media

I tend to think of my cable bill kind of like my health insurance premium. Every month, I begrudgingly pony up the funds necessary to continue this so-called “service” wondering the what the heck it is I’m actually paying for--especially since most of what I regularly watch can be found online in some form--all the while deathly afraid of the consequences should I ever stop wiring in my money.

Every month, I consider amputating cable from my bottom line once and for all. But what’s holding me back is that I think I might actually miss it.

I guess some people will do anything to get on television. In the media blitz last week, nobody seemed to pause to wonder whether the escaped helium-filled contraption would in fact have sufficient buoyancy to carry a 40-pound boy to a height of 7000 feet. Let's apply some physics to the case.

If the late-’90s dot-com boom was the original Golden Age for awful TV tech ads, then today we are surely living in the Renaissance. Yes, back then we had the Pets.com sock puppet and lots and lots of chimps, but take a spin around the dial and I think you’ll agree that there are now more technology-related ads on television than ever—most of them quite terrible. Here are the ten that bug me the most, and I invite you to please cut loose in the comments on any offenders I neglect to mention.

Some people may not think of artists as being scientifically minded or scientists as caring about the arts, but it's a surprisingly common crossover. Look at Richard Feynman- he won the Nobel Prize for physics and loved painting... and bongo drums. David X. Cohen, who has a BA in physics from Harvard and an MS in computer science from Berkeley, is most well known as the co-creator and executive producer of Futurama, a FOX tv show set 1000 years in the future. Enter Christina Hurtado, PopSci.com's new columnist.