.| UrbanNerd |.

Hi, I’m Chris, the other other blogger here on UrbanNerd.

I’m also the one person crazy enough to pick up a Nokia 770 recently, and will be providing a semi-regular (read: annoyingly infrequent) segment on it.

Suffice it to day, it’s a small Linux-based tablet with a 800×480 touchscreen, built-in WiFi and Bluetooth, and a capable web browser, RSS reader, and media player. It claims to handle email, but from what I’ve seen, it hardly excels at that task.

More to come later.

A book featuring the Elmo character from Sesame Street is creating quite a stir.

The book is titled “Potty Time With Elmo.” Some parents say that after pushing a button, you can hear an unpleasant recording that asks, “Uh oh, who wants to die?”

The publisher that released Potty Time With Elmo released this statement:

The track was recorded as “Uh oh, who has to go?” and due to compression of the digital audio file, some consumers hear a different phrase. We are absolutely certain that the audio file was not tampered with. If one listens very carefully, it does indeed say, “Uh oh, who has to go?”

Read the rest here

BOGOTA, Colombia (Reuters) – A Colombian man accidentally shot his nephew to death while trying to cure his hiccups by pointing a revolver at him to scare him, police in the Caribbean port city of Barranquilla said on Tuesday.

After shooting 21-year-old university student David Galvan in the neck, his uncle, Rafael Vargas, 35, was so distraught he turned the gun on himself and committed suicide, police said.

The incident took place on Sunday night while the two were having drinks with neighbors.

Galvan started to hiccup and Vargas, who works as a security guard, said he would use the home remedy for hiccups of scaring him. He pulled out his gun, pointed it at Galvan and it accidentally went off, witnesses told local television.

“They were drinking but they were aware of what was going on,” one witness said.

Reading this reminds me of an episode from Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends “Hiccy Burp” (premiered September 5, 2005) — Mac finds a rival in his school named Richie Wildebrat talking about his imaginary friend, Blake Superior, being the best in the world. They have never heard of Uncle Pockets.) Bloo gets an earful from Mac about it and decides to drink mass quantities of soda and eat a few bags of potato chips, and gets the “invincible” hiccups. Everyone tries to rid Bloo of his hiccups before the county imaginary friends talent show pageant, which serves as the home’s annual fund raising event. On registration day, Richie brags to Mac about it so much, that Mac decides to enter Bloo in the contest, using the hiccups to Bloo’s advantage in the talent segment, which Richie and Blake are secretly viewing…and proceed to steal the act, which makes Bloo lose those hiccups. Can those hiccups come back and be an blessing or a curse for him in the contest? And will Wilt do a better job hosting than the previous year?

The title is a pun on the Quincy Jones song “Hikky Burr” which was the theme to The Bill Cosby Show from 1969 to 1971.

From Realtechnews.com:

To be honest, I’ve never been a huge fan of the emoticon. When harmless they are cute, when used at the end of a rude comment like “just kidding!” they seem hostile. But for the most part, they are a part of Internet culture ever since email began zinging around. Today, if you can believe it, I found out that Cingular is going to patent the emoticon. As far-fetched as that sound, in this era of Amazon owning “the one-click” and RIM battling for the ability to send Blackberry email, patent law is scary and not even close to overheating. The patent number is US2006015812 if you want to look it up.

We say: Why stop there? Why not patent BTW and ROTFL and RTFM?

I am adding a few more voices to the site. Don’t worry you will still find all the scooter stuff that I always write about, but because I split my scooter news between this website and vespaway, I wanted to fill out the rest of the Urban Nerd content a bit. Two voices will join the fray and will broaden the blog’s content in the areas of movies, games, toys, comic books and other nerd stuff. CousinPaulie has already introduced himself to all of you, and I expect Chris AKA Raptor will be signing on to say hi soon as well.

According to online reports, a large five-alarm New York building fire which slightly injured six firefighters and one civilian has damaged
the SoHo headquarters of Take-Two Games subsidiaries 2K Games and Global Star Software.

