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Johnny Chung Lee unlocks the Wii’s hidden potential.

In a collection of videos, notable for their lucid explanations, the Ph.D. graduate student from CMU’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute shows exactly how versatile the “Wiimote” system can be. Among the uses he convincingly demonstrates: a virtual-reality head-tracker; a virtual whiteboard on a wall, tabletop, and laptop screen; and a Minority Report-style arm-waving and finger-pointing multitouch user interface.

As of September 2007, Nintendo has sold over 13 million Wii game consoles. This significantly exceeds the number of Tablet PCs in use today according to even the most generous estimates of Tablet PC sales. This makes the Wii Remote one of the most common computer input devices in the world. It also happens to be one of the most sophisticated. It contains a 1024×768 infrared camera with built-in hardware blob tracking of up to 4 points at 100Hz. This significantly out performs any PC “webcam” available today. It also contains a +/-3g 8-bit 3-axis accelerometer also operating at 100Hz and an expandsion port for even more capability.

So that’s the geeky shit. Check out this video and have yer mind blown.

Check the full article on CNet’s News.com here. You can also visit Johnny’s Wii project page to see more examples, as well as instructions on how you can do this yourself!

Bill Maher talking some straight talk to the religious test for office.

Lego master Mark Kelso has just recently put the last brick on his model of the Invisible Hand, General Grevious’ ship from Star Wars Episode III.

Yes, that photo of him and his model is to scale—it’s frickin’ massive! This sucker took him 9 months to build, it’s 231 studs long (73 inches to ya non-Lego-geeks), 41 studs wide and weights around 30 pounds! This things looks like it’s straight from one of the StarWars sets. Click through to see more screenshots!

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Straight from SmashingMagazine.com comes this awesome list of wordpress themes. Dang, now this just means I’m going to be trackin down a new theme for my site again!

High-quality WordPress themes always come in handy. Whether you are looking for some design inspiration or professional coding solutions — in both cases you can learn a lot, you can apply them and you can build customized designs upon them without reinventing the wheel all the time.

In this article (snagged from smashingmagazine) they present 100 free high-quality WordPress themes. Together with hundreds of other designs, these themes have been manually selected, installed and tested over the last weeks. They all can be downloaded, customized and used for free in both personal and commercial projects. Links to demo-versions provide a direct preview of a theme.

Please notice that the listed WordPress themes are presented in 8 sections: vibrant themes, simple & minimalistic themes, magazine style, grid-based, clean and legible, advanced, experimental, photoblog & videoblog.

The full list can be found at  smashingmagazine, below are a few of the ones I found most impressive.

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Chidi Ogbuta of Allen, Texas, had a wedding cake that looks just like… her. A couple of comments on this as this gal has some seriously ghettotastic issues:

• I can hear her now “does that cake make my butt look fat?”.

• I suppose her husband really can have his cake and eat it to!

• Besides, what’s wrong with eating your wife on your wedding night?

• Probably the only time you could say, “I’ll take a breast piece.” to a wedding cake.

Take a look at this 3rd pic… is her taking his first slice out of her vag…. oh nevermind.

Ron Paul was excluded from the latest Fox news debate. So much for Fair and Balanced, but that’s typical of Fox News. Being on Jay Leno as the headlining guest was likely MUCH more helpful to Ron Paul than being just another one of the stuffed suits sitting around on the Fox News table taking turns puffing chests, raising noses, and smugly reciting campaign slogans.

This is a two part video, but worth the watch to get a feel for Dr. Paul.

Jada’s Air Guitar Rocker is exactly what it seems to be: an air guitar made real.

“We took the air guitar phenomenon and put it into an amp,” says creator Nitrous Roxide, who demonstrates it well in this video.

The belt buckle detects strums of the air plectrum, while the belt unit plays the sounds. The songs, stored on little expansion packs, are divided into each note: all the player must be able to do is keep to the track’s tempo, and he or she can rock on.

“It’s Guitar Hero on the go.”

Lewis Black on creationism. This… is… awesome.

Seems that politics is in full swing. Having a hard time deciding WHO you should vote for? Who believes what you believe? Ultimately, this will only be valuable for the primaries, once the parties pick the guy they want to run for pres, it won’t be up to you anymore. That said, you can vote in the primaries to help your party (if you live in a state where you are required to register with a particular party) or your favorite candidate get elected.

Two new sites have popped up to help with just that. Move beyond the sound bites and what the major news outlets want you to hear. Check out how the candidates feel on the issues and how they align with your views on a range of subjects. 

Visitors to the nonpartisan Glassbooth website are asked a series of questions on topics ranging from immigration to war and health care. The site then spits out the candidate they should vote for in the upcoming presidential election. Glassbooth is aimed at the 50 million-plus 18- to 31-year-old voters, a group that — contrary to popular belief — showed an increase in voting in the past three presidential elections. Glassbooth has a simple interface, you assign points and weight in on issues most important to you and you’re returned a list of candidates that match your views based on a percentage of similarity.

The next site is Electoral Compass. This site asks a series of questions which you comment on as completely agree, tend to agree, neutral, tend to disagree, completely disagree, or no opinion. Based on your responses you’ll be shown a chart with the proximity the candidates to your views. You can then analyse your position and view the positions of the candidates.