They got The Starfighters, Secret Agent Super Dragon, Monster A-Go-Go, The Rebel Set, and The Giant Gila Monster (which is great). None of those are my favorites, but I'd watch them again. In case you don't know what Mystery Science Theater is, watch this:

They do the same with cheesy movies—the worst they can find, la-la-lah—mostly science fiction. If you have never seen them, go check it out. If you are a fan, you are welcome. [Hulu—Thanks Bonnie]

I really doubt that many of us will send or receive Christmas cards like this one, but if you really feel like a DIY project then don't forget to get an iPhone app called Bauble. Yeah, as if buying an iPhone isn't enough, you need to get a $.99 app to make the card. [Bauble App]

Click to zoom in.

Just try to count all of those. And then multiply that number by 100 billion, the estimate of all the stars in our own galaxy. Then imagine all the worlds surrounding all those stars. And then play this video:

The image was taken in the same region as the most amazing photo Hubble Ultra Deep Field, which was taken in 2004 and is the deepest visible-light image of the universe.

Here's where the area is located:

The photo was taken in August 2009—with a total exposure of 173,000 seconds—by the new Wide Field Camera 3, which was installed by astronauts during the most dangerous shuttle mission ever. The WFC3 captures light from near-infrared wavelength which allows to see further into the Universe, as the light traveling from the most distant galaxies gets stretched "out of the ultraviolet and visible regions of the spectrum into near-infrared wavelengths by the expansion of the universe."

I would tell you what is expanding now, NASA. You and I alone. In the chat room. Now. [NASA]

BBC4's Synth Britannia was a sufficiently comprehensive look into the electronic music of postpunk Britain, from the pioneering soundtrack to "A Clockwork Orange" by Wendy Carlos, to experimental groups like OMD, Throbbing Gristle, and early Human League...

on to the pop greats that were my first real introduction to synth music, Depeche Mode and New Order. It ends in the middle '80s as synth music transitioned to club music and rave culture, getting nowhere near this decade's full-circle acceptance of '80s synth and chip sounds in pop.

A lovely way to spend 90 minutes, especially for dorks of a certain age who felt a kinship between early synth pop and the captivating other of both Britain and anything electronic. Too bad it's not available for watching on the BBC's iPlayer. You'll have to check the box where you keep your synthesized television experience.

First of all, these guys haven't done anything yet. They've just announced their plans to play nice and work together. Those demos we've seen? Those were done by individual companies, so they need to figure out a way to make everything standard.

And just where will these digital magazines be distributed? On the theoretical Apple Tablet? On the Kindle or Nook? None of these are great options. Apple, Amazon and Barnes and Noble are all pretty deeply in the content-delivery business, and they may not be all that excited to have these publishers invading their territory. And, well, the Kindle and Nook are in no way designed to handle the sort of multimedia package that we've seen demos of.

And all of this is based on the idea that people will actually be willing to pay for these "digital magazines," which I don't think they will be. The magazine industry seems to think that by taking content that works perfectly fine on websites—text, images and video—and mushing them into a weird version of page-based magazines, people will treat them like the old format and will be willing to pay for them. I doubt it. The traditional magazine format was designed for paper magazines, and that format doesn't make sense digitally.

But hey, maybe I'm dead wrong. They could make a super-slick program that works on upcoming tablets, making reading magazine articles an exciting venture that people will suddenly be willing to shell out money for. I just doubt it. [All Things D]

As a bonus: Enjoy Sir Richard Branson with his blonde wig—come on, nobody can have such perfect hair, and be so dashing—and the legendary Burt Rutan and his even-more-legendary muttonchops. These guys, my friends, are making history right now. And I'm talking about taking humans to the stars, not hairstyle history. Sure, it's suborbital fight, but you have to start somewhere. These people are the ones really pushing the envelope forward.

Check the still pictures here.

I just saw SpaceShipTwo. It's very large and shiny. It's really impressive mounted to the mothership, makes Eve look right.

