Cary

This is a video of Cookie, the recently rescued penguin, going berserk after being tickled. Man, those sounds were like PURE JOY, a feeling I have never and probably will never experience. Still, Cookie gives me hope. Also, I'm just assuming the penguin is happy, but I don't know anything about penguin behavior. What do I look like, a zoologist? No, I'm just some run-of-the-mill turtle whisperer trying to finish writing this article on his cell phone because IT already got on my case about why I spend so much time on geekologie.com. I told them it was a web resource like Wikipedia except way more accurate, but I don't think they bought it. If they start blocking it though I'm quitting. Hit the jump and improve your day.

Fulfilling its mission to warn you of the dangers of wasted youth, Danny Boyle is planning a 20-years-later sequel to Trainspotting, a movie that will be a 60-second pan over a row of tombstones on the Scottish Highlands. Or rather, something potentially even more depressing: A return from the original cast—yes, including Ewan McGregor, who’d finally be burying the hatchet with Boyle after their late-‘90s falling out—for a follow-up “very loosely based” on Irvine Welsh’s Porno. Talk of adapting the author’s own Trainspotting sequel has been around for years now, with Boyle saying last summer he’d begun working on a draft with Jonny Lee Miller and was planning to approach the rest of the cast when it was ready. That time is apparently now drawing near, with Boyle telling The Playlist at SXSW that Trainspotting screenwriter John Hodge is actively working on the ...

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Envelope X-Ray Spray is a $16 can of magic that lets you see through a layer of paper for 30-60 seconds before evaporating and leaving no trace of itself. It's perfect for finding out what kind of birthday card your grandmother sent before you opening it on your actual birthday. Granted you won't know how much money is in the card, so just assume $20 less than last year. Now x-ray envelope spray is neat and all, but what I really want is a spray that can see through scratch-off lotto tickets. I've seriously only won $20 on the last $170 I've spent. My system isn't working! "What's your system?" Get drunk and buy a bunch on the walk home. Hit the jump for a video demonstration.

This is a series of infographics showing the most search for p0rn terms by country and state for the last six months as compiled by PornMD, aka The Porn Doctor, aka never under any circumstances open up your mouth and say "Aah." I flipped through half of the US and a bunch of the countries of the world and, I dunno, dinosaurs doesn't seem so weird now. Regardless, as hard as I unknowingly tried, they didn't make the top ten list for California. Maybe next year. Hit the jump for a handful more but go to the interactive maps HERE where you can just roll over your own state/country and see what kind of f***ing weirdos you call neighbors.

What if, before your child was born, you could make sure they had the genes to be taller or smarter? Would that tempt you, or would you find it unnerving? Two teams of experts debate genetic engineering in the latest Intelligence Squared U.S. debate.

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It's pretty standard for scientists to look at human skeletons to reconstruct past human health. But a new approach looks not at our ancestors themselves but the hardened gunk on their teeth to re-create the timeline of human dietary changes. Scientists performed that analysis by looking at an array of ancient teeth. They found that shifts in the human diet over the millennia have led to big drop-offs in the diversity of good bacteria in our mouths---and the result is a severely weakened

Aesthetic judgement of orientation in modern art. "When creating an artwork, the artist makes a decision regarding the orientation at which the work is to be hung based on their aesthetic judgement and the message conveyed by the piece. Is the impact or aesthetic appeal of a work diminished when it is hung at an incorrect orientation? To investigate this question, Experiment 1 asked whether naïve observers can appreciate the correct orientation (as defined by the artist) of 40 modern artworks

online pickup artists try to seduce a chatbot  

Credit to Levi Sparkx for finding this.

Indie film powerhouse, Quentin Tarantino, joins Jian at the desk to talk about his latest film, "Django Unchained", its music, its violence, and its taboo historical setting.

St. Mary Avenue. Re-edit of a photo from 2009. I originally went way too HDR-crazy with this one: www.flickr.com/photos/bryanscott/3860311451/.

