Almost 48 hours ago, Skynet self-activated, and the clock is a'tickin for us humanoids. In the spirit of all things destructive, we started thinking about some other mythical (or are they?) future dates to watch out for, in terms of the fate of humanity. The LA Times has rounded up "Thirteen Sci-Fi Dates That Tell Us To Fear The Future," from 2022—the year that Soylent Green invents a new, uh, foodstuff; to 2013 (coming up!), when Kevin Costner gets totally panned as a post-apocalyptic Postman. A world without email, and some other terrifying harbingers of doom, ahead: more ›

Let's step away from some of the more popular sports for a second. Move aside basketball and your NCAA Tournament. Take a chill pill baseball with your World Baseball Classic and Spring Training. Yesterday the Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum hosted the Big Apple Grapple, which featuring the some of the world's best male and female arm wrestlers. All battling for NYC's King and Queen of Arms. Unfortunately, there are no results online for this scintillating display of strength. more ›

Mayor Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Kelly announced the opening of the Real Time Crime Center, a sleek $11 million project that "will conduct rapid analysis of homicides and shootings Citywide." The benefit to the police is that all crime information will be centralized, with databases that "offer 5 million state criminal, parole and probation records; 20 million city criminal complaints and summonses, including 911 and 311 calls about specific locations; 31 million national crime records; and more than 33 billion public records." Police Commissioner Kelly waxed poetic, saying, "This crime-fighting center is harnessing the power of information technology and putting it into the hands of our investigators to fight and solve crime." The power of information technology! Gothamist wonders if the Intel or Windows music signatures were cued up when he said that. The crime center looks fancy, sort of like a TV control room meets what Hollywood thinks police departments look like (but usually only in futuristic films, like Judge Dredd). Mostly, as much as this is good for the NYPD, this also sounds like the Mayor's answer to CompStat, which was Mayor Giuliani's claim to dramatically decreasing NYC crime. Hello, election year!
more ›