Author: luapo

It’s on like Holiday Kong…

9V battery and some LEDs….

Holiday greetings from the crew on the International Space Station.

Aboard the International Space Station, Expedition 26 Commander Scott Kelly of NASA and Flight Engineers Cady Coleman of NASA and Paolo Nespoli of the European Space Agency offered Christmas and New Year’s greetings to all people on Earth from the orbital outpost on Dec. 21 as they flew 224 statute miles above. Kelly, Coleman and Nespoli are part of the six-person crew that includes Russian cosmonauts Dmitry Kondratyev, Alexander Kaleri and Oleg Skripochka.

If you’re into Google Doodles then Micheal Lopez is your very own Santa. Lopez is responsible for Google’s Doodles, those delightful illustrations that crop up over the course of the year to celebrate holidays, pop-cultural moments, civic landmarks and scientific achievements. But the most highly anticipated Doodle of them all must be Google’s very own holiday card, which launched at 9.00am ET Thursday and will stay up on the home page until Christmas is over.

(See pictures of Google Doodles.)

The 30-year-old’s concept (which took five artists roughly 250 hours to complete) was to show the famed logo via 17 interactive portraits of holiday scenes from around the world. Lopez wanted to roll it out over three days, ending on Christmas Day itself. But the powers that be had other ideas as they asked for the Doodle to go up in its entirety, and thus the six month process suddenly had a rather frantic finish.

Even Lopez had to concede that a Christmas opening might diminish the amount of people who would enjoy the fruits of his labor, including those close to home. “I thought, ‘Is my mom going to be available to play this on Christmas Day?'” he said. “The answer is, no, she’ll be making me food!”

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is on a roll of remarkably nonsensical declarations of late, not least of which are the “mpg” ratings for the 2011 Nissan LEAF and 2011 Chevrolet Volt. The latest, and possibly silliest, pronouncement: the 5,771-pound, 453-horsepower V-12 Rolls-Royce Phantom Coupe is a compact car.