When we posted about Bilal's "Domestic Tension" project, plus his more recent project where he inserts himself into an anti-George Bush video game, reaction among io9 readers was definitely split, with several people lambasting Bilal for cheap sensationalism.

So it's interesting to read Bilal's own account of his creative process, which starts from his feelings of constant trauma. Imprisoned by Saddam, Bilal managed to escape to the U.S., but his family stayed behind in Iraq. He writes about running for his life on several occasions, but also reading the news about Iraq with a punch-in-the-gut feeling. He also talks about his guilt about living in the "comfort zone" of the U.S. while his family and friends suffered, and his desire to bridge the "comfort zone" and "conflict zone" somehow. He also was inspired by the U.S. Army using video games as a major recruiting tool.

In the book, the story of Bilal's art installation is interspersed with his account of growing up in Iraq and feeling constantly surrounded by madness. He talks about his father going insane when he was a child, and how his father was abusive or psychotic even when he wasn't pretending to be a sheep. Later, an "epidemic of insanity" hits his town of Kufa later, as young people pretended to be insane to get out of fighting in the Iran-Iraq war. How can you tell the difference between a real insane person and a fake one? For those who are faking insanity, it's an act "born out of desperation," he writes. Later, Bilal's brother kills a man who raped him, and Bilal's family has to flee their town or face revenge killings.

As the book goes on, Bilal's project gets more and more famous, and the book becomes more of an exploration of cyberculture and gaming culture. After about a week, the site runs out of bandwidth, and the project almost grinds to a halt — but a Chicago web developer steps in and donates a dedicated server, becoming one of the project's main sponsors. The constant stress, loneliness and grief starts to take a toll on Bilal, who hides his tears from the webcam. And then there are moments like this one:

A tall, fresh-faced young man with a crew cut ambles into the gallery. His name is Matt Schmidt, and he tells me that until recently he was a U.S. Marine. He saw the YouTube video where Estonia killed the lamp, and how upset I had become. He holds out a plastic bag. "I got you a new lamp and some light bulps," he tells me. "I figured you can use all the help you can get."

Matt says he never thought much about the consequences of killing in war. He says he and his fellow Marines were always too busy trying to survive to be worried about their targets. But the paintball project has made him see things in a different light, enabled him to see his adversaries as human beings. He wishes his Marine buddies could visit the gallery.

In general, the onslaught is furious, traumatizing and overwhelming — and that's before Bilal's site hits on Digg. "I survived Digg day," Bilal writes. People spread rumors the site is a fake and Bilal is animatronic.

If you want to see just how surreal online culture can get — and get a taste of where confrontational art is heading in the future — you should totally pick up a copy of Shoot An Iraqi.

Brown Coat, or random frontier person. We talked to Shawna Trpcic, costume designer for Joss Whedon's shows Firefly, Serenity, Dr. Horrible and Dollhouse. She's all about adapting easy-to-find materials — she cut up her own wedding dress to make Inara's ballgown in the Firefly episode "Shindig." Says Trpcic:

Thrift stores are a treasure source. You don't feel bad cutting something up to make it a-line or off center, to make it other-worldly. I love the "Towns" in cities - Chinatown, Little India, Thai-town — you can get amazing costume pieces for very little, [with] all the embroidery and beading. Crazy shoes, neat jewlery. The stores that supply "work" clothes are also great, for Amish, prairie, or cowboy. You can get thick pants, prairie dresses [or] patriot shirts. Again usually not very expensive. Then the planet you choose to be from will determine the make-up.

Random cyborg mutant. We got a similar answer from Ruth Secord, who's worked on a slew of TV movies including Threshold, Bugs, Terminal Invasion, and Encrypt. Go down to your local Army surplus store and "Value Village" type stores and look for random stuff that you can put together into a ramshackle survivor of the purge of humanity.
What you'll need: Scraps of rubber and leather. Pieces of chain mail. A pop riveter. Bits and pieces of electronics. Old Army uniforms.

Nerd Herder from Chuck. We talked to Augusta, aka burlesque performer Penny Starr, Jr., who works as a costumer on NBC's series about a nerd in an electronics store who gets the CIA and NSA databases plugged into his brain. And not surprisingly, Augusta suggests dressing as a member of the Nerd Herd, the team of computer fixers that Chuck belongs to.
What you'll need: "Black pants, white short sleeve shirt, grey tie and pocket protector."

Mork From Ork. The manic, happy-to-go-lucky, finger-drinking visitor from a crazy backwards planet, from the classic sitcom. He's due for a come-back, and I'm frankly shocked the Mork movie hasn't been announced yet.
What you'll need: Shaggy hair, vertical stripey suspenders, glue-on chest hair, and heaps of cocaine.

