I am off to points unknown putting my Sooper Sekrit Project ™ into action, so I don’t have time for a lengthy post. Instead, go to the 143rd Carnival of Space, hosted at Next Big Future. Space! Astronomy! Science!
Apple Rejects App For Containing "Minimal User Functionality" [Apple]
A million fart app developers must've just started sobbing in hysterical fear as Apple decided to reject an app because it "contains minimal user functionality and will not be appropriate for the App Store."
The app in question, DuckPhone, was developed by Nick Bonatsakis of Atlantia Software and had one simple purpose: To make your phone quack like a duck. For whatever reason, Apple didn't think that was useful enough to an average user and wrote Nick this love letter:
"Dear Atlantia Software LLC,
We've reviewed your application DuckPhone and we have determined that this application contains minimal user functionality and will not be appropriate for the App Store.
If you would like to share it with friends and family, we recommend you review the Ad Hoc method on the Distribution tab of the iPhone Developer Portal for details on distributing this application among a small group of people of your choosing or if you believe that you can add additional user functionality to DuckPhone we encourage you to do so and resubmit it for review.
Sincerely,
iPhone App Review Team"
My guess is that whoever was stuck reviewing DuckPhone really hates Jersey Shore, but the bigger issue remains: Apple's now got yet another completely arbitrary reason to reject an app. [Crunch Gear]
Libertarian Wayne Root, Republican Sarah Palin together on stage for Nevada Tea Party
Headliners Libertarian & Republican
2008 Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin will share a stage with 2008 Libertarian Vice-Presidential candidate Wayne Root at the upcoming Tea Party Express, "Showdown in Searchlight," set for March 27. Among other celebrities attending: SNL's Victoria Jackson, Joe the Plumber, and Melanie Morgan.
"You're invited to help kick Harry out of the Senate, and send him back home for an early retirment..."
NCBI ROFL: D’oh! An analysis of the medical care provided to the family of Homer J. Simpson. | Discoblog
“In the quiet town of Springfield, noted for its substandard nuclear power plant and eccentric citizenry, Drs. Julius Hibbert and Nick Riviera frequently come in contact with Springfield’s everyman, Homer J. Simpson, and his family. Homer, who works at the power plant, is known for his love of donuts and Duff’s beer. Like the forces of good and evil battling for the soul of medicine itself, these 2 physicians are polar opposites. Julius Hibbert is an experienced family physician with a pleasant, easygoing manner, while Nick Riviera is an ill-trained upstart who is more interested in money than medicine. Knowing that appearances can be deceiving (and first impressions rarely correct), we explored this question: Which of these 2 physicians should Canada’s future physicians emulate?…The true medical hero for whom we search is Julius Hibbert’s foil, the enterprising Dr. Nick Riviera, an international medical graduate who attended the Club Med School. He practises with an enthusiasm that is matched only by his showmanship. Unfortunately, this has led to 160 complaints from Springfield’s narrow-minded Malpractice Committee, but artists like Riviera are rarely understood in their time. Dr. Nick, as he is known, may be a tad weak on anatomy. “What the hell is that?” he asked after making the incision for Homer’s coronary artery bypass. However, he does possess all the requisite traits for the doctor of tomorrow: he is resource conscious and he gives the customer what she wants… … In these turbulent times, we need a hero to guide us into the next millennium. As a profession, we must shed the dark past embodied by Dr. Hibbert — a wasteful, paternalistic and politically incorrect physician. Instead, the physician of the future must cut corners to cut costs, accede to the patient’s every whim and always strive to avoid the coroner. All hail Dr. Nick Riviera, the very model of a 21st-century healer.
“See you at the operating place!””
Thanks to Myrian for today’s ROFL!
Image: Hugh Malcolm/Canadian Medical Association
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The DVE Immersion Room Is Corporate Hologram Hell Back to Haunt Us From the ’80s [Three-dee]
The DVE Immersion room might well be the most impressive holographic telepresence setup for sharing 3D Powerpoint presentations ever (better than anything you could buy), but their promo video feels like it was produced by OCP in Robocop.
The idea, as you can see in the video, is that you're not trapped in a tube like traditional telepresence setups. As for technical specifications, what they're offering is a full 1080p 60fps camera and display system, with room for 8 people on each side of a call. But I really can't get over the video, which should only be aired after 2am on select cable channels. [DVE via TelepresenceOptions]
Update: PlayStation Network Is Working Again, You Can Turn On Your Fat PS3 Now [PS3]
After Sony's warning, the PlayStation Network seems to be back online and fully operational, according to reader Larry Gallant. Updated
I wanted to let you guys know that the phat PS3s are now able to login to the Playstation network and the clocks are working. I was able to login at 6:28 PM eastern time in the Boston, MA USA area.
No official word from Sony yet, however, so proceed with caution.
Update: Multiple readers are reporting that things are fixed, and they now can use their PS3s normally.
Have you been able to connect to the network? Tell us in the comments. [Thanks Larry]
Inside the Excruciatingly Slow Death of Internet Explorer 6 [InternetExplorer]
It's the bane of Web designers everywhere, and it makes most modern Websites look broken and horrible. So why are 20% of web surfers still using it?
Today was supposed to be a great day for the Web. As of March 1, 2010, Google will no longer support Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6 browser-a decade-old dinosaur engineered to navigate the Web as it existed in the year 2000. Why would this be cause for celebration? Because IE6 is barely capable of navigating the modern Web and a total nightmare to build sites, services and applications for.
But ten years after its release, it's still being used by an estimated 20% of surfers. And while Google's move is one in the right direction, I'm not breaking out the whiskey and noisemakers for IE6's funereal wake quite yet. Sadly, IE6 isn't going away for good anytime soon.
Those unfamiliar with the Internet Explorer 6 saga might be wondering what the big deal is. How could the life or death of one browser be so critical to the future of our increasingly Internet-based lives? When compared to browsers of today, IE6 is a standards-incompliant antique. It debuted during a dark, dark period in Web history; In the summer of 2001, Microsoft had soundly beaten Netscape into submission for a 90% lock on the browser market and was in the uniquely powerful position to decide which Web standards it would ignore, which it would integrate, which it would halfway adopt and which it would simply make up. And IE6 is the bastard child of this hubris. It doesn't behave like any other browser on the market because it doesn't interpret Cascading Style Sheets or JavaScript according to the universal standards set by organizations like the W3C. I've heard of developers spending anywhere between 20% and 50% of their time on a project making a site work in Internet Explorer 6. I know of many others who simply chop out advanced features, enhanced interactivity and slick design elements altogether, just so their work doesn't "break" in IE6.
Why do they bother? Because nearly a decade after it shipped with Windows XP, IE6 still commands a mind-blowing 20% market share for browsers, according to the most recent statistics compiled by NetMarketShare. That's more than double the shares of Chrome and Safari combined, and just shy of Firefox's 24% piece of the pie. And that's only Internet Explorer 6. Combined with its better-behaving but by no means perfect descendants, IE7 and IE8, Internet Explorer as a whole owns 62% of the browser market. Now, browser market share is not an inexact science and the numbers vary widely from site to site and country to country, but you get the picture.
The longevity of IE6 is the result of a perfect storm of unfortunate factors. First among them: Microsoft's IE division simply fell asleep. Having emerged the undisputed victor of the late '90s browser wars, Microsoft had virtually no competitors and so no incentive to fix any of IE6's bugs. It took Microsoft more than five years to release IE7, which was an improvement over IE6, but still a disappointment for Web designers and developers. Five years! In the five years between 2004 and 2009, Mozilla released three versions of Firefox (actually, 3.5 versions to be exact). Meanwhile, Chrome has gone through four iterations in just over a year. In those five years between IE6 and IE7, technological progress on the Web was severely hobbled to say the least. After all, who cares if Firefox can do something really cool if only a handful of users will ever see it?
But Internet Explorer 7 did eventually come out, and so did Internet Explorer 8, Firefox, Safari, Chrome and new versions of Opera. And yet, IE6 remains the second most popular browser in the world (behind IE8). What gives? The chief reason Internet Explorer 6 keeps hanging on is because people are using it at work or on work computers.
As anyone who's ever used a computer furnished by their employer can attest, IT departments are slow to make any changes that might disrupt the delicate balance of their electronic ecosystems. And they sure as hell aren't going to let you upgrade or install anything yourself.
Making matters worse, Internet Explorer 6 is deeply embedded in the infrastructures of countless corporations worldwide. Back when IE6 was the only game in town, businesses invested in Intranets and browser-based apps that functioned only in IE. Why bother with anything else? Five years later, of course, a lot of businesses learned the hard way that "IE-only" actually meant "IE6-only." Oops. Now, ask yourself how much interest corporations have in re-investing more capital to fix something that, in their eyes, isn't broken. The answer is: not much.
A recent article on Dell's IT Expert Voice blog cited another reason your company doesn't upgrade to IE8 or another browser: user control. Your bosses don't want you on Facebook and YouTube, and they know that the experience of visiting these sites with IE6 will be painful enough to limit your time on them. They effectively block you without coming off as overtly Orwellian. Win win.
Finally, there are the countless folks who simply don't know any better-a contingent I was reminded of by David Walsh, a developer for the Mootools Javascript framework (for which IE6 support remains a priority). "When it comes to Internet Explorer 6, developers ask, ‘God, why do people choose to stay with it?'" he says. "But, I like to remind them that users don't care and shouldn't have to care. The one example I give is my grandmother. She doesn't know what a browser is. She just knows that when she clicks the little blue ‘e' on her desktop she gets to see the Internet."
It's not just grannies, either. I was using the computer of a 30-something year-old friend recently and mentioned my surprise to see him still using IE6. He asked me why it even mattered.
If people aren't allowed to upgrade or have no idea that they need to, then does the Google announcement inch us any closer to an IE6-free Web today than we were yesterday? "It's an important first step that I'm quite happy about," Walsh says. "But, I don't think it would be wise for developers to say, ‘Well, Google is doing it so I'm going to do it too.' I foresee at least another year or two of having to support Internet Explorer 6."
I'm less optimistic than Walsh, and that's thanks mostly to Microsoft's pledge to support IE6 until April 8, 2014-the day it officially ends support for Windows XP, the OS it was bundled with. As much as it pains me, I have to give Microsoft a tiny bit of respect for doing this. Though the company wouldn't provide comment for this story, it pointed me to a blog post explaining the method behind this madness. "Dropping support for IE6 is not an option because we committed to supporting the IE included with Windows for the lifespan of the product. We keep our commitments. Many people expect what they originally got with their operating system to keep working whatever release cadence particular subsystems have." Microsoft is basically taking the exact opposite approach to upgrades that Apple takes, which is to upgrade quickly at the expense of its users (Snow Leopard on G5, anyone?).
For its own part, Microsoft would be happy to see you stop using IE6, too. In another blog post, the company says, "Think about what technology and the Internet were like in the year 2000 – and consider how they've evolved since then. In 2000, ‘phishing' was something that happened at the lake, not online. There was no social networking, no RSS feeds, and no real blogs. It was a different time – and people's browsing needs were different."
The post goes on to explicitly recommend moving off of IE6. The problem is, corporate IT departments won't do so until they absolutely must, which may be well after the April 2014 death knell sounds. If Microsoft was smart, it would actively help businesses upgrade their IE6-based systems to IE8 (and future versions). And they would do it for free.
Why? Because IE's very survival could be at stake. If Microsoft doesn't, then Google could certainly afford to offer similar support for companies to move their systems over to Chrome. Overnight, we could see Chrome's market share balloon to 30% and all versions of Internet Explorer shrink to below 40%.
