More goals.

Dedicated to Audrey from Paris!

Here’s more productivity.

It’s the only qualification necessary to be the ambassador to Siberia. Yes. Just Siberia.

Jimmy Fallon hosted the PlayStation 4 during his post-E3 videogame week with Sony's Mark Cerny, who showed off Knack on the new console. I'll say it outright, Mark Cerny was much easier to watch than Phil Spencer, and the entire appearance felt more natural as a whole.

For instance, rather than going the route of spouting constant buzzwords and "television integration," Cerny namedrops Katamari Damacy like it's genuine, and the whole affair doesn't feel nearly as scripted as Microsoft's appearance. I think Cerny was the perfect choice, as his less-corporate image and game design experience helped increase the appeal for pretty much every demographic.

They also re-iterate the full support of used games and the lack of a required internet connection, which the crowd cheers for, and Jimmy briefly celebrates (as Jimmy tends to do on a constant basis). I'd say it was a success.

Riding high off its announcement that the PlayStation 4 will have no DRM, no anti-used game policy, and will support game ownership, Sony has released a video detailing its incredibly deep and nuanced system for sharing physical copies of games. 

This, right here, is the great video of E3 so far. Bar none. 

Oh my GOD, is this stuff glorious. 

Xbox Owned. 

Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze is coming to Wii U, with wacky camera angles, and two-player co-op. Secondary players can choose to be either Diddy King or Dixie Kong. 

A sidescrolling platformer in the same vein as Donkey Kong Country Returns, Tropical Freeze features dynamic scenes, and looks gorgeous in HD. It's due out by the end of the year. 

[Update: watch the above video starting at 6:00! This is crazy!]

Live from the E3 showfloor, Nintendo has revealed a third new Smash Bros. character in addition to the Animal Crossing villager and Mega Man -- the Wii Fit trainer! Director Masahiro Sakurai noted that she will use "healthy" moveset, using abilities like yoga to best her foes.

Although the character was briefly demoed, not much info was given at this time. Still, we already have three new characters joining the fray, so it's only a matter of time until we get a look at the returning cast.

Wow Nintendo [Twitter]

When (if ever) did the Sun finally set on the British Empire?

—Kurt Amundson

It hasn't. Yet. But only because of a few dozen people living in an area smaller than Disney World.

The world's largest empire

The British Empire spanned the globe. This led to the saying that the Sun never set on it, since it was always daytime somewhere in the Empire.

It's hard to figure out exactly when this long daylight began.  The whole process of claiming a colony (on land already occupied by other people) is awfully arbitrary in the first place. Essentially, the British built their empire by sailing around and sticking flags on random beaches.^[1] This makes it hard to decide when a particular spot in a country was "officially" added to the Empire.

The exact day when the Sun stopped setting on the Empire was probably sometime in the late 1700s or early 1800s, when the first Australian territories were added.^[2]

The Empire largely disintegrated in the early 20th century, but—surprisingly—the Sun hasn't technically started setting on it again.

Fourteen territories

Britain has fourteen overseas territories, the direct remnants of the British Empire.^[3]

(Many newly-independent British colonies joined the Commonwealth of Nations. Some of them, like Canada and Australia, have Queen Elizabeth as their official monarch. But they are independent states which happen to have the same queen; they are not part of any empire that they know of.)

The Sun never sets on all fourteen British territories at once (or even thirteen, if you don’t count the British Antarctic Territory). However, if the UK loses one tiny territory, it will experience its first Empire-wide sunset in over two centuries.

Every night, around midnight GMT, the Sun sets on the Cayman Islands, and doesn't rise over the British Indian Ocean Territory until after 1:00 AM. For that hour, the little Pitcairn Islands in the South Pacific are the only British territory in the Sun.

The Pitcairn Islands have a population of a few dozen people, the descendants of the mutineers from the HMS Bounty. The islands became notorious in 2004 when a third of the adult male population, including the mayor, were convicted of child sexual abuse.^[4][5]

As awful as the islands may be, they remain part of the British Empire, and unless they're kicked out, the two-century-long British daylight will continue.

Will it last forever?

Well, maybe.

Four hundred years from now, in April of 2432, the island will experience its first total solar eclipse since the mutineers arrived.^[6]

Luckily for the Empire, the eclipse happens at a time when the Sun is over the Cayman Islands in the Caribbean. Those areas won't see a total eclipse; the Sun will even still be shining in London.

In fact, no total eclipse for the next thousand years will pass over the Pitcairn Islands at the right time of day to end the streak. If the UK keeps its current territories and borders, it can stretch out the daylight for a long, long time.

But not forever. Eventually—many millennia in the future—an eclipse will come for the island, and the Sun will finally set on the British Empire.

Standing up too quickly can be a doozy.

While the Xbox One may have been appealing to some non-gamers, the gaming community reacted in a unified, "not interested" front, much to the chagrin of Microsoft. Now that people are disinterested in whatever Microsoft is peddling, why not just buy a Wii U or wait for a PS4, right? Well, it seems as if you aren't alone in your thought process.

