Noah’s ark film delayed due to… yes, flooding

Via WorstPreviews.com, a slight silver lining to all the bad news coming out of Hurricane Sandy. It seems Darren Aronofsky’s current project, Noah, has suffered from delays and set damage owing to all the flooding in Oyster Bay, New York. The best part? This quote:

To make it as realistic as possible, the director built a massive ark, which measures 450 feet long, 75 feet tall and 45 feet wide. Unfortunately, it was never meant to be sailed.

Emphasis mine. That’s what you call irony. Considering scholars pretty much uniformly agree that the Bible dimensions wouldn’t carry the necessary load, that’s as realistic as I think Aronofsky could have made it!
Continue reading “Noah’s ark film delayed due to… yes, flooding”

Noah’s ark film delayed due to… yes, flooding
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Video of ConEd building explosion in NYC

Apparently this is the ConEd building at E14th and FDR. Pretty cataclysmic. Shouldn’t be long before news outlets start picking this up. If you’re in the path of this hurricane, get off my damn blog and get to a hurricane shelter ASAP.

And remember, Mitt Romney will get rid of FEMA. He said so himself. But don’t worry, his sons are invested in disaster recovery companies.

Video of ConEd building explosion in NYC

Curiosity piqued, tonight at 2:31am!

Atlantic Daylight Time, of course. So 05:31 UTC.

Remember Curiosity and its Rube Goldberg-like planned landing? That happens tonight. Tomorrow morning, technically, for some of us. Phil Plait has details on how to participate in the fun:

If you want to watch the proceedings live, I have a few things you can do.

1) Fraser Cain, Pamela Gay, and I will be doing a Google+ Hangout on August 5th starting at 03:00 UTC on August 5/6 and running until 07:00 – note that for the US, this starts on the evening of the 5th at 23:00 Eastern time and runs through 03:00 in the morning. We plan on having special guests, a live feed from NASA, and more. The Hangout is being sponsored by Google itself, CosmoQuest, and the SETI Institute, which has a strong astrobiology mission and therefore is very interested in Mars. Our coverage will be complete, intense, awesome, and fun. Promise! There’s more info at Universe Today, and we have an events page set up on G+ to help you out. There’s also a Facebook events page, too! Use the #marshangout hashtag on Twitter to follow along, too.

2) You can always watch NASA TV. They’ve posted a schedule of events for media.

3) If you are in the Pasadena California area, then join the party! Literally: The Planetary Society is throwing a bash to celebrate and watch the landing at the Paseo Colorado – Garfield Promenade on Saturday, August 4. Attending will be TPS blogger (and big pal o’ mine) Emily Lakdawalla as well as Bill Nye (yes, THE Bill Nye). You can get more info on Emily’s blog, and get tickets online. If I could, I’d go there too! But I’ll be at home and quite busy myself (see #1 above).

4) The Planetary Society is holding PlanetFest at the Pasadena Convention Center on August 4 and 5 – it’s again a celebration of planetary exploration. It looks like fun!

X-Box 360 users will also be able to live-stream the landing. My sleep schedule has been completely screwed by work for a very long time, so I’m planning on staying up myself. I’m trying to figure out if the PS3 browser can handle Ustream, but I’m not having a lot of luck with it myself. Anyone know of a good way to stream to PS3, given that’s my primary media centre?

Curiosity piqued, tonight at 2:31am!

My CONvergence schedule

I’m on three panels at CONvergence this weekend, in the Science/Skepticism track. I have no idea what panels I’ll be attending outside of these three, which I have to attend by virtue of having a spot on them. So this is all I can confirm right now.

*record scratch*

Wait, I’m on panels!?! WTF!!!
Continue reading “My CONvergence schedule”

My CONvergence schedule

Kid tries to prove his masculinity by shooting himself in the head on live video

See, it’s bullshit like this that motivates me to destroy gender roles, not just for feminism’s sake, but for men as well. This child did not, obviously, think things through before he tried to prove how “manly” he was to his friends on video chat. He put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger, not realizing that the gun was loaded.

About 1:15 a.m., the teen was video-chatting — police believe it was either over Skype or another video-chat service called ooVoo — with an as-yet-unidentified person while his brothers were asleep in the room in their Kensington house.

Sometime during the video chat, things went horribly wrong.

“His manhood or his ego was challenged and he said something along the lines of, ‘I’ll show you,'” Gallagher said. “He thought he was clowning around, trying to shock the other party on the Internet site.”

That’s when the teen picked up his older brother’s gun and, believing it was unloaded, put it to his head and pulled the trigger, police said.

Continue reading “Kid tries to prove his masculinity by shooting himself in the head on live video”

Kid tries to prove his masculinity by shooting himself in the head on live video