OH BABY I WANT AN E-READER
AND A MEANINGFUL METER
MY TEACHERS TRIED TO TRAIN ME
THAT BOOK YOU GOT MAKES ME SO BRAINY
(Not mine - via Nerds Do it Better on FB)
Mean Girls meets: Harry Potter (part 1)
Hi all, Marvel’s VP of Web and Application Development Pete Olson here.
Don’t worry - this isn’t an announcement that we’ve hired an abstract expressionist as our newest artist.
At Marvel we’re constantly trying to understand our characters and stories better so that we can better present those to you, our fans. (Also, we are big data nerds.)
As part of this effort we focused some sophisticated data analysis tools on the world’s most interesting social network—the Marvel Universe. The result is what you see above: in each image, every node represents a character and each line represents a shared appearance between two characters (in some of the graphs, the thickness of the line corresponds to the number of shared appearances).
Some cool things we’ve found:
- There are four big clusters of characters (you can see them in the different colored graphs above) which correspond to the X-Men, the Avengers, Spider-Man and Wolverine.
- Wolvie seems to have his own entourage independent of his teammates in the Avengers and the X-Men.
- There are about 10 other smaller clusters—in the high-res images linked below you’ll see groups corresponding to X-Factor Investigations, our cosmic heroes, teen heroes like the Runaways and Avengers Academy students and even Alpha Flight.
- The Ultimate Universe orbits the main Marvel Universe like a satellite (you can see it as a small spur on the right or left on most of the graphs above).
- The graph diameter (the furthest distance between any two characters) is 9 hops.
- The graph is relatively sparse (meaning many characters are not directly linked) with a density rating of .032.
- The average character has links to 41 other characters
We have high-res versions of the first two graphs above (warning: these are about 10 megs each) here and here.
This tweaks my geekery on several levels. Love it!
