sheep

It's not easy being a wolf. You finally find a delicious sheep to eat, but before you can take a bite it sprays you with repellent chemicals and then texts a shepherd who comes and chases you off with a horrible big stick.

A biologist in Switzerland is researching an SMS-powered sheep collar that monitors the woolly one's heart rate and could summon a shepherd if a significant change is detected, the BBC reports.

Tests have already been carried out on 12 unlucky sheep, who were scared by muzzled Czechoslovakian wolfdogs while their heartbeats were monitored, revealing that … Read more

TowerMadness has been around for a while now, but the unique challenge and several updates over time make it a must-have for tower defense fans. Featuring 3D graphics that look great on the Retina Display, TowerMadness challenges you to defend a flock of sheep from an onslaught of attacking aliens. You can view the action from above or use a reverse-pinch gesture to zoom in on the action. You'll play on 49 included maps, but you can purchase 28 expansion maps from within the game. A recent update added five more maps, and two new weapon upgrades to add … Read more

TowerMadness has been around for a while now, but the unique challenge and several updates over time make it a must-have for tower defense fans. Featuring 3D graphics that look great on the Retina Display, TowerMadness challenges you to defend a flock of sheep from an onslaught of attacking aliens. You can view the action from above or use a reverse-pinch gesture to zoom in on the action. You'll play on 49 included maps, but you can purchase 28 expansion maps from within the game. A recent update added 5 more maps, and two new weapon upgrades to add … Read more

Words, being playful things, sometimes like to play hide and seek.

And I must say mine found a hitherto unexplored corner of the universe when I watched former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina's new ad in her campaign to be elected to the Senate.

You might remember that her first effort, the so-called "Demon Sheep" ad, resembled something that a mass orgy of acid enthusiasts might have come up with during a week-long retreat.

However, this new ad, which poetically compares California Senator Barbara Boxer to a hot air balloon, suggests that its creators have been doing nothing … Read more

I once went to a wedding in which a British High Court judge was the bride's godfather.

Having made a deeply insincere speech, he then proceeded to get blind drunk and attempt, for no clear reason, to remove his trousers. He left the proceedings with his pants around his ankles, his wife around his torso, and a deep hush around the marquee in which the wedding was being held.

People stared, so frozen at the lips that the wine enjoyed no sips. And this, I imagine, is a posture many have experienced upon viewing a campaign video made on … Read more

We love getting (scheduled) visits from fans of The 404, especially when they come with treats for us! Henry Chu, aka Charlie Chu, aka Tapchus in the chat room, stopped by this morning to pick up some stickers and ended up joining us in the studio for the first segment of the show. If you're watching the video, that's Henry taking some flicks of the CNET podcast studio. Be sure to send us those pictures, Henry, and thanks for the delicious pastries!

Plenty of stories to talk about today, including a kooky wedding stunt courtesy of Gizmodo. Instead of a traditional flower girl, an S.F. bride commissioned her robot-crazed sister to build a flower-bearing bot instead! We're all nerds here, but unfortunately Jeff tells us that there will be no robots in attendance at his wedding in October 2010.

Next up, we have some very exciting news, albeit three years too late, about the "Arrested Development" movie starting to unfold. The movie starts production this year, and despite rumors about Michael Cera, the entire cast will reprise their roles in the movie. Can't wait!

If you were ever a fan of the Mega Man series, get ready for Mega Man 10! We take a special look at Mega Man's eight new enemies (with eight painfully uncreative names, like Sheep Man) in the downloadable title, available for all three platforms this March.

TowerMadness Zero is the free, ad-supported (and full) version of TowerMadness, a tower-defense game in which you defend a small herd of cute sheep against an advancing army of aliens (who want to turn your sheep into "a new scarf for their emperor").

The game and its interface will be familiar to fans of tower-defense games, with enemies from multiple UFOs attacking across an open plain at first, but then mixing in fixed-path and open-path challenges as the game progresses through 15 maps. You touch the map to build and upgrade towers, and you can use two fingers … Read more

If you're wondering about the people who subscribe to your Twitter feed, there's a newish service out called Twittersheep that will tell you about them. It scours your list of followers and pulls together a tag cloud with various keywords to describe them.

If you remember Tweetclouds, the idea is similar, except instead of going through your posting history, it simply grabs its words from the profiles of those who are following you. This isn't an exact science, but it made me notice that a good majority of the people following me are work-related, be it PR … Read more

We all know what fractals are, even if we can't explain them very well (myself included). In simplest terms, fractals are geometric shapes that can be split into increasingly smaller, yet identical, fragments.

In 2002, Scott Draves created something called "fractal flares," which are a class of fractals that use nonlinear transformations and color in a way to create spectacular images. His work was put into a free, open-source fractal-flame called Apophysis.

I've been playing a bit with Apophysis this week, and be warned: once you get started, you may find yourself spending hours creating increasingly … Read more