Steampunk person. Another suggestion from Augusta, the Chuck costumer. "There's nothing more 'in' these days than steampunk!" she says. For those who slept through the past two decades, Steampunk is about imagining an alternate Victorian era that achieved high technology (including cyborgs and stuff) powered by steam.
What you'll need: Victorian clothing. For men, a white shirt and fitted (not pleated) trousers. For women, a long, full skirt. Turn up your collar, and then buy a women's silk scarf and wrap it around your neck, with a knot, to make an ascot of sorts. Buy some goggles from the Army/Navy surplus store, and while you're there, ask if they have any gaiters, which are canvas leg coverings that go over your leg like spats. "Add a suit vest from the thrift store, and get a length of chain from the hardware store for your 'pocket watch' — buy a connector to clip it to the second to last button hole and connect the other side to your iphone!"

Bodypainted superhero. If you're bald and skinny, paint yourself silver and go as the Silver Surfer. (It may help to have a surfboard, also painted silver.) If you're a bit bigger, paint yourself green and go as the Hulk. (Or She-Hulk if you're a tall, buff woman.)
What you'll need: Bodypaint. And, if you're the Surfer, a surfboard and some silver paint.

Random Stargater: Our resident Stargate expert, Meredith, points out that the basic Stargate uniform is pretty simple — and very close to actual Army fatigues.
What you'll need: Basic Army fatigues. And a patch. You can be lame and just laser print it, or you can try and track down someone like this guy who makes the real thing. Ahh... just laser print it.

Off-duty Battlestar personnel. Particularly in the Battlestar Galactica miniseries, the Galactica crew had a pretty simple uniform for when they were off duty. And yet it has the advantage of being pretty recognizeable, because who wears a tanktop over a T-shirt normally?
What you'll need: cream/tan-colored T-shirt, olive-green or dark green tank top, and green fatigue pants. Bonus points if you're female and have short blonde hair.

Col. Doctor Irina Spalko, from Indiana Jones and the Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull. She's awesome and distinctive, but also quite simple. The only hard part is the sword, but you can probably use a toy for that.
What you'll need: A blue/grey jumpsuit, similar to what maintenance workers wear. Try your local thrift store and uniform supply store. Big black gloves, big black boots, and a big black belt with a gold buckle. (You can paint the star on it yourself.) And then there's that sword, which could totally be a toy, unless you can borrow someone's real sword. And finally, a shiny straight black wig with a bowl/fringe cut, which you can find in my neighborhood for $10. Boom, you're done.

Starman. This one's a suggestion from Annalee. Jack Knight takes over as the superhero Starman, the hero his dad invented, after his brother dies on the job. Jack spurns the spandexy costumes and big fins the original Starman went for, and instead goes with a simpler, but more kick-ass, outfit.
What you'll need: Black leather jacket, T-shirt, jeans. Big goggles. And you'll have to figure out a way to make your own power rod — Annalee suggests a broomstick with a globe attached.
Another T-shirty superhero costume: Captain Hammer, who just wears a black T-shirt and cargo pants. You just have to attach the trademark logo somehow, either by glueing it on or by getting it from a custom T-shirt store. (In my neighborhood, they have a two-hour turnaround now.)

And here's a bonus idea, that's a bit harder but still pretty doable:

Cassandra from Doctor Who. Okay, this one is a bit more ambitious, but not really as hard as it seems. Stay with me here. Cassandra is the self-proclaimed "last human," who's had so much plastic surgery that she's now just a piece of skin stretched across a frame. She's bitchy and fabulous, and always seems to be hatching plans to destroy all of the zillions of other people who could lay claim to being among the last humans.
What you'll need: A metal garment rack on wheels, some kind of thin tarp or flesh-colored plastic sheeting, some paints, a rubber brain, a glass tube, a white smock, white pants, some bandages, some goggles. What you do is, stretch the fake skin across the dress rack, and attach the brain to the base of the rack inside the jar, and paint eyes and mouth on it, plus maybe a few little veins. Then you dress in all white, with the goggles, and wheel "Cassandra" around. If you can throw your voice so it sounds like she's telling you to moisturize her, so much the better.

1. The dystopic Communist regime will continue.

While some China experts think that democratization is an inevitable first step to total economic domination, Andy Nathan, author of How East Asians View Democracy, believes otherwise. "China has authoritarian resilience," he says. "If (the current regime) was not supposed to survive modernization, it's proving very adaptable." In other words, as long as Hu Jintao's government can prove itself efficient albeit its shortcomings, the people will continue to sustain their loyalty to it.

Nathan does pinpoint one costly solution to bringing democracy and human rights to China. The current regime could be toppled, he says, if China were to be hit with a series of natural disasters, terrorist attacks, and bad political decisions (like if they invaded Iraq and accrued a huge budget deficit... hint hint). If the current regime relies on a certain complacency cushioned by the fact that, while it's oppressive and fucked up, it somehow seems to be working, a mechanical failure of the government machine could unleash the unrest and cause a revolution.

