(Photo: Deep Roots at Home)

Trading in your twin bed for a sleepover-friendly double bed in a childhood rite of passage--one that allows you to stretch out among your pile of big girl CDs, magazines and clothes.

But tweens today may not ever know this meaningful transition, because sales for twin beds are dropping. Instead, kids are demanding double size beds early on so that they can comfortably sprawl out in bed next to their computers.

The Daily Mail reports that single bed sales have fallen by 9 percent as more and more kids are opting for double beds to accomodate their laptop and tablet obsessions.

"As a child, the bedroom was a place for me to sleep, but I think for today's children, the meaning of a bedroom has changed," one researcher told the Mail. "It is where they sleep, but it is also where they interact on their laptops and iPhones and iPads."

Next up: tweens demanding their parents literally spoonfeed them so they don't have to look away from the laptop during dinner time.

"WHAT?" -- everyone. (screencap)

What does actor Christopher Walken have in common with rap legend DMX? Apparently neither gives a single, solitary fuck about keeping up with the Internet.

Last Night, Mr. Walken appeared on the Daily Show to promote his latest flick. Noting that Mr. Walken is hard to get hold of, Jon Stewart asked whether he's a technofile. "No, I missed all that," the oddball actor replied.

But it seems he doesn't simply mean he's disinterested in Twitter. Mr. Stewart followed up: "Are you saying you don't have a computer?" Mr. Walken: "No." Mr. Stewart: "For real?" Mr. Walken: "No, I don't. And you know, if you don't have a computer...you don't have a certain kind of identity. You don't have a footprint in the cloud."

Any information he needs, he gets from his wife.

Mr. Walken doesn't even have a cell phone--except when he's working: "When I make a movie, they hand me one, and I always think, that's nice," he said. "But you know, it's not for me." It's so the director, producers and their ilk can track him down if necessary.

Pity: We bet Mr. Walken would send some epic Snapchats.

The discussion of technology starts at about 3:40:

(Photo: Dan-Dare.org)

Possibly stoned NASA scientists have already conjectured that we may live inside a computer, much to the delight of Matrix fans. Now, researchers at the University of Washington--a state which just legalized recreational marijuana!--are planning the first-ever test to determine whether or not our world really is a super sophisticated computer simulation. Duuuuude.

The truth is we're still many years away from possessing the supercomputing power to simulate even a significant fraction of the universe. But fear not! Some physicists believe that by searching for patterns within the working model of the universe that we do have, we may be able to "detect 'signatures' of constraints on physical processes." The test will help determine whether or not our entire lives have been one big joke devised by a technologically advanced future species that invented this whole "Snapchat trend" just to see our boobs, which they probably made out of space material.

The test will take many years to accurately complete. For now, allow your mind to be blown by the notion that we could all just be avatars on a future child's starter computer.

Rise and shine! (Photo: flickr.com/aloshbennett)

Twitter is blocking its first account: Tweets from the neo-Nazi group Besseres Hannover are no longer viewable in German. [Quartz]

For a company that hasn't done a damn thing, Color Labs inspires a lot of rumor-mongering. Yesterday the talk was all about whether the startup was winding down. Today, the scuttlebutt suggests Apple might buy the ill-fated photo-sharing startup. [The Next Web]

Pour one out for the concept of "going online," which is increasingly archaic and soon to be utterly foreign to the youngs, like cassettes and modesty. [AllThingsD]

Please share Betabeat's delight in this collection of "wonderfully ridiculous" movie computers. Obviously, the supposedly state-of-the-art hunk of junk from the 1974 classic The Towering Inferno takes the cake. [Wired]

Silicon Valley has its very own cover band, composed of VCs and entrepreneurs. But what did you expect? We live in a world where Dennis Hopper once did an Ameriprise commercial. [Wall Street Journal]

(Photo: The Film League)

A NASA scientist would like to legitimize that highdea you had one time in college: What if we all live inside a computer, man? How fucking trippy would that be?

Vice found the one NASA scientist who isn't afraid to sound like a stoned kook, and we kind of want to be his best friend. Rich Terrile, director at the Center for Evolutionary Computation and Automated Design at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, argues that there's a distinct possibility that our world could actually be a computer game generated by a programmer from the future, Matrix-style.

Writes Vice:

The essence of Rich’s theory is that a “programmer” from the future designed our reality to simulate the course of what the programmer considers to be ancient history—for whatever reason, maybe because he’s bored.

According to Moore’s Law, which states that computing power doubles roughly every two years, all of this will be theoretically possible in the future. Sooner or later, we’ll get to a place where simulating a few billion people—and making them believe they are sentient beings with the ability to control their own destinies—will be as easy as sending a stranger a picture of your genitals on your phone.

What if we're all pawns in a game being played by a bored Mountain Dew-chugging neckbeard? Mind. Blown.

(Photo: Imgur)

Sliding down the slippery slope. (via The Atlantic)

Somewhere up in the Great Beyond, Steve Jobs just crossed his arms and said, "I told you so." However, it's also worth pointing out that, by now, even your septuagenarian grandma knows what HP is, and she probably spends more time on Facebook than you do. Maybe this chart says more about Google than it does about the end of the personal computer.

Wait...they're using computer too?

One of the reason that Bernie Madoff was able to stay undetected for so long was that he could alternately charm and intimidate the young SEC staffers sent to investigate his firm. In the wake of that scandal, reports The Wall Street Journal, the SEC has developed a computer system that analyzes performance from thousands of hedge funds and looks for  unusually good performance year-over-year that, like Mr. Madoff, seems too good to be true. 

So far the data crunching effort has led to four indictments, a positive sign that has the SEC thinking about expanding the scope of their computerized scrutiny to include up to 20,000 mutual funds and private equity firms.

Wall Street's reaction has been to suggest that this kind of scrutiny will have a chilling effect on managers who perform well. "There are people out there who have been committing fraud, and we want to get them and get them out of the system," Robert Leonard, a partner at law firm Bingham McCutchen LLP who represents hedge funds told The Wall Street Journal. "I'm concerned there probably will be some chilling effect for managers who are knocking the cover off the ball."

Right. Money managers with nothing to hide are going to begin tanking their own returns, rather than risk a SEC investigation? The financial sector has been relying on the world's best mathematical minds and most powerful computers for decades to gain an edge. The fact that the SEC is just now beginning to use these methods to detect fraud is a shocking, if welcome sign that they realize they have a lot of catching up to do if they are going to keep pace with the bad actors in these markets. This will help them do a better job detecting those hard-to-identify bogus firms, the ones with zero name recognition and no website who list their address as a non-existent street in New Jersey.