Geek culture

Congrats to Gary M. of Las Vegas for winning a pair of Pick-Pocket Proof Pants from Clothing Arts in last week's giveaway. This week's prize is for the young tinkerers out there.

We're giving away a Boe-Bot Robot Kit from Parallax, a company that specializes in DIY robotics. CNET's Donald Bell and Seth Rosenblatt visited the Rocklin, Calif., electronics manufacturer earlier this month, and returned bearing this gift and others (stay tuned for another Parallax giveaway soon).

The Boe-Bot kit, recommended for ages 14 and up (and that includes you geeky grown-ups) lets you build and program your own rolling robot with a BASIC Stamp 2 microcontroller for a brain. The bot uses touch, light, and infrared sensors to independently navigate its environment. … Read more

At long last, a line of demarcation more clearly dividing the respective territories of geeks and nerds is being drawn with the help of (what else?) science.

Scientist and software engineer Burr Settles took on a little weekend project this year to try to more precisely define the realms of geekdom and nerdaliciousness using data scraped from Twitter.

Settles took a look at how often various words occurred within tweets alongside "geek" and "nerd" and then, using a mathematical equation that I sadly am not quite nerdy enough to explain adequately here (Settles finds "math" to be a much stronger part of the nerd vocabulary, as is the word "vocabulary"), plotted the following graph to serve as our first-ever atlas of a subcultural universe occupied by two sometimes dueling empires.… Read more

Dogshaming.com is full of electronics incidents. Coco the hound knocked a glass of soda onto a MacBook Pro. Levon ate his mom's new cell phone. Slim pooped on his person's laptop. These crimes against technology are pretty hilarious after the fact, but a new study by electronics warranty provider SquareTrade totals up some pretty serious damage statistics.

According to the survey results, pets damage 8 billion electronic items each year, with a repair and replacement bill totaling $3 billion annually. Good thing our pets are so cute. The most common offense is chewing, with two-thirds of accidents resulting from a pet placing a delectable phone, laptop, or other device in its mouth.… Read more

Leaked from today's 404 episode:

- So weird: Bruins fans watched tons of porn after they lost on Monday night.

- A collection of songs ruined by film, TV, and humanity.

- New kiosks at 7-Eleven stores will store your keys.… Read more

It sounds like the start of a joke: "A group of MIT people walk into a sock factory..." But the punch line is a pair of socks that have been so thoroughly engineered, they make tube socks look like something a triceratops would have worn back in the Cretaceous Period.

MIT startup Ministry of Supply has turned its plentiful resource of engineering and high-tech minds to the problem of dress socks. The result is the Atlas performance dress socks Kickstarter project, which has already more than doubled its $30,000 funding goal. There is good reason for this outpouring of sock support.… Read more

The United States had 53 shark attacks in 2012, according to a University of Florida report. Many people find sharks both fearful and fascinating, but their presence in the water doesn't deter surfers and swimmers from jumping into the ocean waves.

Sometimes, people look like prey to sharks. One company is taking an unusual approach to preventing shark attacks with the creation of a shark-repellant rash guard. The form-fitting top does a lot of the usual rash guard things, like offer UV protection and wick moisture. What's different is the design on it.… Read more

Leaked from today's episode of The 404:

- Watch Kate Kendall drop an F-bomb on live TV after gay marriage ruling.

- California same-sex marriage gets a Supreme Court win; San Francisco celebrates.… Read more

Lara Croft is famous for many reasons. As the protagonist in a video game that sees her performing daring feats of archaeology (a field that tends to be a lot less action-packed in real life), she filled a role that much more commonly would go to a male protagonist.

Although her designer, Toby Gard, wanted Lara to break some stereotypes, an accident led to what Lara Croft became very well known for. While attempting to increase her breast size just 50 percent, Gard accidentally hit 150 percent -- and, at the roaring approval of the development team, the change stayed over Gard's protests. Stayed, and grew; as video game technology became more sophisticated, "jiggle physics" entered the scene. Even 2000's Game Boy Color title had them.

Lara Croft, with her jiggling breasts and tight short-shorts, was officially a sex symbol.

But there's no equivalent video game protagonist for someone who likes looking at well-endowed men in tight, sexy clothing. So one artist decided to draw his own.… Read more

Maker and teacher Bill Porter had a very important task ahead of him. He had to impress more than 100 eighth graders at a STEM camp. He had already wowed them with an LED lab coat and an 8-bit tie, but they wanted to know what was next. So Porter invented the Tetris tie, a glowing LED tribute to the classic falling-blocks game.

It took Porter about four hours to get the working prototype up and running. The tie uses 80 LED pixels powered by a DigiSpark microcontroller. It cost about $50 in materials.

Showing ingenuity and the ability to work with parts on hand, Porter fashioned the tie itself from two pieces of card stock and a cheap clip-on tie. The clip-on feature is the nerdy icing on the geeky make-cake. "I plan to revisit the design and embed the strips directly into a fabric tie for long-term use," Porter writes.… Read more