Simply put: The dystopic Communist regime that punishes free will and uses forced labor to build the economy may continue to rule China until a superhuman disaster wipes it out of existence.

2. A giant amount of wind power will up the nation's hip-and-cool factor.

Green tech is the new black—it's the symbol of belonging in the hip and cool country clique. China plans to be the hippest and the coolest by 2020 by becoming the world leader in wind energy. According to EcoWorldly.com, the country currently produces about 6GW of wind energy, which makes it fifth in the world. Some experts believe that China will reach at least 100GW in the next 12 years. That's an increase of 1667%! China still relies a lot on old school energy resources like coal for its imitation Prada handbag factories, but a 2005 legislation mandates all utilities to be supplied by renewable energy. Clean tech funds are being bought up like lychees at street stands.

3. Joe Chen will be the next Steve Jobs.

While engineering is a dwindling profession in the US, it's booming in places like China and India. Only a decade or two ago, students from China entered Harvard and MIT and then stayed in the states to pursue their careers. Now, they're all going back home because they believe that's where they can have the most impact. Joe Chen, for one, is a Stanford grad who founded popular entertainment site Mop.com and Xiaonei, the local equivalent of Facebook. He's going to be the next Steve Jobs, minus the black turtleneck sweater.

Rebecca Fannin, author of Silicon Dragon: How China is Winning the Tech Race, believes that Beijing will be the hub of the next Silicon Valley. China also has the fastest growing number of patents—it's currently seventh in the world—and owns the world's largest Internet market. "Venture capitalists are all looking for the next new thing in China," she says. "Chinese entrepreneurs are hard working and passionate, and they're bringing knowledge from the US back home."

China isn't just the hub of cheap imitation handbags anymore. It is, finally, rapidly and most certainly, inching up the manufacturing food chain and will lead the next major innovation cycle in web-based tech.

4. Beijing will go head-to-head with Dubai in an architectural prestige contest.

Dubai is the world capital of futuristic buildings, but China's not doing so bad either. Beijing already has a crazy new airport, not to mention the Water Cube and the Birds' Nest. Plans to construct a tube-fed eco-city, islands made from scratch, and a Starfleet Academy-like museum are well underway and we should be seeing results within the next ten years. "The government agencies and building companies are going for prestige projects that break the mold," Nathan says. "They're going to continue to go for constant shock value."

We'll see what happens when the cheap IKEA-grade foundations start giving out. Until then, enjoy the cool futuristic citiscapes as they pop up left and right.

5. As China's global market share grows, so will our likelihood of becoming robotic drummers.

Right now, companies like GM, Johnson and Johnson, and Coca Cola produce first and foremost for the US market. But this will change. As the Chinese customer base catches up in size and influence, the way products are marketed and business is done will inevitably shift to meet demand. "American political values are very distinctive," Nathan says. "We believe in guns, we believe in the law, and we believe in religion. If the Chinese were dominant, the global market would be more collectivistic, harmony-oriented, less rights-concious, and more about getting through things without causing a ruckus than about suing people."

Think of Japan and the way the market there still has many of the formalities and customs native to the Japanese. "Values never completely disappear," Nathan says.

There's no doubt that China will be the biggest world market in fifty years. The question is, how is this going to affect what we do and how we do it? Maybe one day we will all become drumming androids and synchronization will supersede individuality. Images: Madiko83 via Flickr, George Lu via Flickr, and AP)

According to 1984's Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, Iron Man's armor is able to, you know, exist, thanks to something called "biological circuit fabrication." This is a fancy way of saying that all the circuitry inside is very, very small, apparently... which happens to be exactly the kind of thing that scientists happen to be working on at this very moment:

[A] group of scientists led by Michael Sussman, director of University of Wisconsin, Madison's Biotechnology Center, and oceanography professor Virginia Armbrust of the University of Washington, are seeing if diatoms will help make even smaller integrated circuit chips by a similar process of biological fabrication... Sussman's interest in diatoms is based on the fact that diatoms are capable of creating lines of silica much smaller than present chip manufacturing processes can make out of silicon.

"If we can genetically control that process, we would have a whole new way of performing the nanofabrication used to make computer chips," says Sussman.

Rex Jameson bikes and swims regularly, and plays tennis and skis when time allows. But the 5-foot-11, 180-pound software engineer is lucky if he presses 200 pounds — that is, until he steps into an "exoskeleton" of aluminum and electronics that multiplies his strength and endurance as many as 20 times... Jack Obusek, a former colonel now with the Army's Soldier Research Development and Engineering Center in the Boston suburb of Natick, foresees robot-suited soldiers unloading heavy ammunition boxes from helicopters, lugging hundreds of pounds of gear over rough terrain or even relying on the suit's strength-enhancing capabilities to make repairs to tanks that break down in inconvenient locations.

Microbes could build 'Iron Man' circuits [LiveScience]
Robotic suit could usher in super soldier era

Wired blogger Jenna Wortham quotes opening keynote speaker David Weinberger, a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, describing how web fame has transformed fame as a whole:

"We made him, made them, famous," Weinberger said while showing photographs of the Star Wars Kid, Obama Girl, the home page of Turkish net fad Mahir and clips of YouTube's ubiquitous laughing babies. Weinberger went on to describe the current state of the fame game, saying that the traditional model of Hollywood megacelebrity is "based on alienation" — a model, Weinberger says, that opens the door for us to reinterpret our notions of fame.

"[Hollywood celebrities] cease to be famous when we see them as they are," a concept he demonstrated by showing several gossip magazine pictures of celebrities without their makeup. "Blogging, however, is all about taking off the 'makeup.' They're exposing themselves as fallible human beings."

The same holds true for the rest of the web celebs. "What's famous on the web looks like it was done by a human hand," said Weinberger, while showing a Homestar Runner graphic. "They still feel like ours."

"It's not just the homespun quality of what's famous on the web. It's how fame works — it's becoming much more DIY," said Weinberger. "Fame is now living in a long tail, or a long continuum of ways to be famous."

While it sounded like a seriously fun party at ROFLCon, packed with people whose online creations I've been enjoying for years, it's hard to take seriously the idea that web celebrities are truly challenging the sartorial-celebrity industrial complex. Many of the "celebrities" in attendance didn't know who the other celebrities were, and a lot of the attendees were fans of the obscure rather than the popular.

Ultimately ROFLCon was a gathering of people who are subculturally famous, the way many weirdo artists and creators have been for at least the past 200 years. I'd love it if Tron Guy's fame really were challenging Tom Hanks' fame, making all of us into potential celebrities. And making Tom Hanks into less of a big deal, which he really should be. But if anything, ROFLCon proved that challenge isn't happening. Web celebrities, if you can call them that, have hundreds of cool, devoted fans. But they're going to need millions before I'm convinced that, as Weinberger asserts, we're "reinterpreting our notions of fame."

I guess what I'm saying is that millions of downloads aren't the same as millions of fans. Until they are, Gem Sweater lady will never vanquish Paris Hilton. I'm not sure if that's a tragedy or a joke.

Tron Guy photographed by Scott Beale.

• Babbage had a life-threatening fever when he was 8 years old, and the parents ordered that his "brain was not to be taxed too much." Babbage later thought that this left him free to daydream, which led to his computers.
• Babbage was later schooled at the Holmwood Academy, which only had 30 students. They also had a massive library, with many books focused on mathematics, which he fell in love with.
• He worked on calculating machine designs from other inventor/mathematicians like Blaise Pascal, Wilhelm Schickard, and Gottfried Leibniz. All of these men had designed working calculators from the 1500s on. In Shickard's case, he had invented a calculating machine called "The Speeding Clock" that could work with six-digit numbers and would ring a bell to indicate memory overflow. It was later destroyed in a fire, but a working replica was constructed in 1960.
• Babbage himself first proposed building a "calculating engine" with much more capacity in 1822, and he went on to design several machines which he called "Difference Engines." Sadly, they were never built because of their enormous size, cost, and also because Babbage's personality frequently clashed with investors. Also, in 1827, Babbage's father, wife, and two of his sons died... all in the same year. He had a resulting mental breakdown which further delayed any construction or design.
• The first Difference Engine design had over 25,000 parts, would have been eight feet high, and would have weighed 15 tons. It was never fully completed during his lifetime, although different sections were later assembled and shown to work by his son, Henry Provost Babbage, after he inherited them.
• Babbage revised his designs for the Difference Engine No. 2, although this was never built during his lifetime either. In 1989, the London Science Museum began constructing one from his designs, and it was completed in 1991. It has 8,000 parts of bronze, cast iron and steel, weighs five tons and measures eleven feet long and seven feet high.
• Only two versions of this Engine exist: the one built for the London Science Museum, and a second one that was built by the museum on special commission for millionaire Nathan Myhrvold.
• The first completed Difference Engine No. 2 performed its first calculation in 1991, and returned results to more than 31 digits. That's more than your souped-up pocket calculator.
• A separate printing unit that Babbage designed was constructed for the Engine in 2000 and didn't need USB a to b cables or a serial interface. Pretty fancy stuff for the 19th Century.
• Babbage improved on his Difference Engine ideas again by working on plans for an Analytical Engine that could be reprogrammed by inserting programs on punch cards into the machine. This was the first programmable computer, which later led to other scientists improving on these ideas and eventually to the modern computer.
• Besides working on engines and calculating machines, Babbage also served as a mathematics professor at Cambridge for many years, won a Gold Medal from the Royal Astronomical Society, working on railroad rail gauges, invented uniform postal rates, ran for Parliament, worked in cryptography, and also invented the "pilot" (better known as a cow-catcher) that was mounted on the front of locomotives to "push" cows off the tracks to help prevent derailings.
• Babbage also didn't suffer from what he called public nuisance very well, either. He published "Observations of Street Nuisances" in 1864, which was a summary of 165 nuisances that he observed over 80 days. He also wrote "Table of the Relative Frequency of the Causes of Breakage of Plate Glass Windows" after counting the broken windows on a nearby factory.
• On a side note, growing up in Dallas, Texas, I used to beg my parents to take me to a little software shop to buy computer games. It was called Babbage's. Today it's better known as GameStop, but I still have a soft spot for that geeky little store.
• To this date, Charles Babbage's brain is preserved in a glass jar at the London Science Museum, just awaiting the perfect moment for reanimation.

