Shared Google Reader Items, 3/8/2009

Here are my shared items from Google Reader. Enjoy!

Entertainment:

• Who watched the Watchmen? I did, and loved it. PZ Myers at Pharyngula also did, and wrote a better review than I could. Warning: some things in there might be spoilers if you don't know the story, I'm not sure.
• Judd Apatow is directing Ghostbusters 3. Will it be hilariously awesome, like Ghostbusters, or hilariously terrible, like Ghostbusters 2?
• Time Warner is offering subscriptions to its channels (such as CNN and TNT) on the interwebs. Very interesting.
• The entire Seinfeld cast will reunite on Curb Your Enthusiasm. Excellent.
• A company plans to sell an electric guitar that also works for Guitar Hero (and, I would hope, Rock Band). Sweet.

Geek Culture:

• My friend Jon sent me an interesting site, listing "What's Special About This Number" for most numbers from 0 to 9999 (well, at least many of them, I didn't check whether it's more than 50%).

Technology:

• A team at Arizona State University, working with E-Ink (the company that makes the digital ink for the Kindle and Sony Reader), have developed bendable, touch-screen e-paper. This is very, very, very interesting to me. Imagine having a reader you can roll up and put in a backpack or briefcase, but then fold out to read that day's newspaper or a new book. Neat.
• A bionic eye has given a blind man weak sight. It's a big step in an awesome direction.
• The Kepler space telescope, which will search for Earth-like extra-solar planets, launched successfully Friday night. I thought that was awesome enough, but then I found out (by crossposting my Google Reader links on Facebook) that a childhood friend-of-the-family worked on the launch as a NASA engineer. I'm so jealous.

Programming:

• I found a neat online favicon generator. If you don't know what that is, you probably don't need to know.

Science:

• Gravitational waves may have been detected in 1987. This would be very cool. I don't entirely understand gravitational waves, but they may travel faster than the speed of light, and that's very interesting. Perhaps we're listening in the wrong spectrum for ET communications, for one thing.
• Obama is reversing Bush's stem-cell research (effective) ban. Very cool, but what took him so long? That was rumored as a day 1 fix.

The Interwebs:

• PDFVue lets you edit PDF documents online. Convenient.
• Dropbox is a cool way to synchronize files between computers (for example, I use it to transfer docs from my office computer to home, and vice versa). If you sign up through that link, I get extra storage. It's win-win!
• Stephen Wolfram claims that he has a site that can answer questions (ie, when you search for "How many bones are in the human body?", it will return an answer, rather than a list of pages that might have the answer). That will be very interesting if it actually works (come May, when the site says it will be available).

Politics:

• Goddammit, John Conyers (D-MI). You have it absolutely backwards. He wants to force researchers to only publish in journals, not to any of the free sources. Stop it!

As always, leave your comments on these or anything else below.