What America Does With It's Tax Dollars

An artist named Mibi On Deviantart has created A Graphical Representation Of What America Spends It's Tax Dollars On.

The surprising thing is that 68% of what Americans pay in tax goes to Security, either military or none-military. I don't know how much of the tax I pay goes to security, but looking at the size of the US army and the equipment that they have compared to to the UK forces, I suspect that it isn't even close to as much as 68%. It is interesting to think wither that money is well spent or not.

I suspect that most people presently will say no because America uses it's military to solve some of it's problems. Problems that could been avoided if less money was spent on the military.

[Source Digg]

Pacemaker Handheld DJ System

ThinkGeek are selling this thing called the Pacemaker Handheld DJ System. It is mega expensive and you might was well get a Korg 10 for the DS or some proper DJ equipment for the $500 price tag, but I really liked the advert.



And then I seen this video below where someone has used a RF output device to listen to the Pacemaker's output on his car stereo system. Which is cool because that could be another evolution of in-car entertainment.

1) In car radio (music chosen for you)
2) In car Tape/CD player (the music you want to listen to)
4) In car MP3 player (on demand audio, music, mixes, podcasts etc)
5) In car DJ system/music game (on the fly music creation)

Incredible Tiger

After watching the Incredible Tiger trailer I was impressed with the selection of movements that have been incorporated into the character. It is as if made by a Kung Fu film buff with complete disregard to actual fighting mechanics, and the fight combinations looks really good. I don't think the game will be any good because it is likely to be just a button masher, but the movements remind me of a few good martial arts films.

StarFox Synchronized Flying Training

I always wondered when I was a kid if it was possible and if there was a reward for doing it well. After a quick YouTube search I now know it is possible and there isn't a reward. My younger self would have been so disappointed.

Star Trek 1 to 6 On BluRay!

OMG! It's HERE!
Not I just need either a new monitor or a BluRay player for the living room.

This Will Blow Your Mind

The rate of technical and scientific achievement of the our people is accelerating all the time. This is both a cause and effect of our global population number, and this video contains some surprising facts around this.



What does it all mean?
It means that we are closer than ever to answering that question.

Cogs

Not my kind of puzzle game, but it does look very interesting and cudos to the developer Lazy 8 for doing proper 3D menus and doing some interesting stuff in 3D.

Dan Ariely On Cheating

Dan Ariely Professor of Behavioral Economics at Duke University (His Papers) did a TED Lecture about Why we think it's OK to cheat and steal.

Essentially people cheat because of the belief that they can get away with it, but I thought it was interesting to hear that people cheat more if they are disconnected from the consequences and less so if cheating questions their morals.



[Source Derren Brown's Blog]

Uncle Jay Explains The Current Economic Crisis

Uncle Jay knows his stuff.

OnLive Another Pump And Dump?

The best place to get info on this is Rock Paper Shotgun, but OnLive is a new webservice where you play games on a server, but not just casual games, the latest FPS and racing games. It is supposedly a Remote Process Service Provider. So the software runs on a remote server, the game is rendered on the remote server, your PC just displays a video of what is running on the server and collects game input signals to send to the server.

The thing that makes me sceptical about this is that I was expecting to see this in the next few years, but not now. Kind of like Phantom which was a download game distribution platform, at the time very cutting edge, was a pump & dump scam to steal money from investors, but retrospectively could have done very well, as online distribution is very much the present and future of the industry. So I just hope that OnLive is for real, but the current day technical challenges seem to me, to be too great for them to do this right now.

Fantastic Aminated Wall Art

Some fantastic animated wall art. I think this video is better without sound, but maybe that is just me.

inFamous

There are two big open world games in development at the moment, Prototype and Infamouse. Ptototype is about a quarentined city and a genetically altered guy who runs around a city absorbing people. Infamouse is about a quarentined city where an event happens that gives some poeple super powers and a guy who has the power to control electricity.

Prototype looks quite forgettable with a main character who absorbs bullets like a fridge, but Infamous really interests me because of the way people you fight have unique powers like teleportation or the ability to control mass. From what I have seen this could lead to some very interesting narrative situations. Unfortunately I will not be playing Infamous because it is PS3 exclusive, and I have no intention of buying a PS3 at it's current price point (as a matter of sanity).



[PS3 Blog via Evil Avatar]

Flash Political Map Quiz

Globetrotter is a great map quiz, not as good as the great Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego, but I can still give it props for being a short distraction.

