Wednesday 29 February 2012

What if The Phantom Menace was a really, really good movie? [Video]

What if The Phantom Menace was a really, really good movie? [Video]:






Dig if you will a motion picture about a vengeful Obi Wan Kenobi, an unkillable Darth Maul, and a forbidden Jedi romance that doesn't involve the kid from Jingle All The Way.



This movie could've been The Phantom Menace, if only the plot was super-streamlined. In a critique similar to that of Mr. Plinkett, the folks at Belated Media have put forth their tantalizing vision of a Star Wars prequel that nixes Jar Jar's antics and instead makes Obi Wan the focal point of the entire trilogy. Hat tip to Sam Biddle!




Tuesday 28 February 2012

Gandalf teacher's stamp is the classiest way to fail students and/or Balrogs [Lord Of The Rings]

Gandalf teacher's stamp is the classiest way to fail students and/or Balrogs [Lord Of The Rings]:

Gandalf teacher's stamp is the classiest way to fail students and/or BalrogsIf you happen to be a teacher saddled with underperforming students and/or demonic beings wielding whips of flames, this teacher's stamp by Etsy crafter Jocelyn is a crackerjack way of informing them that their efforts are not up to snuff. Hat tip to Wayne!




Has all of humanity actually forgotten the right way to sleep? [Mad Science]

Has all of humanity actually forgotten the right way to sleep? [Mad Science]:

Has all of humanity actually forgotten the right way to sleep?Exactly how long we're supposed to sleep each night can vary depending on who you talk to, but we all seem to agree on one thing: you want to get one long, uninterrupted sleep. But it wasn't always that way.



Generally speaking, the recommendation is that we should sleep for about eight hours each night. Historically, people seem to have slept for roughly that long, but there's a key difference - they woke up in the middle of it. As Virginia Tech historian Roger Ekirch captures in his book At Day's Close: Night in Times Past, there are over 500 literary references from Homer to Charles Dickens that note the concepts of first and second sleep, in which people would sleep for a few hours and then spend one or two hours awake before going back to sleep.



Crucially, according to Ekirch, none of these references treat first and second sleep as anything out of the ordinary - this just was the way that things used to be, apparently for thousands of years. The BBC has a cool overview of Ekirch's research as well as new followup work by fellow historian Craig Koslofsky. It includes this look at how people spent this time of mid-sleep wakefulness. Oh yes, you better believe there was sex involved:





During this waking period people were quite active. They often got up, went to the toilet or smoked tobacco and some even visited neighbours. Most people stayed in bed, read, wrote and often prayed. Countless prayer manuals from the late 15th Century offered special prayers for the hours in between sleeps.



And these hours weren't entirely solitary - people often chatted to bed-fellows or had sex. A doctor's manual from 16th Century France even advised couples that the best time to conceive was not at the end of a long day's labour but "after the first sleep", when "they have more enjoyment" and "do it better".




According to Ekirch and Koslofsky's works, the second sleep started to disappear beginning in the 1600s among the emerging urban upper class of Europe, and in 200 years the practice had all but disappeared. Improvements in street lighting made it possible for people to stay active longer before going to bed, and suddenly the idea of going to bed early just to wake up in a few hours lost its luster.



The question, then, is whether the decision to abandon segmented sleep was actually the right decision for humanity. Certainly, the fact that uninterrupted rest has caught on so completely that we now pretty much think of it as the natural way to sleep suggests it wasn't a bad decision.



At the same time, there are still plenty of people who regularly will wake up in the middle of the night and have trouble falling back to sleep (I've certainly experienced this phenomenon more often than I'd like) to the point that it now has its own name: sleep maintenance insomnia. This condition might actually just be a throwback to the way humans used to sleep - and how some still do, based on some anthropological research on the sleep habits of certain tribes in Nigeria.



If nothing else, it's probably good to know that waking up in the middl of the night shouldn't be seen as something to worry about - you're just reconnecting with how your ancestors used to sleep, 1500s style. And as long as you're not actually sleeping with your ancestors, I can't see anything wrong with that.



Read more at BBC News. Image by Vadim Balantsev, via Shutterstock.




News: Epic showing Unreal Engine 4 at GDC

News:
Epic showing Unreal Engine 4 at GDC
:



Selected GDC attendees will get a glimpse of Epic's latest technology, the Unreal Engine 4, at the event in San Francisco next week.






"Epic will also unveil a preview of its next-generation game technology, Unreal Engine 4, to select licensees, partners and prospective customers during the exhibition," revealed the company in an email to press.






Last year Epic games impressed at the conference with its Samaritan demo. This year as well as its new engine the company will host sessions on subjects like indie development, mobile platforms and gameplay data analysis.







Read more...

Muscle Facts

Muscle Facts:

Muscle Facts

Friday 24 February 2012

Wot I Think: Syndicate (Singleplayer)

Oh well. At least Firaxis are making a proper X-COM.