Measuring 12 inches long by 6-1/2 inches wide by 2 inches deep, and weighing a mere 3 pounds, the World typewriter was roughly the same size as many of today's laptop computers. Instead of a keyboard, however, the World used a dial; users chose a character with the right hand, then used the left to operate a lever that pressed it into the paper. Yet another lever was used to make spaces between words. Even so, the World typewriter was said to be

. . . readily mastered, so that after a month or two of practice any one of ordinary intelligence, by application, can acquire a speed of forty words per minute, or about twice the number that a rapid penman will write with the pen.

Avoid debt at all costs. If anything, you'll want to save up as much money as you can, in case you have to live off your savings. Thanks to recent changes in bankruptcy law, it's much harder than before for an individual to declare bankruptcy. So if you're stuck in debt with little or no income, you'll still be working for the banks. And as this guy points out, the banks will be hurting, so the moment you miss a payment, they'll be quick to try and liquidate your collateral for whatever they can get.

Get out of your mortgage before the housing market collapses any further. As this site says, if you paid $300,000 for your house and it sells for $200,000, you could end up not owning your house and owing the bank $100,000.

Buy some cheap land in a rural area. Build a house, or just get a used RV. Either way, make sure you own your home free and clear, so you can live rent-free and mortgage-free for as long as you need to.

Go off the grid. Get your own power generator — or, better yet, some of those solar helium balloons. Or some wind turbines. Don't be dependent on the power company to keep all your necessities running.

Cultivate some skills that will always be in demand. Become a decent electrician, handy-person, carpenter or cook. There may not be much need for someone who understands content management systems during a total economic shutdown, but someone who can build a house will always have a place to crash.

Offshore yourself. As the dollar gets weaker and weaker, U.S. white-collar service workers will be the cheap overseas employees for Europeans and Asians, predicts Robert Scoble in his roundup of how to recession-proof yourself. So as long as someone, somewhere, is still making use of those white-collar service skills (like programming, or customer support) you may be able to offer yourself to overseas companies as a cheaper alternative.

Invest in the ultimate counter-cyclicals. Some industries will always be in growth mode — like any business that caters to the rapidly growing senior population. Also, "sin and comfort" industries, like cigarettes, gambling and booze, do well during downturns and will probably make bank this time around as well. (Too bad booze and cigs are generally part of huge diversified conglomerates these days.) Also, movie companies are quietly bragging that the movie industry had one of its biggest growth spurts ever in the 1930s, as people craved escapism.

Invest in some Euros, or some other currency that's not the dollar. Chances are the U.S. dollar will keep getting weaker, so you'll be better off holding a more stable currency. You could also try investing in gold or silver, but those commodities are already skyrocketing in value.

Have some liquid funds on hand. MSN Money suggests reducing your contributions to your retirement plan or 401(k) (if you have one) so you can put more money into your savings instead. And remember, the banks are still FDIC insured, so your savings are probably safe — but other investments have no such guarantee.

or take part in a community garden in your neighborhood. Try to position yourself so you can get as much of your diet as possible from food you've grown yourself, instead of being hooked on sushi.

Learn to hunt. These fine people claim that hungry people are already hunting small animals in the parks of San Francisco, and during the 1930s deer and squirrels were hunted almost to extinction. Learn how to trap, kill, prepare and eat a squirrel now, so you'll be ahead of the curve.

Stockpile medications. Your biggest problem, in an economic meltdown, could be getting health care. If you're dependent on prescription meds, try to get some extra pills now so you'll have some on hand later. Just make sure you're always taking the oldest meds you have, to minimize the risk of taking expired pills, these folks advise.

