I have always been a fan of the Doppler effect. If that isn’t nerdy I don’t know what is. Seriously though I always liked the sound a car made when it went by, the way the wavelength got shorter as it approached and stretched out as it went away, of course I didn’t always know that was what was going on, but still. Now I am writing a papers on it and doing equations involving Doppler shifting. It is one of those things that is really simple when you think about it but it took a long time to ‘discover’ I would imagine it didn’t come up until we had the ability to move quick enough to notice it. I mean it is unlikely in the extreme that some one on foot or horse back is going to notice that “hey, Olaf’s voice seems to change as I charge at him.” or “Hmm these arrows sure seem to sound different as they fly past my head.” generally not situations conducive to scientific thought.

Considering scientific thought: ultrasonic imagery is really quite fascinating. The idea that we can use sound to ’see’ things is really very interesting, it makes me wonder if things like the heart beat sensor from the Rainbow Six games actually exist. Or could exist in the future. I don’t know if a specific heart beat sensor would be possible but I am sure it would be possible to create some sort of essentially portable sonar type of device that could identify soft tissue in a house at range. It would not be necessary to distinguish features as specific as a malfunctioning aorta but it would still be a good idea for police and such to have advanced knowledge of what they were heading into. With more information they would be better able to defend themselves and prepare for an encounter. Click to continue Reading.

Speaking of defending oneself from attacks, let me tell you of a little occurrence I call “natural God mode”. So some twelve years ago now (holy crap that was a long time ago) there was a little game called Zero Divide. It was a first generation fighting game for the Playstation, just the Playstation, the PS2 wasn’t even a rumor yet, this was when the Playstation was competing with the Super Nintendo the Dreamcast and the Saturn, remember those systems? I do. ANYWAY.

There comes a time in every gamers life when a level arises that is to tough to beat, a boss who is just to much of a challenge a puzzle that is so tricky it can’t be solved. This is when a player cheats. A code to skip the level, a guide to the puzzle or to become invincible. The latter is known collectively as ‘god’ mode. The methods differ but they frequently exists. Sometimes though a code is not needed sometimes a day arises when you attain an unnatural level of competence this is a tale of such an event. Zero Divide had a secret sub game called Tiny Phalanx. For those of you who don’t know Phalanx was a side scrolling space shooter available on the SNES, it was crap-tacular. Tiny Phalanx on the other hand was much better. The game play was balanced, the level progression was comfortable and the game was challenging enough to be fun but not so challenging to be annoying all in all a satisfying experience.

Once when playing tiny Phalanx I noticed that my ship had not been destroyed in several minutes of playing and that I had even managed to beat a boss without a loss. I began to suspect that I had accidentally entered a cheat to become invincible. There I managed to avoid shots with only a pixel to spare, I scraped the edge of the collision boxes, it appeared at times that shots actually passed through my ship unscathed. My hands deftly maneuvered (and muscled for rank) the ship with a skill that bordered on precognition. Never before had I seen such amazing game play. It startled me, scared me, convinced me to crash my ship into an asteroid. I dubbed this moment natural god mode. The moment when you attain an unprecedented level of skill and understanding the time when your brain perceives the pattern the underlying code and begins processing well enough to predict exactly what is going to happen.

Later in life I heard of a moment when a man was able to recognize the pattern behind tetris and was undefeated for several hours. The human brain has such an amazing ability to recognize patterns that we see them wear they belong or not. If we can ever fully understand the complete power of the human brain the games we will have will truly be worth playing.