Wot I Think: Syndicate (Singleplayer):

Hello, I am this videogame's alloted personality



I’ve been playing EA and Starbreeze’s contentious FPS reboot of the legendary Syndicate. I’ve only done a little dabbling in co-op, a report on which I will present very soon (so far: better than singleplayer, but very much in the unlock/ranking modern multiplayer idiom), so for now these are my thoughts on the campaign mode, and the tale of the hysterically-named Eurocorp Agent MILES KILO.



CHOOSE YOUR REVIEW



1) Whether Syndicate is a decent first-person shooter or not.



2) Whether 2012 is anything like Syndicate 1993.



3) The coffee I’m currently drinking.

(more…)





The secret story behind Admiral Ackbar's "It's a trap!" line [Video]

The secret story behind Admiral Ackbar's "It's a trap!" line [Video]:






Thirty odd years ago, radio dramatist Erik Bauersfeld recorded the voices of Admiral Ackbar and Bib Fortuna for Return of the Jedi, saw the movie, and promptly forgot about the whole experience.



It wasn't until decades later that he began receiving fan mail from Star Wars lovers wanting an autograph from the guy who knew how to properly articulate a trap.



Despite a long and fruitful dramatic career, the ninety-year-old Bauersfeld has achieved pop cultural immortality thanks to an entirely off-the-cuff recording session. Explained the actor to the San Francisco Chronicle:





Bauersfeld says he was at Lucasfilm, working on a radio project with [sound designer Randy] Thom, when sound designer Ben Burtt asked him to read for Ackbar, a character with about a dozen lines in the film. The actor says he was offered no direction.



"I went over, he showed me the picture of Admiral Ackbar, and I did it," Bauersfeld says. "I saw the face, and I knew what he must sound like."



He was done in an hour, then spent 30 more minutes reading for Fortuna, who speaks entirely in the fictitious language of Hutt. ("Die wanna wanga!") His parts were added late, and he didn't receive a screen credit for either reading.




Mind you, Bauersfeld never watched A New Hope (and still has yet to). Bauersfeld is happy that his performance left fans enthused, but he admits that he hasn't seen Jedi since 1983, so the Ackbar voice doesn't come as naturally as he'd like. Watch the charming actor describe his time as a Mon Calamari above. Hat tip to Maven!




Community comes back next month! [Community]

\o/

Community comes back next month! [Community]:

Community comes back next month! Thank you Starburns — Community is coming back on NBC on March 15th! According to show creator Dan Harmon's twitter account "What you call 8:00, we call home. Community returns to Thursday nights on March 15th." New Community and an Inspector Spacetime web series? Wonderful news!




This is the worst reproductive strategy in the animal kingdom [Video]

Love these things :D Especially the look on it's face when it fucks that guys head.

This is the worst reproductive strategy in the animal kingdom [Video]:

This is the worst reproductive strategy in the animal kingdomThink pandas are inept when it comes to carrying on the species? Think again. The giant panda is a champion reproducer compared to a chubby, land-bound parrot called the kakapo. Between navigational problems, botanical problems, and the occasions when horny male parrots try to have sex with animals that can kill them, this is the most hopelessly inefficient reproducer on Earth.


It's not entirely the kakapo's fault that its entire species consists of one hundred and twenty-seven animals. The eight-pound parrot had evolved in ancient New Zealand, where it kept to itself, staying away from other animals even of its own species, obsessively clipped trails to its mating habitat, and developed a bright green cloak of feathers that so perfectly matched the surrounding undergrowth that you could look right at it and not see it. The bird's stumbling block is, if you do see it, it doesn't have the instincts to do anything useful. It can freeze. It can, and more friendly species will, come right up to you. And it can, if alarmed, run up into a tree (It's an excellent climber.) and jump out to fly away. It can't fly, and so it lands in a heap on the ground, but it will attempt to fly, if stressed out. It's trying to do its part.


Sadly, nothing it tries is any use against the many mammal species - rats, opossums, stoats, and cats - that have come to New Zealand along with ships, and decimated the kakapo population. Before that, the kakapo had done a pretty good job decimating themselves. It's not their fault. They live for about ninety years. They have to keep the population down some way.


This is the worst reproductive strategy in the animal kingdom But did they have to be so good at it? In the mid-nineties, the kakapo population was down to between thirty and fifty animals in total. The kakapo has contrived, through a miracle of natural selection, to make their mating dependent on timing, acoustics, botany, and the male being able to tell a female kakapo from, say, an angry opossum. None of these things should be taken for granted.


Let's start with the botanical problems. Kakapo, despite having beaks and claws that would look more appropriate incorporated into an industrial mulcher, are herbivores. They grasp branches in their claws and pull them through their beaks, stripping away the fruit and leaves. It's a hard life, and the female kakapo aren't going to make it any harder by bringing on chicks. It's only when they get a specific burst of food that the females will be interested in mating. Their favorite food, the food they eat almost exclusively when it's in season, is the fruit of the rimu tree. The rimu is a tall green tree with its fruit in the canopy, and so kakapos scale the entire thing to finally get enough food in them to make them horny. The problem is, the rimu fruits roughly every few years. And the kakapo will only mate in a high-fruit year. Occasionally there will be females fed enough to think about getting a little something every two years. More often, it's every five years. Conservation researchers, when they first found that out, felt a burst of elation. They fed up the females as much as they could, and it worked. Females mated more often and had more chicks. And the vast majority of those chicks were male. The original population of kakapo, all moved to a de-mammaled island for conservation purposes, was already mostly male. The elation turned to worry. Did the species just always tend towards male chicks? At last the conservationists noticed a trend. The heavier females produced male chicks. And since females bred during the fruiting season, they tended to be heavier when they mated. The kakapo, assisted by conservation scientists, had found yet another way to kill themselves off.