What you are seeing here is the rehearsal for the presentation of Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo, the first space airliner in history. It will happen tonight, so stay tuned for images of this new spectacular aircraft, hopefully the beginning of a long series yet to come.

UPDATE:

• Watch the photos of SpaceShipTwo here.
• Watch the video here.

[Flickr and Twitter via Hyperbola]

Katie pressed the record against re-frozen ice plates instead of vinyl. Then she played them on two turntables until they melted over the course of two hours.

Update: Reader Wolfgang Oblasser wrote to say that Austrian artist Claudia Märzendorfer also uses ice for pressing records.

I know, pointless. And that's exactly why I love it. [Katie Paterson via I'm Revolting via Today and Tomorrow]

As demonstrated in the video above, the fix shouldn't take more than a minute, or a few minutes, if you're being very careful. It's basically just pushing in a bit on a small metal piece that, when too far out, makes it easy for your battery to slide right off. You'll want to be careful, of course, and especially with your SIM card so close by, but if you've had the unpleasant experience of a falling battery cover, this fix might just be what the (DIY) doctor ordered.

Found another fix for your Droid's battery cover slippage? Tell us about it in the comments.

The playback is smooth, the sound apt. Iron out some of the interface quirks we spotted last week in that video and we'll have a nice little platform for OEMs to work with once Creative options this thing out into the ether. [Mobile990 via Engadget]

Resolution aka 720p vs. 1080i vs. 1080p
Resolution is pretty simple—it's the number of individual dots (pixels) that make up a display, arranged in a grid. However, when it comes to TVs, we tend talk about it in a slightly weird way, as lines of resolution (think of a FourSquare board), and we tend to do it in shorthand. So, for instance, what's considered "standard definition" is a resolution of 640 x 480, which refers to 640 vertical lines, and 480 horizontal lines. A 720p TV has 720 horizontal lines of resolution, and most typically, 1280 vertical ones. A 1080i or 1080p TV is 1920 x 1080. And the whole 1080i vs. 1080p thing—i stands for interlaced, where only every other line of resolution is displayed, while p is for progressive scan, where the whole picture's displayed at once. Really, since even the cheapest sets are progressive now, you don't have to worry about it.

An important thing to consider, however, is the Lechner Distance, or the distance at which your eye can actually process all of the detail in a 1080i/p resolution image. While you should consult the chart, basically, if you're sitting further back than 7 feet from a 52-inch TV, your eyeballs can't actually resolve the difference between 720p and 1080p, so you might as well save the cash.

Motion Resolution
A somewhat trickier spec that some TV experts swear by, it refers to how well a set's resolution holds up when stuff's actually moving on the screen, like a baseball player running down a field. Plasmas tend to have better native motion resolution than LCD, but LCD has been fixing this problem. (See "hertz," below.)

Viewing Angle
Basically, it's how far to each side of the TV you can be and still see the picture, measured in an angle that is, naturally, less than 180º. Again, traditionally this was more of an LCD problem than a plasma one, but all TV technologies have had some issues in the past, and the worst offenders used to be DLP and other microdisplays.

To see viewing angle at work, start where the picture on a TV looks best, and move to one side—now note where the picture starts looking weird, with the colors changing, washing out and getting hard to see. Nicer sets reach nearly 180º, so plenty of people can take part in the HD glory.

Hertz, or What 120Hz and 240Hz Mean
Hertz is basically just the number of times the image onscreen refreshes a second. Because of broadcast standards, TVs in the US need to be 60Hz, meaning they refresh the image onscreen 60 times a second. (In Europe, the standard is 50Hz.) Video sources are generally 30 or 60 frames per second, because of this, and a regular video camera shoots at 60fps a second. So typically, 60Hz sets are the norm.

Lately, though you have 120Hz, and even 240Hz sets, all of them LCDs. They do this to increase motion resolution—see above. A 120Hz TV refreshes 120 times a second, and it comes up with those extra frames by making them up—either duping the frames that are there and putting black spaces in between, or by splicing in intermediary frames that are basically realtime morphs of the two frames they come between. Stuff looks really smooth—sometimes too smooth, true—but the point's to fight LCD's motion blur disadvantage against plasma.

