firehose

More than 100 game developers, many paying their own way, came to Washington last week to participate in the first game jam sponsored by the White House.

The games they made spanned subjects from ecology to astronomy to political science, following President Obama's call, made in 2011, to create educational software "as compelling as the best video game." The event was sponsored by the Education Department, and featured teams with ties to Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, and other major industry players.

Mark DeLoura, an advisor in the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy, and himself a 20-year games industry veteran (including posts at THQ and Google) called the event a success. He told USA Today that for video games to break through as educational tools, many more, touching a vast range of academic subjects, need to be built.

"We need scale," he told USA Today. "We need lots of data. We need lots of designs."

You can see some of them in the videos above and below. At top is Function Force 4, a math game developed by a team from American University. And below are Rare Earth by Santa Cruz, Calif.-based Magic Leap, and Accel-o-rama, by a team from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Apple finally killed off the original, click wheel, hard drive iPod this week. A lot of people barely noticed, because we were too busy gawking at a watch that isn't really a watch. However, for a generation of music-lover, the iPod was the consumer electronics product of the last decade. It brought Apple back from the dead, birthed a whole new family of iDevices, and literally changed the way we interact with music. In some ways for worse, in some ways for the better.

Mat Honan at Wired has put together a fitting eulogy for the iPod that made me remember just how exciting a prospect it was to have your entire music library in your pocket. And a huge part of that reason wasn't the technology — it's because so many of us used to define ourselves through our music —first through the record and CD collections we lovingly spent our hard-earned money on, then through what you loaded onto your iPod, whether that music was "stolen" or not:

Looking at someone’s iPod was like looking into their soul. In their music you could see who they were. You could tell if they were sophisticated or rough. You could see in their playlists the moments they fell in love and the moments they fell back out again.

But now, the iPod is a relic of the past, and everything has changed. The notion of a music collection has been obliterated by the fact that we can stream nearly any song ever recorded and released, for free, instantly. Spotify and its ilk have fundamentally changed the way we interact with music again. In some ways for the better, in some ways for the worse:

Soon there will be no such thing as your music library. There will be no such thing as your music. We had it all wrong! Information doesn’t want to be free, it wants to be a commodity. It wants to be packaged into apps that differ only in terms of interface and pricing models. It wants to be rented. It wants to reveal nothing too personal, because we broadcast it to Facebook and we should probably turn on a private session so our boss doesn’t see that we listen to Anaconda on repeat and think we’re high at work.

Don't get me wrong. I don't want to go back to syncing my music with iTunes over a USB cable and being annoyed if I forgot to load up the new album I've been loving. It's great to be able to access anything I want, whenever I want. But I can't help but miss the days when I laboriously curated my MP3 collection, taking nearly as much delight in a well-organized collection of MP3s as our parents might have taken with a shelf full of vinyl records.

I miss the time when we were still defined by our music. When our music was still our music. I miss being younger, with a head full subversive ideas; white cables snaking down my neck, stolen songs in my pocket. There will never be an app for that.

Even though it's a relic, I'm not getting rid of my iPod — it's a great reminder of how I grew up at the dawn of the 21st century and all the weird freedoms that came along with it.

Please go read all of Honan's excellent essay over at Wired.

Amazon got the biggest headlines for its drone delivery plans, but it's an idea that's catching on across the shipping industry. At a nautical trade fair in Hamburg this week, the shipping research firm DNV GL revealed designs for a new electric vessel that would ferry cargo with zero crew members — roughly the nautical equivalent of Amazon's automated delivery drones. Dubbed "ReVolt," the concept ship is designed for short sea voyages, carrying up to 100 standard TEU containers at a relatively slow 6 knots. But because the ReVolt has no crew, it doesn't need living quarters or safety equipment, resulting in a much more efficient trip between ports.

It's still just a concept vessel, but vessels like the ReVolt could make a huge difference in how we move goods around the world. More than 9 billion tons of cargo moved through ports in 2012, leaving a huge market if automated vessels like the ReVolt are adopted. According to DNV GL, there will be real benefits for firms who do. Because of low maintenance costs, the company estimates the ReVolt would save more than a million dollars a year compared with shipping the same goods on conventional diesel ships.

Last night I spent a lot of money at 3AM in my underpants. I was not alone.

The concept of waking up at a godforsaken hour to pre-order a new cell phone seemed normal yesterday. Or at least, normal-ish. I spent the evening triple-checking the sign-in credentials for my AT&T and Apple accounts, ensuring they wouldn't fail me at the crucial moment of purchase. I made sure my mobile contract was due for an upgrade. I poured a glass of water and set it alongside my laptop, so I wouldn't be thirsty.

At midnight, I set my alarm for 2:50AM, then went to sleep like a boy on Christmas Eve, slowly and stubbornly. But when my phone buzzed, it was clear this wasn't a holiday. There was work to be done.

After a mental pep talk, I plucked sleep from my eyes, booted my laptop and used the restroom. Then I booted my wife's laptop and our iPad Mini. I loaded AT&T's homepage on my computer, the Apple Store on my wife's and the Apple Store app on the Mini, because at 2:55AM the idea that one, two or even three Apple devices could fail me in the purchase of another Apple device seemed logical.

At 2:58AM, an iPhone 6 vanilla-flavor appeared on the AT&T page for delivery on September 19, but — because I am a sucker for new, large things — I decided to wait for an iPhone 6 Plus. Unfortunately, AT&T wouldn't be able to send a Plus for 15-20 business days. A gambling man, I chose to play the odds on Apple's storefront.

At 3:01AM, Apple's online store was down.

At 3:02AM, Apple's online store was down.

At 3:03AM, Apple's online store was down.

At 3:04AM, Apple's online store was down.

At 3:05AM, Apple's online store was down.

At 3:06AM, Apple's online store was down.

At 3:07AM, Apple's online store was down and I considered just ordering an iPhone 6 vanilla off AT&T. I no longer felt like the only person on the internet. I sensed I was surrounded by thousands of other cold bodies refreshing and refreshing and refreshing.

At 3:08AM, Apple's online store was down and so was AT&T's online store.

At 3:09AM, I accepted that refreshing websites on three different devices would be my foreseeable future, so I turned to Twitter and Slack, Vox Media's preferred chat client, where I found colleagues to commiserate with.

At 3:14AM, Casey Newton ordered an iPhone 6 and I immediately regretted my decision to go for a 6 Plus.

At 3:20AM, the AT&T store loaded in my browser and I again considered buying an iPhone 6 vanilla to just end this experience, because what the hell is wrong with me.

At 3:23AM, the AT&T online store failed to load my order page for an iPhone 6.

At 3:25AM, the iPhone 6 Plus appeared for sale on the Apple Store app, so I clicked order without any real thought. The page disappeared, reappeared, and then I had a confirmation in my inbox, informing me that my new phone should arrive next Friday.

But I couldn't go to sleep. Now I was energized. I was part of a moment, a really silly moment. Not to mention I'd spent a ton of money. Oh, no, I'd spent a ton of money. Why did I do that?

Naturally, I stuck around Twitter and trolled Sam Sheffer, our resident Apple hypebeast.

At 3:35AM the absurdity of thousands of adults sitting in the dark in their underwear spending trying desperately to spend hundreds of dollars and being constantly rebuked by Apple, because the company knows you riffraff will buy whatever it dangles in front of us, really overwhelmed me.

Then came the monetary guilt trip. I order the 128 GB iPhone 6 Plus on contract, so the half grand price seemed fine to me, but as my friends at The Verge explained to me, I'd essentially gone all out and bought what would be a $1000 phone off contract. That people had to explain the oddity of this has me, this morning, has me questioning my relationship with money and my consuming habits.

Just kidding, I'm an addict and I'll never change.

And I'm not alone. If you're still here, reading this morbid account, you too may be one such bag of flesh, sitting in your boxers, slouched over a laptop at 3:40AM in the morning, typing softly so as not to wake your more well-adjusted spouse.

At 3:45AM, I fell asleep at my desk.

At 4:03AM, I woke up, crawled into bed and my wife murmured something in her sleep about pancakes, and I imagine her dream world must be pretty nice.

At 7:00AM, the alarm went off for the second time and I woke with the gnarliest hangover. I need a bacon, egg and cheese, and an iced coffee. But I'll probably take a free yogurt from the office fridge. I'm on a budget.

BEEP BOOP YOUR DOCUMENT, SIR.

Nikkei Business Publications

Japan’s Fuji Xerox Company unleashed an automated roving robot printer on an unsuspecting office building in Tokyo over the summer. It’s definitely no giant beweaponed Gundam, but the robot does include a Xerox color laserjet printer mounted on a set of LIDAR sensors which it uses to build a map of the room it's in and to avoid obstacles while navigating.

To summon the printing robot, users access a webpage unique to their seating location, denoted by a card at each desk. Users drag the document to be printed into the browser window, and the printing robot begins to roll happily in their direction. Once the printer arrives at the desk, the user holds up the desk’s card to be scanned by the robot, which then prints your document. (Having the robot print at your desk introduces a delay into the process, but it also prevents other people in the office from seeing your documents.)

Once the robot has done its job and produced the document, tap a button on its top and it rolls away to service the next job in queue—or scurries back to its home location to await the next print job. The batteries in the unit are said to last up to a full day.

Apple CEO Time Cook and U2 frontman Bono made big news this week when they announced that the band's new album would be distributed, at no charge, to the roughly 500 million people with an iTunes account. But as Bono made clear on stage, someone had to make up the difference. "First you would have to pay for it," he told Cook, "because we’re not going in for the free music around here."

"We’re not going in for the free music around here."

So what does 500 million records cost these days? According to several reports Apple is spending at least $100 million to market the album, plus an undisclosed lump sum that goes to U2 as a direct payment. That's an enormous promotional budget for a single album, but for Apple, the price tag is pretty easy to swallow.

