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Have you been following the action on Robocup 2010? Robocup is taking place in Singapore this year, with a hoard of soccer playing robots from all over the world competing against each other. The organizations goal is to be able to field a team of humanoid robots that can beat their human opponents in the World Cup by the year 2050. It seems that some American Robots from Carnegie Mellon University have been programed with a new algorithm for predictive ball physics that may give them an edge. In the video, the bot with the blue center dot is the one running the algorithm.

Google ran some non-intuitive tests of its Google Chrome browser speeds versus real world events. Unless you have Ghod’s Own Internet Connection and a state of the art computer built next week, your mileage may vary. But still, this is more than a bit impressive. Also, be aware that Futurama is about to kick into its new season in a few weeks. I for one am thrilled the wait is almost over.

The Syfy Channel ran Alice last month, which won’t actually be available on DVD until March, but was a wonderful interpretation of the book from the same folks who did Tin Man last year. But there is a computer variation of the namesake I wanted to mention here. It comes in the form of the A. L. I. C. E. Artificial Intelligence Foundation which uses an artificial James T. Kirk to drive its point home, as well as the Alice Programming Initiative which allows students to learn basic 3D graphics object-oriented programming while creating their own home-made videos.

Out of all the online Advent Calendars this holiday season, two of them have been outstanding. I didn’t know what an Advent Calendar was when I stumbled onto the first site, and by then I had missed the first ten days or so of the offerings. Rest assured that next year I will be searching for them in early November, and post a list of the best ones I find Thanksgiving weekend, so we can all be ready come 1Dec2010.

The first is the AppVent Calendar, a project put together by Blacksmith Games. Starting on December 1st, each day they made one to three of their IPhone/IPod games available for free, and several of them were quite impressive. Most of the games offered for free for one day were also offered for dirt cheap ($.99 for a normally $3 piece of software, on average) for the remainder of Advent.

The other one that gave me useful presents was the WP Engineer’s amazing offering, where each day the tech-savvy team handed out another way for you to rebuild your WordPress driven web site into a true powerhouse. Each entry in this arsenal is a small bit of code, usually in the 5 to 25 lines category, but sometimes as simple as using the Custom Fields entry in the Query Post function to sort entries in a way that would normally take you some development time (as a single example).

I am pretty sure their goal was to offer a VAR (Value Added Resource) to their site in order to attract another one or three hundred potential customers. I am also pretty sure they added a lot more visitors to their web site than they were expecting, and even if most of the new additions do not end up being paying customers today, it will be a good thing for them in the long run. Congratulations to WP Engineers on creating my personal favorite holiday site this year!

The folks at io9 have put together a fun little chart graphing the science fiction after Star Trek (TOS). It goes rather nicely with one they posted a week ago, a timeline of Time Travel, which shows the start and end jumps of many fictional time travelers. Doctor Who was left off the chart, or you wouldn’t be able to see any of the other travelers (he may get his own chart later). Paste has a small but accurate chart comparing the Best and Worst of SF: District 9 vs. Plan 9 that you might also enjoy. To see more Chart Porn, stop by Information is Beautiful.

Graphing real-world data in real time in a 3D virtual world… that is what Glasshouse is all about, and it is pretty amazing. It works in environments like Second Life, or as a stand-alone using the Sun Java JRE6 or JDK6. You can read a good interview and watch some video demo’s over at Maxping, and if you have Java installed try out the Applet environment. This is an excellent tool for making complex arrays of data visually comprehensible, such as genomic progressions, biochemical reactions, or N-body gravity interactions.