For John Robert

PediSedate: feed kid nitrous oxide while they play a Game Boy.

JR, do they have DS hack for this?

(via MedGadget via Boing Boing)

Nanotech explained with song and puppets

(via Neatorama)

1981: Newspapers on your computer.

"...of the two to three thousand computers in the bay area..."
Also and era when dial-up charges were $5 an hour.

(via io9)

Microsoft's Songsmith

I posted awhile back the weird ad for Microsoft's you-sing-to-i-and-it-writes-music-for-you software.

There are a bunch of songs on youtube now.

Here's a personal favorite:
"White Wedding." Sung by Billy Idol. Music by the SongSmith Jug Band.

"You are making love at a very good pace."

I don't even want to spoil it by talking about it.

The LoveTrainer from Sega Toys.

(via Gizmodo)

 

EDIT: Sadly, a hoax.

Obama's inauguration speech via speech-to-text software

Excerpt:

"the loss of the wall from a worsening from the was those in a doc the wasn.t the is the's room of the room fo war: a in a 100 100 and onger as well as 31 Arsen along with wall version when all 100 and what we had loss of a lay fro English through 100 and are to the sure for the shores will the longer it up in is 100 they are also the Lewis of the loss her her the e also the whom is looking for the little 2 mil loss: 1 whose the report was a so as a little of the bu what a wall in a than the tour having this is a flock of th 000 illusion had mor at at the those with the room was a the 0 will all this one little lose the number of our way we is is in a was careless 001 tho England and was one with the organs was 20"

Dracos.co.uk used his laptop and a microphone help up to the tv.

(via Boing Boing)

Mach Dice

One more reason I want an iPhone.

And I'm not even gaming right now. I wish I was. It's just so darn hard to keep a game going. I should do one offs or short games. But I like epics.

(via Eliza)

Gordon Freeman has new job CERN

Popgive noticed something about a photo at the Large Hardon Hadron Collider. Yes. That is Gordon Freeman, previous of Black Mesa. And, yes. He is thinking that the long handled ratchet might work as a make-shift crowbar/crate smasher/headcrab killer.

Yes. We are all gonna die.

(To be fair, they are only running the Collider in one direction tomorrow. So that means no actual colliding. Still, I'm going to start work on my zero point energy gun this evening.)

Large Helical Device

(via Neatorama)

"Shopping for pants. Wait. I don't have legs."

The MarsPhoenix has a Twitter feed. In the first person.

Why is it that when I picture MarsPhoenix, I picture WALL•E?

26 Days Until Doomsday

In 26 days the Large Hardon Collider [ed.- HADRON, idiot] goes online. A 17-mile ring stretching from near Geneva and into France, the LHC will crash particles together, producing "tiny fireballs of primordial energy, recreating conditions that last prevailed when the universe was less than a trillionth of a second old." Imagine creating the universe, over and over, 30 million times a second.

Chances are discoveries will be made that will make theoretical physicists swoon and make the rest of use say, "Awesome. I'm going to go see The Dark Knight." But there as never been a collider near this scale so who knows what will happen.

(via Gizmodo)

Searches

I of course haven't check the stats for this blog for eons. I just did. Still an odd amount of traffic.

I am happy to say that the top key world search during 2008 has been "push button receive bacon."

March is RIAA Boycott Month!

I'm going to give this quick shout out without going into the details. I'm not a big music comsumer, so this will be easy for me. There are others out there reading thais that I know it will be more difficult. And, yes, I am skeptical about boycotts in general... especialy something on this scale, with such a little understod issue. But it's worth a shot.

I'm going to quote pretty much wholesale from Gizmodo:

Gizmodo is declaring the month of March Boycott the RIAA month. We want to get the word out to as many people as humanly possible that we can all send a message by refusing to buy any album put out by an RIAA label. Am I saying you should start pirating music? Not at all. You can continue to support the artists you enjoy and respect in a number of ways.

Firstly, I encourage everyone to purchase music from unsigned bands and bands on independent record labels. There are tons of great artists out there, many of which you're probably already a fan of, that have nothing to do with the RIAA. Buy their records at eMusic, an online store that sells independent tunes in beautiful, DRM-free MP3 format.

Secondly, you can still support RIAA-signed bands without buying their music. Go see them live and buy their merchandise; they get a hell of a lot more money from that then they do from album sales. And hey, you could benefit from getting out more, couldn't you?

So direct your music money elsewhere for March. Use it as a chance to expand your horizons. The current system is pretty god awful.

My RSSes have asploded again

I don't know how most RSS readers work. I use Safari so it's all built in. If I have a RSS bookmarked, I just look at my bookmark bar thingie and in parenthesis after the name is a number. That is how many new article are in the feed. And if I have numerous bookmarks in a bookmark folder, it adds them all up. As soon as I look at a feed, the number disappears. Very easy to tell when something has been updated.

