Undead Astronauts

Boxer vs. Idra

The original boxer, thats right, the reasons sc2 was made, is now getting into sc2. Heres a video of him playing the best non-korean zerg in a 1v1.

1. should u attend an ivy? a post at gnxp shows a graph of mean earnings at age 28 vs US News rankings. this more than ever reinforces my opinion that colleges need to drop their unofficial asian quotas. i knew results from law school earnings resembled this graph, but didn’t know that it applied to the general college population so starkly.

2. some of you may have heard the recent news that atheists/agnostics tend to know more about religion than the ppl that actually believe. here’s the quiz they gave. of course this news should come as no surprise b/c religion correlates negatively w/ iq.

3. “it is pointless to ask whether a model is real, only whether it agrees with observation.” – stephen hawking in a particularly “there is no spoon” zen moment. he says there may never be a theory of everything. further reason to think today’s theoretical physicists are full of it.

i really wasn’t expecting this b/c i saw they went back down to #4 for a little while. but wow big big congrats to the guys at FM!

update: i didn’t think to check at the time, but this song is #6 on billboard 100 on october 6th, and still #1 on itunes.

i’ve made plenty of posts recently on how gaming can reshape the brain. add another one to the mix.

a study published in cortex found something slightly new. previous studies found that certain brain regions grew w/ frequent gaming, but this one found that action gaming could task a different neural pathway entirely.

The study found that during the tasks the less experienced gamers were relying most on the parietal cortex (the brain area typically involved in hand-eye coordination), whereas the experienced gamers showed increased activity in the prefrontal cortex at the front of the brain.

wiki says that the prefrontal cortex is the home of complex behaviors, personality expression, and executive function. this result is interesting b/c it basically mirrors what some pro gamers (and pro competitors in general) say about how non-pros can become more pro-like. i’ve heard many times from pros that to be good, a person has to spend a lot of time developing fundamentals, but once that’s done, the person has to put his own personality and creativity into the gameplay.

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just watched the first episode and it wasn’t bad. here’s a little interview w/ kevin and his dad.

top japanese players are playing online in a streamed tourney. this match between daigo and mago was incredible.

here are the live streams if u happen to be awake while they’re going on. they’re playing on the weekends at what would be late night or early morning in the US.

stream A

stream B