Video Games
drorzel | March 6, 2015I've updated the detailed blog post describing our summer workshop introducing writers to quantum physics to include a link to the application form. For the benefit of those who read via RSS, though, and don't follow me on Twitter: the application form is now live, and will be for the next few weeks. We expect to make acceptance decisions around April 1.
So, if you make up stories and the idea of spending a few days at the Joint Quantum Institute learning about quantum physics from some of the world's leading experts sounds like fun, well, send us an application.
drorzel | March 3, 2015
A few years back, I became aware of Mike Brotherton's Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop, and said "somebody should do this for quantum physics." At the time, I wasn't in a position to do that, but in the interim, the APS Outreach program launched the Public Outreach and Informing the Public Grant program, providing smallish grants for new public outreach efforts. So, because I apparently don't have enough on my plate as it is, I floated the idea with Steve Rolston at Maryland (my immediate supervisor when I was a grad student), who liked it, and we put together a proposal with their Director of…
drorzel | January 5, 2015Over on Facebook, my colleague Chris Chabris was talking up a smartphone game from a company he's associated with. Which of course got me thinking "Wait, why don't I have a smartphone game company?" (The Renaissance Weekend is also partly to blame, as I was one of about six people there who didn't have a start-up company of some sort...) Which, in turn, led to the realization that there really ought to be a quantum optics video game. Or maybe a series of games, because you could construct a whole bunch of puzzlers around quantum phenomena:
-- The most basic would be to do something like the…
milhayser | March 23, 2014For the first time, researchers have transformed induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) into specialized bladder cells. Meanwhile the development of iPSCs from normal cells has been shown to depend on two proteins necessary for the induction of a glycolytic state. In order to make iPSCs, researchers have previously needed to collect significant amounts of skin, bone marrow, or blood from a donor, but researchers have demonstrated a new method that requires only a single drop of blood. In the future, you may be able to prick your finger, send a drop of blood to the lab, and have them grow a…
drorzel | March 13, 2014So, last week I idly wondered about the canonical falling-bomb whistle. The was originally intended to be a very short post just asking the question, but I got caught up in thinking about it, and it ended up being more substantial. And leaving room for further investigation in the form of, you guessed it, VPython simulations.
This one isn't terribly visual, so you don't get screen shots, just a link to the code at Gist. It's a simulation of a falling bomb, with air resistance, tracking the velocity as a function of time. Then it calculates a "Doppler shift" using the velocity as a fraction of…
drorzel | February 10, 2014One of the more annoying points of contention back in the days of the Sokal hoax and the "Science Wars" was an argument over social construction. This is, loosely speaking, the idea that our understanding of the world is not strictly rational and objective, but is heavily influenced by interactions with other people, and the culture in which we live. The idea originally arose in literary academia, but expanded to be applied to basically everything, including science.
At bottom, this is probably the best and most useful idea to come out of whatever collective "-ism" you want to use to refer…
carlyo | December 19, 2013By Stacy Jannis
Kavli Science Video Contest Manager
The Kavli Science in Fiction Video Contest challenges Gr 6-12 students to examine the science in fiction, including science fiction movies, TV shows, and games. Our contest advisors include science educators , scientists, and Hollywood scifi visual effects experts.
Sebastian Alvarado is a postdoctoral fellow in the Dept. of Biology at Stanford, with a research focus on epigenetics, as well as co-founder of the video game science consultancy group, Thwacke! Consulting. Thwacke offers scientific insight from a diversity of disciplines to aid…
drorzel | June 27, 2013The day I bought my iPad, as I was taking it out of the box, SteelyKid (then 3) came bopping into my office, spotted it, and declared "I want to play Angry Birds!" It's a remarkable demonstration of the genius of their product: not only have they created a game that a three-year-old can play, they've managed to make every three-year-old in the industrialized world aware of their product.
It's also a testament to my current obsession, the universality of science, and not just because you can use the game to illustrate physics. After all, the process of playing the game serves as a good…
drorzel | June 3, 2013Rhett at Dot Physics departed ScienceBlogs before NAtional Geographic fully took over, but still managed to connect with their book division for a physics text. This is part of a series they're doing tied in with the folks from Rovio, makers of the world's most popular smart-phone time-waster, and, as the title suggests, it uses Angry Birds as a jumping-off point to talk about physics. Rhett was, of course, an obvious choice for this, given the amount of time he's spent doing video analysis of Angry Birds to extract the underlying physics.
This is a book that can't really be reviewed just as…
drorzel | March 30, 2010SteelyKid is a fan of a web game called BumperStars, which my parents introduced her to. If I'm at the computer doing something, she'll march over, demand to be picked up, then point at the screen and say "Buh-Pah" until I open it up.
