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Yes, it’s that time of the — well, whatever length of time between Le Linkage postings again. It’s time for another episode of Le Linkage, there. I’ve been trying to think of a good intro this time, but I can’t think of anything good, so just check out the links. At least those are good.

The World’s Biggest Diamond Mine: Originally, this was supposed to be the “world’s biggest hole”, but as it turns out there are a couple of man-made holes larger than this one. (Insert “I used to work for a bigger hole than that” joke here. And no gay jokes, please.) This set of pictures shows exactly how big this thing is: it’s so big, flying over it has been banned because it creates such a powerful and large vortex of air over it. (You can replace “it’s so big” with “your momma’s so fat…”) What’s even more interesting is that this hole — about a mile wide and half a mile deep — is found right in the middle of a town in Russia.

Let’s Complicate Some Issues: Don’t you hate it when some nutty left-winger comes up to you to tell you how wrong your conservative values are, and how obviously right they are because, let’s face it, it’s a simple issue? And what about when some nutty right-winger comes up to you to tell you how wrong your liberal values are, and how obviously right they are, because it’s a simple issues? In this essay, the author talks about the complexity of real life issues and why “the only way either liberals or conservatives can turn them into such exercises in obviousness is to omit big parts of the picture, [which] guarantees that we’re not seeing it accurately.”

Comic Book Foreign Policy (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3): I’ve been following this set of articles for a little while now, and they’re pretty interesting. The author talks about how the comic book industry is making comics a serious ground for political and ethical debate using today’s real-life issues. A must read for anyone who enjoys comics and politics, pro-war and anti-war alike. (As of this writing only three parts have been written. There’s still a fourth one to come.)

//Edit: Part 4 has been published.

Free Older Moves: The title says it all. Movies where the copyright has expired, which are now in the public domain, are made available here for download. (Bittorrent required.) Some greats and greatly bad are here, such as the infamous Plan 9 from Outer Space. I haven’t searched, but I don’t think Manos: The Hands of Fate has quite made it to this list. Yet.

English as a National Language: Does it Require Protection? “The problem isn’t just restricted to schools and papers. There are places in THE US of FREAKIN A that you can go and feel like a feel like you just crossed a border. Not only will English not be the residents first language, you’ll be lucky if it is spoken at all.” With the election-year politics dominating Washington, puff-my-patriotic-chest amendments such as the one making English the official national language of the United States are being brought up (again) by one side or the other in order to get the votes of single-issue voters. But does English really need protection as the National Language? (By the way, if the quote at the beginning sounded good, you’re in good company: it sounded good to all the people who agreed with you back when it was first written — in 1890.)

Chad Vader: What if instead of the Death Star, a dark lord of the Sith was in charge of your local supermarket? This hilarious Chanel101 Web series attempts to find out. Super hilarious!

Carbon Calculator: Interested in living a “Carbon Neutral” life? Let’s face it: unless you’re blinded by politics, you know that human activity is severely affecting the planet’s climate, making creating what’s been dubbed a “climate crisis”. While your government (local or national) may not be doing much to help protect the environment, you can find out how much you’re affecting the environment on a personal basis, and how much it would cost you to invest in technologies to help you be as “carbon neutral” as possible.

So, How Big is Earth Compared To…? If you’ve ever been in an astronomy class (or have ever been in an astronomy-themed conversation), you know that compared to Jupiter and the Sun, the earth is tiny. Do you realize exactly how tiny? The following images from 3D modeling software show how big Earth is compared to every planet from Mercury to Pluto (yes, I still count it as a planet) and the Sun, and how big the Sun is compared to other stars, such as Rigel, Aldelbaran, and Betelgeuse.

An Introduction to Buddhism: When first learning about Buddhism, it’s easy to get confused with terms like “rebirth”, “karma”, “eight-fold path”, “Skandhas”, “noble truths” — you get the drift. But if you’re interested in Buddhism, or just learning what it’s all about, this page offers a number of essays to help you get started. (I recommend starting with the Five Minute Introduction.)

(If you’re not a Firefly/Serenity fan, read this post anyway. You may soon find yourself wanting to watch the show, or at least the movie.)

If you’re a Firefly/Serenity fan, then today is the day you’ve been waiting for.

Actually, I’ll take that back: Monday was the day you were waiting for. Sadly, this post is not about some miraculous change of heart by the networks to return the series to TV. It’s also not the announcement of another Serenity movie, at least not in the big-movie-theater sort of way. This post is actually to announce that the documentary Done the Impossible: The Fans’ Tale of Firefly and Serenity, a massive DVD project which brings together the cast, crew, and noted fans such as writer extaordinaire Orson Scott Card (author of the Ender’s Game series) to pay a tribute to “the greatest science fiction series ever created” (according to Card).

