The government pumps about $20 billion into NASA each year to levitate mice and study crystals. Whatever. All most of us want from space are pictures. And some MIT students did that for a far cheaper fee. Math lesson, anyone?

Megan Fox will claw her way onto the screen as Catwoman in the next Batman.

The woefully underfunded yet "inspiring" NASA found some money to send mice into space.

NYT: "Scientists Worry Machines May Outsmart Man." James Cameron: "TOLD YOU SO."

Comic-book geeks can't turn movies into blockbusters, or at least that will be the lesson from Watchmen's spectacularly bad second week. Literally begging nerds to see the movie this weekend didn't work.

Jimmy Fallon's critics hate him for being so awkward and manic. But all indications are the Saturday Night Live veteran will embrace those qualities, crafting the geekiest Late Night yet.

If you were cool and went out last night, you missed two hours of decent-ish television on the Fox network! Kind of unbelievable, I know. But Dollhouse and Terminator ain't bad.

If you detected an extra pungent smell of Cheetos and Mountain Dew in New York today, it wasn't coming from New Jersey. It's emanating from the Javits Center, home of 2009's New York Comic Convention.

Salacious college gossip site JuicyCampus is going out of business. You'd think collegians would learn to be polite! But here's "cool" blog IvyGate, calling this nice article the "nerdiest story of the day." That's mean:

Yeah he might have a hot body, but Olympic swimmer and Son of Neptune Michael Phelps is kind of a dweeb. Those ears! That kind of lumbering awkwardness. Sure his glorious be-medaling has emboldened him a bit, but still. So it's funny that he's gone and done what so many newly-rich, videogame-anime-lady-obsessed nerds have done before him: he's found himself an Asian girlfriend.

At left is the wicked (and blessedly dead) Grand Moff Tarkin, high-powered henchman to Darth Vader, from the 1977 space documentary Star Wars. At right is Republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin speaking at a campaign rally in Colorado yesterday. Note the similarities. We're not sayin', we're just sayin'. [Palin image via Splash]

Click to viewTake a look at the front page of crazy-huge crowdsourced web aggregator Digg today and you'll see a totally different portrait of the war in Georgia than you'd find on the front of the New York Times. It's not the scary specter of Russia asserting its dominance over the region and thumbing its nose at the West, gambling that we won't respond with force. It's not tanks rolling toward a soverign nation's capital in the hopes of overthrowing its pro-American leader. No, it is, as usual, a conspiracy by George W. Bush and the Mainstream Media to confuse and deceive you. A false story propagated by those terrible, biased gatekeepers. Also-Russian tanks are fucking awesome!!!! Why the hell would typically nerd-news and cute photo-obsessed little Digg take such a counterintuitive view of a war being waged on the other side of the globe? Three simple reasons.

After all this Mickey Kaus blathering about MSM gatekeepers censoring the news and preventing the reader from learning "what happened yesterday" (or, at this point, last week), it's wonderful to see the citizen-journalists and crowdsourced new guardians of information acting just as ridiculously about this supposed John Edwards scandal. As you'll recall, the National Enquirer caught John Edwards sneaking into a hotel late one night to visit former staffer Rielle Hunter and her child. When they confronted him on his way out, he hid in a bathroom. Fox News confirmed the visit. But none of this meets Wikipedia's high standards of notability! You won't find Rielle or the Beverly Hilton even mentioned on the Edwards entry.

A TV reporter in LA went out to cover the wacky goings-on at the line of people waiting to buy a new iPhone 3G. He approached a guy in line with much goofiness; the guy in line responded by (accurately) calling the reporter a "Jackass" on live TV. It's truly a landmark moment in the history of gadget nerds asserting themselves against media mockery. Click to watch the verbal smackdown—complete with a whole crowd of Apple fans simultaneously crying, "Ooooooooo!!" [via BoingBoing]

Nerds may be polishing up their plastic light sabers and dusting off their Darth Vader helmets in anticipation of the new, animated Star Wars movie The Clone Wars, set to open in August. But you know who's not awaiting the movie? Pepsi, Kellogg's, and and Burger King, traditional Star Wars sponsors! Why not? "A spokeswoman for Pepsi, meanwhile, was unaware that a new 'Star Wars' movie was being released." Ha, this flick has BIG BUZZ going for it. Luckily for nerds, McDonald's and Toys "R" Us have stepped in to fill the void with all types of action figures fit for stockpiling by grown men. But it's never a good sign when key parts of corporate America don't even know your movie exists. Prediction: a big, animated suckfest. Still, fans are planning to line up at Toys "R" Us just for the release of the toys. Let's hope that Triumph the Insult Comic Dog makes it out to that one:

Unfortunately for me, I don't roll around in the comment threads of other sites, so I am just now learning that Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull haters have decided that "Nuke the Fridge" is the new "Jump the Shark." Because, you know, they couldn't handle the campy opening scene in which Indy escapes a nuclear blast by hiding in a lead-lined refrigerator. I guess it does lack the gritty realism of faces being melted by one Biblical relic and a gut-shot being instantly healed by another or, say, using an inflatable raft as a parachute, or a thousand year-old knight or... Anywho...

Whoa: Wired interviews the stoner hackers, "Defiant" and "EBK," who "took down Comcast's homepage and webmail service for more than five hours Thursday." Apparently they're pretty psyched about what they did but also scared: "I wish I was a minor right now because this is going to be really bad," says 19-year-old Defiant (pictured). Here's how they did it:

Why settle for the virtual world when destroying ogres and dwarves and elves and whatever the hell else you can kill in Worlds of Warcraft when you can get together with your geeky pals and role-play in the fresh air? That's what the kids in the upcoming documentary Monster Camp decided to do. Trailer after the jump. [via GuestOfAGuest]

OMG Babylon 5—the Battlestar Galactica of the mid-90s, back when getting all obsessed with cheesy space-opera was, for me, still age-appropriate—is on Hulu. C'mon guys, Quantum Leap next! [Hulu]

Hey who wants to go to New Haven?? We just got an invitation (sort of) from Yale Law School to attend an event of great historical import. Some crazy kids are trying to set the world record for the most people in one place who are all dressed like The Hills star, Lauren Conrad. It's next friday, 10pm at Yale. (Again, in Poo Haven.) Someone go! Someone go! They're providing eyeliner! (Click through for larger invite image)