240Hz is another ball of sticky still, promising less motion blur, but with a tradeoff. but there are two different ways to achieve it. One way's kind of cheating, in that it's a 120Hz that uses a flashing backlight to simulate 240 frames a second. The other, more "legit" 240Hz is genuinely faster, with images staying up on the screen for just 4ms before moving to the next. There's no real way to tell which kind of 240Hz a TV uses (though a "scanning backlight" is a tip off it's not the "real" 240Hz). There is a law of diminishing returns in reducing motion blur as you climb past 240Hz, but for some serious AV nerds, like Home Entertainment's Geoff Morrison, it does make LCD TVs more watchable.

Plasma TV brands sometimes boast "600Hz," but that's mostly to show off to LCD shoppers that these kinds of motion-blur refresh problems are really specific to LCD. It's not so much a spec as a declaration of the tech's superiority in this department.

To make things just a tad weirder for you, films have been shot since ancient times at 24 frames per second, so many TVs have a 24P mode, meaning the screen refreshes 24 frames per second, or in multiples thereof. (Any mathmagician can tell you that both 120 and 240 are divisible by 24.)

Plasma
The basic way plasmas work is that there's a party of noble gases trapped between two glass panels that are zapped and light up all pretty. More practically, what plasmas offer over LCDs is superior color (often), better motion (typically) and deeper blacks (always and forever, with a couple of exceptions). The tradeoff is that they're more power hungry, and generally heavier.

The life-or-death questions people have about plasmas are almost mythical now: Burn-in, where an image is permanently etched into the panel after being left up on screen too long isn't really problem anymore (unless you're sadistic to your TV). The "Denver problem," where high altitudes affect sets, is less of an issue, but it exists: If you live at 6,000 feet or higher, you should read this summary by our friend David Katzmaier at CNet. Panel half-life is a very long time, now, about the same as LCD's backlight (which, of course, could be replaced, but we're talking like 10 year out). When it comes to the cheapest TVs, 720p plasmas are hands-down the safest bet for best picture quality.

LCD
The people's HDTV technology, LCD, stands for liquid crystal display. The liquid crystal part is a gel that sits in front of a backlight, which is divided up into pixels. There are two main kinds of backlights used, CCFL (pictured, via Home Theater Mag) which are like the lights in your high school cafeteria), and LED, which we talk a bit more about below. There are two major kinds of LCD displays. There's the traditional twisted nematic kind (TNT), which is cheaper and known for faster response times, and then there's in-panel switching (IPS), which is more expensive and usually slower response times, buuut it's got a wider viewing angle and better colors.

On a broader level, the stuff to consider with LCD when it comes to actually buying a TV, is that, on the cheap side, LCDs tend to have worse motion and less excellent contrast ratios than plasma. You step up a bit, and it starts to even out. Especially if you pony up for the best of the best LCD TVs, typically lit up by LEDs. LCDs in general are way more eco-friendly, slimmer, and—because of their backlights—better to watch in environments where you're gonna have a ton of light spilling in.

DLP
DLP is a rear-projection technology made by Texas Instruments that creates the image onscreen using a whole bunch of tiny mirrors that reflect light through a lens. The big thing about DLP sets is that they're, um, big and for cheap—a 65-inch DLP set is just $1500. But you're probably not gonna be mounting this sucker either.

DLP is the last survivor of the "microdisplay" projection TVs, that also included LCD and LCOS techologies. They are great on contrast, but they got killed by flat panel because you can't make them an inch thick.

Laser TVs
Mitsubishi's LaserVue TV is a microdisplay projection set (with a DLP chip) that is lit up by lasers instead of just focused light. Thanks to this, it delivers some of the most amazing colors and deepest blacks possible, as good as plasma sets, but at a ridiculously low power consumption. Sadly, you'll probably never buy one, and not just because it's $5000 for a 65-inch set.