I don’t disagree with him one bit.

Now, before you get the wrong idea, no I’m not a huge fan of the show. I like the show — a lot — but I wouldn’t consider myself a huge fan. Still, this is an awesome development, especially if, like me, you actually like to watch the extras and commentaries included with DVDs. (I’ll gladly pay the little extra for the 2-disc edition almost any time.)

If you’ve never seen the show, imagine this: you see a guy who’s an ex-confederate soldier after the American Civil War. He goes out west to make his living transporting cargo — legal and otherwise — to the various sprawling cities, most of the time while trying to stay away from the authorities. He gets a together a posse (a doctor, a priest, a few hired guns, and a parlor maid) to do all this and — well, there you go. Now, take all that and put the guy in a junky, old spaceship, mix in some western music and Chinese culture, and make the cities planets. Finally, add the best writing you’ve ever heard on a science fiction show and you have yourself a show that can be loved by sci-fi geek and non-geek alike. (Think about it as science fiction that will attract more than just nerds and people with bad hygiene.)

Edit: To get a feel for the show, here’s the intro. Thanks be to YouTube.

Edit 2: Here’s the movie trailer, plus the first 15 minutes or so of the movie (divided into 2 clips), just to whet your appetite a bit.

The point of science fiction is not to focus on the technology. The point of science fiction is to focus on how people work within very real situations that wouldn’t necessarily be occurring (or would be occurring, but with different consequences) if the technology didn’t exist. This show covers all of that. Very human, very relatable, and the character development is awesome.

If you’ve never seen the show Firefly, at least do yourself a favor and watch the movie Serenity. After you fall in love with that, go grab the show (or stream it using WinAmp’s Shoutcast TV streams, available for free) or go grab the documentary, which can be pre-ordered right now for about $17.00. It includes something like 5-hours of lost footage and a ton of interviews with the cast and crew, so if you’re a fan it’s definitely worth it. (If you still doubt me, watch the trailer, or at least the celebrity highlights (Quicktime required).) By the time you’re done there, you’ll probably be in the same position I was when I first discovered the series: hungry for more.

Your assignment for tonight is to go out and either rent that movie or buy it, then sit at home with your significant other (whether they be spouse, pet, or android) and enjoy this incredible work.

For the first time in what seems like forever, this morning I was finally able to go through and read all my RSS feeds. It seems like today was one of those days when weird news just seemed to come out of nowhere, which means it’s time for another episode of Le Linkage! This one I’ll call the “Just Plain Weird” edition because a good number of the articles here are just plain weird. There are some, however, that make for spectacular reading, and one that will make every anime-lover reading this blog wet his/her pants in joy.

ScienceBlog.com — Drunks Don’t See the Monkey: “It’s pretty difficult to overlook the proverbial 800-pound gorilla, or even an average-size person dressed in a gorilla suit. But a new study indicates that people who were given a simple visual task while mildly intoxicated were twice as likely to have missed seeing the person in a gorilla suit than were people who were not under the influence of alcohol.” Lesson: never try to spot a man in a gorilla suit while tipsy. Because if you can’t spot the gorilla, what good are you?

Engadget — Korea to test 1,000 remote-controlled domestic robots: “The Ministry of Information and Communication … will begin placing 1,000 wheeled, cell-phone controlled automatons — dubbed URCs, or ubiquitous robotic companions — into households and kindergartens this fall as a trial run for new robot technologies. The URCs will do the usual handling of domestic tasks as we might expect (and some … like cleaning rooms and reading books to children), as well the usual hanging out, taking care of pets, [and more] … The only thing at all disconcerting about any of this is the fact that unlike normal household droids, these URCs will be operated wirelessly from a central computing center ala I, Robot.” Having just watched that movie agan, the thought of a remote controled robot companion isn’t one I’m at all too comfortable with.

Akihabara News — The Wonderbra powered USB keyboard: Ok, uhm… hmm. How do I… err… geez, oh man… heh… I mean… Hmm. So, like, anyways, I uhmm… hmm… How do I put this? Uhm… What?

USB powered keyboard bra with USB powered camera tail that can be switched out with other USB powered items, such a lights and memory sticks. You have to see this for yourself [Angelkitty.jp]. I guess what I’m wondering is where exactly that thing is supposed to be plugged.

