February 17, 2004

» Turning Segways into football players and Aibos into comedians

Segway: The Coral research group at Carnegie Mellon University is preparing to hold the first ever football match in which mixed teams of humans and robots play against each other, all on Segways.

Aibo: You can download AIBO hacks that will transform your robot dog into Scooby-Doo or a canine version of the Terminator. You can push the boundaries of family friendliness with the Exorcist AIBO, which does just about everything Linda Blair did short of projectile vomiting. Or you can engage in an elaborate Q&A with the HomieGate AIBO: Ask "Who invented the Internet?" and AIBO will respond, "Al Gore". You can also turn your AIBO into the ultimate party animal.

» Computers play computer games: Sims play SimCity; a chatbot plays Star Wars Galaxies

Sims: It was bound to happen. First there was SimCity. Then there was The Sims. And then came a series of highly successful expansion packs like Hot Date, Livin' Large, House Party and others.

Now comes a fan-made plug-in that allows Sims characters to effectively play SimCity inside The Sims. The Sims franchise has gone meta.

[...]

Star Wars: The Autocamp 2000 talks to other players with following rules:

  • If someone says something ending in a question mark, respond by saying "Dude?"

  • If someone says something ending in an exclamation point, respond by saying "Dude!"

  • If someone says something ending with a period, respond by randomly saying one of three things: "Okie," "Sure," or "Right on."

  • EXCEPTION: If someone says something directly to you by mentioning your name, respond by saying "Lag."

  • (And remember to accept all trade requests from other players by giving them a melon.)

» Strikingly varied maps of different kinds of network
» M&Ms pack better than spheres

Using bench experiments and computer simulations, the team has found that squashed or stretched versions of spheres snuggle together more tightly than randomly packed spheres do.

» A new end to the universe

Once upon a time, if you wanted to talk about the end of the universe you had a choice, as Robert Frost put it, between fire and ice.

Either the universe would collapse under its own weight one day, in a fiery "big crunch," or the galaxies, now flying outward from each other, would go on coasting outward forever, forever slowing, but never stopping while the cosmos grew darker and darker, colder and colder, as the stars gradually burned out like tired bulbs.

Now there is the Big Rip.

» Baffling subliminals on Japanese TV

The program, "Manee no Tora" (Money Tiger), featured a split-second image of Yukichi Fukuzawa from Japan's 10,000-yen note as the program switched from its opening theme to the beginning of the program.

[...]

In an NTV-affiliated broadcast in December 1989, a subliminal image of AUM Shinrikyo cult guru Shoko Asahara was inserted into a cartoon that had nothing to do with him. Tokyo Broadcasting System (TBS) also inserted a face shot of Asahara into a broadcast special in May 1995, inciting criticism from society.