This year's Ig Nobel awards lacked the gas mask brassieres and whale snot breakthroughs that made them so charming in the past, but that doesn't mean the most recent batch was a letdown. More »

I'm surprised I never thought of this before: a whale tissue holder. It makes so much sense, the tissue "comes out" of the whale's blowhole. Oh the cleverness of Etsy! [Etsy via NOTCOT] More »

We're sure if you asked Powercast nicely it'd tell you a whale of a tale, about how the "more than 100 companies" who allegedly signed up to develop products that seemingly pull energy from the ether materialized into this light-up Christmas tree. Still, we'd be happy to forgive and forget if meaningful products emerged instead, and that's why we're moderately happy the company's announced a nice big development kit. $1,250 buys your firm or deep-pocketed hobbyist the spread pictured above, with a wireless transmitter to throw three watts and a pair of receiver boards to catch them from over 40 feet away, plus a low-power development board from Microchip equipped with that company's proprietary short-range wireless protocols and ZigBee functionality. We can't wait to see what people build, but we won't be snapping one up ourselves -- we're still holding out for the firm to go open-source and build an Arduino version. PR after the break.

Continue reading Powercast and Microchip fire up interest at a distance with wireless power development kit

Powercast and Microchip fire up interest at a distance with wireless power development kit originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 27 Oct 2010 09:39:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The secret of the bull and the bear are in the bird and the whale: Twitter can be used to predict the stock market behavior with an accuracy of 87.6%. In other words: Justin Bieber controls the world's economy. More »

Twenty four billion. That is how many times users are searching Twitter per month; a truly gargantuan figure. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone noted that twitter.com now handles roughly 800 million search queries per day, a 33% increase from April of this year. To put that number in perspective, Yahoo! handles roughly 9.4 billion search queries per month, while Bing handles around 4.1 billion. Almost makes you a bit more tolerant of the fail whale, now doesn’t it.

[Via Reddit]

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OCEntertainment wanted to know why we don't have a Comment of the Week. I don't really have an answer to that, but how about a collection of this week's best #whitenoise comment threads instead?

If you don't like the gallery view, you can click here.

We're proud of our comment system and commenter community. A great display of the sheer insanity and brilliance of the gals and boys who make it so wonderful is our open forum, #whitenoise. From Whitenoise is a regular feature to show the best of the best and the weirdest of the weird.

It's the weekend, so Jux and some pals are getting an early start on #drunkmodo. In their defense though, they're being responsible and keeping track of their BACs.

Oh, Nathan Obbards! Always ready with a new game thread or a Batman-themed photoshop challenge.

jeevesofRKdia wants you to stick a caption on his strange creation.

So far my favorites are WolfCobra13's

I'm the Twitter whale's depressed cousin!

and otko's

I'm blue da ba dee ba da bi

Ok, maybe I'm fibbing about being all that fond of Otko's line—I really hated that song—but I'm just happy he's rejoined us in #whitenoise.

Modest Mouse is giving everyone—including himself—in #whitenoise a pat on the back:

You guys are especially hilarious today, bringing your A-game and whatnot. Good work, you've entertained me... now get back to it.

MagicalTrev is getting serious and needs some advice:

Ok, I could use some advice, or at least some educated opinions. I'll settle for what I can get here, though.

Jabs aside, I have relied on a PDA in some sort or another for the last 10 years. I do not want to spend a monthly fee for the privilege of using a smartphone when I'm not interested in the data features. I need something to keep track of appointments, can store simple notes quickly, and I wouldn't mind if it stored an address book or could play music. Displaying pictures would also be a strong plus, as would syncing with either outlook or google calendar. If I could get these features in a phone without needing to sign up for a data package, that would be ideal as I'm tired of carrying around multiple devices. Thoughts or suggestions?

Picture by Jiri Brozovsky

SmokeyRivers missed most of it, but there was a grand war. The troops of #whitenoisers went off into battle against Lifehacker and Kotaku. Thankfully, General Bill Can't Fart helped keep things organized:

OK, troops. In about 1 hour, we will begin war against Kotaku. This battle will be more challanging. There's a good chance the enemy could retaliate and attack our base. There will be lives lost.

So, battle plans. We'll be attacking Kotaku's #speakup at 11am EST. Let's gather all our contest ideas and games and post them there. If you don't understand what's going on, take a look at what's left of Lifehacker's #openthread ([lifehacker.com]) and the #greatgizwar tag.

Remember guys, we're going over there to have fun. Some of the editors have reminded us to not let things get too out of control. So don't get too crazy, obnoxious, stupid, etc. We're not trolls, we're #whitenoisers. Our goal is to spread our ways to the other Gawker blogs.

REMEMBER! Wear the #greatgizwar hashtag in all of our comments there, this needs to be organized.

Ok, Ok. I'll be honest. I do have a favorite comment thread right now. It was started by a fellow named BobotheTeddy and is a tribute to most of the Gizmodo editors (though I think that Brownski still wants to know what makes me so darn special that I get to hold the great banhammer).

Wednesday is supposed to be #wednesdaybookclub in #whitenoise, and Fractal the Meek and jeevesofRKdia made sure to get some discussions started.

