As a kid, I used to pretend I was Luke Skywalker, using the Force to save the universe from the forces of the evil empire. As I got older, I realised that being Vader would be better (until the prequels came out at least) because he had power. But obviously that power didn’t come to him straight away, as this Volkswagen commercial shows. More »
R2 is squealing at me. Honest-to-God stormtroopers are standing guard nearby. Perfect conditions to prove that I’ve outgrown my Padawan pants, and can now move a plastic ball with my mind like a real Jedi.
“Wow!” was basically my reaction to this video of the Fly Stick levitating toy in action, followed by the realisation that this is about as near as you’ll ever get to really playing with magic (or the Force, my inner geek reminded me). Of course the forces it uses are all very real: it’s a mini battery-powered Van der Graaf generator, and it uses electrostatic repulsion to keep some 3D mylar shapes aloft. So you don’t need to utter “wingardium leviosa!” or indeed “use the force!” to make it work, but that’s not going to stop hundreds of delighted users from doing so, now is it? Out now for $US27. [ThinkGeek via OhGizmo]
newVideoPlayer("clonewars3d_gizmodo.flv", 475, 376,"");Feast your eyes—squinting a bit—on the leaked two-minute trailer that was briefly seen in YouTube and then pulled off just to be rescued at the last minute by a Polish Corvette, saved into an astromech droid, launched onto a desert planet, and found by us in a garage sale somewhere in Kraków. Or something like that. The trailer further shows the work of the three hundred 3D animators who have been working on this project at Lucasfilm Animation for the past three years. And except for its lousy quality it, it seems that we are in for a ride (here’s hoping Mr. Lucas didn’t write the dialog.)
CERN’s scientists, the fine people who brought us the W and Z particles, anti-hydrogen atoms and hyperlinked porn sites web pages, are now hard at work building the Large Hadron Collider to discover something even cooler: the Force. Yes, that Force. Or like physicists call it, the Higgs boson, a particle that carries a field which interacts with every living or inert matter, which could bring us closer to understanding how the Universe works:
