Here's What's Awesome: Animatronic Indie Rock, Counting Climate Change

The things we learn on the internet. For years I'd assumed - wrongly - that March was best known for its Madness; I figured that without the whole basketball thing, we'd wrap up February and go straight on to April. But, as I learned this morning, there's more to March than its Madness: there's International Talk Like William Shatner Day. Now it's OK if you're still planning on clutching your brackets and cheering on a men's basketball team that could win you 15 bucks at work instead of shouting "KHAAAAAAAAAANNNNNNNN!!!!!!!!!!!!" to the sky. Change is hard, especially for those of us who haven't been studying up on old T.J. Hooker scripts. But rest assured, this new development will not - will not - affect our weekly supply of awesome links. Because Here's What's... Awesome... is here... for you.

Are you ready to rock-afire?
William Shatner may have spent the mid-1980's searching for Spock, but if you were a child of the Eighties, you probably spent more than one birthday party in the company of a robotic animal band called the Rock-afire Explosion. What you might not know is that the Explosion, plus human creator Aaron Fechter, is in the midst of a comeback. They were the subjects of a documentary released last fall and have even added some of today's tunes to their repertoire. Here's their performance of a song by Arcade Fire called "Neighborhood #1: Tunnels":

[YesButNoButYes]

They're really just trying to find the bridge
The Rock-afire Explosion's pinpoint timing is, of course, programmed in advance - it can take up to a week to choreograph a single song - but human musicians, it turns out, sync themselves up when they're putting a groove together. German scientists studied the brainwaves of musicians playing an intricate piece of music and found their brainwaves are aligned at key points of the song. And the synced-up waves are in the part of the brain that affects motor function, which affects how they play their instruments. So it's not just a figure of speech to say a band is really in a groove, because they are. At least until their brains get tired. [ReadWriteWeb]

Cooler near the lake, but not in 40 years...
Not so long ago Virginia talked about a research study that said the warnings about global warming were often too abstract to prod the brain into action. Maybe a new project called Change in Numbers could solve that problem. It's a simple LED counter, but it measures the current ambient temperature of a city and compares it to historical weather data for that same month in that same city. Saying "temperatures are rising" may be too foggy for some, but how about a sign that says "fifty years ago, this spot was 10 degrees cooler"? [Like Cool]

Now it's your turn: share an awesome link in the comments. Or if you're a Klingon, beam... your link... off the starboard engine...