Sites are reporting that the Wii U saw a sales increase of 386% on Amazon UK, with a huge jump from the #243 spot to #50. Now, this is probably just a temporary jump related to a price cut and not wholly Microsoft's fault, but one thing's for sure -- the next generation console wars are just getting started, and two of them aren't even out!

Consumers Go Crazy For Wii U [Nintendo Life]

If you're a jaded hardcore gamer, and if you've ever complained that the new generation of "dumbed down" console gamers are the bane of life, prepare to feel justified. The arrival of Super Metroid on Wii U demonstrates the depths of mental degradation humanity's suffered since you were a child.

The Super Metroid Miiverse community is currently littered with people asking why Samus can't crawl through a small gap. They've all taken screenshots, they're all stuck at the same place, and they all seem fully unaware of how to play Super Metroid.

Some of them think this is a glitch. It's quite possible they all think this game was released for the first time yesterday ... just imagine that. Imagine it long and hard.

You hate it, don't you? But also, you love the sense of superiority. You are at once disgusted with the simple-minded idiocy on display, and thrilled that you're better at videogames than these people. You're furious Call of Duty literally murdered the brain cells of these goons, and yet you feel so validated by what you see as proof of everything you believe.

Today is your best and worst moment. Enjoy it. Loathe it.

"y cant metroid crawl?" [NeoGAF]

How high can a human throw something?

—Irish Dave on the Isle of Man

Humans are good at throwing things. In fact, we’re great at it; no other animal can throw stuff like we can.

It's true that chimpanzees hurl feces (and, on rare occasions, stones), but they’re not nearly as accurate or precise as humans.^[1][2]Antlions throw sand, but they don’t aim it. Archerfish hunt insects by throwing water droplets, but they use specialized mouths instead of arms. Horned lizards shoot jets of blood from their eyes for distances of up to five feet. I don’t know why they do this because whenever I reach the phrase “shoot jets of blood from their eyes” in an article I just stop there and stare at it until I need to lie down.

So while there are other animals that use projectiles, we’re just about the only animal that can grab a random object and reliably nail a target. In fact, we’re so good at it that some researchers have suggested rock-throwing played a central role in the evolution of the modern human brain.^[3][4]

Throwing is hard. In order to deliver a baseball to a batter, a pitcher has to release the ball at exactly the right point in the throw. A timing error of half a millisecond in either direction is enough to cause the ball to miss the strike zone.^[5]

To put that in perspective, it takes about five milliseconds for the fastest nerve impulse to travel the length of the arm.^[6] That means that when your arm is still rotating toward the correct position, the signal to release the ball is already at your wrist. In terms of timing, this is like a drummer dropping a drumstick from the 10th story and hitting a drum on the ground on the correct beat.

We seem to be much better at throwing things forward than throwing them upward. Since we’re going for maximum height, we could use projectiles that curve upward when you throw them forward; the Aerobie Orbiters I had when I was a kid often got stuck in the highest treetops. But we could also sidestep the whole problem by using a device like this one:

It could be a springboard, a greased chute, or even a dangling sling—anything that redirects the object upward without adding to—or subtracting from—its speed. Of course, we could also try this:

But the deflector box seems easier.

I ran through the basic aerodynamic calculations for a baseball thrown at various speeds. I will give these in units of giraffes:

The average person can probably throw a baseball at least three giraffes high:

Someone with a reasonably good arm could manage five:

A pitcher with an 80 mph fastball could manage ten giraffes:

Aroldis Chapman, the holder of the world record for fastest recorded pitch (105 mph), could in theory launch a baseball 14 giraffes high:

But what about projectiles other than a baseball? Obviously, with the aid of tools like slings, crossbows, or the curved xistera scoops in jai alai, we can launch projectiles much faster than that. But for this question, let’s assume we stick to bare-handed throwing.

A baseball is probably not the ideal projectile, but it’s hard to find speed data on other kinds of thrown objects. Fortunately, a British javelin thrower named Roald Bradstock held a random object throwing competition, in which he threw everything from dead fish to an actual kitchen sink. Bradstock’s experience gives us a lot of useful data (and a lot of other data, too). In particular, it suggests a potentially superior projectile: A golf ball.

Few professional athletes have been recorded throwing golf balls. Fortunately, Bradstock has, and he claims a record throw (to first contact with the ground) of 170 yards.^[7] This involved a running start, but even so, it’s reason to think that a golf ball might work better than a baseball. It makes sense; the limiting factor in baseball pitches is the torque on the elbow, and the lighter golf ball might allow the pitching arm to move slightly faster.

The speed improvement from using a golf ball instead of a baseball would probably not be very large, but it seems plausible that a professional pitcher with some time to practice could throw a golf ball faster than a baseball.

If so, based on aerodynamic calculations, Aroldis Chapman could probably throw a golf ball about sixteen giraffes high:

This is probably about the maximum possible altitude for a thrown object.

… unless you count the technique by which any five-year-old can beat all these records easily: