Links and write-ups about beautiful things from around the web!
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The Complete History of Lemmings We Did Manage
The Complete History of Lemmings.
We did manage to fox Psygnosis now and then, and I can lay claim that it took John White an hour to figure out “Its hero time”. When ever psygnosis did some testing, we’d get back a fax with the level name, time taken to complete, and some comments and a difficulty rating. These were usually aound 3-6 minutes, and some general coments on how they found it.
Every now and again though, the fax would be covered in scribbles with the time and comment’s crossed out again and again; this is what we were striving for while we were designing the levels, and it gave us all a warm fuzzy feeling inside.
(Yet another good link via O’Reilly Radar)
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Putting the Public Service back in PBS
Enjoyed this post on O’Reilly Radar advocating that PBS should realign with their original educational and public discourse mission. As local affiliates drop their secondary cable channels in favor of multiple over-the-air digital broadcasts, it’d be great to see at least one of those OTA channels used for stronger educational programming:
Our nation’s founders recognized that an educated public was crucial to the sustainability of American democracy, which led to public funding of education. Today, education happens in the media as well as in school. It is important that we use the media of television, in combination with new media, to support educational goals. There is even greater opportunity to combine a public broadcasting network and the interactive capabilities of the Internet to create a new hybrid framework for lifelong education.
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jsvi, a JavaScript vi emulator
There’s something satisfying about hitting ZZ and returning to a webpage. This might be a good way to ensure that 100% of your blog comments come from *nix or code geeks…
(Via O’Reilly Radar)
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The Proclamation of the European Environmental Criminal Court as Read by a Piano
The Proclamation of the European Environmental Criminal Court at World Venice Forum 2009 as read by a piano.
(Via Neatorama)
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In a spin: the mysterious dancing epidemic of 1518.
“In 1518, one of the strangest epidemics in recorded history struck the city of Strasbourg. Hundreds of people were seized by an irresistible urge to dance, hop and leap into the air. In houses, halls and public spaces, as fear paralyzed the city and the members of the elite despaired, the dancing continued with mindless intensity. Seldom pausing to eat, drink or rest, many of them danced for days or even weeks. And before long, the chronicles agree, dozens were dying from exhaustion. What was it that could have impelled as many as 400 people to dance, in some cases to death?”
See also: choreomania, the Tanganyika laughter epidemic of 1962 (the wonderful Radiolab did a segment last year about this), la danse macabre, and St. Vitus’ Dance, not to mention the final scenes of Bergman’s The Seventh Seal and Fellini’s 8½.
(Via NCBI ROFL)
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Near Real Time Face Detection on the iPhone Using OpenCV
Near real-time face detection on the iPhone using OpenCV. An obvious point to make, I know, but I still think it’s amazing that this would have been very difficult to do on any home computer just a few years ago but now our mobile devices can handle the task with relative ease.
(Via O’Reilly Radar)
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CirculaFloor
From the SIGGRAPH 2004 emerging technologies demo, here’s the CirculaFloor, for when you want to play a bit of live-action Mario Bros. The tiles automatically rearrange themselves holonomically (albeit a bit slowly) depending on what direction the user is trying to walk.
(Reminded of this by Make)
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Phillip Torrone Rides the Square Wheeled Tricycle
(video no longer available)
Phillip Torrone rides the square-wheeled tricycle from the Math Midway, a traveling exhibition of mathematics. Figuring out what kind of catenary curves would be needed for differently shaped wheels is a branch of mathematics that I’m happy exists (as far as I know the problem dates back on some level to the 1960s, but for a good recent illustration of the math involved, check out this PDF from a St. Norbert College mathematical modeling class).
(Via Make)
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NEMO
Early 1990’s gamers all surely remember the schlocky FMV games like Sewer Shark (sadly directed by VFX legend John Dykstra!), Night Trap (widely attacked in the U.S. Senate by Joe Lieberman!!), and Double Switch (starring Corey Haim and Debbie Harry!!!), and probably even get a cold chill whenever the name Digital Pictures comes up. Turgid, not much fun, and costing in the millions to produce, they were supposed to revolutionize the home entertainment business (anyone remember the $700 Philips CD-i?).The side of the story that I hadn’t heard until now is that those were actually ports by the time the Sega CD and 3DO came around. Originally those games were created for a late 1980’s Nolan Bushnell-produced VHS (!!!) system called the Control-Vision, aka the NEMO (short for “Never Ever Mention Outside”, an appropriate moniker). Special circuitry in the system would allow games to be encoded onto multi-track VHS tape, jumping quickly (?) between segments as players push the control buttons.
Going up against the then-$100 NES, and with a competing video tape game system that already failed on the market (World of Wonder’s Action Max), Hasbro wisely pulled the plug on the NEMO. All of the expensive FMV footage that was shot would only make the light of day a few years later, squeezed down to a resolution of 256×224 pixels, mercilessly dithered down to 64 colors at a time.
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The Original IBM (pen-and-paper) Thinkpad
The original IBM ThinkPad, a bit of corporate pen-and-paper swag from the 1980s that later inspired the name for their long-lived laptop line.
(Via A Continuous Lean via 5cience)
