My Spock - Hamilton / Star Trek Parody

How to win any popular game, according to data scientists

Wonkblog explains How to win any popular game, according to data scientists "Here are 20 data visualizations that offer lots of insight into the most popular games in America, including chess, Connect Four, Monopoly, Pac-Man, 'Wheel of Fortune' and much more."

Make This Mini Star Wars BB-8 Ball Droid with a Hacked Sphero

Can't wait for new Star Wars toys? Make This Mini Star Wars BB-8 Ball Droid with a Hacked Sphero.

Celebrating 50 Years of American Doctor Who

36-Year-Old NASA Probe's Engines Successfully Fired Up by Private Team

The ISEE-3 is still going strong.

36-Year-Old NASA Probe's Engines Successfully Fired Up by Private Team

"NASA's International Sun-Earth Explorer 3 probe (ISEE-3), which the agency retired in 1997, performed the maneuver in preparation for a larger trajectory correction next week. The spacecraft hadn't fired its engines since 1987, ISEE-3 Reboot Project team members said.

It took several attempts and days to perform the roll maneuver because ISEE-3 was not responding to test commands. But this time, controllers got in touch. They increased the roll rate from 19.16 revolutions per minute to 19.76 RPM, putting it within mission specifications for trajectory corrections."

The Math Aficionado’s Guide to High-Fives

The Math Aficionado’s Guide to High-Fives is kind of amusing.

The Birth of Standard Error

The Birth of Standard Error "Earlier today Stephen Johnson, in a mailing list run by the The Unix Heritage Society, described the birth of the standard error concept: the idea that a program's error output is sent on a channel different from that of its normal output. Over the past forty years, all major operating systems and language libraries have embraced this concept."

I wouldn't have guessed it came about because of a phototypesetter.

Someone made a full-size, working car out of Legos

Someone made a full-size, working car out of Legos and I declare that he has won Lego.

• The engine is made from standard Lego pieces and runs on air!
• The engine has four orbital engines and a total of 256 pistons.
• More than 500,000 LEGO pieces.
• Top speed around 20-30km (We drive it slow as are scared of giant lego explosion)
• Built in Romania and shipped to a secret location in Melbourne.
• It's a Hot Rod design, mainly because hot rods are cool.

New Research: Cheating on Exams with Smartwatches

New Research: Cheating on Exams with Smartwatches "A Belgian university recently banned all watches from exams due to the possibility of smartwatches being used to cheat. Similarly, some standardized tests in the U.S. like the GRE have banned all digital watches. These policies seems prudent, since today’s smartwatches could be used to smuggle in notes or even access websites during the test. However, their potential use for cheating goes much farther than that."

"As a proof of concept, I developed ConTest, an application for the Pebble smartwatch that shows how students could inconspicuously collaborate on multiple-choice exams in real time. ConTest allows students to select a question, vote on answers, and view the most popular solution based on all of the responses from other students taking the exam. Prior to an exam, students pair their watches with their smartphones and choose the exam that they are taking. During the exam, the smartphone—hidden in the student’s pocket or backpack—facilitates communication between the smartwatch and a cloud-based aggregation service. All user interaction during the exam takes place on the smartwatch itself with simple, inconspicuous button presses."

Mosh: the mobile shell

Hadn't heard of Mosh: the mobile shell.

Remote-shell protocols traditionally work by conveying a byte-stream from the server to the client, to be interpreted by the client's terminal. (This includes TELNET, RLOGIN, and SSH.) Mosh works differently and at a different layer. With Mosh, the server and client both maintain a snapshot of the current screen state. The problem becomes one of state-synchronization: getting the client to the most recent server-side screen as efficiently as possible.

This is accomplished using a new protocol called the State Synchronization Protocol, for which Mosh is the first application. SSP runs over UDP, synchronizing the state of any object from one host to another. Datagrams are encrypted and authenticated using AES-128 in OCB mode. While SSP takes care of the networking protocol, it is the implementation of the object being synchronized that defines the ultimate semantics of the protocol.

Roaming with SSP becomes easy: the client sends datagrams to the server with increasing sequence numbers, including a "heartbeat" at least once every three seconds. Every time the server receives an authentic packet from the client with a sequence number higher than any it has previously received, the IP source address of that packet becomes the server's new target for its outgoing packets. By doing roaming “statelessly” in this manner, roaming works in and out of NATs, even ones that may themselves be roaming. Roaming works even when the client is not aware that its Internet-visible IP address has changed. The heartbeats allow Mosh to inform the user when it hasn't heard from the server in a while (unlike SSH, where users may be unaware of a dropped connection until they try to type).