First off, Apple's marketing campaign will likely tie into its own products heavily. So while it's putting up billboards, TV spots, and display ads for Songs of Innocence, it will also probably be pushing iTunes and its new smartphone and watch. Secondly, Apple has an ungodly amount of money in the bank — $150 billion and counting. The entire U2 spend constitutes a few days of profits.

If anything, the $100 million figure, while eye popping at first, really highlights how devalued music has become as a commercial commodity, especially compared with the devices and software we use to listen to it. Over at Pitchfork, Rob Mitchum brilliantly laid out the diminished state of the record industry and the ascension of free as the dominant paradigm for artistic consumption.

Time was, the recipe for a superstar artist to create a Big Event Album was well known—a few teaser ads in the music mags, a lead single for radio, some late-night talk show appearances, then sit back and watch the fans line up at the record store on release day. But now that basically every entity in that sentence has been culturally marginalized, and the propeller churn of social media refuses to tolerate slow-burn marketing, the best—and, perhaps, only—way to get everyone talking about your record at once is to release it with no warning. U2 being U2, they’ve taken that strategy one step over the line into indisputably queasy territory, aligning with their old friends Apple to insert their new album, Songs of Innocence, into all of our libraries without consent. By updating the old Columbia House Record Club scam to the digital age, U2 and their Cupertino buddies have created a new avenue of opt-out cultural transmission, removing even the miniscule effort it takes to go to a website and click "Download."

Justice Sonia Sotomayor visits Rosa Parks Elementary School in Berkeley, Calif. in 2011.

Berkeley Unified School District

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor says that without proper privacy safeguards, the advancement of technology could lead to a world like the one portrayed in "1984" by George Orwell.

Speaking to Oklahoma City University faculty and students, the justice said Thursday that technology has allowed devices to "listen to your conversations from miles away and through your walls." She added: "We are in that brave new world, and we are capable of being in that Orwellian world, too."

The President Obama appointee also discussed the lack of privacy standards concerning drones.

Anchor Distilling Co. debuts Anchor Old Tom Gin 

San Francisco’s Anchor Distilling Company introduces Anchor Old Tom Gin.  This is the third style of small-batch gin produced by the distillery, which currently includes Junipero Gin, a classic London dry gin, and Genevieve, Genever-style gin.

Anchor Old Tom, like its historical predecessors, is pot-distilled with juniper berries and other botanicals, sweeter than modern London dry gin, and bottled unfiltered.  Though produced with the traditional botanicals star anise and licorice root, Anchor Old Tom also features stevia. Sourced from Paraguay, the stevia contributes to the gin’s sweetness.

Anchor’s  tomcat featured on the label is a nod to Captain Dudley Bradstreet, who is rumored to have created an illicit gin “vending machine” on the streets of 18th-century London and advertised his product with the sign of a sly black cat. Customers put money through a slot in the cat’s mouth and Bradstreet would “bid them receive it from the Pipe under her Paw” while pouring it through a funnel.

Anchor Old Tom Gin
750 ml 45% ABV Suggested Retail Price $29.95

For more information on Anchor Old Tom Gin, visit AnchorDistilling.com 

About Anchor Distilling Company

A privately owned distiller and importer, Anchors portfolio has nearly 400 specialty products from 26 countries. Our products are from multigenerational, family-owned companies and are sought for their handcrafted artisanal qualities. From a distilling perspective, Anchor is dedicated to creating very small batches of traditionally distilled spirits.

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Contrary to popular belief (and popular culture) women across history and across cultures have done far more than get married, have babies and be the mothers, daughters, sisters or wives of the key players on the world stage. A recent list on Whizzpast of ten lesser-known women revolutionaries is a perfect example, and a lineup that deserves attention from, say, game developers that create fiction around particular historical periods.

Take Petra Herrera, a soldadera (woman soldier) who went into combat in the Mexican revolution.

She established her reputation by demonstrating exemplary leadership (and blowing up bridges) and was able to reveal her gender in time. She participated in the second battle of Torreón on May 30, 1914 along with about 400 other women, even being named by some as being deserving of full credit for the battle.

If ever there's an Assassin's Creed game that takes place in India during WWII and the subsequent Indian Independence Movement, I'd want to see "Captain Lakshmi" in the mix.

Lakshmi Sahgal, colloquially known as "Captain Lakshmi", was a revolutionary of the Indian independence movement, an officer of the Indian National Army, and later, the Minister of Women’s Affairs in the Azad Hind government. In the 40s, she commanded the Rani of Jhansi Regiment, an all-women regiment that aimed to overthrow British Raj in colonial India.

As the industry increasingly looks to represent women characters — or, fails to — it's important to be wary of the biases of modern pop culture and the presentation of history. The truth is almost always more complicated that the tropes and stereotypes associated with our common understanding of a time period or movement. That goes for gender just a much as any other factor.

Any of the ladies on this list would make for an intriguing playable character — in one of Ubisoft's historic adventures, or in any game. And all of the movements represented here offer fresh territory for drama, intrigue and action.