Hey Remember Books?

They were neato.

Via Daily Dish

First Skyrim Gameplay Trailer

Is it wrong that I just keep hitting "Replay" like a trained rat jonesing for another food pellet? 

Avalanche!

Full out collapse of the Metrodome caught on tape.

Creepy Wax Figure Saturday

No amount of Harry Belafonte can fix this.

All The Free Star Trek You Can Handle

Some nerds (even some at Nerd Pop) have yet to enjoy all the greatness of the Star Trek universe. With this website at your disposal you can now watch any episode of The Original Series, Next Gen, or Deepspace 9 for FREE!  They have Voyager and Enterprise as well, but watch at your own risk.

Feel free to celebrate this news by singing your favorite Klingon Opera.

BBC Four has become my favorite Acronym-Number combination.

And after you watch this, they will become yours as well.

I can't find much info about this other than this less than informative press release, but WHO CARES IT'S DIRK FREAKING GENTLY!!!!!!!

An Apology...

An American Brodeo (1865)

If you are one of the literally tens of tens who have subscribed to Nerd Pop, or added us as a bookmark in your favorite browser we owe you an apology.  You came to us in good faith and we failed to even give you a creepy wax figure every Saturday. We haven’t had many “real” posts to this site in about a month and a half. Why? Well, as you may or may not know Nerd Pop is composed of three people. Under normal circumstances when disaster strikes and real life takes priority over the site the other two would pick up the slack, but we hadn’t prepared for disaster striking all three of us at the same time.

In short, one of us had a brief but soul crushing period of employment with an unnamed evil, one of us had to rapidly flee a state for his own life, and one of us went temporarily blind.

No biggie.

So what does this mean for you?

Well,

1. Posts.

2. A genuine attempt to start working on a second podcast.

3. More damn creepy wax figures.

Sincerely,

Nerd Pop

Beginner's Guide To Podcasting

A typical day at Nerd Pop's recording booth.It seems simple at first. Podcasts are mostly talking. Talking is easy, therefore making a podcast must be easy. Sure, you know that there will be a bit of editing, but how hard can that be? Well, unfortunately for you and me, making a podcast requires some pricey hardware, software, and many hours of learning how to efficiently use them. You have the choice of many software programs, but I would like to walk you through the programs that I found to be easiest to use for a beginner with nothing but a Mac and a dream. That was corny, I apologize.

Okay, so I have only made one podcast so far. I’m not going to tell you that I’m the definitive voice on “how to make a podcast” but I can tell you that I did learn a hell of a lot in the progress of making my own. This article is here for anyone who has an idea for a podcast, but has no clue how to make it. Please let me impart hours upon hours of research and testing. I should mention that this article is intended for Mac users. I would have preferred to work on my much more powerful PC, but the editing software I tried on the PC was not very user friendly. The fact is that Mac really is the simplest platform to work on, and if you are a beginner, this is what you’re going to need. My brain almost melted when I attempted to use Audacity or Sony’s Acid.

Click to read more ...

Super Awesomely Neat Science Thing: NASA discovers new life form!

You've waited patiently for NASA's announcement, and here it is: NASA has discovered a new form of life! ARSENIC based life!

From Wired: 

At their conference today NASA scientist Felisa Wolfe Simon will announce that they have found a bacteria whose DNA is completely alien to what we know today. Instead of using phosphorus, the bacteria uses arsenic. All life on Earth is made of six components: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur. Every being, from the smallest amoeba to the largest whale, share the same life stream. Our DNA blocks are all the same.

But not this one. This one is completely different. Discovered in the poisonous Mono Lake, California, this bacteria is made of arsenic, something that was thought to be completely impossible. While she and other scientists theorized that this could be possible, this is the first discovery. The implications of this discovery are enormous to our understanding of life itself and the possibility of finding beings in other planets that don’t have to be like planet Earth.

More as the story unfolds.

Update on Thursday, December 2, 2010 at 4:08PM by Soraya

From NASA: NASA-Funded Research Discovers Life Built With Toxic Chemical

For more background and context, TED has put together 5 TEDTalks related to NASA's announcement.

PZ Meyers post It's not an arsentic-based life form on Pharyngula.

A Happy Thanksgiving! Neat Science Thing

We all have plenty to be grateful for. As NPR's 13.7 blog points out:

Let’s start with our universe. What an amazing place to be alive! Some 200 billion galaxies, each with some 200 billion stars, a good fraction of them with planets, and these planets with moons. Trillions of worlds besides our own, each unique, each with its own history, with its own mysteries and wonders.

If Copernicus thought (he didn’t, but many who followed him did) that displacing the Earth from the center of the cosmos would make the cosmos and the Earth less interesting, he was quite wrong. This expanding fabric of space, with texture so rich we couldn’t have imagined even 20 years ago, will never cease to amaze us.

So, give thanks to our universe, the one among the many that has the right properties to live long enough so that galaxies and stars can form, and then planets and, in some of them, life.

But wait! Don’t get carried away. Our universe couldn’t care less about life or about preserving it. Be suspicious of arguments that claim that our universe is just right for life!

So, it’s not really to the universe that we should be giving thanks but to Earth itself, our amazing, life-bearing, life-preserving planet. The more we move outwards to explore other worlds, the more remarkable our own becomes. We should all, collectively as a species, be giving thanks to our world. Most of all, for its patience in taking so much abuse from us and still letting us stick around. Few mothers would be this patient.