Well, it’s Friday again, so it’s time for another installment of BetaBites, where all of the authors offer up just a small piece of awesome culled from our internet explorations during the previous week. It’s like link blogging with a little more class! Without further ado, here are some great time-wasters for you AND your loved ones!

• Brendan - 2005’s LEGO Star Wars (free demo) was the epitome of two licenses that should never have come together, but somehow ended up merging into a game that was realized in stunning stylistic beauty. This week I found this press release for the game’s sequel. The thing that makes it BetaBites worthy is the second line of the subheader: “THE SEQUEL…WILL APPEAR ON SEVEN PLATFORMS”. I can’t believe the different localization/porting teams they must have employed for this project. And, in case you’re curious, the seven are the PS2, XBox, GameCube, PSP, DS, GBA, and of course, Windows.

• Brian - Not really something I discovered on the internet this week, but it relates to several things I’ve read in the past. Exhibit A - The Onion piece “Fuck Everything, We’re Doing Five Blades“. Exhibit B - Gillette actually builds the five blade razor, to our collective amusement. Exhibit C - Our suitemate builds a nine blade razor. And yes, he tried it.
  

• Grant - I AM 8-BIT - Too bad I don’t live in LA. I AM 8-BIT is an annual art show inspired by classic video games and electronics from the good ol’ days. Check out their art show gallery and the store for some beautiful shirts.

• Sean - What’s Up? - One of the coolest visualizations of live world news that I have ever seen. This flash app loads news sources from around the world via RSS and pops up stories from their locations on the map in real time. Be careful, (as with most news,) reading the headlines can actually be depressing.
  

• Zach - Aspirin: Not Approvable. For no particular reason, I started reading In The Pipeline, a blog by a drug discovery researcher a few months ago. He wrote this article about how popular “safe” drugs like Aspirin and Tylenol would never get approved if they were discovered today. It’s a really interesting look at how drug discovery works and dispels some of the myths about how dangerous drugs that get pulled (like Vioxx) actually are.

Now you get a chance! Post one cool thing you found online this week in the comments. If we like it and write a post on it or something, we’ll even give you finders credit with your name and a link! C’mon, open up and share. You know you want to.