Contrast Ratio
So, technically, contrast ratio is just the ratio between the brightest and darkest images a display is capable of showing, which sounds like an objective enough specification. But like many specifications, this one has been turned into a marketing tool, and subverted to a point where it is not helpful. In the lab, there are several kinds of contrast ratios: Static, which is the ratio between the brightest and darkest a screen can display simultaneously, and dynamic, which is the darkest and lightest a screen can ever be at any given time. Sadly, it's this latter figure that most TV makers brazenly display on their boxes, to the tune of ridiculous numbers like 1,000,000:1 (or more). It's utterly meaningless, and you're better off ignoring it.

OLED
It's the beautiful future of television, but vastly too expensive for anyone but CEOs to own right now because OLED displays are really hard (read: expensive) to make at large sizes. "OLED" stands for organic light-emitting diode, and what's special is that the individual pixels light up by themselves, like plasma, but can be laid out on a single sheet of glass (or plastic), like LCD, so they get the best of both: They're super thin, they don't need a backlight, they have higher contrast, and they're energy efficient too. Also, they may one day—soon—be bendy!

LED TVs or LED Backlighting
While a standard LCD set is lit up by a cold-cathode fluorescent lamp (think dreary lighting from high school), the best LCD sets use LEDs (light-emitting diodes). They can be configured a few different ways: Edge-lit, where the LEDs are arranged in strips along the sides of the TV, and allow it to be super-thin; and backlit, where a grid array of hundreds of LEDs sits behind the screen and, with local dimming, where clusters of lights turn on and off individually, offers the best LCD money can buy. Three of the five best TVs you can buy are LED-lit, if that tells you anything. And no, they're not cheap.

3D
If you thought you heard a metric shitton about 3D this year, just wait for 2010. We have a giant primer on 3D tech right here, but there's just a couple you really need to know. Polarized 3D glasses are the cheap 3D for the masses—i.e., IMAX—where two synced projectors throw out two different images are slightly different polarizations that can only be seen by one eye at a time, making your brain see stuff in 3D without that annoying red/blue thing.

And while we kinda made fun of them, shutter glasses are actually the way 3D is moving in nicer implementations, from Panasonic and Nvidia, among others. Essentially, the glasses are battery powered, and shutters blink rapidly over each eye timed to the refresh rate of the display, so each eye sees a slightly different image as the shutter opens. It works better on plasma than LCD (even 120Hz models), in our experience.

Anti-Glare vs. Anti-Reflective
Anti-glare and anti-reflective displays, surprisingly are not the same thing. Anti-glare displays often try to diffuse light coming at a display with a treated or textured surface, almost like a "matte" finish. It's about cutting back external light hitting the display, but the tradeoff is that the picture coming through may not be as clear. Anti-reflective deals with light that comes from the display itself, as well as external light, and handles this with special coatings or films that minimize reflections from all angles to make the picture clearer. (Just think about eyeglasses, with that greenish coating. Same idea.)

HDMI
Honestly, the only thing you really need to know about but the High-Definition Multimedia Interface—you know, HDMI—is that the cables in most retail stores cost waaaaaay too much. If you pay anything over $10 for an HDMI cable, you are getting suckered. Order cheaper cables from Monoprice.com and other retailers—they do just fine as long as you're not installing them inside your walls. (If you're doing that, you should pick something heavily coated and insulated, and built to last a few generations of TV.) Oh, and there's a new version coming out—HDMI 1.4—that supports higher resolutions and internet. Not only will that require brand new HDMI cables, it will require new TVs and new content too, so it's a ways off.

Other HDTV Guides

• 5 Best HDTVs Under $1000
• 5 Best HDTVs Period
• The Difference Between a $600 and a $6000 TV
• How to Buy an HDTV Today (or Any Day)
• Picking an HDTV Like a Pro
• How to Set Up Your New HDTV
• How to Calibrate Your New TV

Still something you wanna know? Send questions about HD, VD, and KFC here, with "Giz Explains" in the subject line.

But then again, that will be full of spooky planets too, emitting the same blood-curdling sounds. This music was recorded by Voyager I and II as they crossed paths with Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune. They weren't captured with a microphone: Audible sound can't travel through space, so Voyager was listening to the electromagnetic waves around the planets and moons. Waves produced by space phenomena, like the planet's magnetospheres interacting with the Sun's radiation.

