Accumulation of Win

Neil deGrasse Tyson makes astrophysics accessible to the average people by his enthusiastic and entertaining way of telling stuff and Stephen Colbert’s fun way of leading the interview is a quality bonus to this video. If you are only slightly interested in the questions why we should raise our scientific literacy and what makes astrophysics valuable to everyone, you should really watch this entertaining talk:

This animated short does not require any comment, except that if you are a gamer, you know how this guy feels… I am particularly haunted since a few months as my provider (Cablecom) has decided to sell a lot more bandwidth on my node than they are actually able to offer – giving me a ping of 2.8 seconds in peak hours!!

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcP9jiCbakw

Do you really know how the earth is spinning around the sun? There is a lot going on there to create climate changes and seasons of different lengths and intensities on the different places on earth. I was not aware how many factors count into the equation if you want to calculate the exact length of a year… A nice scientific explanation in under 10mins:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ml4_Jv_HkE

Some guys wanted to go on a road trip and bought a mini-van for 300$ but they never left the parking lot… here is why:

http://vimeo.com/4133035

This is the most awesome Speedrun I have ever seen: Portal in 9m 25s (World Record)! The guy is just blazing through the levels in a way where – even if you played the game – at many points you will have no idea where he is. Of course this is mainly due to the fact that he is exploiting the even craziest glitches in the game engine. He literally broke out of the intended game path, like the test subject broke out of glados’ test path during the portal storyline. He even presents some of them that are not required for speed at all, but just to show off his skills and the possibilities with the engine (for example how to reach the room with the cake)…

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1U5RUVENNE

Even more amazing though i found the commentary videos that he provided (making the speedrun even more awesome). In those he explains exactly which glitches he used and demonstrates live (and proofing no hacks used), how difficult it must have been to do the levels and find the glitches. You can watch him trying 100s of times while recording for the commentary video. Man, I admire his patience!! A definite must watch for anyone into computer games, game engines (or game development in general) and portal geeks of course: First part of the commentary (1 of 15):

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziuj8KW_XQ0

Thiago Costa (Lead Technical Director at Ubisoft Digital Arts) released a teaser on his blog about his latest project: The Lagoa Multiphysics Engine 1.0 – and i really hope this is what gaming will look like pretty soon too! There are also a few other projects on his blog that are worth having a peek at… for example if you did not have a chance to see Assassin’s Creed Lineage yet – a short movie about the story just before the beginning of Assassin’s Creed 2 – you should definitely have a look.

Lagoa Multiphysics 1.0 – Teaser from Thiago Costa on Vimeo.