Agricola, the fantastic worker-placement farming game, hit the iTunes store this today! In the game, you take on the role of a 17th-century farmer, expanding your family, growing crops, and raising livestock—oh, and try not to starve while you’re at it.

Playdek decided to forgo the literal translation of game to app and opted for a layout that looks like a town instead. You can still turn on text boxes to see descriptions of each location, or you can tap on those to see the actual card from the game. I can tell it’ll take a little time to get used to the layout and icons, but the artwork does look a lot like the actual game, too.

The farm is much like the board in the physical game, except that to the left of your house there are slots for improvements like the ovens and so on. (You may be pleased to note that, yes, even in the app version some of the rooms include people playing Bohnanza.)

You have options for playing offline and online, with a solo play track available also, and profiles allow multiple people to track their own stats separately. I’ve only gotten to play around briefly so far, but the tutorial looks pretty solid and fans of the physical game will appreciate the quick setup time—plus the fact that you won’t have all those bits to sort and put away.

Agricola works for both iPhone and iPad (though I’d recommend the larger screen myself), and is $6.99 on the iTunes Store.

Disclosure: GeekDad received a copy of the game for review purposes.

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schwit1 writes with a followup to a story we discussed in April about how using voice-activated texting while driving was no safer than using your hands. Now, a study by AAA has found that using voice commands to send texts is more dangerous than simply talking on your cellphone. "Texting a friend verbally while behind the wheel caused a 'large' amount of mental distraction compared with 'moderate/significant' for holding a phone conversation or talking with a passenger and 'small' when listening to music or an audio book, the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety found in a report released today. Automakers have promoted voice-based messaging as a safer alternative to taking hands off the wheel to place a call and talk on a handheld phone. About 9 million infotainment systems will be shipped this year in cars sold worldwide, with that number projected to rise to more than 62 million by 2018, according to a March report by London-based ABI Research. 'As we push towards these hands-free systems, we may be solving one problem while creating another,' said Joel Cooper, a University of Utah assistant research professor who worked on the study. 'Tread lightly. There's a lot of rush to develop these systems.' The findings from the largest U.S. motorist group bolster National Transportation Safety Board Chairman Deborah Hersman's call to ban all phone conversations behind the wheel, even with hands-free devices."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Artist Claire Moynihan lives and works in rural Hertfordshire, England where she creates tiny sculptural insects and snails on felt balls using a variety of freeform embroidery techniques. After completing a collection of work Moynihan then organizes the pieces inside traditional entomological boxes which from a distance could almost pass for the real thing. See much more of her work in her gallery. (via lustik)

kim-jong-chill:

this is the best instagram

If there are two things I love about nerd folk, they’re surely Angela and Aubrey Webber. (See what I did there, internet?!) The sisters, also known as Portland-based duo The Doubleclicks, recently released a new music video for the track “Lasers and Feelings,” and it’s a love song for the super villain in all of us.

Peep the video below, and don’t forget to catch the ‘Clicks on tour this summer with Marian Call, Joseph Scrimshaw and Sarah Donner!

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Rocket Man. Mr. Tambourine Man. Even My Way.

William Shatner has performed and, according to some, butchered many a perfectly good song. His “stylings,” as he calls them, are part over-the-top dramatic readings, part over-acted poppycock. And yet we love him for it.

Now, Shatner’s taken on kid lit.

At the recent Denver Comic Con, on June 2, William Shatner arrived unexpectedly at the children’s story time stage (aka the “Comic Book Classroom Corral”) and delivered a special styling of the Maurice Sendak picture book Where the Wild Things Are.

And, yes, Shatner can get away with it. With anything, it seems, at this point in his over-dramatic career.

Say no more. Just watch below.

[Note: in this version posted over at MTV Geek, you can see Shatner's weird and sort of scary intro which may or may not have made children freak out.]

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Ape Lad posted a photo:

(415): I'm still confused. So he's NOT your cousin by blood, but WAS your cousin, on two separate occasions, by marriage? Still too weird I think...

