Moore's Law in action

(source)

Mindblowing CGI

Check out this video on Vimeo. Yes, that really is 100% computer generated, nothing you're seeing is real. This is really incredible, it's leaps and bounds beyond anything I've ever seen before.

Called It

Sure, the Beatles are good and all, but "Tomorrow is another day. That you'll never forget."? Really, Apple? Yawn.

New things!

First off, Girl Talk's new album, All Day, was released for free download online this morning! As of now, their servers are still swamped, but there's a mirror on Mediafire here. I'm listening to it now, and I'm really liking it so far. I would put it ahead of Feed the Animals, but still a bit behind Night Ripper.

This Week's Episode of "Aging Executives Who Don't Understand The 21st Century"

I read this article earlier today about videogame retailers fighting back against Valve's Steam, the digital distribution platform I've previously gushed about here. According to the article, Steam is responsible for a whopping 80% of videogames downloaded on PCs (using "PC" to mean any personal computer, not just those running Windows). Apparently a number of UK videogame retailers are threatening not to stock any games distributed by Steam, to try and pressure publishers into not using steam. From the article:

The head of sales at a big-name digital service provider agreed: “At the moment the big digital distributors need to stock games with Steam. But the power resides with bricks and mortar retailers, they can refuse to stock these titles. Publishers are hesitant, but retail must put pressure on them.”

Yup, the power definitely does reside with the brick and mortar stores. Just to be safe, they should ask Hollywood and Blockbuster how they successfully put pressure on Netflix in order to.... oh.

L.A. Noire

This is the first I've heard of this game, developed by Team Bondi and published by Rockstar Games, of Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption fame. The setting is an uncommon one for a videogame: film-noir Los Angeles from the late 1940s, and the atmosphere they've created looks pretty cool. On a more technical level, the characters' facial animation looks incredible. The people move very smoothly and naturally, and the developers claim that the player will be given an "open-ended challenge to solve a series of murders". Unfortuantely, it's coming out for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3, neither of which I own,  but it looks like it could be a quite interesting game to follow.

EDIT: Embedding doesn't seem to be working right, you can check out the video on the original page here.

Flash

Flash

Various Lifehacks

If you haven't heard of a "lifehack" before, Wikipedia gives a pretty good definition:

Anything that solves an everyday problem in a clever or non-obvious way might be called a life hack. The term became popularized in the blogosphere and is primarily used by geeks who suffer from information overload or those with a playful curiosity in the ways they can accelerate their workflow.

My earlier post on dorm room engineering is a good example of that sort of thing. Here are a few more that I've been using lately.

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

I've found this fantastic fanfiction, called Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which asks what would be different about the Harry Potter universe if Harry had been raised by a scientist instead of by Vernon Dursely? I'm only a few chapters in, but here are some of my favorite quotes so far:

Take 2: TIME Magazine's Top 100 Films

Before I go through this, I'm guessing that I'll have seen barely any of their top 100 films as compared to the list of novels. For one thing, I tend to read more often than watch movies, but even when I do watch movies, it's usually just the latest thing that I'm seeing with my friends, not one of the timeless classics of cinema. Anyway, here goes nothing.

Jack Bauer, Always On Duty

My favorite part is the perfect crescendo of the opera in the background.

TIME Magazine Top Novels

Alternate title: My Long-Term Literary List (I would say to-do list, but I like the alliteration).

Sometimes I feel bad that I don't read as much as I used to when I was younger. Maybe I'll go to the library tomorrow and fix that, but to assuage my guilty conscience for now, here's TIME Magazine's list of the top 100 English Novels published after 1923. If I've read or heard of one of them, I'll talk about it.

Intimidation

When Oscar Peterson was still a young boy, his father played him a recording of Art Tatum performing "Tiger Rag". Once the young Peterson was finally persuaded that it was performed by a single person, Peterson was so intimidated that he did not touch the piano for weeks. (source) 

I can definitely sympathize with him there.

Spring 2011 Schedule

(Alternate title: The Most Stressful Thirty Minutes Of My Semester)

Today was registration day for my class at W&M, which is a mixed bag; it's exciting to know what classes I'll be taking next semester, but the actual registration process is extremely stressful. I've heard of some schools that have systems where you just put in a request for what classes you want, with no time pressure, and you get placed in them based on priority (which I guess includes your year, your major, that sort of thing). Here at W&M, that's not how we do things.

Android

My Software Development class is spending the rest of the semester doing something very cool: learning how to develop software for Google's mobile OS, Android. At first, I thought we were all going to get phones to work with, but sadly, that's not the case. Instead, we're using an emulator, which looks pretty cool.

I don't know why this emulated phone only has 50% battery...

Fireflies!

Go Lisa for getting video of this! Too bad I totally failed on the transition to the chorus; I promise I nailed it the first time I played it.