They were released in the 90s as the "Voyager Recordings - Symphonies of the Planets," but they are not for sale anymore. You can look for them on the internet, however. [How Stuff Works]

Apparently the facial movements and accompanying audio are on a 15 minute loop, and they even sing together. Oookay. [Mute Magazine and YouTube via Engadget]

This nausea-inducing iPod can be seen at Art Basel Miami Beach, which runs December 3rd to December 6th and shows a selection from more than 250 worldwide galleries. I'm not sure who's responsible for this great riff on the iPod, but I'll be sure to thank them when the room stops spinning. [Thanks, Buster!]

I have a Droid, and like it a lot, but I'm a little concerned that these ads are alienating buyers by making the phone seem a lot more complex and threatening than it really is. To a first-time buyer, smartphones are a pretty intimidating purchase, and while I understand the impulse to differentiate the Droid from the cute-as-a-button, simple-as-can-be iPhone commercials, the Droid commercials may be going too far in the opposite direction with the whole DROID SMASH aesthetic. But that's just me, and, well, I bought one anyway—what do you guys think? [YouTube]

The phone looks tiny, especially compared to the iPhone-sized Creative Zii Egg, but it seems the kinks haven't quite been worked out—some gestures, like swiping between homepages, result in opening the app tray by mistake. But the hardware looks nice, if a little generic (although it's probably designed to be generic, since it'll be optioned by different OEMs). I like the idea of the swappable microUSB/mini-HDMI port on the bottom, but time will tell if that feature stays in the final product. [CNET Asia via Engadget]

Not only the first class is actually a super-first class with seats bigger than my apartment, but the Airbus A380 is so huge that Emirates' business class actually feels like the first class from the rest of the airlines. I have to admit that, despite all that horrible gold and rose wood naffness, I'm impressed. [FlightGlobal]

Feather is the name of YouTube's new lightweight version of the video streaming site. You can try it out now via Google's TestTube collection of beta trials.

What you lose with the lightweight option is the ability to view videos in High Quality, and most of the commenting and sharing options have been stripped out. But hell, that's a small price to play for being able to watch the above gem on your $249 netbook, right? [YouTube Feather via All Things D]

The only way to create something with this sort of complexity is rapid prototyping—and laser sintering, to be exact. The process works by sweeping a laser across a pan of powdered nylon; when the lasers hit the nylon, it fuses ("sinters"). The process repeats in layers, until the final product emerges. Thus, you can create interlocking shapes all at once—for example, a chain whose links are completely closed.

Dror created the lamp for Materialise.MGX, which specialises in producing furniture using laser sintering. The lamp shade itself is designed so that the cubes are densest in the center—thus diffusing the light simply by overlapping.

[FastCompany]

OK, maybe I just dreamed that one, but this electrically powered painting frame—all made in wood, including some beautiful gear action—is real. Or is it? I don't know. I need to stop sniffing glue with my flakes. [Dugnorth via Makezine]

Yes, Friendster is prepping for a big ol' relaunch tomorrow, using a brand new logo and a new slogan, "Connecting Smiles." Hoo boy.

Apparently, they're trying to make it more customizable than Facebook. So...like MySpace? Based on the above video, it looks exactly like Facebook, just with customizable skins and backgrounds, like MySpace. Oh, and it's aimed pretty hard at Asians, as Asia is the only place where the Friendster brand has any cachet these days, apparently.