Walsh points out that Explorer's market share is being further threatened by empowered Web developers and a more educated Web-going public. "There's this assumption that people are going to go straight from Internet Explorer 6 to Internet Explorer 7 or 8," he says. "But, the thing we have to realize is that browsers as a whole have become more popular. Five years ago, most people probably didn't know what a browser was, but more and more they're able to indentify them. And as Web sites drop IE6 support, developers are going to steer people toward the browsers they like. Firefox, Chrome and Safari are going to be pitched a lot more than IE and I think those browsers have a good chance at being the next step for people."
But IE6 is something many Web developers will have to tangle with for years to come. For any Web site considering following Google unto the breach, I ask you to remember a few things. First, Google.com isn't going to suddenly stop working for folks using IE6. By dropping support, Google is saying that future upgrades to sites and services like YouTube, Gmail and Google Docs will no longer prioritize IE6 compatibility. Second, let your user base determine your course of action. David Walsh's blog, for example, is targeted at professional Web designers and developers. "My Website is 1% IE6," he says. "So I don't really care about it." (Only 5% of PopSci users are on IE6). But, you can believe a site like the New York Times will care about IE6 until the bitter end. No matter what you do, consider this comment to one the above-mentioned Microsoft blog posts:
"I work for a large financial services company with 40,000+ employees. And yes, every desktop PC and laptop runs WinXP and IE6. More than 85% of all browsing is intranet. Basic news sites etc deliver the information without the frills. For our vendors who offer Web portals (eg home loan valuations, stationery suppliers etc) - we'll simply dump them if we can't access their sites after a ‘no-IE6 revamp.'"
So, there it is. Continue at your own risk. And in the meantime, IE6's celebratory funerals might be in haste.
Popular Science is your wormhole to the future. Reporting on what's new and what's next in science and technology, we deliver the future now.
Days Get Shorter Because of Chilean Earthquake [Science]
Apart from a colossal tsunami, here's another effect of the 66.6 exajoules liberated by this weekend's earthquake in Chile: NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory says that days will now be shorter because the quake shifted Earth's axis by three inches.
The change—which can only be measured thanks to computer models—will result in days that are 1.26 microseconds shorter than before. That's 0.00000126 seconds shorter. There may have been more visible changes, like islands changing its position. One of them, Santa María, may have raised two meters after the shattering land move.
This is not the first time this has happened, as every single earthquake has an effect on the planet's axis. [Business Week]
SNL’s Victoria Jackson really is a Rightwinger
From Eric Dondero:
There were rumors for years that former Saturday Night Live cast member Victoria Jackson was a closeted rightwinger. And why not? Her cast-mate was none other than libertarian Republican Dennis Miller. But it wasn't til the 2008 Presidential campaign that the rumors started to be confirmed. Jackson on the O'Reilly Report on Fox endorsed John McCain, and straight out called Obama "a Communist." She went even further, saying he reminded her of someone straight out of a George Orwell novel, with his face plastered everywhere one turned. (See video here.)
Jackson then showed up at a Tea Party rally in Van Nuys on April 15, 2009. She jumped up on a make-shift stage with mic in hand, and started quoting Jefferson. She also railed against Obama: "NObaman, No Taxes, No Bowing!" She showed up again over the summer at a similar rally held in Pasadena.
Now she's a headliner at the upcomming "Showdown in Searchlight" Nevada, billed as the "largest Tea Party event" ever for the State. (Searchlight is the hometown of Harry Reid.)
Given her appearance at what promises to be a very hardline anti-Obama/anti-Big Spending event, it's now safe to add Jackson to the growing list of Rightwing Celebs, challenging leftwing domination of Hollywood, the music industry, and television.
Photo of Dennis Miller looking up at the actress/comedienne on the set of SNL.
Project Gustav: Microsoft Research Updates MS Paint In a Huge Way [Microsoft]
MS Paint may be beloved but it's also the butt of plenty of jokes about art skill. Project Gustav is Microsoft Research's answer: A GPU-intense multitouch and Wacom-tablet-friendly natural painting program, giving artists a genuine old-school experience, in 3D.