The fire started late Saturday night (1/21/2006) in the building, 575 Broadway, which also “houses retail stores American Eagle Outfitters and Prada, as well as numerous offices for businesses, such as Bobbi Brown Cosmetics, the Guggenheim Museum and Antiques Magazine”, according to a CBS report.

The extent of damage to the building, which is a separate office from Take-Two and Rockstar’s New York headquarters, is as yet unknown, but comments on the weblog of 2K Games PR Manager Jason Bergman indicate that one side of the building may have been more seriously affected than the other.

Take-Two’s third-floor offices were directly in the path of the fire, which “got up into some duct work on the first floor and traveled up to the fourth floor”, according to comments made to ABC News by the FDNY Chief of Operations. No further official information was immediately available as of press time.

A side note: I used to work there.

Hello, my name is Paul, affectionately known as Cousinpaulie. I am a blood relative of this sites creator Neil Barton. I have been invited by him to share my sometimes-warped sense of the world with all his readers. I have found over the years that there is no gray area with me, either you love me, or hate me.

I will be bringing with me to this site a wealth of knowledge on hundreds of useless facts, and years of experience in wasting time.

I hope that you find my posts informative, enjoyable, and funny.

PARK CITY, Utah — The Motion Picture Assn. of America, the leader in the global fight against movie piracy, is being accused of unlawfully making a bootleg copy of a documentary that takes a critical look at the MPAA’s film ratings system.

The MPAA admitted Monday that it had duplicated “This Film Is Not Yet Rated” without the filmmaker’s permission after director Kirby Dick submitted his movie in November for an MPAA rating. The Hollywood trade organization said that it did not break copyright law, insisting that the dispute is part of a Dick-orchestrated “publicity stunt” to boost the film’s profile.

The standard the MPAA is using for itself appears to be at odds with what the organization sets out for others: “Manufacturing, selling, distributing or making copies of motion pictures without the consent of the copyright owners is illegal,” the MPAA’s website says. “Movie pirates are thieves, plain and simple…. ALL forms of piracy are illegal and carry serious legal consequences.”

Donaldson said in an interview that the MPAA previously had promised in writing that it would not copy the film, but an e-mail exchange does not completely support that claim.

Donaldson added that while he is not planning at this time to sue the MPAA for copyright infringement, he reserved the possibility of filing a lawsuit later. “It’s my practice and style to wait and see what they do, go over all of our options, and then make a decision,” he said.

Read the rest here

I have long said that I am a moderate. I hold no hard and firm alliance to any particular political party. Being moderate (to me) has always meant reviewing an issue and evaluating all of the facts before coming to a conclusion. Obviously when facts are in place they cannot be disputed. Sometimes new facts can indeed cause me to change my mind. This is a reasonable stance to take, and very refreshing when it comes to political issues. Unfortunately our airwaves are flooded with nothing but hard left & hard right opinions. News stories are reported with opinions, everything has a slant. Ideas and bias are treated as if they were facts, and those who are biased just plain ignore the facts.

Well now I have science on my side. It turns out that the political extreme in our society that dominate our airwaves & news outlets really are unreasonable & ignorant. Here comes the science:

Democrats and Republicans alike are adept at making decisions without letting the facts get in the way, a new study shows.

And they get quite a rush from ignoring information that’s contrary to their point of view.

Researchers asked staunch party members from both sides to evaluate information that threatened their preferred candidate prior to the 2004 Presidential election. The subjects’ brains were monitored while they pondered.

The results were announced today.

“We did not see any increased activation of the parts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning,” said Drew Westen, director of clinical psychology at Emory University. “What we saw instead was a network of emotion circuits lighting up, including circuits hypothesized to be involved in regulating emotion, and circuits known to be involved in resolving conflicts.”

Bias on both sides

The test subjects on both sides of the political aisle reached totally biased conclusions by ignoring information that could not rationally be discounted, Westen and his colleagues say.

Then, with their minds made up, brain activity ceased in the areas that deal with negative emotions such as disgust. But activity spiked in the circuits involved in reward, a response similar to what addicts experience when they get a fix, Westen explained.

The study points to a total lack of reason in political decision-making.

Read the rest here