Month: April 2014

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4 Mind-Blowing Facts for Star Wars Fans (and a chance to WIN some cool Star Wars gear)

It’s not quite May the Fourth yet, but since we’re giving away some sweet Star Wars™ First Edition STREET by 50 On-Ear Headphones… we’ve got some fun facts from a galaxy far, far away. Don’t worry – none of them have anything to do with Jar Jar.

A Schizophrenic Galactic Empire?

star wars facts memeDid you know Darth Vader was played by a total of six actors on screen? If not, I find your lack of knowledge disturbing.

In the original three films, bodybuilder David Prowse played Darth Vader, while stunt performer Bob Anderson did the lightsaber action scenes.

Actor James Earl Jones provided the famous voice. Sebastian Shaw played Darth Vader unmasked in Return of the Jedi. In the more recent films, Jake Lloyd portrayed young Anakin Skywalker in The Phantom Menace, followed by Hayden Christensen in Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith. So, which one is Luke’s father?

Source: http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Darth_Vader

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Rebel Alliance and an Alias

Luke Skywalker went through multiple changes in George Lucas’s early drafts of the script. Originally intending Luke to be female, Lucas also toyed with portraying him as a grizzled old general.

In fact, Luke’s last name was almost “Starkiller” before a last minute change. Which is good, because “Starkiller” just doesn’t seem to suit our protagonist.

Source: http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Luke_Skywalker

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The Truth About the Elusive Boba Fett

Although the mysterious bounty hunter gained cult status and was ranked #79 in Empire Magazine’s 100 Greatest Movie Characters, Boba Fett only has four lines in the Star Wars films. 

Catch all of the lines here, in less than 30 seconds:


George Lucas even admitted that had he known the Mandalorian would become so popular, he would have given him a more dignified death scene. Oh well, Boba Fett’s still a badass.

Source: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086190/trivia?ref_=tt_ql_2

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Seriously, Stormtroopers…

Though notoriously bad at aiming, Stormtroopers look freakin’ cool. So much so that there’s an international fan-based organization dedicated to Stormtrooper costumes called the 501st Legion. In its 17th year and 6,500 members strong, the group got an homage in Revenge of the Sith; the legion of blue clone troopers led by Darth Vader into the Jedi Temple was designated the 501st. It pays to be a fan.

Source: http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/501st_Legion

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How about you? What’s the craziest Star Wars™ trivia you’ve ever heard?

 

 

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Humans Find Meaningful Patterns in Meaningless Data

FPQPNS0H9T4LUWE.LARGEWhy do people see faces in nature, interpret window stains as human figures, hear voices in random sounds generated by electronic devices or find conspiracies in the daily news? A proximate cause is the priming effect, in which our brain and senses are prepared to interpret stimuli according to an expected model. UFOlogists see a face on Mars. Religionists see the Virgin Mary on the side of a building. Paranormalists hear dead people speaking to them through a radio receiver. Conspiracy theorists think 9/11 was an inside job by the Bush administration. Is there a deeper ultimate cause for why people believe such weird things? There is. I call it “patternicity,” or the tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise.

Traditionally, scientists have treated patternicity as an error in cognition. A type I error, or a false positive, is believing something is real when it is not (finding a nonexistent pattern). A type II error, or a false negative, is not believing something is real when it is (not recognizing a real pattern—call it “apat­ternicity”). In my 2000 book How We Believe (Times Books), I argue that our brains are belief engines: evolved pattern-recognition machines that connect the dots and create meaning out of the patterns that we think we see in nature. Sometimes A really is connected to B; sometimes it is not. When it is, we have learned something valuable about the environment from which we can make predictions that aid in survival and reproduction. We are the ancestors of those most successful at finding patterns. This process is called association learning, and it is fundamental to all animal behavior, from the humble worm C. elegans to H. sapiens.

Unfortunately, we did not evolve a Baloney Detection Network in the brain to distinguish between true and false patterns. We have no error-detection governor to modulate the pattern-recognition engine. (Thus the need for science with its self-correcting mechanisms of replication and peer review.) But such erroneous cognition is not likely to remove us from the gene pool and would therefore not have been selected against by evolution.

(Read more from Scientific American)