Picture by Ian Wilson

I'm not sure what Kotaku commenter deanbmmv was thinking when he posted this picture in #whitenoise, but it certainly kicked off one heck of a thread.

This week's Fake Rumor Thursday and the fantastic Damage, Splash brought us this silliness:

7. This rumor is sponsored by Windows 7.

7. Further spurred by the current Thread Raids, rumor has it other Giz commenting team is forming plans for counter attack. For instance, lifehacker will either use automated comment attack or use outside third party to handle that, as using actual manpower would really cramp their productivity. io9 is rumored to use cyborgs from outer space, while Japolik will employ bunches of degenerate car lovers.

All sign points to the LEGION invading Gizmodo. Thanks guys, like we really need that.

7. Apple's Mighty/Magic/Hyper Mega Mouse will be replaced by the super sleek G-Spot Mouse. Lines forming as we speak, developing.

7. Kingston, outraged by reports of not so nice memory cards entering their supply chain, purchased several Chinese factories in Shenzen, and introduced new lines, such as Samdisk, SanSunk, and Rexar. Developing.

7. Sony will completely abandon Memory Stick and adopt XD as their primary memory format. Then the XD will be immediately supplemented by XD-HS-PRO-XG-PS3++ and XD-DUO-PRO-PS4+++.

7. Jay Leno will introduce a new sidekick: Conan O'Brien. Andy Richter will be their personal slave for the rest of the term.

It seems that jmcm's friend was really bored while decorating his or her room, but it still looks neat.

Conspiracies! Zmx15 wants to play a game:

This one is called Conspiracy. You just keep relating things to other things and end up with a whole huge conspiracy theory.

ExamplePersonA: January is a Month
ExamplePersonB: January Starts with J
ExamplePersonC: Jesus also starts with J
ExamplePersonQ: Jesus works for Gizmodo

Jason Chen also works for Gizmodo.
Jason just got a bunny.
Bunnies are evil...

Today I ate two things: whale steak and the Windows 7 burger. Only one of these meals made me want to vomit.

CheapyD, who's no stranger to eating gigantic-ass burgers (I had that burger earlier in the week too), tried his mouth on the Windows 7 burger with his buddy. I physically couldn't watch his video while writing this post because it the gastrointestinal wound was too fresh, so I don't know if he liked it or not—I just know that he finished the thing with his buddy.

I, on the other hand, tried to consume the thing with my wife, and the two of us couldn't quite manage to finish it. Not so much that we weren't hungry, we just couldn't stand the taste of it anymore. It was hard to actually even hold, being made out of two flimsy pieces of bread soaked in the juices from seven pieces of meat. There are a few problems with the way they made this burger. One, there's no cheese. Two, there's barely anything else besides meat. It would have been much more appetizing if they had made the tomatoes and lettuce and onions in proportion to the meat. As is, in the Shibuya, Tokyo store at least, there was one slice of lettuce, a few tomatoes and not much of anything else.

How does it taste? How do you think it tastes? It's seven pieces of Burger King meat. There's no way I would eat this thing normally. I did it for you. Oh, and it's not 777 Yen—it's goddamn 1450 Yen. The only people who got the 777 Yen deal were the ones who showed up at launch, or on a first-come-first-served basis. I couldn't understand the tellers well enough to get the story straight. Point is, it's not only ridiculously bad, it's expensive too.

This is meat followed by meat, washed down by meat. You start with an appetizer of meat, then maybe a meat salad and some meat soup, perhaps interjected by a meat meat, then moving on to the entree of meat, enhanced by a bottle of your best red meat. Oh waiter, what's for dessert? Is it meat? Oh this chef is so creative.

Since I am not a snake, I couldn't unhinge my jaw to get the entire burger into my mouth at once. The best way, we found, was to eat it like an ice cream sundae; by hacking away at its sides with a fork. We were like chefs at a Greek restaurant, chipping at a a gigantic clump of flesh a little bit at a time; except there was no falafel at the end of this, just more F-grade ground beef. As shown in the video, you're going to be eating meat almost all the time, with a little bit of bread and tomato occasionally as frosting.

The proportions were similar to Adam's giant cheeto, in that too much of the inside of a thing totally screws up the delicate balance set forth by its maker. If you had an Oreo that was five inches of frosting and two normal-sized cookies on the end, you'd quickly discover that nature, like Nabisco, knows the meaning of moderation.

To recreate this Windows 7 burger for yourself without having to travel to Japan, head to Burger King and order a Whopper. Then throw a ten dollar bill down and ask them to make six more patties as disgustingly as possible.

I've been in Tokyo a week, and I can say that, for the most part, Japanese people are quite thin thanks to their normal diet. This Windows 7 burger must be Microsoft's way to get them up to the US range in order to make us feel better about ourselves.

Oh and as you probably guessed already, the burger was the thing that made me want to vomit—the whale actually tasted pretty good. Kinda like a tough steak. And whale tongue? That was even better. Fried whale was kinda weird, but edible.

Unless Apple decides to make a Snow Leopard Big Leopard Mac promotion with McDonalds, I'll see you all in a week when I'm back from Japan. In the meantime, you can keep up with me on Twitter.