And hey, here's a meeting coming up in New York on how to "prepare and profit" from the next Depression. If any of our readers are in NYC, please please go to the meeting and tell us what they said, so we can learn how to turn abject economic misery into pure lovely gravy.

Doctor Who. The Doctor may be the king of the MacGyvers, constantly improvising incredibly complex devices out of whatever garbage he finds. But his craziest moment of jury-rigging is probably in "The Time Monster," when he builds a space-time disruption machine — which renders time-travel impossible — out of a wine cork, a yoyo and a fork. I loved that scene so much when I was a kid, but now it's a bit embarrassing. And yet, still kind of inspiring!

Star Trek. Over the decades of Trek, there's been a lot of people building weapons out of translators, or technobabbling their way into creating Everything machines. But the man who says the phrase "jury-rig" or "Jerry-rig" the oftenest, and in the craziest situations, is Scotty, our ingenious engineer. He's the guy who builds a nuclear reactor pump out of bits and pieces in "Devil in the Dark," and coverts an ancient ship's shields to hold a Dyson sphere open in "Relics." Not to mention retooling a transporter to keep him in stasis, in that same episode.

Stargate: Atlantis. Rodney McKay famously asks "What am I, MacGyver?" in this spin-off from the Richard Dean Anderson-starring Stargate SG1. But he actually does work technological marvels at regular intervals, making sense of Ancient technology. He built an atomic bomb for his sixth-grade science project. Not to mention, in "Condemned," he totally one-ups Scotty when he says it'll take two days to cobble together a new "Dial-Home Device" from secondary systems... and then downgrades that estimate to ten minutes in a pinch.

Can Of Worms. We have to send a shout-out to Mike Pillsbury, who manages to transform his family's satellite dish into a communications device to contact alien life forms. Watch our awesome video here.

Eureka. Henry Deacon, a former NASA engineer, is the mechanic for the small town of Eureka, and literally every other episode revolves around him building some crazy gadget out of nothing in particular. Need a pocket-sized gizmo to erase someone's memories of an alternate timeline? Or a quick cobbled-together device to undo the effects of a paranoia ray on a whole bunch of bigwigs? Henry's your guy.

E.T. Okay, you don't really think of that wormy-faced, big-eyed cute alien with the glowing cockfingers in the same breath as Scotty and McKay. But just think: who builds an interstellar communications device out of an old Speak & Spell toy using a coat-hanger? It's not Scotty.

Bill And Ted's Excellent Adventure. The only people less likely than E.T. to come on your MacGyver radar are Bill and Ted — but they do fix their time machine using only a fruit can and some bubble gum. You have to give them props for that.

Fantastic Four. I hesitated to include Reed Richards, the super-scientist who's always building rockets and weird toys out of bits and pieces, because he has a huge lab and doesn't really just use scraps. But then I saw this panel, from the alternate-universe Last Planet Standing, and had to give it to him:

Buckaroo Banzai is another wacky inventor who has a lab and an ample supply of parts, but we're still blown away by some of the things he throws together, like the Oscillation Overthruster, which transports matter into parallel universes. Not to mention the Jetcar.

Thanks to Angel and Kevin for research help.

Starblazers. Desslok, leader of the Gamilons, tried to crush the puny humans over and over again, but finally lost his empire. So in season two, he decided to take revenge on the crew of the Yamato, who defeated his ambitions. He finally catches up to them in an episode auspiciously titled "Desslok's Victory," and pounds them with his gunships. Then he surrounds the Yamato with magnetic mines before the humans can fire their famous Wave Motion Gun. And then taunts his adversaries mercilessly. "Go on, take a shot." Ha ha ha ha. (I know it's sacrilege, but I actually prefer this scene in the English dubbed version.)

Battlestar Galactica. It takes less than an episode for things to go south between the Galactica and the newly discovered Battlestar Pegasus. Admiral Cain decides to execute the Chief and Helo, leading to a tense confrontation complete with the whirly cam. Commander Adama shows why you don't mess with Galactica, with his terse "I'm getting my men" speaking volumes. And then the phone comes down, because the space battle is on.

Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan. Star Trek pretty much perfected the art of hailing-frequencies bravado, as early as "Balance of Terror"'s Romulan Sub-Commander Tal. "Your ship is surrounded, Captain. You will surrender immediately, or we will destroy you." With Kirk responding, "Save your threats. If you board this ship, I'll blow it up. You'll gain nothing." But Trek's masterpiece of comm-taunting has to be TWoK, where Kirk keeps needling Khan's poor marksmanship, until finally he lures him into a disabling nebula by laughing at his superior intellect. "We tried it once your way, Khan. Are you game for a rematch?" The script says: "Khan's eyes bulge." And they do.

