Category: geek stuff

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High-larious…

Mariju-wii-ana

What does Isaac’s Dad do when he finds out his 15-year-old son is smoking marijuana? He unwraps that new copy of Guitar Hero III that was under the tree and puts it up for sale on eBay, along with a lengthy discussion as to why it’s for sale. Needless to say, Isaac probably isn’t all that pleased… Personally, I find this to be a very creative punishment…but Dad probably should have taken the Wii away, too…

Please note that the “lengthy discussion” is quite amusing…and also, as of today (6:45 pm), this $90 game is going for $224… I think Dad should buy himself something nice…

So, now does the title make sense? Hope so…I was proud of that one…

Update: The auction ended this evening…and I checked at 8:50 pm and it sold… After 42 bids, it went for $9,100.01… All I can say is…wow…

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SfN 2007

So, I was away in San Diego from Oct 31 – Nov 7 for two scientific meetings: National Parkinson Foundation and the Society for Neuroscience. These were my first real “meetings” that I attended and my first experience with people “in the field” that I’m working with (and there are a lot of the, apparently…).

The Parkinson meeting was over two days and was very helpful. The whole thing was set up so that there were presentations that were grouped along certain topics, discussed by people who know what they’re talking about, and educating the rest of us on this aspect of the Parkinson’s research field that we would otherwise be unaware of. Most of the discussions, it seemed, focused on the genetic forms of Parkinson’s disease (which only account for maybe 10% of total cases…) and that was informative, as we don’t really focus on the genetic forms, per se. Regardless, we met some folks, heard some good talks and learned more about the field.

While the Parkinson meeting involved 100-120 people, the Society for Neuroscience (SfN) meeting involved…oh…30,000 people…which meant that I learned a little bit there, but not as much as before. You come to a point where you get overwhelmed by all the posters and topics that your head spins…and after 6 days of straight brain research, you get tired and ready to go home. I learned a bit at the SfN meeting, but there was honestly too much to learn, and thus, it was a bit overwhelming… However, Newt Gingrich did speak to us…more on that later, perhaps… 😉

San Diego itself was decent, although Macarthur was right in that the place seems “artificial.” By that I mean that the downtown area didn’t have much character: you can go to Dogtown, Soulard, and The Loop in St. Louis and get a feel of “character,” but San Diego didn’t really have such things. That, and it was hazy the whole time – it was only sunny for one day in “sunny southern California” while we were there…

Anyway, it was a good trip! Certainly informative for a first meeting and I look forward to going to more in the future…hopefully an international one next time… 😛

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Wii Tidbits

A few things caught my attention this morning (while I was waiting for my experiments to be ready…early this morning…) related to my lovely Wii. Firstly, apparently, the Wii has sold 7.8 million Virtual Console downloads in the last year. If you multiply that out as if all the downloads were NES titles (i.e. $5 each), then that translates to $39 million in nearly pure profit, and we all know that not all those titles were NES (i.e. as high as $10 per title). The truly sad part about this is that these are old games that have already been sold. It’s akin to Ford making Model Ts for free and selling them again. Oh well…

On another note, here’s a video of old people in a Wii bowling tournament…worth watching for a few minutes, at least… 😛

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Sony Defense Force

For anyone that doesn’t care at all about the ensuing “console war,” you can stop reading now, as I’m quite certain you don’t want to read what I’m going to write next… Stu, Dave and Jeremy are probably the only readers that’ll care about this… 😛

So yeah, otherwise, you may (or may not) have noticed a link to “SDF” on the right-hand of the blog, which stands for “Sony Defense Force.” And yes, you simply must go by this site, as it’s possibly the best satirical site on the internet… 😉

If you aren’t keeping up with console sales and reviews, you’ll quickly notice that the Wii is practically printing money for Nintendo and Microsoft’s Xbox 360 enjoys pretty good success, at least in North America. The Sony Playstation 3, on the other hand, is doing neither. That, and it’s games tend to not be so well reviewed and it’s plagued by ridicule of the fan-base that Sony has built up since the late-90s.

