In a move that should earn them national kudos, MIT-goer Oliver Yeh and his equally brainy friend, Justin Lee, grabbed these images of earth by putting a cell phone into a Styrofoam box, stuffing the box with disposable hand warmers and attaching it all to a helium balloon. The camera snapped a picture every 5 seconds for a journey 17 miles above the planet and back after the balloon popped. A GPS in the phone helped track it all down. And it only cost $150!

Meanwhile, NASA's over paid nerds are looking to build a base on the moon, which will serve as a stop-off station for missions to Mars, a trip that will itself make astronauts radioactive. To achieve all of their unnecessary and harebrained schemes, NASA would need another $3 billion a year. MIT costs about $48,000 a year — give or take a few grand.

Wouldn't the country be better off just sending kids to MIT and receiving these pictures in return, rather than sending red-blooded Americans into space to become the Fantastic Four? Who needs that dang universe, anyway?

The graphic-novel-based movie saw its U.S. box office receipts fall 67 percent, while overseas the film fell 50 percent. So far, it has grossed $134 million in 10 days. It cost $200 million to make and market.

Box office normally falls in a film's second week, but Variety cites figures showing this tumble is especially bad.

Sorry, nerds: Warner Brothers might have made a hash of your beloved comic-book masterpiece, but the only lesson most studio heads will glean from its failure is that you're a finicky bunch who can't be trusted to reliably carry smash hits. All movies will be made for chuckling jocks and vapid celebutante-wannabes for the rest of the depression.

(Image via alt.nerd.obsessive)

Obviously, Fallon will have to rein it in. He can't be cracking up at his own jokes as he did on SNL. But maybe he can turn nerdishness in his favor.

Fallon's co-producer, G4 channel (read: nerd TV) veteran Gavin Purcell, walked Silicon Alley Insider's Nicholas Carlson through part of the strategy:

• The show will respond rapidly to internet memes, like "Kenneth" from 30 Rock appeared on a test show less than 24 hours after the "Bobby Jindal sounds like Kenneth the Page" observation spread all over the internet.
  
• The shoe will embrace gadgetry: A skit in a test show hinged on Skype video conferencing; Fallon's producers would also like to book nerd-friendly guests like Apple CEO Steve Jobs and Amazon's Jeff Bezos.
  
• The show hired a bunch of bloggers (to blog) and is on Twitter, Facebook, etc. Basically all TV shows are trying to jump on various online bandwagons these days but it sounds like Fallon is pushing further, faster.

Gillian Reagan of the Observer also noticed some of Fallon's geek moves back in January:

• Fallon promoted his show on the Diggnation podcast.
  
• The host created a War of Warcraft character, and videoblogged about it.
  
• He said during a winter press junket, "I think our show is going to bea lot more tech, gadgetry talk."

Fallon still needs traditional showbiz skills. During his most last appearance on predecessor Conan O'Brien's Late Night, his raw-nerved jumpiness was almost frightening.

But Fallon's been practicing, making a series of Webisodes, which seems to have improved his delivery over time. And as the old SNL clip below illustrates, he's worked his geeky side effectively in the service of comedy before.

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles is a spin-off of the movies, obviously. It takes place a few years after T2, when John is an angsty teen and he has a new sexy Terminatrix named Cameron (Summer Glau from Firefly) who watches over him. I started watching this on Hulu when very bored one day during work approved free time, and got addicted. Lena Headey is badass and gunslinging as mama Sarah, Glau is creepy and appropriately robotic, Thomas Dekker is kinda crute, and, whoa!, Leven Rambin, Mary's terrible boyfriend-stealing sister, actually isn't bad. But the real good stuff right now is Garbage's Shirley Manson as an evil secret robot CEO and (be still beating body parts) 90210 alum Brian Austin Green as John's uncle from the future. He's grizzled and scruffy and looks better than ever. Plus, you know, he can actually act. I know the whole thing sounds dumb as hell, but the show is actually pretty enjoyable, what with all the shooting and big guns and stuff. Fun for, you know, a sad sober Friday stay-at-home.

The other nerdsville show last night was the series premiere of Joss "Buffy" Whedon's new paean to slinky, ass-kicking ladies, Dollhouse. It stars a surprisingly (like, seriously surprisingly) capable Eliza Dushku as a girl named Echo who is constantly reprogrammed with a new personality to carry out various tasks for a shadowy, wish-granting (sorta) company. Last night's episode was engaging, if a bit peculiar. If she's a new person all the time, how do we get to know "her"? I'll keep watching, though, because the new-every-week format is interesting, and I'm curious about the barely-teased-at-in-the-last-few-seconds mythology arc. In the hot boyz department (I need a cold shower, apparently) is the rock-cut Tahmoh Penikett as a dogged FBI agent trying to uncover the Dollhouse. Yes, Helo from Battlestar, you fucking dweed. (Talking to myself.)

No, nasty commenters, this isn't an advertisement for Fox. The rest of their shit sucks. Fair enough? These just happen to be decent shows that are on Friday nights and it's Saturday morning and we're all just trying to get through this thing together. OK?

