Geeking Out

In case you aren’t already aware, Gravity Falls is a fantastic animated show, currently airing on Disney Channel, that’s basically an animated version of Eerie, Indiana mixed with the shenanigans from Angry Beavers. It’s great, and Adam WarRock thought so too — that’s why he made a rap specifically about the show. That rap has now been updated, and it’s even more glorious than before. Relevant to your interests WarRock recently released a Hodor rap song We actually interviewed him back in 2010 Here’s a chart of word frequency in TMBG songs

An anonymous reader writes "The open-source Intel Linux graphics driver has hit a milestone of now being faster than Apple's own OpenGL stack on OS X. The Intel Linux driver on Ubuntu 13.04 is now clearly faster than Apple's internally-developed Intel OpenGL driver on OS X 10.8.3. when benchmarked from a 'Sandy Bridge' class Mac Mini. Only some months ago, Apple's GL driver was still trouncing the Intel Linux Mesa driver." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

astroengine writes "In a recent batch of images beamed back to Earth from Mars rover Curiosity's MAHLI camera, obvious signs of wear and tear could be seen in the 'skin' of the robot's wheels. Considering Curiosity is only 281 sols (Mars days) into its mission and roved less than a kilometer after landing, surely this doesn't bode well? Fortunately, there's good news. 'The wear in the wheels is expected,' Matt Heverly, lead rover driver for the MSL mission at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., told Discovery News. 'We will continue to characterize the wheels both on Mars and in the Marsyard, but we don't expect the wear to impact our ability to get to Mt. Sharp.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

“Merger” is usually such a dull word. Companies merge. Lanes of traffic merge. But it’s not all bland and boring, because large galaxies can also merge with one another to form what is scientifically referred to as a “super-giant elliptical galaxy,” according to NASA – and apparently it’s happening right now. Or it did 11 billion years ago, at least. Light-years are weird, guys. This event was first spotted by the Herschel Space Observatory, the European Space Agency funded infrared-telescope that ran out of liquid coolant in April. Astronomers at NASA’s Hershel Project Office found images of the merging galaxies in the data that the observatory collected, and follow up studies by the Hubble Space Telescope and Spitzer Space Telescope confirmed the findings. The galaxies in question, now called HXMM01, are located approximately 11 billion light-years from Earth, meaning that they actually merged when our planet was only 3 billion years old and the light from that event is only just reaching us now. Trippy. Mergers between cosmic entities actually aren’t all that uncommon in space, but this one is special because of just how mind-numbingly big it is. To put its size in perspective: Our Milky Way births about two to three new stars every year. These galaxies are cranking out 2,000 a year. Between the two, there are about 400 billion stars in total. This merger is also of particular interest because it was previously thought that larger galaxies grew in size by acquiring smaller ones, but these galaxies were both fairly equal in size before they started to collide. On a side note, we’ve decided that “super-giant elliptical galaxy” should be the name of the next album that the English rock band Muse puts out. It seems right up their alley. (via NASA, image ESA/NASA/JPL-Caltech/UC Irvine/STScI/Keck/NRAO/SAO) Relevant to your interests:  Watch a black hole eat a planet… well, whole Space telescopes team up to find the largest spiral galaxy ever Hubble has spotted the new most distant object in space

Social media etiquette can be hard, so here’s a primer (GeekSugar) Jose Canseco’s being investigated for rape (SportsGrid) 10 Tumblr webcomics you should be following (The Daily Dot) Seth MacFarlane won’t return to host the Oscars (The Mary Sue) The 5 unluckiest guys who’ve ever won the lottery (Guy Code Blog) Bloodied London attacker speaks to camera after attack (Mediaite) Why Tobias is the best Arrested Development character (Flavorwire) (Title pic via Reddit)