Sure, there are geniuses—including possibly one or two on our staff—who can make masterpieces with Illustrator and Photoshop. But the logic of Gustav, named after Klimt and Courbet, is that the training required to get good at those apps limits artists trained in traditional physical media. What this does is re-create the analogy of real oils and pastels, not just in how they stream but in how the colors blend. In fact, to make a new color, you do what you'd do in the real world, blend your paints together. You can use pens on a Wacom, twisting flat brushes them to achieve swirls and calligraphic flourishes. But you can also reach up to draw on the multitouch screen, the little HP screen shown in the pic.
I am not much of a visual artist, but for a research project, this is a gorgeous execution of a very natural experience. I didn't want to pull away from my own hideous oil, so God knows what a budding Leonardo could do. Bye bye, MS Paint. It's been, uh, swell. [Project Gustav]
Fancy Math Allows For Near-Perfect Enhancement of Poor-Quality Images [Math]
It's a common thing to see on TV: the cops get a dark, blurry image of a perp, and using the magic of computers, are able to zoom in and see his face. But now that might be actually possible.
The technique, called compressed sensing, won't work like those fake programs do on TV. And it's mostly meant for scientific purposes, like shortening MRI scan times by only scanning a small amount of data and then filling in the rest.
But how can you do all the number crunching that is required to find the sparsest image quickly? It would take way too long to analyze all the possible versions of the image. Candès and Tao, however, knew that the sparsest image is the one created with the fewest number of building blocks. And they knew they could use l1 minimization to find it and find it quickly.
To do that, the algorithm takes the incomplete image and starts trying to fill in the blank spaces with large blocks of color. If it sees a cluster of green pixels near one another, for instance, it might plunk down a big green rectangle that fills the space between them. If it sees a cluster of yellow pixels, it puts down a large yellow rectangle. In areas where different colors are interspersed, it puts down smaller and smaller rectangles or other shapes that fill the space between each color. It keeps doing that over and over. Eventually it ends up with an image made of the smallest possible combination of building blocks and whose 1 million pixels have all been filled in with colors.
That image isn't absolutely guaranteed to be the sparsest one or the exact image you were trying to reconstruct, but Candès and Tao have shown mathematically that the chance of its being wrong is infinitesimally small. It might still take a few hours of laptop time, but waiting an extra hour for the computer is preferable to shutting down a toddler's lungs for an extra minute.
So yeah, it's meant for scientists right now, but this is clearly the first step to us all being about to enhance, enhance, enhance our pictures automagically. And that is damned cool.
[Wired]
Firefox’s Chrome Ceiling [Chart]
A disheartening chart from Ars Technica, if you're a Firefox booster: That gentle downward slope indicates Firefox might never reach 25 percent marketshare. Why? Because companies with money care about browsers now. Or, in a word: Chrome.
Chrome is the only browser that gained marketshare from January to February, bouncing .41 percent to 5.61 percent. Even the release of Firefox 3.6 in the last two months didn't help, with Firefox sliding .18 percent (second to IE's .6 percentage point drop, which you'd assume would be sending users to alternative browsers, like Firefox).
Here's one difference between Firefox and Chrome, in a nutshell: Banners on two of the biggest, most trusted websites on the internet. Chrome's by Google. It's fast! It's nice! Switch to it!
But you know what? It is faster and nicer than Firefox. The heyday of Firefox, when it was hands down the best was when nobody with money cared about browsers that worked, that made the internet a better place. So guys on a shoestring could out-innovate and slaughter the incumbent tyrant. Now companies with resources—Google—can iterate new versions and features just plain faster. Not to mention, advertise the crap out of its browser.
Part of me really hopes that Firefox does hit 25 percent, just as a symbolic "fuck you" to the old browser regime. But the other part me thinks Chrome might do it first, even if that's a ways away. [Ars]
Microsoft Makes Surface Mobile By Turning It Upside Down [Microsoft]
Microsoft's Surface tables are sweet but they have two problems: They're huge pieces of furniture and they cost a lot. Turns out, they could solve both problems by turning the system upside down, using a portable camera/projector and any surface.
