The Dr. Horrible actress sits down with Wired.com to talk about Hollywood, her webseries The Guild, and other assorted things.  I hope I’m not alone is saying that I could listen to her talk all day long about her geektasticness. 

Wired.com: What are your fans communicating to you when they meet face to face?

Day: I hear a lot from women, “I love The Guild and I love that you have a geeky girl and that you’re representing that because that’s how I feel.” And: “I’m a girl gamer and I’ve never seen girl gamers that are authentic before.” I remember one guy at BlizzCon told me, “Thank you very much because now I tell my co-workers that I game without shame.” He really genuinely said that and I was so touched, because when I created the show I was just writing organically about my experience. I think that most people, if they were in Hollywood, they would never write something about a niche that wouldn’t please everybody. But the thing about the web is that you can make niche content and you can give a voice to people who wouldn’t feel like they have everything in common with what the mainstream is giving them.

I got some change back from the store a few days ago and didn’t realize immediately that I was given four James Knox Polk dollar coins.  Turns out that the US Mint is determined to push some sort of dollar coin onto Americans. 

I was pumped Polk got his own coin — afterall, he is one of my top five favorite US presidents (what, no one else keeps a running list like that?) – unfortunately the US Mint turned him into creepy egg-face Vader at the end of Jedi. 

And if that wasn’t insult enough, the other presidents in the series are some of the worst Presidents to ever get their pimp on in the Oval Office. 

First, it makes no sense to honor Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, or Monroe with a dollar coin since they’ve already been mintified in some capacity.  Secondly, it makes no sense to honor Martin Van Buren (well he did help build the trans-continental railroad), John Tyler, Zachary Taylor, or William Henry Harrison because the general public have no idea who they are or what they accomplished.  Because they were horrible presidents. 

But James K. Polk?  I can get down with him.

Voyager 1 and 2 have passed through the “termination shock” boundary — a magnetic bubble that partially protects the solar system from cosmic rays.  Currently, they two probes are traveling through the heliosheath before moving into the heliopause. The heliopause is the assumed boundary of the solar system.  Read More. [Space via Reddit]

Google Wave gets rolled out to a 100,000+ test audience today in the hopes that the bugs and wrinkles will get fully worked out.  Those people will also get invites to hand out to people, with what I assume, is a rollout plan similar to Gmail.

I’m of two thoughts: Is this really going to be the next generation of communication programs and when will it roll out to the public at large?  “While the team declined to give a specific time-table, they did say that it will definitely be 2010, and alluded to the fact that it should be the first half of 2010. They also noted that one key next step will be to provide support for other languages. Right now, Wave is English-only, even though it has tools built in that translate its content to any other language,” writes Tech Crunch.

Imeem is streaming Karen O’s soundtrack to Where the Wild Things Are. [via]

Update: I’ve made my decision.  For my starting lineup I’m going with these five shows: Mad Men, Sons of Anarchy, Dollhouse, Fringe and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

The five bench shows are going to be: Psych, Numbers, Castle, How I Met Your Mother/The Office and Glee. 

My reasoning is that both Mad Men and Sons of Anarchy will end their season’s soon, allowing me to dive into AMC’s Prisoner remake in November and ABC’s V remake.  So it won’t be a big thing when Lost returns in January. 

So I’ve gotten rid of cable and watch all my television through bittorrents and streaming, bu the reality is, though I’ve cut out all the crappy pointless television, I still watch too much tv. 

I’ve decided that it’s a necessity for me to restore balance to my life,  (it’s become very one dimensional on weekdays)  by reading or doing other projects at night.  In my head I’m listening to music, playing board games, doing apartment renovations, building stuff, etc.  

It’s a decision to live a proactive life; a DIY life, me thinks. But, and this is huge, I need some help. 

I need to decide which shows I’m going to cut out of my life for good and walk away from.  This is where ya’ll come in.  MORE »

The Los Angeles Dodgers really don’t want people to buy tickets.  Maybe the other way to put it is how badly do you want tickets to see the Dodgers at Chavez Ravine? 

I can’t 100% verify the veracity of this photo, photoshop and all that, but my friend buying the tickets swears it’s real.  I don’t think he has any reason to photoshop something like this and lie about it.

Film Drunk has the backstory on the new Mel Gibson comedy (it orignally starred Steve Carrell as a man who communicates to the world with a beaver puppet).  For whatever reason, this picture just seems to speak for itself. 

When Gibson replaced Carrell, I was kinda disappointed but not anymore.  Remember how Mel Gibson used to kill comedies?  I mean, like really knock them out of the park.  Like the comedies he was acting in were Jewish or something (remember when we all just assumed Mel Gibson was an anti-semite before he basically came out and admitted as much?).

As Triumph the Comic Insult Dog used to say, “it’s good enough for me to poop on.” 

Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin was able to “write” her memoir in a mere four months. Going Rogue: An American Life clocks in at 400 pages (not sure if there will be pictures/child-like ryhmes), and will be available in hardcover on November 17. A little surprised it’s not coming out straight to mass-market paperback, since that’s generally her audiences’s perfered book format.  Dan Brown, John Grisham, Tom Clancy, blah blah blah. 

It’ll make the perfect holiday gift for the teabagger in your life.

MacGuyver has nothing on this little trick.  You know, for the next time you’re stranded at a bus station, have gone to the bathroom and all you have is a bus ticket.  This technique may get you cleaned up, but it won’t do anything for the stink palm.   

[via]

Jonah Lehrer explains the science behind Girl Talk:

Let’s say you’re listening to that catchy Wu-Tang song, with the chorus “And let’s start it like this, son, rollin’ with this one / And that one, pullin’ out gats for fun”. Once the acoustic snippet enters working memory, individual neurons in the prefrontal cortex will fire in response to the stimulus – they are the neural representation of the song. Here’s where things get interesting: even when the stimulus disappears – you’ve now started listening to a different song, perhaps that Boston song “Foreplay/Long Time” – those working memory cells continue to fire. They’re still holding on to the Wu-Tang clip, which is why working memory is a type of memory. This echo of activity only lasts for a few seconds, but it’s long enough so that our thoughts get blended together, as seemingly unrelated sensations overlap.

Got it?  Gregg Gillis, the genius behind Girl Talk, is profiled by GQ and interviewed by Whitney Matheson.

This is some haul for biologists:

Scientists have found 850 previously unknown species living in subterranean water, caves and micro-caverns.These insects, crustaceans, spiders and worms are likely only about one-fifth of the number of undiscovered species the researchers think exist underground amid the harsh conditions of the Australian outback. Two species of blind fish and two of blind eels were also uncovered.

“What we’ve found is that you don’t have to go searching in the depths of the ocean to discover new species of invertebrate animals — you just have to look in your own backyard,” said researcher Andy Austin, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Adelaide in Australia.

The season 8 premiere of Family Guy (”Road To the Multiverse”) sees Stewie and Brian travel all around the multiverse to different animated worlds.  The episode was pretty good, if only to see all the different animation styles applied to the show.  Besides Disney, Stewie and Brian became a Washington Post political cartoon, were depicted IRL, etc.