Last three from AP, all the rest from Getty

"Throwing around standard ILMUNC lingo - "DISEC" for the Disarmament and International Security committee, "WFP" for World Food Programme - the façade of the microphone and business-professional attire lend delegates an aura of maturity far beyond their adolescent years.

Mean, but accurate. Carry on.

["Decorum, delegates: behind the scenes at the Ivy League Model United Nations Conference"]

I mean, look at all these rich nerds with fetching Asian ladies on their arms. We don't want to sound "offensive" but it's just a thing, you know? I mean, it's not like we blame Phelps, that girl is cute in a cocktail waitress-y way (she, um, actually is a cocktail waitress). It's just fun to watch someone nestle into a cliché so fully.

He even brought her home to Mom.

If the adolescent groupthink of Diggers could be summed up, it's this: whatever Bush says is wrong, whatever the MSM says is wronger, and if the two are in agreement it's clearly the wrongest idea ever.

Contrarianism Digg is made up mostly of angry young white male nerds. That particular group is naturally contrary and anti-social. If the NORMALS want them to CONFORM, too bad! They're going to go watch V For Vendetta again because only $54 million dollar movies distributed by Time Warner subsidiaries truly understand their anti-authoritarian struggle! So if the powers that be say "Georgia Good, Russia Bad," Diggers will be inclined to specifically seek out contrary opinions, and promote them.

Anti-MSM Crusading Part of the contrarianism is their innate distrust of the Mainstream Media. This is a terribly commonplace Internet Attitude that combines the well-funded war against press credibility waged against journalism by conservatives since the Nixon days with its not-that-odd bedfellow, leftist fear-mongering about corporate consolidation of all forms of media and its result on the message fed to willing consumers. Diggers will probably not read the front-page Times story on the crisis, but they will read a blog post denouncing and debunking it.

Bush Lied The web feeds on Bush-hatred. Diggers are a libertarian-leaning bunch with pockets of radical liberalism, so hated of the entire Bush regime is deep and vitriolic. This spills over even to situations that Bush is not actually personally responsible for. So if you can mange to blame this entire situation on Bush, somehow (he PROPPED UP THE GEORGIAN MILITARY [when we trained them to help us in Iraq and Pakistan]), you've hit on the magic formula for getting Diggers to actually read something about the conflict in Georgia. Congrats! Good luck with that feeling of odd emptiness you'll experience when your personal hell demon retires to Kennebunkport.

The reasonable (or maybe mealy-mouthed concerned helpless liberal) read of the situation is that the Russians are seizing on a Georgian aggression they basically provoked and planned for in order to effect regime change, and the Georgians just pushed the Russians a little too far banking on non-existent support from NATO (sorry guys!). Unless you're on Digg, in which case the BBC and George Bush propped up a tinpan dictator in Georgia and Putin is maybe bad but he drives a totally awesome killing machine and he's not as evil as Chimpy McHitler over here.

Despite the fact that the basic facts of the evening seem to be proven, Wikipedia's power-mad power-users are immediately deleting any and all mention of the John Edwards lovechild scandal the second any other user adds it. You could go over there and add "In July of 2008, Edwards was confronted at a Beverly Hills hotel by National Enquirer reporters searching for evidence of his participation in an extra-martial affair"—all true and verified by more "reliable" sources!—and it wouldn't last two minutes. (Actually you couldn't add that. The entry has been locked.) It's not notable enough for them, apparently. Though this is. And hell, so is this!

But no, the details of the probable end of the political aspirations of one of the 2000s most visible Democratic politicians are just not as notable as the fictional history of the Wookee homeworld.

(Kudos, of course, to the enterprising editor who buried mention of this scandal in this unread entry on a book by Rielle Hunter's ex-boyfriend Jay McInerney.)

[NYT]

"The phrase was born on May 24—two days after the film opened—and it went viral on movie message boards. In barely a month, it has blown through several Web. 2.0 benchmarks: YouTube tributes, 'fridge' haikus, merch-hawking Web sites, 'Word of the Day' status on UrbanDictionary.com. 'You're expecting [the movie] to be as great as you remembered it,' says Beth Russell, creator of nukingthefridge.com, 'and after the fridge scene, it was like, Oooo-K.' A new legend is born, for all the wrong reasons." [Newsweek]

The hackers say the attack began Tuesday, when the pair used a combination of social engineering and a technical hack to get into Comcast's domain management console at Network Solutions. They declined to detail their technique, but said it relied on a flaw at the Virginia-based domain registrar.

...However they got in, the intrusion gave the pair control of over 200 domain names owned by Comcast. They changed the contact information for one of them, Comcast.net, to Defiant's e-mail address; for the street address, they used the "Dildo Room" at "69 Dick Tard Lane."

Comcast, they said, noticed the administrative transfer and wrested back control, forcing the hackers to repeat the exploit to regain ownership of the domain. Then, they say, they contacted Comcast's original technical contact at his home number to tell him what they'd done.

When the Comcast manager scoffed at their claim and hung up on them, 18-year-old EBK decided to take the more drastic measure of redirecting the site's traffic to servers under their control. (Comcast would neither confirm nor deny the warning phone call.)

"If he wasn't such a prick, he could have avoided all of that," says EBK. "I wasn't even really thinking. Plus, I'm just so mad at Comcast. I'm tired of their shitty service."