Lewis Black deconstructed Earth Day children's programming on last night's The Daily Show, including a great jab at actor / MTV Cribs balla' Wilmer Valderrama. Enjoy. 

Cool trailer. The Day the Earth Stood Still is one of the better disaster movies to come out this year. Keanu Reeves' cold logic about solving Earth's problems is bone-chilling.

I wanted to post this before editorial found it, because when I see something this cool, I like to plant my flag on it. The following is a segment from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's program "Marketplace," back in 1978. To repeat: Nineteen. Seventy. Eight.

Remember the gPC? It's Everex's $199 "green" Linux computer, the one Wal-Mart stocked up on during the last holiday season. Well, it seems the "experiment" is over, with an unsatisfied Wal-Mart putting those famous price-cutting scissors on their plan to sell the cheap PC in their stores. According to the AP, Wal-Mart concluded that their middle-American consumer base was not hip to the gPC's Linux-based operating system. However, seeing the appeal of the computer to a more geeky clientele, Wal-Mart will continue to sell it on their website. Why should anyone care? Far as I know, this was the first …

A friend of mine showed me this video last weekend, and I just wanted to show you all how freaking cool it is. It's a ongoing work of Dutch artist Theo Jansen, who's literally creating artificial creatures that can move on their own and survive autonomously on a beach. Wind-powered and updated using simulated genetic evolution ... well, just look! Outside of the coolness factor, the ramifications of this project -- creating autonomous, renewable-energy-powered, zero-emission systems from vehicles to robotics -- just blows my mind. I look forward to seeing something like this in person one day.

Wal-Mart has always been a place of consumer frenzy at the beginning of the holiday shopping season, and this year is no exception. What's different is that one of the items flying off the shelf faster than they can restock it is the "Everex gPC," a cheap (less than $200) desktop computer. The tech news world has been buzzy about gPC's popularity, in particular questioning what the "g" stands for. It could stand for "green," thanks to the environmental friendliness of its low-power CPU (average 2W, 20W maximum). However, that seems to be its only green credential; nothing on its …

I found this in my Google Reader feed this morning, a post from a British blogger named Charlie living in Beijing. Three weeks after it was reported that the Chinese government convinced the World Bank to suppress a report that over 700,000 Chinese citizens die every year of pollution-related ailments, due to the fact that it may lead to revolution social unrest among the populace, Charlie's post reads like a bittersweet valentine to the city he's lived in for four years: I woke up this morning and ate some baozi. They were disgusting! I'm sure I they were made of …

As birthplace of the Kyoto Protocol, Japan is one of the pioneering countries in climate change policy and research. In 1990, Japan pledged to reduce carbon emissions by 6 percent by 2012. One of their proposed stratagems for meeting this goal is to replace the 132 million gallons of gasoline that Japan car drivers use with a biofuel option. Domestic biofuel production has always been difficult in land-lacking Japan, which in the past had to consider importing biofuel from countries like Brazil as its primary means of obtaining ethanol. However, Japanese researchers at Mitsubishi and The University of Tokyo are …

If not, here it is. Man that's cool. I wish we had one of Chip standing on his head.

As Dave noted yesterday, we rolled out a new site feature last weekend, and although we simply call it "topics," it's something we've been working on for months. Eventually it will be integrated into the site just as profoundly as commenting. Like the integrated search rolled out a while back, "topics" is meant to give you another tool to find current and archived articles. Some features will be helpful for everyone -- the "read more about" tool embedded in articles and posts, or basic browsing in the "topic results" page. But we also created some advanced features that will more …