Surface tables are just cameras and projectors pointing upward at a tabletop of glass. Since both of those mechanisms have become totally portable, Microsoft Research conceived of a prototype that is, effectively, portable. The advantage, beyond mobility, is that the camera can read depth in free space, so it can do 3D activities, almost like a baby Natal.
Here, in this functional proof-of-concept, you can see a drums app, where both hand interaction and stick interaction are measured when your hands are between the camera and the projection. (On a regular Surface, you'd have to touch the screen to interact.)
In the explainer shot below, you can see a more real-world scenario, where you'd set your phone on a table at a restaurant and it projects pictures and documents out, so that you and others can interact with them. We're already seeing projectors built into phones and cameras, so it may just be a matter of time before this appears. Windows Phone 8 maybe? Microsoft, of course, isn't promising anything at this point. [Mobile Surface]
Our Friends in the Night
At its most general, the word “constellation” refers to a group of celestial bodies which appear to form a pattern in the sky. Not all familiar, easily-recognized patterns are constellations. For instance, the Big Dipper isn’t a constellation, although it is (coincidentally) part of a constellation. The Big Dipper is a “stand alone” pattern called an asterism.
NGC 290 Star Cluster, NASA/ESA HubbleSite
Many people think of the Zodiac when they think of constellations, but that’s fairly limiting. The Zodiac (used in Astrology) consists of only the twelve constellations that roughly line the ecliptic. Since 1922, the International Astronomical Union has recognized 88 constellations. The ancient Greeks were familiar with more than half of these, and some archaeologists now believe that our ancestors were depicting on cave walls the patterns they saw in the night sky some 17,000 years ago. While it’s not possible to know what meaning (if any) prehistoric man attributed to these patterns, the drawings themselves are believed to have been of religious or social importance.
Path of the point of vernal equinox along the ecliptic over a 6000 year period - Image D.Bachmann, all rights reserved
In early Greek and Roman civilizations, knowing the constellations could prove to be very important. Before the invention of the compass, the only way you could navigate (by land or by sea) was by studying the positions of familiar celestial bodies; the Sun, the Moon, the stars, the constellations. Linking the constellations to stories of heroes, villains, monsters, and exciting legends made them more familiar; easier to recognize and remember. The legends themselves usually contain “add on” stories telling how that particular subject came to be a constellation; for example, Cancer the crab was made a constellation by the goddess Hera, who sent him to distract Hercules while he was fighting the Hydra. Cancer was stomped to death, but Hera made him a constellation as a reward for his effort and sacrifice.
I’m sure that made Cancer feel tons better about being stomped to death by Hercules.
There are about 35 “former” constellations that, for one reason or another, didn’t make it on the IAU list of 88 recognized constellations. Some of these are well-known (Argo Navis – as in Jason and the Argonauts), and some not (Machina Electrica – yes, an electric generator).
Bode, Machina Electrica - Image Credit Michigan State University, Physics and Astronomy Dept
Whatever importance we give the constellations in modern science or philosophy, every human culture has them. Even the Australian Aboriginal culture, the oldest continuous culture in the world, has an astronomical tradition. We have always looked to the night sky, found our friends, and told stories about their adventures.
This is the website for the International Astronomical Union, linking directly to the page with the chart of all the constellations (the 88 recognized). It gives you a star chart of each to view, one to download, and boundary coordinates for each constellation.
If you’re interested in reading the stories behind the constellations, this link will take you to Ian Ridpath’s Star Tales. A very interesting read, and well worth looking over.
