Buenas Noches From Guatemala
by Charles W. Bryant | February 10, 2010
Hello folks, or more appropriately… Buenas Noches! Yes, team SYSK is south of the border as we speak. Way south. So far south that I’m in a hotel watching a Spanish language episode of Seinfeld.
Our day — we landed in Guatemala City at about mid-day and after a little cambio action headed to the hotel. [...]
Ferrari and BMW Prep Hybrid Supercars – “The Ferrari 599 hybrid is scheduled to debut at the Geneva Auto Show in March. The first Ferrari hybrid will keep its big V12 engine, but add a mild hybrid system. This piece borrows cutting-edge “kinetic energy recovery system” technology from the company’s Formula 1 program. [...]
Yesterday, I told you what Toyota is doing to fix its floor mat and gas pedal problems. Basically it all boils down to this: Toyota is busy, busy, busy trying to come up with a reliable solution, repair literally hundreds of thousands of cars, trucks and SUVs, get people back into the showrooms and maybe most important of all, recapture the trust of its customers.
What’s art — and what’s groundbreaking — in video games?
by Tracy V. Wilson | February 9, 2010
After ducking out of work early last Thursday for the evening panels, I spent Friday and Saturday of last week at the Art History of Games symposium. Scholars, game designers, architects, museum curators and the like gathered to talk about how — or in some cases, whether — games have a place in the world of art. It was a densely packed weekend, and I’ll probably write more than one post about it this week. I’m starting off with the Thursday keynote by John Romero, game designer and artist most well-known for his work on games like “Wolfenstein 3D,” “Doom” and “Quake.”
Last week, Marc Whitten posted on the Xbox 360 press page some discouraging news. Microsoft will stop supporting games for the original Xbox on Xbox Live. That means you won’t be able to play online with or against your friends in classic games like Halo 2, Crimson Skies or Star Wars Battlefront. And that means your old Xbox consoles won’t work online anymore.
Microsoft is tweaking Xbox Live and plans to introduce new features to the service. According to the press release, some of these changes are incompatible with the classic Xbox games.
OK, so as Jonathan and I were streaming live this afternoon on TechStuff Live, Google executives were rolling out the company’s new social networking project, Google Buzz. Rumors were circulating this morning that Google wanted to do something new with social networking with status updates akin to Twitter, probably something related to Gmail.
Space Music Vol. 8: Sun Ra and Afrofuturism
by Robert Lamb | February 9, 2010
It’s Black History Month, so is there a better time to discuss the space music of Sun Ra? Stick to the facts and you have in Herman Poole Blount (Ra’s birth name) a highly prolific and influential black musician. Take the artist at his word and you have a being from another planet, come to Earth to save us with a message of cosmic liberation.
As always, it’s best to tread a middle path between the reality and the myth. In this post we’ll explore Sun Ra’s origins and contributions, as well as just what Afrofuturism is all about. So don your favorite space robe and light-up Egyptian headpiece because we’ve quite the celestial crash course ahead of us.
How to Take a Road Trip, Abraham Lincoln-Style
by Molly Edmonds | February 9, 2010
The countdown is on to the most important day in February — no, not Valentine’s Day. For me, the best day of the month is February 12, which is Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. Keep your candy hearts and your romantic dinners; give me a Lincoln biography and a top hat. To people in the U.S. who would abandon the penny, I say that you better not do so without putting Lincoln on another coin first.
You do not want to get cancer in general, but pancreatic cancer is one of the worst. 90% of people getting pancreatic cancer die of the disease in the United States.
Now there is evidence that drinking soft drinks nearly doubles your risk of getting pancreatic cancer:
Study links soda, pancreatic cancer
Writing in the journal Cancer [...]
Amazing – Going inside the Giant Crystal Cave
by Marshall Brain | February 9, 2010
This is one of those “Must See” videos, especially around minute 3:00. It shows the preparations for going into, and then the actual entry into, what must be the most amazing cave on the planet:
The Ice Pack Vest is pretty unexpected.
You can learn more about this cave here. There is also [...]
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