You may be seeing a lot of press about a new version of Superman these days, from a graphic novel called Superman: Earth One that comes out today. People have been throwing around adjectives with no regard for the safety of those around them, words like “cinematic,” or “staggering,” or “hipster.” You may be wondering how this new version of the Man of Steel will affect you and your loved ones.

Is he really a hipster? Does he still stand for Truth, Justice, and the American Way? Is he going to lobotomize me with his laser eyesohgod.

Allow us to explain.

Not only has the wave of hope that crested in the hearts of many Apple fans when white iPhone 4s surfaced in Apple’s updated App Store app crashed after Apple announced that, oops, the white iPhone 4 won’t actually be available until next spring; now, that wave may sink into a sea of sadness, for the white iPhone 4 may never come at all.

YouTube user Hickock45 shows us the proper way to carve a pumpkin. It only takes 38 bullets and an epic mustache.

More pics below:

Barnes & Noble announced a major update to their Nook e-reader line yesterday: The Nook Color. The device has a 7 inch full color LCD touchscreen with a 1024×600 resolution with 16 million colors, has a film on the screen to help reduce glare, runs on Android, has 8 gigabytes of storage, and has built-in WiFi, as well as integration with Facebook and Twitter. It’ll be launching at a $249 price point and will be shipped starting November 19.

Barnes & Noble seems to be marketing the Nook Color as a hybrid e-reader and tablet computer, though from various impressions around the web, the device is being met with mixed reviews. Read on past the jump for a mini round-up of praise and criticism.

Avatar director and pioneering submariner James Cameron has announced that he has signed a deal with Fox to direct both Avatar 2 and Avatar 3. The films are slated for release in December 2014 and December 2015, respectively.

Cameron’s statement:

It is a rare and remarkable opportunity when a filmmaker gets to build a fantasy world, and watch it grow, with the resources and partnership of a global media company. AVATAR was conceived as an epic work of fantasy – a world that audiences could visit, across all media platforms, and this moment marks the launch of the next phase of that world. With two new films on the drawing boards, my company and I are embarking on an epic journey with our partners at Twentieth Century Fox. Our goal is to meet and exceed the global audience’s expectations for the richness of AVATAR’s visual world and the power of the storytelling. In the second and third films, which will be self contained stories that also fulfill a greater story arc, we will not back off the throttle of AVATAR’s visual and emotional horsepower, and will continue to explore its themes and characters, which touched the hearts of audiences in all cultures around the world. I’m looking forward to returning to Pandora, a world where our imaginations can run wild.

No new word on plot or shooting details beyond what we’ve already heard.

(THR via Bleeding Cool)

Additive color diagram illustrated in pancakes. Still tasty-looking, or does all of the food coloring spoil your appetite?

(Foodbeast via Evil Mad Linkblog)

The LA Times‘ Hero Complex will be running an interview with Christopher Nolan later this morning, but before it went up, they have teased some very, very exciting Batman 3 news from it.

In a nutshell:

• The movie will be called The Dark Knight Rises.
  
• It will not be in 3D.
• The Riddler will not be the main villain.

The results are in from the Duracell Toy Report, an annual report that tracks what kids from ages five to sixteen want for Christmas. The big winner: Apple, which swept the #1, #2, and #3 slots. Who gets their child/tween an iPhone 4, though?

Survey results below:

This past Saturday, the U.S. temporarily lost control of 50 nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles, or 1/9 of our domestic nuclear stockpile, due to an engineering failure.

According to a military officer who The Atlantic spoke to, this incident represented an unprecedented loss of control: ”‘We’ve never had something as big as this happen’ … Occasionally, one or two might blink out, the officer said, and several warheads are routinely out of service for maintenance. At an extreme, ‘[w]e can deal with maybe 5, 6, or 7 at a time, but we’ve never lost complete command and control and functionality of 50 ICBMs.’”

All told, according to Danger Room, for about 45 minutes, “launch control officers at F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming couldn’t reliably communicate or monitor the status of 50 Minuteman III nuclear missiles.”

In the video above, YouTuber Clayton Boyer guides us through a succession of progressively more remarkable gears, all of which manage to spin together just fine. The square gears at the start are straightforward enough, but the dolphins, the mega-gear at the end, and the I don’t even know what that is at 2:15 are weird and hypnotic to watch.

(via Boing Boing)

The rumored PlayStation phone is real after all, and Engadget has the prototype pictures to prove it. Aside from the PlayStation-inspired triangle, square, circle, and X buttons, the main connection this Sony Ericsson-made smartphone will have to the beloved console line will be “a custom Sony Marketplace which will allow you to purchase and download games designed for the new platform.” For more phone-like needs, it’ll be built on Android; Engadget surmises that it’ll be Android 3.0, a.k.a. Gingerbread.

The PlayStation phone’s specs: A 1GHz Qualcomm MSM8655 chip, 512MB of RAM, 1GB of ROM, and support for microSD cards, with a screen “in the range of 3.7 to 4.1 inches.” No word on a release date, but it’ll likely be in 2011.

More pics at Engadget.

Update: The Escapist thinks it could be a fake:

Both Sony Ericsson and Sony Computer Entertainment have refused to comment on the existence of a PlayStation Phone, saying that they do not comment on speculation or rumor. The images of the phone are now thought to be faked however, thanks to certain irregularities in the device’s interface.

Engadget is sticking by their story, however. No word on what those “irregularities” are, btw.

It’s the end of an era on the Internet: LimeWire, one of the first P2P music-sharing services to attain breakthrough popularity online, is pulling the plug on its Gnutella-connected P2P software following a simmering legal battle with the RIAA which ended today with a court-ordered injunction.

Inspired by this Reddit gem, programmer Rory McCann created the Google Suggest Venn Diagram Generator, which generates a Venn diagram based on Google’s suggestions to complete a phrase.

Here’s how it works: In the “base query” section, you write some snippet containing “X”; the example above uses “why is X so”… Then, you pick three Xes: In the above case, “America,” “England,” and “Canada.” (h/t 3pt14159). Hit “update” and the generator will spit out a Venn diagram for you, complete with points of twofold and threefold overlap. Some Google queriers evidently think that both England and Canada are boring, cold, or expensive, but some also think that England, Canada, and America are great.

MacBook Air definitively benchmarked (MacWorld)

Did Digg game its own system to benefit publishers? (Lt. Gen. Panda)

Explaining the Internet to a 19th century British street urchin (Fast Company)

South Park apologizes to CollegeHumor for yoinking Inception spoof (Urlesque)

Hark, a Vagrant takes on Dracula (Hark, a Vagrant)

Don’t even ask. (WTF Japan Seriously)

The 40 best passive-aggressive parking notes (Buzzfeed; Language NSFW)

(title pic via GraphJam)

The team of rescuers that pulled 33 Chilean miners to safety from over 2,000 feet below the Earth’s surface acted with purpose, togetherness … and of course, compassion for the trapped workers. And yesterday, the rescuers used two of those three qualities to beat the miners in a friendly soccer match, 3-2, held in the Chilean capital of Santiago.

Making the rescuers’ victory more impressive is the fact that the team of miners included a former member of Chile’s national team, Frank Lobos. Sure, Lobos is 53 now, but hey, Chilean president Sebastian Pinera – who captained (and scored for) the victors – is 60.

>>>See the video at SportsGrid.