Sorta Nightly Open Thread

Dark energy is real!

And it’s speeding up the expansion of spacetime.

Speaking of space…let’s talk about orphan planets!

Japanese and Kiwi astronomers have discovered the first orphan planets in the Milky Way, and apparently they’re massive (as in: Jupiter-sized).

And numerous, too:

That’s just the tip of the iceberg, explains David Bennett, a NASA-funded co-author of the study. “Our survey is like a population census,” he said. “We sampled a portion of the galaxy and, based on [this] data, can estimate overall numbers in the galaxy.” Bennett and his colleagues believe there may be twice as many lonely planets as stars, adding up to hundreds of billions of lone planets in our Milky Way galaxy alone. Aww.

Hey, what’s that “aww” for? Maybe the planets like being out on their own, roaming the stars with no clingy stars dragging them back into orbit all the time.

Help my friend Ian raise funds for MS research!

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPPcfdf0bac&w=480&h=390]

The RONA MS Bike Tour

My friend Ian Crowe rides in the RONA MS Bike Tour every year to help raise funds “for all the people with multiple sclerosis who need help financially to get through life and to help increase funding for research so that one day they will find a cure.”

MMO games and their avatars.

Photographer Robbie Cooper lines up real-life photos of MMO gamers with screenshots of their virtual selves.

Cuter in real life.

Actually, it’s an interesting list — some of the comparisons are touching, others cringe-inducing, and others stereotypical — and I’m sure there’s the potential for a psychology paper examining the implications of how people see and present themselves in the virtual world.

Not that I intend to embark on such an analysis.

Verifying passwords by how you type ’em.

It makes sense, actually. Most of us, when we sit down at our usual computer and log in to our usual services, type our passwords almost by rote; “muscle memory” does more of the work than actual memory, and we “recall” the password less by consciously calling it to mind and more by simply executing a series of hand movements that ensure the appropriate keys get pressed in the right sequence.

And usually, things like the time it takes to enter the password, the force applied to each key, and the minute delays between each key-press remain relatively constant.

Whereas someone else typing in our password would type it with a very different timing.

For once, I agree with the cops.

Okay, they actually removed this lady from the Amtrak train she was on because of disorderly conduct. But there’s a bit more to the story:

For sixteen solid hours after she boarded an Amtrak train in Oakland, KATU.com reports, she yapped loudly into her goddamned phone. SIXTEEN HOURS. And she was sitting in a designated “quiet car.”

After several passengers asked her, pleaded with her — begged her just out a sense of basic human decency — to stop yelling at the top of her lungs into the greasy little piece of plastic wedged inside her clammy paw, she completely ignored them. Then, a passenger who had reached the breaking point finally mustered the courage to stand up to her. So Beard “got aggressive.”

But wait! There’s a happy ending! These things never have happy endings, but this one does! Conductors stopped the train in Oregon, where hero members of the Salem Police Department were waiting to escort Beard off the train.

Just hazarding a guess here, but based on the image of the woman that accompanies the article, I’m thinking that the excruciatingly long/loud converstaion was probably also fairly banal and overly personal in nature. The sort that isn’t just annoying, but also very awkward to have to overhear.

Sometimes, I’m glad that airplanes (unlike trains) don’t get cell reception.

Tonight’s post brought to you by Jimi:

Trippy!

Bonus Jimi:

rage comics - Oh, I Thought He Was Just a Musician...

Trippier.

8 Responses

  1. Handshakes says:

    Just saw George Broussard (of 3D Realms fame) in a shacknews chatty talking about how if EA is going to start farming old franchises, the first he’d like to see is a next gen Ultima. It is kind of cool seeing old giants in the industry talk about their favorite games of old.

  2. Andy_Panthro says:

    After seeing the first bits of the XCOM reboot (Bioshock-style FPS), the Syndicate reboot (rather dull script excerpts that I hope have been long binned and redone) and various facebook versions of things, I am not hugely optimistic at the direction such things are going.

    Whilst my chances of getting a big-budget U7-style Ultima are probably rather low, I would hope that with the success of Oblivion that EA would look to the Underworld games as potential remake territory.

    In other news: Notch has updated MineCraft to version 1.6.4, so I need to redo my texture pack. I have an upcoming three day weekend, so expect it at midnight BST on Monday! 😉

  3. Sanctimonia says:

    My childhood memories of gaming have been eaten, partially-digested and shit out so many times that I don’t hold hope for anything other than my own feeble efforts to reproduce what I once thought was greatness. The wheels keep turning, and I’m not there, but that’s perfectly okay.

  4. Infinitron says:

    Just saw George Broussard (of 3D Realms fame) in a shacknews chatty talking about how if EA is going to start farming old franchises, the first he’d like to see is a next gen Ultima.

    Ultima Forever?

    • WtF Dragon says:

      Define “next gen”, I suppose, is the question to put to Mr. Broussard. Are we talking “Battlefield 3” next-gen, or a next-gen browser game?

  5. Infinitron says:

    I swear I did not know about this when I posted that comment:
    http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/hok09/ultima_forever_a_hidden_ultima_legacy_site_by_ea/

  6. Sanctimonia says:

    Since this is the latest open thread, thought I’d post a video I made for fun tonight:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SY3qfLXsoq8

  7. Sanctimonia says:

    Without you, without you
    I always thought that everything was fine without you
    Never knowing you’d be mine
    Suddenly my world has changed
    And I just wonder why
    All it took was just one smile

    Now with you, out of the blue
    Love appeared before my eyes with you
    A dream come true
    I never thought I’d realize what love was
    What love was, what love was…

    I need you, oh I need you
    And everyday I love you more and more
    Without you
    I know what it’s all for
    Suddenly I see you there
    And everything’s okay
    Don’t know why I feel this way

    Et cetera.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zfvjmhfh5NQ