Serenity. This one's a bit different. Chiwetel Ejiofor's Operative is mournful and regretful after he slaughters dozens (maybe hundreds) of innocents to get to Mal. But he still needles Mal via the viewscreen, suggesting that all the carnage is Mal's fault. And he's successful in goading Mal to take rash action — just not maybe the action he was hoping for.

Avengers #94, part of the Kree-Skrull War saga. The Skrull emperor appears on a view screen to warn the Avengers that the Kree warrior, Mar-Vell, is creating the ultimate weapon, an Omni-Wave Projector. And then when the humans don't respond to his threats fast enough, the emperor launches Plan Delta, which sends an all-consuming fireball spiralling towards Earth.

Farscape, "Die Me, Dichotomy." In the second season cliffhanger, Scorpius takes over Crichton's brain via a neural chip, and the mind-controlled Crichton tricks Aeryn into letting him go. She chases after his module in her Prowler, leading to a harsh exchange. Scorpius asks her how the skull fracture is doing, and she threatens to shoot him down. "Make no mistake." Scorpius/John replies: "I believe you'll pull the trigger. I just don't believe - you'll hit anything." And then he goes into a dive. Sadly, this is just a few moments before Aeryn takes her chair-dive into the frozen lake.

Halo 3, "The Crow's Nest" level. The Chief and Johnson reach the Command Center and start making plans to attack Truth's army, but then Truth appears on all screens and says: "You are, all of you, vermin. Cowering in the dirt, thinking...what, I wonder? That you might escape the coming fire? No! Your world will burn until its surface is but glass! And not even your Demon will live to creep, blackened, from its hole to mar the reflection of our passage; the culmination of our Journey. For your destruction is the will of the gods! And I? I AM their instrument!" Okay, so that's not a space battle. But I love that speech.

Galaxy Quest. Jason and Sarris have many great confrontations over the viewscreen, including the first one, where Jason thinks Sarris is just acting, and the second one, where Jason calls Sarris stupid and ugly because he thinks the sound is off. But the best, by far, is the final jaw-dropping confrontation. Sarris reminds Jason that he's a General, who's seen war and death that Jason can't imagine, and Sarris won't blink no matter what. (This scene is lengthier in the original script, actually.) But Jason retorts that it doesn't take a great actor to recognize a bad one, and Sarris is sweating. And then we get to the classic exchange, "You fool. What you fail to realize is that without your armor my ship will tear through yours like tissue paper." To which Jason responds: "Yeah. Well what you fail to realize is... I'm dragging mines."

Babylon 5, "Between The Darkness And The Light. We're totally embarrassed that we missed this crucial showdown between Earthforce and Susan Ivanova, and super grateful that commenters Michael and BcBeBop pointed it out to us. I am going to start calling myself "the right hand of vengeance" and "the boot up your ass" in the same breath now:

Doctor Who, "Bad Wolf." Another one we're embarrassed we missed originally. Thanks to commenter AspiringExpatriate for pointing it out! I love how Christopher Eccleston's Doctor is just like, "No." As if it's not even worth arguing. It mirrors his awesome "No" in "The Long Game" when The Editor asks that long-winded philosophical question about whether a slave is still a slave if he doesn't know he's a a slave. I have to admit, every time I watch this scene I wonder why the Daleks don't just say, "Okay then," and exterminate Rose right then and there.

So what classic space talk-downs did we miss? Feel free to let us know in the comments, but only in the most trash-talking, mouth-running, space-taunting way possible. You fools! We're laughing at your superior intellects.

Rucker, a retired mathematics professor, says, "We tend to very seriously undervalue quotidian reality." He then goes on to scold the starry-eyed futurists who predict smashing up the real world to make way for a virtual world as varied and granular as the one we live in now:

I might ask why someone would passionately want to believe that we can be translated from flesh into bits? There's something ascetic and life-hating about the notion. It's a bit like a religious belief; one thinks of the old "work now, get rewarded in heaven" routine.

We know that our present-day videogames and digital movies don't fully match the richness of the real world. What's not so well known is that computer science provides strong evidence that no feasible VR can ever match nature.

This is because there are no shortcuts for nature's computations. Due to a property of the natural world that I call the "principle of natural unpredictability," fully simulating a bunch of particles for a certain period of time requires a system using about the same number of particles for about the same length of time. Naturally occurring systems don't allow for drastic shortcuts . . . Natural unpredictability means that if you build a computer sim world that's smaller than the physical world, the sim cuts corners and makes compromises, such as using bitmapped wood-grain and cartoon-style repeating backgrounds. Smallish sim worlds are doomed to be dippy Las Vegas/Disneyland/Second Life environments . . .

Come on, if you want to smoothly transform a blade of grass into some nanomachines simulating a blade of grass, then why bother pulverizing the blade of grass at all? After all, any object at all can be viewed as a quantum computation! The blade of grass already is an assemblage of nanomachines emulating a blade of grass. To the extent that you can realize an accurate VR world, the exercise becomes pointless.

Annalee: "So, if you had to get out of that Stormtrooper outfit really, really fast what would you start with?"
Stormtrooper: "My helmet!"
Annalee: "Okay, then... what next?"
Stormtrooper: "Uh... my chestpiece!"
Annalee: "Okay, but what if you had to go to the bathroom? Is there any way to get out of there?"
Stormtrooper: "No!"

We left him to his Nerds and heard him whimpering for mommy. Did the Stormtroopers use catheters or something?

In retrospect, if I hadn't been such a Tetris freak as a kid, I would probably be a completely different person today. Here's how a simple video game taught me things that neither my parents, teachers, nor any religion could have ever ingrained in my stubborn-ass pre-pubescent head. I'll go through the lessons step by step.

Take calculated risks.
In the beginning, when you still have a lot of physical and emotional space to work with, you have to go for the Tetris score, even if it means cranking out the first few minutes with no instant gratification. Patience, confidence in the future, and comfortableness with the unknown are a must. Don't worry—the long orange stick will come.

Keep things simple.
Don't try to get fancy and open up the board to two Tetris opps or create pockets for hard-to-place blocks unnecessarily.

Whatever you do, do it with dignity.
Dignity could mean several things. It could mean not leaving holes in work that has potential to be flawless. It could also signify the need to stay even-tempered despite the chaos taking place on-screen.

The nail that sticks out should be hammered down.
Try not to create bumps in the surface of your palate unless you're anticipating a green or blue block that requires a hook to rest on. Smoother surfaces are easier to deal with, and you don't want to be the one that's causing the entire board trouble.

Get perspective.
Your blocks are stacking up and your anxiety is snowballing. Don't let it kill you—take what comes and spread it out so that it doesn't hurt too much in one place.

When faced with adversity, practice humility.
So you screwed up, and your board is totally out of sync. This is where you practice moderation. You can't expect to recover by executing some flashy move that's going to blow out the holes and miraculously smooth things out. You'll probably die trying. Take things one line at a time, and repeat to yourself: This, too, shall pass. Before you know it, you'll be back in the groove.

A Brief History of the Reality Distortion Field

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• Steve Jobs and his Reality Distortion Field: Apparently the Star Trekly-esque named Bud Tribble was working on a software project for Apple in 1981, and thought he had been given an unrealistic ten-month schedule from inception to ship date. When asked why he didn't just ask Steve to change it, he reportedly said "Well, it's Steve. Steve insists that we're shipping in early 1982, and won't accept answers to the contrary. The best way to describe the situation is a term from Star Trek. Steve has a reality distortion field." Although it turns out no one could find a connection between that term and Star Trek, and thus a legend was born.
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• The Scramble Suits from A Scanner Darkly: In Phillip K. Dick's novel about drug addiction and the paranoid world on both sides of that issue, government narcotics agents wear "scramble suits" that change every aspect of the reader, shifting at a moment's notice so that people looking at someone wearing one will never be able to tell what they look like. In the novel they shift extremely quickly, but they slowed it down in the movie to show how they work. They alter your voice as well, making you the most visible invisible man/woman around: they scramble reality for everyone except you.
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• The Matrix in The Matrix: Nothing distorts reality more than entire system of machines set up to grow you from a fetus, nurture you, and feed your brain signals that tell it you're growing up normal inside a world that doesn't exist. As Morpheus says, "It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth." Sounds pretty distorty to us, although if they decided to make us some sort of science fiction superstar inside this simulation, we probably wouldn't mind. Then you'd all be invited to the rad parties we'd throw.
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• The Holodeck in Star Trek: Seriously, we could never understand why people just didn't stay on the holodeck 24/7. Sure, it's technically "not real," but it does everything you'd want a real world to do. You've got an entire library of billions and billions of option of things to simulate, plus you can even disable the security protocols making it possible to actually die while you pretend you're inside Alice in Wonderland. It's like a portable Matrix To Go (tm), so how did they ever manage to get any work done with one of these things around?
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• The world of They Live: You can blame our current obsession with this film on the fact that it's been showing up on cable a lot lately, but there's something about this Roddy Piper/John Carpenter film that makes it hard to hate. In their world, an alien signal is being beamed out that makes humans as complacent as cattle, and stops them from seeing the aliens as they actually are. Thankfully, Roddy gets some magic glasses that help him kick ass and thwart the fugly aliens. Although in retrospect, they just wanted to make him rich. Was that so bad?
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Image above from the Joy of Tech website. Full version can be seen here.