Tesla Motors announced today it has completely repaid the $465 million loan from the U.S. Department of Energy the company received in 2010. The funds were generated by Tesla through a recent sale of their stock, worth close to a billion dollars. The stock price had risen sharply after the company reported its first profitable quarter (and the stock still sits roughly 50% higher than before their earnings release). Today's payment of $451.8 million finished off both the loan's principal and its interest, nine years before the final payment was due. Tesla CEO Elon Musk said, 'I would like to thank the Department of Energy and the members of Congress and their staffs that worked hard to create the ATVM program, and particularly the American taxpayer from whom these funds originate. I hope we did you proud.' Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Scientists at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany (why is it always Germany?) have created a study whereby they torture an adorable robotic dinosaur in order to determine whether or not humans can empathize with its pain.  And I can tell you unequivocally that yes, mutha fuckers, we do indeed. Probably BECAUSE IT FRACKING SCREAMS AND MOANS, and most of us (not Germans apparently) have a heart. So great, now I have protective feelings for a robot that will more than likely escape from the scientists and murder me.  I hate you University of Duisburg-Essen, I hate you so much. Read more »

Allosaurus and T-Rex have a lot in common. They’re both carnivores, both theropods, and I would not know whether to cheer or weep in terror if I saw either one in the flesh. But researchers at Ohio University’s Witmer Lab have discovered one important difference in the way the two creatures fed. While the much larger T-Rex ate like a crocodile — shaking prey in its massive jaws to rip away chunks of flesh — the smaller allosaurus likely ate more like a falcon, tearing off smaller strips of flesh from its unlucky victims. It’s pretty much as close as you can get to ‘dainty’ when discussing the eating habits of a 30-foot-long, two-and-a-half ton murder lizard. Paleontologist Eric Snively and his team looked beyond the surface similarities of the two dinosaurs to find the differences in the way they are engineered. Statring with a cast of the ancient reptile’s head and neck, the team created a digital model of the skull, neck and muscles that connected the two that they could manipulate and test, getting a better look at what sort of movements allosaurus would have been capable of. It turns out a strange placement of a neck muscle made it unlikely that allosaurus could shake it’s head vigorously back and forth to rend prey. Instead, it was much better equipped to drive its head down, then pull it back up with a great deal of power. The allosaurus, say researchers, would have been able to move it’s head more flexibly — and more quickly — than T-Rex, but that flexibility came at a cost of sheer power, suggesting that the hunting styles of the two carnivores could also have differed more widely than once thought. (via Witmer Lab) Relevant to your interests Jurassic Park T-Rex is the finest possible T-Rex Here are some T-Rex bones…so to speak This man legally changed his name to Tyrannosaurus Rex

psykocrime writes "The crazy kids at Fogbeam Labs have a new blog post positing that there is a trend towards advanced projects in NLP, Information Retrieval, Big Data and the Semantic Web moving to the Apache Software Foundation. Considering that Apache UIMA is a key component of IBM Watson, is it wrong to believe that the organization behind Hadoop, OpenNLP, Jena, Stanbol, Mahout and Lucene will ultimately be the home of a real 'Star Trek Computer'? Quoting: 'When we talk about how the Star Trek computer had “access to all the data in the known Universe”, what we really mean is that it had access to something like the Semantic Web and the Linked Data cloud. Jena provides a programmatic environment for RDF, RDFS and OWL, SPARQL and includes a rule-based inference engine. ... In addition to supporting the natural language interface with the system, OpenNLP is a powerful library for extracting meaning (semantics) from unstructured data - specifically textual data in an unstructured (or semi structured) format. An example of unstructured data would be the blog post, an article in the New York Times, or a Wikipedia article. OpenNLP combined with Jena and other technologies, allows “The computer” to “read” the Web, extracting meaningful data and saving valid assertions for later use.'" Speaking of the Star Trek computer, I'm continually disappointed that neither Siri nor Google Now can talk to me in Majel Barrett's voice. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tesla haters just lost another quiver in their dwindling arsenal. The upstart electric automaker has paid off the entirety of its Department of Energy loan -- a whopping $451.8M -- and did it nine years ahead of schedule.