TURNCOAT #1
ENTERTAINMENT
— Troll Hunter! It mixes the mythic with documentary styles. The build up of story is quite well done. Yes, netflix instant has it.
“Shot in a vérité style, TrollHunter is the story of a group of Norwegian film students that set out to capture real-life trolls on camera after learning their existence has been covered up for years by a government conspiracy. A thrilling and wildly entertaining film, TrollHunter delivers truly fantastic images of giant trolls wreaking havoc on the countryside, with darkly funny adherence to the original Norwegian folklore.”
— Dear Human. Comedy saves the day yet again.
“You are a tiny speck dwarfed by even the tiniest objects in the heavens…”
— Burning Man 2011 just concluded and the stories, photos, and videos are starting to pour out. NOT SAFE FOR WORK!
Here is a collaborative music video made at Burning Man 2011. Here is taste of the 2010 experience.
— Extremely creepy realtime face substitution.
Hello? I didn’t know this depth of uncanny valley existed!
— Beautiful music of all kinds: Laundrymat. Horse racing. Arvo. Harmony. Tau. Dinosaurs. haha gotcha!
— One Chance. Game as art. Thought provoking and moving; at least for me. I played this game in Dec 2010 and I for some reason it made an impression. You can only play it once ever. I think it remembers your IP address. So just treat this as a memento mori…
There’s a problem with branching paths and moral decisions in videogames: even if they are meaningful (few are), players can usually bypass the system by using multiple save files or other means to go in for another attempt and a different outcome. While the same is still true for the online flash title One Chance, more work has been put in place to prevent you from “cheating.” It’s one of those games that doesn’t try to be fun, but that’s not to say the experience isn’t entertaining. In six days, all life on Earth will cease to exist. It’s up to you how to spend that time. I recommend giving it a play. You’d be surprised how tense a game with this aesthetic can be. I’m not entirely sure how many possible outcomes there are.
ARTICLES
— Most accurate simulation of the universe to date: Bolshoi Simulation. The previous most accurate was the Millennium Simulation.
The simulation traces the evolution of the large-scale structure of the universe, including the evolution and distribution of the dark matter halos in which galaxies coalesced and grew. Initial studies show good agreement between the simulation’s predictions and astronomers’ observations. Related news: evidence for the cosmic thread that connects us to the vast expanse of the Universe.
— Thoughtful article about PAX culture.
“Every year, tens of thousands of gamers descend on Seattle to attend a convention that began as a webcomic, and has grown into the epicenter of gaming culture. An account from this year’s event, which encompassed nearly every imaginable game genre—and a few never before imagined.”
— Brain scanner can record your dreams on video. News stations are casting this in a weird light, so here is the run-down of how it was actually accomplished:
“Subjects watched two separate sets of Hollywood movie trailers, while fMRI was used to measure blood flow through the visual cortex, the part of the brain that processes visual information. On the computer, the brain was divided into small, three-dimensional cubes known as volumetric pixels, or ‘voxels.’ … The brain activity recorded while subjects viewed the first set of clips was fed into a computer program that learned, second by second, to associate visual patterns in the movie with the corresponding brain activity. Brain activity evoked by the second set of clips was used to test the movie reconstruction algorithm. This was done by feeding 18 million seconds of random YouTube videos into the computer program so that it could predict the brain activity that each film clip would most likely evoke in each subject. Finally, the 100 clips that the computer program decided were most similar to the clip that the subject had probably seen were merged to produce a blurry yet continuous reconstruction of the original movie.”
— Gamers solve molecular puzzle that baffled scientists. Finally citizen science has arrived. About damn time.
“For more than a decade, an international team of scientists has been trying to figure out the detailed molecular structure of a protein-cutting enzyme from an AIDS-like virus found in rhesus monkeys. Such enzymes, known as retroviral proteases, play a key role in the virus’ spread — and if medical researchers can figure out their structure, they could conceivably design drugs to stop the virus in its tracks. The strategy has been compared to designing a key to fit one of Mother Nature’s locks. That’s where Foldit plays a role. The game is designed so that players can manipulate virtual molecular structures that look like multicolored, curled-up Tinkertoy sets. The virtual molecules follow the same chemical rules that are obeyed by real molecules. When someone playing the game comes up with a more elegant structure that reflects a lower energy state for the molecule, his or her score goes up. If the structure requires more energy to maintain, or if it doesn’t reflect real-life chemistry, then the score is lower.”
— Placebos are getting more effective. It is fascinating to wonder what is really happening that we cannot grasp.
“It’s not that the old meds are getting weaker, drug developers say. It’s as if the placebo effect is somehow getting stronger.”
— Faster than the speed of light. Just how possible is it? Has our foundation of physics gone wtf? Coder shares opinions. Entropy chagrins…
“It noted that the surprising result was based on more than 15,000 “neutrino events” that had been created when researchers sent a beam of subatomic particles called neutrinos from the organization’s headquarters near Geneva to a detector at the Gran Sasso Laboratory in Italy, about 450 miles away. “When an experiment finds an apparently unbelievable result and [can't] account for it, it’s normal procedure to invite broader scrutiny,” CERN research director Sergio Bertolucci said in a statement. ”If this measurement is confirmed, it might change our view of physics, but we need to be sure that there are no other, more mundane, explanations. That will require independent measurements.”
— The Document Which Used To Be Called The MIT Lockpicking Guide.
Hallelujah! Nerds rejoice in engineered ecstasy.
— What if the Secret to Success Is Failure? Interesting perspective on how to teach children.
The most critical missing piece, Randolph explained as we sat in his office last fall, is character — those essential traits of mind and habit that were drilled into him at boarding school in England and that also have deep roots in American history. “Whether it’s the pioneer in the Conestoga wagon or someone coming here in the 1920s from southern Italy, there was this idea in America that if you worked hard and you showed real grit, that you could be successful,” he said. “Strangely, we’ve now forgotten that. People who have an easy time of things, who get 800s on their SAT’s, I worry that those people get feedback that everything they’re doing is great. And I think as a result, we are actually setting them up for long-term failure. When that person suddenly has to face up to a difficult moment, then I think they’re screwed, to be honest. I don’t think they’ve grown the capacities to be able to handle that.”