Friday Fun Blog: The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence Edition

It’s time, once again, for everyone’s favorite Friday afternoon time-waster, The Friday Fun Blog! As always, we’re brought to you by Dave & Buster’s—the place where grown adults can act like kids and get a little too aggressive playing arcade games.

On to the links!

The original Nintendo console was the groundbreaking system of a generation and the commercialization of home video game systems. Nintendo is trying to bring that back with a new mini NES that comes with 30 games built-in and HDMI support.

Photo Credit: theverge.com (linked above)

Now you can finally see those fantastic 8-bit graphics in beautiful 1080p. Just a heads up: I will fight you in a Target for this on Black Friday. You’ve been warned.

Speaking of Nintendo, they’re currently dripping in success with the rise of Pokémon Go. But don’t get it twisted: this is just the beginning of the augmented reality craze.

Hey! Is unrolling toilet paper to wipe your butt too time-consuming? Get a robot to do it (via Sploid):

Obligatory Space Post(s) of the Week: Did you know that space is FILLED to the brim with space trash? “Filled” might be a little hyperbolic, but there’s a lot of trash floating around out there, and the European Space Agency wants to clean it up. Specifically, they want to wrangle in an unused ESA satellite in low orbit around Earth and pull it into the atmosphere to burn up.

A lot of science goes into it, especially considering you have to track its orbit, find a way to catch it, and then synchronize orbits to bring it back down into the atmosphere. We need space garbage trucks.

SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, is looking for new ways to find life in the cosmos, as our ever-evolving ideas of “life” changes. We here on earth only know one type of life, our own, but given the vastness of space, there might be different types of life out there that is different than what we know.

They’re looking at different ways to identify whether life might be viable, including looking at the atmosphere of a planet to see if there is a signature element that might signal life. I’m also partial to our continued efforts of yelling, “ANYBODY OUT THERE?!” into space.

And finally…

Hafthor Julius Bjornsson a.k.a The Mountain on Game of Thrones is a monstrosity of a man. He has his own vodka, which I assume his made from the blood of his conquered enemies, and this is a fun video about a day in his life (via Mashable):

It’s amazing how a man can be so intimidating while being extremely nice.

See you next week!