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Gravity Assist
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1–2 minutes·
No comments on Gravity AssistFinally, I understand how gravity assists for spacecraft work now! (scroll to bottom of linked page) Imagine a ball rolling down a hill. It gains speed rolling downhill, but then loses speed as it rolls up the next upslope. It’s hard to see how speed can be permanently gained this way. But now imagine that…
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The lament of the immersive fiction gamer
Dan’s just written a new article entitled The curse of massively multiplayer immersive games. “To be blunt: they have all, to a greater or lesser extent, sucked.
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Jargonwatch
As much as I love reading Wired, I find it a bit tiresome how they go completely over the top in using overtly techy terms when more normal (and accurate) ones would do. For example on the reviews page, Iain Banks is described as writing ‘post-cyberpunk novels’. Well, that’s interesting, because the last time I…
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Robota
Doug Chiang Studio – home of the Robota art/book/film story. There’s an extremely well done teaser video (Teaser II) for the project there.
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Mutant Intelligent Mice!
Now this is why I love neuroscience. In a recent weekly paper presentation, one of the groups in my class presented a paper called Genetic enhancement of learning and memory in mice. After altering a single gene in mice, the authors of the paper managed to improve their learning and memory significantly, by up to…
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Adrian’s crazy day
Today I had to give two presentations; one summarising a paper about systems consolidation in memory, and another covering my research project this year. The research project presentation had been prepared for quite a while in advance, but as luck would have it, yesterday afternoon we struck on a different way of statistically analysing my…
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All wrong
This BBC News article about collaborate immersive fiction games would normally be a cause for joy, considering the great publicity it brings to the genre. However, the article is so wrong that it’s painful. For example: The first stage of the challenge, which had a $25,000 prize, was supposed to take people a month to…
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Fuji Food
Fuji Food – Cambridge’s first Japanese food store, full of Japanese snack, noodle and frozen food goodness. I was quite pleased with their sweet selection, stocked with the requisite Pocky sticks and rice crackers. The noodles looked pretty decent as well, and I’m considering trying out the frozen octopus balls sometime.
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I want my MP3
Unlike many people at Cambridge, I don’t really visit the libraries except to pick up the odd paper that I can’t find off the web. I certainly don’t work in libraries; the atmosphere feels intolerably stifling, as if you’re being forced to work by the mere presence of dozens of your peers’ eyes upon you.…
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Magnetic Attraction
Today I had an interesting and unique experience – I had my brain scanned by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The point of this was to take part in one of my friend’s psychology research experiments, earn �27 and also (arguably most importantly) get a picture of my brain. Doing an fMRI is an unusual…
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