Cooper Griggs

Only seven episodes of Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror have been made, but their dark and unsettling depictions of the future have garnered a sizeable cult following. Now, Radio Times is reporting that the show has attracted the attention of Netflix, ...

There are already computer chips with brain-like functions, but having them perform brain-like tasks? That's another challenge altogether. Researchers at UC Santa Barbara aren't daunted, however -- they've used a basic, 100-synapse neural circuit to ...

via http://www.mtschiember.com/work/display/

The Solar City Tower is a nifty concept, but it isn't going to be built for the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.

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Illustrator and graphic designer Simon Prades (previously) delights in the surreal and dreamlike, where silhouettes of faces open portals to other places and strange visual metaphors for difficult subjects are brought vividly to life. Prades works primarily with non-digital mediums like pen and ink, using Photoshop to cleanup and occasionally animate his work for the web. The German illustrator currently freelances for some of the biggest publications around including the New York Times, The New Yorker, The Guardian, and elsewhere. Shown here is a selection of work from the last two years, but you can explore a bit more on Behance.

This video contains strong language.

By now you’ve no doubt heard the famed “Leeroy Jenkins!” battle cry, and possibly even seen the viral video of a World of Warcraft sequence gone horribly wrong, even if you have no idea what the heck is going on. That video turns ten years old this week.

Back on May 11, 2015, according to Business Insider, the famed Leeroy Jenkins video first showed up on an obscure video gaming forum. The video shows a handful of World of Warcraft (WoW) players discussing – in exacting detail – their plans for an upcoming sequence in one of the game’s dungeons. One player even “calculates” their odds of success (“32.33, repeating of course, percentage”).

And then the unthinkable happens: one player, “Leroy Jenkins,” apparently bored with all the talk, rushes headlong into the dungeon, shouting his name as his battle cry.

“Let’s do this! Leeroy Jenkins!”

Within seconds, everyone is dead, and Leroy’s fellow players are cursing him for not sticking to the plan.

The video was a gag, of course; there was no player named “Leroy Jenkins” who ignored his friends and cost them their battle. “Leroy” was actually a college student named Ben Schulz (who is now an electrical engineer), and his friends in the sequence are also acting. Here’s a hint: listen to the guy at (1:36) trying desperately not to crack up while delivering his lines (“Stick to the plan!”). And here’s another hint: there’s no actual way to calculate your odds of success (“32.33, repeating”) in a World of Warcraft dungeon.

But none of that mattered to the phenomenon that “Leeroy Jenkins” would become.

In those days, YouTube and Facebook were just getting started, and World of Warcraft was just a fraction of the cultural mainstay that it is today. No one had ever heard of a “viral video,” and a “meme” was something written about in academic journals.

Whether “Leeroy Jenkins!” changed all that is something for internet historians to debate, but one thing is clear: Leeroy has since become one of the internet’s most well-known, and well-parodies, memes. He’s become synonymous with rushing headlong into danger without giving a second thought to overwhelming odds.

He’s also become a beloved part of the game that made him famous, according to Shack News. Blizzard, the company that produces World of Warcraft, has hired “Leroy Jenkins” – er, Ben Schulz – to appear at World of Warcraft conventions, and have even worked the Leroy character (voiced by Schulz) into subsequent game expansions.

Like “Charlie Bit Me” or “Leave Britney Alone!,” “Leeroy Jenkins!” is one of those internet gags that you either “get” or you don’t. There’s no explaining the joke. But whether or not “Leeroy” is your cup of tea, there’s no denying that he’s become part of our collective consciousness.

Here’s to ten more years, Leeroy Jenkins!

[Image courtesy of: YouTube]

Leeroy Jenkins! World of Warcraft’s Favorite Viral Video, Meme Turns Ten Years Old Today is an article from: The Inquisitr News

Your next Sidecar ride could be carrying more than passengers and parcels. The ride-sharing company announced that it is teaming with local cannabis service Meadow to bring same-day weed deliveries to medical marijuana patients in San Francisco. The ...

What if you could stand at the top of a volcano and peer out across the universe?

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As movie vehicles go, not many rank as high on the cool scale as a Tron lightcycle. So when father and son collectors Paul and Chris Andrews decided to offer up their full-scale replica of the two-wheeler from Tron: Legacy for auction at Sotheby's, w...

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After multiple reports that a player was using hacks to easily win player-versus-player battles in Guild Wars 2, game maker ArenaNet came to the only logical conclusion: execution.

This involved a public stripping, and forced suicide for the character within the game. Behind the scenes, ArenaNet was deleting the character completely, along with the hacker's other accounts, from the server.

It was just composed of 0s and 1s, of course — but this strange form of capital punishment sent no less of a message for it

User DarkSide had been accused of teleporting around the game world, dealing impossible amounts of damage then easily escaping harm — all in ways that couldn't have been possible in Guild Wars 2 Read more...

More about Entertainment, Gaming, and Guild Wars 2

The handheld gaming world has been on the retreat since smartphones replaced the Gameboys in our pockets. But, when you mix nostalgia, an Arduino and a low price point, you get the credit-card sized Arduboy. The 8-bit gaming rig fits in your pocket, ...

Back in November, SolaRoad launched a test bike path that generates energy through solar cells embedded in the concrete. It sounds like an outlandish idea, but it's apparently paying off very quickly. The company has revealed that its road has genera...

(gif via jesuspunk)

As far as the delicate world of parenting is concerned, it is often hard to know where exactly the fine line is when it comes to raising balanced and happy children.

However, a new study, carried out by Psychologists at Washington University’s school of medicine, found that punishing kids is far more effective than other more modern parenting techniques, such as offering rewards.

For their part, the researchers claim that the study they carried out seems to prove that responses to punishments are hardwired to the brain. As the lead author of the study, Dr. Jan Kubanek, explained to the reporters.

“Regarding teaching strategies, our study suggests that negative feedback may be more effective than positive feedback at modifying behaviour. Our study showed that such feedback does not have to be harsh, since it appears that we tend to react in the same manner to any amount of negative feedback. From an evolutionary perspective, people tend to avoid punishments or dangerous situations. Rewards, on the other hand, have less of a life-threatening impact.”

At the same time, the study, which was published in the journal Cognition, found that when the participants in the groups under observation were given a reward, they tend to repeat the previous choice, and that grew stronger as the award increased.

Then again, those participants who received some kind of penalty or punishment were less likely to make the same choice again.

As Dr. Kubanek added, “Objectively, you’d think that winning 25 cents would have the same magnitude of effect as losing 25 cents, but that’s not what we find.”

Another professor involved in the study, Richard Abrams, a psychologist at Washington University, added, “The question of how rewards and punishments influence behaviour has occupied psychologists for over 100 years. The difficulty has been devising effective tasks to probe that question. We used a simple approach that reveals dramatic differences in the way people respond to different types of feedback.”

[Image credit: northcountrypublicradio.org]

The ‘Stick Is More Effective Than The Carrot’ When It Comes To Disciplining Children, Study Finds is an article from: The Inquisitr News

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Rudolph! Nooo! [video]

The sands of time are running out for the central star

News: Trayvon Martin defendant George Zimmerman was reportedly shot at in Central Florida but escaped serious injury.

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