Living

There are coincidences in this world, and it's important not to read too much into them. Pandora playing the song stuck in your head doesn't make you psychic. But then there are coincidences you can't help but think might mean a little bit more. Like, say, three heavy hitter holdouts all hopping on Apple TV within two days of each other. Maybe it's just one of those things. Or maybe it's a sign that something major's in the works. Let's embark on some wild conjecture, shall we? Two days ago, word came down that Hulu Plus had crash-landed on Apple TV. It's hard to overstate what a big deal this is; the assumption had long been that Apple didn't want Hulu on its streaming box because it directly competes with Apple's own (highly profitable) iTunes offerings. Who's going to buy a $30 season pass to Modern Family when when it's rolled into your $8/month Hulu Plus subscription? That's not just idle speculation, either; Hulu Plus had repor...

Christopher Columbus is a polarizing figure in modern America. He was a hero! He was a villain! But what if we look past the immediate consequences and look at his broader, unintended impacted on the human species as a whole? That's exactly what Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson does in this short video. Dr. Tyson was the headlining speaker at last week's First Comes the Dream event Gizmodo and io9 threw at the American Museum of Natural History. After his talk, rather than sneak away in a gigantic, star cluster-shaped limo, he spent hours standing around answering peoples' questions. To put this into context, this is what Dr. Tyson was saying leading up to his statement about Columbus: No life-form on Earth either lives or dies in vain. Because the fact that you die from some virus removes your gene-pool from what remains on the Earth, so that those who did not die from it have the immunity to it allowing them to continue forward. So you didn't die in vain and you didn't l...