Well, then comes along this site, and it’s unbelievably funny…and if it isn’t a satire on Sony Fanboy-ism, and the authors are actually serious, then they need to get their anti-psychotic medications checked… Case in point: they’ve done “reviews” on 4 games, including “Lair,” “Heavenly Sword” and “Warhawk” for the PS3, followed by “Bioshock” for the 360. If you go by Metacritic, “Bioshock” has an average 96% rating, while the three PS3 games are at 56%, 80% and 84%, respectively. SDF is adamant that all three PS3 games deserve 10/10 ratings, while “Bioshock” is only so-so with a 5/10… 😛

Another, more humorous “case in point:” they did a nice article about this months NPD reports, declaring Sony the winner in sales for the month of August. Hopefully, you quickly notice that it was the “Sony Family” that beat out the 360, the Wii, and the DS. That’s with something like 484k for Sony (PS2, PS3 and PSP sales, combined…) and 786k for Nintendo (Wii and DS, combined…). Regardless, it’s rather sad when you have to combine your current generation sales with the previous one’s…

Anyway, the fanboy-ism is rather sad. They frequently talk of how bad “Halo 3” is and how PS3s are just flying off the shelves, while Xbox 360s sit around collecting dust. They really only pick on the 360 and leave the Wii alone, but still…it’s rather hilarious… I guess enough PS3 fans became pissed with the likes of Joystiq and Kotaku constantly making fun of Blu-Ray and the Sixaxis that they just started making stuff up. It’s like a “Weekly World News” for Sony’s PS3…

So yeah, if you want a good laugh, and you hate the PS3 and all of what Sony stands for, you should check it out. It’s pretty funny…

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Quotes and Links…

On my iGoogle page this morning, the following was my link of the day…and I enjoyed it:

“Equations are the devil’s sentences.”
– Stephen Colbert

On another note, Zachary Quinto will be playing Spock in the new “Star Trek” movie that J.J. Abrams is producing/writing/directing… Honestly, I’m not sure how I feel about this. I mean, I think the guy, with the proper hair, could look the part, and I know he can do “unemotional acting,” but the character he plays in “Heroes” is Sylar…and that guy is evil. There are certain actors that just seem to play good “bad guys,” and it’s hard to imagine their transition to a “good guy” role. I’ve heard they’re envisioning a trilogy for these “Star Trek” movies, assuming this one does well enough, meaning that this guy could be playing Spock for years to come, but still…I just dunno…

In other news, my boss is still out of town, so I’ll be going home early today…maybe play some “Super Mario World” and “Resident Evil 4,” but I also need to get started writing my Prelim. This document will be a 25-page grant that I have to defend in order to “officially enter the doctoral program” here at SLU, so it’s kinda a big deal. I generally know what I’m writing it on, but it’s a little hard getting the ball rolling. I hope to defend in November/December, so I’ve still got time – that, and I don’t have classes to take anymore, so there isn’t much getting in the way of the writing…

…I just need to get started…that’s all…

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Patrick Stewart is a genius…

…a genius at life, of course!

I ran across this video of our good friend, Jean-Luc, singing and dancing… If you aren’t a Star Trek fan, you probably won’t find it all that amusing…but if you are, then it’s well worth the watch…

(For the record, this isn’t a new video or anything…just a good reminder…)

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March of the Giant Penguins

Giant penguin

I know I need to get a “vacation post” up, likely later today, but I just had to point this out… Apparently, according to an article in PNAS (a decent science journal), as reported in National Geographic, giant penguins used to roam Peru. New fossils discovered show that one species lived around 42 million years ago and were 3 feet tall, about the size of a modern King Penguin…but the other kind was 5 feet tall and lived 36 million years ago… It also had a foot-long beak to spear fish; both species were more “warm-adapted” than their modern cousins.

w00t, giant penguins! Let the Linux community rejoice! 😉

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Internet Culture War

So, there’s a blurb on Slashdot mentioning this article that talks about class divisions between users of MySpace and Facebook. It kinda talks about the history of each, especially how Facebook used to be exclusively for college students and, because of this, seems to be almost more “elitist” in its constituents. For example, Facebook users hated the idea of high school students joining their ranks late last year, and even with the infusion of “younger blood,” the site still seems to contain more educated users, while MySpace users tend to be even younger and less-educated.

