Noted scientist Kate Mulgrew and several actual scientists are horrified to discover that they’re starring in a quack-science movie (no relation to actual Quack Science, as practiced by all right-thinking ducks). For more fun, the person behind the movie is a Holocaust denier and frothing anti-semite.

But this is the best part (emphasis added):

Following confusion as to why Mulgrew, a life-long Democrat, chose to narrate the film scientists have described as "garbage", the actress posted a statement on her Facebook page denying she was a geocentrist or "in any way a proponent of geocentrism".

So, the author of this piece apparently believes “Democrat” is synonymous with “scientifically literate” and “possesses critical thinking skills”.

Your automatic metadata matching system is complete crap. Just thought I’d mention that.

So, the music video named Shy Boy by the girl-group Secret got matched to a 1931 movie named Local Boy Makes Good. Similarly, Hyuna’s Bubble Pop became the action/comedy film Knight And Day. Hoot, by Girls Generation, became the 2006 children’s film Hoot, and their song Gee became a Jane Fonda movie called Georgia Rule. Worst of all, perhaps, Leonard Nimoy singing Bilbo Baggins became the animated version of The Hobbit. In all of these cases, a four-minute video is being mistaken for a full-length ripped movie, based on some fairly vague keywords, and there’s no easy way to undo it; you basically have to start over to get rid of the downloaded image and phony metadata.

The academic feminists who view everything through the lens of usually-imaginary oppression would surely not tolerate something like this if it happened to a girl:

A single woman over the age of thirty promises a young boy a ride in her beautiful boat, in order to get her hands on his magic flute.

Yes, I bought the Amazon Fire TV as soon as it was announced. It’s tiny, sleek, a pleasure to unpack and set up, and very responsive. I haven’t tried the optional game controller yet, but I did buy one, and you get a free game with it.

The voice search works quite well, in my limited testing. Sadly, while it correctly recognizes “Stargate SG-1”, it cannot directly navigate to “Stargate SG-1 Season 4 Episode 6”. Someday.

Also, it doesn’t appear that the Crunchyroll app has been ported yet, which means that the anime selection is mostly limited to dubs. I hadn’t realized how wretched the voice of Hermes was in the dub of Kino’s Journey.

[Update: I took it over to a friend’s house, and we couldn’t get any audio over HDMI, using two different cables. Works fine at my house, completely silent at his. We tried every option that was available on both his TV and the Fire TV, but no luck. I don’t see any mention of the problem anywhere yet, so it may be limited to a specific hardware configuration.]

From the blog of Muku Flooring comes this charming picture of the statue outside Iwakuni High School Memorial Hall, a kendo dojo. It most likely predates modern anime, but would fit right in…

[Update: It’s Sasaki Kojiro, the opponent in one of Musashi’s most famous duels, the one that gave birth to the popular “carved oar” heavy training bokken. The statue is apparently a bit of a tourist attraction.]

"Don't say these terrible things that wound me psychologically," we say. "I'm going out of town for a week and keeping my door unlocked. Please don't rob my house," is what the troll hears.

(via)

Microsoft finally released the Surface Power Cover recently, and it was worth the wait.

There is only one downside: the keys aren’t backlit, like the standard Touch and Type Covers. I can’t imagine why they did this, since the set of people who want significantly more battery life and don’t want a backlighting option has to be pretty small.

Physically, it’s twice as thick and twice as heavy as the standard Type Cover, giving my Surface Pro 2 more of a netbook feel to carry, but not unpleasantly so. It came with a warning label telling you to make sure you have all the latest software updates before attaching it, but since I preordered mine the moment they flipped the switch on the Microsoft site, I got it the day before the official release date, and the firmware updates didn’t show up until the next day. It worked fine, though, and after the update, the battery levels were tracked separately.

How well does it work? Well, I just finished 45 minutes on the elliptical with a ripped Bluray disc playing, at 2/3 volume and 100% brightness, with WiFi turned on. The system reported that I had just over 15 hours of battery life left, and based on how the Pro 2 has performed the past few months, I believe it.