Star Wars in ASCII Sunday, March 30, 2008

This has got to be one of the geekiest things ever: there's a telnet server that broadcasts Star Wars Episode IV in ASCII text. Open a command prompt and type telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl and you will be treated to the entire movie in ASCII art. No joke.

This slice of geek heaven brought to you by the Red Bull by way of Lifehacker. That rocks. Never... ever... underestimate the power of the bored geek.

Starships to Scale Wednesday, June 21, 2006

So wonderfully geeky, I had to post it: Starship Dimensions, a site that compares ships from different science fiction worlds:

This site is intended to allow science fiction fans to get an impression of the true scale of their favorite science fiction spacecraft by being able to compare ships across genres, as well as being able to compare them with contemporary objects with which they are probably familiar.

Enterprise, Serenity, Rama, the Death Star... they're all there, drawn to scale. Never underestimate the ambition of a bored geek.

Death Star Energy Tuesday, June 13, 2006

Like Neil Simon did when he described Mississipi's weather as "Africa hot," I'm using a proper noun as a description of scale. Death Star energy is a lot of energy. Like a lot-lot. Enough to blow up a planet. But just how much energy is that? Luckily, we have bored geeks to answer these vital questions for us. Thanks to a link provided by Furrygoat, we now know that the Death Star had to generate about 2.4 × 10³² joules of energy in order to disperse the mass of Alderaan fast enough to overcome the forces of gravity keeping the planet together. If you don't believe me, you can check the math here.

Sure, 240 nonillion joules sounds like a big number, but just how big is that? Well, let's see. It's enough energy to power the entire world for a trillion years (based on 2001 numbers), about a tenth of the kinetic energy of the Earth as it hurtles around the sun in its orbit, or the equivalent of exploding over a quadrillion of the largest nuclear devices ever detonated simultaneously.