2013 — 1 April: Monday — rabbits!
Assuming it isn't still too cold for the furry things.1 Wonder if they'd like a cuppa. I know I need another (already). It's 08:47 and rather dull grey out there so far.
RED eye special?
Having seen (and been impressed by) that tasty Korean 84" 4K plasma screen in the Richer Sounds demo room a month or so ago, here's one of the (few) next-gen 4K players capable of feeding it:
A snip, I'm sure you'll agree, at $1,450 — even if you factor in the cost of the four hdmi 1.3 cables (or one hdmi 1.4 cable) it needs to squirt a 4K signal to the £22,500 screen:
My 20GB monthly data download cap might need to be rethought in years to come. (More info here.)
This looks...
... well, just plain wrong, I suppose:
It's been tagged as Monty Python meets Michel Gondry. I quite liked "trying to pound a square peg into a unicorn's empty eye socket". Well, "liked" isn't quite le mot juste, I guess.
I've been introduced...
... (not that I intend to go anywhere near it) to the existence of a game called "Minecraft". It's apparently proof that I'm not the least little bit obsessive (something I already know, of course, but some of my chums seem to need convincing now and again). This is obsessive.
My informant tells me:
It started off as a little block man who could mine blocks of landscape (earth, rock, iron ore etc) and use the results to build block structures. One of the few really successful one-man efforts in recent years, it became a runaway timewaster. It has become more sophisticated over time but the basic principles are still that you dig stuff up, use it to make things, and build structures etc. With dedication and time you can level mountains, divert rivers and landscape your personal world.
The original minecraft was something of a surprise to the gaming industry. A game with no beginning, no end, no goals, no plot. No point, many said. The only immediate goal is survival — nasty things come out at night and eat your little block man so you need to build some sort of defensive structure. The more useful minerals are deep so you dig down (hence the name) but then you can break through into caverns full of things which will eat you. Zombies spawn in the dark. Some of the most useful materials can only be obtained by killing the zombies but hunting them is tedious and dangerous, so you build zombie spawning grounds with pit traps and they fall through into flowing water which carries them into lava walls, carrying away the burned remnants to where you can collect the valuable bits and use them to build powered minecarts which run along tracks in Indiana Jones style caverns.
It is really quite amazing what you can do when you have to use your brain rather than be spoon fed. Some of the blocks can be used to implement switching so one guy built a universal Turing machine simulator. All written in Java, which is one of the reasons I no longer have it on my system.
'Nuff said :-)
It's a shame...
... that this is not an April Fool. (Link.)
Nicely put
And entirely plausible:
The Singularity will occur in the same geological eyeblink as the Great Anthropocene Extinction
Coincidence?
I don't think so. We are making the world uninhabitable for humans just as we are starting to make machines that can flourish without human assistance.
Carbon breva, Silicon longa
It's bad enough trying to live with a predictive text message on my phone. This is lots (lots) worse.
That "Songs for Tibet" album is pretty good; as were yesterday's other two acquisitions. Wonder if machines like music? [Pause] Inevitably (?) it turns out that the (I thought, new) Rupert Hine track is merely a remixed version (and not an improvement, either) of the original on his 1994 album "The Deep End". 'Twas ever thus.
Which guvmint?
Care to guess?
[The tax on capital assets irrespective of whether they bring the owner any income] thus amounts to outright confiscation... the government has sent a clear message that it regards possession of capital as inherently selfish, antisocial, and in need of moral rectification. This does not mean, of course, that individual members of the government have any interest in lowering themselves to the average or even median standard of living.
Typical. The WRN radio channel has quietly evaporated from the Freesat cluster. (Not that you'd know by studying their out-of-date channel guide.) It was my fallback method of getting NPR.