I’ve been really impressed by what I’ve seen of the new PoP game in the numerous trailers that have come out in the last month or so. But this one pushed some final buttons, and I think I’ll get it when I have the chance.
Check out the others if you have the chance. There’s some with more game play, and the fighting system with Elecca (sp?) looks pretty solid.
Along the same lines as the Garfield comics with garfield’s text removed is The Nietzsche Family Circus! This time all thetext is replaced with a random Nietzche quote. As with anything random, some results are funnier than others – but there were a few lollable ones in my experience.
So, for reasons I can’t explain, I decided to use finger puppets to recreate (ver batim) a conversation I had earlier with Lauren. Lauren is the green one with a bunch of eyes. (she’s not exactly famous for her cooking prowess). Monster puppet converstaion
Gun and Roses’s “Chinese Democracy” is streaming on MySpace in its entirety. Quite good.
I was today reasonably privileged to attend a physics lecture at work by Marin Soljačić. His work is in Non-Radiative Wireless Power Transfer, which basically means powering something from a distance without wires and without killing everything in between. In practical terms, that means this.
The lecture was pretty interesting, though of course it bobbled over my head occasionally. The gist of it seemed to be that if an energy supplier and an energy receiver resonated at the exact same frequency electromagnetically, power could be sent from the former to the latter over a distance of a couple meters. The lightbulb in the above photo is being lit with 60ish% power efficiency with copper wiring, though apparently numerous other rarer materials work even better (types undisclosed for patenting reasons).
He was not optimistic about sending it much farther than that (apparently the size of the supplier has to increase near-exponentially past a point) but provided several useful examples of companies/governments that have displayed interest, and all said he will probably be a shazillionaire shortly. Examples include powering bioelectrical implants like pacemakers and electric hearts without needing invasive surgery when their batteries periodically run out, not plugging in things to recharge them, not buying 60 billion batteries a year worldwide, recharging underground sensors, etc.
He suggested this would hit the market optimistically in 2 years. He would not indicate what would first hit the market, citing that he was not allowed to per business agreement, but said Toyota, Honda, GM, etc. were interested in creating mats one would place in one’s garage, so that parking your electric or hybrid car over it would recharge the battery.
There’s been a lot of talk about the updated Google Mobile app update for the iPhone. Aside from a slew of UI and customization updates, the app now works with a fully functional voice recognition search. Simply open the app, hold the iPhone up to your ear, wait for the beep, and then speak your search request. Ta-da! I’m seriously floored by how well this worked. Sadly, Google isn’t politely preparing us for our new robotic overlords; much to my dissatisfaction, the search function gets confused if I add “please” or “thank you.” Sigh.
You can check out the feature in action right here:
I suspect Project Euler will be wasting some of my time. It is “a series of challenging mathematical/computer programming problems that will require more than just mathematical insights to solve. Although mathematics will help you arrive at elegant and efficient methods, the use of a computer and programming skills will be required to solve most problems.”
so um, remember that music video I made with Lauren awhile ago? We went to the mtvu woodie awards ceremony in New York a couple days agao and it won “Best video of the Year”!! ( http://woodies.mtvu.com/ )
It was a pretty surreal evening. The record company invited Lauren (and was nice enough to let her bring me along) and we got to sit in the area with all the bands. I happened to be int he front area where people waited to go up on stage and at one point some guy kept backing up into me. I was ignoring him and trying to look past him to the stage when Lauren leaned over and told me “that’s Moby!” and it was, so now I’ve seem the ‘other’ Moby. So yeah, very strange evening. The guys from MCS were really cool, but I felt pretty out of place the whole time. It was really cool to have won, but now it barely seems real. Part of it I think is because we had a really long flight to NY, went pretty much straight from the airport tothe show, and then we got one hour of sleep and went back to the airport after the show and flew back to california – so it’s all a blur.
I strongly recommend Yahtzee’s weekly review of video games at Zero Punctuation. The reviews are pretty quick, and generally accessible even if you haven’t played any of the games. I love the style of the review as well. The pace is outrageously fast and the visual jokes are incredible. I hate to compare it to Family Guy since it shares none of FG’s short comings, but I think it’s a good reference in one particular case. Although FG has it’s problems, it made excellent use of a quick pace to magnify the impact of a visual gag. Yahtzee takes that idea to the next level – it makes FG look like paint drying.
Check out this weeks review of Fable 2. If you like it, you’ll love the archives.
30% Rise in gun sales since Obama has been elected. Frightening.
In other news, the amigo of mine who was running for Rep in the state house lost. Though the outcome was expected by most, it is still kind of a bummer. Still, a 24-year old with no experience gaining 40% of the vote running as a democrat in a very firmly republican district against a well-to-do townie is pretty impressive. Apparently in his months of full-time door-to-door campaigning he stopped at 6,000 homes. It also triggered me to hold signs up for him on a couple of occasions and to attend his campaign kickoff, this being my first time participating politically aside from voting and/or complaining. It was an interesting experience, and if nothing else at least now I have a picture of myself holding signs on election day, surrounded by my typical god-like halo.
