Good morning, everyone! Pop your coffee pod in your office Keurig and settle in for some nice technology bytes...

Sad tidings at Google this year -- the company's annual 'We're so much better than you' holiday party has been cancelled in favor of smaller, more socially responsible get-togethers. According to reports, instead of lavish dining and festivities that include laughing at the escorts the very rich, very geeky employees found through online ads and brought to the party, employees will be spending the early evening volunteering and then touring museums. Did I also mention that there is only one steadfast loser out there searching for a date to his Google mini-shindig? Best get right on that, ladies.

Big Bang Theory is one of my very favorite shows -- who doesn't love Sheldon's razor-sharp monotone and 3/4-length shirts? -- but should you stick around afterwards for the tepidly entertaining How I Met Your Mother? From an acting perspective... only if you adore (as I do) Neil Patrick Harris, whose lone spotlight in the show was eclipsed only by his bra-zilliant turn in Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. But, onto my tech point, the show offers a whole online aspect I've rarely seen in my surfing. Official sites for Not A Father's Day, TedMosbyIsAJerk.com and Lily's 50 Reasons to Have Sex pop up minutes after airtime and offer loyal viewers another whole facet to the fan experience. Kudos to the show's forward-thinking marketing team. Not so much to its writers...

Apple is quietly suggesting that it's loyalites install anti-virus software onto their precious Macs -- a definite sign of the times. Gone is the arrogant pontificating by Mac users that their computers are 'safe' from malware. I'm not if we should celebrate this day or lament it -- I've never thought Macs were immune to attack, but I do think this may be a ploy within Apple to advertise (whether or not it's true) that it has a close to similar market share as Microsoft. Redmond has been a favorite target for hackers (not the cute, multi-colored hair, chain-wearing ones that we all love) and miscreants for year -- does Apple want some of the attention, too?

Scientists are scrounging up new data on Oetzi -- "the famous, 5,300 year old frozen mummy found in the Alps nearly two decades ago" -- writes PopSci. By analyzing the contents of his stomach, researchers have determined the Iceman ate six different kinds of moss (probably not the sweetly delicious pond scum found the the Naked's Green Machine drinks at the grocery store...). They are also not willing to close the book on his death and are revisiting possible causes.

Quote of the day:
"I'm one scotch and soda away from the cantina scene in Star Wars."
--Barney Stinson (Neil Patrick Harris), How I Met Your Mother

**Coming up: I take the new Flip HD Mino out for its paces against it's rival, the Kodak HD Zi6. Which mini-corder reigns supreme? Hint: The winner is officially my coolest gadget of the year. Tune in Friday to read all about it...

Labels: Apple, Big Bang Theory, Flip Mino HD, Google, How I Met Your Mother, malware, Oetzi the Iceman

Happy 'Big Bang' Day! You are obviously reading this, so we will all assume that the universe has not changed, Earth was not sucked into a massive black hole (unless we are a part of some twisted LOST episode) and the most brilliant humans are the planet are gathering data on how our universe began.

Confused yet? In what is probably the biggest (literally and figuratively) sci-tech news of the past century, the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN facility in Geneva (known to most normal humans because of it's reference in Dan Brown's Angels and Demons, which is, coincidentally, being made into a movie as you read this) became fully operational today.

What is the LHC? It's a huge underground circular tube -- the biggest machine ever built, with a 17-mile diameter -- that speeds up protons around and around and collides them more 30 million times a second, which smashes them up and releases the particles hidden inside the proton at nearly the speed of light. This gives scientists an absolutely unreal an, until now, unheard of amount of information on particle physics, which relates back to the Big Bang and how our universe works. According to Scientific American, 'You could think of it as the biggest, most powerful microscope in the history of science.'

Much beyond that, things get a little too complicated for me to wrap my head around. But, yay! I'm really looking forward to the news coming out of CERN from the analysis of the LHC particles.

Labels: Big Bang Theory, CERN, Large Hadron Collider, LHC, particle physics