You probably missed this among the CES clusterskgjhaskjgh: the Simpsons made fun of Steve Jobs on this week’s episode, titled Politically Inept, with Homer Simpson. As Homer is being interviewed on TV, “Steve Jobs unveils iGhost” crawls across the news ticker.
In the episode, Homer becomes a Glenn Beck type after Bart uploads a video of him having an Alec Baldwin-ish airplane meltdown moment. At one point, he gets interviewed in a Fox News program. At that point, the news ticker runs several funny fake headlines, like “Europe puts Greece on eBay,” “Congress postpones end of the world to 2013,” “Satan tweets support for Santorum” and the aforementioned “Steve Jobs unveils iGhost.”
The episode is actually funny (surprise!) but is it too early to make fun of Jobs?
Did you find Heath Ledger as The Joker scary? Then perhaps you suffer from coulrophobia, the abnormal fear of clowns. Join a self-confessed coulrophobic for a look at these guys and see if you are too. Like you don’t already know!
Researchers have “cloaked” a three-dimensional object, making it invisible from all angles, for the first time. However, the demonstration works only for waves in the microwave region of the electromagnetic spectrum. It uses a shell of what are known as plasmonic materials; they present a “photo negative” of the object being cloaked, effectively cancelling it out.
Duracell? Energizer? The cheapie packages of AAs at the dollar store? Tired of dumping money blindly on batteries for Wii remote controllers, flashlights, Nerf guns, and the like, a physicist decides it’s time to investigate which batteries truly give the most bang for the buck.
Rhett Allain, an associate professor of physics at Southeastern Louisiana University, had gotten into the habit of buying batteries based strictly on price. Mostly, this meant skipping the Duracells and Energizers of the world and purchasing cheapie off-brands at dollar stores instead.