The Lowders were simply trying to take their bridal party pictures when a most unexpected guest popped into the photo frame. But their terror is our gain, and it has resulted in what is clearly the greatest wedding photo of all time. Update: We talked to the photographer!

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In brainstorming my first post for GeekDad, I found myself contemplating what exactly it means to be a geek. “Dad” has a well-understood biological and cultural meaning. But “geek” is a term applied to a wide variety of interests and behaviors. Most obviously, there are tech geeks, sci-fi geeks, fantasy geeks, and comic geeks, with a fairly high rate of cross-pollination between them. But I’ve also heard the term applied to activities you probably won’t see written about on this website. I’ve known people that called themselves band geeks, policy geeks, law geeks, and even grammar geeks. Could someone be a football geek? Does the word “geek” mean nothing more than someone that is unusually interested in any field of human endeavor? I think not. “Geek” is a subculture that embraces a set of ideas and a way of looking at life that is subtly but profoundly different from the outlook of majority culture.

The word “geek” has a rather unpropitious origin. It probably derives from the Low German word “geck,” meaning fool. In the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth century the word became associated with circus performers that engaged in strange or bizarre acts like biting the heads off of chickens. It wasn’t until the 1980′s that the term became widely associated with social outcasts knowledgeable about new technology. Because tech geeks tended to also be interested in science fiction, fantasy, comics etc., the meaning of the word quickly expanded to include anyone that shared those enthusiasms. “Geek” was initially a term of derision, a variant of “weirdo” used to belittle people whose interests did not match those of their mainstream peers. But like many pejoratives, it was eventually adopted by the targeted group as a badge of pride.

But what does geek mean today, now that we’ve co-opted the term? It means something near and dear to every geek dad, something that has to do with our children. A “geek” is someone that never loses their childlike sense of wonder in the new, the unexplored, and the different. A geek is someone that rejects the incessant cultural programming to “grow up” and continues to dream about the stars. A geek is someone that imagines other worlds, be they worlds that never were or worlds that might yet be. Some geeks work at making those imagined worlds a reality. Others work at stretching the bounds of imagination itself. Still others appreciate and evangelize. But the thing we all share is the notion that it is okay for a grown man and woman to hold onto that boundless sense of possibility that children are blessed with.

So in the end the word “geek” is much more than a list of interests. It is a way of looking at life. It is a culture that embraces the wonder of childhood into adulthood rather than telling us to leave childish interests behind. And that is why I hope my own son grows up to be a geek. I don’t want him to grow up in a world that forces him to give up everything he loved as a child. I don’t want him to be beaten down by the practical, or changed by what others tell him he ought to care about. There is a reason almost every child likes dinosaurs and space ships. Those things represent big dreams. I never want my son to stop dreaming, and I intend to teach him by example. I am a geek, and proud of it.

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Do you like stories? Geek & Sundry’s TableTop has a good one this week as Wil sits down to play the storytelling game Once Upon a Time with guests Mike Phirman, Amy Berg, and Chris “Doc” Wyatt. The card game is a cooperative effort to tell a fairy tale like story. However, competition enters the plot as players attempt to outdo each other in getting rid of their cards, which represent story elements like people, objects, events, and fairy tale aspects (like planning, sleeping, robots(?!?), etc.).

If, during gameplay, the story mentions one of your cards, you can play it and become the storyteller. Get rid of all of your cards and steer the game’s story toward your ending card and you win the game. This episode of Once Upon a Time shows the creativity of this wonderfully inspired and inventive group. The episode is reminiscent of last season’s Fiasco and Gloom, in its funny and fantastic narrative. Can Wil spin his way to a win? Watch and find out!

Parental warning: There’s a little language in this episode.

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mvar writes "Various sources report that a few days ago at CinemaCon Disney announced their plan to release, following the 2015 JJ Abrams Episode VII, a new Star Wars movie every 1 (one, uno, une) year. Yep, get your stomachs ready, because that's a lot of Jar Jar Binks."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This build is wonderful, but click through to see a lovely version of the Face of Bo as well.

Thorsten Bonsch (Xenomurphy) has continued his series of scenes celebrating the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who with two scenes from the 2007 episode “Gridlock”.

via How the Face of Boe saved the Doctor, Martha, and New New York | The Brothers Brick | LEGO Blog.

