Giant Freakin Robot

“Bite something cooked inside of my shiny metal stomach,” doesn’t have quite the same ring as Bender Bending Rodriquez’s usual catchphrase, but it sounds a lot better to my taste buds and teeth.

And should anyone so choose, they can also eat something cooked inside of Bender’s stomach, thanks to U.K. welder and all around drunken genius Rob Halftroll – by far the coolest last name I’ve typed in a while – has offered up something of a D.I.Y. tutorial covering how he created his own Bender woodstove. Fun on a bun! The hot dog and hamburger kind of fun, that is.

Alderaan, Leia’s native land, was completely destroyed by Darth Vader and his Death Star. Not entirely unlike the way the White Man destroyed the land of the Native Americans, turning their home (eventually) into a Starbucks-laden cesspool. Also, it’s common knowledge that George Lucas‘ first script for Star Wars featured dozens of scalping incidents.

The first entry – and fourth episode – in Lucas’ space saga will be the first Hollywood film to ever be dubbed in the native Navajo language, bridging the massive cultural gap between tribal cinema and science fiction. Manuelito Wheeler, director of the Navajo Nation Museum in Window Rock, AR, has spent part of the last three years translating Star Wars, in collaboration with Lucasfilm and Deluxe. This will be the 40th official translation of the film, and believe it or not, the Navajo language – or Diné – is not equipped with words like “stormtrooper” and “holographic droid message,” so some liberties have been taken.

Because there are generally more English words involved in the translations, there will be probably be some overlay. Being conscious of this Wheeler hopes for something far different from “what people saw in the old Kung Fu movies when the lip movements didn’t coincide with what was said. I don’t want to disparage the Kung Fu movies because I loved watching them.” He continued, “But this can become very distracting and we don’t want to see that happen here.”

Next month, the PC peripheral Leap Motion will be released, and it’s looking — and hoping — to change your computer behavior forever. It’s a tiny device, it’s hands-free, and it has already proven to be a remarkable innovation to such shitty time wasters as Fruit Ninja. A few months ago, Leap Motion released thousands of its prototypes to software developers, wanting a full line of apps available as soon as the product launches. And while many of the ones that have been shown so far were mostly predictable, I don’t think anyone saw this coming.

You can now fly around the planet like Superman, thanks to a partnering deal between Leap Motion and Google Earth. What are you wearing your underwear on the inside of your pants for? Grab your cape and check out the promotional video below.

Earth Day, for all of its admirable qualities, is still seen by too many people as just a tree-hugger holiday, or as an excuse to feel good about themselves for buying new light bulbs and water filters. Considering its relative closeness to the Product-of-the-Earth-Day, 4/20, some people might just be waking up, wondering what the hell happened.

Well, let’s all sit back and hope for for the success of the recently announced solar energy project from partners IBM, Airlight Energy, ETH Zurich, and Interstate University of Applied Sciences Buchs NTB. They are planning on building and further developing the technology used in their High Concentration PhotoVoltaic Thermal (HCPVT) energy system, one of which already exists at the IBM Research lab in Zurich.