Hasta La Gadget!

Who are 2010’s “Most Fascinating People?” It’s hard to argue against the inclusion of Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. The 26-year-old exec has had a rollercoaster year, between the sheer social networking dominance of his site, to the unflattering major motion picture portrayal of his life, to the boatloads of cash he’s given to charity this year.

How about Justin Bieber? Well, last week we suggested that the teenage Canadian pop start might, in fact, be 2010’s tech person of the year, so it’s pretty tough to argue against his inclusion in the list.

Okay, what about Snooki? Well, we’d argue against the inclusion of the Jersey Shore cast on Barbara Walters’s 2010 Fascinating People list, if only because we don’t think they need any more face time on TV, to be totally honest. The same goes for LeBron James–he’s the first professional sports player who’s ever switched teams before, right? No? Huh.

Kate Middleton made the list because she is going to marry a prince. I think I read somewhere that no one in the US really cares–I’ll defer to Ms. Walters on this one, I suppose. Sarah Palin made the list, not surprisingly–say what you will about her, it was certainly a fascinating year for the woman.

Also on the list: Jennifer Lopez, David Petraeus, Sandra Bullock, and Betty White.

If you didn’t find what you were looking for in PCMag’s roundup of the best gifts for music lovers, we found another great product that will surely make any music geek smile. The Electronic Music Synthesizer Shirt ($29.99) from ThinkGeek puts a real playable music synthesizer on your shirt. You’ll never leave home without your synth again. It’s no Moog, that’s for sure, but it allows you to play five different pro-quality sampled instruments. Also, up to eight keys can be played at once.

This is the third musical instrument shirt from ThinkGeek. There’s already an Electronic Rock Guitar Shirt, and a Drum Kit Shirt, so I guess the only thing left ThinkGeek needs to make is a bass shirt. Then you and your three friends could walk around playing music from your shirts. The shirt comes with a wearable retro-style amp box with an adjustable tone knob.

It’s perfect for the person who’s always humming tunes, and is always saying, “if I only had my keyboard here, I’d play you a jingle.” That happens, right? And in case you were wondering, the electronics are removable for easy washing. It requires 4 AAA batteries, which I assume go into the amp that clips onto your belt.

One thing I’m wondering: How does this work for women?

Want to see the shirt in action? Check out the video after the jump. There are some wonderful renditions of A-Ha’s “Take On Me,” and Europe’s classic “The Final Countdown.”

These days man and stork-kind get along pretty well. They deliver our babies and promote our pickles and in return, we don’t eat them at Thanksgiving. Tens of thousands of years ago, however, things weren’t quite so simple. Remember those “hobbit” fossils that scientists found on an Indonesia island, back in 2003? Turns out that they may have been delicious appetizers for a species of giant storks.

Scientist also discovered fossils of giant birds alongside the diminutive human remains. The leg and wing bones date back 20,000 to 50,000 years ago. The birds in question were likely around six-feet-tall–far taller than the humans they shared the cave with.

“From the size of its bones, we initially were expecting a giant raptor, which are commonly found on islands, not a stork,” one of the paleontologists told MSNBC.

The storks likely grew to that size due to a lack of lack of mammal predators like wolves, lions, and hyenas. The stork most likely did most of its hunting on land, due to its large size, thick bones, and weight, which is estimated to be around 35 pounds. Its diet most likely consisted of fish, birds, and lizards.

There may well have been some juvenile hobbits in the stork food pyramid, as well, “although we have no evidence for that,” said the scientist, adding, “these birds are opportunistic carnivores — if you give them plenty of prey items, they’ll hunt all of them.”

According to the scientists, there is no evidence that the storks were hunted by the tiny humans either.

Gorillaz mastermind Damon Album has been hard work on a follow up to March’s Plastic Beach. The former Blur frontman has eschewed all of that fancy studio nonsense, recording the thing on the road at piecing it together on his iPad. Last month he told NME, “I’ve made it on an iPad–I hope I’ll be making the first record on an iPad. I fell in love with my iPad as soon as I got it, so I’ve made a completely different kind of record.”

In that interview, Albarn said that he was attempting to get the thing out before Christmas. According to a new interview with Gorillaz co-founder cartoonist Jamie Hewlett, however, it looks like we’re going to have to settle for on Christmas,

At the moment, we’ve got an Advent calendar on our website, and there is a daily door that opens to reveal a gift. On Christmas Eve, a video for one of the new songs from the iPad album will be released. Then, on Christmas Day, fans get the whole album downloaded to their computer for free as a gift.

Albarn, also taking part in the interview, added,

I wanted to make sure that it came out at the end of the tour because I don’t want anyone to think I’d tampered with it. I literally made it on the road in America over a month. I didn’t write it before; I didn’t prepare it. I just did it day by day as a kind of diary of my experience in America. If I left it until the New Year to release it, then the cynics out there would say, “Oh well, it’s been tampered with.” But if I put it out now, they’d know that I haven’t done anything because I’ve been on tour ever since.

There you have it, Cynics, no tampering. Now merry Christmas.

Twitter early this week denied claims that it was censoring trending topics surrounding the embattled whistle blowing site WikiLeaks. The microblogging service does appear to have stepped into the fray, however, by suspending the account of Operation Payback, the group that helped rally hackers against MasterCard and Visa in the wake of the companies’ decision to freeze WikiLeaks fundraising accounts.

Twitter early this week denied claims that it was censoring tweets from the embattled whistle blowing site WikiLeaks. The microblogging service does appear to have stepped into the fray, however, by suspending the account of Operation Payback, the group that helped rally hackers against MasterCard and Visa in the wake of the company’s decision to freeze WikiLeaks fundraising accounts.

There’s not much in the way of info–just the standard Twitter error message with te words “Sorry, the profile you are trying to view has been suspended.”

Operation Payback took partial credit for the DDoS attacks that took down Visa and MasterCard yesterday–attacks that were also linked to infamous message board, 4Chan.