Author: Kyle VanHemert

If you’re on terra firma, it’s pretty obvious when you need to grab your make-out partner. But how, asks Slate’s Explainer, do you know when to celebrate “when you’re hurtling through time zones at 17,500 miles per hour?”

The obvious answer is something like: “you don’t pick a single moment, you celebrate once over each of the 30 different time zones in an all-day, space beer kegger.

The actual answer is a little less exciting. The ISS astronauts set their clocks to Coordinated Universal Time, which is the same thing as Greenwich Mean Time, just with a cooler name. That means they were debating if it’s “two thousand and ten” or “twenty ten” at the same time Londoners were doing so back here on Earth.

But they still got some time zone-hopping fun: the ISS crew celebrated New Years with mission controllers in Moscow and Houston when the clock struck midnight in those cities. [Slate’s Explainer]

Late last night, Time Warner Cable and Fox Networks Group reached an agreement on subscription fees, ending their very public stand off and guaranteeing Time Warner subscribers their American Idol, Glee, and House fixes in 2010.

The spat over carrier fees that had Time Warner threatening to drop Fox’s stations altogether has been resolved. The details of the agreement are as of yet unspecified, but let’s see if we can’t figure out whose ego seems more intact from these statements.

Chase Carey, deputy chairman and president and COO of News Corp, Fox’s parent company, said:

We’re pleased that, after months of negotiations, we were able to reach a fair agreement with Time Warner Cable — one that recognizes the value of our programming.

Glenn Britt, top dog at Time Warner Cable, said:

We’re happy to have reached a reasonable deal with no disruption in programming for our customers.

Hmmm. I’m reading Carey’s claim that Time Warner finally “recognize[d] the value of our programming” as finally “coughed up enough money to keep its customers from rioting.” [ABC News]

My chess strategy doesn’t extend too far beyond pulling my knights out first, because that’s what the computer games always do against me. But with this cube-based set, I’d probably need a strategy just to remember which piece is which.

Chess has been reimagined more times than anyone cares to count. But Scott Cruz‘s chess set, designed around a cubic pawn, makes the game even more difficult to master, rendering all the pieces as rectangular towers of different heights.

Thankfully, Cruz has included a built-in cheat sheet for the easily confused; each piece is indented with tiny squares showing its possible moves.

Still, my go-to set-up mnemonic—”the Queen always starts on her own color”—won’t work too well on the gray scale board. [The Design Blog]