The game consists of a world map, a sign at the top of the screen lists the name and country of a place. You then have to put a pin in the map as to where you think that place is. You get points for accuracy and each level you have to acquire a certain number of points to proceed to the next level. Simple yet fun.

It ticks the boxes of improving the players strategy as they play by educating them and by making the player feel as if they are doing well by simply being in the correct vicinity of the place.

I managed to reach level four by cheating with Google Maps; and like to consider myself well versed in different cultures. I hope others do better.

[Jay Is Games]

Barreleye Fish Seen In Wild

I sometimes wonder wither I should have gone into Zoology. So the National Geographic has the First Photos of the Barreleye fish in the wild. This is significant because since the fish was first discovered in 1939 by Chapman, only corpses had been studied, but in the wild it is clear that it is a fish with eyes inside a transparent head. The new discovery here is that it can rotate it's eyes to look up when possibly searching for food or forwards when it eats. What it eats however is still kind of a mystery.

Random Fact

Facebook has a friends limit of 5000.

[Explosm]

Nice Film Trailer, FanBoys

I was over at Apple Trailers when I seen the trailer for FanBoys. It is a road-trip film set in 1998 about some Star Wars fanboys who go on a pilgrimage to Skywalker Ranch; mainly to steal stuff.

There has been many movie spoof films over the past five years. Recent notable enteries have been Superhero Movie and Disaster Movie. Both are horrible slapstick comedies, but Fanboys looks good; I am looking forward to it.



[Apple Trailers]

Science, Primates And Sperm

Jacquelin Nascimento is part of a project to findout which primate has the fastest sperm. Not sure who her funders are, but it is quite an odd project.

Mirrors Edge And New Monitor

Two things happened this week. Firstly I got a new monitor and secondly I played through Mirrors Edge on it.

Firstly this is my old setup:



This is a 16" 4:3 CRT monitor I got more than ten years ago and has served me very well over the years. The reason why I haven't replaced it in so long was because I didn't have any desire to. But the fact that Bluray films didn't look any better or worse on it than DVD or for that matter on my 24" Samsung LCD TV made me want a screen where I could see that extra resolution. Plus the idea of widescreen FPS gameplay was an appealing one. So I bought this:



It is a blue Acer G24, the G24 standing for 24" gaming monitor. 16:10 ratio and very importantly a 2ms gray to gray response time so there is no ghosting on the screen. It has a native resolution of 1920x1800, that's higher than 1080p, well it would be 1800p. This means Bluray films look amazing at their full resolution, but unfortunately DVDs because they don't have as much resolution to them, don't. Games of course look fantastic on and that brings me to Mirrors Edge.

Maybe it was because of my new screen, but I loved this game from start to end. I have read a few opinions and I disagree with almost all of them. And mainly in the area of what kind of game Mirrors Edge is. To me it is clearly an FPS Platformer with shooting elements. Shooting elements that should have been left out, but I can imagine someone seeing seance at EA during development and saying that if there are guns in the game the player should be able to shoot them. Personally I would have left them out all together and replaced them with tasers. Pacing on the game is great, but I would have liked to have played few more basic courier missions to start with to get the player into the flow of the action before the main story kicks off, but then that is me saying that after playing the finished game. It is very difficult as a designer to make such decisions at the start of a project.

The story of Mirrors Edge should have been fleshed out more, although with my interest in writers I was surprised to find that it was written by Rhianna Pratchet, the daughter of Terry Pratchet. I am not familiar with her work, but the story in Mirrors Edge leaves a lot to be desired. The game in general feels very short so my thoughts on this are that if the game was longer, the story would have been better.

Having said all that, Mirrors Edge is by far my most favourite game from last year simply because it offered me a new and original play experience, and maybe my new monitor had something to do with that too.

Dead Snow

Død snø or Dead Snow as it is called in english, is a film coming out later this year about a group of teenagers who holiday in a cabin that is attacked by Nazi Zombies. This might seem very 1981 and even formulaic, but I think the Nazi Zombie angle could hold my interest.

I Won't Miss Bush

In one week Obama takes up the United States Presidency from Bush. Many commentators on the news will probably talk about Bush's legacy, but I don't think anybody, now or in the distant future will anybody call Bush a good president. His legacy is one of death and greed. So Goodbye Bush I am glad to see the back of you.

Random Fact
Bush is responsible for adding more new words to our language than any US president before him.