Of course, she's a toddler, and thus has an extremely short attention span (except when she doesn't). About two minutes after I start a game for her, she'll slide down off my lap, and go find something else to do. Which would be fine, except for one thing: I have competitive OCD.
I don't mean that I try to one-up other people who have obsessive-compulsive…
edyong | February 23, 2010I grew up in the days of the SNES and the Sega Megadrive. Even then, furious debates would rage about the harm (or lack thereof) that video games would inflict on growing children. A few decades later, little has changed. The debate still rages, fuelled more by the wisdom of repugnance than by data. With little regard for any actual evidence, pundits like Baroness Susan Greenfield, former Director of the Royal Institution, claim that video games negatively "rewire" our brains, infantilising us, depriving us of our very identities and even instigating the financial crisis.
Of course, the fact…
drorzel | January 27, 2010Cheryl Morgan has a post urging people to nominate for the Hugo Awards. While I don't place the same priority she does on the gender distribution of who gets nominated, I applaud her for doing this now, while there's a chance to influence the actual ballot, rather than waiting until April to complain about it. If you care about what science fiction and fantasy works win awards, go read what she says about it.
I will also toss out another cheap way to influence the Hugo ballot and eventual winner. As a member of last year's Worldcon, I am entitled to nominate for this year's award. Here is my…
drorzel | January 9, 2010One of the few sad things about the recent American domination of physics (says the American physicist) is that new physical phenomena are now mostly given boring, prosaic American English names. Don't get me wrong, I like being able to pronounce and interpret new phenomena, but when the pre-WWII era of European dominance faded away, we lost those awesome German names. Like, for example, zitterbewegung, a word that just demands an exclamation point: Zitterbewegung!
The phenomenon it describes, ironically, comes out of work by the great English physicist and odd duck Paul Dirac. Dirac's…
nisbetmc | June 28, 2009[Contributed by guest blogger, Katherine Broendel]
The last time I posted, I wrote about the effects pornography and violent pornography may have on viewers' perspectives of women and sexual violence. Rather than stating an opinion, I provided a brief review of some of the studies I read as preliminary research for my thesis. On a related note, I want to explore the topic of sexually violent video games, or, rape simulation video games.
A couple weeks ago, an AAUW colleague and fellow AU grad student, Mandy Toomey, wrote an interesting blog post about rape simulation video games. I have…
edyong | March 29, 2009Anyone who has played video games for too long is probably familiar with the sore, tired and dry eyes that accompany extended bouts of shooting things with rocket launchers. So it might come as a surprise that playing games could actually improve a key aspect of our eyesight.
Renjie Li from the University of Rochester found that intensive practice at shoot-em-ups like Unreal Tournament 2004 and Call of Duty 2 improved a person's ability to spot the difference between subtly contrasting shades of grey. In the real world, this "contrast sensitivity function" is reflected in the crispness of…
edyong | March 16, 2009The effect that violent films and games have on our minds, and the implications for their place in society, has been a source of much heated debate. Now, a new study looks set to fan the flames even further. Several studies have found that violent media can desensitise people to real acts of violence, but Brad Bushman from the University of Michigan and Craig Anderson from Iowa State University have produced the first evidence that this can actually change a person's behaviour, affecting their decisions to help others in need.
Using professional actors, they found that after 20 minutes of…
sciencepunk | January 23, 2009Shares in Sony, Nintendo, and major games companies dropped sharply today after scientists linked playing video games with poor relationships with friends and family and increased drug use. Nintendo, long the face of family-friendly gaming, were said to be aghast and promised to immediately discontinue their wildly popular Wii system.
OK, so only one part of the above is true. A press release from Brigham Young University revealed that undergraduate Alex Jensen and his tutor had questioned 813 college students on their gaming habits and other behaviours, concluding that:
"As the amount of…
edyong | January 11, 2009You've just been in a horrific car crash. You're unharmed but the vividness of the experience - the sight of a looming car, the crunching of metal, the overwhelming panic - has left you a bit traumatised. You want something to help take the edge off and fortunately a doctor is on hand to prescribe you with... Tetris.
Yes, that Tetris. According to Emily Holmes from the University of Oxford, the classic video game of falling coloured blocks could prevent people who have suffered through a traumatic experience from developing full-blown post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). As ideas go, it's…
drorzel | October 28, 2008Over at Dot Physics (which might be the best physics blog in the world at the moment), Rhett Allain has a pair of posts exploring the physics of Fantastic Contraption.
The posts don't really lend themselves to excerpting, so you need to go over there and read them, but I think they're brilliant, and deserve better than just a spot in a links dump. These may be the best example of the scientific mindset that you'll find on a blog.
What he does is to set out to determine whether the world of Fantastic Contraption obeys a consistent set of physical laws, by coming up with ingenious experiments…