One of the more interesting points in the article (about mid-way down) discusses the U.S. military, and more specifically how they banned the use of MySpace, but allow the use of Facebook. This is particularly interesting because officers tend to have Facebook accounts, while lower ranked soldiers have MySpace accounts upon military entry.

So yeah, the article talks about methodology and data recovery to a minor extent, and personally I think some of the “data” may be suspect, but it still brings up an interesting point or two… On a related note, I loathe MySpace… I hate going to MySpace pages and seeing terrible web design, horrible pictures in the background that make a given page nearly impossible for me to read, and I think it’s too easy for people to be able to access someone’s page. Now, on the other hand, I think it’s quite useful for getting your music “out there,” but a better-designed web page would be more useful…

Are different socio-economic classes using each site? Perhaps… I’m not sure this site represents anything definitive, but it does bring up a few interesting points and things to think about. I really don’t use MySpace, so I can’t attest to it… Facebook, however, is very clean and easy to use. I’d almost go so far as to say “elegant.” So, my bias toward Facebook is moreso about useability and access restrictions, rather than “the people that use it” (I’d like to think). Then again, as I scanned through some user groups around the time of the last election (Fall 2006), there were a lot of poorly educated high school students making up all kinds of “science” about stem cells…let alone frequently misspelling things…

Thoughts?

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Home stretch, and new Mario…

Well, the Easter holiday was quite fun… We took Edie to Columbia, where she met Pepper (our 15-year-old Cocker Spaniel that eats people….), and it went surprisingly well… Otherwise, we mostly chilled at home and visited with family and friends. We hadn’t been there in about two months, so it was good to get back for a change!

…yet now, I’m back at school… My last regular exam is next Thursday, and my comprehensive final is a week later. Then I’m done with taking classes forever! Next year, I can choose to teach “Drugs We Use And Abuse” to the undergrads, which I’ll probably do, but I’ll be on the other side of the desk – a different experience, to be sure…

Anyway, more importantly, Super Paper Mario comes out today, so I’ll be heading to Circuit City to buy it later…and hopefully playing it as much as possible… 😛

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Evil more fundamental?

So, an intriguing perspective, as pointed out by “ST: Voyager” in an episode titled “The Darkling“… The episode basically centers around a malfunction in The Doctor such that he goes all Jekyll and Hyde on the crew and attacks people…

…anyway, here’s the important part… The Doctor goes on this rant about evil, essentially describing evil as more “fundamental” than good. The argument went from a physics perspective such that light involves photons, which is made up of particles (yes, light has mass…weird, eh?), yet there is no corresponding particle for dark. So, if there were no particles of light, there would only be dark. There is no corresponding force to go against light, at least as far as particle physics goes.

I guess it’s just an interesting idea, ’cause I’d always heard the argument that you can’t have good without evil, and vice versa, because our notion of “right” and “wrong” requires that opposing force. How can one define “evil” without a “good” to counterbalance it? Our notion of “evil” requires that you know what is bad and what isn’t, and to know what isn’t, you have to have a sense of “good”…confused, much?

Well, using the argument from physics, actually, light (i.e. “good”) is the force encroaching upon what would be there otherwise (i.e. “evil”). If there were no light, there would only be dark. You can’t not have dark (w00t!, double-negative). But you can not have light.

So, thusly I ask: is evil more fundamental than good?