… WTF! Human civilization is doomed. Mike Judge’s Idiocracy was prophecy! Oh shit Oh shit Oh shit Oh shit!

Nintendo pulls Christmas Wii ads in the UK because “demand is already too high.” Nintendo has stated that “production has been stepped up to 1.8 million units a month, [but] that it has not been able to meet the demand. … [R]etailers have been running out of consoles. … The game company has increased its forecast of the number of units it expects to sell in the year to March 2008 from 14 million to 17.5 million.” Holy crap … the Wii is kicking some ass in the gaming console market. Read more here

I’ve heard rumours for years that Amiga still survived in dark corners of the worlds, but it appears that it is still in the news. Amiga OS 4 is currently tied up in court and an open source bit-compatible version of Amiga OS 3.1 (called AROS … Amiga Replacement Operating System) is out on the tubes. So … Amiga Lives! (sort of).

What do you get with a Wii, a bottle of baby oil, two beautiful British women, a video camera, and a computer? Topless Wii! … Can you guess what games they are playing? Also, I have to ask, is this some sort of new Nintendo ad campaign … ’cause if it is, it’s frelling brilliant … even if a bit pervie. It certainly has my attention …

ROTFLMAO. You guys have to wander over to escapist magazine and watch Zero Punctuation’s Review of Assassin’s Creed … Literally too funny for words.

An amazing article on Gen IV nuclear reactors being designed around the world … well mostly the US, however some are being built in South Africa. The leader of the next generation, at least according to the article is the Pebble Bed Reactor. It uses “balls of uranium” covered in pyrolytic graphite. The nice elements of this reactor design are a) it is meltdown resistant. It uses helium (or nitrogen or carbon-dioxide) instead of water as a coolant. This is significant because helium is inert and thus posses no radiation risk if a coolant breach occurs. Additionally, as mentioned previously, it uses pyrolytic graphite as the neutron moderator. This is a passive system, which doesn’t require the coolant to stop a chain reaction, the reactor simply has to get hot enough and the atoms in the fuel speed up, reducing the possibility of neutron fission and allowing the uranium to absorb the neutrons, slowing down the reaction and bringing it under control. Apparently the Chinese were crazy enough to test this by shutting down their coolant system on their prototype pebble reactor and no meltdown occurred. b) using helium (or other inert/semi-inert gases) also allows greater thermal efficiency, meaning greater power generation capability. The Americans are trying to reach a temperature of 900C to 1000C, which will allow them to use the reactor to also generate hydrogen for vehicles c) spent fuel can be retrieved from the bottom of the reactor and new pebbles put into the reactor from above … all while the reactor is running. Also, the spent fuel can be recycled and put back in. d) pebble reactors are theoretically possible to use in vehicles. All pretty cool, IMO.