I don't know about you guys, but I'm deleting my Facebook account tonight in anticipation. I hope all my friends will be waiting for me at Friendster! With any luck, they were too lazy to delete their accounts back when Friendster became totally irrelevant years ago. [Friendster via TechCrunch]

Based on Flash, it looks like a simplified OS that almost makes us think of the Zune interface. A bit slow and buggy in places, we think it's got potential fo' sho', but what do you think? [MobiFrance]

The C300 SSDs, available in 128GB and 256GB capacities when they're released sometime early next year, whups the current top dogs in read/write speeds. It's also the first to take advantage of the new SATA 3.0, which allows 6Gb/s throughput, twice that of SATA 2.0—but regardless of whether it's using 2.0 or 3.0, it's still blazingly fast. It's rated at 355MB/s read and 215MB/s write—for comparison, the champ, OCZ's Agility EX, gets 255MB/s and 195MB/s read and write speeds, respectively. You can see it compared with "a market leader" (probably either the OCZ or maybe Intel's X25-M) here:

By using the new ONFI 2.1 specification, it's also got nearly five times the data speed per transfer, which is basically means you'll be seeing improved performance while multitasking.

The C300 series is expensive, obviously, at about $350 for the 128GB and $715 for the 256GB (and then only when bought in bulk), but it's a pretty incredible performer—hopefully we'll be seeing it in some equally impressive laptops when it's released next year. [Micron]

They've been working on these Active Protection Systems for a while now, but this is the first that works on a moving vehicle. As Danger Room details, It uses radar, optical sensors and some other secret elements to detect projectiles. It then destroys them right before impact, creating an explosion but one that is much less harmful to the vehicle.

But don't take my word for it, check out the bananas video of it in action above. [Danger Room via BotJunkie]

That's what Dana Hanna—the guy in the video aka "theSoftwareJedi" aka "Ican'tbelieveit'sbutterandI'mgettingmarried"—did, without his bride knowing anything about it. The worse thing: The wife asked for her cellphone to update hers. Maybe she tweeted "Sigh. This is not going to last long."

It's like the world has transformed into a huge sitcom. One produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, directed by McG, and written by two thousand monkeys. Oh well, my best wishes go for the couple. I hope you guys don't divorce too soon. [Techcrunch]

I mean, if I were God, I would go live there: A well illuminated apartment, with a nice kitchen in which to cook some new stars, and a sunny beach. But since I'm agnostic, I will tell you that this nebula is just a titanic group of particles, with sizes ranging from ten to a hundred times smaller than a Earth dust grain. It doesn't emit anything: NGC 7023 just reflects the light from HD 200775, a nearby magnitude +7 superstar.

The Iris Nebula was first discovered in 1794 by Sir William Herschel, this is the first closeup, taken by the Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys. Scientists are now studying its composition—which is formed by an unknown hydrocarbon-based compound—using Hubble's infrared camera. [Hubble]

Called The Battle of the Brick, the movie features Red and Blue battling it out (but of course!), and is an extension of Kobbs' shorter Lego Halo efforts. It's expected to hit the Web early 2010, and you can keep up with the latest over at: [Kooberz Studio Blog via Kotaku]

This is the Altair moon lander simulator, the newest, most exciting toy for astronauts planning to go to the Moon and beyond. It's also one of the most difficult arcade games they can play, requiring landings within 10 feet of the target coordinates.

Built on the Vertical Motion Simulator at the NASA Ames Research Center, the sim has an internal layout similar to the real Altair's, which itself is very similar to the old Apollo Lunar Module. As in the LM, astronauts have to stand up looking down small windows. Unlike in the LM, however, most controls seem to be placed in touchscreens. I don't know about the astronauts, but I like the old school buttons and switches in the Lunar Module a lot better. Click. Click. CLICK. [CNET via Hyperbola]

Update: Okay, after seeing how many of you know about this already, I guess I could have had one of these as a kid. But I didn't. Maybe it's a relaunch of a long-lost tool. Or maybe it's been around forever. Either way, I still think it's neato.

This thing got announced video popped up way back in March, and I'm amazed we missed it up until now. The device has four trays with square holes along the bottom. These openings get progressively smaller to sort out the bricks by size. And that's really all there is to it. Genius.

Sounds good, and according to the Brothers Brick, it works well too. They found it does a great job sorting a kid's collection, and even works well as pre-sorter for more complex adult collections.

Seems like cool beans, but we'll have to let Jesus take a crack at it. Then, and only then, will we have the ultimate judgement. [Brothers Brick, Youtube via @chr1sa]