I have slightly less than a hundred feed in my bookmark bar, all organized into folders and subfolders. Now most of those aren't updated all that often. Many personal blogs that I once followed have probably been abandoned by their keepers. Other sites, like Fark or Digg, are constantly updating. But I have it all set up so that it is easy to keep track of and so I don't spend a tenth of my day just checking the same sites over and over.

But sometime the system fails me. For whatever reason, Safari decides I haven't read any of the sites... ever. Suddenly all the numbers shoot up and the whole system becomes useless. I them have to go through each one and look at the site, affectively "resetting" it.

That's what I am looking at now.

Lawyers of Second Life

Law.com has a fascinating article by John Bringardner discussing lawyers setting up shop in Second Life. It is the best article that I have seen that touches on Second Life's importance. It isn't about the marketing or the age play or the furries. It's about who owns what and how they own it. A lot of IP law future is going to fought and possibly decided in the Liden's little sandbox.

Caffeinated Donuts

Doctor Robert Bohannon, molecular scientist, as developed a way to add caffeine to baked goods. Each pastry has the caffeine of two cups of coffee.

This may be the greatest scientific discovery. Ever. This is why I love science. I love Doctor Bohannon. Someone give him some more grant money.

My god. We live in a glorious age!

(via Gizmodo)

Episodic gaming will NOT draw in more game players on the PC

Rick Sanchez over at Gamasutra has an interesting article up on why episodic games on the PC are a good thing. I agree with a lot he says, but he does try to make the argument at the end that it will open up the audience for PC gaming. And that the Wii is just a fad.

I'm not sure how making episodic makes it more open to broader market. The reason YouTube is filled with videos of dads and moms and grandmothers playing the Wii is because the learning curve is small. PC games, episodic or not, are just harder to figure out. Not for those us here or those reading Gamasutra, but for my mom? Yes, it is. Even loading, installing, saving, blah blah, is all just that bit more difficult. If you can't get them to even turn it on, how can you get them to play?

And making it episodic certainly doesn't change that. That is all about game play. Saying "Oh, but all of these people now have access to it because they own PC's and they are now accustomed to buying music from iTunes means they'll down load games"... I don't see the connection. Well, that is not true. I can imagine there will be more break out games on PCs, but along the lines of Bookworm Adventures. Small games that appeal to an audience that just want walk into the game section at Best Buy. Heck, is unlikely to even walk into a Best Buy.

The appeal of the Wii is easy of entry (stop snickering) and family. That is where they are going to draw all of these untapped players.

And as too longevity or the fact the fact that it is of 0.5 of next gen... "moms" don't care. The rest of the world doesn't care. They never have. Maybe the Wii will tun into a gateway console for some folks. Maybe they'll be introduced to gaming via the Wii and then their eyes will wander over to other systems and some will say "Wow! That Halo 3 of FF13 or Crysis sure looks neat..." But it won't be a lot. Because these are people who aren't going to rent Predator or some anime film.

Longevity: There are two systems that the Wii should be compared with as to this. The first is the Gameboy. It lasted because of Tetris and games of that sort. And it lasted forever. Sure it was upgraded along the way, but not hugely until the DS. And many other more advanced portables failed in that time. Because most people (by most people I again mean out of the WORLD, not out of "gamers") don't give a rats ass about tons of features or the best graphics. They want something they understand and can pick up and just play.

The other system: a deck of cards. Or Monopoly. Or any boardgame. Those haven't gone away. People still plat them and with the resolution on then are great, their frame rates are very very slow.

(Sidenote: Sanchez is the vice president of content at GameTap so this may explain his blind spot.)

Cha Cha Guides and trolling for a living

Apparently I totally missed the existance of the search engine Cha Cha. It is your standard search engine but it also let's you get assistance from a Guide, a real human being. That's right. I real human being.

Now, this being the internet, you that Guides must get harassed and trolled often. So it was also fun to find a blog of one Guide's experience and how he trolls right back.

Reuters picks up Ellis's Second Life article

This is good news for those of us who follow Second Life and how it is the protoculture of the virtual metaverse of the future. (If that sentence made any sense to you, than you care about this. If you didn't, just move along.) Warren Ellis, author of such amazing comic books as Transmetropolitan and Global Frequency, has been writing a series of "Second Life Sketches" on his website since August. Now Reuters has picked it up.

“Second Life is not only the biggest digital art installation in the world, but potentially the most radical shift yet in the way communities are formed online, and possibly also the germ of the next great operating system,” Ellis said. “It’s not only a place where people get as strange as they can, but an incubator for the future.”

Ellis is probably the person giving Second Life the most serious thought... or at least the one writing about. If you are at all curious as to what all of this Second Life stuff is and what it might mean for your children, give Ellis's stuff a read.

(via Boing Boing)

My New Favorite Game: Google Patent Search

I love old patents. There is something just wonderful about hand drawn technical drawings, be it Disney's redesign of the Tomorrowland Rocket ride from 1994...
...or a Centrifugal Exerciser from 1969...

...or jumper shoes from 1939...
Google's Patent Search application is just a wealth of greatness.