From Chico, CA all the way to the Bay, the blue skies have turned gray. No matter what part of California, everyone is lost in the abyss of smoky clouds.I can not even walk out my front door without the smell of smoke lingering into my lungs. Even the governator was in Butte County this week, visiting the local Starbucks, for his grande non-fat, light caramel, caramel macchiato. What he did up here is unsure, but he was here none the less. (My boss took a picture with him and BOY is he short!) Instead of blogging about the usual celeb gossip or random shit us Synthesizers bring to you readers, I decided to post some pictures from KTVU.com, showing the view of the smoke from space. This is just proof that these fires are a lot bigger than mankind can handle.

Hope everyone is staying safe and indoors, which gives you more reason to hit up the Synthesis.net. WHY!?! Cuz we are hot like fire too!

How bored are we? On our amazing Google trend datalist, there is without fail more than 20 celebrity break-up rumor searches every day. I don’t even care when someone I KNOW breaks up with a significant other; why would I give one splash of whiz about people I don’t know?

Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner are denying that they, too, are splitting up. Who fucking cares? Does someone sit around their apartment, turn down the volume on Judge Joe Brown and decide to be completely useless and start unmitigated rumors all day long? Well, congrats, you waste of fucking life, here’s your 15 minutes. I MENTIONED YOU. Welcome…make yourself at home. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be off READING A BOOK. It’s a good one too. Dostoyevsky’s Notes From the Underground. Maybe I’ll start a rumor that ol’ Fyodor boned his own mother. Rumor mills will be LABORING on that one.

The audacity of these pricks! Topping both the Billboard Top 200 and the UK Album charts with their newest album Viva La Vida. Coldplay was mildly awesome when Parachutes came out, but ever since they compromised their souls, married actresses and named their kids after fruit, they’ve huffed DONG.

Actually, I haven’t heard the album. But I heard the single and it was pretty fucking good. I just don’t like band monopoly. Judge me.

Coldplay’s latest album, Viva La Vida, debuts at No. 1 on The Billboard 200 with over 720,000 copies sold in its first week of release in the U.S.  Viva La Vida has topped the U.K. album chart for the second week in a row, where it is the fastest-selling album of the year, and No. 1 rankings continue to come in from around the globe including Japan, Australia, Canada, France and Germany.

Already the biggest album pre-order in iTunes history, Viva La Vida also set the record for highest first-week album sales ever on the iTunes® Store worldwide. Today the album’s title song surpasses “Clocks” as the band’s biggest-selling single to date on the iTunes Store. “Viva La Vida” hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 last week, marking Coldplay’s first Hot 100 No. 1 single ever, and it debuted this week at No. 1 on the U.K. Singles chart.

[Synthesis blog once again brings you the philosophy of Synthesis Weekly columnist Mad Bob. With no further adieu, we present to you Immaculate Infection.]

In My Hour of Darkness

I am suffering through a crisis of confidence.

More after the jump. (more…)

Yesterday a severed foot washed up on the western coast of Canada. It was the 5th severed foot to have washed up in the same area in the past year or so. In the article on cnn.com Constable Sharlene Brooks of the Delta Police Department in British Columbia was quoted as saying

“It is a little mysterious, but we don’t know if it is linked to others.

Are you fucking KIDDING me?!?! How many one footed pogo stick looking motherfuckers do they have hopping around Canada?! Is it so many that they don’t know if 5 severed feet washing on to shore in the same spot may not be related because this was a left foot and the others were right feet?!?!

I used to like Canada, but now I realized it’s fucked. If I were a serial killer I would totally move there. “We don’t know if these deaths are related because all 11 of these people were killed with a different size knife to the throat”.

Morons.

And I remember when I got a phone that could take pictures I was pumped.

Since 2004, a team of professors and students from the University of California, Berkeley has searched for ways to let a single human supervise a team of robot planes. Now, this Center for Collaborative Control of Unmanned Vehicles has a new device for ordering around its drones: an iPhone.

In a video taken from this month’s Teaching & Technology conference, the Berkeley crew uses an iPhone to pick tasks for its drone squadron, input a set of coordinates for a local reconnaissance mission, and send the planes new orders while the aircraft are in the sky.

But don’t tell Steve Jobs how the Berkeley folks are using his gadget. According to the terms of the Apple Software Developer Kit agreement, “applications may not be designed or marketed for real-time route guidance; automatic or autonomous control of vehicles, aircraft, or other mechanical devices; dispatch or fleet management; or emergency or life-saving purposes.”