kismetism

Video Games and Learning.

Not a bad video. But I admit… I didn’t know “Sephiroth” was a reference at all. O.o

“The Secret Powers of Time”, Philip Zimbardo.

Quad linked the full talk to me some time ago, but I wasn’t able to watch it just then and kind of forgot about it. Then I ended up seeing a link to the animated one, which reminded me (“didn’t Quad link me something about time, too?”) … and then I found it was the same guy / talk. ;x

I do like the animated one better, just because it has all the essentials packed in. The full talk has some interesting studies, just a little too long for my tastes.

USC SCA 2010 Commencement →

Haha… meant to just find a transcript of Katzenberg’s keynote address, but found this instead. In case anyone is incredibly bored and wants to see. :x

stevedore:

Axis of Awesome - Four Chord Song

WHOA. :D

Hilarious. I especially like the Fireflies cameo. ;x

Absolutely incredible and brilliant talk. There is something for everyone in it. Reserve half an hour of your day to watch it… you really will not regret it. Some of my notes and reactions below.

• “And then you combine that with the psychological idea that… the rationalizion: anything you spend time on, you start to believe “this must be worthwhile. Why? Because I’ve spent time on it. And therefore it must be worth me kicking in twenty bucks, because look at the time I’ve spent on it. And now that I’ve kicked in twenty bucks, it MUST be valuable, because only an idiot would kick in twenty bucks if it wasn’t!” … what the hell! This is so simple, but it explains so much!

• Achievement system: the modern version of the old trophy shelf/room/collection. This is not something Schnell says explicitly, but it’s what occurred to me. It’s not the actual physical object that is important, it’s the symbol that represents your completion of it. Which makes virtual ones better, really, because they take up less space. >_>

• World is insane for “reality”. Avatar the film is about using technology to get back to nature/reality.

• Technologies diverge, not converge. But pockets turn the law of divergence inside out! Examples: Swiss army knife, iPhone. “This is why everyone hates the iPad”, because it’s a giant swiss army knife. x_x

• “And if anyone has the new Ford hybrid car… What are those leaves? What the hell is that? The more gas you save, the more the plant grows. THEY PUT A VIRTUAL PET IN YOUR CAR, and it changes the way people drive.”

• “Lee Sheldon … is teaching at University of Indiana now. ‘You know this grading system kind of sucks.’ Cause school’s a game, right? … ‘I’m gonna do this better.’ He doesn’t give out grades for each assignment, he gives experience points. And you level up through the class. And so class attendance is up, class participation is up, homework is turned in often and better, because it’s a better structure. It’s a better system.” (OH %&#$ YES. I WANT TO DO THIS AT ATDP THIS YEAR.)

• Disposable technology: furbies have more technology in them than they used to put a man on the moon.

Excellent commentary about not taking things for granted. Thanks Quad. :)

That’s comedian Louis CK, being interviewed by Conan, of course.

The Kotaku iPad article made a mention of this in-development MIT experiment called the SixthSense and the screencap was interesting, so I Googled and was pleasantly intrigued by the TED video that came up for it.

There are definitely similar strains of work occurring with this and the Gspeak (aka Minority Report system) that MIT was also developing.

I also find it relevant how they call it the “SixthSense” system, considering Manda’s belief that Twitter is Telepathy… something that my gut instinct wanted to reject, but I admit I was partially won by her reasoning. >_>

… So fricking weird/cool/random/something.

Courtesy of Alex. He calls it “twelve minutes of uninterrupted beauty”… I’m inclined to agree.

This is not for those of you who have little to no patience or appreciation for architectural magnificence, because that’s all this is about. No story or gimmicks, just complete and total glorious visual aesthetic. It’s things like that make me feel like I’d have enjoyed architectural design.

The clincher is that the whole damn movie is CG. Well, mostly. There’s a compositing breakdown video that you can gawk at too.

By the way, “the third and the seventh” apparently refers to the third and the seventh arts, according to one of the video’s comments. That is, out of the following ordered list, the video is about the third and the seventh items: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, Literature, Music, Dance, Cinematography.

I couldn’t find a reference to this online (the seven arts according to who?), so I guess we’ll just have to take that dude’s word for it. >_> If nothing else, there’s the shot at 0:26 of a backward page of text, that when you flip horizontally, it reads like this.