Giant Freakin Robot

Captain Planet is back! The final two installments in Don Cheadle’s run as the Eco Avenger sees the world getting back to normal after Captain Planet turned all the people into trees. Do we finally get a happy ending at the end of the four-episode series?

Part three features Captain Planet changing the hearts and minds of the EPA as he turns its members into trees. At this point, Captain Planet is drunk with power and even the last living Planeteer Ma-Ti, (Efren Ramirez), isn’t safe from Planet’s tyranny. Watch Part Three below…

Pop culture fanatics have Comic-Con and SXSW. Geo-scientists have the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU). The conference, which runs from Dec. 3-7, is being held at San Francisco’s Moscone Center, and is bound to be a reference point for numerous news stories in the days to follow. Do you have Curiosity about what one could be? I’ll admit that wasn’t smooth.

Monday’s events start with something that has probably already happened by the time anyone reads this. NASA will be holding a briefing about what the Mars rover Curiosity has been finding, which almost certainly isn’t extraterrestrial genome charts. Climate gets the bulk of today’s spotlight, as climate change’s role on the rise and fall of past civilizations is discussed. Scientists will present the effects and implications of the oddball 2011-2012 winter experienced in the Rocky Mountains, with six-week-early snows disrupting plant and animal life. Round out the day with “Black Swan cyclones” and “Pineapple Expresses,” and how ecologists are working to study and form prevention methods against both.

As a country, we make a lot of blunders, both publicly and privately. It’s no surprise, of course, because our population is 311,000,000 strong. Even if each person only made one-half of a mistake every other day, that would still be, like, so many mistakes being made. I might have a more exact number, but I’ve never been that good at math, and I am far from being alone in this country. As it happens, the teaching methods one learns by may play a large role in this.

A study published in the journal Educational Psychologist, itself taken from two previous studies, sheds some solar-powered calculator light on the steep downward spiral that this country’s mathematics education has taken. The subjects were community college students who placed into a remedial math class, so these aren’t just your everyday village idiots. But these tests weren’t the standardized standards either, and traded learned knowledge for applied knowledge. Traditional math problems can be solved purely by memorizing formulas and procedures, but when these formulas and procedures are themselves the subject of questioning, the understanding falls apart.

I’ve been immersed in geek culture more or less my whole life. I started trying to read The Hobbit at age five, then quickly expanded to raiding my father’s treasure-trove closet full of old science fiction books. I’ve been to the conventions, waited in the lines for midnight showings, and once shared an extremely awkward elevator ride sandwiched between a pair of Vampire: The Masquerade LARPers and a man dressed as Dr. Frank-N-Furter. When you factor in that I’m lucky enough to have made a career writing about stuff I’d be thinking about anyway, I would have said that there’s very little geek-centric weirdness that could shock or surprise me. Then I read an uncomfortably specific job posting seeking a driver/secretary who looks exactly like the character Juno Eclipse from the Star Wars: The Force Unleashed videogame.

Update: At the time of this posting, the job listing has been removed. We’re not sure whether this means the poster didn’t like people across the internet mocking his post or if he finally found his Juno…

Do you look like this?