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Meet UGC 12158. Or as he calls himself in bars to pick up chicks, Biggie Spiral. You’ll notice a resemblance between Biggie and our favorite galaxy: Sir Milky Way. Namely, that they’re both gorgeous spiral galaxies. Phil Plait, who has worked with Hubble images for years, decided to crunch the numbers on this gorgeous galaxy:

So I went to the release page for it, and when I saw the distance, I was shocked: that galaxy’s not big, it’s freaking  huge.  I figured it was part of the Virgo cluster, maybe, 60 million light years away or so. Nope: it’s a whopping  400 million light years distant, which is a long, long haul. That was stunning to me; if it’s that far away the galaxy really has to be a bruiser. So I grabbed a raw image from the Hubble archive and measured its size in pixels, which I could then convert to a spatial size given its distance.

And I can still hardly accept this, but UGC 12158 is  140,000 light years across. I measured it twice, two different ways, to be sure. That’s the biggest spiral I’ve ever heard of! Mind you, the Milky Way is in the top tier of galaxies in the entire Universe when it comes to size, but UGC 12158 whips us by a clean 40%!.

Good lord. I had no idea that the Milky Way Galaxy was an impressively sized galaxy until Phil Plait dropped that knowledge bomb on me. But still!, this galaxy is 40% bigger? Brain. Doesn’t compute. Wants to, but cannot.

Via.

I don’t give a fuck about the PlayStation phone, and for that reason I haven’t covered it here. Until tonight. According to Kotaku, the Chinese website IT168 got its grubby paws “on a version of the phone (which it carefully points out may not be the final, production model) and put it through its paces, detailing not just the device’s hardware specs but some other interesting tidbits as well.”

Interested in the specs, as well as some images of the phone? Hit the jump, you slags.

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I’m just a fan.

That’s the truth of it. Maybe you already know this. But as I said, that’s the truth of it. I don’t know if it’s a bad thing, or if it’s a good thing. To aspire to be nothing more than a fan. At this point in my life, at this point in the site’s life, maybe it isn’t even worth reflecting upon.

I’m just a fan.

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Some old lady in Britain dropped 14 dress sizes and decided to celebrate in the most logical way imaginable: getting an enormously creepy Twilight back piece. So basically she has a mural of teen virgins on her wrinkly back. Fucking brilliant!

But this lunatic instead done. No. From the DailyWhat:

She plans on covering the rest of her body with Twilight tats, starting with her arms: “There are still a few bits to do. I am going to get my arms done before my 50th birthday in summer. I love Robert Pattinson. I want to tone up so I can get his character Edward Cullen on my stomach.”

You do that, you fuck. Flip the script for a second. What if a 49 year-old man got a huge tattoo of Miley Cyrus or one of those other tween douchebags? He’d be called a pervert.

This old lady is a pervert. Case closed.

The Andromeda Galaxy is our boy. It’s the nearest spiral galaxy to us, and someday we’re going to collide with it. The good news is that we have some time to prepare for it, since it isn’t going to happen for another three to five billion years. Calm down. Sit down. We got time. Over at io9, they break down a gallery recently done by the European Space Agency. The ESA created the gallery by using “three different kinds of light: visible, infrared, and x-ray. These three very different views are then combined together to create one amazingly beautiful composite image.”

Want to see the images? Hit the jump.

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Earlier this week we got our first glimpse of Andrew Garfield as Spider-Man. Now today running throughout the various pipes and tubings of the internet are excerpts from The Los Angeles Times‘ interview with him. Taken from The Envelope, the awards blog for the Times, Garfield opens up about the first two weeks of filming the new Spider-Man flick.

Hit the jump for excerpts, and an insight into the new Peter Parker. Hint: he seems less doughy and dorky than Tobey McGuire. I like.

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The line-up for Marvel Vs Capcom 3 continues to grow, as does the thunder in my pants. Anyone with a knack for anything Capcom or Marvel has got to be in on this shit, regardless of their feelings towards fighting games. Right? Well, probably not. But I can’t play them for shit, and I’m still sweating this title. Today trailers were dropped for both Haggar and Jean Grey. X-Men and Final Fight! Hells yes.

Hit the jump for their debut trailers.

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Goddamn that fucking Kinect! I knew it was the Devil. El Diablo! It wants to corrupt us! Sure it has us petting animals and playing volleyball, now. But in the future? Once the indoctrination is complete, it’ll have us stabbing our grandparents and bathing in the blood of purified newborns!

Don’t believe me? Here’s some more proof. It causes the dreaded Red Ring of Death. Maybe! Sensationalism? Sure.

According to the BBC, a nice, untainted British family bought a Kinect. And then their console died. Could this be coincidence? Absolutely not! Wink. According to 10 year-old Adam Winnifrith,  “We plugged it in the day we got it but only played it a few times before we got the red lights. The next day when we tried it again we still had the red rings of death and haven’t been able to use it since.”

See! What more proof do you need? Fuck Kinect! It’s encouraging Big Brother. It’s going to result in robotic spy planes of death, and if that isn’t bad enough: it’ll kill your fucking Xbox 360.

Via.

Today, it’s my birthday. Twenty-eight years spent spinning along with this blue marble. Twenty-eight years of good memories, and entropy. Can’t defy the laws, I have it under good authority the Universe can’t even trip the life immortal. Oh well, so it goes. A fantastic twenty-eight years.

My birthday is not impressive. I am a dot on a blip on a relativistic scale. As someone who thinks on a far more cosmic scale, I’ve found myself thinking bigger. Larger. Over the holidays, I started thinking about the upcoming New Year, my upcoming birthday. I began mulling over the simple, obvious, yet entertaining notion: what exactly is a year?

Not in the sense of memories, or moments cobbled together in the illusory concept of self-experience and identity. But rather, what exactly is a year?

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Oh real-life, you are so awesome sometimes. Also us nerds, we’re pretty much awesome all the time. In a variety of ways: really awesome, ironically awesome, pathetically awesome. This is a case of all of the above. There’s an actual superhero in Seattle. His name is Phoenix Jones. He changes in the back of a comic book shop. This is all true. And last Sunday in Lynwood, Washington, Jones thwarted a carjacker.

This is tremendous.

A real-life deranged dude who is something out of Kick-Ass is taking crime into his own hands. A tip of the cap to you, Mr. Jones. When you’re fatally shot and bleeding out in the middle of a street after trying to stop a robber from escaping from a convenience store, I will be the first to begin writing your effusive eulogy.

Hit the jump for Jones in action.

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