2007 Lists

Fimoculous has published its annual year-end list of lists, with all the usual suspects — books, movies, music — but also stuff like: the world's most expensive homes (mine just missed the list, again!), best UFO photographs (if it were really the best UFO, it couldn't be photographed!), and Japanese buzzwords (there's a fine line between motepuyo and just plain chubby!).

Infoporn: Steam Stats

Valve has a Steam & Game Stats site with fantastic infographics that may be more interesting than the games themselves — to people like me, at least.

For example, there's a hardware survey that shows Intel, nVidia, and Realtek leading in their respective hardware categories, among the users sampled. I also learned that a majority of the users of the service have monitor refresh rates of 60 Hz, about a fifth of users have HyperThreading enabled, and 6.43% have over 250 GB of free hard disk space.

The coolest, though, are the Half-Life 2: Episode 2 Death Maps that show where players died most often in each map.

[via Kottke]

An elephant never forgets how to serve

Amazon Kindle

Rumors had been swirling about the imminent release of an e-book reader and service from Amazon, and Steven Levy has the scoop on "Kindle" in the latest issue of Newsweek. You can read the epic article or your favorite gadget blog for the particulars.

Update: Or you can get the particulars from our own Nanoflux, who wrote:

Amazon will be releasing Nov 21, 2007 a new e-book reader using digital ink called Kindle for $399. I'm not sure I'm bothered by or not bothered by the fact that it is entirely closed. It is closed and only uses EVDO to get content. It's about the size and weight of a "large" paperback but at 600x800 167ppi it's still not the same resolution of a similar book.

Could it do what nobody has yet been able to do? From Levy:

Though Bezos is reluctant to make the comparison, Amazon believes it has created the iPod of reading.

I think it will be a while yet.

Set aside the not-so-physically-attractive hardware and price, since they will surely improve. Some of the features — annotations and highlighting, text search, the ability to load your own PDF and Word documents, and wireless Wikipedia access — are steps forward, compared to what's on similar devices now.

Content is the key, though. The Kindle store may not revolutionize its industry's sales and distribution as quickly as the iTunes Store did, since "Search Inside the Book" and free first-chapter previews are not quite substitutes for the bookstore experience. The iPod also caught on because people already had enough content with which to fill the device, since music can easily be ripped from CDs. Not so with books. There's also no denying the role of file sharing in the nascent days of digital media players. Can't share Kindle e-books like you could loan out a book (which is just the way the publishers like it). You can burn your iTunes Store purchases back onto CDs, but you can't print out Kindle books. The list goes on.

Still, some of the aforementioned problems may not be show-stoppers. There may be enough people out there who only read books once, don't loan them out much, and read mostly new and popular ones, which people might look hard at the Kindle, especially if the wireless features live up to their potential.

What do you all think?

Nanoionics results in new memory type

1000 Gigabyte Thumb Drives. Maybe. We'll see.

Researchers have now developed a brand new memory technology, unlike anything currently available. At one-tenth the cost of flash memory, and 1,000 times as energy efficient, Programmable Metallization Cells (PMC) is bound to revolutionize the technology industry as we know it.

Michael Kozicki, director of Arizona State’s Center for Applied Nanoionics, and the developer of this new computer memory states the first product containing PMC memory is slated to launch in 18 months.

This new memory uses a technique that manipulates charged copper particles at the molecular scale. Instead of storing bits as an electronic charge, PMC creates nanowires from copper atoms the size of a virus to record binary ones and zeros. The key technology is that of nanoionics.

Sources:
* Wired October 26, 2007
* IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices October, 2007

Also see:
Goodbye Flash Memory We Hardly Knew Ya

Nanosciences

Spot the Video Game References ...

... in this halftime performance by the Cal band:


Cal Band Great!!

The Gimli Glider

The aptly named DamnInteresting.com (a personal favorite) has an article about The Gimli Glider, an Air Canada 767 that lost engine power in mid-air:

After repeated unsuccessful attempts to restart the stalled engines, Pearson and Quintal once again consulted the 767 emergency manual, this time for advice on an unpowered landing. Much to their dismay, no such section existed, presumably because a simultaneous engine failure had been too ridiculous for Boeing engineers to contemplate.

epicly later'd

The VBS.tv show Epicly Later'd has been picked up by mtv2! Check it out when it airs. It is a show that takes a very candid look at the lives of professional skateboarders. Can't wait.

Check it

What's wrong with Heroes Volume 2?

Heroes fans, do you agree with creator Tim Kring's assessment of where volume two (the first half of season two) went wrong?

Mr. Show: Pre-Taped Call-In Show

"Don't call to talk about it; it's too late! Instead, call about cooking, which is next week's topic ..."

Turtle Shel Silverstein

Slate talks about Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels. Probably old news to the Nintendo junkies and Wii owners out there, but it got me thinking about what must've been going through Shigeru Miyamoto's head when faced with the task of creating a sequel to his industry's Citizen Kane.

After lulling you into complacency with the game's superficial similarity to Super Mario Bros., Miyamoto (depressed or not) signals that he intends to torment you. The first row of question-marked boxes you encounter includes that familiar mushroom, Mario's iconic power-up. Except this mushroom is different. It's deadly. As Mario was tossed from the screen, I experienced a combination of shock and puzzlement. That would become a familiar sensation over the next three hours. Again and again, the game uses your familiarity with Super Mario Bros. to subvert the playing experience.

Mental Floss Magazine profiles Shel Silverstein's career, from Playboy cartoonist to children's books author to musician.

