Hasta La Gadget!

If you’ve ever gone to a comedy show in the days following a tragic event, one thing inevitably happens. After several acts perform sets that avoid the elephant in the room, one comic will, after breaking the ice, tentatively ask permission to try out their [recent tragic event] material. More often than not, the audience says yes.

This seems to have been the case at Los Angeles’ Laugh Factory on Thursday, when Dane Cook performed a joke related to the tragic theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado. Caught on tape by an audience member who was committing one of the cardinal comedy-show sins — taping a comedian’s set without permission — Cook joked that “The Dark Knight Rises” is such a bad movie that ” … if none of that would have happened, I’m pretty sure that somebody in that theater, about 25 minutes in, realizing it was a piece of crap, was probably like, ‘Ugh, fucking shoot me.’”

The joke was met with a few groans, but they quickly gave way to laughter and then applause.

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We’ve been following the antics of Austrian daredevil Felix Baumgartner for months now. Baumgartner is the daredevil who plans on jumping from over 120,000 feet in the air, setting a world record and becoming the first person to break the speed of sound without an aircraft. Baumgartner has conducted several practice jumps and his latest practice jump came this week.

Baumgartner donned his pressure suit and climbed into a special capsule to take a ride to 96,640 feet above southeastern New Mexico. Once at altitude, the daredevil stepped out of the capsule and plummeted towards the ground reaching a top speed of 536 mph. After freefalling for 3 minutes and 48 seconds, Baumgartner opened his parachute.

Baumgartner was safely back on the ground 10 minutes and 30 seconds after jumping from his capsule. He had encountered a few difficulties on previous practice jumps, but there’s no word of any issues with his latest practice jump at this time. Baumgartner hopes to leap from 125,000 feet in the next month or so.

[via Space.com]

Welcome to Growing Up Geek, an ongoing feature where we take a look back at our youth and tell stories of growing up to be the nerds that we are. Today we have Philip Berne, who is currently Samsung’s Marketing Manager for Technical Media and a regular contributor for Slashgear.

When I was in high school, I wanted to be a writer. My fallback plan was to get a degree in Psychology and become a therapist. If you were to time travel back to my high school days (which were not even 20 years ago) and tell me what I’d be doing today, I’d probably say something like:

“Are you crazy? That’s not even a real job. And what the heck is a smartphone, anyway?”

I was a phone and gadget reviewer until I recently took a job with Samsung. Now I’m still reviewing phones — I just review them a few months before anyone else. If you love phones and mobile tech as I do, it is certainly a dream job. I know how lucky I am. I wouldn’t be here unless I had grown up geek. But in fact it wasn’t luck that got me here (unless I mean luck of birth).

Growing up geek, in my case, meant growing up spoiled. I’m afraid to admit it, but I certainly had a spoiled childhood, especially when it came to toys and electronics. Let’s go through my bona fides.

Continue reading Growing up Geek: Philip Berne

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Growing up Geek: Philip Berne originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 27 Jul 2012 11:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Chick-fil-A, the now notoriously anti-gay fast-food chain, is once again involved more controversy, this time involving gender discrimination.

Brenda Honeycutt, a former employee of a Chick-fil-A establishment in Georgia, is suing the restaurant for wrongful termination, alleging that she is a victim of gender discrimination, according to GLAAD.

The lawsuit, which was obtained by GLAAD, refers to a June 27, 2011, incident in which Jeff Howard, the owner and operator of a Duluth, Ga., Chick-fil-A, fired Honeycutt so she could be a “stay home mother.”

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By Wynne Parry, LiveScience Senior Writer:

One species of termite sends its older workers on suicide missions armed with explosive blue "backpacks."

When grabbed by another termite, a predator or a person with tweezers, these backpack-sporting termites, which the researchers call blue workers, rupture and spew a toxic, sticky substance, scientists have found.

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