Bonobos will readily share food, but they'll offer it up to a strange bonobo before they give it to a member of their known group. Sophie Bushwick reports

Mexico City birds that decorate their digs with discarded cigarette butts are less bothered by parasites. Karen Hopkin reports

Boo at the Zoo, a traditional Winnipeg Hallowe'en event, has been cancelled due to declining attendance.

Previous research indicated that rats can smell in stereo, and there are suggestions that sharks and ants can, too.

Tommy Edison, who has been blind since birth, talks about his fears.

Referenced in the video: Tommy Nearly Gets Hit By A Car/Breaks His Guide Stick (radio show interview)

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THE TOMMY EDISON EXPERIENCE
Starring Tommy Edison

Directed & Edited by Ben Churchill
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J.Viewz spielt Massive Attacks „Teardrops“ per Makey Makey auf frisch gekauftem Gemüse.

The Making of The Weeping Angels

∟ Most of the Weeping Angels aren’t statues at all. They’re girls painted like statues.

Sylvie Reuter

The old definition of insanity is doing the same thing again and again and expecting a different result. The new definition, which applies only in the case of North Korea, is: doing something different and expecting a different result.

The North Koreans have been pursuing a nuclear arsenal for a couple of decades. We have tried negotiating; we've tried cutting off negotiations; we've tried threatening them; we've tried ignoring them, and we've tried whistling "Camptown Races" while standing on our heads. Nothing has made any visible difference. Come rain or come shine, they keep pursuing a nuclear arsenal.

So it should have come as no surprise when the Pyongyang government conducted a nuclear test, the third it has done. Given the regime's record, it was not a matter of if it would light the fuse but only a matter of when.

Maybe it was significant that the explosion took place the same day as President Barack Obama's State of the Union address. Maybe it was significant that it occurred before rather than after the inauguration of a new South Korean president. Maybe it was an auspicious day in the eyes of the regime's astrologers and Tarot card readers. Or maybe none of this stuff played any role whatsoever.

As for why, that question is easier. The common assumption is that North Korea is playing a high-stakes game aimed at impressing or coercing the United States, or South Korea, or Japan, or China or its own populace. But the better explanation is the simpler one. It does these things because it wants a nuclear weapon more than anything else in the world.

Why? Same reason we wanted one. Same reason the Soviet Union felt impelled to follow suit. Same reason China did likewise.

Same reason all the other existing nuclear powers insisted on getting nuclear weapons: because they have a value that is both enormous and unparalleled. They tell other countries, "You cannot eliminate us except by assuring your own destruction."

North Korea has obvious reasons to prize this guarantee. To begin with, it is small, poor, backward, short on friends and long on enemies. Those facts have always furnished excellent arguments for the security blanket offered only by the bomb.

But in this century, the incentive got sharper. In 2002, following the 9/11 attack, President George W. Bush described North Korea as part of an "an axis of evil arming to threaten the peace of the world." The other members were Iraq and Iran. The U.S. proceeded to invade Iraq to topple its government, and it called for "regime change" in Iran, as well—with some people in Washington favoring military action to bring it about.

The North Koreans had no trouble counting to three, and they didn't need a map to see who might come next. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld confirmed their fears with a secret 2003 memo, leaked to the press, endorsing regime change there, as well.

President Bill Clinton's administration coaxed the North Koreans into signing an agreement to halt their nuclear program. But they cheated on the deal, and when the Bush administration exposed the fraud, the U.S. initiated a tougher policy. That didn't work either. In 2006, Pyongyang carried out its first nuclear detonation.

When Obama took office, his secretary of state made conciliatory gestures toward North Korea. What happened? Oh, you can guess. Within months, it launched a long-range missile and carried out a second nuclear test.

The assumption among both doves and hawks is that there is some action we can take that will show the regime the error of its ways. Hawks are the latest to have their turn: An editorial in The Wall Street Journal urged the president to threaten military strikes so Pyongyang knows "it faces a choice of giving up the bomb or failing."

