Undead Astronauts

1. New flash game where you compete with a comp and other ppl to find the better pattern of DNA matching. It’s a bit addicting once you score a high score that no one else has scored. You’re helping science at the same time!
2. Satoshi Kanazawa reminds us that once-upon-a-time, apparently everybody knew that sexual orientation was hereditary and/or caused by some exposure to differential hormone levels… and then it was forgotten in the 60s only to be rediscovered recently.
3. someone’s assassinating iranian nuke physicists (via steve hsu). this is after we find out that a military grade virus designed to destroy centrifuges has caused the nuke program to halt for the time being. kinda scary, but pretty cool at the same time.

Not sure how I feel about this, but it certainly looks like it would work. In short, a speeding camera takes pics of everyone who passes by. Those who are speeding are fined, and the money collected (minus the house cut) is randomly distributed among the non-speeders.

updated: added jasmine
updated 2: added peter
updated 3: added jennifer and with that, the entire cast is represented

short clip of steve laying out his life’s outlook. he’s so damn shallow. i’d probably be that shallow too if i had his game. life is cruel.
(source)

update: here’s a clip of violet explaining her views on gender roles. she comes off as very korean i might add.

(more…)

at long last, we get to see a battle! and it wasn’t completely hokey. i mean it wasn’t the greatest ever, but it wasn’t totally lame like i thought it’d be. that’s what’s great about low expectations i guess.

for any that remember macross plus, the main antagonist was an AI idol singer named sharon apple that used holography to project herself. the idol was so popular she would fill stadiums with fans during concerts. fact meets fiction with arrival of hatsune miku. she’s a real life holographic idol. if that makes any sense. only in japan.

this is the tech behind the projection. her voice is synthesized from voice samples of a real person who intoned phonetic japanese syllables. the syllables are then put together and pitched correctly to create words and songs. what’s a little odd is that the producers play it so straight with the concert. the character is very anime inspired, but doesn’t incorporate any fantastical elements that would be so simple to add.

more white flight… from asians and self-segregation by both groups. whites can’t/don’t want to compete against asians in the more academically oriented colleges in canada, so they go to party schools. asians don’t want to drink all the time, so they avoid white schools.

Canadian institutions operate as pure meritocracies when it comes to admissions, and admirably so. Privately, however, many in the education community worry that universities risk becoming too skewed one way, changing campus life—a debate that’s been more or less out in the open in the U.S. for years but remains muted here.

…

The division is perhaps most extreme at Waterloo, where students have dubbed the MC and DC buildings—the Mathematics & Computer Building and the William G. Davis Computer Research Centre, respectively—“mainland China” and “downtown China,” and where some students told Maclean’s they can go for days without speaking English. Writes one Waterloo mathematics graduate on an online forum: “I once had a tutorial session for the whole class where the TA got frustrated with speaking English and started giving the answer in Mandarin. A lot of the class understood his answer.”

i find that hilarious. i’m not really in favor of hard-ass asian parents, but if they get asians to pretty much take over an entire university, i can’t say i’m really against it either. this article was originally posted to a canadian news site, but was taken down after heated comments erupted.

(via aam).