But the female species assassins were assisted, ably, by the males. It's not that the males weren't willing to mate. They were much mere consistently in the mood than the females. There were many more of them. What could be the problem?









The main one was that the kakapo is the only parrot to practice the lek system. The lek system is a practice wherein males put on competing displays for the females. Since the kakapo doesn't have the ability to fly or to fight, and is a better waddler than a walker, the only thing it has to display is its home and its voice. The male clips paths to his mating site, scoops out a nice bowl in the earth, preferably near a rock face on a cliff that will let the sound carry, and 'booms.' The booming is a deep repetitive throb with just a hint of musical overtone. It carries for miles. It sounds like it's coming from everywhere. Absolutely everywhere. Nowadays, when kakapo are concentrated in relatively large numbers on relatively small islands, it's not so much of a problem. In, for example, the majority of Fjordland, a region so mountainous and rough that sections of it are unexplored, it's a bit more frustrating to not know where whoever you want to mate with is calling from. Females were known to show up to empty mating sites and wait for days for males who were busily occupied booming somewhere else.









The males don't do themselves any favors, either. Understandably frustrated that females take the space of a college education off between breeding seasons, the males are known to breed with anything that catches their attention. This includes things like other birds, bits of the scenery, and a human's head. There are multiple video segments that show the male birds attempting to mate with the people filming them. Usually, due to the mulcher claws, the clips are accompanied by words like, "Ow! Ow! Ow!" Not all creatures, especially some of the new mammals in New Zealand, appreciate this kind of treatment. These kinds of encounters probably ended disastrously. (To be fair, this also might be why more males survived in the wild. Using the claws to try to mate with a cat is still better than just freezing up and hoping the cat loses interest.)


In the end, it looks like the kakapo's odd are actually improving. Their numbers have just about tripled, after a research program that put the females on careful diets resulted in twenty-four surviving chicks, with a majority of them being female. Slowly, they're even beginning to repopulate islands, once all the mammals and other non-native species have been cleared out. Still, the kakapo is one of the species that is now going to need constant human intervention to survive. Some researchers actually report having to help the chicks out of the eggs by using tweezers to remove the more stubborn bits of shell. Under any kind of ecological pressure, the round little ground parrot simply can't make it on its own.


Top Image: Wiki Commons


Second Image: Wiki Commons


Via ABC, Kakapo Recovery, and Last Chance to See.



Ascii What You Did: Syndicate Dev’s Message To Pirates

Ascii What You Did: Syndicate Dev’s Message To Pirates:

STARING EYES

The humble .nfo file is a business card, instruction manual, and score-setting rap song in ascii form. They’re the files that the piracy scene drops into their releases to claim bragging rights for that particular chunk of nefarious code. So why the hell did Syndicate Developers Starbreeze stick one in the legitimate release of their first-person shooter? Redditor MikkelManDK spotted the file in the game’s directory: it’s there to partly to mock the scene a little — the install notes resd: ’1) Insert disc 2) Play ;)’ — and partly to bring the Warez groups into the games industry: Starbreeze’s .nfo asks them to apply for jobs.



(more…)





Editorial: GAME Changer: The Impact of the Collapsing High Street

Editorial:
GAME Changer: The Impact of the Collapsing High Street
:



Tipping points are a peculiar thing. They always seem obvious in hindsight - but it's next to impossible to see them coming in advance, or even to recognise them when they actually turn up. Yet almost every market transition - indeed, almost every transition of any description - has its tipping point, a moment where the various factors pushing in a certain direction become inexorable.






Because this is such an alluring concept for journalists, we've got a terrible habit of labelling all sorts of things as being tipping points, when they're almost certainly nothing of the sort. Every decent Android handset that comes out is the "tipping point" that'll swing the mobile market in Google's favour. Every attempt by Microsoft or Sony to appeal to a casual market is a "tipping point" that'll demolish all that Nintendo has wrought. "Is this the tipping point for social games?", we wonder aloud every time Facebook or Zynga makes a pronouncement, never entirely clear what's being tipped or what it's being tipped into.






All of which is a long-winded way of saying - when someone starts banging on about tipping points, unless they're talking in academic hindsight, they're probably best ignored. So, bearing in mind my own admonition on this matter, I'm not going to describe what's happening to UK retail right now as a "tipping point". It's more complex than that, and perhaps more worrying.







Read more...

How Do You Get Pink Eye?

How Do You Get Pink Eye?:

How Do You Get Pink Eye?