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Well let me tell you, it was quite the pragmatic purchase. It has endless uses in my morning routine.

Such as making the bed:

Making toast:

Getting things off high shelves:

Making coffee:

Reaching the remote when it’s too far away:

And assisting me when I ran out of toilet paper:

I don’t know how I survived life without it.

Uruk-Hai Scimitar by Zoë [tumblr] 

you know nothing jon snow

Pressure Cooker

Am I right to be afraid of pressure cookers? What's the worst thing that can happen if you misuse a pressure cooker in an ordinary kitchen?

—Delphine Lourtau

The worst thing?

Pressure cookers are dangerous.

They can explode, in a sense, but not as violently as you might fear (or hope). The pressure inside a consumer cooker doesn’t go above about two atmospheres—about the pressure inside a can of soda. Those levels can be dangerous, but they’re generally not high enough to cause the metal to violently rupture.

So what makes a pressure cooker dangerous?

Imagine a world where Pepsi is scalding hot. Now imagine that someone shakes up a can of Pepsi and sets it in front of you.

That’s the real threat from a pressure cooker: If the seal fails (or the lid is opened too early), it can spray scalding stew in all directions.

But it’s not really an explosion.

The blast couldn’t even fling the lid very far. If you mounted a rifle-style barrel on a pressure cooker, even in ideal circumstances it wouldn’t be able to fire the lid much faster than you could throw it. Any potato cannon (especially this one) could do better.

Of course, the question wasn’t about whether a pressure cooker is likely to explode. It was about what the worst thing that could happen was.

If you disable the safety valve, there are plenty of ways to produce much more dangerous pressures. You could completely fill it with water and heat it, fill it with Drano and aluminum foil, or just pump in air from a compressor.

The result would depend on your pressure cooker. Chances are it would start to leak. If it didn’t, and it somehow stayed together up a few hundred atmospheres (pressures typical of scuba tank), when it finally ruptured it could easily kill you.

Even so, that’s far from the worst thing you could do with a pressure cooker.

Frankly, there are so many options it would be impossible to survey them all. But for my money, one of the most horrifying things you could do is this:

(Note: Never try this, for reasons which will become obvious in a moment.)

Fill the cooker with oxygen up to 5 PSI, then pump in fluorine until it starts escaping through the safety valve. Put the vessel over an open flame until it reaches 700°C (That’s °C, not °F. Yes, this will probably set off the smoke alarm.) Now, pump the hot gas over a liquid-oxygen-cooled stainless steel surface.

The procedure here is a little tricky, but if you do things right, the gas will condense into dioxygen difluoride (O2F2).

And that stuff is awful.

Ray Bradbury taught us that paper burns when exposed to oxygen at temperatures above 451°F. Dioxygen difluoride is so volatile that it makes almost any organic substance ignite and explode at any temperature hotter than 300°F below zero. It can literally make ice catch fire.

In an article about O2F2, Chemistry blogger Derek Lowe (of the excellent In The Pipeline) used phrases like “violently hideous”, “deeply alarming”, and “chemicals that I never hope to encounter”. Another article refers to fluorine as “the gas of Lucifer”, and lists chemists who were poisoned or blown up while attempting to work with it.

If your house is heated by natural gas, and it happens to contain hydrogen sulfide, you could pipe some of it into your container of O2F2. In addition to a massive explosion, this will also produce a cloud of hydrogen fluoride gas. Hydrogen fluoride can dissolve human tissue on contact, starting with your lungs and corneas.

As Lowe points out, the chemistry of this kind of reaction (O2F2 and sulfides) is largely unexplored.

Which gives us an answer to our question. What’s the worst thing that can happen in a pressure cooker?

Science.

Ape Lad posted a photo:

Artist Ralph Sevelius has transformed your favorite Disney Princesses into a a couple of badass Jedi and Sith Lords. We could seriously get into a very special Disney animation where Snow White slices up the dwarves with a double-bladed lightsaber.

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lokithehedgehog:

Tummy rubs (x)

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