But that's not a credible threat. The regime has outlasted many forecasts of failure. And it can respond to any attack by using one of its nuclear weapons. But it doesn't even need that option: With a mass of artillery and rocket launchers within range of Seoul, it is fully capable of turning the capital into a "sea of fire," to use its charming phrase.

The North Koreans are staunchly resolved to build a nuclear arsenal. We may entertain fantasies that we can stop them. But they know better.

My what a purposefully controversial post title this is.

I’ve been working in the games industry for nearly ten years now which I think makes me something of an old man in games industry terms at the ripe old age of 28 (seriously if you go to just about any developer you will mostly find an office full of spotty twenty-something graduates). In all my time I’ve been a proponent of Intelligent Design when it comes to making a videogame. By that I mean writing lots of documents, having lots of meetings and cogitating long and hard on every single aspect of the project.

“No plan survives contact with the enemy.” - Helmuth von Moltke the Elder

In ten years of games development I have never worked on a game where the resulting product paid more than a passing resemblance to what was originally designed. Such is the way with an inherently creative process like videogame design. Once you start to implement features and interact with them then juices start flowing and you start to have new ideas or realise that something would work a bit better if you changed it. Part of this is because the only people who read Design Documents are other Designers.

Design documents will get nailed down into what is termed a “Functional Spec” which is often written either by the assigned programmer or a Designer who happens to be a Programmer in disguise (like me). A Functional Spec will take the ideas generated by the Design team and try to boil them down into the rules, systems and variables that are actually needed to implement it. These tend to be the most useful documents and where the majority of documentation time should really be spent. It’s these documents that work out what content is required to make the feature work and how it’s all going to plug together. They are absolutely essential to the first implementation of a feature.

They are then useless after that point.

Once you have the first implementation of a feature in your hands to play with documentation is largely useless and tends to get thrown to the side of the road. Everybody has ideas and tweaks they want to make and often a feature will end up being scrapped completely or turn into some other feature nobody ever thought the game needed but turned out to be essential (Vehicle Melee in Wheelman was such a feature. It was never “Designed” it just kinda happened one day). From this point on Evolution takes over.

What happens next is called “Creativity” and it’s something that likes to run around without any pants on and if you cage it in bureaucracy it will fade and eventually die. Without it though you won’t end up with a fun game. You’ll end up with something that might look like a fun game but here is a tip: If the people you’re paying to make the game don’t enjoy making it then the people who are going to pay you for it probably aren’t going to either.

Alot of Producers hate this bit in games development because it doesn’t fit neatly onto a schedule but it is absolutely necessary and vital to having something worthwhile when you ship. Unfortunately this part of development (usually called “Prototype” in my experience) tends to be the bit of the schedule that gets cut the fastest when it turns out that you have content requirements to meet. You promised the Publisher 150 levels over 10 different environments. What you didn’t promise the Publisher was that the game would be fun. The term “Deliverable” will be thrown around and the time required to actually turn a feature from a Functional Spec into something amazing will shrink to almost nothing.

The reality is that you really can’t design a videogame up front and expect it to be amazing and awesome without first playing it and then making revisions to it. I doubt there are many composers out there who won’t spend ages fiddling around with the music before they consider it ready. The problem the games industry generally has though is that with teams of 300 people and budgets up the wazoo individuals can no longer move fast enough or with enough freedom to be truly Creative bound as they are by Bureaucracy. If you wondered why Indie games tend to be more Creative it’s because they are created in atmospheres that foster Creativity and allow swift revision, iteration and evolution before exposing themselves to the world.

Creativity in the Games Industry struggles purely because of the “Industry” part. The same way it struggles in the Music and Film “Industries”. To me this is the best evidence I’ve seen that games are an artform. They’ve suffered the exact same fate as all the others.

Tens of thousands of protesters turned out on the National Mall Sunday to encourage President Obama to make good on his commitment to act on climate change. The pipeline would carry tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada, to refineries on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico.

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