An App That You Play With Live Pigs
Provide some kicks for both yourself and a farm animal on a faraway continent. Treehugger writes:
In hopes of staving off boredom in human and swine alike, a team of Dutch designers have created Pig Chase — an app for interspecies entertainment that playfully pits iPad users against real-life pigs, who might otherwise only meet one another on a plate.
Since 2001, law has required pig farmers in the European Union to provide some form of entertainment to their livestock as a way of keeping them in good emotional health, which in turn helps curb aggression and anxiety. Often, toys and other materials are placed inside the sties for animals to interact with, but perhaps unsurprisingly, some farmers have found it quite difficult to turn their pigpens into playpens.
With that in mind, designers from Utrecht School of the Arts and Wageningen University in the Netherlands ventured to create new ways to make swine…
Can AI-Powered Games Create Super-Intelligent Humans?
A technology CEO sees game artificial intelligence as the key to a revolution in education, predicting a synergy where games create smarter humans who then create smarter games.
Citing lessons drawn from Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, Alex Peake, founder of Primer Labs, sees the possibility of a self-fueling feedback loop which creates “a Moore’s law for artificial intelligence,” with accelerating returns ultimately generating the best possible education outcomes.
“What the computer taught me was that there was real muggle magic …” writes Peake. And he reaches a startling conclusion.
“Once we begin relying on AI mentors for our children and we get those mentors increasing in sophistication at an exponential rate, we’re dipping our toe into symbiosis between humans and the AI that shape them.
Virginia Boy Impaled by Bamboo Stick Through Neck Survives (Video)
Ellen Tumposky reports on ABC News:
Dez Heal, 13, of Lynchburg, Va., was rushed to the hospital with a bamboo stick impaled his neck. Dez had been playing a Ninja game with friends and “decided to put the bamboo stick in the back of my shirt,” he told ABC affiliate WSET-TV.
“I guess when he jumped, the stick must have went forward,” Nicholas Blencowe, Dez’s friend and Ninja partner, told the station. “And when he hit the ground, the stick went in his neck.” Dez’s father, David Heal, described to WSET how the stick pierced Dez’s neck and came out about about 3 inches behind his ear. Heal called 911.
Homelessness: The Game
Zachary Sniderman writes on Mashabe.com:
It’s one thing to feel bad for homeless people; it’s another to be forced into their shoes. Advertising agency McKinney has teamed up with Urban Ministries of Durham (UMD), a non-profit based in North Carolina, to create SPENT, an online game that guides users through what it feels like to be homeless.
Here’s how it works: If you accept the challenge to play, you enter a simple point-and-click game, navigating multiple choice questions about your livelihood. The site says you have been stripped of your savings and are currently unemployed, asking, “Can you make it through the month?”
You’re given simple choices with varying consequences. Do you want to try working in a restaurant? A factory? If you live far from the city your rent will be cheap, but, as you’re informed through pop-ups, you’ll have to pay more for gas or transportation.
The game’s integration with Facebook is its best feature.…
Sega’s ‘Toylet’ Turns Japanese Bathrooms Into Arcades
Discovery News reports:
Japanese toilets are famed for functions such as posterior shower jets and perfume bursts, but entertainment company Sega has gone a step further by installing urine-controlled games in Tokyo urinals.
Four types of “Toylets” games are available to be played during a test period ending this month at four male bathrooms in pubs and game arcades, in a project aimed at drawing attention to digital adverts.
Each urinal is fitted with a pressure sensor, and a small digital display is placed at eye level. Digital adverts are shown after the games.
Games include “Graffiti Eraser” in which a user tries to aim at the pressure sensor in the urinal to erase virtual graffiti on the display.
Or there’s “Mannekin Pis” — named after a Brussels fountain depicting a urinating boy — which measures the volume of the user’s stream.
Another is called “The North Wind and The Sun and Me,” in which the strength…
Bed Bug Blaster: Get Them Before They Get You
Call it the Summer of Bed Bugs in New York City: seems like they have been popping up everywhere around here from Victoria’s Secret to the AMC movie theater in Times Square.
If you’ve or your loved ones have been a victim of our new Bed Bug Overlords, get some virtual payback with this Bed Bug Blaster game:
Don’t become a bed bug late-night snack! If they can infect GE executives are any of us safe?
Indie Game Designers Talk About Their Transhumanist RPG FreeMarket
Luke Crane and Jared Sorensen talk about their new science fiction role playing game FreeMarket. Via Technoccult:
It also sounds like it’s a more intellectual game than most – you’ve said you can, for instance, play the role of a philosopher and have that be meaningful within the game.
Luke: Yeah, but don’t think you can’t play Soulshitter Killfuck and have fun, too. But, unlike many other games that I’ve played, you can play an artist and have serious conflict about what you do. It’s impossible to just make a piece of art in this game and have it sit there, inert. Art is controversial.
Jared: And conflicts (especially philosophical, critical and artistic) are both internal and external and can have wide-reaching and unplanned repercussions.
Right. So you could do a more typical hack and slash scenario, or you could do something where you’re dealing with post-scarcity speculation. Or maybe both.
Luke: Yes. But the “typical”…
Offshore Oil Strike: The BP Board Game
Want to teach your kids about the fun of deep-sea drilling? Pick up a copy of the unfortunate 1970 board game Offshore Oil Strike, produced by BP. “The 1st player to make $120,000,000 cash is regarded as the winner.” Via BLDGBLOG:
With this “exciting board game for all the family,” released in 1970, BP delivered all “the thrills of drilling, the hazards and rewards as you bring in your offshore petro-dollars.”
It’s “a race to find and develop the riches ‘neath the seabed,” where no deepwater is beyond the horizon of possible drilling.
Accumulating this fortune, however, is not without its difficulties. Each player has “Hazard” cards to deal with; here are some of the risks BP thought to include:
—”Fire breaks out. Pay $2,500,000 for repairs.”
—”Hit High-Pressure Gas—Rig Damaged. Specialists called in.”
—”Blow-Out! Rig Damaged. Repairs cost $2,000,000″
—”Drill pipe breaks. Pay $500,000 for replacement.”
—”Strike High Pressure Gas. Platform Destroyed.”
—”Blow-Out! Rig Damaged. Oil Slick Clean-Up…
Alternative Marketing for Vuvuzelas
With the World Cup finished there has been a deafening quiet without the constant noise of vuvuzelas. To make sure that all those horns don’t go to waste we’ll have to get creative about different ways to use them. Vuvuzelas make noise, Guitar Hero is a game based on noise, the two seem like a perfect match. Maybe Vuvuzela Hero will catch on.
Meet A Fourth Time Lottery Winner
What are the odds of winning the lottery? Sufficient to say most player’s odds are slim to none. With luck like Joan Ginther, I’d be playing everyday. She recently picked up her fourth set of multi-million dollar winnings. The Corpus Christi Caller-Times in Texas gives details:
Joan R. Ginther, a native of Bishop who moved to Las Vegas, made her fourth appearance Monday at lottery headquarters in Austin to collect seven figures, lottery officials said.
Ginther, 63, won $10 million, the top prize in Texas Lottery’s $140,000,000 Extreme Payout scratch-off ticket, pushing her total wins to $20.4 million.
It was her third time to win on a ticket from a Bishop store, and second one at Times Market at 525 Highway 77 Bypass, in Bishop.
“This is a very lucky store,” said Bob Solis, store manager. The owner Sun Bae is the one with the lucky hand, Solis said. “Sun sold both the winning tickets…
Northern China Hosts Robot Olympics
Walking, running and even dancing robots have been competing at the International Robot Olympic Games in China:
