Below is a small poster that hangs in the guys’ kitchen on THE BIG BANG THEORY.

I first noticed it in the pilot episode, some four years ago, but couldn’t figure out what precisely it was. They never showed a really good close-up of it for me to accurately read the words, and an inquiry of the google gods for “robot chef” — because that’s what I thought it was — never returned anything useful. All I knew about it was that I liked it a lot, and wanted a copy.

Well, in the most recent episode, in a tight shot on Sheldon, the poster was clearly visible over his shoulder, and I was finally able to get a clear look at it.

Turns out it’s an advertisement from the 1930′s for Petre Devos, a Flemish beer brewed in the village of Audenaerde.

So the good news is that I know what the poster is called. The bad news, though, is that the cheapest reproduction I can find costs $249.

Ah well. Maybe once I’m working again.

The other day at the Air Force Museum, as we were eating breakfast in the cafeteria, Nate casually mentioned that he wanted to buy one of those “hard drives made from a model DeLorean.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” I asked.

He went on to explain how he’d seen online that one could buy a 500GB USB external hard drive built into a scale replica of the DeLorean from BACK TO THE FUTURE.

Not only that, but the DeLorean in question is the vaguely steampunk-looking one from the third movie. It’s the most visually interesting of the three styles, I think, and my favorite by far.

It’s an ingenious idea, really. Unfortunately, it first went viral back at the end of November, and the maker has since discontinued orders for the time being (he constructs these by hand) as he has a huge backlog.

Still, if he ever accepts orders again in the future, I’d love to have one.

Sidebar: The fact that I originally missed this when it went viral a couple of months back is kind of surprising, considering that I’m basically married to the Internet and all. It’s my old “ball and fiber optic cable.”

The U.K. edition of William Gibson’s new novel ZERO HISTORY, which I already prefer to the cover of the American edition, boasts a particularly clever bit of design work on the back cover.

I wants.

Templesmith really is an amazing artist:

The above is the cover for the upcoming POPGUN Vol. 4 anthology.

(Via BoingBoing.)

I think writers’ room for the show EUREKA contains the single awesomest, and probably nerdiest, wall clock ever:

For a better view of it, go to this post on the official EUREKA writers’ blog and scroll down. It should be the fifth picture.

Uncommon Goods sells it for $25, and will also include a cheat sheet for those of us who don’t possess Ph.D’s in mathematics from MIT:

12 – a radical
1 – Legendre’s constant is a mathematical constant occurring in a formula conjectured by Adrien-Marie Legendre to capture the asymptotic behavior of the prime-counting function. Its value is now known to be exactly 1.
2 – A joke in the math world: An infinite number of mathematicians walk into a bar. The first one orders a beer. The second orders half a beer. The third, a quarter of a beer. The bartender says, “You’re all idiots,” and pours two beers.
3 – A unicode character XML “numeric character reference.”

I actually knew what 8:00 is — an illustration of binary code — so I guess I’m not a complete #MathFail.

These Bookbooks are very cool, and I would very much like to have one. The only issue is that they are designed for MacBooks, but I bet with some fiddling my Toshiba Satellite could be made to fit in the 15″ model.

Protecting your MacBook is a top priority and it’s job one for BookBook. Slip your Mac inside the velvety soft, padded interior. Zip it closed and your baby is nestled between two tough, rigid leather hardback covers for a solid level of impact absorbing protection. The rigid spine serves as crush protection for an additional line of defense. BookBook creates a hardback book structure that safeguards your MacBook like few other cases can. Far better than any floppy neoprene bag ever will. End of story.

I also wouldn’t mind owning one of these doormats shaped like an “Enter” key:

A doormat like this says: “Enter if you like, but beware — you may not return.” Get it? Return? Like, as in the “Enter” key is sometimes called the “Return” key?

[whistles as he walks off]