In a super clever stroke, TCD student Stephen Dolan has created a tool that works out the shortest path between two articles on Wikipedia. Example:

Shortest path from Bertie Ahern to corruption
Bertie Ahern
Tribunal of Inquiry Into Certain Planning Matters and Payments
Corruption

2 clicks needed

ZING!

Now go play with it yourself: Six degrees of wikipedia.

Derek O’Connor, director of the Darklight film festival and all round superhero, talking about it on RTE’s WE Tv.

Darklight is Ireland’s premier festival for filmmakers, animators and artists whose work explores the convergence of art, film and technology.

The Darklight film festival is running from Thursday 26th - Sunday 29th June 2008. Website is: www.darklight.ie.

Great to see at least a part of RTE embracing youtube. Here’s a mad one for you RTE: (broken record time) Drop real player all together, and switch to youtube as your content delivery platform. The cost savings would be immense. Hurray!

eBoy make awesome pixel art representations of world cities, and their version of Dublin is part of a Coke ad. Be cool if they release the full poster de-cokerised.

Full pic is up on flickr here.

Found at the awesome le craic.

Hello 8 year old Jazz Biscuit. What do you want to be when you grow up?

An Astronaut.

Hunt is on for Europe’s newest astronauts.

Bring it!

Application opens May 19th 2008.

There’s a part 2 too:

Created by www.jammedia.ie and it’s already won several awards. Found via The Chancer.

Giveaway is over folks, all sets of tickets are gone.

Yep. In conjunction with super hero Darragh Doyle, Jazz Biscuit has seven sets of two tickets to giveaway to the Cinemagic festival showing of Vexille next week.

Japan, 2077: A female agent named Vexille is dispatched to Tokyo to investigate whether Japanese are developing robotic technology, which has been banned by the U.N. due to its potential threat to humankind.

It has 7.2 out of 10 on IMDB, a very respectable score.

The showing is on Monday April 28 in Cineworld Dublin at 7pm.

How to get the free tickets
Giveaway is over folks, all sets of tickets are allocated. Those who were successful (and left valid email addresses!) will be emailed details by Friday at the latest.

The world’s largest tidal turbine, weighing 1000 tonnes, has been installed in Northern Ireland’s Strangford Lough. The tidal turbine is rated at 1.2 megawatts, which is enough to power a thousand local homes. It was built by Marine Current Turbines, and it will be the first commercial tidal turbine to produce energy, when it begins operation later this year.

What can I say, I get all excited by tidal energy turbines. It’s great stuff. Did you know that it’s one of very few energy systems not created by the sun? Wikipedia says so:

This is the only form of energy which comes from the motion of the Earth-Moon system, though some of it comes from the solar tides as well. Most other sources of energy come directly or indirectly from the Sun, including fossil fuels, conventional hydroelectric, wind, biofuels, and solar. The remainder, nuclear and geothermal for instance, have radioactive material on Earth as their source.

I know. Amazing. Let’s go learn more:

Environmental News Network: World’s Largest Tidal Turbine Successfully Installed
www.seageneration.co.uk - the company behind it is actually called Marine Current Turbines.
Tidal power at wikipedia. (Not to be confused with Wave power.)

While you were all having a wonderful Easter, I had Captain Code back in giving things around here a bit of a spring clean.

Gone is the old logo:

And in with the new logo:

Truth be told I’m not entirely sold on it yet, but we’ll give it a run and see how it settles in.

There’s a few other awesomely original* changes, but I’ll let you discover them yourself.

Any suggestions, comments or bugs, email or just leave a comment on this post.

*As long as you’ve never seen any of the Gawker media blogs. Although I came up with some of the ideas myself, the wordpress hacker shot back with ’so basically rip off Gawker.’ Damn it. Trying to be original on the interweb is like trying to enjoy life without boobies, satisfying farts and fig rolls.

We already mentioned Francis McReary, but there’s another Irish-ish character in the upcoming GTA4; Packie McReary. The clip even shows a nice Irish granny:

More: Packie’s page at the official site.

Two nights and possibly at €150 a pop too. That’s ridiculous. The rumour is posted at the awesome Thrill Pier.

Let’s all rock out to Goin’ out West:

Other music stuff:

• On The Record wants to know if you’ve any burning questions you’d like to ask Moby.
• The Chancer has Damo Ricecakes covering Hallelujah.
• The State launch gigs are up for all to see.

I bought State magazine. It’s shiny. Very mongrelish in a lot of ways, but that’s a good thing. The only thing it’s missing is a bit more non-music stuff. Lob in a few life-features and I think they’re on to a winner. Purists will say that would distract from the core idea of the mag, but screw that, diversity is key.