Emoji Major No. 1: The "Breaking Bad" Premiere

Emoji Major No. 1: The "Breaking Bad" Premiere "Zoe Mendelson, master of long-form emoji, turns her talent to 'Blood Money' as Walter White nears his end." Yes, it is the latest episode of Breaking Bad, retold in Emoji.

Watch the Simpsons’ amazing Game of Thrones intro

I think I missed this, Watch the Simpsons’ amazing Game of Thrones intro "Tonight's [March 4th, 2012] episode of The Simpsons opens with a couch gag that warms our fantasy-loving hearts. Watch as Springfield is transformed into Westeros, with King Burns overlooking his nuclear-powered domain — and eying the Iron Couch. It's not the real thing, but it will have to hold us until April. Hat tip to Ross for the heads up!"

I'd embed the video here but it wasn't obvious how to an the versions I saw on YouTube suck.

Who Would Win? Star Trek vs. The Empire

Now this is how to have an geeky sci-fi argument, Who Would Win? Star Trek vs. The Empire.

How the Air Force and SpaceX Saved Dragon from Doom

This is also from April, How the Air Force and SpaceX Saved Dragon from Doom.

"Right after spacecraft separation in low Earth orbit , a sudden and unexpected failure of the Dragon’s critical thrust pods had prevented three out of four from initializing and firing. The oxidizer pressure was low in three tanks. And the propulsion system is required to orient the craft for two way communication and to propel the Dragon to the orbiting lab complex."

"“The problem was a very tiny change to the check valves that serve the oxidizer tanks on Dragon.” Musk told Universe Today"

"“What we did was we were able to write some new software in real time and upload that to Dragon to build pressure upstream of the check valves and then released that pressure- to give it a kind of a kick,” Musk told me at a NASA media briefing."

"“But we had difficulty communicating with the spacecraft because it was in free drift in orbit...So we worked closely with the Air Force to get higher intensity, more powerful dishes to communicate with the spacecraft and upload the software to do the Heimlich pressure maneuver.”

What's the most intellectual joke you know?

Reddit asks What's the most intellectual joke you know? and gets some funny answers and even funnier commentary.

The PC inside your phone: A guide to the system-on-a-chip

Ars Technica presents The PC inside your phone: A guide to the system-on-a-chip "To help you keep things straight, we've assembled this handy guide that will walk you through the basics of how an SoC is put together. It will also serve as a guide to most of the current (and future, where applicable) chips available from the big players making [system-on-a-chips] today: Apple, Qualcomm, Samsung, Nvidia, Texas Instruments, Intel, and AMD. There's simply too much to talk about to fit everything into one article of reasonable length, but if you've been wondering what makes a Snapdragon different from a Tegra, here's a start."

I mostly skimmed this but it explained all the chip codenamed I've heard and didn't know how they related to each other.

Inside the Battle of Hoth: The Empire Strikes Out

Spencer Ackerman goes Inside the Battle of Hoth: The Empire Strikes Out. "When Vader enters the Hoth System with the Imperial Fleet, he’s holding a winning hand. What follows next is a reminder of two military truths that apply in our own time and in our own galaxy: Don’t place unaccountable religious fanatics in wartime command, and never underestimate a hegemonic power’s ability to miscalculate against an insurgency."

Update: Lots of followup, Defense Nerds Strike Back: A Symposium on the Battle of Hoth

The Shakespeare Programming Language

The Shakespeare Programming Language "A few weeks earlier we had discovered a number of truly fascinating programming languages, such as Java2k, Sorted!, Brainfuck and Malbolge, and we wanted to make our own. We have no idea why, but that night we were also thinking about Shakespeare in general, and Shakespearian insults in particular and three hours later we had come up with this amazing idea: the Shakespeare Programming Language, SPL."

Twine - Listen to your world, talk to the Internet

"Twine is a wireless sensor block tightly integrated with a cloud-based service. The durable, rubbery block has WiFi, on-board temperature and orientation sensors, and an expansion connector for other sensors. Power is supplied by micro USB or two AAA batteries (and Twine will email you when you need to change the batteries).

The Twine web app makes it simple to set up and monitor your Twines from a browser anywhere. You set rules to trigger messages — no programming needed. The rules are put together with a palette of available conditions and actions, and read like English: WHEN moisture sensor gets wet THEN text 'The basement is flooding!' We'll get you started with a bunch of rule sets, and you can share rules you create with other Twine owners."

Neat idea.

Think you know all there is to know about paper snowflakes?

If you like math and have kids (or are a kid) and want to go crazy, then watch the video io9 points to, Think you know all there is to know about paper snowflakes? You pitiful, pitiful fool..