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Large Hadron Collider Guys Get Theatrical With Half-Life Street Theatre
Posted by Luke Plunkett at 7:00 PM on November 21, 2008
Back when we thought the Large Hadron Collider was going to kill us all, instead of just hum for a few days then break down, we learned that an emergency package had been sent to the site. Within, everything that Gordon Freeman needed to save us from the horrors of an alien-spewing vortex. At the time, it was a cute joke, but there was always the lingering understanding that nobody at the LHC would actually get it. The package, or the joke. Turns out they did! Sandro Bonacini, who works there, got the joke, and eventually the package as well. He's Gordon. Stefano Michelis also got the joke, and for his troubles, is about to get whacked. Oh, those wacky scientists.
The US' Natural Resources Defence Council have released a report detailing how much money it costs the average American to run a gaming console. And, by extension, how much money gamers could save by taking those consoles and throwing them in the closet/garbage. Were you to decomission a 360, for example, you'd save yourself $11 a year. $11! Binning a PS3 would save you $15, while packing the Wii away - provided you haven't already done so - will save you...$3 a year. Best keep it around then, in case Gran comes over and wants a swing at that "computer bowling".
You know how it goes. You're waist-deep in physics exams, calculations and numbers out the wahzoo, and all you really want to do is play Tetris. Whipping out a Game Boy in the lab, that's poor form, but whipping out a calculator? That's cool. Cooler when your calculator isn't a calculator at all, but this cleverly-disguised...yes, Game Boy.
Fresh from the "Study finds violent video games do X to kids" pile, we now find -- shock -- playing them results in "a greater variation in Heart Rate Variability." This isn't straight out one's pulse quickening. HRV is "the oscillation in the interval between consecutive heartbeats" -- more or less, a measure of minute changes in heart rate.
The irRegular Game of Life is a weird but fun little game (by irRegular Games) based on mathematician John Horton Conway's 'Game of Life' theory. In this iteration, you are given puzzles to solve and must set the little cells into motion to meet the goals of each level. It's surprisingly hypnotic at times — after getting past the initial introductory levels, you watch the cells shuffle back and forth, creating a variety of patterns and interacting with each other. There's also a sandbox mode and some other features; the regular puzzle mode was plenty fun for me.
The US Army are working on fake soldiers, that are, to dumb the science down a pinch, holographic projections imbued with artificial intelligence. These fake troops can then be used for stuff like training exercises. Anyway, to test the AI for these holo-soldiers, the Army wants to set them up in games like World of Warcraft and Eve Online. They figure that if the AI - which can be designed to speak in local slang and make human conversation - can pass for human in the online realm, they'll be on the right track. Hopefully the AI doesn't act too human, and end up quitting the army, moving in with its parents and blowing 19 hours a day grinding away on WoW.
Is Playing on the Wii actually any good for you? Kotaku was all over this from the start - 
It's been a while since we've had a really good "video games make our children violent" study, and I was beginning to fear we've given up on the idea, but then the story "Violent video games linked to child aggression" showed up on CNN.com this morning and my fears were completely assuaged. The story is about a study conducted by Dr. Craig A. Anderson, Ph.D., of Iowa State University, who studied three groups of children in both the United States and Japan to gage their violence levels three to six months after playing violent video games, versus children who did not play violent video games. The results may not surprise you at all. 
An article in Science magazine discussing why Spore flunks various kinds of science after close scrutiny by a variety of scientists reminds me of history buffs that get hysterical when a movie is historically inaccurate. While a couple of them had a few nice things to say, Spore in general got poor marks in organismic and evolutionary biology, squeaked by with barely sufficient grades in cultural anthropology, physics, and astrobiology, and was reasonably highly rated in sociology and galaxy structuring. But they're not just trying to grouse, really:
Any girl gamers reading this - move along please, nothing to see here.
