As you no doubt already guessed, League Of Legends – All About That Ace is a parody of Meghan Trainor’s great “All About That Bass” song. This is yet another silly track from the folks at The Warp Zone, who just keep cranking out some great geek oriented music.
I swear this concept is based on the Rudy Rucker thought experiment turned into the novel The Hacker and the Ants, in which a programmer models virtual ants to work out a system of robotics driven by emergent behavior and mesh networking. That was in the early 1990s, when Rucker was a programmer at Autodesk, Inc., writing 3D CAD/CAM modeling software as his day job. With the state of the technology at that point, that story was officially science fiction; he could have copyrighted the concept, but there was no way to actually build any of it in the real world, therefore no patent. Pretty much the same way Aurthur C. Clarke lost a billion dollars in his spare time when he invented the geosynchronous satellite during WWII; it would be almost 20 years before anything could actually launch into terrestrial orbit, and more years after that before any of it could reach the geosynchronous sweet spot 23,400 miles up.
But now, decades later, the folks at Festo in Germany have done it; using a combination of 3D Printing, Piezoelectrics, Mesh Networking, Neural Networking, Heuristic Extrapolation, and just damn good programming, they have created Rucker’s Ants. And yes, it does look like they have hit on a system that supports Emergent Behavior as well. Mind, these ant-like androids are the size of your hand, but that is useful for a lot of tasks, and as they continue to develop the project, they will no doubt be able to miniaturize them more each year (scaling them up was never a problem). I have to wonder if Rucker’s new ant story, Attack Of The Giant Ants, was created once he learned of this project. Thanks to New Scientist for the heads up on this one!
I think they have only mapped out around 50 cities in North America, although it could be even a smaller number than that. But if you ever wanted to play real live PacMan on the streets of Washington, DC, now is your chance, using this link:
If you want to play in one of the other available major cities, go to: Google Maps, and look for the PacMan icon in the lower left corner of the browser window. If you see it, click it, and play the game on the streets of your preferred city. I suspect this is yet another Google implementation that could evaporate as soon it is no longer Aprils Fools Day, but I intend to play it for all it is worth until it expires!
This is the NSFW trailer for the 2015 Anime version of the latest Ghost In The Shell story, and it takes a bit of a look back at its predecessors. Along with Akira, this franchise changed the face of Anime in the west, and it was one of the best Cyberpunk stories I have ever read or watched. It will be in theaters in Japan in June, I am hoping it makes it to some in the US shortly after that.
Yes, this one certainly looks like silly fun, and continues the 8 Bit Silly Theme we began yesterday. The Pixels Movie assumes some aliens intercepted Voyager, got the data off the disc included with the ship, and got upset. The result was an invasion of 8 Bit video games out to exterminate mankind.
I thought I would post a few pictures of myself and a friend of mine hanging out on my Balloon House. I generally keep it parked a hundred meters above sea level somewhere above an island paradise. You have to love Virtual Reality environments like Second Life; they can be so whimsical.
