jonathan coulton

Jonathan Coulton, PopSci's contributing troubadour and longtime friend, has a new DVD/CD set out titled "Best. Concert. Ever." Leave a question or comment below for a chance to win the goods. We'll announce our ten lucky winners on July 17th. Good luck!

Chances are you've got a more advanced recording studio in your laptop than the Beatles had when they made Sgt. Pepper's, so record your music yourself. Then build an Internet home that can grow with your entourage. Skip the cookie-cutter MySpace stuff and get a full-fledged content-management system like WordPress or Drupal, which will allow you to build your empire as you go: a blog, forums, photos, videos -- all in one place that you control. And make sure it can support a digital music store so you can sell your own MP3s.

On this week's podcast, host Chuck Cage, gets the scoop on SXSW Interactive from Web editor Megan Miller. Marvel over the origins of the Internet! Learn how tech can change the world! Catch Jonathan Coulton's live concert! All that and more, on Cocktail Party Science.

Come the holiday season, some folks have visions of sugarplums dancing in their heads. But if you´re like us, your Christmas dreams tend more toward rows of blinking LEDs and the soothing hum and sweet smell of fresh new electronic gadgetry.

We are currently surveying the field of entrants to our Jonathan Coulton video contest, and will soon announce the big winner! To recap, a month ago, we asked PopSci readers to create their own music videos for Jonathan's song, "I Feel Fantastic" for a shot at winning an 80 GB iPod engraved with JCo's autograph. The resulting videos have ranged from machinima to live-action goodness, with a bit of original Flash animation thrown in for good measure. If you haven't sent in your video yet, HURRY! You have till midnight tonight to come up with something brilliant. Stay tuned for an announcement of the winner and runners up tomorrow.

—Megan Miller

PopSci's official contributing troubadour and podcaster Jonathan Coulton got some major love in the Sunday New York Times Magazine this week as the centerpiece of a story on how musicians are using the Internet to interact directly with their fans in ways that were previously not possible. When he's not interviewing the best and brightest minds of the science world from his PopSci office on the moon or performing at our swanky Future Lounge in Second Life, Jonathan is a full-time, self-supported singer-songwriter. We're all crazy about his tracks here at PopSci (if you haven't heard "Code Monkey" yet, do so at your earliest convenience) and thrilled that Jonathan will probably have an even larger audience to interact with online after this week's piece.

You can read the whole thing online here. And after you're done, why not check out Jonathan's PopSci Podcast and our video coverage of this year's Consumer Electronics Show that also featured Mr. Coulton. And last but certainly not least, find out what being a magazine's "contributing troubadour' actually means by checking out Jonathan's five-track digital soundtrack to 2005's Future of the Body Issue called "Our Bodies, Ourselves, Our Cybernetic Arms," still available for a free download. Great stuff.

Remember when electric cars only went 20 mph and ran out of juice after ten minutes of uphill driving? Those were the days. Steve Schneider is the CEO of a California company called ZAP that sells electric vehicles - not hybrids mind you, real honest-to-goodness electric cars - and it sounds like they might actually be useful for say, driving from one place to another. Even the tiny weird-looking ones are kind of sexy, and the prototype electric SUV he describes may be the perfect vehicle for both road-rage crazed soccer moms and tree-hugging hippies.

Hopefully this is another one of those cases where the environmentally
friendly option doubles as the smart business decision. A few days after I interviewed Steve I actually saw a striped Xebra electric in the wild, so I know he's sold at least one. Fingers crossed—Jonathan Coulton

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Normally, we're not one to toot our own horn, but at yesterday's 2006 Magazine Publishers of America Digital Awards, we walked away with three prizes—more than any other magazine Web site. So, toot-toot! We won the shiny trophy pictured at left in the "Best Online Tool" category for our Best of What's New microsite. Contributing troubadour Jonathan Coulton got well-deserved props with second place in the podcast category for his PopSci Podcast from the Moon. And we also got second place for "Best Sports/Enthusiast Web Site," losing out only to Sports Illustrated's big-budget, big-staff SI.com. Not bad for a bunch of geeks, huh?  —Megan Miller

I read this piece in the magazine a couple of times to make sure I wasn't missing anything before I made the call. Let me get this straight: you put garbage into the machine—any kind of garbage, it doesn't matter—and this thing breaks it down to its component elements, generating only steam, a few harmless byproducts, and a synthetic gas that can be further refined into useful fuels like hydrogen, natural gas and ethanol? And the whole process generates enough energy to keep itself running plus a little extra that you can sell back to the grid? Come on! It sounds way too good to be true—also I'd like one in my kitchen, please. (I have a really big, garbagey kitchen.)

Joseph Longo, whose company, Startech, makes the device, appears to be yet another charming, humble supergenius who's changing the world. What's with these guys? I keep waiting to talk to someone who's doing great things but has a really bad attitude. But no evil genius here. Longo immediately won me over with his story about furry olives, and kept the hits coming with various philosophical musings about the nature of technological change.

Another detail you won't want to miss: the plasma conversion process uses manmade lightning three times hotter than the surface of the sun. Awesome!

—Jonathan Coulton

 
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