KurzweilAI — Frozen Brains Awaiting Resurrection Day in Storage: (From St. Petersburg, Russia) “Kriorus, the world’s first cryonics company outside the United States, located in Alabushevo village in Russia, has two brains in cryonics storage so far. The price: $9,000.” Just what we need, Russian discount cryonics. “You want better brain? Lie down. We do operation, take out brain now. Give you new brain next week. We freeze brain now so if you want back later, you have. ”

My Heart’s in Accra — Book review: “Globalization and its Enemies”: “This is the basic question development economists try to answer. It’s a question with profound practical implications - if we could suggest strategies that consistently helped nations grow wealth, we could address a huge range of problems in education, public health and state stability. It’s also a question that both development economists and political commentators are surprisingly bad at answering.” A very thorough book review and critique by Ethan Zuckerman. Good reading for anyone involved in economics or business.

The New Yorker — How can someone live with only half a brain?: This week’s New Yorker features a particularly interesting article about the hemispherectomy operation. In this procedure, an entire side of the brain is removed as a treatment because of cancer or chronic seizures. The incredible thing is that if the hemispherectomy is done when a patient is very young, the remaining hemisphere does double duty and the child often develops normally. (This one also came by way of My Heart’s in Accra.)

Index of 1,000 Full Length Anime On YouTube: (via Digg) “There are no ads or garbage clips to weed through, just 1000 anime episodes and movies. This index includes The Animatrix, Cowboy Bebop, Ghost in the Shell, Samurai Champloo, Serial Experiments Lain, Ultimate Avengers, and more.” Not weird and not news, but I’ll be damned if I don’t put this link up.

Have you heard? A live action Transformers movie is being made. Yeah, I know — this is the last straw, probably crap, shouldn’t be done, why god why, blah, blah. I totally understand how you feel. I felt the same way! I mean, why mess with a good thing, especially one that doesn’t look anywhere nearly as good now as it did when I was a kid? (Have you seen Thundercats or Silverhawks lately? Geez!)

Anyway, that was until I saw the first trailer, just released today. (If you thought different then you’ve probably never heard of Uwe Boll.) After seeing the trailer, I’ll admit, I got pretty excited about it. Really excited.

07/04/07, baby. 7-4-7.

Newsflash Edit: Looks like the trailer was leaked in YouTube.

(Note: I would still go to the Transformers.com site and see it there. Much better quality. Still, this isn’t bad.)

Newsflash Edit 2: Looks like someone pulled the trailer from YouTube. (Gee, I wonder who.) Anyway, the only place you can see it now is at Transformers.com, which is just fine, unless you use Linux; Flash 8 is requred and Macromedia still hasn’t released it for Linux. Dumbasses.

As a side note, It’s nice to see that all my childhood media heroes are getting resurrected onto the movie screen, most of which are good movies (think Batman Begins and X-Men). This probably means that economically, generation X-ers and Y-ers are finally worthy of attention by industries that have until now been held captive by the economic power of the baby boomers.

Now that we’ve captured the movie market, maybe we can begin influencing auto makers. Why not start asking for our own Transformers? (Hybrid, of course.) Heck, if that’s too hard I’d settle for my own KITT (as in Knight Rider).

The thing is, right now the only “cool” cars are SUVs, Hummers (also known as “monster trucks”), and hybrids, depending heavily on who’s deciding what “cool” is. On the whole, hybrids are generally pretty cool. SUVs and Hummers, however, scream of middle-age soccer mom like a bald man in a convertible Corvette screams of midlife crisis. (Because SUVs and H2s have become the new Minivan. H3s just plain suck.) Maybe auto makers should start updating them to appease the GenX and GenY crowd. After all, if they’re making gas guzlers anyway, if they’re going to force us to drain all of the planet’s resources, why not at least make them appealing to us? (Suck it, Gore!) How to do that, you ask? Easy. Just have the engineers watch at all the 80’s TV shows and get them to start making that stuff. We’ll even let them start with something simple: how about adding a new “Go go Gadgetmobile” feature to the Toyota Sequoia? Call it the Sequoiavalon. Or better yet, since we’re apparently at war, (against… Iraq? Terror? Gangs? Illiteracy? The Poor? Democrats?) how about making super intelligent Hummers that come with mounted weaponry as a standard feature? (Think Airwolf, but on wheels.) Terrorists aside, this would come in handy when riding through insurgent strongholds like Detroit and New Orleans, or when trying to find a parking spot in South Beach on a Saturday night.

After all that is done, maybe we can start with the Transformers. Because, as we all know, what better way is there to fight terrorism, Detroit, New Orleans, or parking problems than with a weapon-loaded Transformer Hummer?

None. Optimus Gasguzler to the rescue, bizatch.

Some guy with way too much time on his hands put together a Star Wars vs. Star Trek video using clips from both the Star Wars movies and Star Trek shows. Absolutely hillarious, except for the part where Enterprise even begins to approximate the power of an Empirial Fleet.

Feel free to debate all its geeky goodness. You may feel free to reference (and post links to) other Star Fleet vs. Galactic Empire sites. Here’s my contribution: StarDestroyer.net.