mrpeebles - Slashdot User

Hank Chien Reclaims Donkey Kong High Score 122

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday January 11, 2011 @07:36AM from the barrels-of-fun dept.

An anonymous reader writes "If you can say anything about Hank Chien, it's that he evidently doesn't take defeat very well. Sure, he knew not so deep down that his Donkey Kong World Record score wouldn't last forever, but he couldn't have foreseen that it would have been toppled so quickly. Twice, even. But he also knew that more Kong competition would be coming his way; namely Richie Knucklez Kong-Off in March. So Hank had something to prove, and prove he did. Scoring a massive 1,068,000 points in less than three hours, Hank has officially reclaimed the high score in Nintendo’s 1981 arcade classic."

Lost Online Games From the Pre-Web Era 186

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday October 02, 2010 @01:42AM from the you-are-no-match-for-my-imperial-starship dept.

harrymcc writes "Long before the Web came along, people were playing online games — on BBSes, on services such as Prodigy and CompuServe, and elsewhere. Gaming historian Benj Edwards has rounded up a dozen RPGs, MUDs, and other fascinating curiosities from the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s — and the cool part is: they're all playable on the Web today." What old games were good enough for you to watch them scroll by on your 300 baud modem?

Doctor Slams Hospital's "Please" Policy 572

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday June 03, 2010 @01:07AM from the paging-doctor-manners dept.

Administrators at England's Worthing Hospital are insisting that doctors say the magic word when writing orders for blood tests on weekends. If a doctor refuses to write "please" on the order, the test will be refused. From the article: "However, a doctor at the hospital said on condition of anonymity that he sees the policy as a money-saving measure that could prove dangerous for patients. 'I was shocked to come in on Sunday and find none of my bloods had been done from the night before because I'd not written "please,"' the doctor said. 'I had no results to guide treatment of patients. Myself and a senior nurse had to take the bloods ourselves, which added hours to our 12-hour shifts. This system puts patients' lives at risk. Doctors are wasting time doing the job of the technicians.'"

Wii 2 Delay Is Hurting Nintendo 310

Posted by Soulskill on Friday May 07, 2010 @12:58AM from the hurting-all-the-way-to-the-bank dept.

BanjoTed writes "Michael Pachter's ongoing spat with Nintendo regarding the Wii 2 is well documented. Pachter is sure it's coming, Nintendo says it's not. Now the analyst has gone one further by claiming that the declining sales of the Wii documented in the platform holder's recent financial statements will only get worse unless it speeds up attempts to get its successor to market. He said, 'The reason for this is clear: the software being created is just not interesting enough or compelling enough to drive Wii owners to buy more than two [games] per year, and most of those purchases are first party software. We can blame the third party publishers for making shovelware, or for misjudging the Wii market, but the simple fact is that the publishers have to develop completely separate games for the Wii because its CPU is not powerful.'"

Man Spends 2,200 Hours Defeating Bejeweled 2 179

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday May 01, 2010 @10:44AM from the wins-complimentary-straight-jacket dept.

An anonymous reader writes "A California steel contractor spent 2,200 total hours over the last three years racking up a high score in Bejeweled 2. He exceeded the 2^31-1 maximum score programmed for the score display, proving that there is, in fact, an end to the game. I suppose congratulations or condolences are in order."

The Fruit Fly Drosophila Gets a New Name 136

Posted by timothy on Saturday April 10, 2010 @06:50AM from the hope-you-used-pencil dept.

G3ckoG33k writes "The name of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster will change to Sophophora melangaster. The reason is that scientists have by now discovered some 2,000 species of the genus and it is becoming unmanageably large. Unfortunately, the 'type species' (the reference point of the genus), Drosophila funebris, is rather unrelated to the D. melanogaster, and ends up in a distant part of the relationship tree. However, geneticists have, according to Google Scholar, more than 300,000 scientific articles describing innumerable aspects of the species, and will have to learn the new name as well as remember the old. As expected, the name change has created an emotional (and practical) stir all over media. While name changes are frequent in science, as they describe new knowledge about relationships between species, these changes rarely hit economically relevant species, and when they do, people get upset."

Gamma Ray Mystery Reestablished By Fermi Telescope 95

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday March 03, 2010 @12:23PM from the back-to-the-drawing-board dept.

eldavojohn writes "New observations from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope reveal that our assumptions about the 'fog' of gamma rays in our universe are not entirely explained by black hole-powered jets emanating from active galaxies — as we previously hypothesized. For now, the researchers are representing the source of unaccounted gamma rays with a dragon (as in 'here be') symbol. A researcher explained that they are certain about this, given Fermi's observations: 'Active galaxies can explain less than 30 percent of the extragalactic gamma-ray background Fermi sees. That leaves a lot of room for scientific discovery as we puzzle out what else may be responsible.' And so we reopen the chapter on background gamma-rays in the science textbooks and hope this eventually sheds even more light on other mysteries of space — like star formation and dark matter."

EA Shutting Down Video Game Servers Prematurely 341

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday January 06, 2010 @07:42AM from the sixty-dollar-yearly-fee dept.

Spacezilla writes "EA is dropping the bomb on a number of their video game servers, shutting down the online fun for many of their Xbox 360, PC and PlayStation 3 games. Not only is the inclusion of PS3 and Xbox 360 titles odd, the date the games were released is even more surprising. Yes, Madden 07 and 08 are included in the shutdown... but Madden 09 on all consoles as well?"

PhD Candidate Talks About the Physics of Space Battles 361

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday December 17, 2009 @03:18PM from the load-photon-torpedoes dept.

darthvader100 writes "Gizmodo has run an article with some predictions on what future space battles will be like. The author brings up several theories on propulsion (and orbits), weapons (explosives, kinetic and laser), and design. Sounds like the ideal shape for spaceships will be spherical, like the one in the Hitchhiker's Guide movie."

Programmable Quantum Computer Created 132

Posted by Soulskill on Thursday November 26, 2009 @12:41PM from the four-out-of-five-ain't-bad dept.

An anonymous reader writes "A team at NIST (the National Institute of Standards and Technology) used berylium ions, lasers and electrodes to develop a quantum system that performed 160 randomly chosen routines. Other quantum systems to date have only been able to perform single, prescribed tasks. Other researchers say the system could be scaled up. 'The researchers ran each program 900 times. On average, the quantum computer operated accurately 79 percent of the time, the team reported in their paper.'"

Comment Re:Mod parent up (Score 1) 1071

by mrpeebles on Sunday January 06, 2008 @12:17AM (#21929416) Attached to: Science Text Attempts to Reconcile Religion and Science

I think that 500 years ago, the Catholic Church was worried about its slipping political control. You could be killed/tortured for challenging that control. If the Catholic Church didn't recognize that the Earth wasn't really 6000 years old, this was because there was no evidence otherwise. This doesn't mean that it didn't read large parts of the Bible as allegory.

For example, I remember reading Augustine referring to the "stories" of the old testament in 300 ad. He says he initially thought them to be simple childrens stories, unable to compare to the other ancient classics, but that with more readings, his appreciation of them grew.

I don't know a whole lot about Biblical history, but I sometimes wonder if ancient and medieval readers of the Bible would be unable to even appreciate what we mean by "reading the Bible literally", which seems to me to be a statement very influenced by enlightment thinking (even if it is enlightment thinking gone wrong.)

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