Silverstein made it pretty impossible to get pigeon-holed into a poetry-and-cartooning rut by simply tossing in a few other careers on top—songwriter, musician, novelist, you name it. In 1959, just a few years before he started to write children’s books, Silverstein began a respectable career in music. How respectable? Well, he was inducted into the Nashville Songwriter’s Hall of Fame, won two Grammy awards, recorded more than a dozen albums, and wrote hundreds of songs that were recorded by artists including Kris Kristofferson, Waylon Jennings, and Jerry Lee Lewis.

Info on $199 dollar PC sold by Walmart

The $199 Everex TC2502 Green gPC w/ Via C7-D Processor, 1.5 GHz (misprint says MHz) Via Technologies C7-D Processor, 512MB RAM, 80GB hard drive, DVD-ROM drive/CD burner, gOS operating system is for sale at walmart.com and limited Walmart stores. Free shipping is supposedly available to "your store" in 7-10 days.

Did a search within 100 miles of Irvine,CA with no stores carrying it.
Did a search within 100 miles of Los Angeles,CA with one store carrying it (out of stock) in Panorama City, CA.

http://tailrank.com/3572328/Everex-TC2502-Green-gPC-w

I guess it is called "green" because the C7-D is touted to be the world's first carbon free processor. And max power consumption is 20W at 1.8GHz. It is "carbon free" via offsetting.

http://www.via.com.tw/en/resources/pressroom/2006_archive/pr060913VIAC7D.jsp


oo

And now for something completely different!

When the thirteen colonies were still a part of England, Professor Alexander Tyler wrote about the fall of a republic over two thousand years previous to that time.

Tyler proclaimed, a democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the electorate (the majority) discover that they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most privileges and the most benefits funded from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship (bondage).

The U.S.A. was set up as a republic which essentially has been transformed into a democracy.

Tyler proclaimed the average age of the world's great civilizations has been two hundred years.
They have progressed through the following sequence:
from bondage to faith,
from faith to courage,
from courage to liberty,
from liberty to abundance,
from abundance to selfishness,
from selfishness to complacency,
from complacency to apathy,
from apathy to dependency,
from dependency back to bondage.
- Alexander Tyler, 1750, known to not be an exact literal quote

Where do you think we are today in this cycle?

One possible hint. Ask a random person on the street what is the biggest problem in America today, ignorance or apathy? A likely answer is "I don't know" and "I don't care".

oo

Detailed Ars Technica review of OS X Leopard

As usual, Ars Technica has a very detailed review of the new Apple OS X Leopard that came out. In (a very brief) summary:

• Lots of potentially good backend changes
• System speedups all around
• Good overall UI interface changes
• Bad Dock
• Stacks doesn't work as well as it should
• WTF did they do with the old icons
• Finder still sucks in some ways

Maybe I'll put up my impressions sooner or later about Leopard.

Sometimes Steal Music

Remember, kids: Don't steal music.*

*Unless you use it — along with video copyrighted by Apple — to make your own clever ad for the iPod touch, which the company's longtime ad agency, TBWA\Chiat\Day, spots on YouTube and remakes into a broadcast version, with you at the helm. Also, it helps if the song you steal is hip, catchy, and has a lyric that seems to reference the product.

Update: Don't worry if the song has already been used in a bizarre ad for a competitor's product.

Post of the Uncanny

Again With the Comics has scans from the Alan-Moore-penned 1963 Book Three: Tales of the Uncanny, an homage to both Marvel Comics' Tales of Suspense and Edwin A. Abbott's Flatland. [via BB]


MEANWHILE...
Todd Klein does in-depth comic book logo studies, tracing the evolutions of superheroes' insignias, like that of Batman.

BACK AT THE VILLAIN'S LAIR...
xkcd, the "webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language" — known around my office for its nerdy take on sandwich-making — is the source of another oldie-but-goodie, people playing chess on roller coasters. Pick your favorite wooden monster from the Roller Coaster DataBase [sic] and recreate the comic for yourself!

WILL OUR HERO SURVIVE...
Further evidence that there is a home on the Internet for everything: Nad Shot, a blog that catalogs instances of groin-targeted attacks in comics, such as this reminder that Wolverine's healing factor applies to all of Wolverine.

ACROSS TOWN...
See Mike Draw has some funny, but disturbing, comics.


FINALLY...
Put on your Fantastic Forefathers t-shirt and check out Robot Chicken's spoof of 300, 1776.

RPS or RSP? You Decide!

Take a moment to vote in the poll on the right. The future of your country is at stake! (The future of what your country calls Bato Bato Pick, at least ...)

See also: Pop vs. Soda

Names for 10^n and 2^n

At least in the U.S.A. people in the hardware and software industries routinely use the 10^n names instead of using the 2^n names. Disk makers use the 10^n names too. See here for the difference between a Gigabyte and a GibiByte along with a table for other powers. Someone wrote a System Monitor for FC7 and they used the GiB (2^n) instead of the GB (10^n) notation.

RPS Variants

We all know that paper covers rock, scissors cuts paper, and rock crushes scissors. But did you know that robot tramples medusa?

It's part of "RPS-101", one of the rock-paper-scissors variants invented by David C. Lovelace. Learn them well, as they make come in handy (no pun intended) when doing business in Japan.

Nissan GT-R

Fina-freakin'-lly!! Nissan has announced the 2009 GT-R (no longer related to the Skyline sedan, our Infiniti G-35). The last model year in which the Skyline GT-R was produced was 2002. Nissan showcased a prototype of this new incarnation at the 2005 Tokyo Motor Show. Soon, I will be able to whip out my Centurion Card and actually buy the thing!


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