Zombies will always infect videogames, because gamers need something they can shoot guilt-free.

—The Escapist

TED: Kathryn Schulz: On being wrong

Most of us will do anything to avoid being wrong. But what if we’re wrong about that? “Wrongologist” Kathryn Schulz makes a compelling case for not just admitting but embracing our fallibility.

Matthew Modine’s “Full Metal Jacket Diary” – iPad App
From the producer of the app, Adam Rackoff:

In 2010, I approached Matthew about turning his diary into an “eBook.” We talked at length about the experience of reading on electronic devices and started to imagine something more cinematic and interactive. We wanted to take the reader on a unique journey; one they couldn’t get on an Amazon Kindle or other eReader. We realized then, that Apple’s new iPad was the perfect platform to re-release his book as an “app.” Matthew gave me his blessing and entrusted me with the contents of his book. After 8 months of pre-production work, I’m ready to begin creating what will become the Full Metal Jacket Diary iPad App. I plan to build an immersive experience that includes not only Modine’s diary and photographs, but audio of Matthew reading his book, sound effects, original music, and never-before-seen images and content! As with the book, it’s very important to us both that we create something Kubrick would have been proud of and wanted to own.

via Daring Fireball

via asaucerfullofwheels

This is a case for your iPad.
“Well, why don’t you just get a MacBook Air? It’s practically the same thing.”
I understand this perspective, but I still thing what the people at ZAGG have created is simple, beautiful and purposeful. In the evolution of computers, we’re currently in the transitory period from desktop to mobile. As is the case with evolution, not everyone will survive and that’s OK.
We’re still figuring everything out.
And making some beautiful mutant solutions while we’re at it.
via Co.Design

The work you do while you procrastinate is probably the work you should be doing for the rest of your life.

—Jessica Hische
via The Brooks Review

The streamline Mercedes of Juan Manuel Fangio and Stirling Moss lead the field through the banking, Italian Grand Prix, Monza, September 13, 1955

via asaucerfullofwheels

Ars Technica: Adobe throws in towel, adopts HTTP Live Streaming for iOS
I used Flash as a tool to create great interactive experiences for clients for many years and it’s still superior to HTML5 & Javascript for creating said experiences, but i have yet to read an article that has convinced me that having Flash on my iPhone or iPad is a good idea.
Seems Flash and portable computing weren’t meant to be.
I’m sorry Adobe, but you and Flash don’t own online video. I’m glad you’re coming to realize this.

Oh yes, let’s check out the technical specifications:

16-bit microprocessor • 16K RAM • 26K ROM • up to 30K ROM in Solid State Software™ Command Modules • built-in BASIC • sound effects, five full octaves of music and 16-color graphics • built-in equation calculator. Accessories: 13″ color monitor • Solid State Speech™ Synthesizer • disk memory drive and control • telephone coupler (modem) • thermal printer • RS 232 interface • dual cassette cables • wired remote controllers.

via Modern Mechanix

Games Beat: Will Wright says games are headed toward ubiquity, diversity, and art

“Almost every new technology is an amplification of our body,” Wright said, “Computers, the internet, social networks expand everything. The most important thing they expand is our imaginations and our brains. I think of games as imagination amplifiers. We can construct these elaborate worlds, play with them, share them back and forth, and this is one of the culturally most impactful things that our medium can offer.”

Maybe it’s why some of us are trying to archive it like it’s art.
I’ve been tuned to the importance of gaming in our culture ever since my brother turned me onto Jane McGonigal‘s book, Reality Is Broken.

On YouTube:

Immediately after the 2011 national Rube Goldberg Machine Contest, a machine built by the Purdue’s Society of Professional Engineers team completed a flawless run of 244 steps setting a world record now featured online by the World Records Academy.

It doesn’t have the poetry of other Goldberg pieces I’ve seen (like OK Go’s video, or that Honda commercial), but impressive nonetheless.
via The Escapist

via Comically Vintage

Scientists are talking about replacing spark plugs with frickin’ “lasers”:

Engines make NOx as a byproduct of combustion. If engines ran leaner — burnt more air and less fuel — they would produce significantly smaller NOx emissions.

Spark plugs can ignite leaner fuel mixtures, but only by increasing spark energy. Unfortunately, these high voltages erode spark plug electrodes so fast, the solution is not economical. By contrast, lasers, which ignite the air-fuel mixture with concentrated optical energy, have no electrodes and are not affected.

Lasers also improve efficiency. Conventional spark plugs sit on top of the cylinder and only ignite the air-fuel mixture close to them. The relatively cold metal of nearby electrodes and cylinder walls absorbs heat from the explosion, quenching the flame front just as it starts to expand.

Despite rocky intiatives like it’s new paywall, it’s good to see there’s interesting work happening at the New York Times:

For the past several months, the R&D Lab has been working, quietly, on a time-based representation of how the Times’ news content is being shared in Twitter’s social space. Its name: Project Cascade. Superficially, it’s a data visualization, but it’s actually a tool that could, ever so slightly, change the way we think about online engagement.

It’s the product of a collaboration among Mark Hansen, the UCLA stats professor who spent a spring 2010 sabbatical working at the Times as what Zimbalist calls the paper’s “futurist-in-residence” — that casual title alone offers evidence of the scope of the R&D Lab’s ambition — along with Jer Thorp (data artist in residence) and Jake Porway (data scientist). And it has, despite its pragmatic uses, a firmly artistic attitude: Hansen, along with the artist Ben Rubin, designed the “Moveable Type” screen installation in the Times’ lobby, and Thorp, whose work we’ve written about previously, has converted data from the Times’ API into visualizations that are both revealing and stunning.

The team had access to a trove of usage data for Times stories, and wanted to figure out a way to see and understand the life those stories adopt once they leave the newsroom’s confines and go out into the world. The tool, which focuses on Twitter and uses information from the Bit.ly URL shortener, is their solution. “What it attempts to do,” Zimbalist says, “is dimensionalize and make really physical and tangible the way that news is shared.”

via FishbowlNY