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This week, TED, offered up a fascinating lecture by game designer and futurist, Jane McGonigal. Particularly interesting is the bit starting around 12:30 where she relays Herodotus’s tales of gaming in the Lydian empire (circa the 12th century BC).
Leave it to Carl Sagan to illuminate the optimistic side of the argument I made a couple posts ago, regarding our species. There is always hope — even if it lies beyond the horizons of our imagination.
While I’m always susceptible to any video that has been auto-tuned, this one, in particular, strikes a chord.
It seems inevitable that our species’ faculties of curiosity and a sense of manifest destiny will lead us to settle off of Earth eventually. However, the longer we wait to plant the seed of humanity elsewhere, the longer we will have all of our eggs in one basket. And that basket is an increasingly dangerous one to linger in…
In case you’re not as into sports as we here at The Mep Report are, you might have missed this little gem from last night: the worst call in the history of professional baseball. Not that we ever engage in hyperbole anyway, but just in case you’re tempted to think that’s what I’m engaging in here, I give you umpire Jim Joyce and one hard luck pitcher called Armando Galarraga.
Looking at this video, I feel like Richarrd Dreyfus from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I feel the need to poke this video with a salad fork and say, “This means something. This is important.”
The issue of Earth’s movement along its orbit is something flux capacitor- obsessed sci-fi authors and screenwriters rarely acknowledge. Perhaps in some future sci-fi story, the author will restrict time travel to events that happened on the same calendar day as the departure, to prevent the Earth movement problem.
For more on the geographical aspects of time, see Claytonian Time.
What’s wrong with this picture?
So, uh, I know the Internet makes it hard to filter ads for potential poor taste. But this pairing I just ran across (above) was kind of ridiculous…
This wiry broad (band) was created by digi-artist Kasey Mcmahon. If she were mine, I would call her Anne of Green Cables.
Kasey is more well known in Mep land for having given birth to the Compubeaver.
Clea Can’t Get No Satisfaction; Greg’s Life in Three Dimensions; Jackie Chan and the Masochistic Dragon Swoon; Mep Report Rare Ostrich Steak Attack GO!!!!!; The World According to EPCOT; We’re Much More Trekkie Than You; and Sometimes Horrible Is In The Middle of Good.
This video, “Four Letter Words,” is cool for several reasons. First of all, this engineer has found a way to depict all 26 letters in an arrangement of fluorescent bars; the linguistic equivalent of a digital clock radio display. Secondly, the words that come up are entirely of the computer’s choosing. They are assembled by an algorithm from a word association database.
So, yeah. Those strings of words were actually chosen by the computer, itself. HAL seems rather repressed. I’d leave those pod bay doors closed if I were you.