The Sound of Olympic Gold Isn’t So Different From Olympic 14th Place [Data]
Olympic finishes always look close, but when these fractions of a second are charted in audio, you really conceptualize the nearly nonexistent margin between the top of a podium and the bottom of a scotch bottle. Just listen: [NYTimes]
More Water on the Moon
NASA Radar Finds Ice Deposits at Moon's North Pole; Additional Evidence of Water Activity on Moon
"Using data from a NASA radar that flew aboard India's Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, scientists have detected ice deposits near the moon's north pole. NASA's Mini-SAR instrument, a lightweight, synthetic aperture radar, found more than 40 small craters with water ice. The craters range in size from 1 to 9 miles (2 to15 km) in diameter. Although the total amount of ice depends on its thickness in each crater, it's estimated there could be at least 1.3 million pounds (600 million metric tons) of water ice."
It’s Not Your Imagination: Windows 7 Release Candidate Started Exploding Today [Windows 7]
Today kicks off the bi-hourly shutdowns for anybody still running their free copy of Windows 7 Release Candidate, which will continue until June 1, when the seizures turn the OS into straight crippleware. (Or more specifically, your copy of Windows is marked as non-geniune, locking you out of any feature that requires a legit version of Windows.) [Windows Blog via All About Microsoft]
Google Picks Up Picnick Image Editor to Make Picasa Better [Google]
One of the more straightforward acquisitions Google's made in a while, they've just bought the online image editor Picnick. Given Google's past acquisition strategy—turning Grand Central into Google Voice, Writely into Google Docs—the logical expectation is that it'll get merged into its already excellent Picasa photo managing app. [Picnick]
Plastiki, the Ship Made From 12,000 Plastic Bottles, Will Set Sail This Month [Recycling]
After what feels like years of concept renders and photos of the hairy David de Rothschild accompanying gushing magazine pieces about his plastic bottle boat, the Plastiki will set sail this month across the Pacific Ocean.
If you'll remember, the boat was constructed using 12,000 plastic 2-liter bottles, which have been pressurized using dry ice powder, making it buoyant enough to carry four people on the 11,000 miles from San Francisco to Sydney. It'll take 100 days they think, with the electricity coming from solar panels, wind turbines and exercise bikes that the four crewmembers will be using.
It's the ultimate eco-warrior ship, with even a small garden growing herbs and veggies included on the 60-foot boat. At least if they sink, they've got an awful lot of bottles to put messages in. [Plastiki via TG Daily]
New Video Game Teaches Soldiers How to Make Nice With the Locals | Discoblog
A new game may help soldiers in that problematic campaign–winning the hearts and minds of people in occupied countries. The game, developed by the University of Texas and backed by the U.S. Army, gives American soldiers deployed abroad some lessons in foreign customs and cultures. This is the opposite of a first-person shooter game; the Pentagon calls it a “first-person cultural trainer” game.
Air-dropped into foreign lands, soldiers often find themselves at a loss, knowing neither the local language nor the cultural conventions. The new 3D simulation game is intended for soldiers to learn the niceties in Iraq and Afghanistan, where a friendly relations with locals could make the difference between life and death.
Wired reports:
It’s a project that’s been in the works for three years, and uses cultural data provided by the military. The goal of the game is to enter a village, learn about the social structures and relevant issues, and then “work with the community” to successfully finish assigned missions.
The player’s main goal is to avoid alienating or scandalizing the community, and to win people over instead. The player also has to rate the characters he meets on the missions on a scale of four emotions: anger, fear, gladness and neutrality. The game developers have worked to make the characters’ reactions realistic, but the game’s critics still worry that soldiers who learn virtually will fail to understand real cultural cues, which are often more complex and nuanced.
The Pentagon has lately made a serious push into what some call “militainment.” The U.S. military, which spends about $6 billion each year on developing games, had a surprise hit when it created the game “America’s Army” to help in its recruitment process. The game, which can be downloaded for free, tracks U.S. soldiers as they duck and weave through dangerous enemy territory. Players fire AK-47’s and kill the bad guys, but unlike real life, anyone who gets shot in the game can start over. And as Peter Singer points out in a report for the Brookings Institution, 70,000 young Americans signed up for the army last year, but almost 4.7 million people spent Veterans Day playing war at home.
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Image: University of Texas
