News-o-matic go!
October 3, 2006
- Bioshock is an upcoming game I'm really looking forward to playing, and a recent developer commentary on IGN shows it looking very nice indeed. I really hope all the chatter about complex AI and dynamic environments is true, because the game certainly looks beautifully atmospheric.
- Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker has a new book out, called The God Delusion. There's an interesting YouTube interview with him about the book, where he basically goes after religion with a pickaxe. He gets serious bonus points for mentioning The Flying Spaghetti Monster. I can't help agreeing with a lot of what he says, but I fear that some nutburger is going to kill him for saying it.
- I found the somewhat amusing Russian comic Hitler vs Stalin awhile back, but it's nice to see some kind soul translated it into English, and added various historical explanations and notes.
- You too can try the Web 2.0 Drinking Game.
- Some very cool paper art in what looks like a Thai forum. The bodies / skeletons are simply amazing.
- For those lovable slackers, ThinkGeek has the StealthSwitch, a foot-activated boss key for flipping back to your spreadsheet without touching the keyboard. Windows only, but that's probably their target market.
- A Boeing 737 crashed in the Amazon recently, with no survivors. Apparently it went down because of a midair collision with an Embraer Legacy 600 corporate jet. Amazingly, that plane survived the damage and landed safely nearby. Whew.
- Robert Downey Jr is apparently lined up to play Tony Stark / Iron Man in the movie adaptation of the popular comic. He's a pretty decent choice, and he looks good with a goatee.
- Intel demoed their quad-core Kentsfield chipset at their recent developer conference. Tech Report has some powerful numbers on it, and although most applications and games are only recently becoming multithreaded, there's definitely some nice performance payoffs for the four core setup. The great thing about Kentsfield is that it uses the existing LGA775 motherboard socket that is being sold right now, and avoids wacky dual socket boards or server-grade exotica that usually make this tech prohibatively expensive. I think I sense Kentsfield in my future.
- Amusingly silly YouTube video of world eating champ Takeru Kobayashi vs a bear. Yes, a Kodiak bear.
- A German businessman has set up the logical opposite of the dating agency, a breakup agency. Classy.